NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  “What for?”

  “What for? So he could buy a couple shirts from Stamler. I knew Stamler would be back as soon as the woman was shipped off to the hospital and he was reasonably sure he wouldn’t bump into me again.” He stopped and then added belligerently, “Why shouldn’t I have helped him to make a sale?”

  I stared at him. “What made you think the man would spend the dollar on shirts? Why not on booze, or groceries, or cigarettes?”

  “Because he had to have a shirt to wear to his wife’s funeral. He wasn’t the kind of person to wear a sweater when he stood at her grave, not if he could help it. I think he understood what the dollar was for.” The doctor arose abruptly, scattering ashes once again on his vest. “Come on, let’s go. Fortunately someone is waiting for me. Do you know what was waiting for the man when I ran away from him? Death, that’s all. And what do you suppose was waiting for Stamler when he ran away from me? Nothing. Not even death. Nobody. Nothing at all. Come, are you ready?”

  A HANDFUL OF BALL-POINTS,

  A HEARTFUL OF LOVE

  Nobody is going to believe me. If you want to laugh, laugh. I’m used to it. If you want to cry, cry. As long as you don’t blame me—for that I don’t need any help.

  I had a twelve o’clock lunch date at the Times Square Automat with a salesman named Jack Storer, with whom I sometimes do a little business.

  This was a real scorcher of a July day, a Friday, I remember. The streets were melting, the men were carrying their suit coats, the women were hanging out of their summer dresses, their kids were whining. Only the custard salesmen were making out, and the one thing that made it bearable for me was the knowledge that at least my family was cool up in the mountains. I dragged myself into the Automat and I could hardly believe my eyes. There was an empty table for two right near the front, next to the stairway. Jack and I have got a standing joke that when we’re going to eat at the Automat we should call up first and make a reservation.

  I grabbed it quick, parked myself facing the street, and threw my briefcase onto the other chair to save it for Jack. After I had a long drink of ice water, I hauled out of the briefcase a bunch of ball-point pens that I was planning on showing to Jack. They were four-color jobs engraved with mottoes that glowed in the dark—a nice novelty item that Jack could move in quantity. I was spreading them out before me so he could see the color selection when my eye happened to catch that of an elderly man who was carrying a tray with a slice of berry pie and a cup of light coffee on it. It was one of those mutual glances where two strangers seem to see right inside each other in an instant, as though they are really old friends. The old man was shaved to within an inch of his life, but his hair was cut by hand and he was dressed shabby, almost like a panhandler. I figured, probably he was living on a small pension and picking up a couple extra bucks as a messenger boy.

  He was a little flustered by my sizing him up the way I did, and he must have decided that at one time or another he had delivered me a bag of sandwiches or a roll of blueprints, because he turned on a small smile and a faint nod. It was such a tiny nod that he could have denied its existence if I had frozen up. But I didn’t. What happened instead was that this business of acknowledging me made him lose his stride, so that when he hit the bottom step of the stairway he wavered uncertainly and the tray tipped in his hands. Another guy coming down the stairs jostled him at the shoulder, and that did it.

  The pie and the coffee went skating across the black shiny tray and hit the marble steps, slosh, smack. I knew in that very instant, even before the Puerto Rican bus boy came along with his mop to clean up the mess of berry jam, pie crust, and coffee, that the old man had just lost his lunch and was going to have to go hungry until suppertime. Sure enough, he stood there for a moment with a weak sickly grin on his face, then instead of heading back for the Pies and Desserts section he made straight for the door and went out into the street.

  I sat paralyzed for a second. Then I was after him, grabbing my briefcase and ball-points as I went. I didn’t have any idea what I’d do. In fact, I doubt if I’d have had the nerve to walk up to the old-timer and ask if I could get him some lunch, not with him wearing that smile. But I figured at least I could take off after him and see where he was going.

