‘Is that why you’re reading all those crappy eighteenth-century novelettes?’
‘Yeah, because I want to pinpoint the moment at which decomposing Christianity transmutes into this new secular religion. Just precisely when did people switch over from the idea of giving yourself totally to Jesus to the idea of giving yourself totally to another human being? C. S. Lewis had it down to the troubadours. But courtly love looks to me more like a literary convention than a life-changing thing. It’s only when Christianity segues into its final Protestant phase that the idea of love breaks free and takes over. Without the Christian ideology of self-giving the whole shebang is inconceivable. Outside Christendom, there’s nothing like it, nothing at all. In any other culture a person who gives up everything for love is regarded as a moral idiot, on a par with a junkie or an alcoholic.’
‘And what do you think?’ Polly sounded nettled too.
‘What do I think about what?’
‘Is a person who gives up everything for love like an alcoholic?’
‘Oh I don’t have opinions. I’m your friendly neighbourhood analyst, I just ask questions and listen to the answers and murmur as I take my fees, there is no cure for this disease.’
‘Come off it, Franco. If this passion thing was just a phase we’ve skipped or we’re growing out of, is that good or bad or don’t you care? Have we lost something precious or are we well rid of it?’
‘You really wanna know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well …’ Franco was face down on the bunk now, stretching out his paw for his beer can and squeezing it flat when he found it was empty. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s hard for us to judge at this distance in time. It must have been a bad moment when people realised that their love was no more immortal than they were. But they still had the consolations of the flesh, screwing and kids and so forth, so it wasn’t so bad as when they discovered there was no God. For that there was no consolation.’
‘How can you be so sure people don’t feel as passionately any more?’ Wizz sounded personally aggrieved.
‘Oh, people, I don’t know about people. I’m only a literary scholar, for Christsake, not a goddam sociologist. For all I know, people may still be killing themselves or each other for love. All I can say is that nobody much is writing about it, nobody worth reading anyway. Joyce couldn’t even mention the word, he was so freaked out by it.’
He yawned and sat up, stretching his arms above his head in his relaxed simian style. As I got up to fetch a couple more cans from the coolstore, I became aware how tight the atmosphere was. Both Wizz and Polly were looking away from Franco in strained postures, as though they had to force themselves not to look at him. How sharp their questions had been, how seriously they had taken him, considering there we were, half-pissed with our wet clothes steaming on the rickety drying rack, with the gamy aroma of Wizz’s stew simmering in our nostrils. They were like believers in the old faith, undeclared ones perhaps, who were finding it hard to keep mum when they heard it abused as obsolete.
As Franco stretched out a hand to take the beer, I caught the look that Wizz gave him. Then, as I was turning back to the creaky wicker chair I was sitting on, I saw Polly looking at him too. There was no mistaking those two looks, partly because the looks were so alike. The gaze was intense and yet at the same time distraught, like the look of someone witnessing a terrible accident or, no, being part of the accident and so shocked that the eye cannot focus, glassy and wild at the same time. That is a confused description but then it is a confusing thing to catch, the look of someone ravening for love.
I had not realised till that moment that either of them was in love with Franco. They never stopped teasing him and making monkey jokes, and I had taken all of that at face value. Presumably each of them knew about the other, or perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps they were each as blind as I had been, having eyes only for that sprawling figure on the bunk seat whose hirsute fingers were now happily clasped round the next can of Budweiser.
Wizz’s stew came and went. I cannot remember much about it, dark and chewy I think. I was so unsettled by the violent currents of feeling that had now broken into our idle talk (assuming that it had been idle and Franco had not been deliberately teasing either or both of them). We could not find a topic that suited us and so jogged about restlessly from one to the next: memories of people they had in common from their various colleges, why Johnson had decided not to run again, how long it would be before there was a black president, whether you could actually teach literature or even if you could whether you should. Then Wizz told us something about the people who lived in this part of the state who were not really German but Dutch or some other nationality that I have now forgotten.
But what I do have a sharp memory of is Wizz getting up to poke the stove and sneaking another look at Franco as he passed, this time not so wild, more the look of a collector who cannot stop looking at the piece he has just acquired, scarcely able to believe his luck. And Polly stretched out opposite with her long arms drooping over the edge of the bunk and a soupy smile on her solemn face as she looked at Franco too. And I wondered whether I was not a little bit in love with her, or perhaps I did not want to be left out of this roundelay.
It was a relief when we agreed to turn in.
‘Being wet is so tiring.’
‘So is being smashed.’
‘Being wet and smashed is the worst.’
I was already in my only dry T-shirt and my boxer shorts, so all I had to do was grab an old blanket from the box under the bunk seat and throw it over me, grunting goodnight to Franco who was doing the same in the opposite bunk. Wizz turned down the wick on the oil lamp and wished us goodnight, then shepherded Polly along to the two tiny bedrooms either side of the passage out to the yard. They were both in white T-shirts and he had his torn old beige shorts on and she was just in her white knickers because her jeans were still damp. They looked like a couple of castaways.
