NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (35 page)

Astonished, Ellen released her hold on the box, photographs fluttered through the air like dying moths, and the little boy scrambled about swiftly, trying to catch the photographs as they fell, tripping over his dangling laces and bumping into Ellen as she stumbled back in an effort to stand clear.

“I didn’t mean…” she said helplessly, but stopped, for everyone was talking at once, the Fanninis apologizing, the old lady saying something incomprehensible as she grabbed at the lopsided table against whose legs Gian Paolo was colliding. A tumbler half full of wine tipped over; the dripping red pool fell into a sticky puddle at the child’s feet.

It was the old man who swooped down, grabbed his grandson by the arm, yanked him half erect and cracked him viciously across the behind.

“Hey!” Sam started in anger as the little boy uttered a scream. He took a step forward to protest. It brought him face to face with the glaring old man, separated from him only by the body of the
squirming, squalling Gian Paolo, held by the middle under his grandfather’s arm like a slippery little pig. Ugo was attempting to explain, but his wife seized her child and carried him away into the cottage.

The old man now retreated once again, just as he had when Sam’s identity had been made clear to him. Sam turned from him to expostulate with Ellen, who was helping Ugo to retrieve the photographs.

“I told you we shouldn’t have done this.” Sam knew that the reminder would annoy her—she could never stand being told that she had been forewarned—but he couldn’t help himself, not with the old man’s eye still fixed on him.

From her squatting position Ellen said shortly, “It was just that the child was used to playing with these.”

“Then why do we have to take them away?”

“They’re not his.”

“For God’s sake, did we come here to teach the kid property rights?”

“His parents want us to have the pictures. And his grandparents. I don’t think we can refuse them now. I offered to take something else of Nick’s—they wouldn’t hear of it.”

“You’re ruthless, you know that?”

Ellen rose. She smoothed out her skirt and, accepting the green box from Ugo, said quietly, “Better that than weak.”

Sam was infuriated. But then Ugo’s wife was back with the child, amazingly fast, with the boy’s face washed and wiped, quite composed, and with every trace of jealous hatred gone from those great black eyes. It was fantastic. Why, Sam thought, in wonder at how the memory came unbidden, when my father slapped me for stealing pennies I bit his hand; but here was Gian Paolo, peaceably accepting Ellen’s placatory presents. Rummaging through her purse, she brought out ticket stubs, packets of Kleenex and photographs of Sam himself, younger,
sans
beard or wife. Gian Paolo, neither snuffling nor snubbing her, accepted Ellen’s random and hurried offerings with a pleased grin.

Everyone was mollified; there were smiles, smiles wherever you looked—except for the old one, who remained grim and motionless, almost as though he were standing in judgment, even
when Sam hoisted Gian Paolo up onto his father’s shoulders as he had been when they had first met down behind the monastery. Ugo offered to walk down the path with them to the piazza, but Sam demurred. “He climbs the hill often enough,” he said to Ellen. “Tell him it’ll be more pleasant to remember them all this way.”

After she had explained, Ellen said, “Now you can take that family portrait.”

The old man, however, either did not understand or refused to budge; in any case, the others had to cluster around him. His wife stood on one side, still somewhat tense, his daughter-in-law on the other; before the three Ugo knelt, with little Gian Paolo still grinning atop his shoulders. Sam shrugged and focused swiftly, and was startled to see, when he peered through the view finder, that the cow in the barn behind the family had stuck her ruminating head out the upper half of the stable door.

“I have it,” he said and snapped the picture. It was only after he put down the camera that Sam became aware of how the old man had stubbornly hung back, hands behind him, chin against his chest, blue eye in shadow, the string sticking out of his empty eye socket like a wick ready to be lit and so to set him afire.

Sam made no effort to shake hands with the old man after he and Ugo had said their farewells. Ellen kissed Gian Paolo, embraced his mother and then took Sam’s arm for the precipitous walk down through the chestnut grove, with the family slowly waving farewell.

At the car door she released her hold on his arm and turned to look up, although the trees separated them from the Fanninis. Her face was flushed—whether from the walk or the excitement, he could not be sure—and it struck him, even in his annoyance with her, that she had never looked prettier. He was going to say it, but Ellen jumped into the car without even giving him the chance to hold the door for her, and he saw that she was clutching the little green box very tightly.

