NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (33 page)

The hand was gloved, but I had the feeling that her fingers would be cold; her lips were pale and bloodless and she smiled at me tremulously.

“You look well,” she said. “I’m sorry I can’t stay very long.”

People were bumping into us in their anxiety to reach the escalator. The vaulted terminal was bleak, drafty and—to me at that moment—terrifying.

“My God, Teddy,” I said, “you can’t just shake my hand and walk away.” I pointed to the bag hanging from her left hand. “You’ve done your Macy’s shopping already. That ought to satisfy your mother. Can’t we get out of here? Please?”

“If we could just be happy one last time—like we were for a little while …”

“Come with me.” I took her by the hand. “I know a good French restaurant near here. While we eat you can talk and I can sit and admire you.”

“You’ll have to promise that you won’t get personal like that.”

“Supposing I get personal not like that?”

By the time we reached the restaurant we were laughing together; you might have thought we were just getting to know each other. But in a matter of minutes the laughter had faded away and we were face to face more nakedly than we had ever been before.

We entered the restaurant and passed through the long, narrow
bar where three elderly Frenchmen were having their apéritifs. We seated ourselves in the glassed-in garden dining room in the rear courtyard and ordered our hors d’oeuvres. Suddenly Teddy pouted, as one does when one remembers a forgotten obligation. Then she reached into the red-and-green, holiday-decorated shopping bag and handed me back my story.

I stared at her, my spoonful of pickled beets suspended in air.

“Teddy,” I said at last, “that was a present. A Christmas present. You don’t give back presents.”

“I have to. I just can’t accept it.”

“But why?”

“It, uh…” Teddy swallowed. “It was insulting, that’s why. Here, take it, please. Then we won’t have to talk about it.”

“The hell we won’t. Do you know how hard I worked on it? Maybe it’s not the greatest story in the world, but it’s the best I have in me, and you might at least have acknowledged it, even if you didn’t like it.”

“But I did. I do.” Teddy gazed at me in agony. “It’s just that you shouldn’t have put down all those intimate details.”

“I can’t believe that you felt like that when you first read it,” I began, and then I stopped. A suspicion formed in my mind. “Wait a minute. Did you show that story to anyone else?”

“Well… just to my mother.”

“I knew it.” I was too sickened to be triumphant. “You might as well give me her literary verdict. I’m sure she had some memorable comment.”

“She said it was dirty.”

I jumped to my feet and flung down my napkin, knocking a knife and a fork to the floor. My legs seemed to be entangled with my half-tipped-over chair. A French family at the next table looked up in surprise from its
pot au feu
. So did three ladies on the other side of us.

With her knuckles at her lips, Teddy asked, “Where are you going?”

“I’m leaving. What did you expect?”

She began to cry. Ignoring the tears that were welling from her eyes and dropping onto her artichoke hearts, she whispered, “Please, please, please, don’t go. Don’t leave me like this.”

Frightened by her tears and by the enormity of what I was about to do—walk out on a sobbing girl under the disapproving gaze of a roomful of people—I hesitated.

Teddy went on. “I promise not to say anything more to upset you. All I ever wanted was for us to have fun together, without hurting anybody, before you shipped out.”

I sat down. Weeping softly, Teddy told me that I had expected too much of her from the start, that she wasn’t like all the other, older girls with whom I had been intimate (there had been only two, but Teddy imagined scores).

“I suppose the trouble was,” she mused sadly, somewhat more under control, “that it was all just a little too cold-blooded. If I had felt that you cared for me … I couldn’t lie to my mother about that. Don’t you see, maybe she’s not so smart, but she’s all I’ve got, she and Stevie, and I have to live the way she expects me to. The way she wants me to.”

If before Teddy had made me enraged, now she was making me squirm. Seeing this, she reached across the table to touch me lightly on the arm and added, “Don’t ever think I’m not grateful. You can’t imagine how much you’ve done for me.”

Mollified, I disclaimed any special virtue, and we left the restaurant almost as calmly as we had entered it. We strolled up to 42nd Street and then east through Times Square to Bryant Park, stopping under the movie marquees to study the stills of the Ritz Brothers and the Three Stooges, of Lynn Bari and Jean Parker.

