The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “That is none of your business, my love,” said Araminta. “Actually, he operates a small art-supply shop. He and I met when I stopped in there for some brushes, and his name is Piero Allegri. Here, drink your coffee, and you’ll begin to feel better.”

  “No! I mean, I don’t want it!” Peter squawked.

  “Drink it, and hush for a while,” his mother commanded. She splashed cream into the cup and put it firmly into his flaccid hand. With due caution, mindful of his shaky stomach, he drank it, doing his utmost to think clearly. He wondered what dreadful thing would happen to him next. His mother folded her small hands in her lap and watched him. When he had absorbed the whole cupful, she took the cup from him and sweetly said, “Now, you dress and we’ll go for a walk, maybe take out the johnboat on the lake, and speak some more about all this.”

  “I don’t care to go for a walk or to row you around in the johnboat, Mother, thank you. My eyes feel like they’ve been boiled, and my head doesn’t feel so well either.”

  Araminta, evidencing diminishing tolerance, set her hands on her hips and surveyed her son. “That’s how heads ordinarily feel after they’re poisoned with half a pint of brandy and a steady dose of cheap German champagne.”

  “Who said anything about champagne?”

  “No one needs to say anything about it. Like father, like son—you’re drinking like the Proverbial Fish, and you smell nasty-sweet like the Proverbial Fish did when he’d half-poisoned himself on all that sweet alcohol. Something needs to be done about you before you take to crime.”

  “Nevertheless, I do not feel inclined to a walk.”

  “You get out of that bed, you big lazy thing, and dress yourself.”

  This was the voice of the law. Peter heeded. He shuffled into his dressing room and dug in his trunk for clean trousers, though for malice he did not put on a clean shirt. He crammed his nightshirt under the waistband, put on his oldest jacket over the whole, and emerged defiantly untidy and bristly of jaw. Araminta took no note. As firmly as if he had been knee-high to her, she took him by the hand and led him outside.

  “It’s still Klionarios, isn’t it?” she asked. He was still letting her lead him by two fingers, but saying that he couldn’t contemplate leaving New Haven. “Well, of all things hopeless and ludicrous, this is the most hopeless and ludicrous I’ve seen yet! After nearly four years of kissing that man’s shoes, what do you think another will profit you? Four years is long enough for him to make up his mind, and to anyone else on earth, it’s plain that he has!”

  “I just want to stay there, that’s all. I can draw clothes for advertisements and paint portraits and things.”

  “Peter, perhaps you don’t understand, but since your grandfather’s death, we’re not only well off, we’re independently wealthy, and you’re my sole heir. You don’t need to draw advertisement illustrations now. With the income I have now, we can go to Greece. Whenever you like. And perhaps you could find a…friend. There is bound to be some other Greek gentleman as handsome as this eternal Klionarios—probably there are several. We could do a tour of the rural districts and see if we couldn’t turn up some likely-looking peasant who’d be grateful for the chance to come to the States and demonstrate his gratitude. Someone who might actually like you and be a friend to you. I think the august Mr. Klionarios’s contempt is affecting your reason.”

  “You’ll buy me my own Greek gentleman, eh, Mother? But they don’t have the Peculiar Institution there. We don’t even have it here anymore, unfortunately.”

  “I’d buy you your own Greek island and every adult male on it if it would woo you from the dubious charms of this Klionarios and those of the bottle!”

  Peter, pleased to have worried her so well, laughed. He then said what he’d been wanting to say ever since she dragged him from between the sheets. “Mother, if my state of affairs doesn’t suit you, you really must remember who raised me. I’m your creature; if you wanted me different, the time to do something about it was years ago.”

  Araminta came to a stop and stared up into his bloated face with the steely eye he had so frequently wished to imitate. He quailed internally, and he was right to do so, for she faced him down and left him with nothing to say.