“Listen, Ellen,” he said as he clambered into the driver’s seat and started up the motor, “I’d appreciate it if you’d leave that box behind.”

“That’ll be the day.”

“There’s nobody else around. They’ll find it here in the piazza.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

“If you won’t put the box down here, we’ll have to leave it for them in the village. Or mail it back.”

“I have no intention of sending it back. It’s Nick’s.”

He released the clutch so swiftly that the car almost stalled as he swung it about. “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded hotly. “You saw how much those pictures mean to the kid.”

Ellen held herself rigid in the lurching car. “Look who’s talking—shooting off that damn camera in their faces as if they were monkeys in a zoo. Everything is a project for you. You had to take pictures to prove to the idiots in your office that you were here.”

“And what do you have to prove with that box you’re hanging onto so tight? You don’t care about those people up there—it’s Nick you care about.”

“I knew you’d throw him at me sooner or later.”

“Why not? It’s the truth.” Even in second they were descending too fast, and he had to hit the brake while he wrenched at the wheel. “All you want those pictures for is to ingratiate yourself with him. And if Nick doubles the rent on those people, or evicts them, you couldn’t care less, could you? What matters is having Nick slobber all over you for bringing those silly pictures of his dead old man in a soldier suit.”

Ellen’s face was contorted. She shouted at him over the wind and the rising babble of the mountain stream below them. “You’re not jealous just of me. You’re envious of Nick, because he loves his father, because he’s happy with his family. Because he makes babies.”

Sam shot out his right hand and twisted Ellen’s bare arm so brutally that she dropped the box. “How do you know I can’t make babies? How do you know?”

“I’ve been waiting four years. Betty diGrasso didn’t have to wait four years.”

“And you’re not Betty. How do I know it’s not you? You wouldn’t go to a doctor, would you?”

“I’ve got news for you. I don’t have to. What do you think of that? Watch the road!” she cried as he bent down to retrieve the
box. “Give me back those pictures. You and your noise about the kid’s playthings. He doesn’t even miss them. I saw how you envied his father. And hated his grandfather. Yes, hated that poor old man! That’s when you give yourself away. Just because he made a simple human mistake and tried to put his arms around you!”

“I didn’t hate him. He smelled bad, that’s all.”

“Like your father, I suppose. Is that why you haven’t talked to
him
in all these years? The whole human race smells bad to you, and all you can do is lie to yourself.”

“You’re the honest one, you and your Conversational Italian, swiping a kid’s toy just to be able to suck around Nick.”

“You lie to yourself. Not just to me. To yourself. You hate happy people like Nick because you’re not happy, you hate men like Nick because you’re not a man. Beard or no beard, you’re a spoiled baby. Talk about little Gian Paolo. Look at you—jealous of your own wife because she speaks Italian!”

“You’re not even honest enough to say why. You have the soul of a cheat.”

Ellen began to laugh. It was that laugh, defiant, bitter, unyielding, that enraged him past the point of any restraint; it goaded him on to destroy her mocking superiority.

He lifted the green box high to pitch it into the swirling stream swinging into sight below as the car careened on down the swerving road. With a cry Ellen was at him. She managed to deflect the sweep of his arm so that instead of soaring through the air and disappearing into the river, the box sprang open as it flew upward, showering them with pictures.

Half blinded by the fluttering photographs that glinted as they tumbled topsy-turvy about him, and thrown off balance by the sudden weight of his wife’s straining body, Sam lost control of the wheel. The car bounded from left to right, once, twice, thrown from rock to rock as though flung by the same hand that sprinkled the glossy, sparkling prints through the air; and as he heard his wife’s high wailing scream rising and then declining with their violent thrust through space, he was hurled forward, his head smashing against the glass of the windshield at the
impact of the car against the great gray boulder which impaled it so that it hung helpless, its wheels spinning uselessly, above the wild blue-white torrent fifty feet below.

