NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (40 page)

By now the guests had progressed from talking to shouting—about the Korean fighting, which had just broken out, about homosexuals in the ballet and the State Department, about compost heaps and wheat germ—and from dancing to banging beer cans together in rhythmic accompaniment of a monotonous folk singer. Helen was not in sight.

I made my way on through the dining room and the living room to the front porch. The awning was rolled down and the living-room blinds were drawn, and it took my eyes a moment to grow accustomed to the darkness. Then I saw that several couples were embracing against the railing at either end of the porch. I was about to retreat and leave them to their business when I realized that a girl was sitting motionless on the glider, hands folded in her lap. It was Helen.

When she heard me she looked up and smiled and motioned to me to sit beside her. I was a bit uneasy, but she insisted, mouthing the words, “It’s all right. They won’t care.”

I glanced to my right. I was a little shaken to see that the blonde digging her fingers into the hair of the boy pressing her against the railing as though he was trying to shove her over the falls, his leg between hers, was Yeti.

“She won’t care either?” I whispered, gesturing at Yeti.

Helen shook her head mildly. “It’s just her boy friend.”

“But what are you doing here? Don’t tell me you’re the chaperone.”

“It’s the only quiet place. I worked pretty hard getting the food ready.”

“I bet you did.” I had to bring my head closer to hers in order to keep my voice low. “I’ve been looking for you all evening.”

That wasn’t strictly true, but it was becoming true as I looked at her. Perhaps because of the heat or the long hours in the kitchen, she had put up her thick dark hair; her face was more mature now, calm, self-assured. She smiled at me again, her cheeks rounding, and she was no longer just Helen; she was someone strange and beautiful.

“I don’t think you’ll be seeing much more of us,” she said, “after this summer.”

“What do you mean?” I asked stupidly.

“You’ll be going off to college. And then … people grow away from each other.”

“Not good friends. Good friends stick together.” Something made me add, “Besides, I’m not a hundred per cent sure I’ll go away. Why can’t I go to college here? Right now I’d rather be here with you than any place else in the whole world.”

“You mustn’t talk like that,” she said agitatedly. “Not when you’ve got the chance to go. Anyway, you’ll see. You’ll see, when you make new friends you won’t need the old ones so much.”

Her insistence, stubborn as a child’s, was charming; and yet I was touched by a sudden premonition that Helen, unlike Yuri, knew more than I—and always would.

Suddenly her dark eyes filled, and I was in terror lest she begin to weep. “Yuri loves you,” she said, “you know that? I hoped you would influence him to be idealistic like you, to use his talent for the best. If it turned out the opposite, and he was the one to influence you… it would be better for you if you never saw us again.”

“I promise you one thing,” I said. “No matter what, I’ll never forget the Cvetics. You’ve been nicer to me than my own family.”

“We just like you, that’s all.”

Encouraged, I added what would never have entered my mind
five minutes earlier but now seemed profoundly true and important. “You know something? You’re not only the nicest one in the family—” I pressed forward, whispering so that Yeti should not be able to hear—“you’re the best-looking.”

Helen shivered, as if taken with a sudden chill, and grasped her bare upper arms defensively.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Are you cold? Here, let me rub you.”

I touched her smooth flesh with my fingertips and discovered that it was not cold but blood-warm, not goose-pimpled but satiny. Helen released her grip on herself and raised her eyes to mine.

As we sat there staring at each other, with my palms on her soft arms, we could hear the shuddering sighs of the embracing couples on either side of us, and the rich wet sound of lips and tongues meeting, sticking, parting. Helen drooped toward me, I slid my hands around her back, she raised her hands from her lap and began to caress my temples. When her fingers reached the back of my neck I pulled her to me, overcome as much by the unexpectedness of what was happening as by the beauty of the moment.

Just as our lips swelled and touched, each to the other’s, in that instant of exquisite revelation, the porch door swung outward. I opened my eyes to the startling beam of light and raised them to meet those of Yuri, who was standing in silence, his fists clenched, staring at us.

How can I ever forget the look on his face? His glare was compounded of rage, disgust, contempt—and a strange, frightening kind of envy. And in the next instant there glinted in his eyes, I could have sworn, a scheming flicker, a swift calculation of the possible advantage to him of what he saw before him.

Helen sat motionless, not from fear or shock but as if time had come to a stop for her and she did not wish it to start again. Her arms hung free, no longer clasping me; her face was pale but quite composed. It was impossible for me, though, to remain impaled under Yuri’s stare. I arose awkwardly, mumbled something, and shouldered past Yuri and on out of the apartment.

