Assorted Prose (8 page)

Footprints around a
KEEP OFF
sign.

Two pigeons feeding each other.

Two showgirls, whose faces had not yet thawed the frost of their makeup, treading indignantly through the slush.

A plump old man saying “Chick, chick” and feeding peanuts to squirrels.

Many solitary men throwing snowballs at tree trunks.

Many birds calling to each other about how little the Ramble has changed.

One red mitten lying lost under a poplar tree.

An airplane, very bright and distant, slowly moving through the branches of a sycamore.

November 1955

L
ATELY
, we’ve been pondering the pigeons in Bryant Park. It seemed to us that they showed a decided preference for the paving, and trod the grass gingerly and seldom. Only once did we see one roost in a tree. It was an awkward, touching performance, like that of a man tying the bow of an apron behind him. Why should the common pigeon be embarrassed in the presence of vegetation? Because, research showed, he is a descendant of the blue rock dove.
Columba livia
is a native of the cliffs and rocky islands of western Europe and northern Africa, with subspecies ranging from the Canary Islands to India and Japan. The American branch stems from some of the English colonists’ domestic pigeons, who flew the coop, went wild, shed their fancy shapes (the shapes of domestic pigeons can be very fancy), reverted to the parent type, and headed for the cities. Pigeons, or doves, have never made much of a distinction between natural and man-made crannies. Song of Solomon 2:14 apostrophizes “my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs.” Homer speaks of “Messe’s towers for silver doves renowned,” and Juvenal describes “the tiled roof where the gentle pigeons leave their eggs.” Tibullus asks, “Why need I tell how the sacred white pigeon flutters unmolested about the numerous cities of Syrian Palestine?” No other bird has been as widely revered. Disturbing their nests in the Mosque of Doves, Istanbul, is blasphemy. In 1925, the Bombay Stock Exchange was closed and riots were threatened because two European boys had ignorantly killed some street pigeons. Kama, the Hindu god of love (a minor deity), is sometimes depicted riding a dove. In Christian iconography, the dove represents the Holy Ghost. And, of course, there’s Noah. The Arabian version of the Deluge contains a pretty touch. When the dove returned to the ark the second time, its feet were stained with red mud. Noah, realizing that this meant the waters were receding, prayed that the messenger’s feet might remain that color. They have. There is a Filipino legend that, of all birds, only the dove understands the human tongue.

Pigeons have been the most faithful of man’s feathered friends. Records of the bird’s domestication extend back to the Fifth Egyptian Dynasty, around 3000
B.C.
Homing pigeons have been used as messengers through the centuries from Cyrus the Great, of Persia, to yesterday’s bootleggers.
How they home is still something of a mystery. Keen eyes and a good memory just don’t quite explain it, and neither do theories about magnetic or electro-magnetic control, sensitivity to light rays, the effect of air currents on the nasal passages or the semicircular canals, or “celestial orientation.” Ancient Romans and medieval monks bred pigeons. Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Victoria were fanciers. The hobby is conjectured to be of Indian or Persian origin, and the results are so elaborate that it took Darwin ninety-eight pages to prove that jacobins, satinettes, barbs (the ideal barb’s head resembles a spool), turbits, dragoons, fantails (when the fantail strikes his favorite pose, he can’t see over his chest), visors, pouters (the pouter looks like a tennis ball stuffed into a glove), long-faced tumblers, inside tumblers (the inside, or parlor, tumbler is prized for his inability to fly a few feet without taking a backwards somersault), priests, nuns, monks, archangels, etc., etc., were all artificial variations of one bird. The difference noticeable in the markings of street pigeons is a vestige of their earlier domestication. Because their feather-color patterns provide an external record of hereditary influences, and because they are docile and hardy, pigeons are a favorite laboratory animal of modern geneticists.

Pigeons are social, somewhat timid, strong, and monogamous. Once mated, they customarily stay so for life. The cock as well as the hen broods the eggs, the hen working all night, the cock relieving her around ten in the morning and mooching off at four in the afternoon. The same schedule applies to the feeding of the young; both sexes secrete “pigeon milk” in their crops. Before coition, at the bonbon stage of courtship, the male feeds a regurgitated substance to the female. Maeterlinck called
Columba livia
“the most sedentary, most homekeeping, most habit-ridden of bourgeois.” Fire will not budge a brooding pigeon. If a female leaves her nest before an egg has been laid, the male marches behind her, pecking at her head, until she returns or faints. A male will fight to the death defending the sanctity of his hearth. The nests are simple affairs—flat arrangements of twigs, feathers, straw, any old thing. The Museum of Natural History once possessed one made of paper clips; it was found near Wall Street. Are pigeons stupid? It is true that they will inadvertently trample their young to death in the nest; they carry only one twig at a time, whereas the sparrow carries two or three; and a pigeon will make romantic overtures to a bit of broken glass. But, pigeon boosters reply, pigeons have big feet and small fledglings; the sparrow makes a sloppy nest; and what’s wrong with looking in a mirror? Certainly
the bird is very eager to survive, unlike his cousin, the passenger pigeon, and his great-uncle once removed, the dodo.

