NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  By evening the recuperative process had advanced so far that Phil could regard even Bradley Holliday with a kind of benevolent neutrality. He awoke from an evening’s slumber in time for a cold shower and a beef sandwich; it was midnight and time for him once again to go on watch.

  And once again he sat facing Australia, facing the slate-gray radio panels with their eye-like dials that kept him, literally, in touch with the other little vessels sliding along the surface of the southern sea—an island, two islands, three islands away. Wiper age 39, cramps lower rt. qdrt., pse adv med…. The plaintive little calls of the distant ships, flutey and disembodied in the rich velvet-black air, served only to lull him further away from the reality of their thread-connected world.

  It was with some surprise, therefore, that Phil looked up from the deep green of his desk, and saw Bradley Holliday standing in the doorway. He must have made some slight gesture in order to attract Phil’s attention, perhaps he merely coughed; in any event, he was carrying a tall bottle of Bols gin with two glasses, a leather case the size of a notebook, and a bulky folder wrapped in manila paper.

  “I’m not intruding, am I?” Holliday looked serious, and even—aided by his impressive paraphernalia—purposeful. “You suggested—”

  “Come in. Take my sneakers off the chair and sit down.”

  “Thanks.” Holliday did as he was told, then held the gin bottle critically up to the light. “You don’t have any scruples about drinking on watch, do you, Sparks?”

  “This is a free and easy ship.”

  “So I’ve noticed. I go up on the bridge every afternoon to chew the fat with the second mate, and the old man hasn’t kicked me down below yet. That’s remarkable in itself.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You’ve got a good feeding ship too—the steward is an all right guy. As a matter of fact, I persuaded him to give me—” he unbuttoned his khaki shirt and drew forth a bottle of Australian lemon juice, “—a quart of this stuff from the freezer. Makes the gin more palatable, you know. Say when.”

  Phil indicated the correct level with his forefinger as Holliday decanted the bottle, then placed it on the desk before the little set of radio manuals and Penguin books and leaned back gingerly in his chair as though he were still unsure of his welcome.

  “But no matter how good…” He stopped, moistened his lips, and then said determinedly, “It really doesn’t matter whether you’re on a happy ship or not if you have a serious problem. There’s something about being at sea that cuts you off psychologically from the ordinary solutions. If you come up against something that you can’t find an answer for by yourself, then you’re stuck. You’re really stuck.”

  Philip looked at him in surprise.

  “It doesn’t make any difference what the size of the crew is either, whether it’s forty-five, or fifty, or a hundred and fifty. The point is that although they’re your shipmates, they’re still not the people you’d voluntarily choose for friends. It’s sheer luck if you find just one person you can talk to. That’s why I’ve come up here tonight.”

  The earphones which Phil wore looped around his throat like a primitive necklace seemed to have grown suddenly both heavy and loud; would Holliday feel that it was rude of him to go on wearing them? He lowered their volume and suspended them from one of the knobs of the short-wave receiver where they swung like a gift offering, squawking faintly. If Holliday wanted to, he could accept the gesture as an invitation to proceed.

  “Frankly,” Holliday said warmly, “I felt that you were the kind of person I could talk to. Perhaps it sounds silly, but I believe that college men and people who like good books in general are usually more understanding than uncultured people. I studied engineering at U.C.L.A. for a while, until my dad’s money ran out, and I appreciate the difference between people who are simpatico, like yourself, from having really made an effort to appreciate the finer things, and people who simply don’t care.”

  Philip was paralyzed into silence by the presumptuousness of this nonsense; it was a marvel how smoothly the passenger seemed to maneuver in this No Man’s Land between sincerity and insincerity. And yet… and yet… Philip was forced to admit to himself that an appeal to his superior sensibility was gratifying, flattering, no matter how or by whom it was uttered. Although he had raised his hand protestingly during Holliday’s brief oration, he dropped it as the statement was brought to a close and Holliday handed him a glass. “Here’s looking at you, Sparks.”

  Phil gulped at the concoction, glancing uneasily over the rim of the glass at his drinking companion. Would he begin by being a little reticent, simply because his conception of the cultivated young man included a modicum of reserve as standard equipment? Phil set down his glass as Holliday unwrapped the manila bundle and straightened the leather case.

  “I’ve been having a bit of trouble with my girl,” Holliday said, in a more casual tone. “You know how it is when you’re out on one of these Pacific runs. There’s so much time to think things over that you don’t take anything for granted. Are you married, Sparks?”

  Phil nodded, but did not volunteer any information. It was one thing for this man to walk into the room with his personal troubles in his pocket, ready to be uncorked and poured like gin; but there was no reason for Phil himself to counter with Natalie, as though the calculated wifely hypocrisy which he suffered from her could somehow cancel out Holliday’s difficulties.

  “Then you’ll see my problem that much more clearly.” He unfolded the leather case and stood it on end, like an open hook, facing Phil. It contained a Kodachrome photograph of a girl who smiled directly out of the picture at him. “This is Phyllis. I thought I’d set the scene for you a little, so to speak, if I brought her picture along so you could see what she looks like. Attractive, isn’t she?”

