Theophilus North (52 page)

The Servants' Ball

For some weeks I had felt intimations of autumn in the air. Some of the leaves of Newport's glorious trees were changing color and falling. I found myself murmuring the words of Glaukos in the
Iliad: “Even as are the generations of leaves so are those of men; the wind scatters the leaves on the earth and the forest buds put forth more when spring comes around; so of the generations of men one puts forth and another ceases.”
The summer of 1926 was coming to an end. I had called at Mr. Dexter's garage and had paid the two final installments on my bicycle, up to and including the last day of my stay. In addition I had bought from him a jalopy at a price somewhat higher than I had paid for “Hardhearted Hannah”—who in the meantime had been restored to further usefulness and was watching this transaction.

“I only use her myself,” said Mr. Dexter. “I know what to do. Did you want to say a few words to her?”

“No, Mr. Dexter. I'm not so light-headed as I was.”

“I heard you had some troubles. Everything gets around in Newport.”

“Yes. True or false, it gets around.”

“I heard you had a theory that Newport was like Troy—nine cities. When I was a boy our baseball team was called the Trojans.”

“Did you mostly win or lose, Mr. Dexter?”

“We won mostly. In boys' schools Trojans were always the favorite team because in the story they didn't win. Boys are like that.”

“What years were those?”

“Ninety-six, ninety-seven. All of us took Latin and some of us took Greek. . . . When would you like to pick up your car?”

“After supper next Thursday night. If you could give me the key now I could drive off without disturbing you.”

“Now, professor, this isn't a new car and it isn't an expensive car; but it'll give you a lot of miles if you handle it right. I'd like to go on a short drive with you and give you some pointers.”

“That's very good of you. I'll be here at eight and turn in my bicycle. Then we can drive to Mrs. Keefe's and pick up my baggage and go for that ride. Will you put in a big can of gasoline, because I'll be driving to Connecticut all night.”

So on the night of the Servants' Ball I took Mrs. Keefe and her daughter-in-law to the “Chicken Dinner Church Sociable” at the Unitarian Church. I saw many new faces and was introduced to their owners. Unitarian faces are pleasant reading. Mrs. Keefe and I had become good friends, New England-fashion, and no moving words were necessary at our leave-taking. I finished my packing, stowed my baggage by the front gate, and bicycled down to Mr. Dexter's garage.

Lessons began at once. He showed me how to start and how to stop; how to back as smoothly as nodding to a neighbor; how to save gas, how to spare the brakes and the batteries. As in violin-playing there are secrets you can learn only from a master. When we had returned to his garage, I paid for the additional gasoline and put it in the car.

“You must be in a hurry to be off, professor.”

“No. I have nothing to do until a few minutes before midnight when I want to pass under the windows of Mrs. Venable's house to hear the grand march at the Servants' Ball.”

“Since my wife's death I have a second home down here up in the loft. Could we sit there and have a little old Jamaica rum while you're waiting?”

I'm not a drinking man but I can take it or leave it. So we climbed the stairs to the attic. It was filled with portions of dismantled automobiles, but he had partitioned off a neat clean little three-room apartment with a big desk, a stove, some comfortable chairs, and some well-filled bookshelves. My host brought some water to the boil, added the rum, some cinnamon sticks, and half an orange. He filled our mugs and I settled down for an hour of New England taciturnity. I resolved to hold my tongue. I wanted to hear more from him. I had to wait for it.

“Have there been any more cities at Troy since the nine that Schliemann found?”

“Seems not. He found a scrubby village called Hissarlik and that's all there is still. You'd think it might have prospered being only four miles from the mouth of the Dardanelles, but it didn't. Probably no underground water left.”

Silence. Wonderful rum.

“Started me thinking about what changes might take place here—give a hundred or a thousand years. . . . Likely the English language would be almost unrecognizable. . . . The horse is almost extinct already; they're thinking about pulling up the train tracks to Providence. . . .” He flapped his arms. “People will come and go on wings like umbrellas.” He passed his hand over his brow. “A thousand years is a long time. Likely we'll be a different color. . . . We can expect earthquakes, cold, wars, invasions . . . pestilences. . . . Do ideas like that trouble you?”

