and a gold lighter. They were not flashy, but they were gold. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked. “Why should I?” she asked. She did not look in his direction. “Some people do,” he said, lighting his cigarette. She was nearly as beautiful as she was unfriendly, but why should she be so cold? They would be side by side for nine hours, and it was only sensible to count on at least a little conversation. Did he remind her of someone she disliked, someone who had wounded her? He was bathed, shaved, correctly dressed, and accustomed to making friends. Perhaps she was an unhappy woman who disliked the world, but when the stewardess came by to take their drink orders the smile she gave the young stranger was dazzling and open. This so cheered him that he smiled himself, but when she saw that he was trespassing on a communication that was aimed at someone else she turned on him, scowled, and went back to her book. The stewardess brought him a double Martini and his companion a sherry. He supposed that his strong drink might increase her uneasiness, but he had to take that chance. She went on reading. If he could only find the title of the book, he thought, he would have a foot in the door. Harold Robbins, Dostoevsky, Philip Roth, Emily Dickinson?anything would help. “May I ask what you’re reading?” he said politely. “No,” she said.
When the stewardess brought their dinners he passed her tray across the empty seat. She did not thank him. He settled down to eat, to feed, to enjoy this simple habit. The meal was unusually bad and he said so. “One can’t be too particular under the circumstances,” she said. He thought he heard a trace of warmth in her voice. “Salt might help,” she said, “but they neglected to give me any salt. Could I trouble you for yours?”
“Oh, certainly,” he said. Things were definitely looking up. He opened his salt container and in passing it to her a little salt spilled on the rug. “I’m afraid the bad luck will be yours,” she said. This was not said at all lightly. She salted her cutlet and ate everything on her tray. Then she went on reading the book with the concealed title. She would sooner or later have to use the toilet, he knew, and then he could read the title of the book, but when she did go to the stern of the plane she carried the book with her.
The screen for the film was lowered. Unless a picture was exceptionally interesting he never rented sound equipment. He had found that lip-reading and guesswork gave the picture an added dimension, and anyhow the dialogue was usually offensively banal. His neighbor rented equipment and seemed to enjoy herself heartily. She had a lovely musical laugh and communicated with the actors on the screen as she had communicated with the stewardess and as she had refused to communicate with her neighbor. The sun rose as they approached the Alps, although the film was not over. Here and there the brightness of an Alpine morning could be seen through the cracks in the drawn shades, but while they sailed over Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn the characters on the screen relentlessly pursued their script. There was a parade, a chase, a reconciliation, an ending. His companion, still carrying her mysterious book, retired to the stern again and returned wearing a sort of mobcap, her face heavily covered with some white unguent. She adjusted her pillow and blanket and arranged herself for sleep. “Sweet dreams,” he said, daringly. She sighed.
He never slept on planes. He went up to the galley and had a whiskey. The stewardess was pretty and talkative and she told him about her origins, her schedule, her fiance, and her problems with passengers who suffered from flight fear. Beyond the Alps they began to lose altitude and he saw the Mediterranean from the port and had another whiskey. He saw Elba, Giglio, and the yachts in the harbor at Porto Ercole, where he could see the villas of his friends. He could remember coming into Nantucket so many years ago. They used to line the port railing and shout, “Oh, the Perrys are here and the Saltons and the Greenoughs.” It was partly genuine, partly show. When he returned to his seat his companion had removed her mobcap and her unguent. Her beauty in the light of morning was powerful. He could not diagnose what he found so compelling?nostalgia, perhaps?but her features, her pallor, the set of her eyes, all corresponded to his sense of beauty. “Good morning,” he said, “did you sleep well?” She frowned, she seemed to find this impertinent. “Does one ever?” she asked on a rising note. She put her mysterious book into a handbag with a zipper and gathered her things. When they landed at Fiumicino he stood aside to let her pass and followed her down the aisle. He went behind her through the passport, emigrant, and health check and joined her at the place where you claim your bags.
