8

Curious to relate, there was at this time living and working on the Adriatic coast a young American painter and sculptor named Waldo Kasz. A native of Buffalo, with a great mop of reddish hair and an expression which, at least in his rare photographs, mirrored a very special and personal detestation of the human race, Waldo Kasz had for a whole year enjoyed a vogue unparalleled by any young artist of his generation. He was of Polish descent; presumably his surname was a simplification of more unpronounceable consonants. His haunting, twisted, abstract forms in oil and gouache, his compressed and tormented statuettes in terra cotta, his larger figures in bronze—skeletal, attenuated, crypto-humans whose knobby outlines and strange, sudden concavities seemed to express the very essence of exacerbated and outraged flesh—all of these had won him, while still in his early thirties, the kind of acclaim for which most artists wait in vain a lifetime. An expatriate, a self-confessed hater of all things American, he lived in sulky exile in a little village on the seacoast not far from Rimini with only (according to a New York fashion magazine) his mother and three Siamese cats for company, and one solitary diversion—this being to prowl the lonely Adriatic shore in search of wild driftwood shapes from which he often took inspiration for his macabre, vaguely anthropomorphic masterpieces. Rumor had it that he was aloof to the vanishing point, a locker of doors and a slammer down of windows, and had even threatened violence upon those persistent souls—chiefly reporters and photographers from popular American journals—who had managed to penetrate his lair. The rare interviews with Waldo Kasz are records mainly of monosyllables and grunts. An article in the Herald Tribune called him “the grim young prophet of the ’beat’ generation.” One of the few photographs taken of him—a huge mug shot in a widely circulated magazine which also ran a three-page spread in color of his works—shows the tousled reddish hair, the glittering eyes two blue pinpoints of near-blind fury, the rather simian brow knitted in furious ripples and, in the foreground, a splashy blur of crimson—wine, so the caption explains, flung without ceremony at the prying photographer. The picture is titled “Angry Young Genius.” It was because of the awful though not very precise coincidence of their names—Cass and Kasz—that Cass had his first encounter with Mason Flagg.

Unless you have been to Sambuco in May, you have never known the spring. This is what many Italians say, and it is no doubt hyperbole, but there is truth in the matter. Spring in Sambuco is something to know. It is odor and sweet warmth, bud and blossom, and, in the sky, ecstatic aerial tracings—sunbeam and bumblebee and hummingbird, and silvery, innocent showers of rain. Then the rain is gone, and it comes no more. Perhaps it is the height, the looking downward, that makes spring here the marvel that it is. Flowers clamber up along the hillsides, donkeys bray in the valleys and over all is that sense of the strut and glamour of newborn life. And you are so high, miles above the common earth. Girls, slender in cotton dresses, walk the street arm in arm in gay parade, while old women in doorways seek the sunlight with upturned faces and drowsing eyes. People shout to each other from open windows. There is an odor of pepper and pimiento and cheese in the air. From the depths of the dank cafe and into pure sunlight moves the eternal card game, kibitzed by two pink-cheeked priests and by Umberto, the Bella Vista’s major-domo, decked out in gold-sprayed summer whites like a Spanish admiral. Radios everywhere give voice, unrestrained, to Pagliacci and sad songs of Naples, bittersweet stornelli that tell of rapture and betrayal, to loud pitches for spaghetti and toothpaste and suppositories, and to Perry Como. Athwart the piazza, portly and grave, moves the begabardined form of Piero Caltroni, M.D., fanning himself with his mail. Rumors buzz like bees in this gentle weather: a cow across the valley in Minuto has given birth to a three-headed calf; turismo will be booming this summer—the West German mark is as solid as the dollar; Sergeant Parrinello, the town despot, is due for a transfer—bravo!; the caretaker at the Villa Caruso has heard ghastly moans in the small hours, and has seen flickering green lights. Specters! Ghosts! Rumors! At two in the afternoon all falls silent. There can be heard only cowbells clanging in the valley or the sound of a bus horn, or, far off, the whistle of some coastwise ship plowing southward toward Reggio Calabria or Sicily.

It has been said that most suicides occur when the air is balmy, the sky blue, the sunlight unclouded, jovial and golden; the writhing amputee, skewered upon life like a wingless June bug, finds the climate of spring a heartless last insult, and so gives up the ghost. No doubt it was just this weather that caused Cass, on the morning of the day he met Mason, to dream this fearful nightmare, so poisoned and festering with the casts of self-destruction.

He was in an airplane. High above the Andes he flew, in drifts of cloud and mist, above Aconcagua and Cotopaxi and Chimborazo, their peaks threatening, billowing with the dark fleece and rack of a thousand soundless storms. The plane was crowded with faceless people; there was a constant dim murmuration—a faintly heard, barely discerned babble of humming and chuckles and remote sibilant whispers—and this murmuration chilled him to the bone, touched as it was with the sound of doom. Music, too, attended this flight of his through space, a discordant, atonal sound as of some bizarre ensemble playing off-key yet in unison, a saxophone, a harpsichord, a tuba, a kazoo; and the music like the constant ebb and flow and hum of voices seemed tinged with premonitions of death. Presently then he got up and went to the bathroom. There was a shower stall here—a strange accommodation, he thought, for an airline, for it was vast and made of concrete and in the corners there were damp, enormous webs where spiders as big as saucers feasted upon struggling insects. Panic enveloped him, and terror; the plane pitched and rocked, and as it did so he found himself taking off all his clothes. Then—wonder of wonders —he had withdrawn from himself. Standing aside, clammy and wet with horror, he saw his other self, naked now, step into the shower and, with the numb transfixed look of one already dead, turn on all the faucets full blast. The spiders trembled in their webs, shriveling; a sense of strangulation, of asphyxia. Christ! he heard his watching self dream, for it was not water which emerged from the nozzles but the billowing jets of suffocating gas. The murmuration grew in volume and tempo, joined by the tuba, ponderously belching, and the panic kazoo. Now naked and blue beneath the rush of gas, his other self grew rigid, skin shiny as a turquoise bead, and toppled soundless to the floor, all life extinct. And he, watching, tried to reach out to his corpse, but here several sporty Negroes entered, shouldering him aside, and leaned over the blue body, shaking their heads and grieving. “Man, why did you kill him?” one said, looking up. “Man, why did you let him die?” But before he could answer the Negro, the plane pitched again, vibrating as if rent by mammoth claps of thunder. And now a ripe mulatto girl, entering too, seeing the cadaver, shrieked, shrieked again and again and, as if to obliterate the sight not just from her own but from all eyes, pulled down a shade upon which was written, in blood, this message …

He awoke half-strangled beneath the bedclothes, blotting out the message from his mind even as he awoke, and with chill after chill of terror, of insight and knowledge and recognition, coursing through him like the recurring rhythmic ague that accompanies fever.

“Nossir,” Cass told me, “I didn’t know what that message was, but I knew something else. I mean this crazy chill and thrill of understanding that kept running through me as I lay there in the shadows. I knew something”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, dreams, you know. I never put much stock in them. That is, those naval wig pickers in San Francisco used to try to worm a few of them out of me, figuring that they’d be able to plug in on my most intimate circuits, I reckon. I knew they probably had something there and all—I wasn’t that ignorant—but it did seem to me that it was pretty much my own private business, so whenever they asked me what I dreamt about, I just told them I dreamt about pussy and let it go at that… .”

“So?”

“Except, as I say, I knew they were probably on the right track. It really doesn’t take any supreme genius to know that these various horrors and sweats you have when you’re asleep add up to something, even if these horrors are masked and these sweats are symbols. What you’ve got to do is get behind the mask and the symbol… .

“Well, God knows. Jigaboos everywhere! Ever since I’d been in Europe about half of whatever nightmares I’d had—the ones I remembered, anyway—had been tied up with Negroes. Negroes in prison, Negroes being gassed, me being gassed, Negroes watching me while I was being gassed. Like that terrible dream I had in Paris. There was always a nigger in the woodpile somewhere, and you’d have thought that as a nice southern boy who was maybe just a little brighter than some of my cornfield brethren I’d have had it all doped out a little bit sooner. But the fact of the matter, you know—and it’s probably a blessing—is that dreams, even horrible nightmares, have a way of slipping out of sight once you’re awake, with the cobwebs out of your eyes. I say it’s a blessing, because I’ll bet you there’s not one white southerner over the age of fifteen—ten! five!—who hasn’t had nightmares just like the one I told you about, or at least variations upon it, replete with Negroes, and blood, and horror. Suppose these nightmares lingered? You’d turn the Southland into a nuthouse… .”

He paused. “Well, I don’t want to sermonize. I guess like your old man—or what you’ve told me about him—I’m a way-out liberal, for a southerner anyway. Comes from living with the Yankees for so long and marrying one. On the other hand, I despise these goddam northerners who’ve never been south of Staten Island and are out to tell everybody down here they’ve got to hew to the line, right now by God, with no wait and no pause and because we know it’s good for you, and it’s humane, and it’s decent and American, and who pretend that Harlem and the Chicago ghettoes don’t exist. The bastards just don’t know what’s going on down here.

“But no sermonizing. The point is that there in Europe I was being wakened up in many different ways. God knows it was tough, and sometimes you’d never know it from some of the things I did, but I was being awakened, and now I can see that some of these dreams and nightmares which I remember so vividly were a part of the awakening.

“Take that dream I told you about. Well, first—try to remember. When you were a kid did you ever holler ‘nigger’ at anybody?”

I reflected for a moment. “Yes,” I said. “What kid hasn’t? I mean in the South.”

“Did you ever do anything else—mean, that is—to someone who was colored? Really mean, that is?”

Pondering my early youth, I could dredge up nothing more sinister than that sorry old epithet, hoarsely shouted. “We’d yell at them from the school bus I used to ride on,” I said. “Maybe some of the other boys would heave a rotten orange. Nothing more than that. They’re rather genteel about such matters in Virginia, you know.”

