The Wapshot Scandal (32 page)

CHAPTER XXVIII

For someone so old, born and raised in a distant world, Honora’s familiarity with the photographs of the monuments of Rome made at one level her entry into the city a sort of homecoming. A large, brown picture of Hadrian’s Tomb had hung in her bedroom when she was a child. Waiting for sleep, suffering and recovering from illnesses, its drum-shaped form and rampant angel had taken a solid place in her reveries. In the back hall there had been a picture of the Bridge of Angels and two large photographs of the Imperial Forum had been handed backward, room to room, until they ended up in the cook’s quarters. Thus, some of Rome was very familiar. But what did one do in Rome? One saw the Pope. Honora asked at the American Express Office how this could be arranged. They were very helpful, respecting her age, and sent her on to a priest at the American college. The priest was courteous and interested. An audience could be arranged. She would receive her invitation within twenty-four hours of the appointment. She was to wear dark clothes and a hat and if she wanted to have some medals blessed he could recommend a shop—he gave her an address—where there was a fine assortment of religious medals sold at a 20 percent discount.

He explained, tactfully, that while the Holy Father spoke English, he spoke the language more fluently than he understood it and that should he forget to bless her medals, she could consider them blessed by his presence. Honora was, of course, opposed to the use of medals but she had plenty of friends who would value a blessed medal and she bought a stock. Returning one evening to her
pensione
she was handed a card from the Vatican, announcing her audience for ten the next morning. She rose early and dressed. She took a taxi to the Vatican, where a man in immaculate evening dress asked for her name and her card. He pronounced her name “Whamshang.” He asked her please to remove her gloves. His English was thickly accented and she did not understand. It took some explaining to make clear to her that one did not wear gloves in the presence of the Holy Father. He took her up a flight of stairs. She had to stop twice to rest her legs and get her wind. They waited in an anteroom for half an hour. It was after eleven when a second equerry opened some double doors and ushered her into an enormous
salone
, where she saw the Holy Father standing by his throne. She kissed his ring and sat in a chair that was proffered by a second equerry. He held, she noticed, a salver in his hands in which there were several checks. It had not crossed her mind that she would be expected to make a contribution to the Church during her audience and she put a few lire onto the salver. She was not shy but she felt herself to be in the presence of holiness, the essence of a magnificently organized power, and she regarded the Pope with genuine awe.

“How many children have you, Madame?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t have any children,” she said, speaking loudly.

“Where is your home?”

“I come from St. Botolphs,” she said. “It’s a little village. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it.”

“San Bartolomeo?” The Holy Father asked with interest.

“No,” she said, “Botolphs.”

“San Bartolomeo di Farno,” the Pope said, “di Savigliano, Bartolomeo il Apostolo, II Lepero, Bartolomeo Capitanio, Bartolomeo degli Amidei.”

“Botolphs,” she repeated, halfheartedly. Then suddenly she asked, “Have you ever seen the Eastern United States in the autumn, Holy Father?” He smiled and seemed interested but he said nothing. “Oh, it’s a glorious sight,” she exclaimed. “I don’t suppose there’s anything else like it in the world. It’s like a harvest of gold and yellow. Of course the leaves are worthless and I’ve gotten so old and lame that I have to pay someone to rake and burn them for me but my they are beautiful and they give such an impression of wealth—oh, I don’t mean anything mercenary—but everywhere you look you see golden trees, gold everywhere.”

“I would like to bless your family,” the Pope said.

“Thank you.”

She bowed her head. He spoke the blessing in Latin and when she felt sure that it was ended she loudly said
Amen
. The interview ended, an equerry took her down and she passed the Swiss Guards and returned to the colonnade.

Melissa and Honora didn’t meet. Melissa lived on the Aventine with her son and a
donna di servizio
and worked on a sound stage near the Piazza del Popolo, dubbing Italian spectacles into English. She was the voice of Mary Magdalen, she was Delilah, she was the favorite of Hercules; but she had the Roman Blues. These are no more virulent than the New York Blues or the Paris Blues but they have a complexion of their own and like any other form of emotional nausea they can, when they are in force, make such commonplace sights as a dead mouse in a trap seem apocalyptic. If homesickness was involved, it was not, for Melissa, a clear string of images evoking the pathos, the sweetness and the vigor of American life. She did not long to canoe on the Delaware once more or to hear, once more, harmonica music on the dusky banks of the Susquehanna. Walking down the Corso her blues were the blues of not being able to understand the simplest remark and the chagrin of being swindled. It was the Campidolio on a rainy day, with a guide trailing her around and around the statue of Marcus Aurelius, complaining about the season and the business. It was a winter rain so cold that she felt for the host of naked gods and heroes on the rooftops without even a fig leaf to protect them from the wet. It was the damps of the Forum, the chill in the seventeenth-century stairwells and the forlorn kitchens of Rome with their butcher’s marble, their fly-specked walls and their stained pictures of the Holy Virgin hung above a leaky gas ring. It was autumn in a European city with war forever in the air; it was the withering of those clumps of flowers that grow in the highest orifices of Aurelian’s Wall, those clusters of hay and grass that sprout up between the very toes of the saints and angels who stand around the domes of Roman churches. It was that room on the Capitoline where the Roman portrait busts are stacked up; but instead of feeling some essence or shade of Imperial power she was reminded of that branch of her family that had gone north to Wisconsin to raise wheat. There seemed to be Aunt Barbara and Uncle Spencer and cousins Alice, Homer, Randall and James. They had the same clear features, the same thick hair, the same look of thoughtfulness, fortitude and worry. Their royal wives were helpmates—and they sat in their marble thrones as if the pies were in the oven and they were waiting for their men to return from the fields. She tried to walk through the streets looking alert and hurried—caught up in the tragedy of modern European history—as most of the people on the street seemed to be, but the sweetness of her smile made it clear that she was not a Roman. She walked in the Borghese Gardens feeling the weight of habit a woman her age or any other age carries from one country to another: habits of eating, drinking, dress, rest, anxiety, hope and, in her case, the fear of death. The light in the gardens seemed to illuminate the bulkiness of her equipment, as if the whole scene, and the distant hills, had been set up for someone who traveled with less. She walked by the moss-choked fountains and the leaves were falling among the marble heroes; heroes with aviator’s caps, heroes with beards, heroes with laurels and ascots and cutaways and heroes whose marble faces time and weather had singled out capriciously for disfigurement. Troubled and uneasy, she walked and walked, taking some pleasure in that tranquillity that falls with the shade from great trees onto the shoulders of man. She watched an owl fly out of a ruin. At a turning in the path she smelled marigolds. The garden was full of lovers, very sweet with one another and candid about their pleasures, and she watched a couple kissing by a fountain. Then suddenly the man sat down on a bench and took a pebble out of his shoe. Whatever the significance of this was, Melissa realized that she wanted to get out of Rome and she took a train to the islands that night.

