Maggie's Farm

by Sherry, John;

  The idea came, as such things so often do, from an oblique direction. In Rome at that time was a friend of my brother’s, a serious, rather ascetic Englishman named Haddam. He was employed temporarily by the U.S. Embassy or perhaps the U.S. Information Service, I was never sure which. Whatever the precise nature of his employment, it was not taxing; he was usually free in the afternoons to chat and I fell into the habit of stopping by his office once or twice a week. Because he was a completely serious man, there was great solace in the occasional hour I spent with him. He too faced an uncertain future; the job he held (which, I believe, had something to do with statistics) clearly did not constitute a career. One day when I was quizzing him about his plans, he remarked idly that he had often thought of returning to England and getting a small farm. It almost went by me completely and then, a moment later, my mind went into reverse and I thought: no, I don’t think somehow that you will do that, my friend; but I might; I just might.

  As a sort of test, I attempted to ignore the idea during the days ahead. I found that I could not. It both lingered and persisted. However, I kept my own counsel as far as the distaff were concerned. I was not about to paint myself into any corners. Feeling rather foolish, I began to browse amongst the books on farming in the U.S.I.S. library. The section did not run to much beyond the works of the late Louis Bromfield. All agricultural neophytes should be warned that these are dangerous books; dangerous because they make farming sound so idyllic. They do so because Bromfield genuinely loved farming and was good at it. Together, he and I tramped the fields of his Ohio farm. We increased our yields and replaced top soil by using cover crops. And we experimented with something called kudzu vine. I am sure that I was the only man dreaming about such matters from a bench in the Piazza Navona or while strolling on the Celio in the hush of dusk. I frequently found myself laughing at these daydreams. Still, there was a curious sensation of health attendant upon them. The terrible fears of a future dictated purely by circumstance receded to a manageable distance.

  I was fascinated that the idea of farming should be able to possess me. My experience of farms and farming was slight. As a boy, during summers spent on the island in Lake Ontario where my maternal Grandfather maintained a summer home, I had worked with the threshing crews occasionally, providing, I am sure, more of a hindrance than a help. That island was so bucolic, so far outside the streams of change that, even in the thirties, the horse and buggy was still the staple of transportation. Each evening, one of my tasks was to fetch the milk from a farm about a mile away. And there were pleasant memories of sitting in the farmer’s cool milking barn while he and his daughter hand-milked their twenty cows, occasionally pausing to squirt a stream of milk into the mouth of some waiting barnyard cat. But I did not—indeed, knew not how to participate in the milking. I liked the farmers on the island but they considered me, as I did them, inhabitants of another world. My grandfather was aloof and autocratic and scarcely paused to speak with the natives as his chauffeur-driven car took him to and from the ferry which served the island. A certain distance between us and the locals was generally preserved. No, there was certainly nothing in the past to explain my present preoccupation.

  Exhausting Louis Bromfield, I gave thought to a more serious quest for information. Rome, happily enough, is a fecund source of farming lore, due to the permanent presence there of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. It is located in a lovely, gleaming-white Tufa building near the Terme di Caracalla. I went there one day and was passed from hand to hand until I fetched up in the office of a gentleman I shall call Dr. Black. He was a courteous man, a North Carolinian who had been associated with agricultural schools of various southern universities. I hardly looked the part of an aspiring farmer and by the time I had given him a brief resume of my past and told him what was on my mind, I am inclined to think the suspicion that he was faced with a madman must have crossed his mind. However, as I was to learn often during the coming years, one of the endearing qualities about Southerners is that they do not care very much whether you are crazy or not as long as your manners are passable. Dr. Black also assumed that my interest in the subject was that of an amateur, a potential gentleman farmer who would never have to depend upon farming for his living. My view of the situation at that point was, to be frank, roughly the same; the slight flirtation I had begun with farming was based upon a hope that I could use it as a means of taking up the slack while I cracked the literary case.

  During the coming months, I would meet with Dr. Black, a number of times; he was of inestimable service to me. First of all because he took—or, at least, pretended to take—me seriously. Second, because he led me to become specific in my thinking about the general area in which I might consider farming and the precise type of farming which I might do. Because of his own experience, he was, of course, most knowledgeable about the southeast, an area comprised roughly of Virginia, North Carolina, West Virginia and Tennessee. He was the only mentor available to me for the moment and I, quite naturally, took on his coloration. I began to confine my dream-farming to that general area, particularly to North Carolina, a state whose beauties and agricultural potentialities he extolled. As to the specific type of farming he felt most feasible: it was the raising of beef cattle. In this, I later discovered, he was wrong. But for the moment, his word was the gospel; I farmed away happily, raising my annual crop of calves on the Palatine hill and along the Via del Babuino. In my saner moments, the truly preposterous aspects of the situation brought forth some rather hollow laughter. Nevertheless the scheme was difficult to dislodge from my head.

