Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  “To answer your other question, Mrs. Lammers, I really don’t know what made me take up being a vegetarian. You could call it a health fad, I guess. But I’ve had a sort of ‘thing’ about meat ever since I was little. They had to coax me to eat it. Then in boarding-school I overcame my prejudice. You know how hungry you get in school. The same in camp. And at home I have three younger brothers who aren’t too fond of vegetables. My mother has to plan meals to suit the majority.

  “But finally in college I started to think for myself. I got to understand body chemistry and I realized that I was being poisoned by what I was eating. Literally. I would keep falling asleep in my after-lunch class; they gave us our heavy meal at noon. Senior year I skipped lunch and ate carrots and peanut butter and dried figs in my room, and right away my marks in Latin—that was my two-thirty class then—went from C-minus to B-plus. But then I lost weight. I wasn’t getting enough calories. So when I came to Paris this fall, I saw that here was my chance to experiment. They have these terrific vegetables in the markets, and I found an apartment with a kitchen, where I could cook all sorts of messes. For me, that was real independence. Freedom, golly me!”

  “Liberty Hall,” said the general. “It’s small, but it’s home. What I’d like to know, is there some theory behind this? Anything to do with cholesterol?” This year, Peter had observed, all the croulants were talking with bated breath about cholesterol, as if it were some new weapon in biological warfare aimed at shortening their lives. The exception was his mother, he was glad to say.

  Cholesterol was not really the point, said Roberta. If you eliminated animal foods from your diet, naturally you eliminated animal fats also, thus reducing the cholesterol level in the blood. “But the way vegetarians see it, a low-cholesterol diet based on lean meat, poultry, and fish may be almost as harmful to the body as a high-cholesterol diet. Man is descended from herbivores. His organs weren’t designed for the absorption of animal flesh. We don’t know when he became a hunter and an omnivore but we know that the habit isn’t natural to the order of primates, with the exception of some of the baboons. Why, some people actually claim that it’s a flesh diet that’s turned man into a killer of his own kind! He has the tiger’s instincts without the tiger’s taboos. Of course that’s only a hypothesis. One way of testing it would be for humanity to practice vegetarianism for several generations. Maybe we’d find that war and murder would disappear.”

  “Do they have vegetarians in Russia?” the general demanded, emerging from a mental tunnel with a cunning look on his face. Nobody could enlighten him. Roberta guessed that most vegetarians in Russia had been Doukhobors and had emigrated to Canada a long time ago. Peter was interested in the Doukhobors. “They were fantastic,” he said. “Completely non-violent. They not only refused military service, they wouldn’t even take up arms against wolves and bears. I read—” The general, with a chuckle, cut him off. “Say, Roberta, why don’t you go to Russia and make some converts? That’s the place to test your theory. Organize a vegetarian movement.” “Don’t tease her, Dad.” “I’m not teasing. I’m serious. If she has a plan for changing human nature, let her tell this Kosygin about it. He’s her boy. ‘Everybody turn vegetarian or get sent to a slave-labor camp.’ ” “Don’t listen to him,” cried Letitia. “Why, if you went there and tried to spread the message, they might arrest you as a spy.” “ ‘Anti-social element,’ ” muttered Peter. The general snorted. “ ‘Might’! You bet they would. They’re not interested in eliminating Ivan’s fighting instinct. But in the States we’ve got a vegetarian party on the ballot. That shows the difference, doesn’t it? Did you vote Vegetarian, Roberta?”

  “I think you mean the Prohibition Party, General Lammers,” she said mildly. “Actually, if you want to know, I voted for Johnson. I’m not a crank; at least I hope not. I don’t believe you can legislate reforms in people’s habits. It has to be voluntary. Of course it’s hard not to want to make converts when you see the change in yourself. I feel so much better physically and mentally since I gave up animal foods. It’s amazing. My motor reactions are quicker. I need less sleep. There’s a big improvement in my attention-span. It’s not just a subjective thing. Even my French teacher notices a difference. I honestly think my IQ must have gone up by several points.”

  “Well!” summed up the hostess. A pall settled again on the banquet, which was looking more and more like a replica of Belshazzar’s Feast or the dream of the great king, his father, who was put out to eat grass. The convives, if Peter was a fair sample, had now started to worry about the damage they had been inflicting on their brains.