CHAPTER XXIX

Emile was out of work for most of the summer and in the fall his mother’s brother Harry came to visit them while he attended a convention in New York. He was a pleasant, heavy man who ran a ship-provisioning business in Toledo. He could, through his influence as a provisioner, get Emile a place as an unlicensed hand on one of the ships that plied the seaway to Rotterdam or Naples and Emile agreed to the plan at once. When Uncle Harry returned to Toledo he wrote to say that Emile could sail as a deck hand on the S.S.
Janet Runckle
at the end of the week.

Emile bought his bus ticket to Toledo at a travel agency in Parthenia, said good-bye to his mother and went on into New York. The bus was scheduled to leave at nine that night but by eight o’clock there were more than a dozen passengers on the waiting platform. These were travelers and you could tell it by their finery, their shy looks and their new bags. Every people seems to have some site, some battlefield, tomb or cathedral where their national essence and purpose is most exposed, and the railroad stations, airports, bus stops and piers of his country seemed to be the scenery where his kind found their greatness. They were dressed, most of them, as if their destination were some sumptuary judgment seat. Their shoes pinched, their gloves were stiff, their headgear was topheavy, but this nicety in dress seemed to suggest that the ancient legends of travel—Theseus and the Minotaur—were still, however faintly, remembered by them. Their eyes were utterly undefended, as if an exchanged glance between two miscreants would plunge them both into an erotic abyss, and they kept their looks to themselves, their bags, the paving or the unlighted sign above the platform. At twenty minutes to nine the sign was lighted—it said
TOLEDO
—and they stirred, got to their feet, pressed forward, their faces filled with light as if a curtain had just risen on a new life, a paradise of urgency and beauty, although it rose in fact on the Jersey marshes, the all-night restaurants, the plains of Ohio and some troubled dreams. The windows of the bus were tinted green and driving out of the city all the street lights burned greenly as if the whole world were a park.

He slept well and woke at dawn. They spent the day crossing Ohio. The green windowglass made the landscape baneful, as if the sun had grown cold and these were the last hours of life on the planet, and in this strange light people went on hitchhiking, mowing fields and selling used cars. Late in the day they came to the outskirts of Toledo but he might have been coming home to Parthenia. There were hamburger stands and places where you could buy fresh vegetables and used-car lots with strings of lights and a dog-and-cat hospital and a woman in a bathing suit pushing a gasoline lawn mower and a pregnant woman hanging out her wash and the elms and the maples were the same, he noticed, and Queen Anne’s lace grew in the fields and you couldn’t tell until you got to the center of the city whether you were in Parthenia or Toledo.

The other passengers scattered and Emile stood on a corner with his suitcase. The air, he thought, had a grassy smell. Perhaps this was from the surrounding farms or the lake. The street lights burned and the store windows were lighted but there was still a rosy light from the setting sun and he felt that excitement he always experienced in the ball park when, during the fourth or fifth inning of a double-header, they would turn on the lights while the sky was still blue. It was not cold at all but he shivered as if at this hour and in this flat country there were some subtle rawness in the air. He asked a policeman for directions to the Union Hall. It was a long walk. The daylight had risen off the buildings and up out of the sky and he walked in the light from store fronts, restaurants and bars. The Union Hall when he got there seemed empty, a place with green walls and an oiled floor and benches for waiting. A man behind a window took his thirty-dollar fee and said that his uncle had made the arrangements. They would board the ship that night and sail whenever the loading was completed. He sat down on one of the benches and waited for the crew to come in.

The first to come was the cook, a short man in a brown business suit, who hailed his friend behind the window and introduced himself to Emile. His skin was sallow, his nose was broken and unset. That was the first thing you noticed, that and the monkey light in his eye. It was the broken nose that dominated his face, the widespread nares that made the shrewd light in his eye seem simian, mischievous at times and at times as reflective as the eyes of any cold monkey in a Sunday afternoon zoo. “You look just like a fellow shipped out with us last year,” he said. “Paff was his name. He got a scholarship in some university and left the sea. You look just like him.”