Set This House on Fire (49 page)

“(Later—much. After mid-night). Quiet now. Only the mosquitoes, & a beacon flashing out among the islands and what looks over to the East like distant sheet lightning a thunder storm out of Italy or somewhere. Its so quiet I can hear my watch ticking. Should keep this carnet with some degree of consistency. Funny how sometime this evening for the first time since I was a boy I remembered what old Uncle said to me once—which was if somethings eating you, if you cant seem to get straightened out about a thing, then go out in the woods and chop down a tree. Which is fine I thought as long as your still a boy in a state of cleanliness & grace & innocence, before that time when suddenly you are a man, at 30, with no tree to cut down in the desert & no axe or hatchet for the cutting even if there was a single bleeding tree. Which in turn reminded me of when I came to N.Y. after the war all full of piss & vinegar & ready to tear out my guts or die or anything for art—an un-educated Carolina clod-hopper with the lint still in his hair & that in spite of four years marine corps etc., & then after all the sweat & toil it gradually dawning that no one gave a god dam. That jewish boy too—Dorman? Dorfman?—standing in the rain on 14th street with his hair prickled out & paint all over his hands & murder in his eye shouting—I want nothing, all I want to do is to give of myself & the swine are too blind to even see much less receive, they will go un-recorded & they deserve it. They are a race of blind ciphers, he shouted & three days later they found him in his hole in the wall hanging from the gas meter. I dont know maybe the paralysis began way back there even. What has happened I dont know. Maybe they deserve us and we deserve them & the guilt & the blame is split right down the middle. Sleepy now. I risked a ‘marc’ grape tasting, after supper and didnt seem to hurt any or lead me on so maybe Im getting better & some day will be able to shore up my foundations if not for my own glory then for the sake of those gentler & sweeter & dearer who have already come after. So tomorrow or the next day Ill tell Poppy that we are going on to Italy where the earth is milk & honey & well load down some slow train with fat legged babies & orange peels & melted chocolate & rubber dollies and off well go again hanging from all the windows, saying goodby France, adieu beau pays, goodby beautiful land… .”

Florence, with its splendor that hurt and intimidated the eye, was too beautiful to stay in long. By the middle of September, Cass and company were living in Rome in a sun-shy apartment—which might have its replica in Brooklyn—on the Via Andrea Doria not far from the western limits of the city and within easy hiking distance, for Poppy, of the Vatican, which loomed over her consciousness as never Mecca did to the most worshipful Mussulman. Cass, walking the shaky tightrope of respectability, blew hot and cold—alternating hosannas for his new-found health with black moods of dejection whose origins he could not determine.

In Rome, one thing that baffled and enraged Cass more than anything else about the curious steeplechase that went on inside his skull was that no matter how long and hard he tried, no matter in what clever combination he placed his bets, he seemed destined forever to lose. When, for instance, by force of determination, or out of desperation or whatever, he made himself play safe and went on the wagon—or climbed halfway up, at least—and in a dozen other ways became a good family man, striving for the sunny ideal of
mens sana,
etc., removing himself from the seductive world of the night and from erotic daydreams and sour semi-suicidal moods, brushing his teeth twice a day and polishing his shoes and cleansing his breath with Listerine—when he did all this there were indeed manifest benefits and blessings, the most important one being simply that he began to function at least biologically as a human. The world of taste and sight and sound—all the sweet sensations Nature granted to the most uncomplicated mortal—were his once more; the air dripped sunlight, his nostrils quivered to long-forgotten odors, he felt he might live to a ripe old age. Yet this state in itself had its drastic shortcomings. Chief among them was the fact that the closer he approached this condition of palmy beatitude—the whole man operating with all his God-given faculties wide-open—the closer, paradoxically, he saw himself coming to be a nice young fellow with a blurred grin, a kind of emotional eunuch in whom that necessary part of the self which saw the world with passion and recklessness, and which had to be flayed and exacerbated and even maddened to retain its vision, had been cut away. Nor was this theory, upon reflection, merely a romantic one: the simple truth of the matter was that he had become dull. To be sure, he finally broke the listless spell which had seized him on the beach at Hyères, and he began for the first time in a year to work in earnest, but his work, he knew inescapably, was flat, stupid, sterile, with all the hollowness about it of the art school, the academy. His eyes were still “as bright as prisms,” his ears attuned to Rome’s rowdy music like singing reeds. And Leopold, his ulcer, was as quiet as a dormouse. Yet no doubt there is such a thing as too much well-being; with all of it he felt that, long before he reached any ripe old age, he might perish of health, good intentions, and dullness.

