SIX

“I must admit,” said my uncle Charles, “that after hearing your side of it I am moved to the same sympathy I felt for your father when he opened his heart to me. But I don’t have to tell you that such sympathy comes cheap. After all, as some wise man once remarked, there is no one so weak that he can’t bear his friend’s calamities with fortitude. But it’s different when he’s asked to invest in them.”

“I wouldn’t call a loan of two hundred dollars much of an investment,” I said.

“I dare say you wouldn’t, and in terms of the amount involved you’d be right. But if I were to give you this money—”

“Lend,” I said.

“Lend or give. If I were to turn this money over to you, it would also mean an investment of loyalty in you. It would mean that I’m taking your side in your quarrel with your father. When I tell him about that—and I’d be honor-bound to do so—you can see what it would mean.”

“Yes, I can.”

“I thought so,” said my uncle. He was obviously enjoying himself immensely, but I had been prepared for that. “What’ll you have to drink?” he asked me.

“Anything you do.”

He crooked a finger at the waiter hovering nearby. “Emile, Chivas Regal for Mr. Egan and me. And ask the chef what he recommends.” When the waiter had gone he said to me, “You’ve never been here before, have you?”

“No.”

“I thought not. Well, I hope you like it more than your father did. I had him here last month, and it was completely wasted on him. He has no taste at all for good food. That’s not surprising when you look back at the cut-rate housekeepers he keeps hiring. Where does he find them?”

“I don’t know. I suppose that’s Peg’s department.”

“Well, she ought to learn how to run it properly. Poor Austin. When I think of the kind of cooking he’s letting himself in for after he and Peg are married—or should I say if he and Peg are married? Strange that it’s been taking them so long to get around to it. Sometimes when I look at Austin I think of Jacob working seven years for his wife.”

“And winding up with the wrong one?”

“So he did,” my uncle said with grave surprise, and the look he gave me to indicate that we were partners in the joke emboldened me to say, “The world is full of Austins. Do you think I’m wrong in not wanting to be one of them?”

“No,” said my uncle, “I don’t. On the other hand, I can’t say that the peculiar banner you’re flying seems any more admirable. Now, don’t go rising in your wrath, Daniel, because I’m doing you the favor of talking to you very honestly about this. I’d say you’re well past the age when you can alternate between sullenness and flamboyant rage. Yes, I realize possibly even more than you do that there are reasons for that temperament. You suffered, perhaps, too much of a loss when your mother died, you’ve been unhappy at home, you’ve had your dreams of being a painter or writer punctured, and so on. I know all that. In fact, I was the one who took the trouble to explain it to your father yesterday for all the good it did any of us. And I’m taking the trouble to tell you that everything you’ve gone through must have no part in the face you show to the world. Despite the psychiatric pablum we’re being spoon-fed today, motivations are not justifications. And recognizing motivations is not automatically expiation for the foolish acts they lead you to. Can you see the sense in that?”

“I can see it in the abstract. I can’t see what it’s got to do with my taking a job to my own sweet taste.”

“Ah, but it does. Because in this case your own sweet taste is being dictated by sophomoric whim. You’re acting in blind rebellion against what Austin stands for. Against what your father and I stand for, when it comes to that. I can understand that. I was once young myself. I read the same books you did, had the same heated discussions, glorified the workingman, even had dreams of leaving home and sailing before the mast like one of Jack London’s pet creations. But when I opened my eyes wide I saw that there were no more sailing ships, and that while my home may have been stuffy and unappetizingly bourgeois in some respects, it offered much in other respects. Music and art and literature, and people who talked my language, and physical well-being. For you and me, Daniel, these are the verities. And I found out very quickly, I assure you, that there was little chance of being bored in my world if one was willing to take what it offered.

“Yes, there was a time not long ago when this whole country was struck starry-eyed by the kind of image you’re probably carrying around in your head now. When the machinery of politics and business seemed to have stopped permanently, and drastic measures were needed. We have these national spasms of emotionalism now and then, and recover from them with a hangover. This one went all out for the noble workingman, the horny-handed son of toil. You know something about art, Daniel, so you’ve undoubtedly seen the vestiges of our national spasm on some gallery walls. Those artistic atrocities showing the laborer with his huge naked chest and his bulging biceps and his eagle eye raised in contemplation of his aspirations.

“And when it was all over, and everyone stirred and looked around at the hallucination he had indulged in, what was the truth that became visible once more? It was the unhappy truth, Daniel. It was that those vaunted aspirations were beneath contempt. They were a hunger for comic books, for mechanical contraptions, for professional baseball, for sex in its most swollen-breasted, fat-rumped, sniggering form. Aspirations, for God’s sake! Why, the one dream of every half-educated Jack who carries a lunch pail is not to be bored, and it’s the one thing he can’t possibly escape. He’s not equipped to escape it. Everything he says, does, and thinks is staggering in its inanity. The word mass-culture was created by him and for him. Is that what you want to have the joy of?”