  It was no use. He was swallowed up in the sticky crowd flowing sluggishly up and down Broadway. What was worse, when I barged out of that freezing restaurant into the ninety-one degrees of high noon, the sun struck down at me out of the sky and the heat rose up at me off the suffering sidewalk, and I thought I’d keel over right on the spot. I leaned back against the wall of the building to try to catch a breath of air, with the ice water bubbling in my belly, and I dropped the briefcase to the ground so I could get my dark glasses out of my breast pocket and onto my nose before I was blinded. I did manage to take off my Panama, because I wanted to wipe the sweat off what’s left of my hair, but I just didn’t seem to have enough strength left to get rid of the ballpoints and haul out a handkerchief. The last thing I can remember was thinking that our table was gone and the hell with it, we’d have to eat someplace else, it was Jack’s fault for coming late. Then I guess I passed out, hat in one hand, ball-points in the other. I suppose the only reason I didn’t hit the sidewalk was that my shoulders were wedged against the brick and my feet were squeezed against the briefcase.

  When I came to, I felt like I was wrestling the world, and I had a really stinking headache. Actually Jack Storer was shaking my arm to snap me out of it, and I was trying to throw him off. And part of the reason for the headache was that he had taken off my sunglasses to make sure it was me, and that blazing sudden light was burning hell out of my eyelids. I managed to blink my eyes open, and I saw his face, worried and scared, and behind him some nosy passers-by, mostly out-of-towners and tourists. The ordinary New Yorkers were ignoring us, thank God, as usual.

  “Lay off, Jack, will you?” I said, exasperated. “You’ll pull my arm out of the socket. It’s not me that was late, it’s you.”

  He was so relieved that he didn’t start to laugh right away, not until he had helped me pull myself together—I was still groggy—and stuff those damn ball-points into my briefcase. But then I mopped off my thin hair and went to put on my Panama (it’s a wonder I didn’t get sunstroke, or maybe I did have a touch of it already) and it was full of money, for God’s sake.

  I stood there like one of those nuts you see on Broadway sometimes, talking to themselves, muttering, waving their arms. Absolutely confused. Jack started to laugh like a maniac.

  “Come on,” he choked. “Count it, count it!”

  So I put down the briefcase once more—we were standing near a theater marquee, with the dead air from the cooling unit blasting out at us and the woman at the ticket counter staring out at us like a death’s head—and dug my hand into my upside-down hat. There were half a dozen bills inside, all singles, and a solid fistful of coins—a few pennies, but mostly silver. I handed Jack the paper money and added up the coins.

  “Cornes to thirteen-seventy-three,” I said finally, “counting what you got there. But I don’t get it. What… ?”

  “They thought you were a panhandler.” I thought Jack was going to bust, he was laughing so hard the tears came to those piggy little eyes. “That’s the greatest haul I ever heard of for standing fifteen minutes with dark glasses and a bunch of pencils.”

  “What do you mean, fifteen minutes?” I looked at my watch. It was twenty after one. “An hour and fifteen minutes is more like it. I must have been there easy that long. We made it for twelve o’clock and I was there twelve o’clock.”

  “Twelve o’clock? We made it for one.” He saw I was starting to burn, so he said quickly, “I must have misunderstood. Honest, I’m sorry. Listen, if you’ve still got an hour, let’s go spend some of that loot on a nice crisp Caesar salad in a nice quiet restaurant.”

  I was feeling a little better, and I thought to myself, I might as well buy him lunch, maybe we can still do some business.


  But when we were finally sitting down in a dark booth, I found that what I wanted most from Jack was that he should promise me not to tell anybody about what had happened.

  “Supposing it gets around,” I said, “to people I know in my line of business. They’ll think I’m sick in the head.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Jack laughed some more, “they might have more respect than ever for an operator that can go out and pick up that kind of change on his lunch hour. What do you say to the fruit salad with iced coffee? Let’s stay healthy.”

  I finally got Jack to promise, for what it was worth, and we even made a deal on the ball-points (although I might as well add that he pushed me a little hard), but all day long it kept nagging at me. Not just that it should be kept a secret, but what I ought to do about it to make it good, to square it, or whatever.

  I knocked off early, around four, went up to One-hundred-and-eighty-fourth Street and got my car out of the garage, and all the way up to Ellenville I turned it around in my mind. At last I decided, I’ll talk it over with Bernice, maybe she’ll have some suggestions.

