NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (30 page)

“That’s cruel! How could you say anything so cruel?”

The music had stopped. But Peter could not have danced any more even if Gainsborough had continued playing, because the elderly man and the policeman were closing in on him. He took a step forward on the granite ledge and looked up at the heavens, at the sky, last free space in all the world.

Two airplanes were gamboling through the cool blue air, swooping and darting as gaily as two young birds. But then Peter saw that they were not merely frisking; they were engaged in a hawklike duel to the death, streaming trails of white spume as they ferociously intertwined the words PEPSI COLA and IJ Fox in a frenzied tangle of melting loops of smoke.

Peter silently asked forgiveness of his parents, of all the people he had met, and of the crowd waiting tensely for his next movement. Then he opened his arms and dove slowly through space, his hair streaming back in the summer sky, his eyes flashing silver tears, as the stone curtain of the sidewalk rose triumphantly on his final dance.

A STORY FOR TEDDY

W
hat is it that drives us to consider the girls of our youth, those we enjoyed for a day or a month, those whose scruples we strove and strained to overcome, those who scorned us, those who fled? I am not sure, since even the easy nostalgia arising from the memory of success must give way to other emotions when defeats and not victories come to mind. In the case of Teddy, it was an accident, a typically New York accident, which brought her back to me not long ago, but it is only as a result of my own deliberate life as a writer, and the painful, endless effort to understand, that she has come back with such clarity that I can close my eyes now and see not merely as much but more than I saw twenty years ago.

When I try to recall how I first came to know Teddy, I think back to a double date early in the war, arranged by an acquaintance. Teddy was his date, but my own I cannot visualize in any way—she was surely one of those girls who sit near the telephone, waiting to be fixed up by an attractive cousin. Teddy must have been that cousin. Within an hour of our having met, while the other two danced (we were in some collegiate hangout in Yorkville), I was urging her to go out with me.

Teddy colored. With her fingertips she pushed her ginger ale glass toward my bourbon glass. “You’re pretty fast.”

“I have to be.”

Teddy was not very strong on repartee, and I fancied that I was ruthless. She was just eighteen, went to college at night, was taking courses in child psychology, and worked by day as a steno for some agency that helped soldiers’ families, like Travelers Aid. She lived with her little brother and their widowed mother in an
apartment house in a remote fastness of the Bronx. All that mattered to me was that she was lovely.

As for me, I was twenty-three and terribly world-weary. I had worked as a copy boy on the old New York
Sun
the year between college and the Merchant Marine, long enough to learn my way around town. I had only three months before finishing boot camp and shipping out, and I was anxious to waste as little time as possible.

Teddy was not sharp and competitive, like the girls I had known at Ohio State and around Manhattan. She was simple, unambitious, and vulnerable. She made no pretense of being smart or well read, but she was gentle and modest and virginal, and utterly unsophisticated—you might have thought she was the one from Ashtabula instead of me. Her skin was clean and glowing, her blond hair tumbled over her forehead, her lavender eyes were soft and troubled.

I picked up her small, defenseless hand, ostensibly so that I could admire her charm bracelet, from which dangled a little Scottie and a windmill with revolving sails; she had gotten it from her father for her fourteenth birthday. Squeezing her still childish fingers, I said, with a self-pity that was realer than she could imagine, “I’ve only got my weekends—and not too many of them—before I ship out. Won’t you meet me next Saturday? In the afternoon, as soon as I can get in? Say at two-thirty, under the clock at the Biltmore?”

All that week I thought about Teddy. In the clapboard barracks where, like college boys all over America, I was learning with a thrill of despair that my fellow citizens from farm and factory were foul-mouthed, ignorant, and bigoted, it was difficult enough to remember that girls like Teddy still existed. Teddy, snub-nosed and sincere, in awe of me because I came from out of town and had hitchhiked to California and back, and eager to help me forget that hell-hole where I alternately sweated and froze; such a girl took on the proportions of a prize, one I had been awarded without even being fully eligible.

When I pushed my way into the Biltmore lobby through the swirling Saturday crowds, I was struck speechless at the sight of Teddy, already waiting for me. Not only was she unaware that she
had breached the code by arriving early, but she did not even seem to notice how she was being sized up by a group of nudging sailors. She was nervous, yes, but only—I could tell—because she was looking for me. The tip of her blunt little nose was pinker than her cheeks, and she dabbed at it with a handkerchief that she took from the pocket of her fur-trimmed plaid coat as she squinted this way and that, searching for me. I realized for the first time that she was nearsighted.

