Parrot and Olivier in America (44 page)

The red ear. How could I not love her?

I now formally released her from the chore of her dictation and, as is obvious from this appalling page, took on the task myself, trusting that the Parrot would eventually rewrite it, but then why am I now speaking in German?

When Amelia asked why I was using this ugly language and not my own exquisite French, I immediately asked her did she read German? As I had intuited, she did not. I said it was an occasional exercise for me to write in German, to keep myself fluent, but really what I needed to discuss was this business of Amelia and what to do about her, for she is a completely delightful, alarmingly different woman, as unlike a Frenchwoman as it might be possible to imagine while at the same time every bit the equal in her wit and beauty, and I do know why I am writing in German, of course I do.

Amelia is not only wealthy, she is a hundred times more splendid and desirable than any other woman I have ever met.

What has been occupying my mind is the subject of marriage. I had thought I could avoid it, even while I flirted with it, but now it appears more certain and more serious, I find myself in the position of the coy bride. Let me explain in confidence:
Lieb mich erklaren im Vertrauen
.

As a result of her father's reformist enthusiasm for the porch he had caused to be built some five cottages, positioning each one where the aspect was thought to be particularly
improving
. And there the little houses waited, above the lake, gazing down upon the wonders of the river--whose secret ripples and hidden shoals were instructive as metaphors within the glory of the Protestant God--waiting to reform the characters of those who never seemed to come.

Perhaps Godefroy had imagined well-behaved prisoners ending their term at Wethersfield, and perhaps there would have been, had he not suffered conservative enemies on the prison board. In any case, these romantic cabins were all empty and it was Amelia's great pleasure to escort me into them, one by one, and do a turn of the rather cobwebby room while pretending we had just arrived to be reformed.

I had imagined I would be able to write what followed but even in this German language, even with no other reader but myself, I am too shy. I cannot, even inside this seashell, confess what urges she wished us to be reformed of.

Parrot

PETER VON GUNSTEREN lent me his handkerchief to stanch the blood of combat. Two rums later he was confessing he had a girl whom he was required to marry in Philadelphia, and it would be a favor to him if I would deal with the New York end of the business which involved not much more than sitting in a tavern all day long. The only strict requirement was that I should never be late for the English papers.

I told him I would think about it and stepped out into the hustle of Greenwich Street, enjoying that bracing, head-clearing feeling that only a fight can properly give you.

Having nothing much to do except make a third inquiry about my mail at the post office, I wandered, using my freedom to consider who I was and how I might be better. I headed along King Street, away from the waterfront where it was very cold and beastly, and the poor Irish girls, clad only in silk and gooseflesh, had their complexions turned the color of a plover's egg. Soon I was down on Chambers Street, with the wind hard against my back and pushing me toward the post office. Here, under the rotunda, my sparring partner waited on me, a long-armed beetle-browed clerk dressed for his chilblained life behind his counter. He wore three woolly jumpers, and mittens like my own Mathilde.

"Nothing for Larrit," said he at once.

This was all as previously, and I don't know why this occasion would be any different, except I suddenly had a vision of his lordship's handwriting. Lord God, what a frightful sight it was!

So I returned to Mr. Woolly Jumper and asked him was there a letter for a man named Carrit.

"You always ask for Larrit," said he.

"Now I'm asking Carrit."

With great reluctance he returned to those pigeonholes to which he had affixed so many labels and handwritten instructions that he had made of his simple job a puzzle no one else on earth would ever solve. He came back empty-handed.

"Then Jarrit?" I inquired. "Or Garrit."

He stared over my shoulder so indignantly you might imagine he saw a phantom queue behind me.

"Garrit is it now? With a G?"

"Try that first."

Soon I heard him give a sort of bark. Then he threw a number of envelopes across the countertop.

"Smudged," said he, as if I did it.

"And blotted," said I.

"They arrive like this," he said.

"I do not doubt it."

And for a moment the pair of us were joined by our severe judgment of the calligraphy. Our alliance was brief, for he would not permit me to read them at the counter, or in the cozy little corner where the ladies got their mail, so it was out in windy old Chambers Street that I learned my services were urgently required back in Wethersfield. My first response was to feel an immense relief. Far removed from conjugal relations, I would be spared this awful unmanned feeling that comes from having no useful purpose on the earth. This was not a long-lasting satisfaction. Indeed, by the time I had got myself to the wine merchant's on Pearl Street (where I went to order the Montrachet he wished me to shake up on the coach), I saw my trip to Wethersfield as no more a serious solution than a job in a pigeon loft.

The pigeons might occupy my days I supposed. I might save enough money to have a shop. But how could Parrot end his days behind the counter of a shop?

I squatted on a stoop on Broadway reading old Garmont's awful smudgy scrawl, not without affection, for he, in being so distant from my prickly presence, seemed to have forgotten exactly who I was. Thus he not only gave me the expected orders regarding wine and banking but confessed his personal feelings toward both his hosts and their nation. He loved beyond reason. Of course he judged them very fiercely for the blot of slavery on their luminous constitution, but how fine it was, he wrote in the very next sentence, what enormous pleasure there was in walking down a good paved street in Massachusetts knowing no one was planning to chop off his head.

This he spoiled by adding:
I don't know, dear fellow, if you can imagine it
.

Well that is a question I will answer for him before this account is over. But on that day, I walked the cold street imagining only myself, thinking of pigeons and making money, wondering what it would be to spend my life writing stock market prices on paper and banding them around the legs of birds. When hats were blown past me I did not chase them. I pushed into the face of the wind and, with my ears freezing and my forehead numb--for I had no hat of my own--I arrived back by the river with its lumbering carts and horse shit and poor cold girls and sailors drunk before lunch and at the Bull Inn I asked permission of the Irishman to inspect Peter's pigeon loft.