  That turned out to be not such a hot idea either. By the time I got to the bungalow the kids were overtired from day camp and waiting up, and they didn’t feel like holding still while I sat down to a late supper with their mother. Then after we got them tucked in and Bernice took the pincurls out of her hair that she washed and set every Friday in honor of my arrival, she was raring to go down to the casino and show us off to all the other couples who were starting to celebrate the week end.

  “Wait a second, Bern,” I said, and while she was wriggling into her slip I told her the whole story. I included what I had never gotten around to telling Jack Storer, the business about the old-timer who slipped and dropped his berry pie and coffee.

  “I don’t see what it’s got to do,” she said, after I had finished. “I mean, the old man dropping the pie and you picking up all that money. What’s one thing got to do with the other?”

  I did wrong, I wanted to say, but the words stuck in my throat. Saying that wouldn’t have made the whole story sound any the less cracked. On the contrary. But Bernice is far from a dope, after all, she’s a college woman. Naturally she laughed at the idea of me snoring out on the street and strangers throwing money into my fifteen-dollar Dobbs. Who wouldn’t laugh? But she saw that I was serious, and that it was getting under my skin. She took my arm going down the hill to the casino, so she shouldn’t trip in her satin pumps with the high glass heels, and she tried to comfort me.

  “I tell you what,” she said. “You got it into your head that the thirteen dollars and seventy-three cents is blood money, don’t you? I mean, because you weren’t entitled to it.”

  “Something like that.”

  “So get rid of it tonight. Spend it on something useless, down at the casino, like mah-jongg or bingo, then you won’t have it on your mind.”

  Well, I did that anyway, like always when I get up to the mountains for the week end. What good did it do? I only felt like I was spending my own thirteen dollars and seventy-three cents. Came two A.M., when I hung my pants over the chair and took out my wallet, I felt I still had their money in it. I could buy guys like Jack all the lunches in the world, I could blow all the money I had in games on week ends, I would still have money that didn’t belong to me.

  I turned it over in my mind all Saturday and Sunday. I thought, maybe I should give it to charity, but there again it would be the same problem, I would only be giving away my own money, nobody else’s. And it wasn’t charity gave it to me in the first place, it was people that could afford to do it because it made them feel a little better.

  Maybe that was what gave me my brainstorm. Monday morning, a quarter to five, I dragged myself out of bed and crawled into the car. I must have been halfway to New York on Route 17 when it hit me, what I ought to do.

  I couldn’t wait to get through the morning. Came half past eleven, I got our bookkeeper to give me twenty singles for two tens. Then I took a bus up to Duffy Square and got out. I started on the corner just north of the Automat, not an arm’s length from a guy with a driver’s hat who was shilling for the sightseeing bus lines. At first I was a little scared, after all I never did anything like it before, but as soon as I had the bills in my hand it went like cream cheese.

  I honestly don’t remember, did I say anything, didn’t I say anything, but I’ll never forget how good it felt those first couple minutes, handing out the money. I just held it in my left hand, and peeled off singles and handed them to people coming toward me. Some of them shook their heads No and kept on walking, refused to take the money; others took without even looking to see what it was. Both kinds, those that took and those that didn’t, must have thought they were handbills.

  But inside of two or three minutes they got the message. The wise guys and the rubbernecks both started crowding in on me. By the time I had given out maybe a dozen singles, I was trapped in the middle of a clawing, shoving, laughing, yelling mob. My head was buzzing, my hat fell off, I had to hold my hands high, they were jumping for the dough.

  “Why don’t you just throw it, Mac!” somebody yelled.

  That sounded like a good idea, so I opened my fists and let fly, sending the money floating like candy wrappers through the hot smelly sticky air.

  Then everybody was screaming and grabbing at once and I felt my suit coat giving way at the armpits as they tore at me. A cop was banging his way through the mob, jabbing and rapping with his club—it was the first time in my life outside the newsreels that I actually saw a cop using a billy—and when he finally reached me he linked his arm with mine and cleared us a path through the screaming faces.

  “You going to come quietly?” he asked, when we were loose.

  “Come where?”

  “I’m going to book you for disturbing the peace.”

  What was I going to do, give him an argument there in the hot sun on the broiling sidewalk while he mopped his face and took out his book? I wanted to ask, What kind of a world is this, where it’s okay if you take money, but if you give money you get arrested? I’ve always been afraid of cops, I admit it, so I kept my mouth shut.

