The Lone Pilgrim (16 page)

She was lying on her side with her hand slightly arched and bent. Her hair had been gathered at her neck but a few strands had escaped. She looked like the slain nymph Procris in the Piero di Cosimo painting
A Mythological Subject
which depicts poor Procris who has been accidentally killed by her husband Cephalus. Cephalus is a hunter who has a spear that never misses its mark. One day he hears a noise in the forest, and thinking that it is a wild beast, he takes aim. But it is not a beast. It is Procris. In the painting a tiny jet of blood sprays from her throat. At her feet is her mournful dog, Lelaps, and at her head is a satyr, wearing the look of a heartbroken boy. That picture is full of the misery and loneliness romantic people suffer in love.

The lovely thing about marriage is that life ambles on—as if life were some meandering path lined with sturdy plane trees. A love affair is like a shot arrow. It gives life an intense direction, if only for an instant. The laws of love affairs would operate for Nellie and Dan: they would either run off together, or they would part, or they would find some way to salvage a friendship out of their love affair. If you live long enough and if you are placid and easygoing, people tell you everything. Almost everyone I know has confessed a love affair of some sort or another to me.

But I had never discussed my amours with anyone. Would Nellie think that my affairs had been inconsequential? Certainly I had never let myself get into such a swivet over a man, but I had made very sure to pick only those with very secure marriages and a sense of fun. Each union had been the result of one of the inevitable low moments that marriages contain, and each parting, when the right time came to part, had been relatively painless. The fact was, I was not interested in love in the way Nellie was. She was interested in ultimates. I remembered her fifteen years ago, at twenty-three, rejecting all the nice, suitable young men who wanted to take her out for dinner and in whom she had no interest. She felt this sort of socializing was all wrong. When my husband and I chided her, she said with great passion: “I don't want a social life. I want love, or nothing.”

Well, she had gotten what she wanted. There she lay, wiped out, fast asleep, looking wild, peaceful, and troubled all at the same time. She had no dog to guard her, no satyr to mourn her, and no bed of wild flowers beneath her like the nymph in the painting.

What a pleasant circumstance to sit in a warm, comfortable room on an icy winter's day and contemplate someone you love whose life has always been of the greatest interest to you. Procris in the painting is half naked, but Nellie looked just as vulnerable.

It would be exceedingly interesting to see what happened to her, but then she had always been a pleasure to watch.

Saint Anthony of the Desert

Haphazardness, as a condition of life, has its usefulness but is of fixed duration. At the time of which I am writing, my life was entirely the product of haphazardness, and I had encountered no reason not to enjoy it. Along with being haphazard, I was lucky. These conditions are often found together, like gold and pyrite. For example, I was very bad about money. It flew out of my pocket, and I could not account for it at the end of the week. My checkbook was described to me as looking more like a poem in free verse than a record of my finances. Naturally, my checks, through no malicious intent of mine, were frequently sent back marked “insufficient funds.” But unlike others who receive letters from their banks that begin: “Due to the sloppy and inconsequential manner in which you keep your account, we no longer wish to do business with you,” I was telephoned by a harried bank flack named Dan Pirotta, who said, “Miss Greenway, if you will come over here some afternoon, I will be happy to show you how to balance your checkbook.”

I also had a habit of losing my wallet. I left it on counters and in taxis, and it was always returned to me, often with the money untouched. My education was as hapless as my finances. As I had conducted it, it suited me for nothing. I had been a cheerful student with a short but intense attention span, waiting for some subject to commit itself to me. Since none did, I floated from course to course and ended up unhirable. No one seemed to have a job for someone whose qualifications included a love of American poetry, an imperfect understanding of astronomy, and a fascination with but by no means a firm grasp of the principles of cultural anthropology. The job I got when I left school was in the gift shop of a museum, selling postcards, calendars, and replicas.

After two years of this work and after my lecture from Mr. Pirotta at the bank, I managed to save enough money to go to Paris. Saving that sum of money was the most serious gesture I had made in my life up to that point.

