NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (3 page)

“I’m still ahead of you, Barney. Pauline and I are married.”

“Dog!” Barney cried. “Dog! Without asking for my approval? But such luck! I don’t suppose he told you, Pauline, that he was drummed out of Omicron Nu for cheating at solitaire. Or that he joined the army after he was jilted by a Siamese.”

“I am trying to make it up to him,” Pauline murmured modestly.

“For that a kiss, even if I wasn’t invited to the wedding. Pucker up, Pauline.”

He kissed her good, too, in all that crush, and didn’t stop until,
with everyone around us watching and laughing, Cordelia plucked him by the arm. “Hey, you never treat me like that.”

“You’re not married.”

We were reluctant to separate, even for an hour. Impatiently we sat through the second half, and then went together around the corner to the Russian Tearoom, where we caught up on the years of separation over tea and baklava. We were rewarded for our extravagance: Marian Anderson sat regally with S. Hurok only two tables away from us.

From then on we four were together more evenings than not, and usually on week ends too. Often there would be others—William Jennings Bryan Oberholser (we called him Peerless Willie), who was getting his Ph.D. at Columbia in history, taught at Brooklyn College, and turned up with an infinite variety of girls, of all shapes and sizes; a clever young couple name of DeFee, designer and interior decorator respectively, friends of Deelie’s; a reckless cousin of mine called Zack, who was writing a war novel about the South Pacific, where he had led several let’s-go-home demonstrations. But we four were the nucleus, or we considered ourselves as such, which was what mattered; for we were the ones who made the big decisions on eating, playgoing, parties, and most important, whom we would invite on our outings.

I have the photos yet of Barney and me in slapstick Abbott and Costello poses, of Pauline and Deelie with their arms linked, of Peerless Willie muzzling a babe in the course of a picnic at Fort Tryon Park when we tramped through the Cloisters and hung from the palisades over the Hudson. I cherish too the snapshot Barney took of me, with Pauline and Deelie on either arm, at the bow of the old One-hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street ferry, trying to look like a New Jersey Viking, but doubled over with laughter. What were we laughing at? I don’t remember, we laughed easily and often. And there is a red rectangular folder with eight serrated snapshots, memento of one Sunday when we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. It started with late breakfast at our place on Remsen Street; then around noon we’d meander over the little Penny Bridge at the foot of Montague Street and on through the broken-down bars and vague-eyed derelicts of Myrtle Avenue
and Sands Street (all gone now, replaced by handsome characterless courthouses and office buildings), on to the great bridge. So there are pictures of Barney and me cavorting, of Deelie and Pauline strolling like models on the promenade, of us all lined up before the struts with the marvelous skyline and the springtime sun behind us, our faces half in shadow but leaning forward to the camera’s eye in hope and expectation.

But I have no pictures of Barney at work in the North Jersey research lab that was deferring him, of Deelie trying to make it on the Broadway stage without seeming eager or obvious, of the inner texture of Pauline’s life and mine.

This last was what was most extraordinary about all our days. Beyond the bickering over my enforced Friday evening visits to the Friedes, where I would sit, a miserable captive of my father-in-law’s complaints and commentators, and our slow, almost imperceptible adjustment to each other’s private rhythm, we discovered that our work and our play, our jobs and our personalities, came to complement each other so well that we were almost frightened by our happiness.

As the weeks went by and we grew more confident about our jobs, we tried to gain some control over where we would be sent. I could usually switch with several enumerators, if not Dante Brunini, a sharp young Italian actor with a game leg, then Herman Appleman, a ruddy-cheeked ex-paratrooper bucking for a G.I. loan to go into the photographic supply business. With their cooperation I worked out my field schedule so that I could see New York as few people had seen it before or ever will again; and I was able not only to meet Pauline at the end of the day, but sometimes to set off with her in the morning, and often to go with her in the evening after supper while she visited a family or I caught up with some of those in my sample who were out during the day.

