Parrot and Olivier in America (6 page)

I was infuriated by the sexton but also nourished in all my dreams and expectations by what he brought me, that is, my mother in all her blindness and bubbling intoxication.

From inside the sexton's pocket, she sang to me like a captive bird:
Lovely boy
she called me, and
brave boy
and
good boy
too: the king had not yet dined at the rue Saint-Dominique but she and my father had been to the Tuileries. This visit, she wrote, meant that the king had not forgotten the service given by her family nor by the valiant Barfleur who had died for Louis XVI, and she was confident that, for this reason alone, my father might reasonably expect to be made a
pair de France
and sit in the Chamber of Peers.

My father wrote less often and, far from calling me a boy, seemed to have forgotten I was not a man. His tone was both sophisticated and familiar--wry, ironic, fed by a disenchantment that I could not have named. The taste of his letters stayed with me, producing in me a profound unease. For instance:

I shall never forget the impression Louis XVIII made when he came out to receive us; we saw an enormous mass emerge from the king's study, shuffling and waddling; this mass was topped by a fine and noble head but the expression of the features was entirely theatrical; the king came forward with his hand over his heart, his eyes raised to heaven. He said a few perfectly well-judged words to us, delivered in the most sentimental manner. It was clear from this that he had rehearsed his performance. We retired from his presence with gratitude for the special kindness that he showed us, and with the conviction that as a king he would make a most excellent actor.

This less-than-respectful tone makes no sense until you know what was omitted from my parents' loving letters. My father did not say that he found himself severely disadvantaged for not having fled the Revolution. He did not point out that the emigres were also now returned. The king, of course, was of their party. I did not understand that my father's loyalty was neither celebrated nor valued, and he had been finally granted what the English call the leftovers--not a seat in the Chamber of Peers but the prefecture of the department of Maine-e-Loire. This was an insult, but he was a Garmont and so he set out for his new residence.

My mother would have none of it. She remained in Paris.

Autumn came and the servants packed away my campaign bed, the specimen table, the Turkey rugs, all the contents of the pavilion except my bear rug which I would not relinquish. Bebe and I withdrew to the chateau where we were appalled to find that the preposterous architect and his assistant had expanded their territories. The Blue Room had proven insufficient for their needs and now they occupied the library where they had taken up the incense habit. Bebe and I retreated to the second floor and here we also took our meals and I developed what was thought to be a sleeping sickness.

Bebe wished to
get the boy outside
but all those useful extending legs and springing arms, those Olivier-in-the-box explosions, saved me. It was not until the ice had melted on the
bain
that I ventured out, my bear rug still wrapped around my shoulders.

And it was on a late March morning in 1815 that my parents returned from Paris and I came rushing to them, dripping wet with the waters of the
bain
, me and Bebe, wet and dry, bear and man, hand in hand, in such a hurry that we were both almost crushed beneath a screeching gun carriage drawn by a company of soldiers up the Paris road.

My mother burst out from her box.

"Hoorah," I cried. She did not hear me. She shook her feathers, and rushed toward the chateau leaving the servants to unload the coaches. The servants, like their feverish mistress, carelessly abandoned precious items where they fell. For instance, here--a grand ball gown lying on the architect's spilled earth like pink hydrangea blooms.

I saw my mother fly past the gallery windows, unwinding like a muslin curtain, a white train floating above the stairs, spiraling around the former pigeon loft. Soon I saw her draw her apartment blinds, although not her window sash. Everyone in the courtyard could hear their mistress weeping. I was ashamed for her. Bebe took my hand to calm me but I tugged free and rushed inside, more like my mother than I knew, wet and white and naked, my childish sex exposed, the bearskin trailing behind me and dragging fallen hats and ribbons in its train. I tripped on the stairs and hurt my leg running toward this dreadful howl of wind bursting from the same dear pipes that had sung "A Troubadour of Bearn." I entered the blood-rich cavity of sound, and discovered my maman on her
chaise
, her face all raw and wet as if flayed by grief.

