“Is that necessary?”
“She deserves a better souvenir than the inscribed book I gave her. If you won’t do it, I will. I believe that consciences should be kept functioning. Right now I’m going for a swim.”
“Ralph, it’s much too chilly—” Rita started to protest, but I put my hand on her arm. Ralph strode swiftly away, down the narrow path to the lake, and Rita and I mounted the porch steps together.
Not long after, he returned to the cottage with a towel draped around his neck and his shock of thick hair standing defiantly on end. “Had a good swim. Did some thinking too—I’ve made up my mind.”
Rita looked at him with fear in her eyes. “What do you mean?”
“I’m driving into town right after supper—going to start work on a new book.”
Rita leaped up like a young girl and threw her arms around his neck. “I knew those rotten articles wouldn’t get you down!”
At that moment I felt like an intruder. Fortunately I remembered that my mother’s only brother, a notions salesman, was in Buffalo on business and that I had half-promised to spend an evening with him, so I said to Ralph, “Would you mind if I drove in with you?”
He and Rita were startled by my request, and I had to explain about Uncle Louis. “But couldn’t it keep until later in the week?” Rita asked. I was on the point of yielding when Daisy came running in to announce that Uncle Ed had arrived.
“Leave it to Herlands,” Ralph said. “He always manages to show up at suppertime. But as long as he’s staying, I’d like to have you along. I was a little worried about leaving Rita and the kids alone this evening.”
Supper was difficult, mostly because of Ralph’s abstractedness and Rita’s wary desire that the children should not disturb their father; and the dull badinage between Ed and me didn’t help much. Ed was just as well pleased to keep Rita company for the evening, since he was obviously anxious to rebuild his friendship with Ralph. “Just make a start, Ralph,” Rita pleaded, “and then bring Harry back. After all, you have so much time now.”
“I do, don’t I?” He kissed Rita fondly, and at such length that even Ed turned away with me in embarrassment; but Penny and Daisy began to laugh, and the spell was broken, and Ralph and I clambered into the convertible. He didn’t forget to take the magazine with him.
The evening was cool, but Ralph didn’t appear to notice it, and I was hesitant to ask him to put up the top. At old Fort Erie the road swerves sharply and suddenly you come upon the Niagara River and the shallow skyline of Buffalo; seeing it at twilight as we did, it seemed very beautiful. “I see why you’ve been fascinated by Buffalo,” I said.
“We’re looking at it now from another country. That makes a difference.”
“I think I understand how you can spend your entire life writing about a place.”
“Somebody else, not me.”
“Then what’s your next book going to be about?”
Ralph looked at me dazedly, as if I had been speaking too fast.
“The one you’re going to start tonight.”
At last he said slowly, “That was just a lie I told Rita.”
I hesitated, but finally I asked, “Why are you going into town?”
“I have to get back to the toolhouse. I have to get back there. It’s the only place where I’ve ever had any peace of mind.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have come out to visit just at this time.”
“I was the one who urged Rita to invite you. I’m glad for Rita’s sake, not just for mine, that you’re here now.”
“When I think of the pleasure you’ve given so many people, and the pride that your family has—”
“The wrong kind of pleasure, the wrong kind of pride.”
“You’re very tired, aren’t you, Ralph?”
“Why wasn’t I tired during all the years I was working on the book? If you can understand that, you’ll know how I feel now.”
Ralph brought the car to a stop at the American end of the Peace Bridge; the immigration man leaned forward and said to me, “Where were you born?” and then he recognized Ralph. “Hello, Mr. Everett. Back to town, eh?”
Ralph nodded curtly. From the other side of the car the customs inspector said solicitously, “Better put up the top, Mr. Everett. It’s turning cold.”
“You see,” Ralph said, without looking at me as he drove ahead, “I’m even a celebrity for the wrong reasons. They’re going to go home and gossip about me.”
“That’s nothing to be upset about, is it?”
The street lamps winked on as we rolled downtown. “At least there’s money,” Ralph murmured. “If I never did anything but build barbecue pits for the rest of my life, there’d still be enough for Rita and the girls. Why work? To grind out a shelf full of second-rate books?”
“Just the same,” I protested, “your father would have been proud of you.”
“Luckiest thing that happened was the old man’s dying when he did. He would have laughed his head off at all this publicity. Oh, he would have been pleased for Rita, I suppose. He was very fond of her—just as you are. That makes things easier for me.”
He came to a stop in front of my uncle’s hotel. “Here you are. You don’t mind picking me up when you’re through with your uncle, do you?”
“Not at all.”
“Just hop in a cab and come over. You’ll find me in the tool-house. Goodbye, Harry.” He leaned out of the car and extended his hand. “I’ve always enjoyed your company. You’ve been a good friend to us.”
I went up to my Uncle Louis’s room and we spent a desultory few hours trading jokes and playing cribbage. At last we had bored each other to the point where we were both relieved when I excused myself. I was glad when my cab reached Humboldt Parkway.
But the street was blocked, and when I smelled smoke and saw children running towards Ralph’s house, I jumped out of the taxi. The sky suddenly reddened before me, and I felt my heart constrict.
