Memoir From Antproof Case (12 page)

Perhaps the people who staff the institution, by reason of their human frailty, cannot always be held accountable, but the institution itself need not ever be let off the hook. It lives by the myth of its singularity, and by the myth of its singularity it can be taken by the throat.

All of which has nothing to do with the first man I killed, except that it makes clear why, in the summer of 1918, my thoughts were martial and I was continually armed. I was not going to lay down my life before highwaymen, or, better, sub-waymen, without a struggle. I carried a Colt .45 automatic of the type issued to our soldiers in France, and which had been developed to stop the fanatics of Samar.

I practiced in the woods, and at twenty-five feet I could blow out the glass eye of a stuffed owl. What is more, with my lightning reflexes, strong hands, and youthful freshness, I could withdraw the pistol, release the safety catch, pull back the slide, express a round into the chamber, aim, and fire, all in less than a second.

When my uncle gave me the pistol he impressed upon me the need for restraint, and I was determined not to use it unless I thought I was about to be killed. I was meticulous about justification, and in my mind's eye I see a boy surrounded by flailing blades and fists, fighting like a dervish, cut, bruised, and bleeding, but never making use of the powerful weapon he carried, never giving death too much the benefit of the doubt. And although the pistol was by my side when I killed the first man I killed, I didn't use it. But the fact that I was possessed of such a deadly weapon when I was apprehended near the scene of the struggle was not a point in my favor. My 'attorney' tried to make it so, maintaining that I did not resort to it even while brutally attacked, but his arguments were always very badly bungled by his everpresent co-counsel, Jack Daniels.

Because I was out of the country and in an insane asylum, I never had the chance to appeal. When you write to the authorities from such a place you are at a disadvantage in regard to your credibility. And I was in an insane asylum because the judge gave me a choice of attending the world's finest private school, in the most beautiful region of the Swiss Alps, or sitting in the electric chair.

Before you consider what happened to me on the beautiful, hot evening of August 20th, 1918, please understand that, apart from my persecution by coffee—every child in the Western World is pressured to accept this drug—my other difficulty in adjustment has been that from the earliest age I have been congenitally unable to know my place.

When I listened to idealistic ministers and politicians taken up in flights of rhetoric about the American ideal, I believed them. I still do. I believe that all the children of God stand before Him as exact equals. I believe that temporal power is an illusion and an irrelevancy. I believe that, because the president of the United States and, let us say, an illiterate sharecropper, occupy God's affections solely according to God's criteria, neither is owed either more or less respect than the other. Though these are the things that I believe, there are some things that I
know.
They are that upon these ideals American democracy was founded and that every citizen may, by right, and in any circumstance, properly demand them, and that I and everyone else serve only one master.

As you can imagine, I have had problems. Given that my place in various hierarchies has been an illusion accepted only by others, I have suffered continual charges of insubordination. And yet, on the several occasions that I have met, for example, presidents of the United States, we have gotten along very well even though I cannot speak to them in the language that everyone else seems to use, even though I cannot bend my knee.

Apart from presidents, prime ministers, and popes, all of whom in my experience have been easy going and delightfully egalitarian, I have had immense struggles with teachers, conductors, police, professors, and people from all walks of life who believe that their rank as they see it requires me, for example, to jump out of their way when they walk down the street. Some people think that if they dress in a certain fashion they are entitled to deference from other people in different attire. Is this not madness?

My irritation with this kind of thing may sometimes cause me to be rather blunt. When, for Stillman and Chase, I used to fly back and forth between the United States and various countries in Europe, I noticed that the pilots would always make what appeared to have been inspection tours in the cabins of the planes.

Because the passengers knew that their lives depended upon the mental and biological vagaries of these aeronauts, they would make submissive gestures, which the captains and copilots lapped up as they strode royally down the aisles.

