Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  There were fourteen at table, which led Peter to speculate that one of their number had been recruited at the last minute to take the jinx off. The general normally was a fairly affable guy, with a white fat baby face, black eyebrows, and a peculiar haircut, shaved on the sides and standing up on top in short black bristles, which made him look like a convict. He was attached to NATO, Peter gleaned today, and was an expert on supply and procurement. His wife, named Letitia (pronounced Leteetia by her husband), was small, Southern, and friendly. “Can I sweeten your drink, honey?” was her usual soft refrain. None of the guests, it appeared, had met each other before, and some were meeting the host for the first time. His daughter led them up. “Dad, this is Jay Williams. Dad, this is Roberta Scott.” “Good to know you, Jay. Good to know you, Roberta. Glad to have you with us.” Peter he greeted by his last name, which perhaps indicated a promotion. “How’s it going, Levi? Have you sold that motorbike yet?”

  If this had been an All-American get-together, conversation might have found its natural level, albeit low. But during the cocktail period, just as people were starting to relax, daughter Jean, prodded by the Frenchwoman, initiated a tour of the art in the apartment from which, like lifeboat drill, nobody was excused. Freighted with drinks and cigarettes, searching furtively for ashtrays or frankly using a trouser-cuff or the wall-to-wall carpeting, the straggling troops inspected Korean graphics and Puerto Rican oils, Japanese ivories, Taiwan scrolls, Spanish fans, German beer steins, Italian majolica, hanging on the walls or installed in cabinets with interior lighting—the general, needless to say, had served in all those places on the U.S. defense perimeter and enjoyed a perfect recollection of the circumstances of each purchase, with emphasis, naturally, on the haggling.

  Then, at table, his wife actually explained the principle of Thanksgiving to the French. “It isn’t a social event with us, you see. It isn’t exactly a family event either, like Christmas, which I always think should be for the children. It’s the day when we Americans—oh, help me, Chuck—as we thank God for our blessings try to gather under our roof some of our fellow-countrymen who might be lonely or homesick. And all over the world, Americans are sitting down to the same meal the Pilgrims ate: turkey and fixings, giblet gravy, creamed onions, mashed turnips or rutabagas. … Why, I’d feel like a heretic if I served duck or Rock Cornish. Though I was reading the menus in the Herald Tribune—” “The stranger at the gate,” interrupted the general. “Yes, thank you, Chuck! I was coming to that. We always make sure to have some foreign guests with us. Last year, when we were back home at the Academy, we had this lovely Japanese couple.” “It’s just a harvest festival, isn’t it?” Peter said, tired of feeling like the Hundred Neediest Cases reduced to capsule form. As far as he could see, what was happening was that Americans were giving loud thanks for being Americans, and, as the hostess said, this was going on all over the world concurrently—allowing for the time difference; the orgy had not yet started in New York.

  To Peter, slightly drunk, the meal seemed like a grotesque parody of his mother’s annual bounty. The general’s wife had the same idea as his mother, only his mother was more refined about it. Identifying with the French couple—who he disliked on sight—he could not help seeing it as a gross and stupid debauch. Yet “Leteetia” was a perfectly nice woman, according to her lights. She had made that awful speech like a nervous recitation; maybe service wives abroad got directives from the Pentagon on what to tell the natives about Thanksgiving. The poor creature looked exhausted, having no doubt spent the morning basting the turkey with her bulb-baster. The rouge stood out on her inflamed cheeks. The work she and her daughter Jean, who seemed to have a good relationship, had put into the food and the table setting, down to the last nut-cup, was begging pathetically for notice. The art that conceals art, Peter reflected glumly, was not an American specialty. With his thumbnail, unobtrusively, he peeled off the price-tag from his hand-crafted napkin.

  As for “Chuck,” he was in a critical mood. He ordered the carving-knife back to the kitchen to be sharpened and dismissed the autumnal centerpiece, which was obstructing his view, to the sideboard. Listening to the rasp of the combination can-opener and knife-sharpener in the pantry, Peter surmised that they had had a family difference this morning. Had the general been issuing the invitations, he suspected, there might have been fewer under-age deadheads on the list.

