NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (12 page)

The doctor shifted his heavy shoulders and pulled a fresh cigar from his breast pocket. “It suddenly struck me,” he said wearily, “that they might both have felt I was making fun of them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“As far as he was concerned, it was preposterous that anyone should take the white shirt man for a doctor. And when I persisted in making a point of it, what else could he think but that I was trying to ridicule him in the worst possible way, that I was poking at the sorest spot of all? He couldn’t afford to put a shirt on his back, and here I was needling him about calling two doctors.”

“But you don’t really know he thought that.”

“Not any more than I know what Stamler thought, but don’t you see that as soon as he saw me staring at him he must have figured that I knew what he was doing? And as soon as I started to apologize he must have figured, remembering the kind of clown I am, that I was warming up to tease him in the most heartless and vicious way. Why else did he duck his head down and scuttle out without saying a word, without so much as answering me?”

“He was embarrassed. He was afraid he’d have to explain to you what he was doing there.”

“Maybe. I’m not sure. Even if that was so, I leave it to you to imagine what agony that first instant of recognition must have been for him.”

“That wasn’t your fault. There was a dying woman—”

“Whose final suffering he could have eased as well as any doctor, even though the last woman he’d treated had died in agony under his hands? No, even if he didn’t think I’d been mocking him, I had to face it—Stamler was going through hell because he’d seen me, or because I’d seen him.

“I had to try to find him, and I had to get away from the man who was shivering in his sweaters. He was so decent about my breaking loose and heading for the door, he must have figured I was trying to spare him the necessity of thanking me, or maybe he was smart enough to understand that I still had the white shirt man on my mind.

“I went down the stairs fast, wondering whether Stamler mightn’t just be hiding behind one of the doors that I passed, but I didn’t see or hear any sign of him. For that matter I went all the way to the corner drugstore which was a kind of monument to the depression in its own way, with its windows displaying fly-specked before-and-after posters of patent medicines for skin diseases and its long row of empty soda fountain stools that nobody could afford to sit on; and I didn’t see Stamler, either on the street or in the lonely drugstore.”

“You never saw him again, did you?”

“I hate to disappoint you, but I never did. I’ll tell you what I did, though.” He stopped, coughed an old man’s dry cough, lit the fresh cigar which he had been toying with, and drew on it slowly.

I said a little impatiently, “You asked the druggist about him.”

“That would have been pointless. I remember him well—he was a sad-eyed Russian Jew with untrimmed mustaches and a look of absent-minded misery about him as though all he was worrying about was how to pay the rent on the store and turn up a miracle that would send his son to medical school. I put a dollar bill in an envelope—an advance against the check the city would send me for my call—and asked the druggist to give it to the man when he came in to pick up the prescription.”

“What for?”

“What for? So he could buy a couple shirts from Stamler. I knew Stamler would be back as soon as the woman was shipped off to the hospital and he was reasonably sure he wouldn’t bump into me again.” He stopped and then added belligerently, “Why shouldn’t I have helped him to make a sale?”

I stared at him. “What made you think the man would spend the dollar on shirts? Why not on booze, or groceries, or cigarettes?”

“Because he had to have a shirt to wear to his wife’s funeral. He wasn’t the kind of person to wear a sweater when he stood at her grave, not if he could help it. I think he understood what the dollar was for.” The doctor arose abruptly, scattering ashes once again on his vest. “Come on, let’s go. Fortunately someone is waiting for me. Do you know what was waiting for the man when I ran away from him? Death, that’s all. And what do you suppose was waiting for Stamler when he ran away from me? Nothing. Not even death. Nobody. Nothing at all. Come, are you ready?”

A HANDFUL OF BALL-POINTS,
A HEARTFUL OF LOVE

N
obody is going to believe me. If you want to laugh, laugh. I’m used to it. If you want to cry, cry. As long as you don’t blame me—for that I don’t need any help.

I had a twelve o’clock lunch date at the Times Square Automat with a salesman named Jack Storer, with whom I sometimes do a little business.

