“I was the fall guy.”
“It didn’t hurt, did it?”
“Come on, here’s the pier.”
As we strolled toward the liberty boat bobbing on its line, Bobby clapped me on the back. “Buck up. Maybe one of these days you’ll be my best man!”
But when we got out to our anchorage and climbed aboard, a telegram from Ceelie Mae was waiting for Bobby. He was the father of a baby boy, named Arvel Shafter, born prematurely, weight nine pounds two ounces. Tears of joy sprang to Bobby’s dark eyes as he stood in the companionway clutching the telegram.
“I’m a father,” he whispered. “I’m a father.”
I murmured congratulations, trying to make up for our words of a few moments earlier.
“Come into my suite, man, and let me break out the VSOP. You wouldn’t refuse a nightcap with a new papa at a time like this.”
So we started to drink all over again. It must have been something like four o’clock in the morning.
“The situation calls for my Fritz Kreisler favorites.”
“It’s your party, Dad.”
Bobby laughed. “I like that: Dad! You know I was just kidding about that little Juanita, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“I mean to say, at bottom I’m the kind of square john that needs romancing even more than he does a roll in the hay.” He raised his glass. “Mud in your eye, baby.”
As I listened to the tremolo of the sentimental violin for the hundredth time, quite drunk and very sleepy now, something made me say, “That’s a mighty big baby, Dad.”
He smiled proudly. Then his face clouded. “Say, how would you know?”
“I’m an uncle twice over. Average babies run six, seven pounds.”
“Maybe, but I’ve been building up that little chick with buttermilk and chocolate shakes.”
I looked at him. “Two months premature, wasn’t it?”
“So she says.” Suddenly his hand shot out blindly, like a snake’s tongue, and fastened itself in a painful clamp on my wrist. “Do you think it’s possible? Do you?”
“Let go.”
He stood over me, glaring down at me. “Do you?”
“I don’t know. I guess not.”
“The stupid little chippy. Not even enough sense to lie about the weight.”
“Wait. Don’t jump too fast.”
“What kind of a sucker do you take me for? She named him after her old man, not me. You know why? Because nine months ago I wasn’t home. I was five thousand miles away on a goddamned tanker. So she moves up the date to when I was home—for three weeks—seven months ago.”
“Bobby, it doesn’t sound like the girl you described to me.”
“Weren’t you giving me the same bit about Nita? Do you think she’d be any different? They all smell the same between the legs. If anybody ought to know, I should.”
“The least you can do is give her a chance to explain.”
“Explain!” Bobby hurled his glass to the deck in a rage. As it broke, a thin pool of Scotch trickled along the fiber rug between us. “Listen, baby-face: When I paid off after the last voyage, I found her in the apartment with a sailor, a homely little jerk. Cousin Willie from Nashville, she said. Five foot four, black as the ace of spades, never finished grade school, eighteen years old. Would you think that a girl I picked up in a bus station, and put a silver-blue mink in one closet and seventeen pair of shoes in another, would shack up with an ugly, undersized, seasick teenager? Why, the poor shnook threw up every time his DE passed Ambrose Light. He asked me for a recipe for seasickness.”
“Maybe Ceelie Mae wasn’t used to being alone. You told me how dependent she was on you.”
“I had to ship out. That’s one thing I don’t discuss.”
The record had finished. The needle was swinging wildly across its smooth core—ticketa, tocketa, ticketa, tocketa. I caged the arm.
“You were very happy about this baby,” I said, “until it got born. You told me you’d been trying for years.”
Bobby glared at me wildly.
“Maybe Ceelie Mae wanted a baby even worse than you did. And maybe she knew how much it would please you to have a son, even if it had to be from a kid—”
Bobby was already shoving me to the door. “Go on, get out of here. Take off, get lost.” He gave me a push that sent me stumbling over the coaming. “You’re just as superior as all the rest.” He slammed his door.
The next day we sailed for Australia. Bobby’s supplies were swung aboard early, so there was no need for him to go ashore again, or even to turn up on deck.
