The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down (18 page)

At this point, the symposium is interrupted by the arrival of the drunken Alcibiades, who proceeds to offer a shameless account
of his frustrated efforts to seduce Socrates and an encomium to the philosopher's endurance, courage, and wisdom. The party
breaks up shortly afterward upon the invasion of a horde of drunken gate-crashers.

It is conceivable, I suppose, that not all readers will recognize their own party chatter in my synopsis of the
Symposium.
We do not, it is true, all discuss the spiritual nature of love at our dinner parties, drawing heavily on classical references,
although we might. It is also possible, since Plato makes no claim to having been present at this particular symposium, that
for literary purposes he has edited out the intervals in which the party-goers talked about their health problems, the cost
of their children's schooling, street crime, and travel plans. What we do recognize despite the absence of women and all the
talk of sex with little boys - is the atmosphere in which people of a certain education and leisure, of all professions and
from all walks of life, sit around of an evening to eat, drink, and exchange often ill-informed opinions in a spirit of friendly,
casual companionship. That is us, and it is not Homer. We do not - at least, my friends and I do not - sit around worrying
that God will punish us for our transgressions, and neither do Plato's or Xenophon's symposiasts. They, like us, have spent
many centuries evaluating the evidence. Even if, like humans everywhere and at all times, they rarely have the fortitude of
their convictions, they, like us, seem to have come to the conclusion that loving, forthright, and virtuous behavior toward
their fellow men and women is rewarded, materially and spiritually, far better than abjection and the slavish placation of
occult forces. Violent, slave-owning misogynists they may yet be, but just look at the quagmire of fear and ignorance from
which they have had to extricate themselves. I am almost tempted to say that they - and by implication, we - have evolved.
A little.

As with us, however, this evolution has been incremental and not fully iconoclastic. Just as it is impossible to understand
the ideas and morals of the twenty-first century without harking back at least to the sixteenth, so with the Greeks of Plato's
time it is probably just as important to examine what they have chosen to preserve from their ancestry as it is to evaluate
what they have jettisoned. We retain our mythologies, archaic as well as contemporary, because they remain pertinent by telling
us something about ourselves. Ancient stories, such as those related by Ovid in his
Metamorphoses,
can reveal the continuity of ideas and attitudes even as they evolve beyond recognition.

Ovid relates how Theseus and his companions, on their way to Athens, are waylaid by the river god Achelous, who is anxious
to extend his hospitality to the great hero. While they are waited upon by barefoot nymphs, Achelous tells them the story
of how Neptune turned the maiden Perimele into an island. When Pirithous, one of Theseus' company, expresses scornful scepticism
about the truth of the story, the aged hero Lelex sets him straight.

He recounts the tale of Baucis and Philemon, a pious old couple living in the hill country of Phrygia. One day, they take
in a pair of footsore travelers who had been turned away from every other home in the region. Though poor and living without
servants in a tiny thatched cottage, the hosts seek to make their guests comfortable in every way. Baucis seats them on sedge-grass
mattresses, which she covers with her best cloth, and engages them in chitchat to distract them from the wait for their humble
meal. She props up the leg of a rickety table, which she wipes clean with green mint. The travelers are given a homey meal
of cheese, olives, garden vegetables, boiled bacon, roasted eggs, and young wine served in beechwood cups coated in yellow
wax - just about everything the household has to offer. They enjoy a dessert of figs, dates, honeycomb, and grapes fresh off
the vine.

As the meal progresses, the hosts notice that the flagon of wine keeps refilling itself. Their guests, it transpires, are
the gods Zeus and Hermes (Ovid uses their Roman names) touring the country in disguise. The old couple, ashamed by the scantiness
of the meal, want to sacrifice their one goose, but the bird eludes them and is finally offered protection by the gods.

Baucis and Philemon are led to a hilltop, whence they witness the flooding of the entire countryside in punishment for its
wicked lack of hospitality. Only their thatched cottage is spared, transformed into a gleaming temple of gold and marble.
Offered any reward for their piety, the couple ask only to be allowed to serve as priests in the temple and, at their appointed
time, to die together so that neither might have to live alone. All this is granted and, on the day of their deaths many years
later, they have just enough time to whisper a hasty good-bye before being transformed into trees, an oak and a linden, that
flourish side by side for centuries thereafter.

