Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (11 page)

The only trouble was that these long cellars were always being discovered. In several cases, when I first went I was the only outlander and everyone was talking in Armenian; a month later bright young couples in search of quaintery had discovered the place, their confident English had abashed the Armenians into silence, and the old men had vanished into the carpets.

I thought, this is a good city. The people found me strange, because I had a strange product to sell, but that 9

was all. Where I was accepted, as I was in many very disparate milieus, it was as me, John Masters, not for what I had done or become. Busy people gave me their time, and rich ones took the trouble to explain what I was up against, and why. A stranger paid my fare to Boston and back and made me his guest for a week-end at an exclusive country club, so that I could meet people who might be prospective clients. The New York manner was sometimes brusquer than I had been used to, but there was seldom any ill will behind it. I became annoyed only once, when I held open the heavy swing door of an office building for a man behind me, and he strode through without a word. I stepped up beside him and said, 'When someone holds a door open for you, it's customary to say Thank you.' He turned with a stare, at first angry; then he shrugged and said, 'Say, I didn't notice.' Well, he probably should have noticed, but there was enough generosity being shown to me so that I learned to ignore the minor forms of politeness.

I met a marvellous variety of people. The first was Stanley Odlum, one of my closest boyhood friends, and this was a sad reunion. The cheerful boy with whom I had climbed trees and walked the downs in Wiltshire had become an embittered alcoholic at thirty-one. What had gone wrong? He was heir to millions, and had perhaps been given too much too soon. He had killed a woman with his car in California, but that was caused by the drinking. What caused the drinking? He had been shot down over Germany and spent two years as a prisoner of war. Perhaps that was the cause, but I doubt it. I spent more hours with him in the King Cole bar than I could afford, or wanted to, and once went home with him to his disgusted young wife. I had met her twelve years before, on their honeymoon in London, but now she took me aside and asked me to leave as soon as possible. Stanley was swaying in a chair, mumbling 'Siddown — have a drink,' but I was glad, and very unhappy, to go. He wasn't interested in her, or his kids, or his father's business, or me. I would probably fail. Have a drink.

Then there was an Afghan prince, in whose apartment I attended an occasion of half-oriental, half-Park Avenue opulence. The other guests were all Americans, but mental expatriates. They didn't think much of the United States. It had little charm and no breeding, and nothing really good was made here. I wondered why they stayed.

And a pair of young men in the east 60s, who had served in the American Field Service. The interior decorator's art — their own — had given their huge rooms something of the air of Nero's palace. They wore crew cuts and suede shoes, and their hands fluttered. Their voices were slightly nasal, the words long-vowelled. We parted on good terms, I with my virtue intact. I doubted whether they or their friends were likely candidates for a Himalayan Holiday, but perhaps I was wrong. There's no reason why gaiety should not reign on such a trip.

The worlds of America continued to burst into existence, like new-cracked crystals, around me. Already the idea of speaking or thinking in generalizations was becoming ludicrous. The garment men were Americans, the Armenians were Americans, the Greek quick-lunch men were Americans, the seedy hotel porter with his seedy tales of life in Moline, Illinois, was an American. So were the members of that country club outside Boston, where flourished a way of life that made me blink from its exact resemblance to that in a good regiment of British cavalry. The wealth was there, but played down, the manners were casual, the tweeds only slightly less hairy than my own, and there was a pack of foxhounds in the kennels outside. The only real differences between that club and the mess of the 10th Hussars was a slight one of accent in the voices, and that the oil painting over the mantelpiece was of George Washington. But they too were Americans.

