Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  He tried to get his thoughts in order. Naturally, he was opposed to cops’ throwing their weight around. But that was how they were. And if that was how they were, they ought to be consistent, handing it out equally to the famous and the infamous. He did not think there was any clause in the Constitution that entitled a citizen not to be called “Buster.” That, apparently, was a privilege. He was free to resent the way the cop talked to a person he considered nobody, a weedy member of the draft pool, but the cop, in fact, had a duty not to know who he was. Peter was ashamed of his mother for letting them talk her into taking advantage of her celebrity and ashamed of the admiral for bringing liquor into his cell and breaking the rules—it was against Kant’s teaching to pretend to be a law unto yourself. His mother’s celebrity, as a matter of fact, was exactly what had got them into trouble; she was used to being flattered by people like Margery who “knew” she played the harp. If the cop had “known” that, he would have handled her with deference, which in turn would have satisfied her ego. So that in some depressing way the whole thing boiled down to a misunderstanding, which the cop would probably pay for.

  The old jailer came and took away his dinner tray. Night fell. Peter put on his pajamas and brushed his teeth with some salt he had saved from his dinner. He washed. These familiar night-time actions made him lonely for his mother. He remembered how she used to tuck him in when he was little, tell him his story, and bring him his glass of water. All at once, he felt contrite. He should never have made her come back to Rocky Port. He took back his harsh judgments. Obviously, a celebrity was in a position to demand courtesy from the law; she would have been wrong if she had not made an example of herself. A cop ought to fear that every nobody was a possible somebody or had a relation who was. This one would think twice before calling the next kid “Buster” or “buddy,” even a kid from the wrong side of town—as Margery said, you never knew these days. Forgiving all his enemies, he fell asleep.

  He had forgotten where he was when he heard someone unlocking his door. The jailer beckoned. “You want to see the fireworks?” He led Peter down the corridor and up some stairs, out to the back of the jail, where there was a raised porch with some rocking-chairs. His mother was already there, in a dressing-gown and mules, smoking a cigarette with Margery. She hugged him. “Isn’t this fun? We’re having an adventure, Peter.” He sighed. That was her way, when he was little, of characterizing some gruesome mishap, such as running out of gas in the desert ten miles from the nearest ghost town. They watched the rockets and the Roman candles. His mother was happy, giving little cries of pleasure as the fireworks bloomed, like big flowers in the sky, and groaning when they fizzled, until the jailer cautioned her not to make noise.

  Peter realized that he was happy too. He and his mother were jailbirds, like Thoreau. True, they were getting preferential treatment, but probably Thoreau had got preferential treatment too. Small worries crossed his mind. He had left his motorbike in the back yard, with the gate unlocked; he hoped nobody would steal it. His father might be angry if he was late arriving at the Cape; he was never one to listen to an excuse. But Peter could not get really alarmed. He felt safe, with his mother, in this clapboarded jail; it had a cosy, small-town Yankee atmosphere. Quite near at hand, he heard an owl hoot. His mother whispered that the fireworks were exceptionally good. “They don’t change much,” said the jailer. “Ain’t much new you can do with a rocket or a Roman candle.” They were lucky, he added, to have a box seat. “Couldn’t have picked a better night, ma’am, you and the boy, for getting yourselves incarcerated. This town-jail porch is the ideal spot”—he pronounced it EYEDEEL, with equal stresses—“for watching the fireworks down there on the point.” The rocking-chairs, which had held so many cops’ bottoms, creaked.

  To Be a Pilgrim

  DURING HIS FIRST WEEKS as a student in Paris, Peter moved several times. The Embassy had given him a list of approved French families that took boarders, but he did not want to live with a French family. For the moment, he did not want to shack up with an American family either and baby-sit in exchange for his room and board, though this idea appealed to him more; he liked children. But if he stayed with Americans, he would never improve his French.

