NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  When I re-entered the cab, though, grimly ready to outlast my new antagonist, Isabel snuggled into the crook of my arm and pressed tightly against me as we drove off.

  “Now we go to hotel.”

  “I don’t want to rush you,” I said. “It’s only four A.M.”

  “You funny.” She murmured to Gertrudis, “Está burlesco.”

  Her friend didn’t crack a smile. It had been clear enough since she had come into my cab from out of the rain that she didn’t like men. I released myself from Isabel.

  “The rain has stopped,” I said. “Isn’t it about time that we dropped off your friend?”

  “We get out first,” she replied equably. “Then her.”

  While I was thinking this over, I had a chance to survey the slick, silent streets, which seemed to be getting a little familiar.

  “How does this guy know where to go,” I asked Isabel after a while, “if nobody tells him?”

  “He knows,” she said simply. “I already tol’ him.”

  “Well,” I said, “you better tell him to go the old-fashioned way. We’ve already passed this plaza twice. Once more and I’ll own the cab.”

  She leaned forward and spoke sharply to the hackie, who gave no indication of discomfiture, but continued to drive us sedately through the night while the blotchy-faced girl droned on in her unpleasant way. Even though Isabel was leaning against me as she listened, I was growing sleepy.

  At last we pulled up before a squat, freshly stuccoed building which, save for its vertical neon HOTEL SUPERBA, might have been a veterinary clinic. Blithe as if we were off to a Sunday picnic, Isabel hopped out, leaving me for the moment with Gertrudis, who was smoking a little brown cigarette and spitting tobacco shreds onto the floor mat.

  “I go in first,” Isabel called to me. “You pay him, yes?”

  I paid him, all right, after a miserable effort to argue. When I put back my wallet it was practically empty, but it was worth all of it, I thought, to see the last of that rude and sulky young woman, who said nothing as I hastened eagerly after Isabel.

  I found her in the lobby, shaking the night clerk, who was trying obstinately to stay asleep in his tilted chair, with the immutable stubbornness of the stoically enduring. He had no protection, and no equipment beyond a freshly sawed table desk sitting on opaque glass blocks. Behind his nodding head hung a raw, unfinished rack for depositing mail and room keys. The dark cubbyholes gaped emptily. It was like staring into the vacant sockets of a jaw from which every tooth has been extracted. Isabel and I, it was plain, were alone with the desperately sleeping Indian in a building that might have been put up just for this one night.

  I yanked his chair upright by its left leg.

  “Numero once,” he groaned, scratching his bare brown belly with one hand—his embroidered white shirt hung unbuttoned to the navel—and with the other extending a key hooked to a hard rubber ball so huge that you couldn’t stuff it into a pocket even if you wanted to. Someone had painted the number 11 on it in white.

  “Hold on.” I was very conscious of exactly how much I had left in my wallet. “Cuánto?”

  He spread the fat fingers of one hand and displayed them. “Cinco.”

  I looked at Isabel. She had helped a lot of people to my money: not only her boss but also the cabbie, her peculiar girl friend, the counterman at the milk bar, and now the hotel clerk. From each, from all, no doubt, she took her cut.

  But then, she had earned it. And I had stuck it out. What mattered, after all, was that she really and truly liked me. At least that was what she seemed to be saying to me as she stood blinking a little in the bare light, her fine legs apart and her bare arms akimbo, daring me not to like her, not to admire her for her dash and her nerve, not to pay. I drew a deep breath and, turning back to the clerk, exchanged money for key.

  “Por dónde?” I demanded, my voice echoing through the empty hall.

  He pointed his dirt-caked thumb dead ahead and then let the arm fall back against his belly, the fingers working their way into the folds of his flesh, like piglets searching for the teats of their recumbent mother.

  “Come, Isabel,” I said, leading her down the bleak uncarpeted corridor which, relieved only by grilled doors at regular intervals, had the clanking monotony of a cell block. Six, eight, seven, nine—we had the last room on the floor. I unlocked it and let her in.

