NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  “Afterwards! And you’re the big planner! The farm is practically on the way to Torino—you know that. Unless we go there now, we might as well forget it. Besides, it’ll be fun. An adventure. Sometimes,” she added, a bit coldly, “I think that you chose your profession to give you an excuse for regulating everything. Why not take things as they come, and get some pleasure out of doing a little favor?” Then, as if to take the sting out of her words, she squeezed his arm as they approached their auto. “You only child, you.”

  But it wasn’t his being an only child, he knew, that worked on her nerves. It was his insistence on keeping remote from family and family responsibilities; it was his refusal to make up with his father ever since their last shouting match, which Ellen had witnessed as a shaken bystander. Why did his throat get dry every time that scene arose in his mind? He swallowed.

  “It’s not that I’m being stuffy,” he said, knowing that he was being just that. “It’s simply that I wanted the two of us to be all on our own. A kind of honeymoon.”

  “We will be. From tonight on we’ll be able to do whatever we feel like.”

  “You know what I want to do tonight? To celebrate our arrival in Italy? I want to make love to you on foreign soil for the first time.”

  “You’d better,” Ellen threatened. But he was pleased to see that beneath her mock toughness she was actually blushing a little.

  Then why, he thought, driving as casually as if he were at home through Genoa’s northern industrial suburbs and its beach towns, and then onward to Savona, why did the idea of this little favor fill him not with expectation but with dread? Was it Nick? Or Nick’s need for family souvenirs?

  Nick’s property was above a hill town, high on a mountainside not too far from Cuneo, on the southern slope of the Italian Alps. To get there they would have to drive from Savona up the autostrada—here Ellen consulted the map while he wound the wheel through green, lovely hills not unlike their own in northern California—then, after the end of the autostrada, up successively narrower roads until they came to a monastery not marked on the map because it was abandoned, but known to the nearby villagers. It was ten minutes’ walk, Nick had said, from the monastery, where they’d have to leave their car, to his ancestral acres.

  Nick diGrasso was somebody the Kellers had met by chance one Sunday afternoon while they were driving around back of Sonoma, looking for a family-owned winery where they might picnic and take home some good table wine. They had stopped in at a small restaurant to inquire on the off chance that the proprietor would know of such a vineyard nearby. The proprietor was Nick.

  He had taken them into his hearth, bade them taste the wine that he bought for his own table, given them a note to his vintner, and introduced his wife, Betty, and their four small children, each born within a year or so of its predecessor. Nick was just Sam’s age, although he looked younger, clean-shaven and with a mop of curly black hair. Betty and Ellen were of an age also and spoke the same language, even if Ellen’s Italian had come from her junior year abroad, while Betty’s had come from the family kitchen on Grant Street.

  Although Sam and Ellen drove out quite often after that, sometimes with friends, they didn’t really have much in common with the diGrassos. Sam had gone to Stanford and done his graduate work at MIT, thanks to his father (who never tired of reminding him of it), while Nick’s education had stopped short of the liceo, after his widowed father had been ambushed by the Social Republicans, the last-ditch Fascists in northern Italy. Sam had a strong sense of profession; Nick, who had beaten his way to the USA with the aid of a GI after the war, would try almost anything for a buck. He’d apprenticed himself to a pastry cook, taken business management at night at San Francisco State, worked weekends at a crab stand down on Fisherman’s Wharf, and saved. When the chance came his way to buy up a small restaurant, he was ready.

  But if Sam had done none of those things, not even saved (they’d sold some of Ellen’s bonds for this European vacation), he’d read a lot of books and listened to a lot of music which Nick had never heard of. This was perhaps why Nick admired Sam inordinately. He made you feel, Sam often thought, as though he had been waiting impatiently all week for you and your wife to pay him the honor of eating his cooking and passing a few cheerful Sunday-afternoon moments with his lively family.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” Ellen had said when Sam had mentioned this talent of Nick’s on their way home from his restaurant one Sunday evening. “He makes me feel as though I’m beautiful.”

