NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  My temples started to pound when I realized what Harold was telling me. The next few days passed in such fevered anticipation that I scarcely noticed how matter-of-factly my sweet Elaine took Harold’s clearing the coast. When I think of it, she was not unlike those coeds I hear about nowadays, who move in and out of their boy friends’ rooms as casually as if the boys were their brothers. People weren’t all that different when I was in school; it was just that love was a little more difficult, and you had to be more circumspect—unless, like Elaine, you were born self-assured and knowing what you wanted.

  After the first rapturous nights we grew almost careless, up in our hideaway. Once I concealed Elaine in the shower when Mrs. Bangs suddenly shuffled up the steps bearing soap and a light bulb that she had forgotten to bring up earlier; another time I had to throw on a bathrobe and run my fingers through my hair at eight-thirty in the evening to answer Mrs. Bangs’s buzz—two short, three long—summoning me to the telephone.

  But we managed to keep our rendezvous all through the winter without being discovered, thanks not only to the tact of my housemates (some of whom were envious, others amused) but even more to my accomplice and accessory in fornication, Harold Bangs. Never once did he become sly or leering when he made his offhand remarks about his wife’s comings and goings. All he asked in return was that I continue to acknowledge our literary fellowship, which I could do only in the most begrudgingly reluctant manner.

  Neither of us had been having what you might call a smashing success with our respective efforts, unless you were to count the handwritten note of encouragement I’d gotten on a story rejected by Esquire. But Harold was unquenchable, and unchangeable in his absolute self-assurance that one day the gates would be opened for him by the elect, while I, if somewhat more prey to self-doubt and occasional despair, was buoyed up by Elaine’s avowals of faith in me.

  Elaine liked the idea of my being a writer. “I want success for you even more than I do for myself!” she cried one night, and I was transported. When the Michigan Daily announced a spring writing contest, Elaine went after me to enter it. I had never gotten mixed up with the campus literary crowd, even to the extent of submitting my stuff to their magazine. To Elaine I explained that they were a bunch of poseurs, big-city intellectuals trying to impose their tastes on us provincials; but in my heart I dreaded the possibility of rebuff. It was one thing to be honorably rejected, no matter how often, by unseen editors in high places, but it would be quite another to be brushed aside as unworthy of publication even in a campus magazine by people of my own age.

  I don’t know whether Elaine understood the real reason for my hesitancy. In any case, she swept away the ostensible ones, and by repeated assurances of faith convinced me that I should enter the competition, which called not for a short story or a piece of journalism but for a character study, a portrait of someone unusually odd or interesting. The winner was to be awarded a hundred dollars plus publication of his sketch.

  If I say that it was Elaine’s idea for me to write about Harold Bangs, I hasten to add that I accepted it enthusiastically and gave it all I had. To be sure, I changed his name, calling it “Howard: Portrait of an Unsuccessful Hack”; I changed his habitat from a rooming house to a trailer, in which he wrote science fiction while his wife was out demonstrating kitchen ware at neighbor-hood parties; and I doctored him up in other small ways that would, I felt sure, prevent his being recognized by anyone but the other fellows in the house, such as giving him a wooden leg instead of bad lungs. But I retained the essentials, the stacks of incoming and outgoing manuscripts, the clattering old typewriter, the glass ashtrays choked with butts, the smell of dead cigarettes and the feel of falling hair, and above all the look of Harold the happy fanatic, with his sleeve garters, dead-white skin, and cadaver’s growth of whiskers, tapping out his malformed fantasies at the mahogany table from which he never rose, embedded forever in that gloomy room like a dead dictator in a wax museum.

  Well, I won. It was a sweet day, with a girl to embrace me on the street when I told her the news, with teachers and other skeptics to call out congratulations, with the spring air invading even my stuffy attic room while I composed my letter home of pardonable triumph and vindication. Then came word that the Daily had sold my sketch to an intercollegiate press association for syndication across the country.

