“That’s probably it,” she said, practically with a sniff. “All right, tell him yes.”
I told him yes.
“Swell,” he said. “Friday at seven.”
Bang in my ear, as if he had tossed the instrument into its cradle from six feet away.
“That old rip,” I said. “He’s got more left at nearly eighty than most of us had at eighteen. Running around in his convertible. Why hasn’t he got sore joints? Why doesn’t he ever get tired?”
“What makes you think he doesn’t?” Ruth said. “He’s got that metal hip joint, he walks with a cane, his heart runs by electronics, he’s alone, and probably lonely. Why do you think he’s any luckier than you?”
“I didn’t say he was luckier. I said he had more left than anybody his age should have. Sons of missionaries must learn early to get around God.”
“Come on,” she said, and let her hands fall and her shoulders droop as if in defeat. “Come on, read some more before we get into a real fight.”
“You don’t want to hear any more.”
“Of course I want to hear more!”
“The perils of the deep are nearly over,” I said. “From here on it’s less profound but with more local color.”
April 3:
Cøteborg, two days late. In three hours ashore I discover that the solid ground of Sweden is as unstable as the North Atlantic. Doped with more than a week of Dramamine, I stand looking at statues and town halls and into store windows, and as I look they start to lean and roll. Which is maybe the way things look to Mrs. Bertelson, too. She is met by a couple of relatives and a representative of the Swedish-American Line and driven off the dock in a car. The Swedish-American Line man has to interpret—Mrs. B’s in-laws have no English, and she can’t understand their Swedish. Just before she got in the car she threw a desperate look back up at the ship and saw us at the rail. We waved. Her face worked. A word formed on her lips. Good-by, she said, probably not to us. Probably to Omaha, where the house and the grocery store were gone and couldn’t be returned to, and to Minnesota, where her roots were cut, and to the only one who could have dealt with her problems for her, who had gone off that deck feet first, sewn into a sack, thirty-six hours before. Good-by. And vanished into a confusion hardly less than what he had gone into.
April 4, Hotel d’Angleterre:
Quiet run this morning down the Øresund in the rain, with Sweden dim on the left and Denmark dim on the right. Hamlet’s castle at Helsingør loomed up awhile, guarding the narrows, and then a stretch of shore with villages and houses like Monopoly pieces among the leafless trees, and then Copenhagen, the harbor full of traffic, the Little Mermaid wet and cold on her rock, and finally we nudged and snuggled against a pier overhung with a railed platform on which hundreds of people smiled and waved and held up signs: Velkommen til Danmark. Velkommen Doktor Holger Hansen. Velkommen Onkel Oskar. Jeg Elsker Dig, Kristin Møllerup.
The rain came down on them, half of them without umbrellas, and their wet faces shone, and they cheered and waved and held up their banners till the rain melted the paper and ran the paint. Altogether the healthiest, happiest people we have ever seen. We feel like something brought up by grappling hooks, but we are happy to accept their wavings and welcomings as if they were meant for us personally. Escaped from the deep. Praise the Lord.
As I write this, Ruth has gone hunting an apothek or some place where she can buy toothpaste and postcards. She is all recovered, I am still woozy. I sit here by the window overlooking the big square called Kongens Nytorv, nibbling Rullemops and drinking akvavit, and take a look at Copenhagen. The center of the square is all one leafless park. Across it I can see some copper spires, and some castle towers, and narrow streets winding away from the square. All around Kongens Nytorv crimson banners hang out the windows into the rain—some holiday, I assume—and a postman in a crimson coat is moving from door to door along the south side. Like the British, the Danes seem to have discovered the functions of crimson in a gray climate.
Bells are bonging the hour of four from a dozen steeples. Below me, people buy sausages from a street wagon. I pour another two fingers of cold akvavit and pick up another piece of slimy herring. I never much liked herring, but this is suddenly delicious. It goes with the akvavit in one of those subtle food-and-drink marriages like octopus, feta cheese, and ouzo in Greece. It is a form of instant naturalization. I am very glad to be here.