_____

Helen had been right, of course, about me and her family. After I was settled in college I sent her a picture postcard of the bell tower, saying that she would like the quiet, regular, pealing music that it made; but even though I printed my return address, she did not reply. The only acknowledgment I got was a postscript at the bottom of one of Yuri’s letters: “Helen asks to be remembered to you.”

I wrote Yuri in some detail, but without undue enthusiasm, about my new life. Yuri’s occasional letters, on the other hand, struck me as not only provincial (anecdotes about classmates I had hardly known) but increasingly desperate, as if now that I was gone he was discovering, in the blind, lonely thrashing that he preferred to conceal behind a mask of amused contemptuousness, that the times were wrong for what he wanted out of life. I began to think that maybe I had never really understood Yuri.

Then came a last letter in which he told me cryptically that he had joined the Marines. All I could think of at first was that he was trying to beat the draft and in a typically sardonic fashion, fiddling his way through the Halls of Montezuma. But he put it to me in a lower key, in terms of his maybe taking advantage of a new GI Bill for Korean veterans to study conducting “when I come marching home.” Maybe he was just saying what he thought might please me or renew my confidence in him. I have no way of really knowing, because after that we lost touch with each other.

It was my father who sent me, many months later, the clipping from the afternoon paper which announced, not without pride, that the gifted young violinist, Yuri Cvetic, who had gone straight from Parris Island to Pusan, had been captured by the Chinese Reds. The best I could do, when I came home in June, was to talk to Yeti and her mother on the phone, for my father’s business had turned sour and I had to leave town almost at once for a resort job as pianist with a dance band.

More than once, at the silly hotel by the lake, I reflected on the irony of the fate that found me making a necessary buck out of my music while Yuri was involved in the miserable consequences of a larger decision. I wrote him about this—why not?—through the International Red Cross, because I thought that it just might bring back to his face—even at my expense—that mocking grin.

But he did not reply, and in truth he may never have gotten my letter, for not long after, word came of his death in a prisoner-of-war camp; and I found myself crying, alone in my room, at the idea of his permanent silence. Where had our music gone to?

The papers of that time were full of angry words about the betrayal of the heroic Marines, and in our town the tragic fate of Yuri was coupled with the implication that he must have died a hero’s death. I don’t know that this was ever substantiated, any more than was the stronger rumor to the contrary when his body was finally shipped home for burial: that Yuri had simply turned his face to the wall and died, as if his capture itself had been a symbolic yielding up of life, which he would not want to have undone any more than he would have wanted to go on living if the joints of his fingering hand had been frostbitten and amputated.

His interment took place on a rare and lovely April afternoon. Yuri was entitled to burial in a military cemetery, but his parents preferred to have him in their own family plot, painfully bought (like his musical education) with their own sacrificial payments. I had just arrived home for Easter vacation, and in fact was not in time for the services; but I borrowed my father’s car and hurried on out to the suburbs.

It took me a while to find the cemetery. I got to the graveside just as an honor guard was lowering the flag-draped coffin into the ground. All I could think, as I stood off to one side, away from the family and the faithful friends, inhaling the ineffable fragrance of fresh-turned earth, was that if through some miracle of this heavenly day the dead could draw just one breath, they would burst open their coffins and climb, happily reborn, from their tombs.

I turned to walk away, convincing myself in the usual cowardly fashion that it would be better if I called on the Cvetics later, when they had had the chance to compose themselves. But Helen, walking with a strange doughy-faced young man, caught sight of me, and I could only wait for her to approach. She smiled at me sadly, very white-faced in her mourning costume, and extended her hand with no word of greeting. Her sadness seemed to encompass not just the wasteful death of a young man but, I thought, the tragic quality of life itself for those compelled to go on.

“I’d like you to meet my fiancé,” she said to me.

I shook the hand of the young man, who was not only embarrassed but restlessly anxious to get back to his salesman’s route before he lost any more commissions.

There was nothing for it then but to await the others, who had not as yet seen me. Mrs. Cvetic, quite bowed over by grief, was being half led, half dragged away from the graveside by her husband and Yeti, whose veiled hat had been knocked somewhat askew by the exertion. As they neared me on the flagstone walk, their figures dappled with the spring sunlight filtering through the river willows, I could hear Mr. Cvetic panting shallowly under his burden and his wife sobbing jaggedly, like a wounded animal, with each step. They stopped to take breath, and suddenly Mrs. Cvetic, in black instead of white, for the first time, raised her head and caught sight of me.

She broke free from the restraining arms and lurched toward me. Before I could move or even think of what to do or say, she had hurled her heavy, sagging body at me, gasping and sobbing.

