NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (49 page)

“Are you married?”

“Sure. Not to American girl. Too flashy. How I know they want me, not the bankbook? So I come home for vacation, I marry a girl from here, I take her back to Chicago. Seven years we live there. You know what? Little by little she gets like a flower when you take it out of the ground. Finally she says, Tony, I can’t stand the snow in the face on Michigan Boulevard, is not for me. So I take her home. Now I’m retired, but they come down from Chicago, they pass the word. Still I’m in demand, still the services
are requested. You got responsibility, people ask for you, you got to go.”

“I suppose so. I wouldn’t know.” Brian raised his head from his arms. “Tony, do you think it’s a bad thing, having a wife make sacrifices for you—so that even when she doesn’t remind you of them because she knows you can’t stand it, you can still see them in her eyes?”

The masseur’s vigorous brown hands paused above Brian’s leg for an instant, then resumed their hypnotic rhythm. “I can do good for the leg. Maybe when you move around better, you can do good for your wife.”

“It’s a little late for that.”

The masseur showed his gold tooth. “Never too late.”

“Didn’t your wife look at you cross-eyed, those winter nights in Chicago?”

“
Look
at me? She cried!”

“So you gave in. You took her home.”

“Only after I saved up enough money, so we wouldn’t live poor in my own city.”

“But doesn’t it bug you to have the poor all around you, pleading for help—” Brian gestured toward the balcony—“when you know that even if you gave away all your loot, it wouldn’t do a damned bit of good?”

The masseur continued to work, and to talk, in the same high good humor with which he had begun. “Nobody can do everything, not even Jesus. Everybody can do a little. I make you feel better, maybe you paint better, you make your wife feel better. Then she make babies.”

Brian sat up abruptly. “Are you almost through?”

“Couple minutes more. You like it here, before you hurt the leg?”

“It’s more beautiful than Chicago. Nicer people, too.”

“But poorer too, huh?”

“You ought to know.”

“That’s right. You and me both. It’s good for us to know.”

“Why?” Brian stared at him curiously.

“The better men think about the poor ones. Okay, we’re all finish for now.” The masseur reached into his hip pocket for his
heavy tooled wallet and drew from it a small engraved card. “You want me tomorrow, next day, I come again or you come to me. Maybe we have to strap, but I think no.”

Brian accepted the card and struggled into his trousers. “I’m very grateful. How much do I owe you?”

“We make it forty pesos, all right? And don’t put weight on the leg yet. Stay still, make the wife work.” He smiled, almost secretively, as he rolled up the muslin and the blouse and tucked them away in the bag with the liniment. “When she gets mad, you jump up and run after her. You feel better then.”

“I seem to have only a few pesos,” Brian said in embarrassment. “Would you mind stopping at the café opposite the movie house and asking my wife to pay you? And would you tell her that I need her?”

“Sure. Let’s open the window, give you lots of fresh air.”

When the masseur had closed the door behind him, Brian turned his head to observe the setting sun throwing its last beams against the blank plaster wall of the cinema across the street. Already the neon sign had winked on; and although from his prone position he could see nothing of the life on the street below, he could hear quite distinctly the sounds of the motors, the sidewalk vendors, the excited children, and a supplicating mendicant woman. Closing his eyes, he lay back against the pillow and waited for his wife to return.

MY CONEY ISLAND UNCLE

I
nevitably our parents are the bearers of our disillusion. After they have ushered us into the world, they must bring word that Santa does not exist, that camp is out of the question, that Grandma is dying, and that they themselves are flawed by spite and unreason. Sometimes it falls to another grownup to renew in us for a time, through disinterested kindliness, that original seamless innocence, the very notion of which can otherwise become a sour mockery. The lucky ones among us can be grateful for a childhood graced by an unencumbered relative—a bachelor uncle, perhaps—who enjoys us not for what we may become, or may one day owe to him, but simply because we exist. I had such an uncle.

