NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  I did get a rather haphazard tourist’s view of New York in the days that followed—waiting in line with the other out-of-towners on Sixth Avenue to see a Marlene Dietrich movie about the Russian Revolution at Radio City Music Hall, riding the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building to peer down at the tiny pedestrians who might be Uncle Al or Uncle Eddie (“from up here your uncles look like ants”)—but what entered deep into my being was a sense of the variety and richness of possibility in the city, a sense of how one could, if one only wished, enter any of a number of communities, each as unique as the single one in the small town I had left behind.

  Uncle Dan did this for me, and without even realizing it. All he knew was that it might be fun for me to tag along with him for a while. It never occurred to him that just by exposing me to his daily round, which to him was not particularly exciting but pleasant enough so that he had no deep incentive to change it, he was presenting me with motives for persisting in this confounding, fascinating world.

  If my father knew everyone who came into his store, everyone knew Uncle Dan when he stepped out onto the street. But there was a difference. On our way to his Buick, which he kept garaged a few blocks away, on Neptune Avenue—I cannot remember whether it was the first or the second day of my visit, for by now everything has blended into a generalized memory of that liberating week, as if the revolution I was experiencing was far more than the sum of its insurrectionary incidents—we were suddenly stopped by a pleading woman.

  “Doctor, doctor!” she cried, gasping for breath, holding out her empty reddened hands as though she were extending something precious and hot, like a freshly baked cake. It occurred to me that if she had been carrying something, anything, even a little purse, in those swollen hands, she wouldn’t have looked so wild.

  “Let’s take it easy,” my uncle said. He addressed her by some Polish or Slavic name. “Is it your husband? Casper?”

  She nodded, trotting alongside us as we approached the car. “He beat up on Mrs. Polanyi. He knock her down, he try to kill her.”

  “I warned you it was going to happen, didn’t I?”

  “What I can do? I can send him away? How we going to eat?”

  “Well, now you’ll have to do it. No two ways.” He held open the front door of the car. “Hop in.”

  She shook her head vigorously. What was this? Why wouldn’t she get in? My heart thumping, I stared at the frightened woman, who stood there with her chest heaving, refusing to sit in the front seat.

  But Uncle Dan understood. With a sigh he yanked open the rear door. “OK, let’s not waste time.”

  She crawled into the back, and as I settled myself beside my uncle, he muttered, “She thinks it’s not polite to sit up front next to the doctor. It’s a wonder she’ll ride with us at all.”

  In a few minutes we had pulled up in front of her house, a redbrick tenement indistinguishable from all the others on the block except for the crowd gathered before it. Uncle Dan leaned on the horn with one hand to clear the way as he reached back with the other for his satchel. “Come on, Clara,” he said to the woman, who had been crouched on the edge of the seat as if afraid that she might soil it, “we’ll go take care of Mrs. Polanyi. Charley boy, you keep an eye on the car.”

  I couldn’t just sit there on that baking Brooklyn street, not with the neighborhood kids staring at me. So I got out and thrust myself into the crowd.

  In its midst a girl of about my age, one of her twin braids half unwound, was crying against the bosom of a gray-haired woman.

  “What happened?” I asked boldly.

  A boy answered wisely, “It was her mother.” “Huh muddah” was the way he pronounced it, and it took me a second or two to understand. “The nut stomped on huh. He’s a real nut. You the doctor’s son?”

  Before I could answer, a thin-faced sallow man came out the front door and sauntered down the stoop, pausing only to light a cigarette with a wooden kitchen match. Although he was tieless, he wore a sharp striped suit with a grease stain big as a campaign button on his left lapel; his fly was open. The crowd moved off even while the flame of the match still flickered, before he blew it out. He came directly to me, placing his face so close to mine that I could see the pores on his fleshy nose, and fixed me with his very pale, almost colorless blue eyes. I had the feeling that he was looking through me, at something just behind my head, rather than at me.

  “You the doctor’s boy?”

  “I’m his nephew.” I heard mutters from the crowd, which had drifted back to either side of us.