  I did have to do some talking before the day was over, though. Otherwise they would have sent me to Bellevue for observation. What I did was, I told the magistrate I’d had a couple of drinks and the sun hit me and I tried to be a big shot, and I was sorry as hell about the whole thing, and I’d take what was coming to me, and it wouldn’t happen again.

  So I paid my fine and walked out a free man, thank God. The only thing I left out when I sweet-talked the magistrate was that it wasn’t now that the sun had hit me, and it wasn’t now that I had acted like a damn fool. It was that first time, that Friday noon, when the old man lost his lunch on account of me. Even though I feel sure now that I did my best to pay it back, that’s something I can’t seem to make clear to anybody, even though I keep trying and trying and trying.

  THE LETTERS

  The first week out of Brisbane was a throbbing nightmare. The tanker rode easily enough in the long slow swells of the South Pacific, but Philip Stolz, the radio operator, was slow in recovering from a prolonged bout of alcohol and sex in which he had indulged at Lennons Hotel.

  The ship had sailed somewhat early. They were already casting off, the first mate hanging over the bow and the old man standing on the bridge cursing at him, when Philip arrived at the pier in a taxi. His armpits were not yet dry, his uniform was wrinkled, stained, and ill-smelling, his hair was matted under the no longer clean summer white hat, and his parched lips, on which he could feel some flakes of the girl’s cosmetics, still tasted of her sleep-and brandy-swollen kisses. But as soon as he had stripped off his soiled blue jacket and rolled up the grimy cuffs of his white shirt he had to mount to the bridge, sore, damp, and sleepy, and see that the antennas were properly rigged, with the sun beating down mercilessly on his strained eyeballs; and then, covered with grease and his head ring
ing like a gong, he had to go into the radio shack and test the equipment. When he finally finished he tore off his clothes, fell on his bunk, and slept through dinner and the slow journey out of Brisbane harbor, awaking only in the middle of the night, the ship already at sea, and time for him to go on watch.

  It was like that for the first week. The physical effects of the thirty-six hours he had spent locked in the hotel room with the tart wore off after a few cold showers and a few glasses of orange juice, except for a trembling at the knees when he made the long walk aft along the catwalk to the saloon at mealtime, and a dead sensation in the pit of his stomach when he raised his head from his plate and looked at the greasy mouths of the intent diners in the saloon. But the other effects of Philip’s private little orgy were far more persistent. Over and over he reviewed the details of the wild hours he had passed with the abandoned girl: at the most inopportune moments—when he was busy trying to raise Honolulu by short wave, when he stood under a cold shower with the tropical sun beating in through the open porthole, when he lay on his bunk slimed with sweat trying to read a paper-bound book of short stories—he smelled the girl’s fevered flesh, or recalled her breasts swinging frantically above his face as she crouched over his recumbent frame, or felt the bedsheets grating under his fingertips, or saw the brandy bottles rolling about, tangled in her torn stockings, on the speckled carpet.

  Probably his most painful memory was the shameful recollection of the way he had whipped up his flagging appetites with the aid of the brandy and the violent and cunning connivance of the fantastically insatiable girl. He had regarded the episode at first as a duty he owed to his body, and then, while the febrile hours slid by in the half-darkened room, as something that had to run its predestined course, like a long and useless life. How his wife (when he wanted to be funny, he occasionally referred to her as “my current wife”) would have wrinkled her nose in disgust! It was not the idea that he had been unfaithful to her that galled Phil—he had been going to sea too long for that—but the certainty of the scorn with which she would greet his depraved conduct, seated at her metal desk in the insurance company offices in Hartford. Phil recognized the fact that he was no longer very fond of his wife, and that his prolonged absences had made her less interesting to him, but he was as vulnerable as ever to her intimations of superiority, made on the basis of her regular attendance at concerts, her regular reading of advanced periodicals, and her association with what she liked to call “thoughtful” people. It was difficult to justify his mode of existence when his wife asserted that he enjoyed living with seamen because they were his intellectual inferiors, or that he continued to go to sea because it gave him an excuse to keep from “really doing anything.” And now this …