  He stared at the huge drumstick bone, like a fossil remain, on his plate. A junior from Northwestern offered a ray of hope. “You’ve got to remember evolution. If eating meat was bad for man, he wouldn’t have survived. Or he would have kicked the habit back in the Stone Age. Man evolved as a flesh-eating higher animal. Maybe he’s more intelligent than the apes because he became a meateater.”

  “Hear, hear!” said the general. “Well, Roberta, you’ve certainly given us food for thought, ha ha. What about booze? Are you going to tell us that monkeys don’t use fermented beverages?” The girl calmly declared that she had given up drinking for pleasure. “You’d be surprised. Truly. I have a much better time now than when I drank cocktails and wine. I like the taste of wine, but just one glass made me sluggish and torpid.” “But you smoke,” loyally prompted Jean. “Oh yes. And I drink coffee and tea. Lots.”

  She had a high cheerful sturdy voice, somewhat childish for her age, as if she had been used to living with deaf people. It was true that her assertions were falling on deaf ears. In this group of skeptics, nobody would buy the idea that her abstemiousness was just an innocent form of hedonism, which was the conclusion you would be driven to if you accepted her explanations. In fact, Peter did not buy it himself. If she smoked and drank coffee, it was just protective coloration—the homage virtue paid to vice. He bet she did not inhale.

  On the other hand, he recalled, there was the precedent of Epicurus. “There was Epicurus,” he said, addressing the center of the table. “What about him?” “Most people don’t realize he was an ascetic. I did a paper on him for a course in ethics. He lived on barley bread and cheese and water because he thought the simple life was the way to achieve happiness, which he considered the summum bonum. Naturally nobody would believe that. Instead, they believed all the lies the Stoics spread about him being a gourmet and lecherous with women. So now Epicureanism means just the opposite of his teaching. But Roberta”—he stumbled—“I mean Miss Scott, is a real Epicurean. She puts pleasure ahead of virtue, and nobody believes her because they identify pleasure with gross sensual satisfaction.” Everybody, including Miss Scott, was gazing at him in wonderment. “Epicurus cultivated serenity of mind. He died with great fortitude of the stone,” he concluded.

  “The stone!” shrieked the hostess. “Do you mean gallstones? But that’s cholesterol!” Peter was not attending. As when he had delivered a short harangue in class, his own distant words roared in his ears like the pounding of the sea in a conch shell. Then slowly he began to pick up fragments of the surrounding chatter. “But what about your proteins?” “Vitamin A?” “Not even cottage cheese?” “Green noodles.” “But if you eat noodles, you’re eating eggs, aren’t you?” “Don’t you find it hard in the restaurants here? You never see a vegetable except in the markets. I always wonder what they do with them.” Peter recognized the languid voice of a Princetonian major in government studies. The clamor of agreement betrayed the anti-French sentiment ever ready to be mobilized when Americans in Paris got together. And as happened with anti-Semites merrily fraternizing, nobody at the table seemed to remember that there were French people present. “I mostly eat in Italian restaurants,” the girl said, when the chortles had died down. “They don’t mind if you only take spaghetti with tomato sauce and salad and fruit. At home, when I cook for myself, I use the Yoga Cookbook.”

  “I use that t
oo!” cried Peter, who had bought his second-hand along the Seine. “It has some great recipes.” “Fantastic. Where in the world did you find yours?” Peter told her. “The guy let me have it for a franc.” “Me too!” she exclaimed, her eyes widening. “Isn’t that funny? Quai des Grandes Augustins. I bargained.” “Me quai Voltaire.” “Do you have a Waring Blendor?” Peter did not have a Waring Blendor. “Golly, you ought to get one. They’re terrific for vegetable soups.”

  Peter thought anxiously of his mother, who refused all traffic with blenders and mixers; at that moment, in New York (9:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time), she was doubtless pressing chestnuts or something through a sieve. “Jean can get you one at the PX,” the girl went on kindly. “You save a lot that way.” “Thanks. Maybe I’ll do that.” He must be out of his mind. His landlady would never let him have a blender, even if he were willing to scrap family principles and acquire one, and it would be a hard thing to hide in what passed for his closet. Yet could he ask this glorious crank to dinner and use a food mill? It came to him that he must be falling in love, but would she deign to notice a reedy college junior?

