Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  It was the same story as in those hotels in Paris. His day started with the race to the gabinetto; when he heard the ancient chain pull, he was on his mark. Followed the Herculean clean-up after its last tenant, only here he had to do it with sheets of thin slippery yellowish toilet paper, no brush being furnished. The big difference was that now he had a nice view through the open window of the red-tiled roofs of Rome and of plants growing in pots on neighboring balconies. Across lines of bright laundry, he could even see the pale moth-brown angels with folded wings, like life-jackets, on the strange bell tower of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte. Afterwards he could saunter out and have a cappuccino at the coffee-store opposite the Propaganda Fide, buy an orange and a sugar bun, and go back for a second cappuccino.

  So that he was glad he had not let himself be discouraged by American Express: no couchettes available, first or second class. Sitting up all night on the ordinary slow train, he had fortified himself with the maxim of William the Silent, which he recited to the clacketing of the wheels: “Il n’est pas nécessaire d’espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer.” He did not know how the person they called “Guillaume le Taciturne” came to be part of French Civilization, but he gave a good mark to the professor for introducing the class to that thought. Part of the night he stood in the corridor, having relinquished his seat to a Frenchman with a hideous baby. When he unclosed his gummy eyes for the nth time, it was the dawn of Christmas Eve; Italian officials were saying “Buon giorno” and asking for his passport and if he had any contraband. He was home.

  Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus. Although it was a corny thing to do, after a late Roman supper of the traditional eels, he followed the crowd into midnight mass at Santa Maria Maggiore, by the station. They had a supposed relic of the Bambino’s crib that the priests carried in procession, and some wonderful mosaics around the high altar were all lit up and shining like a holy fire. Near where Peter stood was a confessional box in which you could tell your sins in Esperanto. Afterward he lost his way and got swept along by another crowd, coming from the Aracoeli. Among these humbler worshippers were big dogs and a little goat, which he patted. He saw the statue, on horseback, of Marcus Aurelius and met the bagpipers from the Abruzzi, dressed like real shepherds, making their wailing music and passing a collection-plate. Returning to his hotel, he felt too excited to sleep.

  The night porter, whom he woke up to get in, told him about a solemn mass at dawn in the church of Sant’Anastasia, at the foot of the Palatine; she had the same birthday as Jesus. He showed him how to find it on a map. It was another long walk. When Peter finally hit the sack after breakfast, he had not been to bed for two whole nights. That way, at least, he had circumnavigated Christmas. Waking up late that afternoon, he found it was already dark outside, since in Italy they did not have daylight saving in the winter. Moreover, it seemed to have rained. He put in a call to his mother and mailed his letters of introduction in the post office at San Silvestro, resigned to passing a solitary weekend on account of tomorrow being Saturday.

  Incredibly, they all clicked. It was as if the lemons, cherries, oranges, and bells came up, one after the other, in some miraculous slot-machine attached to his telephone. Bonfante’s sister invited him to lunch twice in her apartment; she was married to a professor at the University. A contessa who was an old friend of the babbo’s invited him to lunch too, with a pair of English pansies; she lived in an historic palazzo, and her menservants wore white gloves. Another friend of the babbo’s took him to dinner in piedi, which meant a buffet supper, on the Via Appia Antica; that night he learned to do the twist. An art scholar Bob knew showed him through the restauro, where craftsmen dressed in white like surgeons operated on damaged frescoes, paintings, and sculptures. Everybody acted so sorry when they heard he had spent Christmas day alone, sleeping (“Se avessimo saputo!”), that he decided for the future to pretend he had not arrived till Christmas night.

  It was an ill wind that blew nobody good. He now felt almost grateful for not having come on his motorbike. He would not have had room in his pack for the two changes of clothes with accompanying haberdashery that at the last minute he had stuffed into his suitcase. Even so, he had had to buy a new pair of too-wide black shoes on the Corso and he was thinking of taking the babbo up on the offer of a new suit. His father claimed to know a tailor here who could make him one in forty-eight hours for the price of a ready-made at home. He had instructed Peter not to let them put in any padding and to charge it, evidently suspecting that if he sent a check, Peter would just add the money to his savings and do without the suit. Or get a secondhand one at the old-clothes market near San Giovanni in Laterano, which in fact Peter had been eyeing—why squander a lot of fric on something that would hang uselessly in his closet once he got back to Paris? On the other hand, he had spilled pasta and Chianti several times on his gray flannel, and the talcum powder and salt they sprinkled on him did not wholly remove the spots.