This was a real scorcher of a July day, a Friday, I remember. The streets were melting, the men were carrying their suit coats, the women were hanging out of their summer dresses, their kids were whining. Only the custard salesmen were making out, and the one thing that made it bearable for me was the knowledge that at least my family was cool up in the mountains. I dragged myself into the Automat and I could hardly believe my eyes. There was an empty table for two right near the front, next to the stairway. Jack and I have got a standing joke that when we’re going to eat at the Automat we should call up first and make a reservation.

I grabbed it quick, parked myself facing the street, and threw my briefcase onto the other chair to save it for Jack. After I had a long drink of ice water, I hauled out of the briefcase a bunch of ball-point pens that I was planning on showing to Jack. They were four-color jobs engraved with mottoes that glowed in the dark—a nice novelty item that Jack could move in quantity. I was spreading them out before me so he could see the color selection when my eye happened to catch that of an elderly man who was carrying a tray with a slice of berry pie and a cup of light coffee on it. It was one of those mutual glances where two strangers seem to see right inside each other in an instant, as though they are really old friends. The old man was shaved to within an inch of
his life, but his hair was cut by hand and he was dressed shabby, almost like a panhandler. I figured, probably he was living on a small pension and picking up a couple extra bucks as a messenger boy.

He was a little flustered by my sizing him up the way I did, and he must have decided that at one time or another he had delivered me a bag of sandwiches or a roll of blueprints, because he turned on a small smile and a faint nod. It was such a tiny nod that he could have denied its existence if I had frozen up. But I didn’t. What happened instead was that this business of acknowledging me made him lose his stride, so that when he hit the bottom step of the stairway he wavered uncertainly and the tray tipped in his hands. Another guy coming down the stairs jostled him at the shoulder, and that did it.

The pie and the coffee went skating across the black shiny tray and hit the marble steps, slosh, smack. I knew in that very instant, even before the Puerto Rican bus boy came along with his mop to clean up the mess of berry jam, pie crust, and coffee, that the old man had just lost his lunch and was going to have to go hungry until suppertime. Sure enough, he stood there for a moment with a weak sickly grin on his face, then instead of heading back for the Pies and Desserts section he made straight for the door and went out into the street.

I sat paralyzed for a second. Then I was after him, grabbing my briefcase and ball-points as I went. I didn’t have any idea what I’d do. In fact, I doubt if I’d have had the nerve to walk up to the old-timer and ask if I could get him some lunch, not with him wearing that smile. But I figured at least I could take off after him and see where he was going.

It was no use. He was swallowed up in the sticky crowd flowing sluggishly up and down Broadway. What was worse, when I barged out of that freezing restaurant into the ninety-one degrees of high noon, the sun struck down at me out of the sky and the heat rose up at me off the suffering sidewalk, and I thought I’d keel over right on the spot. I leaned back against the wall of the building to try to catch a breath of air, with the ice water bubbling in my belly, and I dropped the briefcase to the ground so I could get my dark glasses out of my breast pocket and onto my nose before
I was blinded. I did manage to take off my Panama, because I wanted to wipe the sweat off what’s left of my hair, but I just didn’t seem to have enough strength left to get rid of the ballpoints and haul out a handkerchief. The last thing I can remember was thinking that our table was gone and the hell with it, we’d have to eat someplace else, it was Jack’s fault for coming late. Then I guess I passed out, hat in one hand, ball-points in the other. I suppose the only reason I didn’t hit the sidewalk was that my shoulders were wedged against the brick and my feet were squeezed against the briefcase.

When I came to, I felt like I was wrestling the world, and I had a really stinking headache. Actually Jack Storer was shaking my arm to snap me out of it, and I was trying to throw him off. And part of the reason for the headache was that he had taken off my sunglasses to make sure it was me, and that blazing sudden light was burning hell out of my eyelids. I managed to blink my eyes open, and I saw his face, worried and scared, and behind him some nosy passers-by, mostly out-of-towners and tourists. The ordinary New Yorkers were ignoring us, thank God, as usual.

