Earthly Powers (81 page)

       In my agony I sat on the cold bed of what had been Heinz's room, the passports of Mrs Hilda Riceyman and Miss Flora Alberta Stokes trembling in my hands. There was no means of masculinizing those first names. Besides, both passports had expired. Toward the end of July I had visitors. The entire cinematographic unit of my nephew John or Gianni. Probably with jeep parked outside. Frank Schlitz, Sergeant McCreery, Lieutenant Mayer, loaded with PX gifts. And the blond husky six-footer Corporal Campanati. Gee but it's good.

       "John, oh God, John, did you get the news about your mother?"

       "I got it. Kind of old news. There was a lot of mail been piled up at Genoa. What new news have you got?"

       I got from my desk Ann's most recent letter.

       "Had to take the eye out. Lucky it didn't pierce the brain. Oh Jesus. She's going to look like a pirate. She's alive, though. That's what matters, she's alive." And of course it was true. To come through alive was the thing. And she wasn't even a war casualty. This team must have filmed a lot of death. I liked the look of them, sloppy decent Americans smelling richly of a lavish land and easy manners: swarthy Schlitz chewing gum in a rotary motion, McCreery flameheaded and big-boned with big nervous hands that needed some occupation like whittling to keep them from mischief, thin sallow Mayer with warm moist brown eyes behind steel-rimmed army-issue glasses. I had nothing to give them, but they had brought quarts of Haig and Beefeater. I got ice and the best glasses. They lounged with their loose American limbs relaxed, thoroughly at home. Nice place you got here.

       Lieutenant Mayer said, "I saw you at Metro, Mr Toomey. You were coming out of the writers' building, sort of muttering. I was wtih my dad, he said that's the great British writer Toomey. Course I was just a kid, didn't know who you Were."

       "I don't feel particularly great," I said. "I feel squashed. Stuck here under the bombs doing nothing. Despised and rejected."

       "I got that story from Mother," John said. "Uncle Ken," he told the others, "went into Nazi Austria to bring out this big Jewish writer before they turned him into soap to wash Hitler's ass. Then the war started and he could only get out by talking on the Nazi radio. And then Churchill or somebody got sore about him talking to the enemy so he's been kind of in disgrace." They seemed to think this was a great story. Sergeant McCreery said, "We got some footage of the guy that was really a traitor. In a kind of cage near that place with the tower that leans cockeyed."

       "He'll fry," John said. "Went on about Roosevelt was a traitor to civilization and he was glad he was dead."

       "There's a lot," McCreery said, "glad of that."

       "What now for you?" I asked.

       "Well," Lieutenant Mayer said, "we got this short furlough. Got in on a rundown French tub from Gibraltar. Full of rats and a Chinese crew. We got rat stew every day."

       "Rabbit, they said," John said.

       "Too small for rabbits. They were clean rats, fat too."

       "And then," John said, "we sail to New York, Manhattan, Forty-second Street, on the Queen Mary. Next Thursday from Southampton."

       "You'll be with her," I said bitterly. "I can't get out. No passport, no travel permit. My own sister. A brother ought to have that right."

       "It's governments," Schlitz chewed. "They're all shit."

       "You come with us," McCreery said, strangling a velvet cushion. "The Queen Mary, that's a British boat, right? It's big, there's plenty of room. You just walk on in uniform and talk American. The lootenant here can give you a uniform. Maybe you'd have to be higher than a lootenant, a bird colonel would be right for a guy of your age, you being kinda old. Soon fix that. Nothing that can't be fixed." This was pure America, a gust of fresh air blowing in as if the windows were open.

       "I wouldn't make it," I said in a faint New England accent. "It sounds like a fine idea but I wouldn't make it."

       "Another way," McCreery said. "You could be me, right? I'd like to get over to the old country, miss the boat, what the hell, war's over, County Wicklow, I've relatives. Nothing to go back to the States for yet. War's over, they can't stop me."

       "They'd bust you to buck private," Mayer said. "Send you to finish off the Japs."

       "Hell, that war's as good as over," McCreery said. "Okay, we'll talk about it later. How's about checking in some place and then seeing the bright lights of Piccadilly Square?"

       "You stay here," I said. "There's a big spare bed and plenty of room on the floor."