  His mother, too, on the telephone; had asked him about clothes. “But I won’t need any, Mother. You sound as if I was going to have a Papal audience. What am I going to do with a lot of white shirts? All I have on my program is sightseeing and taking in a few movies.” But it turned out that she was right. The Romans were hospitable, and Italian men, he had to admit, whatever their age and condition, wore dark suits, white shirts, and dark ties when invited out in the evening. He wondered what they put on, to mark the difference, when somebody died.

  His mother wanted to know what had made him change his mind about the motorbike. Of course she was happy that he had, on account of icy roads, but she said that it did not sound like him to listen to the voice of reason. “It’s too long a story, Mother. I’ll tell you some other time.” “And, dearest, I don’t understand why you didn’t leave Paris sooner, since the weather there is so grim.” “Neither do I,” said Peter. “Hey, Ma, this is long distance! Let me say hello to Bob.” Bob was inquisitive too. “What kept you so long in Paris? Was it the Smith girl or the beautiful vegetarian?” “Lay off,” said Peter. “I had a lottery ticket, I had to study, I had a date with a Christmas carol. Pick the one that suits you.” He was not going to confess that he had been holed up in dreary Paris all those extra days, as it turned out, for nothing.

  He still writhed when he thought of the fool’s paradise he had carefully constructed that had fallen ignominiously to pieces at the first contact with reality. Taking “Qui ne risque rien n’a rien” for his motto when actually the gamble had been all inside his own mind. On the creeping train, he had plenty of time for mortification. The only comfort he could find in contemplating his downfall was that nobody but himself knew how high he had been flying. Yet that was clammy comfort. If the sole witness to your disappointment was yourself, it indicated you were a weakling or, at best, a nut. Nobody could split his sides laughing at you but nobody could feel sorry for you either.

  He could laugh, but without pleasure, at the picture of himself buttoned into his flannel suit, engraved invitation in his pocket, hopefully ringing a doorbell on the rue de Lille and then walking through a garden with statuary to a house with all the windows lit up. His boats were burned, except for a little life-raft—the assurance that at least he would see her at this song-fest, and that, he had decided, was worth waiting for, whatever happened next. On purpose, he was late, so as not to be stuck with total strangers, and as his feet crunched on the gravel path he was chanting “Auprès de ma Blonde,” for which he had invented some new words: “What wóuld you gíve, my dárling, to háve your lóved one hóme? I’d gíve the Sístine Chápel and Buónarroti’s dóme. The cóins in the Trévi Foúntain, the Pórta Pínciána wálls. An íce cream át Rosáti’s, the Vílla d’Éste fálls.” And all the while, the one eventuality that had not entered into his calculations was awaiting him, like death biding for Achilles at the Scaean Gate. She was not there.

  Yet he had come to the right place. In a big high-ceilinged room with French windows and h
eavy white draperies, he found a number of compatriots whom he had already met at a rally of Americans in Paris for Johnson, an organization about which he was having second thoughts; he wished he had back the tithe of his October allowance he had donated to the cause. Trying to quell his apprehension (she might be late or have gone to the bathroom), he shook hands with a corporation lawyer, a trustee of the American Hospital, two bankers, a minister, a management consultant, an author of a famous book he had seen the movie of, a Negro actor, a travel agent, a guy from the American Center, a professor who was writing a book on De Gaulle, and some miscellaneous women in glittering dresses; this, he guessed, was the infrastructure of what they called the American liberal community—plus the hostess’ French teacher.