We sat on a stone bench under a leafless tree in Bryant Park, discussing books and observing the types on their way into the library. We were careful not to talk about ourselves, or about Christmas, or about what the new year would bring; when we bumped knees, we excused ourselves. But then it began to rain again, the fine but mean rain of a Manhattan December, and as we looked hopelessly at each other and then at the forbidding bulk of the library, I remembered the movie houses on 42nd Street.

“Come on,” I said. “I’ll take you to see
Intermezzo
.”

“I really must go home. I’m expected.”

“Not yet.” I tugged her off the bench. “You yourself told me Ingrid Bergman is the most beautiful girl in the world. You bragged about seeing her in front of Bloomingdale’s.”

Laughing and protesting, Teddy allowed me to hurry her to the theater. But
Intermezzo
was a mistake. We had to sit through the last hour of an anti-Nazi epic, plus a newsreel of Mrs. Thomas E. Dewey launching a Liberty ship, before we were rewarded with Leslie Howard making love to Ingrid Bergman. They went off together to celebrate their illicit passion in a sun-kissed Mediterranean villa, knowing—or at least Ingrid knowing—that it could come to no good end and that she would have to tiptoe out of Leslie’s life in order to spare him for his art.

I sat with my arm around Teddy’s shoulders, but I might as well have clasped a statue. She held herself absolutely rigid and stared fixedly at the screen through the little shell-rimmed glasses she was no longer self-conscious about wearing, her elbows tight against her sides, her fingers locked together in her lap. By the end of the film I was intoxicated all over again with the odor of Teddy’s damp blond hair and lightly fragrant perfume, and she was biting her lips, fighting back the tears as Ingrid took leave of her unsuspecting lover. The theme music swelled to a crescendo, and we groped our way out to the street.

It was almost pitch-dark, the dimout was on, and the rain was driving directly into our faces. Luckily I captured a cab and we tumbled gratefully into it, slammed the door behind us and waved the driver on. Then, to my astonishment, Teddy flung her arms around my neck, held me so tightly I could hardly breathe, and proceeded to kiss me as I had taught her to kiss.

My God, I thought, have I won at the last possible moment? And when the driver called back, “Which way, folks?” I whispered to her, “Let’s go down to the apartment. Now!”

I have thought since then that if I had been a bit more mature, more masterful, if I had simply directed the driver down to Jane Street, I might have won out. But I doubt it. For Teddy shook her head fiercely, even while she continued to caress me, and muttered, “No, no, no, I’m going home, I’m saying goodbye to you here.”

We remained clasped in each other’s arms all the way up to the Bronx. In front of her apartment house, while I stood, distraught, counting bills into the cab driver’s hand, Teddy ran a comb unsteadily through her hair and apologized for the expense of the long ride.

“I’m the one who should apologize for never taking you home before,” I said. “Let’s go on up.”

In the back of my mind, I suppose, was the final hope that Teddy’s mother and brother would be out. The old red brick building was shabby, with peeling hallways; but what was worse, it was a walkup, and Teddy lived on the top floor.

We climbed slowly and awkwardly with our arms around each other’s waists and on the fourth floor Teddy told me, blushing, that we still had two more flights to go. “The higher you go, see, the cheaper the rent is.”

As we moved dreamlike up the last flights, I thought how often she must have flitted up and down all these steps—no wonder she was so slim!

When we reached the top floor she indicated silently the door which was hers: 6B. But before she could say anything I unbuttoned her coat—my pea jacket was already open—and pulled her close to me. As I began to kiss her she went limp. I was kissing her hair, her ears, her eyelids, her cheeks, but when I pressed her lips to mine she did not respond with the ardor which had so surprised me in the taxi; and even though she opened her mouth under the pressure of my lips, she remained absolutely passive, drooping like a flower deprived of sun, her eyes closed, as I raised her unresisting arms and slipped them around my neck.