“That’s what you think,” he said sourly, but with a sort of smile.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, that morning—the same morning I ran into Mason—when I woke up with that dream still hovering in my mind, these chills were still going up and down my back, these chills of recognition, you see, and all of a sudden I knew what it all meant. No, it wasn’t as clear and as pat as all that, but right there simultaneously with my waking up I remembered something wretched and horrible that I had done when I was about fifteen years old—something really dreadful and wicked that I must have kept way back in my mind all these years. And floating over me like the palest big fat blob of a balloon you ever saw was the image of this guy I hadn’t thought of in so long that for a while I couldn’t remember his name. Then it came back to me. Lonnie.

“Lonnie,” he repeated.

“Lonnie?”

“Well, let me tell you about it.” And now, on the lovely river Ashley, lolling against a pine stump, he told me of something which, seventeen years before, had brought him for the first time into the slovenly presence of shame. He told of the summer of his fifteenth year—or was he sixteen? One year either way, no matter how you looked at it, could not mitigate the crime—when his uncle bought him a bus ticket and farmed him out (as had been his habit from time to time during those depression years when the bottom dropped out of the bright-leaf tobacco market) to a first cousin once removed, Hoke Kinsolving by name, who lived up in southside Virginia in a dinky sun-blistered town called Colfax, pop. 1,600, altitude sea level, in a part of the commonwealth no tourist intent on Williamsburg palaces and elegant river mansions had ever seen or heard of, and boasting in the business way only a peanut warehouse, a lumber mill, a sagging cotton gin and a Western Auto store. Cass remembered that summer for many things (fifteen! He must have been, for he came to manhood then, neither early nor late, but enormously and unforgettably, as all men do, in this case after watching Veronica Lake in the sweltering one-horse movie house, and later half-fainting in the throbbing dark, among the summery-smelling mimosas behind his cousin’s house)—for the mimosas themselves and their pale pink watery blossoms, and the dust rising from the scorched back alleys of the town, and old ladies fanning themselves on front porches drenched in green shadow, and mockingbirds caroling thunderously at sunup—for a hundred gentle memories, purely summer, purely southern, which swarmed instantly through his mind, though one huge memory encompassed all. Vaguely, this involved his cousin Hoke, who, being a corn and peanut farmer nearly as poor as his old uncle, got him a part-time job at the Western Auto store, working in the back among the stacked-up tires and cartons of radio tubes and hubcaps and tools odorous of rubber and oil; more distinctly, more clearly, more threateningly, it came to mean someone called Lonnie (if he had a last name Cass never knew it), who was a man of twenty-one or so with bad teeth and a caved-in sallow face and a broad plastered-down wig of unparted, Lucky Tiger fragrant, custard-colored hair. Lonnie was the assistant manager. Now, had I ever been to Sussex County and seen a real Virginia gentleman in operation? No? Ecco Lonnie then, who to be sure was somewhat unlettered, a Baptist and only half a cut removed from trash and all, yet a soul neither deluded nor demented and the fairest flower of southern manhood. Let us remember, too, that this was Virginia, Peter, my own Virginia, the Virginia of stately chateaux and green carpeted lawns and bony aristocrats on horseback, the Virginia of the outlawed lynching and the soft word and the enlightened (mildly) Jeffersonian notion of justice—not Mississippi, not Alabama, not Georgia, but the Old Dominion, home of conservatism leavened by gentility and breeding and by a gentlemanly apprehension of democracy. To be sure, Colfax was not that Virginia so dear to chamber-of-commerce pamphleteers—the sunny commonwealth containing so many varied riches: eighteenth-century ladies richly draped in velvet and crinoline, by candlelight shepherding the credulous fritter-stuffed visitor through opulent hallways at Westover and Shirley and Brandon; or darkies starched to the neck and in cocked hats and satin pantaloons looking just like they did when Marse William Byrd owned the whole James River from Richmond to the sea; or that quaint ivy-shuttered church where Patrick Henry voiced his immortal cry for freedom —no, this was a Virginia that no one ever knew, the flat hot Virginia of swamps and scrub pine and sludgy lowland rivers and pigs snorting among the peanut vines, and flop-eared mules, but all the same Virginia. And Lonnie.

Well, Lonnie had a queer way with Negroes, Cass went on, the shy, faltering field niggers who in that county were well over half of the population. A really queer way, around the store. Not that there was any hostility in him, any meanness or severity; indeed, it was all quite to the opposite. Badinage was his trick, and cajolery, and such a light-hearted tomfoolishness marked his way with the customers that you might have thought that he was the darkies’ original friend—not a nigger lover, understand, for his manner was loaded with too much condescension for that. Nonetheless, with all of his raillery and banter, his knowing digs, the teasing patter he’d keep up through some fifty-cent transaction, you might never have suspected that behind those mashed-in features and beneath that blond pomaded hair raked so slickly back was boiling trouble, ready to explode. Certainly Cass, if he could remember having given Lonnie and his breezy ways any thought at all, was full of approval; he was old enough to appreciate that southern remark, “He gets along good with the niggers,” which in mercantile circles is meant as a compliment, and implies good business. Take that afternoon in August, for instance—the one Cass recalled so well—and take the way that Lonnie dealt with a certain grizzled old-timer, black as doom itself, who shambled in to buy a radiator-cap ornament for his 1931 Model-A Ford. Blazing heat, and the smell of oil and a vulcanized odor, and sticky flies zigzagging over all. “You mean this ain’t fancy enough, Jupe?” says Lonnie, yellow teeth bared in a cackle of wicked laughter. “You say you want that nekkid woman anyway? Why by damn, Jupe, an old buzzard like you oughta be ashamed of yourself! Haw! Haw! Haw!” The old man stands sagging in his overalls, a shy smile creases his face. “Taint for me, boss. Like I says, it’s my youngest boy’s—” “Don’t give me any of that, Jupe,” says Lonnie, grinning, bare elbows on the counter. “I know why you want that nekkid woman. It’s because an old buzzard like you hasn’t got any more lead in your pencil. You just want that nekkid lady sittin’ there out front all the time, so you can get just one more hard-on before you die. Now ain’t that right, Jupe? Haw! Haw! Haw!” The old man remains perplexed, embarrassed, grinning, runs a finger through his sparse grizzled hair. “Nossuh, Mistah Lonnie. To tell the truth, my youngest boy—” The words avail him nothing; for five minutes Lonnie teases, nags, cajoles. Large issues are joined: blasted virility, the ravages of age, waning powers, rejuvenation; Lonnie mentions monkey glands, goat serum, a doctor in Petersburg who has done wonders for old buzzards like Jupe. Jupe sweats; Lonnie babbles on: it is hot, business is off, he is bored. At last Lonnie calls to Cass. “Get me that nekkid lady, Cass.” Then, “O.K., Jupe,” he says largely, “that’ll cost you a dollar more’n the other kind.”

Later, Cass recalled—sometime later that very afternoon—Lonnie stuck his head into the stockroom, with a quick jerk of his neck said: “All right, boy, come on. We got to go out toward Stony Creek and dispossess a radio. Hump it, boy.” Cass humped it. He climbed into the cab of the pickup truck next to Lonnie and they headed out of town. Had Lonnie been afraid, afraid to go through this simple operation alone, so that he required the company and support of a fifteen-year-old boy to redeem a defaulted radio from a Negro farmer who he knew would or could make no protest even if he had been at home; or did he concoct the whole plan beforehand, assuming that the man and his whole family would be in the fields most likely chopping cotton, and needing Cass to bolster him morally not to say physically in an act which already had taken outline in some far fuzzy corner of his brain? Or did what happened occur as a simple impulse of the moment? Cass never knew, nor until that morning he had been awakened in Sambuco by his nightmare had he ever really wondered—but did it matter, after all, since he himself had partaken so inescapably in the blame? He remembered the ride out through the flat hot fields of peanuts and soybean and cotton, and pinewoods blinding-green and tinder-dry, seeming almost to crackle with a parched quality of dryness both dusty and verging on combustion, the stench of gasoline seeping up through the rump-sprung seat as they jounced along, and above all Lonnie, crouched forward bare-elbowed against the wheel, mouthing over the clatter of the unmufflered engine gusts of countrified, come-to-manhood wisdom. “There’s all types of cul-lud, I’ll tell you. Good, bad, and in between. Some like that old Jupe there you could trust with every nickel you got. Almost like a white man.” Blue sky and fields, and a stretch of riverside stagnant, foam-flecked, greenly decaying; and a rickety brindle barn crazily aslant with signs on it: Copenhagen, nehi, bull Durham. “What this nigger Crawfoot is is a crook, criminal type.” Dusty fields, riverside again, a blue Greyhound bus, tires clattering and awhine, roaring southward. “And uppity, boy. He’s got a son lives up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Never saw such monkeyshines… . Most niggers’ll pay, see, give ’em enough time. Get a crooked nigger like this Crawfoot and he just plain don’t intend to pay, in no way, shape or form.” A moldering columned mansion, set back from the road among ponderous oak trees; a white metal sign of the commonwealth, glimpsed in a blur: plumtrees. here in april, 1864, union deserters from the army of general burnsides … “Criminal type like this Crawfoot is a disgrace on the whole nigger race.” On a rutted side road they turned off, bumping, toward a grove where a frame church stood with that breezeless, shadowed, weekday air of benison and tranquillity of Negro temples on a summer afternoon: SHILOH A.M.E. ZION CHURCH, REV. ANDREW SALTER, PASTOR, Matthew V, 6: “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled!” visitors welcome. Nearby, with a castoff rubber tire taller than themselves, two Negro children only a shadow beyond babyhood played in the dust of the road, turned in white-eyed apprehension at Lonnie’s command. “C’mere.” Stock-still, they made no move or sign. The truck pulled ahead twenty feet, stopped. “You kids deaf? Where’s a nigger named Crawfoot live?” No answer, only the wide-eyed look part incomprehension, part fear, or more exactly that emotion which is perhaps far less fear than the ordinary mistrust engendered by how many overheard hours of their elders’ bitter and wrathful and despairing complaints of injustices done and afflictions borne only young Negro children know, and which, reflected imperfectly in small black faces, white men mistake for reverence, or at least respect. Neither of them uttered a sound. “Cat got your tongue? Crawfoot!” he repeated. “Where’s he live at?” One thin young black arm finally went up, pointed down the road toward a cabin, dimly discerned among the pines and a shimmering gauze of pollen-white dust. “Young’uns near ’bout worse than the grownups,” said Lonnie, grinding gears. “Nits breed lice. That’s what Daddy always says.”

