No Place for an Angel (26 page)

“I think perhaps, as regards America,” said Mario, “that whatever it is about you, you must have been able to bring here to us as good as we could find it there. My ambition to go there fell away, was no longer primary to me the day I realized this. Now I also can see this idealism freeing itself, even from you, perhaps, going out to the world. What is it? Enthusiasm, a desire to excel, to perfect, and also to act with joy, to lose nothing in the action. There are many mistakes, of course—you fall short, as everyone does. Yet in thinking this for a time I lost my Italianism, my cinismo . . . then in the normal course, it returns. We do not go too far into one direction or another. For us, we miss our true natures in this way, we feel ourselves to be fools. But still I can see it—the splendid test, this quality of life like some sport, to achieve—not happiness, perhaps; a peasant may be happier than you; but if not happiness, then what? I would call it glory!” He turned his head to take her swiftly into his regard. “You are like that.”

He broke off, coloring, and Irene, for the first time in miles,
suddenly paused to reconsider. She had been getting on with him too well, she saw that. A road construction project caused them to slow down, and cut into the moment. Lavoro di stato. A long paragraph of explanation stood out in black letters on a white sign. It could be read while the car jounced, breaking the eyes' focus painfully, hurling the vision at times face to face with some Sicilian workman's face. The eyes looked straight at her without hesitancy or apology and without giving up anything to her; yet she gained for an instant a sense of both herself and the workman being uncomfortably involved in the trouble with the road, and that was a fleeting equality, wasn't it?, which she could take to herself. Yet his stare withheld everything of his own truth. Perhaps he even hated her—in her approach, while their eyes met, after she was gone. Who knew? One workman, swart, with a red bandanna wrapped pirate-fashion around his head, knotted at the side, and a gold earring in one ear, sweat pouring down his neck, flashed her a theatrical smile. He dressed like that just to do that, to wait for somebody like me to pass, she thought; either did it on purpose, or was glad it happened that way. Now his day is a little bit different. She remarked his sly folk-pride. But her mind returned to the blank and arrogant starer as being in some way the victor. My friend is italiano, she wanted to say. And he understands americani and he thinks we're glorious. He just said so.

Mario had scarcely noticed the workmen at all. Picking up the road again he had retired, she noted, into his quieter nature, and the brief attraction to him that had pulsed for a moment along her veins had vanished easily. As the road straightened, flattening out once more, they saw clearly now on the horizon ahead the high plain and the city which held her friend, helpless, sick and alone.

Through a corner of the window he could see a corner of the sea. He could always hear it. The fever beat in his head, and his vision and hearing blurred the outlines of what was distant and what was near; his own body sometimes flowed out and was the sea; at others the sea came in and curled over him, washing and streaming, making a final slap against his ear as though on a stone. The Ionian Sea, he thought. The Ionian Sea.

He had run away from Rome to get to Sicily to get away from his estranged wife who scared hell out of him. Her name was Linell and she had been a pretty—meltingly pretty—little girl from Arkansas. She was still a meltingly pretty girl from Arkansas who had come to Rome to find him, the Lord alone knew why. It was because of her that he had stolen $2,000 from her father and uncle's company safe and had fled to New York seeking freedom, though this motive was not recognized by the law enforcement officers in Hoskins County, Arkansas, nor by Linell's family.

For they did not decide to “hush it up,” “keep it in the family,” make him “feel better about it,” help him “live it down,” “smooth things over,” and think in terms of a “fresh start,” the way they would have done for anyone not an artist who had got engaged to their daughter and niece. They said that because he was an artist they should never have given their consent to the marriage or believed anything he said, let alone thought that he could be trusted with the combination to the safe or the keys to the office. They had his background investigated and discovered that he was only calling himself Bernie Porter instead of Bernard Desportes, a suspicious name in itself. (Barry had changed it, just as he did the second time, for aesthetic reasons, but try telling them that.)

Looking back, he saw what a fool he had been. He saw, too, that he had had motives both good and pure, whole-souled and even passionate. For this had been his Americana phase, though at the time he had thought it was always and forever, a total commitment. It was his postwar-vibrant-new-life phase; his rediscovery-of-the-grass-roots-with-all-of-life-ahead-while-he-was-still-so-young-and-vigorous phase. He was going to be not only a Great Artist but a Good Guy; he was going to be One of the People; he was going to set loose a new kind of realization, binding art to life and both to the soil.

There was never anyone better fitted for carrying this off than Bernie Porter, who dreamed of settling down with some pretty, average girl and living among ordinary people, pursuing his art and doing whatever else was necessary to keep alive. He got a job in an Arkansas vocational school, once he got out of the army. He did not even have his period, as so many artists, writers, and others did, of living on his rocking-chair money, which was what they called the government allotment to veterans to bridge them over into civilian life.

Bernie Porter was to teach gym and coach basketball, in this town near the Ozarks, teach French—about which he knew very little—supervise study hall, and offer a class in drawing and painting. Could anything be more perfect than that? (He refused to take a Sunday school class.)

The children were brought to school in yellow buses which congregated in the broad, flat, nondescript schoolyard each afternoon waiting for the final bell. It was just after that final bell, one day, after the study hall was empty and nothing was left there of the children except their smell and the echoes of hurrying feet, a wrangle of voices, a whoop from the lower hall, the heavy clump of big boys' shoes. He looked out of the window toward the buses and saw the drivers, who sat on the steps of the school to smoke or talk, walk out to get inside. The tide of children overtook them, rushed around and ahead, submerging them. They dropped their cigarettes, exchanging so-longs, but more often saying nothing at all. They were apt to run to silence back up in the Ozark foothills, after the run and the whoop of the school years was done. Then the last footstep died from the resounding wood-floored hallway and scarped from the concrete steps. The tide went out. Here came one, a straggler in a hurry, running, her brown hair bouncing about her shoulders, back arched and feet flying. She had some books and a sweater she must have worn when she started out from home in the cool of the morning, looped between her arm and the books, the thin elbow of her free arm came to a point, pumping and running. This was Linell McIntosh, but he did not know it yet. He just felt a sudden affinity: she was the one.