For some reason this passivity drove me wild, and I tore at her woolen dress, searching for the zipper and the buttons, until I had worked my hands through. Her underthings slithered to my touch, and in a frenzy I pulled up handfuls of her slip until my fingers reached the smooth flesh of her back and her belly. She remained motionless, neither assisting nor opposing me, as I worked open her brassiere and freed her breasts.

My hands roved frantically, attempting with desperate speed to discover what had been denied them for so long. Her body was more delicately wrought than her wistful, pretty face, and I was stunned to feel the sharp, childish wings of her shoulder blades, the fragile bones of her rib cage behind which her heart was throbbing, the pathetic soft buds of her breasts.

Suddenly I was crying. “Teddy, Teddy, Teddy,” I whispered, and I felt her give way in my arms. In another moment we would
both have sunk to the cold stone floor; but at that instant the steel door of 6B swung open and Teddy’s mother flew into the hall like some great bird of prey.

She could have been no older than I am now, but she seemed a dreadful old bag, a harpy, her hair half crammed into a net, her eyes darting venomously out of a craggy face slimed with cold cream. As I released Teddy, she pulled her coat together to cover her gaping dress, and then, yanked forward in her mother’s iron grip, stumbled blindly into the sanctuary of their apartment. Her mother flashed me one scornful glance—part rage and part pure triumph—before she slammed the door.

I stood there dripping rain and sweat, too shocked even to be conscious of frustration. My eye was caught by the Macy’s shopping bag, stuffed with gaily wrapped Christmas presents, that had fallen from Teddy’s hand to the floor. I bent to pick it up when the door opened again. Teddy’s mother snatched the bag from me without a word, and before I could open my mouth she had slammed the door.

No doubt it was the shopping bag, decorated with holly and mistletoe, that reminded me of my story, my gift to Teddy. As I made my way slowly down the long flights of steps, pulling myself together to face what had to be faced in the world beyond Teddy, I discovered that I did not have the manuscript she had returned to me. It must have been kicked under the table at the restaurant, and as I swayed out into the dreary street I thought, Well, I’ll never see the restaurant, I’ll never see the story, I’ll never see her. Never again.

I was right, of course; at least in that limited realization I was right, if in nothing else. But a few weeks ago I had to see an editor about a manuscript, and I drove into New York and pulled into a West Side lot. It was a raw wintry day, with the soundless wind rushing papers about the streets to remind one that beyond the solid brick and stone, nature still strove to do you down. I gave myself one more moment of my car heater’s warmth before braving the cold, and while I was checking the contents of my briefcase and putting on my hat to protect my bald skull, I was
overcome by the eerie sensation of having been here once before, in some different incarnation, younger, hatless, without a briefcase. But in an empty lot?

The attendant rapped on the car window with his knuckles. “What do you say, Mac? I haven’t got all day. Leave the key in the car.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Do you live around here?”

“I was born exactly two blocks down the street.” He was an underslung, argumentative Italian, remarkable only for his long nose and for his pride in the place of his birth. “Anything you want to know about the neighborhood, ask.”

“What used to be here, before the parking lot?”

“Rooming house, like everyplace else on the block. Restaurant on the first floor.”

My eyes began to smart. I closed them for a moment. “A French restaurant?”

“French, Italian, what’s the difference? A restaurant.”

I got out of the car and shuddered in the chill wind as loose sheets of paper plastered themselves against my shins. They were not likely to be pages of the story I had left behind, a story which had surely turned to ashes with the restaurant, and probably long before. The story was gone; so was the little blonde who had sat just here, weeping as she handed it back to me—and so was I, the would-be writer, pompous but still unsure of his craft and his magic charm.

We have all three died, as surely as if the war had done us in; but did we really die forever? Teddy still lives in my mind as she was then, whether she has gained the chairmanship of her P.T.A. or not. And I, too, live again in my mind as I was then, whether or not I have won my way to what I dearly desired to be. Only that well-meant and ill-written manuscript, that rejected gift, deserved to die forever. It is
this
story—called up by the sudden stinging recollection of two young strangers, the boy and girl at the last table of the garden restaurant, yearning for everything but understanding nothing—that is the real story for Teddy.