In any case he did not, not for three days thereafter. We were worried about him in the saloon, but the purser assured us that he had spoken to him through the door. The captain would have been just as pleased if Bobby had died in his cabin, so nothing was done.
One day at sunset I stood at the fantail, idly watching our wake and thinking about Evan Jones and the sisters, when I felt Bobby at my side. I turned to find him rather drawn and bloodless, but composed.
“Can I apologize?” he asked.
“Forget it.”
“It’s that last crack I made. I was upset. I really don’t feel that way.”
I shrugged in some embarrassment. “What are you going to do, Bobby?”
“I could kill her—that’s one possibility. Or I could pretend to believe the whole silly story and play Daddy. Or I could go back to Panama and marry Nita, at least long enough for her to do the same thing to me.”
“Oh, come on.”
“You know something? No matter what I come up with, I can’t win.”
The one thing he did not say was that I had pushed our friendship too far, that I had presumed on an acquaintance that was, in the nature of the situation, unbalanced. It was just too easy for me to be superior; in fact, he understood it all better and more bitterly than I ever could.
We passed some quiet hours after that, he and I, on the long voyage to Australia and then on through Suez; but there were no more long sessions in his cabin, with the record player spinning sentimental music and Bobby snowing me about his conquests, and I asked him no more about his wife than I did about how he disposed of his cigarette boxes. When at last we tied up at the slummy nethermost reaches of Staten Island, supposedly home but in reality as far from our dreams of home as Tierra del Fuego, we paid off in the saloon and parted with a handshake, leaving unspoken the common realization that it was only now, in our own city and on our own soil, that we had to part.
“So long, kid,” he said, reaching out to straighten my carelessly knotted tie. “Don’t rush into agitating—or marrying.”
In fact I did marry two months later and gave up the sea. And with it gave up the possibility—or so I begin to feel now, after all that has been happening in a world beyond my reach and my personal involvement—of ever again being as close to another troubled wanderer as I once was to Bobby Shafter.
WHERE DOES YOUR MUSIC COME FROM?
When I was sixteen and a junior in high school, my whole life changed. Until then I had led a very ordinary existence, growing up in the postwar years with my younger sister on an elm-lined street in the house in which my mother had been born. I had a Rudge bicycle, a chemistry set and a crewcut, and the only thing that marked me out from the rest of the kids on the block, apart from my height, was that I really liked my piano lessons and shone at the annual recitals of Miss Wakefield’s students. Indeed, I used to daydream of going to New York City and playing the Grieg Piano Concerto under the stars at Lewisohn Stadium, with thousands cheering me as they did Arthur Rubinstein.
My father, an uneasy real-estate broker, regretted an enthusiasm fostered mainly by my mother, and tried to steer me from music toward medicine, starting with the chemistry set and later taking me on long Sunday-morning walks in the course of which he tried to convince me, man to man, that there was nothing like being your own boss. He ran his business from a wooden cottage attached to the back of our house, so he
was home a lot, between phone calls, and he probably exercised more of an influence on me than most of the fathers on the block did on their kids.
It was only after I finished junior high and began to flounder around with swarms of strangers in Franklin Pierce High that I discovered how many different worlds lay beyond the placid, comfortable one of Buchanan Street. There were boys who smoked marijuana and girls who got pregnant; longhairs who did math problems in the caf while the others fiddled with their jalopies and hot rods; Negroes who disappeared after school as though they had been swallowed up; jocks who stayed until it got dark, playing soccer or jogging around the track as if they had no homes to go to and no pianos to practice. I didn’t settle into any of the cliques, because I wasn’t ready to limit myself. Belonging to almost any of them would only have confirmed me as being what I already was on Buchanan Street, and I was getting a little tired of that.
So, with the seamless illogic of the sixteen-year-old, I limited myself almost exclusively to one boy’s company for so long that people used to kid us about going steady, as if we had been of different sexes, or about being twins, as if we had been brothers.
