The Stories of John Cheever Part 24

The bar was full of a noisy and pleasant company, and Will was glad to join it and get a drink. He had begun to feel like himself when the rector of Christ Church bore down on him, shook his hand, and drew him away from the others.

The rector was a large man and, unlike some of his suburban colleagues, not at all wary of clerical black. When he and Will met at c.o.c.ktail parties, they usually talked about blankets. Will had given many blankets to the church. He had given blankets to its missions and blankets to its shelters. When the shepherds knelt in the straw at Mary's knees in the Nativity play, they were clothed in Will's blankets. Since he expected to be asked for blankets, he was surprised to hear the rector say, "I want you to feel free to come to my study, Will, and talk to me if anything is troubling you." While Will was thanking the rector for this invitation, they were joined by Herbert McGrath.

Herbert McGrath was a banker, a wealthy, irritable man. At the bottom of his thinking there seemed to be an apprehension-a nightmare-that without the kind of order he represented, the world would fly apart. He despised men who raced to catch the morning train. In the "no smoking" car, it was customary for people to light cigarettes as the train approached Grand Central Station, and this infringement so irritated Herbert that he would tap his neighbors on the shoulder and tell them that the smoker was in the rear. Mixed with his insistence on propriety was a curious strain of superst.i.tion. When he walked along the station platform in the morning, he looked around him. If he saw a coin, he would shoulder his way past the other commuters and bend down to get it. "Good luck, you know," he would explain as he put the coin in his pocket. "You need both luck and brains." Now he wanted to talk about the immorality at the party, and Will decided to go home.

He put his gla.s.s on the bar and started thoughtfully through the pa.s.sage to the living room. His head was down, and he walked straight into Mrs. Walpole, a very plain woman. "I see that your wife hasn't recovered sufficiently to face the public today," she said gaily.

A peculiar fate seems to overtake homely women at the ends of parties-and journeys, too. Their curls and their ribbons come undone, particles of food cling to their teeth, their gla.s.ses steam, and the wide smile with which they planned to charm the world lapses into a look of habitual discontent and bitterness. Mrs. Walpole had got herself up bravely for the Townsends' party, but time itself-she was drinking sherry-had destroyed the impression she intended to make. Someone seemed to have sat on her hat, her voice was strident, and the camellia pinned to her shoulder had died, "But I suppose Maria sent you to see what they're saying about her," she said.

Will got past Mrs. Walpole and went up the stairs to get his coat. Bridget had gone, and Helen Bulstrode was sitting alone in the hall in a red dress. Helen was a lush. She was treated kindly in Shady Hill. Her husband was pleasant, wealthy, and forbearing. Now Helen was very drunk, and whatever she had meant to forget when she first poured herself a drink that day had long since been lost in the clutter. She rolled a little in her chair while Will was putting on his coat, and suddenly she addressed him copiously in French. Will did not understand. Her voice got louder and angrier, and when he got down to the hall, she went to the head of the stairs to call after him. He went off without saying goodbye to anyone.

Maria was in the living room reading a magazine when Will came in. "Look, Mummy," he said. "Can you tell me this? Did you lose your shoes last night?"

"I lost my pocketbook," Maria said, "but I don't think I lost my shoes."

"Try and remember," he said. "It isn't like a raincoat or an umbrella. People usually remember when they lose their shoes."

"What is the matter with you, w.i.l.l.y?"

"Did you lose your shoes?"

"I don't know."

"Did you wear a girdle?"

"What are you talking about, Will?"

"By Christ, I've got to find out!"

He went upstairs to their room, which was dark. He turned on a light in her closet and opened the chest where she kept her shoes. There were a great many pairs, and among them were gold shoes, silver shoes, bronze shoes, and he was shuffling through the collection when he saw Maria standing in the doorway. "Oh, my G.o.d, Mummy, forgive me!" he said. "Forgive me!"

"Oh, Willie!" she exclaimed. "Look what you've done to my shoes."

Will felt all right in the morning, and he had a good day in the city. At five, he made the trip uptown on the subway and crossed the station to his train automatically. In the train, he got an aisle seat and scanned the asininities in the evening paper. An old man was suing his young wife for divorce, on the ground of adultery; the fact that this story had no power to disturb Will not only pleased him but left him feeling exceptionally fit and happy. The train traveled north under a sky that was still spread with light.

A little rain had begun to fall when Will stepped onto the platform at Shady Hill. "h.e.l.lo, Trace," he said. "h.e.l.lo, Pete. h.e.l.lo, Herb." Around him, his neighbors were greeting their wives and children. He took the route up Alewives Lane to Shadrock Road, past rows and rows of lighted houses. He put his car in the garage and went around to the front and looked at his tulips, gleaming in the rain and the porch light. He let the fawning cat in out of the wet, and Flora, his youngest daughter, ran through the hall to kiss him. Some deep recess in his spirit seemed to respond to the good child and the light-filled rooms. He had the feeling that there would never be any less to his life than this. Presently, he would be sitting on a folding chair in the June sunlight watching Flora graduate from Smith.

Maria came into the hall wearing a gray silk dress-a cloth and a color that flattered her. Her eyes were bright and wide, and she kissed him tenderly. The telephone began to ring, for it was that hour in the suburbs when the telephone rings steadily with board-meeting announcements, sc.r.a.ps of gossip, fund-raising pleas, and invitations. Maria answered it and he heard her say, "Yes, Edith."

Will went into the living room to make a c.o.c.ktail, and a few minutes later the doorbell rang. Edith Hastings, a good neighbor and a friendly woman, preceded Maria into the living room, protesting, "I really shouldn't break in on you like this." Still protesting, she sat down and took the gla.s.s that Will handed her. He had never seen her color so high or her eyes so bright. "Charlie's in Oregon," she said. "He'll be gone three weeks this trip. He wanted me to speak to you, Will, about some apple trees. He meant to speak to you before he left, but he didn't have the time. He can get apple trees by the dozen from a nursery in New Jersey, and he wanted to know if you wouldn't like to buy six."

