“No.”
“I thought not. Well, I hope you like it more than your father did. I had him here last month, and it was completely wasted on him. He has no taste at all for good food. That’s not surprising when you look back at the cut-rate housekeepers he keeps hiring. Where does he find them?”
“I don’t know. I suppose that’s Peg’s department.”
“Well, she ought to learn how to run it properly. Poor Austin. When I think of the kind of cooking he’s letting himself in for after he and Peg are married—or should I say if he and Peg are married? Strange that it’s been taking them so long to get around to it. Sometimes when I look at Austin I think of Jacob working seven years for his wife.”
“And winding up with the wrong one?”
“So he did,” my uncle said with grave surprise, and the look he gave me to indicate that we were partners in the joke emboldened me to say, “The world is full of Austins. Do you think I’m wrong in not wanting to be one of them?”
“No,” said my uncle, “I don’t. On the other hand, I can’t say that the peculiar banner you’re flying seems any more admirable. Now, don’t go rising in your wrath, Daniel, because I’m doing you the favor of talking to you very honestly about this. I’d say you’re well past the age when you can alternate between sullenness and flamboyant rage. Yes, I realize possibly even more than you do that there are reasons for that temperament. You suffered, perhaps, too much of a loss when your mother died, you’ve been unhappy at home, you’ve had your dreams of being a painter or writer punctured, and so on. I know all that. In fact, I was the one who took the trouble to explain it to your father yesterday for all the good it did any of us. And I’m taking the trouble to tell you that everything you’ve gone through must have no part in the face you show to the world. Despite the psychiatric pablum we’re being spoon-fed today, motivations are not justifications. And recognizing motivations is not automatically expiation for the foolish acts they lead you to. Can you see the sense in that?”
“I can see it in the abstract. I can’t see what it’s got to do with my taking a job to my own sweet taste.”
“Ah, but it does. Because in this case your own sweet taste is being dictated by sophomoric whim. You’re acting in blind rebellion against what Austin stands for. Against what your father and I stand for, when it comes to that. I can understand that. I was once young myself. I read the same books you did, had the same heated discussions, glorified the workingman, even had dreams of leaving home and sailing before the mast like one of Jack London’s pet creations. But when I opened my eyes wide I saw that there were no more sailing ships, and that while my home may have been stuffy and unappetizingly bourgeois in some respects, it offered much in other respects. Music and art and literature, and people who talked my language, and physical well-being. For you and me, Daniel, these are the verities. And I found out very quickly, I assure you, that there was little chance of being bored in my world if one was willing to take what it offered.
“Yes, there was a time not long ago when this whole country was struck starry-eyed by the kind of image you’re probably carrying around in your head now. When the machinery of politics and business seemed to have stopped permanently, and drastic measures were needed. We have these national spasms of emotionalism now and then, and recover from them with a hangover. This one went all out for the noble workingman, the horny-handed son of toil. You know something about art, Daniel, so you’ve undoubtedly seen the vestiges of our national spasm on some gallery walls. Those artistic atrocities showing the laborer with his huge naked chest and his bulging biceps and his eagle eye raised in contemplation of his aspirations.
“And when it was all over, and everyone stirred and looked around at the hallucination he had indulged in, what was the truth that became visible once more? It was the unhappy truth, Daniel. It was that those vaunted aspirations were beneath contempt. They were a hunger for comic books, for mechanical contraptions, for professional baseball, for sex in its most swollen-breasted, fat-rumped, sniggering form. Aspirations, for God’s sake! Why, the one dream of every half-educated Jack who carries a lunch pail is not to be bored, and it’s the one thing he can’t possibly escape. He’s not equipped to escape it. Everything he says, does, and thinks is staggering in its inanity. The word mass-culture was created by him and for him. Is that what you want to have the joy of?”
The waiter came up to our table and placed our drinks before us. To my uncle he said, “Louis recommends the blanchaille today.” He shaped a circle in the air with his thumb and forefinger. “He says it is excellent.”
My uncle looked inquiringly at me. “Louis’ blanchaille,” he said. “You’ll find it a great delicacy.”
“With crabmeat,” the waiter said hopefully. He was fiatfooted and had no look of eagles in his eye. I knew that my uncle was smiling inwardly at me.
“I’ll have it,” I said, and my uncle said, “Make it two, Emile. And a salad. But I want to mix the dressing myself.”
The waiter went off again, and I waited for my uncle to thrust in the knife. But he did not. Instead, he raised his glass, said, “To your future,” and took a small sip.
I said pointedly, “Right now my future depends on about two hundred dollars.”
“So I gathered. Would you mind telling me how you arrived at that figure?”
“No. For one thing, I won’t be starting on my job for another week or so, and I’d rather not have to live at home until then. I thought I’d get a room somewhere. And for another thing, I want to go upstate and see the Gennaros.”
“The Gennaros collectively or one Gennaro in particular?”
“It’s hard to do one without doing the other,” I said.
“Yes, that’s so, isn’t it? I was up there myself last week, you know. Oh, I see you didn’t know. Well, I attended the services with your father. It seemed the least I could do, considering how fond I was of Ben. Aside from the overcolored publicity that came his way, he was really quite a remarkable man, and having met his family en masse it’s not hard to see why. They’re an amazing breed, aren’t they?”
