The Mortgaged Heart (31 page)

"The square of the hypotenuse—" As you go out of the drag store, Mr. Parker's voice will carry on where he had left off, and his daughter will sit there, sadly popping her chewing-gum.

Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister. Things move more slowly out here (the street-cars still rattle leisurely down most of the main streets), and there is a feeling for tradition.

The history of Brooklyn is not so exciting as it is respectable. In the middle of the past century, many of the liberal intellectuals lived here, and Brooklyn was a hot-bed of abolitionist activity. Walt Whitman worked on the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
until his anti-slavery editorials cost him his job. Henry Ward Beecher used to preach at the old Plymouth Church. Talleyrand lived here on Fulton Street during his exile in America, and he used to walk primly every day beneath the elm-trees. Whittier stayed frequently at the old Hooper home.

***

The first native of Brooklyn I got to know when I first came out here was the electrician who did some work at my house. He is a lively young Italian with a warm, quick face and a pleasant way of whistling operatic arias while on the job. On the third day he was working for me, he brought in a bottle of bright homemade wine, as his first child, a boy, had been born the night before. The wine was sour and clean to the tongue, and when we had drunk some of it the electrician invited me to a little supper to be held a week later at his house on the other side of Brooklyn, near Sheepshead Bay. The party was a fine occasion. The old grandfather who had come over from Italy sixty years ago was there. At night, the old man fishes for eels out in the Bay, and when the weather is fine he spends most of the day lying in a cart in the backyard, out in the sun. He had the face of a charming old satyr, and he held the new baby with the casualness of one who has walked the floor with many babies in his day.

"He is very ugly, this little one," he kept saying. "But it is clear that he will be smart. Smart and very ugly."

The food at the party was rich, wholesome Italian fare—
provolone
cheese, salami, pastries, and more of the red wine. A stream of kinsmen and neighbours kept coming in and out of the house all evening. This family had lived in the same house near the Bay for three generations, and the grandfather had not been out of Brooklyn for years.

Here in Brooklyn there is always the feeling of the sea. On the streets near the water-front, the air has a fresh, coarse smell, and there are many seagulls. One of the most gaudy streets I know stretches between Brooklyn Bridge and the Navy Yard. At three o'clock in the morning, when the rest of the city is silent and dark, you can come suddenly on a little area as vivacious as a country fair. It is Sand Street, the place where sailors spend their evenings when they come here to port. At any hour of the night some excitement is going on in Sand Street. The sunburned sailors swagger up and down the sidewalks with their girls. The bars are crowded, and there are dancing, music, and straight liquor at cheap prices.

***

These Sand Street bars have their own curious traditions also. Some of the women you find there are vivid old dowagers of the street who have such names as The Duchess or Submarine Mary. Every tooth in Submarine Mary's head is made of solid gold—and her smile is rich-looking and satisfied. She and the rest of these old habitues are greatly respected. They have a stable list of sailor pals and are known from Buenos Aires to Zanzibar. They are conscious of their fame and don't bother to dance or flirt like the younger girls, but sit comfortably in the centre of the room with their knitting, keeping a sharp eye on all that goes on. In one bar, there is a little hunchback who struts in proudly every evening, and is petted by everyone, given free drinks, and treated as a sort of mascot by the proprietor. There is a saying among sailors that when they die they want to go to Sand Street.

Cutting through the business and financial centre of Brooklyn is Fulton Street. Here are to be found dozens of junk and antique shops that are exciting to people who like old and fabulous things. I came to be quite at home in these places, as I bought most of my furniture there. If you know what you are about, there are good bargains to be found—old carved sideboards, elegant pier-glasses, beautiful Lazy Susans, and other odd pieces can be bought at half the price you would pay anywhere else. These shops have a musty, poky atmosphere, and the people who own them are an incredible crew.

