NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (45 page)

“How did it go?” I asked him.

“Same as here.” He waited until the bartender had brought him his drink before adding, “I saw your friend.”

“You gave her the message.”

“Oh yes. She smiled at first. Either she didn’t understand or she figured I was joking. So I took out your note. She stared at it and stared at it. First I thought maybe she was illiterate, but no, she began to jabber a mile a minute. In order to stop her I told her what you said, about hiring the Mafia to knock her around. Well, she started to tremble, you know, and her eyes filled with tears. She was pale, and biting on the letter as though—”

“Biting on what letter?”

“On your letter. The note you typed. Then she turned around and ran out of the bar like a deer, by the side exit, at the corner of the bandstand. I thought I’d better go after her—I didn’t want to carry it too far—but when I asked the bartenders where she lived,
they made out like they didn’t know what I was talking about. I said to them, When she comes back tell her I was only kidding. But I don’t know that she ever came back. If you ask me, by now she’s on her way to Tampico, or wherever it was she came from.”

I couldn’t think of anything much to say. Tommy gulped down his drink a little more swiftly than usual and wound up, looking at his glass instead of at me, “I can’t stick around tonight. Fact is, I’ve got a dinner date. I’ll see you.”

Why did I do it? None of the excuses that I can muster up even approaches adequacy. Just because she had humiliated me, did that give me warrant to terrorize her? I had accepted the rules of the game. I knew when I started that her livelihood, her very life, depended on her countering aggressive men with all the cunning she could conjure up.

No doubt it was to Gertrudis that she had turned, in miserable panic, for help in fleeing from those bandy-legged little Indian soldiers, strapped into their Sam Browne belts and serving both their provincial masters and whatever rich gringo could afford their services for a job of pistol-whipping. Isabel and Gertrudis knew in their bones what I understood without ever being honest enough to make explicit to myself: that the cards were stacked in favor of the Tommys and the Tobys, the rich, careless Yankees who, if they were outwitted in the skirmishes, could always win the wars simply by whistling up the apparatus of terror and repression that had been invented precisely to crush the victimized and the rebellious.

Well, if Isabel could only know it, this is one time she won. For, despite all my efforts to bring back just that one night when she charmed me and I tried so hard to charm her, to win her not by her rules but by mine, not with money or force but with the assertion of my simple manhood, I cannot really call her up in her mature and weary beauty. All I have, instead, is what I have earned for myself: the woman whom I never saw, but who remains nevertheless indelibly imprinted in my mind’s eye, pale, trembling, fearing me, hating me and cursing me, now and forevermore.

THE HACK

S
ooner or later everyone who writes, and publishes, is bound to be approached by a supplicant who writes but does not publish. “Would you read this? And be honest with me: Have I really got it?”

Such a plea for reassurance goes straight to the heart, for it is one that every writer has uttered, once upon a time, if only to himself. What could be more natural, in a trade without diplomas, licenses, or name plates? Sometimes there comes a more extreme demand, the most painful of all, and the most painful to answer: “Should I go on?”

A negative answer is implicit in the very uttering of the question. If you do not believe in yourself, even beyond the boundaries of sanity, no one else will. But the cruelty of replying with absolute frankness is easy only when you are young, desperate to assert yourself, and so prove your own gifts, if necessary at the expense of others.

Just before I came of age, I met a man in Ann Arbor named Harold Bangs who threw these questions into relief and so, I gradually came to see, altered my conception of myself. The funny thing is that, far from being unsure of himself, he was fanatically certain—like many eccentrics—that he held an exclusive option on a certain corner of the truth.

After my sophomore year at college I had gotten a summer job as lifeguard at a Michigan beach resort; but instead of spending my evenings making out with the girls at the casino, I had sat up late, night after night, in a kind of fever, writing stories about the people around me, the busboys, the waiters, the lonely wives, the weary worried husbands. By the time fall came around I knew that
this was what I wanted to do, more than anything in the world, and I was convinced, in the way that you can be only when you are very young, that I was greatly gifted. Anyway, I had to find a single room, off in some quiet place, so I could write all night, if I wanted to, without disturbing anyone. That was how I met Harold Bangs.

Mrs. Bangs was the one who answered the doorbell of the unprepossessing, run-down house in a courtyard only a few blocks from the Michigan Union, and led me on up to the attic room. Thin, shy and puckered at the lips as if she had just bitten into something bitter, she stood in the doorway of the narrow room and rubbed her hands up and down her flanks.

“I know it’s not very big,” she said, blinking rapidly in what I later realized was a tic, “but you did say you wanted a real quiet place.”

Mrs. Bangs must have had a first name, but I never learned it, nor could I ever have thought of her as anything but Mrs. Bangs, not young, not old, not interesting, just an overworked rooming-house keeper whom I never saw in anything but a J. C. Penney house dress, ankle socks and white open-toed buckle-strap Enna Jetticks, and who always smelled of ammonia and Bab-O while she scrubbed the endless steps to my room and the toilet next to it.