And then the cabin itself, effaced these years from his memory, or if not effaced then only a dim blur amid the congeries of blurs that made up all his boyhood recollections, but now looming like some habitation whose every sagging board and termite-riddled sill and rusted nail he had committed with the solemnity of an oath to his mind and heart.

“Fantastic!” Cass said beneath his breath, hardly aware at all of whom he was talking to now, as he brought forth a vision of this solitary and forlorn and benighted hut, surrounded by hollyhocks and a bumble of bees and tattered washing on a line, with three creaking rickety steps that rose to an unlocked door which Lonnie, shirt sweatily plastered at his back, threw open with a clatter. “Fantastic!” Cass repeated. “What we did!”

They asked no permission, permission being not only unneeded but beyond remotest contemplation. “Jesus Christ, smell it!” said Lonnie, as the stench—of dirt and sweat and rancid fat cooked up a multitude of times and of too many human bodies in one place, of bathless crotch and armpit, of poverty naked and horrid and unremitting—struck them in the face; Cass drew back gasping. “Nigger house stinks worse than a whorehouse!” Lonnie bawled. “Whoop! Let’s get that radio and get out of here!” The radio was not directly found; every country nigger had spies in town, Lonnie explained as they tramped through the deserted cabin; they knew when you’re coming to get something, and they hid it. Crawfoot had hid it well. Remorselessly Lonnie searched, with Cass trailing indifferently after, behind the woodstove, beneath the bed and beneath the single stained and reeking mattress, down behind the soot-smeared sills underneath the roof, in the privy outside and in the tiny lime-smelling chicken coop and, backtracking, in the house again, where Lonnie, stubbing his toe against a sprung floorboard, finally reached down behind the planking and, triumphant, fished up the pathetic radio —white, plastic, already cracked, not much larger than a box of salt or rice, which had brought witchery in the night and tinny bright sounds of singing and laughter. “Hid it!” said Lonnie. “The wise sonofabitch.” A great slanting beam of yellow sunlight, trembling with dust, gushed through the door and filled the house with hazard, with immensity, with flame; Cass remembered this, and the buzzing flies, and joining indissolubly with the whistle of a train in the pine barrens far off, high and rending in that captured moment of South and summer, the single photograph on a table which caught his eye—the family, the man and his wife and his many children and two quizzical white-haired old matriarchs of some other generation, all solemn and standing stiff and straight in cheap Sunday-go-to-meeting, the two-for-a-dollar snapshot already fading and taking on the bluish hue of age but imprisoning still behind its cracked pane of glass one sweetly gentle, calm-visaged mood of solidarity and pride and love. He remembered, too, how this dissolved—or splintered, rather, right before his eyes—as Lonnie (spying the crack on the radio’s plastic side he let out a wounded yell which broke in on Cass’ reverie like the sound of broken glass) in a frantic swing of rage and frustration and unstoppered resentment thrust his hand violently forward, sweeping with his arm every jar and bottle and can of beans off the shelf above the stove, the momentum carrying him on so that in a sort of final flick or encore of wrath he lighted upon the photograph and sent it spinning across the room, where it tore apart—frame, glass, and all—into two raggedly separated pieces. “Shit!” Cass heard him cry, in a voice pitched near hysteria. “Not only he don’t pay for it, he went and broke it, too!” Nor was this the end, it was only the beginning. For as Cass, struck now with horror (though with a queasy visceral feeling of excitement, too), looked at Lonnie, saw the mashed-in face break up into a commotion of pink patches like rouge, he made an involuntary step to retrieve the picture but was fetched up short by Lonnie’s voice again: “Well, we’ll see about who breaks what!” And then pivoted on his toes, and with the other leg outthrust like a fullback punting a football shot a cowboy-boot-shod foot out against the flimsy kitchen table, hard, and brought the whole clutter of china cups and plates and saucers, sugar in cans, flour and meal and bacon fat, down to the floor in one monstrous and godawful detonation. And from then on he was quiet, giving forth only the faint asthmatic wheezes of a man possessed and in extremity as he went through the cabin upturning chairs, yanking from their moorings the dingy curtains, raking to the floor all such gimcrack mementos as had brought to this place color and loveliness—china dolls, a plaster bulldog brightly enameled, picture postcards (one of which Cass snatched up: Hello All Haveing fine time up hear Love Bertrim) and a pennant, he strangely, wrenchingly recalled, which read University of Virginia. These came to the floor, as did a maple Grand Rapids chiffonier, a patent heirloom, which Lonnie pried away from the wall and toppled earthward with a squeal of sliding drawers and the snapping uproar of sprung joints and pegs and corners. “That’ll teach him!” Lonnie howled. “Where you goin’?” Cass, panicky, had raced already to the open door, froze in mid-stride at the sound of Lonnie’s voice. “Come on!” he commanded. “This’ll teach every black son of a bitch in this county!” But, “Ain’t you done enough! Ain’t you done enough!” These words, Cass recalled, hung unspoken at the back of his throat—troubled, horrified, but unspoken—and therein, he knew, lay his ponderous share of the blame. For although he was sickened to his entrails in a way he had never been, his newborn manhood—brought to its first test—had failed him. Not only did something within him refuse to allow him to give voice to the monstrousness he felt at his heart and core, but this—

“So he told me to come on,” he said, gazing out over the river, as if to summon up all of that bereaved moment entire—ravaged hut wrapped in its stench of poverty and decay, and summery afternoon, and flies buzzing, and bumblebees. “He told me to come on. What was I standing there for? We had to teach every crooked nigger in the county. So we went over to the stove. It was one of those big black cast-iron jobs, I remember, and it was heavy. And what I mean is this. It was wrong, I knew. No, not just wrong—awful, monstrous, abominable. I knew this to my very soul. That goddam picture, and that postcard I’d picked up where he’d thrown it, with this scrawl on it—and that broken plaster bulldog—my heart was near about torn from its roots. But what, for God sake? What made me do it? What?

“That bleeding stove. It was a heavy bugger, see? And on top of it I remember there was a big dishpan filled with dirty water. Well, what happened was, Lonnie grabbed hold underneath, and so did I, and we began to heave and heave until it started to tilt and the dishpan began to slide off. And then you know I remember this, see, how as we stood there bent over heaving and sweating a tremendous warm excitement came over me, a feeling that—well, it was almost a feeling of anger, too, as if I’d picked up some of this young lout of a maniac’s fury and was set on teaching the niggers, too. By God, this feeling, you know, I remember it—it was in my loins, hot, flowing, sexual. I knew it was wrong, I knew it, I knew it—bestial, horrible, abominable. I knew all this, understand, but it was as if once I’d lost my courage anyway, once I’d given in—like some virgin, you see, who’s finally stopped struggling and said to hell with it—then I could actually do what I was doing almost even with a sense of righteousness. All the cliches and shibboleths I’d been brought up with came rolling back—a nigger wasn’t much more than an animal anyway, specially field niggers, crooked niggers like this Crawfoot—so I heaved and pushed there with Lonnie, and the legs of the stove became unstuck and it tilted more and more and finally the whole bleeding mess went toppling over with one hell of a roar and a crash, water and all, stove and stovepipe and dishpan, until it turned that poor little house into what looked like something hit by a tornado… .”

He fell silent and although I waited for him to speak again, he said nothing.

“Well, what happened then?” I said finally.

“That was all,” he said. “All. We left then. At least it was all I ever heard about it. Oh, maybe Crawfoot complained, I don’t know, but if he did nobody ever said anything to me or Lonnie. Of course Crawfoot should have complained—he’d probably have gotten a fair shake from the sheriff—but there was that radio, after all. I don’t know. I went back anyway, soon after that, back to Carolina. But you know it’s true,” he added after a pause.

“What?” I said.

“Until all those well-meaning people up North understand characters like Lonnie, and characters like this young Epworth Leaguer Cass Kinsolving, this downy Christian who was age fifteen and pure of heart and mind, and didn’t mean no harm, really, to nobody, but was cruel and dangerous as almighty hell —until they understand about such matters and realize that they’ve got as many Lonnies and as many young Casses in dear old Dixie as they’ve got boll weevils, they’d better tread with care. It’s those two guys that’s going to make the blood flow in the streets.” He paused. “But what I’m getting at is something else, you see. It was bad enough to do what I did. Certain things are so monstrous there is no atonement for them, no amends. I reckon I should be able to tell you a nice redemption story, about how I maybe robbed the auto store at night and went back to that cabin and laid a hundred dollars on the doorstep, to pay for all the wreckage. Or ran down Lonnie with a truck. Something clean and honorable like that, very American and all. But of course I didn’t. I went on back home and put the whole thing out of my mind.” He fell silent for a moment again, then said: “Except I didn’t put the whole thing out of my mind at all.” He rose from his seat against the pine stump, and stood erect, gazing out over the river.

“No, there are no amends or atonement for a thing like that. But there is another thing, and though it won’t bring back any busted stove or plaster bulldog or picture either, it’s something, and it’s strong. What I mean is, you live with it. You live with it even when you’ve put it out of your mind—or think you have—and maybe there’s some penance or justice in that.

“I think maybe sometimes you’ll be able to see how this figured in with what happened to me there in Sambuco. I remember that morning so well. The nightmare, and the chills running up and down my back—these chills of pure recognition and understanding—and then, after that, just lying there, for the first time in as long as I could remember thinking of Lonnie and his ugly flat mug, and the cabin and the smell, and the picture and those sweet sad proud black faces, like ghosts still haunting me after so many years. And the guilt and the shame half-smothering me there in bed, adding such a burden to the guilt and shame I already felt that I knew that, shown one more dirty face, one more foul and unclean image of myself, I would not be able to support it.

