NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (23 page)

There was an uncomfortable silence—I could think of absolutely no reply—and we finally made our way up the steps to the silent house. The old man was sitting sideways in the easy chair, asleep, his forehead glistening in the lamplight, his stump pressed tight against his chest. His lean mouth had gone slack and his legs were folded sharply at the knees as though they had finally snapped from the long task of holding his body erect. He did not stir when the door closed behind us.

Rita tiptoed across the room, turned off the bridge lamp, and
kissed him on the forehead. He stirred and raised his wrinkled lids, and Rita said gently, “I’ve brought the morning paper.”

“That’s fine.” He cleared his throat. “The children didn’t stir. How was the concert?” He looked amiably at me, as though there had been no words between us at all.

“We played pretty well. I hope they enjoyed it.”

“All you can do is your best.” He arose and clapped his son on the back. “Eh, Ralphie? Then if they don’t like what you’ve done, it’s tough, that’s all.” He chuckled as he waved his good nights and stalked off to the bedroom, the morning paper tucked obliquely under his stump and the white waxy cast of death on his narrow farmer’s face.

Ralph stared expressionlessly after him until Rita said gaily, “You see, darling? It’s all right.”

“You don’t understand,” he replied slowly. “You don’t understand at all.”

“Well, I understand that I’ve got to make up the couch for Harry.” She set to work briskly, brushing aside my offer to help, and not quite looking me in the eye as she tucked in the sheets. When it was done I sat down on the temporary bed and looked up at my tired friends. They stood arm in arm, their minds already turned inward to their dark bedroom and their common life. Even the most bitter recriminations bound them closer to each other than I could ever be to anyone.

That night I was untroubled by intimations of my nearness to Rita and Ralph. Before I fell into a heavy sleep, I wondered only whether old man Everett lay in the little bedroom that had once been mine for a night, with the rumpled morning paper lying where his weary hand had dropped it, listening to his son’s lively ardent useless movements beyond the thin wall, and cursing his inability either to fall asleep or to die and leave those whom he had given his curse to their damned stupidity.

It seemed to me that I had been sleeping for only a few minutes when I was awakened by a light shining in my eyes. I raised myself on my elbow and peered into the kitchen, where Ralph was outlined before the open refrigerator, whose bare bulb sprayed light rays around his disheveled figure. I called out to him softly.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” He turned quickly, digging his fingers through his stiff uncombed hair. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“How do you do it? An earthquake couldn’t get me out of bed after two hours of sleep.”

Ralph advanced towards me through the dark dining room, hitching at his half-buttoned trousers, over which his shirttails still hung, and squeezing together a thick sandwich with his other hand. As he reached the couch where I lay with my hands behind my head, I looked up into his red-rimmed unsmiling eyes and realized perhaps for the first time how profound were the differences between us.

“It’s just a matter of habit,” he said quietly.

“Tell me, Ralph. I don’t mean to be rude, but is it really worth it, this kind of life, just to do some writing?”

The circles under his eyes were violet in the pale glow of the street lamp. “Rita would have been willing to make any sacrifice, to go without children, to go out to work to support us, so that I could write. But I couldn’t do that to her.”

Yes, I thought, that’s all very well, but would she? As Ralph talked on about his book, speaking of the sacrifice of sleep, and of the eventual freedom it would bring them, my sleepy mind wandered to Rita, whose smooth cheek even now was buried in her warm soft pillow, and whom some part of me would always love; and I felt that at last I was seeing her through disenchanted eyes. Looking up into Ralph’s haggard fanatic’s face, I felt that he was crazy, that he was driven by an utterly unrealizable obsession to punish himself day after day, year after year, with this grueling schedule for something which was, after all, just another book.

“My father,” he was saying, “hates creative work. He persists in acting the betrayed parent in front of Rita, although he knows that I can’t stand to see her upset on my account.”

“Maybe Rita’s right about him.”

“In any case my work will go on, and he knows it.” He smiled and extended his hand. “So long, Harry.”

I never saw Ralph’s father again. He must have been a terrible problem, for not long after my departure he had a stroke which
left him bedridden and helpless, a burden to Ralph and Rita and even more so to himself.

