NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (51 page)

“Nothing like that in Dunkirk,” I assured my uncle.

“Charley boy,” he laughed, “you could say the same thing about Sands Street, in spades.”

On the way back to the car, cutting across the open square in front of Borough Hall, we came upon a circle of lunch-hour loungers listening to a sidewalk speaker. I thought at first that he was selling razor blades or carrot slicers, the kind of pitchman that my father always referred to as cheap, cutthroat competition, but then as I pushed my way through I saw that he was black, and that he displayed nothing but a stick of yellow chalk.

He was a skinny, solemn man, conservatively dressed, but with eyes bulbous and roving like those of a rearing stallion. The bony, imperious hand that held the chalk slid occasionally to his mouth to wipe the spittle from his lips.

“Ich bin a shvartser id!”
he cried.

Out of the corner of his mouth Uncle Dan explained, “He’s telling them he’s a black Jew.”

“I do not preach the New Testament,” the orator shouted in English. “Let us speak only of the wonders concealed in the Old. Let us confine ourselves only to the Pentateuch. Those of you who paid attention in
heder
will recall where it says …” and he lapsed into Hebrew.

His accent brought grins from the crowd; but suddenly he squatted and began to print characters on the street, in the space before us. His calligraphy, stark and sharp and yellow, stood out on the black street like the brilliant mysterious border of an Oriental rug. Drawing with nervous rapidity, he continued to scream at us as he stooped over his chalk, lecturing in English, quoting in Hebrew. Swiftly a pattern emerged as he whirled and twisted on his haunches: The mysterious phrases intersected at their center to form—“Inevitably!” he cried out, enraptured, the sweat of persuasion dripping down his cheeks—a cross.

“What I tell you?” a tubby man beside me demanded of his companion. “He’s a
meshummad
, like I said.”

“To be a
meshummad
, you got to be a Jew to start out. Otherwise, how can you change over? Nah, he’s a missionary, an agitator. He comes downtown to convert.”

Some of the crowd were muttering angrily, others turning their backs in disgust, a few (like Uncle Dan) chuckling, as the black orator called after us, flailing his long arms, white cuffs dangling over his wrists, “It is written in our own Book! We must admit the Christ to our hearts!”

And in the course of that week I saw signs and portents, cabalic symbols chalked on the city streets and tattooed on the shoulders of beings who ate cold steel; I rode with lunatics, moved from murderers to fallen women, accepted an inscribed photo from the fattest woman in the world, and one morning Van Mungo, the great Dodger pitcher, my hero long before I had come to Brooklyn, and my uncle’s friend, rumpled my hair and autographed a baseball for me to take home, where I could varnish it to protect his signature and display it to the doubters of Dunkirk.

What is more, during Uncle Dan’s office hours I lolled on the beach with
Official Detective
magazines from his waiting room
that were forbidden me at home, surrounded by the undressed throngs come in their thousands from every stifling flat in New York, from every darkened corner of the world, actually, to sun themselves at my side; I learned the sweet subtleties of bluff and deception, kibitzing at the weekly session of my uncle’s poker club, attended by the cadaverous dentist, Dr. Reinitz, and three Coney Island businessmen; and I was not just allowed but encouraged to stay up practically all night for the great flashy Mardi Gras parade, blinking sleepy-eyed at the red rows of fire engines rolling glossily along streets sparkling like Catherine wheels. It was the greatest week of my life.

But if my uncle graced my childhood, he also—one bitter wintry evening some ten years later—illumined my adulthood. When the destroyer escort on which I had been pitching miserably through the north Atlantic on wartime convoy duty paused in the dead of night in Gravesend Bay before nosing on up through the Narrows to the Navy Yard, I wangled my way ashore and hurried directly to my Uncle Dan. After all those black nights blinking at meandering merchant vessels groping toward their own destruction, Coney Island was startling, even in the dimout. But it had changed. Icy and inhospitable in the off-season, its faded invitations to dead pleasures creaked in the winter wind, and its empty, empty streets were rimmed with frost and frozen grime.

