NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (37 page)

“That’s what you think.” Bobby showed his teeth.

“Wait,” I said. “I’m the one whose behavior is questioned.”

“I assure the gentleman …” the headwaiter muttered.

I stood up. “I’ll sit with whom I please and dance with whom I please.” At last. I felt virtuous.

“Don’t waste your breath on this joker,” Bobby said. “We’ll talk to the manager. Period.”

The headwaiter was trembling. “He will speak to you by the door.”

“Never mind that jive. If he can’t come here there’s only one place I’ll meet him, and that’s the kitchen.” Bobby put both hands on the table and stood erect. “Clear? Now shove off.”

Evan Jones shepherded the sisters, stunned by the abruptness of it all, away from our table and toward the kitchen, which opened off the lobby. He touched Bobby’s elbow. “None of us will enjoy prolonging this. Can’t we leave quietly? Why the kitchen?”

“Just let me do the talking.”

Head up, Bobby marched into the kitchen leading all of us, and the two waiters, as smartly as though he had earned his uniform at Annapolis. He paused at the great chopping block and allowed the headwaiter to scuttle before him with his funny crablike gait. There we found the manager, a fat Panamanian with an octagonal diamond that glittered on his little finger, and an eye both sad and greedy.

The manager extended his hand to Bobby and nodded gravely. “I’m afraid we have inconvenienced you.”

Bobby ignored the hand. “I bet this is the first time you ever had Gold and Silver dancing together on your floor.”

“You understand, to me it makes not a particle of difference.”

“Oh sure.”

“But we simply cannot afford to disrupt our guests.”

“Maybe we educated them a little tonight. But I’m not concerned about them.” Bobby raised his voice. “I’m concerned about my own people.”

He aimed his finger at Evan, at Maria, at Concepcion, at Juanita—and then at the kitchen help, the cooks, the pearl divers, the busboys, the waiters, the musicians, all dark-faced, all beginning to grin and whisper. Suddenly we had an audience of over a dozen; and it grew every second, as more waiters came through the swinging door and pressed against each other in order to see and hear. Then I knew what Bobby was up to.

“We proved tonight,” he said, “that if you are determined, you can do things that were never done before. We proved that you can be a man, if you really want to.” He snapped his fingers at our waiter, who stared at him openmouthed. “What do you think about it, man?”

“I guess that’s right.”

“You
guess
? Don’t you want to be a man before it’s too late, before you’re nothing but bones in a box? Black man can be just as much man as white man.”

“That’s right!” a voice called out.

“You tell them, Yankee man!” cried a squat black dishwasher in an ankle-length rubber apron, in accents as British as those of Evan Jones.

“All right, I’ll tell you,” Bobby shouted above every kitchen noise, above splattering faucets, clattering dishes, rattling silverware. He waved aside the enraged manager.

“I’ll tell you that I wouldn’t work in a place where my black brothers were insulted. I wouldn’t work where my black brothers weren’t served. I wouldn’t work—” he dropped his voice to a virtual whisper, now that he had us—“where I had to be the one to tell a black man or a black woman to sit in a corner.

“I know you’ve all got mouths to feed. But you can refuse to degrade yourself or your people. Right?”

“Right! Right, man, right!” They pronounced it
mahn, mahn
, but I knew what it meant.

They pressed on him from all sides to shake his hand, to clap him on the back, to touch his gold-ribboned arm, laughing and shouting with pride and delight. I found myself jammed against the great wooden door of the meat locker, with Evan and Maria squashed breathless against me, gasping and shining-eyed.

“You see?” Evan demanded. “You see? He’s champion, simply champion!”

I looked down into his little wife’s glowing eyes. Yes, I had to see. I looked across, beyond Bobby and his cheering admirers, to Juanita, who stared with silent adoration at her laughing, perspiring hero, and to Concepcion, who, despite the monumental impassivity with which she stood, arms folded across her vast bosom, now exuded an air, almost an aroma, of justification, like a mother who has lived to see her maligned boy vindicated at last. If I had known a little less, I too would have been wholehearted in my admiration for the way in which Bobby—a live symbol of the intoxicating possibilities of freedom—had so swiftly engendered this renewal of faith and self-confidence.