We lay quiet in the glimmer of the lamp, listening to them brushing their teeth in the shower room. I expected Franco to start off on some midnight homily but he did not utter. In fact, he lay so still I thought he must have gone to sleep the moment his head touched the pillow.
Perhaps I had dozed off myself but it seemed like only half an hour later (I did not check my watch) when I saw Franco get up from his bunk and walk slowly across the room. I imagined that he was going out the front to piss in the wet bracken – no, imagined is not the right word, that is what I hoped.
But he went the other way, down the passage. Halfway along he stopped, or at least the creak of his footsteps stopped, and there was a tingling silence. Was he pausing before taking the plunge? Or could he not remember which was Wizz’s door and which was Polly’s? There had been some business about Wizz giving up the slightly better of the two hutches to her, but Franco might not have known which was supposed to be the better one (I had put my head round both doors and could not see much difference). Or – and this was a more unsettling thought still – perhaps he did know which of them was sleeping where, but could not make up his mind which door to try. How was I to presume which way his fancy went?
I have never forgotten that silence although it happened so long ago. Each second of it seemed dragged out, separate from the moment before and the moment after. I could just hear the flickery throb of the stove. The silence was so heavy I felt I could touch it.
Then a door opened, a flimsy creaky noise, and closed again with a little thwap and I heard the voice of an English girl. Not that I could hear her actual words, she was keeping her voice down, just the slightly higher pitch of the vowels. Then murmurings, so low that it was soon hard to tell which of them was talking. Then silence again, nothing but the throb of the stove. And a few minutes later, rhythmic, tentative at first then gathering pace, those other noises.
I woke late, at least it seemed late. Stale beer, headache, stale fumes from Franco’s French cigarettes, Franco’s bunk still empty, grey light stragg
ling under the stubby flounces of the curtains. In the little galley – too cramped to call it a kitchen – I heard a kettle steaming and there was Wizz fully dressed, grimly placing bacon strips on a filthy griddle.
He brushed aside my sleepy good morning. ‘Today’, he said, ‘you and I are going down to the city. You said you were longing to see it.’
‘Did I?’
‘If you didn’t you should have. It’s the greatest city in America.’
‘Won’t the others –’
‘We must leave the lovebirds to it.’
We ate our blackened bacon and scalded coffee without either of us saying a word. Wizz looked pinched, as if he had lost weight overnight. I imagined this was how he would look when he was sixty, though there was not a line on his face.
‘Could you give me a hand with the gas? Let’s try not to wake them.’
We lugged the spent cylinder into the back of the pick-up. We must have looked like a couple of murderers humping the body.
‘I’ve left a note,’ he said, jumping into the driver’s seat, leaving me no time to fetch my anorak. He drove down the twists and turns of the mountain road with the intent ferocity of a rally driver. His pace did not slacken as we came out of the woods, and we drove through scattered villages and orchards heavy with fruit until we came to the general store in Leconfield where we dumped the empty cylinder and picked up a couple of pieces of junk mail directed to Uncle Bob (who had died three years earlier).
I hoped his mood might lighten after we hit the freeway and he did begin to talk a little, in a clipped sort of way.
‘I have to visit our lawyers, Chisholm and Daly, known in the family as Chisel and Dally.’
‘How impressive.’
‘We’re trying to break up Uncle Bob’s trust. My cousin Marve’s getting married and he wants out.’
The explanation seemed to depress him, whether because of the impending bother or because he did not care for Cousin Marve was hard to tell.
After a couple of hours’ steady driving, mostly through a light drizzle, we reached the outer suburbs of the city. The first lights were red and Wizz turned to me with an anguished twist to his mild features. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind about them fucking, they can fuck themselves stupid for all I care, but he shouldn’t play around with other people’s feelings just because he doesn’t have any himself.’
‘Oh, are you—’
‘Because it’s all crap what he was saying last night. Love is the most important thing in life.’
‘Even in America?’ I said, trying to lighten the tone.
‘Sure it is. Hell, we take everything else seriously, why wouldn’t we take this seriously? We’re the last romantics in fact, always were, always will be.’
‘So nothing’s changed?’
‘You don’t believe me? Listen, I’ll show you something.’
He drove on down the long avenue, putting his foot on the accelerator as though he had just received an urgent summons. Soon the suburban lawns and the wide sidewalks gave way to streets with older four- or five-storey houses with iron fire escapes zigzagging down their fronts. Then in another ten minutes we were driving though a city park with broad lawns and fine old trees and public buildings in red brick with classical façades and Doric pillars. The rain was bucketing down now.
‘There,’ he said, pulling up at the next intersection and pointing dramatically to one of these classical buildings on a quiet side street. ‘You go in there and ask the librarian to tell you the story of William Short.’
‘Who’s presumably some sort of ancestor?’
‘I always said you were smart. Ask him to show you the letters, oh and the bust too. He’s a friend of mine and he loves to do the spiel. And then you come back and tell me that Americans are incapable of romance.’
