NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  The building, so I was told by two forestry students who’d roomed there the year before as well, had been willed to Harold Bangs by his mother. What was more, he got a monthly pension (I saw that, too, in the front hall) for almost total disability—he had been gassed in the war. Apparently Harold figured that the house and the check for his lungs were sufficient contribution on his part, and that if his wife wanted to eat regularly it was up to her to put in a fifteen-hour day in the rooming house. But I hardly set eyes on the man, who was as indifferent to my existence as he was to the ten other roomers barracked over his head—until the day early in October that two of my literary efforts came back from Story Magazine in the very same mail.

  All the winey fragrance of the autumn afternoon leaked away as I dropped my load of library books to the oak table and stared miserably at the creased manila envelopes that bore my name and address in my own handwriting. There was no need to open them. I knew their message by heart: Dear Contributor, This alas is a rejection slip. And heaven knows the editors have had their share… You’re no good, you’re no good, the two envelopes shouted at me. Yes, you are, yes, you are, screamed the defiant starlings, black, bold and unrepentant in the courtyard elm that grew all the way up past my attic window.

  I closed the front door behind me and picked up my books and rejected stories, clenching for the long climb up the dark rubber-treaded stairs to my solitary room. Suddenly a voice called out to me from Mrs. Bangs’s quarters.

  “Hey, Tommy.”

  Mrs. Bangs never addressed me by anything other than my last name—after all, it was I who paid her once a week, and I whose room she dusted and swept. But this was a man’s voice, thin and twangy, coming from beyond the end of the hallway, where I had never ventured, from the dining room, whose sliding doors stood somewhat ajar.

  “Come on in.”

  Harold Bangs was sitting in a pool of light at the far end of the round mahogany dining-room table, before an old L. C. Smith office typewriter with a metal circle of keys, the kind of machine that you used to see in pawnshop windows wedged between banjos and golf clubs. He was a long-limbed, lank-jawed man in his middle years, with protruding shoulder blades that pushed out the back of his shirt like hidden wings, and swollen knuckles that he must have cracked a million times, sitting humped over the typewriter. He wore black garters above the elbows to hike up his shirt sleeves past wrists that looked as though they connected his hands to his arms not with bones but with twisted cotter pins. The shirt itself had no collar—I thought they’d stopped making them years before. His skinny shanks were crossed, exposing bare skin, hairless and white as bird droppings. He wore no socks under his plaid carpet slippers.

  Although it was bright daylight, the bile-green shades on the dining-room windows were drawn down so far that their wooden spring rollers were revealed. As I approached, he squinted at me across the goose-neck lamp with shrewd frankness. Or at least frankness was the impression he seemed to want to convey; actually, I thought, he looked fanatically self-assured, like an evangelist, although of course I had no way of knowing why or to what end.

  “So you scribble too,” he said, sizing me up with his ice-blue myopic eyes.

  My temper shifted at once from depression to fury. I detested that word; besides, who did he think he was to couple us like that? But, since I could not think how to express any of this without sounding impossibly snobbish, I said nothing, but tried unsuccessfully to glare as I advanced into the circle of light cast by the student lamp, exactly like those with which all the other rooms in the house were furnished. It was now that I observed that his face and neck were covered with a week’s growth of graying stubble which further hollowed his already cadaverous cheeks and made him look toothless, when in fact he was equipped with a garish set of store teeth that intensified the fixed insincerity of his welcoming smile. It was only later that I learned that the teeth were a gift from the Veterans Administration, just as I was to learn, from continuous observation, that Harold was one of those rare birds, like Gabby Hayes, the old cowpoke in the Hopalong Cassidy movies, who was never clean-shaven and never bearded but somehow managed to maintain a continuous seedy stubble.

  “This is where I work,” he said. “Right now I’m knocking out an adventure yarn about two prospectors in the Andes. Going to try it on the Post and then on the men’s mags.”