“Lay off, Jack, will you?” I said, exasperated. “You’ll pull my arm out of the socket. It’s not me that was late, it’s you.”

He was so relieved that he didn’t start to laugh right away, not until he had helped me pull myself together—I was still groggy—and stuff those damn ball-points into my briefcase. But then I mopped off my thin hair and went to put on my Panama (it’s a wonder I didn’t get sunstroke, or maybe I did have a touch of it already) and it was full of money, for God’s sake.

I stood there like one of those nuts you see on Broadway sometimes, talking to themselves, muttering, waving their arms. Absolutely confused. Jack started to laugh like a maniac.

“Come on,” he choked. “Count it, count it!”

So I put down the briefcase once more—we were standing near a theater marquee, with the dead air from the cooling unit blasting out at us and the woman at the ticket counter staring out at us like a death’s head—and dug my hand into my upside-down hat. There were half a dozen bills inside, all singles, and a solid fistful of coins—a few pennies, but mostly silver. I handed Jack the paper money and added up the coins.

“Cornes to thirteen-seventy-three,” I said finally, “counting what you got there. But I don’t get it. What… ?”

“They thought you were a panhandler.” I thought Jack was going to bust, he was laughing so hard the tears came to those piggy little eyes. “That’s the greatest haul I ever heard of for standing fifteen minutes with dark glasses and a bunch of pencils.”

“What do you mean, fifteen minutes?” I looked at my watch. It was twenty after one. “An hour and fifteen minutes is more like it. I must have been there easy that long. We made it for twelve o’clock and I was there twelve o’clock.”

“Twelve o’clock? We made it for one.” He saw I was starting to burn, so he said quickly, “I must have misunderstood. Honest, I’m sorry. Listen, if you’ve still got an hour, let’s go spend some of that loot on a nice crisp Caesar salad in a nice quiet restaurant.”

I was feeling a little better, and I thought to myself, I might as well buy him lunch, maybe we can still do some business.

But when we were finally sitting down in a dark booth, I found that what I wanted most from Jack was that he should promise me not to tell anybody about what had happened.

“Supposing it gets around,” I said, “to people I know in my line of business. They’ll think I’m sick in the head.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jack laughed some more, “they might have more respect than ever for an operator that can go out and pick up that kind of change on his lunch hour. What do you say to the fruit salad with iced coffee? Let’s stay healthy.”

I finally got Jack to promise, for what it was worth, and we even made a deal on the ball-points (although I might as well add that he pushed me a little hard), but all day long it kept nagging at me. Not just that it should be kept a secret, but what I ought to do about it to make it good, to square it, or whatever.

I knocked off early, around four, went up to One-hundred-and-eighty-fourth Street and got my car out of the garage, and all the way up to Ellenville I turned it around in my mind. At last I decided, I’ll talk it over with Bernice, maybe she’ll have some suggestions.

That turned out to be not such a hot idea either. By the time I got to the bungalow the kids were overtired from day camp and waiting up, and they didn’t feel like holding still while I sat down
to a late supper with their mother. Then after we got them tucked in and Bernice took the pincurls out of her hair that she washed and set every Friday in honor of my arrival, she was raring to go down to the casino and show us off to all the other couples who were starting to celebrate the week end.

“Wait a second, Bern,” I said, and while she was wriggling into her slip I told her the whole story. I included what I had never gotten around to telling Jack Storer, the business about the old-timer who slipped and dropped his berry pie and coffee.

“I don’t see what it’s got to do,” she said, after I had finished. “I mean, the old man dropping the pie and you picking up all that money. What’s one thing got to do with the other?”

I did wrong, I wanted to say, but the words stuck in my throat. Saying that wouldn’t have made the whole story sound any the less cracked. On the contrary. But Bernice is far from a dope, after all, she’s a college woman. Naturally she laughed at the idea of me snoring out on the street and strangers throwing money into my fifteen-dollar Dobbs. Who wouldn’t laugh? But she saw that I was serious, and that it was getting under my skin. She took my arm going down the hill to the casino, so she shouldn’t trip in her satin pumps with the high glass heels, and she tried to comfort me.