Then, as the blood began to trickle down his forehead, oozing hot and sticky like spilled wine in the afternoon sun, his wife flung herself into his arms, sobbing wildly. Clinging to each other fiercely in the sudden stillness, they sat listening to the pumping of their hearts and to the waters rushing away beneath them.

BOBBY SHAFTER’S GONE TO SEA

I
t was on a T-2 tanker, some years ago, that I became a particular friend of the steward. He was a stocky, smooth-spoken young man of about thirty, of mixed Negro and Indian and Irish ancestry. His name was Bobby Shafter, and what happened to the two of us, one steamy night in Panama, I am only now beginning to understand.

We had been knocking around the Caribbean for some months—Aruba, Curaçao, Galveston, La Guaira, Mobile, Paramaribo—but with very little port time in any single place. So we were delighted with the news that we’d be laying up at Balboa to wait for engine-room parts.

Nevertheless, Panama City—and the Zone—soon wore itself out for me. There was an air of malign vacancy about the broad, empty tropical streets that was oppressive and even sinister. There, in all their nakedness, gaped the tourist traps, bulging with Dutch gin, Swiss watches and English woolens that the inhabitants could not afford and had no use for anyway, and the grog shops sprinkled with drunken sailors and pregnant prostitutes. Even sex turned sour after I was accosted at four o’clock in the morning by an adolescent girl at least six months gone.

If there is no revolution afoot, life in these latitudes must imperceptibly degenerate for the visitor into the kind of lethargic vegetating that the existence of the inhabitants seems to him to be. So it was with me.

I did join nighttime crowds, squatting in their white ducks and huaraches and laughing without comprehension at old Marx Brothers movies thrown onto improvised bed sheets in village plazas; I did follow, from a hunger for both music and love, youths
strumming guitars and singing romantic Latin ballads through half-deserted back streets—until they saw me and closed their mouths; I did buy a pretty parakeet from a sandaled Indian who knew how to squeeze for an extra balboa; I even tried to enter the lives of some of the whores at the Villa Amor, my closest connection with the republic. But you cannot buy conversation any more than you can buy intimacy or love, and finally, appalled by the utter absence of any strenuous ambition, by the seemingly absolute unawareness of even the possibility of any largeness of social prospect, I found myself lapsing into the torpid colonial mindlessness of those around me—sailors and savages, Yankees and Indians—my days punctuated only by the rains that from one afternoon to the next came pounding at us all with the relentless insistence of death itself.

I was more than ready for anything Bobby had to propose. One afternoon I ran into him in a cantina, impeccable in his gold-braided dress blues and white hat. He shook his head sadly at my loud sport shirt and stained khaki trousers and drew me aside. “I’ve got a date for Friday with one of the sharpest babes on the Isthmus.” He winked. “We’re in love.”

I congratulated him.

“Nita’s a Nicaraguan, and very proper.”

“You like them that way.”

“True, but it raises problems, pal, problems. For this ball she insists on bringing along her two sisters.”

“You’ll be a busy man.”

“So will you. One of them has a husband; the other’ll be your date.”

Bobby was already married, to a square chick from a shanty town outside Nashville; I had seen pictures of her, and I knew that when they had been married, in a formal Catholic ceremony, she had cried for two hours from shame at her own ignorance and fear.

Bobby could joke about his Catholicism to me as he couldn’t to anyone else aboard ship: “Man, there was a time when you scored zero on the turf if you didn’t belong to the Church. And if you did, you made the society column, dig?” Yet the ceremonial of the Mass touched him deeply. He enjoyed the white man’s religion
and the white man’s church; still, he retained a lively contempt for his fellow Negroes who wore out their mouths trying to suck their way into the white man’s world.

Bobby had been born and raised in Florida. His grandfather, a Seminole, had bequeathed to him his copper coloring and his name. His father had worked for the express agency, his mother had taken in washing, his sisters had studied bookkeeping and stenography and had nevertheless wound up as maids. Infuriated, he himself had gotten out while the getting was good, expelled after one year from a Negro agricultural and mechanical college. He was more specific about his early sexual adventures: pleased by my incredulity, he insisted that Southern white girls were allured by Negro men.

“During the ten months I worked as an orderly in the state hospital, there wasn’t a week passed that I didn’t make out with one of the nurses.”

