And then, as Cass began to croak out another limerick and as I gazed at him, keeping Mason in the corner of my eye, all of those feelings and suspicions and apprehensions which had been stirring about at the back of my consciousness suddenly jerked into place in the forefront of my mind, made vividly clear.
Mason had Cass, had him securely in hand, just as in an entirely different but no less impregnable way—up until this night, at least—he had had me. And as I looked at Cass, and as then I looked at Mason—at that slick, arrogant, sensual, impenitently youthful, American and vainglorious face to which I had paid for so long my guilt-laden fealty—I shuddered at the narrowness of my escape, and at my ignorance. And I felt sorry indeed for Cass. The Prioress of Chatham wound up upon a thunderous hullabaloo, surpassing all yet for hysteria, and now it occurred to me that stranger, even more abominable things were taking place. “This’ll shatter you,” I heard Mason say, in what seemed a remote and unreal voice—only half-heard because my attention was now fixed upon two babies in nightgowns who had crept wide-eyed through the door. They were Cass’—the oldest boy and the oldest girl—and they gazed with searching, lovely, bewildered eyes around the room until they spied Poppy and hand in hand marched swiftly to her side. Deep silent sobs racked her gentle frame, and she bit in anguish at the sleeve of her kimono, and with one hand gathered her children to her as she watched the scene. Rosemarie, I noticed, had vanished from the room. “O.K. O.K., Cass,” I heard Mason say, his back turned now. “You’ll get something to drink. After the exhibition bit.”
“Oh, stop him someone, please!” Poppy’s thin wail soared above the hubbub. “Stop—”
“This is an authentic re-creation of a Paris exhibition, as practiced only in the highest-class establishments of Montmartre. Proceed, Cass, old dollbaby.”
And in cold horror I saw Cass get down onto his knees. “Messieurs, dames, c’est comme-ci que l’on fait l’amour en Norvège.” He leered up drunkenly at the bemused guests, amber disks of light glinting from his glasses. As big and as hulking as he was, hunched over like a great desolate animal in this ignoble posture, his voice with its flawless accent was a simper, a prissy obscene lilt at once high-pitched and vacuous and dripping over with apathy —a perfect imitation of a Paris whore. “In Norway, the way they do it …” And then, stupidly licking his lips, adjusting his feet, his long maniac’s hair dangling down over his face, he poised himself to duplicate in parody that act which even the Paphian gods above—had they had the eyes—would have mourned to see brought to such degradation. ’En Norvège …” But he never made it, and the crowd had no more time to laugh. For an instant I saw myself in that same position—clownish, prostrate, and dishonored. I sprang to his side—beaten there by Alonzo Cripps, who, pulling Cass to his feet, supporting him, looked at Mason with black loathing.
“That’ll be enough of this, do you hear?” Cripps said.
“But Jesus, Alonzo—” Mason began in a whine.
“That’ll be enough, I said.”
Poppy pushed through the crowd toward Cass and fell on his shoulder, sobbing. His head was lolling on his chest. “Sorry, my little girl,” I heard him say in a muffled, stricken voice. “Oh Christ, I’m sorry.”
I suppose Cripps sensed in me an ally. “Why don’t you help get him downstairs?” he murmured. I was holding Cass up with all my might. “I never saw such a disgusting business in all my life.” This was an aside from Cripps, but I know that Mason heard it.
“Jesus sake, Alonzo,” Mason began, “it was only fun and games—” But Cripps had already vanished down the hallway. An admirable man, above sordid involvements.
The guests dispersed quietly, melting into the night. I have no clear idea what their reactions were, being too busy with Cass to tell or care, but they were silent, and the silence seemed to be an unregenerate one, full of sulkiness and disappointment rather than shame. Together with Poppy, and with the children tagging after, I tugged and labored Cass toward the door.
“Why are you up, children?” Poppy said, sniffling. Then she turned back and looked at Mason, standing alone with a baffled, unhappy expression in the foyer. “Mason Flagg!” she cried. “You’re a dirty, wicked man!” He made no reply.
“You and your goddam phony buffalo!” I added, as we staggered out the door. Since they were the last words I said to him ever, they have caused me more than one twinge of remorse, in spite of all he did.
“I’ve got to get sober, I’ve got to get sober,” he muttered beneath his breath, over and over. “Got things to do. Thanks, Leverett. Poppy, make me a whole lot of hot coffee. I’ve got to get sober.” We pushed and pulled Cass through the cable-tangled courtyard.
