NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  Afterward we walked off the dinner through the dim, narrow streets of Chinatown, echoing with soft, slurring voices, and then took a subway back up to midtown in order to see Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. We were fortunate to get tickets, and made it just after the curtain had gone up, groping our way to our seats.

  Teddy poked frantically in her purse and came up at last with a pair of shell-rimmed eyeglasses. She was seeing bright comedy on the stage for the first time; I was seeing her in glasses for the first time. For both of us it was a revelation. She thought the play was brilliant; I thought she was delicious.

  When the play let out, we stopped in at Jimmy Ryan’s on 52nd Street, ostensibly for a drink, but actually so that Teddy could see how casually I greeted the boys who were playing there—Pee Wee, and George Brunies, and Zutty Singleton—poker-faced at the drums like Joe Louis—and Art Hodes, whose daily jazz program, I told Teddy, I used to follow on WNYC. But since Teddy’s musical background was confined to André Kostelanetz and Lily Pons, she was only impressed, and not overwhelmed, by my acquaintance with the great. I took her across the street to hear Billie Holiday.

  We stood at the bar, Teddy’s back against my chest, and stared through the throat-tearing smoke at Billie, who sang “My Man” and “Strange Fruit” and “Gloomy Sunday.”

  Teddy’s eyes were wet and shining. She raised her head. “You’re opening a whole new world for me.”

  That was precisely what I was trying to do, but it bothered me to have her put it so patly. It reinforced my conviction that she would always be like that, forever, and that there was no point in my even considering that she might ever be otherwise.

  She went on, “And I don’t know that it’s such a good thing. For either of us. Why should we kid ourselves? It’s not going to be my world—it never will.”

  It was a somewhat melancholy note on which to end the evening, but in a way I preferred that. It struck me that it would be almost diabolically patient to let Teddy stew overnight, torn between guilt and gratitude. The next day was to be the climactic one. I forced myself to kiss her more lightly in parting than I wanted to, and we agreed to meet the next day by the lions in front of the Public Library.

  For a change the weather was on my side. The wind was brisk, and Teddy had tied her print scarf around her blond hair babushka-style—it accentuated the slope of her cheekbones when she laughed—but the sun was out. We walked all the way up to the Frick Collection and were lucky enough to get in to the Sunday concert. Teddy had never even heard of the institution and made no attempt to conceal her ignorance.

  Although she knew no more of chamber music than she did of jazz, Schubert stirred her, and she held tight to my arm throughout “Death and the Maiden,” breathing softly and shallowly while she squinted (no glasses in the daytime) at the musicians. When the recital was over, we walked on up to the Metropolitan Museum, which Teddy hadn’t visited since she was ten.

  I led her directly to El Greco’s View of Toledo. “This is worth the trip, this and the Courbets inside. Better to see just these than to get a headache from looking at too many.”

  How insufferable I must have been, lecturing Teddy first on music, then on painting, about which I knew so little! But she smiled at me gratefully, and let me know by the way in which she clung to me that I was both patient and wise.

  As we left the Metropolitan and walked south through Central Park, darkness caught up with us and the wind came up too. Our breaths frosting, we hurried on across Central Park South against the traffic, skipping in and out of the dimmed, blurry headlights until we had gained the rococo refuge of Rumpelmayer’s.

  Warm, snug, soothed, we spooned up the great blobs of whipped cream floating on our hot chocolates and laughed over inconsequential things, and then suddenly, as if by common accord, we both stopped. I stared into Teddy’s lavender eyes, so soft and moist that I wanted to kiss them closed, and she opened her mouth but without speaking, as if she dared not utter whatever it was that she wanted to say.

  “I must kiss you,” I murmured.

  She nodded dumbly.

  We went outside. In the dimout across the street the aging men who took you on carriage rides through the park and along Fifth Avenue were adjusting the straps on their horses’ feedbags and hoisting blankets over their hides to protect them from the chilly evening. I signaled the leader of the line.

  Teddy said apprehensively, “This must be terribly expensive.”

  Without answering, I raised her up into the carriage and climbed in after her. The driver tucked us in with a warm comforter, swung himself aboard behind us, clucked to his horse, and we were off.

  Teddy and I turned to each other so precipitately that we bumped foreheads, searching, in the sudden dark of the covered carriage, for each other’s lips. We rode on through the lamplit evening, clinging to each other, kissing, until the current that flowed between us warmed not only our lips but our cheeks and our hands, our fingers and the tips of our fingers.

  “You have been so nice to me, so nice to me,” Teddy whispered.

  I responded by kissing her into silence. It was only after a long time that she could protest, trembling in my arms and frowning, “You shouldn’t kiss me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know. It’s not right, that’s all.”

  “Nobody can see.”

  “Silly! I mean, I think it’s for married people, or anyway for engaged couples, and like that.”

  We weren’t engaged or like that—the very thought was enough to frighten me out of my ardor—but I had every intention of our becoming lovers, and the sooner the better. “There’s only one way,” I whispered into her ear, “for you to stop me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Kiss me back the way I kiss you.”

  Before she could express her shock, I had stopped her mouth again. We must have been near 72nd Street on the west side of the park before we drew apart, panting.