“I suppose so.”
“The last time I was up at Maartenskill,” my uncle said reflectively, “was twenty—no, almost thirty years ago. They were thriving then; now they seem to have taken over the entire community. A demonstration of happy feudalism in the atomic age, you might say. But as for your relationship with the girl—”
“Yes?”
“My dear boy, you don’t have to sound that kind of warning at me; I am not going to trample with heavy feet on your dreams of bliss. If I were in your place I’d undoubtedly have the same dreams. The girl is exquisite, and, what is more, since she probably accepts the American convention that all women must starve themselves to death in the midst of plenty, she will remain that way, instead of becoming as fat and ungainly as her mother. But there are questions to be considered, like it or not. What about her religion? I had the feeling while I was there that I was living in the middle of the Vatican City. Would you seriously consider conversion?”
“Yes, if that’s what she wants.”
“Oh, she will, you can depend on it. But before you even meet that problem there’s another one to settle. Do you really believe that Ben’s death won’t have a serious effect on her? I mean, as far as you’re concerned. And while she’s brooding about that, do you intend to walk in on her and offer her a lifetime of marriage to a laboring man who’ll barely be able to pay rent in a tenement? She seems to be a sensible girl, Daniel, and there’s going to be a vast hiatus between your own outlandish ideas and her practicality.”
I managed to force a smile despite the taste of acid in my mouth. “I thought you weren’t going to trample on my dreams,” I said.
“Is that what you call it? I thought I was merely holding them up to scrutiny. After all,” said my uncle, “I’m entitled to know what I’d be investing my money in.”
“In that case, you know what you can do with your inves
tment.”
“Don’t be rude, Daniel. As a matter of fact, I’m going to give you the money. You’re a fool, but I won’t let that influence me, because I think you’re entitled to be a fool at twenty-one. I know I was; I suspect most people are. So I’m giving you the money as a memorial to what I once was myself, and as a testimonial to my belief that you’ll learn wisdom just as I did. You may learn it in a month or a year, but you’ll learn it. Right now you’re obsessed with your youthful discovery that the world is very badly run indeed. You’ve discovered that whether in government or business or family life there’s no accounting for the infinite follies of mankind, and you are up in arms against that. Well, what you’ve got to learn is that as long as human beings run things they must be run badly, and those who refuse to accept that gamy fact are guilty of the only real folly. Eventually, some of those people choose to do something drastic about it. They join together in wild-eyed organizations and tear apart the world, trying to get at the core of the trouble, and then we all suffer. I’d like you to keep that in mind, Daniel, while you’re exploring the other side of the moon. And when you’ve come to sensible conclusions don’t be ashamed to admit their good sense. Then you can pick up where you left off, and no one will think the less of you for it.”
My uncle leaned back as the waiter placed our plates before us. What I had ordered turned out to be several tiny fried fish the size of minnows. I tried one and it was exactly like the whitebait served by George’s, the shabbiest but most available lunch wagon near the University.
“Like it?” my uncle said.
“Yes,” I said. “What is it?”
“Blanchaille?” said my uncle Charles. “It’s whitebait.”
SEVEN
It was one of the Egan boasts that our progenitor who brought the family name to America was not, like so many contemptible pig-in-the-parlor Irish, fleeing the potato famine that year. In fact, he was fleeing something considerably more drastic, namely, as the phrase goes, a short shrift and a long rope.
My great-grandfather must have been an exceptionally pugnacious member of a notoriously pugnacious breed. He was a Belfast bricklayer who had already served a couple of jail sentences for riot and disorder when he capped all past performances by killing a fellow bricklayer in a brawl. He fled the country one step ahead of the law and turned up in New York City in plenty of time to take an active part in the Draft Riots of the Civil War. Again one step ahead of the law he moved upstate, and having discovered that in the town of Maartenskill there was a brickyard he turned from the laying of brick to the manufacture of them. Ten years after this, by dint of hard work and a profitable marriage he was sole owner of the brickyard.
From then to the day my father abandoned the brickyard Maartenskill was, in effect, the Egan township. It was a good long reign of sixty years, but when it was all over it left no monuments, no public buildings with the family name inscribed on them, and no mourners. All it left was an economic and political vacuum which the Gennaros were ready and willing to fill, and which they filled more than adequately.
Ben’s grandfather had started as a laborer in the brickyard and had risen to foreman. His father and uncles had continued the tradition, all of them serving as foremen in, the yard, but they had also steadily expanded their interests. They bought land, added to it, and went into dairy farming on a big scale. They bought stores and tourist homes in town, leaving the operation of them to the women in the family, stout, hard-working women imported from Italy. In the spirit of the clan they always lived together and worked together; they built their homes on the communal land and expected their children, when married, to do the same. They built the new church to the glory of the Sacred Heart and ran the parish. They elected themselves to the town council, and since the council consisted of five delegates and there were never less than three Gennaros on it, it made the council pretty much a cozy family affair. As my uncle Charles had observed, they were very much a feudal family operating effectively in a Hudson Valley town in the twentieth century. It may not have been much of a town; it was small and placid, a stopping-off point on the Hudson River between Kingston and Albany, but I always had the feeling that the Gennaros could have done just as well in a large and flourishing city. They had the touch.
