“By all means. Excuse me, Mr. Everett. I’ll let you finish your paper.”
He looked at me sourly. “Nothing but bad news anyway.”
Rita was diapering the infant, a safety pin between her lips, while the older child stood in her crib, silently watching her mother. “Harry! Give us all a kiss.”
I kissed Rita first. Her lips were hot and dry, and the infant squirmed uncomfortably between us as we embraced briefly. I made the appropriate remarks about the children, who were friendly enough; but I cannot remember now what they looked like that evening, except that neither of them seemed to take after their mother. We closed the door quietly behind us and stood in the hall for a moment talking softly.
“You must be working like a dog.”
“Ralph gets up with the babies at night. And he still manages to write. That’s something, isn’t it?”
“The harp is gone.”
Rita flushed. “Impossible, with the children underfoot. And with Father here … it’s stored in the attic … Come, tell me about yourself while I fix the grapefruit.”
Dinner was not a happy meal. Rita had to jump up twice to go in to the babies. She and Ralph wanted to talk about New York, music, books, but the table was dominated by Mr. Everett. The old man hated the world, and he wanted as many people as possible to know before he took reluctant leave of it. He spooned up his grapefruit carefully with his one hand, disposing of as much juice as he possibly could, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, using the same gesture as his son. Throughout the meal he stared hard at me, as though waiting for me to make a social error. “I understand you’re on the road a lot, with that orchestra.” His eyes narrowed calculatingly. “How are conditions?”
I hesitated. He went on quickly. “I’ll tell you something. This country is going to hell in a basket.”
Rita and Ralph were very absorbed in their food. I said, “I think we’re better off than we were a few years ago.”
“You wouldn’t talk that way if you had to struggle along on a pension. What are you anyway,” he said with rising aggressiveness, “another Roosevelt New Dealer?”
“Father,” Ralph said, “don’t you think it would be better if we discussed politics later and let our guest finish his supper now?”
“Later?” He said the word with such anguish that we all looked up, taken aback by his vehemence. “When is that? I might not wake up tomorrow. This is still a free country, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?”
“Of course, Father. I just don’t want to spoil Harry’s dinner.”
“I’m only a fiddler,” I said. “In politics I vote for the man and not for the party.”
The old man’s eyes lit up. “That’s just the kind of thinking that’s softening up the country.”
Rita’s hand shook as she ladled noodles onto my plate. “Isn’t that a little extreme, Father?”
“Extreme? What do you call those professors in Washington? I just hope none of you ever have to exist on a miserable pittance. I went to work when I was eight years old, after my father lost his farm.” He glared insanely at me. “Worked hard, saved, all my life, to the day I lost my arm. But they don’t encourage thrift and hard work any more. Suckers, that’s what we were, suckers.”
“More noodles, Father?”
The old man hooked a finger inside his mouth and drew forth a piece of gristle on which he had been chewing as he talked. He put it on the edge of his plate and stared at it somberly. “Now Roosevelt wants a law that a man can’t make more than twenty-five thousand dollars a year. What do you say to that?”
“I haven’t thought much about it.”
“That’s how the public gets fooled. They don’t think.”
“I never expect to earn that kind of money. Or anybody I know.”
Ralph raised his eyes and looked at me coolly. “I do, Harry.”
“Who cares how much money you’re going to make?” Ralph’s father chewed savagely on a pickle. “If you had mouths to feed, the incentive would be there, wouldn’t it?”
“The opportunities—”
“Don’t tell me about opportunities. I’ve lived longer than you. Rubinoff and his violin, on Eddie Cantor’s program—I bet he makes more than twenty-five thousand a year. There’s no reason for the government to confiscate the wealth of those who did make good, just to provide cake and circuses for the ones that didn’t. It’s high time we quit thinking of ourselves and started thinking about principles.”
“I respect your principles, Father,” Ralph said, “but Harry hasn’t come here to talk politics. Besides he’s got a hard evening ahead of him.”
“You hear that?” the old man cried out to me. “He respects me—isn’t that a hot one? I’ll tell you something. To this day he doesn’t know what I sacrificed in order to put him through the University of Rochester. He doesn’t know the policies I borrowed on, the friends I—”
Ralph’s nostrils were dilated. “I must insist—”
“I’m talking.”
Ralph subsided, after giving Rita (who was desperately spooning cream into the hollow cavern of her baked apple) and me an odd glance, at once beseeching and encouraging.
His father went on inexorably, “It makes me sick to my stomach to watch a boy with your education wasting his time, getting up at four every morning to write that junk.”
“Say it all. You might as well.”
“Respect? You don’t even respect your wife and children, or you’d try to make that expensive education pay off. You’d try to get someplace in your profession and provide some security for your family.”
The old man bent his right hand back against the edge of the table until the knuckles whitened. In the hot silence his swollen finger joints cracked loudly, one after the other. Suddenly he cried out in an agonized voice, like an old minister appealing to his wicked flock, “How do you suppose I feel that the few miserable dollars of my savings has to go to you? You’ll piss it away, fooling yourself and Rita into thinking you’re a genius. I just wish I could live long enough—”
“You will live long enough.” Rita flung her head back challengingly. Her eyes were damp and pained, but I sensed that she had been through crises like this before. “I have faith in Ralph, and I know that you’re going to be—”
“I’m going to be dead, that’s what. And I wish I could take my money with me.” He looked impassively at Rita. “You let him make a fool out of you.”
