Parrot and Olivier in America (43 page)

I tried a burlesque and imagined myself a man of leisure, but everyone in the street was working at a plan, and I would not be a market for their enterprise. I rushed downtown and called in on the old boardinghouse, inquiring for mail. No one knew me. I headed across Park Row and there, by mistake, found myself confronted with the bloody banners of Eckerd's play. Of course I turned away.

The oyster bars were open before noon and I ate a good two dozen, observing how they shrank from my lemon juice, curdling in horror from their fate. I chewed them without desire, while my own gray matter shrank back from the awful fact that I had no purpose on the earth unless it be to embrace a pretty woman, to raise her off the mattress with my arms beneath her spine and cause her an hour of pleasure before she set to paint again.

I headed out along Downing Street, treading carefully amid the shit on the broken banks of the Manetta Water, and by the time I was in the stand of red sumac by the back gate of Mathilde's house I was admitting to myself that I missed the company of Olivier de Garmont. I never thought I would think such a thing in all my life. When I came into the kitchen I discovered that the old lady had produced a mighty stew. The rich vinous fumes made my stomach growl as always, but I was not as always, no longer the Parrot who had left that morning. I was some poor wretch who has lost his station, returning home with a misery he cannot share.

VIII

MATHILDE HAD AN EYE, and you could normally rely on her to notice the light in
my
eye, or where I looked as I chewed my food or changed my mind. But she was living deep inside her tar-pit paintings and arrived at table with that wild and startled look you see in artists when surfacing at dusk. She wore tall fuzzy socks up to her sweet round knees. She had not brushed her tangled hair. The skin around that eye was bluish, taut, her pupils very large.

I knew she had not washed her hands for she was still wearing fingerless gloves--the kind market women wear to count the change--chrome yellow and ultramarine marked her nails and nose. She smiled at me, showing me her rosy gums, the tiny imperfect incisor with the pointy end.

I smiled but at the same time I was thinking, She only dares do these things because someone else is paying for her. I meant those frightening canvases which no one could expect to praise except a lover, or some genius from another star. To paint like this was to shove an unacceptable fact beneath my nose.

Soon I discovered her removing her paintings from their hiding place. I inquired if she had a buyer.

"I am making money," she said. "Don't you worry, monsieur."

"Monsieur?"

"Monsieur my darling."

I touched her little woolly hand and felt her icy fingertips.

"How are you making money?" I asked.

"Come to the theater on Friday night," said she, "and I will tell you then."

By theater, of course, she meant the business set up by the Jew, and I felt so sad I could have cried.

"You'll come? You promise?"

"I promise," I said. Then I thought a rum and milk might improve my horrible mood, so it was out the back gate, through the rusty sumacs, up onto the bridge, and into the Bull Inn where I was confronted with about fifty roaring men--merchants from the Tontine, clerks, loungers, racetrack touts, reporters--all squeezed in and shouting and writing in their notebooks or on butcher's paper, pressed against the next chap's back.

To the publican, I said, "So what is this?"

Said he, "It is the packet
Waterloo
released by customs." And he nodded beyond the crowd where the smoke-yellowed windows had been thrown open to reveal the busy wharf, the windy river.

"But what are these men doing?"

"What are they doing?" He was a big cheeky red-haired Irishman with hard-used cheeks. "They are getting the news from England. That chap there is from the
New York Sentinel
." He listed the names of all the newspapers, and as he spoke I spotted the tall stringy fair-haired lad I had last seen strangling pigeons. He was not seated but had one knee rested on a chair and a little stub of pencil between two big fingers. At a certain moment he looked up from his labors and caught my eye and gave me an indication that he would be with me in a tick.

The blood-cheeked Irishman was very happy to keep me tippled while I waited. I asked him could he get me paper and pencil which he very cheerfully provided, and for a while I occupied myself making a picture of the scene.

I wish I could tell you all my old skills returned or, better, that new ones had developed in the years I slept, but of course that is not true. I had made nothing useful of my life.

Soon enough the pigeon boy returned, depositing himself heavily, laying his inky hands flat on the table.