But if all this was true it was equally true that he couldn’t afford to repeat the months-long bender which had brought him so low in Paris. The memory of that last day and night still lingered in his mind like the faint echo of a nightmare, its moments of frozen beauty etched distinct and clear upon his memory yet adumbrated and made malign as if from the shadowy wings of spooks and goblins. The very thought of it gave him the shakes. Any way, he was bound to lose.

Sometimes, he thought, sometimes I think I should have stayed in New York. I could have become an abstract expressionist and I’d smoke pot, which is healthier than booze, and I’d be a bleeding Eisenhower success. It wouldn’t take anything out of me, and I’d be chic as hell, and I’d make a mint… .

But in winter Rome can be fabulous and grand. Although for a while the money problem was a headache, a bonanza came one day in the form of a rebate check on his G.I. insurance and with part of this he bought a second- (or third-) hand motorscooter and began to tool around the city, bescarfed and bemittened, spectacles smoking over, and with his beret flat around his ears to keep them from the Tiberous fog and damp. Americans were few at that time of the year, and he was happy. He saw everything the tourists saw, and more. When his eyes were weary with galleries and churches and ruins, with Domenichino and Guido Reni and Tiepolo and a lesser horde of his sainted forebears, he sat in cafés and bars, peering intently at Roman faces, listening to everything, and, with the rueful moderation of an elderly clergyman, sampling
fiaschi
of white lukewarm Roman wine. The Romans made him feel gregarious. In his brighter moods he would go to the jammed cafes of Traste-vere, where he argued with bartenders and talked to learned grandmothers with cats, with a withered old liar—a regular at one bar—who claimed to have stormed Porta San Pancrazio at the side of Garibaldi himself, and with a group of noisy young Communists who, each one, longed to go to America yet loved Cass because he loathed the place, and serenaded him with guitars. In this way he learned a more than passable Italian, which was no great feat, since long before in France he had discovered his effortless knack for tongues: it was, he thought sometimes with sadness, the only real gift he owned. Where had he read that a multilingual talent was prevalent among psychotics? This fact occasionally made him ill-at-ease. In his darker moods, while Poppy took Peggy to school or, in the housewifely way she had of dropping in on her favorite saints, shepherded the toddlers from church to church, Cass would stay home in the Canarsie apartment, smoking Sicilian cigars, groaning, and painting his dull pictures. Sometimes he listened to the phonograph, which had all but lost its voice. Sometimes he read Sophocles, who always bewildered and unnerved him and made moist the palms of his hands; more often than he cared to acknowledge he read
Oggi,
or rather—since he could not
read
the language—looked at the pictures, drooling, in the fashion of all but the most detached male humans, at Gina Lollobrigida and Silvana Mangano and Sophia Loren, and discovering new delight in photographs of Texas tornadoes and Illinois murders
(un triplice assas-sinio a Chicago)
with the bodies laid out beneath bloodstained sheets. Sometimes he slept all day. Sometimes he did nothing but sit and think—inert, mouth dry, nerveless as a stone—wondering what it was that was eating him. Now and then he wrote in his journal. He was gentle with Poppy and the children. He committed no harm upon himself or upon others. In this way he passed seven months in Rome.

Then, during a cold and blustery time in March (it happened to be Holy Week, Cass remembered) there occurred a series of troublesome events that once more pointed him southward in the direction of Sambuco.