So Pauline and I would meet on the streets of the city as we had first found each other below the ground. Briefcases in hand, we would hasten off together to dinner through the twilight of Red Hook, Ridgewood, or East Harlem; and after we had eaten, I would drowse at a bar over television (still a barroom novelty) while Pauline, her heart aching, would be struggling with the problems of bewildered refugees afflicted with cancer and layoffs.
If I was the one who had to work, Pauline would read Mary McCarthy in a cafeteria while I mounted the steps and soared in the elevators to enter for a moment the worlds of the New Yorkers of all kinds who opened their doors to me.

They were becoming a very intimate part of my life, these citizens whom I would visit, pad in hand, to inquire whether there had been a change from one month to the next in the household, job status, hours worked, income earned.

An old Italian lady of Bay Ridge with a hairy chin and a blinking smile, who forced jelly beans on me while she answered my questions and continued to work at the kitchen table, wedging bobby pins onto cardboards for the neighborhood notions store.

A youngish woman of the rooming-house type with fine legs and hair dyed the color of newly minted pennies, who always opened her door furtively to me, as though I were a secret lover. After the first few monthly visits, I was just as furtive, because her husband, a slippered, scant-haired crank with a bitter eye and mouth, both pulled down at one corner by a stroke, would invariably kick me out if he heard my voice. “So it’s Henry Wallace’s stooge again.” Useless for me to explain that Wallace was not my boss. “Go on, get out of here. There’s no law says we have to answer.”

A wholesale diamond merchant in a sunken living room in River House, rising every month to greet me punctiliously across half an acre of Baluchistan carpeting, and to offer me a glass of port while he told me politely of his job status.

A Jewish FBI agent, self-satisfied but wary, who always took me confidentially into his kitchenette to explain that it was a state secret, he couldn’t even estimate how many hours he had worked, and that he was always just a phone call away from hardship and hazard. He grew morally outraged, agitatedly fingering his little mustache, when I finally ventured to suggest that it sounded like an ideal job, no questions askable, for a husband who wanted to play around.

A suave importer of Parisian negligees who refused to answer my questions but instead questioned me about my education, my army record, my ambitions, and finally offered me a job at his Fifth Avenue salon with, he assured me, an unlimited future.

This one Pauline laughed about. It was funnier than the pathos she had to live with in her own work. “Imagine somebody asking you what you do, and you saying, I’m in ladies’ underwear!” That wasn’t the only reason, though. It was more that we couldn’t imagine ourselves doing anything else but what we were, or living any place on earth but in New York—and the importer had thrown out as bait that if I came to work for him he would be sending me to Paris on occasion. Paris? I had had my bellyful of Europe, and it was only afterwards, years later, when Pauline and I began to dream of traveling abroad, that we bethought ourselves of the negligee importer, and began to wonder what it would have been like, living in Paris during those years …

It was bitter for Pauline, a soft and gentle girl, to meet misery every day; clever and attractive as she was, Deelie hadn’t yet found herself, as the saying went (nor had I, for that matter); and Barney was marking time until he could be released to pick up his career. Nevertheless our lives were good. The very air smelled of freedom and hope. What more can you want?

Barney lived at home with his parents in Flatbush, but Deelie had inherited a tiny little place in the Village, on Gay Street, from a friend who had given up the theater for marriage and Long Island. When the four of us were together in that dark, narrow little alcove it was jammed, but it was a place to go, and I think Deelie and Barney were happy there.

They used often to meet us in Brooklyn Heights, since our place was more or less midway between Flatbush and the Village. Not just for Sunday breakfast and the walk across the Bridge, but in the evenings too. Deelie would curl up catlike on the studio couch, purring and sleek in her stockinged feet, awaiting the arrival of Barney, his pockets loaded with delicacies lifted from the fancy goods counters of Gristede’s and Esposito’s. We divided the labor equitably: Barney the burglar earned relaxation with
PM
, while Deelie set the card table, Pauline opened the mulligatawny soup and heated it on the burner, and I worked the coloring agent into a bowl of white margarine. Throughout these unbalanced meals, the anchovies, smoked oysters, and Argentine ham augmented by a Mason jar full of chopped herring from Barney’s mother or a bowl of jelly cookies baked by
Pauline’s mother, we argued politics and hashed over the day’s doings.

