NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (8 page)

I suppose that is what bothered me most about New York,
aside from the actual fate of all of us. Whom you had to sleep with, he nice to, eat lunch with, in order to stay in the race, struggling blindly for unknown ends. I could never he happy in a city where drink and food, and friendship itself (as impermanent as the buildings), became a part of the whole grinding success mechanism. Nor could I be happy in the place where I truly learned, as I had only begun to in the army, what sin and sellout meant. After I understood what compromises would be expected of me—demanded of me—I had to leave.

I know the streets still, I know the stops on the GG Local as few New Yorkers do, I know where the best chances are for finding parking space. I know where to buy button coverings and Pakistani food. But the magic and the mystery of the city are gone. Now it is just a place, no worse, for those who want to look at it that way, than the placid and self-satisfied town where I live. Yet it persists, an indelible part of my young manhood. And like everything else I endured in those passionate years, it will remain until the end of my days embedded in the very core of my being, an internal capital, aflame with romance and infected with disillusion.

A GLANCE IN THE MIRROR

W
aiting for the doors of the high school to open and his daughter to come running out, Roy Farrow was thinking about how stealthily spring had crept up on him. He had taken the usual precautions with the change of season—put his overcoat and tweeds in storage, brought the car in for tune up and overhaul—and he had even noticed, as he drove alone, not stopping for hitchhikers, across New York State, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, that he could keep the windows down and that beyond the curbs in town after town the forsythias were turning to gold and the daffodils were blowing open, yellow and wet with spring rain on the lawns of all the old houses that drifted back away from him as he sped on to the place where he had been born forty years before.

But now that he was here he really felt it in his heart, which was where you really should feel spring if you were to know it at all. Lazily slouched like this in the open convertible with the warm wind in his hair and the strengthening sun on his hands lax across the steering wheel, he was uncertain whether the quickening in his chest could be charged to the weather, to his return to his birthplace, or to the fact that in a moment he would be seeing his only child for the first time in twelve years. Indeed, it might have been the intoxicating fragrance of the early spring breeze bellying through the riverward windows of his Manhattan apartment that had first filled him with an unease verging on disgust when he turned to observe Minerva, half-drunk in broad daylight at the piano, and drove him to consider how he might repossess himself by screwing up his courage to return home at last and identify himself to his daughter.

A quarter of a century earlier, at this very time of year, he had
been jogging along the cinder track that girdled the cathedral-spired school, desperately trying to earn his letter; and for an instant now he was shaken with a comical yearning to re-experience that boyish agony, even if he had to turn up the cuffs of his doeskin slacks and trot his heart out just once more on the hot, half-forgotten cinders; but in five minutes the doors would open, and beyond all this spring craziness was a painful desire to watch his daughter unobserved for a moment or two before he should walk up to her and take her by the hand.

He knew that he would recognize Kate at once from the snapshots that her mother sent him in response to the requests that sometimes accompanied his checks. Even without the pictures in his wallet, he would know her from a thousand other girls of her age, because of his ineradicable memory of how she had looked and felt as a three-year-old when he had hugged her goodbye, or maybe simply because of the special affinity of fathers for daughters, even for the daughters they left behind and came home to only after it was too late.

But then he thought: Suppose she doesn’t recognize me? What would he do if she were to stare at him blankly when he called out her name, and then turn away, as her mother must have taught her to do when strange men offered her candy or automobile rides? Roy wrenched about convulsively on the leather seat. Now he would probably have to pay the price for not having behaved sensibly, written ahead to Lisa that he was coming and then waited prudently at her house for Kate to come home from school. As he twisted about he caught a glimpse of his angry and ashamed face in the rearview mirror.

He pulled down the mirror for a better look at himself in this final moment and stared coldly at the empty stranger’s face. Bland and unlined, it had an aura of perennial youth that had been commercially useful in his trade but now struck him as almost hideous for a man of forty; and besides he knew, as few others did, that when he put on his reading glasses the pastiness of his complexion was accentuated and the large pores of his nose became perfectly noticeable. Beyond his broad pale forehead his platinum hair lay flat against his scalp like a smooth shining cap, just as it had done fifteen years before—no one but Minerva and his barber
knew just how sparse it was getting. In five or six years he would be quite bald; already he could hear the wheedling words that his manager would use when he persuaded him to wear a hairpiece.