In addition to telling me about Ralph’s father Rita wrote me that she was pregnant again, and that the doctor had told her to expect twins. She mentioned nothing at all about Ralph, which more than anything else led me to suspect that he had reached the limits of his financial and physical endurance.

I sat in my mother’s living room in the Bronx (I never thought of it as my living room), with both my 4-F notice and the letter from Rita in my hand, thinking of old man Everett lying stiff and moribund, cursing the world because he could not be quit of it, and listening to his son tiptoeing off in the middle of the night to his fantastic labors; of Rita, heavy and tired, struggling to keep the two little girls from disturbing the old man; and of Ralph, still adding pages to his endless novel and silently looking through his red-rimmed eyes at his dying father and his taut wife. I was glad that I would not be going to Buffalo that year.

It was Ralph who sent me the next letter from Buffalo, some time later. “My father died peacefully yesterday afternoon,” he wrote. “I thought you would want to know although you only met him once. It is just as well that he is gone from this unhappy world …” The twins had arrived, and they were both girls: counting Rita, Ralph now had a household of five females.

Old man Everett had left them his pittance, apparently, for they had been able to take over the remainder of the big house in which they lived. There was plenty of space now, even with the children, and when I arrived in Buffalo the following year, it was taken for granted that I should stay with them.

I was very much taken with the children. The older girls resembled their father in physique, in their stern little faces, and in their slow and thoughtful speech. Penny, the oldest, held out her hand as soon as she saw me and said gravely, “Hello, Uncle Harry. Have you got a nice present for me?”

It was fun, in spite of the war. I even took Rita canoeing in Delaware Park one fine afternoon, with Penny and her younger sister Daisy. Rita stretched out before me, trailing her fingertips
in the dusty quiet water as I paddled slowly around the margin of the lake. We reminisced about school, and then I think we chatted about Ralph, but when I asked about his writing, she smiled nervously, reached back to stroke her silent little girls’ legs with her wet fingertips, and changed the subject.

But Ralph did not want to change the subject. When he learned at supper where we had been, he said, “Rita and I never have the opportunity to do anything like that. But I’m going to make it possible for Rita to float around in a canoe all day long.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked at me in genuine surprise. “There’s no contradiction between writing a good book and writing a profitable one. Isn’t that one of the reasons why this country is the envy of the world—the fact that excellence is rewarded?”

“Do you believe your book will be a bestseller?”

Ralph didn’t even smile. “With all my heart.”

How like his father he looked at that moment!

That evening Ed Herlands rolled up to the house in his fine convertible, escorting a frightened showgirl with long legs and a nervous smile. Rita had also invited her brother, who was at the time an Army captain stationed at Fort Niagara for the duration, and his wife. We were a very mixed company.

Rita’s brother Fred was a sandy-haired small-town lawyer with a pompous drawl and a way of uttering commonplace statements as though they were new and important. He seemed very pleased with his uniform. His wife was a clubwoman with fluttering fingers and a harassed air who regarded Rita and Ralph as her social equals and me as her superior, apparently simply because I was a New Yorker associated with “the arts.” Her deferential manner did not extend to Ed Herlands, despite his obvious wealth, and certainly not to his girl friend, who sat in a corner of the couch with her wonderful legs tightly crossed, chain smoking and trying desperately to look as though she was used to spending her evenings chatting about T. S. Eliot.

Ed was determined to shock the yokels. Obviously Captain Fred Conway and his wife had never mixed with showgirls, and were making an earnest effort to regard Ellie as a girl with a “different” and “interesting” occupation, despite Ed’s chuckling
assurances that she was just someone whom he was fortunate (or wealthy) enough to be sleeping with. “Ellie and I were having breakfast the other day,” he said genially, “and we got involved in a heated discussion—even before we’d brushed our teeth—on the relation of homosexuality to artistic creation.” Then he looked around to observe the effect of his statement.

Fred sat with his freckled fingers linked across his officer’s jacket, his eyes blinking rapidly and expressionlessly, as if he were listening to a client outlining a legal problem; his wife looked as though she wished with all her heart that she were back home in Fredonia; and Ellie herself, breathing deeply, perhaps from nervousness, perhaps to call attention to her excellent bosom, smiled defiantly, waiting for us to challenge this preposterous account of a conversation that could never have taken place.

