Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  That Mr. Sciarappa should question their professions of enthusiasm was perhaps natural. His own acquaintance with Italy’s artistic treasures seemed distant; they had had the reputation with him of being much admired by English and American tourists; the English and American air-forces, however, had quoted them, as he saw, at a somewhat lower rate. Moreover, it was as if the devaluation of the currency had, for Mr. Sciarappa’s consistent thought, implicated everything Italian; cathedrals, pictures, women had dropped with the lira. He could not imagine that anyone could take these things at their Baedeker valuation, any more than he could imagine that anyone in his right mind would change dollars into lira at the official rate. The two friends soon learned that to praise any Italian product, were it only a bicycle or a child in the street, was an insult to Mr. Sciarappa’s intelligence. They would be silent—and eventually were—but the most egregious insult, the story that they had come to Italy as tourists, they could not wipe away.

  He felt himself to be the victim of an imposture, that was plain. But did he believe that they were rich pretending to be poor, or poor pretending to be rich? They could not tell. On the whole, it seemed as if Mr. Sciarappa’s suspicions, like everything else about him, had a certain flickering quality; the light in him went on and off, as he touched one theory or another, cruising in his shaft like an elevator. And, as the young man said, you could not blame Mr. Sciarappa for wondering: was it in the character of a rich man or a poor that they stayed in the best hotel, which was slightly less expensive than an American auto-camp?

  The obscurity of their financial position justified Mr. Sciarappa’s anger. Nevertheless, though sympathetic, they grew tired of spending their evenings with a stranger who was continually out of sorts because he could not make up his mind whether they were worth swindling. “We did not come to Italy to see Mr. Sciarappa,” they would say to each other every night as they rode up in the elevator, and would promise themselves to evade this time, without fail, the meeting he had fixed for the next day. Yet as noon came on the following morning, they would find that they were approaching the Galleria. He is waiting, they would say to each other, and without discussion they would hurry on toward the café with the orange tablecloths, where they were late but never quite late enough to miss Mr. Sciarappa.

  He was never glad to see them. He rose to acknowledge them with a kind of bravura laziness of his tall “English” figure, one shoulder lifted in a shrug of ennui or resignation. He kissed the young lady’s hand and said to the young man perfunctorily, and sometimes with a positive yawn, “Hello, sit down, my dear.” One of his odd little tricks was to pretend that they were not together. The young man’s frequent absences of mind he treated literally, when it suited him, as if they were absences of body, and once he carried this so far as to run his fingers up and down the young lady’s bare arm as the three of them rode in a taxi, inquiring as he did so, in the most civil tone imaginable, whether she found her friend satisfactory. His conversation was directed principally to the young lady, but for all that he had no real interest in her. It was the young man whom he watched, often in the mirror of her face, which never left her friend as he talked wildly, excitedly, extravagantly, with long wrists flung outward in intensity of gesture: did Mr. Sciarappa see beauty and strangeness in him or the eccentricity of money? Or was he merely trying to determine which it was that she saw?

  It was irresistible that they should try to coax Mr. Sciarappa (or Scampi, as they had begun to call him, after fried crayfish-tails, his favorite dish) out into the open. The name of a certain lady, middlingly but authentically rich, who was expecting to see them in Venice, began to figure allusively, alluringly, in their conversation. These pointers that they directed toward Polly Herkimer Grabbe had at first a merely educational purpose. National pride forbade that they should allow Scampi to take them for rich Americans when a really good example of the genre existed only a day’s journey away. But their first references to the flower-bulb heiress, to her many husbands, her collection of garden statuary, her career as an impresario of modern architecture, failed, seemingly, to impress Scampi; he raised his eyes briefly from the plate of Saltimbocca (Jump-in-your-mouth) that he was eating, and then returned to his meal. The language difficulties made it sometimes impossible to tell whether Mr. Sciarappa really heard what they said. They had remarked once, for example, in conversational desperation, that they had come to Italy to retrace the footsteps of Lord Byron: they were on their way from Lausanne, where he had composed “The Prisoner of Chillon” in a bedroom of the Hotel Angleterre, to Venice to visit his house on the Grand Canal. “Ah well, my dear,” said Mr. Sciarappa, “if he is an English lord, you do not have to worry; his house will not be requisitioned, and you will have the use of his gondolier.” There had been no way the young man could find of preventing the young lady from supplying the poet’s dates, and now, it seemed, Scampi was under the impression that everyone they knew in Venice was dead. It required the largest brush-strokes to bring Miss Grabbe to life for him. By the third night, when the young man had finished a wholly invented account of Miss Grabbe’s going through the customs with a collection of obscene fountain statuary, Mr. Sciarappa showed interest and inquired how old Miss Grabbe was. The next evening, at cocktails, he had an auto-pullman ticket to Venice.