I hung back for just a moment, then stepped forward and called out her name.

With a glad cry she hastened toward me. “I was afraid I might have missed you in all this crowd.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t show up at all.”

“Silly.” This was a word Teddy used often. But she was pleased, and as she pressed my arm I could smell her perfume, light and girlish. “What are we going to do?”

I wanted to show her off. Outside, I led her over to Fifth Avenue, then north, and we paused now and then in the faltering late-October sunlight to look in the shop windows. With Teddy at my side I felt once again a part of the life of the city, secure for the moment at least, as I had not felt wandering forlornly with my false liberty, or hanging, miserable, around the battered ping-pong tables of the USO, waiting for nothing.

At 53rd Street we headed west and stopped at the Museum of Modern Art. The bulletin board announced an old Garbo movie. I turned to Teddy.

“We’re just in time for the three-o’clock showing.”

“Don’t you have to be a member or something?” Teddy looked at me uneasily.

I was still learning how provincial some of these New York girls could be. I led Teddy through the revolving glass doors and took unhesitating advantage of my uniform to get us two tickets; skirting the crowd waiting for the elevator, we skipped down the stairs to the auditorium.

The movie was
The Story of Gösta Berling
. I remember very little about it other than the astonishingly plump whiteness of the youthful Garbo’s arms, for I was burningly aware of Teddy’s forearm alongside mine. After a while I took her hand and held it
through the picture. As our body warmth flowed back and forth, coursing between us like some underground hot spring, I peered covertly at her. She was staring intently—too intently—at the screen; and I knew, as I knew the thud of my own pulse in my ears, that I would never be content with simply sitting at her side. I would have to possess her. Somewhere near the end of the movie, reasonably certain that no one would be observing us, I raised her hand to my mouth, palm up, and pressed it full against my lips. At that she turned her head and gazed at me tremulously.

“You mustn’t,” she whispered.

She meant the contrary, I was positive. Giddily, I allowed her to retrieve her hand, and when the picture ended I slipped her coat over her shoulders and led her up the stairs to the main gallery.

“I’ll show you my favorite picture here,” I said. We stood before the big canvas that used to be everybody’s favorite in those old days before everybody went totally abstract. It was by Tchelitchew, it was called
Hide and Seek
, and it’s too bad it didn’t get burned up in the fire they had not long ago. It consisted mostly of an enormous, thickly foliated tree, like an old oak, aswarm with embryolike little figures, some partly hidden, some revealed, some forming part of the tree itself.

Teddy appraised it carefully. Finally she said, “You know what it reminds me of? Those contests I used to enter. Find seven mystery faces hidden in the drawing and win a Pierce bicycle.”

I was nettled. “Did you win?”

“Sure. But instead of giving me the girl’s twenty-six-inch bike, they’d send me huge boxes of Christmas cards to sell.”

By the time Teddy and I were walking south on Lexington, with the wind comfortably at our backs, we had exchanged considerable information about our childhoods, none of hers important enough for me to recall now except that her father had dropped dead in the street during his lunch hour, in the garment center, two years earlier.

“Where are we going?” she asked, clinging to my arm.

“I thought we’d eat in an Armenian restaurant. Unless you don’t care for Armenian food.”

“I never tasted it. Not that I know of.”

No other girl that I knew would have admitted it. Not in that
way. We hastened to 28th Street, to a basement restaurant with candlelit tables and a motherly proprietress.

I thought I was doing not badly at all. Over the steaming glasses of tea and the nutty baklava Teddy’s eyes glowed, and she held my hand tightly on the crumpled linen cloth. Her face was still unformed, but I observed, for the first time, that her cheekbones slanted, almost sharply, beneath the soft freshness of her delicate skin, and in the shadow cast by the uncertain candle there was a suggestion of a cleft in her chin. I couldn’t wait to be alone with her, and I judged that the time had come for me to tell her about my friends in the Village who sometimes loaned me their little apartment for my weekend liberties, as they had this weekend.

“Phil is in four-F with a hernia, but he’s nervous about being reclassified, so he’s been trying to line up a Navy commission in Washington. Charlene—that’s his wife—just found out she can’t have children. She’s planning to start her own nursery school in Washington if Phil gets into Navy Intelligence.”