My uncle was not at home. “But you go on over to the Turkish bath,” his housekeeper said to me. “You remember where it is, right down the block. He’s playin’ poker there with his club, Dr. Reinitz and all of them.”

Already a little let down, I shivered along the barren streets and shouldered on into the hot, dank sanctuary of the bathhouse. There, seated around a card table messy with poker chips, sandwich ends, French fries on wax paper, and beer in paper cups, were my Uncle Dan and his fellow bachelors, their bare skulls and shoulders shining wetly under the brilliant light of a hundredwatt bulb that hung straight down from a cord. The cadaverous Dr. Reinitz was naked save for clogs and a Turkish towel across his lap, but I recognized him at once by his Adam’s apple and his
green eyeshade, which apparently he never discarded; instead of his swiveled drill he held three cards in his hand, but he had changed in no essential aspect.

Uncle Dan was half draped in a bed sheet, roughly like a Roman senator, except that you don’t think of Romans as clenching cigars. The fringe of hair on his chest had turned white, and his paunch was twice what I had remembered it to be. He glanced up at me coolly, with a weary casualness more startling than the collapse of his looks.

“Look who’s here. How are you, Charley boy? Gentlemen, you remember my nephew. Otto, Oscar—”

I nodded.

“Here, pull up a chair.” The one named Oscar extended his hand and showed me two rings. “Hey, Jake, bring another corned beef. And a beer. Never saw a sailor didn’t like beer.”

“You been overseas?” Dr. Reinitz inquired incuriously.

“I’ve been back and forth,” I muttered. “On convoy duty. Halifax. Scotland. Murmansk.”

“You don’t say. I was in Archangel once myself. Very drab. You could see daylight right through the chinks in the log cabins.”

“Well,” said Uncle Dan, “main thing is you’re back in New York safe and sound. What are you going to do with your leave—paint the town red?”

“Paint the town red?” I cried, hoping desperately that he would do for me, one last time, what he had when I was thirteen.

I had been seasick and frightened for a long time. I had been knocked off my feet by depth charges, I had been nauseated by the twilight farewell of a helpless wallowing Hog Island veteran of the first war, flaring briefly against the horizon like a struck match and then pointing its bow at the sky like an accusing finger before sinking beneath the sea, leaving nothing but a few screaming men and the junky debris of war.

Now I was appalled by these civilians and their unrationed self-satisfaction, and most of all by my uncle himself. I was heartsick with disappointment. Like a boy crudely misunderstood by a girl he has romanticized, I wanted only to flee. Then I saw that my uncle wore a queer expression that I would never have identified with him, and so found incomprehensible: At that moment I
took it to be a look of envy, embedded in the puffy used-up features of one seemingly beyond anything but an evening of cards with his similars in a Turkish bath. And I could think of nothing to say except to repeat, “Paint the town red?”

He shook his head slowly. And slowly, as he turned the cigar between his lips, an old glint came back to his eyes. Passing his index finger across his whitening mustache to brush it into place, he murmured, “I know what you mean, Charley boy. But I wasn’t worried about you for a minute. You’re bigger now than I ever was. I’m the one that’s been going down, here, little by little, and with no lifesaver either.” Ignoring those about us, who had suddenly ceased to exist either as his friends or my antagonists, he paused for a moment in order that the words that followed, more shocking to me than his appearance, might bar the door forever to my childish demands on him. “I’m the one who could use some help now.”

THE TREE OF LIFE

I
n the summer of my thirty-first year, I found myself living alone in a rural slum, in a Mexican village outside Oaxaca called San Felipe. My wife had left me in Taxco and I was having a bad time of it, what with self-pity and lack of funds. Although I had failed to persuade her, I was still trying to convince myself that I had a distinct talent as a potter. What was happening to me was that, with no wife, no children, and no great originality, I was slowly being overwhelmed by the terror of growing old to no purpose, of gradual annihilation by the meaningless declension from a life that in my heart I despised but still feared to let go of. In between throwing and firing pots, I played dominoes with a Mexican linoleum salesman I knew, at the sidewalk café in front of the Hotel Marques des Valle in the main plaza of Oaxaca.