  A rough general plan began to outline itself. Clearly it was madness to think of returning to the United States and immediately set about buying a farm—even if I could somehow manage to find the money to do so, an eventuality of which I was by no means certain. Both as an earnest of faith and as a way of finding out some things, I was going to have to find some sort of farm employment. Just how I could set about finding a farmer amiable and eccentric enough to take on a thirty year old, one-book novelist with nary a callous to his hands, was a question into which I was not yet prepared to inquire too closely. At the same time, I knew that the amount of time during which I could confine my thoughts to my imagination was limited; my Calvinistic heritage instructed me that more lives are lost through dreaming than in any other way. I also suspected that the exposure of my dreams to the women of my house would provide some sort of test; women are stern judges of possibility. Therefore I hung back from that moment, hesitant and afraid.

  One day in the Cafe Greco off the Piazzi di Spagna, I bumped into Lisette O. down from Milan on a modeling assignment. In spite of their fundamental incapacity to get along together, she and my friend O’Hara had lived together during most of the preceding three years, joined by God knows what sexual or intellectual affinity. Lisette was a wild likeable soul, one of those who are incapable of taking thought for the morrow. Half Polish, half South African, born in Penang, she was a beautiful girl then at the very top of her career as a mannequin and about to begin the downhill slide. She was surprised to find Dorothy and me in Rome and I invited her to come to our flat the next day for drinks. Then, on a whim, I swore her to secrecy, and told her I was playing around with the idea of returning home to be a farmer. She received the idea with perfect seriousness and I knew that, by showing my hand even to Lisette, I had moved one step closer to reality.

  It was almost as if, in meeting Lisette, the signal had been given for the party to begin; the last party we would enjoy for many years. For Frank O’Connor telephoned the next morning. I asked him to come along for drinks that afternoon. Frank sounded uncharacteristically worried and said he had something he wished to speak to me about.

  He arrived the next afternoon looking rather distraught. Lisette was already there. The two had never met although each had heard much of the other from O’Hara. It was immediately apparent that Lisette was interested and her character, mixture of courtesan and adventu
ress that it was, did not allow her to dissimulate. Frank, on the other hand, was brusque and preoccupied. He passed her by with a brief how are you, and crossed to my mother to extend his full range of courtliness. My mother always found Frank disquieting and always succumbed to his charm. Whenever they met, she would view him with an air of distinct disapproval which would disappear rapidly as he drew her into the net of his complicated Irish nonsense.

  He soon withdrew with me into a corner and produced an imposing looking document which he gave me to read. It was a letter from some California lawyer advising him of his recent inheritance of a huge tract of land in that state. Beyond the fact that he was most certainly rich enough to live on a rather grand scale without working, his finances were a mystery to me. As mine must have been to him—for his distraught quality, it turned out, stemmed from a temporary need for money. I explained that we were hanging on by our fingernails. I asked him if his situation was serious and he replied that it was nothing that time would not cure. He sighed then and said, “Two thousand a month going out and fifteen hundred coming in; there’s some kind of a bind coming.” With that, he shrugged off his cares and we spent a couple of pleasant hours. He and Lisette left together finally, having clearly reached some sort of understanding. We made arrangements to meet the next day. Lisette had to return to Milan the next day to fulfill some modeling assignment. During the next two weeks, she would bombard him with telegrams.

  And so a round of gaiety began which lasted two weeks. Frank’s traveling companions were stellar examples of what he usually referred to as “my set”: Lord R., an English novelist of the middle reaches and his friend David, an aging writer of travel books, whose debauched appearance was such that it suggested purity. There was little in the world that his hooded old eyes had not seen and nothing in which he had believed. Like many very corrupt men, he was almost wholly without ego. I liked him and never ceased to marvel at a world which could have brought him and me into social juxtaposition.

  I cannot defend the pleasure I once took in the company of unabashed hedonists; it is simply a fact. I suppose it lies in the time-tested attraction of opposites; for I am, in spite of frequent attempts to avoid it, one of those who believes that the work of the world must be done.

  One night, dining at Ranieri, I told Frank the story of the smart pills. He complained bitterly, saying that “a prepared story is an abomination in the sight of God”. Nevertheless, I persisted. No habitual teller of jokes, I agreed with him; yet this was perhaps a bit more than a joke. It seemed apposite to the present:

  A poor southern man is in the habit of frequenting the local cafe. There, nightly with awe and wonder, he watches a very rich man cavort. Consumed with envy for the other’s big car, fine clothes and beautiful girls, the poor man finally screws up his courage and approaches his nemesis. “Man,” he says, “tell me somep’n, whut makes you so smart?” The rich man takes a pill from a case, swallows it, and disdainfully replies, “I’m smart, man, ’cause I take an occasional smart pill?” Intrigued, the poor man says, “How much you gettin’ fo’ them pills?” He is told they cost fifty cents apiece and, after due deliberation, he pays over half a dollar and receives a large brown pill which he swallows. Making a terrible face, he says, “Man, that is one bad tastin’ pill and man, I don’t feel one bit smartuh.” “Well man,” the pill purveyor says with even greater contempt, “you don’ get no smartuh on jus’ one li’l ole pill; you gotta eat a few”. Whereupon the poor man digs down into his overalls, brings up all the money he has, which is two fifty, and buys five pills. By the time he gets the last one down, he is sweating and his eyes are watering with the effort. “Man,” he says, “These pills is jus’ awful tastin’; why, they taste to me jus’ like rabbit shit”. “Well, there you are, man,” the pill salesman says triumphantly, “you is gettin’ smart already”.