  Until he landed at Le Havre, he considered himself fluent in French. Against his parents’ advice, he had brought his motorbike, refusing to be separated from it, as though, said his mother, it were the fleet of fire-trucks he had slept with as a child. Owing to the motorbike, he had traveled by boat, whereas the other students in his group were traveling by charter plane. On the voyage, every day he had gone down to the hold to visit his trusty old steed, which, thanks to the New York Mafia, had a broken headlight, like a blind cyclops’ eye. According to his well-laid plans, he would be reunited with it on the dock and speed off for Paris, checking his suitcases and book bag through on the train: a two-pronged assault on the capital. On the boat (an American bottom; Peter was supporting the dollar), the baggage-master had assured him that all he would have to do, after seeing the bike through customs, would be to gas up on the pier and take off. On the pier he would find an agent to handle the shipping of his baggage, but Peter distrusted agents; his travel motto was “Do-it-yourself.” He had his route mapped; his first stop was going to be Rouen, to inspect the remains of the cathedral and the church of St.-Maclou—he had decided to be interested in art this year.

  But on the dock the French scored their first victory over Peter Levi, famed linguist. He heard himself say “De Le Havre,” instead of “Du Havre,” to the porter he had hired to guard his motorbike while he took his bags to Expéditions, and immediately his forces were thrown into confusion. He was routed by an enemy tactic he came to know well: they lay patiently in ambush, waiting for you to make a mistake; then they sprang. Confident of the difficulty of their terrain, they could afford to let you forge ahead for a paragraph without offering any resistance—time was on their side. As soon as those two little words (“De Le”)plopped from his lips, everything changed, as though, knowing better, he had pronounced a sort of negative password.

  The porter, who only a minute before had been chiming “Oui, monsieur” and “Parfaitement,” suddenly shifted to sign language. The burden of his pantomime seemed to be that Peter should surrender his trusty steed to another porter while the first one carried his bags. Resigning himself to a double tip, Peter agreed. “On est en France, Pierre,” he said to himself. But you could not buy off this enemy (there ended the second lesson); not even money spoke to the French.

  Before his eyes, the motorbike was seized and wheeled away while his captive bags were hustled off in another direction—toward the boat train, he realized, gulping. He stood swallowing his saliva, uncertain which to trail. The porter with the suitcases turned around and beckoned angrily with his head for Peter to follow. All at once, Peter grasped their maneuver. They were trying to put him on the boat train! He ran after his suitcases; the motorbike had vanished into the madding crowd on the platform. “Essayez de comprendre, monsieur,” he pleaded, catching up with the original porter. “Je vais à Paris en vélomoteur. Je ne voyage pas avec le train.”

  The man halted. “Ticket!” he shouted in English, bringing his face close to Peter’s, so that it was impossible not to smell the morning wine on his breath. Peter launched an appeal to himself for a little calm. He spoke as slowly as he could, putting a pause after each word like a language-teaching tape. “Je n’ai pas de billet. Je vais à Paris en vélomoteur. Rendez-moi mes bagages, s’il vous plaît.” “Ticket! Ticket!” repeated the porter peremptorily. Some Americans at the train window looked down at Peter and smiled. He was dressed for the road in leather helmet, leather jacket, khaki pants; strapped to his back was a canvas pack containing his pajamas, clean underwear, shaving stuff, toothbrush, goggles, Band-Aids, the green Michelin guide to Normandy, road maps, the Plan de Paris, candy bars for energy, and a French-English pocket dictionary. “He wants to see your ticket,” a woman called out from the train. />
  At that moment, an ally appeared on the platform, smoking a small cigar—a young salesman of pharmaceuticals who used to drop in, slumming, at the tourist-class bar. “What’s your problem?” he said in a thin, snappy voice; he was a blond former druggist from Berkeley who made the trip, cabin class, twice a year on business. Peter explained. He wanted to send his baggage by train and get his motorbike back. The salesman summoned a man from Cook’s. The verdict was that Peter’s baggage could not travel unaccompanied on the boat train. “But I can send it by express or freight, surely?” Did Peter have an address in Paris where it could be delivered? Peter’s only address was “Care of American Express,” and he hesitated to say this in front of the man from Cook’s. “Better hop on the train,” said the salesman. “Play it their way.” “But my motorbike!” The motorbike was already in the baggage car (where else?). The porter claimed this was what the gentleman wanted. “Mais je vous ai dit cinq fois, monsieur—” Peter started to expostulate. The salesman cut in. “Give him his check for the bike,” he said to the porter. “And get a move on with those bags. The train’s due out of here in five minutes. Find him an empty place. Second class. Do you want the smoking or the non-smoking?” “I don’t care,” said Peter. “Non-smoking, I guess.” To Peter’s surprise, the porter dug. He complained, in French, that all the places on the train were reserved. “Baloney!” said the salesman to the porter. “There’re plenty of seats down the line.” He patted Peter’s arm. “You’re all set now. See you soon. And let me give you a little guidance. Never try to speak French to these froggies, even if you know how. They lose their respect for you.”