  “He’s a great man. Man of science. You know science?”

  “Not much.”

  “It powers the world. You know science, you got hidden power. Mrs. Polanyi, she was tuned in. She was wired for sound. They send her messages against me. Man, she could have destroyed everybody. You know Mrs. Polanyi?”

  I shook my head wordlessly. I knew, suddenly, who he was, and what was wrong, but I was not frightened. I was simply curious and fascinated. After a few moments of odd disjointed talk my uncle tramped out in his heavy, solid way, lugging his satchel and blowing on a prescription blank. He beckoned to the crying girl.

  “Hey, Jeanette! Take this to Rudnicki’s drugstore and get it filled. Your mother’ll be all right—I’ll stop by tomorrow.” He winked at me as he shoved a fresh cigar into his mouth, then turned to the man who had been talking with me. “Casper, you got to go for a ride. You met my nephew already?”

  “Sure. He’s a smart one. Science, like you. It powers the world.” His pupils were the merest pinpoints; his jaws were clamped as if with a wrench; when he smiled it was like a dog baring his fangs.

  “Amen. Come on, Casper, let’s go. Here comes your wife.”

  Her handkerchief to her face, she stumbled down the steps and through the ranks of the curious.

  “I’m going to need you to sign the commitment papers, Clara.… Close that door, will you, Charley boy?”

  And we were off to the hospital, my uncle making easy talk with the wife, and me sitting beside the demented husband who had almost murdered a defenseless woman. It did not take long for him to be removed to the barred retreat where for all I know he still paces, hunting for the secret wires of science.

  After we had finally left his wife, in the charge of a sister, weeping in terror at the prospect of feeding her family without her husband’s wages, Uncle Dan took me into the precinct house, where he had to make out a report. Then we drove across the length of Coney Island, from the hump of Sea Gate, sticking out into Gravesend Bay, over to Brighton Beach, to that corner of it which encloses Sheepshead Bay, and there, on a street of bay-front cottages smelling not of traffic exhaust, dumbwaiters, and dark metallic elevators, but of clams, salt marshes, oakum, and rotting bait, I met a sword swallower.

  Mr. and Mrs. Alvarez might have been, superficially, customers of my father’s. She was a childless but motherly woman with the bosom of a pigeon, but her flashing eyes were those of an opera singer. When we arrived she was just removing a sheet of cookies from the oven. While her husband, who greeted us in his bathrobe with the Daily News dangling from his left fist, was squeezing my hand so hard that it brought tears to my eyes, Mrs. Alvarez was already pouring me a glass of milk and setting the cookies before me.

  She stood over me and stroked my hair while I ate and drank, saying, “You come from a nice part of the country, kiddo. Many’s the time Alfredo and I played the fairground circuit all in through there.”

  “What did you do?”

  She laughed, her bosom shaking. “You wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I used to be a bareback rider. Since I got too heavy, we settled here, and Al works the shows on the island.”

  Her husband, the examination of his throat and chest completed, returned to the kitchen from the bedroom without bothering to throw his robe over his undershirt and trousers. I was impressed by his shoulders, which were embroidered like tapestry with writhing tattooed dragons, their tails looping up around hi
s wiry corded neck.

  “How you like it here, kid?” he demanded.

  “I like it fine.”

  “Doc says I’m going to live for a while,” he announced to his wife and to me.

  “Not if you don’t change jobs,” my uncle grunted, but that seemed to make no particular impression. Mr. Alvarez stepped jerkily to the closet and fetched out a long package, a broom handle maybe, wrapped in flannel.

  “You didn’t take the boy to the sideshow yet, did you, Doc?”

  Uncle Dan shook his head. “Give us a chance. He hasn’t even been to Bedloe’s Island yet, to the Statue of Liberty.”

  “Aw, the Statue of Liberty. Let me show you something, kid.” He unwrapped the flannel with a flourish and exposed a glittering sword, wonderfully filigreed all along the blade.

