AEgypt (37 page)

"Pisanello,” Axel said, taking the card he and his son had both got from Florida, and holding it out to Pierce.
"Quattrocento
, yes? I don't think though that they should imitate the gold leaf by these gold sprinkles. That seems very tasteless to me. Can't they leave well enough alone? Must they gild the lily?"

"Paint the lily,” Pierce said.

"Paint the lily, and gild refined gold? Gild refined gold, and paint the lily? Now pour again, Pierce, will you? Please."

Before they struck out onto the slushy streets toward the old and famous (and in Pierce's view now sadly declining) Brooklyn restaurant where long ago the Moffett family had gone for special treats and which now served Axel's and Pierce's Christmas dinner, there was an exchange of gifts: for Axel, as every year, a trifle of clothing or decoration ennobled by the famous name of a woodpaneled Madison Avenue shop, or by an English brand name or royal arms; for Pierce, lately, something off the truck. A book, this year.

"You remember it, of course,” he said, even as Pierce was tearing the wrapper. “Oh god I remember how you loved it. You'd ask to see the pictures, the beautiful pictures...” Axel imitated round-eyed child wonder.

"Oh,” Pierce said. “Hm."

"Not a first edition,” said Axel.

"No, well,” said Pierce.

"I read it to you."

It was Sidney Lanier's retelling of the Arthurian legends, in the old deluxe Scribner's edition with pictures by N. C. Wyeth, all ultramarine skies and white silver armor. He did remember it. He owned a glossy paperback reproduction of it, in fact, but he didn't remember that he had
especially
loved it, as he had other books, and opening this musty hardback brought no special pang; pictures and text suggested something remote, untouching and untouched, clear but not his: everything that Pierce thought Axel meant by the word
pure
, which Axel used in a way all his own, to express something that moved him deeply and Pierce not at all.

"Hey, thanks,” he said, “sure, I remember.” He didn't want to meet Axel's eyes for fear they might be full of tears. He could well imagine that, when he was a child and Axel had read him these stories, Axel had mistaken Pierce's silence and his amazement before his father's deep emotion for deep emotion on Pierce's own part; but what Pierce truly remembered with great vividness of his bedtime stories was not these knights at all, but Axel's acting out, in minute detail, episodes from the Flash Gordon serial. Ming the Merciless, the Mud Men of Mars, all of it, the best bits of dialogue said over and over, punctuated by Axel's self-appreciative laughter and Pierce's delight; his father's eyes flashing histrionically, his chubby face transmuting from heroic resolve to threatened purity to demonic malice and back again. That's what Pierce remembered.

And yet (he turned to the last picture, the effulgent chapel, the mystery within) he did remember a night when this book was the bedtime reading. He remembered it, though it was possible that Axel, who believed that he remembered every detail of Pierce's life with him, had forgotten it. It was the night before the day when Pierce and Winnie left for Kentucky.

Pierce in his pajamas, teeth brushed, prayers said, lay with the covers up to his chin, in the corner formed by the two walls against which his little bed was pressed (the more tightly the better, to prevent the midnight egress of whatever might be underneath). Axel, awesomely grave and gentle—as he had been all day, only gripping Pierce's hand and turning away to sob now and then through the day's walks and treats (Winnie left alone at home to pack)—took down from the shelf the
Boy's King Arthur.

"This book,” Axel said. “Do you want a story from this book? The book of knights?"

Pierce nodded, whatever was required of him, only let him get alive through the ritual of these days weird and solemn as a midnight Mass. Yes, that book.

Axel, rubbing his forehead, smelling a little of drink and Sensen, opened the volume. “Well, here's a story,” he said, “a story of a little boy just like you,” which issued as a hollow groan. “Like you, and he was a good boy like you. His name was Percival."

He cleared his throat wetly, and began.

"The father of Sir Percival was that king hight Pellinore who fought so terrible a battle with King Arthur. King Arthur drove him from town to town and from place to place until, at last, he was driven away from the habitations of men and into the forests like a wild beast. And that was a very great hardship for the lady who had been queen; and likewise, it was greatly to the peril of the young child Percival.

"Now Percival was extraordinarily beautiful and his mother loved him above all her other sons. Wherefore she feared lest the young child should die of those hardships.