We lived, my parents and I, in a small frame house not far off Main Street in Dunkirk, New York, which is on Lake Erie about halfway between Buffalo and Erie, Pennsylvania. My father had inherited a hardware and agricultural-implements store to and from which he walked every day, and where my mother joined him to keep the books and wait on customers during the hours when I was in school.

My mother was a good sport, I think now, about a life that she could not have foreseen when she fell in love with my father on a summer vacation at Lake Chautauqua. She had been a New York girl with musical ambitions; she often exercised her light and agreeable soprano voice of an evening during my boyhood, accompanying herself at the Aeolian Duo-Art piano father had given her on the occasion of the arrival of her firstborn—me, Charley Morrison, who also turned out to be her lastborn. Mother solaced herself with introducing me to “the better things”
(Friday-night poetry readings at her Sorosis Club, piano lessons with Miss Letts, and reproductions of the Great Masters), traveling to an occasional concert in Buffalo, and taking me to New York every year to visit her three brothers, my uncles Al, Eddie, and Dan.

Uncle Dan was the one who mattered. I can’t remember why he happened to be visiting us when I entered kindergarten on the very morning of my fifth birthday. What I do remember, so vividly that the sunlit-noonday thrill of it is still almost painful, is the sight of Uncle Dan coming toward my mother and me on the cracked sidewalk before our little house, which sagged, a bit askew, like my father, as we returned from that terrifying first day of school. He was leading an Irish-setter puppy by a braided leather leash.

Aside from our family doctor, who had bad breath and wore high-top shoes, Uncle Dan was the only real doctor I knew. He might not have been an outstanding physician, but he did know, even though he never married or fathered a son, what could turn the trick with a small boy. As I ran up to him, still trembling from the strange lonely newness of the classroom, he unwound the leash from his fingers and flipped it at me.

“Here you go, Charley boym,” he said. “Here’s a puppy dog for a good student.”

And he stood there, stocky and self-possessed, smiling around his cigar, ignoring my mother’s shocked surprise and nudging amusedly at my bottom with his toes as I dropped to my knees to caress my new dog. “Just treat him right, Charley boy,” he said, “and you’ll have a real friend.”

I didn’t know how to tell Uncle Dan that he was my favorite. The other New York uncles were all right, but they had wives and children of their own; he was the one who I felt belonged to me. People said that I looked like him, which was beyond my understanding—he was a burly man with an impudent mop of reddish-brown hair (my father had almost none that I can recall even from my earliest childhood, and I couldn’t even tell you the color of the fringe around his ears), and an even more unlikely mustache, full, square, and bristling. How could I resemble a middle-aged man—he must have been in his thirties at that time—with a big thick
mustache? It was enough that he would give me a dog, and an occasional boot in the behind, to show me that he appreciated what I didn’t dare to tell him.

As the years passed, I came to believe that he would have understood, had he been around, far more than my parents. Not that they didn’t try, in that dull and drowsy community. But in the cruel way of children, I often felt, particularly as the depression invaded our lives like a prolonged state of mourning, that they—immured in their dark semibankrupt store that smelled of iron filings and bird seed—had no notion of how they ought to treat me. Else why would they have lied to me after they had my dog put away when he went into distemper convulsions? And why did they take it for a kindness to let me oversleep the grand opening night of the circus, the only halfway exciting event of the year in Dunkirk, after I had worked to the point of exhaustion for a pass, a ticket which they could never have afforded, in those lean days, to buy me?

I was going on thirteen that summer, sullen and rebellious after the circus fiasco, when my father informed me with clumsily evasive tact that, as a reward for having done well in school and helped out at the store, I was to be sent to New York. Alone.

I was old enough to know that my parents could not have come to this decision by themselves. Mother’s family had to be consulted, if only because they would have to put me up. My mother had already forgone her annual visit home, but this, as well as the matter of who was paying for my ticket, was something that simply went unmentioned in our household; to bring it up would have been like asking if you were going to get a Christmas present, and how much would be spent on it.

Besides, I had a strong hunch that it was my Uncle Dan who was footing the bill. He was the one with the fewest responsibilities, and it was he who scrawled me the postcard (he never could manage a whole letter) asking if I’d like to batch it with him for a while.

