Theophilus North (35 page)

“Buon giorno, Mino.”

“Buon giorno, professore.”

“Mino, I'm not going to ask you if you kept your promise to invite a girl to lunch yesterday. I don't want to hear a word about it. From now on that's your business. What shall we talk about today?”

He was smiling with a more than usual air of “a man who knows where he's going” and I was answered. Young people are eager to be made to talk about themselves and to hear themselves discussed, but there is a limit—as they approach twenty—beyond which they shrink from such talk. Their interest in themselves becomes all inward. So I asked, “What shall we talk about today?”

“
Professore
, will you tell me what a college education gives a man?”

I spoke of the value of being required to devote yourself to subjects that at first seem foreign to your interests; of the value of being thrown among young men and young women of your own age, many of whom are as eager as you are to get the best of it; of the possibility—it's only luck—of being brought into contact with born teachers, even with great teachers. I reminded him of Dante's request to his guide Virgil. “Give me the food for which you have already given me the appetite.”

He was looking at me with urgent intensity. “Do you think I should go to college?”

“I'm not ready to answer that question. You are a very remarkable young man, Mino. It is very possible that you have outgrown what an American university could give you. You have the appetite and you know where to find the food. You have triumphed over one handicap and the handicap was spur to the triumph. It may well be that you will triumph over this other handicap—the lack of a formal higher education.”

He lowered his voice and asked, “What do you think I lack most?”

I laughed and rose to go. “Mino, centuries ago a king in one of the countries near Greece had a daughter he loved very much. She seemed to be wasting away with some mysterious illness. So the old man journeyed to the great oracle at Delphi, bringing rich gifts, and asked the sibyl, ‘What can I do to make my daughter well?' And the sibyl chewed the bay leaves and went into a trance and replied in verse, ‘Teach her mathematics and music.' Well, you have the mathematics all right, but I miss in you that music.”

“Music?”

“Oh, I don't mean what we call music. I mean the whole vast realm that's represented by the Muses. You have your Dante—but the
Divina Commedia
and the
Aeneid
are the only works that I've seen here that are inspired by the Muses.”

He smiled at me, almost mischievously. “Wasn't Urania the Muse of astronomy?”

“Oh, yes. I forgot her; but I stick to my point.”

He was silent a moment. “What do they do for us?”

I said briskly, “A school of the sympathies, of the emotions and passions, and of self-knowledge. Think it over. Mino, I can't come next Sunday morning, but I'd like to be here the Sunday after that.
Ave atque vale!
” At the door I turned and asked, “By the way, do Agnese's son and Rachele's Linda come to call on you here?”

“They come and see Rosa and my mother, but they don't come to see me.”

“Do you know much about the death of Agnese's husband?”

“He was drowned at sea. That's all I know.”

He was blushing. I guessed that he had invited Agnese to lunch on the day before. I waved my hand airily and said, “Cultivate the Muses! You are an Italian from Magna Graecia—you have probably lots of Greek blood in you also. Cultivate the Muses!”

In my Journal, from which I am refreshing my memory of these encounters, I find that I was assembling a “portrait” of Mino, as of so many others in these pages. I come upon a hastily written notation: “Mino's handicap involves restrictions I had not foreseen. Not only is he aware that people do not talk to him ‘naturally,' he has never received visits from the young children of his sister's two best friends, and has probably not even seen them. The implication is that the children would be affected ‘morbidly' by his accident. That consideration would not have arisen in Italy where the disfigured, the scrofulous, and the maimed are visible daily in the market-place—generally as beggars. Moreover, Mino seems not to have been told those details of Warrant Officer O'Brien's death that had so distressed the Hilary Joneses and that were rendering life all but unendurable to his widow. In America the tragic background of life is hidden in cupboards, even from those who have come most starkly face to face with it. Should I some day point this out to Mino?”

