NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (4 page)

I was a little embarrassed. I was the one, not Barney, who had been involved at college in left-wing politics; I had been only slowly and painfully disabused of my more adolescent ideals during the war years. So I should have been the one to feel that we were all in a fool’s paradise. But I didn’t. For one thing, I was happy as he really wasn’t, even though I hadn’t yet made a long-term work commitment and he was earning almost exactly three times as much as I, at work in his own field. The war was over, but the draft lingered on, and Barney had been forced to break off his graduate studies (no longer reason for deferment) and take up a military research job he didn’t want, to stay out of the army. There were moments, I knew, when he was tempted to say the hell with it and sign up as a drunken conqueror in Tokyo or Berlin; but then there was the hope that the draft would die and he would be able to return to graduate school. Besides, there was Deelie.

She was sitting and laughing, not listening to us, between Pauline and Dante Brunini, whom I had brought along despite the fact that he was not one of us. Dante had done me favors on occasion, and even though he wasn’t their kind of intellectual, the others did find him amusing.

In fact he dominated the table, different from us in that he was more determined, more insistent, less polite about his ambitions than we could afford to be about ours. If for Deelie the theater was a game, or a dream, for Dante it was so practical that even the
most glamorous clowns and tragedians, Chaplin, Lunt, Olivier, members of a pantheon awesome even while arguable, were to Dante no more than guys who had gotten there before him.

Nothing awed Dante. I looked at him, entertaining us with his version of Jules Munshin in
Call Me Mister
. His eyes, black as currants, snapped in the lamplight, his voice was resonant and happily husky, his hands were shapely as they sped through the air, he battered us with his self-assurance and the confidence that he would one day be paid to do what he was doing now for fun, to ingratiate himself with his new friends. The fact that for us highbrows theater meant Copeau and Brecht and Pirandello, while for him it meant auditions, Equity, and New Haven, neither daunted nor amused him. It was just a fact, among all the others that he faced every day; and if there was anything to be gotten from mixing with us, he was out to get it.

But if Dante was sure of what he could do, I knew what he
couldn’t
do—understand the compunctions that were troubling Barney. There was no point in my interrupting him to argue with Barney, much less in my using him as an example of the very thing that bothered my friend. Whatever I said in direct response to Barney would not only bring Deelie’s head up, it would alert everyone at the table to a malaise that maybe, if it was only a passing mood, I had no right to underline at this time and among these people.

So I let it ride. In the weeks that followed Barney didn’t bring it up again. We took Pauline and Deelie swimming in the St. George pool, and to hiss Clark Gable (Gable’s Back and Garson’s Got Him!) from the balcony of the Greenwich Theatre. We rented rowboats in Central Park, and bicycles in Prospect Park, and cycled through the gardens and greenery of Brooklyn all the way out Ocean Parkway to Coney Island. We met dutifully at the New School to hear Meyer Schapiro lecture on Picasso. We even dragged the girls to Ebbets Field, once the season had started, so that Barney could show off his indomitable hero, Pistol Pete Reiser. During all this time that we had fun, we were so far from the matter of Barney’s winter uneasiness that Pauline and I never thought to discuss it alone together.

We talked about other matters, including—as we felt surer of
each other—having a baby. I played bold, but the idea frightened me beyond words, for I thought of myself, socially and in relation to my family, as the last of a line rather than the progenitor of a new one, but this I couldn’t say to Pauline for fear that she would misunderstand… We talked too about Deelie, whom we both enjoyed, Pauline somewhat more than I. Which was unusual, because Deelie’s poise and self-assurance were qualities that seldom endear one woman to another. But Pauline knew that Deelie could never pose any threat to her. Not with me. The whole business of sizing up other women as sexual possibilities simply wasn’t occurring to me at that time. In consequence I could be, and often was, more objective about girls than Pauline. Deelie was a surprisingly good mimic, with an eye for little surface mannerisms. She could for example do a sharp take-off of Peerless Willie coming to a party with a new girl on his arm. And yet she didn’t really understand, or care, why Willie had to have so many different girls, or what kind of person he was beneath the boulevardier manner. That was what made me a little uncomfortable.

During the spring she did catch on as understudy to an ingénue, but we had barely prayed for the ingénue to develop laryngitis when the show folded. By June, Deelie had taken a leave from her gallery job in order to go into summer stock up on the Cape. Barney had a couple of weeks’ vacation due him, and was going to take two more weeks unpaid in order to be with Deelie at Provincetown.

