9

“Art is dead,” Mason was saying. “This is not a creative age. If you look at it that way—and really, Cass, I’m not trying to pull your leg about this—if you look at it that way, you won’t have any worries at all. As capable as you are—and I mean that—do you think the world has any use for your stuff, even if it were not representational, as it is? Put the whole thing out of your mind. A kind of Alexandrian, patristic criticism will fill the vacuum, and after that—nothing. The Muse is on her last legs—look around you, can’t you tell?—she is tottering toward the grave and by the year 2000 she’ll be as dead as the ostracoderm.” Above the slipstream noise of wind sliding past the Cadillac, Mason sneezed; removing handkerchief from gabardine slacks, he wiped his nose. “What’s that?” Cass heard himself say gummily, his tongue (though it was not yet noon) already bethickened. “What’s an oshtracoderm?” In the V of his crotch he nursed a pint bottle, gripped tightly in both hands against the car’s pneumatic rise and sway, and he hoisted it to his lips and drank. Gurgle and glug, a sweet taste, burning. “A fishlike animal,” Mason said. “It vanished in the late Devonian. Just a fossil now. I mean really, Cassius,” he went on persistently, “that being the case, how can you take all this so seriously?” He saw Mason’s foot go up against the brake pedal, felt momentum urge his own spine forward as the car paused: a red and white stop sign, the sea blue, glittering beyond, gay with boats. Atrani—slimy fish nets, bedecked with seaweed, drying in the sun. “Now which way do I go, on this new route of yours?” “Take a left.” The words thought, spoken simultaneously, and uttered upon the fag-end of a half-hour-long program of hiccups which now, after much breath-holding, much squinting, more concentration, mercifully ceased: That’s what you get for drinking without any breakfast, enough to make Leopold give up the ghost. “Take a left, Mason. What’s patristic?” There was no reply to this; the voice continued, lilting, high-pitched, avid, tireless: “So look at it in this light. Hypothesis: art is dead. Corollary: after art’s death, talent must be put to expedient purposes. Final deduction: you yourself, Cass Kinsolving, have done nothing wrong. I desired the expediency of your talent—namely, a certain picture, commissioned in the way pictures have been for centuries. You needing goods I had to offer (Cellini and Clement the Seventh, all right, I’ll agree, the parallel’s absurd like you say, but there’s a similarity in outline), you needing goods painted me a certain picture. I in turn made the appropriate recompense. So it isn’t art. Who cares? The deal is done. Could anything be simpler than that?”

Blinding blue with July’s clear weather, the sky arched above the topless car; cool sea-wind fanned Cass’ face. The Cadillac clock, aslant on the glittering panel, registered eleven on the nose. In his mind, a dilatory quality seemed to inform all of Mason’s words: they made their imprint on his brain seconds after they were uttered, like an echo. On the pebbled beach below, brownlegged children played; past the beach there were white-hulled boats; past these, flashing sea birds; past all, a blazing eternity of blue: slowly, replacing the bottle in the cradle between his legs, Cass brought his eyes back to the clock, then the road ahead, hearing the echo—Could anything be simpler than that? “I still—” Cass said. Just that for an instant: “I still—” Even he himself could not hear those muttered words. He cleared his throat. “ I still want that picture back, Mason,” he said. The hiccups commenced again, pain lurched in his guts: Bleeding Christ, stoppit! “Still,” he repeated. “I still—huke!—still want that picture back, understand? I reckon I’m ashamed of it, that’s all.” Mason was silent, though was that the engine making that chiding clucking sound, or something that Mason was doing with his tongue? Like a dog who averts his eyes from his master’s face, Cass could not, this moment, bear to look at him; he gazed at the sea again and though he tried to repress it the painting rose up in his mind, horribly superimposed against the seascape’s blue: a nude and lovely young girl with parted mouth and the fairest of hair, supine, eyelids closed tight in passion’s grip, the gold and rose-petal flesh of her thighs entwined round the naked waist of a boy, somewhat Grecian of cast, black-haired, nostrils aflare, who made his sturdy entrance into her at the very vortex of the painting, assisted by a young, fair, yet most urgently contorted hand. Pure realism, it had been done in encaustic (with waxes Mason had bought for him in Naples); though sickeningly plastered during the three sessions it had taken him to complete the job, he had used no model save his imagination, and Mason had pronounced it a work of genius. The contrast! The light flesh and the dark! The perineal area—ah, said Mason, he had never seen a perineum so “moistly stimulated,” and as for the lovely youth—why, each delicate bluish vein seemed to throb with a gathering, pitiless increment of desire. (And that hand, that girl’s sweet young hand: it was absolutely frantic.) And for all this: seventy thousand lire—just enough to pay back rent—three bottles of French brandy, three vials containing ten cc. each of streptomycin sulfate (Squibb), and, now, the burden of an all but unbearable shame. “No really, Mason,” he heard himself mutter, “I want that painting back. I’ll pay you for it, see?” But Mason, unhearing—unlistening?—had switched on the radio. E adesso le sorelle Andrews nella canzone ‘Dawn fanzmi in.’ … Christ! He flinched, grabbing the bottle as Mason swerved past a donkey cart loaded with bags of meal, gained the straightaway, gunned forward, leaving behind meal-motes floating in air, a stooped old man with skin like wrinkled mahogany, eyes rolling in blank belated terror. Give me land lotsa land under starry skies… . The bleeding Andrew sisters, a Red Cross canteen in Wellington, New Zealand, ten thousand years ago, and that song, a girl… . Gorblimey, Yank, you do cut a fawncy caper… . But the memory faded as Mason said now: “Really, why do you want it back so bad, dollbaby? If you’d just give me one honestly logical reason I’d—” But it was his turn to remain silent, thinking: Because of the bleeding abyss. Because I feel how close I am now. Because even in futility’s supremest futility I cannot let my last and only creation be a perineum, a moist membrane and a bunch of pulsing veins, in short, a screw. … He held his breath, the hiccups stopped. I got to watch out, he thought.

Smooth and serpentine, the road wound far above the sea. The sun blazed down. On the heights above them wild roses bloomed, and water from springs poured forth out of the cliffsides, purling and splashing in whispery gush over the noise of the motor, the whistling wind. Far off, smoky Salerno sprawled against the shore, baking. He took another glug from the bottle, thinking the thought he had thought for many days: What I should do is really rob the son of a bitch. Let me be by my-saelf where the West commences! le sorelle sang, in wild throbbing treble. A power wire sagged above the road, cutting through the sisters with a blast of static. A seaside vacation village, smelling of caramel.

“Where is this new road of yours?” Mason said, as the car eased to a halt. Hard by the seashore, where spangled umbrellas flowered on the rocky beach, there was a stone fountain, trickling rusty water. From this piazza, somnolent and sticky with morning, three asphalt roads branched off into the steep hills. “What’d you say, Mason? Wish I had a paper cup. ’Bout half of this here whiskey’s slopping down my neck." “What I said was—” He sensed the sharpness in Mason’s voice, was aware that Mason had turned to stare at him, leaning slightly forward, his left arm curled around the steering wheel. “What I said, Buster Brown, if you care to listen,” he said heavily, sarcastically, “is where is this new route to Naples you were telling me about. This short route, which presumably—if it’s shorter—we should have been using for the last dozen trips. If you can just remove that bottle from your lips long enough—” Two priests, one fat, the other rail-skinny, bounced past them on a sputtering Vespa, slanted black and billowing around the fountain, were gone. Neither Cass nor Mason spoke. For a moment motionless, they sweltered in the car, amid the smell of leather. Barely hearing Mason, Cass turned his eyes toward the sea; above Salerno, aloft, unbelievably high in space, there seemed to hover a mist, a churning rack of cloud, terrible and only faintly discerned, as of the smoke from remote cities sacked and aflame: he gave a stir, touched on the shoulder by an unseen, unknowable hand. He closed his eyes in sudden inward fright, trembling again on the marge of hallucination. Jesus Christ, not again today, not today when I got these things—Mason’s voice broke in: “Well, Buster Brown, do you navigate or do I?” Opening his eyes, Cass spoke. The mist, the stratospheric rack had vanished. “Ah, see that sign; says Gragnano? Take that one, Mason, dead ahead.” The car eased forward with an oily meshing of gears, barely perceptible; the sea slid out of sight behind them as they began the northward climb. On the outskirts of the village the road followed a stream bed where, shaded from morning heat by towering bay trees and willows, women with hiked-up skirts and brown bare legs scrubbed away at clothes. And now the way ascended, smoothly, through vineyards and lemon groves. Screaming, red-necked and with panicky flapping wings, a starved rooster rose up in front of them, escaping death by a feather. “So put it out of your mind, Cassius,” Mason said tersely. “The picture’s bought and paid for.”