Deelie had a three-day job at a private gallery, mostly cataloguing and mailing out announcements, and she filled the week with volunteer work for a ladies’ organization that did good deeds for wounded veterans. There was neither money in one nor satisfaction in the other, but Deelie’s people in Greenwich had money anyway, and she took her pleasure from Barney, his quick mind and cutting humor, and from her theatrical expectations. If she didn’t make it in the theater she was bound to make it somewhere. She was good-looking and had an elegant figure; and even if for me she was not sexy, not as Pauline was, with her brooding eyes and those nostrils which flared as her passion mounted, yet she was undeniably desirable, smelling as she did of money and challenging all men with her self-assurance. She had gone for a while to Bradford Junior College and then to Bennington College; the traditional upper-class upbringing, overlaid with a patina of avant-garde ambition, was captivating to Barney, whose experience hadn’t ranged, to my knowledge, much beyond flat-heeled girl radicals and harpsichord players. Deelie was fun. She was also anxious not only to be one of us but to be good to us. And she was, in many little ways: she passed on to Pauline “extra” cashmere sweater sets given her by spinster aunts; she gave us theater tickets, which she insisted she had gotten for nothing; and one memorable week end she hauled us off in her cousin’s jeep to his wonderfully isolated and comfortable summer place out at Southampton.

Pauline and I used to lie in bed and talk about why Barney and Cordelia didn’t run off and get married. When you’re young and married, you find it hard to imagine that there can be others willing simply to say good night and go their separate ways. Barney didn’t seem eager to discuss it, not as we would have done in our undergraduate days, but the way Pauline had it from Deelie, neither was quite sure of the other—or of their families, neither of whom would have known what to make of the other or in fact would have wanted to have anything to do with the other. So for the time they were simply having a love affair and enjoying it.

When we spent our evenings on Remsen Street, Barney and I playing the Bach double concerto or the Telemann two-violin sonatas while the girls knitted and gossiped, everything was as it had been when we were rooming together. We both played badly, but it was a communion that completed the day.

But it was different when we went out. And how sharply I remember the casual restaurant discussions, as we admired the Chock Full O’ Nuts girls assembling cream cheese sandwiches with knife and fork, or chewed pastrami deep in the swaying forest of suspended salamis at Katz’s delicatessen—maybe because later eating out was to become an occasion of state like going to the theater, and the axis of your life turned inward, so that at mealtime you argued only with yourself, or, your mouth full of food and your head tired, with your other self, your wife. When we went out Barney was more frank than he was in my own little apartment.

There was an evening in Joe’s Restaurant (gone now to make room for more faceless Brooklyn buildings and boulevards), with its white-tiled walls, slowly swinging fans like horizontal windmills and slow-moving black-jacketed waiters who looked as though they had been carrying platters of pigs’ knuckles since Theodore Dreiser’s youth. Barney and I sat carving lamb fries and explaining to the girls’ shivery delight what it was that we were eating with such relish. Larry MacPhail and some of the lesser Brooklyn Dodgers, whose offices were around the corner, were talking baseball at the next table, and under the cover of their voices Barney suddenly turned to me, apropos of nothing. “How long can it go on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you feel sometimes that it’s all too good to be true? That we haven’t earned this?” He waved his arm negligently.

“No, I don’t.” The unexpectedness of it made me a little aggressive. “I spent three stinking years in the army, mostly with people I didn’t like. Now I spend my time the way I want, and I don’t feel one damn bit guilty about it.”

Barney pressed it no further than to comment, “I didn’t mean it that way, about feeling guilty. Certainly not in your case. Me, I stayed home and dodged the draft.”

But another evening, half a dozen of us were having supper in the Sokol Hall on Seventy-first Street, spooning up our dumplings and chicken soup under President Masaryk’s watchful eye, while the athletes leaped up and down thunderously in the gymnasium beyond the wall. In the middle of the heavy food and an argument about Palestine, I felt Barney’s bony fingers pressing my knee.

“You remember what I said that night in Joe’s?”

I knew what he meant.

“I wasn’t thinking about fighting Bevin in Palestine, or even that the food sticks in my throat because the DP’s are hungry. That was your pitch in college, and you never sold me. But now that the war is over for most of us, and we want to live it up, I feel uneasy. Have we really earned it, the whole country?”