  According to his mother, there was no such thing as unreciprocated love. Love was something that happened between two people. It was not a solitary affair. But even if that dictum could be trusted, he was not sure that it applied to him. After adolescence, the fair Rosamund had stipulated. Maybe he had not finished adolescing. He still had that croak in his voice.

  A piece of pumpkin pie had materialized before him. Assuming that egg and milk had gone into its composition, he hardly dared turn his eyes to his right. His own appetite had left him; he shook his head to a scoop of vanilla ice cream. But Roberta Scott was eating the pie. She must be hungry. Her nut-cup, he observed, was empty. Silently he exchanged it for his full one, which he had been saving for her—a present.

  “Maybe you’d like to come to supper some night at my place. I could make some spaghetti and salad.” She considered this for nearly a minute, putting down her fork and chewing her lower lip; she had a way of looking you steadily in the eyes when you had made a remark, such as he had encountered among very poor people the summer before last in Umbria. “Why, yes, sure. I’d like to. Thanks a lot.” A friendly eager smile replaced the clouds of perplexity on her features. “Next week?” he said boldly. “What about Tuesday?”

  But even as he spoke he became aware of a pervasive silence. The general was on his feet and tapping on his glass for attention. He was going to offer a toast. To a character called Benjy, aged about eighteen, who had passed most of the meal in speechless obscurity. Peter had been introduced to him in the elevator. “We’re Leonard and Alice Burnside, from the Embassy, and this is our son, Benjy. Benjy, put that cigarette out and shake hands.” At table his wine intake had been monitored by his mother—a big crinkly-eyed woman with dimples in a magenta wool dress. Now, amid general astonishment, wriggling and pale, he was elevated to star billing. “Is it his birthday?” someone wondered. But it was not Benjy’s birthday. The kid was volunteering to take up arms for his country. That was what the clinking of glasses was about.

  Glances of disbelief passed among the other young males at the table, numbering three: Peter, the boy from Northwestern, and the ultra-WASP Princetonian, who bore the curious name of Silvanus Platt. They listened to Benjy’s mother explaining to the French colonel that her son was so sold on the Vietnamese war that he could not wait to be drafted. “Il s’est rallié aux couleurs.” “Il a devancé l’appel,” absently corrected the Frenchman. “Je vous félicite, jeune homme. Et vous surtout, madame.” He raised his glass.

  The mother drank to her son. “It was Benjy’s own decision. ‘I’ve got to go, Mom,’ he said. Leonard wanted us to refuse our consent. Though he’s only Benjy’s stepfather. ‘Let him wait till he’s drafted,’ Leonard said. But I couldn’t say no to Benjy. I never have been able to. I guess I’ve spoiled him. But he’s my only child.” Her face, which might have been pretty when she was young, crinkled and puckered like a wide seersucker bedspread.

  During all this, her son had not opened his mouth except to engorge pie and ice cream. Benjy’s worst fear, she went on, giggling, was that he might be sent to Germany, instead of out there, where the fighting was. At that point, the kid gave tongue. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s right.”

  Actually, Peter felt a revolted pity for Benjy. As transpired somewhat later, the kid was a “problem” who had not been able to get into any college or find a job and had been hanging around Paris collecting traffic tickets while driving the family car—food for powder, in the words of Falstaff. Yet it would be surprising if he passed his physical, he was so awful and pathetic. His hobby was collecting matchbook folders. On the mental plane, the only message that had got through to him was anti-Communism. He wanted to be able to kill Viet Cong. And his parents, probably, were letting the poor creep volunteer in the hope that the Army would make a man of him—passing the buck to the Pentagon where they themselves had failed. That woman must know that she was in line to be a Gold Star mother unless the war stopped.