  As my wife and I went the rounds with Frank and his companions, I began to get the same insight as the poor man in the story. Too much laughter, too much food and too much drink had the predictable effect of making my dream about a farm assume a greater urgency. As Frank’s time in Rome became shorter, I was torn between a desire to see as much of him as possible and a horrified disgust at our wastrel ways. The night before he left, we reneged and remained at home. The drunken phone calls importuning us to join them began late in the evening. They came from a place which only Frank could have discovered. It was called, “Bob’s Flying Restaurant” and was located, God help me, in the main railroad station. It was the name of the place, of course, which so bemused Frank. He had developed an entire fantasy about “Bob” whom he had never laid eyes on. In response to any quandry, Frank was likely to say, “We’d better see Bob about this”. This last night, the phone calls finally became so oppressive that I got angry and told him he was waking up the baby and everybody else in the house. I hung up to a hurt silence. A few minutes later, the phone rang again and I went wearily to answer it prepared to deliver a real blast. “Listen,” he said in tones of great portent, “I’ve got something to tell you: Bob’s a wop.” I hung up, laughing.

  With a mixed feeling of relief and sadness, I picked Frank up the next day to see him off. The first person I saw as I entered the lobby of his hotel was Lisette. Beautifully turned out as always, she was clutching a small parcel. I asked her where on earth she was going and she replied that she was going back to Tangier with Frank.

  “What’s that?” I said, pointing at the parcel.

  “My luggage.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “The damnedest looking nightdress you’ve ever seen.”

  David, the old writer and I took them to the station in a taxi. Never had I watched a train pull out with such a mixture of pleasure and sadness. David and I rode the first part of the short trip back to the Piazza de Spagna in silence. Then I told him about my intention of becoming a farmer. He said a curious thing; one of those remarks from semi-strangers which hang on and provide strength in times of weakness.

  “Oh, I should think you’d always be all right,” he said, “after all, you’re a man of spirit.”

  I had a letter from O’Hara in London shortly after that. He was planning to return to the States; he said; so was my brother. Darroch, it seemed, had already returned—to St. Louis, of course—beginning again his odd, compulsive hegira between St. Louis and New York. It would go on for many years. At this point, however, I had the feeling that Darroch was giving thought to fulfilling some of his primary obligations; he was, after all, the father of a child by Kate, who had waited in St. Louis for the preceding three years in the hope that he would return changed enough so that they could take up the threads of their lives together. It was not a forlorn hope because Kate is not a forlorn woman; misplaced, is probably the proper word. While O’Hara’s letter dwelt much upon these matters, I did not then realize the passionate interest in their resolution which gripped him. The hallmark of O’Hara’s mind is not deviousness but complexity, the ability to project events to an extent where they become abstract and have no real relationship with the original premises of their projection. “It’s always stranger than you think,” was a dictum he was fond of repeating. True enough; but it is dangerous knowledge to support unmatched by faith.

  Throughout O’Hara’s letters and those of my brother during this time, ran a thread of preoccupation with the workings and the meaning of our own country. Our basic attitude towards America—inherited from such disparate sources as Hemingway, Henry Miller, Mencken and Mark Twain—was one of fundamental scorn; that it was a pretty good joke. What few pitiful efforts we had made to meet our country halfway had been such ludicrous failures that we were prone to believe all the hope which American proffers with such profligacy contains about as much real sustenance as a cone full of cotton candy at a country fair. I could not then see what arrant nonsense this was. I could not even recognize, for example, the latitude we had all been granted in the realm of choice. None of us was rich, yet all of us had rattled aroun
d the world without restraint to our hearts’ desires. None of us was yet capable of recognizing that we were children of a country which offers its citizens a degree of freedom unparallelled in the history of the world. And none of us was yet capable of realizing that that lack of recognition was tantamount to the invention of a personal tyranny. Our minds worked like Rube Goldberg machines, ceaselessly trying to invent a world which would conform to them, rather than deal with the one that was there. Fly now, pay later, has a moral and a spiritual backlash as well as an economic one.

  The plans of both O’Hara and my brother were nebulous and vague. They talked of going to Washington, D.C., but exactly what they intended doing there was not clear. The vagueness of their intentions, however, had the effect of making me concentrate upon turning my plan of being a farmer into a reality.

  A month or so later, a rather cheerful thing happened: my novel was sold to the paperbacks for five thousand dollars of which sum I got half. It doesn’t seem like much now, but it was more money than I had had in a lump in my life, and—more important—it was money I had earned from writing. On the negative side, it was a bit of a two-edged sword, strengthening my feeling that I could approach farming in the spirit of amateurism.

  At any rate, the moment eventually arrived when I decided to lay down my hand. Half prepared to be hooted to death with laughter, I announced to my wife that I was seriously thinking of trying to be a farmer. Her reaction was the single one that could have taken me by surprise. She did not bat an eyelid—her only question was: when do we start?