NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  _____

  I remained in the barracks after that, brooding, waiting to ship out into the North Atlantic. I made no effort to get in touch with Teddy. Finally, since I had time on my hands for the first time in months, and access to a typewriter in the Master at Arms’ office, where I often stood night watch alone, I wrote a short story.

  It was a bitter story, of course, about a young serviceman who, because he is denied physical intimacy by the girl who claims to love him, goes recklessly to his death, a snarl upon his lips.

  I made two copies. The first went to The New Yorker. After debating with myself for a day or so, I wrote across the face of the carbon copy, Here is the most I can offer you for Christmas, something I made for you myself, from the bottom of my heart. I signed my name and mailed it to Teddy.

  Within two days the original came back from The New Yorker. I stuck it in a fresh envelope and shipped it off to the Atlantic Monthly, where I knew from experience that it would rest long enough for me to go off to sea under the happy illusion that it was being seriously considered.

  I heard nothing at all from Teddy. After a few days I could stand it no longer, and one night I rang her up from the pay phone in the rec room. She answered, but from her tone, a little frightened when she recognized my voice, I was sure that her mother was there.

  “Teddy,” I said, “I’ve been worried by your silence. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I am. Are you?”

  “Yes, of course. Is your mother there with you?”

  “I don’t see what difference that makes.” Then she said what her mother must have been coaching her to say, against the moment when I should phone again. “My mother feels I shouldn’t see you any more. And I think she’s right.”

  I was so shocked that I forgot to ask about my story. I stammered, “But all I wanted was to see you one last time before I ship out. Does that seem so unfair? For us just to get together this Saturday afternoon?”

  “If you had any respect for my wishes,” she said stiffly, “you wouldn’t press it any further.”

  I muttered goodbye and slammed down the receiver. But the next day, after a night spent cursing myself for not having let it rest with my sardonically inscribed story, I received a note from Teddy.

  She apologized for the way she had spoken (I was right; her mother had been listening) and went on to add that if I still wanted to say goodbye she’d look for me on Saturday at one o’clock in the waiting room of Penn Station. She would tell her mother she was going shopping at Macy’s.

  It was Teddy’s willingness to deceive her mother that encouraged in me the wild hope that maybe my story had accomplished what my physical presence and my pleading had been unable to do. But when I dashed into Penn Station, Teddy came up to me unexpectedly and offered me only her hand and not her lips.

  The hand was gloved, but I had the feeling that her fingers would be cold; her lips were pale and bloodless and she smiled at me tremulously.

  “You look well,” she said. “I’m sorry I can’t stay very long.”

  People were bumping into us in their anxiety to reach the escalator. The vaulted terminal was bleak, drafty and—to me at that moment—terrifying.

  “My God, Teddy,” I said, “you can’t just shake my hand and walk away.” I pointed to the bag hanging from her left hand. “You’ve done your Macy’s shopping already. That ought to satisfy your mother. Can’t we get out of here? Please?”

  “If we could just be happy one last time—like we were for a little while …”

  “Come with me.” I took her by the hand. “I know a good French restaurant near here. While we eat you can talk and I can sit and admire you.”

  “You’ll have to promise that you won’t get personal like that.”

  “Supposing I get personal not like that?”

  By the time we reached the restaurant we were laughing together; you might have thought we were just getting to know each other. But in a matter of minutes the laughter had faded away and we were face to face more nakedly than we had ever been before.

  We entered the restaurant and passed through the long, narrow bar where three elderly Frenchmen were having their apéritifs. We seated ourselves in the glassed-in garden dining room in the rear courtyard and ordered our hors d’oeuvres. Suddenly Teddy pouted, as one does when one remembers a forgotten obligation. Then she reached into the red-and-green, holiday-decorated shopping bag and handed me back my story.

  I stared at her, my spoonful of pickled beets suspended in air.

  “Teddy,” I said at last, “that was a present. A Christmas present. You don’t give back presents.”

  “I have to. I just can’t accept it.”

  “But why?”

