“I thought you said she wasn’t consciously sexy,” I commented.
“And it’s true,” he said. “You think she was baiting her hook with flattery. She wasn’t. She was just stating a fact. I had my points; but I was also unbearable. Twenty years of formal education and a lifetime of my poor mother had produced a real monster.” On the outspread fingers of his left hand he itemized the monster’s components. “I was a learned bumpkin; I was an athlete who couldn’t say Bo to a girl; I was a pharisee with a sense of inferiority; I was a prig who secretly envied the people he disapproved of. And yet, in spite of everything, it was worth while to put up with me. I was enormously well meaning.”
“And in this case, I imagine, you did more than mean well. Were you in love with her?” I asked.
There was a little pause; then Rivers slowly nodded.
“Overwhelmingly,” he said.
“But you couldn’t say Bo to a girl.”
“This wasn’t a girl,” he answered. “This was Henry’s wife. Bo was unthinkable. Besides, I was an honorary Maartens, and that made her my honorary mother. And it wasn’t just a question of morality. I never wanted to say Bo. I loved her metaphysically, almost theologically—the way Dante loved Beatrice, the way Petrarch loved Laura. With one slight difference, however. In my case it happened to be sincere. I actually lived my idealism. No little illegitimate Petrarchs on the side. No Mrs. Alighieri, and none of those whores that Dante found it necessary to resort to. It was passion, but it was also chastity; and both at white heat. Passion and chastity,” he repeated, and shook his head. “At sixty one forgets what the words stand for. Today I only know the meaning of the word that has replaced them—indifference. Io son Beatrice,” he declaimed. “And all is dross that is not Helena. So what? Old age has something else to think about.”
Rivers was silent; and suddenly, as though to elucidate what he had been saying, there was only the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece, and the whispers of flames among the logs.
“How can anyone seriously believe in his own identity?” he went on. “In logic, A equals A. Not in fact. Me-now is one kettle of fish; me-then is another. I look at the John Rivers who felt that way about Katy. It’s like a puppet play; it’s like Romeo and Juliet through the wrong end of the opera glasses. No, it’s not even that; it’s like looking through the wrong end of the opera glasses at the ghosts of Romeo and Juliet. And Romeo once called himself John Rivers, and was in love, and had at least ten times more life and energy than at ordinary times. And the world he was living in—how totally transfigured!
“I remember how he looked at landscapes; and the colors were incomparably brighter, the patterns that things made in space unbelievably beautiful. I remember how he glanced around him in the streets, and St. Louis, believe it or not, was the most splendid city ever built. People, houses, trees, T-model Fords, dogs at lampposts—everything was more significant. Significant, you may ask, of what? And the answer is: themselves. These were realities, not symbols. Goethe was absolutely wrong. Alles vergängliche is not a Gleichnis. At every instant every transience is eternally that transience. What it signifies is its own being, and that being (as one sees so clearly when one’s in love) is the same as Being with the biggest possible B. Why do you love the woman you’re in love with? Because she is.
And that, after all, is God’s own definition of Himself: I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some of her isness spills over and impregnates the entire universe. Objects and events cease to be mere representatives of classes and become their own uniqueness; cease to be illustrations of verbal abstractions and become fully concrete. Then you stop being in love, and the universe collapses, with an almost audible squeak of derision, into its normal insignificance. Could it ever stay transfigured? Maybe it could. Maybe it’s just a question of being in love with God. But that,” Rivers added, “is neither here nor there. Or rather it’s the only thing that’s either here, there or anywhere; but if we said so, we’d be cut by all our respectable friends and might even end up in the asylum. So let’s get back as quickly as possible to something a little less dangerous. Back to Katy, back to the late lamented…”
He broke off.
“Did you hear something?”
This time I distinctly did. It was the sound, muffled by distance and a heroic self-restraint, of a child’s sobbing.
Rivers got up and, thrusting his pipe into his pocket, walked to the door and opened it.