  Before any of us could say a word Mr. Alvarez snapped to attention as though he were presenting arms at court, then raised his walnut-brown sinewy arms and brought the point of the sword to his lips. He bent his grizzled head back farther than I had ever seen anyone do and slipped the sword into his open mouth and down his gullet, inch by inch, then foot by foot. You could actually see it going down from the outside, his bare neck working and swelling as it contained the cold steel.

  Mrs. Alvarez sat at the kitchen table, placid and proud. “Pretty good, huh? Here, take along some cookies in wax paper. You’ll get hungry later.”

  Mr. Alvarez brought up the sword as deliberately and delicately as he had slid it down, clicked his heels, and bowed. “You get the point?” he asked, and laughed with a hoarse bark.

  “That’s the most amazing thing I ever saw,” I said honestly.

  “I can do that with almost any type sword. Except one that’s too curved, like a scimitar.” Skimitar, he pronounced it. “I can do it with a rapier, even with a saber. You got to keep a straight passage, see, the head has got to be straight back. It’s all in the head, am I right or wrong, Doc?”

  Mr. Alvarez gave me the sword to examine. “You come to the show, kid, and you’ll be able to see right through me. I swallow an electrified sword, it’s got little bulbs on it. I stand in front of a black curtain and you can see the bulbs inside me just like my backbone was lit up.”

  He was chuckling all the way to the door. “See you in the freak show.”

  In the car my uncle sighed, his hands hanging over the steering wheel for a moment before he stepped on the starter. “Nice people, aren’t they?”

  “You bet.”

  “He’s got an ulcerated throat. It’s a precancerous condition, really. You can’t go on insulting the body indefinitely, Charley boy. But his wife can’t work anymore, and he doesn’t know how to do anything else. Well, I thought you’d enjoy meeting them.”

  We did visit the freak show a few nights later. I gaped at the tattooed lady’s bluish hide, blurred like an old map, and stared in uncomfortable awe at the seminude form of the half man, half woman, not wholly convinced by Uncle Dan’s explanation of glandular pathology. My parents would never have taken me there, either as a favor or an object lesson, and I did not dare to ask Uncle Dan what he had in mind, if anything, besides entertainment.

  The Fat Lady was off that night because of a toothache. But since she too was a patient of Uncle Dan’s, next morning I found myself riding with her and my uncle in an old panel truck from her flat in Brighton over to the dentist’s, on Linden Boulevard in Flatbush. Uncle Dan and I sat in front with the driver, her brother-in-law, who was all business; Smiling Sally herself was spread out, like some giant growth, all over a plank fixed to the bed of the truck for her. From time to time a groan would issue from that vast heap of flesh, and her massive arm would rise slowly, alarmingly, reaching out to my uncle for comfort.

  Uncle Dan was to give her the anesthetic, but before the extraction we had to get her into the office of his colleague, Dr. Otto Reinitz, whose first-floor office fortunately had French windows. No sooner had we begun preparations to transport Sally through the window to the dentist than the envious neighborhood kids began to gather, picking their noses and pointing at the groaning circus queen.

  First we had to rig up a kind of staging with a block and tackle, like the bos’n’s chair used by sign painters, and then, supervised by her sweating but experienced brother-in-law, we hoisted unsmiling Sally aboard and on into the office of the waiting Dr. Reinitz, a skinny man with an eyeshade and the biggest Adam’s apple I had ever seen. We pushed the sofa from the waiting room into the office so that Sally could recline on it within reach of the dentist’s forceps.

  When the job was done and Sally came back to life, she became a person for me. I had no idea how old she was, maybe twenty-five, maybe forty-five, but beneath all of that fat there beat the heart of a flirt. She smiled winsomely, bravely making light of her pain, she looked sidelong at me, she squeezed my hand.

  “That’s some assistant, Doc,” she said to my uncle. “A regaleh doll. How old are you, sonny? Old enough for the girls?”

  I knew the answer to the first question, if not to the second, and she rewarded me with an inscribed postcard photo in a glassine envelope, displaying her in a grotesque tentlike puffed-sleeve party dress, bobby socks, and Mary Janes, which she took from the purse that dangled like a toy doll’s from the rings of flesh at her wrist. SMILING SALLY, 649 LBS. OF JOLLITY, it said.