Just now the door opened and a maid, evidently expecting an empty room, started in. I said something in English. A wave of red washed upward from her neck, a blush so dark it looked painful, and she scrambled out, falling over her own feet. New, probably, a country girl just learning to make beds and scrub bathtubs and bring in morning coffee. I can’t avoid the feeling that she is just such a girl as my mother was when she first got up the courage—and what an act of courage it had to be—to spend her savings on a third-class ticket to America, all by herself. I have been half joking about going back to the village she came from—Bregninge, I don’t even know what island it’s on—but I’m sure now I will. Tomorrow we will start negotiations for a car, and call on the rental agent whose name we got from the cherry grower on the Stockholm. We will get maps, guidebooks, phrase books. Ruth swears she will not try to learn Danish, but that doesn’t have to hinder me. Already I can say Ja tak and vaer saa god and en smuk pige, and I am getting pretty good at the glottal stop.
On the corner, carpenters are working on the second floor of a building. I watch a boy, an apprentice he has to be, come from the street with bottles of beer spread fanwise between the fingers of both hands. Eight bottles, he carries. He disappears under the scaffolding, reappears after a while on the second floor. The carpenters lay down their tools and each takes a beer. They pass the opener around, they hoist their bottles toward one another and tilt them to their mouths. They look like a bugle corps playing “To the Colors,” and I accept their salute.
Velkommen, Onkel Yoe.
I slapped the notebook shut. “That’s all for the night. I’m getting singer’s nodules.”
She didn’t object “All right. That was nice, We can read some more tomorrow night, and every night till we finish it. Unless it bothers you too much.”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“I’m afraid it does,” she said. “It bothers me, too. But don’t - you think ... I mean, this fits right in with the letters you’re going through. Here’s a whole piex of our life, a sort of strange interlude.”
“Strange interlude is right.” I stood up, and I guess she saw me wince.
“Hurt?”
“Just the old hinges.”
“You shouldn’t saw all that wood. I beg you and beg you, and still you go on working as if you were a young man. You could hire somebody to do that hard work.”
“And then what would I do?” I said. I stood and listened to the rain hitting the windows in pattering gusts. “Minnie’ll be tracking in more dirt tomorrow than she sweeps out.”
“Oh, my Lord,” Ruth said. “Tomorrow is Minnie’s day, I’d forgotten. I meant to clear out that mess in the other bedroom.”
My good wife is a cliché, the one who cleans up for the cleaning lady. And a good thing too, the cleaning lady being perceptibly slapdash.
The telephone rang again. Arching her eyebrows clear up into her bangs (who’d be calling at this hour, nearly ten o’clock?), Ruth answered it. “Yes,” she said. “Just a moment, please.”
Making don’t-ask-me faces, she reached the instrument across. “Hello?” I said.
Female voice, breathless, hurried, young, apologetic, false. “Mr. Allston? I’m terribly sorry to be bothering you at home, and so late. Do you have a minute? You don’t know me, my name is Anne McElvenny, I live in San Franscisco and I’m one of a group who act as hostesses and guides for State Department visitors. It’s a Junior League thing. I’d like to ask you a favor, or a question.”
“Ask away. Maybe I don’t have the answer, but I can try.”<
br />
“I know! It’s nervy of me, but I thought maybe this is something you’d ... and since he asked about you, and wondered if you weren’t in the Bay Area. You know Césare Rulli.”
“Of course. Is he in town?”
“Yes. For the last two days. He leaves tomorrow night. And you know him, so I don’t have to tell you. He’s such a dynamo, he’s run through everything I had planned for him. -I had such a list I thought we’d never get halfway through it, but... Well! We’ve done the City, and visited the bookstores, and had about six radio and TV interviews, and lunched with a lot of writers, and dined with the Italian consul—I’m calling from there, so I can plan tomorrow. I know he’d love to see you, if you’ll be at home.”
“Why, yes,” I said. “We’d love to see him, too, if we aren’t tied up. Just a minute while I look at the calendar.”
The routine again, hand over mouthpiece, mouth down, sotto voce explanation. “Césare Rulli’s in town, somebody wants to bring him down. Could we give them lunch?”