It was purely Olympian—an Olympian moment.

He had been pleased with himself for weeks. Everything he had scarcely dared to hope for was working out. Simple children
from the country could love art, after all. This was what he had wondered when he first—chewing his nails day after day in a cryptographer's hut in Wales during the war with constant rain aslant against the cramped windows and himself unable to draw even the profiles of the men he saw every day, all day long—thought of it, that whole glorious scheme. He had lived on it, fed on it, months on end. Now, step at a time, it was working. But this particular basic question—could ordinary children like art, be taught it and learn, if not to practice it, to make it a part of their lives—had been an uncertainty. And it was crucial, perhaps the most crucial part of the plan. Now it was happening. He already had a lively class of drawing going, and though some of the girls giggled at the young veteran, new at teaching, and one or two wrote him anonymous notes, more and more of them were getting interested in the work. He even had a fair scattering of boys. So he saw it stretching out before him, that for which he had longed, since his moment of resolution across the sea, to give his life to—the beautiful pastoral dream. It had been there all along—a possibility. It could be reached, attained, like anything else if you worked hard enough and understood what you were doing. If he could do it, then other people could and would. Perhaps they were at it also, here and there, across the great beloved land, at that moment. False images—the wartime images—God Bless America—all that crap—a course like this deliberately cast out. Furthermore, his basketball team was shaping up. Soon the buses would start rolling back in the evening for the night games in the gym, which would echo shouts and the slap and wham of the ball, all clear as hounds belling in the frosty night. But now the
sun—hot, harsh, but bringing the faintest suggestion of dry, dusty, golden light—lay aslant; fall light, harsh against every windowpane, entered everywhere. It lay on the distant surrounding farms the children were going back to; the small farms that had reached that sad moment of the season's pause, the harvest, in some sense, never being the equal (he meditated) of the human effort and beauty that had been extracted to create it, though neither the earth nor the people could help themselves; it was the old timeless struggle with the earth. He was swept by love and understanding of it—of it all—and the girl with brown hair and slender arched back and narrow elbow went running, running on forever. She gained the school bus, the awkward, steep, rough steps, and climbed, her arm stretched out, grasping the rod near the door. Her face profiled, and it was the right face, the one he had had in mind. What was it they said about steering clear of students? Well, there would be ways of handling that one, too, he thought. Nothing was beyond Bernie Porter, who in addition was going to be a Great Artist.

In retrospect, lying sick and feverish in Siracusa where he had fled to get away from Linell McIntosh, it seemed remarkable not that he had failed in his golden quest, but that he had come so near succeeding.

Or did I, or did I? he wondered.

The sea turned back but came again; it rushed throbbing against the rock and his temples throbbed. His eyes throbbed also, and he closed them, and when even the tender veiling of the lids failed to shut out the pain, he opened them and there standing in the door was a cool vision: Irene.

Because his illness had slowly debauched the sense of life throughout his limbs, making him seem scattered and crushed below the bright and hardy surface of existence, Irene Waddell appeared to him as preternaturally lovely, her skin luminous and transparently radiant, her hair, brownish with red lights, curling crisply and naturally back from her broad cheeks where the convex planes were breaking and reforming, rearranging around the blasphemous idea she clearly had in her head—that all this was a little bit funny; that he was beyond a doubt going to live. But she was glad to see him, was nothing if not affectionate, and he couldn't quarrel with that, he just had to take it and be content with it. A crust is sustenance, after all; after all, she
had
come. But Charles—? It was Charles he had got word to, Charles, really, whom he wanted. A woman's presence embarrassed him. The padrona of the pensione had frightened him into a deeper despair, a well of fever, by telling him after Irene's call, only: “Qualcuna viene.” “Una donna?” “Si.” “Suo nome?” “Non so.” He was afraid it was Linell. Linell McIntosh. Oh God, what a name to conjure with! Had she spoken Italian? he pursued. She had a friend, un signore; he was speaking well. That couldn't be Irene, whose Italian was excellent. Unless she was with Charles. But Charles was not good at languages. None of it made sense. When nothing made sense he always thought of Linell. It must be Linell. She had hired somebody to come with her. He almost panicked.

At first he tried to rise, dress, get out at all costs. But he could not walk. The infection in his knee had spread in a red stain up his thigh. The sight made him shudder. He could not bend his knee. And even if I dressed, he thought . . . if I got up, got into something, staggered out feverish into the sun, groped through street after street, where would I end, if I did not die before I got there, but at the sea? This is Land's End. Linell McIntosh has driven me to the ends of the earth, and I am dying.

One thing is certain. If she walks through that door, I shall either go out the window, or I shall throw her out of it.

He pulled the sheet up to his cheek, seeking coolness, and having resolved upon this course, closed his eyes.

But it was Irene who entered. A goddess, with a goddess' risky carelessness over human affairs—she didn't
have
to be interested—she was nonetheless there. Thank God, he was thinking, all the while he was getting angry with her for not being serious enough about him. “Where's Charles?” he asked, rejoicing in her cool touch across his forehead. She thinks I'm one of the twins, he thought, resenting it. But he was aware of her love. It became a medium in the day, like air and light, an element in his fever, a conductor through which the pain shot and throbbed. Oh, Irene, he thought, or whispered.