  “It, uh…” Teddy swallowed. “It was insulting, that’s why. Here, take it, please. Then we won’t have to talk about it.”

  “The hell we won’t. Do you know how hard I worked on it? Maybe it’s not the greatest story in the world, but it’s the best I have in me, and you might at least have acknowledged it, even if you didn’t like it.”

  “But I did. I do.” Teddy gazed at me in agony. “It’s just that you shouldn’t have put down all those intimate details.”

  “I can’t believe that you felt like that when you first read it,” I began, and then I stopped. A suspicion formed in my mind. “Wait a minute. Did you show that story to anyone else?”

  “Well… just to my mother.”

  “I knew it.” I was too sickened to be triumphant. “You might as well give me her literary verdict. I’m sure she had some memorable comment.”

  “She said it was dirty.”

  I jumped to my feet and flung down my napkin, knocking a knife and a fork to the floor. My legs seemed to be entangled with my half-tipped-over chair. A French family at the next table looked up in surprise from its pot au feu. So did three ladies on the other side of us.

  With her knuckles at her lips, Teddy asked, “Where are you going?”

  “I’m leaving. What did you expect?”

  She began to cry. Ignoring the tears that were welling from her eyes and dropping onto her artichoke hearts, she whispered, “Please, please, please, don’t go. Don’t leave me like this.”

  Frightened by her tears and by the enormity of what I was about to do—walk out on a sobbing girl under the disapproving gaze of a roomful of people—I hesitated.

  Teddy went on. “I promise not to say anything more to upset you. All I ever wanted was for us to have fun together, without hurting anybody, before you shipped out.”

  I sat down. Weeping softly, Teddy told me that I had expected too much of her from the start, that she wasn’t like all the other, older girls with whom I had been intimate (there had been only two, but Teddy imagined scores).

  “I suppose the trouble was,” she mused sadly, somewhat more under control, “that it was all just a little too cold-blooded. If I had felt that you cared for me … I couldn’t lie to my mother about that. Don’t you see, maybe she’s not so smart, but she’s all I’ve got, she and Stevie, and I have to live the way she expects me to. The way she wants me to.”

  If before Teddy had made me enraged, now she was making me squirm. Seeing this, she reached across the table to touch me lightly on the arm and added, “Don’t ever think I’m not grateful. You can’t imagine how much you’ve done for me.”

  Mollified, I disclaimed any special virtue, and we left the restaurant almost as calmly as we had entered it. We strolled up to 42nd Street and then east through Times Square to Bryant Park, stopping under the movie marquees to study the stills of the Ritz Brothers and the Three Stooges, of Lynn Bari and Jean Parker.

  We sat on a stone bench under a leafless tree in Bryant Park, discussing books and observing the types on their way into the library. We were careful not to talk about ourselves, or about Christmas, or about what the new year would bring; when we bumped knees, we excused ourselves. But then it began to rain again, the fine but mean rain of a Manhattan December, and a
s we looked hopelessly at each other and then at the forbidding bulk of the library, I remembered the movie houses on 42nd Street.

  “Come on,” I said. “I’ll take you to see Intermezzo.”

  “I really must go home. I’m expected.”

  “Not yet.” I tugged her off the bench. “You yourself told me Ingrid Bergman is the most beautiful girl in the world. You bragged about seeing her in front of Bloomingdale’s.”

  Laughing and protesting, Teddy allowed me to hurry her to the theater. But Intermezzo was a mistake. We had to sit through the last hour of an anti-Nazi epic, plus a newsreel of Mrs. Thomas E. Dewey launching a Liberty ship, before we were rewarded with Leslie Howard making love to Ingrid Bergman. They went off together to celebrate their illicit passion in a sun-kissed Mediterranean villa, knowing—or at least Ingrid knowing—that it could come to no good end and that she would have to tiptoe out of Leslie’s life in order to spare him for his art.