Edith Hastings was one of those women-and there were many of them in Shady Hill-whose husbands were away on business from one to three weeks out of every month. They lived-conjugally-the life of a Grand Banks fisherman's wife, with none of the lore of s.h.i.+ps and sailors to draw on. None-or almost none-of these widows could be accused of not having attacked their problems gallantly. They solicited funds for cancer, heart trouble, lameness, deafness, and mental health. They cultivated tropical plants in a capricious climate, wove cloth, made pottery, cared tenderly for their children, and did everything imaginable to make up for the irremediable absence of their men. They remained lonely women with a natural p.r.o.neness to gossip.

"But of course you don't have to decide this minute," Edith went on when he didn't answer her question. "I don't suppose you really have to decide until Charlie comes back from Oregon. I mean, there isn't any special time for planting apple trees, is there? And, speaking of apple trees, how was the fete?"

Will turned his back and opened a window. Outside, the rain fell steadily, but he doubted then that it was the rain that had heightened Edith's color and made her eyes s.h.i.+ne. He heard Maria reply, and then he heard Edith ask, "When did you people leave?" She could not keep the excitement out of her voice. "And I understand that a pair of slippers and a girdle..." Will swung around. "Is that what you came here to talk about?" he asked sharply.

"What?"

"Is that what you came here to talk about?"

"I really came here to talk about apple trees."

"I gave Charlie a check for those apple trees six months ago."

"Charlie didn't tell me."

"Why should he? It was all settled."

"Well, I guess I'd better go."

"Please do," Will said. "Please go. And if anyone asks how we are, tell them we're getting along fine."

"Oh, Will, Will, Will!" Maria said.

"I seem to have come at the wrong time," Edith said.

"And when you call the Trenchers and the Farquarsons and the Abbotts and the Beardens, tell them that I don't give a good G.o.dd.a.m.n what happened at the party. Tell them to think up some gossip about someone else. Tell them to imagine some filth about the Fuller Brush man or the chump who delivers eggs on Friday or the Slaters' gardener, but tell them to leave us alone."

She was gone. Maria, crying, looked at him so wantonly that he nearly choked. Then she climbed the stairs in her gray silk dress and shut the door to their room. He followed her and found her lying on their bed in the dark. "Who was it, Mummy?" he asked. "Just tell me who it was and I'll forget about it."

"It wasn't anybody," she said. "There wasn't anybody."

"Now, Mummy," he said heavily. "I know better than that. I don't want to reproach you. That isn't why I ask, I just want to know so I can forget about it."

"Please let me alone!" she cried. "Please let me alone for a little while."

Waking at dawn in the guest room, Will saw the whole thing clearly. He was astonished to realize how the strength of his feeling had obstructed his vision. The villain was Henry Bulstrode. It was Henry who had been with her on the train when she returned that rainy night at two. It was Henry who had whistled when she did her dance at the Women's Club. It was Henry's head and shoulders he had seen on Madison Avenue when he recognized Maria ahead of him. And now he remembered poor Helen Bulstrode's haggard face at the Townsends' party-the face of a woman who was married to a libertine. It was her husband's unregeneracy that she had been trying to forget. The spate of drunken French she had aimed at him must have been about Maria and Henry. Henry Bulstrode's face, grinning with naked and lascivious mockery, appeared in the middle of the guest room. There was only one thing to do.

Will bathed, dressed, and ate his breakfast. Maria slept on. It was still early when he finished his coffee, and he decided to walk to the train. He strode down Shadrock Road with the peculiar briskness of the aging. Only a few people had gathered on the platform for the eight-nineteen when he reached the station. Trace Bearden joined him, and then Buff Worden. And then Henry Bulstrode stepped out of the waiting room, showed his white teeth in a smile, and frowned at his newspaper. Without any warning at all, Will walked over to him and knocked him down. Women screamed, and the scuffle that followed was very confusing. Herbert McGrath, who had missed the action, a.s.sumed that Henry had started it and stood over him saying, "No more of this, young man! No more of this!" Trace and Buff pinned Will's arms to his sides and quick-stepped him down to the far end of the platform, asking, "You crazy, Will? Have you gone crazy?" Then the eight-nineteen came around the bend, the fracas was suspended by the search for seats, and when the station-master rushed out onto the platform to see what was happening, the train had departed and they were all gone.

The amazing thing was how well Will felt when he boarded the train. Now his fruitful life with Maria would be resumed. They would walk on Sunday afternoons again, and play word games by the open fire again, and weed the roses again, and love one another under the sounds of the rain again, and hear the singing of the crows; and he would buy her a present that afternoon as a signal of love and forgiveness. He would buy her pearls or gold or sapphires-something expensive; emeralds maybe; something no young man could afford.

BRIMMER.

No one is interested in a character like Brimmer because the facts are indecent and obscene; but come then out of the museums, gardens, and ruins where obscene facts are as numerous as daisies in Nantucket. In the dense population of statuary around the Mediterranean sh.o.r.es there are more satyrs than there are G.o.ds and heroes. Their general undesirability in organized society only seems to have whetted their aggressiveness and they are everywhere; they are in Paestum and Syracuse and in the rainy courts and porches north of Florence. They are even in the gardens of the American Emba.s.sy. I don't mean those pretty boys with long ears-although Brimmer may have been one of those in the beginning. I mean the older satyrs with lined faces and conspicuous tails. They always carry grapes or pipes, and the heads are up and back in att.i.tudes of glee. Aside from the long ears, the faces are never animal-these are the faces of men, sometimes comely and youthful, but advanced age does not change in any way the lively cant of the head and the look of lewd glee.

I speak of a friend, an acquaintance anyhow-a s.h.i.+pboard acquaintance on a rough crossing from New York to Naples. These were his att.i.tudes in the bar where I mostly saw him. His eyes had a pale, horizontal pupil like a goat's eye. Laughing eyes, you might have said, although they were sometimes very gla.s.sy. As for the pipes, he played, so far as I know, no musical instrument; but the grapes could be accounted for by the fact that he almost always had a gla.s.s in his hand. Many of the satyrs stand on one leg with the other crossed over in front-toe down, heel up-and that's the way he stood at the bar, his legs crossed, his head up in that look of permanent glee, and the grapes, so to speak, in his right hand. He was lively-witty and courteous and shrewd-but had he been much less I would have been forced to drink and talk with him anyhow. Excepting Mme. Troyan, there was no one else on board I would talk with.

