Part 2

I did not want to go in to lunch, although there was no choice in the matter. I had arrived at one o’clock; I was expected at one-thirty. Meanwhile, avoiding the house until the last possible moment, I had taken a neighbor’s privilege of strolling alone about the garden; the house behind me was gray and austere, granitic, more English than Hudson Valley. The grounds swept softly down toward the river nearly a mile away. A vista had been cleared from the central terrace, a little like the one at Versailles but more rustic, less royal. Dark green trees covered the hills to left and right of the sweep of lawn and meadow. No other house could be seen. Even the railroad between the terrace and the water was invisible, hidden by a bluff ... only its sound and an occasional blur of smoke upon the blue marked that machine’s essential passage.

I breathed the air of early summer gladly, voluptuously. I lived my life in seasonal concert with this river and, after grim March and confusing sharp April, the knowledge that at last the leaves were foliaged and the days warm was quite enough to create in me a mood of euphoria, of marvelous serenity. I contemplated love affairs. I prepared to meet strangers. The summer and I would celebrate our triumph soon; but, until the proper moment, I was a spectator: the summer love as yet unknown to me, the last dark blooming of peonies amid the wreckage of white lilacs still some weeks away, held in the future with my love. I could only anticipate; I savored my disengagement in this garden.

But then it was time to go in and I turned my back resolutely on the river and ascended the wide stone steps to the brick terrace which fronted the house on the river side, pausing only to break the stem of a white and pink peony, regretting immediately what I had done: brutally, I had wished to possess the summer, to fix the instant, to bear with me into the house a fragment of the day. It was wrong; and I stood for a moment at the French door holding the great peony in my hand, its odor like a dozen roses, like all the summers I had ever known. But it was impractical. I could not stuff it into my buttonhole for it was as large as a baby’s head while I was fairly certain that my hostess would be less than pleased to receive at my hands one of her best peonies, cut too short even to place in water. Obscurely displeased with myself and the day, I plunged the flower deep into a hedge of boxwood until not even a glimmer of white showed through the dense dark green to betray me: then, like a murderer, the assaulted day part-spoiling, I went inside.

2

“You have been malingering in the garden,” she said, offering me her face like a painted plate to kiss. “I saw you from the window.”

“Saw me ravage the flowers?”

“They all do,” she said obscurely, and led me after her into the drawing room, an oblong full of light from French windows opening upon the terrace. I was surprised to see that she was alone.

“She’ll be along presently. She’s upstairs changing.”

“Who?”

“Iris Mortimer ... didn’t I tell you? It’s the whole reason.”

Clarissa nodded slyly from the chair opposite me. A warm wind crossed the room and the white curtains billowed like spinnakers in a regatta. I breathed the warm odor of flowers, of burned ash remnants from the fireplace: the room shone with silver and porcelain. Clarissa was rich despite the wars and crises that had marked our days, leaving the usual scars upon us, like trees whose cross-sections bear a familial resemblance of concentric rings, recalling in detail the weather of past years ... at least those few rings we shared in common, or Clarissa, by her own admission, was twenty-two hundred years old with an uncommonly good memory. None of us had ever questioned her too closely about her past. There is no reason to suspect, however, that she was insincere. Since she felt she had lived that great length of time and since her recollections were remarkably interesting and plausible she was much in demand as a conversationalist and adviser, especially useful in those plots which require great shrewdness and daring. It was perfectly apparent that she was involved in some such plot at the moment.

I looked at her thoughtfully before I casually rose to take the bait of mystery she had trailed so perfunctorily before me. She knew her man. She knew I would not be difficult in the early stages of any adventure.

“Whole reason?” I repeated.

“I can say no more!” said Clarissa with a melodramatic emphasis which my deliberately casual tone did not entirely justify. “You’ll love Iris, though.”

I wondered whether loving Iris, or pretending to love Iris, was to be the summer’s game. But before I could inquire further, Clarissa, secure in her mystery, asked me idly about my work and, as idly, I answered her, the exchange perfunctory yet easy, for we were used to one another.

“I am tracking him down,” I said. “There is so little to go on, but what there is is quite fascinating, especially Ammianus.”

“Fairly reliable, as military men go,” said Clarissa, suddenly emerging from her polite indifference: any reference to the past she had known always interested her, only the present seemed to bore her, at least that ordinary unusable present which did not contain promising material for one of her elaborate human games.