  He was leaving the next morning at seven. The two Americans, remembering that the flower-bulb heiress was, after all, their friend, felt appalled and slightly frightened at what they had done. They thought of dropping some note of warning into the letter of introduction which of course they would have to write. But then they reflected that if Miss Grabbe was richer than they, she was also proportionately shrewder: glass bricks only could Mr. Sciarappa sell her for that submarine architectural salon she spoke of opening in the depths of the Grand Canal. Miss Grabbe’s intelligence was flighty (she had once forgotten to include the furnace in a winter house that so hugged the idea of warmth that the bathtubs were done in buff), but her estimates were sharp; no contractor or husband had ever padded a bill on her; she always put on her glasses to add up a dinner check. Men, it was true, had injured her, and movements had left her flat, but these misadventures she had cheerfully added to her capital. An indefatigable Narcissa, she adapted herself spryly to comedy when she perceived that the world was smiling; she was always the second to laugh at a pratfall of her spirit. Mr. Sciarappa, at worst, could only be another banana-peel on the vaudeville stage of her history. It was possible, of course, that he might bore her, thought the two friends, reasoning from experience; this alone she would not forgive them, yet Miss Grabbe’s judgments of men were often strikingly lenient—she had been unattached when they left her in Paris.

  Besides, Mr. Sciarappa was looking quite presentable this evening, even though he had not yet changed his suit. Bright, eager, intensely polite, useful, informative, he seemed once more the figure they had seen in the train corridor; some innocent, cavalier hope that had died in those long Milan evenings had revived in him, as the expectation of parting made the two friends recede from him a little and become strangers once more. The letter of introduction wrote itself out, somehow, more affectionately than the friends had planned it. “Enclosed,” it said, “please find Mr. Sciarappa, who has been most helpful to us in Milan.”

  Signorina Grabbe was waiting alone with a gondola in the orange-lampshade glow of a Canaletto sunset when their autobus drew up, two days later, at the station. Against the Venetian panorama of white domes and pink towers, Mr. Sciarappa was so pronouncedly absent that it seemed an indelicacy to inquire after him. The two friends, whom solitude and a consciousness of indiscretion had worked up to a pitch of anxiety and melodramatic conjecture, now felt slightly provoked that Miss Grabbe had not, in this short interval, been married or murdered for her money. At the very least, they had expected to be scolded for sending her that curious envoy, but Mr. Sciarappa’s arrival seemed barely to have disturbed Miss Grabbe, who had been busy, so she said, with an inner experience. “Your f
riend turned up,” she remarked at last, in the tone of one who acknowledges a package. “What on earth did you find to talk to him about?” The young man groaned. Miss Grabbe had put her rich, plump, practiced finger on the flaw in Mr. Sciarappa as prosaically as if he had been a piece of yard-goods—was there nothing more to be said of him? “We found him rather odd,” the young man murmured in half-apology. “Oh, my dear,” said Miss Grabbe, raising her dyed black eyebrows, “all the men you meet on the wagons-lits are like that. You must go to the little campos and the trattorias to meet the real Italians.”

  And as Miss Grabbe went on to talk, in the dipping, swaying gondola, of the intense, insular experience she had found, blazing as the native grappa, in the small, hot squares, the working-class restaurants and dirty churches of Venice, Mr. Sciarappa seemed indeed a poor thing to have offered her, a gimcrack souvenir such as one might have bought in a railway station. The young man blushed angrily as he felt his own trip and that of the young lady shrink to fit inside Mr. Sciarappa’s nipped-in gabardine suit. He was only saved from despair by a memory of Miss Grabbe, as he had last seen her in Paris, alone, with her hunter’s look, and three saucers under her vermouth glass, at a table in a Left Bank café—“Isn’t it divine?” she had called out to him; “don’t you love it, don’t you hate New York?”