How dull travel really is! How, at noon, when the whistle sounds and the band plays and the confetti has been thrown, we seem to have been deceived into joining something that subsists upon the patronage of the lonely and the lost-the emotionally second-rate of all kinds. The whistle blows again. The gangways and the lines are cleared and the s.h.i.+p begins to move. We see the faces of our dearly beloved friends and relations rubbed out by distance, and going over to the port deck to make a profoundly emotional farewell to the New York skyline we find the buildings hidden in rain. Then the chimes sound and we go below to eat a heavy lunch. Obsolescence might explain that chilling unease we experience when we observe the elegance of the lounges and the wilderness of the sea. What will we do between now and tea? Between tea and dinner? Between dinner and the horse races? What will we do between here and landfall?

She was the oldest s.h.i.+p of the line and was making that April her last Atlantic crossing. Many seasoned travelers came down to say goodbye to her famous interiors and to filch an ashtray or two, but they were sentimentalists to a man, and when the go-ash.o.r.e was sounded they all went ash.o.r.e, leaving the rest of us, so to speak, alone. It was a cheerless, rainy midday with a swell in the channel and, beyond the channel, gale winds and high seas. Her obsolescence you could see at once was more than a matter of marble fireplaces and grand pianos. She was a tub. It was not possible to sleep on the first night out, and going up on deck in the morning I saw that one of the lifeboats had been damaged in the gale. Below me, in second cla.s.s, some undiscourageable travelers were trying to play Ping-Pong in the rain. It was a bleak scene to look at and a hopeless prospect for the players and they finally gave up. A few minutes later a miscalculation of the helmsman sent a wall of water up the side of the s.h.i.+p and filled the stern deck with a boiling sea. Up swam the Ping-Pong table and; as I watched, it glided overboard and could be seen bobbing astern in the wake, a reminder of how mysterious the world must seem to a man lost overboard.

Below, all the portable furniture had been corralled and roped together as if this place were for sale. Ropes were strung along all the pa.s.sageways, and all the potted palm trees had been put into some kind of brig. It was hot-terribly hot and humid-and the elegant lounges, literally abandoned and very much abandoned in their atmosphere, seemed to be made, if possible, even more forlorn by the continuous music of the s.h.i.+p's orchestra. They began to play that morning and they played for the rest of the voyage and they played for no one. They played day and night to those empty rooms where the chairs were screwed to the floor. They played opera. They played old dance music. They played selections from Show Boat. Above the cras.h.i.+ng of the mountainous seas there was always this wild, tiresome music in the air. And there was really nothing to do. You couldn't write letters, everything tipped so; and if you sat in a chair to read, it would withdraw itself from you and then rush up to press itself against you like some apple-tree swing. You couldn't play cards, you couldn't play chess, you couldn't even play Scrabble. The grayness, the thinly jubilant and continuous music, and the roped-up furniture all made it seem like an unhappy dream, and I wandered around like a dreamer until twelve-thirty, when I went into the bar. The regulars in the bar then were a Southern family-Mother, Father, Sister, and Brother. They were going abroad for a year. Father had retired and this was their first trip. There were also a couple of women whom the bartender identified as a "Roman businesswoman" and her secretary. And there was Brimmer, myself, and presently Mme. Troyan. I had drinks with Brimmer on the second day out. He was a man of about my age, I should say, slender, with well-kept hands that were, for some reason, noticeable, and a light but never monotonous voice and a charming sense of urgency-liveliness-that seemed to have nothing to do with nervousness. We had lunch and dinner together and drank in the bar after dinner. We knew the same places, but none of the same people, and yet he seemed to be an excellent companion. When we went below-he had the cabin next to mine-I was contented to have found someone I could talk with for the next ten days.

Brimmer was in the bar the next day at noon, and while we were there Mme. Troyan looked in. Brimmer invited her to join us and she did. At my ripe age, Mme. Troyan's age meant nothing. A younger man might have placed her in her middle thirties and might have noticed that the lines around her eyes were ineradicable. For me these lines meant only a proven capacity for wit and pa.s.sion. She was a charming woman who did not mean to be described. Her dark hair, her pallor, her fine arms, her vivacity, her sadness when the bartender told us about his sick son in Genoa, her impersonations of the captain-the impression of a lovely and a brilliant woman who was accustomed to seeming delightful was not the listed sum of her charms.

We three had lunch and dinner together and danced in the ballroom after dinner-we were the only dancers-but when the music stopped and Brimmer and Mme. Troyan started back to the bar I excused myself and went down to bed. I was pleased with the evening and when I closed my cabin door I thought how pleasant it would have been to have Mme. Troyan's company. This was, of course, impossible, but the memory of her dark hair and her white arms was still strong and cheering when I turned out the light and got into bed. While I waited patiently for sleep it was revealed to me that Mme. Troyan was in Brimmer's cabin.

I was indignant. She had told me that she had a husband and three children in Paris-and what, I thought, about them? She and Brimmer had only met by chance that morning and what carnal anarchy would crack the world if all such chance meetings were consummated! If they had waited a day or two-long enough to give at least the appearance of founding their affair on some romantic or sentimental basis-I think I would have found it more acceptable. To act so quickly seemed to me skeptical and depraved. Listening to the noise of the s.h.i.+p's motors and the faint sounds of tenderness next door, I realized that I had left my way of life a thousand knots astern and that there is no inclination to internationalism in my disposition. They were both, in a sense, Europeans.

But the sounds next door served as a kind of trip wire: I seemed to stumble and fall on my face, skinning and bruising myself here and there and scattering my emotional and intellectual possessions. There was no point in pretending that I had not fallen, for when we are stretched out in the dirt we must pick ourselves up and brush off our clothes. This then, in a sense, is what I did, reviewing my considered opinions on marriage, constancy, man's nature, and the importance of love. When I had picked up my possessions and repaired my appearance, I fell asleep.