  “You know where I’m going to take you to dinner?” I asked.

  “Where?”

  “Phil and Charlene’s. And I’m going to cook it myself. Wait till you taste my soufflé! On the way down we’ll pick up some French pastries, and—”

  “They’re not there, are they?”

  “Who?” As if I didn’t know.

  “Phil and his wife. Because if they’re not there, I’m not going. I don’t think you ought to take advantage of the fact that you’re so attractive and I’m so weak.”

  I forced myself to be calm and reasonable. “Teddy, darling, what’s so terrible about our being alone together for a while?”

  “I don’t trust myself. Any more than I trust you.” She uttered the words with as much heartfelt emotion as though she had invented them—as though no one before her had ever even expressed such thoughts. And she looked more ravishing, more flowerlike than I had ever seen her before, her lips fuller than usual, a little swollen perhaps, her eyes staring piteously at me, her hair escaping from her scarf in little tendrils that clung to her forehead.

  “Is it so awful,” I demanded, “for two people who care about each other to be alone together?”

  “But what you care about isn’t me, it’s getting me alone.” Teddy paused, as if to give me time for a fervent denial.

  I could say nothing. I was not the noblest or the most honorable twenty-three-year-old left in the United States, but I was incapable of promising engagement rings to young girls in return for their favors. And this much at least Teddy understood about me. The damnable truth was that I couldn’t even imagine myself falling in love with, much less marrying, a girl who would make a big issue out of protecting her virtue. And on top of it all, I had been keyed up for what was going to be a triumph. I still wanted Teddy very badly, but it was obvious that I had failed completely.

  After a long while she said, “I think I’d better go home.”

  She wanted to be contradicted, as with her other assertion that we had left hanging in the air, bu
t I could no more find it in me to protest this time than before. I was too hurt and too shamed.

  But so was Teddy, and when we had been brought back in jolting silence to our starting point, she jumped out and began to walk away toward the Sixth Avenue subway so swiftly that after I paid the driver I had to run for the better part of a block before I caught up with her.

  “Please, if you insist on going, let me see you home.”

  “There’s no need. Really. And I don’t want you to think I’m angry with you, because I’m not. I had a perfectly lovely time. You’ll never know how much I loved it—every minute of it. I’m just angry with myself, that’s all. You and I are very different, and it’s my fault, not yours. I should have faced it right at the beginning.”

  Still dumb, I shook her extended hand and watched her hurry off toward the subway and the Bronx.

  Three days later I stood by my bunk staring at a letter from Teddy, incongruously pink and girlish on the coarse blue of my Navy blanket. For a moment I was afraid to touch it. Finally I tore it open.

  It was the letter of a pen pal, jolly and comradely. A friend had given her two tickets to the Columbia-Brown game this coming Saturday. (I was learning that when a girl says a friend she means a boy—otherwise she specifies.) Wouldn’t I please be her guest, so she could repay me just a little for all the fun I’d shown her?

  If I had been older probably I would have said no. But I was desperately lonely in those barracks, graduation time was nearing for my platoon, and I thought, If I say no, she’ll think I’m still pouting. And besides, hope revived: If I turned her down, how would I ever know for sure that she hadn’t changed her mind and was using the football game as an excuse, a means of saying I’m sorry, I was wrong, you were right, I’ll do whatever you want?

  So I awaited the weekend as fervently as I had all the others, and to calm myself on the long, long subway ride up to Baker Field I did a crossword puzzle. Teddy met me by the entrance on the Columbia side, as she had said she would—but so much more real, so much more beautiful than my imaginings of her, that I could almost have believed I not only wildly wanted her but wildly loved her too.

  It was apparent immediately, though, that we were to be pals. Teddy was dressed for late November, and for this last game of the season, in plaid flannel skirt and a heavy mackinaw and little fuzzy earmuffs. She looked adorable. When she arranged her small lap robe across our knees I reached around her waist and hugged her tightly to me, but all I could feel were layers of wool and bulky insulation.

  “It’s my brother’s mackinaw. Do you recognize it?”

  “It looks better on you than on him.”

  “This stadium must seem pretty tiny to you after those Big Ten games with seventy and eighty thousand people in the stands.”

  It did, it did. I could hardly take any of it seriously, the scrimmages, the end runs, the quick collisions, the slow roars, the cheerleading. And especially not the athletes, so puny compared to the hulks on football scholarships with whom I had eaten in my Ohio coop. Not when so many other young men my age were burning and drowning, trapped in torpedoed tankers less than a hundred miles from where we sat cheering. But then it was going to be a long war—everyone promised us that—and these boys on the field would get their chance to die, some of them before the next year was out.

  As we shoved our way through the crowds onto the street, weaving in and out of the crawling cars, Teddy turned to me, her face glowing. I had never seen her prettier—or happier.

  “That was fun, wasn’t it?”

  “What’s next on the program?”

  She laughed. “Know anything about bowling?”

  “I know what you’re up to,” I said. “You’re trying to wear me out.”