  I sat with my arm around Teddy’s shoulders, but I might as well have clasped a statue. She held herself absolutely rigid and stared fixedly at the screen through the little shell-rimmed glasses she was no longer self-conscious about wearing, her elbows tight against her sides, her fingers locked together in her lap. By the end of the film I was intoxicated all over again with the odor of Teddy’s damp blond hair and lightly fragrant perfume, and she was biting her lips, fighting back the tears as Ingrid took leave of her unsuspecting lover. The theme music swelled to a crescendo, and we groped our way out to the street.

  It was almost pitch-dark, the dimout was on, and the rain was driving directly into our faces. Luckily I captured a cab and we tumbled gratefully into it, slammed the door behind us and waved the driver on. Then, to my astonishment, Teddy flung her arms around my neck, held me so tightly I could hardly breathe, and proceeded to kiss me as I had taught her to kiss.

  My God, I thought, have I won at the last possible moment? And when the driver called back, “Which way, folks?” I whispered to her, “Let’s go down to the apartment. Now!”

  I have thought since then that if I had been a bit more mature, more masterful, if I had simply directed the driver down to Jane Street, I might have won out. But I doubt it. For Teddy shook her head fiercely, even while she continued to caress me, and muttered, “No, no, no, I’m going home, I’m saying goodbye to you here.”

  We remained clasped in each other’s arms all the way up to the Bronx. In front of her apartment house, while I stood, distraught, counting bills into the cab driver’s hand, Teddy ran a comb unsteadily through her hair and apologized for the expense of the long ride.

  “I’m the one who should apologize for never taking you home before,” I said. “Let’s go on up.”

  In the back of my mind, I suppose, was the final hope that Teddy’s mother and brother would be out. The old red brick building was shabby, with peeling hallways; but what was worse, it was a walkup, and Teddy lived on the top floor.

  We climbed slowly and awkwardly with our arms around each other’s waists and on the fourth floor Teddy told me, blushing, that we still had two more flights to go. “The higher you go, see, the cheaper the rent is.”

  As we moved dreamlike up the last flights, I thought how often she must have flitted up and down all these steps—no wonder she was so slim!

  When we reached the top floor she indicated silently the door which was hers: 6B. But before she could say anything I unbuttoned her coat—my pea jacket was already open—and pulled her close to me. As I began to kiss her she went limp. I was kissing her hair, her ears, her eyelids, her cheeks, but when I pressed her lips to mine she did not respond with the ardor which had so surprised me in the taxi; and even though she opened her mouth under the pressure of my lips, she remained absolutely passive, drooping like a flower deprived of sun, her eyes closed, as I raised her unresisting arms and slipped them around my neck.

  For some reason this passivity drove me wild, and I tore at her woolen dress, searching for the zipper and the buttons, until I had worked my hands through. Her underthings slithered to my touch, and in a frenzy I pulled up handfuls of her slip until my fingers reached the smooth flesh of her back and her belly. She remained motionless, neither assisting nor opposing me, as I worked open her brassiere and freed her breasts.

  My hands roved frantically, attempting with desperate speed to discover what had been denied them for so long. Her body was more delicately wrought than her wistful, pretty face, and I was stunned to feel the sharp, childish wings of her shoulder blades, the fragile bones of her rib cage behind which her heart was throbbing, the pathetic soft buds of her breasts.

  Suddenly I was crying. “Teddy, Teddy, Teddy,” I whispered, and I felt her give way in my arms. In another moment we would both have sunk to the cold stone floor; but at that instant the steel door of 6B swung open and Teddy’s mother flew into the hall like some great bird of prey.

  She could have been no older than I am now, but she seemed a dreadful old bag, a harpy, her hair half crammed into a net, her eyes darting venomously out of a craggy face slimed with cold cream. As I released Teddy, she pulled her coat together to cover her gaping dress, and then, yanked forward in her mother’s iron grip, stumbled blindly into the sanctuary of their apartment. Her mother flashed me one scornful glance—part rage and part pure triumph—before she slammed the door.