It was dark and rainy in the morning-now the wind was cold-and I walked around the upper deck, four laps to the mile, and saw no one. The immorality next door would have changed my relations.h.i.+p to Brimmer and Mme. Troyan, but I had no choice but to look forward to meeting them in the bar at noon. I had no resources to enliven a deserted s.h.i.+p and a stormy sea. My depraved acquaintances were in the bar when I went there at half past twelve, and they had ordered a drink for me. I was content to be with them and thought perhaps they regretted what they had done. We lunched together, amiably, but when I suggested that we find a fourth and play some bridge Brimmer said that he had to send some cables and Mme. Troyan wanted to rest. There was no one in the lounges or on the decks after lunch, and when the orchestra began, dismally, to tune up for their afternoon concert, I went down to my cabin, where I discovered that Brimmer's cables and Mme. Troyan's rest were both fabrications, meant, I suppose, to deceive me. She was in his cabin again. I went up and took a long walk around the deck with an Episcopalian clergyman. I found him to be a most interesting man, but he did not change the subject, since he was taking a vacation from a parish where alcoholism and morbid promiscuity were commonplace. I later had a drink with the clergyman in the bar, but Brimmer and Mme. Troyan didn't show up for dinner.

They came into the bar for c.o.c.ktails before lunch on the next day. I thought they both looked tired. They must have had sandwiches in the bar or made some other arrangement because I didn't see them in the dining room. That evening the sky cleared briefly-it was the first clearing of the voyage-and I watched this from the stern deck with my friend the minister. How much more light we see from an old s.h.i.+p than we see from the summit of a mountain! The cuts in the overcast, filled with colored light, the heights and reaches all reminded me of my dear wife and children and our farm in New Hamps.h.i.+re and the modest pyrotechnics of a sunset there. I found Mme. Troyan and Brimmer in the bar when I went down before dinner, but they didn't know the sky had cleared.

They didn't see the Azores, nor were they around two days later when we sighted Portugal. It was half past four or five in the afternoon. First, there was some slacking off in the s.h.i.+p's roll. She was still rolling, but you could go from one place to another without ending up on your face, and the stewards had begun to take down the ropes and rearrange the furniture. Then on our port side we could see some cliffs and, above them, round hills rising to form a mountain, and on the summit some ruined fort or bastion-low-lying, but beautiful-and behind this a bank of cloud so dense that it was not until we approached the sh.o.r.e that you could distinguish which was cloud and which was mountain. A few gulls picked us up, and then villas could be seen, and there was the immemorial smell of insh.o.r.e water like my grandfather's bathing shoes. Here was a different sea-catboats and villas and fish nets and sand castles flying flags and people calling in their children off the beach for supper. This was the landfall, and as I went up toward the bow I heard the Sanctus bell in the ballroom, where the priest was saying prayers of thanksgiving over water that has seen, I suppose, a million, million times the bells and candles of the Ma.s.s. Everyone was at the bow, as pleased as children to see Portugal. Everyone stayed late to watch the villas take shape, the lights go on, and to smell the shallows. Everyone but Brimmer and Mme. Troyan, who were still in Brimmer's cabin when I went down, and who couldn't have seen anything.

Mme. Troyan left the s.h.i.+p at Gibraltar the next morning, when her husband was to meet her. We got there at dawn-very cold for April-cold and bleak with snow on the African mountains and the smell of snow in the air. I didn't see Brimmer around, although he may have been on another deck. I watched a deckhand put the bags aboard the cutter, and then Mme. Troyan walked swiftly onto the cutter herself, wearing a coat over her shoulders and carrying a scarf. She went to the stern and began to wave her scarf to Brimmer or to me or to the s.h.i.+p's musicians-since we were the only people she had spoken to on the crossing. But the boat moved more swiftly than my emotions and, in the few minutes it took for my stray feelings of tenderness to acc.u.mulate, the cutter had moved away from the s.h.i.+p, and the shape, the color of her face was lost.

When we left Gibraltar, the potted palms were retired again, the lines were put up, and the s.h.i.+p's orchestra began to play. It remained rough and dreary. Brimmer was in the bar at half past twelve looking very absent-minded, and I suppose he missed Mme. Troyan. I didn't see him again until after dinner, when he joined me in the bar. Something, sorrow I suppose, was on his mind, and when I began to talk about Nantucket (where we had both spent some summers) his immense reservoirs of courtesy seemed taxed. He excused himself and left; half an hour later I saw that he was drinking in the lounge with the mysterious businesswoman and her secretary.

It was the bartender who had first identified this couple as a "Roman businesswoman" and her secretary. Then, when it appeared that she spoke a crude mixture of Spanish and Italian, the bartender decided that she was a Brazilian-although the purser told me that she was traveling on a Greek pa.s.sport. The secretary was a hard-faced blonde, and the businesswoman was herself a figure of such astonis.h.i.+ng unsavoriness-you might say evil-that no one spoke to her, not even the waiters. Her hair was dyed black, her eyes were made up to look like the eyes of a viper, her voice was guttural, and whatever her business was, it had stripped her of any appeal as a human being. These two were in the bar every night, drinking gin and speaking a jumble of languages. They were never with anyone else until Brimmer joined them that evening.

This new arrangement excited my deepest and my most natural disapproval. I was talking with the Southern family when, perhaps an hour later, the secretary strayed into the bar alone and ordered whiskey. She seemed so distraught that rather than entertain any obscene suspicions about Brimmer, I lit up the whole scene with an artificial optimism and talked intently with the Southerners about real estate. But when I went below I could tell that the businesswoman was in Brimmer's cabin. They made quite a lot of noise, and at one point they seemed to fall out of bed. There was a loud thump. I could have knocked on the door-like Carrie Nation-ordering them to desist, but who would have seemed the most ridiculous?

But I could not sleep. It has been my experience, my observation, that the kind of personality that emerges from this sort of promiscuity embodies an especial degree of human failure. I say observation and experience because I would not want to accept the tenets of any other authority-any preconception that would diminish the feeling of life as a perilous moral adventure. It is difficult to be a man, I think; but the difficulties are not insuperable. Yet if we relax our vigilance for a moment we pay an exorbitant price. I have never seen such a relations.h.i.+p as that between Brimmer and the businesswoman that was not based on bitterness, irresolution, and cowardice-the very opposites of love and any such indulgence on my part would, I was sure, turn my hair white in a moment, destroy the pigmentation in my eyes, incline me to simper, and leave a hairy tail coiled in my pants. I knew no one who had hit on such a way of life except as an expression of inadequacy-a shocking and repugnant unwillingness to cope with the generous forces of life. Brimmer was my friend and consequently enough of a man to make him deeply ashamed of what he was doing. And with this as my consolation I went to sleep.

