NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Read Free

slick magazines and gossip columns, as it does candy bars. I remain a social radical, too, at once dismayed and exhilarated by my seemingly doomed yet endlessly optimistic native land.
    But if my father was distressed by his lack of commercial success, he certainly never voiced this concern to me; on the contrary, I was oblivious to the financial problems that so often characterize the life of a serious writer. As I grew up, the grants, fellowships, and awards bestowed upon my father—and the occasional sabbaticals he was able to take—led to prolonged and peripatetic stretches of time spent in a variety of homes. Over the years, “home” became something of a generic term to us, comprising Valley Cottage, a small town in Rockland County, New York; San Francisco; Iowa City; Cagnes-sur-Mer, a tiny medieval village nestled in the hills between Nice and Cannes; and finally, a white clapboard house high atop a Berkshire mountain ridge in Chesterfield, Massachusetts, the quiet New England town to which my parents moved just one year before my father’s death.
    Our three sojourns to Cagnes in the fifties and sixties were particularly happy times for my family. We were ensconced on the Mediterranean coast and surrounded by a new and very different set of friends and acquaintances—peasants and artists, American expatriates, Scandinavians, British aristocrats both current and fallen. But the culture shock, however mild, led to certain frictions. In particular, it wasn’t an easy move for my mother, who had never been out of the country and spoke no French.
    In “Year of Grace,” a frightened and generally inexperienced small-town woman whose stuffy academic husband has transported her abroad during a year’s sabbatical, discovers, unexpectedly and without a trace of vindictiveness, that there is more to her life than her connection to her husband. Predating the women’s movement by more than a decade, this unstrident portrayal of self-discovery appears as valid today as it did twenty-five years ago. It seems perfectly apropos that it is followed by what mightbe considered its Gallic counterpart, “The Peacocks of Avignon.” This brief but deeply moving piece tells the story of a young woman whose sorrow and resentment threaten to destroy her otherwise loving relationship with her mother, a widow desperate to make up for the loss of her husband—and her youth—by engaging in an affair with a man half her age. Alone in a foreign country, she discovers, in a sudden and profound moment of revelation, the meaning of forgiveness.
    Although my family spent more than five years in Europe, it was the “seemingly doomed yet endlessly optimistic native land” to which my father always insisted we return. It was America—a country whose political and social mores served as the target for much of his disapprobation—for which he retained his greatest loyalty and deepest affection. It was here that he found his true voice—a voice that spoke out for the great American values, values he felt were all too often perilously ignored by his fellow citizens.
    He was often ahead of his time. His 1959 essay in
Esquire
, “Why Resign from the Human Race?,” provoked an unprecedented avalanche of mail and is generally acknowledged to have inspired the formation of the Peace Corps. His social concerns were no less apparent in his stories. For example, in “A Chance Encounter,” the issue of abortion, possibly more controversial today than when the story was written, produces a surprising and most unexpected victim. Peopled almost exclusively by male characters, it is a subtle, shrewd, and thought-provoking argument for freedom of choice.
    My father gracefully balanced the larger social and political concerns in his novels and essays with a tender humanism in his stories. The subject of poverty, for example, plays a devastating role in “A Question of Loneliness,” in which an overburdened and underpaid young worker winds up paying