One Saturday morning he called to ask if I would help him with some shopping. He wanted to buy some blue jeans. He pronounced them “blugins,” and it was some time before I understood what he meant. He stopped at my house a few minutes later and drove me in to the village Army and Navy store. He had a large air- conditioned car covered with chromium, and he drove like a Roman. We were speaking Italian when we entered the store. At the sound of this language the clerk scowled as if he sensed shoplifting or check kiting.
“We want some blue jeans,” I said.
“Blugins,” said Boobee.
“What size?”
Boobee and I discussed the fact that we did not know his measurement in inches. The clerk took a tape measure from a drawer and passed it to me. “Measure him yourself,” he said. I measured Boobee and told the clerk the size. The clerk threw a pair of blue jeans on the counter, but they were not what Boobee had in mind. He explained at length and with gestures that he wanted something softer and paler. Then the proprietor, from the back of the store, shouted down the canyon of boxed work boots and denim shirts to his clerk, “Tell them it’s all we got. Where they come from they wear goatskins.”
Boobee understood. His nose seemed to get longer, as it did in every emotional crisis. He sighed. It had never occurred to me that in America a sovereign prince might be penalized for his foreignness. I had seen some anti-American feeling in Italy but nothing as crude as this, and anyhow I wasn’t a prince. In America, Prince Parlapiano was a wop.
“Thank you very much,” I said, and started for the door.
“Where you from, mister?” the clerk asked me.
“I live on Chilmark Lane,” I said.
“I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean where you from in Italy.”
We left the store and found what Boobee wanted in another place, but I saw that his life as an alien was hazardous. He might be Prince Parlapiano at some place like the Hotel Plaza, but struggling with the menu at Chock Full O’Nuts he would be an untouchable.
I didn’t see the Parlapianos for about a month, and when I did see Boobee again, on the station platform, he seemed to have made a good many friends, although his English showed no improvement. Then Grace called to say that her parents were paying a visit and would we come for cocktails. This was on a Saturday afternoon, and when we got there we found perhaps a dozen neighbors sitting around uncomfortably. Boobee had not caught on to the American cocktail hour. He was serving warm Campari and gumdrops. When I asked, in English, if I could have a Scotch, he asked what kind of Scotch I wanted. I said any Scotch would do. “Good!” he exclaimed. “Then I am giving you rye. Rye is the best Scotch, yes?” I only mention this to show that his grasp of our language and our customs was spotty.
Grace’s parents were an ungainly middle-aged couple from Indiana. “We come from Indiana,” said Mrs. Osborn, “but we are directly descended from the Osborns who settled in Williamsburg, Virginia, in the seventeenth century. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side was an officer in the Confederate Army and was decorated by General Lee. We have this club in Florida. We’re all scientists.”
“Is it Cape Kennedy?” I asked.
“Christian Scientists.”
I shifted to Mr. Osborn, who was a retired used-car dealer. He went on about their club. There were many millionaires among the members. The club had an eighteen-hole golf course, a marina, a college- educated dietitian, and an exacting admissions committee. He lowered his voice and, shielding his mouth with one hand, said, “We try to keep out the Jews and Italians.”
Boobee, standing in front of my wife, asked, “I am dropping down onto you for staying together?”
His mother-in-law, across the room, asked, “What did you say, Anthony?”
Boobee lowered his head. He seemed helpless. “I am asking Mrs. Duclose,” he said shyly, “if I could drop onto her.”
“If you can’t speak English,’ Mrs. Osborn said, “it’s better to keep quiet. You sound like a fruit peddler.”
“I am sorry,” Boobee said.
“Please sit down,” my wife said, and he did, but his nose seemed to get very long. He had been injured. The awkward party lasted not much over an hour.
Then Boobee called me one night, one late-summer night, and said that he had to see me, and I invited him over. He wore his gloves and his green plush hat. My wife was upstairs, and since she didn’t especially like Boobee, I didn’t call her down. I made some drinks, and we sat in the garden.