Gentili ascoltatori! the radio blared. Canzoni e melodie, un po’ di allegria di Lawrence Welkf Murder! Mason’s hand went out, fiddled with the dial, the voice complaining now about Italy, the dearth of jazz, the lack of this, of that—what? A short stretch through a tunnel in the rock, black as midnight, filled with the sound of rushing torrents, obliterated the voice. In an explosion of light they emerged from the cavern, Mason’s voice flat, insistent, haranguing: “—but you may not think so, Cassius old boy. I don’t mind missing a little chow once in a while—a can of beans here, a loaf of bread there, et cetera—you’re going to get that from servants anywhere. I think you’d agree, however, that there’s a slight difference between a little totin’ from the kitchen and lifting jewelry right out from under your nose. Those earrings were one of Rosemarie’s heirlooms. I’ve done my damndest, I tell you. I’ve eliminated Giorgio; I’ve eliminated those two wenches in the kitchen. Then who else is left? Much as I hate it, all the evidence points to—” Wrenching pain gripped Cass’ heart. The name Francesca on Mason’s lips, as always, spoken in that flat fatuous northeastern cum Hollywood voice larded over with some acquired lounge-lizard accent, faintly British, faintly phony—the name was like filth on his lips. Say one thing against her, do one thing out of line, friend, and I’ll pop you in the bleeding mouth. But Mason: close to the line as he often came, he had not stepped over it, yet; there was a wariness here, a caution, one area of Cass’ existence that Mason had hesitated—or feared—to violate, possibly dating from that day weeks and weeks before when Mason, in the very act of appropriating Francesca for a servant—after all, he could pay; Cass couldn’t—had said something crass and lewd, making plain in his broad wisecracking way not only his desires but his designs, and then had turned around blanched, wide-eyed, even apprehensive at the sound of Cass’ sober words, just those: Say one thing against her, do one thing out of line, friend, and I’ll pop you in the bleeding mouth. It had been a tense moment, but he had failed to drive the wedge in tight. For if there had been a single point during the past two months when Cass might have gained the advantage, at least come up to Mason’s eyelevel, made this plain: There is some shit I will not eat—that surely was the time. But instead the hard moment had become soft, blurred, blunted: Mason had said something querulous, vacantly apologetic—Arright, Cass, sorry, don’t be a hardnose about it, sorry—and he himself—in deathly outrageous panic lest his harsh words cause Mr. Big to withdraw the bambini’s fresh milk, plus Life Savers, bubble gum, frankfurters, bacon, liverwurst, booze (not the least)—had been soft, conciliatory, deplorable. What I mean, Mason, is don’t get any ideas, that’s all She’s just a kid, can’t you tell? And now Mason went on warily, cautiously: “She’s good around the place, works her little tail off. I remember when she was working for you and Poppy, how you told me what a terrific worker she was. And she is. That’s what’s so rough about it. I know how hard up she is. You’ve told me all about her trouble. My great heart bleeds, Cass. But I can’t think that it’s anyone but her. The evidence is in. The place, the time. Am I supposed to stand around and let her steal everything in the joint?”

Drowsily, he heard himself say: “You’re barking up the wrong tree, Mason. Get you another goat, hear?” “What?” Mason said. “Goat,” he repeated. “I said get yourself another goat. You’re barking up the wrong tree.” Mason was silent. They were climbing now, steeply, along the rim of a gorge, a savage place where only scrub oak grew upon granite outcroppings strewn with gigantic boulders. But as they climbed, the air grew cooler, touched with a high mountain scent of laurel, fern, evergreen. Down through a space between the buttresses of the ridge they were ascending, the sea flashed by like blue enamel in bright sunlight, lakelike, a thousand feet below. Then the rocks and scrub oak returned—dusty abandoned country, conjuring hints of wolves, banditry, bleached and scattered bones. “This looks like the San Bernardino mountains,” said Mason. “Where’s that?” Cass said. “Out on the coast,” Mason replied, “sixty, seventy miles east of L.A. Parts of them wild as hell. Up around Lake Arrowhead, you know?” He fell silent for a moment. Then, “Well, all I can say, Cass,” he went on, “is that there’s going to come a reckoning with Francesca, wrong tree or not. I can take anything but sneak thievery. It’s the worst sort of thing, this sneaky Italian malady of theirs. I’d almost prefer the out-and-out gangsterism they brought to the U.S.A. Violence. You can deal with violence. Anything but this mean, behind-the-back petty larceny. As for Francesca, I know you have all sorts of sympathetic insights about her that I don’t"—for a moment, again, the voice was touched with sarcasm, then became solemn as before—"but she didn’t work very long for you. I don’t believe you ever saw the sly little bandicoot in action. I could pay for a trip back to New York just on the sugar she’s stolen.” He felt Mason’s eyes turn toward him. “Look, dear dollbaby, don’t take my word for it. Ask Rosemarie. You just don’t know—” The voice became a nag, a slurred complaint, a monotone barely distinct from the sizzling and strumming of tires upon the macadam, the obbligato of fruity saxophones, muffled, halfdrowned in a steady nickering of static. “You just don’t know, you see, how—” A sound, half-giggle, half-moan, rose up softly in Cass’ throat. You just don’t know. I just don’t know what? he thought. Old buddy, I know more than you’ll ever find out. For if Francesca had finally been reckless enough this day to steal something of value—and he had no doubt that she had fleeced Mason (or Rosemarie) of earrings—what Mason still did not know was this: that for the rest—the sugar, the butter, the flour, the cans of soup which several times with a desolate whine Mason announced had disappeared from the pantry shelf—Cass had engineered their removal, encouraged Francesca in her depredation with all the smooth calculated craft of a Fagin, tipped her off as to Mason’s comings and goings, schooled her as to the amount of goods she might safely get away with, and in the end performed the feat, through Francesca, of depleting Mason’s supplies almost every evening in respectable proportion as he helped him augment them —through these insane, ceaseless trips with Mason to the commissary—almost every morning. He had cut a large hole into Mason’s cornucopia.