The woman from whom I got most of my things is called Miss Kate. She is lean, dark, and haggard, and she suffers much from cold. When you go into the junk-shop, you will most likely find her hovering over a little coal stove in the back room. She sleeps every night wrapped in a Persian rug and lying on a green velvet Victorian couch. She has one of the handsomest and dirtiest faces I can remember.

Across the street from Miss Kate, there is a competitor with whom she often quarrels violently over prices—but still she always refers to him as "Ein Edler Mensch," and once when he was to be evicted for failure to pay the rent she put up the cash for him.

"Miss Kate is a good woman," this competitor said to me. "But she
dislikes washing herself. So she only bathes once a year, when it is summer. I expect she's just about the dirtiest woman in Brooklyn." His voice as he said this was not at all malicious; rather, there was in it a quality of wondering pride. That is one of the things I love best about Brooklyn. Everyone is not expected to be exactly like everyone else.

[
Vogue,
March 1, 1941]

I
T IS THE SUMMER
of 1941, and I am helping a friend to pack. My friend is called Mac, and he lives in a room across the hall from me. In the late afternoon, when the weather was fine and the sky over the city a pale grey-blue, we have often met up on the roof.

Mac would sit leaning against a chimney, usually with a book, as after office hours he goes to night classes at N.Y.U. Nearly always Sugar would be on the roof with him, her head resting on one of his knees. Sugar is a very small, very smart terrier who has the most finicky of manners. Now as we are packing, Sugar sits in the corner of the room, and occasionally she whines and gives a little shiver, as she knows that something is happening that she does not understand. We are packing because Mac has volunteered for the Army and has been accepted; he is going off to fight.

The room is in mad disorder—with books, clothes, and phonograph records on the floor. Scattered about are old newspapers with their blunt, black head-lines of destruction, their captions of ruin. Mac sorts out his possessions quickly, not hesitating about the things he can take with him and the things he will leave behind. Much must be left.

Mac is twenty-three—with a short, wiry body and red hair. He has a freckled face, and his expression is now rather sombre and scowling, as he is cutting a wisdom tooth and keeps feeling out the sore spot with his tongue. As we crate the records with excelsior and nail the boxes of books, we are both of us intent on that inward reckoning that departure and great change bring about.

What few words we say aloud are only the flotsam of thoughts
within us. Our meditations probably follow the same track. Our backgrounds are similar. We have known secure childhoods, in homes neither rich nor very poor. We have had our share of formal education and have been allowed to seek for and to affirm our own spiritual values. In short, we have grown up as Americans. And we have much to think over, much to remember, and not a little to regret.

"But why did it take me so long? Huh?" Mac is saying. "Glued to the radio, talking, talking. Doing nothing. Why? Answer me that one!"

Sugar looks up at the sound of his voice. Mac has had her for six years. She sits across the table from him when he has his meals at home, and eats exactly what he eats—eggs for breakfast, carrots, anything. Whenever he offers her some special dainty he holds it close to her nose, and before taking it she has a pretty way of raising her right paw in a gesture halfway between begging and benediction.

But Mac pays no attention to Sugar now.

"There is this," he says. "A virtue is a virtue only insofar as it leads to good. But when it can be used as a weakness, as an instrument to make way for evil...."

Mac balls up a sweater and throws it on a pile of clothes in the corner. "You know what I mean."

I do know what he means. We were all of us pacifists. In our adolescence and our youth, we had no notion that we would ever have to fight. War was evil. The last World War had no place in our memories, but we had heard and read all about it. Our heroes in childhood were not soldiers, but great adventurers.

There was Byrd. There was Lindbergh—I thought he was wonderful and wrote him a long letter to tell him so. But that was in 1927, ages ago.

Then later in High School. My High School was like any one of thousands of High Schools in America. On Thursdays, we studied a subject called current events. My teacher had a great spirit and a passion to instil in us the horrors of war. She need not have been so anxious; we were born to the pacifist point of view.

