NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (10 page)

“London!” Her eyes widened.

“As soon as the agency gets a summer replacement for the TV show. So that—” he stopped at the sound of Kate’s footsteps. She walked swiftly to his side and turned to face her mother.

“I did my Latin, it was easy, and I can do my geometry during study period tomorrow. Can’t I stay here with Father now?”

“I was just telling your mother,” Roy said, slipping his arm around her waist, “that I’m going to have to leave for London very soon. We’ve got an engagement there.”

“How arc you going to go? Are you going by jet?”

He laughed. “Oh, sure. I wouldn’t want to disappoint you. And I’ll send you a cashmere cardigan sweater. Would you like that?”

Her eyes were like her mother’s. Glowing brilliantly, they seemed to be pleading with him never to falter, never to allow his dream image to become tarnished. He released his hold on her waist and stepped back so as to be able to look at Kate and her mother at once. They gazed back at him with that same compound of arrogant possession and humble abasement that he had seen so often in the eyes of his adolescent audiences. Was he playing up to that look now because he had become so completely an article of commerce that he was incapable of any other response? What else could he do but respond with a false and hearty smile?

“If I manage to get to Paris,” he heard himself saying with great calmness, “even if it’s only for a day, I’ll get you both some perfume. I think I know what kinds you like.”

“Now, Roy,” Lisa said, “don’t go spoiling Kate.”

“Tell you what. You keep tabs on her and let me know if she really deserves it. Okay?” He winked at Kate. “And now I have to be getting along.”

“Why don’t you stay here, Father? We’ve got a spare room.”

Lisa arose and dropped her knitting behind her in the chair. “If your father prefers, honey, he can come back first thing in the morning and have breakfast with us.”

Roy found himself biting at the nail of his little finger. “I’m afraid I haven’t made myself clear. You see, I really won’t be able to come back in the morning, or to see you again for quite a while.”

The two stared at him in consternation. For one terrible second he thought that one of them—it might be either, the way they both gazed at him with their soft mouths slightly open—would accuse him of running away, just as Kate had suspected him of cowardice when he had brought her home.

He heard himself saying, swiftly but smoothly, “I simply have to be in Chicago and Cleveland before I get back to New York for my show. As it is, I’m going to have to drive all night.” It was a poor lie, but as the hurt faded from their eyes and was replaced by awe and pride, he went on, “I purposely went out of my way to stop here—figured I’ve been feeling guilty long enough about not seeing you. Besides, I wanted to ask you, Lisa, if you’d give Kate permission to come and visit me later this summer—after I get back from England, that is.”

He couldn’t even remember now, looking into his daughter’s glowing eyes in the moment before she flung herself on him and began to hug him, whether he had intended to ask this of Lisa before he got here. But, smiling at her over the top of Kate’s head, he had the impression that she was pleased, almost as pleased as her daughter, but that she would not let her go to New York alone. Next year, perhaps.

The goodbyes were a little prolonged. Kate and Lisa walked him out to the car (it struck him as fortunate that they had no way of telling from the car or from his one valise how long he had intended to stay) and stood at the curb with their arms around each other in the moonlight, like a couple of school-girls. In the hushed spring moment of rural silence before he gunned the roaring
motor and flipped the gearshift into first, it was borne upon Roy that his former wife and his daughter were clinging to each other protectively, shielding each other from the desolation of his departure, perhaps, or merely from what the incalculable future could bring them, as today it had brought them this unforeseen visit. They would talk about the visit for a long while, probably, but in the end there would be other things, more important things, from which to protect each other.

Then he was off, floating like a moth through the green and black avenues of the town in which he had been born, passing the hospital where he had had his tonsils out and where his wife, after severe travail, had been delivered of his daughter, and he wondered fleetingly whether either of them would ever accuse him—not to his face, but to each other—of having come only to preen himself for one pathetic hour. It was not likely; they lived a little too meanly, though, all things considered; I will have to ask Archie, he thought, if I can’t hike Lisa’s checks just a little. When he reached the state highway heading east, his foot came down lightly and the automobile leaped forward easily at seventy miles an hour. He leaned back snugly in the bucket seat that cradled him as the tires sang beneath him, and while he listened to the song of the humming rubber in the dark of the night, he began to compose in his mind for Minerva (who was bound to consider the episode as faintly ridiculous) a defense of what he had done, of what he had not done—as if in the end there could ever be any defense of what you had made of your life.