Although I spent all my childhood summers at the Egan house outside Maartenskill, I never came to know the Gennaros very well until after my mother died, and Margaret and I lived for three years in the old homestead. Now I know that those earlier summers on the farm must have been bitterly unhappy ones for my mother, ailing as she always was, and saddled with two small children and the company of a pair as dull as the Schupfields. I suppose that my father could not see wasting the empty rooms in the house during vacations, so instead of our going to some resort which might cost money we were shipped up to Maartenskill at the end of June to live in isolation until September. It was an isolation I didn’t mind since I could live full tilt on the farm, and since I hardly saw my father at all during those months, both of which considerations were marked as assets in my mind. For my mother each summer must have seemed like a lifetime in limbo. My father was abroad on business much of the year while we were at home in the city, so she didn’t see much of him then. And then knowing that he was in the city while she was off in the backwoods could only have filled her cup of unhappiness to the brim. The fact is that despite everything in him that was cheap and bullying and cruel she loved him completely. The hour after supper every night was set aside for a long letter to him, and on Sunday evenings she would phone him long distance, and would, from what I can recall of her voice and manner while on the phone, have desperately affectionate little talks with him, probably worried to death all the while about the cost of the phone bill.
For myself all this was something that touched only on my peripheral vision. It was something that came into my ken only as I learned that there was a good deal of the world which you had to turn your head to see. After all, I had the river before me, the countryside around me, a sister who did not share my interests and so left me to my own devices, and a mother who put up only feeble resistance to my most risky projects and who could tell wonderful stories. So my memories of Maartenskill are a tangle of fact and fancy, all of them somehow flowering around the image of my mother. From her I heard endless tales of the Indian boy named Little Tomahawk, one of whose adventures was to journey all the way up the Hudson the day it suddenly dried up, so that he could see what had happened to the water. There at the very headwaters of the river, where it emerged as a tiny trickle from a rock, he found that an evil witch doctor had stuffed a twig into the rock, stopping the flow of water, so he removed it at great risk and started the river running again. And I remember splashing in that same river with a length of clothesline tied around my waist while my mother, holding the other end of the rope, played me like a fish from the bank. She was mortally afraid of water, as she was of so many things, and she had solved the problem of my swimming this way. As for Margaret I don’t remember her swimming at all. She once pointed out that the rocks leading into the water were slimy with moss, and it was disgusting to walk on them. I didn’t find it disgusting; I found it slippery and exciting. And after Margaret’s observation I even found it heroic, doing what she didn’t dare to do.
It was the farm and the old stone house at Maartenskill that made my mother’s death easier to take. For one thing, I couldn’t quite comprehend the death—that took a long time—and so when I learned I was going to live with the Schupfields, all I knew was that I was going to be for the year around at a much happier place than in the city with my father. And it was while living at the farm that I came to know the Gennaros. Thus, at the time when the permanence of my mother’s absence was coming home to me like the dull pain of a knife wound after the first unbelievable shock of it has passed, I had Ben and Mia to help me get over it. And beyond them their brother, Aldo, and their father and mother, and a seeming host of uncles and aunts and cousins, all of whom, with overw
helming kindness and with the grave consideration of a ruling Gennaro for the motherless son of the abdicated ruler, made it their business to befriend me.
But it was Ben and Mia who possessed me, heart and soul. I had been registered at the district school by Mrs. Schupfield, and the first morning I entered the school bus full of fears and tremors I saw Mia sitting there, the delicate ivory and ebony image of her incredibly lovely among that lumpish crew around us, and I fell in love with her on the spot, with all the pulsating, heart-pounding love that the poets sing of. It was not a love that went below the navel, any more than a dose of liquor enough to set you reeling goes below the navel. I was too young for that at ten, too ignorant of what I was feeling, although I had already experimented in private with the glandular implications of romance. But this was literally the purest of pure romance, the agonized desire to look without touching, the electric realization that I had my own Lorna Doone close at hand. Lorna Doone was very much part of the picture, because I had pretty well addled my head with the book that summer. I had found it in the attic of the farmhouse, a cheap edition bound in red cloth that had bled profusely through its pages after a leak from the roof had gotten to it, and I must have read it through a half-dozen times, sick with yearning for its heroine. When Mia Gennaro came along it was just in time to get the full impact of that.
I was not an importunate lover; it took me a month to get up courage enough to enter the Gennaro farm, which bordered on our own, and that only came about because of a crisis I had with my sister. An inevitable crisis, because Margaret, like any big sister, was a nag. As far as I was concerned, Mrs. Schupfield was in charge, and Mrs. Schupfield, who felt that she had done her best when she had seen us fed, clothed, and shipped off to school, left a host of details regarding manners and morals to Margaret’s authority. It was a triangular relationship fraught with trouble, and when I finally burst out in loud rebellion, I didn’t omit to call Margaret a few of the choice names I had picked up at district school.
The Winter After This Summer Page 7