If they had fixed it up not with my Coney Island uncle but with the Manhattan uncles, Al or Eddie, I probably wouldn’t even have wanted to go at all. Not that I was spoiled or blasé about New York. But mother and I had always stayed with Uncle Al and
Aunt Clara, mother sleeping on the studio couch, me bunking with their boys.

They were all right, but as far as I was concerned there was nothing glamorous or big-city about them. Uncle Al was seldom home except Sunday evenings, when he’d slump down morosely before the radio to listen to Ed Wynn, and Aunt Clara was in the kitchen baking all day, gabbing with mother. She wouldn’t let my cousins own bicycles, they didn’t even know how to ride, and they never ceased needling me monotonously as a hick. We’d stand around in the concrete courtyard of the apartment house, not a blade of grass in sight, bouncing a sponge-rubber ball back and forth in the little clear space to one side of the corroded green fountain of a nymph with jug that never worked anyway, and taunting each other out of boredom and aimlessness.

“Is this all you guys ever do?” I’d ask. “Isn’t there anything else to do in New York, except follow the horseballs in the bridle path in Central Park?”

“Horseballs yourself. Is it true you still got Indians running around loose in Dunkirk? Aren’t you afraid of getting scalped? Why do you always say faw-rest and George War-shington?”

And then my mother, with her relentless passion for intellectual improvement, would haul us off on the bus to the Museum of the City of New York to look at dolls costumed as dead mayors’ wives, or to the Museum of Natural History to study the pasted-together bones of brontosauruses and tyrannosauruses. After five or six days I was more than ready to go home.

I just knew that it would be different now, staying with my Coney Island uncle. From the moment that father bade me goodbye in the unwashed bus depot that smelled of depression and defeat, stowing his rusty Gladstone in the rack over my head, shaking hands with me shyly, and smiling a reassurance that did not conceal his perpetual somberness, I settled into the new mood of freedom and adventure. All through the long ride down across Pennsylvania, Erie to Warren to Coudersport to Towanda to Scranton to New York, I pitched and rolled on the torn leather seat with the stuffing oozing out, exalted as though I strode the deck of a Yankee clipper. Even the discovery that my uncle was not at the Manhattan Greyhound Terminal to meet me, as he had
promised, was exhilarating. I kept a good grip on the valise, as father had advocated, and while I was looking about for Uncle Dan, a lady from Travelers Aid came up and asked if I was Charley Morrison.

“Your uncle is tied up in an emergency. He says to come right out to his place. Now you can take any line of the BMT, can you remember that? Don’t take the IRT, you’ll get all mixed up.”

It was like Uncle Dan, I thought, not to send some stooge relative after me, but to trust me, even though it was already well into the night, to find my way out to Coney Island. I got there without trouble, hauled the valise down the steps of the elevated into the street at Surf Avenue, and walked straight up the block, milling and restless as Times Square, even at midnight, to the corner where Uncle Dan’s signs hung in all his second-floor windows. Just as I was reaching out to punch his night bell I heard my uncle’s familiar voice behind me, deep and drawling.

“Charley boy! Have a nice ride?”

I swung around. Uncle Dan was standing there smiling, medical bag in his left hand, cigar and door key in his right. His hat was shoved back on his head, and his Palm Beach suit was wrinkled at the crotch; he had put on some weight and seemed tired, but otherwise he looked the same.

“Let’s just throw our bags in the hall, so we can go out and grab a bite.”