A QUESTION OF LONELINESS

T
he Hamlins had gotten into the habit of telling each other that their main problem was one of money. Throughout the first year of their marriage they had enjoyed a double income, but when Alice became pregnant there was only Paul’s salary, which wasn’t enough to enable them to hire help after Alice’s return from the hospital. The pregnancy had been an unadmitted accident, and in the exhausting weeks that followed the childbirth Paul was driven to the suspicion that it was not so much the lack of money that was making their lives miserable, despite the fact that finances had become their chief topic of conversation, as it was Alice’s inability to cope with her new responsibilities.

She had taken to concealing her weariness and anxiety from outsiders with an over-effusive display of affection for little Barby, which worried Paul at least as much as the lassitude and disorderliness that served only to remind him constantly of his deficiencies as a wage-earner. Alice’s excessive pride was accepted by the aunts and cousins who came to examine the new member of the family as proof of her devotion to her child, but acquaintances who called were obviously annoyed. One evening after a classmate of Paul’s had dropped in with his wife for a brief visit, the Hamlins stood at their door and listened to the fading voices of their guests as they descended the stairs. The woman was saying, “You’d think she was the first girl in the world who ever had a baby!”

Alice burst into tears. She was trembling with tiredness, and Paul knew by now that she would probably have cried even if she hadn’t overheard the remark, but the least he could do was to assure her that it had been prompted by spiteful envy. Just as he began to speak, the baby let out a cry. It was only a little cry, but
even as Paul felt his wife’s back stiffen under his outspread hands he knew that it was the inevitable forerunner of another difficult night.

Ever since the birth of the baby their life together had been a series of difficult nights. All the gaiety of the early days while they were getting to know each other—sightseeing, playgoing, hunting for a little Village apartment and then furnishing it—seemed to have disappeared so quickly with the baby’s earliest whimpers that Paul began to believe he had discounted too quickly the earlier indications that Alice felt herself too good for this world. Just as she had complained before that her stenographer’s job in the shipping agency where he worked was beneath her intellectual capacities and threw her into the company of her inferiors, so now she seemed to take as a personal affront the croupiness and poor sleeping habits of her baby.

“I wasn’t made for this!” Alice burst out one evening, flinging a soiled diaper into the toilet bowl.

Paul looked up from the sink where he was rinsing his nylon shirt. “For what?”

“For what? For what?” she mimicked angrily. “I studied psychology in college. I trained my mind. I prepared for something better than a dingy apartment and smelly diapers.”

“Would you like to go back to work?”

“That’s what you think, isn’t it—that I want to run away from my baby!”

Paul knew that even the most mollifying answer would upset Alice even more. “Postpartum melancholia,” the Health Insurance Plan doctor had cheerily explained to Paul. He had consulted the doctor about Alice’s depression immediately after the childbirth, for she had turned her face to the wall each time he came to visit her, but the doctor had been irritatingly nonchalant. “Give her lots of love and kisses. She needs affection.”

Alice had needed affection, but she also needed the things that money could buy. The doctor could not have been expected to foresee that Alice would grow thin and querulous, that the baby would be cranky and a nuisance to carry up and down three steep flights of stairs, that the super would make nasty remarks about the baby carriage in the stairwell, or that they would be horribly
lonely, unable to afford to go out, and with nobody to keep them company during the long evenings but the crying baby and the radio that Alice had come to hate because it reminded her of both the outside world and her own remoteness from it.

Neither of them really knew many people in New York City. After the relatives and office acquaintances had paid their duty calls, no one came but the diaper-service man and the delivery boy from the drugstore.

“Not that I blame anybody,” Alice said bitterly. “Who would want to come here, when we can’t even afford to offer them a drink, and the baby is liable to wake up any minute?”

“It’s inevitable that we should have less and less in common with the people we used to know.”