“It is not chauvinism at all,” Mason was saying, by way of extension upon Francesca, thievery, Italians in general. The road had been torn up here; they were forced to drive slow, and billows of dust, raw umber, swept through the car. “It is not chauvinism in any way when I say that, Cass. But it’s a sickening thing when you consider the money the U.S.A. has squandered here, and find only that you’re regarded as some witless nincompoop of a fat rich uncle who’s meant not only not to be treated with ordinary decency, but robbed and swindled at every turn. Now you know my orientation is essentially liberal. But sometimes I think the greatest disaster that ever happened to America was that fountainhead, or fathead, of good will, General George Catlett Marshall. An old pal of mine in Rome just quit his job with E.C.A. or whatever it’s called, you’ll meet him; hell of a nice guy. Should be here today, in fact. If you want to get the low-down on the monstrous way our dough has been mishandled, just ask—” Cass belched, stuck a finger in the bottle’s mouth, protectively, against the dust. “Tell me something, Mason,” he said. “That movie star. That Alice what’s her-name. Does she put out?” He found himself giggling to himself disgustingly and without reason; rocking slightly, reeling, the sky above seemed to cloud over—though the sun still blazed down—touched with presentiments of dementia. Merciful God, let me hold out, let me endure this day. He chuckled, helplessly. “Down in Carolina we call stuff like that table pussy. Tell me, Mason, do you think old Alice would—" “They’re all narcissists,” Mason said shortly. “Make it only with themselves. No, I mean it, Cass, our whole foreign policy needs a complete overhauling. Everything political can be reduced to human terms, a microcosm, and if it’s not utterly plain that this petty thievery is not the reductio ad absurdum of what’s going on, literally, on a higher general level, then we’re all blinder than I’d thought. What we—” What we’re going to do is get that picture back, Mr. Big, he thought, then we’re going to cut out. He nipped at the bottle, delicately. Una conferenza sugli scienziati moderni! the radio squawked. Stamattina: il miracolo delta fisica nucleare! Madness! He felt his soft helpless interior chuckles diminish and die out. The car with a rubbery bumping regained the pavement and the air cleared, greasily shimmering with heat waves high above the sea. His mouth felt sour and dry, he began to sweat. Above, the sun, pitched close to its summit, rode like a heat-crazed Van Gogh flower, infernal, wild, on the verge of explosion. Che pazzia! he thought. Madness! Madness! All that he had done, that summer, all his thoughts, motions, dreams, desires had evaded madness by a hair, and this, at least, was madness, the maddest of all. Madness! The drug (Was it the heat? the whiskey? In a ghastly moment of fugue he forgot the name of the anointed medicine, gave a gasp which made Mason turn. Then he recalled it again, murmured the name aloud.), the pa-ra am-i-no-sal-i-cyl-ic acid, would be waiting at the PX pharmacy, of this he was sure. But to think that after all this—hovering next to the D.T.’s as he was, an amateur sawbones with nothing to support him save an intern’s manual, desperation, and the marvelous but uncertain drug—he could bring new life to that forsaken bag of bones in Tramonti: this, all this was madness… Christ, Mason, slow down! His head bobbed forward, eyes fixed upon the gorge which fell seaward short feet from the road (often during the first trips with Mason he had wondered at this frenzied desire for speed, considered it a species of reckless courage even, until that now dim and distant moment on the Autostrada when, casting a glance at Mason, watching that flushed yet tight-lipped face facing the road at ninety miles an hour, he realized it was not courage but if anything its vacant opposite—an empty ritualistic coupling with a machine, self-obsessed, craven, autoerotic, devoid of pleasure much less joy) and he said softly, aloud: “Mason, for pity’s sake, kindly slow the hell down, will you?”

The car slowed, though it was not due to Cass’ plea, for here as they rounded a wide bend in the road there was a flock of sheep, fat-rumped and filthy, sturdily trotting, tended by a solitary boy. Mason hissed between his teeth, stopped, eased forward slowly. Sad bleats filled the air; the car moved ahead, parting the flock like shears. The boy called out, words high and indistinct. “In bocca al lupo!” Cass shouted back, waving the bottle; there was another bend, the sheep and boy were gone. “Strictly from Creepsville, sweet Alice Adair,” Mason was saying, “Nee Ruby Oppersdorf in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Couldn’t act her way out of a wet paper sack. She was a dumb little New York model when Sol Kirschorn got hold of her. I don’t know, she may have known a special bedtime trick or two—though frankly I doubt it—but anyway she got him by the balls and he married her. So now he’s cast her in everything he’s done. Such hebetude you could not possibly imagine. And yet she’s been cast as Joan of Arc and Madame Curie and Florence Nightingale and Mary Magdalene, for Jesus sake … she’s barely bright enough to come in out of the rain… . I told Alonzo that in this Beatrice Cenci role the only possible thing to do would be to concentrate on …” The voice became splintered, dim, remote. In a sort of shadowy grove the smell of hemlock bloomed around them; then, emerging from the wood into blinding sunlight, they mounted a long and level ridge: on one side was the sea again, on the other a field full of wildflowers, shimmering in the heat, smitten with light and summer. A shepherd’s hut lay in ruin, crazily blasted and aslant amid dockweed, yellow mustard, dandelion. A brisk wind blew toward the sea, cooling Cass’ brow. For a moment he closed his eyes, the flowers’ crushed scent and summer light and ruined hut commingling in one long fluid hot surge of remembrance and desire. Siete stato molto gentile con me, he thought. What a thing for her to say. You have been very kind to me. As if when I kissed her, and the kiss was over, and we were standing there in the field all body and groin and belly made one and wet mouths parted this was the only thing left to say. Which meant of course I’m a virgin and maybe we shouldn’t but you have been very nice to me. So—So maybe I should have took her then, with gentleness and anguish and love, right there in that field last evening when I felt her full young breasts heavy in my hands and the wild way she pressed against me and her breath hot against my cheek. … Siete stato molto gentile con me … Cass … Cahssio …

“Crackerjack,” Mason was saying. The sunny meadow with its sweet conjuring mood of another field, another moment, had slipped behind them, yielding to a sloping ascent through the last stretch of woods before the summit, precipitous and awash with water from the roadside springs; beneath them, the tires whispered and splashed. With a shudder Cass raised the bottle to his lips and drank. “An absolutely crackerjack director, completely first-rate. Do you remember Mask of Love, back in the late thirties? And Harborside, with John Garfield? It was one of the first films ever done completely on location. That was Alonzo’s. But the trouble with Alonzo is that he’s neurotic. He’s got a persecution complex. And so when that Hollywood Communist investigation came up, even though he wasn’t remotely connected with anything to do with the Party—he was too bright for that—he got disgusted and came to Italy and hasn’t been back to the States since, making a lot of wretched two-bit pictures in Rome. I think it’s only because Kirschorn has a guilt complex—a sort of fairweather liberal, you might say—that he signed Alonzo up for this monstrosity. Poor bastard, Alonzo hasn’t—” Cass tapped Mason’s shoulder. “Bear right here, Buster Brown, the right fork.” The car swerved to starboard, with a soft lurch and a squealing of tires. “Christ, Cass, stay on the ball, will you?” He barely heard the words, maddening, insistent as they were. I cannot say it is not sex yet if it were sex pure and simple I would have took her long ago. No there is this other thing. Maybe you could call it love, I do not know …

Abruptly, the summit gained, all Italy rolled eastward, in haze, in blue, in a miracle of flux and change. Steaming with noon far below, the Vesuvian plain swept away toward the Apennines, a ghostly promenade of clouds dappling all with scudding immensities of shadow. A rain squall miles away was a black smudge against the horizon, the enormous plain itself a checkerboard of dark and light. Westward Vesuvius loomed, terrible, prodigious, drowsing, capped with haze. Beyond these heights—invisible—the gulf. Blinking, with odd and sudden panic, Cass turned his eyes away. Frattanto in America, said the meticulous radio voice, a Chicago, il celebre fisico italiano Enrico Fermi ha scoperto qualcosa… . Cass blinked again, shut his eyes, drank. The gulf, he thought, the gulf, the perishing deep. The volcano. Merciful bleeding God, why is it always that I—“So they can say what they will about Alonzo. You should see what Louella wrote about him, by the way. He might have been foolish, he might have had a bit too much of what is commonly known as integrity, and all that nonsense, but give him some film and a great actor like Burnsey to work with and he’ll turn out something first-rate. It might not be Eisenstein, or the early Ford, or Capra, or even Huston, yet there’s something individual—” Yatatayatata. His eyes still closed against mad Vesuvius, Cass thought: That voice. That bleeding outrageous voice. Cripps. Yatatayatata. Cripps. Why was that name now so sharply meaningful? Then suddenly, even as he addressed himself the question, with dark revulsion and even darker shame, he knew: recollecting dimly some sodden recent night, an assemblage of faces—the movie yahoos—leering and howling, Mason standing above him flushed and grinning and with his ringmaster’s look, and then himself, finally, impossibly murky with drink, rubbery-limbed, mesmerized, performing some nameless art even now unrecollectable save that it was clownish, horrible, and obscene. The limericks, the dreadful exhibition bit, the filthy lines—and what else? Merciful Christ, he thought, I think I must have took out my cock. But yes, Cripps. Had it not been Cripps, alone among that mob sympathetic, who with face at once enraged and compassionate had approached him sometime after, steadied him, guided him downstairs, splashed his brow with water, then gone off on a tirade about Mason the words of which meant only this: Courage, boy, I don’t know what he’s doing to you, or why, but I’m on your side? Let him try that again and he’ll answer to me… Good old Cripps, he thought, nice of the guy, I’ll have to thank him sometime. He opened his eyes. But for Christ’s sweet sake it’s not Mason who done it after all, it was me!