“White nurses?”

Bobby laughed at me. “You think there was any other kind? The first few times I couldn’t believe it, but later I got to taking such crazy chances, it makes my hair stand on end now to think back.”

“How old were you?”

“I turned seventeen that year. A wild kid. Once we were parked out in some stump-jumper’s field, and when he snuck up pointing his flash I had to take off with my pants around my ankles, shaking like a treed raccoon. I left for Harlem the next week.”

When he hit 125th Street, he had already been tempered by his audacious nights with the aggressive nurses, by the money he had earned as a kid selling bootleg corn to and for white men beneath the grandstand of the local ball park, and by the bitter knowledge that his parents and his sisters were grinding their lives away because they were both frightened and resigned.

Because Bobby was neither frightened nor resigned, he threw himself into the labor movement, picketing the cafeterias whose tables he bussed and the docks where later he longshored. The Communists took him up, and for a while he took them up. The idea of a career as a leader of the oppressed—planning, telephoning, haranguing—had its appeal for someone who hated
being shoved around as much as he hated work, but Bobby was too shrewd to let himself he exploited as a kept boy. He broke with them, but delicately, without destroying those connections that might later prove useful, and moved on to new fields.

He ran numbers, and then jobbed hot cargoes from his longshore friends; afterward there were stimulants, from pep pills to goofballs, and then party pictures. At one time he was living with twin sisters, and three really frantic show girls were working for him part-time. All these activities brought him more and more into the odd zones of the white world, from Cancer to Capricorn, so perhaps it was understandable that it was precisely during these years that he joined the Catholic Church—just as it was at the height of his involvement with the party crowd that he bumped into poor little Ceelie Mae, cutting through the Greyhound Bus Terminal on 34th Street. Bumped into her as she was waiting tensely to roll back to Tennessee, conned her into staying, and married her.

“It was a revelation,” he murmured, fondling their wedding photograph, “that a girl could be so pure. I mean, she didn’t even know what she had it for. And for once I managed to restrain my appetites. In fact I couldn’t imagine touching her until we were married.”

He and Ceelie Mae lived happily on Sugar Hill. She knew nothing of his activities, whether for human rights or for his bank balances, and had never gotten over her original Cinderella bewilderment at their fine apartment, or the splendid clothing that he chose for her.

Then suddenly he shipped out to sea. It had nothing to do with Ceelie Mae, who was no doubt as bewildered by it as she was by Bobby’s other activities and who accepted it (he assured me) as she did everything that he decided to do. I suspect that it was some nastiness connected with either the party pictures or the profits from girls, or both. Within a few years he had worked himself up (probably with the help of well-placed friends) to chief steward on this tanker.

The one great thing that had happened since then was that at last, only some six months before, during Bobby’s most recent shore leave, Ceelie Mae had succeeded in becoming pregnant. It
was the one fruition that Bobby had always wanted of his marriage but had never been able to admit that he yearned for; and now he was happy.

So we sat in his cabin, more often than we did in mine, because he had a record player, and we talked about all this while we listened to his record collection. Bobby had no use for jazz and didn’t care for classical music. He did love operettas, and he adored the little encore pieces of Fritz Kreisler. There was one record called “Kreisleriana.” How can I ever forget those evenings with the sentimental Viennese waltzes sobbing away, the moonlight floating through the porthole as our ship knifed through the warm black waters of the Caribbean, and Bobby confiding in me about daisy chains in Central Park West duplexes at dawn, and the lovely twins who spoiled him, bought him delicately engraved gold slave bracelets and white leather driving coats, besides turning over to him half of their earnings. He made it all sound not vile or even sordid, but like something out of André Gide.

Bobby’s expenses were heavy, and he turned to unorthodox ways of augmenting his income. He and the Old Man had agreed to split the kickback on the ship’s stores which Bobby was responsible for purchasing. It was not a particularly unusual arrangement; what made it so in this instance was that the captain was from Georgia. But as Bobby said, “If you can show a cracker how to make a buck, he can be mighty big about prejudice. The long green is the one color line he won’t draw.”