  Still I could find nothing to say. Around the typewriter the dining-room table was piled high with copy paper, manuscripts, carbons, envelopes, and back numbers of the Writer’s Guide and the Information Please Almanac. Over everything hung the foul odor of dead cigarette butts, thousands of them, heaped in dime-store glass ashtrays which had surely not been emptied since his last shave; obviously Mrs. Bangs, always moving through the upper floors with dust mop and toilet brush, was not allowed in this sanctum.

  “Tell me straight,” Harold demanded. “How does Story treat you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Do they give you a prompt reading? I haven’t tried to crack that market yet.” He laughed hollowly, coughed, and spat out a crumb of tobacco. “Not that I’ve got anything against them. It’s just that, according to the Yearbook payment scale, they’re pretty far down on the old totem pole.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t had anything from them but rejections. Form rejections. They return my stories pretty fast, but that’s no help.”

  “Sure it is.” Harold cracked open a carton of Wings, pulled out a fresh pack, and offered me a cigarette. “You should keep a tally of your submissions, like I do.” Between us lay an open notebook whose pages were ruled off in columns headed TITLE, DATE SENT, POSTAGE SPENT.

  My head was spinning. “I haven’t thought much about anything that systematic.”

  “But you should! Aren’t you a serious writer?”

  “I think I am,” I said. I thought I was the most serious writer in Ann Arbor. “That is, I’m trying to write about serious things.”

  “Who isn’t? I had a feeling, even before I saw your manuscripts in today’s mail. When I heard you pounding your machine up in the attic night after night, I knew you weren’t just doing term papers. It’s too early in the semester,” he added, shifting the wet cigarette with his tongue, “for that much schoolwork. I been running a rooming house long enough to know that.”

  I could feel my face reddening. “I hope the noise hasn’t bothered you or Mrs. Bangs.”

  “The missus turns in early, right after Lowell Thomas and ‘The Shadow.’ Me, I put in a long day. Fourteen, fifteen hours at the machine is nothing for me. Nobody knows what’s involved except another writer, right? Working out plots and outlines, making copies, studying your markets—there’s no easy road to riches for us guys. It’s a very time-consuming business.”

  By now I had edged back to the sliding doors. “If you’ll excuse me,” I said, “I’d better get back up there and start scratching away again, Mr.—”

  “Call me Harold, Tommy. That’s the spirit. Don’t let those rejections get you down—I’ve got drawers full. And, say,” he called after me, “any time you want me to read over some of your stuff, don’t hesitate.”

  I fled.

  But that was to be only the first of many such encounters, although I never took him up on his offer. Harold got to know my class schedule, and approximately when I would be returning to the house to drop off books, or change clothes, or do some writing; and all too often at those times he would leave the dining-room doors ajar in order to entrap me.

  Just as Mrs. Bangs seemed always to want to wish herself out of my way, blushing when she collided with me as I shuffled out of the toilet in the morning and shrinking against the wall when I clattered down the stairs in the evening, Harold, seemingly nailed to his squealing swivel chair before the L. C. Smith, sought out excuses to lure me into his den. I never saw the two of them together—it was like those mystery movies where you discover that the real reason is because they are both one and the same person, a
master at disguise and a master at crime. Except that Harold and Mrs. Bangs loomed larger in my life than did Lon Chaney or Boris Karloff.

  Harold, I found out, wasn’t all that eager to read my stuff. What he did want was for me to read his, and more than that to reassure him by my camaraderie that we were both members of a very special fraternity.

  “I invested a lot of time on fillers,” he informed me one day.“Fillers, jokes and funny coincidences. Matter of fact, I even hit ‘Keeping Posted’ one time. Not bad, hey? That’s the top of the market, you got millions of readers going for you there. But you’re dead unless you can concentrate on that exclusively. It doesn’t pay, Tommy, take my word for it.”

  He lit one cigarette from the end of another, and dropped the short one in the butt cemetery without bothering to stub it out. No wonder the room stank.

