Flying to America (28 page)
“Right.”
“Behave yourself, Fog.”
“Right, Katie.”
“I’ll see y’all. Bye-bye.”
“Goodbye, Kate.”
“You all right, Judge?”
“I’m fine, Katie. Just a little taken aback by what we’ve found out here today.”
“Oh. O.K. Well, take care of yourself. You too, Fog.”
“I will, Kate.”
“O.K. See you two.”
“Goodbye, Kate.”
“You sure you don’t want to come into town with me? I’ll make you some tamale pie.”
“That’s O.K. Kate we got lots of stuff to eat right here.”
“Oh. O.K. ’Bye.”
The truck moved off into the dust.
“Look!” said the Judge. “She’s waving.”
“Wave back to her,” Fog said.
“I am,” said the Judge. “Look, I’m waving.”
“I see it,” said Fog. “Can she see you?”
“Maybe if I stand up,” the Judge said. “Do you think she can see me now?”
“Not if she’s watchin’ the road.”
“She’s too young for us,” the Judge said. He stopped waving.
“Depends on how you look at it,” said Fog. “You want to go on over to the rodeo now?”
“I don’t want to go to no rodeo,” said the Judge. “All that youth.”
I
am cordially invited. I have nothing else to do. So I go. Men and women standing on a terrace holding drinks. The date is Thursday, the twenty-fourth of May. The time, 6:32
P.M.
The quality of the air, acceptable. Similarly the quality of the whiskey. A ferocious vivacity amidst the green-painted iron garden furniture. A kind of harvest festival. A publisher’s cow has calved, and we are celebrating that. The host’s barns bursting with cocktail onions and potato chips. At the finish we will fall many floors to the street, where we will all join hands and dance around a taxi. The boldest dancer making it into the cab with a bruising hip check to the lady on his left.
I am spoken to by the lady on my left — a very old lady, seventy if she’s a day.
“Hey!” she says. “Wake up!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You were exhibiting the gaze vacant. Dangerous in a man your age.”
She has a beautiful smile and her eyes are very bright.
“Things are not that bad!”
she says.
“They’re not?”
“Listen! I have something to tell you. There is a new eight-cent
U.S. postage stamp honoring Copernicus, the great astronomer. Copernicus is wearing a fur-trimmed robe and looks, on the stamp, struck dumb with terror. Can you explain this?”
“No,” I say, for I cannot.
“Of course you can’t,” she says with satisfaction. “That is a minus. But I can give you a plus. Listen! The membership rolls of the New York Architectural League for the year 1912 list a Franz Kafka. Kafka was born in 1883. Could he have been moonlighting as an architect in New York in 1912? If so, which buildings are his? Have any survived? Have you wondered about that?”
I shake my head.
“We are wondering for you,” she says. “We wonder well. We wonder
efficiently
and
constructively.
We are
on your side.
I have to sit down, my legs are killing me. There’s a bench in the corner.”
I am led to the bench and seated there. She does not stop talking.
“Listen!” she says. “We bring you hope. Your head hurts but we know that your head hurts and we are working on it. Everybody’s head hurts. Our organization is on top of the situation, not in the sense that we have it licked but in the sense that we can see the outlines.” During all this she has been feeling me, shoulder, elbow, back of the neck, as one feels a child who has been lost but now is found.
“My name is Cornelia,” she says, knocking back a good fifty percent of her drink. “Pay attention. This is very important. I saw, on Saturday the twelfth, a young woman walking confidently. I immediately wondered: What does it mean to walk confidently? How is it possible? The good news I bring you is that
I have seen it done.
[Emphatic squeeze of kneecap here.] And our people are now hacking away at the problems of analysis, replication, quantification.
You, too, may someday walk confidently.”
“Are all your people, uh . . .”
“Old ladies?” she says maliciously. “Damn right. Old ladies are solid gold, young trooper, and don’t ever forget it. Listen! On Thursday the tenth I saw a woman wearing platinum I.U.D. earrings on behalf of Zero Population Growth. This joyous sight, a definite plus,
was of course balanced by the news that attack cats are now being trained for the defense of small households in Queens. But —”
“Where do you get your funding?”
Cornelia looks, for a moment, a little glum. Then she takes hold of my belt buckle, a firm grasp, and continues.
