Old Glory (41 page)

“You better look out for the river,” said the bartender. “Up here is supposed to be the
safe
part; down below St. Louis …”

“Yes, I’ve heard about it,” I said. I was in a mood in which I was afraid that it would be all too easy to frighten me off the lower river. I didn’t want to hear the horror stories.

“Hey,” called one of the chickenshit women. “You come from England?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I thought. We got an English lady living here in town. She come over from England when she married Everett Asquith. He’s got a paint store up on Main.”

I said I’d like to look her up.

“She talks just like you do. She got one of them British accents. Like that
Masterpiece Theatre
on Channel Eleven.”

Warm, dry, cabined in a motel on the bluff, I reached Betty Asquith on the telephone. Sure, she said; it would be real nice to see someone from England. She hadn’t seen nobody from back home in years. Her voice was a complete puzzle. She did not, admittedly, sound as if she had been born and raised in Missouri, but she had the queerest British accent I had ever laid ears on. Her husband drove around to the trucking café to pick me up.

“Asquith,” he said. “That’s a good English name, ain’t it? Didn’t you once have a president, or head minister, or some such, name of Asquith? I guess him and me must’ve been kin at some stage of the game, but that’d be going back a piece, wouldn’t it?”

When he was in the U.S. Army in the early 1950s, he’d been stationed in London. His wife was Welsh, from Cardiff, and she had been working as a nurse in a London hospital when he met her. They had come back together to Missouri in 1955. In their neat house on the hill above town, Mrs. Asquith told me the story of that journey.

They had set out from New Jersey on the thousand-mile drive west. She had never seen such endless space. As the states unrolled—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois—she had thought America could never end. Farms and fields to her meant the little stone-walled plots and
cottages of Wales; she couldn’t take in these unbroken miles of crops and forest. By the time they had crossed the Alleghenies, she felt it was high time for the sea to show up on the horizon. It took them three days to reach Bowling Green, ten miles up the road from Louisiana, where Everett Asquith’s parents lived.

“After a couple of days, Everett says let’s go downtown. We got to Bowling Green Square. I said, ‘Where’s the town?’ Everett says, ‘This is it. You’re in it.’
Town?
It wasn’t no town at all!”

After twenty-five years, her vocabulary and grammar were totally American. But she talked, singingly, from the front of her mouth, still, and had created a dialect of her own, a sort of Pike County Welsh. Pike County itself, its own memories of immigration long lost now, had been mildly astounded by Betty Asquith. Everett’s friends were surprised that she could speak English at all. “Well, they knew I was a foreigner, and they knew foreigners couldn’t speak English, and that was that. Then I’d ask the neighbors in for coffee and biscuits. That wasn’t no good.
Biscuits?
They thought that was real queer. Then I’d ask for a ‘chemist,’ and nobody knew what I meant. And I’d walk to the store. They thought I was crazy. Nobody walked anyplace in Bowling Green, and folks was going around saying we was too poor to have a car. But back home, I always walked. Everywhere.”

She was determined to turn herself into an American. She got a job as a night nurse at the local hospital, she gave coffee klatches and learned to call biscuits cookies. She collected American words and wrote them down in a notebook. She dressed herself from the Sears catalogue and drove herself to the supermarket in the station wagon.

In Louisiana she was still “the English lady.” Yet the one way in which she now kept in touch with her original culture was itself characteristically American. Like the German towns with their Oktoberfests, and the Swedes with their Smorgasbords, Betty Asquith occasionally cooked a ritual British Sunday lunch with roast lamb, mint sauce and Yorkshire pudding. This ceremonial food was the last, necessary reminder that she had once made that long journey, and become someone else.

“You aiming to stay on in the United States?” she asked me.

“No. I’ll be going back to London.”

“I couldn’t go back. Not now. I’d love to go on vacation there, but to live … no, there’s no way. I
feel
like an American, you know?”

The next morning was bright and rough. I was awakened by the metallic clinking of the leaves outside the window. I inspected the river
from the bluff: it was streaked with ribbons of froth. Even so, I meant to go on. I had looked at the charts, and between here and St. Louis the river was either so narrow or so well broken with islands that I doubted if the wind could do me much harm. I was well downstream of all the wide pools now: it was typical of the Mississippi’s unfathomable nature that it actually grew thinner as it headed for the ocean. At Louisiana it was only half a mile across—just a domestic trickle, compared with the great dawdling sweep of water on which I’d ridden through Minnesota and Wisconsin and northern Iowa.

