explained that he wanted to make an offering to the sainted angel and showed the priest his golden medal. The priest wanted to know if it was true gold and Bascomb then regretted his choice. Why hadn’t he chosen the medal given him by the French government or the medal from Oxford? The Russians had not hallmarked the gold and he had no way of proving its worth. Then the priest noticed that the citation was written in the Russian alphabet. Not only was it false gold; it was Communist gold and not a fitting present for the sacred angel. At that moment the clouds parted and a single ray of light came into the vineyard, lighting the medal. It was a sign. The priest drew a cross in the air and they started back to the church.
It was an old, small, poor country church. The angel was in a chapel on the left, which the priest lighted. The image, buried in jewelry, stood in an iron cage with a padlocked door. The priest opened this and Bascomb placed his Lermontov medal at the angel’s feet. Then he got to his knees and said loudly: “God bless Walt Whitman. God Bless Hart Crane. God bless Dylan Thomas. God bless William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, and especially Ernest Hemingway.” The priest locked up the sacred relic and they left the church together. There was a cafe on the square where he got some supper and rented a bed. This was a strange engine of brass with brass angels at the four corners, but they seemed to possess some brassy blessedness since he dreamed of peace and woke in the middle of the night finding in himself that radiance he had known when he was younger. Something seemed to shine in his mind and limbs and lights and vitals and he fell asleep again and slept until morning.
On the next day, walking down from Monte Giordano to the main road, he heard the trumpeting of a waterfall. He went into the woods to find this. It was a natural fall, a shelf of rock and a curtain of green water, and it reminded him of a fall at the edge of the farm in Vermont where he had been raised. He had gone there one Sunday afternoon when he was a boy and sat on a hill above the pool. While he was there he saw an old man, with hair as thick and white as his was now, come through the woods. He had watched the old man unlace his shoes and undress himself with the haste of a lover. First he had wet his hands and arms and shoulders and then he had stepped into the torrent, bellowing with joy. He had then dried himself with his underpants, dressed, and gone back into the woods and it was not until he disappeared that Bascomb had realized that the old man was his father.
Now he did what his father had done?unlaced his shoes, tore at the buttons of his shirt, and knowing that a mossy stone or the force of the water could be the end of him he stepped naked into the torrent, bellowing like his father. He could stand the cold for only a minute but when he stepped away from the water he seemed at last to be himself. He went on down to the main road, where he was picked up by some mounted police, since Maria had sounded the alarm and the whole province was looking for the maestro. His return to Monte Carbone was triumphant and in the morning he began a long poem on the inalienable dignity of light and air that, while it would not get him the Nobel Prize, would grace the last months of his life. ANOTHER STORY
Paint me a wall in Verona, then, a fresco above a door. There is a flowery field in the foreground, some yellow houses or palaces, and in the distance the towers of the city. A messenger in a crimson mantle is running down some stairs on the right. Through an open door one sees an old woman lying in bed. The bed is surrounded by court attendants. Higher up the stairs two men are dueling. In the center of the field, a princess is crowning a saint or a hero with flowers. A circle of hunting dogs and other animals, including a lion, is watching the ceremony with reverence. On the far left there is a stretch of green water on which a fleet of sailing ships?five?is heading for port. High against the sky two men in court dress hang from a gibbet. My friend was a prince and Verona his home, but commuting trains, white houses planted with yews, the streets and offices of New York were his landscape, and he wore a green plush hat and a shabby, tightly belted raincoat with a cigarette burn on the sleeve.
Marcantonio Parlapiano?or Boobee, as he was called?was a poor prince. He sold sewing machines for a firm in Milan. His father had lost the last of his patrimony at the casino in Venice, and there had been a good deal of it to lose. There was a Parlapiano castle outside Verona, but the only privilege the family retained was the privilege of being buried in the crypt. Boobee loved his father in spite of this senseless loss of a fortune. He took me to tea in Verona with the old man one day, and his manners with the gambler were reverent and serene. One of Boobee’s grandmothers was English, and he had light hair and blue eyes. He was a tall, slender man with an immense nose, and he moved as if he wore Renaissance trappings. He pulled on his gloves finger by finger, tightened the belt of his raincoat as if a sword depended from it, and cocked his plush hat as if it were covered with plumes. When I first knew him, he had a mistress?a stunning and intelligent Frenchwoman. He traveled for his firm, and on a trip to Rome he met and fell in love with Grace Osborn, who was working at the American Consulate. She was a beautiful woman. There was in her character a trace of intransigence that someone shrewder would have concealed. Her politics were reactionary, and she was terribly neat. A drunken enemy once said that she was the sort of woman for whom the water glasses and toilet seats of motels and hotels are sealed. Boobee loved her for a variety of reasons, but he particularly loved the fact that she was an American. He loved America, and was the only Italian I have ever known whose favorite restaurant in Rome was the Hilton. They were married on the Campidoglio and spent their honeymoon at the Hilton. Some time later, he was transferred to the United States, and he wrote to ask if I could help find him a place to live. A house was for rent in our neighborhood, and the Parlapianos arranged to take it.
I was away when Boobee and Grace arrived from Italy. The setting for our reunion was the station platform at Bullet Park, at seven-forty one Tuesday morning. It was very much a setting. Around a hundred commuters, mostly men, made up the cast. Here were tracks and ties and the sounds of engines, but the sense was much more of a ceremony than of journeys and separations. Our roles seemed fixed in the morning light, and since we would all return before dark, there was no sense of travel. It was the fixedness, the rectitude, of the scene that made Boobee’s appearance in his green plush hat and belted raincoat seem very alien. He shouted my name, bent down and gave me a bone-cracking embrace, and kissed me loudly on both cheeks. I could not have imagined how strange, wild, and indecent such a salutation would appear to be on the station platform at seven-forty. It was sensational. I think no one laughed. Several people looked away. One friend turned pale. Our loud conversation in a language other than English caused as much of a sensation. I suppose it was thought to be affected, discourteous, and unpatriotic, but I couldn’t tell Boobee to shut up or explain to him that in America if we talked in the morning we aimed at a sort of ritual banality. While my friends and neighbors talked about rotary lawn mowers and chemical fertilizers, Boobee praised the beauty of the landscape, the immaculateness of American women, and the pragmatism of American politics, and spoke of the horrors of a war with China. He kissed me goodbye on Madison Avenue. I think no one I knew was looking.
We had the Parlapianos for dinner soon after this, to introduce them to our friends. Boobee’s English was terrible. “May I drop onto you for staying together?” he would ask a woman, intending merely to sit at her side. He was, however, charming, and his spontaneity and his good looks carried him along. We were unable to introduce him to any Italians, since we knew none. In Bullet Park, the bulk of the small Italian Population consisted of laborers and domestics. At the top of the heap was the DeCarlo family, who were successful and prosperous contractors, but whether perforce or by chance, they seemed never to have left the confines of the Italian colony. Boobee’s position was therefore ambiguous.