  With incomparable grace, Isabel held out her arms to me in the quiet of our ultimate sanctuary. A familiar gesture, but she endowed it with a rich and wonderful mystery. Our bodies close, we whispered, not because we had to but because it did not seem right to rupture the before-dawn silence. At last, I thought, at last, I’ve won! And I kissed her slowly, savoringly, deeply.

  Isabel pushed at my arms, and as I lowered them my jacket fell to the chair at the side of the bed. She tugged gently at my loosened tie until she had it in her hand, then unbuttoned my wrinkled shirt and slipped it off too. I stood naked to the waist. As I stepped out of my loafers to more nearly equalize our heights, I began to fumble with the buttons of Isabel’s white blouse.

  She laughed a little, helping me. “You got big fingers. Sin arte.”

  “That’s because I’m nervous,” I muttered. By the subdued light of the bed lamp I stared at her newly exposed throat and soft upper bosom, bronze-gold above the lace of her slip. “I’m dazzled. Isabel, Isabel, Isabel.”

  “Toby, you nice boy,” she chuckled. “You do me one more favor.”

  I drew back in order to look at her, but did not answer.

  “We get a room for my friend. She have no place to stay.”

  “Now you ask me? Why now?”

  “I promise to. Gertrudis can’t ask you herself. Tímida.”

  “She looks it.”

  “What you say?” Isabel demanded, with just a touch of impatience. “I got to tell her, she’s waiting with the taxi driver.”

  “She’d better stick with him—he’s got the last of my dough.”

  Isabel was gazing at me sorrowfully. I unbuttoned my hip pocket, pulled out my wallet and spread it apart with my fingers. “You’re looking at my train ticket and my last dollar bill. If you sandbagged me you wouldn’t find anything more.”

  Even as I spoke, Isabel was buttoning her blouse. She tied the little bow at her throat and picked up her purse. “I go tell her,” she said.

  “You do that.”

  “You lie down, you look tired. Okay, Toby?”

  “Okay.”

  After she had slipped out I lay down dizzily and waited, staring up at the frieze of cobwebbed cracks running along the upper wall of the plastered cell, hardly finished but already falling into disrepair. I might have been lying in the bare bedroom of a bleak new garden apartment in Bayside, Long Island. But not alone. Not all alone.

  The time passed very slowly. I said to myself, She knew I didn’t like that girl. Who would? The fact that I had no money left, for her or for anyone else, was more than just fate. It was her responsibility as much as mine.

  But I could not go on talking to myself. I got up in my stockinged feet and padded out into the hallway. It was empty. I could see clear down to the sleeping clerk with no obstruction, human or otherwise. I started to run.

  Without pausing at the clerk’s desk I went right on to the door, which I struck with my shoulder, skidding to a halt on the slippery sidewalk beyond it. I peered first this way, then that. For as far as I could see, the length of the street in both directions was absolutely bare, and drying out here and there where it was touched by the first flush of dawn.

  I walked back slowly into the Hotel Superba, my socks soaked through and plastered to the soles of my feet. I took hold of the snoring clerk and shook him awake ruthlessly.

  “Did my girl friend go out?” I demanded. “Did she go away in the taxi?”

  “No home,” he mumbled. “No home.”

  I released my hold on his shirt. He fell back to sleep at once and I proceeded on down the blank corridor to its e
nd, my wet socks leaving footprints on the unwashed plaster dust of the still unfinished tile flooring. Inside my room I stripped off the socks and, drawing the blind against the early dawn that was already seeping through the window, I threw myself down on the bed once more. Unslaked, my lust turned—like a glass of milk left undrunk—to a sour, hateful curd. I lay for a long while, burning and seething, frustrated, shamed, humiliated. It was only after seemingly endless hours that exhaustion overcame me, and I fell asleep.

  But when I awoke, bewildered for an instant, alone in the strange room, I was finally able to laugh at myself.

  That, in essence, is the story I have told others not once but many times in the years that have passed since it—or something like it—first happened to me. Presumably I tell it on myself when I want to show what a sucker, what a fool, a young man can be.

