NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN by Harvey Swados

Milton Berle’s, “do you know that couple? The man looks so familiar…”
    I looked out at the foyer. There, just inside the door, arm in arm, stood Dante and Cordelia. They had been walking in the rain, their faces were damp and flushed, Dante’s coat collar was turned up dramatically, his curly black hair glittered with raindrops. He was smiling expectantly, showing his fine teeth and his complacent pride in having brought a belle to the party. He hid nothing, it was hardly necessary; but then neither did Deelie. Each had dashed greedily to grasp for something momentarily exciting—and useful.
    At my side Barney uttered a grunt that ended in a moan as he broke away from us and made for the bedroom. Before I could think of what to do or say, or even fully understand, Barney was in the foyer and plunging for the door with his coat over his arm,his face white, ignoring the couple who were making their way into the throng of ambitious decorators and editors and young academics on the make. The door slammed behind him and he was gone.
    “I’m going after him.”
    “No.” Pauline shook her head. “Leave him alone.”
    “I can’t stay here any more. I don’t want any part of it.”
    “We’ll go in a few minutes. But let’s not give anybody any satisfaction.”
    We did it Pauline’s way. After a while we said our good nights and slipped away unnoticed. We said nothing to each other all the way home (except for neutral remarks on the subway platform: “Do you want a
Times
?” “No, thanks.”) until, at our very door, Pauline put her hand on mine.
    “He’ll be back.”
    “It won’t be any good. It’s all over.”
    I lay all night thinking about Barney, and about those two who had betrayed him. And us, I wondered, what about us?
    When I got to Manhattan the next morning, instead of going to work I took the Grand Street bus on over to the East Side. I hastened down the bleak street with the bitter wind whipping stained sheets of newsprint about my legs.
    Marya’s building, that great rotting corpse, was more ghastly than ever in its loneliness now that foundations were actually being dug around it for the new projects. Gloved workmen were hauling away the debris of the toppled structure next door. I mounted the three flights to her flat, past walls which stank of wet and rotting plaster, on floors which had heaved from the wrecker’s ball swung against the groaning neighboring beams.
    She was gone. I stared at the padlock on her door, shook it, pounded senselessly in a frozen rage on the panel. The building was quite empty. Where had they taken her? I sat down on the steps in the cold, the dirt, and the echoing quiet, and tried to think. No one knew I knew her. She didn’t even know my last name, or care. We were torn apart as effectively as though she had indeed died.
    And if I could find her? What difference would it make, what good would it do for me to come upon her homeless in a Home, or bewildered in a project apartment with thermostat and engineered kitchen?
    I got up and blew my nose and brushed myself off and walked out of the tenement without once looking back. In my mind it was already pulled down.
    When I got home to Brooklyn I set to work at once on my census reports. When Pauline arrived I told her that I was up to date and prepared in good conscience to quit. And prepared too to leave the dingy inadequate apartment where we had spent all our nights, our nostrils filled with the nocturnal scents of real and dreamed-of gardens. And to leave the city, where I had found my love and been so happy—and where I could never be happy again.
    When I first went to the suburbs in search of a place where we could rent a small house, raise a baby, and go into business, Barney gave me a skeptical farewell. “You’ll be back soon. One winter on the moors, and you’ll head back for civilization.”
    He was wrong. But since he was New York born and bred, he had never quite understood how passionately I had