And there was Vyvyan Donner, whose British cousin's wife was the inventor of The Bra. Vyvyan was in her mid-fifties at that time, I suppose, and was fashion director for Movietone. I presented my letter of introduction and she invited me to tea in her beautiful apartment in the Osborne. I told her what I was trying to do. She believed me, and in me; and from that day one for three months I often wondered how she and her cousin Eugenie Huckel got any other work done. They seemed to spend their entire time ferreting out people who could help me with my plans, and bullying them into inviting me to their houses. I ran from lunches to teas to cocktails to dinners, talking. Vyvyan knew everyone in New York, from O'Dwyer and Impelliteri to Believe-it-or-Not Ripley and Fernand Tappe, and didn't hesitate to enlist them. She tried to persuade Movietone to make a documentary in the Himalayas, with me as the narrator. She gathered groups for informal discussions; she thought up ideas by the score, wrote letters, made telephone calls. In that time I never heard her say an ill word about anyone, and I never heard anyone say an ill word about her. She was amusing, she worked hard, she was a well-known figure in the movie industry, which is not noted for its gentleness; but nothing ever altered her smiling efficiency and grace. With her and Eugenie, almost invariably at her expense, I began to see something of a more luxurious New York than I could have seen on my own. I collected vast and exotic sandwiches from the Stage Delicatessen a little down 7th Avenue; and sipped cocktails in the Beekman Tower, where the lower buildings between 1st and Lexington Avenue offered the best view of the glittering towers of midtown Manhattan. We rode together, well wrapped, in a drosky through Central Park, and actually shook hands with Sherman Billingsley and Toots Shor; and took three or four Sunday week-end trips to the estates of her friends in New Jersey and along the Pennsylvania Main Line. It was not a world that I would ever want to belong to, however successful I might become, but it was a much needed change from the fleapit... and it was fun.

Occasional visits to the Mathews' on Morningside Heights would strengthen my moral fibre and broaden my mind. Troup and Alice had four small girls by then, and I was amazed and encouraged to see how they could live on very little money, and with no servants at all, not even a Nanny. Troup's family came from Georgia, but he had been born in France and educated there and in England. He seldom finished sentences, and his talk was like flung crackers, exploding ideas to cast sudden light from unexpected angles. He thought my Himalayan Holidays plan was too pie-in-the-sky to succeed, but he did all he could to help. More important, he explained much, for his background enabled him to translate to me matters that I had no bearings on.

Alas, the time came when the expedition account was down to $ to, and the nearest to a client I had was a lady in California, who wanted her two daughters to take the trip. And, although a Miss America (Bess Myerson) had hugely admired The Bra (giggling), and although Vyvyan had almost twisted the arms off all her many connections in the garment industry, that too remained unsold.

It was April, a formidable month for the Englishman in the eastern United States. Since February he has been expecting spring to begin its slow appearance from behind the cold curtains of winter, as it does at home, at first leaving the secret white sign of the snowdrop in the bare woods, then a primrose in the hedge, then daffodils, while a subtle balm blunts the edge of the wind and a pale green 94 95

presence creeps along the black branches over the garden walls. Here, it was different. The snow lay everywhere in February, and the Hudson ferries hooted mournfully in the river fogs. The snow lay everywhere in March and the wind blew down the bitter canyons. The snow lay everywhere, and a drawn breath of air was a chill bronze in the throat, the first days of April. Then thunderstorms marched across the city, systematically bombarding it as they passed. One caught me tramping down Lexington Avenue and for an hour I sheltered in a doorway while the rock core of earth shook, the explosions crashed and boomed among the skyscrapers and the sky darkened at noon. For an hour I watched lightning flashes sear the silvered narwhal's horn of the Chrysler Building, and rain poured down like a monsoon in Burma. Three days later forsythia flamed in every lot and yard and the temperature was 75 degrees! Had I known better, I would have rushed out into the streets crying
Rejoice, today is spring!
But I did not know. I waited cautiously for the daffodil, the narcissus, the sight of a chaffinch collecting twigs and grass. Then the continuing sun hit me on the back of the head, the arsonists fed more flame into the blossoms all over the land, and it was summer.