But what were they inspecting? Seating position and weight distribution? Cracks in the fuselage? The quality of the engine exhaust? Of course not. They had nothing to inspect. They were on their way to the bathroom. After I realized this, I would sometimes drop my reading glasses a notch and, without looking up, say rather dryly but so that all could hear, "Ladies and gentlemen, the captain is triumphantly proceeding to the toilet." You can imagine how cordially I was treated after that. A certain kind of person grew very angry at me for mocking the authority upon which we depended, and, man or woman, would berate me with a finger wagging, afraid that the captain would punish me by crashing the plane into the sea. As I had actually crashed a plane into the sea, I was confident that the pilots would not consider this option.

Given my difficulties with rank and hierarchy, I sometimes wonder why I had such a good time with the Pope.

I was by then a full partner at Stillman and Chase, which means that had I been someone else I would have thought that I was higher than the Pope, for the partners of Stillman and Chase were a Cromwellian bunch who considered the Pope to be a kind of jungle medicine man.

I was the right person to send, as I believed that the Pope and I, and anyone else for that matter, were of the same rank, and therefore I was less likely to offend him. Which may have been why they sent me, although they didn't care whether they offended the Pope or not, and it was more likely that they sent me because I had spent so much time in Italy during the war, and knew the language.

The United States, the only undamaged major industrialized country, was for the Vatican a source of immense concern in regard to the investment and stability of Church funds. After several days of meeting with various accounting cardinals in what amounted to a dissertation defense of our foreign investment strategies, I was granted an audience with the Holy Father. I think the accounting cardinals assumed I would turn to jelly and count every second as if it were a gold bar, but as fate would have it we bumped into the Pope in a corridor rather than in a reception room, and I, buoyant after passing my orals, ran up to him and said, "Oh hi! We were just on our way to see you."

The cardinals didn't like this, and didn't like that shortly after we began to walk I went to an open window in the corridor and stuck my head out into the evening sun. It was May, the time in Rome when perfection takes its name amid the balances of light and dark, blazing sun and blinding moon, the Tiber flowing, still cool and powerful, the birds surfing upon the rollers and breakers of green that have newly crowned the avenues and hills.

All day long I had been inside a magnificent frescoed chamber, listening to the warm wind as it coursed through the trees. I could not resist the open window, and, as soon as I felt the sun on my face, my expression became, I suppose, beatific. The next thing I knew, the Pope, who had dismissed everyone else, was standing next to me, his head thrust out the window too, his little white hat in his hand.

"How often do you get outside?" I asked.

"I have a garden, where I go every day."

"Is that enough? Do you ever swim in the sea, or spend weeks in the mountains?"

"Not really, not since I was a boy."

"Why not?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Look," I said, "tomorrow's Sunday. Why don't you put on some regular clothes, and we'll take the train to Ostia."

"I can't do that," he said. "I'm the Pope."

"Oh come on. It won't be crowded. The Italians think the sea is too cold for swimming now, but the Tyrrhenian is warmer than the sea off Southampton will ever be, and I swim there in May. I swim off Mount Desert Island in
June.
"

"Mount Desert Island?" the Pope asked. "In Purgatory?"

We began to talk—about places we knew, childhood, the music in natural sounds such as the surf, the wind, and the songs of the birds, and we touched upon many things, from politics to beekeeping.

I left about nine, after some nuns had served dinner in the Pope's little garden and we played bocce. I remember what we ate: a mixed salad with tomatoes, arugula, lettuces, and a few thin slices of mozzarella; beef broth with gnocchi; a piece of broiled fish; bread; and mineral water. It was served on a small wooden table that must have been five hundred years old, and the china and cutlery were as simple as if we had been in a
pensione
near the station that catered mainly to soldiers, Sicilian migrants, and African exchange students.

He was very surprised, indeed, astonished, when I asked him about his parents. He was moved, and he said, "In all these years, no one has ever asked me about my father and my mother, and yet I think of them every day. Why
did
you ask?"

"It seemed to me," I told him, "that you must think back all the time, and that your memories must be very vivid."