One afternoon, as I was washing down my tequila with a swallow of sangrita, a perfectly enormous American automobile, its windows ablaze with Mammoth Cave, Blue Ridge, and
turista
stickers, rolled to a stop at the curb, over at the far end of the plaza. There was no one in the car but the big-bellied driver, who wriggled out slowly, like a snake easing himself free of his skin.

“Good God,” I said.

“What about him?” Julio glanced at me drowsily. “Jus’ one more tourist, no?”

“No,” I said. “It’s my Coney Island uncle.”

And as I sat there, all but paralyzed, watching my uncle make his way gingerly around the square with that blind, groping uneasiness peculiar to the American away from his homeland for the first time, I saw not this aging man, with the outsized cigar and dark glasses, the outrageous Hawaiian sport shirt over the
great soft paunch that spelled lassitude more than stateliness, but rather the stocky, self-assured bachelor who had been the favorite uncle of my boyhood. How I had admired him! And how good he had been to me!

Although more than ten years had passed since he and I had been in close communion, what I remembered now was not our last, wartime encounter, when I had been a frightened sailor back from Murmansk and he a philosophical civilian physician, relaxing with his cronies over a poker game in a Coney Island bathhouse; nor even the wonderful week I had spent with him on his medical rounds as an adolescent in flight from my parents’ failing hardware store in Dunkirk, New York, during the depression. No, what I would always associate ineradicably with him was the healing visit he had paid me during a terrible period of childhood disillusion.

One summer afternoon when I was seven or eight, my Irish setter Ryan and I had gotten caught in an unexpected rainstorm on our way home from the lake. At the front door I knelt to wipe him off and discovered that the dog’s eyes and nose were running and that he was breathing jaggedly through the mouth, his sides heaving as though he had run all the way. Mother refused to listen to my pleas. She threw the dog out of the house and threw me into a hot tub.

Next day the vet told us that Ryan had pneumonia. My mother was contrite and let him into the house, but it was a little late, for the pneumonia was simply a secondary result of distemper, about which we could do nothing but wait.

I wrote, or rather printed, a letter to Uncle Dan in Brooklyn, since I thought he ought to know what had happened. He was the one who had given me the dog for a present, on my first day of kindergarten; and besides he was a big-city doctor. Uncle Dan sent me a picture postcard of the Hotel St. George (World’s Biggest), and advised me to hope for the best.

We all did, but one sultry afternoon Ryan went into convulsions. Mother ran to the hardware store to get help while I called the vet. I had been feeling queer for some hours, almost as if I’d had a premonition; by the time the dog was taken away I had a raging fever and was aching not just in the region of my heart but
all over, as if I were being squeezed in one of the steel vises in the back of Father’s store.

Mother’s hair, usually coiled so neatly at the nape of her neck, was coming down; as she bent over me a hairpin dangled limply, like a worm from a leaf; and as she unbuttoned me tears were running down her cheeks, leaving shiny tracks in her face powder. I was crying too, but I couldn’t even tell whether it was because poor Ryan, his hindquarters quivering uncontrollably, had been taken from me, or because I myself was suddenly in such pain as I had never known before.

It turned out that I had rheumatic fever. As I lay fretful and languid in my sloping-eaved little room at the back of the second floor, mesmerized for days on end by the coffee-colored stains where the chimney flashing had curled back and allowed the snow to seep through the wallpaper, I sipped juice through a straw and whined for my dog who could have comforted me at the foot of the bed. But I did not rage against my parents, or even blame them, until Ronnie, the big kid from down the block, came to bring me some Don Sturdy books and laughed in my face when I told him about my folks putting Ryan out to board in the country.

“Put him away is what you mean.”

I stared at him and his grinning buck-toothed superiority.

“The vet chloroformed him. They always do. Ryan is dead, that’s what.”