Even the mail, which for her consisted principally of utility bills, catalogues and a weekly letter from a Mrs. J. C. Hurd of Ishpeming, Michigan, was invariably addressed to Mrs. Harold Bangs, that drooping-breasted, down-dropping woman who never relaxed, seldom smiled, and ran the house alone, as if she were a widow woman.

In fact it was the mail that first brought Harold and me together. There were eleven of us roomers in that dark, cool and faintly moldy old house, not counting Mr. and Mrs. Bangs, and it was customary for the one who first spotted the postman stuffing the box to bring in the mail and lay it out in piles on the oak hall table, under a hand-lettered poem, a souvenir of the Chicago Fair, entitled “That’s Where the West Begins.” That was how I knew about Mrs. Bangs’s mail; and that was how Harold came to know about me.

The building, so I was told by two forestry students who’d roomed there the year before as well, had been willed to Harold Bangs by his mother. What was more, he got a monthly pension (I saw that, too, in the front hall) for almost total disability—he had been gassed in the war. Apparently Harold figured that the house and the check for his lungs were sufficient contribution on his part, and that if his wife wanted to eat regularly it was up to her to put in a fifteen-hour day in the rooming house. But I hardly set eyes on the man, who was as indifferent to my existence as he was to the ten other roomers barracked over his head—until the day early in October that two of my literary efforts came back from
Story Magazine
in the very same mail.

All the winey fragrance of the autumn afternoon leaked away as I dropped my load of library books to the oak table and stared miserably at the creased manila envelopes that bore my name and address in my own handwriting. There was no need to open them. I knew their message by heart:
Dear Contributor, This alas is a rejection slip. And heaven knows the editors have had their share
… You’re no good, you’re no good, the two envelopes shouted at me. Yes, you are, yes, you are, screamed the defiant starlings, black, bold and unrepentant in the courtyard elm that grew all the way up past my attic window.

I closed the front door behind me and picked up my books and rejected stories, clenching for the long climb up the dark rubber-treaded stairs to my solitary room. Suddenly a voice called out to me from Mrs. Bangs’s quarters.

“Hey, Tommy.”

Mrs. Bangs never addressed me by anything other than my last name—after all, it was I who paid her once a week, and I whose room she dusted and swept. But this was a man’s voice, thin and twangy, coming from beyond the end of the hallway, where I had never ventured, from the dining room, whose sliding doors stood somewhat ajar.

“Come on in.”

Harold Bangs was sitting in a pool of light at the far end of the round mahogany dining-room table, before an old L. C. Smith office typewriter with a metal circle of keys, the kind of machine that you used to see in pawnshop windows wedged between
banjos and golf clubs. He was a long-limbed, lank-jawed man in his middle years, with protruding shoulder blades that pushed out the back of his shirt like hidden wings, and swollen knuckles that he must have cracked a million times, sitting humped over the typewriter. He wore black garters above the elbows to hike up his shirt sleeves past wrists that looked as though they connected his hands to his arms not with bones but with twisted cotter pins. The shirt itself had no collar—I thought they’d stopped making them years before. His skinny shanks were crossed, exposing bare skin, hairless and white as bird droppings. He wore no socks under his plaid carpet slippers.

Although it was bright daylight, the bile-green shades on the dining-room windows were drawn down so far that their wooden spring rollers were revealed. As I approached, he squinted at me across the goose-neck lamp with shrewd frankness. Or at least frankness was the impression he seemed to want to convey; actually, I thought, he looked fanatically self-assured, like an evangelist, although of course I had no way of knowing why or to what end.

“So you scribble too,” he said, sizing me up with his ice-blue myopic eyes.

My temper shifted at once from depression to fury. I detested that word; besides, who did he think he was to couple us like that? But, since I could not think how to express any of this without sounding impossibly snobbish, I said nothing, but tried unsuccessfully to glare as I advanced into the circle of light cast by the student lamp, exactly like those with which all the other rooms in the house were furnished. It was now that I observed that his face and neck were covered with a week’s growth of graying stubble which further hollowed his already cadaverous cheeks and made him look toothless, when in fact he was equipped with a garish set of store teeth that intensified the fixed insincerity of his welcoming smile. It was only later that I learned that the teeth were a gift from the Veterans Administration, just as I was to learn, from continuous observation, that Harold was one of those rare birds, like Gabby Hayes, the old cowpoke in the Hopalong Cassidy movies, who was never clean-shaven and never bearded but somehow managed to maintain a continuous seedy stubble.

“This is where I work,” he said. “Right now I’m knocking out
an adventure yarn about two prospectors in the Andes. Going to try it on the
Post
and then on the men’s mags.”

Still I could find nothing to say. Around the typewriter the dining-room table was piled high with copy paper, manuscripts, carbons, envelopes, and back numbers of the
Writer’s Guide
and the
Information Please Almanac
. Over everything hung the foul odor of dead cigarette butts, thousands of them, heaped in dime-store glass ashtrays which had surely not been emptied since his last shave; obviously Mrs. Bangs, always moving through the upper floors with dust mop and toilet brush, was not allowed in this sanctum.