  “Besides, I think my forte is in yarns. I’ve got a tale of the sea here, about two brothers, Alaska salmon fishermen, with a powerful story line and strong romantic interest. So far I’ve had fourteen turn-downs, all printed, not one personal note. It beats me. Want to take a look at it and tell me your honest opinion?”

  I put it off as long as possible, and finally came back with some miserable half-assed corrections of his typing and spelling (even when I am an old man I will remember with sour satisfaction that Harold Bangs wrote “wearwithal” and “medeival” and “irregardless”), but I could not bring myself to discuss his plot, which was incredible even if you accepted its premise—that a New York society girl would go to Ketchikan in search of adventure. Or its characters, high-flown on one page and mealy-mouthed on the next.

  All I did say was “Harold, when were you in Alaska?”

  “Never. But I got it down pretty good, didn’t I?”

  “Why don’t you write about something you know, like the world war?”

  Harold cracked his knuckles. “Tommy, I knocked out fifteen Flying Aces yarns—they’re all in that corner.” He gestured with a blackened fingernail. “Dogfights between Spads and Fokkers, Jennys and Messerschmidts, I wrote them all and never hit once.”

  “I didn’t know you were in the Air Corps.”

  “I wasn’t. I was a plain old doughboy—that’s how I got gassed. But nobody wants to read about the Argonne woods any more. You got to know your readers and your markets.”

  Harold shifted his bony frame in the swivel chair and drew back his lips, showing me not only those store teeth white as his shanks, but his pale-pink gums as well. “You like to think you’re sitting up there and writing for posterity. But first you got to get published, right? You know what James Joyce went through with his stories? Here, take this copy of Writer’s Digest and see what the editors of Blue Book have to say.”

  The worst of it was that when he gave me something to read I was under obligation to return it and so start a whole new round of conversations. Once I tried to outsmart him by leaving the magazine on the mail table in the hall with a note of thanks. All that happened was that next time I passed, Harold called out, “Hey, Tommy, you don’t have to stand on ceremony, I’m always here. And you don’t have to worry about interrupting me. I can always pick up where I left off.”

  All through that autumn I lived half in anticipation, half in dread of those sessions in Harold’s den. Businesslike and implacable, he went on writing his unpublishable yarns about lean, silent adventures and red-lipped maidens on the Amazon or the Yangtze, and I struggled on too with my unpublishable college romances that make me cringe when I recall their ineptitude. Night after night I heard his typewriter, and he reassured me that the sound of mine was music to his ears.

  Finally it got to be too much for me. Not the writing, but Harold’s belief that he and I were engaged in the same kind of enterprise. The more I heard his machine, knowing that when it stopped he would seek me out for what he called “shop talk,” the more it graveled me. And so, because I was constrained to leave the rooming house and find another place to write, I regard it as Harold’s doing that I went out and fell in love.

  The closest campus building to my rooming house was the old music school, which I had had no reason to visit before. Now as I wandered through its seedy corridors in search of a quiet corner where I could write undisturbed, I was charmed by the mishmash of sounds that filtered out to the hallway—fiddles tuning up like cats in pain, cellos clearing their throats, clarinets showing off, sopranos trilling loudly as if terrorized—sounds that happily bore no relation to my work.

  I chose an empty practice room, slipped into a chair with a writing arm in front of the piano, and was deep in my work when a girl walked in and said, “I’m sorry, but I signed up for this room for this period.” She didn’t sound at all sorry.

  “You want to practice?” I asked. I was a little stupid not just from surprise, but because she was an excitingly attractive girl, downy, dark and snapping-eyed.

  “It’s not just that I want to,” she explained, zipping open her briefcase and placing a Czerny volume on the piano rack. “I have to.”

  I persuaded as hard as I could, and finally succeeded in getting her to let me stay on and work while she did her exercises. Elaine was intrigued with my having selected such an unlikely place in which to write. At four-thirty, when she had finished her stint, I walked her to her dorm; then we had dinner together and walked the streets, telling each other about ourselves, until eleven o’clock. The next morning we met for breakfast, and in two days we were in love.

