The Lone Pilgrim (12 page)

We ended up waiting for three hours. The chairs filled up with Cubans, farmers, and fishermen. Finally, the flights were called. Eight people lined up to go to Oopalachia. Six flew off to Little Trinidad. The fishermen went to Connaught Key. They all had to wait for the morose Indian to load the luggage and for the pilots to finish their coffee. The pilots on spur lines are like motorcycle racers. Given the chance, they would fly in any weather, but commercial responsibility imposes itself on them. The older ones were mail pilots, the middle-aged ones were commercial pilots who got bored, and the younger ones learned to fly in Vietnam and didn't want to stop once they got home.

Finally, we lined up for French Falls. The plane held eight, but there were only six of us: the Cuban woman and her child, my husband and I, and a couple who appeared at the last moment—a hatchet-faced man with a blond pompadour, carrying a fiddle case, and his wife, whose cheekbones obliterated her eyes. They looked like birds of prey in a moment of pause.

Our pilot's name was Ike Fooley, a stocky vet with a moustache. He knew everyone on the flight except us, but my husband sat co-pilot with him and learned that they had been in Vietnam at the same time. When we got to French Falls, we went to the bar of the local lodging house and had dinner with him. Ike Fooley had been considered the dolt of his family, he told us. His father and brothers were in steel, in New Orleans. He had saved enough to have his own plane. He pulled out a picture of it—a red-and-white Piper Cherokee with
Fool's Paradise
painted on the wing in black. He also showed us a stack of photographs of Hué—the intense, heartsick photos of an amateur. He said that he had still not gotten over what had happened to him in the war, that he was slow and that it took him a long time to sort things out. His moustache curved down and gave his cheery face an edge of mournfulness. After dinner, he told us who our fellow-travelers were. The Cuban woman was the housekeeper at a mansion outside French Falls that was owned by the former ambassador to Argentina. The couple had just come back from a fiddle competition in Paris, Kentucky. They flew around quite a bit, Ike said—to Nashville and Muscle Shoals to do studio work—but they didn't like it much. The man had explained country fiddling to him as follows: “Something pretty you put on the edge of something plain.”

As we had our dinner, the weather kicked up, and finally another storm broke. Ike Fooley called Miami to say he was laying over. He and my husband settled down to drink. Ike asked why we had come to French Falls, and we told him the truth. The truth was it was just a place to fly to. My husband subscribed to
Aviator
magazine to keep informed on remote landing strips and oddball spur lines. French Falls sounded good to him, since he was just about to record the French Suites. Ike found this altogether reasonable. But he said there wasn't any reason to stay in French Falls unless you lived there, so he offered to take us to Key West the next day. He had the weekend off, he said, and if we liked to fish and snorkel, he knew a good place to do both. In the morning, we would fly back to Miami with him, drive to a private airport, pick up
Fool's Paradise
, and fly around the Keys.

They stayed downstairs to drink out the storm, and I went to our room to take a bath and go to sleep. The room smelled of seawater and rain.

As I lay in bed, I thought of all the places we had flown to as something pretty you put on the edge of something plain. The love my husband and I bore for each other seemed very plain to me—there was still no communal reference point for it. It was only the two of us.

One day after we were married, my husband opened up a battered wicker case and put on the bed an ammunition pouch, a dog-eared copy of the “Italian” Concerto, a leather-bound diary, and his army belt—his relics of the war, he said. When he pulled shift, he had studied the “Italian” Concerto and sung it in his head. During the sixties, you often saw in slick, liberal magazines photos of the possessions of dead or captured enemies, photos that were meant to show you that the enemy was a human being, too. That clutter on the bed looked like one of those photos, but these things belonged to my husband. I remember thinking, What if he hadn't come back to me? Suppose he had come back to me all shot up? Suppose he had never come back at all? I never touched a thing on the bed—I remembered that I hadn't known him when he came back, that we had met by chance in a time when people didn't think much about the war, and if you said you had fought in it they looked at you without much interest, registering a fact they had no connection to, or for.