SOMETHING A LITTLE SPECIAL

S
itting at the Genoese sidewalk café with his bearded chin cupped in one hand and a glass of cool white wine in the other, Sam Keller glanced at the bowed blond head of his pretty wife, bent industriously over the
conto
for the luncheon of
frittura
and rolls, which she had ordered in a brave and hardly faltering Italian. If it were not for the camera dangling in its tan leather case over the wire back of his chair, and the new open-top Fiat glittering in the spring sunlight at the opposite curb, with their luggage strapped to its rear, they might have been oldtime residents or expatriates, he thought happily, instead of mere tourists with just two weeks of vacation travel ahead of them before they turned around and headed back for San Francisco. For the first time since their honeymoon four years earlier, abbreviated to accommodate his budding career, they were utterly free—with the exception of one little obligation. At the thought of it, Sam frowned, and as Ellen looked up, satisfied with her calculations, her sharply observant eye caught his uneasiness.

“What’s the matter, Sam?”

He concentrated on paying the black-coated waiter, counting out the tip carefully to familiarize himself with the money. Then he said, “Not a thing.” Knowing what her response would be, he persisted nevertheless. “I just wish that we hadn’t promised Nick to look over his property. Couldn’t we just go on to Como and Milano? And maybe afterwards—”

“Afterwards! And you’re the big planner! The farm is practically on the way to Torino—you know that. Unless we go there now, we might as well forget it. Besides, it’ll be fun. An adventure. Sometimes,” she added, a bit coldly, “I think that you chose
your profession to give you an excuse for regulating everything. Why not take things as they come, and get some pleasure out of doing a little favor?” Then, as if to take the sting out of her words, she squeezed his arm as they approached their auto. “You only child, you.”

But it wasn’t his being an only child, he knew, that worked on her nerves. It was his insistence on keeping remote from family and family responsibilities; it was his refusal to make up with his father ever since their last shouting match, which Ellen had witnessed as a shaken bystander. Why did his throat get dry every time that scene arose in his mind? He swallowed.

“It’s not that I’m being stuffy,” he said, knowing that he was being just that. “It’s simply that I wanted the two of us to be all on our own. A kind of honeymoon.”

“We will be. From tonight on we’ll be able to do whatever we feel like.”

“You know what I want to do tonight? To celebrate our arrival in Italy? I want to make love to you on foreign soil for the first time.”

“You’d better,” Ellen threatened. But he was pleased to see that beneath her mock toughness she was actually blushing a little.

Then why, he thought, driving as casually as if he were at home through Genoa’s northern industrial suburbs and its beach towns, and then onward to Savona, why did the idea of this little favor fill him not with expectation but with dread? Was it Nick? Or Nick’s need for family souvenirs?

Nick’s property was above a hill town, high on a mountainside not too far from Cuneo, on the southern slope of the Italian Alps. To get there they would have to drive from Savona up the autostrada—here Ellen consulted the map while he wound the wheel through green, lovely hills not unlike their own in northern California—then, after the end of the autostrada, up successively narrower roads until they came to a monastery not marked on the map because it was abandoned, but known to the nearby villagers. It was ten minutes’ walk, Nick had said, from the monastery, where they’d have to leave their car, to his ancestral acres.

Nick diGrasso was somebody the Kellers had met by chance one Sunday afternoon while they were driving around back of Sonoma, looking for a family-owned winery where they might picnic and take home some good table wine. They had stopped in at a small restaurant to inquire on the off chance that the proprietor would know of such a vineyard nearby. The proprietor was Nick.

He had taken them into his hearth, bade them taste the wine that he bought for his own table, given them a note to his vintner, and introduced his wife, Betty, and their four small children, each born within a year or so of its predecessor. Nick was just Sam’s age, although he looked younger, clean-shaven and with a mop of curly black hair. Betty and Ellen were of an age also and spoke the same language, even if Ellen’s Italian had come from her junior year abroad, while Betty’s had come from the family kitchen on Grant Street.