  Unstrapping his pack in the compartment, Peter compared this advice with the advice he had received from his father, which was never under any circumstances let a French person trap you into speaking English—they lost their respect for you. Pensively, he took off his helmet and felt in his pocket to make sure his bicycle clips were still there.

  Once the train got moving, Peter was filled with gloom. The auspices looked bad. Not only had his project been frustrated and his mount shot from under him, but he had suffered a failure of nerve in the face of French civilization. The fact was, there still would have been time, probably, to get his motorbike off the train. Instead, he had let the salesman arrange the terms of his capitulation and had actually felt grateful to him. The reason was not far to seek. He had been afraid of being left by himself on the pier, in the midst of all those French, trying to do something unconventional like express his stuff to Paris. He guessed he had had an attack of agoraphobia, which was as common as the trots, they said, among American tourists. To tell the awful truth, he now wished he had traveled with a group.

  On the boat, he had been expecting to meet some fellow-students in tourist class, but there were only a few married Fulbrights with babies, who were not interested in a kid his age. The only other student he found was a Wellesley girl in first class who had graduated last June, a former pupil of the babbo’s; unfortunately, she had got off at Cobh. Most students nowadays, the purser told him, traveled by air, unless they camp with their parents. The word nowadays, after Rocky Port, was poison to Peter; it made him feel like the Last Rose of Summer blooming wanly on D deck.

  Staring out the window at the vanishing oil refineries of Le Havre, Peter wished he knew where he stood about being an anachronism. On the one hand, he admired Don Quixote, who had replaced Sir Pellias the Gentle Knight as his hero when he had to “outgrow” King Arthur and the Companions of the Round Table and the nightly story he told himself of marrying the Damsel Parcenet. At college he had done a paper on the role of Rosinante in Cervantes’ thought for his gen ed course, and he had named his motorbike Rosinante as a pious act. He had bought it, second hand, with his savings freshman year, at a time when others were getting sports cars, and he had brought it to Europe, he supposed, because everybody at home made fun of his attachment to it and of the curious (they said) idea he had that somebody might steal it—according to his father, it was its own best insurance against theft. On the other hand, unlike some of his classmates, he could not swallow Burke and neo-conservatism or Plato’s Philosopher King; nor could he wear waistcoats and grow an Edwardian mustache. He was a weirdie without conviction, cast in the part by others, just as, in school plays, he always got the clown’s bells, because of his long nose and reedy build; his first years in boarding-school, they had made him be Jaques in As You Like It, “weeping and commenting upon the sobbing deer.” Shakespeare was coarsely punning, their English teacher explained: a “jakes” was the Elizabethan word for toilet, like “john” today in girls’ schools, and Monsieur Jakes (guffaws) was a “wet blanket.” Peter had never told his mother that for a while the kids there used to call him Jakes (“Jakes, have you been to the john?”), though he had not been really picked on for some reason—quite mysterious, considering that he hated athletics and that boys at that age were beasts.

