NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (41 page)

“Hey, Mommy, look here!”

As she approached him, slowing her pace, so did the street urchins, beggars and vendors bearing boxes of junk jewelry and chewing gum. If she did not remonstrate, they would continue to cluster around her and Dickie as thickly as the insects that buzzed about them all.

“Vayase!”
she said sharply, waving them away, and then, to Dickie: “You mustn’t give them anything, or they won’t leave us alone.”

“Mommy,” he demanded, pointing, “look at the leather stuff here. Look at those neat holsters! And that saddle! That’s all they’ve got here is leather, nothing but leather. I bet we can find a mitt inside.”

“Well, we’re not going to look.”

“Just for a minute? It’ll only take a minute.”

“I told you yesterday, there’s no sense in carting a baseball glove all over Mexico.”

“But, Mommy, we’ve got a great big station wagon. I can tuck a mitt away so you won’t even notice it. Please, Mommy, can’t we just look?”

Louise did not honestly know whether it was his logic or his whining that annoyed her more. “I said I’d get you one on the way home. Not now. It’s a matter of principle.”

“Please?”

“And I told you not to nag.” She was beginning to perspire. “When you’re ready to behave like a ten-year-old instead of a five-year-old, you can come along with me for a walk. Until then, wait in the car. Here are the keys.”

And she strode off without looking back, determined not to yield, but sweating with the guilt that breaks out when the inflicting of punishment affords unforeseen satisfaction. Never mind, she thought, I’d rather accuse myself of harshness and unfairness than of overindulgence; one Roger is enough.

It was hellishly hot. She had to force herself to go on past the seedy arcades, dabbing at her face and neck and glancing into the gloomy grogshops, the side-alley groceries and one-man barbershops without customers, the nameless stores with no signs saying what they sold. And the last-chance bargains stacked up as they were all over the world in every last-hope town at the end of the line—watch charms and wineglasses, bracelets and book-ends, ashtrays and earrings, scarves and serapes, baskets and belts, monkeys woven from wicker, pillows embroidered “Souvenir of Mexico.”

Her head ached, flies rose droning from the horseballs in the
gutter, importuning voices whistled Señora, Señora in her ear, a Spanish lover sang tinnily in the cavernous cantina, clouds of dust blew like powder, carrying the wail of a baby, the hoarse quarreling of two men, the last-ditch pleas of the sidewalk merchants. The medley of noises that filled the ramshackle streets, not just unfamiliar but frankly foreign in its steady persistence, deafened her for a moment to the wail she should otherwise have recognized at once.

She whirled about. Dickie stood where she had left him, but his hands were gripping his gut, and he swayed as though he had been shot on this preposterous Southwest movie set. His face was contorted; his usually pale features flamed hotly.

“Dickie!” she cried, her voice quavering. “Dickie, what’s wrong?”

As she ran unsteadily toward her son, cursing herself, the half-circle of Mexican children that had formed around him wavered and broke.

“Dickie, are you all right?”

Before he could answer, a bold little boy with flat Indian features thrust a box at her and cried in English, “Chiclets, lady? Jus’ one peso?”

She turned from him to her son, but a girl who came only to Dickie’s shoulder loosened the greasy black rebozo which she wore like a parcel, pulled back its edges, and revealed a baby whose face was covered with sores. Louise recoiled and drew Dickie to her.

“Have you got cramps?” she demanded.

Dickie shook his head wordlessly. Tears were coursing down his cheeks. The Mexican children looked on interestedly, offering suggestions, making comments she could not catch. The boy with the box of chewing gum wore sandals made from truck tires; the others stood barefoot in the dust.

Louise cradled Dickie’s head in her arm and pressed his abdomen with her fingertips. “Let’s make sure it’s not appendicitis,” she said, the words sounding ridiculous even as she uttered them. “You might have a touch of food poisoning.”

“I’m not sick,” he muttered, shuddering. “I’m not sick.”

“Then what is it?”

“I can’t stand it,” Dickie buried his boiling face in her blouse. “They’re so poor.”

Louise felt her legs give way. As she slipped to the curb, pulling him down with her, she heard him say, “I gave them twenty-seven cents. It was all I had. I divided it up. What else could I do?”