As he poked the mirror back into place, the school doors banged open and the walk before him became alive. First were the boys, cavorting, sniggering, elbowing, tossing balls back and forth, shouting. Then came the girls, moving more sedately than he would have thought possible, ruminant and bovine, and all wearing what looked like outlandish castoff skirts of their mothers, voluminous and puffed out fore and aft, above the thick shapeless white wool socks folded double over their ankles. But there were so many of them!

Roy was suddenly panicked. Supposing he were to miss her? He would have to drive to Lisa’s and hang around, like a rent collector or a man come to fix the faucet, in that house he had been dreading to visit. He jumped out and made his way through the pack of yelling boys to the girls strolling with linked hands and schoolbooks cradled in their arms like babies. Where was she?

When he heard someone calling, “Father! Father!” in a high clear voice, he could not at first believe that it was meant for him. He was taken by the arm, then, and half turned around by a tall thin girl who came up to his eyes. “Don’t you recognize me? I’m Kate!”

He felt himself flushing. He had to speak loudly to make himself heard. “I didn’t think
you’d
recognize
me
… Say, can’t we get out of here?”

But it was too late already. He and Kate were surrounded by a growing circle of boys and girls who shoved at each other with happy ferocity, poking pencils at him for his autograph and chanting his name as though it were an incantation; he had to strain his ears to hear Kate, who clung fiercely to his arm, her eyes burning with pride and devotion. “You’re so modest!
Anybody
would recognize you, even if you weren’t their father! And I’m so glad you’re here! I knew it, I always knew you’d come!”

Yes, she was glad—but was this what he had wanted? With their arms twined awkwardly around each other’s shoulders, they moved slowly away from the school and down to his sloping convertible, which looked out of place and affected here. More
students had gathered admiringly around the car and were waiting to be introduced by Kate. For one self-hating moment he wondered whether this cheap and easy hero worship had been his real reason for coming unannounced to pick up his daughter. And even if he hadn’t, why else was
Kate
so delighted to see the father who hadn’t even bothered to visit her in a dozen years?

At the curb some of the noisy crowd fell back to make way for a tall stout man who came forward with his arm outstretched and a hearty smile on his florid face. “This is Mr. Klass,” Kate said. “He’s our vice principal.”

“Delighted to meet you at last, Mr. Farrow.” He squeezed Roy’s hand fiercely. He was as bulky and self-assured as a football coach. “It’s always a pleasure to greet an outstanding alumnus. May I ask if you expect to be in town long? We’d be honored to have you address our assembly next Wednesday morning.”

“That’s very kind of you. But I’m just here for a very short visit with my daughter. I’m sure you understand.”

The vice principal was swallowed up in the press of his students before he could reply. Roy opened the door for Kate and then slipped behind the wheel himself. “Why don’t we meet your gang someplace?” he asked.

She said a little timidly, “Would you mind going to the ice cream parlor? That’s where everybody hangs out.”

It was only four blocks away. Kate’s hair, as fine as her mother’s, was blowing against his face, and as he reached down to shift into high his hand brushed her thigh, thin and not yet fully developed; but he could not see her face without squinting out of the corner of his eye, and indeed he was beginning to wonder if he would be able to look at her directly at all during the afternoon.

But when they were settled in a booth at the soda parlor, Roy found himself seated near the wall across from his daughter, with only two of her friends to keep them company. He glanced at the record selector at his elbow; four of the fifteen records listed were his. Guiltily he turned back to the glowing face of his daughter, as one of the girls leaned across him to insert a nickel.

“You don’t have to pick one of mine just because I’m here, Sally,” he said to the girl.

“What do you mean?” she said gruffly. “Roy Farrow and the
Music of Tomorrow? We hardly ever play anything else, except for singers. You’re our favorite.”

Kate added excitedly, “She’s not just saying that because you’re my father, either. Even our music appreciation teacher had to admit that your band plays wonderful arrangements and that people are starting to play string instruments again on account of you.”

“But you don’t play a string instrument, do you?”

“Didn’t Mother write you? I’m taking the cello from Mr. Poggi. I know you don’t use cellos in your orchestra, but ever since I heard Gregor Piatigorsky play the Dvořák Cello Concerto I’ve been crazy about it.” She went on, somewhat defensively, “Some of the kids think it’s not graceful for a girl.”

