Parrot and Olivier in America (47 page)

I asked him what endeavors and he answered that his proposition was to leave the house when the family sat down to lunch and return in time for supper. I thought, Would not even an American democrat be offended by this presumption? He said he would rise at four each morning and, being absent for the hours he had decided, work until nine at night. He invited me to do the arithmetic although there was no need for he had already done the calculation. It was a bargain for me.

"Indeed," I said.

He could not have been deaf to my tone, but he stared at me directly and I thought, He has something "on me" certainly.

I had confessed everything. If he had forgotten what I told him in my madness on the steamer, I had reminded him in writing. Of course the scoundrel imagines he can stare at me like that and then demand to be provided with a horse for some endeavor he will not name.

"Wait," he cried, seeing the expression on my face. "This is all to your advantage." He then explained that the horse would allow him to spend more of his time laboring in the library and a great deal less along the road to Wethersfield.

His
time? This was a very modern concept he had learned. I was far too angry to ask him what business he might have in Wethersfield. I said I would talk to Mr. Godefroy about the horse.

But he had already spoken to
Miss
Godefroy and she, without consulting his master as she might have, had been very happy to oblige him. In a democracy, it seemed, one could not go against a servant's will.

Thereafter John Larrit performed his duties as he had invented them for himself.

Sometime later, a week or so perhaps, it was reported that Mr. Godefroy's black mare had been seen in the shed adjoining Mrs. Dover's boardinghouse, and so poor Godefroy had a very urgent need to establish that the horse was not there on account of any business of his own, nor was he in unseemly congress with Mrs. Dover whose reputation, it was widely agreed, was not beyond reproach. Godefroy was very cool with me when giving me this news and I was very sorry to be the cause of upset for the man with whom I wished, one day, to form a close association. He left it to me to reprimand my servant, who naturally swore that he had no relationship with Mrs. Dover except to rent the shed from her, and he undertook to ensure that the shed door was always closed in future.

My good Amelia chanced upon this conversation which another of her sex might have thought judicious to leave alone, but as in other controversial matters, such as Christmas and her opinion of the educational qualifications of President Jackson, she surprised me. Taking up her usual chair by the library fireplace, she reached for her English novel and rested it upon her knee as if it were a Bible upon which she would make John Larrit swear.

"How was your time in Wethersfield?" she asked my man.

"Very good thanks miss."

"I suppose it was on a private matter that you ventured forth?"

"Yes miss."

"But you looked after our Molly."

"Next time I will have a feed bag for her."

"She has a stable, I heard."

"A shed. I rented it, miss."

"Did you meet the landlady at all?"

"A moment."

"They say she is handsome."

"Yes, very."

"It would not be the first time she gave a stranger shelter."

"Will that be all sir?" he asked me, coloring.

"Yes," I said. "Please leave us."

When he had gone Amelia said, "He looks at you in such a cheeky way, don't you think? What have you just given him permission for?"

I said I had given no permission, and if anyone had been permissive it was she who gave him the horse.

She put aside her book and stood as if to leave. "My father thinks Larrit has smuggled his wife to Wethersfield."

And then, the minx, she kissed me, and held my hands, high, so they would almost touch her breasts.

Said she, "It must be very nice to have a wife," referring frankly to those pleasures which she had hitherto invited but denied.

"Indeed," I said, for what else could I say? She had such a bright engaged intelligence, and such beauty, that one would think her, in France, to be an aristocrat, a woman like Mme de Stael, although not burdened with her flirtatious reputation. Here in Wethersfield, she could also be seen carrying feed for her chickens, not playing the farm girl but running a considerable business of her own. She would not marry a man who did not love her and a man who loved her could only make that clear by his proposal. There was no question in my mind that I must, sooner rather than later, overcome my sense of duty to my mother. I must eliminate all those ancient lines that led me to this point, sever that root to the Clarels and Barfleurs, everything by which I secured my place on earth, my hope for glory. And yet of course my past in France was not secure at all, nor could my future be when, even now, my own kind was once again regarded an enemy of the state. If this mortal danger was a privilege of rank, why should I not cast it from me?

Was not the American democracy preferable? Was not the French turmoil the result only of its inevitable path toward democracy, a treacherous confluence where the river of nobility met the ocean of equality? Was it not better to inhabit the future than the past? And if the future appeared half-made and raw, was it not also peacefully free of politics and parties? In America there was nothing like our schisms, our ancient blood-drenched hatreds. I could discover no discord here more serious than the manufacturing states bickering with the agrarian about a tariff.

Life in rural Wethersfield was never without amusement. For instance, I soon discovered why the horse was kept in Mrs. Dover's shed. Larrit had become engaged in a business with the printer Mr. Cloverdale who housed his presses in the lane behind the widow. Soon it was clear to everyone that Mr. Godefroy had no relationship with Mrs. Dover. But then the entire village was alarmed to learn that my servant was demanding Cloverdale order in paper of an unheard of and expensive kind. No one had seen this paper, let alone felt its weight, but its price so offended something in Cloverdale's Protestant soul that he must take his anxieties to a town meeting (of which it was judged better that I be left in ignorance). Here at the meeting house there appeared many citizens who apparently feared a counterfeit was to be committed, a type of fraud such as had become common recently.

No one came to me as they should have. As a result my servant was called before the village in the middle of the afternoon. There he was asked what he wished this expensive paper for.

He laughed at them outright, asking them what did they imagine he would do?

They did not like to say.

Thus, in the same church in which I had been so moved by the marvels of democracy, the servant publicly quizzed the printer who was soon revealed to be not very much of a printer at all, and the town was shocked to hear the questions he could not answer, and alarmed to learn these failures would have disqualified him from his trade in London or even Hartford. As for the expensive paper, the servant had already fetched it himself from Boston and used it before the printer's very nose.

