The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down

by Jesse Browner

  At this point, the symposium is interrupted by the arrival of the drunken Alcibiades, who proceeds to offer a shameless account of his frustrated efforts to seduce Socrates and an encomium to the philosopher's endurance, courage, and wisdom. The party breaks up shortly afterward upon the invasion of a horde of drunken gate-crashers.

  It is conceivable, I suppose, that not all readers will recognize their own party chatter in my synopsis of the Symposium. We do not, it is true, all discuss the spiritual nature of love at our dinner parties, drawing heavily on classical references, although we might. It is also possible, since Plato makes no claim to having been present at this particular symposium, that for literary purposes he has edited out the intervals in which the party-goers talked about their health problems, the cost of their children's schooling, street crime, and travel plans. What we do recognize despite the absence of women and all the talk of sex with little boys - is the atmosphere in which people of a certain education and leisure, of all professions and from all walks of life, sit around of an evening to eat, drink, and exchange often ill-informed opinions in a spirit of friendly, casual companionship. That is us, and it is not Homer. We do not - at least, my friends and I do not - sit around worrying that God will punish us for our transgressions, and neither do Plato's or Xenophon's symposiasts. They, like us, have spent many centuries evaluating the evidence. Even if, like humans everywhere and at all times, they rarely have the fortitude of their convictions, they, like us, seem to have come to the conclusion that loving, forthright, and virtuous behavior toward their fellow men and women is rewarded, materially and spiritually, far better than abjection and the slavish placation of occult forces. Violent, slave-owning misogynists they may yet be, but just look at the quagmire of fear and ignorance from which they have had to extricate themselves. I am almost tempted to say that they - and by implication, we - have evolved. A little.

  As with us, however, this evolution has been incremental and not fully iconoclastic. Just as it is impossible to understand the ideas and morals of the twenty-first century without harking back at least to the sixteenth, so with the Greeks of Plato's time it is probably just as important to examine what they have chosen to preserve from their ancestry as it is to evaluate what they have jettisoned. We retain our mythologies, archaic as well as contemporary, because they remain pertinent by telling us something about ourselves. Ancient stories, such as those related by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, can reveal the continuity of ideas and attitudes even as they evolve beyond recognition.

  Ovid relates how Theseus and his companions, on their way to Athens, are waylaid by the river god Achelous, who is anxious to extend his hospitality to the great hero. While they are waited upon by barefoot nymphs, Achelous tells them the story of how Neptune turned the maiden Perimele into an island. When Pirithous, one of Theseus' company, expresses scornful scepticism about the truth of the story, the aged hero Lelex sets him straight.

  He recounts the tale of Baucis and Philemon, a pious old couple living in the hill country of Phrygia. One day, they take in a pair of footsore travelers who had been turned away from every other home in the region. Though poor and living without servants in a tiny thatched cottage, the hosts seek to make their guests comfortable in every way. Baucis seats them on sedge-grass mattresses, which she covers with her best cloth, and engages them in chitchat to distract them from the wait for their humble meal. She props up the leg of a rickety table, which she wipes clean with green mint. The travelers are given a homey meal of cheese, olives, garden vegetables, boiled bacon, roasted eggs, and young wine served in beechwood cups coated in yellow wax - just about everything the household has to offer. They enjoy a dessert of figs, dates, honeycomb, and grapes fresh off the vine.

  As the meal progresses, the hosts notice that the flagon of wine keeps refilling itself. Their guests, it transpires, are the gods Zeus and Hermes (Ovid uses their Roman names) touring the country in disguise. The old couple, ashamed by the scantiness of the meal, want to sacrifice their one goose, but the bird eludes them and is finally offered protection by the gods.

  Baucis and Philemon are led to a hilltop, whence they witness the flooding of the entire countryside in punishment for its wicked lack of hospitality. Only their thatched cottage is spared, transformed into a gleaming temple of gold and marble. Offered any reward for their piety, the couple ask only to be allowed to serve as priests in the temple and, at their appointed time, to die together so that neither might have to live alone. All this is granted and, on the day of their deaths many years later, they have just enough time to whisper a hasty good-bye before being transformed into trees, an oak and a linden, that flourish side by side for centuries thereafter.

