Set This House on Fire (12 page)

“Pockets full. What is your name?” I said. We sat on the crumpled bumper of the car together while the hazy premature dusk settled in the valley below us, and lit up a couple of Chesterfields. Smelling powerfully of goats, clad in five cents’ worth of rags, he sent blue clouds of smoke billowing through the twilight and pondered my question.

“I’m called Saverio,” he said finally. “I speak good English. My uncle lived in
la città di Brooklyn
many years ago. He told me. Listen.
Corney Island. Oly Smokes. Skeedo. Wanna pizza tail?”

“Bene,”
I said.

“Skeedo,
that signifies ‘hide the red lobster.’”

“What?”

“‘Hide the red lobster,’” he repeated. “Are you with the films? Did you ever hide the red lobster with La Mangiamele? I would dearly love to do that with her. Have you ever? She has such wonderful big breasts.”

“No,” I said. “Have you?”

“Never,” he said, gurgling sadly. “I have only done this once in my life which was with a shepherdess named Angelina in Tramonti many years ago. She died though of the evil vapors. Are you a millionaire?”

I got up, thinking that I heard a faint toy piping sound in the air around us, the sorrowful scamper of naked feet, long ago pursued, long made still.
“Vieni,
Saverio,” I said, “earn yourself some riches. Those bags there, those boxes.
Andiamo!
To the hotel!”

Beneath a mountainous load of suitcases, blankets and bedroll and portable radio, books and tennis racket and guitar, slung from him at all angles like a packhorse and like a packhorse foot-sure, burly, and uncomplaining, he preceded me back through town, singing to himself and gabbling the entire way. “Out of the road!” he bellowed at an inquisitive dog.
“Via, via,
son of a whore! Make way for the Americans!” In wild song and in words I could not understand he sent his demented voice, harsh as rattling stones, through the archways and up to the rooftops, and hooted and crowed, and sprayed jubilant globes of spittle through the air. Then I bade him halt and shut up, for at the end of some dark alleyway Rosemarie and Mason were standing in the shadows, and I was conscious of a mechanical racket, basso profundo (one of those mobile generators, it has later occurred to me, which the movie people were forever dragging across the Italian landscape), and the two voices, one husky and male and furious, the other high, placating, touched with chill alarm, both rising up and up in frenzied contest with the roar.

“I did
not,
Muffin!” she pleaded.

“You did, you did!” he yelled. “You
hinted,
you lousy bitch!”

“I didn’t mean to, darling. I only meant—”

“You hinted!”

“Muffin, darling, please listen—” she implored him.

“You listen!” he put in. “My sex life is no concern of yours! Like it or lump it, understand?” A dozen of his words went skittering away on the churning din. “—you to know that if I want to get laid—”
Chuckety-clack, chuckety-clack.
“—and
lay
anybody, anywhere—”

“Darling!”

I heard them say no more. With baffling simultaneity the flowered oblong of his arm went up to hit her just as the generator ceased its roar, then struck, and in that vacuum which rushed in upon the engine’s final flutter one flat smack of his hand against her face seemed to echo down the alleyway in wave on hurtful wave, then faded, then lay still.

I drew back for an instant, waiting for some cry or whimper, but I heard no sound at all. So I hustled on (ragtag Saverio, my bedeviled, lustful, gifted Papageno galloping behind me) like a voyeur, ashamed, but undetected.

Later, at the Bella Vista, sprawled on the bed fully clothed and still unwashed, I was kept fretfully awake for a while by the painting which engulfed one whole panel of the wall. It had been pointed out to me by Windgasser, the Swiss-Italian landlord, a soft-handed youngish man with rosy cheeks and burgeoning dewlaps, honey-tongued, flatulent as his name and, at least at that moment, wholly insufferable, who had greeted me at the door with a cry in English like a song, then with a threatening look and a curse, which revealed a lisp in both languages, chased Saverio away, and led me upstairs babbling good evenings,
bon thoirs
and
guten Abends
to his guests and to me obsequious, mystifying amends. “Had I known,” he said. “Had I just known. Ah, but this room will be
very
compelling. You thee? This was my father’s hotel and his father’s before him. But I’m devvistated. Any friend of Mr. Flagg’s is Fausto Windgasser’s most honored guest. That, thir,” he said pointing to the painting and flinging open the blinds, “That painting is by Ugo Angelucci who—I don’t know if you know it or not—died twenty years ago in this very hotel. It’s his masterpiece.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Now kindly close the blinds.”