“Well, for heaven’s sake, Cass,” said Poppy in her small childish voice, panting as she tugged him along. “Heaven’s sakes alive! I told you to get sober this morning. You just won’t listen to me! You’re just a—a reprobrate, that’s all.”
“Reprobate,” he mumbled. “I’ve got to get sober.”
“You’re so obstinate, Cass,” she mourned, still sniffling. “Think of the children! They saw you doing that disgusting thing!”
“We saw you!” the children chimed in from behind. Slim in their nightgowns, their eyes dark and grave, they looked as bright and beautiful and fresh as a couple of daisies. “We saw you, Daddy!”
“Oh, Mama!” Cass groaned, stumbling over a cable. “Did I really do what I think I did?”
“Think of your ulcer!” Poppy said.
“Jesus God, I’m a lunatic. Sober me up!”
We entered through the green door and into the Kinsolvings’ part of the palace. This—or at least as much of it as I could discover at first glance—was a cavernous, dimly lit room with large French doors at the far end which, like Mason’s, gave out upon the somber, twinkling sea. Otherwise there was no resemblance to Mason’s dwelling, and perhaps it was just the comedown, or letdown, from the magnetic grandeur above which fortified my sense here of anarchic housekeeping and grubby disorder. Or perhaps it was the diaper on the floor at the entranceway, which made a wet sloshing noise beneath my feet. Whatever, as Cass lurched forward and fell face downward on a ratty couch and as Poppy hurried off with the children into another room, I was certain, as I stood there blinking, that I had never seen such squalor. Dishes and coffee cups were everywhere. In the air hovered a troublesome, gamy, enigmatic odor not precisely, but not far removed from, decay, as of a place where garbage cans languish days on end in unfulfillment. The piled-up stumps of cigars protruded from half a dozen ashtrays, or had been squashed down into empty wine and Coca-Cola bottles, one of which still fulminated with greenish, greasy smoke. Comic books in Italian littered the floor, where Mickey Mouse had suffered a change to Topolino, along with Stefano Canyon and II Piccolo Abner and Superuomo. Across one half of the room a bediapered clothesline sagged damp-looking and redolent, while from the only hopefullooking object in the room—a large wooden easel—a tattered rag doll grotesquely dangled with stricken button eyes, as from a gallows. Upon his couch Cass called out loudly and hoarsely to Poppy for coffee. Then as I accustomed my eyes to the haze in this benighted room, I saw what at first I was certain was the wraith of Pancho Villa come out from the distant shadows—a young, round-faced, mustachioed carabiniere, bandoliered to the neck and flashing his white front teeth in a yawn, who clanked and rattled obscurely as he approached through a swarm of flies and greeted me with a melancholy “Buonase’I”
I fairly expected, in the morbid state I was in, to be arrested, but the cop—languidly picking his teeth as he strolled past me—paid me no attention as he sauntered over to the couch and laid his hand on Cass“ shoulder. “Povero Cass,” he sighed. “Sempre ubriaco. Sempre sbronzo. Come va, amico mio? O.K.?” His voice was subdued, sad, almost tender.
For a moment Cass said nothing. Then I heard his muffled voice from the pillow, in lazy, fluid Italian: “Not so O.K., Luigi. Uncle’s had a bad night. Sober me up, Luigi. I’ve got things to do.”
Bending over him, the cop spoke in his gentle tones. “You got to go to bed, Cass. Sleep. That’s the best thing for you. Sleep. What you’ve got to do can wait till morning.”
Cass rolled over with a groan, laying his forearm over his eyes, breathing hoarsely. “Jesus,” he said, “it’s all going round and round. I’m a lunatic, Luigi. What time is it? What in God’s name are you doing here at this hour?”
“Parrinello put me on night duty. The swine. Again I’ll swear it’s because I’m an intellectual, and he’s an unreasoning block head who despises thought.” (An intellectual policeman! I could hardly believe my ears.) “I more than half-expected it. You remember my telling you—”
Cass interrupted him with another groan from the couch. “Come off it, Luigi. My heart bleeds for you as ever. But I’ve got real troubles. I’ve got to get sober. Poppy!” he yelled. “Hurry up with that coffee!” He rolled over on his side, blinking up at the policeman. “What time did you say it was? I’ve got bugs in my head.”
