NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN by Harvey Swados Page A

needed New York, nor how abruptly that need had been quenched.
    I got a G.I. loan—it was Herman Appleman who put the idea in my head—to start a music and record shop. I did well not because I am a brilliant businessman, but because LP’s came out, and I rode the wave of the culture boom. Who could go wrong? I had Pauline to help, too. Her brother came in with me after we saw him through college and he put in his time in Korea. With him in the shop, and a woman at home to watch the kids, Pauline and I are free of an evening to go to New York.
    Every so often we get together with Barney and his wife. They own a very substantial house on Avenue J, with a two-car garage and a big lawn, for Brooklyn. We don’t find a lot to talk about. I had made the mistake of nagging at Barney, in those early months of his misery and loneliness, to get out of industry and back to graduate school. At last, after even the draft had finally blown over his head, he turned on me and cried angrily, “Would you aska thirty-year-old arthritic to go into training for the Davis Cup matches? Why don’t you lay off?”
    I think too that Barney was aggrieved at me for a while for having introduced Dante Brunini to our crowd. Certainly it was after he found out about Cordelia and Dante that he said to me, apparently apropos of nothing in particular, “It’s always bad to mix your business life and your social life.”
    That shook me. “But that’s why we were happy in New York for a while. Everything was of a piece—work, play…”
    “Life doesn’t work out that way.”
    It hurt to hear him say that. But I knew then that we were going to have to go our separate ways. At least I had my music. Barney had neither his music nor his math.
    Sometimes we still make a foursome of it and meet at the theater or at Town Hall, but Barney is not very good company. He is not just balding, he is embittered. His wife seems pleasant enough, so are their children, and he has done well—even better than I—as an executive in a toilet supply service owned by a wealthy brother-in-law. Always the brothers-in-law! But he is disappointed in himself in a way that makes me want to turn away and go.
    I don’t think it was just Deelie. Surely Barney would have gotten over her sooner or later, Dante or no, because she doesn’t seem to wear well. After Dante she married twice, unsuccessfully; first a producer and then a vague European man of the world. From time to time I heard of her, a little high at art show openings and quite striking at first nights; once I bumped into her at a lavish impersonal cocktail party given by a record company to greet the arrival of stereo—she barely knew me.
    She never did become an actress—the last I heard she was promoting the talents of a welder of fifteen-foot-high towers of crankcases and pistons—but Dante Brunini stuck at it. He has had some luck on TV as Dan Bruno. He wears a built-up shoe and is better looking than ever, and I read an item in the
Times
recently about his signing for a supporting role in a Tennessee Williams play. I still don’t like him, and I can imagine what he has done to get ahead.
    I suppose that is what bothered me most about New York,aside from the actual fate of all of us. Whom you had to sleep with, he nice to, eat lunch with, in order to stay in the race, struggling blindly for unknown ends. I could never he happy in a city where drink and food, and friendship itself (as impermanent as the buildings), became a part of the whole grinding success mechanism. Nor could I be happy in the place where I truly learned, as I had only begun to in the army, what sin and sellout meant. After I understood what compromises would be expected of me—demanded of me—I had to leave.
    I know the streets still, I know the stops on the GG Local as few New Yorkers do, I know where the best chances are for finding parking space. I know where to buy button coverings and Pakistani food. But the magic and the mystery of