NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (39 page)

In Yuri’s eyes I was, I began to realize, like a boy who fantasies great success with girls—rescuing them from drowning or halting their runaway horses, causing them to fall madly and pliantly in love with him—but dares not visualize a consequence consisting of marriage, children and passionless slippered evenings yawning at TV over a can of beer. If for me our music was going to make us famous, that fame would serve only to make us more desired and more famous—and so on, into Carnegie Hall and
Lewisohn Stadium, in tails and smiles. But for Yuri the fame was going to bring him Oriental rugs.

It was disconcerting to learn that he was so practical, but I started with the recognition that he was the better musician and that he was the soloist too. What was more, he took the initiative with my mother, who was a little awed by him, in getting us invitations to perform Schubert, Brahms and Bartok for her clubs and her friends’ clubs, for the Soroptimists, the AAUW and the Matinee Musicale Society, some of which got us excused from school, others of which actually paid us. We were big shots in a small way, and I wasn’t the only one to realize that I owed it to Yuri. Even my father had to admit that Yuri wasn’t doing me any harm, if I didn’t get a swelled head from the recitals, which wasn’t likely to happen as long as I was merely the accompanist.

One unusually hot June afternoon we were ambling along Cotter Street after a final exam in Spanish, licking at Dairy Queens and sizing up the strolling girls in their thin summer dresses. We came into Yuri’s front hallway and looked up to see Helen’s broad, soft behind undulating gently at the head of the stairs; she was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the steps. At the sound of our entrance she turned, raising her dripping hand to brush away the dark hair from her forehead, and regarded us with a still childish gravity.

“Hi, Helen,” I said.

Then she smiled down at us. “I was trying to do the steps before anybody got home. Where’s Yeti?”

Yuri shrugged. “Probably downtown, seeing
Red Shoes
for the fourth time.” He stepped over her pail and waved me onward, calling back over his shoulder, “Make us something cold to drink, will you, Helen?”

The rooms were half bare, as usual, the floors strewn with a knocked-over heap of Mr. Cvetic’s magazines. Usually I loved entering that apartment, but now it struck me for the first time as somewhat bleak and airless, smelling still of Mrs. Cvetic’s cigarette butts. We went on out to the front porch and flopped onto the glider.

I said, “Why do you give Helen such a hard time?”

“You don’t mean me, you mean all of us.”

I was embarrassed. “I mean, we could have gotten our own drinks from the icebox.”

Yuri shrugged again, drawing back his full lips over his teeth. “Division of labor. My old man works for the rent and the groceries. My mother works for the music and the ballet lessons. Yeti dances and can’t spoil her feet, I fiddle and can’t spoil my hands, and Helen takes care of the house. What’s wrong with that?”

I wasn’t quite sure. Maybe, I thought, everything was taken for granted just a little too readily. But Yuri waved away my discomfort.

“Never mind that stuff. You know something? There’s room in this town for another kind of music besides rock-and-roll and Schubert. What future is there in Schubert? Fifty bucks a night, two nights a month? All we need is four, five more fiddles, bass, percussion, couple horns, and we’re in business. Then, with a booking agent and some stylish arrangements—”

“What kind of music are you talking about?”

Yuri blinked rapidly, as though he were signaling me. “Strauss waltzes, gypsy fiddle music, things people can dance to without being acrobats and hum without being self-conscious. I could be like a strolling violinist, and you could conduct from the piano.”

Helen was standing in the doorway with a pitcher of lemonade. She spoke before I did, in a tone that I had never heard her use. “Is that what everybody’s been knocking themselves out for?”

Yuri turned on her swiftly. “Who asked you to listen? What do you know? You’re fifteen years old, you still think I can go off to Europe and win one of those international prizes and live happily ever after. I’m trying to be practical.”

He was, too. At seventeen we weren’t ready to organize the kind of society orchestra he had in mind—but in a few years we would be. And in the meantime he knew, better than I, that we simply weren’t up to the cut-throat concert world. Given his teaching, his instrument and his practicing, Yuri would at best qualify one day for a first-desk job with the city symphony. In order to supplement his income he would either have to teach (“What a drag! Look at Fiorino!”) or play hotel music, which at least had some of the glamour that he thought we had been talking about all these months.