I was much too late, of course. The firemen had kept the blaze confined to the toolhouse, but that was enough. A spaniel-faced old inspector pointed at the flaming shack and said, “We have to figure that he’s inside. His car is still out front with the key in the ignition. It’s a terrible thing.”
It was a terrible thing. They made me identify Ralph when it was all over. I got sick and had to go outside, but the night air revived me—or maybe it was the feeling that Ralph had died in a way that had more dignity than the ugly deathbed scenes with which so many of us reluctantly let go our grip on life. They found him leaning forward over the typewriter as though he were hard at work, and they surmised that when he was sickened by smoke and unable to make his way to the blackened windows or the latched door (which he had locked from the inside apparently to make sure that he would not be disturbed) he returned to his typewriter to await the end with tranquility and courage. Everyone seemed to agree that while Ralph had been inexcusably careless in dozing off with a lighted cigarette in a wooden shed piled high with papers, what was more important was that he had finished his masterpiece before the tragic accident, which could have taken place at any time during the previous decade. As for his files and records, which he had maintained with such scrupulous devotion, they were utterly destroyed. Nothing remained, not his notes, not even the cabinets themselves, nor the framed pictures of Rita and his daughters.
I took Ralph’s car and drove back to Canada. The night was cold and I had to concentrate on the unfamiliar road; somehow I found my way to the summer house, where Rita and Ed were sitting on the porch and waiting for Ralph and me. Without any preliminaries I told them what had happened. Rita looked at me uncomprehendingly, then brushed past me and ran down the steps to the empty car, as though I had perpetrated some kind of hideous joke. I stood stupidly staring after her, and it was Ed Herlands who lumbered down and caught her as she fell.
Rita refused ever to return to the house on Humboldt Parkway. The funeral was held from the cottage in Canada—we buried Ralph ne
xt to his father—and Rita stayed on there with the children and the nursemaid while her sister-in-law and Ed and I disposed of everything in the house, which we also sold at her request.
I took a room in an ugly boardinghouse in the nearby resort town of Crystal Beach, and I passed my entire summer vacation with Rita. The girls, as children will, were soon playing happily, unaware of what their gaiety was costing their mother.
“If only they didn’t forget so quickly, Harry.”
“It would be worse. Life would be unbearable if children lived in the past. And as for us, we have to live in the future, don’t we?”
“Ralph did, and for what? I can bear everything else but the thought that he had to die just at the beginning of the kind of life he deserved.”
“He fulfilled himself in his children and his book. And he lived long enough to reap the reward for his work. Isn’t that more than most artists can say?”
Rita took my hand. “You’re very comforting. I know it’s hard for you to sit here all summer and listen to me. But who else can I talk to about Ralph? You understand him so well.”
At the end of the season I arranged for Rita to take a cruise with her sister-in-law. It seemed only natural for me to meet her at the pier with the children upon her return. By the beginning of the winter I didn’t feel too much constraint about asking her to marry me, and I was overjoyed when she accepted.
We have a lovely home in Westchester now, and the children seem very fond of me. When we moved in I surprised Rita by having her harp (which she thought I had sold, along with everything else) placed in the living room. Naturally she approached it with some diffidence, but soon she began to practice regularly, and now our friends enjoy dropping in and listening to our duets.
We often speak of Ralph, and I make a point of impressing upon the girls that their comfortable standard of life is due largely to his unremitting and unselfish labors. The movie made from Queen City was released recently, and we all went to see it. Rita cried a little—she says that the stars realized their roles just as Ralph would have wanted—and the girls were thrilled. I like to think that Ralph would have been pleased to see us at the première, which represented in a way the culmination of all his striving. And if he is watching, wouldn’t he be happy now to know that not only his great public but his wife and children too revere his memory and respect the fruits of his genius?
THE DANCER
When Peter Chifley left Elyria, Ohio, for New York City, he was twenty-one years old. He took with him all the money he had saved while serving in the occupation forces in Japan, where something had happened which changed the course of his life.
One day Peter had wandered into a movie where one of the early Fred Astaire pictures was being shown. He sat through it three times, and he began to follow the Astaire movies from one section of Tokyo to another: he was no longer the same person. Peter felt that the lightness and grace of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers corresponded to something in the daily life of the Japanese of which he had been vaguely aware before; and he recognized that Astaire’s trim and airy leaps had released a great creative force within himself.
He decided to become a dancer.
Peter had never learned to suppress his true feelings, and when he stepped into the cool winter twilight after a rapturous afternoon watching Top Hat, he was overcome with a breathless buoyancy, and he began to dance at once. The two military policemen who elbowed their way through the crowed of smiling Japanese leaped to the grotesque conclusion that Peter was drunk; and Peter tried to explain without much success that his movements were wobbly simply because he had never danced before.
This incident, and several others, may have influenced the army authorities to return Peter to the United States somewhat early. He hurried home to Elyria, worried about what his parents would think of his new ambition; but they were reasonable people, and when customers gathered in droves at their lunchroom to watch Peter dancing alone in the empty lot next door, they could actually measure their pride and happiness in the ringing of the cash register. However, when they saw that the curious customers never bought anything except coffee, and that Peter was growing restless and unhappy, they reluctantly acceded to his desire to go to New York to study dancing.