“And then that morning! Staggering out into that lemony spring morning afloat with pollen and bees, and a strumming of music and rich-throated huckstering shouts and cries and a great shrilling choir of birds as if the Lord Himself had turned into a field full of fat larks gone all berserk with beauty and joy. And me adrift in the midst of all this ecstasy—hung-over, hacking up my guts, and feeling about the size of a gnat. That nightmare kept working on me, coming back in sort of fitful flickers. I felt like slitting my throat.

“And then on top of that there was Mason and this damn Kasz business.”

“What was that?”

“Well, this painter fellow Kasz that Mason got me confused with. One thing, I’d never even heard of him, famous as he was. That’s how far I was removed from America and the art world and so on. It was really quite comical—the first part—in a grisly way. What apparently happened, you see, was this. Mason had just landed in Naples with Rosemarie and this cerise Cadillac of his and he came up to Sambuco and became so smitten by the place that he figured this would be just the spot to settle down in and write his play. Well, what I gathered later is that he fell into conversation with Windgasser, who not only sold Mason on taking up quarters in the palace, but also let drop the fact that there was an American painter living downstairs. Now you know that marble-mouthed way of speaking Windgasser had. He says ‘Cass’ in an offhand way probably, and Mason jumps to the conclusion that it’s the famous mad painter of Rimini. I don’t guess it was very sharp of Mason, but it was an honest enough mistake, given Windgasser’s diction, and given Mason’s personality, and you know this kind of letch he had for—well, capital-A art and artists, this Bohemian streak he had. And even someone as coony as Mason could forget that Kasz was a bachelor and lived in Rimini with his mother and so on. Anyway, what he obviously thought was that I was this crazy Polack, this wonder-boy of American art, and he moved right on in upstairs. God only knows what he was really thinking, but it might have been something like: This is it. Man oh man I’m in clover. Me and old Kasz, living it up art wise on the Amalfi coast. Shuck all that phony movie and Broadway world I’ve been in so long and finally get cracking on the vie artistique. I think he figured it’d be just him and Kasz, living it up together from then on out. Sort of like all the great historic friendships—you know, Van Gogh and Gauguin—only he’d be the writing end and Kasz’d be the painting and sculpting end and they’d go down through the ages together, hand in hand, as cozy as two burrs on a hound-dog’s ear. Only to really get this good thing going he had to be quite cool and calm and collected about it, if you see what I mean. That is, he couldn’t present himself and go in there with a couple of big paws stuck out and drooling all over like some auxiliary Elk. Especially I guess when he must have heard that this guy was something of an oddball and might take a poke at him if he looked like he was some tourist on the make. No, he had to be real cool and reserved, you see, and all the ass-kissing had to come in very subtly, and that’s just what he done.

“Well anyway, that morning I was standing there on the balcony, trying to get that nightmare out of my system, when I heard this big commotion out in the courtyard. What it was, of course, was a bunch of Fausto’s slaves tramping about and carrying Mason’s junk up to the top part of the palace. Such elegant paraphernalia you never saw—aluminum luggage and leather luggage and golf clubs and a dozen hatboxes and God knows what all. I just stood there blinking for a while in my skivvies, trying to figure out what was going on and who had come to stay, and then just as I started to go back inside, the outer door to the courtyard flung itself open, and there he stood—this loose long lanky Mason, handsome as a Vitalis ad and looking about as American as it’s possible to get, with his huge beautiful Rosemarie clutching at his arm. I can remember it as clearly as I can remember anything in my life—Mason standing there with this sort of expensive white flannel costume on, and sun glasses, and a pleasant inquisitive half-grin on his face, as amiablelooking as you’d ever want to ask, along with this really ingratiating quality of being somewhat lost and confused and being ever so grateful if you’d just point him in the right direction, and with that great blond undulating hunk of sex, that wonderful Rolls-Royce of a humping machine draped over his elbow. And then as I stood there with my mouth hanging open, Mason stepped forward with Rosemarie slinking beside him and came up to me and said, cool but oh so infinitely polite: ‘Cass?’ He was just chock-full of politesse and humanity and good breeding, and he stuck out his hand and without knowing it I stuck out mine and took it, and then he gave a thin well-bred friendly little smile, saying, ’I’ve been wanting to meet you very, very much,’ and it was all done with such grace and aplomb that it would have melted the heart out of a brass monkey. Well, what do you do in a situation like that? I guess at first it flashed through my mind that this was the beginning of some kind of a con game, yet he really didn’t look like a man who was out to sell me anything—he was too beautifully decked out for that—and I suppose I just figured that if he wanted to call me by my first name it was a little forward and familiar coming from a total stranger, but he was an American, after all, and Americans were glad-handers in general, and that if he wanted to meet me very much it was only because Windgasser had told him I was an old hand, more or less,. and he wanted to get checked out on life in Sambuco. Anyway, I was a real pushover, I’ll tell you.

“So I allowed as how I was me and just as I tried to apologize for being in my underdrawers he introduced me to Rosemarie, and she gave a sort of whinny—I think she must have been as awe-struck at what she thought was the golden boy of art as Mason was, or even more so—and bubbled that she was so pleased to meet me and all, and stuck those beautiful knockers in my face, and said, ‘We’d heard you were ever so unapproach able. Why, there’s nothing stand-offish about you at all!’ I remember that word, stand-offish. Frankly I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, but if that’s what she had heard about me and I wasn’t that way at all, and if she was willing to come here and parade that beautiful lush body around and give me the impression that she was ready to smother me with it on the spot, then I didn’t care what she was driving at. All that flesh! That tremendous heaving wonderland of a groaning carnal paradise! To think that that great walking Beautyrest of a woman was all wasted on Mason. It’s enough to break your heart, even now.

“Anyway, there wasn’t too much else to do but invite them in. I put on a pair of pants and of course the place looked like an accident ward, but as a matter of fact I imagine that’s just what they were set up to expect from a mad genius. On the way in I remember Mason patting me on the back and saying, ’somehow I expected a more frail and wiry person.’ Well, I guess it crossed my mind that Fausto had given him a complete if inaccurate rundown on me, and I vaguely wondered why, but I was still in the dark, see—deaf, dumb, and blind—so I shrugged it off and muttered something pleasant and got the conversation switched around to him. Because up until then he hadn’t explained himself at all. So while I was fixing up the coffee on the hot plate and Rosemarie stood at the window ooh-ing and ah-ing at the view, old Mason just plunked himself down in the armchair and rared back and really gave me the works. What a snow job! Said he was doing Europe and all, said he was fed up with the New York rat race, and said he finally realized that here in Sambuco was the place he’d always longed for. And it’s funny, you know, the impression he created while he talked—it was all as charming as hell. These little wry jokes about himself, and funny little puns and sour remarks and so on. And the way he conveyed to me that he was a playwright and a man of talent—it was subtle as hell. Things like saying in a flat, offhand, mildly disgusted voice, “Critical success in the theater, you know, is synonymous with popular success,’ and you must hand it to him, that’s about as cagey and collected as you can get in the fine art of prevarication, because it was in regard to a play of his he said had been produced the year before, and had flopped. I mean, a real clumsy cross-eyed blunderer of a liar would have fallen all over himself trying to snow a person with his success. But not Mason. No, you see, too fragrant a lie would get found out. So he works on the premise that Waldo probably don’t keep up with the theater, be ing so far away and doubtless having little interest in it anyway, so that a nice soft medium-sized lie will do, and he very artfully mentions his play, and says that it flopped, and tags on this kind of embittered but manfully stoical remark about critical and popular success, so that in the end the effect is simply that of a dedicated artist who has been hooted down by the rabble and the dimwitted critics yet has the courage to keep his chin up and struggle on. What an actor Mason was! He could have sold rotgut whiskey to the W.C.T.U. He sure impressed me, all right, so that by the time we’d finished the coffee and he’d dropped a few names—but tastefully, you see, and just the ones anybody might recognize in the theater—we were almost what you might say buddy-buddy—no, not that exactly, but I’d taken a shine to him, in a casual way.

“Well, along about then began the really touching part. We sat there in the sunlight on the balcony for a while, chatting and admiring the view. About this time Rosemarie looked over and gave a kind of mental nudge to Mason. Then a little flicker passed across his face and he turned and beamed at me and said in the nicest way: ‘I wonder if you’d do us a really extraordinary favor. I know—‘ And he paused, then went on: ’Well, I know how reticent you are about showing your work to strangers. And the Lord knows I don’t want to appear presumptuous. But I wonder if you’d do us the great favor of letting us look at some of your work. We’d just—” And then he paused again with this sort of half-flustered and abashed look on his face, as if he felt he was being presumptuous after all. Then Rosemarie clutched her hands together and turned them outwards and tucked them into her crotch like women do, and she leaned forward and chimed in with a ‘Please do! Oh please do!’ Well, you could have dropped me on the spot with a broomstraw. Would I show them my work? Would I show them my work? Why, it was like asking some beat-up lifer of a convict if he’d care to have the keys to the front gate. Bleeding God, what a question to ask! In going on close to ten years I could count on my fingers the number of people who had wanted to see my work, or had seen it—outside of maybe Poppy and the kids, and the strays you pick up looking over your shoulder in the park or somewhere, and a couple of goofy dogs or so. Now here comes this nice, clean-cut, charming young American, and he’s not only so engaging and witty but he’s also dying to see my work—can you see how I might have been taken by the guy? Well, I guess I beamed a bit, and blushed, and went through the old gee-whiz routine, and then after a while I relented and said something like: ’Well, if you really want to.’ And they began to look happy about that, and expectant, you know, and then all of a sudden it occurred to me that maybe all of us, both them and me, had bitten off a little bit more than we could chew. Because the fact of the matter was that—well, I just didn’t have a hell of a lot to show off. In the first place, I simply hadn’t done much in a long, long time. In the second place, practically everything I’d done that I considered halfway decent I’d done in America and had stored at Poppy’s house in New Castle, and all the rest I had with me—this really grim, interior, tight-assed stuff I’d done in Paris and Rome—was work I really couldn’t be proud of at all. But Mason and Rosemarie were still insisting and prodding me, you see, and as I say I was in quite a glow over all this attention—it still hadn’t occurred to me to wonder just who in hell had told them I was reticent—and so finally I got to my feet and gave a sort of boyish grin and said: ’Well, if you really want to see them, it’s not much but—O.K.’ And I remember them giving these sly, knowing, tickled little looks to each other, pretty much for my benefit, all as if to say, ‘Heavens, how charming this guy is with all his modesty.’