On the following Sunday afternoon I called on Linda and her parents, carrying a small old-fashioned bouquet nestling in a lace-paper frill. Hilary, reunited with his wife, had become family-proud, which is always an engaging thing to see. Rachele's family had come from the north of Italy, from the industrial region near Turin where girls of the working classes are brought up to enter the widening field of office workers and, when possible, to become schoolteachers. The little apartment was spotless and serious. Linda was still convalescent and a little wan, but delighted to receive company at tea. I was surprised to see what used to be called a “cottage piano” or a “yacht piano,” lacking an octave at the upper range and an octave in the bass.

“Do you play, Rachele?”

She let her husband answer. “She plays very well. She's very popular at the boys' clubs' rallies. She sings too.”

“Usually on Sunday afternoon Agnese drops in with her Johnny. You don't mind, do you?” asked Rachele.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I liked the Avonzino twins at once. Will you and Agnese sing for me?”

“We do sing duets. We each take two lessons a month from Maestro del Valle and he made us promise to sing every time anyone seriously asks us to. Are you serious, Theophilus?”

“Am I!”

“Then you'll hear four of us. Our children have heard us practice so often at home that they know the music and sing with us. First we'll sing alone, then we'll sing again and they'll join in. Please act as though it were a perfectly natural thing. We don't want them to become self-conscious about it.”

Presently Agnese arrived with Johnny O'Brien, also almost four. I'm sure Johnny was a firehouse of energy at home, but like most fatherless small boys he was intimidated by two full-grown men. He sat wide-eyed by his mother. Agnese, apart from her vivacious sister, was subdued also. We talked about the lunch at the Scottish Tea Room and the glowing picture I had painted of Mino's future. I assured them it was true. Agnese asked who Bodo was and what he “did.” I told them. All girls like one surprise a day.

“Then it was shocking our talking about him as a dog.”

“Oh, Agnese! You could see how pleased he was.”

When we'd finished tea I asked the girls to sing to us. They exchanged a glance and Rachele went to the piano. Each mother turned to her child, put her finger to her lip and whispered, “Later.” They sang Mendelssohn's “Oh, That We Two Were Maying.” Mino should have heard that.

“Now we'll do it again.”

The mothers sang softly; the children sang unabashed. I glanced at Hilary. So this was what he almost lost for Diana Bell!

Agnese said, “For a bazaar at my church we learned some parts of Pergolesi's
Stabat Mater
.”

They sang two terzets of that; first alone, then with the children. Pergolesi should have heard that.

Newport is full of surprises. I was learning that perhaps the Ninth City is nearer to the Fifth—perhaps to the Second—than any of the others.

When we had taken our leave I walked to her house door with Agnese, hand in hand with Johnny.

“You have a beautiful voice, Agnese.”

“Thank you.”

“I think that Maestro del Valle must have ambitious plans for you.”

“He does. He has offered to give me regular lessons without fees. With my pension and my daily job I could pay for them, but I have no ambition.”

“No ambition,” I repeated, meditatively.

“Have you ever suffered terribly, Theophilus?”

“No.”

She murmured, “Johnny, music, and submission to the will of God . . . they . . . they hold me.”

I ventured a very rash remark, still meditatively. “The War left behind many hundreds of thousands of young widows.”

She answered quickly, “There are some aspects of my husband's death that I cannot talk about with anybody—not with Rosa or Rachele, not even with my mother or Filumena. Please, don't . . . say . . .”

“Look, Johnny, do you see what I see?”

“What?”

I pointed.

“A candy store?”

“Open on Sunday too! When I went to call on Linda I took her a present. I didn't know that you were going to be there. Come up to the window and see what you'd like.”

It was what used to be called a “notions” store. In one corner of the window were toys—model planes, boats, and automobiles.

Johnny began pointing, jumping up and down. “Look! Look, Mr. North! There's a submarine, my daddy's submarine. Can I have that?”

I turned to Agnese. She gave me a harrowed glance of appeal and shook her head. “Johnny,” I said, “today's Sunday. When I was a boy my father
never
let us buy toys on Sunday. Sunday we went to church, but no games and no toys.” So I marched in and bought some chocolates. When we reached the Avonzino home, he said goodbye nicely and went into the house.