He led me around the corner and up the ramp, gritty with sand, to the boardwalk. Above us the looped wires of bulbs drooped like heavy necklaces, the neon lights of stores and stands slashed on and off, some hurling their arrows hopelessly after each other, others stabbing into the sky like red-hot sparks, and the night was so illumined by them all that you could follow the smoke from the skillets of the hamburger joints high into the air before it disappeared into the darkness, along with the hot steam of the coffee urns. Amidst the acrid smell of burning molasses, before saltwater-taffy machines swaying rhythmically as they pulled the fat, creamy ribbons to and fro, girls opened cupid’s-bow mouths to receive huge wobbling cones of cotton candy extended eagerly by their sailor boy friends. The ground shook beneath me with the thudding of thousands of feet on the wooden boardwalk, stained
in spots from the wet footprints of late bathers and the spilled soda pop of boys my age who shook up the open bottles and released their thumbs to aim the spray at the unsuspecting before they fled. And over it all the intermittent roar of the plunging roller coaster across the way at Steeplechase Park, its electric controls rattling as it raced down below the horizon like an express train to hell.

Uncle Dan led the way to Nathan’s hot-dog stand and said to a Greek counterman, “Two franks well done, Chris, for me and my nephew.” He turned to me. “You take yours with sauerkraut? I forget.”

I said boldly, “I like mine with everything.” Mother would never have let me eat a spicy hot dog in the middle of the night, much less with all that junk smeared, rubbed, and squeezed on it.

“That’s your nephew, hey, Doc?”

“Come in from the West to keep me company for a while. We’re going to have some fun, us two bachelors.” My uncle took a huge bite; I had never before seen anyone handle a hot dog, a cigar, and a toothpick all at once. “And listen, Chris, if this boy comes by with a hungry look during the day, his credit is good.”

“I got you.” The counterman extended his bare arm, hairy as a gorilla’s. “Have a knish, kid.”

We washed down the hot dogs and knishes with big shupers of root beer. The glass mugs were heavy as sin, frosty, with foam running down the sides; Uncle Dan blew off some of the suds at me as if we were drinking beer, which was just what I had been secretly pretending. As we strolled on he asked, “What time do they make you go to bed back home?”

I hesitated. I wanted to add thirty minutes to my weekend late limit, but then something made me answer honestly.

Uncle Dan screwed up his face. “That sounds awful damn early to me. At least, it is for Coney Island. Tell you what, if you promise not to snitch to your mother, we’ll just forget that curfew stuff while you’re staying with me.”

I could hardly trust myself to reply.

“Your mother’s a good woman,” Uncle Dan remarked, in a thoughtful tone that I had never heard him use before. He took me by the elbow and led me to his apartment through the midnight
crowds, thicker than we had even for circuses back home. “She’s got her troubles, you know, like all of us. But she’s my favorite. I mean, your uncles are all right, they’re not bad fellows, but they’ve made a couple mistakes. Number one was when they got married.”

As he threw away his cigar, he added, “Number two was when Al and Eddie left Brooklyn. In Manhattan, you don’t even realize that you’re living on the shore, on the edge of the ocean, the way you do here.”

He fell silent, and I, matching my step to his, could not remember when Uncle Dan had ever talked to me so much all at once. After a while he went on, “This is a good place to live. You’ll see.”

In the two minutes that it took me to fall asleep, I observed that Uncle Dan came to bed beside me in his drawers. It was a practice that my mother condemned as disgusting, but I resolved to put my pajamas back into father’s Gladstone next morning. Mother thought too that you couldn’t get really clean in a shower, and at home we had a monstrous old claw-legged tub that we filled part way with kettles of boiling water from the kitchen stove, in a bathroom so drafty that we stuffed the casement with rags and plugged in two electric heaters from the store ten minutes before bathtime. But Uncle Dan’s shower stall, into which I leaped when I awoke, with Uncle Dan already halfway through his office hours down the corridor, had a ripply-glass door with a chrome handle, the first I’d ever seen outside of the movies, and water that kept coming out hot, forever.

I did get a rather haphazard tourist’s view of New York in the days that followed—waiting in line with the other out-of-towners on Sixth Avenue to see a Marlene Dietrich movie about the Russian Revolution at Radio City Music Hall, riding the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building to peer down at the tiny pedestrians who might be Uncle Al or Uncle Eddie (“from up here your uncles look like ants”)—but what entered deep into my being was a sense of the variety and richness of possibility in the city, a sense of how one could, if one only wished, enter any of a number of communities, each as unique as the single one in the small town I had left behind.