names. I asked at the post office, but the answer here was the same. Then it occurred to me that they would be at the manor house. How stupid I had been! I left the village and walked up a sloping lawn to a Georgian house, where a butler let me in. The squire was entertaining. There were twenty-five or thirty people in the hall, drinking sherry. I took a glass from a tray and looked through the gathering for Flora and my wife, but they were not there. Then I thanked my host and walked down the broad lawn, back to the meadow and the sparkling brook, where I lay on the grass and fell into a sweet sleep.
MARITO IN CITTR
Some years ago there was a popular song in Italy called “Marito in Cittr.” The air was as simple and catching as a street song. The words went, “La moglie ce ne Va, marito poverino, solo in cittadina,” and dealt with the plight of a man alone, in the lighthearted and farcical manner that seems traditional, as if to be alone were an essentially comic situation such as getting tangled up in a trout line. Mr. Estabrook had heard the song while traveling in Europe with his wife (fourteen days; ten cities) and some capricious tissue of his memory had taken an indelible impression of the words and the music. He had not forgotten it; indeed, it seemed that he could not forget it, although it was in conflict with his regard for the possibilities of aloneness.
The scene, the moment when his wife and four children left for the mountains, had the charm, the air of ordination, and the deceptive simplicity of an old-fashioned magazine cover. One could have guessed at it all?the summer morning, the station wagon, the bags, the clear-eyed children, the filled change rack for toll stations, some ceremonious observation of a change in the season, another ring in the planet’s age. He shook hands with his sons and kissed his wife and his daughters and watched the car move along the driveway with a feeling that this instant was momentous, that had he been given the power to scrutinize the forces that were involved he would have arrived at something like a revelation. The women and children of Rome, Paris, London, and New York were, he knew, on their way to the highlands or the sea. It was a weekday, and so he locked Scamper, the dog, into the kitchen and drove to the station singing, “Marito in Cittr, la moglie ce ne va,” et cetera, et cetera.
One knows how it will go, of course; it will never quite transcend the farcical strictures of a street song, but Mr. Estabrook’s aspirations were earnest, fresh, and worth observing. He was familiar with the vast and evangelical literature of solitude, and he intended to exploit the weeks of his aloneness. He could clean his telescope and study the stars. He could read. He could practice the Bach two-part variations on the piano. He could?so like an expatriate who claims that the limpidity and sometimes the anguish of his estrangement promises a high degree of self-discovery?learn more about himself. He would observe the migratory habits of birds, the changes in the garden, the clouds in the sky. He had a distinct image of himself, his powers of observation greatly heightened by the adventure of aloneness. When he got home on his first night, he found that Scamper had got out of the kitchen and slept on a sofa in the living room, which he had covered with mud and hair. Scamper was a mongrel, the children’s pet. Mr. Estabrook spoke reproachfully to the dog and turned up the sofa cushions. The next problem that he faced was one that is seldom touched on in the literature of solitude?the problem of his rudimentary appetites. This was to sound, in spite of himself, the note of low comedy, O, marito in Cittr. He could imagine himself in clean chinos, setting up his telescope in the garden at dusk, but he could not imagine who was going to feed this self-possessed figure.
He fried himself some eggs, but he found that he couldn’t eat them. He made an Old-Fashioned cocktail with particular care and drank it. Then he returned to the eggs, but he still found them revolting. He drank another cocktail and approached the eggs from a different direction, but they were still repulsive. He gave the eggs to Scamper and drove out to the state highway, where there was a restaurant. The music, when he entered the place, seemed as loud as parade music, and a waitress was standing on a chair, stringing curtains onto a rod. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” she said, “Sit down anywheres.” He chose a place at one of the forty empty tables. He was not actually disappointed in his situation, he had by design surrounded himself with a large number of men, women, and children, and it was only natural that he should feel then, as he did, not alone but lonely. Considering the physical and spiritual repercussions of this condition, it seemed strange to him that there was only one word for it. He was lonely, and he was in pain. The food was not just bad; it seemed incredible. Here was that total absence of recollection that is the essence of tastelessness. He could eat nothing. He stirred up his stringy pepper steak and ordered some ice cream, to spare the feelings of the waitress. The food reminded him of all those who through clumsiness or bad luck must make their lives alone and eat this fare each night. It was frightening, and he went to a movie.
The long summer dusk still filled the air with a soft light. The wishing star hung above the enormous screen, canted a little toward the audience with a certain air of doom. Faded in the fading light, the figures and animals of a cartoon chased one another across the screen, exploded, danced, sang, pratfell. The fanfare and the credits for the feature he had come to see went on through the last of the twilight, and then, as night fell, a screenplay of incredible asininity began to unfold. His moral indignation at this confluence of hunger, boredom, and loneliness was violent, and he thought sadly of the men who had been obliged to write the movie, and of the hard-working actors who were paid to repeat these crude lines. He could see them at the end of the day, getting out of their convertibles in Beverly Hills, utterly discouraged. Fifteen minutes was all he could stand, and he went home.
Scamper had shifted from the dismantled sofa to a chair, whose light silk covering he had dirtied with hair and mud. “Bad Scamper,” Mr. Estabrook said, and then he took those precautions to save the furniture that he was to repeat each night. He upended a footstool on the sofa, upended the silk chairs, put a wastebasket on the love seat in the hallway, and put the upholstered dining-room chairs upside down on the table, as they do in restaurants when the floor is being mopped. With the lights off and everything upside down, the permanence of his house was challenged, and he felt for a moment like a ghost who has come back to see time’s ruin.
Lying in bed he thought, quite naturally, of his wife. He had learned, from experience, that it was sensible to make their separations ardent, and on the day but one before they left, he had declared himself; but Mrs. Estabrook was tired. On the next night, he declared himself again. Mrs. Estabrook seemed acquiescent, but what she then did was to go down to the kitchen, put four heavy blankets into the washing machine, blow a fuse, and flood the floor. Standing in the kitchen doorway, utterly unaccommodated, he wondered why she did this. She had merely meant to be elusive! Watching her, a dignified but rather heavy woman, mopping up the kitchen floor, he thought that she had wanted, like any nymph, to run through the bosky?dappled her back, the water flashing at her feet?and being short-winded these days, and there being no bosky, she had been reduced to putting blankets into a washing machine. It had never crossed his mind before that the passion to be elusive was as strong in her sex as the passion to pursue was in his. This glimpse of things moved him; contented him, in a way; but was, as it so happened, the only contentment he had that night.