  Although they never knew it, Baucis and Philemon have waited their entire lives for this divine encounter. All the stories on their parents' knees, all the religious training, all the practice and patience of hospitality have led up to their meeting with the gods. They have won the lottery: millions upon millions of Greek hosts, every bit as humble and diligent as they, lived and died anonymously without ever being put to the test. By all lights, Baucis and Philemon should be trembling in their sandals, paralyzed with dread as they face their moment of truth. How many thousands have come to this crossroads and failed to pass through, being transformed for their sins into birds, beasts, inanimate objects, geographical features, or the tortured damned?

  But Baucis and Philemon are serene and unafraid, evincing but a momentary alarm when they first come to understand the situation. In fact, the entire story, despite the destruction, is suffused with a most gentle and transcendent love that transmutes all it touches. The love of supplicants for their masters, which, like a child's love for his or her parents, is trusting and never abstract; the protective, sheltering, divine love in which the righteous bask so peacefully, like thoughtless lizards in the desert; the love of the host for order, calm, and cleanliness, all enwrapped in a sprig of green mint; the love of the gardener for nature's simple bounty; most of all, an old couple's love for each other, as elemental and encompassing and eternal as the Earth itself, a sanctuary as holy and sanctifying as any temple, as deep-rooted and phototropic as any linden tree. With barely a pittance of learning between them, Baucis and Philemon live in full conceit of the love that Plato is at such pains to transpose.

  Socrates, Plato, and their peers were fully aware that they were not the same as the Greeks of Achilles' time, or of Homer's time, or of Baucis and Philemon's time, and they congratulated themselves on it. What they were probably less attuned to were the ways in which they were similar and, in some respects, the ways in which they fell short in understanding.

  It is entirely plausible, in fact, that, having put such an enormous distance between themselves and their god-fearing ancestors, the philosophers and intellectuals of Plato's time had, all unwittingly, lost something of great value and beauty. They may well have seen Homer's characters as fearful, superstitious barbarians, not unlike our view of them, timeless poetry notwithstanding. Perhaps, though, what the Homeric Greeks were really afraid of was not the wrath of the gods, but that the gods might not exist after all. Perhaps they peopled the universe with gods not to explain and propitiate the unknown, but to serve as epitomes for their own inchoate need to aspire, to love transcendentally - in other words, as instinctual expressions of the very same love that Socrates explicates at great length. If that is the case - if Homer understood this love just as deeply and transcendently as Socrates - it turns our theory of ancient Greek hospitality as god-fearing placation on its head. In humble hospitality, we do not placate the gods, but create them.

  This brings us full circle to the paralysis of fear I sometimes experience before the arrival of my guests. If, in welcoming people into my home, what I am actually doing is summoning the presence of the divinity, is it any wonder that I tremble before the prospect of this unfolding miracle? Just as Plato describes, we long; in longing, we look around ourselves for the object of our longing, and, not
finding it, we look upward. If we do not find it there, there is nowhere left to turn but to the Baucis or Philemon beside us. What is real is our love; what is contingent is its object. So what if, in its contingency, that object is also an object of dread? That stranger at your threshold, that friend across the table: is she a god to be feared or is she that "certain single knowledge" of yours, your love which has yet to be told, embodied and emboldened to seek your welcome, to come home to you and your hospitality - transfigured, like a tumbledown cottage of Phrygia, into a Temple of Love.

  After all, when we lie awake in bed late at night, or as we prepare to receive the guests whom we have summoned to the table, in Phrygia as in Manhattan, what is it that pains us the most: our terror, or our longing?

  CHAPTER IX

  THANKSGIVING, NEW YORK CITY, 2001

  They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods.