In point of fact, my husband takes the ammunition pouch, his army belt, the diary, and that score for the “Italian” Concerto with him' whenever he flies. I saw them first one evening while I was unpacking in Shawano, Wisconsin, to which we had flown on Wolverine, and I've seen them ever since. I've never mentioned it, and neither has he, but it is a fact between us, since I always unpack for him.

He carries around those artifacts, and I dream about wrecked jets. Secretly, I read accounts of crashes in the paper, which indicates to me that I never get used to flying, that I am always caught between thrill and fear. He knows I read the paper for those ghoulish accounts, and I know about his kit. But it all works out. When he isn't rehearsing, and I get time off from the Riiks Point marine-biology station, we fly to someplace central and then to someplace remote so that I can ask, some wide, scopeless afternoon on a bleak winter's day, “Remember when we flew around Key West with Ike Fooley?” And my husband can nod yes, with exclusive understanding.

Delia's Father

Delia Schwantes's father did not work. Her mother worked—she taught French in the private school to which we and Delia were sent. Delia, as the child of a teacher, was a scholarship pupil, while our parents paid through the nose to get
us our education. Some of us had crushes on Delia's mother, who wore the sort of clothes our mothers never would have worn: plaid skirts with pleats, and plain sweaters like a schoolgirl. She wore her hair in a chignon, and she was the first person we had ever seen with pierced ears. Our mothers, who favored short hair and pearl clip-ons, said that Frenchwomen such as Delia's mother did not need money in order to have style. The Schwanteses, of course, had no money.

There were a number of girls with crushes on Delia herself. She was thin and undersized with features our mothers said she would grow into. We looked like ruddy, well-fed American girls, but Delia with her straight, pale hair and rather mournful eyes looked like a sprite, an elf, some creature out of a storybook published abroad.

Then there was Delia's father who occasionally turned up at school functions but was mostly seen around town. He wore gabardine shirts of rose and blue and brown, with knitted ties and twill trousers and shoes that slipped on—these were the mark of a lounge lizard. Our fathers wore sturdy English business shoes that laced. Delia's father chain-smoked imported cigarettes that came in a flat, ornamental tin. Our fathers, who believed that cigarettes were for women and foreigners, smoked pipes and cigars. For some of us, our first whiff of manhood, apart from the customary smells of our own old men, was Delia's father's cigarettes, and whatever sort of imported cologne he used.

Our fathers all knew each other, or seemed to. They were each other's law partners, or fellow club members, or business associates, or they were related or had been at school together. On the weekends they played golf and tennis together and at night they found themselves at dinner parties discussing politics or the stock market. We had never seen anyone like Delia's father.

He had been one of a group of avant-garde artists and poets in Prague called the Ten Wild Men. He had been a poet and journalist and had fought in the Resistance. Once in a while a review or poem of his would appear in one of those cultural journals, and he occasionally translated books from French and Czech. When Delia was asked what her father did, she said he was a writer, which sounded much more wonderful to us than banker, lawyer, or stockbroker.

Her father spoke four languages: Czech with his oldest friend—a man with whom he played game after game of very fast chess called “Blitzkrieg”; French to his wife; English to his daughter; and German to the refugee tailor who made his trousers and jackets for him at half price. Although he did not consider Italian one of his languages, he could pass the time of day with the man who sold him vegetables and fruit.

He had glossy brown and grey hair which he combed straight back from his beautiful, high forehead. He was of middle size and looked both delicate and strong at the same time. In his direction people said things like: “Never trust a man who dresses too well.” Men, by which we meant our fathers, paid no attention to him. He didn't register with them, and at school functions they passed him as if he were invisible. Our mothers, on the other hand, were drawn to him.

We were the daughters of people who had money instead of imagination and complete self-confidence. We came from good Jewish and Episcopalian families, and we grew up all alike. We all had small dogs—but not too small—miniature dogs being for the nouveau riche. We had hearty, solid dogs like Scottish and wire-haired terriers, or dachshunds or Welsh corgis, like the Queen of England. Our mothers lunched with one another, worked as volunteers for charities, and were active in our school. Our fathers wore hats and looked most natural either in bathing trunks or business suits. The kind of clothes Mr. Schwantes wore were unknown to them. For sport they wore the brightly colored clothing golfers favor and always looked rather clownish. By and large our parents' lives were invisible to us—we never saw what they did all day. Our visible adults were Mr. and Mrs. Schwantes.

