by W. S. Merwin
What use we might make of the Ford was still not clear. It was kept in the garage by the main gate, alongside Alan’s station wagon, and I began to consider what trips it might be used for. I wanted to go to Roquebrune to see the hotel where Yeats had died and the cemetery where he had been buried until after the war, when the Irish navy had sent a small warship to recover his body and take it back to definitive burial in Ireland, in Drumcliffe Churchyard, the place that he had designated. Since my days as a student Yeats had been the modern poet who had meant more to me than any other. I might even get the address of Robert Service and call on him. But I would have to be a bit more confident of the Ford’s behavior and my control of it before asking Alan about any such outings.
The real maiden voyage of the resurrected Ford that would determine the possibility of any expeditions in it was to be a drive to Nice and back. The idea must have been Alan’s—a ghost from his own heedless youth. Dorothy came along, and he entrusted Peter and Andrew to the Ford’s uncertain temperament and my ineptitude. We set off one afternoon in the lull after the midday meal, when the world’s drivers, with luck, might still be asleep. André, in his kitchen apron, peered into the garage as we backed out, and as he watched us go, he looked very serious, signaling that he would shut the doors behind us so that I would not have to risk the motor’s stopping. We rolled along to the place, heads turning as we went by, and up the hill beyond it, with me holding the gear lever in place once I had the auto in second.
There was more traffic on the main road than I had bargained for. The usual bicycles three abreast. Trucks veering out on the curves that gripped the buttresses of cliffs on the corniche. I managed to stop at the top of the hill, then lurch and heave forward onto the main road and get into second again. The gear jumped out on the grade, before a tight curve. I managed to get it back in again. The boys were silent. I put on the brakes before the curve. There I learned what their secret had been, back on the empty cape road with no cars ahead of us and behind us. They were really working on only one wheel, the left rear, which meant that if I tried to brake hard or in a hurry the front of the car swung around to the left, toward oncoming traffic. I kept what I had discovered—or I tried to—from Dorothy and the boys. As we approached the next curve, going downhill, I tried the hand brake, which seemed to work, more or less, on both rear wheels, though without great authority. Trying not to slip out of gear when I put the clutch in to brake, I steered us downhill into Nice and managed, in thickening traffic, to negotiate one intersection after another, all the way to the wide open central space where the Boulevard Jean Juarés flows into the Place Massena.
Whatever purpose may have figured in the plans for this trip besides its own dubious self had probably been forgotten by then, and I cannot imagine why I had taken us straight into the heart of downtown Nice, where a constant loud stream of trucks, delivery vans, Vespas, mobylettes, and bicycles circled around a policeman on a stand, in a tropical helmet and white gauntlets, directing the current in the middle of the place. He, of course, raised his gauntlet in our direction to stop the stream we were in, just as we approached, so that the delivery van ahead of us whizzed on, and we choked to a stop and the Ford’s motor shuddered.
When the white gauntlet, with a gesture from a ballet, motioned us on to rejoin the orbiting swirl, I pressed down politely on the accelerator, put the Ford into first, eased off the clutch, and the motor stalled. Horns began jabbing from behind. Staring ahead at the policeman’s face above the white glove I tried desperately to start the auto. More horns. Nothing inside could rouse a response from the coma under the hood, and I got out to try cranking it, accompanied by a full brass section. On about the third heave I saw beside my feet several pairs of heavy shoes, and looked up into the faces of two burly figures, drivers of vehicles behind us, who had come to inspect the problem. I gave another heave on the crank but the motor seemed to have returned to a pre-war dream. The carburetor was probably flooded by then. When I straightened up the policeman himself was standing there. I expected some kind of stern impossible command from him, but instead I could see from his face that he was looking the Ford over with a mixture of amusement and admiration, and so were the others. The cars nearest to us had stopped honking, and the continuing chorus had drawn back. The policeman asked me what year it was, and whether its papers were in order. He glanced at my international driving license and nodded. By that time a crowd of drivers had gathered around us and the horns had given up. The policeman suggested that some of the drivers help me roll the car over to the curb out of the way, and try to start it there. Dorothy and the boys got out, and half a dozen of us wheeled the Ford aside and let the stream flow on. The first two drivers on the scene, who had assumed a proprietary role in the Ford’s performance, had it started in a moment. Then, after a question or two, they restrained their curiosity with evident difficulty before trotting back to their own vehicles, whose motors were still running as they sat like islands in the current of traffic.
We made our way cautiously into a relatively empty square, parked, explored some of the narrow streets of old Nice, found a tiny dark restaurant where we all had socca, and then went back and coaxed the Ford awake again and groped our way out of Nice, up the road to Italy, back to the villa. Alan looked surprised—perhaps he had not noticed until then that we had all gone. He asked how the Ford had behaved and I told him about the second gear and he nodded. He remembered. It all came back to him, he said. Then the brakes. I told him their shortcomings and he agreed that they needed some work if the Ford was to be driven at all. He had the man from the garage come and pick it up, and it remained in his keeping for the rest of the summer.