“Tell me straight,” Harold demanded. “How does
Story
treat you?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Do they give you a prompt reading? I haven’t tried to crack that market yet.” He laughed hollowly, coughed, and spat out a crumb of tobacco. “Not that I’ve got anything against them. It’s just that, according to the
Yearbook
payment scale, they’re pretty far down on the old totem pole.”

“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t had anything from them but rejections. Form rejections. They return my stories pretty fast, but that’s no help.”

“Sure it is.” Harold cracked open a carton of Wings, pulled out a fresh pack, and offered me a cigarette. “You should keep a tally of your submissions, like I do.” Between us lay an open notebook whose pages were ruled off in columns headed TITLE, DATE SENT, POSTAGE SPENT.

My head was spinning. “I haven’t thought much about anything that systematic.”

“But you should! Aren’t you a serious writer?”

“I think I am,” I said. I thought I was the most serious writer in Ann Arbor. “That is, I’m trying to write about serious things.”

“Who isn’t? I had a feeling, even before I saw your manuscripts in today’s mail. When I heard you pounding your machine up in the attic night after night, I knew you weren’t just doing term papers. It’s too early in the semester,” he added, shifting the wet cigarette with his tongue, “for that much schoolwork. I been running a rooming house long enough to know that.”

I could feel my face reddening. “I hope the noise hasn’t bothered you or Mrs. Bangs.”

“The missus turns in early, right after Lowell Thomas and ‘The Shadow.’ Me, I put in a long day. Fourteen, fifteen hours at the machine is nothing for me. Nobody knows what’s involved except another writer, right? Working out plots and outlines, making copies, studying your markets—there’s no easy road to riches for us guys. It’s a very time-consuming business.”

By now I had edged back to the sliding doors. “If you’ll excuse me,” I said, “I’d better get back up there and start scratching away again, Mr.—”

“Call me Harold, Tommy. That’s the spirit. Don’t let those rejections get you down—I’ve got drawers full. And, say,” he called after me, “any time you want me to read over some of your stuff, don’t hesitate.”

I fled.

But that was to be only the first of many such encounters, although I never took him up on his offer. Harold got to know my class schedule, and approximately when I would be returning to the house to drop off books, or change clothes, or do some writing; and all too often at those times he would leave the dining-room doors ajar in order to entrap me.

Just as Mrs. Bangs seemed always to want to wish herself out of my way, blushing when she collided with me as I shuffled out of the toilet in the morning and shrinking against the wall when I clattered down the stairs in the evening, Harold, seemingly nailed to his squealing swivel chair before the L. C. Smith, sought out excuses to lure me into his den. I never saw the two of them together—it was like those mystery movies where you discover that the real reason is because they are both one and the same person, a master at disguise and a master at crime. Except that Harold and Mrs. Bangs loomed larger in my life than did Lon Chaney or Boris Karloff.

Harold, I found out, wasn’t all that eager to read my stuff. What he did want was for me to read his, and more than that to reassure him by my camaraderie that we were both members of a very special fraternity.

“I invested a lot of time on fillers,” he informed me one day.
“Fillers, jokes and funny coincidences. Matter of fact, I even hit ‘Keeping Posted’ one time. Not bad, hey? That’s the top of the market, you got millions of readers going for you there. But you’re dead unless you can concentrate on that exclusively. It doesn’t pay, Tommy, take my word for it.”

He lit one cigarette from the end of another, and dropped the short one in the butt cemetery without bothering to stub it out. No wonder the room stank.

“Besides, I think my forte is in yarns. I’ve got a tale of the sea here, about two brothers, Alaska salmon fishermen, with a powerful story line and strong romantic interest. So far I’ve had fourteen turn-downs, all printed, not one personal note. It beats me. Want to take a look at it and tell me your honest opinion?”

I put it off as long as possible, and finally came back with some miserable half-assed corrections of his typing and spelling (even when I am an old man I will remember with sour satisfaction that Harold Bangs wrote “wearwithal” and “medeival” and “irregardless”), but I could not bring myself to discuss his plot, which was incredible even if you accepted its premise—that a New York society girl would go to Ketchikan in search of adventure. Or its characters, high-flown on one page and mealy-mouthed on the next.

All I did say was “Harold, when were you in Alaska?”

“Never. But I got it down pretty good, didn’t I?”

“Why don’t you write about something you know, like the world war?”

Harold cracked his knuckles. “Tommy, I knocked out fifteen Flying Aces yarns—they’re all in that corner.” He gestured with a blackened fingernail. “Dogfights between Spads and Fokkers, Jennys and Messerschmidts, I wrote them all and never hit once.”

“I didn’t know you were in the Air Corps.”

“I wasn’t. I was a plain old doughboy—that’s how I got gassed. But nobody wants to read about the Argonne woods any more. You got to know your readers and your markets.”