It was a cool sunny day, very early in spring, when Peter’s bus crossed the bridge into Manhattan, and as he craned his neck to the rear he could see the glowing rays of the declining sun striking sharply against the iron girders of the bridge, like a vision of his bridges burning behind him.
“Look,” he cried without thinking, “look, the bridge is burning!”
Everyone turned and gaped. Some of the passengers were disgruntled at seeing only the sunset. A fat man who had been dozing in the seat directly in front of Peter’s muttered audibly, “Damned yokel! Man can’t even take a nap.”
“I’m sorry,” Peter said tentatively, “I didn’t mean to bother anybody,” but no one paid any attention, now that their goal was so near.
Peter alighted from the bus on Eighth Avenue, in the middle of the city, and found himself surrounded by an even greater throng than he had ever seen in Tokyo, which was the only other large city that he knew. These people were carrying briefcases and newspapers, and some even pushed wagons filled with Hershey bars and Chiclets. He decided to approach a shabby smiling man who wore a cardboard hat bearing the words SIGHTSEEING TOURS perched rakishly on his curly gray head.
“Excuse me.” Peter spoke, without thinking, in Japanese. “Do you know where I can find a nice clean room?”
“Got much money?” the guide asked coolly.
“No, I don’t,” Peter admitted, in English. “But how did you understand me?”
“Fortunately you came to the right party, son. I used to coach baseball in Kobe—ran a sex shop on the side.” He drew forth a grimy calling card. “Mrs. Blight, who runs this rooming house in Chelsea, went to P.S. 127 with my bookie’s sister-in-law. Caters to theatrical people. Tell her Shanker sent you.”
“What does P.S. 127 mean?” Peter asked, but the man had already turned away and was calling out softly, as though he hoped no one would hear: “See the secrets of Chinatown, the world-famous Bowery, the tallest building in the world …”
Peter picked up his valise and walked slowly downtown in the pale glow of the late afternoon twilight. At Seventeenth Street he took out the card that the guide had given him and surveyed the old red brick houses, some latticed with tough old ivy branches like protruding veins, some with flowerpots on their window ledges. Almost every house bore a small sign: Furnished Rooms, Rooms for Men, or Light Housekeeping Rooms.
He rang the doorbell of the house that had been recommended to him and was greeted by a small worried-looking woman, who stuck out her tongue at him.
“I’m looking for a room.” Peter held out the card. “But if—”
“Oh, Shanker sent you! I thought you were a meter reader. I’ve been having a feud with the Consolidated Edison Company. Your eyes are going to pop right out of your head when you see the lovely room just waiting for a nice boy like you. At seven dollars a week it’s a steal.”
Peter followed Mrs. Blight, who was wiping her hands furtively on her meager hips, into a long narrow room that was dark and not lovely at all.
“I’ll take it, ma’am. Should I pay you now?”
Mrs. Blight nodded in a motherly way and pocketed the money. “I’ll give you a hand-painted receipt tomorrow, Mr.—”
“Chifley. My name is Peter Chifley. I’m going to be a dancer.”
“Thrilling! My late husband Benito was an accomplished soap carver—”
She was interrupted by a stout young man who suddenly appeared in the doorway. “An addition to the personnel, Mama?”
“Oh, you startled me! This is Mr. Chickpea. I’ll leave you two alone now. Angus, you’ll explain about the lavatory and the rules, won’t you?” She slipped out beneath his outstretched arm and disappeared down the hall.
“Are you Mrs. Blight’s
son?” Peter asked.
“Oh no! My name is Angus Mondschein. Like yourself, I am a paying guest. I reside directly across the hall, and I entered to ascertain whether I might possibly be of assistance while you were getting acclimated.”
“That’s very kind of you.” Peter surveyed Angus more closely. He was perhaps twenty-five, with an extraordinarily large, fleshy, powerful-looking nose, and a pair of thick, well-nourished ears that grew out of either side of his head like cabbages. His eyes were surprisingly large and soft, and his long white teeth were clamped around a fragrant calabash pipe.
“Where do you hie from?”
“I come from Ohio,” Peter replied, “if that’s what you mean. My father has a lunchroom in Elyria.”
“Ah, a native of the Buckeye State. Have your parents too been unable to comprehend your desire for the higher things?”
“I want to go to school. But my parents are being very helpful.”
Angus curled his lip. “A false front. You must make a clean break. May I assist your cogitations, as an older student?”
“That’s very nice of you, Mr. Mondschein.”
“Call me Angus.”
“Do you know of a school where I could study dancing?”
“One must avoid a stereotyped curriculum. I myself have explored the offerings of—” he extended his sturdy fingers under Peter’s nose and flexed them at the first joint, one by one, “—the New School for Social Research, the Henry George School, the Ethical Culture School, Cooper Union, and at the moment of speaking I am enrolled in several fascinating courses at the Paul Revere School. If you accelerate your unpacking, you’ll be enabled to accompany me to said institution. It’s within perambulating distance.”
NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Page 23
