A few mornings after we arrived, Alan had an ancient Ford, a 1908 Model A, delivered to the courtyard of the villa. The local garage between the place and the main road had been keeping it there in storage, up on blocks in the back. Alan walked around it smiling with the pleasure of a child to whom a favorite toy has been restored. I could see that the car represented moments of his youth that he remembered with fondness, from summers when he and his brother had been growing up, but his allusions to those times were oddly featureless and elusive, whether because he realized that they would serve as deplorable examples or because he wanted to keep them to himself, I could not guess. He spoke of the ability to master the peculiar workings and niceties of the archaic vehicle as a new test of my real worth. I suppose I passed, but his attention was on the Ford and he kept to himself any doubts about how practical it would be to have the old car back in the stable again. He had good reason to wonder about such things. By now I no longer remember some of the fine points of coaxing it into action and keeping it awake and tractable, but I recall brass tubing around and under the dashboard, with beautiful antique brass valves, all of which the garage had kept oiled and polished. The main valve controlled the flow of gasoline from the tank to the carburetor, and had to be opened before undertaking the arduous rituals of getting the motor running, which usually—perhaps always—required the use of a crank. Sometimes the operation took two to make it work, one out in front bowing and grunting over the handle of the crank, the other in the driver’s seat with a hand on a lever attached to the steering rod, which I suppose was one of the throttles, for there may have been more than one. All this, of course, was before the day of safety inspections. The car had been registered once for all time, and the card was somewhere in it.
Peter had seen the Ford before. He may even have ridden in it, in earlier summers. He now seemed to regard it as an exotic ancestor of the Deer Park jeep, which in a way it was, and Alan allowed him to climb into it and go with me on a tentative sortie along the one road leading past the villas on the cape, where there were no cars to speak of. Peter’s hilarity from the summer before, when I had been learning how to manage the clutch on the jeep, came back to him as we inched and chugged out the gate. There were subtleties and protocols to this clutch and gear system too that kept eluding me. For such a simple car the controls were remarkably elaborate, and I did not know whether to ascribe the old car’s uncooperative behavior to its age and condition or to my ignorance or to its recalcitrance at having been taken over by a barbarous stranger. Not all of the gears would work, and one of them—I think it was second—liked to change its mind after I had wheedled it into place and had released the clutch, and was driving on, depending on it. It would let me start ahead and then skip back out of engagement again, the motor suddenly racing free with a happy shriek, and the auto’s forward momentum, such as it was, dying in one winded exhalation, the wheels giving up instantly. And the brakes puzzled me. They worked, sooner or later, but out of a long sleep, and not always in quite the same way. Still, we made it out to the end of the road and back, and Alan, André, Gilles, and Andrew were waiting in the courtyard to cheer us in, looking a little surprised that we had made it.
What use we might make of the Ford was still not clear. It was kept in the garage by the main gate, alongside Alan’s station wagon, and I began to consider what trips it might be used for. I wanted to go to Roquebrune to see the hotel where Yeats had died and the cemetery where he had been buried until after the war, when the Irish navy had sent a small warship to recover his body and take it back to definitive burial in Ireland, in Drumcliffe Churchyard, the place that he had designated. Since my days as a student Yeats had been the modern poet who had meant more to me than any other. I might even get the address of Robert Service and call on him. But I would have to be a bit more confident of the Ford’s behavior and my control of it before asking Alan about any such outings.
The real maiden voyage of the resurrected Ford that would determine the possibility of any expeditions in it was to be a drive to Nice and back. The idea must have been Alan’s—a ghost from his own heedless youth. Dorothy came along, and he entrusted Peter and Andrew to the Ford’s uncertain temperament and my ineptitude. We set off one afternoon in the lull after the midday meal, when the world’s drivers, with luck, might still be asleep. André, in his kitchen apron, peered into the garage as we backed out, and as he watched us go, he looked very serious, signaling that he would shut the doors behind us so that I would not have to risk the motor’s stopping. We rolled along to the place, heads turning as we went by, and up the hill beyond it, with me holding the gear lever in place once I had the auto in second.
