NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (6 page)

I cleared my throat. “I didn’t come for questions. Not for three weeks yet. They’re not due for three weeks yet, you understand?”

“So you came anyway. Why not?”

“I came …” I hesitated. “Do you know a Barney Meltzer? Your cousin’s son?”

“My cousin Sadie’s a boy? You know him? Bernie Miltz?”

“If it’s the same one.”

“Why it shouldn’t be? You know how long it is I didn’t see him? I got the announcement from his Bar Mitzvah maybe ten years ago. But I don’t remember, tsu did I send a present, tsu
didn’t I.” She smiled shyly. “He came to the door when he graduated high school, I didn’t recanize him. A giant. A beauty, like a policeman, big, handsome. What’s a matter, Bernie, I said, you didn’t come by me sooner? Now I don’t know, will he come again.”

I was embarrassed. And confused too—we were probably talking about two different people. “Well, like all of us, he’s got trouble.
Tsurros
. With his job, you know, brain-work.”

She nodded knowingly. “So how’s by you, with the government?”

We chatted desultorily after that. I felt a vast sense of ease and relaxation with the old lady once we got away from such topics as Barney. My own tensions seemed to find release in her kitchen as nowhere else. Perhaps that was why, after I had left and gone about my business, I decided not to mention it to Pauline. My first meeting with Marya had aroused more curiosity in Deelie, it was true, than in Pauline, who was used to my encounters. But how could I explain to Pauline, particularly when I couldn’t even explain it properly to myself, this second visit, which had no excuse at all? So I didn’t mention to Pauline a meeting apparently trivial, but yet of a significance that I could not quite fathom.

For a while I persuaded myself that I had stopped by first to find out whether Barney was indeed related to Marya, and thereafter because her flat was convenient for a breather and a glass of tea. Only gradually did I admit to myself that it made no real difference to me whether or not she was Barney’s relative, that I had no other calls within a radius of eight blocks of her blasted and devastated neighborhood, and that it was an effort to arrive at that lonely tottering tenement surrounded by rubble, and to climb the moldy and odorous three flights of decaying stairs to the serene sanctuary of her changeless apartment.

For a while I was afraid that I was imposing on her privacy, so I took to bringing along small presents: a net sack of oranges, a tin of Swee-Touch-Nee Tea, a bag of Bialystoker rolls, things that I thought she could use. And it was always with an indescribable sense of relief that I heard her shuffling to the door in response to the rap-rap-rap code signal of my knock: “Who’s dere? Is you?”

We became friends. As the fortunes of my other friends turned, and the face of the city closed and hardened for us, I looked forward
more eagerly to my visits with Marya. Barney had had no luck with the FBI. In desperation, he was commuting to Washington, hoping to find somewhere in the blank impersonal corridors of the federal investigative agencies an answer to his dilemma before it would be too late. He stayed three days, he came back, he went out to Jersey to quiz McKenna again, he explained the unexplainable to his draft board, he went to Washington. There was little we could do to help. Deelie was concerned, but her mother in Greenwich had developed an acute liver ailment (probably cirrhosis, I thought unkindly, from too many martinis) which kept Deelie running back and forth too.

But when I went to see Marya, I didn’t talk to her about any of this, although it was preying on my mind. I think all I wanted was the assurance of her solidity and permanence in those rooms in which she had spent so many rooted years. As long as she was there I could not be soured on the city, with its grinding drive for money and place, or frightened by the rank growth of ambition among my friends, whom I had thought to be as happy and careless as Pauline and I, but who were learning a vocabulary—“in the know,” “lunch dates,” “capital gains”—that was new in our lives.

I could never explain to Pauline, who was hurt by my stubborn resistance to being bored every Friday night at her parents’, that I was the one who had found a relative in Cousin Marya. That she had been teaching me a game called
sechs und sechsig
, which we played with some matchstick pegs, a pad, and a greasy, rubbed, and creased pack of cards. That I enjoyed watching her ringless hands, of which she was very vain (with good reason, they were her best feature), patting the cards together and dealing them out deliberately, her heavy lips, shadowed with white hairs, moving silently, counting, as she dealt. That, although I was crudely, even vocally grateful for my mother-in-law’s weak heart, which prevented her from coming to Brooklyn to visit us, I even enjoyed sitting in silence with Marya over a glass of tea, watching her fingers drumming endlessly, patiently, on the stained tablecloth as she marked the measured passage of time in my company.