       "Wouldn't want to put you to no trouble," Schlitz chewed.

       "Lord Byron slept here," I said with partial accuracy. "It's supposed to be historic."

       "Well, okay then. I never slept where a lord slept. Something to tell the folks in Flatbush."

       "You slept where a duke slept," John said. "In that palazzo just outside of Moneta."

       "Yeah, but that was only a wop dook. Here it was a real lord like your uncle says.

       "Moneta?" I said.

       "Yes," John said. "I saw my other uncle. He did all right. He sends his regards. He's going to be made archbishop soon, he reckons. The Archbishop of Milan had a heart attack, his third. That came through on the phone while we were there. Uncle Carlo's next in line for the job. That," he said to Schlitz, "is bigger than a lord. If he makes cardinal he'll be a prince."

       London was a kind of American territory. The Americans had the money, the glamour, the nylon stockings, the cartons of Luckies, the chewing gum for the kids, the ready triple fares for the cabs. They wouldn't want me with them tonight though they were too courteous to say so. But John said, as we stood outside Albany looking for a taxi: "Look, you guys, Uncle Ken and I, we've got family things to talk over, okay? So you go off, see you later." They were politely relieved to see that I, kinda old, would not be there. Girls, they would be after girls. I told them that Piccadilly Circus was just down there, see, a brief walk. No need for a cab. Hell, we'll grab us a taxi, no point in walking when you can ride, see, there's one, just let out that old dame with the furs and the little dog. Schlitz whistled like a bomb. Lieutenant Mayer looked like one who, already breathing the air of a society which kept the ordering and ordered apart, felt he ought to be going his own way, officers' club, high-class ladies or something. Still, they all got into the cab together. We waved them off like a wedding.

       It was dinnertime. They had brought me a huge can of Spam, likewise of buckwheat flour for flapjacks, Hershey bars, Chesterfields, a pack of small tins of salted peanuts. I set the Spam to frying and reconstituted some dried egg. John ate peanuts in lavish handfuls, riding a kitchen chair. What did he know of me in his capacity as adult and soldier? I had seen him last as a boy, polite, reticent, anglicised by Choate. Had Hortense told him that his British as opposed to Italian uncle was a screaming queer? I asked most of the questions.

       "What now then, John?"

       "Anthropology."

       "Anthro—?" Strangely I had heard the word as anthropophagy, wondering if he was bitterly joking, having learned in Europe of the last enormity of the abandoned and starving, seeing the pink flabby Spam as some final desperate artefact of unspeakable though piglike origin.

       "Pology pology. Funny how a thing will seem to go in one ear and out the other when all the time it's sticking and growing, quiet and dark. We had this professor who came to Choate and gave us a talk about it. That's what I want to do."

       "A degree in anthropology? Where?"

       "I thought of Liverpool, that's where it all began. Frazer who wrote The Golden Bough was professor there. But there's more work been going on in the States. Chicago, perhaps."

       I set down the mock food on the kitchen table. I still had a couple of bottles of Montrachet and I opened one. John, in the American manner, drank off his first glass without ceremony and with a vague glaze of disappointment: wine, celebrated in literature and liturgy, ought to be magic but never was. We both ate with fork in right hand, also in the American manner. The Spam didn't need knifing: it was beneath the dignity of true meat.

       "Not Columbia? Not CCNY?"

       "If you mean I ought to be living with Mother, she'll be all right. I guess. Of course, we don't know how she is. Perhaps I ought to telephone Ann."

       "You'd be hours getting through. If you ever got through. Strict priorities and so forth."

       "But, hell, the war's over. I mean, the Hitler war."

       "Sometimes, John, I have the feeling that it'll never be over. Hitler just showed the way to the future. Showed how far governments could go with impunity. We've hardly begun to have the inkling of a realisation of what this war's been about."

       "Well," John said, "isn't that a good reason for wanting to do anthropology?"

       "Not psychology?"

       "Hell, that's just the individual mind. Individuals don't make war. We have to understand the basic principles of human society. Why societies make war. And do other things. I know nothing about it. That's why I have to learn."

       "You get a degree and what then?"

       "Well, I guess once I'm in Academe or Academia or whatever it's called I just have to stay there. If they'll have me. The most important study in the world and it's no good in the world. I mean, General Motors doesn't advertise for trained anthropologists. It's strictly for the scholars. But it's not library stuff. Not now."