He looked down, saw that his legs were trembling out of control. “I’m gonna cut out, Mason,” he said, turning to stare at the lovely profile, cool, swank, sweatless, scrupulous, a silk scarf beneath, chaste polka dots. “I finally decided I’ve just about had Sambuco. So soon’s I clean up this little job back in Tramonti I’m gonna cut out.” The booze had made him bold; it was out before he had time to think: “Now if you could just see your way clear to advancing me say about hundred and fifty thousand lire I could get me and the family back to Paris. See, in France I could get some kind of a job, and pay you back, and besides—” “How much do you owe me already?” (The voice peremptory but, withal, not unkind.) “Oh I don’t know, Mason. I got it all down some place. Somewhere around two hundred thousand. Except that I—” Mason spoke again, affable still, yet in tones inhibitory if not adamant: “Don’t be silly, Cassius. A hundred and fifty thousand couldn’t get you as far as Amalfi. Quit worrying about the money, will you? Stick around, we’ll have us a circus.” He turned, with a sort of wink, faintly apologetic, adding: “I mean a ball, dollbaby, not what you think I mean. A ball. Picnics in Positano. Capri. Just a good time, that’s all.” (In spite of nausea, weariness, fidgeting legs, Cass began to giggle again, without a sound: Merciful Christ, a circus. Thinking of that delicious crise, somewhere in the depths of June, when Mason, propositioning Cass at a fuzzy vulnerable moment with the idea of a circus, coyly divulged the information that this would engage the four of them—Mason, titanic broad-assed Rosemarie, himself and, implausibly, insanely, Poppy—in some co-operative bedroom rumpus; more tickled and bemused than horrified by the vision of his saintly little Irish consort sporting with Rosemarie, all naked as herring, he had laughed so uproariously that Mason gave up the venture straightaway, though sulking.) His giggling ceased, died out as suddenly as it had come. So the guy really is going to hold out on me. Which is all the more reason I guess for shaking him down on the sly. He glanced at Mason again, sideways, wordlessly addressing him: If you’d just come on out and admit you was basically a plain old sodomist and wanted to get into my fly you’d be a lot more attractive person, Buster Brown.

“So cut the crap, Cassius. Quit this silly talk about leaving. Look, I know it’s a rather banal observation, but the grass always looks greener on—” At horrifying speed now they moved northwest along the spine of the ridge, tires humming, above the enormous plain. Focusing his eyes upon Mason’s knee, Cass again opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, belched. And for a long moment, almost as if in delicate, easily shatterable opposition to the volcano which he could not bear to allow himself to see, he thought of the crazy mess of incidents and misadventures which had brought him to this day, this ride, this horror and this hope: the vision of Michele on that doomed, suffocating afternoon when first he’d seen him (the day itself had been touched with premonitions of ruin, somehow, for far off down the coast a highway crew was blasting and gusty tremulant explosions all too reminiscent of warfare and death accompanied them, Cass and Francesca, as they walked back into the valley and as she told him of her father’s consumption—tisi, la morte bianca—which was, Dio sa, bad enough in itself to have, yet surely He must have had special vengeance in mind to compound this disease with such a wicked accident: the time between the moment she heard his helpless frantic cry and the instant he struck the ground could scarcely have been ten seconds, less than that, yet seemed a long eternity—for the cowshed roof, wet and slanting, offered no grip at all to his clutching hands, so that when he stumbled and fell he lay there for a moment spread-eagled against the peak and for that instant she thought he was safe until very slowly he began to slide feet first and belly down along the glassy incline, uttering not a sound and making futile grasping motions with his hands, slipping still, skidding faster and faster to the eaves, where, a limp figure catapulted into empty space, he soared outward, and down, his leg snapping like a piece of kindling beneath him as he struck the earth), that stifling afternoon when, with Francesca at his side, gazing down for the first time at Michele, at the great blade of his nose and his sunken cheeks so pale and cruelly lined, the mouth like a gash parting in a whisper of a smile, revealing jagged teeth and a mottled diseased patch of bright red gums—at that smile, was it not then that he had come to his own awakening? Or was it later, sometime after those sick fevered eyes, gazing up from the hammock in the shade, had rested upon Cass gently and questioningly and not without wonder, and the voice in a croak had said: “An American. You must be very rich”? There had been no reproach in this wan and worn-out remark, no indignation, no envy; it had been merely the utterance of one to whom an American and wealth were quite naturally and synonymously one, as green is to grass, or light is to sun, and Cass, who had heard these words spoken before though never by one so unimaginably far gone in misery and desolation, had felt clamminess and sickness creep over him like moist hands. The man, he saw, was not too much older than himself. Perhaps his awakening had begun then. For, “Babbo!” said Francesca then, sensing his embarrassment. “What a thing to say!” And runnels of sweat had coursed down Michele’s cheeks, while Francesca moved to his side, mopping his face with a rag, crooning and clucking soft words of reproof. “For shame” she had said, “what a thing to say, Babbo!” Then carefully she had ministered to her father, stroking his brow and rearranging the folds of his threadbare denim shirt, smoothing back the locks of his black sweat-drenched hair. So that with pain and distress in his heart and a hungry indwelling tenderness he had never known quite so achingly, he had watched her as she attended to the stricken man, and all her beauty seemed enhanced and brightened by this desperate, gentle devotion. An angel, by God, he had thought, an angel—And then, embarrassed, he had turned away, and stepped into the doorway of the hut. Here in the hushed light his eyes had barely made out the dirt floor and a single poor table and, beyond, empty, the cow stall with its meager bed of straw, and his nostrils were suddenly filled with a warmly sour and corrupt odor that bore him swiftly into some mysterious, nameless, and for the moment irretrievable portion of his own past, thinking: Lord God, I know it as well as my own name. And then he had inhaled deeply, almost relishing the sour and repellent smell, then almost choking on it as he filled his lungs with the thick putrescent air, in a hungry effort to dislodge from memory that moment in years forgotten when he had smelled this evil smell before, when suddenly he knew, and thought: It is niggers. The same thing, by God. It is the smell of a black sharecropper’s cabin in Sussex County, Virginia. It is the bleeding stink of wretchedness. And then, exhaling, he had stepped back puzzled and distressed into the sunlight, and Francesca raggedy and lovely bending down over Michele, then standing up. A great collapsed grin had spread over Michele’s face, and with an aimless gesture in the air of one limp and bony hand he scattered a cluster of green hovering flies. For a moment they were all silent. A thunderous detonation sounded once more from the sea, borne on a hot blast of air which shuddered in the pine trees around them, welling up thudding through the valley distances and died finally with a rumble like that of colliding kegs and barrels diminishing in murmurous echo against the hills. “It is a festa?” Michele said. The sunken grin creased his face again, and for no reason at all an awful chuckle gurgled up in his mouth, terminating not in the sound of laughter but in one long agonized spasm of coughing which set his arms, shoulders, and spindly neck to jerking like those of a puppet on wires, so loud and prolonged, this fit, that it seemed not simply the effort of one frail body to free itself of stifling congestion but a kind of explosive, rowdy anthem to disease itself—a racking celebration of infirmity—and it was at that instant that Cass, belatedly and desperately, at last awakened, understood that the man was dying. And had thought, turning, his eyes closed tight against the sun: I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to do something and do it quick. And remembered the women carrying fagots. And thought again: And I have been poor, too. But never anything like this. Never.