“So I went downstairs to the guardaroba where I had everything stored and I drug up all of this miserable, pallid, ineffectual, self-centered stuff I’d done for the past several years: five or six dreary figures and landscapes in oil, and some water colors, and seven or eight ink and crayon sketches—that was about all. And I brought the whole pathetic mess back upstairs and got some books out to prop up the unrolled canvases against the wall, and rummaged around and found some tacks to peg the upper corners to the molding, and set out the water colors and the sketches around the room so that they’d be displayed with the proper delicacy and dignity. And even as I was doing all this—proud and hopeful in a way, see, and just itching and itching for some kind of praise—I began to sweat and tighten up inside, knowing every second that it was all an outrageous disaster from beginning to end. But as you know, Mason was never one to be daunted by the mere realities of a situation, and neither was Rosemarie, for that matter. If this character was the young—the young tycoon of American art, the big wheel, the golden young Leonardo of the mid-twentieth century, well by God you can bet your hat and ass that Mason and Rosemarie were going to make no gaffes in the maestro’s presence. Nossir. They were going to be properly reverent and humble—not abased, see, not inferior or servile or anything like that, because that would be pretty unsophisticated—but just properly reverent about this magic art, and humble, just like anyone should be, after all, who doesn’t know or feel a goddam thing about painting, but is up on it, having gotten all the latest poop in Life magazine. So in they slunk from the balcony, wreathed in rosy expectation. Godalmighty, you should have seen them. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure them out. You couldn’t have asked for more wonderment, for more fatuous credulity, from a pair of beauticians on a pilgrimage to Albert Schweitzer. Or some other Great Soul. Yet still they were playing it cool, you see. They wanted to think about it a bit, to ponder and muse and absorb—to soak it up, if you see what I mean. So they began to pass very slowly around the room, lingering for a long time before each painting or sketch and murmuring to each other in these voices that were almost inaudible, and they were holding hands, and every now and then—with their backs to me, you see—I’d see Rosemarie’s hand clutch his in a kind of convulsion and she’d give a little gasp of wonderment or delight that I could barely hear, and they’d be cocking their heads to one side and another like a couple of parakeets. ‘Aha!’ Mason would say. ‘I see you’re flirting with the representational. Interesting phase.’ And I really mean it—I was snowed for a long while there. Because although I felt deep down that this stuff I had done was pretty feeble, who after all was I to tell? These two certainly didn’t seem to be fakers; if anything they seemed to be more honest and earnest—more genuine, you might say—than almost any young Americans I had seen in Europe. They seemed to really care, if you know what I mean, and perhaps I was all wrong about what I’d done. I remember that it passed across my mind with a sense of delight that was almost like rapture that maybe this, after all, was the turning point. I mean, maybe what I had done all this time was really terrific, was basically first-rate stuff, only my own miserable selfloathing had not allowed me to accept the fact or to grant the worth, so that all that had been needed all along was somebody like this guy Mason to hop out of nowhere like a genie from a bottle and put me on the road to acceptance and affirmation—salvation, even. What crap.

“It wasn’t really too long before I began to sense vaguely that something really was quite screwy somewhere. They were just a little bit too wrapped up in this personal awe of theirs, you see. What with all the hand-squeezing and the sighing and so on, and Rosemarie’s little gasps and the husky sort of half-whistles Mason put out every now and then, I began to feel—well, somewhat ill—at-ease, I guess. And besides, I guess they figured it was time to open up a little, it was time for Act Two, and they began to make more comments. And they were the goddamdest comments you ever heard. I remember one in particular. In Rome I remember I’d gone up on the Palatine and made two or three sketches one day, each one worse than the next. I can’t describe them. They were tight-assed, if you know what I mean. That is, the basic idea was good, but nothing in them gave or flowered, spread out, encompassed, whatever the word is. They remained fidgety, selfish little corners of some private view, a bunch of aborted, stunted notions wriggling in a vacuum. I kept them anyway, I don’t know why—maybe because the idea at least had been good—and anyway I showed them to Mason and Rosemarie with all the rest. A school kid could have seen how aimless and pointless they were, but not Mason. And not Rosemarie, either. Because, as I say, the second act had begun and they had decided to show just how bleeding sharp and sensitive they were. Mason turned around and looked me square in the eye and said, ‘God, man, the sense of space. It’s absolutely uncanny.’ And Rosemarie wasn’t missing a trick, either, I’ll tell you. Without turning, and before Mason could open his mouth again, she stood there, with her head bent down on this poor little strangulated fetus of a drawing and I heard a long inspiration of breath and then she said, so help me God, ’Not only space, Muffin. The incredible humanity.’

“Well, I began to get a sneaky feeling right then and there. There wasn’t no more space or humanity in those drawings than you could stuff up the back end of a flea, really, but in spite of this I was about to put them down as a couple of misguided people who were nonetheless trying desperately to be kind, when Mason opened his mouth again, staring at me with these sort of soft, compassionate, wonder-filled eyes, and said: ‘They were right. You have a true vision. True and pure.’ Then wheeled about again quickly, as if he couldn’t trust his own emotions, and commenced looking and cocking his head and whistling once more. Well, now who in the hell were they? This time I guess you can imagine my suspicions really began to rise. They had me really buffaloed, these two, but mind you I still didn’t catch on to what was up. I guess it was too big an experience—I mean, having somebody interested in my work—for me to see clearly much farther than my own flattered ego. I just stood around behind them as they wandered around the room, clenching my hands together like Charlie Chan and licking my lips and coughing self-consciously every time they sighed or made a remark. Finally, after about ten minutes of this, they drew up to a halt before this canvas I’d done in Paris the year before—it wasn’t too bad, either, a sort of impressionistic thing with a lot of color of Montparnasse rooftops—and Mason went into his familiar spasm and turned and clenched his teeth and said something—oh, I forget exactly what, but it put me several hundred miles past Matisse—and then after a long pause he said: ’Haven’t I seen this before?’ Then before I could say anything, or even think, Rosemarie picked up the cue and said: ’Muffin, I was thinking the very same thing!’ But then, she said slowly, and rolled her eyes: ’I know it couldn’t have been in that show in New York. Because wasn’t it true, dearest, that they didn’t have any of his oils?’ And then she shot me an artful glance, and let it slide off, and said: ‘I think it’s maybe because it has that—well, that je ne sais quoi—that universal quality that reminds me of all paintings.’ So help me God. Well, of course, that did it. I finally knew that something was really hideously wrong—I didn’t know what exactly, but these two people sure had blundered into the wrong shop—and I was about to open up and very delicately try to get the whole situation straightened out, when in Poppy bounced with about twenty-five balloons and the kids, and half a dozen village children shrieking and trailing after.”

“Tell me,” I said, “how in the world did you get the terrible business over with? What did you say to them? What did you do?”

“Well, it was tough, you know. I’ve always been twisted completely out of shape by such situations, even ones less serious than that. I don’t know what it is, because I don’t think I’m a real coward when you get right down to it. I guess I’d just rather see people have their illusions, rather than break them up and in the process make them seem even slightly stupid or silly. It’s a failing, I guess, but I’ve never really been able to conquer it. When I first went to art school in New York, I remember, the instructor thought my name was Mr. Applebaum, don’t ask me why, and for the longest kind of time I let him believe it—afraid to make him look like an ass—until it went on so long that it really became too late to tell him—then we both would have looked like idiots, you see—so I guess to this day if he ever remembers me he thinks of that nice Mr. Applebaum, from North Carolina.

“Anyway—Jesus Christ, lead us not into temptation… . Well, just like McCabe up in Rome, you see, Mason had him a bottle of whiskey. Twelve-year-old Scotch it was, too. He poured me out a stiff belt and had a weak one for himself, and pretty soon the glow was on. I remember along about here he went over to the balcony again and stood there looking out. And he was silent for a while, sort of musing; with his nose sticking out over the rim of his glass, and then he came out with this whispered line in German. Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blüh’n? Then he turned and looked at me with this little wistful half-smile on his face and said: ‘At last I know. Honest to God, it’s crazy beyond belief. At last I know, Waldo, what Goethe meant when he had his vision of Eden.’ And I reckon I was getting a little dreamy, on four ounces of Chivas Regal too, but I was damned if I was going to let this guy outdo me in the poetry line, so not to be topped, I said that yes, I understood what he meant, it was an earthly paradise, all right, and that it oft reminded me of those lines in praise of Attica to my old friend Oedipus at Colonus—to wit, and I quoted: ‘Nor fail the sleepless founts whence the waters of Cephisus wander, but each day with stainless tide he moveth over the plains of the land’s swelling bosom, et cetera.’ What a real collusion of frauds! Except, as I say, I was still worried deep down how I was going to straighten out this confusion of identities. You have no idea how embarrassing it is to be called Waldo in all earnestness when your name is something else.

“As usual, the booze took care of everything and worked the situation out in its own sweet way. Which of course is to say that it wasn’t more’n about fifteen minutes before I was plastered to the eyeballs. And now that I look back on it, I don’t suppose that Mason could ever forgive me for what I said and what I had done. He was being so phony and he was trying so hard, you see, only he had the wrong man. He was barking up the wrong tree, and when I finally got going there—spilling out all my bile and poison—I must have really hit him where he lived. Anyway, along about then Poppy took Rosemarie and the kids out for a stroll down into the piazza and Mason and I were alone. We started chatting again and I remember I had gotten up to pour me out another shot when at this point the damndest thing happened …”

Cass fell silent, and closed his eyes briefly, as if trying to recapture the moment in its reality. “As soon as I caught sight of her I was struck that I could have seen her these two times and each time forgotten her, and then see her again and be touched all over by the same sort of million-fingered joy and delight at her beauty. What she had done, you see, was to give a timid little knock at the door while Mason and I were talking. We hadn’t heard the knock and she was just standing there, God knows how long, in this sort of frowzy, shabby croker-sack of a dress and her naked feet were planted firmly on the floor and as I came toward her she reached up and slapped at a fly and then she folded her hands together in front of her. It would be easy to romanticize that moment, you know, and tell you how her hair had the fragrance of camellias and her skin the hue and sheen of fairest marble, but you saw her—you know how she looked—and the fact of the matter is that she smelled like a cowshed and she had streaks of reddish dirt running up her bare legs. But no matter. She had brushed her brown hair till it shone with a silver luster and she didn’t crack a smile when I came over and looked into her grave and lovely face.