When he had gone, allowing me, in a depletion of spirit so profound that it threatened sleep, to lie twitching restlessly on the bed, I found that the empty-faced beautiful woman which was Angelucci’s painting was scrutinizing me with half-closed eyes. She was a vapid, heavy-lidded blonde, presumably in bed but hardly tantalizing, for her lower parts were swaddled in what looked like some impermeable rug and a yard of squeamish lace appeared from nowhere to cover both her breasts. Yet as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I could tell that the painting, whether Windgasser was aware of it or not, was meant to be naughty; the title beneath in rambling Italian script—”Troubled Sleep“—gave it away, and with a dozing, wondrous sense of discovery I saw that Angelucci, the old rogue, had arranged in artful, subtle lines of chiaroscuro a famished male profile against the woman’s shoulder, while tangled around her naked belly, and concealed there just as in one of those drawings for children where you must always find the hidden duck, a cart, or a horn, were the phantom shapes of two groping, ardent hands. With her budlike lips and stiff neck and arctic air of chastity, the woman generated no more vigor or excitement than those old, dim sketches of Madame du Barry—a fraud, a cheat, and a disappointment—and I remember sinking back in the pillows, thinking of Angelucci and listening, as I began nervously to drowse, to hidden bells and boats far down the slope on the placid sea. Who was Angelucci? I wondered, nodding off. What manner of man was he? And for no reason at all, in fantasy still dwelling upon the gloomy damask Edwardian rooms through which Windgasser had conducted me below—the
salone
with its elephantine sofas and yellowing stackedup copies of the
Illustrated London News
and bookcases dusty with Bulwer-Lytton and Fenimore Cooper and Hapsburg memoirs, and the framed photographs, stained and damp with time, of the hotel’s regal visitors (Umberto the First, looking old and sickly, the Duke of Aosta with his pretty family in a box-shaped old Daimler, Queen Margherita in a cloche hat, Ellen Terry, Erich von Stroheim, movie queens and sheiks of the twenties now dead or sunk out of memory)—my mind became a drowsy camphorous collage of antimacassars and dogcarts stuffed with children in pinafores, of
croissants
and governesses and elegant outings to the blue incomparable sea, where men with goatees sunned themselves, and the air was filled with an extravagant babel of tongues. Oh, for that fragrant, bygone, impossible life! And again, across some exquisite margin of desire and longing that separates waking from sleep, the clownish figure of Angelucci cavorted—a Neapolitan lecher, perhaps, with sticky fingers and a Vandyke beard, artist
manque
in a land of giants, who came each summer to the Bella Vista to simplify his liver, to paint a bit, to bask in the transcendent light of Hapsburg and Aosta and Savoy.
“Vostra Maestà !”
I heard his plea across the decades. “Majesty! If I could just paint—” Or, turned humiliatingly away, sidling now toward the lovely English girl with rose-stung cheeks (how rich she must be!): “Excuse me, signorina, but the color of your hair—” Did he die perhaps in this room? In this very bed? Dimly, remotely, the bells from the gulf jangled in my reverie, my eyes seemed to behold once more those fatuous eyes, those ghostly, licentious hands, and now smitten sorrowfully with the sudden knowledge that this maiden resembled someone … someone … I began to pass into oblivion…

But I did not go to sleep then—not quite. I only half-dozed, and as I did so a lowland boyhood seascape formed in outline against my brain: a quiet blue waterway, boats, seas, gulls. Then Wendy, propped near me blank and lovely against the cork cushions of a sailboat whispering over foam-flecked Virginia waters, indolently murmuring: “What sunlight. What a divine day.” And Mason’s voice, merry from the helm: “Stand by to come about!” Then the stilted feminine voice again—”Mason, darling! I
always
get the spray!“—as the boat in ponderous swerve came up to meet the wind, trembled for an instant at standstill amid a flutter of sails, then caught the breeze and turned—gulls, trees, sky and distant riverside all turning too, slowly spinning, moving in languid panorama out of sight. And,
“Mason
darling,” the voice cajoled light-heartedly, “I
always
get wet. Let Peter sail,
chéri.”

“Don’t be silly, Wendy-dear,” I seemed to hear his reply. “Peter wouldn’t know a jib from a jibe.”

“But darling, how
uncuhteous
to your guests.”

“Shut up. I love you, angel.”

“Angel-pie. My sweet adorable seventeen-year-old. Happy birthday, lover. And Peter, dear. Happy birthday, too.”