  For a day my article was everywhere, and for a little while I was a hero, at least to Elaine and to myself. But then my stories began coming back, seemingly faster than ever, with the same printed rejection slips. And one night as I was sorting through the dismal mail on the hall table, a voice called out to me from beyond the dining room’s sliding doors.

  “Mr. Harlow, would you come in here?”

  It was Mrs. Bangs. But what would she be doing asking me into Harold’s sanctum? With the bad news tucked under my arm, I moved uneasily down the hallway to see what was up. To my astonishment Mrs. Bangs was standing beside Harold, her red and roughened hand resting on his rounded shoulder. Before she could say anything, however, he spoke.

  “Congrats, Tommy, on the prize and the sale. I knew you’d hit if you stuck at it.” For once he was not smoking, and his hand seemed to tremble as he passed it along his bristles. His shoulder blades jutted like a twin hump.

  I peered at him across the student lamp, but before I could thank him Mrs. Bangs said, her voice shaking. “You have chosen a poor way to repay confidence and friendship. Harold is too polite to say it, but you have disappointed us both.”

  I was sick with embarrassment. I stammered, “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Don’t say that,” she said, blinking rapidly. “You knew who you were writing about. It would have been different if we had been mean to you, or intolerant. But you never had a better friend here than Harold. Isn’t that true?”

  What did she know? I stared at Harold. Had he told her? Nothing like that showed in his face. He looked wretched, but not as though he had given me away. On the other hand, how did I look? Fortunately his den had no mirror.

  “Yes,” I said to Mrs. Bangs, “it’s true. Harold has been very loyal.”

  “And you made a joke out of him for your own gain.” Mrs. Bangs had tears in her eyes, but she wouldn’t stop.

  Oh God, I said to myself. Aloud I said, “Honestly, I didn’t think of it that way.”

  “Well, you should have, because I do. I work hard to keep this house nice, and quiet for my husband so he can concentrate on his writing. And you come along and treat it all like some kind of dirty joke. My husband is nobody to laugh at, Mr. Harlow.” Now she was weeping openly.

  “Harold,” I said miserably, “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s all right, kid.” Harold cracked his knuckles. “The missus just got upset, what with me not having any luck lately with my own stuff. But I’ll hit one of these days, just like you did.”

  “I know you will,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

  “It’s just a question of time. Maybe I won’t make it like you did, but I’ll make it. You and I work in different ways, is all. I have to make things up. I couldn’t write about what happened to me, or about my family or friends. I couldn’t do that.”

  Even as I backed out of that artificially lit, artificially lived-in room, mumbling apologies to the couple whom I was seeing together for the first—and last—time, my heart was hammering triumphantly in my chest. Harold had put his nicotine-stained finger directly on the difference between us, a difference on which I was ready to stake my life.

  For when the chips were down, Harold would never dare; and I always would. Even on his own limited terms, his caution condemned him to failure, since, immured in his dark study and his immature fantasies, he shrank not just from human beings but from the materials of his own life; while my ruthlessness, of which I had not known myself capable, assured me that, with all the failures in store for me on all the hall tables of my future, I was bound for certain ironic petty successes (even though the
y were to be most gallingly belated), bought at a price Harold would never be prepared to pay.

  And so, victory strangely mingled in my heart with self-disgust at seeing that it was Harold and not I who had defined the boundaries separating us, I slunk from his room and from his wife’s contempt and despair. I could be bold on paper, I would be bold on paper again, I was certain of it now. But I would always be a coward in other ways.

  A few weeks later the semester was over and I tiptoed out of the Bangs house with my two valises and my laundry bag, leaving the final week’s rent in an envelope on the accursed table so as not to have to face Harold or Mrs. Bangs again. And that summer, my love affair with Elaine already dying, I returned to the lifeguard’s job and to my typewriter.

  THE BALCONY

  Their room had seemed ideal at first sight. High-ceilinged and airy, it had a cool, shabby, clean appearance that was most inviting. Madeline stepped to the jalousies and tugged at them gently, and as the sun came streaming through, outlining her slight figure, she turned to smile at her husband.