  Unwilling to admit that he was shaken, Sam had replied promptly, “But you are,” and peered hopefully at her, curled up in the dark beside him.

  “You would say so,” she had murmured almost scornfully, and then added, “Besides, I don’t mean exactly that. I mean, he makes me feel I’m voluptuous. And don’t tell me you think I’m that.”

  Well, pleasing women was supposed to be an Italian gift. And Nick, who played up to Ellen’s love of Italy (as well as to her vanity), was overjoyed when he learned of their vacation plans.

  “You’re just the ones,” he had said excitedly, “to find out for me. Wait till you get up in those mountains above Savona. Man! It won’t take you too long, and you’re gonna see something different, I promise you, something a little special.”

  The farm where Nick had lived until he had run off to America had been his since the death of an uncle some years ago. It was tenanted now by a fellow named Ugo Fannini, with whom Nick had played as a boy and who had never left home; Ugo lived there in the diGrasso house with his wife and small boy, his father and mother, and worked somewhere nearby as a mason or roadmender. The question was, Had Ugo kept it up? What was the place worth now? There had been a fine stand of horse-chestnut trees; and no matter what might have happened to the property, the view was really sensational. Sam was a big expert: when he looked it over, he’d be able to say whether the property ought to be sold or converted into something more modern.

  “No point in tying up money in the old country, right? It brings me in next to nothing. I could use the cash here in my business.”

  It was the sort of responsibility Sam hated to take on, the sort that relatives continually asked of you—if things turned out badly, they always blamed you—and if this had been Nick’s sole request, he would have sought a way to get out of it, even though Ellen had practically consented as soon as the words were out of Nick’s mouth. But Nick had been shrewd enough to realize that he could really commit them by making a more sentimental demand.

  “What I’d like is a souvenir of the tribe—you know what I mean?” He had leaned forward confidentially. “Ugo wrote me he’s been keeping everything. If you could bring back some pictures of my family—you know, the old folks—especially of my father, mio caro padre …” And he had lapsed into Italian with Ellen.

  Sam was more annoyed than he dared let on at Nick’s using Ellen in order to get at him, and at the use of family piety to milk him for a professional opinion on that land. He and Ellen had not had as easy a time of it as people thought who only saw them clam-digging or holding hands at concerts: She had been stunned by the discovery that he and his father could say the things to each other that they had. What was more, she could not understand why he should shrink from her father’s generosity (“What do you mean, he’s trying to buy you? That’s paranoid!”), as if it were simply the converse of his father’s meanness. Despite the messed-up lives of her sisters and brothers, she insisted that it had been fun growing up in a large family, and she resented friends’ assumptions—assumptions she dared not deny as yet—that she was still childless because she and Sam were not ready to “settle down.”

  So now, having duly turned off at Savigliano, in quest of a place he was not eager to find, Sam said hesitantly, “Maybe Nick thought he was doing us a kindness.”

  Ellen glanced up from the map, puzzled. Then her brow cleared. “Maybe it’ll be a kindness all around. I bet the Fannini family will be glad to have news of Nick.�
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  “If we get there.”

  For a while it looked as though they wouldn’t. Finding Santa Maria dei Fiori was easy enough, yes. At the public washbasin in its unpaved square, women in black balanced baskets atop their heads, old men in berets and felt slippers gazed at them incuriously, a mangy dog yelped as they slowed down, a spavined goat tied with a rope to a rickety cart raised its tail to drop its beanlike black excrement onto the dust. Three small boys came running out of a churchyard with books under their arms and heavy wool socks dropping down their calves, chasing one another and crying shrilly until they caught sight of the new Fiat.

  “I’ll ask them the way to the monastery,” Ellen said.

  Laughing, the boys nodded as Ellen spoke (even to Sam her Italian sounded harshly Nordic), and they vied with one another to give directions. A sinistra, a sinistra, that much he got, but just where to turn left he could not make out. After saying grazie three times and punctuating her thanks with candy bars, Ellen turned to Sam happily.

