The Lost Continent (16 page)

There was something wrong with the whole setup, something deeply fishy about the way it worked. I had lived in America long enough to know that if the only way into Williamsburg was to buy a ticket there would be an enormous sign on the wall saying, You MUST
HAVE
A
TICKET
. D
ON
’
T
EVEN
THINK
ABOUT
TRYING
TO
GET
IN
WITHOUT
ONE
. But there wasn’t any such sign. I went outside, back out into the bright sunshine, and watched where the shuttle buses were going. They went down the driveway, joined a highway and disappeared around a bend. I crossed the highway, dodging the traffic, and followed a path through some woods. In a few seconds I was in the village. It was as simple as that. I didn’t have to pay a penny. Nearby the shuttle buses were unloading ticketholders. They had had a ride of roughly 200 yards and were about to discover that what their tickets entitled them to do was join long, ill-humored lines of other ticketholders standing outside each restored historic building, sweating in silence and shuffling forward at a rate of one step every three minutes. I don’t think I had ever seen quite so many people failing to enjoy themselves. The glacial lines put me in mind of Disney World, which was not altogether inappropriate since Williamsburg is really a sort of Disney World of American history. All the ticket takers and street sweepers and information givers were dressed in period costumes, the women in big aprons and muffin hats, the men in tricornered caps and breeches. The whole idea was to give history a happy gloss and make you think that spinning your own wool and dipping your own candles must have been bags of fun. I half expected to see Goofy and Donald Duck come waddling along dressed as soldiers in the Colonial army.

The first house I came to had a sign saying D
R
. M
C
K
ENZIE
’
S
A
POTHECARY
. The door was open, so I went inside, expecting to see eighteenth-century apothecary items. But it was just a gift shop selling overprecious reproductions at outrageous prices—brass candle snuffers at $28, reproduction apothecary jars at $35, that sort of thing. I fled back outside, wanting to stick my head in Ye Olde Village Puking Trough. But then, slowly and strangely, the place began to grow on me. As I strolled up Duke of Gloucester Street I underwent a surprising transformation. Slowly, I found that I was becoming captivated by it all. Williamsburg is big—173 acres—and the size of it alone is impressive. There are literally dozens of restored houses and shops. More than that, it really is quite lovely, particularly on a sunny morning in October with a mild wind wandering through the ash and beech trees. I ambled along the leafy lanes and broad greens. Every house was exquisite, every cobbled lane inviting, every tavern and vine-clad shoppe remorselessly adrip with picturesque charm. It is impossible, even for a flinty-hearted jerk-off such as your narrator, not to be won over. However dubious Williamsburg may be as a historical document—and it is plenty dubious—it is at least a model town. It makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, “Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let’s go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings.” But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.

A lot of Williamsburg isn’t as old as they like you to think it is. The town was the capital of Colonial Virginia for eighty years, from 1699 to 1780. But when the capital was moved to Richmond, Williamsburg fell into decline. In the 1920s John D. Rockefeller developed a passion for the place and began pouring money into its restoration—$90 million so far. The problem now is that you never quite know what’s genuine and what’s fanciful. Take the Governor’s Palace. It looks to be very old—and, as I say, no one discourages you from believing that it is—but in fact it was only built in 1933. The original building burned down in 1781 and by 1930 had been gone for so long that nobody knew what it had looked like. It was only because somebody found a drawing of it in the Bodleian Library at Oxford that they were able to make a reasonable stab at reproducing it. But it isn’t old and it may not even be all that accurate.

Everywhere you turn you are confronted, exasperatingly, with bogus touches. At the Bruton Parish Church, the gravestones looked like they were faked or at least the engravings had been reground. Rockefeller or someone else in authority had obviously been disappointed to discover that after a couple of centuries in the open air gravestones become illegible, so now the inscriptions are as fresh and deep-grooved as if they had been cut only last week, which they may well have been. You find yourself constantly wondering whether you are looking at genuine history or some Disneyesque embellishment. Was there really a Severinus Dufray and would he have had a sign outside his house saying, G
ENTEEL
T
AILORING
? Possibly. Would Dr. McKenzie have a note in florid lettering outside his dispensary announcing, D
R
. M
C
K
ENZIE
BEGS
L
EAVE
TO
INFORM
THE
P
UBLIC
THAT
HE
HAS
JUST
RECEIVED
A
LARGE
Q
UANTITY
OF
FINE
G
OODS
,
VIZ
: T
EA
, C
OFFEE
,
FINE
S
OAP
, T
OBACCO
,
ETC
.,
TO
BE
SOLD
HERE
AT
HIS
S
HOP
? Who can say?

Thomas Jefferson, a man of some obvious sensitivity, disliked Williamsburg and thought it ugly. (This is something else they don’t tell you.) He called the college and hospital “rude, misshapen piles” and the Governor’s Palace “not handsome.” He can’t have been describing the same place because the Williamsburg of today is relentlessly attractive. And for that reason I liked it.

I drove on to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home for most of his life. Washington deserves his fame. What he did in running the Colonial army was risky and audacious, not to say skillful. People tend to forget that the Revolutionary War dragged on for eight years and that Washington often didn’t get a whole lot of support. Out of a populace of 5.5 million, Washington sometimes had as few as 5,000 soldiers in his army—one soldier for every 1,100 people. When you see what a tranquil and handsome place Mount Vernon is, and what an easy and agreeable life he led there, you wonder why he bothered. But that’s the appealing thing about Washington, he is such an enigma. We don’t even know for sure what he looked like. Almost all the portraits of him were done by, or copied from the works of, Charles Willson Peale. Peale painted sixty portraits of Washington, but unfortunately he wasn’t very hot at faces. In fact, according to Samuel Eliot Morison, Peale’s pictures of Washington, Lafayette and John Paul Jones all look to be more or less the same person.