People who have lived together a long time are said to begin to look alike. They also respond alike to anything that challenges their routine. I could see my own sentiments pass across Ruth’s face, followed by some of hers. First the automatic impulse to reject the intrusion as a threat to peace—a sort of Why can’t they leave us alone? Then some rapid-eye-movement reconsiderations, neutral or only partly negative: what’s on hand? have to shop? rainy day, everything will look its worst. On the other hand, Minnie’s day, that’s a plus. And a break in the daily round, good for Joe. And Césare is good company, and it’s been a long time.
“We could take them out somewhere,” I said.
“No, we should have him here. I’d like to see him, wouldn’t you? But I’d hate to lose the whole afternoon. I’d like to get in a walk if it clears up. Ask her if they could be here by twelve-thirty.”
“Looks fine,” I said into the telephone. “Could you lunch with us? About twelve-thirty?”
“Oh, that will be lovely!” said Ms. McElvenny. “He’ll be so pleased. But are you sure it’s not a ...”
“Not a bit. We’d be hurt if he didn’t give us a chance at him.”
“Oh, here he is now, just going by the door. Would you like to say hello?”
“Sure, put him on.”
There he was, shouting in my ear. “Giuseppe! Come va? And what are you doing out here? I looked for you in New York, and they told me, and I didn’t believe it. I thought you owned New York. Cos’ é successo?”
“Césare,” I said, “you ought to subscribe to Publishers Weekly. I retired and we moved out here eight years ago.”
He still refused to believe it. Retired? A giovane like me? Now what was it, really? Chased some girl out here, had I?
It amuses Césare to talk as if, every time we get together, we do nothing but pinch bottoms, follow Lollabrigidas and Lorens down alleys, and live the dolce vita with accommodating starlets, whereas in plain fact we have spent nearly every hour we ever had together sitting at a table at Downey’s, where Césare will be most visible, conducting monologues with him as monologuist and me as monologuee, and consuming drinks for which, naturally and gracefully, he lets me pay. He always understood what agents are for, even though he was never more than briefly my client.
I held the telephone four inches from my ear and let him shout for a while. When he lulled, I said, “Well, that’s great, it’s great to hear your voice. We’re delighted you called, and tickled you’re coming for lunch. I know you’re at a party now, so I won’t hold onto you. We’ll spill it all tomorrow, shall we? But better let me tell Ms. McElvenny how to get you here.”
D’accordo. Va benissimo. A domani. Ciao, ciao, Giuseppe, arrivederla. He put her back on, and I gave her directions. She couldn’t thank me enough. She knew it would make Mr. Rulli’s trip, just to see us.
“Galloping sociability this week,” I said as I put the telephone back.
“Is that so bad?” Ruth said. “I thought you liked Césare.”
“No, it’s not bad, and I do like C6are. I was just commenting on the way the calendar fills up.”
“It’s just as well,” Ruth said. “You’re getting such an automatic way of evading people. I should think you’d like seeing Césare. He’s the liveliest person we know. He’ll come into our quiet little backwater like a waterspout, and stir us up.”
“And that’s exactly what we need.”
“What you need.”
“And am perfectly happy to accept,” I said. “I’ll probably have more fun out of tomorrow’s visitors than you will, since you have to cook.”
“Yes,” she said absently, already far ahead, already planning, forgetful of what she had started to say to me. “He’s such. an amusing man. He loves himself so he makes you love him too. But I hope they have sense enough to leave by three-thirty or so. Then Minnie can get us cleaned up before she goes.” In a couple of minutes she got out of bed. “Maybe I’ll just go and clear out that bedroom right now,” she said. “Then Minnie’ll have more time to...”
Exit, murmuring and thinking ahead.
TWO
1
Pazienza.
The day that started hectic ends morose. I sit here grumbling to myself, while Ruth recuperates with a couple of aspirins and a heating pad. My impulse is to damn Césare, but he is not responsible, he was just being Césare. If I can’t handle the sort of challenge that Césare makes to my chosen life, I had better choose another life.