I remember the physical gestures and peculiarities of this teacher better than anything ever said in class—the way she rapped the top of her head with a pencil to emphasize a point, the way that, when she was exasperated, she took off her glasses, pressed her fingers to her eyeballs, and said, "Oh pshaw! Pshaw! Pshaw!" There was always a giggle when this happened, and she would put her glasses back on and peer all around resentfully.

A disarmament conference—the League of Nations—a new party in the German Reich led by a man called Hitler. None of these things meant very much. Everybody knew there could never be another war. What country could start such a thing again? And if in the future it happened—why that would be in Europe. And American faces would never rot in European mud again.

"They told the truth. They were right," Mac says, and I look up at him. He is still packing books. Among them are
Company K, A Farewell to Arms, The Road to War,
and
The Enormous Room.
It was in our adolescence that the culmination of all the agony and destruction of the past war was finally expressed. The influence of these books on us can not be exaggerated. Mac arranges the volumes in stacks according to their size.

"They were right, but only for their time. They could not have realized then that there are worse things even than war. You know?"

"Yes," I answer.

The books are now packed in their boxes, and Mac stops off for a rest. He goes over to the medicine cabinet, opens his mouth very wide, and paints his sore gum with iodine. Then he sits down on a packing-case, his forehead propped on his fists, his face pink and sweating.

"Listen!" Mac says suddenly. "Do you remember May the first, 1935? Can you think back that far?"

Sugar looks up at him, and, as he gives her no notice, she sighs so deeply that her ribs stand out, and she drops her head down on her paws.

"That May day was my first year at University, and I was a member of a students' club. We marched in the parade. I was carrying a big banner against war and fascism. Everything was either black or white. War was evil, Fascism was evil—they were the same. We never knew then that we would ever have to choose between them."

"They were marching that year in Germany, too," I said quickly. "But they weren't choosing the banners they marched to."

"Yeah," Mac says. "They were marching all right."

Mac starts folding his good suit to put into the bag. "It was Spain," he says. "It was Spain that waked most of us up....

"That was the first round, and we lost it. Then afterward we were forced to pull our punches for so long that most of us just gave up. We didn't make this war, so why should we have to fight in it. Why I ask you? Let's just sit around punch drunk and see what happens. Maybe that gorilla on the other side won't even notice that we're in the ring."

There is truth in what he has just said. The last year has a weird, drunken quality. The
Blitzkreig
—the collapse of Europe—funereal radio voices affirming each new loss—the debris that was once Democracy. We in America have not been able to grasp it all at once. We were prepared to fight for the betterment of Democracy, and to fight with Democratic means—that in itself is no paltry battle.

We never knew that the full force of our barrage would have to be turned outward in order to escape complete annihilation. We have been demoralized. It has taken us long, too long, to come to terms with our inward selves, to adjust our traditions to necessity, to reach the state of conviction that impels action. We have had to re-examine our ideals, and to leave much behind. We have had to face a moral crisis for which we were scantily equipped. But at last we have reached our conclusions and are ready to act. We have come through.

Democracy—intellectual and moral freedom, the liberty to work and live in the way most productive for us, the right to establish our individual spiritual values—that is the breath of the American ideal. And we Americans will fight to preserve it. We have clenched our giant fist; it will not open until we are victorious.

"Thank the Lord it's over," Mac says.

He may be speaking of the past indecisions, or of the packing. We have finished. The room has a sad, naked look with the boxes and suitcases piled up on the dusty floor. Mac goes down-stairs for beer, and when he comes back we close the door and go up to the roof. It is a quiet, warm late afternoon. Wet clothes are hanging on a line, and pigeons strut along the parapet. We sit resting with our backs against a chimney.

Mac opens the beer. Because of the warmth, the foam geysers up over the neck of the bottle and spills on his hand and arm. He holds out his arm to Sugar, and she licks it daintily. Evidently the taste pleases her, for very slowly she raises her right paw and begs for more; he draws her in between his knees and scratches her behind the ears. To-morrow Sugar will be sent on the train to Mac's brother in Delaware.