  “I get a quarter for these at the freak show,” she told me. “For you, nothing. Someday you’ll grow up to be a big doctor like your uncle.”

  That morning, I thought maybe I would. There were others my uncle attended whose lives had also been tarnished, some in ways I would not dare to mention when I returned home. In Greenpoint, just across the East River from Lower Manhattan, on Noble Street (the name has stuck in my mind), I waited in a candy store while Uncle Dan administered sedation in the flat upstairs to a screaming woman whose son’s body had just been brought back from Red Hook, where rival mobsters had put three bullets in the back of his head. From there we drove in silence, around the Navy Yard, over to a portion of Sands Street which no longer even exists, teetering shacks aswarm with prostitutes.

  I waited in the car, my face on fire, trying not to stare back at the bored, gum-chewing girls waving at me from behind lace-curtained windows. When my uncle came out, he tossed his satchel on the back seat and gave my bony shoulder a squeeze.

  “The more trouble I see,” he said, “the hungrier I get. Let’s grab a bite in Borough Hall before I get stuck with my office hours.”

  He had to file some papers and pick up vaccines in downtown Brooklyn too, so we parked on Montague Street and had a businessman’s lunch in a real bar, where I watched salesmen matching each other for drinks by rolling dice from a cup.

  “Nothing like that in Dunkirk,” I assured my uncle.

  “Charley boy,” he laughed, “you could say the same thing about Sands Street, in spades.”

  On the way back to the car, cutting across the open square in front of Borough Hall, we came upon a circle of lunch-hour loungers listening to a sidewalk speaker. I thought at first that he was selling razor blades or carrot slicers, the kind of pitchman that my father always referred to as cheap, cutthroat competition, but then as I pushed my way through I saw that he was black, and that he displayed nothing but a stick of yellow chalk.

  He was a skinny, solemn man, conservatively dressed, but with eyes bulbous and roving like those of a rearing stallion. The bony, imperious hand that held the chalk slid occasionally to his mouth to wipe the spittle from his lips.

  “Ich bin a shvartser id!” he cried.

  Out of the corner of his mouth Uncle Dan explained, “He’s telling them he’s a black Jew.”

  “I do not preach the New Testament,” the orator shouted in English. “Let us speak only of the wonders concealed in the Old. Let us confine ourselves only to the Pentateuch. Those of you who paid attention in heder will recall where it says …” and he lapsed into Hebrew.

  His accent brought grins from the crowd; but sudd
enly he squatted and began to print characters on the street, in the space before us. His calligraphy, stark and sharp and yellow, stood out on the black street like the brilliant mysterious border of an Oriental rug. Drawing with nervous rapidity, he continued to scream at us as he stooped over his chalk, lecturing in English, quoting in Hebrew. Swiftly a pattern emerged as he whirled and twisted on his haunches: The mysterious phrases intersected at their center to form—“Inevitably!” he cried out, enraptured, the sweat of persuasion dripping down his cheeks—a cross.

  “What I tell you?” a tubby man beside me demanded of his companion. “He’s a meshummad, like I said.”

  “To be a meshummad, you got to be a Jew to start out. Otherwise, how can you change over? Nah, he’s a missionary, an agitator. He comes downtown to convert.”

  Some of the crowd were muttering angrily, others turning their backs in disgust, a few (like Uncle Dan) chuckling, as the black orator called after us, flailing his long arms, white cuffs dangling over his wrists, “It is written in our own Book! We must admit the Christ to our hearts!”

  And in the course of that week I saw signs and portents, cabalic symbols chalked on the city streets and tattooed on the shoulders of beings who ate cold steel; I rode with lunatics, moved from murderers to fallen women, accepted an inscribed photo from the fattest woman in the world, and one morning Van Mungo, the great Dodger pitcher, my hero long before I had come to Brooklyn, and my uncle’s friend, rumpled my hair and autographed a baseball for me to take home, where I could varnish it to protect his signature and display it to the doubters of Dunkirk.