It was not my birthday at all, but a half-dozen martinis had clouded many of her perceptions; when we docked she almost toppled from the boat but, svelte in slacks and nimble, recovered her balance and stood poised at the bow gleaming and joyful, stretching out her arms and whispering, “Youth, youth,” to an apricot-colored sunset. It was the day Mason was kicked out of St. Andrew’s, imprinted deep in my memory because the havoc wreaked upon Wendy-dear (I rarely heard him call his mother anything else) beginning at the moment that evening when, I think, she sensed the news (he tried to pick the most propitious moment, too, when liquored up, in chirrupy flattery still bestowing upon him garlands of
chéris
and angel-pies, she seemed most able to absorb the shock), sketched upon my mind such a cruel portrait of human turmoil that I often still wonder how, at that age, I survived it.

St. Andrew’s was not much as a school, I suppose. Created for the sons of impecunious Virginia Episcopalians, threadbare and creaky, as frigid in December as Dotheboys Hall and chronically short of money, it had more than its share of misfits and nincompoops who could not find lodging elsewhere, and was a snug harbor for storm-driven scholars washed up from the academic sea. Our English master one year, I remember, was a young football star from an agricultural college somewhere who kept reading us verses by Grantland Rice; another year, some poor old derelict, a French instructor, was found dead in bed with a bottle of booze beside him. But what there was lacking in scholarship and learning was made up in something called “St. Andrew’s spirit”; the football team, clad in cast-off moth-eaten jersies, was regularly trampled by every institution in the state, but rowdily cheered; and the school’s situation—its bucolic setting in the lost Virginia tidelands, the surrounding blue and brooding sweep of river’s estuary and riverside and bay, nodding cedars around the windows close by where we slept, and pines in the woods, and willows at the water’s edge which at each morning’s tolling bell, I remember, let loose to the sun a flight of exultant birds—made it an agreeable place for a boy to live and grow. What is more, it was a tiny school—there were rarely more than forty of us—so that often I think we felt, though unconsciously, that we were more of a family than a school and that Dr. Thomas Jefferson Marston, the pious old minister who reigned over us, and so Virginian that it was almost heartbreaking just to hear him say “General Lee,” was more of a father to us than a headmaster. His voice was seraphic—a posthorn, a cello, a psaltery upon which each evening, with artless splendor, he played the liturgy’s ravishing song; now when I recall those musty twilights in chapel, and the old man’s luscious voice floating over our bowed, disheveled heads—
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord
—and then let my mind rove to some other scene, to the river, blue, immaculate blue, where we sailed our leaky boats, and the surrounding crickety frog-filled woods lit at night by our stealthy, clandestine lamps and the hill sloping chaste and grassy to the bay, where we went digging for clams and the evening gulls would slant away in full cry eastward toward the sea—when, as I say, in impiety and yearning, in headlong rush toward some departed tranquillity and innocence, I think of those scenes, there soars above them in my memory that reverend voice still crying out in dusk like some celestial trumpet:
O Lord, my strength and my redeemer!

Into this dutiful Christian atmosphere Mason burst like some debauched cheer in the midst of worship, confounding and fascinating us all. He came out of the North (to all of us a mysterious place; Rye, New York, was where he had lived until the age of twelve), enunciating his “r’s” with a brisk, sophisticated lilt, draped in a cashmere blazer, and loaded down with Tootsie Rolls, golf clubs, and contraceptives. Already, he told us with some pride, he had been kicked out of
two
schools. He was seductively glib, winning, quick-witted and beautiful. And at first he bewitched all of us.

Once he told us that he had been only thirteen when he lost his virginity—one summer week end at his father’s recently acquired estate on the York River—to a no longer young but still lovely and still celebrated Hollywood actress. The story was outlandish but somehow plausible. We all knew Mason’s family moved in movie circles. And considering other tales about this lady (one of them, having something to do with a scandalous act beneath a night-club table, had been powerful enough to unhinge the imagination of a whole generation of schoolboys), I guess we at first believed it. Mason was only sixteen at the time, and he unfolded the story with all the dreamy richness of detail of some rancid old libertine. Yet it was typical of Mason even then to undermine his own credibility, and to ruin a good thing: in later accounts that early seduction was only the first of many skirmishes, and the insatiable movie queen became his mistress for three summers running. There were steamy liaisons in Richmond or Washington, love-bouts in the backs of cars, in swimming pools, on boats; once, he claimed, standing up in a hammock—all these even at our gullible, lascivious age were flights of desire beyond reason and the whole wonderful erotic edifice crumbled finally, broken by Mason’s preposterous embellishments. I think our disbelief honestly hurt Mason; later I found out from his mother that the actress had indeed visited the Flaggs—once in Rye when Mason was very young—and had brought him a teddy bear and dandled him on her knee.