  Slowly it came to Peter that, contrary to what you would expect in such a milieu, Benjy’s parents were far from being proud of the patriot they had fledged. Even if he came back covered with medals, he would not get the fatted calf. To hear his mother tell it, she spent most of her time on her knees praying for peace. “Though Benjy doesn’t like me to. He hates it if I go into some little church and light a candle.” “Yeah. I want to get some of those gorillas first.” “Guerrillas, please, Benjy.” She gave the l’s a Spanish pronunciation. “He used to think they were real gorillas,” she explained, with a little gurgle of a laugh. “He got that from listening to the radio.” “I guess a lot of people make that mistake,” the general said easily. “Well, here’s luck to you, Ben.” He handed the boy a large non-Cuban cigar. “Hope you see some action if that’s what you want. In an ‘advisory’ capacity, of course.” He chuckled. From Benjy, a strange ack-ack sound issued; like a kid playing machine-guns, he crouched in his chair, taking aim. “Here they come,” he said, “in a human-wave assault!”

  Silence followed. Even Chuck appeared somewhat embarrassed by the potential hero in their midst. “I guess Ben saw too many World War II movies when he was younger,” he suggested. “The little yellow men in the jungle.” “That’s what I used to say to Leonard,” the boy’s mother chimed in. “ ‘I don’t see why the Embassy keeps showing those old war movies. They ought to think of the effect on the children.’ Didn’t I say that, Leonard? And now look at the result. All he can think about is human waves and sharpshooters hiding in coconut palms and assassins in black pajamas.”

  “Holy cats, Mom,” said Benjy, puffing on the general’s cigar. “You sound as if I was a freak or something. Isn’t a guy supposed to want to fight for his country?” That was the sixty-four-dollar question. “Personally I want to stay alive,” said Silvanus Platt. “How about you, Jay?” “Me too,” said the boy from Northwestern. “Me too,” said Peter, though in fact he was not sure that this ought to be his prime aim. “Wouldn’t you rather be dead than red?” said Benjy. “No,” said Peter. “Practically nobody would, when it comes down to it. They just think they would. All those Poles and Hungarians would be committing suicide if that idea was true. Anyway, this war isn’t stopping Communism, so far as I can see. It may even be helping Communism by making people hate Americans.”

  To his surprise, the general nodded. “This is the wrong war in the wrong place, the way I look at it. Nothing will suit the world Communist conspiracy better than to have us send a land army to get bogged down in those mangrove swamps. It’s a diversionary tactic as old as war. The sooner the U.S. winds up its business out there, the happier all concerned here at NATO will be. We know where the main enemy is located—at the same old address, the Kremlin, Moscow. The day the U.S. lands ground forces on those Asian beaches, it surrenders Western Europe to the Red Army.”

  Peter had not thought of it this way.
Still, he was interested to hear a militarist espouse getting out of Vietnam. “But won’t Johnson have to face some pretty rough domestic criticism if we just pull out our advisers and leave the South Vietnamese to cope?” wondered Jay Williams. “For Christ’s sake, I said, ‘wind it up.’ Hanoi has to come to its senses. We could knock out that little country with one punch tomorrow. You fellows know that as well as I do. They know it.”

  At these words, suddenly, the party got rough. Practically everybody started shouting his opinion. The Frenchwoman was shrilling about Foster Dulles and the chronic “lâcheté” of the Americans. Always too little and too late. The betrayal at Dienbienphu. Suez. Her husband, more tactful, sought to divide the blame. The French had betrayed too. The Left. Mendès-France. Geneva. He barely stopped short of attacking General De Gaulle, his own commander-in-chief. A parliament of fools was in session. Roberta Scott put her hands over her ears. “But what would you have us do now, sir?” said Silvanus Platt smoothly. “Granting that you’re right in your analysis. That’s all water over the dam now. Where do we go from here? How do we persuade Ho Chi Minh to call it quits?”

  “Mais la bombe, bien sûr,” the colonel answered, throwing out his hands. “Une seule suffirait.” “Atomic or hydrogen?” Peter inquired coldly, getting in return a pitying look. “Atomique, naturellement. N’exagérons pas.” But the general was not convinced that an atomic bomb on Hanoi would do the trick. You had to think of world opinion and what the Russian response would be. If you decided to use the bomb, it might make more sense to drop it on Peking, before the Chinese got theirs. That would give Ho something to think about, and the Russians would scarcely object. “Ces Chinois s’en foutent,” said the Frenchman. With the manpower they had, an atom bomb would be just a flea-bite.