Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  Indeed, he had never arrived alone in a big foreign city before; someone had always met him. The sense of the difference hit him. No one would be waving to him from the platform, as the train pulled in. No one would hug him, crying “Peter!” No one would waft him off in a cab to a hotel, pointing out monuments on the way. No one in fact would know he was there.

  If these old teachers did away with him, it would be quite a while before he was missed. Only his faithful motorbike would be waiting for him in the station, unclaimed. When his parents did not hear from him, eventually they would cable the Embassy, but by that time the trail would be cold. His heart lurched at the thought that for the first time in his life he did not count i.e., nobody was counting him; he was nobody’s chicken. Not even God’s, because there was no God. If a universal roll call were decreed tomorrow, there would be nobody to mark Peter Levi “Absent.” This meant that pro tem there was no Peter Levi, except in his own mind. It was a creepy idea, like solipsism in philosophy. He would only begin to be real again when he had an address and people started checking up on him.

  But supposing when he arrived he could not find a place to stay? Foolishly, as he now felt, he had not listened to his parents and made a hotel reservation. He had wanted to be free to do a little touring en route if the spirit moved him; on the map he had marked a place called St.-Wandrille, near Rouen, where there was an old Benedictine abbey—some Catholic convert had told him the monks there took pilgrims for the night. He liked the pious notion of being a pilgrim, sleeping in a monk’s cell and hearing them chant the plain song when he woke up with the birds. He saw himself in some old woodcut with a humble scallop shell—his dinner plate—and a pointed pilgrim hat with another, tiny scallop shell on the crown, hitting the trail of Saint Jacques. Or as a young knight in home-made wattled armor like Sir Percival of Gales (the darling son of his poor widowed mother), seeking shelter from a kindly hermit. Or crossing the Seine on a rude ferry; he had checked a bac on the map near the abbey and pictured the rustic ferryman, a giant Christopher, pushing off with his solitary passenger for the other shore. But now the sense of adventure, which he had opposed to his parents’ prudence, had abandoned him. Unhorsed, he did not feel errant. Instead, the responsibility of finding a hotel room in an unknown city weighed on him like some vile duty that he would like to shirk.

  “I suppose you spoke Italian in your home.” They were questioning him again. “When did your folks come to America?” “My father came during the war,” Peter answered shortly; he was too dejected to pick up the conversational ball. Besides, if these old educators could not figure out from that datum that his father was an anti-fascist exile, he was not going to tell them. Let them think his father was a Wop immigrant instead of a Wop emigrant—who cared?

  In any case, maybe he should have said “My father’s an Italian Jew,” just in case there were anti-Semites present. People of Jewish “extraction” (the word reminded him of the Rocky Port kitchen with flannel jelly bags dripping in concert) ought to be willing to declare themselves, but Peter often forgot. What he disliked about being Peter Levi was that there was so much to explain. He almost wished he had been born Pinkus Levy in Flatbush—a self-evident proposition. Technically, he was an Italo-American on his father’s side, which would not have been so bad if his father had been what was meant by an Italo-American, instead of being a professor and a Jew, which would not have been so bad either if he had been what was meant by a Jew, instead of being, primarily, an Italian, since his part of the Levi family (a Triestine outfit) had been assimilated in Florence for generations, and, growing up in a Catholic country, the babbo had a lot more in common with the Jesuits, whom he hated, than with a rabbi, whom he knew nothing about.

  As a Jew, Peter was a farce; the proof was that nobody had ever given him a rough time on that account. He was grateful to his last name for saving him the labor of telling people he was Jewish; on the other hand, like many labor-saving devices, such as dishwashers, it made almost more work in the end. There was no easy way to get it across that he was only a half-Jew. He could not send out announcements saying that his mother was a Christian or wear half a yellow star on his coat-lapel. In other times or climes, he would have had no worries on this score: under the Nuremberg Laws, he would have counted as a Jew, while in Israel he would count as a Christian, since what mattered to them was your mother—he did not know how he would fare in the Arab states.