He was in the bar at twelve-thirty the next day, but I did not speak to him. I drank my gin with a German businessman who had boarded the s.h.i.+p at Lisbon. It may have been because my German friend was dull that I kept scrutinizing Brimmer for some telling fault-insipidity or bitterness in his voice. But even the full weight of my prejudice, which was immense, could not project, as I would have liked, traces of his human failure. He was just the same. The businesswoman and her secretary rejoined one another after dinner, and Brimmer joined the Southern family, who were either so obtuse or so naive that they had seen nothing and had no objection to letting Brimmer dance with Sister and walk her around in the rain.

I did not speak to him for the rest of the voyage. We docked at Naples at seven o'clock on a rainy morning, and when I had cleared customs and was leaving the port with my bags, Brimmer called to me. He was with a good-looking, leggy blonde who must have been twenty years younger than he, and he asked if they could drive me up to Rome. Why I accepted, why I arose with such agility over my ma.s.sive disapproval, seems to have been, in retrospect, a dislike of loneliness. I did not want to take the train alone to Rome. I accepted their offer and drove with them to Rome, stopping in Terracina for lunch. They were driving up to Florence in the morning, and since this was my destination, I went on with them.

Considering Brimmer's winning ways with animals and small children-they were all captivated-and his partiality (as I was to discover later) to the Franciscan forms of prayer, it might be worth recounting what happened that day when we turned off the road and drove up into a.s.sisi for lunch. Portents mean nothing, but the truth is that when we begin a journey in Italy to a clap of thunder and a sky nearly black with swallows we pay more emotional attention to this spectacle than we would at home. The weather had been fair all that morning, but as we turned off toward a.s.sisi a wind began to blow, and even before we reached the gates of the town the sky was dark. We had lunch at an inn near the duomo with a view of the valley and a good view of the storm as it came up the road and struck the holy city. It was darkness, wind, and rain of an unusual suddenness and density. There was an awning over the window where we sat and a palm tree in a garden below us, and while we ate our lunch we saw both the awning and the palm tree picked to pieces by the wind. When we finished lunch it was like night in the streets. A young brother let us into the duomo, but it was too dark to see the Cimabues. Then the brother took us to the sacristy and unlocked the door. The moment Brimmer entered that holy place the windows exploded under the force of the wind, and it was only by some kind of luck that we were not all cut to pieces by the gla.s.s that flew against the chest where the relics are stored. For the moment or two that the door was opened, the wind ranged through the church, extinguis.h.i.+ng every candle in the place, and it took Brimmer and me and the brother, all pulling, to get the door shut again. Then the brother hurried off for help, and we climbed to the upper church. As we drove out of a.s.sisi the wind fell, and looking back I saw the clouds pa.s.s over the town and the place fill up and s.h.i.+ne with the light of day.

We said goodbye in Florence and I did not see Brimmer again. It was the leggy blonde who wrote to me in July or August, when I had returned to the United States and our farm in New Hamps.h.i.+re. She wrote from a hospital in Zurich, and the letter had been forwarded from my address in Florence. "Poor Brimmer is dying," she wrote. "And if you could get up here to see him I know it would make him very happy. He often speaks of you, and I know you were one of his best friends. I am enclosing some papers that might interest you since you are a writer. The doctors do not think he can live another week..." To refer to me as a friend exposed what must have been the immensity of his loneliness; and it seemed all along that I had known he was going to die, that his promiscuity was a relations.h.i.+p not to life but to death. That was in the afternoon-it was four or five-the light glancing, and that gratifying stillness in the air that falls over the back country with the earliest signs of night. I didn't tell my wife. Why should I? She never knew Brimmer and why introduce death into such a tranquil scene? What I remember feeling was gladness. The letter was six weeks old. He would be dead.

I don't suppose she could have read the papers she sent on. They must have represented a time of life when he had suffered some kind of breakdown. The first was a facetious essay, attacking the modern toilet seat and claiming that the crouched position it enforced was disadvantageous to those muscles and organs that were called into use. This was followed by a pa.s.sionate prayer for cleanliness of heart. The prayer seemed to have gone unanswered, because the next piece was a very dirty essay on s.e.xual control, followed by a long ballad called The Ups and Downs of Jeremy Funicular. This was a disgusting account of Jeremy's erotic adventures, describing many married and unmarried ladies and also one garage mechanic, one wrestler, and one lighthouse keeper. The ballad was long, and each stanza ended with a reprise lamenting the fact that Jeremy had never experienced remorse-excepting when he was mean to children, foolish with money, or overate of bread and meat at table. The last ma.n.u.script was the remains or fragments of a journal. "Gratissiino Signore," he wrote, "for the creaking shutter, the love of Mrs. Pigott, the smells of rain, the candor of friends, the fish in the sea, and especially for the smell of bread and coffee, since they mean mornings and newness of life." It went on, pious and lewd, but I read no more.

My wife is lovely, lovely were my children, and lovely that scene, and how dead he and his dirty words seemed in the summer light. I was glad of the news, and his death seemed to have removed the perplexity that he had represented. I could remember with some sadness that he had been able to convey a feeling that the exuberance and the pain of life was a gla.s.s against which his nose was pressed: that he seemed able to dramatize the sense of its urgency and its deadly seriousness. I remembered the fineness of his hands, the light voice, and the cast in his eye that made the pupil seem like a goat's; but I wondered why he had failed, and by my lights he had failed horribly. Which one of us is not suspended by a thread above carnal anarchy, and what is that thread but the light of day? The difference between life and death seemed no more than the difference between going up to see the landfall at Lisbon and remaining in bed with Mme. Troyan. I could remember the landfall-the pleasant, brackish smell of insh.o.r.e water like my grandfather's bathing shoes-distant voices on a beach, villas, sea bells, and Sanctus bells, and the singing of the priest and the faces of the pa.s.sengers all raised, all smiling in wonder at the sight of land as if nothing like it had ever been seen before.