"Bonaparte is back," she said. "It's over."

"Over?" I was terrified. "Over!" I yanked the bearskin once again, brought down something with a crash. I heard the rattle of the deadly blade in its grooved oaken track. I fled out down the stairs, sprinted naked along the gallery to my father's office, where I found him behind the great leather-topped desk which was piled high with papers accumulated in his absence.

"Ah, Master de Garmont," he said, as if we had been separated for only a few minutes. "There you are." He said nothing of my undress or bloody leg. He laid his hand on my head and looked at me but I knew he was blind, that he could know nothing but my mother's shocking distress which was carried to us even here, so many stairs and walls away.

He had in his hand the soda-water flask my mother and I had drunk from now so long ago and he was turning this object over and over and peering into it. He was a great man but he could no longer help us.

Only Odile knew what to do. She rushed on her big flat feet to my mother's rooms, carrying her Ch'ien-lung bowl before her. I followed close behind, a lace cloth to hide my naked skin. In my mother's apartments, Odile lit the candles, thumping from place to place making a deep soothing noise of a type one might imagine would persuade a cow into her bails. She arranged my mother on the
chaise
and, having wet the noble lady's brow and wiped away her rouge and powder, turned her attention to the bowl.

Squatting beside her, shivering, girlish in my lace, I saw the great oily stillness of our neglected leeches in their prison, unneeded and forgotten, starved to scum, their sucking stilled, all my glory dreams turned broth and black corruption.

Parrot

I

YOU MIGHT THINK, who is this, and I might say, this is God and what are you to do? Or I might say, a bird! Or I could tell you, madame, monsieur, sir, madam, how this name was given to me--I was christened Parrot because my hair was colored carrot, because my skin was burned to feathers, and when I tumbled down into the whaler, the coxswain yelled, Here's a parrot, captain. So it seems you have your answer, but you don't.

I had been named Parrot as a child, when my skin was still pale and tender as a maiden's breast, and I was still Parrot in 1793, when Olivier de Bah-bah Garmont was not even a twinkle in his father's eye.

To belabor the point, sir, I was and am distinctly senior to that unborn child.

In 1793 the French were chopping off each other's heads and I was already twelve years of age and my
endodermis naturalus
had become scrubbed and hardened by the wind and mists of Dartmoor, from whose vastness my da and I never strayed too far. I had tramped behind my darling da down muddy lanes and I was still called Parrot when he, Jack Larrit, carried me on his shoulder through Northgate at Totnes. My daddy loved his Parrot. He would sit me on the bar of the Kingsbridge Inn, to let the punters hear what wonders came from my amazing mouth:
Man is born free and is everywhere in chains
.

If that ain't worth sixpence what is?

My daddy was a journeyman printer, a lanky man with big knees and knubbly knuckled hands with which he would ruff up his red hair when looking for
First Principles
. Inside this bird's nest it was a surprise to find his small white noggin, the precious engine of his bright gray eyes.

"Children remain tied to their father by nature only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this ends," so wrote the great Rousseau, "the natural bond is dissolved. Once the children are freed from the obedience they owe their father and the father is freed from their responsibilities towards them, both parties equally regain their independence. If they continue to remain united, it is no longer nature but their own choice, which unites them; and the family as such is kept together only by agreement."

More or less that's it.

My daddy and I were two peas in a pod. The acquisition of knowledge was our occupation, but of my ma I knew nothing except that she had a tiny waist which would fit inside her husband's hands. I missed her all my life.

I knew Adam Smith before I reached fractions. Then I was put to Latin which my father liked no more than I did, and this caused us considerable upset, both with ourselves and with each other. It was due to Latin that my father got in a state and clipped my lughole and I grabbed a half-burned bit of kindling and set to drawing on the floor. I had never seen a drawing in my life, and when I saw what I was doing, dear God, I thought I had invented it. And what rage, what fury, what a delicious humming wickedness I felt. All over the floor and who will clean it? I had seen my daddy's hand reach for his belt buckle and I was, ipso facto, ready for the slap. Yet at this moment I entered a foreign jungle of the soul. I drew a man with a dirty long nose. A leaping trout. A donkey falling upside down.