In fact Yuri was a twin himself, and he walked to school every day with his sister Yeti (born Yetta), the ballet dancer. Yeti’s beauty was so immediate that it was frightening. She had long, straight, shimmering blond hair that hung uninterruptedly down her back to her waist, eyes the color of delphiniums in July, set shallow and slantwise above her Slavic cheekbones, and skin smooth as eggshell. She walked with the characteristic half mince, half prance of her craft, toeing out as she advanced, she was as slim and flat-chested as a boy, and because of her self-absorption she was—besides being my best friend’s sister and therefore inviolable—as close to being absolutely uninteresting as any girl I had ever known.
Yuri was something else. He was bowlegged, his tough and kinky brown hair barely grew above my shoulder (after a while they called us Mutt and Jeff), and his thick, passionate lips were usually twisted in a cynical grin. He played the fiddle—which he carried with him nonchalantly in its weathered case wherever he went, even into the john—with dazzling fervor and dexterity. He had been the concertmaster of our school orchestra since his freshman year, but I hesitated to approach him not only because he was so good but because of that grin. The other members of the string section said he was decent enough, if somewhat condescending, like a big kid playing for an afternoon with little ones. They said too that his mother awoke him at dawn so he could practice for two hours every morning before school—later I found that this was true.
One day after ninth period I was in the music room practicing on the Mozart A-Major Concerto, the K. 414, the first movement of which the conductor, Mr. Fiorino, had promised me I could play with the orchestra for the spring festival, when Yuri Cvetic sauntered in and leaned his elbows on the tail of the piano.
He listened for a while, his fiddle case wedged between his torn sneakers, that grin showing the spaces between his front teeth. Finally he said, “Ever do any accompanying? I got a Brahms thing here we could try.”
Within days we had exchanged confidences never before revealed to anyone else. Everyone took it for granted that we two would eat together in the cafeteria; and when, because of homework or music lessons, we couldn’t see each other after school, we would talk on the phone, more quietly than our sisters but just as lengthily.
Yuri never came to my house more than once or twice. My father complained that he couldn’t bear the squeal of Yuri’s fiddle being tuned up to the piano. It was no more legitimate than his shouting, after we were in tune, “I can’t hear myself talk on the telephone when you guys are playing.” I knew I was losing respect for my father when he came out and said that he mistrusted Yuri not only because he encouraged me to have musical ambitions but because he came from the other side of Pierce High, from Cotter Street, a noisy neighborhood of teenagers tuning up go-karts, women arguing loudly in foreign tongues and drunks too shameless to go on indoors.
Yuri shrugged it off with the grin that I suspect bothered my father more than anything else, for it bespoke that wise invulnerability that can unsettle an adult more than any adolescent surliness. After that we hung out together at the park in fair weather, at his house in foul. His family never objected; they were always delighted to see me whenever I turned up at their second-floor flat.
In addition to his twin sister, who, when she was around, was usually polite enough, in her self-centered way, there was a younger sister, Helen, a freshman when I first met her. Not only had her parents used up their inventiveness on the twins’ names, but they also seemed to have taken one look at their last-born and decided that a ballerina and a violinist would be enough and that this time they would settle simply for a daughter. Helen was a nice enough girl, with a sweet, even smile and dark, gentle eyes unlike Yuri’s and Yeti’s in that they were always shadowed, as if she didn’t get enough sleep, but she had no interest in music or dance and she never opened a book. She appeared content just to get by in school and to keep the household going while her parents were off working and the twins were off practicing. And besides, she was buxom; she gave you the feeling that if she didn’t watch herself, she’d wind up looking like her mother.
I think that was what put Mrs. Cvetic off her youngest and convinced her that it would be profitless to push Helen into the arts as she had done with the twins. Mrs. Cvetic, a practical nurse, was a heavy-breasted, shapeless woman who breathed through her open mouth and waddled so alarmingly that you could practically feel the friction of her thighs. She always wore a wrinkled and stained uniform, not quite white, its pockets bulging with Pall Malls, wooden kitchen matches and professional samples of Anacin and Bufferin, which she chewed as other people do gum or candy.