Then the manager, after a tense and voluble consultation with his headwaiter, came up, his fury reined, and asked us please to consider that we had all been his personal guests. Cheap at that if it would get Bobby out of the kitchen and his help back on the job. But Bobby capped the evening.

“We don’t want any free rides. You know what we want? To be treated exactly the same as anyone else. That shouldn’t be too hard to understand, should it?” And he draped his arm almost
paternally around the manager’s pudgy shoulders. “Now if you’ll just let us square our bill, we’ll be on our way.”

Out in the street five minutes later, Evan and the three sisters were still hardly able to believe that they had been a part of Bobby’s feat. I whistled up a cab; this time Concepcion insisted on hoisting herself into the front seat, obviously to let Bobby ride in state between Maria and Nita, who held his hand in quiet rapture while Evan and I perched on the jump seats.

Evan could not contain himself. “This has been one of the greatest evenings of my life. How rare to find a man who is personable, charming and brave. One of our own! With fifty, a hundred, a thousand men like that, what couldn’t we accomplish?”

At the sidewalk in front of the girls’ home, we chatted for a few moments more, in order that Bobby and Nita might have their parting embrace alone in the shadows. It was just getting to be uncomfortable when Bobby came bounding out, dancing a little soft-shoe routine and patting his lips with his handkerchief.

“Let’s go man, go,” he called to our cab driver; and we took off with a jolt.

Bobby dragged deeply, with a contented exhilaration, on his cigarette as he drummed his fingers rapidly against the window. He turned to me, bright-eyed. “Maybe we ought to dig up a couple chicks to finish off the evening.”

“Not tonight. Let’s sack in. I stand watch in the morning. Tell me something, Bobby: You set up the whole show tonight, didn’t you?”

He looked at me blandly. “Son, I wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. How could I know they’d kick up such a breeze?”

“You knew damn well Negroes don’t go dancing at the Jockey Club.”

“Maybe they will now. And maybe the help will be a little more aggressive.” He looked me over challengingly. “Is that bad?”

“Not for Evan. But is it good for the sisters?”

“Are you going to turn preacher on me now?”

“I suppose you’re going to marry her.”

“I could do worse. She’s neat and clean, and she loves me. I wouldn’t be the first cat to keep two households going. I’m really
a family man at heart.” He winked at me. “I can’t bat around night in and night out like you single guys.”

“You know something, Bobby? You stink.”

He laughed out loud. “If I thought you meant that, I’d poison your cornflakes. I do want to thank you for coming along tonight. You helped me out of a spot with Concepcion.”

“I was the fall guy.”

“It didn’t hurt, did it?”

“Come on, here’s the pier.”

As we strolled toward the liberty boat bobbing on its line, Bobby clapped me on the back. “Buck up. Maybe one of these days you’ll be my best man!”

But when we got out to our anchorage and climbed aboard, a telegram from Ceelie Mae was waiting for Bobby. He was the father of a baby boy, named Arvel Shafter, born prematurely, weight nine pounds two ounces. Tears of joy sprang to Bobby’s dark eyes as he stood in the companionway clutching the telegram.

“I’m a father,” he whispered. “I’m a father.”

I murmured congratulations, trying to make up for our words of a few moments earlier.

“Come into my suite, man, and let me break out the VSOP. You wouldn’t refuse a nightcap with a new papa at a time like this.”

So we started to drink all over again. It must have been something like four o’clock in the morning.

“The situation calls for my Fritz Kreisler favorites.”

“It’s your party, Dad.”

Bobby laughed. “I like that: Dad! You know I was just kidding about that little Juanita, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“I mean to say, at bottom I’m the kind of square john that needs romancing even more than he does a roll in the hay.” He raised his glass. “Mud in your eye, baby.”

As I listened to the tremolo of the sentimental violin for the hundredth time, quite drunk and very sleepy now, something made me say, “That’s a mighty big baby, Dad.”

He smiled proudly. Then his face clouded. “Say, how would you know?”

“I’m an uncle twice over. Average babies run six, seven pounds.”

“Maybe, but I’ve been building up that little chick with buttermilk and chocolate shakes.”

I looked at him. “Two months premature, wasn’t it?”

“So she says.” Suddenly his hand shot out blindly, like a snake’s tongue, and fastened itself in a painful clamp on my wrist. “Do
you
think it’s possible? Do you?”