“Mr. Dexter, after I graduated from college I went to Rome for a year to study archaeology. Our professor took us out into the country for a few days to teach us how to dig. We dug and dug. After a while we struck what was once a much traveled road over two thousand years ago—ruts, milestones, shrines. A million people must have passed that way . . . laughing . . . worrying . . . planning . . . grieving. I've never been the same since. It freed me from the oppression of vast numbers and vast distances and big philosophical questions beyond my grasp. I'm content to cultivate half an acre at a time.”

He got up and walked the length of the room and back. Then he picked up the jug from the stove and refilled our mugs. He said, “I went to Brown University for two years before I came back here and got in the livery stable business.” He pointed to his bookshelves. “I've read Homer and Herodotus and Suetonius—and still do. Written between twenty-eight hundred and eighteen hundred years ago. Mr. North,
one
thing hasn't changed much—
people!
” He picked up a book on his desk and put it down again. “Cervantes, 1605. They're walking up and down Thames Street—as you say—laughing and worrying.' There'll be some more New-ports before we slump into a Hissarlik.—Could we change the subject, Mr. North? I'm not yet freed from the oppression of time. After forty we get kind of time-ridden around here.”

“Sir, I came to this island a little over four months ago. You were the first person I met. You may remember how light-headed I was, but underneath I was exhausted, cynical, and aimless. The summer of 1926 has done a lot for me. I'm going on to some other place that may be unrecognizable three hundred years from now. There'll be people in it, though at this moment I don't know a soul there. Thank you for reminding me that in all times and places we find much the same sort of people. Mr. Dexter, will you do a favor for me? Do you know the Materas? . . . and the Went-worths? Well, I'm a coward about saying goodbye. When you meet them will you tell them that among my last thoughts on leaving Newport was to send them my grateful affection?”

“I'll do that.”

“Five persons that I love will be at the Servants' Ball tonight. They got the message already. Tonight, sir, will be among my happy memories.” I rose and held out my hand.

“Mr. North, before I shake your hand I have a confession to make. I buy old cars, as you know. My young brother cleans them up. Some weeks we get four or five. He's a careless soul; he dumps old things he finds under the seats, in the linings, under the rug—all kinds of things—in a barrel for me to sift out later. Sometimes I don't get to look at it for weeks. About six weeks ago I found a sort of story. No name on it; no place mentioned except Trenton, New Jersey. The license on your car was New Hampshire. After talking to you tonight I think that story was by you.”

I had turned scarlet. He reached down to a lower drawer in his desk and pulled out a long entry from my Journal—the account of an adventure I'd had with a shoemaker's daughter in Trenton. I nodded and he handed it over to me.

“Will you accept my apology, Mr. North?”

“Oh, it's of no importance. Just some scribbling to pass the time.”

We looked at one another in silence.

“You made what happened pretty vivid, Mr. North. I'd say you had a knack for that kind of thing. Have you ever thought of trying to be a writer?” I shook my head. “I'll see you down to your car.”

“Good night, Josiah, and thank you.”

“Drive carefully, Theophilus.”

I didn't wait under the trees outside Mrs. Venable's cottage to hear the Sousa march and the “Blue Danube Waltz.”

Imagination draws on memory. Memory and imagination combined can stage a Servants' Ball or even write a book, if that's what they want to do.

Afterword

Overview

Wilder never was able to write in any sustained fashion at his home in Hamden, Connecticut, on the edge of New Haven and ninety miles from Manhattan. Early in his career, it became his self-imposed style to hide away for short or longer periods in order to get any serious writing done.
The Eighth Day
, for instance, the bestseller and National Book Award winner published in 1967, took Wilder five long, hard years to complete. It was written all over the map, including one twenty-month sojourn in Douglas, Arizona, where the novel was born. Throughout his literary career, by habit and necessity, Wilder sought the solitude he and his work needed, and found it more than once in places like Newport, Rhode Island.