But look, look. Why does he point out her bag to the porter and why, when they both have their bags, does he follow her out to the cab stand, where he bargains with a driver for the trip into Rome? Why does he join her in the cab? Is he the undiscourageable masher that she dreaded? No, no. He is her husband, she is his wife, the mother of his children, and a woman he has worshipped passionately for nearly thirty years.
THE JEWELS OF THE CABOTS
Funeral services for the murdered man were held in the Unitarian church in the little village of St. Botolphs. The architecture of the church was Bullfinch with columns and one of those ethereal spires that must have dominated the landscape a century ago. The service was a random collection of Biblical quotations closing with a verse. “Amos Cabot, rest in peace / Now your mortal trials have ceased…” The church was full. Mr. Cabot had been an outstanding member of the community. He had once run for Governor. For a month or so, during his campaign, one saw his picture on barns, walls, buildings, and telephone poles. I don’t suppose the sense of walking through a shifting mirror?he found himself at every turn?unsettled him as it would have unsettled me. (Once, for example, when I was in an elevator in Paris I noticed a woman carrying a book of mine. There was a photograph on the jacket and one image of me looked over her arm at another. I wanted the picture, wanted I suppose to destroy it. That she should walk away with my face under her arm seemed to threaten my self-esteem. She left the elevator at the fourth floor and the parting of these two images was confusing. I wanted to follow her, but how could I explain in French or in any other language?what I felt? Amos Cabot was not at all like this. He seemed to enjoy seeing himself, and when he lost the election and his face vanished (excepting for a few barns in the back country where it peeled for a month or so) he seemed not perturbed.
There are, of course, the wrong Lowells, the wrong Hallowells, the wrong Eliots, Cheevers, Codmans, and Englishes, but today we will deal with the wrong Cabots. Amos came from the South Shore and may never have heard of the North Shore branch of the family. His father had been an auctioneer, which meant in those days an entertainer, horse trader, and sometimes crook. Amos owned real estate, the hardware store, the public utilities, and was a director of the bank. He had an office in the Cartwright Block, opposite the green. His wife came from Connecticut, which was, for us at that time, a distant wilderness on whose eastern borders stood the City of New York. New York was populated by harried, nervous, avaricious foreigners who lacked the character to bathe in cold water at six in the morning and to live, with composure, lives of grueling boredom. Mrs. Cabot, when I knew her, was probably in her early forties. She was a short woman with the bright-red face of an alcoholic although she was a vigorous temperance worker. Her hair was as white as snow. Her back and her front were prominent and there was a memorable curve to her spine that could have been a cruel corset or the beginnings of lordosis. No one quite knew why Mr. Cabot had married this eccentric from faraway Connecticut?it was, after all, no one’s business?but she did own most of the frame tenements on the East Bank of the river where the workers in the table-silver factory lived. Her tenements were profitable but it would have been an unwarranted simplification to conclude that he had married for real estate. She collected the rents herself. I expect that she did her own housework, and she dressed simply, but she wore on her right hand seven large diamond rings. She had evidently read somewhere that diamonds were a sound investment and the blazing stones were about as glamorous as a passbook. There were round diamonds, square diamonds, rectangular diamonds, and some of those diamonds that are set in prongs. On Thursday morning she would wash her diamonds in some jewelers’ solution and hang them out to dry in the clothes-yard. She never explained this, but the incidence of eccentricity in the village ran so high that her conduct was not thought unusual.
Mrs. Cabot spoke once or twice a year at the St. Botolphs Academy, where many of us went to school. She had three subjects: My Trip to Alaska (slides), The Evils of Drink, and The Evils of Tobacco. Drink was for her so unthinkable a vice that she could not attack it with much vehemence, but the thought of tobacco made her choleric. Could one imagine Christ on the Cross smoking a cigarette? she would ask us. Could one imagine the Virgin Mary