  Maybe it was not important anyway to set the record straight. To point out that you were “only” half-Jewish although your name was Levi made you feel like a recreant. Yet it was part of being an American that, once you got started, you felt impelled to tell all the people all the truth all the time. His college tutor, a stupid Freudian, had advised his mother that Peter had an “identity problem.” But he was quite clear who he was; the problem was whether it was necessary to clear up other people. His tragedy, he had decided, was that his every move in this domain seemed to require a lengthy gloss. E.g., in his school, which was trying to be liberal, he was told that he could be excused from the headmaster’s course in Christian religion—a low blow to Peter because he was quite interested in Christian religion. When he said No, thanks, he would like to take the course, his attitude seemed natural to him but not, he discovered, to the headmaster or to the other kids, who thought he must be nuts to go to a class he could get out of. The headmaster made him write out his reasons for taking the course and did not accept that being an atheist was a valid one, till he heard from the babbo about all the dominies on the fair Rosamund’s side. From the kids’ point of view, Peter was practically a scab. They envied a certain Weinstein, who was allowed Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana off, and a Catholic kid named Ryan, who even got excused from chapel. Peter would have been glad to belong to some religion that got you out of athletics; but he enjoyed chapel—it was the only peaceful moment in the school day. Looking back, he concluded that taking Christian religion must have been his first, innocent ploy.

  One of the attractions of Europe for him was that he would not have to go into all this with the native population. In Europe, you did not have to have antecedents if you came from the New World. You were an American, and that was it.

  “Does your mamma make the real spaghetti?” the jolly teacher wondered. “Spaghetti with meat sauce!” She sighed. “Out in Kansas we don’t get the real Italian food. My daughter told me it isn’t the same at all.” “My mother usually makes it plain,” Peter replied cautiously. “With just butter and cheese.” The three women turned a joint suspicious stare on him. “Yes,” he said. “You’d be surprised. A lot of Italians eat it that way. You watch when you’re in a restaurant. What they like is the pasta. Your daughter probably had it alla bolognese. Or al ragù. Sometimes my mother makes it with pesto. Like in ‘mortar and pestle.’ That’s Genoese. You take basil and parsley and garlic and pine nuts and cheese and pound them in a mortar with olive oil. It’s green.” He ground to a halt, reminded of Peter Levi’s Paradox: most people did not care to be taught what they did not already know; it made them feel ignorant.

  “Well, live and learn! What else does your mother make? Those pizza pies?” Peter hedged. “She’s got a pretty big repertory.” A little bird with an olive branch in its beak was telling him to avoid Italian words and phrases since he could not avoid pronouncing them correctly. “A few years ago, when we lived in New England, she had a jag of cooking American.”

  “Isn’t that nice now?” They softened. “I guess she was trying to please you. Give you the same as your friends had, in their homes. You must have a very smart mother.” “Yes, I have,” said Peter, drawing a deep breath. He seemed to have been elected It in a game of Twenty Questions where the players were meant to finally discover that their modest train companion was the son of Rosamund Brown, the famous harpsichordist. Whom they would never have heard of. But that was not the point. The point was, if he did not give them a clue or two, he would be meanly concealing information that these women, as h
is fellow-Americans, were somehow entitled to, even though, when they got it, they would feel disappointed—all that work for nothing. Having a celebrity in your family gave you an unfair advantage over people who did not guess you had a celebrity in your family. If the teachers were to find out afterward that he had had this ace in the hole, they would think he had been laughing up his sleeve at them. In common decency, he ought to help them out. If it had been a real game of Twenty Questions, at this juncture he could have given them a weary hint: “Look, you haven’t asked me if my mother is Italian.”