Waves watched from the bluff were one thing, though; seen from the boat they were quite another. They rolled me around and jerked the sky about over my head. Then they started coming in over the bow in bucketfuls. I ran ashore a few hundred yards south of where I’d started out.

The bartender at the Fireside Lounge said, “I never thought you were fool enough to tangle with that river on a day like this.”

“No,” I said. “I was being stupidly overconfident. It only took me five minutes to learn my lesson, though.”

“Five minutes is plenty long enough to drown in.”

A young man was nursing a beer in quivery hands. He looked like a habitual morning drinker. He was too thin for his clothes; he had wet, spaniel’s eyes, sunk in pits in his skull. When he talked he sounded like a sleepwalker.

“You’re the Englishman,” he said.

“Yes—”

“You seen Jeannie yet?”

“Who?”

“The English lady.”

“Yes.
Betty
. Betty Asquith. I saw her and her husband last night.”

“She don’t live with her husband no more.”

“Betty Asquith does.”

“Jeannie don’t.”

Mrs. Asquith had said nothing about there being another G.I. bride in town. It seemed improbable that a place as small as Louisiana should harbor British immigrants who didn’t know each other’s names.

“Jeannie’s good people. She’s real good people. I could take you around there.…”

It took him two more beers to cure his shakes; then Jerry led me to a pickup truck which, I suspected, he had salvaged from a dump. Its exhaust and brakes had gone. There were knocks in its engine and hollow groans in its transmission. We dithered across town in this
wreck, misfiring badly up Third, past the decrepit mansions and a ruinous wooden mock-up of the Parthenon, out into a suburban scrub of yard sales, bungalows, vacant lots and dogs on chains. Jerry wanted me to see the trailer home where he lived with his mother.

It was parked in an overgrown orchard. Inside, it smelled of dust, fried bacon and old clothes. It was stuffed with knickknacks. Jerry had been an adopted child, and he’d furnished himself with a personal history by amassing a collection of junk and trinkets. He showed me his clam shells, his old medicine jars and perfume bottles, the 1938 cabinet radio he’d bought for fifty cents in a sale, a Confederate dollar bill. He had two real treasures. One was the Pike County Atlas for 1875. It represented Louisiana as Louisiana never could have been, as an elegant metropolis of genteel culture. Crudely etched pictures showed the ladies and gentlemen of the town riding past trim estates in horse-drawn buggies, the men in top hats, the women dressed in the newest and most fashionable creations of St. Louis. Whaleboned, bonneted, richly petticoated, they processed through the book like queens. Besotted as the artist was with this vision of fine women, he was even more obsessed with fences. Every stake and wattle in Pike County had been carefully drawn in. They were marvelous fences. They crisscrossed the pictures, out of all perspective, reducing the Missouri landscape to a checkerboard of perfect order. In 1875, civilization had meant good fences; and in the matter of fences, Louisiana would not yield a single picket to any city in the land.

In the maps at the back of the book, each lot was marked with its owner’s name. “See? Z. O. Mackintosh …” Jerry said. “He’s my kin.” We worked slowly through every patch of Pike County which had been held by Z. O. Mackintosh. He had evidently collected land much as Jerry himself collected clam shells and old coins and ghostly tintypes of people who might have been his relatives. Mr. Mackintosh’s name dotted the atlas: an acre here, a narrow strip of ground a mile off, another acre, another strip … “He was a real big guy in these parts,” Jerry said. “There wasn’t nobody to touch Z. O. Mackintosh. I don’t know where it all went. By rights, I reckon, some of that land … it should’ve come down to me. I guess the papers are all lost, though, now. My mother, she doesn’t know nothing about it. But then she ain’t kin, like I am.”

Jerry’s Pike County, preserved in his atlas, was his lawful inheritance, out of which he had been tricked by misfortune. In this musty trailer, with his part-time job at a plastics factory and his six-packs of Miller’s, he was just the sad, daydreaming shadow of the person he
believed he really was. In the atlas, he was Z. O. Mackintosh, landowner, builder of fences, horseman and escort to beautiful women in crinolines.

“This town …” Jerry said, pulling the ring from another can of beer, “… it was founded … I dunno, it was in the eighteen-hundreds. It’s dead now. It’s been dead for forty years. Maybe more.”