  “At the end of the village, a real steep road, not paved, goes straight up to the sky.”

  “They said all that?”

  But at the end of the village the road petered out into a mountainside meadow, with no ascending road in sight. They turned about and still did not find it; they asked an old man, but he had no teeth in his head and seemed to be mumbling, according to Ellen, the opposite of the children’s instructions. They tried it his way and found nothing, and by the time they reached the town square yet again, Sam was ready to go on to Torino.

  “Once more around,” he said glumly, “and the old ladies at the washtubs will think we’re out of our minds.”

  “I’ll get out and ask them. They must know.”

  Ellen came back confidently. “The kids were right. We must have missed it. We have to cross the river.”

  They had been bemused by the glorious stream, carrying melted snow from the Italian peaks all the thousands of meters down to the Mediterranean, from which they had mounted an hour or two earlier. It leaped like something alive, from boulder to boulder, singing dangerously to distract you from the insignificant road which snaked over it on a trembling wooden bridge and promptly bent out of sight around the mountainside.

  So they crawled over the bridge in low gear, and then around and up a stony track so eroded that it should have been strewn with the cracked axles of wrecked carts, abandoned after they had bent and slipped to death part way up the mountainside.

  “We’re ruining a brand-new car,” Sam grumbled, but actually he was happy, with Ellen crying out in delight and clutching his arm as they swung out over seeming emptiness, with the leaping stream now fifty, now a hundred feet below.

  “If we keep on going, Ellen, we may wind up in Switzerland.”

  “Or in heaven.”

  “Well, where’s the monastery?”

  “You need faith, Sam, if you want to encounter the house of God.”

  “Faith in God, or in the car?”

  “In yourself. That’s all I’ve ever wanted of you,” she said cryptically. “Look, there it is.”

  The brick-and-plaster monastery stood squarely on a grassy knoll, the one level spot on the mountainside. The only unusual thing about it was that it should be there at all, hulking and bulbous as a Victorian exposition hall, utterly unlikely in this remote corner. It seemed to be quite deserted.

  But as Sam swung the car about on the hard-packed dirt in the shade beneath a jutting bay, a strolling couple came into view. A farm woman in a shapeless and all but colorless dress, her arm hooked through a heavy woven market basket, walked beside her husband, a sunburned, knotty-looking man whose collar lay open and whose shirt sleeves were rolled up to expose his white neck and arms and who looked younger than his wife, perhaps because of the proudly careless way in which he bore their little boy high on his shoulders, like a prize he had won at a village fair. They strolled on, too shy to stop and stare frankly at the strangers, alone in the empty square.

  Sam pulled up the handbrake. “Let’s find out if they know where the Fanninis live.”

  Ellen had already snapped open the car door and scrambled out to confront the couple, who awaited her in silence. Addressing them eagerly in the dusty piazza, the wind whipping her pink skirt about her thighs and the sun glinting on her lacquered toenails in her Sausalito sandals, she might have been a child of this workworn couple, come back from California with news of a new world. It was startling to think that his wife, talking bravely in her high, clear, unyielding American voice, was probably as old as this couple, who looked as though they might have been cast, centuries before, out of some hard and ruthless material.

  Ellen turned to Sam while he was striving to disentangle his long legs from the baby like shell of the little car. “Sammy,” she cried, “these are the ones!”

  They confronted him now, not cold or inhospitable in the least, but wary, like forewarned children, waiting for proof that he had not come from the bank or the government.

  “Buon giorno,” he said uneasily. The little boy sat still on the man’s shoulders, gazing down from that height as unsmiling as his parents and with the same smoldering black eyes. Sam stuck out his hand, although it felt as awkward and artificial at the end of his arm as a divining rod. “Sono un amico di Nick. Nick diGrasso.” Desperately he turned to Ellen. “Was that right? I wasn’t ready to start talking.”

  But the man was pressing his hand with his own, which felt as though it had been carved from oak. His brown face was wrinkling like a bent leather glove. “Benvenuto,” he said, “benvenuto a Santa Maria dei Fiori.”