  “Where did you attend high school?” The gray-haired one rapped out the demand. “In Massachusetts.” Peter hedged again; he felt embarrassed to admit that he had gone to a private school. “I mean, that’s where I graduated.” Then he mumbled the names of his previous schools: Rocky Port High, junior high at Berkeley. “Your folks moved a lot,” the teacher commented. “It’s a wonder you weren’t put back a class.” Old Miss Lewis nodded. “Always hard on a transfer.” “Have you got lots of brothers and sisters at home?” asked the jolly teacher kindly.

  “Well, yes and no.” Peter licked his lips. “My parents are divorced.” Though divorce was common as measles in the U.S., he could feel himself turning red. “So that I have quite a few stepbrothers and -sisters. And a half-brother and -sister on my father’s side. But I’m my mother’s only child.” Of all the facts about himself, this business of divorce and step-parents was the one that, for some reason, he hated most to talk about. But of course it had to be the one that came out most naturally in the course of a casual conversation. If you were under twenty-one, oldsters always asked you if you had brothers and sisters; it made them feel benevolent.

  As he had feared, silence followed his revelation. Probably the teachers were pitying him for his “broken” home. In fairness to his parents, he ought to explain that he liked the net effect of serial monogamy: being an only child and still having a flock of kids around of whom he did not have to be jealous, as he would have been, certainly, if his parents had gone on breeding together when he was little. But the average American, he had noticed, looked skeptical when he said he approved of divorce for parents; they seemed to think he had been indoctrinated. He decided to pipe down. If he went on talking, he would be bound to disclose that his mother had been divorced twice.

  There was still an hour to fill in before the train got to Paris. Outside in the corridor, two transistor radios were playing. Peter would have been glad to read or sleep or practice his French argot, but the teachers obviously felt they could not let the conversation die at the point it had reached. “My!” said the jolly one. “You’ve got a lot of books there! Are you over here to study?” Peter answered that he was taking his junior year at the Sorbonne, under a supervised program; lots of colleges had them. Someone, he reflected, could make a fortune with a small, battery-powered tape-recorder, designed for travel, that would play back standard answers when asked a standard question, such as “Will you be taking your courses in French?” “How big is the Sorbonne campus?” “Will you live in a dormitory?” “Do they have fraternities and sororities?”

  “Of course you’ve got a place to stay in Paris.” Peter swallowed. “No, I haven’t. My plans are sort of fluid.” He laughed weakly. “I thought I’d just cruise around and find a cheap hotel room. Back home, you could sign up to live with a French family, but I couldn’t see doing that.” The teachers stiffened. “Don’t you know that Paris is jammed at this time of year? Our travel agent says there isn’t a bed. Why, our tour has had its reservations for months! What were your folks thinking of, not to get you a hotel room?”

  “My mother wanted to. She kept telling me Paris was crowded. But I wouldn’t let her. I …” The argument he had given his mother was that he was not sure, exactly, when he would get to Paris. But that, he recalled with a jolt, was ancient history now. Incredibly, he had nearly forgotten the premise of his reasoning: the cherished idea of visiting Normandy en route. For a minute, his guard had been down. If he had not caught himself in time, it would have all come out about the motorbike and his defeat at the hands of those porters. The very thought of being here, penned up with these nosy old women, when he might have been there in solitary splendor, musing in a cathedral like Henry Adams, made his throat tighten. It was as though his plans had died young and he was traveling with their coffin. No one, he resolved, was going to prise out of him this unspeakable chapter in his history—not even his mother, when he wrote to her tonight.

  The teachers were waiting. He cleared his throat. “Well, you see, I’ve got a principle. About not being forehanded. A lot of this compulsive planning, if you get what I mean, is just a way of trying to stay ahead of the next guy. Be smart and reserve in advance so that when some dumb guy shows up, you’ve got the priority. I mean, it’s OK probably for older people—people your age—and women with little babies, but for somebody my age it’s repulsive. Either there are enough rooms to go around, so why bother with all the early-birding? Or there aren’t enough rooms to go around, so why not take your chances with the rest of humanity? Let the other guy be first. Live dangerously.”