“Did you know him?” I never accepted, literally, Clarissa’s unique age: two thousand years is an unlikely span of life even for a woman of her sturdy unimaginativeness; yet there was no ignoring the fact that she _seemed_ to have lived that long, and that her references to obscure episodes, where ascertainable, were nearly always right and, more convincing still, where they differed from history’s records, differed on the side of plausibility ... the work of a memory or a mind completely unsuperstitious and unenthusiastic: (she _was_ literal; she was, excepting always her central fantasy, matter-of-fact. To her the death or Caesar was the logical outcome of a system of taxation which has not been preserved for us except in quaintly obscure references; while the virtue of the Roman republic and the ambitions of celebrated politicians, she set aside as being of only minor importance: currency and taxation were her forte and she managed to reduce all the martial splendor of ancient days to an economic level).

She had one other obsession, however, and my reference to Ammianus reminded her of it.

“The Christians!” she exclaimed significantly; then she paused; I waited. Her conversation at times resembled chapter-headings chosen haphazardly from an assortment of Victorial novels. “_They_ hated him.”

“Ammianus?”

“No, your man Julian. It _is_ the Emperor Julian you are writing about.”

“Reading about.”

“Ah, you _will_ write about him,” she said with an abstracted pythoness stare which suggested that I was indefatigable in my eccentric purpose which, for some years, had been the study of history in a minor key.

“Of course they hated him. As well they should have ... that’s the whole point to my work.”

“Unreliable, the lot of them. There is no decent history from the time they came to Rome up until that fat little Englishman ... you know, the one who lived in Switzerland ... with rather _staring_ eyes.”

“Gibbon.”

“Yes, that one. Of course he got all the facts wrong, poor man, but at least he tried. The facts of course were all gone by then. They saw to that ... burning things, rewriting things ... not that I really ever _read_ them ... you know how I am about reading: I prefer a mystery novel any day. But at least Gibbon got the tone right.”

“Yet....”

“Of course Julian was something of a prig, you know. He _posed_ continually and he wasn’t ... what do they call him now? an apostate. He _never_ renounced Christianity.”

“He what ...”

Clarissa in her queer way took pleasure in rearranging all accepted information. I shall never know whether she did it deliberately to mystify or whether her versions were, in fact, the forgotten reality.

“He was a perfectly good Christian _au fond_ despite his peculiar diet. He was a vegetarian for some years but wouldn’t eat beans, as I recall, because he thought they contained the souls of the dead, an old orphic notion.”

“Which is hardly Christian.”

“Isn’t that part of it? No? Well in any case the first proclamation of Paris was intended ...” but I was never to hear Julian’s intent for Iris was in the doorway, slender, dressed in white, her hair dark and drawn back in a classical line from her calm face: she was handsome and not at all what I had expected, but then Clarissa had, as usual, not given me much lead. Iris Mortimer was my own age, I guessed, about thirty, and although hardly a beauty she moved with such ease, spoke with such softness, created such an air of serenity that one gave her perhaps more credit for the possession of beauty than an American devoted to regular features ought, in all accuracy, to have done: the impression was one of lightness, of this month of June in fact ... I linger over her description a little worriedly, conscious that I am not really getting her right (at least as she appeared to me that afternoon) for the simple reason that our lives were to become so desperately involved in the next few years and my memories of her are now encrusted with so much emotion that any attempt to evoke her as she actually was when I first saw her in that drawing room some fifty years ago is not unlike the work of a restorer of paintings removing layers of glaze and grime in an attempt to reveal an original pattern in all its freshness somewhere beneath ... except that a restorer of course is a workman who has presumably no prejudice and, too, he did not create the original image only to attend its subsequent distortion, as the passionate do in life; for the Iris of that day was, I suppose, no less and no more than what she was to become; it was merely that I could not suspect the bizarre course our future was to take. I had no premonition of our mythic roles, though the temptation is almost overpowering to assert, darkly, that even on the occasion of our first meeting _I knew_. The truth is that we met; we became friends; we lunched amiably and the future cast not one shadow across the mahogany table around which we sat, listening to Clarissa and eating fresh shad caught in the river that morning.

“Eugene here is interested in Julian,” said our hostess, lifting a spring asparagus to her mouth with her fingers.

“Julian who?”

“The Emperor of Rome. I forget his family name but he was a nephew, I think, of Constantius, who was dreary too though not such a bore as Julian. Iris, try the asparagus. We get them from the garden.”

Iris tried an asparagus and Clarissa recalled that the Emperor Augustus’s favorite saying was: “Quick as boiled asparagus.” It developed that _he_ had been something of a bore, too. “Hopelessly involved in office work. Of course it’s all terribly important, no doubt of that ... after all the entire Empire was based on a first-rate filing system; yet, all in all, it’s hardly _glamorous_.”

“Whom _did_ you prefer?” asked Iris, smiling at me: she too was aware of our hostess’s obsession; whether or not she believed is a different matter. I assumed not; yet the assumption of truth is perhaps, for human purposes, the same as truth itself, at least to the obsessed.