“Of course,” she murmured. She could not remember when she had last cried like this, helpless and broken by the loss of innocence. But no, that was not true; the twanging spasms of her boy’s sobs were her own. They revived in her now the stifled memory of the undead past. Her father, fallen out of life without warning, like a precious coin flung carelessly into a fountain, and she weeping in Roger’s arms. That fraternity boy, who laughed uncomprehendingly at her infatuation with the distant poor, proved to her how instinctively, without guidance or instruction, he understood the terror of deprivation when it shook and retched within the circle of his arms. And because he proved it, she believed gratefully that he had proven himself, and she fell in love with him.

“It’s hard to explain, Dickie,” she said to her son. “I tried to, but it was a bum try. Particularly since I didn’t realize whom I was talking to. You’ll have to forgive me. Here, blow your nose and we’ll go look for a mitt.”

“I don’t want it! I don’t want it any more! Don’t you understand?”

Louise gazed at him pensively. If she did now, she had not before—that was sure. And it struck her that it was not Roger’s early compassion but its perpetuation in his son that was his best gift to her. Now that she was grateful again, maybe it would serve her better.

“I’ll try to,” she said to Dickie, “if you’ll give me another chance. And it looks as though you’ll have to, because you’re stuck with me.” As she arose, drawing her son up with her, she added, “For the time being, anyway. Come on, Dickie, let’s head for Monterey.”

CLAUDINE’S BOOK

N
ot so long ago, in the town of Phoenix, a shopping center for upstate New York and western Vermont farmers since the days of the American Revolution, there lived a very bright young girl named Claudine.

Claudine’s father, Fred Crouse, was a widower. He had brought his unmarried sister Lily over from Loudonville to cook and keep house for them, which she did very well, except that she was high-strung and got to feeling that she was wasting her life away in an old eleven-room house with no closets but a cupola big enough for a fancy-dress party. As soon as Claudine was old enough for school Lily got a part-time job, working at the local library four afternoons a week. It kept Lily in touch with the higher things and made her feel more worthwhile, but it meant that Claudine was left alone a lot.

Claudine didn’t mind. She liked best hanging around her father’s Mobilgas station on the state highway, but he didn’t want her making all those crossings between school and the station; besides, the language of the truckers was apt to be kind of vulgar for a little girl’s ears. Claudine didn’t bother to tell her father, who worked thirteen hours a day and was harried with many worries, that she knew all those expressions already. Nothing ever happened in Phoenix was the main trouble. In fact, nothing ever had, not since Joseph Walker, whose widowed mother drank and took in sewing, got drafted and was captured in Korea and then wouldn’t come back when the war was over. A turncoat, Aunt Lily called him, and said that when it was in
Life
Magazine about his refusing to come home from China, two New York reporters had interviewed his mother, his school friends and the librarian.
But all that was before Claudine was born. Nothing else had happened since Joseph Walker had come back, which he finally did one day, to dig footings for contractors when he felt like working, and looking like the most ordinary man in the world.

But then Claudine looked like the most ordinary girl in the world. At least, you wouldn’t have guessed from her appearance that extraordinary things were going to happen to her. Lily always said that Claudine’s eyes were her best feature, which is what you always say about a girl who isn’t pretty. She was long-legged and short-waisted, so that she seemed always to be groping up through the tops of her jumpers, like a giraffe reaching out over the fence; her nose was long, with widespread nostrils, like her father’s, and had a tendency to run with the first frost. What was more, her short upper lip (Aunt Lily said that she had been a thumb-sucker) made her teeth seem unusually long, like Bugs Bunny’s. Over all, she looked woebegone—although she rarely felt that way.

Claudine had only one friend. The other children at the consolidated school thought she was stuck-up, or funny-looking, or even dumb. When they caught her making faces at herself in the mirror of the girl’s room—even though they did it sometimes themselves—they decided that Claudine was queer and left her to herself.

There was Robin Wales, though. He found none of these aspects of Claudine annoying, maybe because he had his own problems. First of all there was his name: it did him no good to bring up Robin Hood or even the great pitcher, Robin Roberts, because he didn’t even try to hide from his tormentors the fact that he despised baseball. “It’s boring and stupid,” he said, and that finished him off in Phoenix, which prided itself on fielding a good Little League team.

Besides, Robin had no use for people who tried to push him around or play rough. “I’m not afraid of those guys, Eddie and Walter and the others,” he told Claudine, and she knew that this was true, that he simply preferred going his own way, doing what she liked to do too.