Although they never knew it, Baucis and Philemon have waited their entire lives for this divine encounter. All the stories
on their parents' knees, all the religious training, all the practice and patience of hospitality have led up to their meeting
with the gods. They have won the lottery: millions upon millions of Greek hosts, every bit as humble and diligent as they,
lived and died anonymously without ever being put to the test. By all lights, Baucis and Philemon should be trembling in their
sandals, paralyzed with dread as they face their moment of truth. How many thousands have come to this crossroads and failed
to pass through, being transformed for their sins into birds, beasts, inanimate objects, geographical features, or the tortured
damned?

But Baucis and Philemon are serene and unafraid, evincing but a momentary alarm when they first come to understand the situation.
In fact, the entire story, despite the destruction, is suffused with a most gentle and transcendent love that transmutes all
it touches. The love of supplicants for their masters, which, like a child's love for his or her parents, is trusting and
never abstract; the protective, sheltering, divine love in which the righteous bask so peacefully, like thoughtless lizards
in the desert; the love of the host for order, calm, and cleanliness, all enwrapped in a sprig of green mint; the love of
the gardener for nature's simple bounty; most of all, an old couple's love for each other, as elemental and encompassing and
eternal as the Earth itself, a sanctuary as holy and sanctifying as any temple, as deep-rooted and phototropic as any linden
tree. With barely a pittance of learning between them, Baucis and Philemon live in full conceit of the love that Plato is
at such pains to transpose.

Socrates, Plato, and their peers were fully aware that they were not the same as the Greeks of Achilles' time, or of Homer's
time, or of Baucis and Philemon's time, and they congratulated themselves on it. What they were probably less attuned to were
the ways in which they were similar and, in some respects, the ways in which they fell short in understanding.

It is entirely plausible, in fact, that, having put such an enormous distance between themselves and their god-fearing ancestors,
the philosophers and intellectuals of Plato's time had, all unwittingly, lost something of great value and beauty. They may
well have seen Homer's characters as fearful, superstitious barbarians, not unlike our view of them, timeless poetry notwithstanding.
Perhaps, though, what the Homeric Greeks were really afraid of was not the wrath of the gods, but that the gods might not
exist after all. Perhaps they peopled the universe with gods not to explain and propitiate the unknown, but to serve as epitomes
for their own inchoate need to aspire, to love transcendentally - in other words, as instinctual expressions of the very same
love that Socrates explicates at great length. If that is the case - if Homer understood this love just as deeply and transcendently
as Socrates - it turns our theory of ancient Greek hospitality as god-fearing placation on its head. In humble hospitality,
we do not placate the gods, but
create
them.

This brings us full circle to the paralysis of fear I sometimes experience before the arrival of my guests. If, in welcoming
people into my home, what I am actually doing is summoning the presence of the divinity, is it any wonder that I tremble before
the prospect of this unfolding miracle? Just as Plato describes, we long; in longing, we look around ourselves for the object
of our longing, and, not finding it, we look upward. If we do not find it there, there is nowhere left to turn but to the
Baucis or Philemon beside us. What is real is our love; what is contingent is its object. So what if, in its contingency,
that object is also an object of dread? That stranger at your threshold, that friend across the table: is she a god to be
feared or is she that "certain single knowledge" of yours, your love which has yet to be told, embodied and emboldened to
seek your welcome, to come home to you and your hospitality - transfigured, like a tumbledown cottage of Phrygia, into a Temple
of Love.

After all, when we lie awake in bed late at night, or as we prepare to receive the guests whom we have summoned to the table,
in Phrygia as in Manhattan, what is it that pains us the most: our terror, or our longing?

CHAPTER IX

THANKSGIVING, NEW YORK CITY, 2001

They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things,
rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods.