  Hesiod, Works and Days

  The calendar tells us that Thanksgiving falls on the last Thursday of November, but that is only partly true. We may celebrate it on that date, but it can no more be confined to a single day than love can be confined to Valentine's Day. Thanksgiving is the commemoration - the act of remembering together - of an event, but I would imagine that few, if any of us are thinking about pilgrims and Indians as the day dawns. We come together and we remember something altogether different. Those memories that impose themselves on us on Thanksgiving Day are our own, with us at all times, guardian angels and devil provocateurs that never sleep but do not always speak to us directly. Instead, they hold their tongues until we come together to commemorate, and then those memories talk to each other in their own ancient language, like a group of dogs on a walk, straining at the leash, sniffing at each other, circling warily. We see them come alive then, among their own, but, like the owners of those dogs, we have no idea what they are saying to each other. We only think we own them. And even when we get them home, alone together on the couch, and we scratch them between the ears and offer them tidbits, those memories still can't tell us what they want from us.

  On Wednesday, I get up before dawn to buy Brussels sprouts, potatoes, yams, lettuce, and herbs at the farmers market on Union Square. I drop these off at home and then head directly for Jefferson Market, where I pick up the twenty-five pound organic turkey that I had ordered several weeks earlier. I've learned from experience that a twenty-five pounder is the largest that will fit in my lobster pot, where it will soak in brine and herbs for the next twenty-four hours. If I have timed everything right, I should have about half an hour left before work to make a last quick excursion to the supermarket for butter, half-and-half, and cream. By the time I get home from work that evening, I'm already wiped out. We husband our energies, kick back in front of the television, drink iced vodka, and order in.

  Thursday morning, the entire household is mobilized. There are sprouts, potatoes, onions, carrots, parsnips, and chestnuts to be peeled. There is sausage to be fried and fresh sage, rosemary, tarragon, oregano, and thyme to be chopped. The stuffing has to be mixed. There are mashed potatoes with creme fraiche, root vegetables roasted with sesame oil, Brussels sprouts sauteed with chestnuts and ham, creamed pearl onions, gravy, cranberry relish, salad, and dressing to be prepared. The turkey must be drained, washed, dried, seasoned, stuffed, slathered with herb butter inside and out, mounted, and in the oven by nine o'clock. Then there are glasses to dust, napkins to be ironed, floors to be mopped, children to be groomed, and a hamster cage to be disinfected. At noon we rest; at two the guests begin to arrive.

  The mood is thoughtful and emotional as our guests assemble. My father is already here, as are my sisters, Nancy and Jenny, visiting from England. Of my immediate family, only my brother Scott, tied up in L.A. on a film shoot, along with his wife, Adena, and their children, Seth and Michaela, are missing. Judy's parents arrive first, her mother, Herzlia, bearing pumpkin scones, her father, David, with some very special Burgundy that he and I will share only reluctantly with the others. Then come Judy's sister, Barbara, and her new husband, Andy. My father's first cousin Norman and his wife, Irene, arrive, bringing cranberry mold and cranberry sauce; then their daughter, Maggi, on whom I had a secret crush as a teenager, with her husband, Michael, their girls, Sarah and Kate, and pumpkin pie. Then comes Jennifer, Maggi's sister, with her husband, Larry, their children, Max and Harry, and chocolate mousse cake. We welcome my father's friends Billy, who has brought two enormous platters of steamed shrimp, and Bernice, a colleague of thirty years. Our old friend Margaret has driven down from Wellesley with her two-year-old, Ben. There are only twenty-five of us this year; we have numbered as many as thirty at Thanksgivings past.

  Some years, Thanksgiving is the only chance I get to see my cousins, although they only live across town. Every year, we have to remind the children how they are related: Norman and Irene are my first cousins once removed; Maggi and Jennifer are my second cousins; Sarah, Kate, Max, and Harry are my second cousins once removed, and Sophie's and Cora's third cousins. This is a puzzle they love to solve, the same game that had delighted me twenty-five years earlier at our Thanksgivings in London and filled me, harboring my illicit passion for Maggi, with the ancient thrill of violated taboo. When they are finally satisfied with the exegesis of the family tree, the children go off to play Twister and listen to Destiny's Child.