But I was wrong, and set the discovery of my mistake in any place where you can find an old copy of Europa or Epoca. It is a Monday and I am spear-fis.h.i.+ng with my son off the rocks near Porto San Stefano. My son and I are not good friends, and it is at our best that we seem to be in disagreement with one another. We seem to want the same place in the sun. But we are great friends under water. I am delighted to see him there like a figure in a movie, head down, feet up, armed with a fis.h.i.+ng spear, air streaming from his snorkel-and the rilled sand, where he stirs it, turning up like smoke. Here, in the deep water among the rocks, we seem to escape the tensions that make our relations.h.i.+ps in other places vexatious. It is lovely here. With a little chop on the surface, the sun falls to the bottom of the sea in a great net of light. There are starfish in the colors of lipstick, and all the rocks are covered with white flowers. And after a festa, a Sunday when the beaches have been crowded, there are other things so many fathoms down-bits of sandwich paper, the crossword-puzzle page from Il Messaggero, and water-logged copies of Epoca. It is out of the back pages of one of these that Brimmer looks up to me from the bottom of the sea. He is not dead. He has just married an Italian movie actress. He has his left arm around her slender waist, his right foot crossed in front of his left and in his right hand the full gla.s.s. He looks no better and no worse, and I don't know if he has sold his lights and vitals to the devil or only discovered himself. I go up to the surface, shake the water out of my hair, and think that I am worlds away from home.

THE GOLDEN AGE.

Our ideas of castles, formed in childhood, are inflexible, and why try to reform them? Why point out that in a real castle thistles grow in the courtyard, and the threshold of the ruined throne room is guarded by a nest of green adders? Here are the keep, the drawbridge, the battlements and towers that we took with our lead soldiers when we were down with the chicken pox. The first castle was English, and this one was built by the King of Spain during an occupation of Tuscany, but the sense of imaginative supremacy-the heightened mystery of n.o.bility-is the same. Nothing is inconsequential here. It is thrilling to drink Martinis on the battlements, it is thrilling to bathe in the fountain, it is even thrilling to climb down the stairs into the village after supper and buy a box of matches. The drawbridge is down, the double doors are open, and early one morning we see a family crossing the moat, carrying the paraphernalia of a picnic.

They are Americans. Nothing they can do will quite conceal the touching ridiculousness, the clumsiness of the traveler. The father is a tall young man, a little stooped, with curly hair and fine white teeth. His wife is pretty, and they have two sons. Both boys are armed with plastic machine guns, which were recently mailed to them by their grandparents. It is Sunday, bells are ringing, and who ever brought the bells into Italy? Not the vaca in Florence but the harsh country bells that bing and bang over the olive groves and the cypress alleys in such an alien discord that they might have come in the carts of Attila the Hun. This urgent jangling sounds over the last of the antique fis.h.i.+ng villages-really one of the last things of its kind. The stairs of the castle wind down into a place that is lovely and remote. There are no bus or train connections to this place, no pensioni or hotels, no art schools, no tourists or souvenirs; there is not even a postcard for sale. The natives wear picturesque costumes, sing at their work, and haul up Greek vases in their fis.h.i.+ng nets. It is one of the last places in the world where you can hear shepherds' pipes, where beautiful girls with loose bodices go unphotographed as they carry baskets of fish on their heads, and where serenades are sung after dark. Down the stairs come the Americans into the village.

The women in black, on their way to church, nod and wish them good morning. "Il poeta," they say, to each other. Good morning to the poet, the wife of the poet, and the poet's sons. Their courtesy seems to embarra.s.s the stranger. "Why do they call you a poet?" his older son asks, but Father doesn't reply. In the piazza there is some evidence of the fact that the village is not quite perfect. What has been kept out by its rough roads has come in on the air. The village boys roosting around the fountain have their straw hats canted over their foreheads, and matchsticks in their teeth, and when they walk they swagger as if they had been born in a saddle, although there is not a saddle horse in the place. The blue-green beam of the television set in the cafe has begun to transform them from sailors into cowboys, from fishermen into gangsters, from shepherds into juvenile delinquents and masters of ceremonies, their bladders awash with Coca-Cola, and this seems very sad to the Americans. E colpe mia, thinks Seton, the so-called poet, as he leads his family through the piazza to the quays where their rowboat is moored.

The harbor is as round as a soup plate, the opening lies between two cliffs, and on the outermost, the seaward cliff, stands the castle, with its round towers, that the Setons have rented for the summer. Regarding the nearly perfect scene, Seton throws out his arms and exclaims, "Jesus, what a spot!" He raises an umbrella at the stern of the rowboat for his wife, and quarrels with the boys about where they will sit. "You sit where I tell you to sit, Tommy!" he shouts. "And I don't want to hear another word out of you." The boys grumble, and there is a burst of machine-gun fire. They put out to sea in a loud but not an angry uproar. The bells are silent now, and they can hear the wheezing of the old church organ, its lungs rotted with sea fog. The insh.o.r.e water is tepid and extraordinarily dirty, but out past the mole the water is so clear, so finely colored that it seems like a lighter element, and when Seton glimpses the shadow of their hull, drawn over the sand and rocks ten fathoms down, it seems that they float on blue air.

There are thongs for oarlocks, and Seton rows by standing in the waist and putting his weight against the oars. He thinks that he is quite adroit at this-even picturesque-but he would never, even at a great distance, be taken for an Italian. Indeed, there is an air of criminality, of shame about the poor man. The illusion of levitation, the charming tranquility of the day-crenellated towers against that blueness of sky that seems to be a piece of our consciousness-are not enough to expunge his sense of guilt but only to hold it in suspense. He is a fraud, an impostor, an aesthetic criminal, and, sensing his feelings, his wife says gently, "Don't worry, darling, no one will know, and if they do know, they won't care." He is worried because he is not a poet, and because this perfect day is, in a sense, his day of reckoning. He is not a poet at all, and only hoped to be better understood in Italy if he introduced himself as one. It is a harmless imposture-really an aspiration. He is in Italy only because he wants to lead a more ill.u.s.trious life, to at least broaden his powers of reflection. He has even thought of writing a poem-something about good and evil.