"Hello friend," said he.

For that, I purchased him a sour mash whiskey.

Then we sat turned sideways, his back to Greenwich Street, his pale scuffed yellow boot resting along his bench. Generally, the shine had gone off him--that is, he had swapped his gray suit and waistcoat for denim and coarse wool, and there was a much harder set to his mouth and a glint to his eye which made his high nose flinty and warlike, although I was sure he never meant to convey that particular expression.

"Back in the pigeon business?" I inquired, for I had not forgotten how he got his stock prices from the English newspapers and flew them up to Philadelphia.

"I'll be quitting soon enough," said he.

I was about to inquire as to his brother but changed my mind. "Then back to Georgia," I suggested.

"Ah, you remember."

"Cass County and Paulding County," I said.

"That's all sold," he said.

"Good price, I hope?"

"No one ever paid more than I did," he said. And then he told me how he and his brother Dirk had traveled to Georgia as they had intended, taking up the lot in Paulding County which was very pretty in its situation--black fertile land, a little swampy, but excellent for cotton (as was the opinion of other holders moved there recently from Louisiana). Among their neighbors, the family of O'Grady had been very hostile at the get-go but when the men had all wrestled they became friendly and the O'Gradys were soon ready to teach the business of cotton as they understood it.

They had settled only two weeks when, without having had the time to sin against another human, they and the O'Grady wives and children were set upon by savages, and although they were well fortified in the O'Grady household, with logs driven five feet down into the earth, and although Dirk shot more than five Creeks and Peter himself a certain three, they were finally overwhelmed and men and women were slaughtered and children had their brains bashed out. Dirk had been pinned to the ground with a spear but instead of murdering him directly the savages cut the soles off his feet, and the last time his brother saw him he was running tied behind an Indian horse and screaming Lord-give-me-mercy.

"Dear heavens," I said, wondering how Peter had been saved but never asking.

"I will see them all in Hell," said he. I supposed his brother must be dead.

"So you are back in the pigeon business."

He looked at me directly, and I wondered if his eyes were bulging more than a month before. He was mad or sad or frightened, which I could not tell.

"I was ignorant," he said. "Now I have been studying up on the savages. I wish I had known this before, but they are not all the same."

"There are different tribes I've heard."

"Quite so." He nodded his head. "The government of Texas will give you what they call a parcel, about one hundred thousand acres, so they say. One hundred thousand acres and no trouble."

"That seems an awful lot."

"It's a different country," he explained. "There are tribes there who are peaceable. Not all, but some. The agent says this is much easier doing than the Creeks."

"I have heard there are some very wild tribes in the Texan country," I said.

"Yes," said he. "I'm not a fool."

And he then pushed at me a piece of folded paper on which he had made three columns: friendly, hostile, harmless.

I was an Englishman, the servant of a Frenchman. I knew nothing of these matters but there are very few men who are harmless when asked to give away their ancient lands.

I asked him would he not rather have a good business in New York.

"No," he said, "for I hate pigeons more than you could ever know."

"Not pigeons."

"Well I don't know what else there is available," he said. "I do pretty good out of pigeons, but it is no work for a man."

"Oh you could do a lot better than pigeons," I said, not really having an idea but thinking, Parrot, you are in America, you too must do something with your life.

"What?" said Peter, suddenly alert and holding my eye very hard.

"Oh, I couldn't say."

"You have a plan," he cried. "I see it."

"Not really."

"You have a plan. It's clear."

He now began to pay attention to my awful drawing.

"You cannot keep it from me," he cried grabbing so violently it tore in two. "Why, it is terrible," he said, and returned a half of it as if in confirmation.

He was not incorrect, but I had drunk four glasses of rum and curdled milk, and my life, generally speaking, seemed to stand on very shaky ground and I would not have trusted his opinion of a dollar bill.

"You tore my drawing," I said.

He tried to laugh.

"You mutt," I said, and thereupon I leaned across the table, and with a style more powerful than graceful, I brought my fist to the attention of that wet and baleful organism on the right side of his beak.