“Why is he not in a hospital?” he had asked furiously. “Why is he lying here like this?” Ghita, the mother and wife, had come then—wild-haired, consumptive herself, feverish, wobbling ever near hysteria—trailed by an evil old crone from the hills, carrying amulets, potions, charms. “Ask Caltroni!” Ghita had screeched. “Ask the doctor! He says there is no use! What hospital! Why put a man in a hospital when it is no use! And when there is no money to pay!” (All this in front of the squalling children, in front of Michele, sunk in his hammock dreaming his gentle smile, while cackling Maddalena, the rustic thaumaturge, hovered over, gat-toothed and with swelling blue varicose veins, waving the amulet like a censer.) “He is going to die anyway!” she had yelled. “Ask the doctor! You’ll see!” And, some days later, he had indeed gone to see the doctor, climbing the dark fish-smelling stairs to an office aerie where, munching on a piece of stringy goat cheese, pompous and vain, evasive, a wop Sydney Greenstreet paradoxically radiating a quality of ignorance and ineptitude so overpowering that it was like a kind of brownish aureole around him, Caltroni held forth, amid a magpie’s nest of rusty probes and forceps and speculums superannuated at the time of Lord Lister. “Perchè?” he had said, and spread pudgy nicotine-brown fingers. “Non c’è speranza. È assolutamente inutile” And had paused, savoring the pronouncement. “It is what is known as generalized consumption. There is not a hope in the world.” And Cass, feeling the blood knocking outrageously at his temples (by then his need to do something had become like a panic, a fierce drive up ward and outward from his self that had begun to cut like flame through the boozy dreamland, the nit-picking, the inertia, the navel-gazing), said loudly and impatiently: “What do you mean there is not a hope in the world? I’m no doctor but I know better than that! I read the papers! There are drugs for this now!” Whereupon Caltroni, stupidity like ooze around his pink lips, had closed his eyes behind his pince-nez, pressed his fingers together, a rich wise gesture, absurdly vain, sacerdotal: “Vero. I do believe there is a drug. It is somewhat like penicillin. The name escapes me.” And opened his eyes. “It is an American product, I believe. But it is in exceedingly short supply in Italy. I myself have never had the opportunity to use it, although in Rome—” He paused. “In any case it could do no good with the peasant”—speaking the patronizing word, campagnuolo, delicately, as if it were a germ—“he is far gone, and besides he could never be in any position to pay—” But Cass had risen, stalked to the door, shouting over his shoulder: “Che schifo! Merda! I wouldn’t let you perform an abortion on my cat!” And felt instant shame, aware even as he slammed the flimsy door shut that the ignorant doctor’s sin was only the venial one of being born in the south of Italy, where, soggy and defeated, even his vanity a sham, he would be reconciled in despair until the end of his days to pricking boils and salving the teats of mangy cows and prescribing quack pills and ointments to people who repaid him—because that is all they had—in goat cheese.

But still Michele continued to get worse: he had no strength to lift himself from the hammock, he had a constant headache, he began to complain of pain in his leg, his attacks of coughing were monstrous to see and hear. Through Cass’ tutelage in plundering Mason’s storeroom (once he took off for a week in Capri with Rosemarie, which made for a field day among the groceries), Francesca saw to it that Michele was fed, and Ghita and the children too, but the sick man’s appetite was poor. Every day Cass visited him; they talked endlessly of America, land of lost content, of gold. For Michele’s sake, he embroidered long lies, baroquely colored. Once, describing in much detail, of all places, Providence, Rhode Island, which Michele, for reasons known only to himself, longed to see, Cass felt sudden pain and longing himself, and annoyance at the demeaning nostalgia, and, breaking off in mid-sentence, wondering at the feeling, realized simply that whatever else he might say against his native land, there would not be this particular gross wrong and insult to mortal flesh. And he looked down at Michele, consumed by a tenderness that he could not understand; seeing the man’s eyes closed in sleep, he thought for an agonizing moment that he was dead. Then shortly after this, sometime around the middle of June, an odd thing occurred which Cass considered a good omen: one day there had come to the Bella Vista a young doctor from Omaha, Nebraska, and his wife, obviously honeymooners—the doctor a short, intense type with a reddish butch crew-cut and square red mustache like matched hairbrushes, his bride gangling and plain, possessing an earnest athletic look and the flatly contoured powerful legs of a miler. The couple was obviously distraught to begin with; they stayed long enough to play one or two desultory sets of tennis on the Bella Vista’s single dusty court, and then (doubtless it was fear of heights, Windgasser observed unhappily, that morbid phobia which had caused even more extroverted-looking tourists than the doctor and his wife to flee the towering crag of Sambuco) had skedaddled sweatily away—possibly all the way back to flat Omaha—frantically chartering a private car to take them to Naples and in their haste leaving behind them, among other things, their tennis rackets, a set of barbells, a douche bag, and several books. It was one of these books—The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, subtitled: A Source of Ready Reference for the Physician—that Cass, having come to beg from Windgasser another extension on the rent, saw on the hotel desk that very evening, and then tucked into his pocket with a secret glow of discovery. And it was through the manual that he finally set up shop as an M.D.

GENERALIZED HEMATOGENOUS TUBERCULOSIS. Subacute Form: The onset of this form of the disease is …insidious. Fatigue, loss of weight, malaise, and fever develop over several weeks. The infection is less overwhelming than in the acute form and fewer lesions are established in the various organs. A greater variety of manifestations develop, however, because the patient lives longer, allowing for the development of local lesions. Lymphadenopathy is more prominent, splenomegaly more frequently seen, and progressive ulcerative pulmonary tuberculosis often develops subsequent to miliary “seeding.” Symptoms and signs of genitourinary tuberculosis, bone and joint tuberculosis, or skin tuberculosis frequently develop during the illness. A ma-jority of the patients die within three to six months but some live for many years with partially healed lesions in the organ systems involved. He committed such passages to memory, finding in this one, or at least in its final line, almost as much to hope for as to cause him despair. For if it was true that some did live for many years, was there not an outside chance that Michele might join the saved? In the Bella Vista library, between Middlemarch and East Lynne, he discovered an enormous rat-chewed dictionary and looked up “splenomegaly"; rushing down to Tramonti that very evening he prodded gently at Michele’s spleen, found that it was swollen, outsized, like a rubber tire, and figured that at least Caltroni’s diagnosis had been correct. Streptomycin or di-hydrostreptomycin is of considerable value in the treatment of the acute and subacute forms of the disease. In addition to specific antibiotic therapy, active supportive treatment is indicated for the patient with severe acute miliary tuberculosis. He may be so ill as to require I.V. hydration and alimentation and vitamin supplements. Blood transfusions may be helpful. And he thought: Shit a brick, how am I going to give him any blood? But that problem he would grapple with when he came to it. The drugs were the immediate, the pressing thing and by dawn of the next day—his mind aswarm with monstrous words like sarcoidosis, histoplasmosis, coccidioidomycosis, but with a rage to cure flaming in his breast—he knew at least where he could get his hands on some streptomycin. That morning he had presented himself early at Mason’s door, for once neatly attired, as befits an up-and-coming doctor of medicine.