Hesiod,
Works and Days

The calendar tells us that Thanksgiving falls on the last Thursday of November, but that is only partly true. We may celebrate
it on that date, but it can no more be confined to a single day than love can be confined to Valentine's Day. Thanksgiving
is the commemoration - the act of remembering together - of an event, but I would imagine that few, if any of us are thinking
about pilgrims and Indians as the day dawns. We come together and we remember something altogether different. Those memories
that impose themselves on us on Thanksgiving Day are our own, with us at all times, guardian angels and devil provocateurs
that never sleep but do not always speak to us directly. Instead, they hold their tongues until we come together to commemorate,
and then those memories talk to each other in their own ancient language, like a group of dogs on a walk, straining at the
leash, sniffing at each other, circling warily. We see them come alive then, among their own, but, like the owners of those
dogs, we have no idea what they are saying to each other. We only think we own them. And even when we get them home, alone
together on the couch, and we scratch them between the ears and offer them tidbits, those memories still can't tell us what
they want from us.

On Wednesday, I get up before dawn to buy Brussels sprouts, potatoes, yams, lettuce, and herbs at the farmers market on Union
Square. I drop these off at home and then head directly for Jefferson Market, where I pick up the twenty-five pound organic
turkey that I had ordered several weeks earlier. I've learned from experience that a twenty-five pounder is the largest that
will fit in my lobster pot, where it will soak in brine and herbs for the next twenty-four hours. If I have timed everything
right, I should have about half an hour left before work to make a last quick excursion to the supermarket for butter, half-and-half,
and cream. By the time I get home from work that evening, I'm already wiped out. We husband our energies, kick back in front
of the television, drink iced vodka, and order in.

Thursday morning, the entire household is mobilized. There are sprouts, potatoes, onions, carrots, parsnips, and chestnuts
to be peeled. There is sausage to be fried and fresh sage, rosemary, tarragon, oregano, and thyme to be chopped. The stuffing
has to be mixed. There are mashed potatoes with creme fraiche, root vegetables roasted with sesame oil, Brussels sprouts sauteed
with chestnuts and ham, creamed pearl onions, gravy, cranberry relish, salad, and dressing to be prepared. The turkey must
be drained, washed, dried, seasoned, stuffed, slathered with herb butter inside and out, mounted, and in the oven by nine
o'clock. Then there are glasses to dust, napkins to be ironed, floors to be mopped, children to be groomed, and a hamster
cage to be disinfected. At noon we rest; at two the guests begin to arrive.

The mood is thoughtful and emotional as our guests assemble. My father is already here, as are my sisters, Nancy and Jenny,
visiting from England. Of my immediate family, only my brother Scott, tied up in L.A. on a film shoot, along with his wife,
Adena, and their children, Seth and Michaela, are missing. Judy's parents arrive first, her mother, Herzlia, bearing pumpkin
scones, her father, David, with some very special Burgundy that he and I will share only reluctantly with the others. Then
come Judy's sister, Barbara, and her new husband, Andy. My father's first cousin Norman and his wife, Irene, arrive, bringing
cranberry mold and cranberry sauce; then their daughter, Maggi, on whom I had a secret crush as a teenager, with her husband,
Michael, their girls, Sarah and Kate, and pumpkin pie. Then comes Jennifer, Maggi's sister, with her husband, Larry, their
children, Max and Harry, and chocolate mousse cake. We welcome my father's friends Billy, who has brought two enormous platters
of steamed shrimp, and Bernice, a colleague of thirty years. Our old friend Margaret has driven down from Wellesley with her
two-year-old, Ben. There are only twenty-five of us this year; we have numbered as many as thirty at Thanksgivings past.

Some years, Thanksgiving is the only chance I get to see my cousins, although they only live across town. Every year, we have
to remind the children how they are related: Norman and Irene are my first cousins once removed; Maggi and Jennifer are my
second cousins; Sarah, Kate, Max, and Harry are my second cousins once removed, and Sophie's and Cora's third cousins. This
is a puzzle they love to solve, the same game that had delighted me twenty-five years earlier at our Thanksgivings in London
and filled me, harboring my illicit passion for Maggi, with the ancient thrill of violated taboo. When they are finally satisfied
with the exegesis of the family tree, the children go off to play Twister and listen to Destiny's Child.