“What kind of an answer is that? Am I supposed to wait until Barby is in school to have a normal life? At least you get out to work—how would you like to be locked up in this jail?”

Paul decided to take matters into his own hands. From his small allowance he saved painfully and secretly until there was enough for two good tickets to a popular Broadway play. Then he jotted down the telephone number of a baby-sitter service that advertised in
The Villager
, and came to Alice with the news that they were going out.

“To a party?” she asked suspiciously.

“No.” He smiled encouragingly.

“To visit people? Because if you think I’ll do that, you’re crazy. I won’t chase people who never came around or offered to help.”

Then he told her, and Alice threw her arms around his neck. Her warm response was in sharp and uncomfortable contrast to her usual behavior, but Paul knew that she had read the reviews of the play in the
Times
and the
New Yorker
, and the very bitterness with which she had envied the fortunate few who could go to plays as they chose now intensified her almost childish happiness. Suddenly she drew back.

“How can we possibly leave Barby?” The tone in which she asked the question was sufficient evidence to Paul that she wanted only to be reassured.

“We have to, Alice. It’s important for all of us.”

“If only we—” Alice bit her lip, her face betraying a guilty confusion that completed the unfinished sentence for her. She began again, speaking with such a transparent attempt at casusal honesty that Paul was amused and touched. “I wonder if it will be fair to the sitter? You know Barby is going to wake up.”

“That’s a sitter’s hazard, like cave-ins for coal miners.”

They both laughed, and everything was all right for a moment. But then the baby awoke, dirty and screaming, and Alice pulled away from him with a jerk, her face contorted. They did not speak to each other again until their child was quiet.

It was only when Paul called the baby-sitter service that they stopped avoiding each other’s eyes. It seemed the most wonderful good fortune that when the doorbell rang they were bathed, shaved, powdered, and the baby was sound asleep. Paul opened the door. A dumpy, heavily breathing old lady came waddling into the room.

“Well!” she panted cheerfully. “Fleischer’s the name. If they’d told me it was three flights up, I wouldn’t be here. Not with my weak heart.”

“Won’t you sit down?” Alice asked.

The old lady was unusually homely, with spreading nostrils, a hairy chin, and an ungainly body set on swollen legs. Instead of responding directly to Alice’s invitation she said bluntly, “Where’s baby?”

“In there.” Paul nodded at their small dark bedroom. “But she’s asleep now.”

“Bless her little heart. Where’s the radio? Ah, I see it, in the bookcase. Very clever! No television, I suppose. Well, that’s the way things are.” She sighed, but whether in pity for herself or for the Hamlins was not clear. “You can leave now—I’ll find everything if baby should wake up.”

“Her name is Barby,” Alice said tensely.

The old lady let out a surprising cackle. “You two look like you were expecting a bobby-soxer. Don’t worry, I’ve had ’em and I’ve raised ’em. That’s more than the bobby-soxers can say, isn’t it? Now go on, have a nice time.” She bullied them through the open door and snapped it smartly to behind them.

On the way to the subway station Paul said thoughtfully, “She
read my mind all right. A baby sitter should come in with school-books, not with arthritis, isn’t it so?”

“Paul, I’m afraid. Do you think we should have—”

“If she’s good enough for her own grandchildren she ought to be good enough for Barby. We’ll phone after the first act, to check.”

It was only a two-act play, however; and after the long first act the balcony and mezzanine were so crowded that they had barely reached the head of the line at the telephone booth when the buzzer sounded for the final act.

“The hell with it.” Paul took his wife by the arm. “Come on, we’ll miss the curtain.”

“I must talk to Mrs. Fleischer first.”

“If she tells you Barby woke up, will you rush home?”

“That’s not the point.” But Alice grew irresolute, and Paul tightened his grip on her arm.

“We’ll call as soon as the play is over. I promise.”

“Well…”

“Come on.”

When the play had ended, they found the telephone booth standing hospitably empty. Paul dropped a dime in the machine and dialed their number. “I’ll tell her we’ll be home in about an hour, after we’ve stopped in someplace for a drink…. Say, that’s funny.”

“What’s funny?”

“No answer.”

“You must have dialed the wrong number.”