  The picture, embossed with the label of a prominent Hollywood photographer, was of a girl in her twenties, no longer flushed with youth, but still fresh and piquant. Her Norse cheekbones were thrown into relief by her smile, which was not the cajoled grimace of an ordinary portrait. There was a wistfulness in the slight arch of her back-flung neck and in the pouting curve of her full parted lips that was reminiscent of the wholehearted tenderness possessed by a few girls whom Phil had known. Only her hair was uninteresting; it was set in conventional curls as though she dared not make one gesture that would set her apart from all the other girls of her world, as though finally she had to cling, to capitulate in this little way to its demands.

  Everything that the photograph revealed about this girl, yes, even her hair, was infinitely touching to Phil, and he paid her the tribute of saying to the man who claimed her, “She’s really lovely.”

  “Isn’t she?” Bradley Holliday smiled gratefully. “She’s just that good in bed too. Sensational.” His smile broadened but did not become vulgar. “I know I can speak frankly to you, Sparks. A lot of sailors would blow their corks if I said anything like that to them. Once you sleep with a girl you’re not supposed to have any respect for her, unless she’s your wife; and then you can’t ever mention the fact that you lay her. The whole world is divided into the whores that you bang and the women you love. Some of these smart apples brag to me—they actually brag!—that they’ve never seen their wives with their clothes off. With people like that it’s useless to talk.

  “But my problem is a little more complicated than anything those sailors ever encountered. For one thing, Phyllis is after me to marry her and I’m damned if I know what to do. Sometimes I think, go ahead, marry her. One of these days you may hit the beach and find her married to someone else. And then I say to myself, why look for trouble? She’s got a nice apartment and a comfortable bed. Everything is fine as long as I come and go when I please. How do I know what will happen after we get married? Supposing I discover that we’re not compatible after all?”

  It was really absurd. Philip had posed the same unreal questions to himself when he married Grace, and again when he met Natalie, and he had been
unable to answer them sensibly. How then could he answer them now, when they were asked by a man who was not even aware of the meaning of the words that he used?

  But apparently Holliday did not expect an answer. “I took the liberty,” he said quietly, as he opened the manila folder and drew forth a packet tied with string, “of bringing along Phyl’s letters, the ones she’s written me since I left on the last voyage. If I may—”

  “Whose letters?”

  “Phyl.” Holliday inclined his head toward the picture. “My fiancée.”

  “You startled me. That’s my name too, you know.”

  “Oh, is it? I’m afraid I didn’t catch it when we were introduced. What did you say your last name was?”

  “Stolz.” Phil hesitated for an instant. “That means ‘proud’ or ‘pride’ in German,” he added, and hated himself as soon as the words were out. What a horror, he thought agitatedly, what a lurking horror to know that the hateful need of “justifying” one’s very name lay always hidden in ambush, like an ugly beast, ready to leap forth snarling whenever identification was demanded.

  Holliday did not seem to notice Philip’s perturbation. He turned over the tied bundle of letters with curious caution, as though he were examining a stack of new banknotes. “Would it be too much of an imposition—” he glanced up warily, as if to say We know that I’m not worried about it being an imposition, “—if I were to read some of Phyl’s letters to you now?”

  But if he had come to the radio room simply to read the letters, why did he bother to ask permission? Was it possible that he was troubled by pangs of conscience, that he desired simple masculine approval for what might otherwise be considered a betrayal of confidence?

  Phil said, “I’m perfectly willing to listen. But do you think—”

  “Oh, I know!” Holliday cried, almost gaily. “You’re afraid that Phyl might be offended. But she’s not that type, not at all. In fact, I think she’d be rather pleased about my reading some passages to you. You’ll see what I mean; some of her letters sound as though she’d written them for an audience, instead of just for me.”

  Phil studied the girl’s photograph. It was possible, wasn’t it, that Holliday was right, that this girl, with her determined brows and her smiling but fervent eyes, was fully capable of a public utterance of her feelings. … Or was he being swayed, as Phyllis very likely had been, by Holliday’s insolent charm?

  Holliday clinched it by saying calmly, “Phyllis works for an advertising agency. Unfortunately, she takes it seriously, so …” His shrug was both worldly and cynical.

  Phil felt baffled and powerless. Even if he too were to shrug in reply, the graceless motion of his shoulders could hardly compete with Holliday’s eloquent gesture. But before the silence could become awkward, Holliday had snapped the string and begun to read the topmost letter.

  “Darling Brad, just a few hours since you’ve left—this was last May—and yet everything seems different. Isn’t it odd how you can go on doing the same things, and yet feel that all meaning has been sucked out of them, merely by virtue of one person’s departure from your life? The egg that was so juicy and tempting suddenly becomes an Easter egg, gaily colored still, but hollow and empty on the inside…”

  So this was the prose that she had polished for Holliday and his chance acquaintances. Phil looked at the girl’s picture with compassion and contempt. If she had entrusted her private dreams to Holliday, she had no one to blame but herself for what became of them.