Pauline and I couldn’t afford to go away, nor were we entitled to substantial vacations, and the summer was hot—but in New York you expect that, and anyway we didn’t care. After supper we’d play tennis at the private courts (gone now too) around the corner on Henry Street, and week ends we fought our way out to Brighton for a romp in the surf and a few square feet of hot sand. There we would lie, taking turns using each other for a pillow, and daydreaming of the future.

I had to begin thinking, no matter how reluctantly, of what would follow the Census Bureau, not only because Pauline was getting serious about a baby, but also because I had been brought up to consider it irresponsible, if not downright immoral, to have fun at what you did for a living (I think Barney had this streak in
him too). Well, we batted around crazy schemes of sailing for a South American pampas and raising our unconceived son as a Latin cowboy, or settling in Thailand simply because it looked good on the exquisite cards that a Siamese classmate sent me from its canal-veined capital. If I had to give up my fun and make money, I didn’t want—for obscure reasons—to do it in New York.

As the summer weeks drifted by, we saw more of Dante Brunini. Barney was away, so was Peerless Willie, and increasingly Dante attached himself to us, although we weren’t quite sure why.

Dante loved to talk about himself, like most actors, but he did it very engagingly. He wasn’t at all bitter—I know I would have been—at having been turned down by Yale Drama School when he tried to enroll with a bum leg. He had interrupted his acting studies to go into the navy, but was back within seventeen months, after a falling sling caught him in the hold of a navy cargo ship in Naples harbor and smashed his hip, leaving one leg shorter than the other. He betook himself to Stella Adler and to a neighborhood theater in his own back yard, between Little Italy and Chinatown. Short leg aside, he had the equipment of a matinee idol: self-confidence coupled with an easy peasant masculinity; a compact, vigorous frame; and a classical head, capped with tight wiry curls. All he needed was brains.

But he was smart enough to see that the Census Bureau job would free him, if he arranged his time right, for auditions or rehearsals. He lived at home on Thompson Street with the old folks. “I’ve got time, kids,” he’d say in the rich baritone from which he had carefully filtered the New York accent. “When I make it I’ll move uptown. Right now I need money in my jeans.” Apparently the money went on clothes. He was the sharpest man in the Federal Building, and the only one of our crowd who knew enough to wear a knit tie with a plaid shirt.

It was Dante who insisted that we all come on over to his old neighborhood for the Festival of San Gennaro. Summer was just ending, Barney was getting ready to sign up for an evening course at Columbia, Deelie had gone back to the gallery, Peerless Willie was actually engaged, and this was to be a big blow-out.

I don’t remember us as individuals particularly, but I know we
filled the sidewalk on Houston Street, arms linked and singing “O Sole Mio.” I think it was the last evening all of us were together in one group.

It was a glorious evening. The air was mild, yet suffused with the expectant almost theatrical hush that precedes the change of seasons. At the very beginning of the fiesta, bulbs were draped across Mulberry Street, from one side to the other, like half-raised curtains. Thereafter, at short intervals and receding into the twilight for perhaps a dozen blocks, glowing clusters of bulbs illuminated the earless street and served as a brilliant archway for the throng that pressed, laughing, from curb to curb as darkness descended above.

It was as noisy as Naples, as buoyant as Bordighera. The sidewalks were banked with stands, some canopied, some open to the night air, many displaying food, a few, toys and novelties, and others games of chance with decanters of rye and cellophane-wrapped mama dolls as prizes.

“Bellyache, here I come!” Barney elbowed his way to a three-foot-deep vat at the gutter’s edge. The vat rested on a red-hot charcoal grate; oil bubbled and then sizzled in it as the shirt-sleeved boy who tended it dropped in little puffballs of raw dough and fished out those which floated up, swollen and crisp. Barney bought a sackful, sprinkled with powdered sugar, and we moved on, already loaded down with pistachio nuts and nougat bars, to the clam bar where Peerless Willie was squirting lemon juice over a plate of newly opened clams while his bride-to-be solicitously tucked a paper napkin into his collar.

“Those are for me,” Barney announced, his mouth still stuck with pastry. “Clams! If I’d known, I wouldn’t have bought this stuff. Here,” he turned on Deelie, “you take these things while I get outside some clams.”