“Our work is proceeding under great handicaps. The feds don’t like to give money to bunches of old ladies not under the umbrella of an officially certified O.K. institution — Harvard, for example. We flirted for a while with M.I.T., where there is a certain openness of mind, but finally the trustees got cold feet. Old
men
,” she hisses. “Sale of homemade lemonade from a card table on the sidewalk outside the office netted $67.50 for the quarter. But was probably counterproductive in terms of staff hours lost. You didn’t by any chance write this abomination, did you?” she asks, holding up a copy of the book we are theoretically celebrating.
“No.”
“I’m pleased,” she says. “I will give you two pieces of advice. Always talk to the oldest lady at the party — then you will have the best time. And when you wake up at three o’clock in the morning, never light a cigarette, because if you do you will think about your crimes for the next two hours. Those are the only two pieces of advice I ever give anybody and they are both solid gold.”
“Thank you,” I say. I notice across the room a nymph talking to an editor. The nymph appears to be naked to the waist and, from the waist down, clothed in the purest gossamer.
“You can get me another drink,” Cornelia says, “and have a closer look at that quite beautiful girl while doing so. You don’t drink enough. Make it quick.”
I fetch us two more of the same, not neglecting to take another look at the girl, who is in fact quite beautiful.
“Now, my colleague Anne-Marie,” Cornelia says, slapping me on the thigh a few times in a rough fatherly way, “is eighty. She’s working on the falling sickness — trying to find out what can be done with nets of words. She’s using words of two kinds: words made out of various polymers (du Pont is cooperating) and magic words. For
the last, she’s testing a group of forty burglars, all volunteers from the Tombs.”
“What are they like?”
“Extremely interesting people. Alert, intelligent. They wouldn’t be burglars if they could be something else, they say. When you ask them what they’d rather be, they say rich. I think that’s extremely sensible. What do you do?”
I tell her.
“Well,” she says, “don’t feel bad. As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven’t heard of some of them. But listen!” she goes on, kneading my ankle. “I am delighted to report that terror inspired by organized religion is diminishing everywhere. I ask you to notice that the new opium of the people is opium, and I think that’s quite a hopeful development. At least the thing is what it is, not something disguised as something else. On the other hand, pain-dependent sexual behavior is increasing, and political torture has reached new international highs. We are working on everything, from the trauma of opening the front door to the unbearable consequences of being loved. We offer hope. If the federal money doesn’t come through we’ll just add Kool-Aid and possibly peanut-butter cookies to the line. Set out more card tables. And before I release you to pursue your lubricious way across the party, I want you to join me in a toast.”
“Of course. To what?”
“Our noble predecessors,” Cornelia says, raising her glass, her eyes positively brimming with benevolent malice. “Whose valiant efforts. Without which. Their heads were, you know,
green
and their hands were blue and they went to sea in a sieve.”
I
do not like to see an elegant pair of forceps! Blundell stated. Let the instrument look what it is, a formidable weapon!
Arte, non vi
(art, not strength) may be usefully engraved upon one blade; and
Care perineo
(take care of the perineum) on the other. His companion replied: The test of a doctor’s prognostic acumen is to determine the time to give up medicinal and dietetic measures and empty the uterus, and overhesitancy to do this is condemnable, even though honorable . . . I do not mean that we should perform therapeutic abortion with a light spirit. On the contrary, I am slow to adopt it and always have proper consultation. If on the other hand a bear kills a man, someone said, the Croches immediately organize a hunt, capture a bear, kill it, eat its heart, and throw out the rest of the meat; they save the skin, which with the head of the beast serves as a shroud for the dead man. Among the Voguls the nearest relative was required to seek revenge. The Goldi have the same custom in regard to the tiger; they kill him and bury him with this little speech:
Now we are even, you have killed one of ours, we have killed one of yours. Now let us live in peace. Don’t disturb us again, or we will kill you.
Carola Mitt, brown-haired, brown-eyed and just nineteen was born in Berlin (real name: Mittenstein), left Germany five years ago. In her senior year at the Convent of the Sacred Heart
in Greenwich, Conn., Carola went to the Viennese Opera Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, was spotted by a
Glamour
editor.
I mean, the doctor resumed, we should study each patient thoroughly and empty the uterus before she has retinitis; before jaundice has shown that there is marked liver damage; before she has polyneuritis; before she has toxic myocarditis; before her brain is degenerated,
et al.