  “I don’t accept the blame for your determination to ruin yourself, no, if that’s what you intend! This is your doing, and don’t you blame your vagaries on me. I regret that I couldn’t give you a worthier father, but when I was sixteen, I was sold to the highest bidder, and that happened to be to a stupid Creole without even the energy to be a good roué or profligate, who wanted to sit in a rocking chair on the porch and drink brandy and listen to the birds sing in the swamp! I’m sorry for the bad parts of his nature that you have, but you’re the one who decides whether or not they’re to ruin you. For that matter, I’m sorry I wasn’t born a man, in Florence, in the fourteenth century, but sorry is cheap. Sorry and a dime will buy you a sack of Geoffrey-Valdosta Prime Rice and a tin pot to cook it in, and so will the dime alone! Now I’ve got sole control over the deuced rice plantations, and I’m going to do what I see fit with them, and I see fit to go to Venice. You can come, or you can stay here. Only if you do stay here, you’ll live on your own means alone, for I don’t intend to support you in the disreputable way of life you’ve taken up. I’m not going to be an accessory to tragedy. Not that I think your proclivities alone doom you to tragedy, but the use you’re making of them points that way. I want you to remember what I’ve told you, and also the offer I’ve made—”

  “You too, huh?”

  “What do you mean by that, sir?” asked Araminta, in the tone that used to precede a stiff workout with a hickory switch.

  “He made me an offer, too. Recommendations for any school a million miles away from him. The next bribe should be thirty pieces of silver, if matters go according to form.”

  “Bosh. Sacrilege, I’d say, too, if I believed in anything up there at all, but the Christians are even worse fools than you on your bad days. But you won’t avoid hearing what I mean to tell you, which is this: You’ll be a prodigy of a painter if you can get that man out of your head and do some work, and I say that even though I know all your sorry ways. Now you’ve been told out loud and in English what you ought to do, and I’ll put it in writing if you like. And if you insist on walking right into your own ruin, you will at least have the graciousness not to blame me when the results come home!”

  “So, the essence of all this is that either I come to Italy like a good little lad, or I am cast on my own resources.”

  “That’s correct,” said Araminta. “I want your decision by term’s end.” Being herself, she didn’t linger over the subject, but left Peter standing there.

  “I suppose you plan to marry your Italian nigger,” he called after her, as insultingly as he had the strength for.

  “I never said I planned to marry anyone ever again,” she called, not bothering to look back at him. “It takes a fool to commit such a stupidity twice.”

  He watched her small figure, its larkspur-blue skirt belling in the wind, as she turned on the path and began retracing her steps toward the house. Peter laughed again at her idea of buying him a tame valet, but let himself envision some gentle god, some shepherd of Arcady who would find his painting miraculous, someone who would come running when called by some melodious name. To sleep lying in some amber-brown shadow! But he had no volition to move a step from where he stood, much less to sail for Italy or Greece. He sat down on the sandy ground and held his head between his hands for a while—his eyes seemed uncomfortably far apart, another of the unamiable aftereffects of brandy. And later he remembered thinking, while he sat there, that he had been offered a bribe to deter him from his destiny. All his life he had felt that whatever happiness came to him would be feeble and substitutional. Someone who had sweeping crime and tragedy encoded in his spirit, his stars, or the palm of his hand would not be content with a tolerable life in a villa and modest success as the alternative to his fated, bla
ck-veiled name. He did not intend to be placated; he intended to hurt someone, if possible in a way that would make the newspapers. Shepherd of Arcady, indeed.

  While his mother was out, Peter roamed through her rooms. He found a photograph of her Italian, an attractive rascal. Ah, the future unstepfather, he thought. Looks quite the ponce. It could be worse; this is a man I wouldn’t mind having in the house, so long as he doesn’t rob us blind or piss on the floor.

  He fingered things and drew in the blood-stirring scent of her perfume; he had never been able to decide what mix of wisteria and magnolia and musk it was. He gathered a handful of petticoats out of the wash hamper and inhaled deeply that mixed scent of flesh and floral and female, that cherished and inaccessible flesh. He wanted a chocolate that she’d bitten into and left half of, but those he found in the current box were unbitten, intact. He wandered through the great Creole pile of a house, up the raw pine stairs that led into the attic studio, and remembered the hot evening smell of resin and oil paints and the sweaty darkie who used to hold the light while little Pete and Missus came down that staircase after rapt hours of drawing, and realized that, like all the other things he couldn’t have, he loved the house. “There should have been a fortune-teller,” he thought, blinking his stinging eyes, “who would have looked at my palm and said, Your love repels like plague or bullets. Whatever you love shall flee from you.”