New York City is a good town for pigeons. The health officials of London kill a third of the pigeon population each year. In 1945, Philadelphia started an anti-pigeon campaign, and it trapped twenty-six thousand birds before it admitted that pigeons are irrepressible. In 1930, the superintendent of the State Capitol in Albany poisoned a batch around the building, and the stirred legislators promptly passed the following law: “Pigeons shall not be killed within the limits of any city except for food purposes, or unless sick or injured beyond recovery.” The only major local violation of the statute occurred in 1937, when an unknown fiend, in two sessions (August 10th and November 17th), fed a hundred Broadway pigeons strychnine pellets. The uproar, including a
Times
editorial entitled “St. Francis Must Weep,” was huge. Building owners wage cold war against pigeons with spikes, prongs, metal netting, and lye-strewn or electrified ledges. The absence of filigrees, cornices, and other nook-rich ornamentation from the newer buildings is partly an anti-nesting device, though the pigeon theory of modern architecture should not be pursued to the exclusion of Frank Lloyd Wright. The bird’s main Manhattan enemy, strange to relate, is the duck hawk, who swoops from bridges and skyscrapers. When Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick suggested that the predators nesting in the steeple of Riverside Church be wiped out, the city’s falcon lovers raised a strenuous outcry. Not quite as strenuous, though, as that which greeted Magistrate Anthony Burke, who in the same month (July, 1936) handed down the opinion that people who feed pigeons are morons. This hit a lot of citizens, for upward of fifty thousand pigeons live in Manhattan on handouts plus garbage. Pigeons cannot vote, and only five are in the phone book—two Edwins, two Georges, and one Pete.

April 1956

E
VER ON THE LOOKOUT
for a feasible means of rejuvenation, we took ourself to the Biltmore Hotel one afternoon during the college Easter
vacations. As we had hoped, the cocktail lounge, that pond of perpetual youth, brimmed with high spirits, forced laughter, and expressively exhaled smoke. The room—“room” is a weak word for a volume of space enclosed by Babylonian veils of palms, pillars, and mirrors, and vertically limited by a ceiling with a truly supernal apogee—seemed quite overheated. Every bright, smooth face we saw was flushed. Whether the room was warming the youngsters or the youngsters the room is a conundrum we were too hot to unravel. We watched a forward-looking hat precede the pink face under it across the public view; noticed large numbers of Alexanders and whiskey sours—easy transitions, both, between orange pop and gin; dodged six boys, four of whom were shaking hands and two of whom were carrying tables; savored the overheard fragment “I say he’s an Existentialist.
He
says he’s a Jesuit”; and scuttled into a nook near a table of burly youths who were bringing a great weight of attention to bear on two pretty girls with slender necks. Their conversation, as we caught it, was only slightly less confused than this transcription, here printed for its value as an American document:

“Hello. Hello, this is Harry Belafonte.” Laughter. (All voices, unless otherwise specified, are male. We were unable to sort out the four or five boys, who looked exactly alike, though of graduated sizes, like boxes of breakfast food.)

“Man, you’re fantastic.”

“And he said, ‘Are you going to be a host tonight?’ I said, ‘Host tonight?’ and just looked at him.”

“She needed a
draft
card—always what I wanted.”

“Hello, this is Morey Amsterdam.”

“Let’s go up to Two Hundred and Forty-second Street.”

“Fantastic!”

“I have a car.”

“Stop that.”

(The above interchange we took to be the warmup. Now they began to address the girls directly.)

“Wouldn’t you all [inaudible]?”

“No.” (Female voice.)

“Waiter!
Wait-er
!”

“Allo. Allo. This is Bridey Murphy.”

“Hey, Les, this is good.”

“What?”

“Your whiskey sour.”

“What’s
this?
” (Female voice.)

“My
name
. What’s the matter, you don’t like it?” (Tones gruff with embarrassment.)

“We’re calling for you if we knew where to call for you.”

“No, she’s leaving her boy friend.” (This was the other female voice, one with a titter in every other syllable.)

“Hey, you know where Atlas holds up the world?”