“Bimbo?” he called questioningly, and then to himself: “How the devil did he get out of his crib?”
For all answer there was a louder sob.
He moved out into the hall and a moment later there was the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs.
“Bimbo,” I heard him saying, “good old Bimbo! Come to see if you could catch Santa Claus red-handed—was that it?”
The sobbing mounted to a tragic crescendo. I got up and followed my host upstairs. Rivers was sitting on the top step, his arms, gigantic in their rough tweed, around a tiny figure in blue pajamas.
“It’s grandpa,” he kept repeating. “Funny old grandpa. Bimbo’s all right with grandpa.” The sobbing gradually died down. “What made Bimbo wake up?” Rivers asked. “What made him climb out of his crib?”
“Dog,” said the child, and at the memory of his dream he began to cry again. “Big dog.”
“Dogs are funny,” Rivers assured him. “Dogs are so dumb they can’t say anything but bow-wow. Think of all the things Bimbo can say. Mummy. Weewee. Daddy. Pussycat. Dogs aren’t smart. They can’t say any of those things. Just bow-wow-wow.” He put on an imitation of a bloodhound. “Or else bow-wow-wow.” This time it was a toy Pomeranian. “Or else wo-o-o-ow.” He howled lugubriously and grotesquely. Uncertainly, between sobs, the child began to laugh. “That’s right,” said Rivers. “Bimbo just laughs at those dumb dogs. Every time he sees one, every time he hears that silly barking, he laughs and laughs and laughs.” This time the child laughed whole-heartedly. “And now,” said Rivers, “grandpa and Bimbo are going to take a walk.” Still holding the child in his arms, he got up and made his way along the corridor.
“This is grandpa’s room,” he said, opening the first door. “Nothing of great interest here, I’m afraid.” The next door stood ajar; he walked in. “And this is mummy’s and daddy’s room. And here’s the closet with all mummy’s clothes. Don’t they smell good?” He sniffed loudly. The child followed suit. “Le Shocking de Schiaparelli,” Rivers went on. “Or is it Femme? Anyhow, it serves the same purpose; for it’s sex, sex, sex that makes the world go round—as, I’m sorry to say, you’ll find out, my poor Bimbo, in a very few years from now.” Tenderly he brushed his cheek against the pale floss of the child’s hair, then walked over to the full-length mirror set in the door of the bathroom. “Look at us,” he called to me. “Just look at us!”
I came and stood beside him. There we were in the glass—a pair of bent and sagging elders and, in the arms of one of them, a small, exquisite Christ child.
“And to think,” said Rivers, “to think that once we were all like that. You start as a lump of protoplasm, a machine for eating and excreting. You grow into this sort of thing. Something almost supernaturally pure and beautiful.” He laid his cheek once more against the child’s head. “Then comes a bad time with pimples and puberty. After which you have a year or two, in your twenties, of being Praxiteles.
But Praxiteles soon puts on weight and starts to lose his hair, and for the next forty years you degenerate into one or other of the varieties of the human gorilla. The spindly gorilla—that’s you. Or the leather-faced variety—that’s me. Or else it’s the successful businessman type of gorilla—you know, the kind that looks like a baby’s bottom with false teeth. As for the female gorillas, the poor old things with paint on their cheeks and orchids at the prow…No, let’s not talk about them, let’s not even think.”
The child in his arms yawned at our reflections, then turned, pillowed his head on the man’s shoulder and closed his eyes. “I think we can take him back to his crib,” Rivers whispered and started toward the door.
“One feels,” he said slowly, as we stood looking down, a few minutes later, at that small face, which sleep had transfigured into the image of an unearthly serenity, “one feels so desperately sorry for them. They don’t know what they’re in for. Seventy years of ambushes and betrayals, of booby traps and deceptions.”
“And of fun,” I put in. “Fun to the pitch, sometimes, of ecstasy.”
“Of course,” Rivers agreed, as he turned away from the crib. “That’s what baits the booby traps.” He switched off the