  And when people press me—as some do—about what happened afterward, I tell them truthfully that I ate a cheap and greasy breakfast, caught the lurching train back to Panama City, and confessed laughingly to Tommy, once he had admitted that Luisa had outraced him on her bicycle, that I had wound up not with Isabel but with the morning paper.

  But observe, as I do now, what a charming self-portrait I have succeeded in painting, what a wholesome person emerges from this “true” recital: good-natured, sporting, able to laugh at himself, and above all charitable. The only thing I have suppressed is the brief epilogue which I must now relate.

  Some days after that fruitless evening, Tommy was ordered to the other end of the Isthmus, to Cristobal, for several days’ work. The minute that I heard this, I began to think of Isabel, whose very name I had put out of my mind. All of my shame and resentment at being victimized came rushing back, and I was taken by a rage for revenge.

  With great casualness I said to Tommy, “I want you to look up Isabel in Colón. You remember, the tease.”

  “If I get the chance,” he said. “But you know, I can’t afford that stuff.”

  “Who can? That’s why I want to scare her out of pulling the same trick on anyone else. Tell her I’m good and angry. Furioso. Frenético. Wait!” I swiveled about in my chair and jammed a letterhead sheet into my typewriter. Rapidly I typed out, in Spanish: “Señorita: I have not forgotten. You shall pay for your treason.” Then I yanked it out and scrawled an indecipherable signature beneath.

  “There, that looks official. Tell her I’m negotiating with the proper parties to have her taken care of. Physically.”

  “My Spanish isn’t that good.”

  “Hers is. You won’t have to draw a picture.”

  Tommy was a good fellow, if a little dull, but I couldn’t predict whether he would go through with it. So it wasn’t until his return the following week that I learned what had happened. Part of it I could see on his face as he pushed through the swinging doors of the Pacifico, where I was having the usual, Myers rum and Coke, before dinner. He wore a dubious expression, as if he weren’t quite sure what to say to me (as if, I thought before casting the notion aside, he were reluctant even to greet me); and the freckles on his forehead had darkened and grown blotchy.

  “How did it go?” I asked him.

  “Same as here.” He waited until the bartender had brought him his drink before adding, “I saw your friend.”

  “You gave her the message.”

  “Oh yes. She smiled at first. Either she didn’t understand or she figured I was joking. So I took out your note. She stared at it and stared at it. First I thought maybe she was illiterate, but no, she began to jabber a mile a minute. In order to stop her I told her what you said, about hiring the Mafia to knock her around. Well, she started to tremble, you know, and her eyes filled with tears. She was pale, and biting on the letter as though—”

  “Biting on what letter?”

  “On your letter. The note you typed. Then she turned around and ran out of the bar like a deer, by the side exit, at the corner of the bandstand. I thought I’d better go after her—I didn’t want to carry it too far—but when I asked the bartenders where she lived, they made out like they didn’t know what I was talking about. I said to them, When she comes back tell her I was only kidding. But I don’t know that she ever came back. If you ask me, by now she’s on her way to Tampico, or wherever it was she came from.”

  I couldn’t think of anything much to say. Tommy gulped down his drink a little more swiftly than usual and wound up, looking at his glass instead of at me, “I can’t stick around tonight. Fact is, I’ve got a dinner date. I’ll see you.”

  Why did I do it? None of the excuses that I can muster up even approaches adequacy. Just because she had humiliated me, did that give me warrant to terrorize her? I had accepted the rules of the game. I knew when I started that her livelihood, her very life, depended on her countering aggressive men with all the cunning she could conjure up.

  No doubt it was to Gertrudis that she had turned, in miserable panic, for help in fleeing from those bandy-legged little Indian soldiers, strapped into their Sam Browne belts and serving both their provincial masters and whatever rich gringo could afford their services for a job of pistol-whipping. Isabel and Gertrudis knew in their bones what I understood without ever being honest enough to make explicit to myself: that the cards were stacked in favor of the Tommys and the Tobys, the rich, careless Yankees who, if they were outwitted in the skirmishes, could always win the wars simply by whistling up the apparatus of terror and repression that had been invented precisely to crush the victimized and the rebellious.