"So one day King Pellinore said: ‘Dear love, I am now in no wise prepared for to defend thee and this little one.'” Axel stopped at these words, swallowing and staring for a moment; Pierce, stilled by strangeness, only waited. At length Axel went on: “'Wherefore for a while I shall put ye away from me so that ye may remain in secret hiding until such time as the child shall have grown in years and stature to the estate of manhood and may so defend himself.

"'Now of all my one-time possessions I have only two left me. One of these is a lonely castle in this forest (unto which I am now betaking my way), and the other is a solitary tower, at a great distance from this, and in a very desolate part of the world where there are many mountains. Unto that place I shall send ye.

"'And if this child groweth in that lonely place to manhood, and if he be weak in body or timid in spirit, thou shalt make of him a clerk of holy orders. But if when he groweth, he shall prove to be strong and lusty of frame and high of spirit, and shall desire to undertake deeds of knighthood, thou then shalt not stay him from his desires, but shall let him go forth into the world as he shall have a mind to do.’”

He stopped reading, and squeezed shut his eyes against the tears. “You'll be a good boy, won't you,” he said. “You'll be a good boy, and take care of your mother, like a good knight."

Pierce in his corner nodded.

"And so it was,” Axel said, finding his place with difficulty, “and so it was that King Pellinore betook himself to that lonely castle where King Arthur found him and fought with him; and Percival's mother betook herself to that dwelling-place in the mountains of which King Pellinore had spoken—which was a single tower that reached up into the sky, like unto a finger of stone. There she abided with Percival for sixteen years, and in all that time Percival knew naught of the world nor of what sort it was, but grew altogether wild and was entirely innocent like to a little child.

"Oh my dear son.” Axel bent toward Pierce as though to bury his head in his son's lap, but did not; he gripped his own forehead with his hand. “You'll grow up to be strong, won't you, yes, and manly, and innocent; and if you want to do deeds of knighthood, oh don't let them stop you, don't. Oh don't."

He threw up his suffering head. “Don't let them make you hate me,” he said. “Your father. Don't let them make you hate your father.” The histrionic abjuring, the careful gravity, had broken; Pierce, awed, saw an adult person in grief like a child. “And you'll come back,” he sobbed. “You'll come back, won't you one day, you'll come back.” Pierce said nothing. He didn't know if that house in Kentucky was truly a finger of stone in a solitude of mountains, nor whether he ever would come back to this lonely castle; but he knew that he was not being sent away. He knew that his mother was taking him away, running away with him, and that he was not beautiful at all.

He had come back, after all. But now he was to leave again.

At dinner he made his announcements, beginning with the sale of his book, for a figure he inflated somewhat. Axel responded with awed congratulations; there was no higher vocation he knew of than to write; he himself, for all his wide and random learning, found it enormously difficult to express himself on paper, or to compose so much as a letter. Then came the decision to leave Barnabas. That drew mixed reviews; teaching ranked only just below authorship on Axel's scale. Pierce assured him that, if he ever had to go back, Barnabas would be only too eager to take him back, and that anyway there were other schools, in other places.

"Other places,” Axel said, “Oh, well. Other
places
, yes."

The decision to leave New York entirely fell heavily. Axel was shocked and dismayed, his rubber face falling dreadfully. At first he chose to regard it as a bizarre speculation merely, a wild thought of his son's, which gentle contempt would help cause to pass; it was ludicrous, if he were embarking on a book, to forgo the greatest libraries, galleries, archives in America and languish in the sticks (here Axel gave impressions of the country drawn perhaps from Marjorie Main pictures, goat-bearded yokels astonished by book-larnin'). But Pierce as gently insisted. And at last Axel grew quiet.

"It's not as though I see you all that much,” he said. “Now I won't see you at all."

"That's not so,” Pierce said. “Hell, it's not much more trouble to get from there to here as to get here from Manhattan. In real time and effort. I'll be back. Often. To use those libraries. We won't lose touch."

Axel remained uncomforted. “Oh no, Pierce, no. Oh where's that waiter, Moselblümchen. Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new. Pour, pour."