“Let go.”

He stood over me, glaring down at me. “Do you?”

“I don’t know. I guess not.”

“The stupid little chippy. Not even enough sense to lie about the weight.”

“Wait. Don’t jump too fast.”

“What kind of a sucker do you take me for? She named him after her old man, not me. You know why? Because nine months ago I wasn’t home. I was five thousand miles away on a goddamned tanker. So she moves up the date to when I
was
home—for three weeks—seven months ago.”

“Bobby, it doesn’t sound like the girl you described to me.”

“Weren’t you giving me the same bit about Nita? Do you think she’d be any different? They all smell the same between the legs. If anybody ought to know, I should.”

“The least you can do is give her a chance to explain.”

“Explain!” Bobby hurled his glass to the deck in a rage. As it broke, a thin pool of Scotch trickled along the fiber rug between us. “Listen, baby-face: When I paid off after the last voyage, I found her in the apartment with a sailor, a homely little jerk. Cousin Willie from Nashville, she said. Five foot four, black as the ace of spades, never finished grade school, eighteen years old. Would you think that a girl I picked up in a bus station, and put a silver-blue mink in one closet and seventeen pair of shoes in another, would shack up with an ugly, undersized, seasick teenager? Why, the poor shnook threw up every time his DE passed Ambrose Light. He asked me for a recipe for seasickness.”

“Maybe Ceelie Mae wasn’t used to being alone. You told me how dependent she was on you.”

“I had to ship out. That’s one thing I don’t discuss.”

The record had finished. The needle was swinging wildly
across its smooth core—
ticketa, tocketa, ticketa, tocketa
. I caged the arm.

“You were very happy about this baby,” I said, “until it got born. You told me you’d been trying for years.”

Bobby glared at me wildly.

“Maybe Ceelie Mae wanted a baby even worse than you did. And maybe she knew how much it would please you to have a son, even if it had to be from a kid—”

Bobby was already shoving me to the door. “Go on, get out of here. Take off, get lost.” He gave me a push that sent me stumbling over the coaming. “You’re just as superior as all the rest.” He slammed his door.

The next day we sailed for Australia. Bobby’s supplies were swung aboard early, so there was no need for him to go ashore again, or even to turn up on deck.

In any case he did not, not for three days thereafter. We were worried about him in the saloon, but the purser assured us that he had spoken to him through the door. The captain would have been just as pleased if Bobby had died in his cabin, so nothing was done.

One day at sunset I stood at the fantail, idly watching our wake and thinking about Evan Jones and the sisters, when I felt Bobby at my side. I turned to find him rather drawn and bloodless, but composed.

“Can I apologize?” he asked.

“Forget it.”

“It’s that last crack I made. I was upset. I really don’t feel that way.”

I shrugged in some embarrassment. “What are you going to do, Bobby?”

“I could kill her—that’s one possibility. Or I could pretend to believe the whole silly story and play Daddy. Or I could go back to Panama and marry Nita, at least long enough for her to do the same thing to me.”

“Oh, come on.”

“You know something? No matter what I come up with, I can’t win.”

The one thing he did not say was that I had pushed our friendship
too far, that I had presumed on an acquaintance that was, in the nature of the situation, unbalanced. It was just too easy for me to be superior; in fact, he understood it all better and more bitterly than I ever could.

We passed some quiet hours after that, he and I, on the long voyage to Australia and then on through Suez; but there were no more long sessions in his cabin, with the record player spinning sentimental music and Bobby snowing me about his conquests, and I asked him no more about his wife than I did about how he disposed of his cigarette boxes. When at last we tied up at the slummy nethermost reaches of Staten Island, supposedly home but in reality as far from our dreams of home as Tierra del Fuego, we paid off in the saloon and parted with a handshake, leaving unspoken the common realization that it was only now, in our own city and on our own soil, that we had to part.

“So long, kid,” he said, reaching out to straighten my carelessly knotted tie. “Don’t rush into agitating—or marrying.”

In fact I did marry two months later and gave up the sea. And with it gave up the possibility—or so I begin to feel now, after all that has been happening in a world beyond my reach and my personal involvement—of ever again being as close to another troubled wanderer as I once was to Bobby Shafter.