Agnese stood with one hand on the swinging gate. She said, “I think you have urged Benjy—I mean, Mino—to ask me to lunch?”

“Before I ever knew that the Avonzino sisters existed, I urged him to bring any girl or girls he knew to the Scottish Tea Room. I then urged him to bring any girl, preferably a different girl in order to widen his acquaintance, on the following Saturday. He said no word to me about inviting you.”

“I have had to tell him that I cannot accept such invitations again. I admire Mino, as we all do; but weekly meetings in a public place like that are not suitable. . . . Theophilus, do not tell anyone what I am about to say: I am a very unhappy woman. I am not capable even of friendship. Everything is just play-acting. I shall be helped, I know”—and she pointed with forefinger from an otherwise motionless hand to the zenith—“but I must wait patiently for that.”

“Please go on play-acting for Johnny's sake. I don't mean by going to lunches with Mino, but by seeing some of us in groups from time to time. I think Bodo is planning a kind of picnic, but his car can hold only four and I know he wants to see Mino and yourself again. . . .” She did not raise her eyes from the ground. I waited; finally I added, “I do not know your intolerable burden, Agnese; but I do know that you do not wish it to be a shadow on Johnny's life forever.”

She looked at me, frightened; then said abruptly, “Thank you for walking home with us. Oh, yes, I am happy to meet Mino anywhere when there are others in the company.” She put out her hand. “Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Agnese.”

At seven o'clock I telephoned Bodo. You could always catch him dressing for some dinner party.

“Grüss Gott, Herr Baron.”

“Grüss Gott in Ewigkeit.”

“What time is your dinner engagement tonight?”

“Eight-fifteen. Why?”

“When could I meet you in the Muenchinger-King bar to lay a plan before you?”

“Is seven-thirty too soon?”

“See you then.”

Diplomats are punctual. Bodo was wearing what we used to call in college his “glad rags.” He was dining at the Naval War College with some visiting “brass,” admirals of all nations—decorations (known to the lower ranks as “fruit salad”) and everything. Quite a sight!

“What's your plan, old man?” he asked with happy expectation.

“Bodo, something very serious this time. I must talk fast. Do you know the Ugolino passage in Dante?”

“Naturally!”

“You remember Agnese? Her husband was lost in a submarine at sea.” I told him the little I knew. “Maybe the men died of suffocation within a few days; maybe they lived on for a week without food. The boat was finally liberated from the ice. Do you suppose the Navy Department informed the widows and parents of the men of what they may have found?”

He thought a minute. “If it was appalling, I don't think they did.”

“The possibilities haunt Agnese. They are robbing her of the will to live. She does not suspect that I know what is haunting her.”

“Gott hilf uns!”

“She tells me that she is filled with thoughts that she cannot tell her sister, her best friends, or even her mother. When people say a thing like that it means that they are longing to tell them to someone. Mino has asked her to lunch several times since our party at the Scottish Tea Room. She tells me she cannot accept any more invitations from him
alone
. Don't you think Mino a fine fellow?”

“I certainly do.”

“I want to give a sunset picnic at Brenton's Point next Sunday. Are you free to come between five and eight?”

“I am. It is one of my last days in Newport. They're giving a reception for me at nine-thirty. I can make it.”

“I shall provide the champagne, the sandwiches, and the dessert. Will you, as a Knight of the Two-Headed Eagle, come with us and lend us your car? You and Agnese and Mino will sit in the front seat and I will sit in the rumble seat with the ice-bucket and the provisions. I don't want to appear to be host. Will you be the ostensible host?”

“No! For shame! I shall
be
the host. Now I too must talk fast. In my guest house there are always bottles of champagne in the ice-box. I shall bring along a little portable kitchen with a hot dish. Any Swiss can open a hotel with one day's notice; we Austrians can do it in a week. If it's raining or cold we can go to my guest house. You have supplied the idea—that's quite enough from you.—Now tell me your plan. What is the idea?”