NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  “Goodbye, Burton.”

  “Then perhaps you’ll write that you’ve missed me after all, and you’ll tell me where I can find you—how I can find you.”

  “Goodbye, goodbye!”

  He bent his long frame almost double to squirm into the taxi with his bags, then quickly straightened up so he could wave to his wife as the cab rattled away. Through the glass he saw her standing in the doorway with her arms at her sides, nodding her head and crying until the cab turned a corner down the hill and they were lost to each other’s seeking gaze.

  THE PEACOCKS OF AVIGNON

  With the wind ripping at her lungs and her eyes streaming tears into the channels of her ears, Terry gunned her Vespa down the highway and onto the main streets of Avignon. It was only when at last she alighted and tried to walk casually away from this one thing in the world that was still hers, this scooter and the little valise carelessly strapped to the rear seat, that she realized how bitterly the wind had bitten at her legs beneath the wool pants and the knee-high socks. Her shins and ankles were nearly numb; she stumbled as she attempted to mount the high old curb and would have fallen to her knees if an elderly gentleman bearing an open umbrella had not been at hand to grasp her elbow.

  “Je vous remercie, Monsieur,” she said politely.

  “De rien,” the old man murmured as he disappeared down the drizzly street.

  It was not actually drizzling any more, although Terry had been driving through the mushy wetness for hours and hours. It had tapered off to a thick mist, the air was not cold when you stood still, and it was likely that the crest of the flood had passed and that it would be possible to drive northward to Paris without being lost on an endless detour or drowned on the low-lying Route Nationale.

  The streets were alive with cyclists, the sidewalks aswarm with pedestrians raising and lowering their black wetly glittering umbrellas as they skittered in and out from under the protection of the shopkeepers’ awnings. They were the first crowds Terry had seen since she had run away: the highways had been empty, empty, except for the ominous water gushing along at the side of the road next to her scooter, and the villages had been blank and shuttered. She had felt like an unwanted messenger, herself stricken, bearing news of an approaching plague. But, she thought now, hadn’t the plague been inside herself, and not communicable at all?

  The bonging of a dozen clocks in the window of an horlogerie under whose awning she stood shivering aroused her to an awareness that it was noon, that the hurrying crowds had purpose, and that she too was hungry. She had had a croissant and coffee hours before, and it had served to get her started, but it was not fuel enough for a healthy American girl, even one sick at heart and suicidal. Terry had not been living in France long enough to forget the tomato juice, the bacon and eggs, and the toast that used to go with the coffee back home when you were setting out on an expedition.

  She stuffed her gloved hands into the pockets of her zipper jacket and walked for some blocks until she came to a working-men’s café. There, ignoring with hauteur (and fright) the stares and the accented wisecracks, she ordered the plat du jour and a demi of vin ordinaire while she observed her yellowed reflection in the peeling mirror behind the bar, captured for these moments between Byrrh and Pschitt! Perrier. Her face was conventionally pretty, but now particularly long-nosed and grief-stricken, beneath the cap of tight brown curls that had been her late father’s too. Her legacy.

  After his death eight months before from a brain tumor Terry and her mother had returned, all alone together, to the France they had known and loved when Daddy had been a vice-consul in Nice and Terry herself a hoop-rolling youngster on the Promenade des Anglais, around and around the kiosks. There had been very little money, but since Terry had just graduated from high school and wanted to study art rather than go to college, Florence, her mother, had agreed that they might live together in Paris if they were very frugal. First however there had been the Côte d’Azur for the summer, and since they could not afford Nice, they had settled in a small hillside village rather heavily populated with expatriate friends of her mother’s. They were all considerably older than Terry, and much given to alcoholic fretting about the old days, so Terry spent her time either sketching the lower Alps or swimming in the sea and lying on the hot pebbles, thinking how much nicer it would all have been if Daddy had only lived to come back here with them. For some reason Florence was reluctant to leave for Paris, and the summer gave way to autumn.