“Mommy!” I cried. “Mommy, come here!”

Frightened by the anguish in my voice, my mother hurried into the room. She collided in the doorway with Ronnie, who mumbled something about having to be going and left her to cope with the terrible suspicion he had aroused in my heart.

Yes, she said, reaching across the bed for my hand, which I withdrew and hid, clenched, under the covers, it was true. Ryan was dead. They had had to put him away.

“But why did you lie to me?” I sobbed. “Why did you lie?”

“We didn’t mean to.” She tried to stroke my hair, but I turned my head aside. “We didn’t want to hurt you, when you were so sick. If you’d been well, we’d have told you. Your father was just waiting—”

I pulled the pillow over my head and refused to listen to any more.

Instead of getting better, I grew worse. By the next day I was out of my head, and I thought I heard Mother discussing me with Uncle Dan, who was almost five hundred miles away. But I was not wholly mistaken, for in her fright Mother had turned to her brother the doctor, calling him for advice on the long-distance telephone, which was something we did only in extreme emergencies.

It seemed to me only moments later, although I suppose it was the next day, that Uncle Dan was standing at the side of my bed, his cigar drooping beneath his big mustache, his watch chain glinting in a double arc across his vest. He hauled out the gold turnip watch that had been his father’s, my grandfather’s, and took firm hold of my wrist.

“What do you say, Charley boy?” he demanded. “Giving the folks a hard time?”

“They killed Ryan,” I whispered.

“That’s right. They did. But it had to be done. It’s my business, you can believe me when I tell you. It would have been cruel to keep that dog alive. Even a miracle wouldn’t have saved him.”

“They should have told me.”

Uncle Dan smiled, showing me his discolored teeth that were supposed to be shaped like mine. “They should have. But people don’t always know what’s best for a sick person. Not even parents. Come on, swallow this, and I’ll tell you something.” He waved his fat cigar at me as though it were a wand. “You turn around and go to sleep, and in the morning there’ll be a different kind of miracle in the yard, right outside your window. Is it a deal?”

I could barely nod, for already I was slipping off to sleep.

When I woke again, I was alone in my room, it was morning, the sun was already hot and bright on the patchwork quilt folded at the foot of my bed, and a whole flock of robins were talking to one another in the old apple tree, a branch of which brushed my windowpane. As I came awake I remembered Uncle Dan’s promise, of a miracle outside my window, and I squatted on my knees by the casement to see if it had happened yet.

For a moment I was disappointed. Through the thick foliage of the tree which my father’s father had planted at the turn of the
century, all the familiar objects in our yard—the hollyhocks, the red pump set in the concrete lid of the well cover, the bird bath bordered with petunias, my little two-wheeler lying on its side rusting in the damp grass—looked just as they had when Ryan and I had chased each other round and round the doghouse Father had built for him.

But then, as my eye was distracted by the birds whirring about their nests in the twisted arms of the apple tree, I realized that it was not just the ripening Baldwins among which they fluttered and sang. No, there were oranges hanging from the tree too! And lemons! It wasn’t possible, but why else were the birds crying out so passionately?

“Plums,” I said aloud, “and pears. And there’s a whole bunch of bananas!”

“That only makes six different kinds, counting the apples,” remarked my uncle from behind me. “There must be more than that. I promised you a real miracle, not just a plain ordinary one.”

“Uncle Dan, how did they
get
there?”

“Just go ahead and count.”

“There’s some grapes over there, and a bunch of cherries. That’s eight different kinds of fruit. And what are those little green things?”

“Look like quince, but I’m no expert, Charley boy. In Coney I buy my fruit from Giuseppe at the corner stand. You spotted nine, now what about the other branch? Take a good look.”

“I see a cantaloupe, and some tangerines, a lot of tangerines. That makes eleven different kinds of fruit. Eleven! And there’s even some tomatoes, down there near that nest. Except that tomatoes are vegetables.”