  “… of course, I can hear you saying, isn’t it foolish of her to sit down and write to me when I’ve just left, and she hasn’t any news for me? But, darling, I only want to tell you that suddenly I understand how it is that there won’t be any news, not any at all, until you come back. The job isn’t going to have any flavor, even the apartment that I’ve been so proud of because you’ve been so comfortable here…”

  Phil knew now that he was going to have to listen to the entire series of letters. He reached for the bottle and poured two more drinks. It was the first liquor he had tasted since the final night with the girl at Lennons Hotel, but it aroused only pictorial memories of that scene as it trickled warmly down his throat. This was going to be one of those occasions when he would remain sober, seeing everything with a cold and painful clarity, no matter how much he drank. Holliday, already absorbed in presenting the evidence of his manhood, gulped absently at the gin, drew forth another letter, and cleared his throat.

  “Darling Brad,” he read, “here goes another letter off into space. I sometimes think that the worst thing about separation is this hollow routine of sending off a whole series of letters before I can even hope for a single answer. But then that’s not your fault, is it? If I had been shrewd and calculating I would have tied in with a junior executive type who would be here for dinner every evening at six-thirty sharp, instead of with a sea-going engineer. Perhaps things will be different when you return from this voyage … dot, dot, dot,” Holliday said. “She puts three dots here, after voyage. That’s a little habit of hers.”

  Phil nodded ambiguously. Was it really possible that with hardly anything more to go on than three dots (and God alone knew what they signified to Holliday) he could begin to construct for himself a portrait of the girl, not contradicting, but only paralleling the portrait that stood before him on the desk?

  “…so that by the time I got home I was really too worn out to curl up on the studio couch with a box of stationery and write you all about the concert, as I really wanted to. Anyway, Serkin was simply magnificent, at the top of his form, and I wanted to cry—I would have cried—during that wrenching, indescribable slow movement, if only it had been you sitting next to me instead of Doris. That’s the girl she shares the apartment with. But I couldn’t very well hold Doris’s hand, could I, dear? … the result is that I’m stealing company time to write to you, and even, as you can see only too plainly, company paper. The folder that I’m supposed to be working up on California lettuce just doesn’t seem particularly intriguing to me now, especially when I think of you making for those sloe-eyed Oriental maidens. Tell me, Brad, are they really sloe-eyed?” Holliday paused and cocked an eye at Phil. “She’s being eu-pha-mistic, you know,” he explained. Phil did not answer. The badly pronounced interpolation was doubly offensive; he was just beginning to feel like an omniscient author who is presented the facts of the case by a nervous shipboard acquaintance. This pleasurable certainty that he was being given a series of facts, some essential and some peripheral, whose significance as fiction he would determine for himself at his leisure, was badly shaken by the engineer’s self-interruption. In a sense it recalled him to a gross reality that had been gratefully diminishing during the reading of the first few letters. He looked up from the scratch pad (on which he had been abstractedly jotting the weather report of a distant freighter as it cheeped from the earphones before him, high above Holliday’s voice), intending to say “Please go on reading,” or something of the sort, but en route to Holliday his eyes met the girl’s, smiling warningly at him from the picture frame, and suddenly he understood that he and Phyllis had become friends. Was she as much of a friend as an author’s newly developing character? More, perhaps, for with any luck at all he would now learn from her own pen, aided by his own retrospective surmises, those things which an author is never quite able to construct; and as he moved towards an identification so absolute that it emboldened him to forecast the entire course of the correspondence, he was gladdened by a sense of his own power and insight surely surpassing, he thought, even the vision of a skilled and inventive writer. He leaned forward eagerly to hear the ardent beginning of a new series of letters.

  Holliday smoothed the sheets over his bare hairy knees. “My own darling,” he read, with an odd kind of detached fervor, like an actor reading for an audition, “it’s a week today that you’re gone, a week torn out of my life, as useless and meaningless as the seven empty sheets of the calendar that I crumple up and throw away. It’s
just impossible to write you a chatty letter about Doris or the new slip covers or what the supervisor said to me yesterday or those brutal cramps that started up this morning. I can’t, Bradley, because I am sick from thinking about you and about how I love your slow, hard smile and the way you smoke in bed with your arms clasped behind your head and the cigarette dangling down towards your chest and the smoke curling over your face …”

  Philip felt himself flushing. But Holliday, pausing only to replenish his glass, continued to read in an impersonal monotone, his voice gradually thickening as the gin slurred down his throat.

  “… one thing I can’t discuss with Doris, even tho’ she sleeps in the next room and is closer to me than anyone in the world but you. Precisely because she’s always slept alone, how could she know anything of that sickening loneliness on a Sunday morning in May? No one else could know the way it was when you and I lay here watching the sun sneak through the long window and crawl across the foot of the bed, while E. Power Biggs blasted away majestically at the organ all the way across the country, and we sipped coffee and listened to Bach and got ready to make love…” Holliday flipped open his Zippo lighter with a metallic snap and lighted a fresh cigarette, then went on: “… that dreadful thrashing about, which is at bottom I suppose the fear that everything is lost and irrevocably in the past. And then … la recherche du temps—” He pronounced the word temps as though it were Thames.