And Mason had held out on him. No, he had not really held out on him at last; he had given in, languidly accoutered himself in his spotless flannels, and with Cass had tooled over to the PX pharmacy, where, making use of his elaborate connections, he had obtained the thirty cc. of streptomycin—plus two hypodermic syringes, and ten ampoules of morphine, too, to ease the pain in Michele’s leg: that was part of the bargain. For bargain it was, a deal—there was no largesse involved—and for this alone, almost, Cass would be unable to forgive him. He had made his plea, straight and simple ( “sMason, see, it’s Francesca’s father, he’s in awful shape and what he needs, you understand, is this new wonder drug that I’d figured you might be able to get for me …” And so on), and had elicited only an Olympian shrug and this rejoinder: “Crap, Cass, now please don’t consider me the Flintheart of all time but you know as well as I do that if each individual American went around nursing every sick distressed Italian that came along he’d go broke in about a week even if he had twenty million dollars.” And swiveled in the bright morning sunlight, immaculate, swank, streamlined, and scrutable in his flannels, and poured two cups of coffee from the spout of a gleaming electric Koffee King. “I’m a bastard, I know,” he said, self-mocking, “but face it, can’t you? If one must accept the notion of a welfare state with all of its committed millions, and European Recovery or whatever it’s called, then one must realize that one has already done his bit. Really, Cassius, I mean this. If I told you how much Federal income tax I paid last year you’d call me a liar. I mean, dollbaby, I’ve already kicked in with a couple of gallons of antibiotics.” Yet a bargain was finally struck after several hours’ conversation during which, for the first time, Mason broached his opinions upon the value of erotica, and in fact showed Cass a stack of his juiciest lithographs. “It might just be the thing, dollbaby,” Mason had said, “to get you around that psychic block of yours.” In his morning haze, the prospect was deceptively titillating. And later he regretted it. But the bargain was struck. For one filthy picture, to be skillfully executed: rent money, brandy, streptomycin. They took off for Naples at noon. And late that same evening, just before he started to fulfill his part of the bargain and began painting the atrocious picture in encaustic, meticulously applied, he had at least the satisfaction of seeing a full gram of the hard-won stuff flow from his own syringe into Michele’s veins. All he lacked was a diploma.

Yet it became a month of disconnected days, verging, it seemed, ever closer to some shadowland frontier separating reason from madness. He drank, he went without sleep; at Michele’s side at least six times daily and often more, he lost count of the hot treks he made into the valley and back—compelled to do so because hysteric Ghita could not be trusted to make the proper injections, even if in a valley which had never known a cake of ice, much less a refrigerator, there had been a place to store the drug (once he struggled into the valley with a huge block of ice, which quickly melted, and he saw that this scheme would be more arduous than a careful program of hikes)—and established a kind of hallucinated rhythmical schedule in which a certain familiar cypress that he passed, or the shallow place where he leapfrogged across a brook, or a boulder that he mounted to short-cut up a slope were only way stations, arrived at without the variation of a minute, upon the route toward that final destination where, pooped and logy with wine or Mason’s booze, he would rest for a while in the fly-swarming heat and talk to Michele (America! America! What lies he told! What paeans, what eulogies he bestowed upon the nation!) and then with great care insert the boiled needle in the rubber stopper of the vial, extract a gram of the rose-colored fluid and slowly pump it into a vein of Michele’s wasted, unflinching arm. Yet Michele, perhaps more slowly than before, but still quite visibly and plainly, grew worse, wasting away like the thin attenuated white stalk of some plant deprived of water and the sun. He saw Michele wither away, and blind outrage seized him as he hiked back up through the valley, storming and raving at his own inadequacy, at Italy, at Mason (thinking: Bleeding God, he could get Michele fixed up just out of his petty cash …), at that black, baleful and depraved Deity who seemed coolly minded to annihilate His creatures not in spite of but almost because of the fact that they had learned to heal their bodies, if not their souls… .

“Questi sono i soli esemplari che si conoscano” said the finicky scientific radio voice, “a rigor di termini—” Mason had fallen silent, and now, as the Cadillac moved swiftly along the spine of the great ridge, a single fleecy cloud eclipsed the sun, bringing a sudden, momentary chill. Feeling the sweat evaporate on his brow, a cool prickle up his back, Cass raised the bottle to his lips and drank. Below in the valley the shadow of the cloud passed westward at tremendous speed, the ragged gray silhouette of some prehistoric bird engulfing fields, farmhouses, trees; behind its trailing edge the sunlight moved voraciously, pursuing the ghost. Slowly the cloud itself passed from the face of the sun, bringing heat to the car once more, and dazzling light. “Say, Mason,” Cass heard himself say with effort, “say, old buddy, tell me something. Are you sure they’ve got that stuff?” “What stuff, Cassius?” he said amiably. “You know, the P.A.S. Last time, I mean Tuesday, are you sure they said you could get it today?” (Merck again, the viscous terminology committed to his memory as unshakably as a nursery rhyme: Para-aminosalicylic acid is indicated chiefly as an adjuvant to streptomycin or dihydro-streptomycin therapy, since it delays the emergence of organismal resistance to these drugs. It may be used alone, however, when streptomycin and dihydrostreptomycin are contraindicated or have proved ineffective, since it possesses antituberculous activ-ity itself. The last bleeding hope and chance. And how, after watching Michele wither and fail for the last two weeks, it had taken him so long to root this precious information from the manual he would never know; no matter, stumbling upon the passage by sheerest chance as he half-drowsed by Michele’s hammock only three days before, he knew he must get his hands on this stuff whether it prove the ultimate miracle or only one last desperate and futile gesture.) “You sure they said you could get it today?” he repeated. “Sure I’m sure,” Mason said. “Put it out of your mind, dollbaby.” “I can’t—” Cass began, sweating. “I mean, Mason, like all the rest I won’t be able to pay you back right away. I mean, if you can just put it on the tab with all the rest of —” But remarkably, impossibly now—could it really be true?—Mason was saying: “Come on now, Cass, don’t be absurd. I’ll take care of it, call it a gift if you want to. For one thing I priced the stuff Tuesday. It’s cheap. It’s synthesized out of coal tar like aspirin, the pharmacist told me, and they have P.A.S. up the ass. But even”—Cass was gazing at him intently; was that a gentle smile on his face, a smile of benevolence even, or only something else, more complicated and devious, he was doing with his lips?—“even if it were really precious, Cassius, I’d want you to have it—for nothing.” And for an instant he paused, rubbing one lens of his sun glasses with a Kleenex, magnanimously smiling. “I mean, God knows, it’s the very least I can do. She’s a virulent little sneak thief—I’ll argue that with you right down the line—but if the old man is as bad off as you say it’s the least I can do to chip in a little bit myself and try to put him back on his feet. After all, it’s not his fault that she’s—well, you know what. So forget about it, Cass, this one’s on me. O.K.?” He didn’t answer. Drowsing now, peering at the valley through half-closed eyes, he felt his jaw drop, the muscles of his limbs growing limp with exhaustion as he thought: I don’t want any of your bleeding charity. Not for Michele’s sake, anyway. I’ll pay you back, Buster Brown. I’ll pay you back for everything.

Vesuvius, looming nearer beneath a blue arch of sky, seemed horribly to swerve and lumber, lurching in ponderous independent motion as the Cadillac squealed, breasted a curve, and began the descent toward Naples and the plain. At this point, what all day he had been so fearfully dreading, happened. Merciful sweet Christ, he thought in terror. Again. Again I’m going to hallucinate; and indeed for a moment—as his hand clutched the door handle not for support, but out of his own quick involuntary arrested impulse to hurl himself to the road—he saw superimposed against the volcano’s blue flank the outlines of a hairy tarantula, disturbingly red and with clumsy groping arms, the whole writhing obscenity as vast as the Colosseum: in seconds, fading into the landscape, it was gone. He shut his eyes tightly, heart thumping, thinking: Think of nothing, think of light. Slowly his hand relaxed its grip on the door, fell back into his lap. So I must really have the D.T.’s, he whispered to himself. And now in the darkness the radio voice had fallen silent, but Mason’s rattled on, garrulous, persevering, unfatigued: “No, getting back, Cass —in an age of cultural collapse, of artistic decline, people still must find some valid outlet for the emotional and psychic dynamism that’s locked up in the human corpus. I remember that time we drove to Paestum I was trying to convince you of this, but I think you’ll buy the theory finally. Remember what I was telling you about Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian and the Diony-sian—a marvel of romantic yet totally acceptable logic, really. … So now with art in decadent stasis society must join the Dionysian upswing toward some spiritual plateau that will allow a totally free operation of all the senses… . What you don’t seem to realize, Cassius, is how basically moral and even religious the orgiastic principle is … not only because in a secondary way, flouting bourgeois convention, that is, it is a form of living dangerously—again Nietzsche … but it is the yea-saying of the flesh … the Priapean rites, you know … time-honored … your friends the venerable Greeks … neo-Laurentian … age-old ritual … phallic thrust … like jazz … pro vita not contra, dollbaby … it’s what the hipster and the Negro know instinctively … bitch-goddess … a kind of divine sphincter … and the penultimate orgasm …”