No better defense of his practice may exist than the boilerplate language he fashioned to accompany his annual “Statement re Professional Expenses” as part of his 1968 IRS return. Responding to his lawyers' request for the words they could use to justify professional deductions on his tax return, Wilder wrote these lines, which appeared thereafter in his tax returns:

1. I work every day (save for occasional overriding interruptions).

2. My work requires that I be free of such interruptions. I have published books and produced plays for 41 years. [This would be modified for the indicated year.] The result is that when living in a big city and near New York I am constantly harassed by interviewers, photographers, enthusiasts, student delegations, visitors from Europe and Asia. It is necessary that I remove myself.

I go to villages where I am little known (Arizona, 20 months; Saratoga Springs; Stockbridge, Mass.). Or I go abroad.

Many months of the year I live and work in hotel rooms or on slow ocean ships. These are my places of business, my “offices”—essential to my profession.

Before I acquired the cottage on Martha's Vineyard (which I cannot live in during July and August because of the harassments I have described) I lived in remote hotels (in America or abroad) for eight months out of the year. That cottage is not a “pleasant summer residence”; it is an essential working hideaway.

Wilder had written many stories in these “places of business,” and after the cheers had subsided for
The Eighth Day
he started writing a series of sketches in which he began to live
through
the stories and dramas that had composed his public and private life. In November 1968, he described his new project to his close friend Catherine Coffin as “a semi-autobiographical collection of chapters—semi-fictional—dipping into stages of my life.” He listed four, each of which corresponded to actual experiences: “1908–1909 China Inland Mission School, Chefoo, China. 1919–1920 Yale. 1937 Salzburg. 1943 Allied div. Headquarters Caserta, Italy. Like that.” (These sketches and others would remain fragments only.) His letter continued that one of the themes “that subtends [the collection] is that old question—what does a man do with his despair (his rage, his frustration)! What does every different kind of person ‘store up' to evade, surmount, transmute, incorporate those aspects of his life which are beyond our power to alter. It would seem to be a depressing subject, but it's not. It's sad and bracing.” What he did not explain in the letter was that the “semi-fictional” theme in each sketch was represented by the introduction into the story of a fictional character.

While Wilder may have wondered privately if he had another book in him, by 1970 the idea of a novel growing out of discrete experiences, filtered through memory and an imagined character, had taken hold of his imagination with a vengeance. As explanation for his travels in 1970 to Italy and Switzerland, he informed the IRS that he had begun work on a new book that, like his last, would require four or five years to write. “It is largely autobiographical,” he went on, “and will require my revisiting the places where I have lived and worked. These travels are devoted to documentation, research, interviews, and supervising photography.”

Wilder explained further that chapters in the new work would focus on his year as a student at the American Academy in Rome in 1920–1921; his posting in 1944 near Naples with Army Air Force Intelligence in World War II; and his experience as chairman of the U.S. delegation to the UNESCO Congress in Venice in 1949. He concluded that he had also visited Zurich, Switzerland, “where I wrote my play
Our Town
.” He added that one chapter would be devoted to “that city and its environs,” and closed by saying that he expected to return to his task in 1971 in England and France.

In the end, a book set in only a single locale, Newport, emerged from this exercise in memory and imagination. It was not the first time that ambitious artistic schemes had not worked out exactly as Wilder had conceived them. In 1937, he had traveled to Zurich and “its environs,” committed to writing as many as four plays before returning to the United States. It was a fair exchange that he returned with
Our Town
all but completed and a strong start on
The Merchant of Yonkers
(later,
The Matchmaker
). This time, Wilder had created Theophilus North as the fictive protagonist for a projected Newport chapter of his book-in-progress—and Theophilus had opened so deep a dam of feeling and artistic passion that he completed the novel in only one year: from April 1972 to April 1973.