  Florence amused herself amiably enough by studying the application of glaze to ceramics with a young potter named Jean, only son of the widow Marie Bongiovanni who came in to clean and do their laundry once a week. At sixty-three—just thirteen years older than Florence, but looking thirty years older—Marie was really an old lady, sweet-tempered and courteous, but an old lady. She had a whitening beard at the sides of her chin, her face had the color and texture of a rumpled paper bag, and she stank, stank terribly, of dried, never-washed sweat. Even though she was gentle and modest, she reeked of mortality, and Terry could not bear to stand near her for any length of time.

  It was not just a cultural void which separated Florence from Marie. Florence was unthickened, still slim-waisted, still fresh and pretty, and sometimes when Terry passed Jean’s tiny shop on her way to the beach and saw her mother’s blonde head bent attentively over the potter’s wheel, next to Jean’s long foxlike head with its piercing blue eyes and aggressive hooked nose, she felt as though she, at eighteen, was the worried mother and Florence, at fifty, was the vivacious young art student. Jean was big and swarthy, he had left school early and was shy and ashamed of his ignorance, his hands were always caked and stained with clay and paint, his blue and white striped sailor’s jersey and denim trousers were always spotless, and he blushed when he was teased. But Terry had no intimation of what was going to happen before he and Florence went over to the next village and got married.

  “I couldn’t tell you about it, baby,” her mother said when she returned with a scrubby corsage pinned to the left shoulder of her gabardine suit and her young husband waiting discreetly outside on the street; she tried to take her daughter in her arms but Terry squirmed away, hating herself for her inability to accept the caress passively. “You’re stronger than I am. You’re reasonable and logical, like your father. You would have talked me out of it. And I didn’t want to be talked out of it. I wanted some beauty in my life before it’s too late.”

  “Beauty?” Terry cried shrilly, her voice cracking. She blew her nose. “With that guy? He isn’t five years older than I am. You’re old enough to be his mother. Have you forgotten, you’re fifty years old!”

  “I know it every minute of the day. Jean knows it too. You can be reasonable, baby, but don’t be cruel. Some day you’ll be fifty.”

  “Maybe, but if I live that long I won’t make a fool out of myself with a small-town gigolo who can hardly read and write.”

  “He is kind and sweet and gifted. Do you know what that means? And he loves me very tenderly.”

  “He loves your pension and your insurance, you mean.”

  Florence started to cry, wrackingly. “He knows we’re broke. He knows all that’s left is yours. He doesn’t want our few dollars. We’re going to Corsica for our … for a few days, and when we get back if you want—”

  “If I want I can call him Daddy, is that it? No thanks. I’m going to Paris, and I don’t want any money or advice from you or your so-called husband.”

  Furious, her mother turned on her savagely. “Did you want him for yourself, is that it? Well, he wasn’t interested in you, any more than your father was interested in me for the last fifteen years. Your father was a—”

  “Don’t mention his name to me. Don’t you dare to mention his name now. I’m leaving, Florence. I think you’ll be more comfortable without me.”

  In her little cell of a room she had thrown sweaters and underclothes into a zip-up handbag, knocking things off the bed and the walls in her haste to g
et out, ignoring her mother’s terrible cries, “Baby, I’m sorry, baby, I couldn’t help myself, baby, baby, I want you to be happy like I wasn’t, all I wanted was a little happiness, a little beauty before I get to be an old woman …”

  Now, less than a day later, her mother’s voice still pursued her like the cries of the Furies. It burned, the shame of it burned within her, as she thought of pathetic, foul-smelling old Marie, of her hairy-chested young son, and of the looks on the faces not of the villagers—for they took everything in stride, wars, occupations, adulteries, misalliances, whatnot—but of the foreigners who had been their friends. She shuddered.