Horseshit, he thought drowsily, triple bleeding horseshit. Impotent, now soft and faint, the voice lulled him for a spell and then was lost to hearing, for as he dozed a wild and agonizing fantasia possessed his brain: Poppy spoke to him, surrounded as ever by her children. “Cass,” she said sadly, “I know,” and moved away, and now he was once again with Francesca. In some sun-drenched field strewn with the cup-shapes of anemones, white, purple, and rose, they strolled together and the clear bright day was filled with the sound of her soft chatter. “Mia madre andava in chiesa ogni mattina, ma adesso mio padre. …” And she fell quiet, sadly, and now together they were crossing a stream, and she raised the hem of her skirt to expose her soft sweet thighs. Was this indeed something beyond a dream? For on the bank beside her, on a grassy mound where willows cast a constant cool shade, he was naked as, at last, was she, and he held her warm body tightly in his arm. “Carissima,” he was whispering and he was pressing long kisses on her mouth—and he felt her hands, too, loving and soft on his chest—and in her hair. Gently he touched the nipples of her heavy young breasts, even more gently that tender warm wet inner place which brought the word “Amore!” to her lips like the cry from a madrigal … yet now there was a sound in his ears, a rumbling, as of the confluence of traffic from a hundred drumming streets, and the meadow, the anemones, the willows—his blessed Francesca—all were gone. A smell of putrefaction swarmed through his brain, a sweet-sour outrageous stench of dissolution, of death. On some wet black shore, foul with the blackness of death’s gulf, he was searching for an answer and a key. In words whose meaning he did not know he called out through the gloom, and the echoed sound came back to him as if spoken in an outlandish tongue. Somewhere, he knew, there was light but like a shifting phantom it eluded him; voiceless, he strove to give voice to the cry which now, too late, awakening, he knew. “Rise up, Michele, rise up and walk!” he roared. And for the briefest space of time, between dark and light, he thought he saw the man, healed now, cured, staunch and upright, striding toward him. O rise up Mi-chele, my brother, rise!

“Sharon’s a Johnny Ray fan, she can’t stand Frankie Laine,” an American voice chirruped somewhere above him. He awoke slowly, with a dull headache, everywhere drenched in sweat. He was racked with lingering sorrow, lingering desire. Pulling himself to a sitting position from the place where he had lain sprawled across the seat, he found himself alone in the car, now motionless, absorbing the full blast of the sun in the familiar parking lot. Two chattering bobbysoxers rosy with acne, in babushkas and blue jeans, both of them licking on popsicles, strolled past discussing culture: “Sharon can’t stand anybody but Johnny.” He was stupefied with drink and the remnants of the all too brief nap; he looked for Mason, saw no one now save a blond soldier with an incredibly square head who strode whistling toward the PX. Sudden panic seized him. Maybe he’s not going to get the P.A.S. he thought. Maybe for some reason he’s going to get all his booze and his groceries and he’s not going to get that P.A.S. after all. The bugger just might be going to hold out on me. Half-stumbling down on the asphalt as he hooked his foot beneath the seat, he lurched from the car and weaved toward the squat, barrack-like PX, muttering to himself, sweating like a Percheron, and belatedly aware (the flushed, tight-lipped look, the suddenly averted eyes of some Army wife told him this) that he was dis- playing through his trousers a large erection. He paused and composed himself and then proceeded toward the glass door, where, pushing through along with a crowd of sport-shirted countrymen, he was met by a frigid blast of conditioned air and a gumchewing master sergeant with mean blue eyes and a large scuttleshaped chin. “Where’s your pass, buddy?” he said, gazing up from his deck. “I’m looking for a friend,” Cass said. “You gotta have a pass.” “I don’t have a pass,” Cass began to explain, “my friend has a pass and I usually—” “Look, soljer,” said the sergeant, laying aside a copy of Action Comics and gazing at him without sympathy, “I don’t make the rules. Uncle Sambo makes the rules. To get into this Post Exchange you’ve gotta have a pass. Signed by the CO. and endorsed by the adjutant. How long you been here? What outfit you in? Guard Company? H. & S.?” Cass felt sounds like sobs welling up in his chest, a red mist of fury began to glaze his eyes. “And another thing, buddy, let me give you a tip,” the sergeant went on, “if I was you when I got into civilian clothes I’d be a little bit more careful about my appearance. Especially when you’re taking a load on. You look like something the cat dragged in, soljer. I’d just go somewhere and sleep it off if I was you.” For a long moment, incredulous and confused, stirring with insult, outrage, Cass stood looking at the sergeant, mouth agape; through the icebox air, muted, sweet, floated a syrupy confection of recorded dance music, saxophones, clarinets, and whining strings; from some other source, competing with the goo, a crooner softly blubbered, adding a mawkish dissonance. He smelled a drug-store smell, as of ice cream, milk, and spilled Coca-Cola. One more word out of him, he was thinking slowly, dimly, deliberately, and I’ll flatten his bleeding nose. And he was not precisely sure, but in his daze and stupor he did seem to be making a clenched fist and a lurching gesture in the sergeant’s direction when he felt a touch on his arm and then saw Mason, intervening. “That’s all right, Sergeant,” he was saying, “let him in on my pass, if you will. He’s—uh—my man, and I’ll need him to help carry some things out.” He turned to Cass, his voice ill-tempered: “You’re a big help, Buster Brown. I tried to wake you up for fifteen minutes. Let him through, will you, Sergeant?” “Yes, sir. Right you are, sir.” And so, trailing Mason, he pushed into the place—his man, now. It was close to the last bleeding straw… .

