NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (22 page)

“I’d better leave now, before you’re ruined up and down Humboldt Parkway.”

Rita laughed out loud. As I stood on the porch in the pleasant morning sunlight, holding her hand, I realized (more than realized: I had known it all along) that I was not cut out to be a tall dark stranger, in her life or in any other girl’s. I had always known it, but nevertheless it was brutal, the way we stood there and joked about it. And then we said goodbye.

Six months later I received an announcement of the birth of a daughter to Ralph and Rita Everett. I must have gone to five or six stores before I found a silver fork and spoon set that seemed suitable. When I dropped the little package down the mail chute, I felt that a chapter of my life had been finished, and that while I was purged now of the anxious desire that had run its course like a long and serious illness, I would never again be really young. A few days later I got one of those little thank-you notes from Rita. It was enclosed with a copy of
Harper’s
that contained a poem by Ralph (about the burning of Buffalo in 1812, I think). “Ralph wants you to know,” Rita added, “that you’re the kind of reader he had in mind. He says it’s not so much, just one poem, but I feel as though it’s the beginning of a new life for us.”

Six or eight months later, Ralph sent me a reprint of a brief article that had been accepted by the
American Historical Review
, entitled (I still have it) “Some Neglected Aspects of the Early Rivalry Between Black Rock and Buffalo.” It wasn’t the kind of information that you’d go out of your way to learn, but I thought it had more verve than the usual scholarly monograph. And it was proof that Ralph was organizing his time, as he would have said, digging away at the raw material for his book.

By the time I got to Buffalo again, Rita had had another baby, and Ralph’s father had come to live with them.

The first thing I noticed when Ralph opened the front door was that the harp was gone.

“You shouldn’t have taken a cab,” Ralph said. “I would have been only too glad to pick you up.”

I put my armful of presents on the couch. At the far end of the
room, barricaded behind a baby’s play pen, Ralph’s father was seated in the easy chair, studying the want ad pages of the
Buffalo Evening News
. The oval peak of his bald head shone under the floor lamp and his high-top black shoes caught the light.

“Father, this is our friend Harry.”

The old man arose. “You went to school with Rita.”

“That’s right.” While we were shaking hands I could hear Rita cooing to an infant who suddenly burst into an angry wail. Ralph moved uneasily, but the old man stood still and erect, like a steel engraving out of an old American history book.

He was taller than his son, with a reddish closely shaven face on which time had worn two vertical grooves between his eyes and on either side of his thin mouth. His left arm was missing just above the elbow, and his empty shirt sleeve (he wore only an unbuttoned vest) was pinned neatly back. On his right arm he wore an elastic garter to shorten the sleeve. Despite his complexion and the almost combative cast of his features, there was an aura of death about him that affected me most unpleasantly. He looked as though he were relaxing after having served as a pallbearer at a friend’s funeral; and yet he gave the impression that his own end could not be far off. Perhaps the anger in his face, in his whole stringy body, even in his gnarled, veiny, and trembling hand, was that of a man who hated and cursed the idea of death.

Ralph said, “Would you like to see the kids before they go to sleep?”

“By all means. Excuse me, Mr. Everett. I’ll let you finish your paper.”

He looked at me sourly. “Nothing but bad news anyway.”

Rita was diapering the infant, a safety pin between her lips, while the older child stood in her crib, silently watching her mother. “Harry! Give us all a kiss.”

I kissed Rita first. Her lips were hot and dry, and the infant squirmed uncomfortably between us as we embraced briefly. I made the appropriate remarks about the children, who were friendly enough; but I cannot remember now what they looked like that evening, except that neither of them seemed to take after their mother. We closed the door quietly behind us and stood in the hall for a moment talking softly.

“You must be working like a dog.”

“Ralph gets up with the babies at night. And he
still
manages to write. That’s something, isn’t it?”

“The harp is gone.”

Rita flushed. “Impossible, with the children underfoot. And with Father here … it’s stored in the attic … Come, tell me about yourself while I fix the grapefruit.”