“Funny thing, I had noticed Mason had gotten up and was giving her the once-over. It was really a hungry look he was giving her. It annoyed me somehow, boozy as I was. I motioned her out into the courtyard where we could talk. I said, ‘Are you the girl that Luigi and Signora Carotenuto sent?’ And she said yes, then I said, ‘What’s your name?’ and she said ‘Francesca, Francesca Ricci.’ My heart was pounding like a bleeding schoolboy’s, and I must have had an oafish look on my face, because I was suddenly aware that she was looking up at me with a puzzled expression and then I heard her say anxiously. ’I knocked, signore, but you didn’t hear me, you didn’t hear.’ As if I suspected her of robbing the joint. Then, as much as I hated to, I came to the point instead of beating around the bush and prolonging the contact, so to speak. I said: ‘I’m sorry. Mi displace. But you will have to go away. There was a mistake made. I just can’t afford to hire anyone.’ And then this terrible look of sorrow came over her face, and she looked out into the street with her eyes full of the purest grief, and I thought she was going to blubber at any minute. I’ve often wondered whether a quality of pity wasn’t rooted in the heart of love just as much as beauty is, or desire; whether a part of love wasn’t just the perfectly human, uncondescending, magnanimous yearning to shelter in your arms someone else who is hurt or lost or needs comfort. Anyway, there she stood looking so raggedy and shabby and wretched—so poor, there doesn’t have to be any other word—that I could have bit off my tongue for causing her such misery and disappointment. But I couldn’t very well back down; what I’d said was true, and that was the simple fact of the situation. I said: ‘I am very sorry, but I’ve had a recent disgrazia. You’ll just have to go away. It is something beyond my control. I know you need the money very much and I’m terribly sorry but you’ll just have to go away.’ Pretty soon she looked up at me again with her lips quivering and said: ‘I can cook and sew, signore. I can scrub clothes and clean the house.’ And then she said in a sort of quick anxious gasp in this horrible English she had picked up: ‘I can wash over the kildren!’ Then I said: ‘Che?’ And then I understood what she meant and I found myself laughing. But not much, because as I laughed her eyes got more and more lost and mournful and despairing, and finally she broke down and stuck her head into her hands and began to sob. And at this point I began to tramp up and down the courtyard muttering to myself and coughing behind my hand, all in an absolute sweat, you see—wanting her to stay if only for a few more minutes just so I could feast my eyes on her, but at the same time trying to figure out a way to get her out of there before I busted out bawling myself. Finally I went up to her and took her by the shoulders as gently as I could and said firmly: ’You cannot stay. I have no money to pay you. Don’t you understand?’ She kept on sobbing, and it was all I could do to keep from taking her in my arms and soothing her and telling her that everything in the end would be all right, but I knew that everything in the end would not be all right so I just stood there and patted her on the shoulders and snuffled and groaned to myself. Then finally she looked up at me and here is what she said. It’s hard to describe her manner, because in the midst of her grief she was proposing something that a girl might find hard to do even in the midst of composure or good spirits or joy, but she looked up at me with these woeful red-rimmed eyes and said with the merest pathetic suggestion of some wan dispirited coquetry: ‘I know you are an artist, signore. I could pose for you well, and do anything—’ But I shushed her up and said, ‘Yes,’ because if she had to go as far as this anything then her distress was deeper even than the distress she had been weeping over, and I figured we’d be able to work out an answer somehow. So I said: ‘Yes.’ And then I said: ‘You won’t have to pose for me or anything. You just come and cook for us and wash over the kildren. I‘ll find a way to pay you.’ And in a moment she had vanished, and I felt an undertone of trouble myself, but with you might say a kind of warm gentle joy along with it, like a man who knows a tremendous secret… .”

Again he fell silent, and when he resumed talking, after a long pause, it was with a laugh that had very little humor in it at all. “Now that I recall it, I don’t think Mason had been eavesdropping. Bald as he could be and all, he was careful about most of the more obvious amenities. But when I turned around he was standing there in the doorway, gazing at the outer door of the courtyard where Francesca had gone. But even if I thought he had been listening in—in which case he couldn’t have understood a word, since the Italian language remained as dark to him as Icelandic right up to the very end—it wasn’t this that griped me and tore at me so as what he said then. ‘Now that looks like real tail, Waldo,’ he said, rubbing his finger up against the side of his ear. “There’s nothing like a round little behind to make me bloom like a rose.’ Then he said: ‘Where did you dig her up?’

“Maybe this was meant as a really virile observation, to offset all the art appreciation and the poetry. But the look on his face was pink and greasy and what he said was like a slap in the face in this hot and disrupted condition I was in. Now that I look back on it I can understand that maybe he didn’t mean anything insulting by it, and actually he was even trying to impress me. Hell, it was a remark I might have made myself, about somebody I didn’t care anything for. For one thing, she was obviously just a poor little peasant and he couldn’t have suspected how she had set me rocking and churning. But the other thing, of course, is that Mason was just like that. The universal man he thought of himself as, the bleeding equilateral triangle of the perfect human male, an aesthete who could quote you half a line from Rilke and Rimbaud and you name it, and dream of himself potting tigers in Burma and getting gored in Seville, and balance himself off as the most glorious stud that ever crept between two sheets. And since he was none of these things to no degree he had to talk a lot, to make you believe he was all of them.” He hesitated for a moment. “Christ, I’m trying to be fair to this guy!” he said with sudden passion and bitterness. “He was bright, too, bright as hell—a marvel even, in his amateur way. What made him such a swine? Such a—” He stopped, lips trembling.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.” For the briefest space of time I had the notion that Mason, sprung forth in spirit from the grave, was sitting in judgment on our judgment upon him. We turned away from each other—I with a counterfeit yawn, Cass fidgeting.

After a moment Cass went on. “Well, I reckon I simmered down pretty quickly. That Scotch he was putting out was on the de-luxe side, and it was too much to forgo just because of a single crude remark. Yet I remember, as we went back into the room there, I remember thinking about him, brooding, trying to size him up. In those days, especially when I was drunk, my judgments on America and Americans tended to get a bit somber and harsh, to say the least. And Mason now—well, I can’t say that I actually out and out disliked him, even with that remark of his—seeing Francesca again had left me feeling very warm—but you might say that there was a whole lot about him that I didn’t exactly cotton to. And all this quite aside from the Waldo business, which had begun to set my teeth on edge. No, there were these other things—all his slickness, and his suavity, and that bland arch pretty-boy face of his, and yes, even those goddam sun glasses he was wearing indoors, too, where there wasn’t no sun. In this haze I was getting into, all these things added up to something, and that something didn’t seem to be much more than the man I had come to Europe to escape, the man in all those car advertisements—you know, the young guy waving there—he looks so beautiful and educated and everything, and he’s got it made, Penn State and a blonde there, and a smile as big as a billboard. And he’s going places. I mean electronics. Politics. What they call communications. Advertising. Saleshood. Outer space. God only knows. And he’s as ignorant as an Albanian peasant.”

He paused. “Maybe it was partly envy in those days. Mason had a lot more than this, I guess. After all he wasn’t a type, he was his own self. But then, as I told you, I always had it in for these young American dreamboats, who’ve had it handed to them on a silver platter—education, especially, books, the opportunity to learn something—and then never used it, but took a couple of courses in water-skiing, and then dragged-ass out of school barely able to write their name and believing that the supremest good on earth was to be able to con a fellow citizen into buying a television set that would reduce his mind to the level of a toadfish or lower even. Millions of them! Because I never had that chance—though if wasn’t nobody’s fault directly, except maybe the depression and my uncle’s having to pull me out of school to go to work—and I resented it, and having to learn the little I know on my own hook, so to speak. Anyway, put part of this feeling down to envy. Nonetheless, with Mason here, you see, he had begun to look and smell a little like that certain man, in spite of Kennst du das Land crap and the playwrighting, and my enthusiasm for him had pretty much wore off, you might say. As a matter of fact, he had begun to look phony as a boarhog with tits. What the hell are you laughing at?”

“At Mason,” I said. “I want to cry, but I’m laughing at Mason. Go on.”

“Well, we got to chatting there by the balcony, and we got on various subjects, abstract expressionism—he had all the proper things to say about that—and I remember somewhere along the line there he started in on jazz. I think he must have seen my phonograph, or maybe my Leadbelly album, and figured that naturally I was pretty well gone on jazz. Though of course what they call modern jazz and Leadbelly are two different things. Well now—jazz. You know, some of it’s pretty good, and I’d probably like it a lot more than I do if it weren’t for some goddamed avant-garde creep always jamming it down my throat. And Mason was basically about as much avant-garde as J. P. Morgan. Anyway, I guess you’ve got to be something of a heretic—a bleeding infidel—to say that you don’t like jazz. In New York, say you don’t like jazz and it’s like saying you’re an F.B.I. man. It’s a shame, you know. Because good jazz should be taken for what it is. Music. It isn’t great art but it’s music, and a lot of it’s fine, only about half the people who listen to it think that it’s some sort of propaganda. They’re worse than the bleeding Russians. Like that time in New York, I was in a bar near the Art Students’ League and I told this young girl that I thought Negro spirituals were very beautiful, and she said: ’Oh, they went out in the thirties. You southerners just want to see Negroes remain in a state of primitive religiosity.’ She was one of these jazz nuts, of course. But it’s true, really. Most of the people who say they like jazz couldn’t whistle “Yankee Doodle.” They’re tone deaf. They like it because they think it stands for something. Or because it’s chic. Well, believe me, it’s not that I have anything against jazz, but until my ears improve there will be very little in it that will ever turn me to fire and ice inside—like the day in Paris when I was listening to the radio, and heard that aria from Gluck for the first time in my life, where Orfeo calls out to Euridice in his grief, and I sat there shivering and burning, with my hair straight on end, and near about keeled over like a log.