He felt himself slowly going. The booze he might have tolerated. Or he might have sustained himself even in the depths of pure exhaustion. But booze in company with his exhaustion (how many hours of sleep had he averaged daily in the past weeks —four? three?—he did not know, aware only of a weariness so profound that it threatened thought, sanity, threatened sleep itself, which in turn was so racked and haunted by his nightmarish six-times-daily ritual hike that even in his dreams his feet kept steadily plodding over rocks and boulders, his mind counting landmark cypresses, his fingers pumping life and sustenance into Michele’s ever-outstretched arm)—whiskey and exhaustion were too much, and together they conspired to unseat his senses. “Mah BAH-lews will be yo’ BAH-lews,” the voice was crooning, in a vindictive whimper, “some day, baby”—and as Cass trailed after Mason toward the food market he felt overpowered, in spite of himself, by a kind of numb, despairing hilarity. In front of him a red-faced rawboned Army matron in slacks loomed up. “Harry!” she crowed. “They don’t have any Reddi-wip!” And Cass, squeezing past her, mumbled, “Merciful God, think of that.” The remark unnoticed, he passed on in Mason’s train, staggering slightly athwart pyramidal towers of canned soup, dog food, and toilet paper, and blundered for a moment into a queue—between two hulking figures, one of them, he dimly discerned, a major in crisp khaki, who scowled and said: “Just a minute there, you. Go to the end of the line.” He giggled, hearing his own lethargic dreamlike voice: “Don’t you believe what they say, Major, peacetime Army ain’t all a bunch of bums, why take you, now, you look like a fine upstanding clean-cut …” but at this moment felt Mason’s clutch on his arm, heard Mason’s smooth apologies—Just a joker, Major, don’t pay any attention—and now Mason’s voice in his ear, the peremptory command: Straighten up, you idiot. I’ll let you make a clown of yourself tonight, any time you want. But not here. Do you want me to get that drug or not? “Sho’, Mason,” he was saying. “Sho’, Sho’, buddy. Anything you say, anything at all.” Shortly after this, briefly separated from Mason in the jostling throng, he found himself half-sprawled across the camera counter amid stacked-up orange boxes of Kodachrome film, amid lenses and light meters and leather camera cases, solemnly sighting through a Brownie. “But what I mean is,” he was cajoling the corporal-clerk, “what I really mean is, is it made for all eternity?” He had begun to wobble dangerously. “I mean can I take and snap a little shot of Myrtle and all the kids, and maybe Mom and Dad too, and Buddy, he’s my brother, and Smitty, he’s my best pal and—” But now he went no further, for almost simultaneously with the clerk’s shouted “Bates, c’mere and help me get this drunk out of here!” he felt Mason’s presence again, heard the apologies, all followed by a moment of blankness so perfect that it was as if someone had stolen up upon him and, quite painlessly and suddenly, bludgeoned him with a sledge hammer. Shortly after (two minutes, five minutes, time had escaped him) he came astonishingly, brilliantly alive, discovering that in some fashion he had acquired a child’s rocket gun and that now, with this noisemaker at rightshoulder-arms, he was weaving precariously among the counters, singing at the top of his voice. “ ‘Gawd … bless … A-murrica!’” he bellowed. “‘Land … ’at I … love!’” Sidestepping some khaki arm outstretched to intercept him, he executed a deft marching manual—wan, hup, reep, jaw—and lurched blindly into a pyramid of Quaker Oats boxes, which flew apart with the impact and came down around his feet in a myriad of separate, puffy explosions. “ ’Stand beside her!’ “ he heard himself roar, tramping on. “ ‘And guide her …’ Gangway!” Stark truth seized him even as he marched—he was courting total disaster—and desperate, prayerful words (Slotkin, old father, old rabbi, what shall I do? Teach me now in my need.) formed a brief and passionate litany on his lips; but wildly beyond control, he marched steadily through the place, scattering dogs, captains, colonels, children, shoppers, bellowing imperial commands. “Gangway! Out of the way, you Army trash! Make way for a real live foursquare Amurrican!” Zock! he went with the rocket gun, taking aim at a cowering Army wife. Zock! “That one’s to pay back the Founding Fathers!” Zock! A portly colonel, quivering, blazing with outrage, came into his line of fire. Zock! “That one’s to pay for the right honorable lady ambassador!” Zock! “That one there’s to pay for foreign aid! Globaloney!” Zock! It was, he knew numbly, the end of the trail. A shudder ran up his back, and the familiar sour taste, presaging the onslaught of oblivion, rushed up beneath his tongue even as he took sight upon a bespectacled major and his wife, aiming to get two ducks with one blast. “Here’s one to comfort the shade of Thomas Jefferson!” he howled. And the rocket gun, expiring, uttered one last feeble and uncertain Zock! as he felt strong arms seize him at last, and as the day reeled and heaved and collapsed into darkness… .

“You’re lucky you didn’t end up in the guardhouse, dollbaby,” he recalled Mason saying some hours later, as they drove back by way of Sorrento. It was a ride full of lights and darks, strange shifting shadows, and a half-sleep composed of abstruse and per- plexing dreams. Totally worn out, he spoke not a word to Mason, even to respond to such singular remarks (though he was careful to store them up in his memory, for future reference and action) as: “You can thank heaven that I got you off the hook, I think you can see how utterly dependent upon me you’ve become.” Even when, somewhere above Positano, he regained strength and sobriety enough to open his eyes drowsily and look at Mason, hearing him say this: “In the complete wreck you’ve become, dollbaby, I don’t think you can fail to understand why I might be determined to get into her pants. Of what earthly use is a lush to her? After all, someone’s got to give her a good workout—” He kept silent, biding his time. He would have his day. He closed his eyes again and slept all the way to Amalfi, where he was to meet Poppy at the festa.

Yet curiously, inexplicably—not to say unforgivably—Mason at last did hold out on him: he did not have the drug in his possession after all. As Cass got out of the car in Amalfi and made a motion to pluck the bottle out of a carton in the back seat, Mason slammed the door abruptly and gazed at him coldly from his place behind the wheel, gunning the motor in savage, sharp bursts. “Hands off, Buster Brown,” he said curtly, with venom in his voice. “I’m going to keep that stuff until you come to your senses. Look me up tonight.” And he stared at Cass with an expression filled with such inchoate, mingled emotions that Cass thought that Mason, too, was about to take leave of his wits. “Look me up tonight,” he repeated in a queer choked voice, “maybe we’ll be able to strike some sort of bargain.” “But for Christ sake, Mason, you said—” Cass began. But suddenly the Cadillac slid away into the dusky afternoon, and vanished up the road toward Sambuco. What sort of bargain had he in mind? Cass never found out, but as he stood there that afternoon on the piazza in Amalfi, swaying slightly, stunned by what Mason had done and by the abruptness of his departure, he was aware that this last look of Mason’s, composed in part of such hatred, was made up in at least equal part of something else not quite love but its loathsome resemblance.

I guess now I’ll really have to rob the son of a bitch, he thought, as he went into a drogheria and bought a bottle of wine. Then after all of this is over I’ll sober up. I’ll sober up and give him a fat lip.

He was really quite ill. When he met Poppy and the children at the seaside festa, she peered at him closely, observed that he looked “gruesome,” and insisted that they go up to Sambuco at once. Through the carnival dust he looked at her: her brow was beaded with sweat, and she was quite agitated, and as he listened to her she seemed extraordinarily pretty; what she was saying he barely heard but he knew that every word she spoke was expressing nothing but concern for him. And with sorrow he realized that for a longer time than was morally or humanly reasonable she might as well never have existed.

He was somewhat more sober now—sober enough, at least, to make an accounting of their joint resources, and to discover that they had not enough cash for the bus. “But you bought that bottle of wine!” Poppy wailed. “Creepers! So now we’ll have to walk up five miles!” Indignant, close to tears, she and the three youngest went on ahead, while he and Peggy trailed after. Hand in hand they walked up the shore, up the road among the lemon groves through the closing lavender light. For a while as they scuffed along Peggy was solemn and subdued, glum, chewing noisily on sugar almonds. Then she said: “Daddy, why are you trying to kill yourself? Mummy says she thinks you’re trying to kill yourself, drinking so much and everything and going without sleep. She’s just been crying and crying. For just days. Are you, Daddy?” There was a distant sound of oars on the water, and from somewhere music, sweet and indistinct, touched with longing. “She told Timmy that you have a sweetheart. Do you have a sweetheart, Daddy?” He paused to light a cigar, saying nothing, thinking: My darling, my dearest little girl, if I could just tell you what—“You know what?” Peggy said. “She told Timmy that you were nothing but an old goat who would never learn. Then she cried again. She just cried and cried.” He took her hand and they went up the hill. Jesus, he thought, she knows. Then after this he realized how foolish it was for him to think that she had not known all along, and so he ceased worrying. Peggy chattered about glamour, magic, movie stars. He thought once more of Michele.

It would not be an entirely easy matter, he knew, to wrest that drug from Mason’s hands; but suddenly he had such a powerful and mysterious convulsion of joy that it was almost like terror. Then, when Peggy asked him to “invent a movie-star song” he took a gulp of wine and burst out singing:

“Oh, we went to the animal fair,

All the birds and the beasts were there;

Carleton Burns was drunk by turns

And so was Alice Adair….”

And it was not long after this—while talking quite incoherently to a haggard, ill-tempered young American who had somehow smashed up his car—that darkness and oblivion once again began to crowd in around him.