Dinner was not a happy meal. Rita had to jump up twice to go in to the babies. She and Ralph wanted to talk about New York, music, books, but the table was dominated by Mr. Everett. The old man hated the world, and he wanted as many people as possible to know before he took reluctant leave of it. He spooned up his grapefruit carefully with his one hand, disposing of as much juice as he possibly could, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, using the same gesture as his son. Throughout the meal he stared hard at me, as though waiting for me to make a social error. “I understand you’re on the road a lot, with that orchestra.” His eyes narrowed calculatingly. “How are conditions?”

I hesitated. He went on quickly. “I’ll tell you something. This country is going to hell in a basket.”

Rita and Ralph were very absorbed in their food. I said, “I think we’re better off than we were a few years ago.”

“You wouldn’t talk that way if you had to struggle along on a pension. What
are
you anyway,” he said with rising aggressiveness, “another Roosevelt New Dealer?”

“Father,” Ralph said, “don’t you think it would be better if we discussed politics later and let our guest finish his supper now?”

“Later?” He said the word with such anguish that we all looked up, taken aback by his vehemence. “When is that? I might not wake up tomorrow. This is still a free country, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?”

“Of course, Father. I just don’t want to spoil Harry’s dinner.”

“I’m only a fiddler,” I said. “In politics I vote for the man and not for the party.”

The old man’s eyes lit up. “That’s just the kind of thinking that’s softening up the country.”

Rita’s hand shook as she ladled noodles onto my plate. “Isn’t that a little extreme, Father?”

“Extreme? What do you call those professors in Washington? I just hope none of you ever have to exist on a miserable pittance. I went to work when I was eight years old, after my father lost his farm.” He glared insanely at me. “Worked hard, saved, all my life, to the day I lost my arm. But they don’t encourage thrift and hard work any more. Suckers, that’s what we were, suckers.”

“More noodles, Father?”

The old man hooked a finger inside his mouth and drew forth a piece of gristle on which he had been chewing as he talked. He put it on the edge of his plate and stared at it somberly. “Now Roosevelt wants a law that a man can’t make more than twenty-five thousand dollars a year. What do you say to that?”

“I haven’t thought much about it.”

“That’s how the public gets fooled. They don’t think.”

“I never expect to earn that kind of money. Or anybody I know.”

Ralph raised his eyes and looked at me coolly. “I do, Harry.”

“Who cares how much money you’re going to make?” Ralph’s father chewed savagely on a pickle. “If you had mouths to feed, the incentive would be there, wouldn’t it?”

“The opportunities—”

“Don’t tell me about opportunities. I’ve lived longer than you. Rubinoff and
his
violin, on Eddie Cantor’s program—I bet
he
makes more than twenty-five thousand a year. There’s no reason for the government to confiscate the wealth of those who did make good, just to provide cake and circuses for the ones that didn’t. It’s high time we quit thinking of ourselves and started thinking about principles.”

“I respect your principles, Father,” Ralph said, “but Harry hasn’t come here to talk politics. Besides he’s got a hard evening ahead of him.”

“You hear that?” the old man cried out to me. “He respects me—isn’t that a hot one? I’ll tell you something. To this day he doesn’t know what I sacrificed in order to put him through the University of Rochester. He doesn’t know the policies I borrowed on, the friends I—”

Ralph’s nostrils were dilated. “I must insist—”

“I’m talking.”

Ralph subsided, after giving Rita (who was desperately
spooning cream into the hollow cavern of her baked apple) and me an odd glance, at once beseeching and encouraging.

His father went on inexorably, “It makes me sick to my stomach to watch a boy with your education wasting his time, getting up at four every morning to write that junk.”

“Say it all. You might as well.”

“Respect? You don’t even respect your wife and children, or you’d try to make that expensive education pay off. You’d try to get someplace in your profession and provide some security for your family.”