“Wrong again. Don’t they teach you kids anything in Dunkirk? Tomatoes are a fruit, they’re a member of the berry family, like grapes or bananas. And that makes twelve fruits, and that’s your miracle.” Uncle Dan’s eyes were glittering, blacker than I had ever seen them, and the flesh around them was unusually dark and shadowed. “That plain old apple tree turned into a tree of life.”

“A tree… ?”

“Sometimes I think you don’t know anything at all, Charley
boy.” Uncle Dan pushed open my window very wide. “Reach out and pick yourself a fruit.”

I glanced at the doorway behind him, at Father in his dangling suspenders and collarless shirt, at Mother wiping her hands tremulously on a dish towel.

“Go ahead. If I say to do it, it’s okay.”

My parents made no move to stop me, so I scrambled onto the sill, leaned far out, and picked myself a plum. As I bit into it, after rubbing it on my pajama sleeve, my uncle gave me a tremendous squeeze.

“There,” he said. “Now. You’ve eaten of the tree of life. If you read your Bible, Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, Book of Revelation in the New Testament, you’d know what that means.”

“My father claims you said the Bible is a pack of lies.”

My father’s face flamed. He had always supported Mother’s insistence that I attend Sunday school regularly, and I had heard him charge his doctor brother-in-law with being a heathen.

Uncle Dan said easily, “We’re not going to get into a discussion about that now. It’s a known medical fact that when you eat of the tree of life, regardless of what you think happened in the Garden of Eden, it makes you immortal. I promise you, you’ll be here long after the rest of us are gone. So why not start getting well, Charley boy?”

I did, of course. My uncle might not have been an outstanding physician, but he knew, even though he never fathered a son, what could turn the trick with a small boy. He must have been up the better part of the night in that old Baldwin apple tree, teetering wearily from Father’s extension ladder while he fastened all that fancy fruit outside my window, but it was good medicine, because the next thing I can remember, he was gone and I was well and pumping my box scooter through the streets of Dunkirk.

And now here he was, an old man, peering up and down the streets, while I—I had to force myself to raise my arm and call out, “Uncle Dan, here I am,” for I was ashamed of his seeing me. My chinos were stained with clays and glazes, my leather sandals were torn, I needed a shave, my hand shook. What could he think,
if he too remembered me from those dead days as the fresh-faced boy who could be solaced for the loss of a pet with fairy trees?

But he strolled up to me with his old equanimity, as if it were only since breakfast that we hadn’t seen each other. He waved the cigar confidently, as though it were the old magic wand with which he could change me back to what I had once been.

“How’ve you been, Charley boy? Had a feeling I’d find you here.”

“I bet you did,” I said. “Word gets around. But what brings you down here?” I could not get used to him in this context, or in any outside of that which I had always associated with him—it was like meeting your barber, out of uniform, at the movies.

“It was time,” he said vaguely. “It was time. Am I interrupting anything?”

I introduced him to Julio, whose English was not good, and over a bottle of dark Mexican beer he explained to us leisurely that it was hotter than the hinges of hell in Brooklyn, that his poker partner Oscar (“You remember Oscar, Charley boy?”), with whom he had planned to go on a cruise, had died, and that he had simply closed the office and started driving.

“I may just keep right on going to Guatemala, if my tires and my spirits hold up,” he said, smiling.

But I knew that wasn’t so. I felt that he had come to see me, although I wasn’t sure why, and I observed that beneath the heartiness his skin was worse than white; it was yellowed and greasy.

“I hear there’s some nice ruins around here,” he said. “I’ll just go on inside and check in—figured I’d stay for a couple days?” His voice went up on the last words, as though he feared that I might discourage him or indicate my unwillingness to have him around.

“I live out of town a ways,” I said, “and it’s just a dump, or I’d invite you to stay with me.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean—”

“But I’ll be happy to take you to Mitla and Monte Alban, and any place else that appeals to you. I’m not very busy these days.”

“Me either, Charley boy.” Uncle Dan flashed the old smile as he arose. “Nice to have met you, Julio.”