Once there, I threw myself on the mercy of my cousin Charles, a much older relative who was an architect working for UNESCO. I had chosen Paris for no discernible reason except that one of my few skills was an ability to show off in imperfect French. Charles had once been my baby-sitter. I had not seen him in many years, but he took one look at me and pegged me for one of those American girls who come to Paris looking for adventure. It was clear that something had to be done with me, so Charles sent me on a walking tour of churches and cathedrals. Perhaps he thought that if I got inside those buildings I might acquire a little sense. He made me check in with him every afternoon so that he could be sure that I had not gotten lost or otherwise gone astray. To his amazement and relief, I was enthralled. Here, I felt, was a subject I might have a lifelong involvement with. I bought a notebook and took detailed notes on what I was looking at.

As a reward for not being as hopeless as I appeared, Charles took me on a car trip to the Benedictine abbey of Saint Wandrille de Fontenelle. Unlike the ruined abbeys we had stopped to look at on the way, this one had real monks living in it. From the public side of the chapel I could hear them singing vespers. The fact that actual people lived in this building filled me with wonder. What sort of lives did they lead? Who had built this place? And were there principles on which religious buildings were planned?

On the way back to Paris, I pestered Charles with questions. What was the difference betweén a cathedral and a church? An abbey and a priory? Charles then asked me for my impressions and listened patiently while I rambled incoherently. From time to time, it would occur to me that I wasn't making very much sense and then I would shut up.

“Go on,” said Charles. “This is very interesting.”

Then I revealed that I had a notebook full of notes. My cousin said, “You seem to have some genuine feeling for form and space. Why don't you do something with it? You say your life has no direction. Why don't you go to architecture school?”

I explained that I could hardly do math, that I could hardly sit still, that I was sick of school and that I did not want to be an architect. After all, was he building cathedrals, priories, abbeys? Besides, I was not at all sure that I had any genuine feelings about form and space. I was not even sure how interested I was. I simply loved being in those buildings—that feeling of chill and reverence, the gorgeousness of that tribute to something higher. Listening to those unseen monks chanting plainsong had stirred me up. For I myself was overheated, had nothing to revere, had never deprived myself of anything. There was nothing serious in my life, and I was so silly that my own face in the mirror hardly mattered.

Charles did not understand interest that did not translate into practical action, but he gave me the name of a friend of his who owned a bookshop. This man was Pete Ethridge, and the shop was called The Architect and Travel Book Supply. I was to go and see him for advice—what books to read, what lectures to hear, what trips, if I had any money, to take. In this way Charles set me on my path, for, if you behave like something with as little weight as a piece of paper, life may float you in the general direction of your inclinations without your having to figure out what your inclinations are.

When I got back to New York, I went to see Pete Ethridge and he gave me a job. His assistant had quit the day before, and although I had little to recommend me besides my cousin's name, I knew how to handle a cash register and Pete needed immediate help. Pete had been trained as a draftsman and he loved to travel. He dealt in new, used, and rare books—anything an architect or traveler might need. On one long shelf were Pete's favorite books—accounts of architectural travel such as
The Old Road, A Time To Be Silent
, and
The Towers of Trebizond.
In time I learned to stock, shelve, order, talk to salesmen, and do the bookkeeping. In general, I began to learn how to run a bookshop, and as I became more useful Pete took me along with him when he went to buy private libraries.

Under his minimal direction, I began to read. The unifying topic of this reading was religious architecture, but if one can be said to pursue this subject in a voluptuous way, I did. I read haphazardly but steadily for two years. I had nothing else to do, except work. I lived in a cheap, fairly pleasant apartment and conducted my social life with rowdy, fun-loving friends, all of whom had minimal jobs: they were actresses who worked as waitresses, poets who were readers at publishing companies, and students who were fooling around with their dissertation topics. I had had crushes, a few inconsequential romances, but I had never been in love. From time to time, a nice steady young man would fall in love with me: a resident at Bellevue Hospital; a lawyer I met at a lecture on baroque cathedrals; a young architect who hung around the shop for weeks on the pretext of seeing if a book he had ordered had arrived. But I did not want one of these nice young men. Their lives looked too plotted for me. I could not see myself safe and married, setting a dinner table with wedding silver and wedding plates and producing an ambitious, correct, and not entirely successful dinner for my in-laws.