The old man bent his right hand back against the edge of the table until the knuckles whitened. In the hot silence his swollen finger joints cracked loudly, one after the other. Suddenly he cried out in an agonized voice, like an old minister appealing to his wicked flock, “How do you suppose I feel that the few miserable dollars of my savings has to go to you? You’ll piss it away, fooling yourself and Rita into thinking you’re a genius. I just wish I could live long enough—”

“You will live long enough.” Rita flung her head back challengingly. Her eyes were damp and pained, but I sensed that she had been through crises like this before. “I have faith in Ralph, and I know that you’re going to be—”

“I’m going to be dead, that’s what. And I wish I could take my money with me.” He looked impassively at Rita. “You let him make a fool out of you.”

“But I’m happy.” Her voice rose dangerously. “I’m happy, won’t you believe me?”

At that moment the clear little voice of her older child came floating through the open doorway. “I want a glass of water.”

Rita jumped up. The three of us were left at the table in a mist of heavy breathing and tobacco smoke. The old man actually looked pleased with himself, but now it was Ralph who could not let matters dispose themselves so easily; he seemed to have been bitten by a bug of misery which inflamed his entire being with a desire to justify himself to his father. I don’t know whether he remembered, or even cared that I was sitting there—or perhaps everything that he said was really directed to me, as the one person who could judge his manner of life against the claims pressed
against it by his father. I am not very perceptive about such things—I only know that Ralph spoke to his father like a despairing man.

I heard him say, “I’m trying the best I know to make something worthwhile of my life.”

The old man didn’t move. His voice was unexpectedly gentle. “I haven’t got any future left, Ralph. Maybe that’s why I’m so anxious about yours.”

Ralph turned pale. “I’m sorry.” He made no effort to deny his father’s statement; perhaps there was an unspoken agreement between them not to bluff about the older man’s life expectations. “I can only ask you to have faith in me.”

“You talk like a preacher!” The old man’s sudden sneer was shocking. I think now that he was trying to conceal his emotions, but at the time I was angered and embarrassed. “If you had any ability it would have come out by now.”

“You’re not competent to judge.”

“Who is? All I ever saw was one poem in a highbrow magazine that nobody reads anyway.”

“So that’s it. You’ll never be proud of me, because you won’t let yourself. If I made a fortune and was praised by all the critics, you’d say it was a fluke.”

The old man knocked his pipe into the dessert dish and stared down at the charred fragments of tobacco floating slowly in the remains of his baked apple. “I don’t know if they told you. I’ve got a bad heart condition, I’m apt to go almost any time.”

Ralph did not return my glance. He was staring at his father with an expression of concentrated loathing, and in the first stunning instant the thought flashed through my mind that he was disgusted with his father’s inability to keep his secret to himself; but then I felt that Ralph hated his father because he was going to die too soon, and so cheat him of his eventual triumph.

“No point in going to my grave,” the old man said, “without getting everything off my chest.”

“You’re not going yet. And you’re not going to rush me, you hear? I’ve got my schedule laid out, I won’t let you scare me out of it.”

Rita came back into the dining room then. She had put on
make-up and tied her hair behind her ears with a ribbon. “I didn’t hear any dishes breaking,” she said pleasantly.

Ralph said heavily, “We’d better get going. It’s not early.”

“You won’t have to worry about the children, Father, they won’t get up.”

“Oh, the children. They’ll be in good hands—” the old man spoke slowly, so that no one should mistake his meaning… “—as long as I’m here.”

We went out to the car and then we all turned around, as if by a common impulse. The old man was standing at the parlor window, holding the curtain back with his one arm and staring out blindly at the darkening street.

I was already committed to spending the night at the Everetts’. Now although there was nothing I would have liked more than to have gone off to a hotel, I could not bring myself to decline the invitation which I had already accepted for fear of hurting Ralph and Rita.

After the concert we were joined by two high-school classmates of Ralph’s, Jim Bagby, a tall cadaverous fellow, and Ed Herlands, who was fat, well dressed, and had the kind of self-assurance that comes only with inherited money. We spent the evening drinking beer and talking about the cultural sterility of Buffalo. It seemed that it was only this common grievance which still bound Ralph to his old friends, for he held hands with Rita as if to assert his basic separateness from the rest of us.

We were driving home when Rita said, “Harry, I know you’re ill at ease about staying with us tonight. But you’re one of us … maybe you could consider it as a favor to us.”