“Anyway, Mason moved in on me pretty quickly there, and he began talking about Mezz and Bird and Bix and Bunk and Bunny and God knows who else, and I just pretty much gave him the helm, sitting there brooding and listening and sipping away at his ten-dollar luxury bottle. I guess almost a half-hour must have passed, and I was getting woozier and dreamier and—I don’t know—sad, I guess, half-listening to him yack away about this horn player named Bird, who had a terrible death-wish and finally croaked, and gazing down into the sea and the valley, which were all blazing gold at that time of the day, and so beautiful, and forever out of my reach. And I kept thinking about Francesca, too—. things that excited me but scared me, too, if you want to know the truth—and his voice came back into focus all of a sudden, and I realized he was talking about parachuting and Yugoslavia, and this jump he’d made into the black, black night. Well, I listened more intently now, and I believed it—there wasn’t any reason not to, especially since his manner of telling it was really so modest, and even funny in a way. As you know, it was quite a tale.

“Well, I reckon what started me off was this. This—After he finished his story he asked me where I’d been, and I told him the Solomons and New Britain, and then he asked me—all in the smoothest way, you understand, without seeming to pry at all—if I’d gotten hurt any, and I said no, I’d been lucky—physically, that is—but that I’d gotten pretty beat up mentally for a while, enough to put me in a hospital for a spell, at any rate. Then he wanted to know if this experience hadn’t deepened me, hadn’t added to my work; then tacked on something heavy about how this Yugoslavian business, and fear, and suffering there, was the key to his own talent. And it’s a funny thing, he wouldn’t let it go at that, you see; in the nicest way he kept wanting to know what happened to me. So I poured myself out another Regal and I told him: about landing at Gloucester in the mists, in that tremendous hovering jungle, and how it wasn’t anything that exactly happened to me that eventually cracked me up, but how the Japs were way back in the bosky dells, waiting, and when we advanced—lucky old Cass being point, lead man in the lead squad of the leading platoon in the leading company, et cetera—it was like being pioneer in an experience so nightmarish and scary that all reality just drained away from your consciousness on the spot, and that being waist-deep in this incalculable muck anyway, the fact of sudden death from some invisible machine gun or sniper stuck up in a tree somewhere seemed at once so inviting and so foregone and so inevitable that from then on, once you miraculously pulled through it all, fear was never the same again. It was a land and an empire whose citizen you would be for the rest of your life. And no doubt for the rest of your life you would be paying it homage. That was my experience, I said, and as I droned away there—getting a little mawkish, I guess, what with the memory and the booze and all—my eyes misted up and I told him this. I told him we done a good job in that war. I told him that it was a war we had to fight, that if there’s such a thing as a just war it was no doubt juster than most. But as for experience, I said, you could keep your goddam experience and give me back those days when I could have been swimming on the green coast of Carolina, washed over by clean green waves and left upright and ready for living, instead of half buckled-over remembering some misbegotten quagmire of a jungle, and with the dirty taste of fear in my mouth. Experience, I said, was for the birds, when it diminished a man. Bugger that kind of experience. Bugger it. Bugger it forever.

“Then came the snapper, you see. Mason’s eyes were all glittery by now. Looking back on it, it must have been just the sorehead renegade talk he was led to expect from this Polish what’s-hisname. Anyway, as I ended up my little outburst, feeling all mean and bitter and drunk and sorry for myself, as I finished up there Mason’s beautiful lips parted and this, so help me God, is what he said. He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands gracefully behind his head and said: ‘Well, I don’t consider myself a member of the beat generation, Waldo, though I certainly sympathize. But I think I can understand why you’re considered one of the leading spokesmen.’ Which is a pretty sweet piece of ass-kissing, you must admit. He had everything all sewed up. With a couple million bucks he couldn’t exactly be beat, and he knew it, but to be beat was fashionable, and he sure could sympathize. Old Mason. He would of sympathized with cancer if he thought it was a la mode. Well, anyway, that did it. What it was I don’t know—an accumulation of things, I suppose. Him pretending to care for my art, which was so poor. Francesca, and the booze, and this sudden memory of the war again, and my general misery and inadequacy, and on top of that this glib young fellow with his fast chitterchatter about abstract expressionism and jazz and this guy Bird with his death-wish and now, drug in by its heels, the beat generation, knowing that was pretty chic, too. I mean, whether justly or not, for a moment there he seemed to be the bleeding shallow and insincere epitome of a bleeding neo-yahoo snakepit of a fifth-rate juvenile culture that only a moron could live in, or a lunatic. He burnt my ass.

“So I let him have it, number-two shot in both barrels. I got up and I looked down at him and I said, very gently: ‘You want to know something, my friend? I think you’re as full of shit as a Christmas goose.’ Then I said, very softly, very even-tempered, see: ‘Let me tell you something. I don’t know what you’re driving at, but those bums don’t know what beat is. They’re just a bunch of little boys playing with theirselves. Get me some men, friend, and I might set myself up in the spokesman business. In the meantime, don’t call me Waldo.’ Well, you’d have thought Mason had been cold-cocked with a wrench. He gave a little jump and his eyes got as gray and washed-out as a couple of oysters. And then that shoulder of his started to jerking and twitching and heaving and he looked like he was trying to say something, but what could he say? Either I wasn’t Waldo at all, or I was sort of a super-Waldo who had transcended even himself, and was so way-out that here I was repudiating the generation I was supposed to be the mouthpiece for. He looked absolutely clobbered. And before he had a chance to collect himself I was charging on, half out of my head, I guess, with drunken spite and bitterness and general all-around anti-everything. And I said: ’Who the hell are you, anyway, some bleeding smart-aleck Joe College with half a semester of art appreciation and several fancy chapters from Bernard Berenson who’s come over here to yawn over whatever Renaissance genius is passe this year?’ (He wasn’t that, of course, but I didn’t know it. Mason might have heard of B.B., but anybody who painted before 1900 was on his shit list anyway.) ‘People like you give me a king-sized pain in the butt. The whole suave smooth Ivy League lot of you should be made to run high hurdles from here to the Strait of Messina, barefooted like one of these contadini and nothing to eat but some week-old bread full of weevils, then by God maybe you’ll know a painting when you see one!’ His shoulder was heaving like mad and—I don’t know—he looked so displaced, all of a sudden, that I sat down and altered my tone a bit. ‘The trouble is, you see, it’s not that you’re not nice, you young Americans, it’s just that you don’t know anything. Take the Greeks, par exemple. Do you know anything about the Greeks?’ He just sat there for a moment, looking walleyed, then he said somewhat stiffly: ‘Of course I know something about the Greeks.’ Then I said: ‘Quote me something! Quote me from Iphigenia, quote me from Orestes’ And he said: ‘You don’t have to be able to quote to show your knowledge, for Jesus sake.’ Which the Lord knows is true enough, but I said: ‘Ha! See! A man who can’t quote one line from Euripides hasn’t got no education whatsoever. And you a play writer? What is your line, my friend? Communications? Some sort of drummer? I thought so. Well, let me tell you something, friend. You’d better prepare for doom. Because when the great trump blows and the roll is called up yonder and the nations are arranged for judgment you and all your breed are going to be shit out of luck. They don’t allow communicators into heaven, or traveling men either.’

“Well, I was getting quite a kick out of needling this guy, and I sloped off on a general tirade against America, its degradation of its teachers and its men of mind and character, and its childish glorification of scoundrels and nitwits and movie trash, and its devotion to political cretins—military scum and Presbyterians and such like whose combined wisdom would shame some country sheriff’s harelip daughter—and its eternal belief that it’s God’s own will that illiterates and fools shall lay down the law to the wise. Ad infinitum. Right on down the line. And Mason was taking it all in, nodding and looking sad and hurt, and with his shoulder going up and down. Except that, talking about America as I had been doing, a swarm of memories had begun to rollick in the back of my mind, and then they calmed down and began to flow through me in one clear continuous stream, clear as water, so that even as I halted, then tried to speak again, there came upon me this spell which I had had in Europe so many times—where touched a bit by this wine, you know, I would glimpse such simple homely things as the fold of a curtain or the knob of a door or a frosted windowpane, and these I would somehow connect with the same things at home, and then I’d remember a house or an old tobacco barn and the way it looked on a wintry evening in the full light of sunset, or the gulls white and motionless in a mad wild gale over Hatteras, or a girl’s voice would come back to me, clear as a bell on some street in New York many years ago, and her eyes and her hair, or the scent of perfume as she passed, or then the sound of a freight train lumbering up through the pinewoods near home, and its long whistle in my ears both a monotone and an ecstasy. So as I say, this reverie came upon me as I sat there, and as I thought of all these things and the memories flowed through me I began to feel like a total stranger, and the anguish and mystery of myself, you see—of who and what I was and had been and was to be—all of these were somehow tied up with these visions and sounds and smells of America, which were slowly breaking my heart as I sat there, and I knew I had to get up and get out of there and be alone. It was as simple as that. I remember I cleared my throat and looked at Mason, who was sort of suspended there in a yellowish winy fog, and then I got up. The only true experience, by God,’ I said, ‘is the one where a man learns to love himself. And his country!’ And as I said these words, and turned around, why so help me God that nightmare I’d had came crashing back like a wave, and then those Negroes and that ruined cabin so long ago and all of that, which seemed to be the symbol of the no-count bastard I’d been all my life, and I became absolutely twisted and wrenched with a feeling I’d never felt before—guilt and homesickness and remorse and pity all combined—and I felt the tears streaming idiotically down my cheeks.