One afternoon late in the winter I ventured to try to explain to Marya some of the things that were troubling me, not specifically—what could she understand of making contacts or getting in on
the ground floor?—but in a general way, as one would tell one’s grandmother of a disappointment in love. She covered my hand with hers as she had never done before, so that I could feel the warmth flowing from her fingers—wrinkled somewhat at the tips from many years of immersion in soapy water, but meticulously trimmed and still shapely—to mine; and she murmured something in Yiddish that I didn’t quite understand, but that seemed to me to mean, “As long as I’m here, you’ve got where to spill out your heart.”

After I had said goodbye to her, I found that I wanted to walk, so that I could think about myself and Pauline, Barney and Deelie (who, it appeared to me, was not cherishing Barney at this hard time of his life as she should have). Was it my imagination that she seemed to be moving away from him, retreating, as the fissure deepened at his feet? Was she not only bothered, but bored by his trouble? Was I being unfair, or smugly parading my own innocence, to feel that Deelie was simply out in front of us all, but was not traveling in a direction essentially different from that taken by our other friends?

I walked for miles. Finally I emerged from the Lower Manhattan jungle at City Hall and mounted the steps to the promenade of the Brooklyn Bridge. While I crossed in the dusty gloaming, only half aware of the city, the harbor, the Statue all winking on behind the delicate fretwork of Roebling’s dream, I made up my mind to tell Pauline all about my meetings these last weeks with Marya, and to ask her whether we ought to talk to Deelie about Barney.

But how idle it is to attempt to arrange the future! Especially when what you plan for is shifting a burden from your own shoulders to someone else’s. Thinking that I would be the first one home, I stopped at the liquor store to buy a ninety-seven-cent bottle of chianti. We would have a quiet glass of wine while we relaxed and talked, and then we would go on out to dinner.

When I opened our door there was a flickering light under the sill, and soft music playing. Surprised and uneasy, I paused at the threshold, the wrapped bottle dangling from my hand. The apartment had been cleaned, and candles glowed on top of the bookcase. There were six fresh-cut roses in the glass vase I had bought
on Third Avenue. I smelled chicken cooking. Then as I stepped forward the door swung to behind me and Pauline was upon me, her arms around my neck and her lips on mine.

I held her off and looked. She was as freshly made up as the apartment. She had tied back her hair and was wearing a new pair of slacks and an Italian embroidered blouse.

“It’s not my birthday, is it?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I just thought it would be nice, for a change … We don’t want to get into a rut, do we?”

“Never.” I hung up my coat and reached farther back into the clothes closet, where we kept our small stock of kitchen utensils, for the corkscrew. “But you must have gotten home very early.”

“I took the afternoon off. Oh, I can’t hide it, I can’t keep anything back! I was going to wait until we ate, and then break it to you slowly. I’m going to have a baby.
We’re
going to have a baby.”

I stared at her dumbly. She looked the same as always. Fresher, yes, excited, but not changed. But I must have looked different, because Pauline’s eyes filled with tears.

“You’re not angry, are you?”

Then I found my voice. “My darling, I was just so surprised. Now that it’s real—it is real, isn’t it?”

We fell together onto the rickety studio couch that Pauline had tried so bravely to smarten up with a piece of fabric. Pauline made herself small in my arms. “I went to see the doctor after lunch. Then I didn’t go back to work. Don’t you think we ought to celebrate a little? It’s only five or six months earlier than we’d planned on.”

“Yes, that’s so.” It was so. When you look back on it—or when you’re the woman in the case—it’s such a small thing, six months. But the moment of impact, when you’re totally unready, is as thudding and heart-stopping as the moment when the doctor comes toward you from the operating room. The saliva dries in your mouth as you struggle to understand that nothing will ever be the same.

