Parrot and Olivier in America (48 page)

In any case, the Comtesse de Garmont had somehow perceived her son's matrimonial intentions. As a result the game had reached a dangerous stage and I was delivered, quite unprepared, to that place above the cataract where life and death decisions must be made. There might still be time to catch a branch, but did I wish it?

Finding myself suffering considerable emotions I turned to stack the fire which had, as always at Old Farm, been neglected by the servants. The great logs being almost exhausted and the kindling in poor supply, I had excuse to make a considerable task of it but finally I must reveal my own eyes to my servant. He had folded his hands in front of his apron and I observed the crescents of red and yellow paint beneath his fingernails. Being irritated by these marks of absence, I set to get him back on track, to now take the dictation he had so much avoided.

"Now?" he inquired.

"Now," I ordered.

But even as I spoke, my mind was in another place. This tactic of the comtesse had forced me to confront myself. I loved Amelia Godefroy with all my heart. I would die rather than be parted from her--but she would be destroyed by noble France. I had been, so many evenings, drunk on the possibility of America, but was I in love with America or Amelia? In this--dear wild wonderful girl--she did not help me. For while I might wax rhapsodic about the simple direct democracy of a town meeting, it was Amelia who took furious issue with President Jackson and his treatment of the Indians. It was she who, affecting not to disturb my concentration, slipped papers beneath my library door. Had I answered these written pleas I would have had my nation prevent Jackson's scheme to have all previous treaties with the Indians denied. I would also have departed for South Carolina that very morning. There I would learn what it was to spend all one's life, from first breath to last, in chains.

Was this what I wished to marry?

How could you not love the woman who wrote these lines? But if I married her, I would join the Union in every sense. Then would not Jackson's crimes be mine as well?

In my own conversations with my beloved, all was turbulence, one moment tender kisses and the next the president was a tyrant and the next he was a brave and honest man who would remove the people's gold from the First United States Bank where it was being used to oppose the people's will.

My heart and mind were in turmoil, yet I could not cease my labor. I ignored the bell to lunch and my
secretaire
, although clearly agitated, did not demand his afternoon in Wethersfield. It was suppertime, and both our stomachs in chorus, when I bade him set the quill aside.

He begged permission to light a pipe--a new habit--and when he had his long legs backed hard against the fire, he announced that he must now travel to New York and could not be sure of his return.

I could not lose him now.

The job of work I had begun in America had its roots in the flinty soil of penal servitude. Had that not been my public intention, to come to Wethersfield to study the administration of the prison? But once here the prison seemed a minor task and what was growing in Connecticut was a second undertaking, and no matter what its author's lacks, his foreign ignorances, his inevitable confusions, I had reason to believe my study of America would stand for many years to come. It would act as map and compass to my countrymen as they negotiated the violent onset of democracy. What business was more important than this? Not Mr. Parrot's, certainly.

As to the engraving he showed me, I never saw so gaudy a thing and I was reminded of the painting of Thomas Cole--a tedious man--whose autumn landscape had already brought an alarming garishness to Mr. Godefroy's foyer. The colors of the American autumn are, in all their splendor, the most magical thing you ever saw, but they are of a very raw and independent nature, wild beasts in their way, creatures who will not permit themselves to be made tame in art. Indoors they are rude and gaudy--one wishes they had left their accordion and muddy boots outside--and that was the vulgar nature of this singular engraving that poor John Larrit, who had already suffered very much in his long life, now staked all his store on. It was nothing much more than a circus bird but he stood before me full of hope, like a boy in a fairy story, off to make his fortune in the world.

I had grown very fond of him and was exceedingly sad to witness his conceit.

III

"YOU HAVE LOST YOUR WIFE," Amelia said, flicking snow into my face. "It is weeks ago he left and you have been in mourning ever since."

"He is my servant, not my wife," I said, although of course I understood the joke. Also it was very true--he had ended up a very useful chap.

"Only a servant?" she said. "Then that's easily fixed. We'll get a new one."

She stooped to pick a small gray rock from the white crisp blanket at our feet.

"Your lordship's rock," said she, smiling to reveal that charming slender shadow between her two top teeth. Why was this apparent defect so entrancing?