“ ‘How will I ever forgive myself, for all the things I’ve done?’ I said to him, hardly knowing what I was saying.

“And then Mason said: ’What have you done, Waldo? What’s the matter? Why, man, you’ve got it made!’

“But I said: ‘The name is Kinsolving’—spelling it out—‘journeyman cartoonist from Lake Waccamaw, North Carolina.’

“And then I got out of there. I went hunting for Francesca, thinking that I might be able to find her and buy her an ice cream or something. But then I realized I didn’t have a nickel to my name. So I staggered down the mountainside and sat and looked at the sea.”

“Tell me, how did you ever get so involved—so chummy with him?” I asked Cass later.

“Well, I’ll tell you a short little incident that I remember very clearly. One morning, you see, not long after that day I got up and started to go down to the cafe for my daily workout with Luigi and the wine bottle. I had just stepped out into the street there when down the cobblestones cruised Mason in that monstrous pneumatic barge of his, loaded down to the gun’ls with the damndest pile of boxes you ever saw. I mean cartons of Maxwell House and Campbell’s soups and catchup and Kleenex, this and that, anything you can name. He’d just come back from the PX in Naples, you see. He was really setting up housekeeping in a big way. He had enough there to outfit Admiral Byrd.

“He drew to a halt and pitched me a big grin and got out and started unloading all his loot. I remember in the back he had a huge big boxful of cans—Crisco, I believe it was, or maybe Fluff o —anyway, it was some kind of fancy American lard, and he had enough of it to fry potatoes in till kingdom come—but the box was heavy and he was having a little bit of a time with it, so I shuffled over to help him out. Funny, this must have been about a week after he arrived. I hadn’t seen much of him up to then, but we’d waved to each other and smiled as we passed in the courtyard—both of us pretty sheepish, I guess, over the jackasses we’d made of ourselves that first day. As a matter of fact, once we’d even stopped there and mumbled a few apologies at each other—he for mistaking me for old ding-dong what’s-his-name from Rimini, and me of course for getting so drunk and outrageous and insulting. Mason must have been in a sort of pickle at the time, you know. I mean he was pretty well stuck there in Sambuco, for one thing. He was committed. Then at the same time, this blow job he’d given me about his work—I wasn’t the Polish boy, to be sure, but after all he had told me that my work was right up there with Matisse and Cezanne, and he couldn’t very well go back on his judgment without looking like a perfect cluck. Well, I didn’t think of all this at the time. Inside he must have been boiling—at himself and at me—but there was no way out, really. If he’d showed his resentment and, say, cut me dead, why he’d look all the more foolish and asinine, that’s all. But maybe, you know, he wasn’t boiling at all. Because maybe I had something else to offer him.

“Anyway, as I say, at that point we were on decent enough terms, even though possibly somewhat distant, and I figured what the hell, I’d help him out with his Crisco. So we huffed and puffed the box into the courtyard, making sort of stiff little formal wisecracks and so on, and while we were doing this I said to myself, for God sake, I’d been pretty stinking and rude to this guy, he really seemed like a decent enough type; if he was going to be around Sambuco—sharing the same house, too—we might as well be friendly, so I just went on and helped him with the rest of his groceries. All that lard! It did seem maybe a little too much at the time, I guess, but who was I to begrudge him all his dough, and besides, he had boxes and boxes of books, too, which sort of excited me, and I remember thinking that maybe he’d loan me one or two. He said he’d picked them up at the dock in Naples, shipped over from New York. And there were a lot of other things that came along behind just then, in a truck he’d hired: that damn buffalo head, and these paintings—a Hans Hofmann, and a couple of de Koonings, and a huge black-assed Kline—and a Toast-master. And a bunch of fancy elephant guns all crated up and packed in cosmoline… .”

Cass paused for a moment, scraping at the gray stubble on his chin. “I honestly don’t know what must have been bumping around in my subconscious. I knew I was stone-broke, and I knew that Poppy’s last ten thousand lire had dwindled down to almost nothing. I was really quite desperate, if you want to know the truth—way behind on the rent, and a wine-and-Strega bill down at the cafe half a mile long. I didn’t know what I was going to do. And here was this solid-gold young Santa Claus, this patron of the arts, moving in right on top of me. I don’t think it would be honest if I told you that I didn’t say to myself something like: Man, this is some gravy train. He sure doesn’t want all those goodies just for hisself. No. No, maybe nothing quite so crass and outright as that—after all, I still did have one or two scruples left. But when things like food, and milk for the kiddies—the lack of them, that is —is not just a vague possibility but an actual threat, and then along comes this guy who not only looks like he’s going to open up an A. and P. right on your doorstep but has brought along two or three cases of booze to boot, and he looks so generous and all, why your scruples really aren’t the same thing any longer. What was once hard pure diamonds turns into something soft on you. Anyway, this initial polite gesture of mine—helping him with that box of Crisco, that is—had suffered a rather tremendous change, and it wasn’t long before I was sweating there like a coolie. There wasn’t any need for this either, see; he’d gotten a couple of Wind-gasser’s boys to help him by then, but there I was anyway, hauling boxes around and toting these cases of Jack Daniel’s and Mumm’s champagne up the stairs, and by the time a half-hour had went by and we’d gotten everything securely tucked away upstairs, why Mason and I were jabbering away at each other like a couple of old college chums who were about to bunk together in the Phi Delt house. ‘Well, by Jesus, Cass, this is all damn white of you,’ he’d say. Or then, ‘You’ll have dinner with us tonight, won’t you, you and Poppy?’ Or then, Those paintings. ’That de Kooning. I’d like you to take a look at it and tell me where to hang it. You know a lot more about such matters than I do.’ “ Cass paused again. “And what—” he said, then halted. “And what,” he resumed, “what was he after then? What was he trying to do, to get? Here I was, shaggy, down-at-the-heel, not his type at all. I had insulted him, furthermore; and it was because of me that he must have suffered a really miserable humiliation. I was not any chic figure in the firmament he wanted to dwell in; I was a bum and a drunken rascal and he must have known it. Yet here was Mason—generous, putting out for me, all sweet friendliness and hospitality. What was he after, do you suppose? Was it because he had no friends in this crazy hot exotic scary land, and needed a protection against his loneliness, and preferring to that a broken-down artist to no artist at all? Maybe.

“Well, soon after that I made my mistake. Soon after that I did the thing that, once I did it, I was in up to my neck with Mason and there was no turning back. We were standing around there among the crates and boxes, chatting and talking and so on, and I heard Poppy call for me downstairs, and I figured it was time to go, because she’d be ready with lunch. So I said I’d be delighted to help him hang the painting, and then—well, even here there was probably more than a little guile behind my thoughts, thinking of that wad of lire Mason must pack around with him—then I asked if he and Rosemarie would like to join me in a game of poker. ‘Poppy will play,’ I said, ‘and this woman I know that runs the cafe, I’ve taught her how to play a decent hand. Plain old stud or draw, none of these ladies’ games—baseball or spit-in-the-ocean or anything like that.’ But Mason said that all he knew about was gin and bridge, and so I figured that the cards was one way I’d never get a penny off him. Well, I was about to leave then, when it happened. He leaned down into one of those liquor cases and he pulled out a bottle of whiskey. Then he said, ‘Here,’ holding the bottle out to me. ‘Here, why don’t you take this along?’ And he just stood there, holding it out, with this little sort of sideways grin on his face, and these elegant knuckles of his all white and bony with noblesse oblige. Very cool of him. Not a case of Rice Krisp-ies, but just what he knew I’d not be able to resist. And then he said: ‘Oh come on, Cass, take it along.’

“It was not exactly a tip for my services, yet it was a tip, too. I’ll swear, I never saw anybody give something with less feeling, less charm. It was neither a gift nor a gratuity, and maybe if it had been either I wouldn’t have taken it. I don’t know what it was, but whatever it was—or maybe it was just his manner, holding it out there and that terribly well-meant and sincere yet lofty and slightly tired ‘Oh take it along,’ and Rosemarie had slunk in, in a pair of those toreador pants, so I felt that here was the lady of the manor watching the baron himself as he dealt with one of the serfs —whatever it was, it was bad. It was bad and I knew it, I knew it right down to the bottom of my guts, but I couldn’t resist that sauce. So I took it and I mumbled my humble thanks, and then I got out of there, flaming like an oven. If I had offered to pay for it, why even that might have taken a little of the curse off it. But I didn’t offer to pay for it—not because I didn’t have any money anyway, but because decency had left me, and good sense, and pride. I just took it, that’s all.

“Then again I heard his voice, calling down at me, just before I got down to the courtyard. ‘say, Cass,’ he hollered, ‘you wouldn’t like to make the PX run with me next time, would you? Maybe pick up a few things for Poppy in the grocery line. Something for the kids?’ And I just hollered back: ’sure, Mason, sure. That’d be just swell. Sure, I’d love to.’ Which was not a lie, but only the wretched truth… .

“Funny thing,” he said after a long pause, “that last awful day —the day I met you on the road for the first time, remember?—that day I’d just finished what he always called a PX run. I lost count of the times I went over to Naples with him; it became a habit, like booze or dope, then at last I was tied to him, bound to him for reasons of pure survival, and not just my own, either, but of all those around me that I in turn had committed myself to save.

“Mason,” he said slowly. “Uncle Sugar. I got so that with Mason I was as helpless as Romulus, sucking on the fat tit of a wolf. But this day here, this day he gave me that bottle, I had no idea how far in I would get with Mason, how deep and involved. Any more than I had the notion that in another way I’d rouse myself—God knows how I did it—and grasp a truth about the shabby and contorted life I’d been leading and make at least a stab at salvaging something out of the wreckage… .

“I just took that bottle, that’s all.” Then, “Mason” he said after a long moment of silence. “I guess I’ve died a thousand deaths since I killed him. But never as long as I live will I forget standing down there in the courtyard, with that bottle like a big warm cow turd in my hand, and him hanging over the balustrade, so lean and so American, with the hungry look of a man who knew he could own you, if you’d only let him.”