  Nor was the ultimatum on Italy the worst of it. In that, he at least had a nominal choice; she didn’t give him one regarding his more immediate future. During his Christmas break, Araminta observed her son impassively but kept precise count of every ounce of brandy he consumed in company as well as what he sucked down on the sneak. Never one to pretend to respect his privacy, she found some of Peter’s drawings of Doriskos, drawings unintended for any eyes but his own. Her conclusion was that Peter should not even go back to Yale this year; instead he would remain at home and study the management of the plantation under the overseer. “Since you’re so attached to this house and the patch of swampy ground it sits upon,” she said. As usual with Araminta, the best whining and moaning Peter could manage did not even begin to budge her; cutting off one’s thumb and putting it in her salad, for that matter, probably would not have. When Araminta made up her mind, she made up her mind. She went back to Italy in January, and Peter was left to supervise a corps of ten sharecroppers and sixty Negro field hands, to sit on a docile old horse and watch them dig while his pimples ripened in the sun, and to reread the scant information that came to him by mail. Topher was not much of a letter-writer and finally proclaimed, in semi-literate impatience: “I am bored of all your blather about Prof. K. Do you think I’ve got nothing better to do than watch what he does? That’s you. Anyhow he’s not very interesting these days, he acts reasonable for once. I’m also bored of gossip about S.S., tho he is cutting a big swath in these parts showing off his money. It will make you happy to know that Andy Carpallon has flunked and will graduate with ’82 rather than us, tho if your Dear Mamma keeps you down there long you’ll graduate with ’82 too. I bet you are happy enough Down There anyway, I bet you’re having it off with the Field Hands 7 times a night.”

  Much of what Peter wanted to know would have been hidden from him, revealed only in its outermost reverberations, even had he been able to return. But he would have been able to perceive a progress toward perfection, like that music of the spheres to which the stars move. After the conception on the ferry had come the mathematical blessing. Simion, back at the kitchen table in Doriskos’s house with a stack of books on engineering mathematics, had considered whether the legs of Doriskos’s proposed masterpiece would hold it up. Its probable weight, the fatigue factors of marble, breaking strain, and twenty other factors all fed into the pages of equations. Doriskos gave up trying to follow as Simion murmured and scribbled all evening, waiting only for the answer. The answer was a qualified yes, a probably, an in all likelihood. But it was good enough for Doriskos, who also trusted Simion to calculate the size of the block that he’d need and hire the men to enlarge his kitchen door to accommodate it. He did not, however, let Simion order the stone by mail, but went to Vermont and chose it. The trouble of the journey—the grinding travel by milk train and mail coach, the amazing Vermont cold, and a couple of nights in the grim inn of the quarry town—appealed to his sense of piety.

  In that same spirit, after he got home, he locked himself in his sanctuary of wishes and burned spikenard incense for the dead gods, who had already done one major favor for him and were now asked not to let this precarious project of his break at its susceptible ankles. It seemed that the gods had laid their hands on the head that had conceived The God in Flight, thus pulling together what had been drifting and disordered and putting him in his element and in control of it. His abilities and the strong elements of his personality seemed suddenly amplified to potency and coordination; now he knew exactly what to do and how to do it. The decisive young professor Peter had come up against at the beginning of the term personified this change, this answered prayer—Baudelaire’s albatross delivered from the earth and lordly upon the air currents.

  By Simion’s nineteenth birthday, the roughing-out process left a fresh crop of rubble daily on the kitchen floor. (“Well, however this statue of yours turns out,” said Moses, “we’ve got the original right here, and he’s reached nineteen, which I have to admit I despaired of for a while last winter. I mean to say, you’re not having to memorialize him.”)