“My God, my God, my God!” she cried.

I tried to put my arms around her, but she was shaking and crying and pounding at me with her fists. It struck me with a thrill of horror that she was greeting me not with affection but with hatred.

“His best friend!” she screamed. “You were his best friend!”

Clumsily, I strained to pat her heaving back, but she cried loudly, “Best friend, why didn’t you stop him? You didn’t even try, you didn’t go yourself, why didn’t you try to stop him? Who’s going to play duets with you now?”

Even if I had been able to think of something to say to her, I would not have had the time. Yeti, her head averted, and Mr. Cvetic, shrunken into an unaccustomed Sunday suit and mumbling something either incoherent or in a foreign tongue, took up their burden again, pulling and dragging her by the elbows. Her wails floated back over her shoulder in the spring sunshine of the silent cemetery, and Helen, nodding an apologetic farewell, hastened after her family, her ankles flashing in their black nylons, her escort hurrying along at her side until they had all disappeared from my view.

From my view, but not from my mind. For years I wondered, Was Mrs. Cvetic right? Should I have tried to stop Yuri from going to his death? Yet I must admit that when I think now of the family that changed my life, my feeling for Helen and her fate affect me just as strongly as my feeling for Yuri and his fate. As for the music, it is enough that I hear it in my mind. Where it has gone, along with my youth, I think I know; but where it came from, during those passionate months of performance with Yuri, I doubt that I shall ever know.

A HOT DAY IN NUEVO LAREDO

L
ouise Ridley’s main reason for driving rather than flying to Mexico—or at least the reason she had given to those who asked—was that she wanted to be able to show Dickie more of Mexico than just Monterey. So, two days after he had finished fourth grade at the day school, she had packed her only child and their valises into the aging station wagon and they had set off for their first trip abroad and—thanks to his father’s cooperation—a Mexican divorce.

Actually she had wanted to be alone with her son on this leisurely trip so that he might gradually accustom himself to something even she could hardly comprehend—that from now on they would be alone together. Alone, with no Roger to call out, “I knocked off work. Who’s for caulking the boat?” or “It was too hot in the office. Who’s for a swim?”

But it had been too hot in the car, after the initial exhilaration of getting away. It had been too hot in Carolina and too hot in Georgia, and long before they had gotten to the Alamo, deep in the heart of downtown San Antonio, Louise and Dickie had lapsed into the sullen rather than companionable silence that tends to surround immobilized travelers squeezed together too long. They were bored with the South and with the somnolent heat, and so they grew bored with each other. Since Dickie was not romantically patriotic, the Alamo—except for the old firearms in its little museum—had proved a disappointment to him, and as they strolled along the banks of the river that meandered sweetly through the heart of the city he had solaced himself with greedy descriptions of what he would be able to buy once they were in Mexico.

A fielder’s mitt was what he wanted, specifically a second-baseman’s glove, because that was what his father recommended. Roger, who in his time had been a great fan of Charley Gehringer, had adjured him in parting—as if he couldn’t think of anything more important to say to his son—that leather and silver were the things to buy in Texas and Mexico. “Ask your mother to pick out a second-baseman’s mitt, Dickie, and I’ll get you a real major-league baseball to go with it.”

The idea of the mitt had kept him busy, or at least animated, most of the dull way down from San Antonio to Laredo. Staring out the windshield at the dusty sun-baked countryside, with no cowboys in sight, no cattle, no nothing, not even oil wells, Dickie would mumble ruminatively, in the nasal, rich-boy’s drawl that was all too reminiscent of his father, “It’s not the padding in a fielder’s mitt, it’s the flex-i-bil-i-ty. You’ve got to have soft leather for that.”

And if, gazing fixedly at the flat strip of highway enclosed by her gloved hands and the white arc of steering wheel between them, she neglected to express agreement or even interest, she succeeded only in calling down on herself a nagging reminder: “Mommy, you promised. Don’t forget, you promised me the mitt. Are you listening?”

At last Louise decided that it was her job to make a more sustained effort than she had felt up to so far to tell Dickie what lay in store for him. For them, in fact.

“Dickie,” she said patiently, “I’ll get you that glove. A promise is a promise. But you’re big enough now to realize that once we’re living together, just the two of us, things will be different than they used to. I’m not going to be able to buy you anything that comes into your head.”

Dickie twisted about to face her, shocked. “I know that. Don’t you think I know that? But the glove—”

“We’ll look for one in Mexico. I just want to make sure that you understand. Nagging for things won’t do you any good—it’ll only make us angry with each other. There’s no point in running after a glove the minute we cross the border, because you wouldn’t be able to use it there anyway. We’ll probably pick it up on our way back, so we won’t have to carry it around with us.”