All the prep work is done and I can relax. We eat shrimp, drink scotch or chardonnay. Naturally, all the talk is about the
World Trade Center attack. Many of us had witnessed it as it happened; Andy had had to scramble down thirty-eight flights
of stairs from his office in WTC 7, which collapsed later in the day; he had arrived at our door covered in a thin film of
white dust. None of us, New Yorkers all, had lived a moment since then without reliving the horrors of that day. Even now,
some ten weeks later, our windows are tightly shut against the burning stench that continues to rise from the crater less
than two miles due south.

Twilight falls early in New York in late November, and it has already begun when the turkey comes out of the oven. It rests,
as massive and still as a monument, while Norman retrieves his freshly laundered apron, carving knife, and fork from his briefcase.
Norman has been honorary carver for as long as I can recall, and I don't believe that even he remembers when or why he started
bringing his own implements. He takes his time sharpening the blade, as he knows that it is not really right to launch the
feast until it is dark outside, for that is when the lights are dimmed, the candles lit, and the apartment begins to feel
enclosed and aglow from within, as it were, like a stage in a darkened theater. No feast or drama can be entirely successful
until this sense of isolation from the outside world is complete and an entirely artificial and hermetic universe has been
created. That is how the trance of hospitality is summoned; that is how we close our eyes, descend into the deep, and retrieve
by sense of touch the remembrance of long-gone celebration. When the lights are low and the autumn night closes in, the host's
most important task of all - that of marrying the dream of the present to the dream of the past - may begin.

The actual Thanksgiving meal is the least important element of the celebration, for me at any rate. For one thing, there are
too many of us to sit in one gathering at the table, so the eternal, circular aspect of the banquet - normally so crucial
to any prospect of a successful dinner - has to be discarded. Instead, we have several tables set up, and people rise and
move around as the whim takes them; naturally, in these circumstances, they are less inclined to linger approvingly over their
food. For another, as fresh, bountiful, and all-American as it is, there is more bulk than elegance to the fare. The diners
- who are serving themselves, buffet-style - tend to overload their plates and shovel down their food with a lack of appreciation
and decorum that might demolish a fastidious cook in other circumstances. They are going straight for
ataraxia,
without any of the intervening stages of pleasure. There are, of course, the usual comments on the juiciness of the bird,
the hint of armagnac in the gravy, the creaminess of the potatoes, but my guests have been eating this food for years and
are not looking for surprises. The chef cannot and should not hope for the praise and wide-eyed wonder that his cooking usually
elicits. I, for one, always lose interest if I cannot expect to be praised.

So the entire meal is wiped out in an hour or less. The wine, the somnolence of satiety, and the prospect of several hours
of cleanup keep us all glued to our seats. I do not get to see my sisters nearly as often as I would like, and we retire to
a quiet corner with my father for a chat. Tonight, we are feeling particularly thankful and especially giving. We cannot continue
to talk or think any longer about September 11; it is time to forget for a while.

My father begins to reminisce about the Thanksgivings of his childhood. He grew up in the Bronx during the Depression, not
poor but in very modest circumstances. An only child, he slept on a daybed in the front vestibule, a latchkey kid who spent
a lot of time on his own. My grandfather worked collecting insurance premiums door to door; my grandmother clerked at a department
store. Along with steaks and chops, she had a deft hand with traditional Eastern European fare - borscht, schav, mamaliga,
schmaltz herring. She made her own caviar out of whitefish roe, grated onion, olive oil, and lemon juice. In the hot summers,
they ate cucumber salad and calves' foot jelly. Within their means, they enjoyed entertaining; an expandable bridge table
was set up in the living room for big events. My father always looked forward to the company.

But the great event of the year was the gathering of the Browner clan at Thanksgiving, at Uncle Dick and Aunt Rose's house.
Uncle Dick, whose real name was Isidore, was the family success story - a traffic court judge. For a kid from the Bronx, a
visit to Dick and Rose's colonial home in the leafy suburb of Great Neck was like a vacation to an exotic foreign country
- or, more accurately, to the all-American dream that my father otherwise knew only from the movies. There was a lawn, with
trees. The children had their own rooms. There was a dining room, and a buzzer under the rug at the head of the table for
signaling staff in the kitchen.