There are many other boats in the water, rounding the cliff. All the idlers and beach boys are out, b.u.mping gunwales, pinching their girls, and loudly singing phrases of canzone. They all salute il poeta. Around the cliff the sh.o.r.e is steep, terraced for vineyards, and packed with wild rosemary, and here the sea has beaten into the sh.o.r.e a chain of sandy coves. Seton heads for the largest of these, and his sons dive off the boat as he approaches the beach. He lands, and unloads the umbrella and the other gear.

Everyone speaks to them, everyone waves, and everyone in the village but the few churchgoers is on the beach. The Setons are the only strangers. The sand is a dark-golden color, and the sea s.h.i.+nes like the curve of a rainbow-emerald, malachite, sapphire, and indigo. The striking absence of vulgarity and censoriousness in the scene moves Seton so that his chest seems to fill up with some fluid of appreciation. This is simplicity, he thinks, this is beauty, this is the raw grace of human nature! He swims in the fresh and buoyant water, and when he has finished swimming he stretches out in the sun. But now he seems restless, as if he were troubled once more about the fact that he is not a poet. And if he is not a poet, then what is he?

He is a television writer. Lying on the sand of the cove, below the castle, is the form of a television writer. His crime is that he is the author of an odious situation comedy called "The Best Family." When it was revealed to him that in dealing with mediocrity he was dealing not with flesh and blood but with whole princ.i.p.alities and kingdoms of wrongdoing, he threw up his job and fled to Italy. But now "The Best Family" has been leased by Italian television-it is called "La Famiglia Tosta" over here-and the asininities he has written will ascend to the towers of Siena, will be heard in the ancient streets of Florence, and will drift out of the lobby of the Gritti Palace onto the Grand Ca.n.a.l. This Sunday is his debut, and his sons, who are proud of him, have spread the word in the village. Poeta!

His sons have begun to skirmish with their machine guns. It is a harrowing reminder of his past. The taint of television is on their innocent shoulders. While the children of the village sing, dance, and gather wild flowers, his own sons advance from rock to rock, pretending to kill. It is a mistake, and a trivial one, but it fl.u.s.ters him, although he cannot bring himself to call them to him and try to explain that their adroitness at imitating the cries and the postures of the dying may deepen an international misunderstanding. They are misunderstood, and he can see the women wagging their heads at the thought of a country so barbarous that even little children are given guns as playthings. Mamma mia! One has seen it all in the movies. One would not dare walk on the streets of New York because of gang warfare, and once you step out of New York you are in a wilderness, full of naked savages.

The battle ends, they go swimming again, and Seton, who has brought along some spear-fis.h.i.+ng gear, for an hour explores a rocky ledge that sinks off the tip of the cove. He dives, and swims through a school of transparent fish, and farther down, where the water is dark and cold, he sees a large octopus eye him wickedly, gather up its members, and slip into a cave paved with white flowers. There at the edge of the cave he sees a Greek vase, an amphora. He dives for it, feels the rough clay on his fingers, and goes up for air. He dives again and again, and finally brings the vase triumphantly into the light. It is a plump form with a narrow neck and two small handles. The neck is looped with a scarf of darker clay. It is broken nearly in two. Such vases, and vases much finer, are often found along that coast, and if they are of no value they stand on the shelves of the cafe, the bakery, and the barbershop, but the value of this one to Seton is inestimable-as if the fact that a television writer could reach into the Mediterranean and bring up a Greek vase were a hopeful cultural omen, proof of his own worthiness. He celebrates his find by drinking some wine, and then it is time to eat. He polishes off the bottle of wine with his lunch, and then, like everyone else on the beach, lies down in the shade and goes to sleep.

Just after Seton had waked and refreshed himself with a swim, he saw the strangers coming around the point in a boat-a Roman family, Seton guessed, who had come up to Tarlonia for the weekend. There were a father, a mother, and a son. Father fumbled clumsily with the oars. The pallor of all three of them, and their att.i.tudes, set them apart from the people of the village. It was as if they had approached the cove from another continent. As they came nearer, the woman could be heard asking her husband to bring the boat up on the beach.

The father's replies were short-tempered and very loud. His patience was exhausted. It was not easy to row a boat, he said. It was not as easy as it looked. It was not easy to land in strange coves where, if a wind came up, the boat could be dashed to pieces and he would have to buy the owner a new boat. Boats were expensive. This tirade seemed to embarra.s.s the mother and tire the son. They were both dressed for bathing and the father was not, and, in his white s.h.i.+rt, he seemed to fit that much less into the halcyon scene. The purple sea and the graceful swimmers only deepened his exasperation, and, red-faced with worry and discomfort, he called out excited and needless warnings to the swimmers, fired questions at the people on the sh.o.r.e (How deep was the water? How safe was the cove?), and finally brought his boat in safely. During this loud performance, the boy smiled slyly at his mother and she smiled slyly back. They had put up with this for so many years! Would it never end? Fuming and grunting, the father dropped anchor in two feet of water, and the mother and the son slipped over the gunwales and swam away.

Seton watched the father, who took a copy of Il Tempo out of his pocket and began to read, but the light was too bright. Then he felt anxiously in his pockets to see if the house keys and the car keys had taken wing and flown away. After this, he sc.r.a.ped a little bilge out of the boat with a can. Then he examined the worn oar thongs, looked at his watch, tested the anchor, looked at his watch again, and examined the sky, where there was a single cloud, for signs of a tempest. Finally, he sat down and lit a cigarette, and his worries, flying in from all points of the compa.s.s, could be seen to arrive on his brow. They had left the hot-water heater on in Rome! His apartment and all his valuables were perhaps at that very moment being destroyed by the explosion. The left front tire on the car was thin and had probably gone flat, if the car itself had not been stolen by the brigands that you found in these remote fis.h.i.+ng villages. The cloud in the west was small, to be sure, but it was the kind of cloud that heralded bad weather, and they would be tossed mercilessly by the high waves on their way back around the point, and would reach the pensione (where they had already paid for dinner) after all the best cutlets had been eaten and the wine had been drunk. For all he knew, the President might have been a.s.sa.s.sinated in his absence, the lira devalued. The government might have fallen. He suddenly got to his feet and began to roar at his wife and son. It was time to go, it was time to go. Night was falling. A storm was coming. They would be late for dinner. They would get caught in the heavy traffic near Fregene. They would miss all the good television programs..