In addition to his being more intelligent than any other sixth-grader, Claudine thought that Robin was quite handsome, despite his ears, which looked like the handles of a cream pitcher, and his
mouth, in which there glittered a fat silver brace. The only thing about Robin that really bothered her—aside from his constantly trying to boss her, simply because he was a boy—was his transistor radio, which he wore suspended from his braided Indian belt that had his name spelled out defiantly and which he never turned off. All his allowance went for batteries, because he loved to surround himself with sound (just as Claudine, when she was not playing with him, loved to surround herself with silence).

“Weather in a word,” he would shout when they met after school, “sultry!” But at least he knew what the word meant, and what the pollen count was, and underground testing, and Cambodia, as well as every rock-and-roll hit on the Top Ten from week to week and the Bargain of the Day at Giveaway Gordie’s Used Carnival.

Much more important than his ordering her around when no one else even tried to, or constantly banging things in time to the noise that came from his beltline, was his ingenuity in figuring out new places to build huts. Neither could remember when they had started, for it seemed to them that they had been building huts forever. It was Robin’s scheme to make a treehouse in the fork of the old hickory above the roof of the Crouses’ barn and to make a lookout lodge out of Claudine’s cupola where nobody ever went, not even Aunt Lily to store winter stuff. And to build a hut in the back of the abandoned diner off Main Street, using some of the things that Robin’s Uncle Burgie, who sold secondhand stoves, sinks, iceboxes, sump pumps and hockey skates, couldn’t get rid of, after they’d been standing outdoors for a season or two.

Like many married couples, Claudine and Robin derived separate benefits from their joint household arrangements. What was unusual was that Robin’s pleasures were those you would commonly associate with a wife (although there was nothing sissyish about him), while Claudine’s were of the kind ordinarily thought of as a husband’s (although again she was no tomboy but an almost fragile girl, with those large, wondering, rather bulbous blue eyes). That is, what Robin enjoyed was the planning involved in making each place livable: finding scraps of carpeting, making pictures to hang on the walls, gluing up chairs out of abandoned
camp stools, even rigging up hammocks for their sleeping bags, and then decorating with the boat paints and lacquers he grubbed from his father’s garage.

But Claudine, although she cooperated willingly enough, was at bottom attached to the huts as sanctuaries. Just as a man will come home from a hard day in the world of affairs in search not of distractions but of a quiet zone for reflection and refreshment, so Claudine looked forward to her hours alone, when she had no obligations at home and Robin was busy feeding his hamsters or taking his accordion lessons.

It was from Robin’s Uncle Burgie that Claudine got the big stack of old business diaries. They had some whitish mold on the binding part, and they dated back to 1926, but as Claudine pointed out to Robin, the inside pages were absolutely clean even if the days of the week didn’t correspond, and lots of them were personalized with initials and enhanced with fascinating facts, like: Bleriot Crossed the Channel This Day, or Hebrew Feast of Pentecost Begins This Day. Robin wasn’t interested in these facts, however, or even in doing much with the diaries.

“Don’t you want to find out who Bleriot was? Or what the Hebrew Pentecost is? If you came to Feb twenty-two and it said G. Washington Born This Day and you were a foreigner, wouldn’t it arouse your curiosity?”

“Everybody knows Washington. Even foreigners. Besides, I’m not a foreigner. The reason I got the diaries, they’ll look good on the shelf.”

“What shelf?”

“I know where to get the shelving. If you help me cover it, I’ll put it up for you.”

In return for her cooperating, Robin turned the diaries over to her. Standing there in rows, they posed a challenge beyond looking up Charles G. Dawes and Gertrude Ederle: all those blank pages cried out to be filled, while she was alone, quiet and sheltered, in one of the huts through which they had scattered the shelving and the diaries like so many branch libraries.

At first Claudine simply copied into them things that she liked. Sometimes it would be a special story out of the newspaper, like the one about the eleven-year-old girl who got up every
morning at five o’clock to practice figure skating for two and a half hours before school so she could try out for the Olympics. Then, increasingly, it would be a poem or a stanza from a poem in one of the books that Aunt Lily was always bringing back from the library: live ones like Richard Eberhart and Horace Gregory, dead ones like Mallarmé (because his name sounded like marmalade) and Keats (because his mask was cool and his poems were not). She liked to copy down parts she didn’t understand, because often they sounded the best. Sometimes she would look up the words in the dictionary; so she got to know not only Bleriot and Dawes but “sacrosanct” and “hyperbolic.”

