NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  “All the kids thought you were swell, not stuck-up or acting like a famous person or even like a father. I could tell.”

  He took her firmly by her thin elbow and led her out to the car, waving his goodbyes to her friends who still remained in the soda parlor.

  Now, he thought, we are alone. They settled down in the car and drove off slowly.

  “I guess …” she hesitated, “… you know the way to the house.”

  “I certainly do,” he replied, a shade too grimly.

  “Father.”

  It still made him shiver to hear the word. “Yes.”

  “Why did you wait so long to come back?”

  Was it the uninhibited tactlessness of children that was so endearing, so ruthless that it became a kind of tactfulness of which adults were incapable—or was it simply that he would have expected, instead of this question, the more brutal query: Why did you come back at all? Why did you come back now?

  “When I first left…” he hesitated, stopped, and then began again, “At the time your mother and I were divorced, we were very angry at each other. We—hated each other. It lasted for quite a long time, with me anyway. Then of course there was the war, and I was in England. And after that I was very busy getting reestablished.”

  “But in the last few years—”

  Roy did not look at her. “By that time it seemed wiser to stay away and let you and your mother continue with your own lives. I am a stranger, you know, even if we do write to each other. And besides,” he concluded lightly, “maybe I was a little afraid to come back.”

  “That’s funny. That’s what Mother said once, but when I asked her what she meant… she said she was just being unfair, and she really didn’t mean it.”

  Oh, she meant it, all right, he thought bitterly. For an instant he could taste the old hatred on his tongue, rank and salty as his own sweat. You could forget hatred, thank God, just as you forgot pain and grief and even ecstasy; but suddenly you could get a flash of the old memory, like an anginal cramp bringing you stabbingly face to face with eternity. Christ, how he had hated her! Within two years after their marriage, she had repudiated everything he had naïvely thought that they both believed in, she had mocked at his dreams of becoming a composer, she had whined and wheedled at him for things that he did not want or even know how to provide. And how she must have hated him! Ambitious and determined, it must have galled her to see her friends go off to New York, to Chicago, to Hollywood, to go, even if they did not become rich or famous, while she rotted away in the town where she had been brought up, in the very house where she had been born—and simply because her husband was content to give piano lessons at a dollar an hour and daydream at home of writing the kind of music he had studied with her at the conservatory, when she knew in her heart and soul that he could never do it and would only succeed in reducing her prospect to an endless vista of small-town drudgery.

  Was that what had been in the back of his mind when he decided to drive out to visit Kate? Was he really so mean that he had only wanted to rub it in, to park his white Jaguar in front of Lisa’s house, to cross his legs in her parlor and display his seven-dollar argyles and sixty-dollar shoes to her burningly envious gaze?

  He said to his daughter, “I’ve been very lonesome, Kate. This seemed like a good time for me to come out and get to know you,” and even as he was speaking he knew that he was being something less than completely honest. “If I was afraid, it was only of how you’d feel about seeing me.” He added winningly, “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I do.” She spoke gravely, staring down at her hands that lay folded in her lap. “But you shouldn’t ever have worried about that. I knew how it was with you and Mother, and that you’ve had your own life to lead.”

  “You don’t think I’ve been selfish.”

  “Oh no!”

  It was strange how you could go on, always believing you were better than people thought you were, reassuring yourself, protecting yourself against the smirks of the columnists and the gibes of the envious by reminding yourself of your secret kindliness and measuring your own sensitivity against the callousness of others; then suddenly it was turned topsy-turvy when a girl, your own daughter, told you that you were better then you were, or seemed to be, and you knew in your own heart that she was wrong.

  What was right? What was fair? Was it better to stay away—or to go away, now that he was here—and leave Kate with her childish illusions untarnished—or should he assume the responsibilities of a father even to the point of trying to open her eyes to the truth about him? No one could answer such a question for you, not your agent or your manager or your current girl friend or your best drinking pal.

  He tightened his lips and turned into the block of elm-shaded bungalows where fathers were walking home to dinner down the cracked old concrete sidewalks and their children were coasting slowly alongside them on box scooters; they turned their heads to stare at his car as he brought it to a stop in front of Lisa’s house.

  “I’ll just drop you here, Kate,” he said. “You can tell your mother that I’ll come by after dinner, if she won’t mind.”

  Kate stopped dead, her hand frozen on the door handle. He was not sure in that instant whether she was bewildered or angry. Her eyebrows came together in a frown and she said in a pained voice, “Do you mean you don’t want to see her at all? Do you want her to be away when you come back, is that it?”

  “No, no,” he replied agitatedly, “it’s just that it’s almost suppertime and I don’t—” but he had to stop because it was obvious that the only way he could prove to her that her father was not a coward after all was to walk up the weathered gray wooden steps of the porch with her and spin the rusting iron bell in the middle of the front door. “Come on,” he said gruffly, “let’s go.”

  But of course Kate would not let him stand formally on the porch of her house, waiting for her mother to answer the bell. Roy had time only to notice that the house needed painting and that the metal glider, still standing where it had a dozen years ago, was mottled with rust spots, before he was pulled into the dim front hall and then into the parlor, with Kate shouting, “Mother, Mother, see who I brought home with me!”