Best of all, for my father, there were people - a press of aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins of all ages. This was what
family life was like in the movies, too: children running up and down the carpeted stairway or congregating in secret conclaves
behind the garage; my grandfather and his brothers - Ben, Harry, Dick, and Max "the Irishman," a fireman - gathered around
the blazing hearth with their drinks; the women in the kitchen, exchanging recipes and gossip. Who cared that Rose was an
indifferent cook who got her cranberry sauce from a can? So what if there was no "staff" to respond to her buzzer? So what
if everyone secretly scorned Dick as a blowhard and a bully? For my father, it was still as good as it gets: a crowd, a house,
a meal, a happy noise. He recalls waking up in his father's arms late one Thanksgiving night as they walked through the cold,
clean air of Great Neck to the railroad station, the crunch of snow underfoot mingling with the soothing wail of a distant
fire engine.

My father had drawn on all these memories when, early in their married life, he and my mother began to host Thanksgivings
of their own. It was not the menu he sought to re-create, nor the guest list, but the sense memory and the feelings of safety
and wholeness, so fleeting yet so overwhelming in childhood, and so rarely recaptured since. Maybe it never even existed,
that feeling, but we insist that it did because we cannot give up the fetish we have made of taking out and polishing its
memory on special days. The feeling itself we chase throughout our adult lives, as we might a false image burned into our
retinas of an object that has long since vanished and did not in any case resemble the picture we retained of it.

Prompted by my father, my sisters and I indulge in our own maudlin reminiscence. It takes us back a quarter of a century,
to London, 1976. Night falls even earlier there than it does in New York; it is stiller and darker yet. Our dining room, its
walls hunter green, its floor carpeted in blue-and-green tartan, has a calming, quieting effect on all who enter. Its one
enormous window frames the spotlit tower of Westminster Cathedral. The walls are hung with vintage and contemporary posters.
The table is a large hunter's trestle, set with blue Italian pottery and French restaurant flatware in the same pattern that
Judy and I would choose for ourselves twenty years later. The food is ready on a marble-topped sideboard: turkey, stuffing,
potatoes mashed and roasted, Brussels sprouts, creamed onions, cranberry sauce. The soundtrack to
A Chorus Line
plays softly in the background.

Some of the same people are here, too: My father, we children, Norman, Irene, Maggi, and Jennifer. There are close family
friends and several young American expatriates, alone and lonely in a foreign city, whom we have adopted for the evening.
Only my mother is missing. She is sick, deeply debilitated by an aggressive strain of multiple sclerosis. For almost two years
now, she has lived in a nursing home.

From the vantage of our corner of a New York City loft in 2001, we watch them all. Is it they, forever reenacting their gay,
oblivious ritual, or is it we, melancholy, disembodied observers, who are the ghosts? They are much younger than we are; more
carefree, perhaps. They do not know what we know; they are strange to us now. Scott is already tipsy on stolen sips of wine;
he does not know that my father will make him go to school hungover tomorrow. Nancy is a distracted, coltish teenager; she
does not know that she will soon meet the man with whom she will still be in love twenty-five years later. Jenny is a timid,
love-hungry child, awed by and mistrustful of the unaccustomed serenity and harmony. My father is youthful and handsome, with
a jaunty mustache and a full head of curly brown hair, proud of the distinguished brushstrokes of gray that have recently
appeared at his temples. He is exactly as old as I am now.

Strangest and most distant of all, to me, is the skinny, fifteen-year-old boy in his National Health glasses and bell-bottoms
that barely reach his ankles. His hair hangs almost to his shoulders and has not been brushed in many weeks. He is small,
four inches shorter than he will be two years later, and uses the fact that he does not look his age to sly advantage. Like
his brother, he sips surreptitiously at other people's drinks, but he is more careful; he reserves his serious drinking and
antisocial misconduct for other occasions, since he knows how much more he can get away with by maintaining the facade of
the sweet little boy. He watches Norman carve the turkey and asks earnest, well-informed questions. He tells cheeky, precocious
jokes to the single adults. Understanding that the direct approach from someone as awkward and funny-looking as he is will
never work with Maggi, a woman at sixteen, he sends her shy, puppyish glances on the unlikely chance that she will take pity
on him. Unprovoked, he says cruel and nasty things to little Jenny when no one is watching.