His wife and his son turned and swam back toward the boat, but they took their time. It was not late, they knew. Night was not falling, and there was no sign of a storm. They would not miss dinner at the pensione. They knew from experience that they would reach the pensione long before the tables were set, but they had no choice. They climbed aboard while the father weighed anchor, shouted warnings to the swimmers, and asked advice from the sh.o.r.e. He finally got the boat into the bay, and started around the point.

They had just disappeared when one of the beach boys climbed to the highest rock and waved a red s.h.i.+rt, shouting, "Pesce cane! Pesce cane!"

All the swimmers turned, howling with excitement and kicking up a heavy surf, and swam for the sh.o.r.e. Over the bar where they had been one could see the fin of a shark. The alarm had been given in time, and the shark seemed surly as he cruised through the malachite-colored water. The bathers lined the sh.o.r.e, pointing out the menace to one another, and a little child stood in the shallows shouting, "Brutto! Brutto! Brutto!" Then everyone cheered as down the path came Mario, the best swimmer in the village, carrying a long spear gun. Mario worked as a stonemason, and for some reason-perhaps his industriousness-had never fitted into the scene. His legs were too long or too far apart, his shoulders were too round or too square, his hair was too thin, and that luxuriance of the flesh that had been dealt out so generously to the other bucks had bypa.s.sed poor Mario. His nakedness seemed piteous and touching, like a stranger surprised in some intimacy. He was cheered and complimented as he came through the crowd, but he could not even muster a nervous smile, and, setting his thin lips, he strode into the water and swam to the bar. But the shark had gone, and so had most of the sunlight. The disenchantment of a dark beach moved the bathers to gather their things and start for home. No one waited for Mario; no one seemed to care. He stood in the dark water with his spear, ready to take on his shoulders the safety and welfare of the community, but they turned their backs on him and sang as they climbed the cliff.

To h.e.l.l with "La Famiglia Tosta," Seton thought. To h.e.l.l with it. This was the loveliest hour of the whole day. All kinds of pleasure-food, drink, and love-lay ahead of him, and he seemed, by the gathering shadow, gently disengaged from his responsibility for television, from the charge of making sense of his life. Now everything lay in the dark and ample lap of night, and the discourse was suspended.

The stairs they took went past the ramparts they had rented, which were festooned with flowers, and it was on this stretch from here up to the drawbridge and the portal, that the triumph of the King, the architect, and the stonemasons was most imposing, for one was involved in the same breath with military impregnability, princeliness, and beauty. There was no point, no turning, no tower or battlement where these forces seemed separate. All the ramparts were finely corniced, and at every point where the enemy could have been expected to advance, the great, eight-ton crest of the Christian King of Spain proclaimed the blood, the faith, and the good taste of the defender. Over the main portal, the crest had fallen from its fine setting of sea G.o.ds with tridents and had crashed into the moat, but it had landed with its blazonings upward, and the quarterings, the cross, and the marble draperies could be seen in the water.

Then, on the wall, among the other legends, Seton saw the words "Americani, go home, go home." The writing was faint; it might have been there since the war, or its faintness might be accounted for by the fact that it had been done in haste. Neither his wife nor his children saw it, and he stood aside while they crossed the drawbridge into the courtyard, and then he went back to rub the words out with his fingers. Oh, who could have written it? He felt mystified and desolate. He had been invited to come to this strange country. The invitations had been clamorous. Travel agencies, s.h.i.+pping firms, airlines, even the Italian government itself had besought him to give up his comfortable way of life and travel abroad. He had accepted the invitations, he had committed himself to their hospitality, and now he was told, by this ancient wall, that he was not wanted.

He had never before felt unwanted. It had never been said. He had been wanted as a baby, wanted as a young man, wanted as a lover, a husband and father, wanted as a scriptwriter, a raconteur and companion. He had, if anything, been wanted excessively, and his only worry had been to spare himself, to spread his sought-after charms with prudence and discretion, so that they would do the most good. He had been wanted for golf, for tennis, for bridge, for charades, for c.o.c.ktails, for boards of management-and yet this rude and ancient wall addressed him as if he were a pariah, a nameless beggar, an outcast. He was most deeply wounded.

Ice was stored in the castle dungeon, and Seton took his c.o.c.ktail shaker there, filled it, made some Martinis, and carried them up to the battlements of the highest tower, where his wife joined him to watch the light ring its changes. Darkness was filling in the honeycombed cliffs of Tarlonia, and while the hills along the sh.o.r.e bore only the most farfetched resemblance to the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of women, they calmed Seton's feelings and stirred in him the same deep tenderness.

"I might go down to the cafe after dinner," his wife said, "just to see what sort of a job they did with the dubbing."

She did not understand the strength of his feelings about writing for television; she had never understood. He said nothing. He supposed that, seen at a distance, on his battlement, he might have been taken for what he was not-a poet, a seasoned traveler, a friend of Elsa Maxwell's, a prince or a duke-but this world lying all about him now did not really have the power to elevate and change him. It was only himself-the author of "The Best Family"-that he had carried at such inconvenience and expense across borders and over the sea. The flowery and ma.s.sive setting had not changed the fact that he was sunburned, amorous, hungry, and stooped, and that the rock he sat on, set in its place by the great King of Spain, cut into his rump.

At dinner, Clementina, the cook, asked if she might go to the village and see "La Famiglia Tosta." The boys, of course, were going with their mother. After dinner, Seton went back to his tower. The fis.h.i.+ng fleet had begun to go out past the mole, their torches lighted. The moon rose and blazed so brightly on the sea that the water seemed to turn, to spin in the light. From the village he could hear the bel canto of mothers calling their girls, and, from time to time, a squawk from the television set. It would all be over in twenty minutes, but the sense of wrongdoing in absentia made itself felt in his bones. Oh, how could one stop the advance of barbarism, vulgarity, and censoriousness? When he saw the lights his family carried coming up the stairs, he went down to the moat to meet them. They were not alone. Who was with them? Who were these figures ascending? The doctor? The Mayor? And a little girl carrying gladioli. It was a delegation-and a friendly one, he could tell by the lightness of their voices. They had come to praise him.

"It was so beautiful, so comical, so true to life!" the doctor said.