  I’ll be damned, Sam said to himself. It works! “What do you know,” he said to his wife. “I can understand. He says ‘Welcome.’”

  Ellen was already exchanging greetings with the little boy, who dimpled at her as his father swung him down to the ground, and his mother, suddenly worried about appearances, bent to wipe the child’s nose. Ellen had learned the boy’s name at once and was rummaging in her handbag for more of those candy bars, cooing at the child, “Eh, Gian Paolo, cioccolata!” and demanding belatedly if his mother objected to his being stuffed with Hershey bars.

  Sam reached quickly into the car for the camera which Ellen’s father had given them for a going-away present. At once the family began to primp, as though they had gotten dressed up for a ceremonial family photograph. Sam did not wait, but while Ugo Fannini dug his thick calloused fingers into his tough wiry hair in an effort to pull it into place, and his wife tucked her child’s blouse into his shorts and pulled up the dangling folds of his heavy woolen stockings from his clodhoppers, he clicked, wound, clicked. Ellen said angrily, “Has it occurred to you that you’re invading their privacy?”

  “They don’t seem to mind,” Sam replied, and then said to the Fanninis, pointing to the camera, “Per Nicolò O.K.?”

  Ugo Fannini nodded animatedly and said something Sam could not catch.

  Ellen explained, a little tight-lipped, “They’d like us to come up to their house.”

  Sam extended his hand to the little boy, who was already leading the way, waving them on with his Hershey bars.

  They had to climb up one more hillside which a jeep could hardly have mounted. The path proceeded jaggedly through the woods at sharp herringbone angles, unsupported by wall or balustrade. Its flagstones, embedded in dirt and enlaced with wandering roots, were worn hollow, like the pavings of an old church, by generations of plodding feet.

  “We’re in a different country, at last,” he said to his wife. “I can feel it under my feet.”

  But Ellen was conversing earnestly with Ugo’s wife, leaving Sam to tramp along stolidly with Ugo and the skittering little boy. He wanted to ask, but did not know how, if these trees through which they were making their arduous way were the chestnut grove that Nick had asked him to examine. He had looked up the word “chestnut” earlier, in their cabin, when Ellen hadn’t been watching, but now it escaped him completely. Still, these must b
e the trees. They were old, potent, sturdy as the people who chose to remain among them. Greening once again and twinkling in the clear spring light, they rose splendidly through the thin mountainous air toward the blue bowl of the sky.

  Then the stone-and-plaster cottage came into view just below the crest of the hillside. At the final few steps Ugo Fannini reached down, as though it were something that was always done, like crossing yourself, and clasped his boy’s hand to swing him up these last couple of feet. For a moment Sam was stabbed with a queer pang of irrational envy.

  The sound of their coming had roused a silky-haired hunting dog and the older Fanninis too, who came out together from a barn which faced the farmhouse and was tied to it by a rotting, unpainted grape arbor under which stood an uneven work table, a wooden bench and several copper kettles. The old lady (no more than sixty, maybe, but she could have passed for eighty) began to shell peas nervously, more to keep her hands occupied than to finish the task, revealing as she smiled—the wrinkles around her eyes deepening into channels—that it was she and not her husband whom Ugo resembled.

  The old man did not smile. He seemed to have grown up out of the ground like the grapevine before which he stood, gnarling, twisting and darkening over the years, his skin seaming with the seasons like the tough bark of a deeply rooted vine. Even his clothing—the shapeless beret wedged between his ears, the blue work shirt bleached almost white, the flannel trousers flapping over the frayed carpet slippers—seemed always to have been a part of him, and added to the sense he gave off, almost like an odor, of stolid permanence. His gaze, fixed and impersonal as he attended, with no sign of interest or comprehension, to his son’s rapid introductions, came from but one eye, for the other had been enucleated. In its place he had plugged a colorless twist of cotton wadding, the end protruding villainously from the socket into which it had been stuffed.