“None of the obvious ones,” said Clarissa, squinting near-sightedly at the window through which a pair of yellow-spangled birds were mating on the wing like eccentric comets against the green of box. “But of course, I didn’t know everyone, darling. Only a few. Not all of them were accessible. Some never dined out. Some that did go out were impossible and then of course I traveled a good deal. I loved Alexandria and wintered there for over two hundred years, missing a great deal of the unpleasantness at Rome, the _unstability_ of those tiresome generals ... although Vitellius was great fun, at least as a young man. I never saw him when he was Emperor that time, for five minutes wasn’t it? Died of greed. Such an appetite! On one occasion as a young man he ate an entire side of beef at my place in Baiae. Ah, Baiae, I do miss it. Much nicer than Bath or Biarritz and certainly more interesting than Newport was. I had several houses there over the years. Once when Senator Tullius Cicero was traveling with that poisonous daughter of his, they stopped....”

We listened attentively as one always did to Clarissa ... does? I wonder if she is still alive: if she is, then perhaps the miracle has indeed taken place and one human being has finally avoided the usual fate. It is an amiable miracle to contemplate.

Lunch ended without any signs of that revelation which Clarissa had led me to expect. Nothing was said which seemed to possess even a secret significance. Wondering idly whether or not Clarissa might, after all, be entirely mad, I followed the two women back into the drawing room where we had our coffee in a warm mood of satiety made only faintly disagreeable for me by that mild nausea which I always used to experience when I drank too much wine at lunch: now of course I never see wine, only the Arabs’ mint tea and their sandy bitter coffee which I have come to like.

A warm breeze fluttered the curtains: the noise of insects responding to the sun’s increasing heat droned all upon the same note, dry and insistent, a bass to the coloratura of birds, while the scent of flowers filled the airy room and I detected lilies as well as peonies, their odor almost too sweet, quite drowning the more delicate rose, the pale Hudson lilac.

Clarissa reminisced idly. She possessed a passion for minor detail which was often a good deal more interesting than her usual talks on currency devaluation.

Neither Iris nor I spoke much; it was as if we were both awaiting some word from Clarissa which would throw into immediate relief this luncheon, this day, this meeting of strangers. But Clarissa only gossiped on; at last, when I was beginning to go over in my mind the various formulae which make departure easy, our hostess, as though aware that she had drawn out too long the overture, said abruptly, “Eugene, show Iris the garden. She has never seen it before.” And then, heartily firing fragments of sentences at us as though in explanation of this move of hers, she left the room, indicating that the rest was up to us.

Puzzled, we both went onto the terrace and into the yellow afternoon. We walked slowly down the steps towards the rose arbors, a long series of trellis arches forming a tunnel of green, bright with new flowers and ending in a cement fountain of ugly tile with a bench beside it, shaded by elms.

We got to facts. By the time we had burrowed through the roses to the bench, we had exchanged those basic bits of information which usually make the rest fall (often incorrectly) into some pattern, a foundation for those various architectures people together are pleased to build to celebrate friendship or enmity or love or, on very special occasions, in the case of a grand affair, one of those fine palaces with rooms for all three, and much else besides.

Iris was from the Middle West, from a rich suburb of Detroit. This interested me in many ways, for there still existed in those days a real disaffection between East and Midwest and Far West which is hard to conceive nowadays in that gray homogeneity which currently passes for a civilized nation. I was an Easterner, a New Yorker from the valley with Southern roots, and I felt instinctively that the outlanders were perhaps not entirely civilized. Needless to say, at the time, I would indignantly have denied this prejudice had someone attributed it to me, for those were the days of tolerance in which all prejudice had been banished, from conversation at least ... though of course to banish prejudice is a contradiction in terms since, by definition, prejudice means prejudgment, and though time and experience usually explode for us all the prejudgments of our first years, they exist, nevertheless, as part of our subconscious, a sabotaging, irrational force, causing us to commit strange crimes indeed, made so much worse because they are often secret even to ourselves. I was, then, prejudiced against the Midwesterner ... against the Californians too. I felt that the former especially was curiously hostile to freedom, to the interplay of that rational Western culture which I had so lovingly embraced in my boyhood and grown up with, always conscious of my citizenship in the world, of my role as a humble but appreciative voice in the long conversation. I resented the automobile manufacturers who thought only of manufacturing objects, who distrusted ideas, who feared the fine with the primitive intensity of implacable ignorance. Could this cool girl be from Detroit? From that same rich suburb which had provided me with a number of handsome vital classmates at school? Boys who had combined physical vigor with a resistance to all ideas but those of their suburb which could only be described as heroic considering the power of New England schools to crack even the toughest prejudices, at least on the rational level. That these boys did not possess a rational level had often occurred to me, though I did, grudgingly, admire, even in my scorn, their grace and strength as well as their confidence in that assembly line which had provided their parents with large suburban homes and themselves with a classical New England education which, unlike the rest of us, they’d managed to resist ... the whole main current of Western civilization eddying helplessly about these youths who stood, pleasantly firm, like so many rocks in a desperate channel.