Unlike me, Yuri was daydreaming, I began to see, not about impossibilities but about reality. It troubled me as much as it did Helen, maybe because Yuri was beating me to the cold compromises involved in growing up. And I could not put out of my mind the way the lemonade pitcher trembled in Helen’s hands before she set it down by the glider and hurried away.

Yuri spoke no more of the dance orchestra that day or for a long time thereafter. I got a summer job as a camp counselor, and Yuri, who had wanted to go to Tanglewood or Marlboro, had to take a paying job with the Civic Pops Orchestra, which did a summer season in the municipal park.

When we came together again as seniors in the autumn, we were both anxious to make up for lost time. We resumed our duets at once. I had almost forgotten the intensity of the pleasure you could derive from making such music with a friend.

But then, starting as an undiscussed eventuality and looming larger as the year rushed by, there was the prospect of my going away to college. My father, who had managed only a year of college before the depression caught up with him, worked at convincing me that in a Big Ten school “You’ll make contacts that will be invaluable to you in later life.”

When I made the mistake of repeating that to Yuri, it broke him up. But his mocking laughter jarred me, and I began to think not about how square my father was but about what it might be like, really getting away from Buchanan Street once and for all.

Yuri was bright, school was easy for him, but he couldn’t have cared less about going to college. And it wasn’t simply sour grapes. I knew his parents would do without necessities to send him to a conservatory, but they hadn’t brought him up to face the prospect of being one more poor fish in a great big pond.

“I’m not kidding myself,” he said when I raised the subject. “The best I could do after Juilliard, or one of those trade schools, would be an audition for a job with a big orchestra. What’s so big about that? I can do better right here with help from people like your mother and without getting gray waiting for a break.”

I stared at him. I said, “Are you satisfied to stay here forever? Don’t you even want to try to make it in the big time?” I was on
the point of adding, What else have we been dreaming about all these months? but something in his face stopped me.

He extended his hands. “Why throw away a sure thing for a mirage?”

He was pleading for more than understanding; he wanted me to tie my future to his. As my best friend, he was hoping against hope that I would turn my back on my father’s ambitions for me. It wasn’t just that Yuri wanted my moral support and my physical presence. What he wanted even more, it struck me with ferocious suddenness, was the kind of real help from my mother and her friends that would depend on my sticking with him.

I was hurt at Yuri’s readiness to use me in this way; I would rather he had come out and said what he wanted from my mother. But that would have involved different admissions on his part, so I held my tongue, and we went on more or less as we had.

More or less, except that even while we were reading duets and rehearsing for recitals, I was studying for my finals and trying to decide among various Big Ten schools. When I finally made up my mind, and then was accepted by several, I didn’t run to tell Yuri or his family, as I might have a year earlier. Nor did he bring up the matter with me again.

Yeti too was itching to be out of school. She had been running with a show-business crowd, or the nearest approximation that our town could boast (little-theater actors, modern dancers, and a part-time beatnik group just coming into its own), and after a number of auditions, including one breathless trip to New York, she caught on with the road company of a Broadway musical. She was to join it directly after graduation, and she was trembling with the first real excitement I had ever seen her display.

If Yuri was not particularly impressed, and Helen, smiling very enigmatically for a sixteen-year-old, said nothing, at least their parents seemed pleased. The twins, they decided, were entitled to a big graduation party.

“Listen, boy,” Mrs. Cvetic said to me, “you come next Friday night for sure. We’re gonna have one hell of a big blowout.”

“You couldn’t keep me away,” I said. “You know that.”

“Okay, but this time bring a girl.”

I was a little disconcerted. The few girls I could take to movies
or concerts wouldn’t have known what to make of the Cvetics. So I mumbled something about seeing whether I could dig up a date.

I didn’t even try, but on the evening of the party I took the steps up to the Cvetic flat two at a time. In the hallway the noises of many voices talking at once sounded reassuringly familiar; the odors of Mrs. Cvetic’s and Helen’s cooking smelled familiar too—stuffed cabbage, eggplant salad, savory pudding.