  Now we did together what before we had done alone. We embraced on a bench late at night at the edge of town, and I read Yeats aloud to her by the light of the street lamp. Because I had given her The Tower, Elaine attuned me to the passions of the Schubert Trios in the record room of the Women’s League. We arose early, anxious to come together, and met at dawn where we could hitch a ride from the milk wagon, breakfasting as we clattered along on a sackful of jelly doughnuts and a container of milk sold us by the driver. We walked, walked, walked, alongside the Huron River, through the Arboretum, past the stadium and on out into the country, on the railroad tracks, under viaducts, across golf courses and meadows, stealing pumpkins and, back in town, scuffling through heaps of leaves piled up for burning.

  The happy surprise was not only that I was loved (although I could not stop wondering that I, I of all unlikely people, should cause such a girl’s face to come alive when she caught sight of me) but that I could still do all I had before, and more. My school-work flourished, and I found that, sitting alongside Elaine while she frowned over her scores, I was writing more fluently than ever before.

  As winter came on, though, Elaine and I were driven from our meadows, lakeside paths and park benches, and we grew to detest the icy ivy wall of her dormitory, where we ended our days at one o’clock on a Sunday morning clinging not alone but in concert with rows of other gasping, groping, miserable couples. It was then that I began to realize how much more bold and resourceful than I this seemingly fragile girl was; and it was disconcerting to have to admit to myself that worship and awe were not enough, that I simply did not understand women in general and Elaine in particular. I could not reconcile her delicate frame, her narrow bones, and the way she fitted into the circle of my arms, with her cool determination that we find a way to be alone together. She was only nineteen and had been too busy with her music to run around much with boys, but her eagerness for absolute intimacy gave me the uneasy feeling that she must already have had a string of lovers as long as my arm.

  A premonitory shudder went through me, and not just because of the danger involved. But the inflaming vision of the two of us alone together in the darkness, warm, safe, locked in a fast embrace, overwhelmed the compunctions of inexperience. I had already told Elaine all about my rooming house, about the fellows on the second floor who knew that I was trying to write undisturbed and never came up to the attic without knocking, about Mrs. Bangs, who always turned in early. And about Harold, always tapping out his yarns at the dining-room table and leaving
the sliding doors ajar so that he could collar me for shop talk.

  “It’s perfectly obvious,” Elaine said coolly, “that if you don’t want me to slip in behind you and go on up while you engage him in conversation, you’ll have to put it to him man to man and see if he’ll help us.”

  Man to man! Even the wicked glance with which she accompanied that cliché could not quite remove the curse from it. Still, it was worth trying to win Harold’s support, considering that his wife was a devout Methodist Episcopalian, much involved with the Epworth League when she was not mopping or scrubbing. So, after all those weeks of avoiding him, one day I brought Harold his mail.

  He had been wondering, he said, why he hadn’t seen me lately and hadn’t even heard my portable clacking away. Was I in a dry spell? He had never had that trouble himself, but he did have a book about writers’ block, put aside for such an eventuality.

  No, I assured him, it was just that I had taught myself to write long-hand. “The reason is,” I wound up, with none of the dash of Robert Montgomery or Melvyn Douglas, “I’ve got a girl.”

  Harold cracked his knuckles and scratched speculatively at his stubble, then flicked a kitchen match across his gritty blackened thumbnail to touch flame to the damp butt that hung from the corner of his mouth. He was not the sort to get his kicks from prying into others’ sex lives. “Well,” he opined, releasing smoke through his nostrils, “as long as it doesn’t interfere with your work.”

  I hastened to reassure him. And I went on, with a glibness that surprised me, to tell Harold how Elaine had inspired me, and how well we worked together, and what a shame it was that she couldn’t keep me company in my room while I typed just as I did her while she practiced her scales and sonatas.

  Without changing expression, as though he hadn’t been listening, or simply wanted to change the subject, Harold mumbled, “The missus has got an Epworth League meeting this Saturday night, right after supper. Myself, I’ll take advantage of the peace and quiet to lock myself in here and get some typing done.”