Although Sam and Ellen drove out quite often after that, sometimes with friends, they didn’t really have much in common with the diGrassos. Sam had gone to Stanford and done his graduate work at MIT, thanks to his father (who never tired of reminding him of it), while Nick’s education had stopped short of the
liceo
, after his widowed father had been ambushed by the Social Republicans, the last-ditch Fascists in northern Italy. Sam had a strong sense of profession; Nick, who had beaten his way to the USA with the aid of a GI after the war, would try almost anything for a buck. He’d apprenticed himself to a pastry cook, taken business management at night at San Francisco State, worked weekends at a crab stand down on Fisherman’s Wharf, and saved. When the chance came his way to buy up a small restaurant, he was ready.

But if Sam had done none of those things, not even saved (they’d sold some of Ellen’s bonds for this European vacation), he’d read a lot of books and listened to a lot of music which Nick had never heard of. This was perhaps why Nick admired Sam inordinately. He made you feel, Sam often thought, as though he had been waiting impatiently all week for you and your wife to pay him the honor of eating his cooking and passing a few cheerful Sunday-afternoon moments with his lively family.

“I’ll tell you something else,” Ellen had said when Sam had
mentioned this talent of Nick’s on their way home from his restaurant one Sunday evening. “He makes me feel as though I’m beautiful.”

Unwilling to admit that he was shaken, Sam had replied promptly, “But you are,” and peered hopefully at her, curled up in the dark beside him.

“You would say so,” she had murmured almost scornfully, and then added, “Besides, I don’t mean exactly that. I mean, he makes me feel I’m voluptuous. And don’t tell me you think I’m that.”

Well, pleasing women was supposed to be an Italian gift. And Nick, who played up to Ellen’s love of Italy (as well as to her vanity), was overjoyed when he learned of their vacation plans.

“You’re just the ones,” he had said excitedly, “to find out for me. Wait till you get up in those mountains above Savona. Man! It won’t take you too long, and you’re gonna see something different, I promise you, something a little special.”

The farm where Nick had lived until he had run off to America had been his since the death of an uncle some years ago. It was tenanted now by a fellow named Ugo Fannini, with whom Nick had played as a boy and who had never left home; Ugo lived there in the diGrasso house with his wife and small boy, his father and mother, and worked somewhere nearby as a mason or roadmender. The question was, Had Ugo kept it up? What was the place worth now? There had been a fine stand of horse-chestnut trees; and no matter what might have happened to the property, the view was really sensational. Sam was a big expert: when he looked it over, he’d be able to say whether the property ought to be sold or converted into something more modern.

“No point in tying up money in the old country, right? It brings me in next to nothing. I could use the cash here in my business.”

It was the sort of responsibility Sam hated to take on, the sort that relatives continually asked of you—if things turned out badly, they always blamed you—and if this had been Nick’s sole request, he would have sought a way to get out of it, even though Ellen had practically consented as soon as the words were out of Nick’s mouth. But Nick had been shrewd enough to realize that he could really commit them by making a more sentimental demand.

“What I’d like is a souvenir of the tribe—you know what I mean?” He had leaned forward confidentially. “Ugo wrote me he’s been keeping everything. If you could bring back some pictures of my family—you know, the old folks—especially of my father,
mio caro padre
…” And he had lapsed into Italian with Ellen.

Sam was more annoyed than he dared let on at Nick’s using Ellen in order to get at him, and at the use of family piety to milk him for a professional opinion on that land. He and Ellen had not had as easy a time of it as people thought who only saw them clam-digging or holding hands at concerts: She had been stunned by the discovery that he and his father could say the things to each other that they had. What was more, she could not understand why he should shrink from her father’s generosity (“What do you mean, he’s trying to buy you? That’s paranoid!”), as if it were simply the converse of his father’s meanness. Despite the messed-up lives of her sisters and brothers, she insisted that it had been fun growing up in a large family, and she resented friends’ assumptions—assumptions she dared not deny as yet—that she was still childless because she and Sam were not ready to “settle down.”

So now, having duly turned off at Savigliano, in quest of a place he was not eager to find, Sam said hesitantly, “Maybe Nick thought he was doing
us
a kindness.”

Ellen glanced up from the map, puzzled. Then her brow cleared. “Maybe it’ll be a kindness all around. I bet the Fannini family will be glad to have news of Nick.”

