Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  Peter spoke rapidly, ending with a nervous laugh. A sarcastic smile glimmered on his adviser’s features, and Peter feared it might refer to a fact that he had just noticed himself: his plan had an Achilles’ heel. Under socialism, i.e., in an ideal republic, just about everybody would be able to appreciate art, so that there would be no reasonable basis for exclusion, and the museums would be even more packed than they were now.

  But Mr. Small had failed to observe the hole in his reasoning. The sneer on his face had another referent. Abruptly he turned off the tape-recorder. “Enough of this modish drivel,” he said. To Peter’s disbelieving ears, he launched into a defense of capitalism, which was the best system yet invented—or likely to be invented—for technological progress and an equal distribution of goods. “Of course it’s flawed, but what human system isn’t? Don’t tell me socialism hasn’t been tried yet! We’ve had it in all its varieties, mixed and straight, and look at the record. Take a good hard look.” And he began to hold forth about something he called the market-mechanism, which worked (with some correction) like the mills of the gods, to spread the wealth, remedy social injustice, multiply choices, advance basic research, apply technology to formerly insoluble human equations. The way he described it made Peter think of one of those mixers the fair Rosamund hated that did everything but chew your food for you.

  “Wow!” said Peter. “You surprise me, Mr. Small. I thought you were some sort of far-out radical. Like a tribune of the people. I couldn’t understand how you could reconcile the ideas you seemed to be for with wanting to work hand and glove with airlines and reactionary governments.” “Those terms have no meaning for a contemporary mind. In my youth I was fond of them too, during a brief romance with that mythic animal called democratic socialism. Today there’s no excuse for that kind of ignorance, when any reader of the newspapers can see that Right and Left, if we must use the old vocabulary, have so clearly changed places. Yet the glib slurs on capitalism remain fashionable.

  “Capitalism, if you were only aware of it, has shown itself to be the most subtle force for progress the world has ever known. In its post-industrial phase, an insidious, awesome force. Boring from within the old structures, leveling, creating new dreams, new desires, and having the technical know-how and the dynamism to satisfy them. You’re living in the midst of a vast global revolution originating in the United States and you seem not to take the slightest interest in it, except to go through some feeble motions of dissent. From your ivory tower, you look down disdainfully on that revolution and pretend to yourself that you’d welcome it if it bore the name of socialism. I can assure you that you wouldn’t, my friend. ‘Socialism’ is your alibi for rejecting the real progress capitalism has made, the leveling you abhor, if the truth were told. ‘Garbage,’ you said just now, in a moment of outspokenness which no doubt you regret That was your epithet for the common man.”

  “Hey, you misunderstood me! I don’t think those crowds are garbage in their natural setting. It’s the processing that does it to them. That’s the word you used. The same with real garbage. Before it’s processed into that state, it’s just food—plain healthy food. And if you take out the tin cans and compost it back into the soil, it will be food again.” “Why don’t you meet the argument instead of taking refuge in childish verbal fencing?”

  “I’m not going to argue with you, Mr. Small. I feel too tired. Just listening to you makes me exhausted, and I’m not saying that to be rude. To have any real discussion, we’d both have to go back to the letter a. And honestly you’re too old for that. I’d rather have an argument with somebody I share a few assumptions with. Maybe you’re right about capitalism being a revolutionary force. Sure, it can produce abundance, but abundance of what? I admit it’s bringing about changes. But those aren’t the changes my generation wants. If capitalism is so great, what has it done for civil rights?”

  “Christ! You privileged kids are all alike. You despise the common man, as long as he’s white. But you suddenly love the Negro. If CORE had been holding a caucus this morning in the Sistine Chapel, you would have slavered with joy. All right, I’ll tell you what capitalism has done for civil rights. The market-mechanism plus technology has brought the black man off the fields and into the cities. North and South. In the cities you got overcrowding, slums, unemployment, welfare, rioting—an explosive situation produced by the restructuring of agriculture. But out of that miserable crowding, those festering slums, the civil-rights movement was born. Your field nigger, as they called him, never knew he had any rights. The whole thing is an urban movement generated by the dynamics of post-industrial society. If it had been left to you, the black man would have stayed on the land forever, close to Nature, peacefully farming or share-cropping. Which means he would have remained an Uncle Tom!” He struck his fist into his palm with a smack that made Peter jump.