“But I’m happy.” Her voice rose dangerously. “I’m happy, won’t you believe me?”
At that moment the clear little voice of her older child came floating through the open doorway. “I want a glass of water.”
Rita jumped up. The three of us were left at the table in a mist of heavy breathing and tobacco smoke. The old man actually looked pleased with himself, but now it was Ralph who could not let matters dispose themselves so easily; he seemed to have been bitten by a bug of misery which inflamed his entire being with a desire to justify himself to his father. I don’t know whether he remembered, or even cared that I was sitting there—or perhaps everything that he said was really directed to me, as the one person who could judge his manner of life against the claims pressed against it by his father. I am not very perceptive about such things—I only know that Ralph spoke to his father like a despairing man.
I heard him say, “I’m trying the best I know to make something worthwhile of my life.”
The old man didn’t move. His voice was unexpectedly gentle. “I haven’t got any future left, Ralph. Maybe that’s why I’m so anxious about yours.”
Ralph turned pale. “I’m sorry.” He made no effort to deny his father’s statement; perhaps there was an unspoken agreement between them not to bluff about the older man’s life expectations. “I can only ask you to have faith in me.”
“You talk like a preacher!” The old man’s sudden sneer was shocking. I think now that he was trying to conceal his emotions, but at the time I was angered and embarrassed. “If you had a
ny ability it would have come out by now.”
“You’re not competent to judge.”
“Who is? All I ever saw was one poem in a highbrow magazine that nobody reads anyway.”
“So that’s it. You’ll never be proud of me, because you won’t let yourself. If I made a fortune and was praised by all the critics, you’d say it was a fluke.”
The old man knocked his pipe into the dessert dish and stared down at the charred fragments of tobacco floating slowly in the remains of his baked apple. “I don’t know if they told you. I’ve got a bad heart condition, I’m apt to go almost any time.”
Ralph did not return my glance. He was staring at his father with an expression of concentrated loathing, and in the first stunning instant the thought flashed through my mind that he was disgusted with his father’s inability to keep his secret to himself; but then I felt that Ralph hated his father because he was going to die too soon, and so cheat him of his eventual triumph.
“No point in going to my grave,” the old man said, “without getting everything off my chest.”
“You’re not going yet. And you’re not going to rush me, you hear? I’ve got my schedule laid out, I won’t let you scare me out of it.”
Rita came back into the dining room then. She had put on make-up and tied her hair behind her ears with a ribbon. “I didn’t hear any dishes breaking,” she said pleasantly.
Ralph said heavily, “We’d better get going. It’s not early.”
“You won’t have to worry about the children, Father, they won’t get up.”
“Oh, the children. They’ll be in good hands—” the old man spoke slowly, so that no one should mistake his meaning… “—as long as I’m here.”
We went out to the car and then we all turned around, as if by a common impulse. The old man was standing at the parlor window, holding the curtain back with his one arm and staring out blindly at the darkening street.
I was already committed to spending the night at the Everetts’. Now although there was nothing I would have liked more than to have gone off to a hotel, I could not bring myself to decline the invitation which I had already accepted for fear of hurting Ralph and Rita.
After the concert we were joined by two high-school classmates of Ralph’s, Jim Bagby, a tall cadaverous fellow, and Ed Herlands, who was fat, well dressed, and had the kind of self-assurance that comes only with inherited money. We spent the evening drinking beer and talking about the cultural sterility of Buffalo. It seemed that it was only this common grievance which still bound Ralph to his old friends, for he held hands with Rita as if to assert his basic separateness from the rest of us.
We were driving home when Rita said, “Harry, I know you’re ill at ease about staying with us tonight. But you’re one of us … maybe you could consider it as a favor to us.”
There was an uncomfortable silence—I could think of absolutely no reply—and we finally made our way up the steps to the silent house. The old man was sitting sideways in the easy chair, asleep, his forehead glistening in the lamplight, his stump pressed tight against his chest. His lean mouth had gone slack and his legs were folded sharply at the knees as though they had finally snapped from the long task of holding his body erect. He did not stir when the door closed behind us.
Rita tiptoed across the room, turned off the bridge lamp, and kissed him on the forehead. He stirred and raised his wrinkled lids, and Rita said gently, “I’ve brought the morning paper.”
“That’s fine.” He cleared his throat. “The children didn’t stir. How was the concert?” He looked amiably at me, as though there had been no words between us at all.
“We played pretty well. I hope they enjoyed it.”
“All you can do is your best.” He arose and clapped his son on the back. “Eh, Ralphie? Then if they don’t like what you’ve done, it’s tough, that’s all.” He chuckled as he waved his good nights and stalked off to the bedroom, the morning paper tucked obliquely under his stump and the white waxy cast of death on his narrow farmer’s face.
Ralph stared expressionlessly after him until Rita said gaily, “You see, darling? It’s all right.”