But Rita was grinning happily, why I couldn’t tell; it might have been that she was not even listening, but was only smiling at the pleasure of relaxing after a long day. Ralph however was nibbling angrily and nervously at his stiff mustache.

“Where’s your friend Bagby?” I said to Ed. “I’d half expected to see him tonight.”

“He’s in New York, studying the dance on a Herlands fellowship.”

“Oh?”

“Nothing princely, you understand. But whenever he gets hungry, he manages to let me know, and I send on a check. If you can’t accomplish anything yourself, it’s nice to know that you can do it vicariously.”

Mrs. Conway was delighted that the conversation was being diverted into safer channels. “That’s wonderful of you. If only more people of means—”

“It’s not wonderful at all. I take it off my taxes. Besides, it gives me a feeling of power.” He laughed soundlessly. “I’ve made the same offer to Ralph, but he’s afraid.”

“Afraid?” Fred cocked his head with judicial caution, scenting some new buffoonery on Ed’s part.

“I told him to go off someplace where he wouldn’t be bothered by the kids, where he could write all day and talk all night—for a
year, or longer if he needed… and I would foot the bills. But as you see he’s never taken me up on it.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Ellie’s bust rising and falling, rising and falling. Ralph sat with his lips tightly pressed together.

“But you could hardly expect—” Fred’s wife began indignantly.

“That he’d leave his family? Not if he were an ordinary ungifted person like me—or like your husband… But don’t we always have other expectations of artistic people?”

Rita said sharply, “Ed, I think—” but he cut in swiftly:

“I’ll tell you why he turns me down. He’s afraid that if I gave him his real chance he’d write a couple tons of junk, or even worse that he wouldn’t write at all without the spur of a lousy job and the dream of getting loose from it by making a million bucks.

“But we mustn’t forget that Ralph is a very moral man. And if he failed to produce he figured he’d have to come back with his tail between his legs and spend the rest of his life working, like a character out of Balzac or de Maupassant, to pay me back the money I’d given him, and that I wouldn’t particularly want anyway, except for his peculiar standards of rectitude.”

Ralph stood up. “Are you all through?”

“Hell, no. Now I’ve got a good idea for a novel myself, and I suspect that I could really get it done and make a name for myself if I was broke and had your incentive to get at it. By the way, am I monopolizing the conversation?”

Rita said: “Tell us about your novel—I hope it’s funny.”

“It’s deadly serious. My hero is a man who is obsessed by one strange fear, which forces him to change his entire pattern of life.”

“Oh, that sounds fascinating.” Mrs. Conway looked around hopefully, as if she still expected that somehow the evening could be salvaged.

“My hero has heart trouble. He has to avoid overeating and overexertion. He’s grown terrified that one day he’ll strain too hard—he also suffers from constipation—and will have a heart attack in the bathroom. This fear of dying at stool is particularly repugnant to him because he is a sensitive man. He has visions, nightmares, of himself dead in an ignominious position, his trousers crumpled around his ankles, his suspenders dangling on
the floor, his face pressed against his bare hairy knees, and his thin hair hanging forward so that his bald spot, usually decently concealed, is immediately apparent to the firemen who break open the door and discover his lifeless body. Sometimes he is horrified by the thought that his body will remain undiscovered for many hours, and will stiffen in its ridiculous and ungainly position. He visualizes burly policemen with faces as red as his is purple, trying to straighten out his corpse and draw his trousers up over his flanks. The irony of it is that this fastidious man must go to the most degrading lengths in order to avoid the necessity of evacuating alone. He searches out bathrooms without locks, and uses those primitive arrangements where men relieve themselves publicly in long rows, military style. He—”

“That’s enough, Ed.”

“More than enough. A compulsive writer could make a powerful thing out of it, couldn’t he? Subtly bringing out the symbolism of the man who wants to create alone but can’t take a chance.” He winked at Ellie, who was nervously rearranging her back hair with arms upraised so that her taut bust, covered with sequins, seemed to blink back at him. “But I enjoy myself so much that I’ve never gotten past the first chapter.”