“Maybe.” (Female.)

“Right in front of that statue.”

“There’s going to be fourteen boys and eight girls.”

“Carol’s your
last
name?”

“Ann, meet Bob, Joseph, Jack, and Lester the Fester. Ann.”

“No, no. We’re asking you out for the
evening
.”

“Cut it out.”

“That’s O.K. They’re roommates.”

“In Scranton?”

“Don’t they dig coal in Scranton?”

“Oh, your father’s a coal miner.”

“Hello, this is Audie Murphy.”

“Good old New York.”

“You know anybody from the Philippines?”

“This is the most honest girl at the table. You hear what she just said?”

“Two girls from Vietnam! Please stand up, girls.” (Voice raised in mock-ceremonial manner.)

“We are gratified to have with us two girls from the free state of Vietnam.”

“We have a car.”

“I’m singing my way into your heart.”

“Come with us now to the Biltmore.” (Girlish laughter.)

“Am
bass
ador, boy.”

“This
is
the Biltmore, dope.”

“We have a car parked in Kinney’s parking lot.”

Suddenly the boys, as if harking to an ultrasonic whistle, left, marching out in single file, their stride jouncy. The girls (there seemed to be three now) made superior little noises with their tongues and teeth. The following voices are all female.

“No, I didn’t like him
at all
.”

“He was
très
peculiar.”

“I like the one who sat here.”

“This one had only one side of his collar buttoned, did you notice?”

“No, I wasn’t embarrassed. I’ve got very hardened, believe you me.”

“I thought Tony was
nice
?”

“I used to get
so
embarrassed.”

The three girls stood up, fastened capes around the chaste white collars of their dresses, became women, and were heard no more.

March 1956

I
N
A
NTARCTICA
, everything turns left. Snow swirls to the left; seals, penguins, and skua gulls pivot to the left; the sun moves around the horizon right to left; and lost men making a determined effort to bear right find they have made a perfect left circle. Sunlight vibrating between white snow and white clouds creates a white darkness, in which landmarks and shadows disappear. A companion three feet away may vanish, and moments later rematerialize. On the other hand, whales and ships appear inverted in the sky. The sun may appear to rise and set five times in a day. Mountains actually over the horizon seem to loom close at hand. Minor irregularities in the ice tower like steeples. All these illusions are created by a combination of the oblique solar rays, the refraction and reflection of light among strata of warm and cold air, and the appalling lucidity of a dust-free, nearly vaporless atmosphere. In unclouded sunshine, the eye can follow an observation balloon for sixteen miles of its ascent into an inky-purple sky. Sudden veils of intense blueness fall over the world and in a few minutes are mysteriously lifted. When the sun is low, the sky appears green. Men exhale, in their crystallized breath, iridescent rainbows. Weather rainbows are white. The wind-driven snow charges men’s noses and fingertips with static electricity, which is given off as a phantom luminescence.

For centuries, the continent itself was a phantom. From the time men first recognized that the earth was spherical, a great land mass in the
south was imagined. In 1539, Emperor Charles V, of the Holy Roman Empire, appointed Pedro Sancho de Hoz governor of an area shown on maps of the period as stretching from the tip of South America across the pole to China. European scholars equated southerliness with fecundating warmth. Alexander Dalrymple, an eighteenth-century hydrographer for England’s East India Company, predicted that the human population of the unknown continent would be found to exceed fifty million. In 1768, Lieutenant James Cook was sent by the British on a secret mission to locate the southern land mass and “to observe the genius, temper, disposition, and number of the natives and endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance with them.” Cook was unable to penetrate the ice pack, and concluded that if a continent lay beyond it, it was uninhabitable and inhospitable. How true! Antarctica more nearly resembles Mars than the earth we live on. It has no trees, no rivers, no land animals except a few degenerate insects, no vegetation other than some doughty moss and lichen, and no political or economic significance, though it may have some any day now. Permanent bases are being established by scientists of many of the nations involved in the antarctic aspect of the International Geophysical Year 1957–58. Russia thus far has not pressed the claims that the offshore explorations of Czar Alexander I’s Admiral von Bellingshausen might justify. In 1948, though, the Kremlin ominously resurrected and published his report. Hitler once dropped thousands of swastika-stamped darts into a mammoth stretch of ice, named it New Swabia, and left it at that. Britain, France, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and Argentina profess to own wedges of the pie. The United States has recognized no claims. Our antarctic policy, reportedly due for an overhaul, was established by Secretary of State Hughes in 1924, when he asserted that the
sine qua non
of territorial rights is permanent settlement.
^*