  Compared to Miss Grabbe, he perceived, he himself and the young lady would always appear to skim the surface of travel. They were tourists; Miss Grabbe was an explorer. Looking at the two ladies as they sat facing him in the gondola, he saw that their costumes perfectly expressed this difference: the young lady’s large black hat, long gloves, high-heeled shoes, and nylon stockings were a declaration of nationality and a stubborn assertion of the pleasure-principle (what a nuisance that hat had been as it scraped against his neck on the autobus, on the train, in the Metro in Paris); Miss Grabbe’s snood and sandals, her bright glass-bead jewelry, her angora sweater, and shoulder-strap leather handbag, all Italian as the merceria, she wore in the manner of a uniform that announced her mobility in action and her support of the native products. Moreover, her brown face had a weather-beaten look, as though it had been exposed to the glare of many merciless suns; and her eyes blazed out of the sun-tan powder around them with the bright blue stare of a scout; only her pretty, tanned legs suggested a life less hardy—they might have been going to the beach. Like Mr. Sciarappa (for all his little graces), Miss Grabbe seemed to have been parched and baked by exposure, hardened and chapped by the winds of rebuff and failure. In contrast, the young lady, with her pallor and her smile, looked faintly unreal, like a photograph of a girl whose engagement has just been announced. And the young man felt himself joined to her in this sheltered and changeless beatitude; at the same time, in the company of Miss Grabbe as in that of Mr. Sciarappa, he was aware of a slight discomfort, a sense of fatuity, like the brief, antagonized embarrassment he noticed in himself whenever, in answer to the inevitable question, he replied, with a touch of storminess, that he was traveling in Europe for pleasure.

  That he and the young lady were happy became, in this context, a crime, or, at best, a breach of taste, like the conspicuous idleness of the rich. They could hardly, he remarked to himself, be expected to give up their mutual delight because others were not so fortunate; they had already settled this question with regard to steak and cotolette. Yet, catching Miss Grabbe’s eye measuring his happiness in the gondola, he felt inclined to withdraw his feelings to some more private place, just as certain sensitive patrons of restaurants preferred nowadays to feast indoors, secure from the appraisal of the poor. His state, as he well knew, was of peculiar interest to Miss Grabbe: for twenty years, Polly Grabbe had made herself famous by coming to Europe, semi-annually, in pursuit of love. These sorties of hers had the regularity and the directness of buyers’ trips that are signalized by a paid notice in the Paris Herald, announcing to the dressmaking trade that Miss Blank of Franklin Simon is staying at the Crillon. Under the eye of that transatlantic experience, the young man felt a little discomfited, as if he had been modeling a housedress before a cosmopolite audience. He had no wish to judge Miss Grabbe, yet he felt installed in a judgment by the dream of perpetual monogamy into which the young lady had invited him. In an effort to extricate himself, he inquired of Miss Grabbe very civilly, as one traveler to another, how she found the Venetian men, but the heiress only stared at him coldly and asked what he took her for.

  Miss Grabbe was aware of her legend; it half-pleased her, and yet she resented it, for, at bottom, she was naively unconscious of the plain purport of her acts. She imagined that she came abroad out of a cultural impatience with America; in her own eyes, she was always a rebel against a commercial civilization. She hoped to be remembered for her architectural experiments, her patronage of the arts, her championship of personal freedom, and flattered herself that in Europe this side of her was taken seriously. Men in America, she complained, thought only about business, and the European practice of making a business of love seemed to her, in contrast, the mark of an advanced civilization. Sexual intercourse, someone had taught her, was a quick transaction with the beautiful, and she proceeded to make love, whenever she traveled, as ingenuously as she trotted into a cathedral: men were a continental commodity of which one naturally took advantage, along with the wine and the olives, the bitter coffee and the crusty bread. Miss Grabbe, despite her boldness, was not an original woman, and her boldness, in fact, consisted in taking everything literally. She made love in Europe because it was the thing to do, because European lovers were superior to American lovers (“My dear,” she told the young lady, “there’s all the difference in the world—it’s like comparing the very best California claret to the simplest little vin du pays”), because she believed it was good for her, especially in hot climates, and because one was said to learn languages a great deal more readily in bed. The rapid turnover of her lovers did not particularly disconcert her; she took a quantitative view and sought for a wealth of sensations. She liked to startle and to shock, yet positively did not understand why people considered her immoral. A prehensile approach, she inferred, was laudable where values were in question—what was the beautiful for, if not to be seized and savored?

