NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (24 page)

“Don’t play dumb,” Ralph snapped. “You’re determined to make me look a fool, with this coarse and vulgar—”

“If you’re going to be stuffy, old man, I’ll withdraw my standing offer of a Herlands fellowship.”

“I’d never take a dime from you for a share in my stock. When it comes, my success is going to be my own.”

Ralph’s brother-in-law nodded approvingly. With his professional smile turned on, he looked like a death’s-head. “Your book will be all the better for that attitude.”

“I doubt if it will satisfy either you or me,” Ed put in blandly. “Ralph operates under the illusion that he can produce a real work of art and make a fortune with it. Mark Twain had reason to believe in himself as a businessman-artist, in his time a Buffalo boy could still make his pile with his pen. But not any more, Ralphie, not any more.”

Rita put her hand to her mouth and turned blindly away, fumbling for a candy dish. At that moment I hated Ed with all my heart.

“I think Ralph is entitled to a hobby without being teased about it, don’t you?” Fred’s wife asked me, as if I could become her ally in averting disaster.

But Ralph turned on her bitterly. “I have no hobbies. I despise people with hobbies. Someday you’ll brag that you’re my relative.”

The three of us were a little constrained at the end of the evening, after Fred and his wife had left, coldly declining Ed’s offer of a lift. Ed stayed on long enough to offer to fix me up with Ellie’s younger sister (I declined not without regret) and to apologize perfunctorily to Rita.

“He was a monster tonight,” she said tiredly, as she stood at the sink in her stocking feet, washing the cake dishes.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Ralph replied slowly. “It wasn’t an unusual performance. I happened to be handy, so he used me. I don’t really care. What the hell, the proof will be in the eating.”

Ralph’s pudding wasn’t ready when I met him next, several years later, but the circumstances of our meeting were so unusual that I didn’t think much about his book at first. I was totally unprepared to see him advancing towards me in the bar of the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, dressed in the uniform of a Naval lieutenant, and without his mustache.

“Great to see you, Harry! Got time for a drink?”

“You seem less surprised to see me than I am to see you.”

“I read about the orchestra in the paper.” He took off his white officer’s hat, and I saw that his stiff shock of black hair had been cropped quite short. He looked ten years younger. “I’d planned to look you up tonight. Didn’t you know I was in the Navy? Didn’t Rita write you?”

“I’ve had only one postal from her in the last year.”

“I expect she wasn’t too anxious to tell you about it. That was the biggest row we’ve ever had, when she learned that I’d applied for a commission. She’d gotten to like the kind of life we were leading, and she couldn’t bear to have anything disrupt it, even though it was inevitable. Probably she’d have been just as upset if I’d allowed myself to be drafted.”

“I doubt that.”

Ralph turned red. “You’re right, of course. What bothered her most was the idea that I was willing, even anxious, to get away. The night I left for indoctrination school—” he hesitated, toying with his glass of beer, “—Rita accused me of deliberately setting out to commit suicide, the way children fantasy themselves dead in their coffins, surrounded by weeping and repentant parents.”

“She was overwrought.”

“Of course.”

“But you look happier now than in years.”

“I am. And I think Rita is too. She had visions of me being torpedoed,
spurlos versenkt
, or blown to pieces by a Kamikaze. But here I am safe and sound in San Francisco, presumably doing naval research because I’m a hydraulic engineer, and with leisure to read and meet people for the first time in my life. I suspect Rita’s enjoying a vacation from the old routine herself.”

“Do you still get up in the middle of the night?”

Ralph smiled shyly. “Only writing I can do is letters to Rita. There’ll be time for the book when I get back.” He stood up and glanced at his watch. “Rita’s expecting a long-distance call from me in a few minutes. Would you like to say hello?”

“I’d love to.”

I stood next to the phone booth and watched Ralph drumming his fingers while he waited for the connection. I thought of his father, whom he never mentioned any more, and as I looked at Ralph I observed for the first time that two vertical furrows were grooving into his cheeks, just like the old man’s. He looked young in his uniform, but he was not really young.