He hung up and dialed again. He listened to the steady ringing. It rang and rang, stupidly and incessantly, until Paul found himself cursing the telephone as venomously as if it were a dog or a relative.

“Are you going to sit there forever?”

Paul looked up blankly. Alice’s pleasant brown eyes were dilated with fear and hate. She said in a trembling voice, “I’m going home. You do what you want.”

Hastening after her, Paul could not keep from making mental calculations even as he ran, balancing the cost of the taxi against two drinks and another hour for Mrs. Fleischer. It would be cheaper
at that, he thought as he raised his arm and flagged down a cab. He tried to help Alice, but when she brushed past him he said, “Listen, there could be a dozen reasons why she didn’t answer.”

Alice, sitting in the far corner with her hands pressed together, did not reply or even turn her head towards him.

“Supposing she was in the bathroom. Supposing she was busy with Barby and couldn’t leave her to pick up the phone.”

Alice said nothing.

“She might even be deaf.”

“Leave me alone.”

When the taxi reached their corner Paul began to figure out the tip. By the time he had gotten his change Alice was inside the house. He took the steps two at a time, caught up with her at the second floor, passed her on the landing, and opened the door of their apartment with Alice just behind him.

All the lights were on and soft dance music was coming from the radio. At the far end of the room Mrs. Fleischer sat motionless with the baby in her arms. His first thought was that both Mrs. Fleischer and his baby were dead.

As he advanced into the living room, unable to speak, his throat constricted and his heart suddenly pounding, Paul saw his daughter lurch awkwardly in the old lady’s arms and belch softly. Mrs. Fleischer was staring at him unblinkingly, her head forward and her mouth a little ajar. He could go no further. In the silence he could feel, he could almost hear a blood vessel thudding in his neck like a muffled drum. While he stood transfixed Alice pushed past him and ran forward across the room.

She picked up the baby and removed a half-empty bottle that was wedged between the old lady’s arm and her body. When she turned with the sleeping baby in her arms her eyes were glittering, but she was so calm that Paul was suddenly conscious, to his intense shame, of his own convulsive shivering. “I’m putting Barby to bed. She seems all right. You’ll have to call the police. Tell them to bring a stretcher.”

He started to reply, but his voice was only a croak, and he was almost relieved to see Alice hurry directly into the bedroom with the baby. He was alone with Mrs. Fleischer. He took a step toward the telephone and then turned for one final glance at her. She
seemed to be hardening before his eyes into a rigid waxed figure, a strange and ugly statue invested with a new dignity, at once pathetic and accusing.

Paul could not bring himself to make the gestures that would assert his human connection with the old lady, to touch her forehead, her eyelids, her wrists. He turned away blindly and picked up the telephone.

Perhaps the most unusual thing about the rest of the night was that the baby did not wake up once, not even when the apartment was crowded with policemen, stretcher-bearers, and the interne who pronounced Mrs. Fleischer dead. People were constantly at the telephone, with calls to the baby-sitter service and then to Mrs. Fleischer’s relatives, a nephew and niece in the Bronx.

After she had been taken away—an arduous and noisy job that shook the hallway—the girls next door, whom the Hamlins had never met before, and the couple below, whom they thought of guiltily every time the baby awoke screaming during the night, came in to express their sympathy. The girls next door brought in a pot of fresh coffee and did their best, with the aid of the people from the second floor, to distract Alice and Paul from the sickening memory that pervaded their apartment like a strange and lingering odor.

Alice was remarkable throughout the night. She was much more helpful to the police than Paul, who was sure that the contrast between her self-possession and his uncontrollable trembling must be obvious to everyone. He was grateful when the neighbors finally said good night at three in the morning, but Alice seemed genuinely sorry to see them leave, not from the fear of being alone, but rather because even in these tragic circumstances she had really enjoyed playing hostess to people whom she had never had the opportunity to meet before.

When they were alone together at last, there seemed to be nothing for them to say to each other. They undressed wearily in the darkness of the narrow bedroom in order not to disturb the baby. In bed side by side, they listened to each other’s deep and slow breathing, and when Paul could no longer bear the silence or
his wife’s open, staring eyes, he turned on his side to take her into his arms.