  “It is nice,” she said. “It looks out on the street. Very lively.”

  Brian nodded to the hotel owner’s wife, who stood at his side, the huge door key in one hand, a scrub brush in the other. “Muy bueno, Señora. We’ll take it.”

  But they should have known better, for it was hardly their first day in the country. No sooner had Brian lugged their bags up from the lobby, and Madeline shaken the wrinkles out of their folded clothes, than they were stunned by a roar that started at the corner two stories below and seemed to increase in volume and intensity as it blasted through the open window, driving directly at them. They stared at each other, almost frightened. Then Madeline walked to the window and looked down.

  “It’s one of those trailer trucks—what did you used to call them in Kansas?”

  “Semis. But for God’s sake, it sounds like he’s driving it right into the bedroom.”

  “It must be because the street is rather narrow and the walls are so high. They almost seem to slant inward, toward the street, as they go up, so maybe it’s—” Madeline seated herself in the wicker rocker and rubbed at her ankle—“something like an optical illusion, only for the ears.”

  “Always the invocation of science. Has it struck you that the Avenida Juarez happens to be the main drag for all the bus and truck traffic out of town?”

  “Did it strike you? It was you who marched us up here from the bus station because you didn’t want to be right in the town square.”

  “I wanted to save money. And it just occurred to me about the highway.” He was about to say more when the air was filled with a shrieking whine, punctuated with a series of rhythmic rattles. Brian winced. “They’re zeroing in on us.” He raised his voice. “Madeline! Pack up that stuff and let’s blow. I never heard anything this bad in Florence, not even in Rome.”

  “It never did us any good to move in Italy, either. We could never afford the kind of place that was quiet, could we? Come, let’s go for a walk and look over the market. Maybe it’ll be quiet tonight, after supper.”

  But the city, for all its pleasures, was no more quiet than any other Latin town. Children played tag, women bickered in the market, an old Indian hawked noisemakers, a young blind beggar girl moaned from her shawled huddle on the spittle-stained sidewalk.

  They bought a pair of unyielding huaraches made from old truck tires for Brian, an impractical comb carved by hand from one piece of wood for Madeline, and a kilo of red bananas that they could peel and munch on as they strolled the musical streets. They tried to figure out the tub of humming insects casually guarded by a yellow-toothed old lady, and what the dignified and distant Indian squatting on his shredded scrape could earn even if he were to sell every one of his little pyramid of speckled apples. Then the seasonal afternoon rains came, and they paused, taking shelter under the hospitable awning of a sidewalk café for a leisurely coffee. But there, across the road, under the overhang of a building that hardly protected her from the straight down-driving rain, knelt the blind girl in her black tatters, her rebozo stretched tautly across the narrow curve of her shoulders. At her side a naked baby a year old, perhaps two, a stick of bamboo clutched in his small fingers, dabbled his other hand in the water that gushed furiously from the drainpipe next to him, while his mother continued to move her lips in the singsong whining chant that was now inaudible above the drumming of the summer rain: “Por amor de Dios, por amor de Dios.”

  In sudden fury, Brian grasped Madeline by the forearm. “Do you see that? She doesn’t even stop her pitch in a thunderstorm. Nobody to listen, nobody could hear her anyway, but she keeps right on wailing.”

  “I’m sure the poor thing was trained to beggary from childhood. It’s particularly horrible when you think that there’s no need for it any longer.”

  “I suppose you mean atomic energy and all that crap. Well, in the meantime I take it as a personal affront. If I emptied my pockets into that baby’s dirty little paw, what good would it do?” He held up his hand to forestall her reply. “I know, I know, charity isn’t the answer. But I don’t want to write to my congressman, I just want to paint.”

  “You might have thought of that before you suggested that we come to an underdeveloped country.”

  “Logic again. Why is it that your logic is always based on sentimentality? You know, I read someplace that they rent those babies by the day, the beggar women. Very effective with the tourists.”