“After two o’clock, Cass,” said Luigi. “I was up by the hotel. There’s some cinema equipment outdoors that I’m supposed to keep an eye on. You know these peasants from the valley; they’d dismantle a steamboat and haul it away, give them the time and the opportunity. Anyway, I heard the glorious strains of Mozart, very loud, coming from the palace, and I knew you were up. So I came for a chat, and what did I find?” He spread his arms wide. “Nothing. You gone. Poppy gone. The bambini gone. Only the record machine going ss-put, ss-put, ss-put! I shut it off, and sat down to watch after the other two children. It wasn’t like you to leave the machine on like that. You’ll ruin Don Giovanni that way.”
Cass eased himself up and sat on the edge of the couch, looking woozily around him. “Thanks, Luigi,” he said. “You’re a prince. Jesus, I really saw a big vacuum there for a while. A big fantastic vacuum. You could hear me all the way to the hotel? It’s a wonder Sergeant Parrinello himself wasn’t down on me.” He shook his head violently, as if to clear it of the obstructing shadows. I sensed a battle and a struggle: he seemed, very gradually, to be emerging from the shrouds of his drunkenness, like a beleaguered swimmer hauling himself up inch by inch onto the dry safeguarding shore. He shook his head again, then banged it with the flat of his hand, as if dislodging water from his ears. “Let me think,” he said, then more loudly: “Let me think! What have I got to do?” His eyes caught mine and he gave a start: I think he had forgotten about my presence entirely. “Well,” he said in English with a smile, “old man Leverett. By God, I think I owe you something, although what,” he added, taking off his glasses and massaging his weary, red-rimmed eyes, “what, and for what, and how much I have no way of telling.” He got up, his arm outstretched to shake my hand, but stumbled on one of the unnumbered nameless objects littering the floor and, collapsing back onto the bed again, began to cough hoarsely and in racking spasms. “Questi sigari italiani!” he howled at Luigi between fits of coughing. “What are they made of, these cigars! Dung of goats! Excrement of priests! Luigi, I tell you—hack! hack!—I’ve got to be x-rayed. I’m turning to mush inside—hack!—the way I torment my poor old bag of guts! Sober me up, for the love of God! I’ve got things to do!”
“Povero Cass,” Luigi breathed sympathetically, “why do you persist still in drowning yourself, abusing yourself, annihilating yourself? Why don’t you take a pill and go to sleep?”
I scrutinized Luigi in the dim light. He was a well-built, neatly barbered young man, not unhandsome despite a tendency to beetle brows and an expression, common to cops everywhere, of dogged, almost prayerful humorlessness. Frowning down at Cass, he looked tired and discontented: cops the world over are underpaid, but where the blue eyes of a New York policeman are often terrifying, and those of a Parisian spiteful and hysteric, the eyes of an Italian carabiniere reflect only a ceaseless, calm, melancholy yearning for money, which is possibly the reason why, more than a policeman almost anywhere else, he is constantly being bribed. “Why do you persist on this dangerous course, Cass?” he said. “Haven’t I been trying to impress on you for months the terrible hazards of this way of life of yours? Don’t you know that the consequences may very well prove fatal? Don’t you know that the trouble in your stomach is no longer a laughing matter? And without, I hope, sounding too pompous, may I ask you whether in your heart of hearts you have really pictured to yourself the whole horrible vista of eternity?”
“Gesù Cristo!” I heard Cass moan. “An Italian Calvinist!”
Luigi looked at me mournfully, briefly, the expression that of a doctor who has just divined the worst. “No, Cass,” he went on to the supine figure, still racked with coughs, “no, my dear friend, I am not a religious man, as you all too well know—”
“You’re a Fascist, which is no better,” Cass replied in a tempered, casual voice. “How could you be a Fascist, Luigi?”
