Parrot and Olivier in America (34 page)

In this way a self-pitying boy grew to be an artist blessed to see what had not been seen in all of London. When I saw Duponceau's folio, I understood what treasure I had thrown away. I had been more talented, more decent. I had been a better man in New South Wales.

That was why I cried, but who knows why I cried? Her name was Aoibheann. I thought she was Eevan until we signed the papers. She was soft and Irish, fair-skinned, hair like my own, an angel with her swollen lips, her sturdy legs. It was really love and really marriage and even though the two of us built the house--she at one end of the saw as we cut the sandstone blocks--I did not consider it a real home, no matter the blisters on our hands.

The first day in the Eastern State Penitentiary I assisted the French commissioner interview four prisoners. I can think of no more disturbing labor, such a soup of gullibility and lies, horror and aristocratic imbecility. At day's end we were outside the crenellated walls and I inquired of my employer if he had some curiosity to taste the arrack, as this was the drink the prisoners had been destroyed by, every one.

"Indeed," said he.

We turned into a low sort of inn where we were given a flask of arrack and a water jug and two glasses.

Said he at last, "I have a question."

Said I, "It is better we speak English here."

"Would you undertake a journey for me? To New York?"

Habit made me hide my eagerness. "As you wish," I said.

"You don't mind then?" he said. I could not tell what changed his eyes, whether it was the awful stink of arrack or one of those peculiar niceties which seem to trouble the noble mind. "I would have you find me a good edition of a French play. It seems you might know books."

"Tell me what you want and how much you wish to spend."

It was such a simple thing to say I could not understand why he was so long about it. On and on he went. "You will see your wife?" he asked finally.

I thought, Frig me. What's this? "With your permission."

"She is a good woman?" he asked.

I thought, Why is he looking like that? His eyes down his long thin nose, those two red marks on each pale cheek. We finished our drinks and set off back to our lodgings. I thought, I will kill any man who hurts her name or body.

II

ARRACK TASTES like mothballs, castor oil, coffin wood, eats your throat and burns your brain, but--speaking of the Indian variety, delivered to Port Jackson on the
Amity
from Bombay--it has a more-ish quality that cannot be denied. Indeed, when Colonel Paterson allowed the captain of the
Amity
to sell his stuff, the entire colony became insane and I was hidden in the ceiling by his wife.

Of the American variety I have no right to talk--from what living plant or creature it has been fermented and distilled I do not know--but I will relate its effect on Lord
Comte Nez Pointu
, who seemed sober as a Quaker when we returned to our lodgings from the pub.

After not too many minutes he was pacing back and forth above my head, and then he was up and down the stairs like old Mrs. Hobbs attending to her dying master.

So--clippedy-cloppedy. Pillow held across the Parrot head.

Then it began to rain and I was imagining that bleak Crooked Billet dock in tomorrow morning's darkness, and the passengers on the
Phoenix
huddled like wet poultry beneath the awning. The rain lashed my bedroom windows, pebbles by the fistful so it seemed. My bed had been made to fit a dwarf. Where was my beloved in the lonely foreign rain?

Comte Nez Pointu
paced above my head. I could have killed the builder who had set the floor joists at four-foot centers. On the basis of no more than the creaks and groans I could have drawn you the whole, in plan and elevation, and was severely critical of all America for doing something I would never undertake in New South Wales.

The rain increased. I slept. I was woken as the front door slammed then blessed silence reigned.

I awoke to find a phantom with a lantern, dripping water on my face.

"Christ, what gives?"

He held up a new bottle of arrack, swinging it above me like a pendulum. This was an aspect of the noble Garmont I did not wish to see.

"What is the hour?"

"Not late," he said, but was made a liar by the church bell. I dressed and joined him in the kitchen where every chair was a punishment, the bones of my arse already saying sorry to the oak.

"Now John," says he.

John?
I was never called John except by a magistrate.

He poured two spilling glasses, and drank without expression.

"I think John," said he, "you may understand the importance of your task tomorrow." His cheeks and lips were cherry red in the charcoal of the night. "You know who the book is for?"

For God's sake let me sleep
.

I had seen the girl in public, drinking in every word he said. She was alive, alight, haughty to me but wet for him, one of those luminous
maidens
you see beyond the glass, bone china, do not touch. He did not need a book to court her. He could have thrown her on her back and done her in the rain.

I sipped in silence.

"How extremely interesting," he said, "to learn of your association with the Marquis de Tilbot. I have known him all my life, but I have no idea either of his character or general occupation. Perhaps you will one day tell me what type of man he is?"

I thought, Be very bloody careful, my Parrot.

I allowed a little arrack to wet my lips. It was foul, a dirty brew, and the rain pelted at the window and I could hear a slow drip in the hall. The roof was leaking but it was not mine. My own property I lost on account of Monsieur. He said he would buy me another house. He said this first in 1814, then again in 1830. A house costs as much as a cow, he told me. And what of a wife and child? Could he replace these too?

I have dreamed of murdering him, driving a screwdriver through his eye. Carrying my own coffin, always, in the end.

"One last drink," I said, and swallowed what remained. I stood.

"And you are content," the Comte Nez Pointu asked, "in your life?"

His brown eyes caught the light of his lantern, his chin dimpled, his brow furrowed. Did he really imagine I would trust him with my heart?

"Good night, sir. Thank you for the drink."

Five hours later I boarded the
Phoenix
in the dark. By then the wind had fallen and the dark houses along the Delaware were all crisp and straight and new against the fresh-washed sky. Who would guess their groans and cries?