  Simion was beginning to understand the arduousness of the project; the time that Doriskos would need him to model was yet far off, but in the meantime he would have to tolerate Doriskos’s preoccupation, his fatigue, his coming to bed at three in the morning and waking zombie-like at seven. Yet Dori was not unmindful of him. Simion had not expected anything so grand for his birthday, but Doriskos took the twenty-fourth of October off, from both block and college—canceled his classes and drove the two of them out to Spee’s Pond for a picnic. And back home, in the foyer, he insisted on tying his handkerchief over Simion’s eyes and carried him upstairs. Scent rushed him like a tide when Doriskos laid him down on his bed and plucked the blindfold off. A lavishly romantic indulgence of both sides of his nature: On the bed around him were several handsomely wrapped gifts of riding gear and three dozen roses, coral and white and gold. He took one of the long stiff stems between thumb and forefinger—someone had been careful and clipped off every thorn.

  “Art isn’t a bed of roses, but this is,” said Doriskos. The English riding gear had been made by a tailor and bootier that also served princes and potentates; the leather smelled as rich as the roses. Nor were these gifts all: Doriskos had also arranged for the serious riding lessons that Simion wanted, having found a displaced tidewater Virginian skilled in dressage and an ex-jockey who could coach the boy in the cross-country chase.

  Simion and Gray started their biweekly lessons in that formal and aristocratic sport, and Simion indulged himself in lavish visions of future fox hunting—he remembered when he’d climbed a fence to mount a horse for the first time at five and learned to ride bareback like an Indian. So remembering, he had a heady sense of progress and possibility: I am realizing my most ambitious dreams. I shall be a scientist and a gentleman, and even more than I dreamt possible.

  k

  Simion pondered the sweet mystery of Karseth and Kneitel’s harmonized lives, in which he saw an order that was not stasis, a code of manners with the grace of Palladian architecture. He cultivated the same kind of fertile tranquility for himself and Dori. He found this kind of ordinariness, this kind of predictability luminous and precious; to him it had the sanctity of dim-lit stained glass, the evanescence of snow seen through lace or candles reflected in water. The evening lights in windows and that body-against-body turning in sleep, or even the simple cupping of a hand on one’s shoulder could have this kind of holiness. He saw it in Doriskos, bending over him in the depths of the night to kiss his brow; in such mundane acts of affect
ion and consideration, it could be at its most apparent.

  Of such minutes, such pictures, he made his private version of his history, his own Book of Hours. It contained a predictable ration of big and little beauties and pleasures, all culminating in that gilt-edged and luminous picture labeled Evening, or perhaps Quartet. The pleasures of the daylight hours included a couple of courses at the Sheff, a refreshing contrast to the juvenile preoccupations of people at the college. And he’d grown bold about skipping chapel, and thus far nothing had happened to him because of it. Rather than proceeding from recitation to chapel, Simion often took Gray out and continued schooling him over walls and fences. Sometimes he ventured out of town for a full-out run on the Boston road or a more sedate jog through forested tracts. He’d linger, indulging his holdover craving to be surrounded by trees. He generally went home tired, chilled, but content, and homecoming was a pleasure in itself. Helmut would hear him knocking the muck off his boots at the hitching post after he’d stabled the horse, and would meet him on the porch: “Darling, you’re cold! Let me help you get those stable boots off!”

  Helmut was cooking at that hour. They had an arrangement in which Doriskos paid for most of the supper victuals and Helmut, who had gotten a clear sight of Doriskos’s absorption early in the term and knew that it could only deepen, prepared them.

  Simion’s role was to set the table and choose the bottle of wine to go with the meal. He still did not like seeing the raw materials of meals go together, so he’d sit in the kitchen alcove and study, then put his jacket and tie back on before sitting down at table. And after supper, Simion and Doriskos drifted back to their own domicile; Simion spread his schoolwork out on the kitchen table and watched the hunks of rock fall.

  Much later, he would wake up alone in his bed and still hear the carving noises downstairs. Dizzy with sleep, he might force himself up and go down the cold stairs to keep Dori company, pass out in one of the kitchen chairs, and find himself put back in bed when he woke in the morning, tired from interrupted rest, with Doriskos asleep in all his clothes beside him. He noticed that Doriskos’s palms sometimes smelled faintly of coffee, of the faint bitterness of all that punishing caffeine. He thought how he’d changed along with Dori’s change. How the bratty anger that he might have felt against this block of rock as lately as last year simply wasn’t in him now; how he knew that things, with a few notable exceptions, were exactly as they should be.