  “Well, young man,” observed old Miss Lewis with unexpected force, “you talk like a real American. It’s nice to meet a boy these days that doesn’t expect to have everything done for him, from cradle to grave. Not afraid to rough it, are you? Did you learn that in your Scout troop?” “Well, no,” said Peter. “I never was a Scout. As a matter of fact, I got it from my father, probably. He used to be a philosophical anarchist. They believe in mutual aid. There’s a whole book, very interesting, by Prince Kropotkin, about mutual aid in the animal world. And they think that nobody really owns anything as long as there’s a scarcity. I mean, take the jacket I’m wearing. I treat it as if it were mine, but it doesn’t really belong to me as long as somebody else doesn’t have a jacket. I just sort of have it on loan. It’s the same with a hotel room.”

  The gray-haired teacher looked at him sharply through the upper half of her bifocals. “Out West, where we come from, there’s a fair share of mutual aid. We call it being neighborly. In Kansas, you could sleep in a barn or a hay-field. Or in most folks’ spare bedroom. Folks are pretty nice, that way, to strangers. But Paris isn’t Kansas—from what I hear anyway.” Peter grinned. “Yeah, I’ve heard that too.” “So what will you do, if you don’t find a hotel room? Have you considered that?”

  Peter had been considering it. “They say you can get arrested and spend the night in jail.” He gave another weak laugh. “Actually, that isn’t as bad as you might think. My mother and I spent the night in jail this summer. Of course that was back in New England.” “Speeding.” The jolly teacher nodded. “Those state troopers in New England are something fierce, my daughter says.” Cravenly, Peter decided to let this pass. “My mother says that in London if you can’t get a place to sleep, you just go to the police station, and they lock you up for the night. Only you have to get up early. In Paris, I could sleep under a bridge. With the clochards. Those are the French bums. But I guess they might not accept me. They have a pretty tight organization. I wouldn’t mind being a wandering scholar. Like in the Middle Ages. They were sort of intellectual tramps.”

  “Oh. We thought you were dressed kind of funny. That pack and all. Miss Lewis thought she saw you with a motorcycle back there on the pier.” “Must have been two other guys, ha ha,” Peter said. His resistance stiffened. He was not going to feed their hungry curiosity. Anyway, it was not a motorcycle. If they did not know the difference, tant pis for them. “We thought maybe you might be one of those Beatniks you hear about.” Peter was slightly offended. “I don’t smoke pot, if that’s what you mean. And the Beats usually have beards.” “That’s what I said, girls!” exclaimed the jolly teacher. “And they don’t wash either. I said, this young fellow washes. And he’s had his hair cut not too long ago.” Peter flinched. “Samson Agonistes,” he muttered.

  The teachers ignored him. “Back home,” said the
jolly one, “he could go to the Travelers Aid in the depot. But I don’t guess they have that over here.” “The Y? Time was, a young fellow could always get a room there for a dollar. Is there a Y in Paris, I wonder? What about a church group? Young man, are your folks Catholic or what?” Peter gulped. Here was his opportunity. “I guess they’re ‘what.’ My father is a Jew. But he doesn’t have any religion.” “We’re Methodist Episcopal ourselves,” said the gray-haired teacher briskly. “But to us you’re a fellow-American, regardless of creed or color. Why, we may have a Jew for president if Barry gets in.” There was a silence. She gazed out the window and clicked her tongue. “Wouldn’t you know it? It’s raining. Our first day in France. Now how are you going to look for a room in a downpour like that?” Peter glanced at the streaming window-panes.

  “Please,” he said, “let’s drop the subject, if you don’t mind. I’ll be OK. This is just a shower. I can wait in the station till it blows over.” Their worrying was contagious. He was starting to panic. He reminded himself that he and his mother and his stepfather had arrived in St.-Tropez that time without a reservation and he had said they would find rooms and they had. But maybe that had been a fluke. He thought sickly of the population explosion. According to the Wellesley girl, three thousand U.S. juniors were slated to hit Paris this fall. She claimed to have read it in a magazine.