  For Polly Grabbe, as for the big luxury liners and the small school teachers with their yearly piety of Europe, the war had been an enforced hiatus. Though she had wished for the defeat of Hitler and been generous with money to his victims, in her heart she had waited for it to be over with a purely personal impatience. She was among the first to return when travel was once again permitted, an odd, bedizened, little figure, alighting gallantly from the plane, making a spot of color among the American businessmen, her vulturine co-passengers, who were descending on Europe to “look after” their investments. Conditions in Paris shocked these men, deep in their business sense, and Miss Grabbe was dismayed also; her own investment had been swept away. She could not take up where she had left off: people were dead or dispersed or in prison; her past stood about her in fragments, a shattered face looming up here and there like a house-wall in a bombed city; normalcy was far away. But Miss Grabbe did not lack courage. She had learned how to say good-bye and to look ahead for the next thing. Paris, she quickly decided, was beautiful but done for, a shell from which the life had retreated out into the suburbs where a few old friends still persisted, a shell now inhabited by an alien existentialist gossip, and an alien troupe of young men who cadged drinks from her in languid boredom and made love only to each other. Her trip to Italy, therefore, had the character of a farewell and a new beginning, and the hotel suite, into which she now showed the two friends, resembled a branch office which had been opened but was not yet in full operation.

  The wide letto matrimoniale in the bedroom, the washstand, and the bidet with the towel over it, the dressing-table on which were arranged, very neatly and charmingly, Miss Grabbe’s toilet waters and perfumes, her powders and lucite brush and comb, her lipsticks, orange sticks, and tweezers, all had an
air unmistakably functional, to which the books and magazines, the cigarettes and pretty colored postcards set out, invitingly, in the sitting room contributed their share, so that it was not so surprising as it might have been to see, when the balcony doors were opened, the figure of Mr. Sciarappa lounging on the terrace, like a waiting client, with a copy of Life.

  This conception of his position, however, seemed not to have struck Mr. Sciarappa. He was there, it seemed, simply for the practical joke of it, for their shrieks, for Miss Grabbe’s discomfiture. He laughed at them with candid merriment, saying, “Caro, I give you a surprise.” The two friends had not seen him so lively since one night in Milan when a tired fat woman, running for a tramcar, had failed to catch it. He showed no inclination at all to step into the role that stood there, ready for him to try on. He had come, he said, as a courier, proposing to take them to dinner, to the Piazza San Marco, to Harry’s Bar, where the smart English officers went and the international set with their electric-blue suits, blonde mistresses, heavy jaws, and decorations from Balkan kings. With all these little offices and services, his mind was completely occupied. His original mission, Miss Grabbe, had plainly dropped into some oubliette of his faculties, and the two friends, observing him, could nearly have sworn that his sole purpose in coming to Venice had been to prepare a place for them, like Jesus for his disciples in Heaven.

  Dinner, however, soon restored him to his normal state of disaffection. Once the four were seated upstairs, in the yellow lamplight at Quadri’s, he was his old self, bored, petulant, abstracted. He jumped up from his chair with almost indecent agility to speak to a bearded gentleman in a respectable suit of clothes, and came back finally to announce that this was Prince Rucellai, an illustrious Florentine nobleman who practiced the trade of antique-dealer. In the manner of all Mr. Sciarappa’s native acquaintances, the prince at once quitted the restaurant, but Mr. Sciarappa’s attention went with him out into the square, abandoning the Americans summarily for the evening. It was as if he suffered from some curious form of amnesia that made him mislay his purpose halfway on the road to accomplishment. He was in Venice and could not remember why, and he stayed on hoping, somehow, for a refreshment of his memory. Now and then, during the following days, the Americans would find him looking at them with a curious concentration, as though their appearance might recall to him his motive in seeking their society. From Miss Grabbe, on the contrary, whose emeralds should have furnished him his clue, he persistently averted his eyes.