“I can’t bear to watch.”

“Me either,” Pauline said. “It makes everything come up inside me.” They took arms and pressed on through the crowd.

Dante threw back his head and laughed, showing his fine white teeth. “Man, we haven’t even started yet.” He gestured forward with his thumb.

Just ahead, clouds of smoke billowed into the night air, obscuring
the stand from which they arose. Skewers of beef and pork tripe were burning ferociously; spitting and sizzling at the heart of the smoke as white-aproned ladies labored to stuff them into foot-long hero sandwiches with tomatoes and onions and green peppers. Navel-high kids darted in and out, faces sticky with the red remnants of apple suckers, threatening us with paper snakes on sticks and wooden clapper noisemakers. There were kiddy rides for them, little city-size merry-go-rounds mounted on the backs of trucks, and in an empty lot a brilliantly lit Ferris wheel, slowly revolving in the September sky and then stopping so that the couples dangling in the boxes at the top of the swaying circle could shriek and plead to be lowered. Pop music burst from a parked sound truck, fighting with the older tinnier noises of the merry-go-round. The high-school kids moved like mercury, joining and breaking, snapping their fingers and singing as they danced, surging from street to sidewalk and back again.

By shoving and calling to each other, we managed to foregather on the corner of Broome Street—I think there were seven of us—and we had no sooner formed our own circle, exchanging swallows of scungilli, spumone, anguilla, wine from wicker bottles, and God knows what else, than we were squashed together, to one side, to permit a sacred procession, bearing the holy icons, to pass on its way to the church. The air was alive with burning and chanting and the cries of children and the high yipping of running mongrel dogs. Flames from the braziers, followed by showers of sparks, shot into the sky and the air was thick with the smell of burning meat and frying dough as we all tumbled hand in hand after the procession.

“I should have brought Dottie,” Dante yelled in my ear. “She would have enjoyed it.”

“Dottie?” Pauline broke her stride. It was the first time we’d ever heard him mention a girl’s name. “Who’s she?”

“Dottie,” Dante repeated a little impatiently. “You know, my wife. Maybe I’ll take her another night.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “You never said you had a wife.”

We had reached the face of the church, garlanded with twelve-foot-high masses of flowers, white, green, and red, in the shape
of a heart. As we stared, the faithful fought to push dollar bills into the hearts of the flowers, from which they protruded like crisp speckled leaves. It was a sight to carry with you forever, those struggling hands beseeching for love and forgiveness with the bills.

Willie and his fiancée were ahead of us, gaping in fascination at the lilies and the carnations, the leaves and the money. I was sure that they had not heard Dante. But I was not so sure about big-eared Barney and Deelie, who was hanging on his arm, a little tired now but stunned by the scene. What struck me was that if they had—and it seemed to me that they must have—neither of them seemed nearly as surprised as Pauline and I. Was I simply naïve?

“It’s no secret,” Dante replied to me, stepping on a cigarette end, his head lowered. Then he looked at me. “She’s old-fashioned, the European type. She’d rather stay home with my mother and mind the baby.”

“Baby?”

Now I was sure of it. Deelie had overheard it all. She paused before us, not bothering to conceal the fact that she was listening—no, more than listening, attending to him as though she had never before really seen him—not in surprise but in fascination, her head cocked to one side, appraising.

“We’ve got a four-month-old daughter. I married Dottie in the old country, I met her in Naples. She doesn’t know much English yet. That’s another reason she’s bashful. You mean I never told you?”

I said something, but my reply must have been drowned out in the sudden burst of noise from a bandstand down the block. A group of seven men, some in oddments of uniform—the trumpeter with a braided cap and jacket, a fiddler with striped trousers of the same blue—and the rest in mufti, had gone to work, without tuning up, on “Come Back to Sorrento.” As all of us stood gazing up at the musicians in the drifting garbage of beer cans, slimy stubs of mustard-smeared frankfurters, oozing tortoni cups, blackened bits of popcorn, burst paper bags and candy wrappers, a chesty little man with a pomaded pompadour and a determined scowl came forward and began to sing. With left hand, all
but the thumb, jammed into his jacket pocket, and right arm extended to implore the heavens, he bellowed his ardent plea. The microphone before his lips squealed in protest.