Early one Sunday morning I took the subway up to Van Cortlandt Park and walked on the grass in the wet wind. I wished Barbara were here so that we could discuss the situation and decide what to do, for a decision had to be made soon now. Well, she was not; I was alone, and only I knew the 'feel' of New York and America, and the possibilities for our future here. So I must make the decisions by myself. First, the Himalayas, I thought I must give up that idea for the time being. It was not going to succeed without my putting more time and money than I could afford into it, and probably not even then. Conditions in the Indian sub-continent where the partition massacres still reverberated in the world press, and warlike bitterness increased between Pakistan and India, did not make it easy for me to persuade people that the areas where I intended to go stood in no danger of riots or religious disturbances. Nor could I, in my picayune one-man campaign, overcome the effects of the massive general ignorance, exemplified by the travel agent who asked whether the Himalayas were north or south of Miami. The travel agents, as a body, knew less about travel than about selling. If they did not go out on a limb to help me sell my trip, it was because they saw at once that it was unsaleable. Only a few of them may have been able to appreciate the extraordinary nature of the experience which I was offering, but all of them knew that people with the desire for such experience seldom had the means, and those with the means seldom had the desire.

So I must turn to something else. One man wanted me to go gem-hunting for him in Nepal. Another had asked me to join him in his travel agency. I did not like either idea very much, but my family were due to move in six weeks time. Should I go back to England? Stay here? Move on to Canada, and start again there, without the incubi of the Himalayan Holidays, The Bra, and my status here as a time-limited tourist?

Walking along the edge of the grass while the cars whizzed by on Sunday excursions to the country, I knew that I did not want to leave New York at this time. The city had excitement and wonder, and my opportunity was there somewhere. I had heard it scratching behind the wainscot in a hundred interviews, in the reading of a hundred newspapers. Nothing I knew about Canada led me to suppose that it could offer as much — to me — as New York. What was there might be easier to get at, and I would certainly be more generally accepted, but
this
was the face that launch'd the thousand ships...

City of the world (for all races are here,

All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)

City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides!

City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede,

whirling in and out with eddies of foam!

City of wharves and stores — city of tall façades of marble and iron!

Proud and passionate city — mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!

It was here I must stay, and hunt, and search, and never give up.

I went happily back to the fleapit, and, a day or two later, out to lunch with a reporter from the
New Yorker.
Word of the English colonel hawking his unlikely expedition about the city had reached the topless towers on West 45th Street, and someone Up There thought I might make a good piece for the Talk of the Town. I knew about the
New Yorker
because I had been taking it since 1937, and I was much pleased. If my Himalayan Holidays were to get this sort of publicity, perhaps they would succeed after all.

Rex Lardner met me at the Longchamps restaurant under the Empire State Building, and bought me a nice lunch, including two or perhaps three dry Martinis. The extra-dry martini, New York style, had been unknown to me before this year, but I had learned it was the
only
cocktail for the true New Yorker, and had been studying the technique of making them. These at the Longchamps were good — better than I knew, perhaps — for they loosened my tongue and gave it wings. The Himalayan Holidays were disposed of in short order, then Lardner drew me out on The Bra, my other plans and past history, and unobtrusively made notes. On my third, or perhaps fourth martini, I became fluent about Hollywood's India and Hollywood's England — the perpetual stunning heat of the one, the perpetual impenetrable fog of the other; the rajahs, snake charmers, sahibs, and chota pegs; the country palaces, dukes, cockneys and yokels — compared with the realities. My wit soared. Lardner listened, laughed, forgot his notes. Boy, was I brilliant!

Over coffee, Lardner said that he found my remarks quite funny. My euphoria began to evaporate. Then he said, 'I think, if you cared to write up what you've been saying, you might be able to sell it.'

'Really?' I asked, my spirits rising again.

'One can't tell,' he said. 'But if you have nothing else to do, it's worth trying.'

I had nothing else to do, as Lardner well knew. I returned to the lonely hotel room, pushed the Holidays file and The Bra into the bottom of the
yakdan
which was my office (a
yakdan
is a box, covered with red leather, designed to carry loads on a yak), and began to draft the article.