Suddenly he stuck his head out of the door and said, apropos of nothing at all, “You must know what it means to get some recognition for your work. If only the war was over and I could
finish
, I know in my bones that people like—” he looked into the telephone as though he could not meet my eyes, “—well, like Edmund Wilson, would take me seriously. If they didn’t, I don’t think I could go on living.” His eyes were burning. “But right now I’m concentrating on finding out what the man in the street wants. I want to do a new final draft that will insure me a really big audience. That’s why I’ve been reading a lot of good histories and talking to all kinds of people.”

Then he laughed and said, “You must think I’m an egomaniac. What about you? You don’t have a wife or anything yet, do you?”

“I was engaged for a while to an OPA economist, but she got sick of waiting for me to make up my mind, so she joined the Waves.”

Ralph disconcerted me by laughing out loud. “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you talk to Rita first? We’ll surprise her. Go on, go ahead.” He stepped out and extended the earphone to me.

I stood in the little metal chamber, listening to the sharp inhuman voices of switchboard girls all over the country.
Yes Des Moines, The exchange is Linden, L as in Love
, and suddenly I did not want to speak to Rita at all, I wanted to be quit of the Everetts and their crumbling dream world.

But suddenly Rita’s voice, clear and yet infinitely small, as though she were speaking from another world, filled me with such anguished nostalgia that I could not bring myself to look through the glass door as I listened. She was frightened and lonely, and she insisted that with Ralph gone, there was no one in Buffalo to talk to. That had been Ralph’s old complaint. I clung to the telephone and I wondered. Why must there be someone to talk to? Does it really mean someone to listen, like the audiences I have had all my adult life—so that I have never deeply felt the need of a listener—or does it imply that the listener will answer, that he will say not the things that are better left unsaid, like Ed Herlands, but the things that one needs desperately to hear?

Ralph’s smile had faded to a shadow by the time he replaced me in the phone booth, for I had managed to get Rita to say goodbye only by promising to come to Buffalo at the earliest opportunity.

Actually I had no such opportunity until after the Japanese had quit and Ralph had returned from the West Coast. When I did get to Buffalo it seemed to me that Rita must have been overwrought during that feverish telephone conversation, for the Everetts’ lives appeared hardly to have been affected by the war. Rita and the older girls had been thrilled by their one visit to the West Coast, and Ralph himself said to me briefly, after he had greeted me at the station and helped me into his car, “Well, I had a very pleasant vacation too—” (This in reply to my remark about
a trip to Nova Scotia I had just taken with my brother and his family) “—but it’s over now, and I’m satisfied. If the war had lasted much longer, I would have had trouble getting back my work habits.”

He had gotten back his mustache too. It was peppered with grey, and I wondered why he felt that he needed it, but that was the kind of question you could never ask of Ralph even if you put it as a joke. Almost as soon as we had reached his home, Ralph excused himself and headed back for the toolhouse, saying over his shoulder, “See you at the supper table.”

The girls greeted me with shrieks of delight and led me to the kitchen, where Rita stood with her head bent forward over a mixing bowl, her blonde hair hanging full across her face. When she looked up her eyes were brimming with tears: I was startled and frightened, and for one instant I felt like bolting.

But then she laughed, and as she brushed the back of her hand across her face I saw that the tears had been caused by onions which she was slicing into a bowl of chopped meat. I was overcome with such enormous relief that I stepped forward and kissed her damp cheek.

“Are we going to play some duets while I’m here?” I asked.

“Don’t tease me. If it wasn’t for our record collection, which is mostly albums you’ve brought us, there wouldn’t be any music in my life at all—except for the girls.”

“Are you happy?”

“I’m busy. Ralph has been writing ten hours a day, trying to finish before his terminal leave runs out. I take his lunch out to the toolhouse so he won’t break his train of thought.”

“And now you’re satisfied. I was never really sure.”

Rita’s hand came down on the kitchen table so sharply that the silverware jumped in the air and fell with a clatter. “Don’t you see, Harry? He’s almost finished. Suppose it’s a failure? What will we do?”

“What you’ve been doing for ten years. It depends on what you mean by failure, doesn’t it?”

“For ten years Ralph has been living for the day when the critics will cheer him. He talks about the money and independence, but it’s recognition he’s after. Suppose he doesn’t get it? Do
you think he’ll be able to say, Better luck next time? Do you?” Her voice rose dangerously. “Do you?”