He was still boiling with rage, and to cool him down I didn’t ask any questions but said, all right, I’d give it a whirl. So I got out of the pick-up and padded across the sopping grass towards the imposing portico. I wondered whether it had only just occurred to him to put me through this experience, whatever it was, or whether he had it in mind even before we left Uncle Bob’s cabin. Either way, it would kill an hour and keep me out of the rain. I did not imagine that the story would occupy my mind, off and on, for the next thirty years.
A flustered lady in spectacles opened the door to me. She had a startled air as though this was a door she had never opened before.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you’re wet. You’d better come in.’
Wizz helped me, of course. In fact, he kept nagging at me to carry on. He liked to call himself my commissioning editor, and he doubled as my research assistant. On his time off from Stilwell Short, the family boutique brokers he had gracefully subsided into, he would go to the Historical Museum or the Phil Soc and copy out stuff for me in his tidy hand with the epsilons for ‘e’s. Sometimes on afternoons in the spring he coxed a four on the Schuykill river and I liked to think of that slight figure sitting there in the library in his cox’s cap and muffler, though he told me he changed out of his city clothes down at the boathouse. But he never offered any comment on the material he sent me or asked to see any of the work in progress and the only time I asked him what he thought about some episode or other he declined, saying, ‘You’re the romancer, I’m just the editor.’ I think he wanted an impartial witness, but witness to what exactly? Was I supposed to prove Franco wrong about the history of love? Or did he want an outsider to tell a story that would make his fellow Americans, possibly the rest of us too, feel differently about something, about themselves perhaps? That would certainly be an ambitious enterprise, to put it mildly, but beneath his modest exterior Wizz concealed his fair share of ambition.
I
The Landing
‘SIMMON, SIMMON, WHERE is that boy, never there when you want him, I know he does it apurpose,’ Madame Suard called in her quick high English, which still had a French buzz to it, though she had been keeping her boarding house in Philadelphia for ten years and more. To call it a boarding house is to do her establishment some injustice. What Madame Suard kept was a French boarding house, serving the best wines from Bordeaux and offering her guests cooking of a refinement found only in two or three houses on Society Hill, Dr Physick’s for example and Mayor Powel’s. It was a fine old mansion of the type they were already calling colonial, on the best part of Walnut Street, the low seventies, with blue panelled shutters, gabled roof, shed dormers and a perron so polished it might have been marble. Perhaps it was; Madame Suard insisted on the finest materials in all departments, napkins of Breton lace, chests and tallboys of New England cherrywood in all the twenty-dollar bedrooms and the table silver of such a quality that those of her guests who fancied themselves in such matters were constantly arguing whether the epergne was by Storr or de Lamerie, which gave her the chance to tell them it was in fact fine Boston work and she had bought it round the corner at Mr Twite’s on Locust Street and for half the price they had hazarded, for she was enough of a Frenchwoman still to boast of belles économies, even at her exalted level.
‘Simmon, enfin,’ she said, as the long skinny youth finally surfaced from the kitchen quarters where he claimed he had been polishing that very piece of silver, pointing by way of proof to the green apron he wore like an English butler. The double ‘m’ in his name is not, as you might think, a misprint. He insisted on it and bridled when anyone tried to write him down as Simon, explaining that it was short for Persimmon, which he had been christened, though the pastor did not care for it, because as a baby his father claimed his bulbous orange head was indistinguishable from the fruit of that tree. Mrs Suard had been fetched by this story when she first heard it and for several weeks called him Monsieur Persimmon, until Simmon asked her not to because the other boys were laughing at him.
‘Simmon, there’s a crate from France for Mr Short just come in on the tide.’
‘Must be a powerful wet crate if it floated all that way.’
/> ‘Don’t be sassy, Simmon.’
He liked the way she pronounced sassy, as if it were the most delightful thing in the world to be. In fact, he liked Mrs Suard a whole lot. She spoke to the boys the same way she spoke to her boarders, as though they were all a little backward and needed to be geed up if any sense was to be got out of them.
‘It was shipped over on an American boat, the Marquis’ – she pronounced it in the French way, mark-ee, and that was neat too, he thought, though why an American boat should be called after a French aristocrat he could not imagine.
‘It is named for the great Marquis de Lafayette,’ she said, not for the first time reading his thoughts. ‘He is a hero for the Americans too, because he fought for both our nations.’
‘Uh – uh.’ Simmon hauled in this information with some negligence.
‘So here’s five dollars for the carriage and you’d best take the wagon. The boy from the Landing says the crate is not so big but it is very heavy.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Simmon with a little more empressement. He fancied he cut a fine figure standing up in the little cart flicking his whip across the mule’s hindquarters, but only when out of sight of 70 Walnut Street, for Mrs Suard did not care to see the mule tickled up.
Simmon sniffed the spring air as he went through the yard down to the little stable at the back. He pretended to flick the whip at the red tulips and gillyflowers in the beds along the brick path but never touched a petal because Mrs Suard might be watching from the window of her small study where she did her accounts and wrote out the menus in that curly hand of hers, which Mr Short always said made him feel he was back in the Palais-Royal.
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