  The hostess, a tall thin nervous blonde in a long gray velvet dress that matched the walls, was passing out mimeographed programs with the words and music and urging the guests into a small white music room that contained nothing but an expensive-looking clavichord, a music stand, and two gilt chairs. “Is everybody here?” she kept asking, tapping on a list. “Harry, is everybody here?” Her husband consulted his list, on which with a small gold pencil he had been putting little checks. He was tall too and wore a dark-gray velvet smoking jacket, gold-rimmed glasses, and a tie that looked like a stock. It came back to Peter that this guy had passed the hat for the Johnson outfit; he was a fund-raiser for an international church group. “I count one to come still. Shall we begin?”

  In the general move forward, Peter found he was stepping on the hostess’ skirt. While he was apologizing, the doorbell chimed three times. He gave a cry of relief. “Hey, that’s her—Roberta!” “Roberta?” the woman said, still inspecting the damage to her train, on which Peter’s foot had left a large damp print. “You mean Bobbie? But she’s gone away. Didn’t she tell you?” “Gone away? For good?” “No, no. Just for the holidays. She and her friend have a fascinating itinerary worked out. They’re going to do Romanesque abbeys in Burgundy. Not just the obvious ones like Vézelay and Cluny but the little recherchés ones.” “I guess she’ll go to Autun,” Peter said glumly. “Oh, surely. Do you know Gislebertus?” “Only from a book I had.” For Christmas, he had sent his mother his copy of Gislebertus, Sculpteur d’Autun and some pans and a conical sieve called le chinois from the Samaritaine. Envy added to his sense of betrayal. He loved the little raisin-eyed people in that book, especially one of the Magi who looked like Harold Macmillan and a tiny brave naked warrior with a big dagger riding into combat on a gigantic bird.

  The hostess was giving her cheek to the new arrival to be kissed and making purring noises. “So naughty of you to be late. Mr. Levi, here’s another friend of Roberta’s. Silly, do you know Peter Levi?” Peter recognized the heavy eyebrows and thick silken eyelashes of Silvanus Platt. “Hi.”

  “Will everybody put out their cigarettes, please?” With an ill grace, Peter let himself be lined up among the basses. He considered that he had been tricked into coming here. The invitation had not specifically said that Roberta would be present but it had certainly left itself open to that construction. Nor did he like the idea that the Princetonian, who sang tenor, had been seeing her unbeknownst to him.

  His old antipathy to music-lovers refueled. There was no Yule log burning merrily in the living room, and he saw no sign of refreshments. Instead of pictures on the walls, they had gray blown-up photographs of prints of antique instruments. “Less is More” appeared to be the house rule. Everything was gray, black, or white. The hostess blew into a recorder, and the host tinkled away inaudibly on the clavichord—his wife’s Christmas present to him. On the program, the words of the carols had been written out in olde Elizabethan spellyng with ampersands, which reminded Peter sourly of Rocky Port. He did not know any of the carols they had exhumed from library stacks and he could not read music, not that it mattered, since he was unable to stay on key. Most of the other carolers seemed to be in his situation. It made him think of those awful mornings in chapel when the headmaster decided to stir things up by posting a new hymn.

  He would almost rather be lending volume to “O, Come All Ye Faithful” or “Silent Night.” It struck him that these rich amateurs needed somebody like his mother or Richard Dyer-Bennet to instruct them in the art of the possible. When they had carols at home or at his aunt Millie’s, the sisters always included a few that everybody knew, like “What Child Is This?” which had the same tune as “Greensleeves,” and “I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In” and “Once in David’s Royal City”—Peter was partial to hymns and carols that had Jews in them.

  The purpose of tonight’s exercise was obscure to him. If the hosts wanted to play a duet, why couldn’t they do it by themselves, instead of recruiting a lot of supernumeraries and giving them sheets of music to hold in their hands as stage-props? The whole occasion was like a long-drawn-out punishment of Tantalus. He guessed there had been a fatal decision to do something “different” this year, which any child could have told them was playing with fire when it came to something like Christmas. Peter felt defrauded not only by the unfamiliar carols but by the tree this couple had, which was trimmed with glass icicles, transparent glass balls, and white roses and carnations that were distributed, when the program finally ended, to the guests according to sex.