The waiter came up to our table and placed our drinks before us. To my uncle he said, “Louis recommends the blanchaille today.” He shaped a circle in the air with his thumb and forefinger. “He says it is excellent.”

My uncle looked inquiringly at me. “Louis’ blanchaille,” he said. “You’ll find it a great delicacy.”

“With crabmeat,” the waiter said hopefully. He was fiatfooted and had no look of eagles in his eye. I knew that my uncle was smiling inwardly at me.

“I’ll have it,” I said, and my uncle said, “Make it two, Emile. And a salad. But I want to mix the dressing myself.”

The waiter went off again, and I waited for my uncle to thrust in the knife. But he did not. Instead, he raised his glass, said, “To your future,” and took a small sip.

I said pointedly, “Right now my future depends on about two hundred dollars.”

“So I gathered. Would you mind telling me how you arrived at that figure?”

“No. For one thing, I won’t be starting on my job for another week or so, and I’d rather not have to live at home until then. I thought I’d get a room somewhere. And for another thing, I want to go upstate and see the Gennaros.”

“The Gennaros collectively or one Gennaro in particular?”

“It’s hard to do one without doing the other,” I said.

“Yes, that’s so, isn’t it? I was up there myself last week, you know. Oh, I see you didn’t know. Well, I attended the services with your father. It seemed the least I could do, considering how fond I was of Ben. Aside from the overcolored publicity that came his way, he was really quite a remarkable man, and having met his family en masse it’s not hard to see why. They’re an amazing breed, aren’t they?”

“I suppose so.”

“The last time I was up at Maartenskill,” my uncle said reflectively, “was twenty—no, almost thirty years ago. They were thriving then; now they seem to have taken over the entire community. A demonstration of happy feudalism in the atomic age, you might say. But as for your relationship with the girl—”

“Yes?”

“My dear boy, you don’t have to sound that kind of warning at me; I am not going to trample with heavy feet on your dreams of bliss. If I were in your place I’d undoubtedly have the same dreams. The girl is exquisite, and, what is more, since she probably accepts the American convention that all women must starve themselves to death in the midst of plenty, she will remain that way, instead of becoming as fat and ungainly as her mother. But there are questions to be considered, like it or not. What about her religion? I had the feeling while I was there that I was living in the middle of the Vatican City. Would you seriously consider conversion?”

“Yes, if that’s what she wants.”

“Oh, she will, you can depend on it. But before you even meet that problem there’s another one to settle. Do you really believe that Ben’s death won’t have a serious effect on her? I mean, as far as you’re concerned. And while she’s brooding about that, do you intend to walk in on her and offer her a lifetime of marriage to a laboring man who’ll barely be able to pay rent in a tenement? She seems to be a sensible girl, Daniel, and there’s going to be a vast hiatus between your own outlandish ideas and her practicality.”

I managed to force a smile despite the taste of acid in my mouth. “I thought you weren’t going to trample on my dreams,” I said.

“Is that what you call it? I thought I was merely holding them up to scrutiny. After all,” said my uncle, “I’m entitled to know what I’d be investing my money in.”

“In that case, you know what you can do with your investment.”

“Don’t be rude, Daniel. As a matter of fact, I’m going to give you the money. You’re a fool, but I won’t let that influence me, because I think you’re entitled to be a fool at twenty-one. I know I was; I suspect most people are. So I’m giving you the money as a memorial to what I once was myself, and as a testimonial to my belief that you’ll learn wisdom just as I did. You may learn it in a month or a year, but you’ll learn it. Right now you’re obsessed with your youthful discovery that the world is very badly run indeed. You’ve discovered that whether in government or business or family life there’s no accounting for the infinite follies of mankind, and you are up in arms against that. Well, what you’ve got to learn is that as long as human beings run things they must be run badly, and those who refuse to accept that gamy fact are guilty of the only real folly. Eventually, some of those people choose to do something drastic about it. They join together in wild-eyed organizations and tear apart the world, trying to get at the core of the trouble, and then we all suffer. I’d like you to keep that in mind, Daniel, while you’re exploring the other side of the moon. And when you’ve come to sensible conclusions don’t be ashamed to admit their good sense. Then you can pick up where you left off, and no one will think the less of you for it.”

My uncle leaned back as the waiter placed our plates before us. What I had ordered turned out to be several tiny fried fish the size of minnows. I tried one and it was exactly like the whitebait served by George’s, the shabbiest but most available lunch wagon near the University.

“Like it?” my uncle said.

“Yes,” I said. “What is it?”

“Blanchaille?” said my uncle Charles. “It’s whitebait.”