“You don’t understand,” he replied slowly. “You don’t understand at all.”
“Well, I understand that I’ve got to make up the couch for Harry.” She set to work briskly, brushing aside my offer to help, and not quite looking me in the eye as she tucked in the sheets. When it was done I sat down on the temporary bed and looked up at my tired friends. They stood arm in arm, their minds already turned inward to their dark bedroom and their common life. Even the most bitter recriminations bound them closer to each other than I could ever be to anyone.
That night I was untroubled by intimations of my nearness to Rita and Ralph. Before I fell into a heavy sleep, I wondered only whether old man Everett lay in the little bedroom that had once been mine for a night, with the rumpled morning paper lying where his weary hand had dropped it, listening to his son’s lively ardent useless movements beyond the thin wall, and cursing his inability either to fall asleep or to die and leave those whom he had given his curse to their damned stupidity.
It seemed to me that I had been sleeping for only a few minutes when I was awakened by a light shining in my eyes. I raised myself on my elbow and peered into the kitchen, where Ralph was outlined before the open refrigerator, whose bare bulb sprayed light rays around his disheveled figure. I called out to him softly.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” He turned quickly, digging his fingers through his stiff uncombed hair. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“How do you do it? An earthquake couldn’t get me out of bed after two hours of sleep.”
Ralph advanced towards me through the dark dining room, hitching at his half-buttoned trousers, over which his shirttails still hung, and squeezing together a thick sandwich with his other hand. As he reached the couch where I lay with my hands behind my head, I looked up into his red-rimmed unsmiling eyes and realized perhaps for the first time how profound were the differences between us.
“It’s just a matter of habit,” he said quietly.
“Tell me, Ralph. I don’t mean to be rude, but is it really worth it, this kind of life, just to do some writing?”
The circles under his eyes were violet in the pale glow of the street lamp. “Rita would have been willing to make any sacrifice, to go without children, to go out to work to support us, so that I could write. But I couldn’t do that to her.”
Yes, I thought, that’s all very well, but would she? As Ralph talked on about his book, speaking of the sacrifice of sleep, and of the eventual freedom it would bring them, my sleepy mind wandered to Rita, whose smooth cheek even now was buried in her warm soft pillow, and whom some part of me would always love; and I felt that at last I was seeing her through disenchanted eyes. Looking up into Ralph’s haggard fanatic’s face, I felt that he was crazy, that he was driven by an utterly unrealizable obsession to punish himself day after day, year after year, with this grueling schedule for something which was, after all, just another book.
“My father,” he was saying, “hates creative work. He persists in acting the betrayed parent in front of Rita, although he knows that I can’t stand to see her upset on my account.”
“Maybe Rita’s right about him.”
“In any case my work will go on, and he knows it.” He smiled and extended his hand. “So long, Harry.”
I never saw Ralph’s father again. He must have been a terrible problem, for not long after my departure he had a stroke which left him bedridden and helpless, a burden to Ralph and Rita and even more so to himself.
In addition to telling me about Ralph’s father Rita wrote me that she was pregnant again, and that the doctor had told her to expect twins. She mentioned nothing at all about Ralph, which more than anything else led me to suspect that he had reached the limits of his financial and physical endurance.
I sat in my mother’s living room in the Bronx (I never thought of it as my l
iving room), with both my 4-F notice and the letter from Rita in my hand, thinking of old man Everett lying stiff and moribund, cursing the world because he could not be quit of it, and listening to his son tiptoeing off in the middle of the night to his fantastic labors; of Rita, heavy and tired, struggling to keep the two little girls from disturbing the old man; and of Ralph, still adding pages to his endless novel and silently looking through his red-rimmed eyes at his dying father and his taut wife. I was glad that I would not be going to Buffalo that year.
It was Ralph who sent me the next letter from Buffalo, some time later. “My father died peacefully yesterday afternoon,” he wrote. “I thought you would want to know although you only met him once. It is just as well that he is gone from this unhappy world …” The twins had arrived, and they were both girls: counting Rita, Ralph now had a household of five females.
Old man Everett had left them his pittance, apparently, for they had been able to take over the remainder of the big house in which they lived. There was plenty of space now, even with the children, and when I arrived in Buffalo the following year, it was taken for granted that I should stay with them.
I was very much taken with the children. The older girls resembled their father in physique, in their stern little faces, and in their slow and thoughtful speech. Penny, the oldest, held out her hand as soon as she saw me and said gravely, “Hello, Uncle Harry. Have you got a nice present for me?”
It was fun, in spite of the war. I even took Rita canoeing in Delaware Park one fine afternoon, with Penny and her younger sister Daisy. Rita stretched out before me, trailing her fingertips in the dusty quiet water as I paddled slowly around the margin of the lake. We reminisced about school, and then I think we chatted about Ralph, but when I asked about his writing, she smiled nervously, reached back to stroke her silent little girls’ legs with her wet fingertips, and changed the subject.
But Ralph did not want to change the subject. When he learned at supper where we had been, he said, “Rita and I never have the opportunity to do anything like that. But I’m going to make it possible for Rita to float around in a canoe all day long.”
NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Page 20