— and it can be done. Meyer Davis played for the Viennese Opera Ball. Copperplate printers, said a man, deliver Society Printing in neat, stylish boxes. They are compelled to slipsheet the work with tissue paper, an expense the letterpress printer may avoid, if careful. Boxes, covered with enameled paper for cards and all kinds of Society Printing, are on sale to carry the correct sizes. No matter how excellent your work and quality may be, women who know the correct practice will not be satisfied unless the packages are as neat as those sent out by the copperplate printers. The devil is not as wicked as people believe, and neither is an Albanian. (Carola Mitt soon dropped her plans to be a painter, made $60 an hour under the lights, appeared on the covers of
Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle
and
Glamour,
shared a Greenwich Village apartment with another girl, yearned to get married and live in California. But that was later.)
The
Glamour
editor said: Take Dolores Wettach. Dolores Wettach is lush, Lorenesque, and doubly foreign (her father is Swiss, her mother Swedish); she moved at the age of five from Switzerland to Flushing, N.Y., where her father set up a mink ranch. Now about twenty-four (“You learn not to be too accurate”), Dolores was elected Miss Vermont in the 1956 Miss Universe contest, graduated in 1957 from the University of Vermont with a B.S. in nursing. Now makes $60 an hour. While Dolores Wettach was working as a nurse at Manhattan’s Doctors Hospital, a sharp-eyed photographer saw beyond her heavy Oxfords, asked her to pose. Dying remarks: Oliver Goldsmith, 1728–74, British poet, playwright and novelist, was asked: Is your mind at ease? He replied: No, it is not, and died. Hegel: Only one man ever understood me. And he didn’t understand me. Hart Crane, 1899–1932, poet, as he jumped into the sea: Goodbye, everybody! Tons of people came to the Viennese Opera
Ball. At noon, the first doctor said, on January 31, 1943, while walking, the patient was seized with sudden severe abdominal pain and profuse vaginal bleeding. She was admitted to the hospital at 1
P.M.
in a state of exsanguination. She presented a tender, rigid abdomen and uterus. Blood pressure 110/60. Pulse rate 110 — thready. Fetal heart not heard. Patient was given intravenous blood at once. The membranes were ruptured artificially and a Spanish windlass was applied. Labor progressed rapidly. At 6
P.M.
, a five-pound stillborn infant was delivered by low forceps. Hemorrhage persisted following delivery in spite of hypodermic Pituitrin, intravenous ergotrate, and firm uterine packing. Blood transfusion had been maintained continuously. At 9
P.M.
a laparotomy was done, and a Couvelaire uterus with tubes and ovaries was removed by supracervical hysterectomy. The close adherence of the tubes and ovaries to the fundus necessitated their removal. Patient stood surgery well. A total of 2000 c.c. of whole blood and 1500 c.c. of whole plasma had been administered. Convalescence was satisfactory, and the patient was dismissed on the fourteenth postoperative day. Waiters with drinks circulated among the ball-goers.
Carola Mitt met Isabella Albonico at the Viennese Opera Ball. Isabella Albonico, Italian by temperament as well as by birth (twenty-four years ago, in Florence), began modeling in Europe when she was fifteen, arrived in New York four years ago. Brown-haired and brown-eyed, she has had covers on
Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar,
and
Life,
makes $60 an hour, and has won, she says, “a reputation for being allergic to being pummeled around under the lights. Nobody touches me.” I entirely endorse these opinions, said a man standing nearby, and would only add that the wife can do much to avert that fatal marital
ennui
by independent interests which she persuades him to share. For instance, an interesting book, or journey, or lecture or concert, experienced, enjoyed, and described by her, with sympathy and humor, may often be a talisman to divert his mind from work and worry, and all the irritations arising therefrom. But, of course, he, on his side, must be able to appreciate her appreciation and her conversation. The stimuli to the penile nerves may differ in degrees of intensity and shades of quality; and there are
corresponding diversities in the sensations of pleasure they bestow. It is of much importance in determining these sensations whether the stimuli are localized mainly in the frenulum preputti or the posterior rim of the glans.
Art
rather than
sheer force
should prevail. (There is an authentic case on record in which the attendant braced himself and pulled so hard that, when the forceps slipped off, he fell out of an open window onto the street below and sustained a skull fracture, while the patient remained undelivered.) The Jumbo Tree, 254 feet high, is named from the odd-shaped growths at the base resembling the heads of an elephant, a monkey, and a bison. Isabella told Carola that she “would like most of all to be a movie star,” had just returned from Hollywood, where she played a small part (“but opposite Cary Grant”) in
That Touch of Mink
and a larger one in an all-Italian film,
Smog.
Besides English and Italian, Isabella speaks French and Spanish, hates big groups. What kind of big groups? Carola asked.
This
kind, Isabella said, waving her hand to indicate the Viennese Opera Ball.
