center, stands around kind of stupidly for a while, then has a pee and a drink of water and wanders back outside. That is what I did now.
From the visitors' center I ambled along Independence Mall to Franklin Square, which was full of winos, many of whom had the comical idea that I might be prepared to give them twenty five cents of my own money. According to my guidebook, Franklin Square had 'lots of interesting things' to see-a museum, a working book bindery, an archaeological exhibit and 'the only post office in the United States which does not fly the American flag' (don't ask me why)-but my heart wasn't in it, especially with piteous and unwashed winos tugging at my sleeves all the while, and I fled back to the real world of downtown Philadelphia.
Late in the afternoon, I found my way to the offices of the Philadelphia Inquirer, where an old friend from Des Moines, Lucia Herndon, was lifestyle editor. The Inquirer offices were like news paper offices everywhere grubby, full of junk, littered with coffee cups in which cigarette butts floated like dead fish in a polluted lake-and Lucia's desk, I was impressed to note, was one of the messiest in the room. This may have accounted in part for her impressive rise at the Inquirer. I only ever knew one journalist with a truly tidy desk, and he was eventually arrested for molesting small boys. Make of that what you will-but just bear it in mind the next time somebody with a tidy desk invites you camping.
We drove in my car out to the district of Mount Airy, where, conveniently for me-and for her too, come to that- Lucia lived with another old friend of mine from Des Moines, her husband, Hal. All day long I had been wondering, vaguely and intermittently, why Hal and Lucia liked Philadelphia so much-they had moved there about a year before-but now I understood. The road to Mount Airy led through the most beautiful city park I had ever been in. Called Fairmount Park and covering almost q,000 acres, it is the largest municipal park in America and it is full of trees and flowering shrubs and bosky glades of infinite charm. It stretches for miles along the banks of the Schuylkill River.
We drove through a dreamy twilight. Boats sculled along the water. It was perfection.
Mount Airy was out in the Germantown section of the city. It had a nice settled feeling to it, as if people had lived there for generations-which is in fact the case in Philadelphia, Lucia told me. The city was still full of the sort of neighborhoods where everybody knew everybody else. Many people scarcely ever ventured more than a few hundred yards from their homes. It was not uncommon to get lost and find that hardly anybody could reliably direct you to a neighborhood three miles away.
Philadelphia also had its own vocabulary-downtown was called 'center city,' sidewalks were called
'pavements,' as in England-and peculiarities of pronunciation.
In the evening I sat in Hal and Lucia's house, eating their food, drinking their wine, admiring their children and their house and furniture and possessions, their easy wealth and comfort, and felt a sap for ever having left America. Life was so abundant here, so easy, so convenient. Suddenly I wanted a refrigerator that made its own ice cubes and a waterproof radio for the shower. I wanted an electric orange juicer and a room ionizer and a wristwatch that would keep me in touch with my biorhythms. I wanted it all. Once in the evening I went upstairs to go to the bathroom and walked past one of the children's bedrooms. The door was open and a bedside light was on. There were toys everywhere-on the floor, on shelves, tumbling out of a wooden trunk. It looked like Santa's workshop. But there was nothing extraordinary about this: it was just a typical middle-class American bedroom.
And as for American closets, they seem to be always full of yesterday's enthusiasms: golf clubs, scuba diving equipment tennis rackets, exercise machines, tape recorders, darkroom equipment, objects that once excited their owner and then were replaced by other objects even more shiny and exciting. That is the great, seductive thing about America-the people always get what they want, right now, whether it is good for them or not. There is something deeply worrying, and awesomely irresponsible, about this endless self-gratification, this constant appeal to the baser instincts.
I should point out that I am not talking about Hal and Lucia in all this. They are good people and lead modest and responsible lives. Their closets aren't full of scuba diving equipment and seldom-used tennis rackets. They are full of mundane items like buckets and galoshes, ear muffs and scouring powders. I know this for a fact because late in the night when everyone was asleep I crept out of bed and had a good look.
In the morning, I dropped Hal at his office downtown-correction, center city-and the drive through Fairmount Park was as enchanting in the morning sunshine as it had been at dusk. All cities should have parks like this, I thought. He told me some more interesting things about Philadelphia: that it spent more money on public art than any other city in America-1 percent of the total city budget-and yet it had an illiteracy rate of 40 percent. He pointed out to me, in the middle of Fairmount Park, the palatial Philadelphia Museum of Art, which had become the city's top tourist attraction, not because of its collection of 500,000 paintings, but because its front steps were the ones Sylvester Stallone sprinted up in Rocky. People were actually coming to the museum in buses, looking at the steps and leaving without ever going inside to see the pictures. As we were driving we listened to a radio talk show hosted by a man named Howard Stern. Howard Stern had a keen interest in sex and was engagingly direct with his callers. 'Good morning, Marilyn,' he would say to a caller, 'are you wearing panties?' This, we agreed, beat most early-morning talk shows hands down. Howard queried his callers with arresting candor and a measure of prurience I had not before encountered on American radio.
Unfortunately, I lost the station soon after dropping Hal off and spent the rest of the morning searching for it without success, and eventually ended up listening to a competing program in which an ear specialist gave advice to callers with hearing difficulties. Later there was a woman who was an expert on dealing with intestinal worms in dogs. As this principally consisted of giving the dogs a tablet to make the worms die, it was not long before I felt as if I were something an expert on the matter too. And so the morning passed.
I drove to Gettysburg, where the decisive battle of the American Civil War was fought over three days in July 1863. There were over 50,000 casualties. I parked at the visitors' center and went inside. It contained a small, ill-lit museum with glass cases containing bullets, brass buttons, belt buckles and that sort of thing, each with a yellowed typed caption beside it saying, 'Buckle from uniform of 13th Tennessee Mountaineers. Found by Festus T. Scrubbins, local farmer, and donated by his daughter, Mrs. Marienetta Stumpy.' There was precious little to give you any sense of the battle itself. It was more like the gleanings of a treasure hunt.
The only truly interesting thing was a case devoted to the Gettysburg Address, where I learned that Lincoln was invited to speak only as an afterthought and that everyone was taken aback when he accepted. It was only ten sentences long and took just two minutes to deliver. I was further informed that he gave the address many months after the battle. I had always imagined him making it more or less immediately afterwards, while there were still bodies lying around and wraiths of smoke rising from the ruins of distant houses and people like Festus T. Scrubbins poking around among the twitching casualties to see what useful souvenirs they could find. The truth, as so often in this life, was disappointing.
I went outside and had a look at the battlefield, which sprawls over 3,500 acres of mostly flat countryside, fringed by the town of Gettysburg with its gas stations and motels. The battlefield had the great deficiency common to all historic battle fields. It was just countryside. There was nothing much to distin_ guish this stretch of empty fields from that one. You had to take their word for it that a great battle was fought there. There were a lot of