Having seen us fight, the landlord knew us to be friends and indicated the window from which I could reach the ladder to the loft.

Squatting in this disturbed air, with the wings hitting the back of my head and my nose pinched up against what the New Yorkers call a shitstorm--an accurate description--I recalled Dirk and his brother wringing necks as if they had no souls. I had been brought up with a better idea of myself than this.

I washed my hands and face in the Hudson River and then I set off once again on one of those walks where the greatest part of your aim is to convince strangers--touts, thieves, barrow men--that you are a busy chap on an errand of great importance. Thus I was a fraud and the only true thing I knew was that I would not return to a house where I had no pride or purpose. By evening time, my very shins exhausted by the day, I came back down Chambers Street and then down Broadway, turned into Park Row, and found myself confronting what I secretly had known I must--a great banner on which was painted in great heroic style, Marianne and the charging bourgeoisie. Dark had fallen now and the banner was illuminated by violent roaring faggots arranged along the top of the high steps. In this light was revealed the work of some ash-faced Bible basher who had painted across Marianne's naked bosom in a style so artless as to be an assault on anyone who has ever touched a breast or brush:

THE DRAMA OF
THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE
And
ITS CHILDREN IN AMERICA

There I was hailed by the impresario. He stood above me and below his sign, his scimitar lips casting a frightening shadow on his features until the moment of a smile revealed a more perfect sweetness than one could hope to find in a mother's kiss. His mustache was waxed. His glistening rug of hair shone in the yellow flares.

Eckerd was a salesman. He was an American. He came down the steps like a dancer, prancing a little sideways to fit his shoes to the narrow tread.

"So there he is at last," said he, "the father of the play, the midwife too," he said. "You were there that awful day. Only you know," he said, "in all the world, what we have done. I am so pleased. No one knows but you. Please come. There are special seats and, afterward, all sorts of surprises. This play," he said, examining me closely with his gleaming foreign eye, "will change your life."

Olivier

LARRIT, I HARDLY KNOW how to address you from this distance. Indeed, having just begun my chapter how democracy affects relations between master and servant, the matter is of some concern. I do wish you will soon return to attend to its legible transcription, and then you will find yourself more in agreement with me than with anyone else in Wethersfield.

I cannot think what has become of you and confess I wake several times each night, alarmed by the powers I have entrusted to you, not least your stewardship of my New York bank. Perhaps it will amuse you--although I hope not--to see your master dangling on this particular hook. And yet there is no other person on this I should trust more than yourself, and no matter what early difficulties we knew, I have never been unmindful of the long and faithful service you gave M. de Tilbot. Surely you would expect that I know a great deal about your service to him in the years after his properties were forfeited. I have been many times reminded of the scrupulous and honorable way you attended to the breaking up of his father's folios, and with what discretion and commercial judgment. That a noble lord should be reduced to surviving as a bookseller was too much for him to bear, and you, I know, undertook this liquidation on his behalf and left the most particular accounting of the transactions. This the Marquis de Tilbot was keen to impress on me when he offered your services. Do not think I accepted his gift ignorantly or lightly.

Perhaps you have not felt your value is apparent to me. Believe me, you have proved yourself to me time and time again, not only when you stood by my side against the mob but even when I least appreciated it. Your purchase of the
Versailles Impromptu
was one such incident and I have successfully copied your comic enactment, together with a string of commentary that pretty much follows the path that you indicated.

All this makes your failure to return a source of concern, for trusting your integrity, being needful of your assistance, I hardly know what to think except that harm has come to you. Are you ill?

I have completed these chapters in readiness for your return:

*
INFLUENCE OF DEMOCRACY ON WAGES

*
HOW THE GIRL CAN BE SEEN BENEATH THE FEATURES OF THE WIFE

*
EDUCATION OF GIRLS IN THE UNITED STATES

*
HOW THE EQUALITY OF SOCIAL CONDITIONS HELPS TO MAINTAIN GOOD MORALS IN AMERICA

*
SOME REFLECTIONS ON AMERICAN MANNERS

Thus some thirty pages are already here. For the present they lie atop the tall black spines of Mr. Godefroy's
Virgil
, and I am reminded by the flickering of the fire--the same warm light that brushes Miss Godefroy's cheeks as she turns the page of her novel--of the double nature of the fire.

Monsieur, I wish to say to you that you have been, and I hope will continue to be, of immense service, and as the long days progress and I labor on this book, I feel we are both, you and I, partners in a matter that represents your own cause as well.

I will write for you, whenever you ask for it, the most useful letter imaginable, one that would have the presidents of America wish to have you as their trusted confidant and friend, and once your service to me is at an end--well, I wonder if this is what you will require. Consider this, as you chart your course, for I doubt there is a better letter for you than the one I plan to write.

Dear Larrit, I have been traveling out from Wethersfield on more than one occasion, having traversed the most primitive wilds, with no sign of any human soul. Last week I came upon one of those poor settler's cabins where one's first thought is to pity them the plainness of their existence, the lack of cultured society, or any of the comforts that even the peasants of Orne might take for granted. But here, as one such fellow pointed out to me, it is the opposite of France where land is beyond price. Here land is taken freely, and it is only the labor of the family that is bought dearly, but what one finally comes to understand is that one is talking to the lord of the manor, and if one's eyes can see the dense wild forest as his domain, one sees oneself much as I might see myself at the Chateau de Barfleur. This, monsieur, may be a life you would consider, and if that were so I would assist you in every way. The cost to you would be somewhere in the region of forty chapters of transcription.