The boy’s face had closed.

“Dickie,” she said sharply, “are you listening?”

“Yes,” he said in a tone that disclosed nothing. “I’m listening.”

“You know, when we cross the border, you’re going to see things you never saw before.”

“I know.”

“I wish you wouldn’t be quite so sure of yourself. It’s one thing to look at film strips, or even to listen to Mrs. Weinberg in social studies, but it’s quite another to see things with your own eyes. I could tell you from now to doomsday about the less developed countries. Like the reasons why they’re poor and we’re rich. But it wouldn’t mean anything compared to what you’re going to see for yourself. That’s one reason,” she concluded, sick of her own sensible voice, “that I decided it would be better for us to go to Mexico than to Nevada. For the divorce, I mean.”

“Whatever the reason was, I’m glad.”

That was somewhat reassuring. They cruised into Laredo at dinnertime and pulled up in the main square before the biggest hotel in town. At that it was nothing fancy, but it promised a better night’s sleep than anything they could get on the other side. Or so she explained to Dickie, when he asked why they couldn’t keep right on going and spend the night in a foreign country.

“I’m tired from the driving, honey,” she said as they ascended in the elevator to the top floor. “Right after breakfast we’ll cross over the bridge into Nuevo Laredo. And we can walk around there before we drive on towards Monterey. Look out the window,” she said as they entered the room. “That’s Mexico, Dickie.”

Ignoring the bellhop, Dickie ran to the window. “Man! You mean that little thing is the Rio Grande? It doesn’t look so grandy to me.”

She tweaked his ear. “Let’s get washed up for dinner.”

Seated across from her innocently amiable son in the hotel dining room and picking at a plate of cold chicken salad, Louise found herself wondering once again why she hadn’t just flown off with him and gotten the divorce over with, instead of wandering through strange towns that she had no desire to visit and that seemed to bring Dickie no visible benefits. Obviously she was putting the thing off; even now she was delaying their entrance
into his foreign land on the excuse that she wanted a night’s sleep—when sleep never came any more without aspirins and tranquilizers.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want the divorce. If anything, she should have broken the marriage off years ago, when she had first had to make excuses to Dickie for Daddy’s repeated absences. Clinging to that feckless man had done her boy no good that she could see; it had gotten to the point that now, nearing thirty-two and with a long-legged boy who all too soon would be taller than she, she could not even remember why she had married his father or what there had been about Roger that had ever made her think she loved him.

To conceal the trembling of her hands, Louise fussed with her bag, digging about in her change purse for the tip. “You want to pay the check?” she asked. “Then finish your milk.”

As soon as they were out on the sidewalk he said, “Can we go to a movie?” but with no real hope in his voice, and when she replied, “No, but you can stay up in the room until eight-thirty,” he did not protest, but fell into step with her as she strolled, without aim, from one lighted shop window to the next. The Fanny Farmer candy boxes in the drugstore windows and the Early American driveway signs (The Smiths Live Here) in the hardware-shop windows were no different from those in Montclair, and if that was all there was to see they might just as well have never left home—except that at home you couldn’t buy divorces.

The men’s furnishings stores, though, of which there were an unusual number, were flamboyantly Texan and aggressively masculine. Hats and boots, hats and boots—who would have thought that the putty-colored men in this scrubby border town could drift into such stores and slap down seventy-five dollars for a pair of hand-tooled boots, or one hundred and twenty-five dollars for a Stetson? Suddenly she caught sight of her reflection and her son’s in a mirror behind these overpriced peacock displays.

She looked tall and pale, pale and sexless, sexless and unloved—a lanky and uninteresting woman in a wrinkled linen dress and soiled cotton driving gloves. Beside her stood the boy who resembled her so strongly that she felt sorry for him. Long-armed, long-legged, short-waisted and broad-shouldered as she was, he stood
staring at the cowboy boots as she did, with his hand pressing down hair as straight and mouse-brown as her own. Even his expression in repose, now that he was not pleading for something or frowning over a book, bore that deprived look which she hated in herself. At least I earned it, she thought angrily, my father didn’t leave my mother and me to chase blondes, he died on us and left us broke; what has happened to Dickie, except maybe me, to make him look so hangdog, as though something vital had been withheld from him?

In truth, however, his face reminded her as much of Roger as it did of herself: those large jug-handle ears, that classically carved but bridgeless nose that grew straight from his short forehead. And those nervous athlete’s hands …

Louise sighed. “Enough, Dickie,” she said. “Let’s head back.” And she was dismayed to see how amiably he obeyed her, how eager he was to please in the small things—just like his father.