  “Brian, you go to the most disgusting extremes to protect yourself from pain. Even if that was true, would it make the baby’s plight any the less terrible? Or her mother’s? Or this girl’s?”

  “How would you know? You’re worse than your mother, always exhibiting her self-satisfaction by making like a mother. You haven’t even got the excuse that she does.”

  Madeline said, almost inaudibly, “And whose fault would that be?”

  “All right, I shouldn’t have said that. But you know, I think if you lived in a world without misery, you’d have to invent some in order to be happy.”

  “I’m getting out of here. The rain’s stopped.”

  Brian folded some bills under his saucer and hastened after Madeline, who was already striding up the street. He took her arm and slowed her pace as they crossed the Zocalo. There was noise there too, but it was more what they had hoped for, the rattling soulfulness of a strolling mariachi band, and with the help of the players the time passed more pleasantly until the late dinner hour.

  After they had eaten, however, they were both very tired and ready for bed, and there was no excuse for them to stay away from their room. The hotelkeeper barely inclined his bald dome away from his vacant contemplation of the evening paper as they passed before the desk and mounted to the second floor. At the head of the broad stairway they came abruptly upon the hollow open square off which opened the dozen rooms of the second story. The emerging stars and the wedge of moon, riding slowly through a soft bank of clouds, illuminated the begonias and cactuses in their terra-cotta pots on the margin of the open square.

  “Be careful, Brian,” Madeline murmured. “The tiles are still slippery from the rain. A cactus spike can really hurt if you fall on it.”

  “It isn’t the rain that worries me, it’s the noise.” Brian closed their door behind them. “I know you’ve heard this routine before, but if they’re going to be pounding at us all the time, what kind of work can I get done in the next couple of weeks?”

  “Sometimes I wish that we could trade places. I wish that you had to listen to those seventh-graders snickering while you were trying to show them color values, and trying to think what to make for supper, and where to go that would be cheap on our vacation. If you had to, you’d do it, that’s all.” Madeline turned back the bedcovers and began to step out of her skirt.

  “That’s what you said in Mexico City, and I still couldn’t draw a line, with all that racket. The difference between you and me is that you love what you do, especial
ly when it’s unpleasant. But I hate to paint, I admit it, it hurts. I welcome any little distraction.”

  “Haven’t I always done my best to protect you from distractions?”

  “Yes, you have, baby, and I love you for it. Now do you mind if I read for a while?”

  “The light won’t bother me. But I do need my sleep.”

  “Of course you do. How else could you have the strength to take care of me?”

  Somewhere below, the doors of a cantina swung open, and a roar of laughter, followed by a tenor raised in romantic song and a bellowing protest, floated up to their window. Madeline raised her head from the pillow to stare anxiously at her husband. His lips were set in a thin line; his large pale eyes stared unseeingly at the book before him.

  “It’ll surely stop soon,” Madeline whispered. “After all, they need their relaxation too.”

  “From what? You don’t have to whisper—they can’t hear you.”

  “Do you really believe that rotten propaganda about them sleeping in their sombreros all day? Because if you do I—” She could not finish; at that instant a semi came blasting up the highway and shifted gears at the corner beneath them with a grinding clatter and a rising howl that seemed aimed deliberately and directly at their hearts.

  They stared at each other, united in despair.

  “Maybe if we closed the windows part way…”

  “Part way won’t do.”

  “Then let’s—” Madeline raised her voice as a motor scooter howled and howled higher and higher, straining as it swung around the heavy truck.

  Brian hauled himself out of bed and clopped to the window. “If I close these jalousies we’ll stifle.”

  “We can open the door.”

  It was a bad night. They tried everything, but in the end it was useless. If they barricaded themselves they could not breathe; if they allowed air in, they were engulfed by the shock waves of the street noises. Only toward dawn did the sounds subside at last, so that they could drop off finally with nothing but the calls of the awakening songbirds to punctuate their fitful slumber.