Set This House on Fire (55 page)

I think I could work here, he told himself that night, I think I could really get cracking. He lay in a bed upstairs in the Bella Vista, unable to sleep. His head ached.
Thirty years old and I haven’t even stuck my toe in the bleeding door.
He thought of the peasant girl in the police station (Assunta? Paola? Desideria? Laura?) and he dozed off with a sense of trouble, hungry with tenderness and desire.

The next morning, he recalls, he had completely forgotten the girl. But the spring weather was like an ecstasy. Inspecting the palace apartment with Windgasser he found it much to his liking. He decided to go up to Rome and bring the family down right away. He paid two months’ advance rent with a check on his and Poppy’s joint bank account, and left for Rome—without the realization, however, that he had just paid out almost the last cent either of them had.

Another move! Poppy was less than pleased.

“Just when I’ve learned to speak a little Italian and all, now you want to move again! Jiminy, Cass! I
like
Rome!”

“They speak Italian in Sambuco, Poppy, for pity’s sake! This city gives me claustrophobia! We’re moving out on Friday. You’ll love it, Poppy. Sea and mountains and sunlight! My God, it’s a bleeding paradise!” He paused. “I’ve got to get some new paints, new brushes. I’ve got to stock up because I’m going to do a lot of work down there. I’ll need some dough.” He paused again. “Speaking of which, how about telling me where our little kitty has gone to?”

She was sitting by the window in a bright splash of sunlight, working on her stamp collection. Some years before she had acquired a big album and a dollar’s worth of stamps from a mailorder house ( “1000 assorted, all countries “). Everybody should have a hobby, he remembered her saying, and since then she had built up a sizable collection, largely through the habit of hoarding duplicates of any and all stamps, no matter how common the issue, and depressing even the infinitesimal value of these by scorning detachable cellophane hinges and pasting them into the book with glue.

As he walked toward her he saw her placidly stick a small brush into a paste pot. Then she looked up and said: “What kitty?”

“What kitty do you think?” he said. “Where you keep the dough. The tea can. I stuck my hand in there just now and all you had in it was tea.”

“Oh, Cass!” she said. “How did you know I hide it there? Peggy must have told you!” Her lips quivered a little, quivering at his knowledge of her secret, which had been no secret to him since a month after their wedding. “How did you know, darling?” she said despondently.

“A bird told me,” he replied. “Look, baby, I’ve got to have five thousand lire to buy some paint and some brushes. Hasn’t your check come this month?”

“What check?”

“You know, Poppy, the
check”

And then it happened. She said she hadn’t received any check. When he asked her why, she hedged a bit, bent over and stuck a stamp in the album and screwed up her mouth, saying she really didn’t know but maybe “those letters” would explain it. What letters? Why, those letters that came with the checks from the bank. And where did she keep those letters? Why, there in the kitchen drawer, of course. And there he found the appalling answer, in half a dozen syrup-sticky envelopes from the trust department of the bank in New Castle, Delaware, which he dredged up out of a hell of rusted knives and unwashed eggbeaters and hair ribbons and coffee grounds. One of them contained the key to the whole thing:

We wrote you time and time again [this is the way it began, without preliminaries; Cass could see some thin-lipped old small-town banker snapping his Dictaphone on and off as he tried to master his chagrin and outrage] but received no answer to our repeated requests that you allow us to dispose of your properties. Under the terms of your father’s will, as you know, you have been receiving approximately $400.00 a month from these two properties, known most recently as the OK Motel and Winnie Winkle Burger Bar & Drive-In, both located in the Second Tax Dist. of New Castle Co., Del. At the time when the construction of the Delaware Memorial Bridge and Highway Approach was still theoretical we felt certain that we could sell these properties for a sum which when invested would still yield you a substantial monthly return.
Since we failed to receive your permission, however
[italics Cass’], as stipulated in the terms of the trust, we had no alternative but to hold on to these properties. With the final construction of the Delaware Memorial Bridge and Highway Approach these properties, having been by-passed and the road they are on cut off to thru traffic, have become virtually worthless and since the present lessees have failed to renew their leases we have to inform you that the check deposited to your account in the Bankers Trust Company, New York, on or about March 1 next, will be your last… .

The rest of the letter, compounding insult with injury, had to do with the matter of taxes that Poppy would be liable for.

“You didn’t give them permission,” he whispered, with wonder in his voice, and grief.

“Well, yes—” she began.