Back in their room he propped up the pillows behind him and disappeared into one of his endless collection of Hardy Boys books while Louise washed her hair and rinsed out their underthings in the bathroom. At least, she thought, he did not seem lonesome or shaken up—not yet. But that would come later, no doubt, when the vacation and the sightseeing were over and he had to face up to a fatherless routine.

“Time’s up,” she called out. “Turn off your light.”

“I’m writing a letter. As soon as I finish.”

When she had draped shorts, panties and nylons over the shower curtain rod, she stepped back into the bedroom, prepared to bawl Dickie out for not listening to her. As she opened her mouth, however, she saw that he had fallen asleep over his letter, with the light on. His book, the sheet of hotel stationery and his ballpoint lay on the quilt by his outstretched hand.

She switched off his bedlamp, smoothed out the covers and took the letter over to the bathroom doorway to see what he had written.

Dear Daddy
, she read,
We got to the border. We can see Mexico from our room. Tommorrow we will ride over the Bridge and we will be in Mexico. Mommy says they are poor there. Everything is cheap. So I will get my mitt there instead of in
Texas the lether is just as good, mommy says. It is stiffling here just like in Georgea. It is going to be a hot day in Nuevo Laredo, love Dickie

Louise placed the letter on the bureau and scrounged through her purse for her pills. If only, she thought, someone or something could reassure her that all this would come to an end; if only she would not have to be reminded so brutally of Roger every time her son struck a pose, caught a ball, wrote a letter. Even his poor spelling came from his father. When there was no longer any necessity for the letters, there would be phone calls, visits, weekends together. Then why the divorce? Only because it would free Rog from the obligation to make those eternal excuses and apologies, and it would free her from having to ask herself why she remained tied to someone who was not merely unfaithful but shallow and foolish to boot.

It was not that she hated Rog or even disliked him any more. It was rather that he made her dislike herself, made her wonder if she really loved her only child. Was she deluding herself now about Dickie as she must have been about Rog, when he had conned her into giving up her hard-won Cornell scholarship for marriage, with only one year left for her degree? What could have possessed her? She had not been impressed with his looks—on their first date she had thought him funny-looking—or with his money—she had known boys with more. He had been persistent, that was all, and so blandly convinced, that young man who had always gotten everything he wanted, from catboats to tennis cups, that he had wound up by convincing her too.

Was that all? Was there nothing about him that had charmed her, seduced her, bowled her over? If so, the very memory of it was gone now. Instead she recalled with shame those evidences of his true nature that had been manifest even in the earliest days of their courtship—his turning to appraise other girls’ legs when they were out walking together, his grinning mockery of her attachment to those large ideals from which he had gradually won her away. But then she couldn’t even say that she had loved him for his weaknesses, as other women had so obviously married because their men were drunkards or mother’s boys begging for redemption. Roger hadn’t dissimulated—he was what he
was—while she … Louise touched her fingertips to her eyelids and lay quietly, awaiting the sleep that would carry her away from all the questions.

Finally it came, but it was soon over. Dickie was up at dawn, eager for his new country. Once she was fully awake, in fresh clothing, and with the sun not yet too high, Louise too began to share his anticipation. They packed swiftly, checked out, ate a more rapid breakfast than she would ordinarily have countenanced, and drove onto the international bridge with Dickie clutching their birth certificates bravely.

“Well, we made it,” she said after their car had been stickered and they were saluted ahead. “Does it feel different?”

“It sure does. Doesn’t it to you?”

Louise laughed. “I’ll let you know in Monterey. I’m going to run into the tourist office to ask a few questions and get a map. Will you come in with me, or would you rather wait in the car?”

“I don’t want to go in any old office. It’s more fun out here. You won’t take long, will you?”

“I’m sure I won’t.”

But when she emerged onto that dusty street, that poor, cheap flyblown imitation of the American streets across the river, the sun was already blindingly high overhead and Dickie was no longer in the station wagon. Taken aback, Louise slipped on her sunglasses and peered anxiously up and down the block.

She was relieved to see Dickie’s unmistakable figure framed in the blank daylight at the end of the street, and she hastened toward the shop before which he stood, his nose virtually pressed to its dirty window. The sidewalk was crowded with tobacco-colored women carrying bundles and babies, bony dogs already listless in the baking sun, and barefoot, mud-stained children, none as pale or long-legged as her boy, who turned at the sharp clear sound of her heels and gestured eagerly.