It has poured all day, if the word “poured” can be used to describe rain that is not vertical but horizontal, mixed with leaves, branches, power failures, and fears for the windows. We awoke to the shaking and shuddering of the house. Ruth took one look outside and began to mourn. Going to the kitchen to make coffee, I discovered en route that the clerestory windows above the bookcase wall in the living room were leaking, and I spent half an hour on the stepladder taking down kachina dolls, papier-mâché Hindu gods, Hopi bowls, and other bric-a-brac from the drowned top shelf, sponging up a bowlful of water mixed with the cobwebs, dust, and dead flies that Minnie’s house cleaning had left up there, setting a row of breadpans to catch the continuing drip, and removing from the shelves and propping open to dry most of the lifework of Joyce Carol Oates, Edwin O‘Connor, Eugene O’Neill, and Katherine Anne Porter.
Then I got breakfast, which we ate as usual while listening to the “Today” show and watching the day develop outside the windows. It was not the day to entertain Italy’s greatest novelist, the profound anatomist of passion, true heir of D’Annunzio, with a dash of Cellini and a dollop of Casanova. Not the day to entertain anybody. As we set to work to prepare his welcome we alternated between anxiety that we might not be able to do right by him and a wan hope that he wouldn’t come.
We are fond of Césare in spite of his books. His books are overrated, but that is because he is completely of his time, and his time overrates itself. He is neither the first nor the worst to make a career out of the verbal exploration of the various bodily orifices, genital, anal, and oral (not the moral orifices, he is less interested in those). Maybe if I were younger, and my hormones more active, I might appreciate his novels more. As it is, I have to think them compulsive, theatrical, and decadent even while I find Césare himself lively, amusing, and full of an attractive kind of Italian blarney. It is as much of an effort for me to flog my flagging sexual interest through one, of his books as it perhaps was for him to flog himself through the writing of it I suspect he much prefers the research to the writing. Nevertheless, in person he is engaging, the friendliest and best-natured of satyrs, far more fun than his books and far less repulsive than his audience. Though I grumbled a little about his coming, I was actually looking forward to it. News of the Rialto, and all that It is possible to feel isolated even when you insist that that’s what you want. It is also possible to feel that you should justify your retirement by showing off the putting green and paddle tennis court.
We used
to do that sort of thing a lot We had invented Eden, and owed it a PR job. Probably we thought we were adapting to one of those illusions they call a life style. We wanted our American plenty to show, but not too much. We wanted to make it clear that our tastes were simpler than our means would have permitted. We wanted to demonstrate that the rush to the suburbs and the country, when conducted by the right people, could be an enhancement of civilization, not an evasion of it. We had books, music, a garden, birds, country walks, friends. We were within ten minutes of a great university, with all it offered in intellectual and cultural weather, and less than an hour from the city that everybody in the world falls in love with. When we had Eastern or foreign visitors we watched them confidently for signs of envy. We wanted, maybe just a little desperately, to be thought terribly lucky.
Well, we were, we are. But at our age, seven or eight years make a difference. Since coming out here we have lost a few friends by their moving away, and one very dear one by death. Eden with graves is no longer Eden. Moreover, we have had an invasion from the Land of Nod. The place has been moved in on by junior executives whose upward mobility is always showing, whose new subdivisions scar the hills, and whose attitudes sometimes offend the godly. So as the people we knew back East die, or are institutionalized, or take themselves off to Tucson or Sarasota or Santa Barbara to estivate their last years away as we are doing here, our contacts here shrink, too. We have half given up the habit of mingling with our fellow man, and mingling, I suppose, is a little like sex. Use it or lose it. Like. they say.
Result: we find it easier to stay home and watch television, or read, than go out, and these days when we entertain visitors we find them less a pleasure than an anxiety. I get smitten with the desire to make garden and patio worthy of admiring exclamations; Ruth cleans like Mrs. Craig and cooks as if Julia Child were coming to dine. We found ourselves preparing that way even for Césare, who could make a desert island lively. Why? I wonder. Maybe just friendship, a wish to show him a pleasant time. Maybe something else, a determination to send him back to his crumbling old palazzo on the Botteghe Oscure crying aloud for the felicity he left behind in California.
The Spectator Bird Page 5