Olivier

TO FORM WORDS with my own hand is to reveal myself to the world as a disgusting kind of cripple who must, in dragging his limb across the paper, arouse both pity and disgust. It must always be a shock to receive a letter from Olivier de Garmont, a young noble whose hand might be reasonably expected to be blessed with elegance and beauty as a right of birth. Imagine the recipient as he innocently slits an envelope and is made privy to the esteemed noble in a state of calligraphic dishabille.

Amelia Godefroy's hand, in contrast, was a very fine and graceful instrument, and I had imagined she would replace Mr. Parrot as my
secretaire
, and then all three of us would be most content. Indeed, when her father whipped his buggy up the hill, when the servant cried out a great halloo as if he was at hunt, no one was happier than Amelia. She showed it too.

For the next two days we worked very peacefully together, occupying the library with all the calm content of a married couple. I laid out, in French, what I understood of the American justice system and thought myself blessed to have my misunderstandings corrected before they were committed to the page.

She was a very cultured young woman, but being American she was also very practical and no one should have been astonished that a portion of the administration of the farm already resided in her hands. That she might not, at the same time as possessing all her graces and virtues, be familiar with the arts of letters or diplomacy, can hardly be thought surprising in the circumstances, and yet it took me a day or so to understand that she, in all her very sweet Christian enthusiasm, had seriously underestimated the amount of labor required as
secretaire
. I rather think she had seen the service as similar to that she might render an elderly aunt who--her once-blue eyes now clouded, her knuckles knotted and woody--wished to write to her sister about last Sunday's sermon, a good deed I had been moved to see her perform.

But I was ridiculously happy to give dictation, to show off the workings of my mind, and, like a bower bird building a mound to entice his mate, to construct, as only a Frenchman really can, the most lovely artful sentences, rippling threads of argument that dazzle even while they lock themselves in place. This sounds a mite grandiose or mad, but did I not hear her sigh? I certainly saw her bosom rise when the subject was no other than the degree to which the towns of America protected themselves from central interference.

She permitted me to dictate the case of Missouri, where the citoyens elected a goat to the Senate, so little did they respect the role of government. This they sent to Washington where Andrew Jackson had it served for dinner. Later I understood this was not true. I deleted the paragraph but one cannot remove the memory of my wicked pleasure, to display myself and see the quiver of response.

I was the peacock of Wethersfield and very pleased to be far from France.

As the days wore on, and as my beloved moved from the breakfast room to the library with less alacrity, and as I understood the occupation was duller than she had anticipated, I saw it would be necessary to fetch my servant back from Babylon. To this end I dispatched one letter and then others, all addressed to him c/o the New York Post Office where he had promised to inquire each day.

I then tactfully professed a weariness with that which I now referred to as the
opus horribilis
and in so doing gained a great reward on earth--the opportunity to explore Wethersfield, although this turned out to be more concerned with mechanical matters than I might have expected.

Our first call was a visit to the new corn-husking machinery Mr. Godefroy had purchased just the year before. We stood in drizzling rain, watching the monster fed, and there was no shortage of neighbors and workers to explain, again and again, the wonders of the mechanism. The sole voice of dissent, and the most complicated and eloquent one, was Amelia Godefroy, who provided a perfect example of that poignancy, that surprising melancholy, that unexpected nostalgia to which Americans are so vulnerable. Their past is so brief and yet they are conscious of an ideal world, a perfect nature disappearing before their eyes, sentiments one would more reasonably expect in an aristocratic rather than a democratic society.

So, Miss Godefroy, on the subject of the corn shucker, her arms folded inside her oilskin coat, the rain running down her lovely cheeks: "Before this excellent invention which my dear papa is so excited by, the corn was hauled in good weather to the barn, and then in wintertime the young people went from farm to farm in the evenings making a party out of the husking. The person who husked a red ear earned the right to kiss his or her sweetheart. This was a way of making work pleasant. It has been replaced by what you see before you now--this solitary worker husking corn in a cold December field."