It was not until we began to get around the city by ourselves that we ever ran into Delia's father. One or another of us saw him on the street, or coming out of a café or restaurant bar, or going into a museum—always with a woman. Vivvie Herbert's sister, a beauty at sixteen, had been escorted by him through the Museum of Modern Art and out to the sculpture garden for coffee. The Herberts did not believe in coffee for children—it made them too nervy. The cup of coffee Delia's father bought for her caused great commotion in Vivvie's sister. She gulped it and bolted like a good girl.

When I was fifteen I met up with him at the zoo in Central Park. He was standing in front of the lion cage, and he appeared to have tears in his eyes.

You did not greet Delia's father in any ordinary way. There was some proper, formal European way in which to salute him. I always extended my hand and flicked my heel in a faint imitation of the curtsey I had been taught as a child.

He took my hand. “Ah,” he said. “It is Georgia Levy. What lovely names your parents give you. These names intrigue me very much.”

His eyes were hazel, and they glittered like reptile eyes. He lit one of his cigarettes. The tin box they came in was red, white, and gold. How lucky for Delia to have a father who smoked such wonderful cigarettes and probably gave her the boxes to keep her bobby pins in. It was clear that he was waiting for someone. He said: “You must forgive me this moment of emotion. I am very sentimental about wild animals.” He took my hand—you shook hands with Delia's father upon greeting and leaving. The encounter was over.

When Delia said “my father” our hearts fluttered that such an exotic creature could be captured by such a homey term. Our fathers were not seen in zoos or museums once their children reached puberty. They did not meet in bars, but at their clubs. They did not loiter in public places waiting for people. When you saw them they gave your shoulder a squeeze or thumped you on the back in greeting. Our fathers did not look as if they had just woken from some drugged, sexual sleep. Their eyes did not have the glittering, mysterious light that made the heart of a teenage girl flop like a freshly caught fish.

Our social life was arranged for us. It included hot chocolate after skating, going to the movies in groups, studying together for exams, and inviting friends for dinner—friends who of course invited you back. When Delia came for dinner we were embarrassed by everything: by the big, uninspired American rib roasts and baked potatoes, by the insipid grapefruit and watercress salad, by the fact that a colored lady (whom we called by her first name) served us, and by our boring fathers and mothers trying to figure out what to say to a child whose parents they had not known forever, especially this child whose father was a roué, whose mother worked, and whose responses were the soft, correct, hidden responses of a European child, not the loud, forthright manners they knew.

When we were invited to the Schwanteses our mothers said things like: “Oh, dear, don't you think it will be an awful chore for Mrs. Schwantes to feed you after working all day?”

You changed your clothes before you went to Delia's for dinner. We had servants but they had formality. You stopped at the florist's and charged (at your mother's instruction) half a dozen sweetheart roses to your parents' account.

The meals you were served by the Schwanteses were wonderful—nothing like the tame lamb chops and crown roasts we were used to. Out of a glazed brown crock Mrs. Schwantes served some fragrant stew made with wine. Even the potatoes in that house tasted different—more of earth than of starch. The salad had a dressing we thought of as grown-up, not like the sweet boiled dressing we had at home. For dessert there was fruit and cheese. We never rememberd the name of the cheese, but if Mrs. Schwantes wrote it down for us and we asked our mothers to buy it, it never tasted the same in our dining rooms. We were given watered wine to go with the meal and after were served coffee in demitasse.

Every now and then Delia's much older sister Vanessa would appear. She was certainly the most beautiful girl any of us had ever seen. She had lived in Paris and now worked for a French designer in New York. She chain-smoked like her father and spoke rapid-fire French to her mother. Her shiny reddish hair was worn in a mop of curls, and her clothes' were a more dashing edition of what her mother wore. Our sisters were by comparison very boring. Vanessa's life, we thought, was like one of those Japanese paper flowers that expands into a beautiful shape when put into water.