California’s my real home. They call it the gateway to Death Valley. My wife came from London. London, Arkansas. Ha ha. My daughter went to school in six states of the Union. California. Washington. Nevada, North and South Dakota, and Louisiana. Mrs. Stebbins passed away last year, and so I thought I’d see a little of the world.”
The Stars and Stripes seemed to break out in the air above his head, and she realized that in America the leaves were turning.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
“You know, it’s a funny thing, but I’m not sure myself. This agency in California planned the trip for me, and they told me I’d be traveling with a group of Americans, but as soon as I get on the high seas I find that I’m traveling alone. I’ll never do it again. Sometimes there’s whole days in which I don’t hear any decent American spoken. Why, sometimes I just sit up in my room and talk to myself for the pleasure of hearing American. Why I took a bus from Frankfurt to Munich, and you know there wasn’t anybody on that bus who spoke a word of English? Then I took a bus from Munich to Innsbruck, and there wasn’t anybody on that bus who spoke English, either. Then I took a bus from Innsbruck to Venice, and there wasn’t anybody on that bus who spoke English, either, until some Americans got on at Cortina. But I don’t have any complaints about the hotels. They usually speak English in the hotels, and I’ve stayed in some very nice ones.”
Sitting on a bar stool in a Roman basement, the stranger seemed to Anne to redeem her country. He seemed to gleam with shyness and honesty. The radio was tuned to the Armed Forces station in Verona, where they were playing a recording of “Star Dust.”
“‘Star Dust,’” the stranger said. “But I guess you know. It was written by a friend of mine. Hoagy Carmichael. He makes six, seven thousand dollars a year on royalties from that song alone. He’s a good friend of mine. I’ve never met him, but I’ve corresponded with him. I guess it must seem funny to you that I have a friend I’ve never met, but Hoagy’s a real friend of mine.”
This statement seemed much more melodic and expressive to Anne than the music. Its juxtaposition, its apparent pointlessness, and the rhythm with which it was spoken seemed to her like the music of her own country, and she remembered walking, as a girl, past the piles of sawdust at the spoon factory to the house of her best friend. If she made the walk in the afternoon, she would sometimes have to wait at the grade crossing for a freight to pass. First there would be a sound in the distance like a cave of winds, and then the iron thunder, the clangor of the wheels. The freights went through there at full speed; they stormed through. But reading the lettering on the cars used to move her; used to remind her not of any glamorous promise at the end of the line but of the breadth and vastness of her own country, as if the states of the Union?wheat states, oil states, coal states, maritime states?were being drawn down the track near where she stood and where she read Southern Pacific, Baltimore & Ohio, Nickel Plate, New York Central, Great Western, Rock Island, Santa Fe, Lackawanna, Pennsylvania, clackety-clack and out of sight.
“Don’t cry, lady,” Mr. Stebbins said. “Don’t cry.”
It was time to go home, and she got a plane for Orly that night and another plane for Idlewild the next evening. She was shaking with excitement long before they saw land. She was going home; she was going home. Her heart was in her throat. How dark and fresh the water of the Atlantic looked, after those years away. In the morning light, the lowlying islands with Indian names passed under their starboard wing, and even the houses of Long Island, arranged like the grids on a waffle iron, excited her. They circled the field once and came down. She planned to find a lunch counter in the airport and order a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich. She gripped her umbrella (Parisian) and her handbag (Sienese) and waited her turn to leave the plane, but as she was coming down the steps, even before her shoes (Roman) had touched her native earth, she heard a mechanic who was working on a DC-7 at the next gate singing: Oh, Humid Isabella Never kissed a fellah.
She never left the airport. She took the next plane back to Orly and joined those hundreds, those thousands of Americans who stream through Europe, gay or sad, as if they were a truly homeless people. They round a street corner in Innsbruck, thirty strong, and vanish. They swarm over a bridge in Venice and are gone. They can be heard asking for ketchup in a Gasthaus above the clouds on the great massif, and be seen poking among the sea caves, with masks and snorkels, in the deep waters off Porto San Stefano. She spent the autumn in Paris. Kitzbuhel saw her. She was in Rome for the horse show and in Siena for the Palio. She was always on the move, dreaming of bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. THE DEATH OF JUSTINA
So help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I expect as if the force of life were centrifugal and threw one further and further away from one’s purest memories and ambitions; and I can barely recall the old house where I was raised, where in midwinter Parma violets bloomed in a cold frame near the kitchen door, and down the long corridor, past the seven views of Rome?up two steps and down three?one entered the library, where all the books were in order, the lamps were bright, where there was a fire and a dozen bottles of good bourbon locked in a cabinet with a veneer like tortoise shell whose silver key my father wore on his watch chain. Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing. We admire decency and we despise death but even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night and perhaps the exhibitionist at the corner of Chestnut and Elm streets is more significant than the lovely woman with a bar of sunlight in her hair, putting a fresh piece of cuttlebone in the nightingale’s cage. Just let me give you one example of chaos and if you disbelieve me look honestly into your own past and see if you can’t find a comparable experience..
ON SATURDAY the doctor told me to stop smoking and drinking and I did. I won’t go into the commonplace symptoms of withdrawal but I would like to point out that, standing at my window in the evening, watching the brilliant after-light and the spread of darkness, I felt, through the lack of these humble stimulants, the force of some primitive memory in which the coming of night with its stars and its moon was apocalyptic. I thought suddenly of the neglected graves of my three brothers on the mountainside and that death is a loneliness much crueler than any loneliness hinted at in life. The soul (I thought) does not leave the body but lingers with it through every degrading stage of decomposition and neglect, through heat, through cold, through the long winter nights when no one comes with a wreath or a plant and no one says a prayer. This unpleasant premonition was followed