  “That’s a good point,” he acknowledged, swallowing several times. “I never thought of it that way. I guess I only looked at one side of the picture. To me, the slums were bad.” Mr. Small grew more affable. “You might say the ghettoes with their high crime rate and juvenile delinquency were a high price to pay for the returns, so far, in actual civil rights gained. But change is often seen as costly in the immediate perspective. Capitalism in time will eradicate the slums because it can’t afford them. Slums mean under-consumption; it’s as simple as that. I can promise you that in the foreseeable future, with automation and full productivity, the remaining pockets of poverty will be wiped out in the U.S. We will look back on the ghettoes as the inevitable way-stations on the highway of development.”

  “Yes. Maybe.” Now that the meal was over, Peter was disinclined to stir up any more debate. It was strange that, unlike the original Dr. Pangloss, who had a sunny outlook, his descendant was of a variable temper, hard to forecast and seldom sereno. Dr. Pangloss’ insulation from reality had made him a good traveling companion, but Mr. Small’s personal plexiglass bell evidently caused a kind of itchiness or inflammation that kept him irritable and peevish—Peter would not have cared to go through the Lisbon earthquake with him even to be in on the happy ending of seeing him hanged by the Inquisition. Maybe the idea that all was for the best was harder to hold onto nowadays, and a guy like Small had to be satisfied with thinking that he was for the best, brimming with good will and faith in the market-mechanism all the time that really, if he only knew it, he was stewing in doubt and rancor. He had a higher I.Q., Peter estimated, than Candide’s companion, and perhaps that was part of the problem.

  Now he played a few sentences back on the tape-recorder, listened as if to music, and lovingly replaced the cover. He seemed so tender with that instrument that Peter wondered if it was new. “Don’t mistake me, Peter. I’m not insensitive to your Angst. I have my own ambivalences toward this abrasive new society we’re making. ‘The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.’ Yes. Nor do I see remedies in the foreseeable future for the sheer increase in man’s numbers, though I’m confident they will be found. I believe in man.” It occurred to Peter that Mr. Small had been successfully analyzed. That might be what was the matter with him. He leaned across the table and touched Peter’s arm. “I know you reject the insights of psychiatry. But if this solitude you speak of is so important to you, perhaps you ought to try some of the mind-expanding drugs. My ‘Beat’ friends may have something to teach us. With drugs, they don’t need the manufactured experience of art. Every ‘trip’ is a tour of the unexplored resources of consciousness. We should ponder the semantics of that word. What if they’ve found the answer to the very real dilemma of tourism you’ve posed? A partial answer, anyway. They perhaps show a greater adaptiveness to the mobile environment we live in than those of us, like you, who persist in the traditional patterns. And their solution, in due time, will be within the reach of every housewife, every old person. There’s no doubt in my mind that pot will quite soon be legalized and marketed through the normal channels at a
n acceptable price. The cigarette industry, in trouble over cancer, will perceive the opportunity. There’s your market-mechanism, don’t you see, with its inherent thrust forward, to open new vistas, resolve old problems!”

  Peter laughed. “ ‘Skip that trip up the Nile. Turn on with a Camel.’ Yeah.” Feeling no acute eagerness for this alternate future either, he added up his share of the bill and put down a thousand-lire note. “Oh! The bad news! Shall we split it?” Peter had had no notion of splitting, since his adviser had consumed a bistecca fiorentina, a half-liter of wine, and a cassata siciliana, while he had had noodles, a salad, and a small San Pellegrino. But some affluent people were like that; they never noticed, when they offered to divide the bill, that they had had the more costly items.