He who is sometimes called the Parrot then left the meeting and returned with a colored etching of a bird he was not prepared to name, allowing only that it had been seen in the lands of Texas, and although it was commonly agreed to be very like a spoonbill parrot, its colorings were another matter, being carmine at its head and sulfur blue at its tail, and as luminous as a phoenix or some beauty in a myth. The exhibition of this etching in the meeting house produced a silence of such length and intensity that even the most prayerful would swear it had been never equaled in the long religious past. I am sorry to have missed it, this proof that God had blessed America with such a wonder. The bird itself must have seemed a miracle, a breathless holy sight, and it is for this reason, perhaps, that Wethersfield soon found itself without a printer and there was no newspaper until after Independence Day.

At this period I was engaged in writing the difficult chapters about the American judicial system, no simple matter for a French lawyer. I was daily perturbed by my servant whom I found continually staring at me, as if there were something he could tell me if he wished, but need not if he did not wish. Many is the time I found him with his lips already parted, before he seemed to change his mind.

This came to a head on an afternoon turned suddenly dark with a snowstorm, and the rest of the family out-of-doors dealing with this unexpected circumstance.

I looked up from my chores and found again that clear direct stare.

"Yes, sir," said I, and laid my notes down. I thought, I will give the chap his notice. I am sick of him.

"Sir," said he, and rose.

I thought, Good grief, the impudence.

"What is it that you wish to say? You may say it. Be done with it and go."

He hesitated.

"Continue."

"The abbe has passed away."

I slapped the rascal's face for such a filthy lie.

II

IN ARISTOCRATIC NATIONS, it is not unusual to find, in the service of the great lords, servants of noble and energetic character who do not feel the status they suffer, who obey their master's will with no fear of arousing his anger.

In these circumstances it would be unthinkable for the one to strike the other.

In a democracy, however, both parties know that the servant may at any moment
become
the master and that he has the ambition to do so; the servant is, therefore, in both parties' understandings, no different from the master. But even this unstable promise of equality will not serve as an excuse for striking Larrit as I did.

Indeed, one does not require the intelligence of Machiavelli to recognize it as unwise to invite combat with an Englishman of his type, orphaned, abandoned, therefore forced to inhabit close quarters with the most depraved type of creature, a servant through necessity although having the misfortune to imagine himself called to higher things, who must become, inevitably, a resentful character and whose body, in the singular case of the man before me, will carry the clear marks not only of the wind and sun but the barroom brawl and perhaps--unseen--the lash. Even his distinctive nose, quite handsome in its way, may not have been the one his parents gave him. In short, John Larrit was the sort of narrow-eyed and haughty character on whose account one might wisely cross the road.

I had seen his eyes blaze, most memorably aboard the
Havre
, where I twice had reason to fear he would kill me in my bunk, but now I observed--after a first highlight of anger--not hostility or belligerence but an awful sort of hurt. Silently, stolidly, he considered me, and I could actually
see
him thinking, of what, I could not say, but the thoughts themselves were as unarguable as clouds crossing a pale green sky, drifting, changing form, blocking out the sun from time to time. Before this uncanny spectacle I stood, a master, yes, but also a child, waiting to be taught the consequence of my savagery.

"You loved him then," he said at last.

"Who told you this?"

"You sir. You could not have made your point more forcefully."

So, he shamed me. I apologized to him from my heart.

"Well, sir," said he, "a man must do something when his father dies. If he does not, he will feel the pain forever."

"He was not my father."

"But there is no doubt he was worthy of the blow."

I thought, What is this to him? Was it a trick of light that his eyes appeared so moist? "Who gave you this bad news?" I demanded.

"It comes from France"--and he gave full pause before admitting that which I might not have known myself--"from your mother."

My mother, I thought. My mother. My mother who loved me so intensely, who could never hold me very long but could never let me go, my mother whom I pinched because I could not share her with the world.

I said, "Does it not seem strange that my
mother
should confide this awful news to you? Has she ever
noticed
you? Why would she not tell me?"

"In any case, her request was of a slightly different nature."

"How different? What exactly do you mean?"

But he was like a horse, shaking his head at the approach of the bridle. "To reveal that is to break a bond."

"But you and I--do we not have a bond?"

He touched his reddened cheek, waiting a discreet moment before glancing at his fingertips. "Call a spade a spade," he said. "She wants you home."

"And I should sail to France to stand by a grave? It makes no sense. My mother would never give this news as an enticement to return. If my old confessor was dying, that would be something else, but I would not cross the world to lay my hand against a stone."

"There you are then. That's it."

"What? You mean he is yet alive?"

"Your parent might have preferred I suggested that."

"Damn these riddles," I cried, but he had his sense of honor and it made him stand excessive straight. "Do you intend now to raise my confessor from the earth?"

"On my honor, he has passed away."

I thought, God save me from the scrupulousness of servants. She wants me home, of course. I thought, She would say anything that served her ends. She has heard I have been sporting. But how could she have heard?

"Were you sent along to spy on me?" I demanded.

His eyes hardened.

"Not you? Then who has been reporting to her?"

This question would never be answered satisfactorily, although for several years I suspected Mr. Peek whose daughters I had unintentionally insulted. He had been recently in France and having, as he was pleased to tell me, "gotten myself about," may have been the source. But this really made no sense for my mother would never have received an American of his type. Most likely, I had betrayed myself with my dissembling letters. My mother knew my heart was easily touched. She knew me judgmental but also passionate, my senses readily excited. If I had only had the wit to
admire
an American woman or two, if I had admitted a single intellect, a melodious voice or two, she may not have so clearly understood the love that I was hiding. As the Parrot coarsely observed when describing her intuition, "Your mother sniffed the fillies in the air."