It all came about like this. Poppy, whose religious activity had been intense enough all through the Lenten season (at times Cass had thought that if she brought one more fish into the house he would throttle her), reached a kind of peak of fervor during Holy Week; unremittingly, she had addressed herself to all sorts of complicated rites and offices, in pouring rain dashing out to see the various Stations—whatever that meant—and it was at one of these, Cass knew not where—at the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, perhaps, or that other one, with the Giotto fresco, San Giovanni in Laterano—that she encountered an American couple, the Mc-Cabes. Purely encountering these two, Cass later thought, might have been all right, and who was at fault in promoting the relationship (it could not have been Poppy, who was usually diffident, and Cass later had a vision of the ham-handed, fat-lipped McCabe, with his concavity of a Galway nose and a Rolleiflex lolling on his breast, standing among the jostling throng and twitching inwardly as his eyes lit on Poppy’s radiant pious face) he never knew for certain. In any case, someone struck up a conversation. All innocence, Poppy cottoned to these pilgrims, and they to her, and she made the grave mistake of bringing them home. It was late in the afternoon when they arrived; molecules of rain floated on the air in a greasy drizzle, it was gray, and Cass, gray as a shad himself, had been brooding all day upon their now shaky financial state. McCabe, a raffish fellow of thirty-five or so in a mackintosh and a snap-brim cap, was full of grins. He dealt (bitter irony!) in retail wines and liquors in Mineola, New York; he referred to Poppy as “this sweetie here,” and he called Cass “pal.” His wife, who wore her hair in bangs over—or to conceal—a somewhat foreshortened brow, was a plain, nondescript, asexual young matron, and her name was Grace. Cass scarcely could believe that it was all happening to him.

“What in Christ’s name has come over you?” he said to Poppy as softly as he could, in the kitchen, while she was fixing supper. “You invited them to
eat
even!”

“Well, I’m sorry, Cass,” she said determinedly. “They were very sweet to me and all. They bought me some
gelato
and everything. And they looked so lonely and kind of lost there, after we got to talking. They’re sweet. Besides,” she added, with a look of sorrow, turning around to face him, “we don’t ever see any Americans—ever!—and I’m just tired of it, that’s all!”

Which the Lord knew was true enough, Cass thought ruefully (for Poppy’s sake), he himself having retreated so far from contact with his native land that in his years abroad he could count on his fingers and toes the sum of the words he had spoken, beyond his family, in his own tongue to his own compatriots. Yet this fact alone he could not square with the desolating McCabes.

“You didn’t have to drag in a couple of
Micks,
for the love of God! From Mineola yet—”

“Hush about being a Mick!” she said, eggbeater quivering in her hand. “I’m a Mick, and the children are
half,
and you’re just about the biggest bigot I know. I’ve—”

“Why didn’t you invite a couple of plumbers, and a half a dozen Odd Fellows—”

“I’ve invited them, now shut up!”

At supper, which was
merluzzo
—a form of oily codfish—and spaghetti, McCabe, blind to the litter of paint and canvas strewn about the room, asked Cass what his “line” was. When told, he grimaced, grinned, but said nothing. In the Eternal City even the Pharisee cannot be unkind to art. The conversation swung, as it logically should, to the spiritual aspects of the season.

“Father Cleary,” said Grace, “you know we came over with him, well, he said that the Holy Father would probably be canonized some day. That’s what the rumor is, anyway.”

“You know how rumors are,” said Cass, plucking a fishbone from his mouth. “You know how they get around. Scuttlebutt. Sound and fury, signifying
niente”

There was a moment of silence, a suggestion, almost audible, of forks and knives in mid-air, suspended. Then as Cass raised his eyes, Grace said, with only the faintest touch of asperity: “On the way over, your wife told us—well, that you weren’t a Catholic.”

“You’re goddam right I’m not a goddam Catholic.” The sentence rose in the back of his throat, pulsating, surly; he could almost see it, inverted commas and all, but the words stopped short of his lips. “That’s right,” he mumbled instead. “Never got the bug.”

Seething, he managed to get through the meal, picking his teeth and rising for restless tours to the bathroom and then, drifting on the tide of his own thoughts, idly sketching on the tablecloth doodles with a spoon as the puerile chatter unspiraled—about Pope Pius, whom the McCabes hoped to see sometime, at an “oddience,” and Cardinal Spellman, who was not nearly so fat—“large” was the word Grace used—as his pictures made out. Poppy, deeply impressed by this news, was nonetheless one up on the McCabes, for she had had, already, an audience with the Pope ( “up real close”) and she had a moment of modest glory when, at Grace’s breathless urging, she was able to describe the Holy Father—his hands, the cut of his nose, the size of his ring, or rings; “a fine glorious man, to be sure,” she said, shiny-eyed, lapsing into her ancestral brogue.