  All the prep work is done and I can relax. We eat shrimp, drink scotch or chardonnay. Naturally, all the talk is about the World Trade Center attack. Many of us had witnessed it as it happened; Andy had had to scramble down thirty-eight flights of stairs from his office in WTC 7, which collapsed later in the day; he had arrived at our door covered in a thin film of white dust. None of us, New Yorkers all, had lived a moment since then without reliving the horrors of that day. Even now, some ten weeks later, our windows are tightly shut against the burning stench that continues to rise from the crater less than two miles due south.

  Twilight falls early in New York in late November, and it has already begun when the turkey comes out of the oven. It rests, as massive and still as a monument, while Norman retrieves his freshly laundered apron, carving knife, and fork from his briefcase. Norman has been honorary carver for as long as I can recall, and I don't believe that even he remembers when or why he started bringing his own implements. He takes his time sharpening the blade, as he knows that it is not really right to launch the feast until it is dark outside, for that is when the lights are dimmed, the candles lit, and the apartment begins to feel enclosed and aglow from within, as it were, like a stage in a darkened theater. No feast or drama can be entirely successful until this sense of isolation from the outside world is complete and an entirely artificial and hermetic universe has been created. That is how the trance of hospitality is summoned; that is how we close our eyes, descend into the deep, and retrieve by sense of touch the remembrance of long-gone celebration. When the lights are low and the autumn night closes in, the host's most important task of all - that of marrying the dream of the present to the dream of the past - may begin.

  The actual Thanksgiving meal is the least important element of the celebration, for me at any rate. For one thing, there are too many of us to sit in one gathering at the table, so the eternal, circular aspect of the banquet - normally so crucial to any prospect of a successful dinner - has to be discarded. Instead, we have several tables set up, and people rise and move around as the whim takes them; naturally, in these circumstances, they are less inclined to linger approvingly over their food. For another, as fresh, bountiful, and all-American as it is, there is more bulk than elegance to the fare. The diners - who are serving themselves, buffet-style - tend to overload their plates and shovel down their food with a lack of appreciation and decorum that might demolish a fastidious cook in other circumstances. They are going straight for ataraxia, without any of the intervening stages of pleasure. There are, of course, the usual comments on the juiciness of the bird, the hint of arm
agnac in the gravy, the creaminess of the potatoes, but my guests have been eating this food for years and are not looking for surprises. The chef cannot and should not hope for the praise and wide-eyed wonder that his cooking usually elicits. I, for one, always lose interest if I cannot expect to be praised.

  So the entire meal is wiped out in an hour or less. The wine, the somnolence of satiety, and the prospect of several hours of cleanup keep us all glued to our seats. I do not get to see my sisters nearly as often as I would like, and we retire to a quiet corner with my father for a chat. Tonight, we are feeling particularly thankful and especially giving. We cannot continue to talk or think any longer about September 11; it is time to forget for a while.

  My father begins to reminisce about the Thanksgivings of his childhood. He grew up in the Bronx during the Depression, not poor but in very modest circumstances. An only child, he slept on a daybed in the front vestibule, a latchkey kid who spent a lot of time on his own. My grandfather worked collecting insurance premiums door to door; my grandmother clerked at a department store. Along with steaks and chops, she had a deft hand with traditional Eastern European fare - borscht, schav, mamaliga, schmaltz herring. She made her own caviar out of whitefish roe, grated onion, olive oil, and lemon juice. In the hot summers, they ate cucumber salad and calves' foot jelly. Within their means, they enjoyed entertaining; an expandable bridge table was set up in the living room for big events. My father always looked forward to the company.

  But the great event of the year was the gathering of the Browner clan at Thanksgiving, at Uncle Dick and Aunt Rose's house. Uncle Dick, whose real name was Isidore, was the family success story - a traffic court judge. For a kid from the Bronx, a visit to Dick and Rose's colonial home in the leafy suburb of Great Neck was like a vacation to an exotic foreign country - or, more accurately, to the all-American dream that my father otherwise knew only from the movies. There was a lawn, with trees. The children had their own rooms. There was a dining room, and a buzzer under the rug at the head of the table for signaling staff in the kitchen.