  If you could ignore the commercials, the food was not too bad. Frankly Peter would not have guessed that the turkey was frozen, from the PX, if the hostess had not announced the fact with what he supposed was pride. In her place, he would have omitted the marshmallows from the candied sweet potatoes, but he approved of the hot Parker House rolls Jean had baked herself this morning, and the colonial stuffing spiked with brandy was OK. The dinner plates, with the Air Force Academy coat-of-arms, were duly warmed in a sort of electric blanket on a tea-wagon at the hostess’ left. It was not her fault that, on this of all days, one of the waifs she had collected proved to be a vegetarian.

  “Dark or light, Roberta?” queried the general, spearing a slice of breast on the point of his antlered knife. His daughter was holding out a plate destined for the tall girl on Peter’s right. “I won’t take any, General Lammers.” It was as if an infernal machine, quietly ticking, had been planted in the room. The appalled general looked at his wife. He set down the carving-knife. “No turkey?” “But honey, you didn’t eat your shrimp cocktail either!” moaned Letitia. It was true, Peter realized: his neighbor had left a neat little pile of shrimps in her monogrammed glass goblet and eaten only the lettuce ribbons and the chili sauce. But the significance of it had escaped him. “Is it Paris tummy, honey? We’ve got just what you need. Jeanie, dear, run and get the Vioform from my medicine cabinet.” “She’s a vegetarian, Mama,” said Jean. “I forgot.” “Oh, come on,” said the general. “This is Thanksgiving!” His white hands, with black hairs on the knuckles, played impatiently with the carving implements. The girl held her ground. “No, thank you. I won’t. Really.” The rest of the company looked away. He essayed playfulness. “I’m in command here. Mess Sergeant Jean, hold that plate where I can reach it.” “She doesn’t want any, Dad. Don’t force her.” “Pshaw!” He laid the slice of breast on the plate, which was already heaped with onions, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and so on, placed there by his wife at the other end of the table. “Take that to the young lady.”

  Now everybody was watching her, some, like Peter, covertly. She had a long nose and short boyish-cut hair that rose in a crest over a “noble” brow. Her eyes were gray, somewhat close together, and she had large appealing ears that reddened easily, as if people were talking about her, which might well be the case. She wore a gray dress made of wool, with a round white collar and a string of pearls, which had been appraised with care by the Frenchwoman, who had eyes like a customs inspector. Peter searched his memory for when or how he had met this dauntless girl before. Maybe in another incarnation. She looked like the title of a book the babbo was fond of recommending: The Protestant Ethic, but with pink cheeks and a shy grin. If he put a tricorn on her head, he could picture her as a revolutionary patriot dumping tea into Boston harbor. He felt sure he had seen her portrait, maybe in male attire, in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum or in some history textbook.

  “The stuffing, Chuck. Give Miss Scott some stuffing.” The girl opened her thin pink lips as if to protest, then bit the lower one and said nothing. Her plate was returned to the head of the table. The general spooned some stuffing onto it and, taking possession of the gravy boat, rapidly ladled giblet gravy onto her mashed potatoes. “There!”

  As her desecrated plate came back, she and Peter exchanged a dismal look. Catching the distress signal, he quickly passed her the cranberry jelly and looked around for olives and celery. “Here, have some.” Angry with the general, he gulped down his Vouvray. Nobody would convince him that “Chuck” was just insensitive, incapable of understanding that his own food habits mi
ght not be acceptable to the entire human race. Or that he was hurt by the girl’s rejection of the sacred fowl, though that no doubt played a part. Unless Peter had gone stir-crazy in his solitary cell on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince, at the head of the table sat a vicious sadist wearing the jovial mask of hospitality. He had seized that gravy boat like a weapon in hand-to-hand combat. No wonder they had made him a brigadier general—at least that mystery was solved. Peter wished he had the strength to pass up the turkey himself, when his turn came, as an act of solidarity. But there were always others to consider, in this case Letitia, who had been toiling harmlessly in the kitchen.