"Yes, yes," he said, "but how do you know that?"

"Well," I continued, putting down my fork, "God puts more of Himself in the love of parent and child than in anything else, including all the wonders of nature. It is the prime analogy, the foremost revelation, the shield of His presence upon earth. As you don't have your own children, you must refer to that holy relation in memories dredged deep and with great love."

He half-closed his eyes, and nodded as I spoke, as if, as I spoke, he were remembering.

"
I
do," I said. "I love children, and I don't have any yet, so I often think back, using my memory not as self-indulgence but as holy instruction."

"
Yes,
" he said. "I frequently visit orphanages. The children ... they...."

"They break your heart," I said, "for in them, too, the arc is broken, and God's warmth must ride over an abyss."

Now, you may wonder how I can jump so quickly from the holy to the profane in this, my narrative, but in life it happens all the time. The one alternates with the other continually. In fact, they seem to be locked in dependency, and my memoir takes me, as if in some sort of planned traverse, from a quiet garden in the Vatican, where I was the sole dinner companion of the Pope, to the great hall of Grand Central Station, at 5:06 in the evening of the 20th of August, 1918.

It was a Tuesday. It was so hot that men loosened their ties as they descended the stairs to the immense room, and you could see pigeons on the high ledges fanning their wings as if they had just been in a bird bath. The whistles were blowing in the caverns below, the sun streaming in the windows, and I was fourteen years of age.

I knew virtually nothing. I was consumed with passion for young Maggie in the sheet-music store, whom I never kissed, never held. I wonder if she's still alive, and I wonder if she wonders if I'm still alive. Maybe she does.

My great thought at that pregnant hour was that I might have a chance in the evening to swim in the Hudson before I got home, for we were having a cold dinner of smoked chicken and salad, which could wait without prejudice. I bought the evening newspaper, took a drink from a fountain, and walked to my train. The surface of the concrete ramp leading down to the trains was salted with ground glass, and as is often the case in New York the pavement sparkled as if in a fairy tale.

Although I could not, without looking, tell you what clothes I am wearing now, and have never been able to remember what I had for dinner five minutes after I finish, or whether I locked the front door, or closed my safe-deposit box, I can tell you exactly what I was wearing then.

A straw boater. Everyone wore a straw boater in the summer. Everyone. Not women, of course, but women did not commute. A few could be seen on the morning trains, going down to shop or visit, but they usually returned in the middle of the afternoon, so that they could go to the market and then prepare dinner.

By evening, the trains were men's clubs. Liquor was served by the gallon. Cards were played on tables and knee boards, and conversation was usually confined to the seven great topics: fishing, money, war, politics, automobiles, women, and woodworking. Had it not been for the fact that we were speeding along at forty miles an hour and no hair was being cut, it could have been a very crowded barbershop.

A blue whipcord suit. It was my first suit. I had been in knickers up to that point, but Stillman and Chase runners wore suits. They weren't supposed to have been boys, although I certainly was, but I could pass for a young man because I was tall for my age. On the train I always took a window seat on the river side, and spent the hour transfixed either by the scenery or by my evening newspaper. That way, I didn't have to talk, my voice didn't have to crack, and I could pretend to be older.

In July the sun was too strong and the shades were down on the river side, but by August you could look out the window. That evening, the window was open and the breeze came in as the train moved north. It was a warm breeze, but it was a lot better than the hot pressurized air of Manhattan.

The man on my right had gulped down two Scotch-and-sodas, tried to read the war news, and fallen dead asleep. The conductor woke him just before Tarrytown, and he got off there, leaving me the prize of an empty seat. I put my right hand on the wicker and my left foot on the sill, and as the train wound toward Ossining, began to whistle softly to myself. Although I was the owner of at least two dozen copies of 'I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy,' as I looked over miles of open water, the blue-green hills beyond, and herons wheeling on the hot afternoon wind or stalking daintily through the marsh, I whistled the Third Brandenburg.