There is a way in which even the most self-preoccupied of eccentrics can know themselves to be eccentrics, know that a set of commonplace connections between themselves and the world has been severed, or was never made. Axel knew it. He knew that his channels of communication were dim, and clogged with static, and he mourned his isolation. His son's return to the city as an adult who found Axel interesting and amusing, and not as a child who was puzzled and embarrassed by him, had been an unexpected gift for Axel, unexpected and precious. He had exploited it hard, bending Pierce's ear in long rambling phone calls, insisting on afternoons for museum visits and organ recitals, undeterred by strings of refusals. Pierce meant a lot to him: he said so frequently; less as a son—for all his seriousness about the role, he found a paternal attitude impossible to sustain for long—than as an understanding, or at least patient, friend.

Pierce tried to be patient. He tried to make room for Axel in his life, a life into which Axel fit only with difficulty. He found an exasperated fascination in the fact that this strange man—a whole head shorter than himself, barrel-shaped, with delicate tapering hands and feet he was proud of—was his father; he didn't remember him being this sort of person at all when he was a child. The two of them together on an outing like this reminded Pierce sometimes of that mild little boy and the insect-winged cigar-smoking fairy godfather who used to accompany him in the funny papers, what was his name again, McFeeley, Gilhooley, he never remembered to ask Axel. Axel would know, for sure.

"Take me with you,” Axel pleaded, mostly in jest. “On your back like old Anchises."

"You can visit. I'm sure I'll have a spare room. Or anyway a sun porch."

"A
sun porch
! A sun porch. And how do you get to this place, and back? There are buses, I suppose. Buses."

"There are buses. And I'll eventually get a car, I guess."

"A car!"

Pierce's single attempt at fiction in his grown-up life had been a portrait of his father. He'd wanted to call it “The Man Who Loved Western Civilization,” and he worked for some time over it, but his transcriptions of Axel's table talk rang false, they made Axel sound like a pompous autodidact and a phony, they were empty of Axel's passion and engagement. And the lurid details of his life, when written down, sounded unbelievable, totally fictional—just as they did when Axel, pure of heart and nearly incapable of a deliberate falsehood, related them to Pierce.

Pierce had to suppose it was a real world Axel lived in, for all that it was not Pierce's. For a time after Pierce and Winnie had gone off to live in Kentucky and before the TV money put Axel back on his small feet again, there had been some years of near-destitution, on the streets, on the bum; and there had been times since, too, when Axel had charitably visited or awkwardly slipped for a while back into a halfworld populated by tough but kindhearted ex-Navy chiefs, by nonagenarian Broadway actresses expiring among their souvenirs in low hotels, by scholarly Jews in dusty bookshops who perceived Axel's true qualities beneath the shabby clothes; by worker-priests he admired, manly and clean, and smarmy Salvation Army hypocrites to whose tender mercies (Axel's words) he had once been subjected.

"Tender mercies,” Axel would repeat, with a touch of Ming. “Tender mercies."

For all Pierce knew, all of them, and the plots they acted out, were just as Axel described them. For all he knew, the men of the salvage operation Axel was now involved in really did run their hands through their hair and shuffle their feet shyly, as Axel described them doing; perhaps they really did say things like, “When a feller's down he needs a friend to pick him up,” and in general act like characters out of
Boys’ Town
not much grown up. Anyway Axel was far less innocent about his city than the dreamy scenarios he spoke in sometimes suggested; less innocent in certain ways than Pierce. He could still shock his son with what went on after hours in the back rooms of working-class bars frequented by cops and firemen. Pierce had learned a lot from Axel in recent years, and not only within their shared interest in Western Civ; well outside it, too.

And so, though Axel's long and impassioned wooing of him had been often irritating; and though it was in general impossible to have actual conversation with someone whose stream of consciousness scoured the banks and overflowed the channels of any temporary subject; and though all of Pierce's friends and lovers had found Axel pretty well unbearable for anything longer than a brief visit, still Axel held Pierce's attention. On the whole he genuinely liked his father, which he found, sometimes, strangest of all. When late at night, “exalted” as Axel said by wine, weaving distractedly through the Brooklyn streets he knew and loved, Axel would sing Thomas Moore songs in a sweet clear tenor, Pierce even loved him.