Iris Mortimer was one of them. Having learned this there was nothing to do but find sufficient names between us to establish the beginnings of the rapport of class which, even in that late year of the mid-century, still existed: the dowdy aristocracy to which we belonged by virtue of financial security, at least in childhood, of education, of self-esteem and of houses where servants had been in some quantity before the second of the wars; all this we shared and of course those names in common of schoolmates, some from her region, others from mine, names which established us as being of an age. We avoided for some time any comment upon the names, withholding our true selves during the period of identification. I discovered too that she, like me, had remained unmarried, an exceptional state of affairs, for all the names we had mentioned represented two people now instead of one. Ours had been a reactionary generation which had attempted to combat the time of wars and disasters by a scrupulous observance of its grandparents’ customs, a direct reaction to the linking generation whose lives had been so entertainingly ornamented with self-conscious, untidy alliances, well-fortified by suspect gin. The result was no doubt classic but, at the same time; it was a little shocking: their children were decorous, subdued; they married early, conceived glumly, surrendered to the will of their own children in the interests of enlightened psychology; their lives enriched by the best gin in the better suburbs, safe among their own kind. Yet, miraculously, I had escaped and so apparently had Iris. Both, simultaneously, were aware of this: that sort of swift, unstated communication which briefly makes human relationships seem more potential, more meaningful than actually they are: it is the promise perhaps of a perfect harmony never to be achieved in life’s estate.

“You live here alone?” She indicated the wrong direction though taking in, correctly, the river on whose east bank I did live, a few miles to the north of Clarissa.

I nodded. “Entirely alone ... in an old house.”

She sighed. “No family?”

“None here. Not much anywhere else. A few in New Orleans, my family’s original base.” I waited for her to ask if I never got lonely living in a house on the river, remote from others; but she saw nothing extraordinary in this.

“It must be fine,” she said slowly. She broke a leaf off a flowering bush whose branch, heavy with blooming, quivered above our heads as we sat on the garden bench and watched the dim flash of goldfish in the muddy waters of the pond.

“I like it,” I said, a little disappointed that there was now no opportunity for me to construct one of my familiar defenses of a life alone: I had, in the five years since my days of travel had temporarily ended, many occasions on which to defend and glorify the solitary life I had chosen for myself beside this river. I had an ever-changing repertoire of feints and thrusts: for instance, with the hearty, I invariably questioned, gently of course, the virtue of a life in the city, confined to a small apartment with uninhibited babies and breathing daily large quantities of soot; or then I sometimes enjoyed assuming the prince of darkness pose, alone with his crimes in an ancient house, a figure which could, if necessary, be quickly altered to the more engaging one of remote observer of the ways of men, a stoic among his books, sustained by the recorded fragments of forgotten bloody days, evoking solemnly the pure essences of nobler times a chaste intelligence beyond the combat, a priest celebrating the cool memory of his race. My theater was extensive and I almost regretted that with Iris there was no need for even a brief curtain raiser, much less one of my exuberant galas.

Not accustomed to the neutral response, I stammered something about the pleasures of gardens; Iris’s calm indifference saved me from what might have been a truly mawkish outburst calculated to interest her at any cost (mawkish because, I am confident, that none of our deepest wishes or deeds is, finally, when honestly declared, very wonderful or mysterious: simplicity not complexity is at the center of our being; fortunately the trembling “I” is seldom revealed, even to paid listeners, for, conscious of the appalling directness of our needs, we wisely disguise their nature with a legerdemain of peculiar cunning). Much of Iris’s attraction for me ... and at the beginning that attraction did exist ... was that one did not need to discuss so many things: of course the better charades were not called into being which, creatively speaking, was a pity; but then it was a relief _not_ to pretend and, better still, a relief not to begin the business of plumbing shallows under the illusion that a treasure chest of truth might be found on the mind’s sea floor ... a grim ritual which was popular in those years, especially in the suburbs and housing projects where the mental therapists were ubiquitous and busy.

With Iris, one did not suspend, even at a cocktail party, the usual artifices of society. All was understood, or seemed to be, which is exactly the same thing. We talked about ourselves as though of absent strangers. Then: “Have you known Clarissa long?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I met her only last winter.”

“Then this is your first visit here? to the valley?”

“The first,” she smiled, “but it’s a little like home, you know. I don’t mean Detroit, but a memory of home, got from books.”