  Outside the air was a little better. Terry lit a cigarette, retraced her steps to the Square, and realized suddenly that this mighty fortress of Avignon was the old papal palace of the fourteenth century. Or was it the thirteenth? As she stood on the far side of the street and gazed contemplatively across at the towering ancient battlements, lowering before her as though they guarded not heretical remnants but the abodes of the storm gods whose cloudbursts were drowning this whole countryside and her own little family too, she fumbled clumsily in the back of her mind for the jumble of historical misinformation that lay tumbled about, gleaned from school courses, paperbacks, Michelin guides, and artist boy friends. Which popes had lived there? Hadn’t they traveled surreptitiously by water across the Mediterranean to and from that little Spanish town that she and Florence had visited a few months ago? Impetuously Terry strode across the Square and up the incline—which had surely been moated once—to the massive doors of the palace. She was not alone, there were many women coming and going with large bundles in their arms, and she was taken aback when a gendarme at the very entrance accosted her and barred the way.

  His belted blue uniform was immaculate, but there were smears of dried mud up and down the sides of his leather boots, and his eyes, shadowed under the bill of his cap, were smudged with weariness. For an instant Terry thought that she might have neglected to buy a historic monument ticket, or that the palace was closed during lunch hour.

  “I regret, Mademoiselle,” the gendarme said, politely but in a voice that was just the least bit clipped, “that this is an area of disaster thanks to the floods. There is a state of emergency and the palace is closed to tourism until further notice.”

  Beyond his trim shoulder through the gaping doorway, Terry caught sight of two lorries, a row of bunks ranked along the walls of the great inner courtyard, piles of medical supplies marked with crosses, and some old women eating steaming potatoes off tin plates. Then her eyes met the gendarme’s, and dropped.

  “I—I am desolated,” she faltered. “I did not think … Excuse me.”

  She turned and stumbled down the ramp, away from the policeman’s eyes. A tourist, she thought, just a bloody tourist. Not a girl running away from home, or a girl awash in a sea of trouble, or a girl who didn’t really want to go to Paris. Just a tourist—and a thoughtless stupid one.

  She found herself trudging up a winding gravel path alongside one of the immense walls of the palace; it led, she observed, to the park, and although it was quite steep she allowed herself to be carried along with the throng of lunch-hour strollers. She wandered through well-tended gardens, formal to be sure, and made lusher than ever by the endless downpour, but desolate now in the raw damp with the blossoms crumbled and the leaves rotted. Up and up she mounted until she came to a plateau from which suddenly there opened a vast panorama of the Loire valley.

  The scene beneath her, as she leaned over the parapet and gazed at the countryside hundreds of meters below, was horrifying—and fascinating. The Avignon bridge seemed to be lying on the swollen waters like a stick floating on a stream. No one crossed it, much less did anyone dance on it. Black and mute on the river that was now a horizon-stretching lake, a shallow ocean of misplaced water, it did not look as though it could ever have served for the stomping fun of the song.

  Everything was very still. The water, seen from this distance, did not seem to be moving at all. It was eerie how silently and stealthily it had crept from its placid banks and worked its way across the farmlands, inundating fields, drowning cattle, leaving only gables, house peaks and spires pointing painfully to heaven. Now it lay as peaceful and apparently motionless as a mountain lake. What was missing, Terry realized, was the ominous mood music, replete with growling glissandi, with which the newsreels always embellished their aerial views of similar visitations and devastations. This was the first flood she had ever witnessed with her own eyes, but she had been prepared for something like it by the filmed records of countless similar acts of God and man, and in consequence what was most awesome about the flood was not its unexpectedness or its lack of any parallel in her previous experience, but the stunning absence of portentous musical accompaniment, indeed of any sound at all save for the beating of her own heart.

  Leaning on the back of a clammy bench with her cheeks in her hands, Terry felt that a fantastic kind of human courage must surely take life in the very teeth of these catastrophes, that vanity, fear and cowardice flourished only in the expectation of disaster and were replaced after it had struck by a stubborn will to go on and render life manageable no matter what stood in the path—flood, fire, pestilence or bombing. Surely the people who lived in those half-submerged houses and farmed the drowned earth were already scheming and striving to retrieve their homes and belongings and to reclaim the land for their plow and their seed, just as these people of Avignon in the very park around her munched and strolled on their lunch hour as though the waters had never risen about their neighbors on the farms around their city.