“If we get there.”

For a while it looked as though they wouldn’t. Finding Santa Maria dei Fiori was easy enough, yes. At the public washbasin in its unpaved square, women in black balanced baskets atop their heads, old men in berets and felt slippers gazed at them incuriously, a mangy dog yelped as they slowed down, a spavined goat tied with a rope to a rickety cart raised its tail to drop its beanlike black excrement onto the dust. Three small boys came running out of a churchyard with books under their arms and heavy wool socks dropping down their calves, chasing one another and crying shrilly until they caught sight of the new Fiat.

“I’ll ask them the way to the monastery,” Ellen said.

Laughing, the boys nodded as Ellen spoke (even to Sam her Italian sounded harshly Nordic), and they vied with one another to give directions.
A sinistra, a sinistra
, that much he got, but just where to turn left he could not make out. After saying
grazie
three times and punctuating her thanks with candy bars, Ellen turned to Sam happily.

“At the end of the village, a real steep road, not paved, goes straight up to the sky.”

“They said all that?”

But at the end of the village the road petered out into a mountainside meadow, with no ascending road in sight. They turned about and still did not find it; they asked an old man, but he had no teeth in his head and seemed to be mumbling, according to Ellen, the opposite of the children’s instructions. They tried it his way and found nothing, and by the time they reached the town square yet again, Sam was ready to go on to Torino.

“Once more around,” he said glumly, “and the old ladies at the washtubs will think we’re out of our minds.”

“I’ll get out and ask them. They must know.”

Ellen came back confidently. “The kids were right. We must have missed it. We have to cross the river.”

They had been bemused by the glorious stream, carrying melted snow from the Italian peaks all the thousands of meters down to the Mediterranean, from which they had mounted an hour or two earlier. It leaped like something alive, from boulder to boulder, singing dangerously to distract you from the insignificant road which snaked over it on a trembling wooden bridge and promptly bent out of sight around the mountainside.

So they crawled over the bridge in low gear, and then around and up a stony track so eroded that it should have been strewn with the cracked axles of wrecked carts, abandoned after they had bent and slipped to death part way up the mountainside.

“We’re ruining a brand-new car,” Sam grumbled, but actually he was happy, with Ellen crying out in delight and clutching his arm as they swung out over seeming emptiness, with the leaping stream now fifty, now a hundred feet below.

“If we keep on going, Ellen, we may wind up in Switzerland.”

“Or in heaven.”

“Well, where’s the monastery?”

“You need faith, Sam, if you want to encounter the house of God.”

“Faith in God, or in the car?”

“In yourself. That’s all I’ve ever wanted of you,” she said cryptically. “Look, there it is.”

The brick-and-plaster monastery stood squarely on a grassy knoll, the one level spot on the mountainside. The only unusual thing about it was that it should be there at all, hulking and bulbous as a Victorian exposition hall, utterly unlikely in this remote corner. It seemed to be quite deserted.

But as Sam swung the car about on the hard-packed dirt in the shade beneath a jutting bay, a strolling couple came into view. A farm woman in a shapeless and all but colorless dress, her arm hooked through a heavy woven market basket, walked beside her husband, a sunburned, knotty-looking man whose collar lay open and whose shirt sleeves were rolled up to expose his white neck and arms and who looked younger than his wife, perhaps because of the proudly careless way in which he bore their little boy high on his shoulders, like a prize he had won at a village fair. They strolled on, too shy to stop and stare frankly at the strangers, alone in the empty square.

Sam pulled up the handbrake. “Let’s find out if they know where the Fanninis live.”

Ellen had already snapped open the car door and scrambled out to confront the couple, who awaited her in silence. Addressing them eagerly in the dusty piazza, the wind whipping her pink skirt about her thighs and the sun glinting on her lacquered toenails in her Sausalito sandals, she might have been a child of this workworn couple, come back from California with news of a new world. It was startling to think that his wife, talking bravely in her high, clear, unyielding American voice, was probably as old as this couple, who looked as though they might have been cast, centuries before, out of some hard and ruthless material.