  As an animal-lover, Peter, if he was consistent, should have been a vegetarian too. In Perugia he had been nauseated by those poor crumpled little birds the Italians loved to serve—the brain, believe or not, was the choice morsel. Bob, ever the logician, had pointed out that those larks and thrushes, before being shot, had lived “free as birds”; compare that to the existence of a battery chicken. This had not persuaded Peter to eat uccelletti but it had interfered with his enjoyment of broilers. Yet whenever he had feebly tried to interest himself in a naturist diet of fruit and raw vegetables, he had come up against his juvenile gluttony. He could live without steak and chicken, he had decided, but he doubted his present ability to forgo lobster and tuna fish. What he had not taken into account was the social pressures he would have to resist. He would need to be a hero, he now saw.

  His other neighbor, a blue-eyed leathery lady with long earrings and gray hair cut in a fluffy bang, was waiting to engage him in conversation. During the first course she had been filling him in on the fact that her husband had left her for a German girl he had picked up hitchhiking on the autoroute. She now recaptured the thread. “Letitia thinks I ought to go home to the States. But what the hell? I’ve gone to all the trouble to learn French, why shouldn’t I stay here? He doesn’t own Paris. He wants a divorce, but if I give him a divorce, they’ll take away my PX card and my QC privileges. You can smile, Peter, but to me it’s a tragedy. Twenty years as an Air Force dependent, and tomorrow, if I let him have his so-called freedom, the guards at the PX will tell me ‘Sorry, ma’am, we can’t let you by. That card has expired.’ Civilians don’t dig what it means to us. Chuck and Letitia can entertain lavishly because, between you and me, they don’t buy a thing on the French market. Not even a stick of celery.”

  Ordinarily Peter would have felt sorry for this coarse-grained Donna Elvira. Maybe she loved the guy and was ashamed to mention that; it was odd what people were ashamed of, sometimes the best part of themselves, which they looked on as “weakness,” he guessed. But now though he kept an ear politely bent in her direction, his eyes slid to his right. Roberta Scott had not succumbed to the appetizing slice of breast in its casing of crisp brown skin. Instead, she was eating carefully around it: the onions, the rutabagas, the sweet potatoes, the Ocean Spray cranberry jelly. She avoided the mashed potatoes polluted with gravy and the stuffing contaminated by animal fat and juices during its stay in the oven. He followed the progress of her fork as it constructed fortifications against the giblet gravy, which ran between the banks of vegetables, lapped at the base of the tottering tower of jelly, divided into rivulets, and finally congealed. Peter was fascinated by these maneuvers. It was like watching a game of Jackstraws or a kid on the beach building a sand-castle as the tide was coming in. Others, were stealing looks too. Only the general, content with his petty tactical victory, disregarded what was happening on her plate.

  “Somebody ought to tell her parents!” interjected the gray-haired lady, tracing Peter’s wandering interest to its source. “Did you ever see anything like that? Look how thin she is.” Actually, in Peter’s estimation, Miss Scott was in the pink of condition, compared to the fat sallow French girl in a two-tone taffeta blouse and to Jean, who today had a stye. She might be underweight, but her eyes were clear, and her breasts made two modest rounds under the thin wool of her dress. An image jumped into his mind of a healthy well-cared-for animal. Her long nose, made for sniffing and scenting, would be cool to the touch, and her hair invited stroking, like a shining pelt. She had gone to Bryn Mawr, he ascertained, and was working at the Institut Pasteur. She must be around twenty-three because after Bryn Mawr she had done a year of medical studies in Philadelphia, where her family lived. It was not hard to picture her as an interne, in a white coat, with a stethoscope.

  Meanwhile the carnivores lifted forks that appeared to have grown heavy with their cargo of turkey and trimmings. They wiped grease from their mouths, quaffed wine, sought elusive food particles between their teeth with their tongues or a furtive fingernail; the older women’s lipstick smeared. This Roberta did not seem to be wearing lipstick and she was not drinking her wine. That did not long escape detection. “Don’t you drink either, Miss Scott?” said the hostess, in a voice like the wringing of hands. “I used to sometimes. But I don’t really like it.” “Not even wine? But you’re in France.” “I know.” “A glass of milk then?” It turned out that she did not drink milk either. “For Christ’s sake, Leteetia,” said the general. “Let’s hear about something else.”