  At college, there was a Peter Levi myth, a girl on the Cape who had a brother in his class told the babbo. He was regarded as a master of one-upmanship, it seemed, and he even had imitators, when the last thing he craved was to start a fashion. His roommate freshman year, a shallow character who owned a Porsche, had congratulated him warmly on the motorbike, telling him that it was a “great” ploy. It was not a ploy, of course. His aunt Millie had been nearer the mark when she said the motorbike was his mother’s punishment for not having got him a dog when he was little. He had given it a new paint job (Mahogany) this summer in his father’s barn on the Cape and he often bought it presents: a padlock, a rear-view mirror, a bicycle pump, wicker side-baskets. He knew they were presents because he never spent any money on himself if he could help it—the bicycle clips were his father’s contribution. And it was true too that he was loyal to the motorbike because it was old and unsteady; he would not have felt the same toward it if it had been new, any more than he would have wanted a pure-bred puppy; it was old dog-eared dogs he used to follow on the street and try to pat. He had once brought a stray mutt home, but Hans, who had asthma, was allergic to dog hair, and when they could not find the owner, it had to be taken to the pound. Maybe the motorbike was Peter’s animal helper, but if so, that was something he tried to keep dark. He had been ashamed of visiting it so often on the voyage and, just now, when he hurried back to the baggage car to check up on it, he had been ashamed to meet the salesman checking up on his cases of samples.

  He ought to despise himself, he knew, for worrying all the time that the bike might be stolen. He hated hearing Americans talk about being robbed and gypped abroad. His roommate freshman year, whose parents had a villa at Antibes, used to assure him that every beggar in Europe was a millionaire; it was a known fact, he claimed, and only suckers gave them money. This maniac traveled with his currency in his shoes. Other kids Peter had met when he was in Italy were always insisting that they had had their traveler’s checks stolen in some place like Harry’s Bar in Venice; they hid their money under their mattresses or the rug and were constantly counting it to see whether the chambermaid had taken any. Or they were fighting with a taxi driver because they did not realize that the night rate was different from what they paid in the daytime. They got these ideas from their bourgeois parents, obviously.

  Peter’s parents had erred, he thought, in the opposite direction. They had drilled into him the principle that to accuse a servant or a cleaning-woman of stealing from you (or breaking your toys) was just about the worst thing you could do. On this they were in perfect accord. If Peter came to his father crying “Somebody took my ball,” his father would shake him and shout “L’hai persa! L’hai persa!” In fact, he had not been allowed to think that anyone stole, except professional robbers in masks. His mother just laughed when he told her there was a kleptomaniac in his dormitory in school. He had tried to be grateful for this training when he compared it with what his schoolmates were getting, but there were times, especially at school, when he felt his parents had lived too sheltered a
life. After all, he used to remind them, there was such a thing as theft; the stork did not carry dollar bills away in its beak. Now he saw their point. It was worse to be suspicious than to be robbed. He would not want to live with an insane person like his ex-roommate, as his constant companion, and your constant companion, alas, was yourself.

  Still, he could not help worrying about the motorbike. That was different, he told himself, from worrying about a bank roll. Property was theft, his parents were always quoting, to get his goat—his mother had copied it from his father, who used to be an anarchist before he settled down. Now even his stepfather said it. But if one of them had listened sympathetically, instead of scoffing at his worries, he might not have this complex now. In a sense, it was their fault. Peter chewed his lip. He had caught himself trying to pass the buck. What was biting him now had nothing to do with his parents. He was angry with himself for having betrayed a kind of promise he had made to the motorbike, to ride it through thick and thin to Paris.

  Peter was alone in the compartment, though some hand baggage was piled on the racks; doubtless, whoever owned it was fraternizing. Outside in the corridor he could hear Americans talking. Their favorite sport, he had observed, was confiding their itineraries in detail. “Then we fly with SAS to Copenhagen, where we get the ferry to Malmö and pick up a Volvo. …” “Frank leaves his medical congress and meets me in Seville, where we join a tour for three days. …” “We rent a Citroën deux-chevaux in Paris and drive it to Zurich. There we turn it in and get the Lufthansa flight to Munich. …” “In England we buy a Morris Minor and take it back on the boat with us. We spend one night in Bath and another at the Mitre in Oxford. Harold’s cousin married an English girl; they have three lovely children.” The voices, whoever they belonged to, were always middle-aged and pursy. Peter had noticed this on the boat. He wondered what Americans had talked about before they became the Affluent Society.