  Then why is it, she wondered, that I still sit here and burn, that the fire of shame still burns in my face whenever I think of my mother? Now that it has happened, now that it is as final and real as the flood, why can’t I adjust myself to the idea of my mother and that man and go ahead and make my own life? But the truth was that she could not adjust herself, that she felt betrayed and soiled, that her mother and even her dead father were degraded—because she could see no sense, no order, no rationality in the awful thing her mother had done, nothing beyond a momentary upheaval of middle-aged lust like the last ugly tongue of flame in the dying fire of a collapsed house.

  And then as she sat there, turning her back to the flood and facing once again the park and the people around her, Terry was startled to see two large peacocks strutting along the graveled walk. For a moment they looked like two dowagers, pursing, preening, chattering to each other as they strolled, surrounded by a retinue of pages, attendants and oglers—schoolboys, linked-armed couples, elderly women with black stockings and little scraps of bread. Suddenly one fluttered, as if aware that the strategic moment had arrived, and opened its tail wide, so wide that in that instant the world seemed blotted out in the sudden blaze of its beauty.

  “Oh!” Terry cried involuntarily. “Oh, how beautiful!” Her heart was wrenched within her, and she arose gropingly to follow the birds with the others. The first peacock having displayed itself, the other now pirouetted, almost fretfully, almost as if it wanted willfully to distract all attention from the sullen competition of the flood below, and released its great fan in a burst of radiance surpassing the first. The purple, mauve, magenta and green iridescent circles sworled before her eyes and dizzied her with the wasteful magnificence of their display. There seemed no impulse, for all this dazzle, no motivation, other than a vain and splendid pride.

  “Oh, maman, comme ils sont beaux!” said a schoolboy in his still-high girlish voice. His matted hair fell across his forehead, his nose ran, a heavy serviceable scarf was wound round his scrawny neck; beneath his bare and bony knees his legs and feet were encased in thick wool socks and ankle-high clodhoppers. Everything about him said farmer’s son.

  His mother looked old enough, it seemed to Terry, glancing at her, to be his grandmother. Her head was wrapped in a shawl which she held gathered tightly, tensely, beneath her chin; all of her shapeless body was clad
in black. She had been crying, or else the raw cold and the air smelling of flood had worked its way into her marrow and loosened her tear ducts; perhaps she had been made homeless by the seeping waters. She replied to her son, almost wonderingly, “Ah oui, oui, pour un moment de beauté … Il faut avoir de la beauté.”

  Terry turned away, breathing rapidly, and began to descend by the way she had come. It is necessary to have beauty. Had she ever known that, or, knowing it, had she reserved the hope and expectation of it solely for her selfish self? Still blinking from the wonder of those swaying delicate treasures opened and displayed for her delectation, Terry made her way out of the garden, to the street, and down across the Square to the P.T.T. There she stood patiently in the long queue of those waiting to send telegrams, shuffling like a somnambulist, not consciously aware of exactly what she was doing there until she had reached the wicket and held a form in her hand.

  Carefully she wrote, Forgive me, forgive me, I love you, be happy. She handed the telegram to the man at the other side of the wicket together with a note which she took from her purse; it was only when he handed her the change and pointed to her printing with a nicotine-stained thumb that she finally raised her eyes and looked into his.

  “Votre nom, Mademoiselle.”

  “Oh, yes.” Terry printed her name and rechecked her mother’s address. “There.”

  “Mais … vous avez répété deux mots. Cela va vous coûter—”

  “Yes, I know.” With some surprise Terry listened to her own voice, as gentle as the clerk’s. “I repeated it only once, because I have no more money. But to myself I must repeat it over and over, do you see?” she demanded of the puzzled man. “Over and over.”

  With a lightened step she emerged into the quieter street. There, under the metallic afternoon sky, she mounted the scooter once again and drove off slowly, no longer burning, no longer sobbing, toward her own fate, her own love, her own unknowable destiny.