NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN by Harvey Swados Page B

the city are gone. Now it is just a place, no worse, for those who want to look at it that way, than the placid and self-satisfied town where I live. Yet it persists, an indelible part of my young manhood. And like everything else I endured in those passionate years, it will remain until the end of my days embedded in the very core of my being, an internal capital, aflame with romance and infected with disillusion.

A GLANCE IN THE MIRROR
    W aiting for the doors of the high school to open and his daughter to come running out, Roy Farrow was thinking about how stealthily spring had crept up on him. He had taken the usual precautions with the change of season—put his overcoat and tweeds in storage, brought the car in for tune up and overhaul—and he had even noticed, as he drove alone, not stopping for hitchhikers, across New York State, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, that he could keep the windows down and that beyond the curbs in town after town the forsythias were turning to gold and the daffodils were blowing open, yellow and wet with spring rain on the lawns of all the old houses that drifted back away from him as he sped on to the place where he had been born forty years before.
    But now that he was here he really felt it in his heart, which was where you really should feel spring if you were to know it at all. Lazily slouched like this in the open convertible with the warm wind in his hair and the strengthening sun on his hands lax across the steering wheel, he was uncertain whether the quickening in his chest could be charged to the weather, to his return to his birthplace, or to the fact that in a moment he would be seeing his only child for the first time in twelve years. Indeed, it might have been the intoxicating fragrance of the early spring breeze bellying through the riverward windows of his Manhattan apartment that had first filled him with an unease verging on disgust when he turned to observe Minerva, half-drunk in broad daylight at the piano, and drove him to consider how he might repossess himself by screwing up his courage to return home at last and identify himself to his daughter.
    A quarter of a century earlier, at this very time of year, he hadbeen jogging along the cinder track that girdled the cathedral-spired school, desperately trying to earn his letter; and for an instant now he was shaken with a comical yearning to re-experience that boyish agony, even if he had to turn up the cuffs of his doeskin slacks and trot his heart out just once more on the hot, half-forgotten cinders; but in five minutes the doors would open, and beyond all this spring craziness was a painful desire to watch his daughter unobserved for a moment or two before he should walk up to her and take her by the hand.
    He knew that he would recognize Kate at once from the snapshots that her mother sent him in response to the requests that sometimes accompanied his checks. Even without the pictures in his wallet, he would know her from a thousand other girls of her age, because of his ineradicable memory of how she had looked and felt as a three-year-old when he had hugged her goodbye, or maybe simply because of the special affinity of fathers for daughters, even for the daughters they left behind and came home to only after it was too late.
    But then he thought: Suppose she doesn’t recognize me? What would he do if she were to stare at him blankly when he called out her name, and then turn away, as her mother must have taught her to do when strange men offered her candy or automobile rides? Roy wrenched about convulsively on the leather seat. Now he would probably have to pay the price for not having behaved sensibly, written ahead to Lisa that he was coming and then waited prudently at her house for Kate to come home from school. As he twisted about he caught a glimpse of his angry and ashamed face in the rearview mirror.
    He pulled down the mirror for a better look at himself in this final moment and stared coldly at the empty