“I tell you what,” she said. “You got it into your head that the thirteen dollars and seventy-three cents is blood money, don’t you? I mean, because you weren’t entitled to it.”

“Something like that.”

“So get rid of it tonight. Spend it on something useless, down at the casino, like mah-jongg or bingo, then you won’t have it on your mind.”

Well, I did that anyway, like always when I get up to the mountains for the week end. What good did it do? I only felt like I was spending
my own
thirteen dollars and seventy-three cents. Came two A.M., when I hung my pants over the chair and took out my wallet, I felt I still had
their
money in it. I could buy guys like Jack all the lunches in the world, I could blow all the money I had in games on week ends, I would still have money that didn’t belong to me.

I turned it over in my mind all Saturday and Sunday. I thought,
maybe I should give it to charity, but there again it would be the same problem, I would only be giving away my own money, nobody else’s. And it wasn’t charity gave it to me in the first place, it was people that could afford to do it because it made them feel a little better.

Maybe that was what gave me my brainstorm. Monday morning, a quarter to five, I dragged myself out of bed and crawled into the car. I must have been halfway to New York on Route 17 when it hit me, what I ought to do.

I couldn’t wait to get through the morning. Came half past eleven, I got our bookkeeper to give me twenty singles for two tens. Then I took a bus up to Duffy Square and got out. I started on the corner just north of the Automat, not an arm’s length from a guy with a driver’s hat who was shilling for the sightseeing bus lines. At first I was a little scared, after all I never did anything like it before, but as soon as I had the bills in my hand it went like cream cheese.

I honestly don’t remember, did I say anything, didn’t I say anything, but I’ll never forget how good it felt those first couple minutes, handing out the money. I just held it in my left hand, and peeled off singles and handed them to people coming toward me. Some of them shook their heads No and kept on walking, refused to take the money; others took without even looking to see what it was. Both kinds, those that took and those that didn’t, must have thought they were handbills.

But inside of two or three minutes they got the message. The wise guys and the rubbernecks both started crowding in on me. By the time I had given out maybe a dozen singles, I was trapped in the middle of a clawing, shoving, laughing, yelling mob. My head was buzzing, my hat fell off, I had to hold my hands high, they were jumping for the dough.

“Why don’t you just throw it, Mac!” somebody yelled.

That sounded like a good idea, so I opened my fists and let fly, sending the money floating like candy wrappers through the hot smelly sticky air.

Then everybody was screaming and grabbing at once and I felt my suit coat giving way at the armpits as they tore at me. A cop was banging his way through the mob, jabbing and rapping with
his club—it was the first time in my life outside the newsreels that I actually saw a cop using a billy—and when he finally reached me he linked his arm with mine and cleared us a path through the screaming faces.

“You going to come quietly?” he asked, when we were loose.

“Come where?”

“I’m going to book you for disturbing the peace.”

What was I going to do, give him an argument there in the hot sun on the broiling sidewalk while he mopped his face and took out his book? I wanted to ask, What kind of a world is this, where it’s okay if you take money, but if you give money you get arrested? I’ve always been afraid of cops, I admit it, so I kept my mouth shut.

I did have to do some talking before the day was over, though. Otherwise they would have sent me to Bellevue for observation. What I did was, I told the magistrate I’d had a couple of drinks and the sun hit me and I tried to be a big shot, and I was sorry as hell about the whole thing, and I’d take what was coming to me, and it wouldn’t happen again.

So I paid my fine and walked out a free man, thank God. The only thing I left out when I sweet-talked the magistrate was that it wasn’t now that the sun had hit me, and it wasn’t now that I had acted like a damn fool. It was that first time, that Friday noon, when the old man lost his lunch on account of me. Even though I feel sure now that I did my best to pay it back, that’s something I can’t seem to make clear to anybody, even though I keep trying and trying and trying.