       "The Golden Bough is library stuff. Somebody gave facts for the books and Frazer collated the books. You collate and work out theories of magic and religion and so forth. In a library. Isn't that it?"

       "Not any more. It's fieldwork now. Professors stung by mosquitoes. Speaking primitive languages."

       "You've had good groundwork in learning languages."

       "Not primitive ones. Anyway, that's what I want to do. It came over me going through Italy. There you had the glory of learning and faith and art" that American curled—up r in art made its utterance seem derisive "and what in hell did it all amount to? You end up with trying to climb mountains and cross rivers just to kill. Not that I killed. Strictly harmless shooting. But you see what I mean—I want to find the hidden patterns under the Vatican and the Uffizi and the Ponte Vecchio and the rest of the junk. What makes societies tick."

       "Did you," I smiled, "tell your uncle Carlo that the Vatican was all junk?"

       "No, I said that religion had to be studied as a social phenomenon. All religion. Of course, he said there was only one. And then he brought out the ink."

       "Ink?"

       "The local wine. He seemed to want to see how I behaved when I got drunk. Toga virilis, kind of. It's all anthropology."

       "So," I said, "we're going to have a scholar in the family. I suppose it's time." And I toasted John's ambition with the last of the Montrachet. "Too many skills and not enough scholarship, that's us."

       "And that includes Uncle Carlo," John said. "Shaman and showman. If scholars proved that Christ didn't rise from the dead, Uncle Carlo'd have the scholars shut up in his cellar, like this SS guy."

       "What's this? I don't know about this."

       "He'll tell you. It's a good story. Or he'd have them quietly shot. Faith and scholarship don't mix."

       "Does this mean you've lost your faith, John?"

       "Not in public," he said, grinning, lighting up a crackling Lucky Strike. "Let's say that I believe belief's necessary. It wouldn't exist if it wasn't. But I think it's dangerous. The Nazis believed in the great German destiny."

       "Is your uncle Carlo dangerous?"

       "Dangerous to the guys who don't believe what he believes. Why doesn't Mother like him?"

       "Something I've never understood. Carlo thinks she's an angel."

       "A one-eyed angel. Oh God. How stupid. How goddam unthinkingly stupid. I could fucking kick myself." And then, "I wonder if he knows. Not that it makes any difference. He wouldn't come running. New responsibilities. You pretend the past never existed or if it did it was all bad. I shouldn't have said locking. Sorry. That's the army for you."

       "Did you see him?" I asked. "Before you left the States?"

       "I can do without him," John said. His personality confirmed that. Nothing of Domenico had emerged in it even after twenty-odd years of the possibility of gestation. Anglo-Saxon open-faced clumsiness and candour, no oiled armoury of charm, no nonsense about art (how could there be nonsense with that front prolonged a and that retroflex burr, pioneer farmer's phonemes?). And a loose easy musculature wholly American, anephebe blondness, Hortense's ears, a chin and nose unplaceable, Hortense's eyes. "Uncle Carlo said something about God being the only father. That makes sense. What is God? God is everybody's father. That makes a lot of sense." And then, "I thought of changing my name."

       "To Campion?"

       He was astonished. "How did you know that? Did Mother—" What had come back was the reading aloud of newspaper necrology in a hotel room in Chicago.

       "It's the nearest name. It's a good name. Lychnis coronaria, leaves that crowned champions. An English Jesuit martyr and an English poet and musician. I wonder if Thomas saw Edmund hanged? John Campion. It suits. You don't look like a Campanati."

       "What's Campanati mean?"

       "I never thought about it. Something to do with bells I'd say."

       "That figures. Mother's still Mrs Campanati and always will be she says. She says you don't play around with Christian marriage. She wears the name like a pillory."

       "Did she say that?"

       "She said that. I hope to Christ she's going to be all right. This Dotty or Dorothy will look after her if she's still there."

       "Who is this Dotty or Dorothy?"

       "A black lady. She used to be a nightclub singer. A very handsome black lady. She said hell, she needed education. She'd saved money so she went to City College. She had a fancy for French, God knows why. Now she reads Flaubert and Anatole France. A very skeptical black lady."