“Well, no!” he said, his voice rising. “And why not?”

“Well, because—Because I didn’t read them!”

“And why the hell didn’t you read them!” he began to shout.

“Because—I don’t know. Because I couldn’t
understand
them, Cass! I tried—”

“Didn’t you think
I
could understand those letters? Didn’t you think that / might be able to divine their secrets? Why by damn, Poppy, you haven’t got the brains God gave to a mushmelon! How could you? How could you throw away four hundred dollars a month, just like that! Just when we got to the place where we might decently live off it—Sambuco, I mean. Do you realize what this means? Do you realize, Poppy! Who the hell are we going to borrow from? St. Peter? Who?
Who!
Answer me that!”

“I don’t know,” she began to moan. “I don’t know, Cass. Oh jeepers, I’m so sorry—”

“It’s too late to be sorry!” he roared. “You know that compensation check of mine? The one I get for being a nut? It won’t even keep us in catchup! How do you like that! What are we going to do now, go to the poorhouse? Beg? Borrow? Steal? What! Do you realize where you are now, Miss Deadhead? Four thousand miles from old New Castle, without a pot to pee in! How do you like that? Oh, Poppy, how could you be so careless?”

“Well, you said it yourself,” she began to reason. “I heard you say it yourself! How you thought the capitalist system was corrupt and dishonest, and investments and all were a terrible delusion.”

“Christ!” he said. “Shut your yap! You’re a living, breathing, walking prefrontal lobotomy! This is a perfect lesson in capitalism! One dumb move and you’re broke! You know what’s going to happen to you, you idiot—you’re going to be swabbing floors for fifty lire a day, that’s what! And the kids! They’ll be living off
grasshoppers!”
(Jesus, he thought, maybe
I’ll
have to go to work.)

“Oh, Cass!” she cried, wilting beneath his assault.

“What have we got?” he demanded. “What! I can sell the motorscooter, but how much spaghetti will that buy us? We’ve got to go to Sambuco now anyway, see? The place is already paid for, two solid months. But what in God’s name are we going to live on? Answer me that!” Desperation ran through him like ice water. “My God, Poppy, what you’ve done!” And his eyes rested for an instant on her hand. “Your engagement ring!” he said, snaking out his arm. “That diamond should fetch a hundred thousand lire, it cost me three hundred and fifty bucks when I bought it. Here, lemme have it.”

“Go take a shit in your bleeding hat, you filthy misbegotten prick!”

“POPPY!” He stood nearly paralyzed, rigid with shock and horror. Then in a small voice he said: “Poppy, where did you learn those words?”

She had begun to bawl, mouth wide-open, and the baby propped in a chair beside her began to howl, too, at the top of its voice.

“Where did you learn them?”

“Where do you think I learned them, you dumb bunny,” she sobbed. “Where do you think I learned them?”

For a moment he was utterly crushed. He tried to touch her shoulder, trying to get close to the mystery of her decency and her sweetness and her innocence, but she shrugged him away. He left the room.

The next day he sold the motorscooter, and what he got from this, together with his compensation check, would be enough to last for a month or so. And they were going south again. Everything was fine, everything was adventurous. Poppy said: “Oh, Cass, it’s going to be dreamy!” But as they rode southward on a bus through the greening spring fields of Campania, he felt a foreboding, and he could not erase the vision from his mind: of elegant passengers in Cadillacs on that blackguard of a bridge across the Delaware, all of them gazing aloofly down, and the OK Motel and the Winnie Winkle Burger Bar & Drive-In, stucco ruin below, mossy and crumbling in a rubble of shattered neon and toppling television antennae and corrupt encroaching weeds. But in Sambuco, of course, new worlds did not open for him. He thought he would be able to paint. Windgasser loaned him (rented him, rather, for two thousand of his diminishing lire) an easel, left years ago in the hotel basement by a ninth-rate Edwardian painter named Angelucci whose barbarous encrustations, like the work of some crazed Burne-Jones given the muscles but not the mind of Michelangelo, still covered every wall and ceiling of the palace. On this easel Cass placed some canvas, and the canvas remained bare. Restless, he began once again to drink too much. He went without eating. He felt presentiments of the same anxiety which had afflicted him in Paris. Hung-over, each morning he sought out Luigi, who idled away his off-duty hours, cool and philosophical, over a single Campari and soda at the cafe in the square. Luigi was fond of what he called, somewhat heavily,
dialettica;
their conversation was usually an argument, conducted however on amiable terms.