26
The owners of the few big villas out on the cape all knew each other, more as colleagues than as friends. In Alan’s demeanor with regard to them, and in his introducing me to them, I could discern again the screened mixture of feelings—of kindness, reticence, uncertainty, obstinacy—that I had come to recognize but not to understand. The neighbors were often not in residence at the same time, he explained, and they had never been intimate, and in recent years had become still less so. But the servants, the skeleton staffs of the villas, knew the family gossip of each place and it had long been common lore among them. André and Georges, and eventually Josephine, were eager to entrust me with more and more bits of gossip about the past of Alan’s family, beginning usually with his mother’s drinking bouts. Josephine showed me the enormous bathroom that Madame had designed for herself, a room the size of her bedroom, but with the walls and floor covered in white tiles like a shower. A huge bathtub, a chaise-longue. There she could lock herself in for a week at a time and drink. And, Josephine said, sometimes throw the empty bottles out the window where they sailed past the garden, down onto the rocks below, and Joseph would go down and try to collect the pieces. Her drinking habits seemed more memorable and outlandish to them than any of the family’s scandals involving sexual pranks. Things of that nature seemed to be taken quite for granted. I could only guess what the neighbors actually knew about each other, and what each knew that the others knew about Alan’s and his brother’s escapades in earlier years.
Alan took me next door to meet the American owner, explaining that they had some matters to settle about a shared wall. A Chinese doorman, in Chinese attire, met us at the gate and showed us up the steps to a living room where much of the furniture consisted of big Chinese pieces. The owner greeted us, accompanied by a large, beautiful, cream-colored Chow. The man was older than Alan by a decade or so, not especially affable, obviously used to having his own way. The Chow was reserved and suspicious, of Alan in particular. We sat down, and drinks were served, but from the start the conversation did not go happily. The problem about the shared wall, and the drainage from the tiles along the top of it, was stuck before it really started, architecturally and perhaps legally. Both of them spoke of possible legal recourses, and the tenor of impatience rose. Before long Alan stood up to go, both of the
m making an increasingly unsuccessful effort to control their tempers, and the Chow watching closely. The man accompanied us to the front gate, with the Chow between him and Alan, his attention on Alan, but not making a sound. As we stepped out of the gate Alan said to the neighbor that those dogs had been used for food in China, which was all they were good for, and the door slammed behind us.
On the other side of the Villa Cucia Noya, along the cliff toward the middle of the village of St. Jean and the place, was the Singer villa, topped by a tall, stone, Italianate tower. No one had been in residence there that season. A skeleton staff—gardener, housekeeper, janitor—came and went, and in the first days there it remained closed to us, behind its high wall. Beyond it, around a curve in the road, was the arched entrance to the Vanderbilt villa, with wide grounds enclosed by a lower wall that one could see over. It was a gingerbread castle in off-white stucco, its current form perhaps a product of the twenties.
Alan knew the current occupant, an aging American tycoon whose name I am afraid I have forgotten. The man had been there since before the war and now was in residence much of the year. He had become a citizen of Monte Carlo, a Monegasque, to avoid American taxes. Just after the war, however, when the American forces were more or less in charge of the area, he had claimed privileges as an American, and had been surprised when they were not readily granted. Alan took me along to call on him.
A succession of liveried servants (the men were dressed like the delivery boy in the Philip Morris advertisements of the period) led us to the entrance hall, full of sunlight filtered through two-story stained glass windows. Our host, a short, puffy, intense man in a light gray suit, received Alan affably, telling us both that he had just finished his daily French lesson—he was really determined to try to speak it properly, after all these years. Then, as a servant was taking our drink order, he began to tell Alan about what he had been doing by way of restorations to the villa, which he said had suffered more from the German occupation and withdrawal than any of the others along the cape. He stood us in the middle of the entrance hall and asked Alan whether he noticed anything. Alan looked around to try to see what he was supposed to recognize, but he was not left to guess. The proud chatelain pointed to the largest stained glass window, at the end of the hall, the size of something over an altar in a big church. Its central figure was a knight in full armor, gazing and striding upward.
“Sir Galahad,” he said. “As you remember.” Then he reminded Alan of the cement blockhouse that the Germans had built down on the rocks below the villas, with its guns trained on the coast across the bay. And as Alan knew, he said, when the Germans were retreating from Italy and moving north they had blown up several of their fortifications along the coast, and that was one of them. He himself had been in Monaco at the time, of course, but when he came back to the villa he was appalled. The effect of the blast had been terrible. It had all but destroyed the Sir Galahad window. But he said he had managed, with great difficulty, to have it completely restored, this time with his own motto—which he pointed out—incorporated in the design.