But my daddy's belt stayed in his trousers.

He stared at me. His hair stood up like taffy. He cocked his head. I permitted him to take my charcoal stick and kiss me on the head. Not a cross word, or a kind one. He led the Parrot downstairs where he ordered the landlord pour me a ginger beer. Then he sat and watched me drink, and what was he pondering, do you reckon?

Why, the benefits of having an engraver in the family.

Thereafter I was a mighty protege and we forgot about our upsets and our Latin and our fractions, and even though my drawings were not always wanted where I placed them, he encouraged me at every turn, always on the lookout for a quiet church porch on account of the quality of its slate. As to subjects, he was not fussy, although once he gave me a pound note to see what I could make of it.

On another occasion he was compelled to scrub clean the Dartmouth footpath on which I had drawn the great bloody head of Louis XVI. My father said he didn't mind the scrubbing, it being a pleasure to make any tyrant vanish from the earth. It was suggested we might leave the town. There was no work in Dartmouth anyway. But up in Dittisham--Dit'sum as they called it--we found a strangely isolated printery, situated just at the place where the estuary became the River Dart, and there we found members of that better-educated class--I mean printers. There is nothing like them. Having spent all their day with words and proofs, they are monstrously well read and disputatious beasts, always--while setting up the type, tapping in the furniture, rolling out the ink--arguing. If it was not that they spoke varying types of English, you might think yourself in France. It was the drunken height of revolution and all was Girondins or Cordeliers, Hume or Paine.

The printers at Dit'sum were family-genus-species
Textus miraculus
. They would shut up only at the long deal table which they shared with their master, Mr. Piggott, and his wife, them both being Catholics of a put-upon variety and very sarcastic about Tom Paine in particular. Mrs. Piggott was a young Frenchwoman easily made tearful by events in her country, which left the men with nothing they could safely say at table--but I am ahead of myself. I did not say our single aim was to find shelter and a decent meal.

We arrived from Dartmouth at dinnertime. My father knocked and hallooed, until we discovered seven full-grown humans, all supping at a table, quiet as Lent.

We finally sat down at the end with big bowls of stew and lumps of rough bread and a cup of rainwater and about twenty cats mewling about our legs. No sooner did my daddy have a mouthful than the master wished to know who he was. He replied he was a press or case man, whatever was needed worst. In fact Piggott required a case man--that is, a compositor--who would lift types for sixpence a thousand, but at first he said nothing of it, for he was staring hard at me. No matter how girlish his wife, Mr. Piggott himself was all of sixty. He was almost bald, with a little lump of a nose.

"The Devil, are you?" he demanded.

"Me, sir?"

"You, lad."

He had a very short neck and colossal shoulders that seemed as wide as the table and when he stood to see me better he began to butt his big head against the ceiling, like a goat.

I would have run but my father clamped my thigh.

I said that I was ten years old and, being too young to be apprenticed, I was accustomed to taking the job of devil.

My father was occupied cleaning the tines of his fork with his shirttail.

Many is the dirty job I did, I told old Piggott. I would rather work than play. I could clean the proofing press, I said. I was a dab hand at dissing which is what they call putting the type back in its right case.

"See him draw a racehorse," said my father.

This comment caused some puzzlement but finally I was given pencil and paper. The result was then passed around the table. No one made a comment but when the horse arrived in front of Mrs. Piggott, she rose up from her chair.

The mistress could have not yet have been twenty, but I saw a small old person, camouflaged like a lizard, and she came around the table at me flicking out a measuring tape like some enormous tongue.

My face and neck burned bright red while I stood in front of all these men and Mrs. Piggott, with no word of explanation, having completely ignored my racehorse, measured me, not only my height but around my chest, from armpit to extremity.