  Well, if Isabel could only know it, this is one time she won. For, despite all my efforts to bring back just that one night when she charmed me and I tried so hard to charm her, to win her not by her rules but by mine, not with money or force but with the assertion of my simple manhood, I cannot really call her up in her mature and weary beauty. All I have, instead, is what I have earned for myself: the woman whom I never saw, but who remains nevertheless indelibly imprinted in my mind’s eye, pale, trembling, fearing me, hating me and cursing me, now and forevermore.

  THE HACK

  Sooner or later everyone who writes, and publishes, is bound to be approached by a supplicant who writes but does not publish. “Would you read this? And be honest with me: Have I really got it?”

  Such a plea for reassurance goes straight to the heart, for it is one that every writer has uttered, once upon a time, if only to himself. What could be more natural, in a trade without diplomas, licenses, or name plates? Sometimes there comes a more extreme demand, the most painful of all, and the most painful to answer: “Should I go on?”

  A negative answer is implicit in the very uttering of the question. If you do not believe in yourself, even beyond the boundaries of sanity, no one else will. But the cruelty of replying with absolute frankness is easy only when you are young, desperate to assert yourself, and so prove your own gifts, if necessary at the expense of others.

  Just before I came of age, I met a man in Ann Arbor named Harold Bangs who threw these questions into relief and so, I gradually came to see, altered my conception of myself. The funny thing is that, far from being unsure of himself, he was fanatically certain—like many eccentrics—that he held an exclusive option on a certain corner of the truth.

  After my sophomore year at college I had gotten a summer job as lifeguard at a Michigan beach resort; but instead of spending my evenings making out with the girls at the casino, I had sat up late, night after night, in a kind of fever, writing stories about the people around me, the busboys, the waiters, the lonely wives, the weary worried husbands. By the time fall came around I knew that this was what I wanted to do, more than anything in the world, and I was convinced, in the way that you can be only when you are very young, that I was greatly gifted. Anyway, I had to find a single room, off in some quiet place, so I could write all night, if I wanted to, without disturbing anyone. That was how I met Harold Bangs.

  Mrs. Bangs was the one who answered the doorbell of the unprepossessing, run-down house in a
courtyard only a few blocks from the Michigan Union, and led me on up to the attic room. Thin, shy and puckered at the lips as if she had just bitten into something bitter, she stood in the doorway of the narrow room and rubbed her hands up and down her flanks.

  “I know it’s not very big,” she said, blinking rapidly in what I later realized was a tic, “but you did say you wanted a real quiet place.”

  Mrs. Bangs must have had a first name, but I never learned it, nor could I ever have thought of her as anything but Mrs. Bangs, not young, not old, not interesting, just an overworked rooming-house keeper whom I never saw in anything but a J. C. Penney house dress, ankle socks and white open-toed buckle-strap Enna Jetticks, and who always smelled of ammonia and Bab-O while she scrubbed the endless steps to my room and the toilet next to it.

  Even the mail, which for her consisted principally of utility bills, catalogues and a weekly letter from a Mrs. J. C. Hurd of Ishpeming, Michigan, was invariably addressed to Mrs. Harold Bangs, that drooping-breasted, down-dropping woman who never relaxed, seldom smiled, and ran the house alone, as if she were a widow woman.

  In fact it was the mail that first brought Harold and me together. There were eleven of us roomers in that dark, cool and faintly moldy old house, not counting Mr. and Mrs. Bangs, and it was customary for the one who first spotted the postman stuffing the box to bring in the mail and lay it out in piles on the oak hall table, under a hand-lettered poem, a souvenir of the Chicago Fair, entitled “That’s Where the West Begins.” That was how I knew about Mrs. Bangs’s mail; and that was how Harold came to know about me.