  He got up and filled glasses all around, but since Roberta Scott’s was already full, indeed brimming, there was nothing he could do about it. He sat down heavily in his place and fixed his light-green eyes, like two probes, on the girl, searching out her secret. “Roberta, Roberta,” he chided. It could not be denied that this fasting vestal was putting quite a crimp in the festivities. “Vous êtes un trouble-fête, mademoiselle,” the Frenchwoman said with a thin pretense of pleasantry. “What is that in English?” “A wet blanket. I know it,” Roberta said seriously. “I’m really sorry, Mrs. Lammers.” “Don’t give it a second thought, sugar. Just enjoy yourself in your own way. If you’re happy, we’re happy.” That of course was a lie. They would not be happy unless she conformed to their definition of enjoyment, which meant that she would have to be miserable to satisfy them.

  Yet if she were old and decrepit or dying of stomach cancer or just unattractive, they would leave her in peace. The fact that she was cheerful and appealing, though not everybody’s pin-up, was what threw them into disarray. Peter did not except himself. One part of him—he hoped a small fraction—had been backing the general in that contest of wills. He admired her force of character, but why come to Thanksgiving dinner if you were determined not to eat like the rest of the tribe? She could make an exception, just once, to be polite. On the other hand, if she started breaking her rule to please other people, she might as well give up being a vegetarian, he supposed. She had a right to eat and drink whatever she wanted. The trouble was, when she started exercising that right in public, she infringed on the right of the rest of the company to have a good time.

  Take him. Like the other castaways, he assumed, he had been looking forward to the occasion, spot-cleaning his jacket, shining his shoes, drinking a liter of milk to line his stomach, hesitating over the choice of a tie. As the hostess had indicated, it was no fun to render thanks all by yourself in a crummy restaurant, which was the only kind a student could afford late in the month on his exhausted allowance. Now he felt like a dipsomaniac cannibal.

  Her best solution, he meanly concluded, was to become a hermit. The Middle Ages had the right idea: anybody who wanted to mortify his flesh retired from the world to do it solo. She ought to live in a hut in the forest of Fontainebleau, eating wild berries and honey and wearing a shift made of bark. Even there, strangers would come to look at her, probably, and try to feed her, the way they did with animals in the zoo.

  “How do you stand on honey?” he said abruptly. She turned her head, puzzled, chin drawn in, like a bird registering interrogation. “I mean,” he said, goading, “it’s cruel, isn’t it, to take honey from bees?” She pondered. “I suppose it is,” she said, knitting her brows. “I never thought about it. I’m not a strict vegetarian, though. With me, it’s not a moral thing. When you study medicine, you learn not to worry too much
about the sacredness of life. You have to experiment on animals in the laboratory. Anyway, golly, where do you draw the line? A tree is alive. How do we know it isn’t conscious when we chop it down? It bleeds just like a human. I just know I feel better if I don’t eat meat and some other animal foods.”

  On hearing that it was not a “moral thing,” Peter felt immediately relieved, which was odd. He hoped she was telling the truth and not merely trying to make him feel comfortable in his carnivorous soul. The general’s wife broke in. “Is this a health fad or what, honey? What made you decide to take up vegetarianism? I don’t mean to be intrusive, but tell us, do you really think it’s cruel to kill animals?” So it was not only him. Even the general, who was carving seconds, paused with his knife in mid-air to await the verdict.

  The girl repeated, in substance, what she had just been saying to Peter. He wondered how many times a week she had to respond to that query; in short, how often she was invited out to meals. In restaurants, did the waiters ask her? He ought to make her a present of his idea of a pocket tape-recorder that furnished standard answers to standard questions. But she did not seem to mind explaining herself at length. He noticed that, unlike most people, she spoke in paragraphs—somewhat breathlessly.