"Shall I warm it for you, sir?" she asked, and proceeded to blow on the rock and hold it under her arm and I thought that tiny gap was really the master stroke in all her face, although how this absence could create such a sense of character, of liveliness, of blessed mischief was beyond my understanding. She was a Rembrandt not a Hals.

We had come to the long ridge of Gibson's Hill, named for a settler of living memory, and all of Old Farm was spread before me like a gift I might unwrap if so I chose, the snow-dusted onion fields, the cow pastures and woods, the idealistic cabins with their porches and, beyond these steep white roofs, the crooked elbow of the Connecticut River beside which I had wandered, in ignorance and love, not daring hope this day be granted me.

My darling was clad in sturdy tall boots and a long native bearskin coat, but on her head she wore the bright red bonnet she had adopted when the locals were still hunting deer. This framed a face that, in all its Greek perfection, recalled the Hygeia which stood on my father's desk, its secret life hidden behind her pale pink mouth which, applied with winter oil against the cold, glistened like those lips which made Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun such a favorite with Marie Antoinette.

"He has gone on to other things," she said. "You should be happy."

How could one not be content with this extraordinary beauty, this grand sweep of life and all the centuries that might be lived within the landscape now considered?

"Your Larrit," she said, "he will make a fortune, you will see."

"If I am sad it is not because I have lost a servant."

"Dear Olly," she said. "Don't be ashamed to miss him. I have observed the pair of you together. It is really rather sweet. You are a very noble noble, dear."

My beloved annoyed me, I admit it. Yet so it is between couples of the deepest and most enduring affections.

"He is my servant," I said. "The person I grieve for is my confessor."

Then, all at once, the rock was a rock, and all frivolity was cast off in the snow, and she had taken hold of both my hands and was insisting I acknowledge the grief I had hidden from her all that time.

Why I should keep this secret from she who would console me, I cannot exactly know, except I had spent the weeks in a state of chronic loneliness that was oftentimes unbearable. When I smelled the sweet Virginia tobacco on Mr. Godefroy's coat, I was reminded, not of American things, not of the nullifiers of South Carolina and the sin of slavery, but of Bebe whose bristly cheek had so often brushed against mine, a caress made more intense by its almost painful roughness on my pale child's skin. How the strong must love the weak, I thought, that he cared for me like a squawking sparrow in a nest. He ran that I must learn to follow, swam that I might not drown.

He was gone, his body in the soil of France, leaving the world entire a foreign place.

Side by side we tramped the ten miles to Wethersfield, and thence another three miles to see a small red schoolhouse where my beloved sometimes came to teach the farmers' children. Amelia had been, from our first encounter, a believer in the principle of education in democracy. On this point we argued freely, with curiosity and humor, but I could never see, and would never see, not if I lived to be one hundred, what use she found in the English novels she made these rural children read. For what can a society learn from Jane Austen except that it is a very nice thing to become married? To my shame, I kept this opinion to myself, but always with the intention that we would discuss the matter properly when we were nicely settled with each other.

The road from the school led up a considerable hill where a great amount of snow had accumulated, calf-high in places. I was more than a little excited by her splendid strength, her pink cheeks, her shining smile, the dear comic faces she made when the snow, on occasion, fell inside her boots.

There was a place below the crest where the downhill coaches pulled politely aside so as not to spoil the momentum of the uphill traffic laboring the last quarter mile to the crest. On a shelf of dark rock we caught our breath and contemplated that plain white sheet on which a glorious history might be writ, perhaps by those very two who stood there now, young, childless, their futures still unimagined.

She said, "It is not good for you, to be cooped up in this way."

"Oh, I am happy enough."

"You are very sad, my dearest, as you just confessed."

"That will pass," I said, wondering if that miracle might not have been achieved already.

"You have no one of your own kind to talk to."

"I have you."

In response she surprised me, as she had done on other occasions, briefly--mischievously--brushing, as if by accident, that item of anatomy which proved me not her kind. And having done that, the imp set off walking up the hill. I followed her in some confusion, knowing that I must amend my chapter on the manners of Americans.