“Hiya, boy,” she would greet me on those occasions when she happened to be home of an afternoon. “You gonna play some music with Yuri today? Okay, stay for supper.”
If I declined, she would wave aside my hesitations, the long cigarette bobbing from her lips, ashes sprinkling the bosom of her uniform, while she growled at Helen, “Move away the goddam ironing board so the boys can practice. And let’s see how much goulash we got for supper.”
The ironing board had no legs. Sometimes Helen would balance one end of it on a kitchen step stool, the other on the edge of the upright piano, and press away at her mother’s uniforms (I never could understand why, since Helen was always ironing them, the uniforms were never clean). When I wanted to lift the keyboard lid, she would take the ironing board and lay it on the round oak dining-room table. When she had to set the table for dinner for the six of us, she’d set the plank against the wall. But Mr. Cvetic had bolted a full-length mirror and a long section of three-inch galvanized pipe to the wall for Yeti, and when Yeti hung onto the pipe with one hand, doing her ballet exercises, Helen had to drag the plank, heavy as a painter’s scaffold, out to the front hall, where it teetered at the head of the stairs, announcing to you as you mounted the worn rubber runners to the Cvetic flat that Helen must be busy doing something else.
Often it was the meals which, while her mother tended the afflicted and her sister flexed her back, Helen prepared by herself and served as well, eating off in a corner like a European mama, only after she had made certain that the rest of us were taken care of. More than once Mr. Cvetic, having worked overtime, came in when we were already on our dessert and had to be served separately. But Helen never lost her composure, even if her father complained that the meat balls were no longer piping hot. It confused me that a girl so downtrodden should look so contented.
In our house the dinner-table conversation was predictable. If mother had the floor, it would be cultural, with quotations from the day’s speaker at her club, John Mason Brown perhaps, or Gilbert Highet. If father was in a talkative mood, and nothing of note had happened in his business during the day, he would inform my sister and me of George Sokolsky’s opinion in the afternoon paper, or of what Galen Drake had phil
osophized about on the auto radio.
At the Cvetics, you never knew. They ate noisily and greedily, as though each meal was to be their last, and they talked fast and loud—all except Helen, who rarely spoke—about whatever popped into their heads. Slender Yeti put away enormous quantities of everything—three slabs of seven-layer cake were nothing for that girl, whose bare arms, when she reached for more, were like match sticks—and she rattled on, in a voice as thin as her arms, about Madame Tatiana’s yelling fight with the accompanist at ballet school. Yuri, chewing fiercely, mocked Mr. Fiorino’s efforts to conduct Von Suppe (“You’d never catch me doing that, teaching fifth-raters to play fourth-rate music”), and simultaneously, in counterpoint, his mother gave us free professional samples of the folk wisdom she had picked up from her years of nursing chores.
“Gertie blew up like a balloon, poor thing,” she would say, spooning up her soup with a loud trill, “and when the doctor stuck the drain in her belly the smell was like the stockyards. But sometimes you got to do that, you got to let out the poison. Helen, bring in the rest of the cauliflower.”
Her husband was small, wiry, wizened, and good-humored. I never saw him (but once) in anything other than working clothes—a brown leather jacket over khaki shirt and trousers—just as I never saw Mrs. Cvetic (but once) in anything but that wrinkled white uniform, size forty-six. Mr. Cvetic worked as a journeyman plumber—actually as a plumber’s helper, I think—on the new housing projects that were going up; he drove a clanking old Ford with a busted muffler, and you wouldn’t have thought that he would be mad for theosophy.
I hadn’t been in his company more than ten minutes when he asked me what I knew about Rudolf Steiner, and when I said, Wasn’t he the man who wrote the operettas? I was in for it. Yuri groaned rudely and Yeti wandered off to do her bar exercises before the mirror, but Mr. Cvetic ignored the twins and plunged ahead into a basic description of the anthroposophical life view. It was all very confusing—it seemed to take in everything from organic farming to better kindergartens—but after a while I took some comfort in observing that it was confusing to the rest of the family too and that even Mr. Cvetic himself grew hazy when it came to details.
NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Page 34