Alan and he sat and discussed what could be done about the boite de nuit, the source of La Vie en Rose, that had been installed in the bay below the villas, and they went over the history of its materializing there while they had been looking the other way. They reviewed what they understood of the local politics, deals and debts and favors, that had allowed it to happen, and the influences and names that might be enlisted to get it removed, though neither of them thought that was likely to happen before the summer was over. They commiserated with each other about the disgrace to the cape and the nuisance to guests. And speaking of guests, our host told us of a lunch he was having for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and a group of their friends, in a week or so (we had already heard about it from Josephine). He murmured something about not having realized that Alan had arrived, and about an invitation, but it was clear that his plans were satisfactory as they were, and Alan waved the suggestion aside, and came away smiling about the visit, and happy to have escaped the luncheon party.
But some of the social life of the cape began to swirl around us as the summer fêtes approached. A classmate of Alan’s, and fellow member of the New York Racquet Club, moved into the villa of a mutual friend, and came by for a drink with his blonde, plainly anxious wife and their pretty, very blonde, extremely shy daughter who looked like a life-sized doll. Mrs. McCormick (of McCormick harvesters) came with her own beautiful daughter, Muriel. It was no secret that Mrs. McCormick had her eye on a titled English bachelor for Muriel, but it did not prevent either of them from being generally friendly, and Mrs. McCormick was happy to find company of Muriel’s own age.
Somerset Maugham, whose white, imposing Villa Mauresque loomed over the end of the cape, came to drinks with several young men who were on his staff. When he held out his fingers to be shaken, looking elsewhere the while, I had never felt a living hand so cold, loose, and limp. He looked even older and more tortoiselike than Graham Sutherland’s portrait of him. I remembered my mixed response to his writing, when I had read it in college a few years earlier, and I listened for him to say something—anything—but apart from a few syllables croaked or whispered to his young men, he said nothing at all for general hearing.
André, in his white jacket, served at these occasions. I was aware of a shadow of resentment that came and went with him. André and his wife had not been there for long, whereas Joseph and Josephine were part of the architecture and history of the place, and seemed to know everything about its past. André was not happy in his own relation with Alan. The way Alan spoke to him, and ordered him around, abraded him constantly. His marriage seemed sullen too, and his wife kept to herself, but he said she was not happy there either, and he was not sure they would stay when the season was over.
Joseph kept to his garden, which seemed to be a whole world to him, though he had a way of appearing whenever anything was needed. He and Josephine looked rather like brother and sister. They were well past middle age, gray, very thin, dressed mostly in black or gray. Josephine was the old soul, the feminine deity, the Inanna of the villa, and she had not forgotten or dismissed the lures of youth. She thought André’s marriage was hopeless from both sides, and she was not on intimate terms with him or his wife. Her tone about Alan suggested that he came and went as he had always done, and she did not expect much of him. His present setup seemed to her agreeably quiet, and she hoped it would stay that way. She must have concluded that neither my own marriage with Dorothy, nor Gilles and Françoise’s marriage, was a carnival, and she took an interest in my swimming and sitting on the rocks with Françoise, whom she admired, and assumed that I must too. If anything further had happened between us, however disruptive it might have been, it would have had her sympathy and approval.
And why did nothing happen? The goldfish-bowl circumstances in the villa, the proximity of everybody to everybody else, no doubt had something to do with inhibiting it. Or was the spark really not there, in fact? The question returned, of course, when it was too late ever to be sure about anything to do with it.
After the first week or so at the villa, Alan left for a few days in Paris, one of his absences that, like his departures from the Deer Park the summer before, were usually mentioned no more than a day in advance, and nothing else was said about them to any of us. They were none of our business. He was back before the summer fêtes began, but we did not participate in the Fête des Lumières in which families on the cape, and each of the villas whose owners were in residence, generally paid a handsome subscription to rent a fishing boat for the evening, complete with crew and adorned from stem to stern with hoisted lanterns. One by one they were rowed out in a long wreath of boats around the harbor. The lanterns included the big, bright Aladdins with reflector rims that were normally hung on the bows of the boats to attract squid to the surface at night. Each of the subscribing families was announced in turn over a loudspeaker, the names interspersed with loud, festiv
e music. There were speeches by local officials, broadcast in the course of the program, and then fireworks and more music. Alan had sent a donation, but instead of taking part we sat on the terrace of the Voile d’Or and watched as the families were heralded one by one, and boarded under the bobbing lights. We were watching as the loudspeaker announced “Dooblavay Mawgaset Maugam et famille” and we saw him totter onto the craft supported by a ring of hands from the crew and his famille.
Alan’s friend from the Racquet Club, and his blonde wife and daughter, were announced as they teetered aboard another lantern-lit fishing boat, helped by shadowy arms. We sat staring as the fireworks rose over the drifting galaxy of lights in the bay between us and Beaulieu. Later, when the boys were in bed, the party continued at several of the villas, more and more crowded, bibulous, and chaotic. At one point, in the Vanderbilt villa, I came upon the wife of Alan’s Racquet Club friend sprawled on the red-carpeted stairs, helplessly drunk and in floods of tears. Her daughter was in the room below. Alan had seen his friend’s wife too, I learned as we walked back to the villa soon afterward. He attributed her trouble, as though he had private knowledge, to some inadequacy in their sex life.