It took a good three or four months, and a couple of diaries all filled, before Claudine got up the nerve to put her own stuff in them. She started with what she called Wondering. “I wonder,” she wrote, “why that girl Nanette got up every morning at five o’clock to go ice skating. Did she set the alarm herself? Did she make her own breakfast? Did she want to show her father she could be the greatest skater in the world? Why didn’t the newspaper article tell all the things you would want to know?” Or: “I wonder what made Horace Gregory write that poem about the girl sitting at the piano. Was it just because he saw her once, in his own house? Maybe he made it all up. If I knew where to write to him, would he tell me, or would he think I was crazy?”

When she saw that Robin was really not interested in using the diaries, or even in looking at them, Claudine began to make up things out of her head for them.

“Sayings All My Own” was what she called them at first, and they fitted nicely into the one-day space of one diary, if she didn’t write too small. If she was feeling businesslike, she would note that “The weather this day continues brillig and fine for Father’s business. It makes people restless, so they get out on the road.” Or, if she was moody and somewhat ingrown from having been left alone by her father, Aunt Lily and Robin Wales, she would allow herself to become abstract and general: “Grownups believe that grownup is a babyish word. They prefer to call themselves adults. They don’t think of children at all. They worry about them and they yell at them, but they don’t think of them. It’s more like putting them out of their minds. PS: Where does
the expression come from, putting somebody out of his misery? Ask Robin.”

But then when Robin asked her one day, “Say, Claudie, are you using those diaries?” she was almost ashamed to reply, “Yes, I put sayings into them.”

Robin didn’t seem to think there was anything odd about that, though. Claudine became all the more eager to fill the diaries, for now that they had become hers alone, she felt a funny responsibility to fill those hundreds of empty pages with her own words. Copying or pasting would be cheating.

She decided to make up a story with all kinds of things in it, descriptions of herself and her daily life, Robin and his radio, their mutual enemies, so that when she got to the end the diaries would have everything in them, like a good long novel.

“Today begins my life story,” she wrote on New Year’s Day. “My father was a very brave soldier, wounded during the Battle of the Bulge. Now he is the prop, of a very big service station, the biggest Mobilgas station within a radius of 30 mi. He is 53, the oldest father I know of. My mother was a beautiful French girl named Adrienne who came to live in Phoenix with my father but could not have any children until I was born after 9 yrs of married life. She named me Claudine after her dead sister and then died herself before leaving the hospital. It was a tragedy of life for my father. I never knew her but Aunt Lily has lived with us ever since and is like a mother to me. Everyone says so. She is 48. Cont. tomorrow.”

Next day, alone up in the cupola, Claudine curled her feet beneath her and began to write. “What do I look like? I am four foot nine inches tall and weigh 87 lbs. Aunt Lily says that if I hold up my chin and straighten my shoulders some day I will be a distinguished looking woman. But right now I am homely, and I bet anything I am always going to be homely.”

She paused to reach for a hand mirror that Robin had gotten from his Uncle Burgie. It had a fancy curved plastic handle, but the back had fallen off and a piece of the silver foil had peeled loose, so that when you looked at yourself in it there was a little hole smack in the middle of your forehead. You could squint through the hole clear to the tree outside the window, so that
instead of seeing the skin on your forehead there would be a chickadee sitting freezing on the bare branch. “It goes to show,” she wrote, “that once you can see not only the outside but the inside of your head, what you will find is a bird sitting on a branch where your brains are supposed to be.” And while she was at it, she made up a poem about the mirror with the hole in it that showed you the world as well as your face.

Not long after this, Claudine brought a newspaper clipping up to the cupola and stuck it in the diary with LePage’s paste. It read: MODERN KIDS KNOW TOO MUCH, STATE PROF CLAIMS. Underneath the headline she wrote, “Why is he so sure. If he went to my school he’d claim just the opposite. Those kids don’t know anything except the Top Ten.” She hesitated, and then crossed out the last four words out of loyalty to Robin. “The real trouble is, they see more and more on TV, but they know less and less. They act wise but they think stupid.”

When there was nothing special in the newspapers, Claudine wrote about her teachers (“Miss Bidwell wears stretch support stockings but she makes fun of other people”), her father (“I wish he didn’t have to work such long hours, but what would he do at home? He never knows what to talk about to me or Aunt Lily”), and how she was changing so much every day it made her dizzy, even though when she looked in the mirror there she was, with the same popeyes and the same hole in the middle of her forehead. The only person she didn’t describe, for reasons that weren’t quite clear to her, was her Aunt Lily, who had to be in there when she wanted to write about food or clothes or books.