"You are a devil," I said, kissing her.

"I might become an angel, in God's eyes."

And thus continued our conversation on the subject of matrimony. It was always present, and never quite declared. Yet when she said
angel
I pictured, as she intended, Amelia Godefroy dressed in white before an altar. Thus our language was functional enough.

Hand in hand, we walked downhill, with the smoke of Old Farm rising from behind a stand of poplar. We spoke not of devils or angels but about Bebe and my peculiar childhood and she persuaded me to once again describe for her the Seine, the orchard, the
Bottom Hundred
, my mother's house in the rue Saint-Dominique.

In attempting to conjure all this I was constantly aware of the weakness of my powers of observation, and yet I caused her to see
something
, see it vividly, and I was moved and comforted by her excitement.

She said, "One day I will walk through the
Bottom Hundred
with you."

"It is a world away."

"Then we will travel worlds away together," she said. "And I will spend years and years seeing everything you have seen, with your eyes, my eyes too. I will walk across the Pont-Neuf, sit at a cafe in the rue du Temple, hear your mother tell me how you were when you were a child. I cannot imagine how it will be, but very old, and very cultured."

"Oh my darling, you would not wish that."

"But I would. Why should we not live in France?"

Here, at this moment when I might have been most considerably alarmed, I was overjoyed. My heart beat fast. I embraced her, held her slender graceful form inside the furry feathers of her coat, pressed myself shamelessly against her. "Do you propose to me, my wench?"

"A hundred times already," she said, and inside the cave of her mouth it was very warm and soft.

"But I am the one who must propose to you. Or is that one more custom you Americans have abandoned?"

"It is a fine custom," she said, and what a smile, what a mixture of delicacy and mischief, some hint of Caravaggio in her Bacchus cheeks.

"But should I not ask your father?"

"Indeed," she said. "But you must ask my permission to ask his."

And so it was agreed, and all my grief smothered by this, this joy that she and I could think of nothing better than to walk in the woods by the Seine and together we would botanize and I would show her all the algae, lichens, fungi, mosses and ferns Bebe had had me classify, not because they were most beautiful or rare but because Linnaeus' plant taxonomy was based solely on the number and arrangement of the reproductive organs.

The dear tender priest chose for my attention those parts of God's creation with no obvious sex organs, the class Cryptogamia, the only "plants," as I was to learn years later, "with a hidden marriage." It was not any sense of propriety that kept me from relating this to Amelia, but rather the fast rush of our conversation, for now a certain door had been opened between us, and she confessed that she nightly dreamed of France, of its soft green grasses, the gentle landscape made by centuries of cultivation.

"In my sleep everyone is speaking French," she said.

It was then, before we reached the long curving drive into Old Farm, that I imagined my mother as she heard my beloved's way of speaking. I saw the glitter in her eye, the slight lift of her upper lip. As we opened the wide gate to the property, I pinched my mother's arm and watched her outraged eyes.

IV

EARLY ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING, complaining that his office fireplace was choking him, Mr. Godefroy brought his trays and folders into the library.

Godefroy was a big man and of athletic frame, and although you would never think him anything less than cultured, there was a comic aspect to his occupation of a desk--his big legs squashed in underneath that walnut octagon. Physically, he was better suited to leading his men in raising a barn or pulling down a bull.

Among the chores pressing him that day I can recall a letter to his friend Biddle at the First Bank of the United States, new proofs of a treatise on workers' housing, the latest shot in a sometimes contentious exchange with the manufacturer of the corn shucker, and the response he must make to a commissioner's inquiry into the justice of various punishments meted out at Wethersfield Prison. This last item appeared in no way ominous, and in truth I paid it very little attention. I was hard at work on the bigger subject of America, and if my present chapter owed something to my host, it was not something I had discussed with him. "Among the small number of men who are engaged in literary works in the United States, the majority are English, if not in origin then in style. Thus they transplant into the democracy ideas and literary uses which are current in the aristocratic nation they take as their model." I was, even as I wrote, aware of the scratching of his quill as he endeavored to persuade the manufacturer, by dint of both argument and illustration, of the change he wished made.