  At that point, the host ladled out some mulled wine which, the hostess explained, ought really to have been warmed with a hot poker instead of being heated up on the stove. People like that, Peter noticed, seemed to think that knowing the right way of doing something excused you for doing it the wrong way, as though knowledge was all that mattered. Installing the carnation in his buttonhole, he decided that this could not be more different from the general’s home atmosphere, and yet it seemed just as American, in a sinister way he could not define.

  He was surprised that this pseudo-worldly pair knew Roberta well enough to refer to her as “Bobbie” and not so surprised that they knew Silvanus Platt, whom the hostess addressed as “Silly” and sometimes “Silly Boy.” Peter hated to think what it must have been like for the poor guy in school. Tonight he was wearing a paisley waistcoat and a pocket watch with a gold chain on which hung a Phi Beta Kappa key. Maybe it was his father’s, or he had bought it at a pawnshop. Even at Princeton, nobody could earn one before the spring of his junior year, and for that you had to burn the midnight oil, whereas Silvanus’ specialty, it appeared, was burning the candle at both ends.

  He was prattling to the hostess about girls, ski resorts, night clubs, poker, somebody’s wine cellar. Peter was getting ready to make his escape when he heard the name Bobbie. Silvanus could not understand why a vegetarian teetotaler would want to do a tour of Burgundy, of all places, where the whole point was eating and drinking. To be fair, the same thought had crossed Peter’s mind. “Food for the soul,” the hostess said, puffing on a cigarillo. “You wouldn’t dig it, Silly. Darling Bobbie has this béguin for the Romanesque. So pure and grand and austere.” “But why does she have to go to Burgundy? Isn’t there Romanesque around here?” “Nothing to write home about. Use your eyes, darling. Of course there’s Normandy. Jumièges, which has some delicious Carolingian bits. And that one where they have the plainsong.” “St.-Wandrille,” supplied Peter. “But what’s great here in the Ile-de-France is the Gothic. Have you been out to St.-Denis? You can see right there where it originated. And you don’t have to have a car or anything.” “Bobbie wouldn’t look at a Gothic cathedral,” said the hostess with a little laugh. “All those fussy crockets and overloaded gables.”

  “I like Gothic,” protested Peter. In fact, one of his plans, if Roberta had stayed here for the holidays, had been to take her to look at Amiens, which, according to a book he was reading, was the Gothic Parthenon. To learn that she was a zealot of the Romanesque was another bad surprise. He felt a loyalty to the Gothic, which he regarded as his personal discovery, and the fact that there was a lot of it around, readily accessible to the modest Paris-based day tripper was an additional merit in his
eyes. He had nothing against the Romanesque, as his love of Gislebertus proved, but a girl who could be unfair to Gothic cathedrals was not likely to care for Peter Levi, with his tall attenuated form and crazy soaring pinnacles. “You do?” said the hostess with a thoughtful air. “One has to see Chartres, of course. Marvelous. But Harry and I aren’t so emballés by church architecture. We’re mad on châteaux.”

  Peter remembered his mother saying that you could divide people into those who liked churches and those who liked châteaux. She meant the guided-tour kind where you admired the furniture, not ruined castles with dungeons, which you could visit by yourself. According to her, social climbers, even those claiming to be interested in art, got rapidly bored by churches unless they had lots of loot in them in the form of gold, marbles, and precious stones. She had a point, Peter decided, listening to this woman briefing Silly on the hôtels particuliers of the Marais. In his mind, he sketched a Last Judgment, with a Weighing of Souls: two little château people, resembling the hostess and her husband, were sitting in a balance pulled down by a horrible demon, while in the other basket he and his mother, light as eggs, were mounting upward, tenderly claimed by an angel holding the scales.

  The party was breaking up. A servant opened the door to the dining room and then hastily closed it. No boar’s head was forthcoming. A long table with twin candelabra was set for two. An insane thought struck Peter. All was not lost. What if he were to go to Autun tomorrow, on his own? It was as good a place as any to spend Christmas, and he had a fair chance of running into Roberta, provided he stayed put. She was bound to visit the cathedral, and he could entrench himself there with his binoculars. A guy could spend a week studying the tympanum and the capitals without getting too bored or (he hoped) catching pneumonia.