Bobby had other ways of making money. He bought cut marijuana in bulk from
campesinos
who grew the weed undisturbed in the fields of their tiny farms on the fringe of Panama City. Occasionally he took it aboard on his person; sometimes he had it carted aboard with the ship’s stores. Brisbane (which was where we were headed, sooner or later) jumped with cats who had developed a taste for tea during the Yank invasion of World War II and who would pay a dollar for a box of twenty cigarettes. So every evening after dinner he spent a quiet hour locked in his cabin, whistling between his teeth while he stuffed cigarette tubes with marijuana, clipped the ends and packed them neatly in the more elegant boxes—Benson & Hedges, Sheffield, Melachrino.

After we became friends I kept him company while he rolled
his cigarettes, although some obscure, indefinable compunction held me back from helping out. As he worked he chatted about some of the strange things he had done in his time and about his hopes for his unborn son, who was going to be called Bobby Shafter, Jr. His manicured fingers worked nimbly, his soft, deceptively innocent countenance glowed with pleasure as he regarded the ornately framed wedding photograph. And behind us, the
zigeuner
music filling the night air, causing Bobby’s liquid eyes to fill with tears for very pleasure at all the beauty that the world contained. What a sentimental man!

On Friday evening he shamed me into wearing my only suit for our date. He found me swiping halfheartedly at my brown-and-white shoes. In mock anger, he reached out and plucked the cloth from my hand.

“For God’s sake, man,” he drawled, “you so cheap you gotta stoop to shining your own shoes? The liberty boat’s alongside. Come on, I’ll treat you to a first-class shine.”

He did, and after that we clambered into an enormous old Cadillac cab that he had commandeered, slanging a little with the adolescent Negro driver in broken Spanish and island-accented English as we chattered through streets still soaked from the afternoon rains.

Bobby dug me in the ribs with his well-ironed elbow. “Better than riding like a smelly sardine in a chiva, eh?”

He
never rode the chivas, those nickel-a-ride buses converted from superannuated Chevy panel trucks into crumbling rust-eaten jalops with two facing benches, each side holding, squeezed tightly, four Indians, Negroes, goats, chickens and their assorted smells; he knew that I did, and he couldn’t resist teasing me about my stinginess.

We cut across a part of the city that I had never bothered to explore and rolled to a stop before a modest white stucco cottage set in a row of similar houses, each with a tiny lawn, a cactus and a flowering geranium or two.

I took Bobby by his uniformed arm as he was telling the driver to wait for us. “Did you let these people know that I’m white?”

He flashed me a confident but wary smile. “They’ll accept you, just the way your friends would me.”

That was equivocal enough—maybe not for the captain, but for me. I followed Bobby up the steps and on inside.

Bobby’s almost-fiancée Juanita, a terribly young girl with huge, dark, frightened eyes, was seated on the very edge of a sagging couch with a young woman a few years older, whom I took to be her sister, and a very handsome if severe-looking young man who was surely the brother-in-law. They were an attractive trio, gotten up for an evening out in semiformal dress, a little nervous, their complexions—more Latin than Negro—a trifle strained. Across from them, stiffly upright in a worn barrel chair, sat a mountainous Negro lady. It was hard to guess her age from her impassive black face, but she was at least ten or twelve years older than the others and seemed to have nothing in common with them; even her shapeless dark dress bore no relation to the frocks of the young ladies. A neighbor woman, perhaps? Or an aunt?

Bobby rubbed his hands together. “Hi, everybody,
buenas tardes
, here’s my buddy, Nita, her sister Maria, Maria’s husband, Evan Jones, and sister Concepcion.”

I gaped. Was
this
my date? I turned to Bobby, appalled. The only thing that got me over the next few terrible minutes was the realization that Juanita and her sister and brother-in-law were almost as ill at ease as I. One or two desperate attempts to communicate with Concepcion exposed the final horror: she knew almost no English. It was no go, despite the fact that Mr. Jones, an extremely well-mannered Jamaican whose Spanish was excellent, did his best to help.

“Have you been living here long?” I asked her. I waited, miserable, while the brother-in-law made this important question clear to the lady.

Old Stone-face nodded once.
“Si.”
That was that.

I tried again: “I suppose all three of you work?”