“I’m not a religious man,” Luigi went on, ignoring him, “and this you well know. However, I studied among the humanist philosophers—the Frenchman Montaigne, Croce, the Greek Plato, not to speak, of course, of Gabriele D’Annunzio—and if there’s one thing of the highest value I’ve discovered, it is simply this: that the primary moral sin is self-destruction—the wish for death which you so painfully and obviously manifest. I exclude madness, of course. The single good is respect for the force of life. Have you not pictured to yourself the whole horrible vista of eternity? I’ve told you all this before, Cass. The absolute blank-ness, il niente, la nullità, stretching out for ever and ever, the pit of darkness which you are hurling yourself into, the nothingness, the void, the oblivion? Yet are you unable to see that although this in itself is awful, it is nothing to the moral sin you commit by willing yourself out of that life-force so celebrated by D’Annun-zio, and by willing thus, to doom your wife and children to the hell of fatherlessness, to the unspeakable—”
“Luigi, you’re a crackpot,” Cass said in an offhand tone, getting to his feet. “I love you like a brother—” He turned to me with a grin, planting, at the same time, his big hand on Luigi’s shoulder. He was still as high as a kite, and he swayed a bit, but he had lost that distant look of oblivion which had been all over his face during the fiasco upstairs. “He’s really a great fellow, Lever-ett,” he said, still in Italian. “Why don’t you two shake hands, you two intellectuals?” Gravely, and with a polite dignified bow, Luigi took my outstretched hand. “Imagine a lovely fellow who’s a Fascist! And a humanist! Did you ever hear of anything so absurd in your life? Look at him—a Fascist! And he wouldn’t hurt a little bird!”
“I’m no one’s weakling,” Luigi said stiffly.
“Of course you’re not,” Cass said, gouging him amiably in the ribs. “Of course you’re not, my friend. But you’re a crackpot. You shouldn’t be an Italian cop, making next to nothing in a little miserable town in Campania, getting corns all over your feet. You should take off that uniform and go to Southern California. You’d make millions! Luigi Migliore, Consultant in Humanist Philosophy! With your looks you’d make a treasure, besides getting all the loving you could possibly handle. Why all those crazy, desiccated, brainless women would be over you like grease. You’d have an office, and a couch, and you could get one of those beautiful dumb California blondes on the couch and gabble to her about that noble humanist philospher, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the whole horrible vista of eternity, and in about two seconds you’d be up to your groin—pardon me—in love, you’d—”
“It’s tasteless to joke about such matters,” Luigi said bleakly. “Besides, as you know, I have no desire to go to America. I’m earnestly worried about you, Cass.”
“Sciocchezze!” Cass said, throwing up his hands. “I never heard such nonsense in my life. All Italians want to go to America. All of them! Why don’t you break down and admit it, Luigi? You love America. You adore it! Don’t try to fool Uncle Cass.”
“I should prefer not to talk about it,” Luigi replied, frowning. “And I see no point in remaining h
ere if it’s your scheme in mind to make me out a fool. You try my patience, Cass. You protest your friendship but you joke too much. I attempt constantly to be your friend, because I’ve felt that you and I are fellow spirits.” He paused and shrugged. “I’ve simply been trying to help, and you make jokes.”
“I know it, Luigi, I know it,” said Cass. “I’m a hopeless drunk on the skids, and I need a helping hand. I love you like a brother. You’ve been my shield and defender, besides drinking up all my vermouth. But please don’t babble on about the horrible vista of eternity. How in God’s name do you know what eternity is like? You’re just trying to scare me, Luigi.”
“Eternity is horrible to contemplate,” he said without humor. ’Nullità, oscurità, like never-ending snow. That is my conception of it. A dark whiteness—”
“What absurdity, Luigi! Suppose I told you why dying was good? Suppose I told you that eternity was a soft quiet place, with grass and rocks and running water, and blue sky above, and sheep in the fields, and the sound of pipes and tinkling bells? Suppose I told you, my dear friend, that eternity was not too unlike the lovely little village of Tramonti back in the valley, which you so ignore and despise? Suppose I told you that eternity was like slaking one’s thirst in a spring of waters that comes down from the snows of the Apennines, where one may lie under the cedars and see all the sweet girls dancing and capering far off on a sunny lawn, and lie there, in endless serenity and repose? Suppose I told you that? What would you think, Luigi? Would I be right or would you? Would you believe me?”
“I would think,” said Luigi, solemn as an owl, “I would think that you would be indulging in middle-class romanticism. You would be telling me a mawkish fable. As D’Annunzio says, ’All life is here and now—’ “
“Vero, Luigi! I do believe you’re right. But let’s cease this feverish chatter. I have things to do yet. You distract me from becoming sober. Hey, Poppy!” he yelled again over his shoulder. “Porta il caffè, subito! E due aspirine!” He turned to me with a slow grin, continuing casually, almost unconsciously, in that limpid, flowing Italian at which he seemed to be as enviably adept as at his native tongue. “I can only offer you a glass of Sambuco rosso,” he said, adding, “my wine steward absconded with the keys and left us clean out of Jack Daniel’s.”
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 72