  “Let’s see,” said Mr. Small. “It comes to about three thousand lire. You put down another five hundred, and I’ll leave the tip.” Peter, who had hoped for some change from his original contribution, felt himself turn red. “The service is included. See, there it is.” He pointed to the item on the bill, trusting that this maneuver would inspire his adviser to make a detailed cost breakdown. “Oh, fine,” said Mr. Small, ignoring the bill and waving to the waiter. “What do I give him extra?” “Oh, a couple of hundred.”

  The waiter was waiting. Peter felt himself in a familiar sort of quandary. Leaving aside the selfish motive of his depleted funds (with the five hundred lire and his rightful change he could buy his supper at a counter and part of his breakfast too), he asked himself whether he did not have a friendly obligation to set his adviser straight. If Small, afterward, were to realize his mistake, he would wish Peter had spoken up. An honest person should always be glad to be saved from cheating another person, especially a younger one. If it was Peter, he would want to be told. But Mr. Small was not Peter—that seemed to be clear—and there were people who would rather walk around with their fly open than have anybody tell them about it. His mother, for instance, always got mad if he said her slip was showing. “Don’t you want to know, Mother?” “No.” Money, he guessed, could be an even more sensitive area in the adult soul. And Mr. Small might have alimony to pay and maintenance for his kids—he had not revealed how many. Would it be cowardly to take the easy course and fork over the five hundred lire? Or Christian? Was deciding to be “Christian” just an excuse for being a coward? He wondered what that contemporary sibyl “Dear Abby” would advise. “Gently draw the error to your companion’s attention”? But that “gently” was a typical sibylline evasion. There was no gentle way of telling somebody he was rooking you.

  Peter’s hand went slowly to his wallet. Then he remembered the foundation. Mr. Small must have remembered too. “By the bye,” he said, “would you mind telling the waiter to bring the check back? And have him mark it ‘Paid.’ I’d like to have it for my records.” In a second, Peter got it. The guy was planning to collect from the foundation on Peter’s lunch as well as his own, which would put him not just even but ahead of the game. The fact that he avoided the term expense account showed that he had some shame left. But not enough. He had dug his own grave. In it, the worm turned. “In that case,” said Peter, “you’ll want separate checks, won’t you?” He spoke to the waiter. “Faccia due conti, per favore. Scusi.” The man somewhat grumpily redid the addition. As Peter pocketed his change, his eyes avoided Mr. Small’s. It was better not to gloat over a fallen adversary. Victory was sweet, but the wise man did not seek to savor it.

  Outside the restaurant, undeterred by the heavy equipment hanging on straps from his shoulders, Mr. Small managed a final effusive embrace. Then he held Peter at arm’s length. “What a wonderful day we’ve had together.” It was hard for Peter to imagine that this affectionate burbling person had tried to gyp him on the check. “Wait just a minute, Peter. Stay there!” He darted across the piazza, the tape-recorder bouncing against one hip and the camera against the other. In a minute he came running back, having found a local passer-by who was willing to take their picture. Extracting the Rollei from its case, he hung it around the man’s neck, showed him how to use the viewer and press the button. After some experiment, he posed himself and Peter, arms linked, against the background of a fountain. Peter faced the camera, feeling the snug pressure of the professor’s arm, undeniably “warm,” upon his and trying to fight off a sense of total unreality. If today was to figure as a sentimental ricordo in Mr. Small’s memory book, then one of them had to be nuts. “Un sorriso, per piacere. Smile, please, misters.” Mr. Small had already, obliged. Peter forced a peaked grin to his own lips. He nodded. He was a snob. He preferred most art to most people. He was guilty of juvenile coldness and non-participation. When he had not shared whatever the sociologist thought they had experienced, the least he could have done was consent to an equal division of the check.

  Two-thirds of a Ghost

  COMING BACK TO PARIS, with his soul refreshed, Peter encountered a “disagreeable” he had managed to erase from his memory—the clochards. In Rome, there were no clochards because the Italians were not vinous. One of the world’s problems you could ignore there was alcoholism. In the street you seldom saw a drunk person, not counting foreigners. In Rome, there were only ordinary beggars, mostly cripples on church steps and ragged gypsy women with babies in their arms that his ex-roommate claimed were rented. You forked over some spiccioli as a matter of course, and the strays, if any, that preyed on your conscience were the homeless, hungry cats.