“A Fascist you say,” Cass would prod him. “Now how could this be? Here you are a man of culture and wit and reading and yet you’re a Fascist. How can this be, Luigi? How can you be a Fascist and call yourself a humanist at the same time?”

“It is easy,” said Luigi, picking his teeth. “What your trouble is, friend Cass, is that like most northern people you are too willing to pin labels on people. Or put it this way: you believe that a label fully identifies a man, either black or white, with no room for chiaroscuro. Thus your so-called liberals will grant the possibility of an Italian embracing Communism, which is a monstrous ideology, but will call an Italian Fascist worse than a dog. While with your anti-liberals the sentiments will be precisely the other way around. All it shows is that none of you Americans knows anything about Italians. We are not Germans, after all, or Soviets either. I think it is this dogmatic tendency that has made you people so lacking in the field of the arts, not to speak of diplomacy.” He sat back and made his humorless grin.

“Go ahead,” said Cass, somewhat grimly, “you haven’t answered my question.”

“All right, I’ll tell you how I can be what I am. For one thing, I am not a spiritual Fascist. No Italian is a spiritual anything in politics. He lives too much for the moment to be idealistic about what is going to govern him. With one or two gaps it has always been a tyranny in one form or another and he has gotten so that he doesn’t care. As for myself, I am an opportunist. A wellmeaning opportunist. That is why for the moment I am a Fascist. Let me explain: Presume first that I am a humanist—this is so. All decent people are humanists, basically, even decent policemen. Presume then that I must get a job, to feed myself and to help support my mother and father and my sisters who live in Salerno. Presume further that the only job open to me—because of my superior intelligence—is that of a policeman.
Please,
Cass, don’t smile, this is true. I must become a policeman or work on the roads or have no job at all; so I choose to become a policeman. It is not much but it is something, and I am lucky to get the job. Now for a minute, reflect. Could I be a policeman in Italy and be a Communist at the same time? What a preposterous thought. Even if it were possible, my revered superior, Parrinello”—and here he made a look of disgust—“is a Fascist sub rosa, and if I were a Communist what kind of life would I lead—”

“What a cowardly way—”

“Please, Cass, no insults. Let me explain. It is not just that. In my extreme youth, as I’ve told you, I was a Communist. But that was a mistake. I was stupid then and had not learned much. Gradually I came to discover, after much pondering, that it was a betrayal of the soul for any man to embrace Communism, which is anti-human, barbaric, and a monstrous despotism—in short, a repudiation of all that is fine and noble in over two thousand years of Western culture—”

“So when you joined the cops you junked all that and became a Fascist. You forgot all about that camp in Poland where they melted down millions of little Jewish babies for butter and saddle soap, or that cave up near Rome where they took several hundred of your innocent countrymen and mowed them down with machine guns in one fearful senseless slaughter. You forgot how twenty years of Fascism turned Italy into a desert, a wasteland. And don’t tell me anything about Mussolini’s fine roads. You forget—Ah, Luigi, what a short memory you have!”

“Please, Cass,” he remonstrated with a sour look. “Don’t get hysterical. We are not Germans. You’re really trying me to the limit now. Are you going to listen—”

“Go ahead.” Go ahead, you ignorant bastard.

“So even in order to eat, to hold myself together—not to speak of my family in Salerno—I could not remain a Communist, practically or morally. Then what ways were open to me?” he asked rhetorically.

“I should think you might have tried the way of the Christian-Democrats, or of the Socialists. Or of anything, Luigi, for the love of God, besides this gruesome—”

“Patience, my friend.” And he laughed, dryly and briefly. “Could an honest man be a Christian-Democrat, I ask you? As the great German philosopher Nietzsche” (great names, with Luigi, were always explicated: the famous Frenchman Descartes, the illustrious painter Bellini) “pointed out, it is such corrupt and selfsatisfied dregs of society that threaten a nation with its greatest harm. Could an honest man embrace the party of the clerics and the fat bourgeoisie and all those who would kowtow to that
orribile
foreign minister of yours”—he pronounced it, somewhat Gallically, Dew-lays—“who wishes only to turn Italy into an image of the American Protestant church? Being so poor, we are willing to accept a decent charity; but no charity can come from this man, only pious words, and graft for the rich men who make typewriters in Torino. Could an honest person respect whoever respects him? I ask you, Cass. As for the Socialists, they are soft and soggy and offer only daydreams.”