  Lisa came out from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. The light was behind her as she advanced, and his first thought was that she had not put on any weight at all. Her figure was slim and fine, just as it had been when they were first married; but then she turned her head in response to a kitchen noise, cocking it a little, like a pretty canary in a cage, just as she used to do when he played something for her that he had just composed, and he saw that she was middle-aged.

  Although he had been creating mental images of what Lisa would look like for some time now, her actual appearance was a revelation to him—while she, who was utterly unprepared for this occasion, looked at him almost serenely now, her shock betrayed only by a quick intake of breath and by a widening and darkening of her pupils that became apparent as she moved toward him through the twilit dining room and the waning light struck her face.

  Her nose seemed sharper than he remembered, and as her nostrils dilated and her chest rose in a shuddering sigh, two grooves that he did not remember appeared on either side of her nose and mouth; her neck, that had been arched and swanlike in her girlhood, was beginning to sag under her chin. Roy felt sick with anguish and pity, both for Lisa and for himself—he was staring, he knew, at the wreckage of his youth—and yet it seemed to him that, simply because she carried the stigmata more obviously, she bore the encroachments of approaching middle age more gracefully than he.

  “Hello, Roy,” she said. “This is quite a surprise. How are you?”

  “Just fine. You’re looking very well, Lisa.” He was tempted to add, You’re starting to look like the librarians and the schoolteachers and the spinsters that you used to point out in such terror when you pleaded with me to get some gumption and get you out of this town; but there was no bitterness in her face now, and if th
e resignation that he saw in it was like what she had seen in the faces of older townswomen when she was a girl, it could only be wanton cruelty to point it out to her.

  “You’ll stay for dinner.”

  “Oh no, I’ll drop back later. I picked Katie up at school and we spent the afternoon together, so I drove her home. But I wouldn’t dream of popping in on you like this at suppertime.”

  “Nonsense. You don’t have to be formal. We’re having chicken—I can always fish out an extra wing for you.”

  They sat in the kitchen—Roy would have preferred the somewhat less chummy formality of the dining room, if only because the dimensions of the round oak table would have kept him further away from Lisa—and chatted about Kate: her ice skating, her cello instructor, her girl friends, her school marks, the clothing that she was outgrowing. And all through the meal, even afterward, while Kate washed, he wiped, and Lisa put things away, he waited tensely for the questions about himself that would betray her real feelings, the emotions she had never dared to reveal in all her years of businesslike letters.

  When they had finished with the last of the dessert dishes (the meal had been substantial and filling, if not particularly tasty, and when he complimented Lisa on it she had smiled, a little grimly, he thought), Lisa glanced about vaguely, rubbed her hands on her apron with seeming nervousness as she folded it and put it down, and said, “Roy…”

  He tensed and closed the lighter that he had been about to touch to his cigarette. “Yes?”

  “I don’t think we’ve had the chance to write you that Kate has been accepted as a junior counselor at the YW camp, you know, out on the lakeshore. Isn’t that fine?”

  Kate was standing in the doorway, looking at him eagerly. “Say,” he said, “that’s perfectly swell. Have you got your lifesaving certificate, Katie?”

  “They wouldn’t have taken me otherwise. I wrote you last year when I got it, don’t you remember?”

  “It comes back to me now.”

  “Your father has more on his mind than your lifesaving tests, Katie.”

  Roy glanced sharply at Lisa as they walked into the parlor, but her face was perfectly serene. She means it, he thought to himself in wonder, she really means it.

  Seated in the parlor on the same sofa on which he had once held his wife on his knees, he leaned back and gazed first at the framed portraits of her long-dead parents staring mildly and eternally back at him from the mantelpiece, and then at Lisa herself, curled up on the slipcovered wing chair across the room from him with her feet tucked beneath her. She looked back at him equably, passed her hand over her hair, and reached for the knitting bag which lay beside her on the rug.

  “Kate,” she said, “you ought to go upstairs and get cleaned up. It’s almost time for your club meeting.”

  “Oh Mother! Not tonight!” Kate had flung herself down on the floor at his feet and leaned back against the couch with her head just under his hand. “This is a special occasion. I don’t want to go any place while Father is here.”

  Roy ran his fingertips lightly over her pale hair. “I’d rather you stayed home too, Kate. But your mother and I might have a few things to talk over alone together.” Her head stirred restlessly under his hand.

  Lisa too shifted about uncomfortably; it was almost as if she hadn’t expected, or wanted, to be alone with him. But she said, “It’s up to you if you want to skip the meeting. But you have to do your homework anyway. Go up to your room and do your Latin and your geometry while your father and I talk, and you can come down as soon as you’ve finished.”

  “All… right…” Kate arose lingeringly and drifted from the room, waving farewell at the foot of the stairs. “I’ll be down soon, Father.”

  The silence, after she had gone upstairs, was unpleasantly heavy—for both of them, it seemed, since they both began to talk at once.