“If they’re your friends,” Teddy said gravely, “they must be nice.”

I winced for her. Now I know a little better; don’t we all flatter ourselves by thinking that way of our friends, when all too often it is simply not true? Phil was not nice; he was a climber. His ambition, combined with his terror of death, drove him to get that commission.

But to Teddy I explained, earnestly and wholeheartedly, “Phil is an anthropologist, and Charlene paints. They’ve been to Mexico, and their place is full of things like beaten silver masks and temple fragments.”

“It sounds lovely.”

“Let’s go. It’s not far—just down on Jane Street.”

Teddy was not quick, but she was not stupid either. “Will there be anyone there?”

I knew at once that I had moved too fast. And lying could only make things worse. “They probably won’t be back from Washington before tomorrow.”

“In that case I think I’d better not.” Teddy flushed, and forced herself to look at me. “You’re not angry, are you?”

“I wasn’t planning on assaulting you,” I said, trying hard not to sound sullen. “I mean, the place isn’t an opium den.”

“I know. It’s just that I don’t think it would be a good idea.”

When we were out on the street once again, walking west into a fall rain as fine as spray from an atomizer, Teddy stopped suddenly before a darkened courtyard and looked up at me anxiously.

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I guess I’m just not very sophisticated about those things.”

Pressing her against the wrought-iron picket fence before which she stood, her head tilted, trying to catch some light in my eyes or across my face which would tell her what I was feeling, I folded her in my arms and kissed her for the first time.

I kissed her again, and a third time, and maybe I wouldn’t have been able to stop, but Teddy passed her hand across her forehead to brush back her damp hair and said, laughing somewhat shakily, “Don’t you know that it’s raining?”

So we went on to the Village Vanguard, and then to Romany Marie’s, where Teddy assured me, after she had had her fortune told, that this had been the loveliest evening she had ever spent. Like a dream, she said—the whole day had been like a dream.

At about two o’clock in the morning I offered to see her home. She insisted, as we stood arguing by the mountain of Sunday papers at the Sheridan Square newsstand, that she wouldn’t think of my riding the subway all the way up to the East Bronx for an hour and then all the way back for another hour. Not when I had to get up almost every morning at five-thirty, do calisthenics, and practice lowering lifeboats into the icy waters of Sheepshead Bay. I yielded, but not before I had gotten her promise that we would meet that afternoon at the Central Park Zoo, where she had to take her younger brother. I stood at the head of the subway stairs and watched, bemused, as she tripped down them, as lightly and swiftly as if she were still a child, hurrying so as not to be late for school.

At the zoo I found Teddy as easily as if we had been alone in that vast rectangle of rock and grass, instead of being surrounded as we were by thousands of Sunday strollers. She was standing in front
of the monkey cages with her younger brother, Stevie, a solemn-looking mouth-breather with glasses and the big behind that many boys acquire during the final years of childhood. She whirled about at my touch, her face already alight with pleasure.

“Did you sleep well, Teddy?”

“Like a baby. Such sweet dreams!” And she introduced me to her brother.

What he wanted was to attend a war-bond rally at Columbus Circle, where they were going to display a Jap Zero and a movie star. I think the star was Victor Mature; in any case, on the way to see him and the captured airplane I pulled Teddy aside and asked her if we couldn’t cut out for a couple of hours and run down to Phil’s apartment.

She stared at me. “Honestly, I think you have a one-track mind.”

“Phil and Charlene are in from Washington,” I explained hastily. “They’d like to meet you.”

“But I’m hardly even dressed to meet
you
!” In dismay she pointed to her loafers, her sweater and skirt, her trench coat, but I succeeded in persuading her.

While we stood in line to see the airplane, Teddy asked Stevie if he’d mind if we left him alone for a while. He barely heard her. He promised to wait for her through the Army Band concert, and we hurried off to the downtown bus. All the way to the Village Teddy kept me busy reassuring her that we wouldn’t be barging in where we weren’t wanted.

Phil’s place was strewn not only with the various sections of the Sunday
Times
but with a crowd of weary weekend loungers who hadn’t been there when I left that morning: an unmilitary Army officer and his hung-over girl friend, a dancer in blue jeans from the apartment across the hall who was studying the want ads while she picked at her bare toes, a nursery-school-teacher friend of Charlene’s who was arguing heatedly with her in the kitchen about child development. The radio on the bookcase was blasting away with the New York Philharmonic.