“That’s silly.” He had to speak loudly, over his own music—it was “Atomic Cloud.” That it was unbalanced in the rhythm section he had suspected before this; but why hadn’t he realized that the whole idea of it was pretentious and phony? “When people say things like that, it’s generally because they’re envious.”

“They’ve got reason to be envious of
me
.”

For one horrible moment he was sure that his daughter was being sarcastic. But he looked into her sparkling eyes, smiling gratefully and frankly above her ice cream soda, and he was ashamed. So she was proud of him. Well, when you were fifteen it was easier to be proud of someone you didn’t know than of someone you knew.

But how could he get to know her here, any more than in his apartment on Seventy-sixth Street, or in the recording studio, or in any of the hotels where he worked? All that he could learn here, as he chatted pleasantly with her friends about his band, about what
Down Beat
had said, about what they liked to hear best, was her facial expression and her public manner. He liked her thinness, her wide eyes, her tension; and behind the school-girl flutter he could sense already a coolness, a self-possession that could only grow stronger as she matured. “It must be a little sleepy here after all the excitement you’ve been used to,” she said, smiling, and it seemed to him that if he had waited another year, or perhaps two, before seeing her, she would have been not merely smiling, but mocking.

Since it was impossible to get any closer to her, Roy resolved
to be simply amiable. The afternoon passed pleasantly, and when he had paid the waitress for all of Kate’s crowd, she turned to him and said, “You were a peach.”

Startled, he turned sideways and stared at her. “Kate … What do you mean?”

“All the kids thought you were swell, not stuck-up or acting like a famous person or even like a father. I could tell.”

He took her firmly by her thin elbow and led her out to the car, waving his goodbyes to her friends who still remained in the soda parlor.

Now, he thought, we are alone. They settled down in the car and drove off slowly.

“I guess …” she hesitated, “… you know the way to the house.”

“I certainly do,” he replied, a shade too grimly.

“Father.”

It still made him shiver to hear the word. “Yes.”

“Why did you wait so long to come back?”

Was it the uninhibited tactlessness of children that was so endearing, so ruthless that it became a kind of tactfulness of which adults were incapable—or was it simply that he would have expected, instead of this question, the more brutal query:
Why did you come back at all? Why did you come back now?

“When I first left…” he hesitated, stopped, and then began again, “At the time your mother and I were divorced, we were very angry at each other. We—hated each other. It lasted for quite a long time, with me anyway. Then of course there was the war, and I was in England. And after that I was very busy getting reestablished.”

“But in the last few years—”

Roy did not look at her. “By that time it seemed wiser to stay away and let you and your mother continue with your own lives. I
am
a stranger, you know, even if we do write to each other. And besides,” he concluded lightly, “maybe I was a little afraid to come back.”

“That’s funny. That’s what Mother said once, but when I asked her what she meant… she said she was just being unfair, and she really didn’t mean it.”

Oh, she meant it, all right, he thought bitterly. For an instant
he could taste the old hatred on his tongue, rank and salty as his own sweat. You could forget hatred, thank God, just as you forgot pain and grief and even ecstasy; but suddenly you could get a flash of the old memory, like an anginal cramp bringing you stabbingly face to face with eternity. Christ, how he had hated her! Within two years after their marriage, she had repudiated everything he had naïvely thought that they both believed in, she had mocked at his dreams of becoming a composer, she had whined and wheedled at him for things that he did not want or even know how to provide. And how she must have hated him! Ambitious and determined, it must have galled her to see her friends go off to New York, to Chicago, to Hollywood, to
go
, even if they did not become rich or famous, while she rotted away in the town where she had been brought up, in the very house where she had been born—and simply because her husband was content to give piano lessons at a dollar an hour and daydream at home of writing the kind of music he had studied with her at the conservatory, when she knew in her heart and soul that he could never do it and would only succeed in reducing her prospect to an endless vista of small-town drudgery.

Was that what had been in the back of his mind when he decided to drive out to visit Kate? Was he really so mean that he had only wanted to rub it in, to park his white Jaguar in front of Lisa’s house, to cross his legs in her parlor and display his seven-dollar argyles and sixty-dollar shoes to her burningly envious gaze?