The main deck of the
Phoenix
was today enclosed on all sides, stacked with casks and sacks like a Shanghai godown. I ascended to the hurricane deck. Up here you could see the engine churning, the connecting rod, caged in a strong and lofty frame, thrusting and turning like a bull. Here I came across two young fellows, no more than twenty, both dressed to the nines in waistcoats and tall top hats, busy with the task of strangling pigeons which they removed one by one from a wire cage before adding a new limp body to the pile between them on the deck. The other passengers being congregated below, the boys were undisturbed in their grim task.

I stood awhile and watched them and remembered the Jew aboard the
Havre
. I thought, I must get money.

The boys were busy but careful with their work, yet as their quick glances soon made clear, they wished to explain themselves. Clearly, I thought, they are on their way to market. They were both tall and lanky, fair-haired, red-cheeked, with low foreheads and high noses. In spite of which you might also call them handsome. They had been Dutch or German once, but now they were Americans.

"Off to Franklin Street?" I asked.

"Tell him," said one.

"You tell him," said the other.

They were on their way to the state of Georgia where they had bought two lots of land, which had recently been the territory of Creek Indians. Thanks to President Jackson these were now offered to settlers in a lottery. Or was it thanks to Jefferson the Creeks would leave the land? In any case--not being natives of Georgia they could not enter the lottery but they had got two lots from an agent, one of forty acres in Cass County which was said to be pretty rich in gold, and cost twenty dollars, and the other lot in Paulding County was two hundred acres, and they had a picture of a house they would build upon it and plenty of money to buy slaves and stock.

The taller one was named Dirk. He said he would have six children. He said there was no better place on earth than the
you-knighted states
, and he knew that because his ancestors had been poor men until now.

This did nothing to explain the pigeons, whose warm carcasses continued to pile up in the salty air, their poor black eyes containing no hope of the hereafter. I asked what they were up to with the birds.

Dirk said they had made a killing.

If he meant to make a joke, his face did not show it. He explained they had made
damn near one thousand dollars
and asked me to guess how they had done it.

I looked at their light bright eyes, their wet lower lips, their long raw hands, and could not imagine how, not for the life of me.

"You tell him," said Dirk.

"Very well," said the other, who turned out to be Peter and the son of Peter who had a dairy farm near the North River in New York until he sold it and now relaxed at a pub on the river at the place where the packet ships came in from England with news of the London stock exchange. It was their pa who saw that if they could get the London market prices from New York to Philadelphia faster than a horse, why, you could do very well indeed for what was in the London newspapers was, to all intents, the future, and if you knew the future you could be made a rich man with your winnings on the stock exchange. And to this end he had given his sons sufficient to rent fifty carrier pigeons from a gent residing in that City of Brotherly Love.

And that had been their business for three months, and they had made the thousand dollars they wished to have, and now they were off, but the gent who rented them the pigeons had refused to take them back on account of some clever cancellation clause (which was a great old birkin for no one wrote a thing). This bastard rentier was, at this moment, in his cabin, and they were eager to watch his face when he came to see their cancellation clause, now piling on the deck.

They said I should wait and see the show, but I did not have the taste for it. They had made me feel too old for pigeons or cotton or anything but being a servant to a waxwork effigy.

I reached the boardinghouse at dusk and found Mathilde and her mother gone.

Olivier

I

WHEN DEALING WITH SERVANTS, abandon all your normal nuance, irony, humor. Play no word games, nor make assumptions. Say exactly what service you require and then repeat it once and only once. In this way you will discover your servants are more intelligent than you supposed
.

Whether he was aware of his habit or not, my father gave that advice, in pretty much those words, every quarter day, and he continued to do so in his letters to me in America, an eccentricity perhaps, but no less valuable for that. Certainly I followed his precepts in dealing with my convict forger. In the case of his visit to New York, I specified the book I wished him to buy and the date of his return.

When he did not return on the Monday, his absence engendered considerable
weather
in my mind; first a fear that I had
propelled
him into a cruel domestic trauma; second a
rage
that he had not obeyed me. These two feelings may appear contradictory, but a hammer and a nail can make them all the one.

Beside all this, a circumstance had changed, which we will come to in just a moment. As a result, I had made arrangements to depart Philadelphia on the Tuesday, traveling to New Haven aboard the
Zeus
, Captain Elihu Cammer. Until my fellow missed the
Phoenix
on the Monday this would have been easily done. The following morning, there were only two hours between the
daily
arrival of the
Phoenix
and the
weekly
departure of the
Zeus
, although with feuding owners, reckless races, and bursting boilers these timetables were at best approximate.

Still, I was a young man in love, impatient, sleepless. I could not pace in my house awaiting news. I would be down on the dock when the
Phoenix
was due to arrive. And if this meant I must pack my servant's trunk, then my father would never know I had kneeled before it. In any case, I had less curiosity about his possessions than the contents of a rat's nest. There was a great deal of strange paper which I had no time to read--maps, engravings of one sort or another. It was my own trunk that presented the greater upset. Who would have thought silk stockings were difficult to contain, a court jacket so resistant to lying flat. Naturally I made a hash of it, but I was now prepared for the dash to the New Haven steamboat, if Mr. Parrot should present himself again.

Duponceau kindly arranged a Negro to transport my trunks and myself to the Crooked Billet Wharf with clear instruction he was not to leave my side. His name was "James" which seemed immensely comic because he was black as coal, but it was clearly no joke to him and he looked me in the eye as if he were a senator.

"Yes, sir, Mr. Duponceau," said he. "I will not leave the gentleman's side."

This James was the proud owner of a coarse tweed suit, patched and darned about its knees and cuffs. He had very short trousers, two odd gloves, and a low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat which he lifted at the slightest excuse. Once at the Crooked Billet, however, he clearly indicated that he would
not
unload as he had been ordered, but would instead remain on his box seat. He paused to lean forward and spit a bright yellow stream of tobacco, an action immediately mimicked by his horse's arse. He would safeguard my boxes, sir, as he had promised.