But when I walked in I felt that I had entered a strange house. The noise wasn’t coming just from the family but from a throng clustered here and there all through the apartment, which had been decorated like a dance hall with twisted streamers of crepe paper, Chinese lanterns, and life-size pencil drawings of Yeti in her tutu and Yuri with his fiddle.

I recognized some kids from the school orchestra and the glee club. In addition there were a number of middle-aged strangers, friends of Mr. and Mrs. Cvetic, I guessed, and a gaggle of bony girls and slim-hipped boys from Yeti’s ballet school.

It was fairly early, but the air was already exhausted, fogged with smoke, and as I blinked my way through the mob, peering around for Yuri, somebody cracked open a can of beer under my nose and swung it about, lashing a circle of suds onto the bare floor. Girls shrieked, but Mr. Cvetic, ignoring everything, had a classmate of mine pinned to the wall and was exhorting him, as near as I could make out, to eat eggshells for their mineral value. When he caught sight of me he waved, his hand clutching a stuffed cabbage transfixed with a skewer to a slab of rye bread.

“Hey, go by the dining-room table,” he called out amiably. “Helen and the missus have got food there for an army.”

He wasn’t kidding, but I wasn’t hungry. I took a beer and went on to the piano, where I found Yuri, with a new haircut and a new sport shirt, surrounded by a crowd of kids from school. They were egging him on to do an imitation of me accompanying the glee club.

Yuri mussed his hair to approximate mine, and, flinging his hands over the keyboard to make them appear long and scrawny like mine, pounded out the Rudolf Friml medley from
The Vagabond King
. Everybody was laughing. I had to myself, in order not to look like a stuffed shirt, although I didn’t think it was
all that funny. When Yuri caught sight of me he stopped and held up his hand.

“Here, you do it,” he said, making room on the bench. “This is your instrument, not mine.”

I was stuck for quite a while after that. The gang pressed more beer on me so that I would give them the cocktail-hour classics that they wanted, but finally it palled and I begged off. I shoved through the knots of dancers and talkers and found myself pushed smack up against Mrs. Cvetic, who was fishing stuffed cabbage out of a Pyrex bowl. She thrust a steaming plate at me.

“Whatsamatta, boy,” she asked, squinting to fend off the smoke from her dangling cigarette, “you on a hunger strike or something?”

I made a pass at eating and congratulated her on the party.

“The kids deserve it, they didn’t let me down, they worked hard all this time. Besides, you only graduate once, right?” She dug me in the ribs. “So have a good time, the party is for you too.”

I wandered on through the apartment, very confused. Mrs. Cvetic was more unselfishly hospitable than my own parents. But was she really doing the twins a favor, making such a big deal about high-school graduation?

At the end of the long hallway I entered the kitchen, intending to leave my plate on the counter and maybe leave the party, since I felt out of place. But as I put down the plate I heard a step behind me, and I turned to face Yuri, who was standing in the doorway, grinning his grin.

“Looking for something?”

“Helen is the only one I haven’t said hello to. This is where she punches the clock, isn’t it?”

“Stick around, she’ll turn up. Can I get you anything in the meantime?”

“Not a thing. Great party.” I could see that he expected more, so I added, “I was accepted by two colleges this week.”

Instead of asking why I hadn’t told him before, he said negligently, “Make up your mind yet?”

“I’m waiting to hear from one more before I decide for sure.”

“In any case you’re going away. That’s it.”

“That’s it.”

I hadn’t meant to be flip about what was terribly important for
both of us, but Yuri seemed to want it that way. Scratching at the fiddler’s rash on the underside of his left jawbone, he said, almost as if it were an afterthought, “I didn’t hurt your feelings before, did I? I mean, imitating you at the piano.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Okay then. Let’s split a beer.”

I was going to protest that I was full, but something in his face stopped me. I held out a glass, and Yuri poured half a can into it. We drank in silence, not looking at each other.

“Well, I’ve got to circulate. Anything you don’t see, just ask for it.” And he swiveled about and walked out of the kitchen.

I should have left then. But it was true, I told myself, that I still hadn’t seen Helen, and she was one person whose feelings I didn’t want to hurt. So I wandered through that crowded apartment one last time.