As our reveries spun out, they overshadowed my earlier need to reveal my meetings with Marya and what I in my turn had been trying to come to terms with during the afternoon. How could I inflict that on Pauline now? I would have to make up my
own mind, alone, what to do about Barney—although during the course of the evening, as we drank and whispered and gnawed on little pieces of chicken, I came to feel that just possibly there was very little I could do, any more than I could have held Pauline back from motherhood when some inner certainty urged her that the time was ripe. Maybe, I thought, maturity lay in the discovery of my own limitations.

Late in the evening, before we moved to the bed in our stockinged feet, arms twined each around the other’s waist, I took it upon myself to say what Pauline was too considerate of my confused feelings to utter aloud.

“This is no place for a baby. No kitchen. No room to mix a formula, change a diaper, rinse bottles—except the bathroom sink.”

“I guess that’s so.” Pauline knew that it was. She knew too how much harder it was for me than for her, at that moment, to turn from the past toward an incalculable future. So with infinite tenderness she added, “But let’s not be cold about this place. I’ve been happy here, alone with you. Have you been? You have, haven’t you?”

I nodded, my face against her throat. Once again I found it impossible to speak, perhaps because now I was close to tears, perhaps because she was mothering me just when I should have been reassuring her. We had eaten and turned off the lights, and by the uncertain flicker of the one candle that still guttered on our teetering bookcase, and the yellow ray that splayed out around the cracked dial of our portable radio, we could just discern each other’s features, and our surroundings—the secondhand and second-rate objects with which we had hopefully furnished our two small rooms. Outside the window, the night breeze rattled the dead leaves on the lonely tree that rose defiantly for two stories from the shabby garden in the courtyard below.

All evening the radio had been playing. Now, as we remained still, listening to the voice of the rising wind and the beating of our hearts, the WQXR announcer’s deadly familiar voice broke in on us: “Next we are to hear ‘Nights in the Gardens of Spain,’ by Manuel de Falla.”

Pauline reached out to turn it off. “We don’t need it. We’ve had our own nights in the gardens of Brooklyn, for a whole year.” She
touched my lips with her fingers. “I’ll never forget this room. Or these nights. We had fun all over New York, but the heart of it was here. After all, it was on a night like this, with the window open and the birds fluttering in the garden, that we made our baby…”

Next time we saw him, Barney had gotten another job, at a small place in the Bronx. For one thing, his money was running out. He had engaged a lawyer, and was still running down to Washington on his hopeless quest for derogatory information about himself. For another, he had to hold off his draft board, at least until they quit reaching for men in his age bracket, if not until the draft act expired. What could I say to him?

Besides, I was retreating into my own troubles. Not, I prefer to think, out of selfishness, but because that was the trend of the times, of our age, of what the city slowly pressed us to do. I had to find a place for the three of us, with a real kitchen and bath, and I didn’t have forever in which to do it. In New York that year it was all but impossible; it was totally impossible on our money.

So one thing brought another in its wake. And up in the Bronx, the Friedes, not yet aware that they were going to become grandparents (I had pleaded with Pauline for an extension while I coped with the problems of expectant fatherhood, knowing that her mother would be hurt beyond words if the secret was kept from her too long), were already sending out feelers, like lonely polar explorers tapping out radio messages. Their boy would be graduating from high school soon. They had high hopes for him. If only he could get a boost from his sister and brother-in-law … I hadn’t asked for the paper bags of jelly cookies made by Mrs. Friede’s loving hands, any more than I had asked for the bills that she wadded into her daughter’s purse during our Friday evening visits. Neither had I foreseen that I would be expected to change my life so that my brother-in-law could go to college.

One night Barney came over to play the fiddle with me. We weren’t doing that as often as we used to. “We may not be doing it at all in the future. Who knows?” he demanded gloomily.

I tightened my bow and rubbed resin. “If you want to look at it
another way,” I said, “we’re lucky we’ve had this year. It’s been pure gravy. Now comes Real Life.”

“Some life. If it wasn’t for Cordelia—well, you know what I mean. I got fired again today.”

I put down my fiddle. “Again?”

“Are you surprised? All the work is classified, no matter where I go. It may take a day, it may take three weeks, but as soon as the word comes through, out I go. With regrets.”