I was happy the way I was. At night, if I came home early, I made myself weird dinners of eggplant. I liked working in the shop, which smelled of Pete's cigars. I liked what I was reading. Except for work, I had no schedule. It was impossible to say when I would be home. I thought it was a wonderful idea to go to Chinatown at four o'clock in the morning if someone suggested it. I thought seeing three movies in one day was a normal thing to do. If five people collected in one apartment, that was a party. One evening two boys came to pick me up at the same time, but that turned out well enough. We went to the movies and out for a drink, and it turned out that they had a college friend in common.

Why in the middle of this cheerful chaos I had elected to read about monastic and church architecture was not clear to me. I was not religious, not an architect, and not a medievalist. Pete, who had made a study of the native structures of Tibet and Lapland without visiting either country, thought it a perfectly reasonable pursuit. I felt that this subject had the appeal of the substantial, the enduring, the traditional—three things notably lacking in my life. The idea of permanence, of a fixed course of life, of belief, was consoling to me. Often I wondered whether I continued this research because it had been handed to me by my cousin Charles. People who are lucky are often superstitious. My superstition was the sort that throws in its lot with the talismanic. This interest was my good-luck charm.

One cold, rainy day, a customer whose name I can no longer remember gave me an inspired tip. It was a slow day, and I was sitting at Pete's desk reading Cardinal Gasquet's
English Monastic Life
and smoking a cigarette. The customer noticed my book. A conversation ensued, during which he asked me if I had read any of the lives of the saints. I said I had read
The Rule of Saint Benedict
, but that was about it. The customer suggested that I might find Saint Anthony interesting, since he is considered to be one of the founders of monastic life.

About a month later I found a monograph about this saint at a secondhand store. It had been written by a German theologian and was mine for fifty cents. I took it home and put it on my desk with all of the other books I intended to read.

I read it in a fit of restlessness one cold Saturday afternoon. I had been invited for dinner that evening by some friends of my cousin Charles, a couple named Karen and Philip Bridges. The Bridgeses were my good angels, in a sense. They liked to feed me, and they felt that I should have some glimpse of what a happy, orderly domestic life looked like. In order to be as impeccable as possible, I usually spent the afternoon before one of their dinner parties selecting my clothes, washing my hair, and lying in a bath preparing my story: I would lie back and rehearse my explanation of why Pete had not taken me to a bookseller's convention, why my job had not expanded, and why I had not yet approached Pete about making me a junior partner. Such things interested the Bridgeses. But since it was early and I did not yet have to begin this process, I picked up the monograph and began to read.

The story of Saint Anthony is well known, although it was not well known to me. As a young man, this rich Egyptian heard the Gospel and took it seriously. After settling the future of his sister, he gave away all his money and repaired to a cave. There he intended to live a life of solitude devoted to prayer. Instead, the devils we have seen in famous European paintings beset him. They came in all shapes and forms. There was no torment or temptation that did not flash before his eyes. At the age of thirty-five, he plunged into the desert to begin another form of hermitage. There he planted a garden, which was trampled on by wild beasts. The bread he ate was of the vilest sort. His holiness and wisdom attracted disciples whom he banded into a primitive kind of monastic life, and he died, full of serenity, at a very great age.

I was surprised to find how moved I was by this account. I liked what I saw as Saint Anthony's impetuousness—giving away everything at once. It made the youthful saint seem something of a hothead, the power of the Gospel notwithstanding. My image of the saint in his cave was that of a serious boy who in modern life might wear glasses and carry a slide rule. The idea of devils parading in front of that innocence made me feel protective. In fact, I hardly reacted to the saint as a saint at all, but as to some endearing person whose life was full of self-invented tests. I especially loved his scolding of the animals who trampled his desert garden. “Why do you do harm to me,” the saint rebuked them, “when I harm none of you? Go away, and in the Lord's name, do not come near these things again.” This scolding worked, we are told. I had thought that saints were enormous figures who performed heroic actions and miracles in the name of faith, but, aside from inadvertently creating a form of monastery life, Saint Anthony had not accomplished very much at all in the world, except to
be
and to put himself in the way of things. And although I was hardly interested in sanctity, I was obviously interested in being and in putting myself in the way of things. Saint Anthony made me feel as if there might be some hope for someone like me, somehow.