  I stood there dripping rain and sweat, too shocked even to be conscious of frustration. My eye was caught by the Macy’s shopping bag, stuffed with gaily wrapped Christmas presents, that had fallen from Teddy’s hand to the floor. I bent to pick it up when the door opened again. Teddy’s mother snatched the bag from me without a word, and before I could open my mouth she had slammed the door.

  No doubt it was the shopping bag, decorated with holly and mistletoe, that reminded me of my story, my gift to Teddy. As I made my way slowly down the long flights of steps, pulling myself together to face what had to be faced in the world beyond Teddy, I discovered that I did not have the manuscript she had returned to me. It must have been kicked under the table at the restaurant, and as I swayed out into the dreary street I thought, Well, I’ll never see the restaurant, I’ll never see the story, I’ll never see her. Never again.

  I was right, of course; at least in that limited realization I was right, if in nothing else. But a few weeks ago I had to see an editor about a manuscript, and I drove into New York and pulled into a West Side lot. It was a raw wintry day, with the soundless wind rushing papers about the streets to remind one that beyond the solid brick and stone, nature still strove to do you down. I gave myself one more moment of my car heater’s warmth before braving the cold, and while I was checking the contents of my briefcase and putting on my hat to protect my bald skull, I was overcome by the eerie sensation of having been here once before, in some different incarnation, younger, hatless, without a briefcase. But in an empty lot?

  The attendant rapped on the car window with his knuckles. “What do you say, Mac? I haven’t got all day. Leave the key in the car.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Do you live around here?”

  “I was born exactly two blocks down the street.” He was an underslung, argumentative Italian, remarkable only for his long nose and for his pride in the place of his birth. “Anything you want to know about the neighborhood, ask.”

  “What used to be here, before the parking lot?”

  “Rooming house, like everyplace else on the block. Restaurant on the first floor.”

  My eyes began to smart. I closed them for a moment. “A French restaurant?”

  “French, Italian, what’s the difference? A restaurant.”

  I got out of the car and shuddered in the chill wind as loose sheets of paper plastered themselves against my shins. They were not likely to be pages of the story I had left behind, a story which had surely turned to ashes with the restaurant, and probably long before. The story was gone; so was the little blonde who had sat just here, weeping as she handed it back to me—and so w
as I, the would-be writer, pompous but still unsure of his craft and his magic charm.

  We have all three died, as surely as if the war had done us in; but did we really die forever? Teddy still lives in my mind as she was then, whether she has gained the chairmanship of her P.T.A. or not. And I, too, live again in my mind as I was then, whether or not I have won my way to what I dearly desired to be. Only that well-meant and ill-written manuscript, that rejected gift, deserved to die forever. It is this story—called up by the sudden stinging recollection of two young strangers, the boy and girl at the last table of the garden restaurant, yearning for everything but understanding nothing—that is the real story for Teddy.

  SOMETHING A LITTLE SPECIAL

  Sitting at the Genoese sidewalk café with his bearded chin cupped in one hand and a glass of cool white wine in the other, Sam Keller glanced at the bowed blond head of his pretty wife, bent industriously over the conto for the luncheon of frittura and rolls, which she had ordered in a brave and hardly faltering Italian. If it were not for the camera dangling in its tan leather case over the wire back of his chair, and the new open-top Fiat glittering in the spring sunlight at the opposite curb, with their luggage strapped to its rear, they might have been oldtime residents or expatriates, he thought happily, instead of mere tourists with just two weeks of vacation travel ahead of them before they turned around and headed back for San Francisco. For the first time since their honeymoon four years earlier, abbreviated to accommodate his budding career, they were utterly free—with the exception of one little obligation. At the thought of it, Sam frowned, and as Ellen looked up, satisfied with her calculations, her sharply observant eye caught his uneasiness.

  “What’s the matter, Sam?”

  He concentrated on paying the black-coated waiter, counting out the tip carefully to familiarize himself with the money. Then he said, “Not a thing.” Knowing what her response would be, he persisted nevertheless. “I just wish that we hadn’t promised Nick to look over his property. Couldn’t we just go on to Como and Milano? And maybe afterwards—”