  In Paris, regular beggars were rare and hung out mainly in the subway. He met one—a blind man with an accordion—on his way home, when he had to change at the Gare d’Austerlitz stop, and, keeping to Roman habits, he searched for a donation among the small coins in his pocket, though it meant putting down his heavy suitcase, which at once became a traffic obstruction. To the sundry “Merde, alors!” hurled at him by the jostling throng, he replied mechanically, “Ta gueule.” In Paris, beggars almost never thanked you, and he was startled to hear the blind man call out after him something that sounded strangely like “Merci!” “De rien,” Peter mumbled. “Monsieur!” the man reiterated, rapping on his begging-cup. Eventually Peter dug. In his confusion, he had dropped some small lire along with the one-centime pieces into the plastic cup, and the blind man, by touch evidently, had detected the fraud. He was angry. Peter put down his suitcase again and fumbled in his pocket; he had no more French coins. He drew a crumpled five-franc note from his wallet—a dollar. The man smoothed it out and felt it carefully, as though it might be counterfeit. “Ça va,” he said finally.

  This little incident assured Peter he was home. Only in France, he guessed, would a subway beggar, on getting a handout, act like an incensed storekeeper presented with a wooden nickel; he was probably lucky the guy had not called the police. Yet when he thought it over, he found less cause for mirth. The blind man had made sense. If a person gave charity, it was because he decided he owed it, maybe not to a particular individual but to the other half of humanity, and the creditor had the right to expect the account to be settled in the coin of the realm. Just the same as a storekeeper—why not? French logic had punched holes in Peter’s philanthropy, which seemed to have been based on the rotten assumption Beggars can’t be choosers. Of course it had been an “innocent” mistake, yet not all that innocent underneath. Peter knew he would not have been so careless with the merchants in the Marché Buci. He ought to be glad to be back in this unsentimental country, where icy reason had its temples and everything taught him a lesson.

  But the clochards were something else. Making his way home that night, along the Boulevard St.-Germain, from the Bonfantes’, where he had delivered his offerings and been persuaded to stay for supper, he stumbled over one sleeping on the Métro grating. They did that in the winter to keep warm; often, near the Odéon stop, between the rue St.-Grégoire-de-Tours and the rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie, there would be two or three dark shapes stretched out or huddled on the big iron ventilator grill, which they treated as a hot-air radiator. Normally he picked
his way with care to avoid them or even, like the bad Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan, walked on the other side of the street. But tonight he forgot.

  His foot trod on something soft and yielding, which stirred under him. He let out a yell of horror. He was walking on what seemed to be a human stomach, but it could be a pair of breasts. The creature was all wrapped up, like a bundle, in a sodden piece of cloth that might once have been an overcoat, and he could not tell its sex or find its face. At least it was still animate. He heard its voice mutter. Then it turned, stretched, settled itself in a more comfortable position; a head had thrust out, and under the street light he had a glimpse of a gray unshaven jaw. Apparently no vital organ had been crushed by being stepped on, but how could he be sure? Alcohol was an anesthetic; in the old days they used it when performing operations—Lord Nelson was crocked when they amputated his arm after Tenerife, or was it while he was dying, at Trafalgar? An awful sour smell came from the recumbent form; on the grill, a few feet away, lay an empty wine bottle.

  Peter picked it up and took it to the trash-basket on the corner. If it was left there, somebody could trip on it and hurt themselves. On second thought, he went back and retrieved it. The guy must have paid a deposit on it, and in the morning he could get a few centimes back for the empty—enough for a cheap cup of coffee maybe. Overcoming his repulsion to touching the inert, stinking heap, he thrust the bottle firmly beneath its arm. The clochard responded with a hugging, cradling motion, as though the gros rouge was a baby. Disgusted, Peter turned away.