Mount Vernon was everything Williamsburg should have been and was not—genuine, interesting, instructive. For well over a century it has been maintained by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and what a lucky thing it is we have them. Amazingly, when the house was put up for sale in 1853, neither the federal government nor the state of Virginia was prepared to buy it for the nation. So a group of dedicated women hastily formed the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, raised the money to buy the house and two hundred acres of grounds, and then set about restoring it to precisely as it was in Washington’s day, right down to the correct pigments of paint and patterns of wallpaper. Thank God John D. Rockefeller didn’t get ahold of it. Today the association continues to run it with a dedication and skill that should be models to preservation groups everywhere, but alas are not. Fourteen rooms are open to the public and in each a volunteer provides an interesting and well-informed commentary—and is sufficiently clued up to answer almost any question—on how the room was used and decorated. The house was very much Washington’s creation. He was involved in the daintiest questions of decor, even when he was away on military campaigns. It was strangely pleasing to imagine him at Valley Forge, with his troops dropping dead of cold and hunger, agonizing over the purchase of lace ruffs and tea cozies. What a great guy. What a hero.

12

I
spent the night on the outskirts of Alexandria and in the morning drove into Washington. I remembered Washington from my childhood as hot and dirty and full of the din of jackhammers. It had that special kind of grimy summer heat you used to get in big cities in America before air-conditioning came along. People spent every waking moment trying to alleviate it—wiping their necks with capacious handkerchiefs, swallowing cold glasses of lemonade, lingering by open refrigerators, sitting listlessly before electric fans. Even at night there was no relief. It was tolerable enough outside where you might catch a puff of breeze, but indoors the heat never dissipated. It just sat, thick and stifling. It was like being inside a vacuum cleaner bag. I can remember lying awake in a hotel in downtown Washington listening to the sounds of an August night wash in through the open window: sirens, car horns, the thrum of neon from the hotel sign, the swish of traffic, people laughing, people yelling, people being shot.

We once saw a guy who had been shot, one sultry August night when we were out for a late snack after watching the Washington Senators beat the New York Yankees 4–3 at Griffith Stadium. He was a black man and he was lying among a crowd of legs in what appeared to me at the time to be a pool of oil, but which was of course the blood that was draining out of the hole in his head. My parents hustled us past and told us not to look, but we did of course. Things like that didn’t happen in Des Moines, so we gaped extensively. I had only ever seen murders on TV on programs like “Gunsmoke” and “Dragnet.” I thought it was something they did just to keep the story moving. It had never occurred to me that shooting someone was an option available in the real world. It seemed such a strange thing to do, to stop someone’s life just because you found him in some way disagreeable. I imagined my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Bietlebaum, who had hair on her upper lip and evil in her heart, lying on the floor beside her desk, stilled forever, while I stood over her with a smoking gun in my hand. It was an interesting concept. It made you think.

At the diner where we went for our snack, there was yet another curious thing that made me think. White people like us would come in and take seats at the counter, but black people would place an order and then stand against the wall. When their food was ready, it would be handed to them in a paper bag and they would take it home or out to their car. My father explained to us that Negroes weren’t allowed to sit at luncheon counters in Washington. It wasn’t against the law exactly, but they didn’t do it because Washington was enough of a Southern city that they just didn’t dare. That seemed strange too and it made me even more reflective.

Afterwards, lying awake in the hot hotel room, listening to the restless city, I tried to understand the adult world and could not. I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted—stay up all night or eat ice cream straight out of the container. But now, on this one important evening of my life, I had discovered that if you didn’t measure up in some critical way, people might shoot you in the head or make you take your food out to the car. I sat up on one elbow and asked my dad if there were places where Negroes ran lunch counters and made white people stand against the wall.

My dad regarded me over the top of a book and said he didn’t think so. I asked him what would happen if a Negro tried to sit at a luncheon counter, even though he wasn’t supposed to. What would they do to him? My dad said he didn’t know and told me I should go to sleep and not worry about such things. I lay down and thought about it for a while and supposed that they would shoot him in the head. Then I rolled over and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t, partly because it was so hot and I was confused and partly because earlier in the evening my brother had told me that he was going to come over to my bed when I was asleep and wipe boogers on my face because I hadn’t given him a bite of my frosted malt at the ball game, and I was frankly unsettled by this prospect, even though he seemed to be sleeping soundly now.

The world has changed a lot since those days, of course. Now if you lie awake in a hotel room at night, you don’t hear the city anymore. All you hear is the white sound of your air conditioner. You could be in a jet over the Pacific or in a bathysphere beneath the sea for all you hear. Everywhere you go is air-conditioned, so the air is always as cool and clean as a freshly laundered shirt. People don’t wipe their necks much anymore or drink sweating glasses of lemonade or lay their bare arms gratefully on cool marble soda fountains because nowadays summer heat is something out there, something experienced only briefly when you sprint from your parking lot to your office or from your office to the luncheon counter down the block. Nowadays, black people sit at luncheon counters, so it’s not as easy to get a seat, but it’s more fair. And no one goes to Washington Senators games anymore because the Washington Senators no longer exist. In 1972 the owner moved the team to Texas because he could make more money there. Alas. But perhaps the most important change, at least as far as I am concerned, is that my brother no longer threatens to wipe boogers on me when I annoy him.