His other great treasure was a brown photograph. I mistook it at first for a genuine relic of Louisiana’s heyday, but it had been taken six months before. Jerry had gone to a “Western studio” in Ozark, Missouri, where he had been dressed up like a doll in the clothes of a nineteenth-century dude. An ammunition belt with twin revolvers had been hung on his hips. A long-barreled rifle had been put in his hands. He was standing on the porch of a homesteader’s log cabin, and this moment of floodlit make-believe had been printed in historic sepia. It looked convincing enough, until one saw Jerry’s hopeless eyes. They stared emptily from the picture in ironic contradiction to all the symbols of frontier manliness with which the photographer had tricked out the body of his subject. If that rifle had actually gone off, the gun-slinger would have died of fright.

“She’s good people,” Jerry said again. He was not a man, I thought, on whom many women would let themselves become dependent, and he was proud of the protective way in which he had been able to look after “Jeannie.” He went shopping for her in winter, he found driftwood for her fire, he took her out to the Fireside Lounge in his pickup. “She gets to be real lonesome … with her being English.… She don’t know too many folks in Louisiana.”

We stopped outside the most tottering and most splay-boarded of all the crumbling wooden mansions in the town. What should have been its front lawn was weeds and thistles; its upstairs windows were broken; a few shreds of once-white paint clung to its siding like flakes of dandruff. “Jeannie” lived in a single room on the ground floor. She was the house’s last surviving occupant, but it looked as if she had just moved in the day before. Her clothes were strung on hangers along the picture rails. There were holes in the ceiling where the plaster had fallen. Two burners on an old gas stove supplied the only heat, and most of the light, since “Jeannie” had pulled down the green blind over her window, and the sun came in through a few ragged chinks where the blind had torn or frayed away. The place was as humid and gloomy as a crypt. “Jeannie” herself was indistinct: an old woman, stiff with arthritis, sitting in a dirty housecoat on an iron bed. There was a doll
on the pillow, with the severed head of another doll lying beside it.

“Jeannie,” Jerry said, “I’ve brought a friend. He’s from
England!
”

“It’s not Arthur … is it?”

“No, this is Jonathan—”

“Did Arthur send him? You haven’t come from Arthur, have you, dear?”

I had to explain that I’d never heard of Arthur. “Jeannie’s” face went slack with disappointment.
Arfur
, she said,
Arfur
. She spoke in the querulous, whiffly accent of suburban East Anglia; there wasn’t a trace of American in it.

“Oh, dear,” she said, “I do wish you knew Arthur, You could’ve brought a message from him. He’ll be coming over, though, any day now. You’ll prob’ly meet Arthur. He’s coming, see, to take me away. I’m going home. On the aeroplane. To Colchester. D’you know Colchester, dear? Colchester, in Essex?”

“Yes, I’ve stayed there. It’s a nice town.”

“That’s where I’m going. When Arthur comes.”

It was in a dance hall in Colchester, in 1943, that she had met her American husband. She had come over to the United States on a boat full of English brides, and arrived in Nashville, Tennessee. The marriage had been a disaster. Within a few months, the couple had split and “Jeannie” had landed in this Louisiana rooming house. She’d had no money. England was a world away; only the rich could afford the luxury of a transatlantic fare. So she had stayed on, camping out in the room as if it were an overnight lodging, waiting to be rescued and brought home. She had been waiting for more than thirty years.

“Don’t call me ‘Jeannie,’ dear. Call me Ivy. Ivy’s me real name. ‘Jeannie’s’ just the name they give me when I come to America. It was from that song. You know … 
Jeannie with the light brown hair …
I don’t know the rest of the words, but that’s what they called me. It’s my American name. But I’d like it if you called me Ivy.”

She hobbled over to the chest of drawers where she kept everything she had which was left of England. There was a big wooden crucifix, wrapped in yellowing tissue paper, which she had brought with her on the bridal ship. There were some blurry snapshots of her English family, all taken in the 1940s, with the marks of rationing and air raids in their clothes and faces. Then a glossy, whole-plate professional photograph, its edges chipped … it showed two couples on the edge of a dance floor. “Look—there’s Arthur, with me sister. They’d just got married then. There’s me. And that’s
him.” Him
was transparently an American, looking bland, smiling and well fed beside the beaky,
strained English people at his side. Ivy put her hand over his image. “I wish
he
wasn’t in that picture. I wanted to cut him out wiv a pair of scissors … but that’d spoil the photo, wouldn’t it dear?” Ivy herself, even in 1943, had been no chicken: big-nosed, bespectacled; her mouth had been lipsticked into a Cupid’s-bow large enough to mail a letter through.