  We went to an alley she knew of in Washington Heights where a young crowd hung out—refined, she said, not bums or low-class. To me they looked like high-school graduates waiting to be drafted and their kid sisters. No doubt their younger brothers were working as pin boys. We drank two Cokes and bowled two games. Teddy was a little clumsy, but I loved watching her strain forward eagerly, frowning over the progress of her ball down the alley.

  If only, I thought, if only. But I couldn’t even plead with her, not when she was content to be surrounded by dozens of shouting kids her own age. Why keep pushing her? I asked myself. Why not leave her to her games and her soft drinks and her soldier pen pals in Greenland, North Africa and Australia?

  We had steaks—black market, to judge from the price if not the taste—at a restaurant on upper Broadway, and as I chewed I mumbled, “We’ve had football and we’ve had bowling; now all we need is swimming to make our day complete.”

  “The St. George pool has mixed swimming tonight. Let’s go!”

  “I see enough water all week. We have to jump into the damned bay with rubber suits on; sometimes they dump out a couple barrels of oil and set them on fire to make it more interesting to swim through.”

  “I didn’t think,” she said, crestfallen. “Anyway, it’s too cold.”

  Of course when she spoke like that I had to insist we go. We rode the Seventh Avenue subway all the way down to Brooklyn, got off at Clark Street and went up by elevator straight into the hotel without even setting foot on the street. We parted for the first time all day at the lockers, urging each other to hurry.

  I got to the pool first. Teddy came in a moment later, a little shy, tugging at the nether parts of her rented tank suit as she stepped forward on the damp tiles, her pink-tinted toes curling gingerly upward. Her body was slight, paler than mine, and vulnerable. Her embarrassment only increased my own; I turned my eyes away and dived into the water at the deep end. But she slipped in after me and came up alongside me, dripping and cheerful.

  “Isn’t it great? I’ll race you down to the shallow end!”

  Actually, although Teddy thrashed bravely, she couldn’t swim very well. But she splashed me happily, slipping loose from my grasp when I reached out to paddle her. Laughing and gasping she hauled herself out of the pool and flung herself upon the tiles. She grinned down at me as I hung from the lip of the pool, my legs dangling in the water.

  “I’m so glad we came. You were sweet to bring me. Isn’t this more fun than all that other stuff? You know what I mean.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s not.”

  Teddy’s little bosom was rising and falling regularly; the droplets of water clinging to her bare arms and legs glistened under the lights. I was infinitely touched by the way in which the fine golden down smoothed itself around the soft flesh of her thighs and her forearms. I had never seen her with so little clothing. Her body was not only tender and almost childishly graceful; it was so appealing that it was physically painful for me to survey it without being able to touch it, and I shrank down into the water.

  “Why?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything.” I reached up and took hold of her ankle. It was so fine that my thumb and forefinger nearly girdled it, and it seemed to me that I could feel every little interlocking bone as she flexed it in an instinctive frightened withdrawal. “Do you know what I’d be doing now if there was no one in the pool but us?”

  Teddy giggled. “There’d still be those people up in the balcony, looking down at us.”

  “I mean if we had the pool entirely to ourselves … I wouldn’t even start by kissing you. First I’d peel your suit off.”

  Her grin faded. She withdrew her foot from my grasp and pulled her knees up tight against her chest, hugging them as if she had taken a sudden chill, or perhaps wanted to hide from me as much of herself as she could.

  “I’d pull you down here into the water, both of us naked,” I said desperately. “I’d hold you against me so we could feel every inch of each other. I’d run my hands up and down your back, and I’d—”

  “Listen,” she broke in nervously, “why don’t you come up here and sit next to me and we’ll talk about something else?”

  “Because I’m in such a st
ate I’m ashamed to get out of the water, that’s why. Now are you satisfied?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Well, if you don’t you’re even more childish than I thought.”

  At that she colored all the way down to the base of her throat. She turned her head swiftly, anxiously, to either side, as if to make sure that the handful of Saturday-night swimmers, mostly older women, could not overhear us.

  “Please don’t be angry with me,” she said. She released her hold on her legs and leaned forward so that she could speak softly, confidentially. The front of her shapeless gray tank suit fell away from her chest, and I found myself gazing raptly into the shadow between her small breasts. She spoke so eagerly that she disregarded my gaze. “If you could get those urges satisfied elsewhere—I mean with some other girls, some other kind of girls—then you and I could just have fun like we did today. Couldn’t we?”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No, no, I’m not. Not really. I mean, if you wanted it like that—” she sucked in her breath and laughed jaggedly—“maybe I could find a girl who would—you know—do those other things for you. Then you could get off that one track you’re always on with me.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. All I could think of to say was, “Here I’m telling you that you’re adorable, that it’s you I want and not some stranger, but nothing registers. It’s obvious that you don’t care about me, or you wouldn’t say such fantastic things.”

  “No,” Teddy muttered, not looking at me, “it’s you who don’t care for me. Do you think, if you loved me, that we’d—” She broke off with a quick shudder. The little golden hairs were standing upright on her arms and legs. “See,” she said sadly, “I’m all goose pimples. I’m going to take a hot shower. We’ve done enough for one day, haven’t we?”