There was more traffic on the main road than I had bargained for. The usual bicycles three abreast. Trucks veering out on the curves that gripped the buttresses of cliffs on the corniche. I managed to stop at the top of the hill, then lurch and heave forward onto the main road and get into second again. The gear jumped out on the grade, before a tight curve. I managed to get it back in again. The boys were silent. I put on the brakes before the curve. There I learned what their secret had been, back on the empty cape road with no cars ahead of us and behind us. They were really working on only one wheel, the left rear, which meant that if I tried to brake hard or in a hurry the front of the car swung around to the left, toward oncoming traffic. I kept what I had discovered—or I tried to—from Dorothy and the boys. As we approached the next curve, going downhill, I tried the hand brake, which seemed to work, more or less, on both rear wheels, though without great authority. Trying not to slip out of gear when I put the clutch in to brake, I steered us downhill into Nice and managed, in thickening traffic, to negotiate one intersection after another, all the way to the wide open central space where the Boulevard Jean Juarés flows into the Place Massena.
Whatever purpose may have figured in the plans for this trip besides its own dubious self had probably been forgotten by then, and I cannot imagine why I had taken us straight into the heart of downtown Nice, where a constant loud stream of trucks, delivery vans, Vespas, mobylettes, and bicycles circled around a policeman on a stand, in a tropical helmet and white gauntlets, directing the current in the middle of the place. He, of course, raised his gauntlet in our direction to stop the stream we were in, just as we approached, so that the delivery van ahead of us whizzed on, and we choked to a stop and the Ford’s motor shuddered.
When the white gauntlet, with a gesture from a ballet, motioned us on to rejoin the orbiting swirl, I pressed down politely on the accelerator, put the Ford into first, eased off the clutch, and the motor stalled. Horns began jabbing from behind. Staring ahead at the policeman’s face above the white glove I tried desperately to start the auto. More horns. Nothing inside could rouse a response from the coma under the hood, and I got out to try cranking it, accompanied by a full brass section. On about the third heave I saw beside my feet several pairs of heavy shoes, and looked up into the faces of two burly figures, drivers of vehicles behind us, who had come to inspect the problem. I gave another heave on the crank but the motor seemed to have returned to a pre-war dream. The carburetor was probably flooded by then. When I straightened up the policeman himself was standing there. I expected some kind of stern impossible command from him, but instead I could see from his face that he was looking the Ford over with a mixture of amusement and admiration, and so were the others. The cars nearest to us had stopped honking, and the continuing chorus had drawn back. The policeman asked me what year it was, and whether its papers were in order. He glanced at my international driving license and nodded. By that time a crowd of drivers had gathered around us and the horns had given up. The policeman suggested that some of the drivers help me roll the car over to the curb out of the way, and try to start it there. Dorothy and the boys got out, and half a dozen of us wheeled the Ford aside and let the stream flow on. The first two drivers on the scene, who had assumed a proprietary role in the Ford’s performance, had it started in a moment. Then, after a question or two, they restrained their curiosity with evident difficulty before trotting back to their own vehicles, whose motors were still running as they sat like islands in the current of traffic.
We made our way cautiously into a relatively empty square, parked, explored some of the narrow streets of old Nice, found a tiny dark restaurant where we all had socca, and then went back and coaxed the Ford awake again and groped our way out of Nice, up the road to Italy, back to the villa. Alan looked surprised—perhaps he had not noticed until then that we had all gone. He asked how the Ford had behaved and I told him about the second gear and he nodded. He remembered. It all came back to him, he said. Then the brakes. I told him their shortcomings and he agreed that they needed some work if the Ford was to be driven at all. He had the man from the garage come and pick it up, and it remained in his keeping for the rest of the summer.