“His book might sell moderately well and get some nice reviews, enough to make Ralph feel that he had made a good start.”

“A start?” she laughed scornfully. “And then what—back to the Water Department and the toolhouse? We’re not kids any more, Harry, neither of us … I hate melodrama, don’t you? Would you do me a favor—tell Ralph it’s time to knock off? You can go right out the kitchen door.”

So I followed the little trampled path that Ralph had made in the grass in his years of crossing back and forth; when I reached the sagging frame toolhouse I hesitated, still uncertain whether I should intrude. Finally I raised my fist and pounded on the iron-barred old door.

But Ralph’s voice said “Yup,” and I entered his headquarters. The walls of his spotless workroom were whitewashed and covered with old maps of the Niagara Frontier. Ralph was seated at a roll-top desk with his shirt sleeves turned back halfway to his elbows. He got up when he saw me. “You’ve never been in here before, have you? Let me show you my stuff.”

“Rita suggested that it’s time to knock off. I didn’t want to intrude.”

“Let me show you my layout.”

His wooden filing cabinets were a marvel of precision. Ralph had cross-filed all of his material the way his engineering reports must have been indexed at his office, so that you could open any drawer and find references to the downtown scene in Buffalo of the 1850s, the clothing of the men, the manners of the women, the shape of the buildings.

The novel itself was in a series of looseleaf notebooks, one chapter to a notebook, and they were stacked head-high on the roll-top desk. “I would have asked you to read it, as a favor to me,” Ralph said, “but every time I got a draft out it needed a little more work. After all these years, I’m almost through. I’m sure that if I hadn’t had to go downtown to work every day I could have gotten it out in a year or two of concentrated effort.”

“Don’t you think you’re more mature now than when you started?”

“I’m older, that’s all I know. Believe me, there’s something wrong about grubbing away so slowly in secret, like a hermit crab. I often think how much better it would have been if I had been able to publish regularly years ago, with each book maybe improving a little.”

“Haven’t you enjoyed it?”

Ralph rubbed his knuckles across his eyelids. “I suppose you’re happiest when you don’t have time to think about what you’re doing. But even if I don’t make a dime on my book, even if no one reads it but the critics, they’ll recognize that my very best is in it. That’s something to be able to say, isn’t it, that you’ve given everything that you have? And that you’ve done it without stimulation or encouragement, in the lonely hours of the night? … You go on, I’ll be in shortly.”

As I turned on Ralph’s lawn to look back at him standing in the toolhouse doorway, caught by the waning rays of the late afternoon sun, I was filled with envy and admiration. Rita was wrong about him—of that I was sure.

Only a few months (perhaps a year) later, I came home to the Bronx one evening from Philadelphia, put down my valise and fiddle in the foyer, and found my mother waiting up for me, lying on the sofa with a newspaper and a bowl of grapes. She had a way of popping the pulp into her mouth so that the skin remained between her fingers—it always made me nervous. She shoved aside the bowl, unable to divide her attention between me and the grapes, and said in a voice at once sad and accusing, “You said you’d be home early.”

“I had to catch a later train. What’s new?”

She sighed, hauling herself upright with a groan, to register her resentment against being treated as merely a messenger service.

“What should be new? A boy (all of my friends were boys to my mother) called up this afternoon. He
said
his name was Ralph Edwards,” she added, as if she was perfectly aware that he had been lying.

“But I don’t know any Ralph Edwards.”

“From Rochester.”

“From—Ralph Everett you mean, from Buffalo!”

“So it was Everett. He said to tell you he was at a cocktail party. He sounded drunk.”

“Where? In New York?” Gradually I pieced together from my mother’s grudging answers the information that Ralph’s book had been accepted by a publisher who had already begun an intensive promotional campaign with a cocktail party. I dialed the Algonquin, but the operator would not put me through to Ralph. Probably passed out cold, I thought, and asked for his wife; but she wasn’t registered.

So he had come to New York alone for his first moment of triumph. It was a masculine enough action, and I knew that if the situation had been reversed Rita would surely have taken her husband and children along, like a lady ambassador. But I called the next morning and Ralph insisted that I meet him for lunch. He sounded frightened.