THE CHIZZOLA BROTHERS put on a magnificent feast to celebrate the new partnership. The maître d’hôtel climbed one of the trees in the patio out of sheer joy that the bar had been salvaged, and jumped from branch to branch, pretending alternately to be a parrot and a monkey. John put on a very creditable imitation of Esmond being a handyman: “Where’s the mop? Where’s the mop?” Crash! Bang! Slosh! I proudly assisted Tony, who was preparing mountains of spaghetti in the kitchen: “Decca! Quick! Where’s that thing, the spaghetti he stop, the water he go through?” I loved them on sight, they were so completely different from the depressing, hard-faced Anglo-Saxons who were my daily companions at the drugstore.
It was a merry occasion indeed, and we ate and drank far into the night, the party ending with a magnificent concert of anti-fascist Italian songs by the brothers.
I threw up the drugstore job to assume my new duties at the Roma, where I was to be buyer of supplies, bookkeeper, and bouncer. “We need a nice young woman to take care of some of the ladies who have passed out,” John explained seriously. “The maître d’hôtel will be pleased; he doesn’t like having to go and drag them out of the ladies’ rest room.” (“What would Muv say?” was still a theme that ran through my mind on occasions like this.)
Life in the Roma bar had much to recommend it. Our agreement with the Chizzolas included meals with the family, and now, for the first and only time during our marriage, we ate three regular and delicious meals a day. A novelty much to Esmond’s liking; he prospered and grew fat. The old regime of feast and famine, hastily gulped snacks at the nearest hash house interspersed with occasional glorious Meyer or equivalent banquets, faded into memory.
The customers were a constant source of amusement. For the most part they were middle-aged businessmen on vacation, or traveling salesmen. Once the restaurant and bar was taken over for the evening by American Federation of Labor officials, meeting in convention in Miami. To our amazement, these representatives of millions of American workers were indistinguishable from the midwestern businessmen who usually crowded the bar. “Aren’t you going to sing the ‘Red Flag’ after the banquet?” I asked one of them, but he looked completely mystified, as though I must have lost my mind. I gathered that, like Mr. Meyer, he was “in favor of capitalism.” We eagerly quizzed them about what stand the unions would take on foreign policy, only to be met with blank, uncomprehending stares.
Esmond made a study of the habits of the American drunk. He found that after two or three drinks, the customer would invariably produce his wallet and fumble through it for photos of “the wife and kids, she’s the grandest little woman in all the world, and our Junior can lick any punk on the block you betcha.” A few more cocktails, and the customer was crashing his fist on the bar: “Yessir, the U.S.A., best little old country you’ll find; and Kansas just about the finest state in the Union, you can say what you like about these furrin parts, we’ve got the lot of them beat . . .” and on and on. With the tenth drink, the customer began to feel a curious, but apparently universal, need to assert and prove his own identity. “Robert G. McKinley, G. for George, that’s me. Bob, they call me. Vice-president of the Smith-Alford Tractor Company, Kansas City, Kansas. You don’t believe me, do you? Huh? Well, I’ll prove it to you.” Out would come the business card, driver’s license, social security card. “See? Right there. Robert George McKinley, but they call me Bob. Robert G. McKinley of Kansas City, Kansas, finest li’l old city you’ll find, and they all call me Bob at home . . .” By this time the bar would be littered with a horrid assortment of identification cards, permits of one kind or another, various Kiwanis and Rotary membership cards, and the pictures of the Little Woman and Kids, their round and guileless faces incongruously splotched with spilled whiskey. This stage would signal the need for me to swing into action in my capacity as bouncer, which I performed by scooping the customer’s squalid belongings back into his wallet and gently leading him to a waiting cab. “Robert George McKinley’s the name, Bob everyone back home calls me . . . finest little old home in all the dang blasted world . . .” we’d hear as he stumbled into the taxi. Esmond soon learned to judge just when the bouncing stage had been reached. “Decca, he’s getting out the driver’s license: would you run out and call a cab?”
Esmond applied himself with great concentration to making the business a going concern. It was as though he was deliberately trying to shut out, for the time being, the realities of life and politics. He was in rather a unique position to accomplish this, being physically unavailable for English conscription and, as a foreigner, not subject to the American draft if one should be announced. He even wrote to tell Philip that we had a “Talk Neutral” sign in the bar. No such sign in fact existed; Esmond elaborately invented it as a way of notifying our friends at home that he was not about to be drawn in as part of a war machine whose purpose was as yet indistinct. The major headlines of that winter dealt with the mobilization of troops at Southampton for possible use against the Soviet Union, and there were indications that highly placed individuals in the British Government were giving full encouragement to the Germans to intensify their feverish war preparations against the day when at last we should be happily allied with them in the crusade against Communism. It was an atmosphere of plots within plots, the final outcome of which remained most unclear.
Perhaps because of the unsettling quality of the news, perhaps because I had taken such a dislike to Miami, at times I felt that something unpleasant would spring out at us from behind the garish façade of that horrible tinselly town with its maddening eternal sunshine pouring incessantly down on white stucco, its hideous sham-looking poinsettias, like cheap Christmas tree ornaments, advertising their scarlet presence from every garden.