  Lisa said, “Kate doesn’t often—”

  And he said, “It seemed to me—”

  Lisa laughed. “I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

  Was she determined to speak of nothing but Kate? He couldn’t let her get away with it, even if Kate was the obvious reason for his being here. He was oppressed suddenly by a peculiar sense of frustration, as if he had gotten here only to find that his daughter had already gone away on vacation.

  “I suppose it all seems pretty ironical to you,” he said.

  “What does, Roy?” she asked calmly.

  “Why… my coming out like this … fancy car, fancy clothes, after all these years. It’s just what you always wanted for me.”

  “Of course I did.”

  There was neither bitterness nor resentment in her voice; yet perhaps she was giving him the needle in a peculiarly subtle way, against which he had no defense.

  “It’s what you always wanted for yourself too,” he went on stubbornly.

  At last her smile seemed to turn a little sour. “Not always,” she corrected him. “Only when you knew me. I mean, when we were married.”

  He looked at her incredulously. “And after I left, you changed?”

  “Not exactly. But my life became all Kate, a hundred per cent. Then when time went by I sort of resigned myself to staying here. I knew you weren’t having such an easy time of it either, so I really didn’t hate you. And besides, I knew the day would come when you’d really make it.” She added firmly, “That I always knew.”

  He leaned forward and said, with a kind of feeble desperation, “But Lisa, you knew how I hated the idea. You knew what I actually wanted out of life.”

  Her smile became almost malicious. She glanced down at her knitting. “But then you changed, too, didn’t you, after you left? You must have. And I knew you would, because sooner or later you’d have to realize what was right for you. I always told you, you had the voice for it, and the figure, and you had the personality too. And now when I turn on the TV and watch you every Saturday, it’s just as though all of those old dreams have come true.”

  Dreams come true … Good God, he thought, she can be cruel… or does she listen to soap operas all day, while she reads about me in the gossip columns and waits to see me at night on the screen? He got to his feet angrily, and in his clumsiness almost knocked over the floor lamp at his elbow.

  “What is it, Roy?” Lisa asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “Don’t you remember the fights at all any more? Don’t you remember how I used to swear that I’d never get caught in the success trap?”

  “You were young then. We both were. But every time I hear you on the radio, or see you on TV, I know that I was justified in predicting what I did.” She hesitated. “I’m very proud of you, Roy, even though we couldn’t stick it out together. Kate is too—you can see that without my telling you. In fact the whole community is. People stop me on the street.”

  There came to his mind then, as he stood nervously picking at the fringe of the lamp, a conversation he had had not long ago with Minerva, with whom he had been living off and on ever since the war. “You don’t even understand,” she had said, “why that poor woman still keeps your name.” “No,” he had muttered, “unless it’s to get even with me in some way.” “Nonsense. It makes her a big shot in town, that’s all. She probably still thinks you’re wonderful.” She smiled crookedly. “Just like I do.”

  He said in a choked voice, “You don’t dislike me then, Lisa. You don’t hold anything against me?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Not any more. I used to, but not any more. Things worked out the way they had to. I’m glad for you, too.”

  “Thank you.” It was impossible now to tell her any of the things he had been burning to: to throw up his success to her, to say, I hate it just as I told you I would, it’s phony and I’m a failure and I hope you’re satisfied, I did what you wanted and now I have to worry about my hair and my arranger and my singer’s sex life and my doctored state income tax returns. Certainly he did not dare to tell her that in the dark moments of the night he despised himself and his white Jaguar, an
d shrank with terror from the thought of what lay in wait when his temporary popularity had run its course. It was too late, it was far too late for him ever to accomplish any of the things he had dreamed of doing ten and fifteen years earlier, and all he could look forward to was cushioning the bruising impact of this desolate realization with as much material comfort and financial security as he could finagle.

  “I read in the paper,” Lisa said shyly, “that you’re making a movie.”

  “Yes,” he murmured, “they’re going to shoot it in New York, mostly.” In all honesty he would have added—if it had not been for the light in her eyes—that he would not clear a dime on the picture after paying off the band and his back taxes and that his only reason for engaging in the idiocies that the script called for was to keep his name before the adolescents who went to the movies. He looked up at her from the lamp fringe that he had been twirling around his finger and said lightly, “It should be fun.”

  “I’ll bet. We’ll be watching for it—you have no idea how much your career means to us in this town.”

  She was nourished by it, and Katie was too—that was what she was trying to say. Who was he to deprive her? He put his hand to the knot of the Sulka tie that Minerva had given him and said, “The movie may not be in the can until fall or winter. I don’t suppose you know that the boys and I are booked into the Palladium in London next month.”

  “London!” Her eyes widened.

  “As soon as the agency gets a summer replacement for the TV show. So that—” he stopped at the sound of Kate’s footsteps. She walked swiftly to his side and turned to face her mother.

  “I did my Latin, it was easy, and I can do my geometry during study period tomorrow. Can’t I stay here with Father now?”

  “I was just telling your mother,” Roy said, slipping his arm around her waist, “that I’m going to have to leave for London very soon. We’ve got an engagement there.”

  “How arc you going to go? Are you going by jet?”