Esmond was impervious to such imaginings; he radiated warmth and life, developed all sorts of wild plans for the future of the bar, set to work doggedly to learn the ins and outs of liquor merchandising, the ways and means of attracting and keeping customers. As usual, he was the center of a whirlpool of activity of his own making, into which he drew everyone around him. The Chizzola brothers regarded him with affection and ever-growing amazement. They had never quite got over the shock of their first acquaintance with him, his gall in posing as a trained waiter on their opening night, the fact that he had successfully hypnotized them into giving him a job as a busboy in spite of his obvious incompetence, and above all his successful quest of the $1000, which they seemed to view as some sort of hilarious conjuring trick.
Now Esmond was actually “admitted to practice at the bar,” as he said, we found there was a lot more to running the business than the mere mixing of pousse cafés and Horse’s Necks. There were puzzling matters of cash discounts and long- and short-term credit to be mastered, strange terms like Bill of Lading and Daily Ledger to be learned.
The days developed their own rhythm. Mornings were devoted to doing accounts and cleaning up from the night before, and to earnest consultation with the brothers about supplies followed by more earnest consultations with the liquor wholesalers. About noon came the exciting moment of opening, with its attendant conjecture about what odd specimens of humanity might fetch up at the Roma this time. After that, the fun began in earnest. Esmond developed several alternative personalities which he tried out on the customers: The Damon Runyon “tough guy,” the courtly old-fashioned English servitor, the sophisticated Ernest Hemingway self-made-world-traveler-at-home-in-five-continents type. I was always afraid that he would get them mixed up, and that a customer who had been given the Damon Runyon treatment (complete with American accent) might return a few days later to find himself being served apparently by the identical twin of the previous bartender — a twin of somber demeanor, addicted to bowing gravely in stiff English fashion, who spoke only when addressed, and then in monosyllables delivered in Esmond’s BBC voice — Cockney, with a heavy veneer of Oxford accent.
Esmond’s most successful act was that of Homely Philosopher. It consisted of getting a conversation going with a customer, then capping every trite remark with a triter one: “I always say young people have too few responsibilities/ too many responsibilities/ too much freedom/ too little initiative these days.” “I always say what this country needs is a firm hand/ a free rein/ a return to the good old principles of our fathers/ to look forward instead of backward . . .” Almost anything would do, if delivered in ponderous enough manner and preceded by the words “I always say.” His audience was merely impressed by such depths of wisdom in one so young. As the customer downed more and more drinks, Esmond would dexterously lead him round in circles for my amusement, and would soon have him agreeing with platitudes the sense of which was exactly opposite to those with which he had started out. I watched the show from my vantage point at the cash register, occasionally volunteering a Homely Philosopher’s Wife’s remark: “I always say that if more of us women were more like our mothers, this little old world would be a better place,” or, “I always say it’s up to us womenfolk to keep our menfolk away from the race track and bars.” The latter remark could only be safely delivered if the customer was thoroughly drunk, and therefore in a mood to polemicize against the evils of liquor, specially when consumed by the younger generation.
At Christmas, the serene, escapist fun of the bar was shattered. There were a couple of days of newspaper rumor to the effect that Boud had been badly wounded by a gunshot and was being returned home by ambulance, to be accorded the extraordinary measure of safe-conduct through enemy lines. There was the usual wild conjecture, then news that she had arrived in England. A journalistic storm of huge proportions broke over us. The telephone rang continually with calls from newspapers all over the country demanding to know the “inside story”: was it true that Unity had been shot by the S.S.? That she had had a violent quarrel with Hitler just after the outbreak of war? Where had she been for the last few months?
“I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . . I don’t know.”
I was terrified for Boud, and grieved over the accounts of her final homecoming, the endless flow of photographs in the papers showing her so changed and ill-looking. The simple truth of what had happened was plain to me. Boud had always said she would kill herself if war should break out between England and Germany; she had tried, but somehow failed. Although a bullet had entered her brain, her enormously strong physique pulled her back to life.
I pondered over the unsolvable riddle: why had she, to those of us who knew her the most human of people, turned her back on humanity and allied herself with those grinning beasts and their armies of robot goose-steppers? The cry of the old Basque woman in Bayonne, “Alemanes! Criminales! Bestiales! Animales!” still rang in my ears. How could Boud, a person of enormous natural taste, an artist and poet from childhood, have embraced their crude philistinism? She had been an eccentric all her life, completely outside the bounds of normal behavior, uncontrollable by governesses, parents and the headmistress of her boarding school (who had diplomatically informed my mother that, since many girls leave school at sixteen she saw no reason why Unity shouldn’t be one of them); yet she had enthusiastically adopted the most deadeningly conformist of all philosophies. She was always a terrific hater — so were all of us, except possibly Tom — but I had always thought she hated intelligently, and admired her ability to reduce the more unpleasant of the grown-up relations to a state of acute nervous discomfort with one of her smoldering looks of loathing. But when she wrote gaily off to Der Stürmer, “I want everybody to know I am a Jew-hater,” I felt she had forgotten the whole point of hating, and had once and for all put herself on the side of the hateful.
It is perhaps futile to try to interpret the actions of another — one may be so completely wrong; but it always seemed to me that this last really conscious act of her life, the attempt at self-destruction, was a sort of recognition of the extraordinary contradictions in which she found herself, that the declaration of war merely served as the occasion for her action, which would in any case have been inevitable sooner or later.
I mourned my Boud of Boudledidge days, my huge, bright adversary of the D.F.D., when we used to fight — only three or four years ago, but it seemed a lifetime — under the banners of swastika and hammer and sickle. I knew I couldn’t expect Esmond, who had never met her, to feel anything but disgust for her, so by tacit understanding we avoided discussing her.