Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  What is biting me here in Paris is something different: being who I am at this juncture in history. I sense myself as irrelevant to practically everything: this room, this street, this city, this world, this universe. Except to you and Bob and the babbo. I’m just an epiphenomenon of your joint history—a wandering footnote. It’s only in connection with you people, who formed me, that I make a semblance of sense.

  You remember how in King Arthur everybody keeps saying to an errant knight, “Tell me thy name and thy condition.” Whereupon he tells, and they search his wounds and give him a bath of tepid water. It would be nice to be errant in a storybook where your fellow-knights recognize you when you say who you are. I am slightly attracted to that Smith girl I mentioned because she can place me, like somebody looking in a file: her cousin used to spend the summer in Rocky Port, and her mother met you once in New York, e così via. In fact, she’s quite boring and middle-class, through pretty; she actually said, “It’s a small world, isn’t it?” But when I’m around her, I feel slightly more real. She knows my name and my condition.

  You may think I’m wandering from the theme of equality. But I’m not. A person has to assume, especially if he’s studying philosophy, that he has a common world with the rest of humanity. Not just the common world of sense data and a common receiving apparatus but a common inner world—his mind, which he uses like a laboratory to conduct experiments. As soon as you start to philosophize, you predicate a common world. A basically democratic world, in which Socrates and his slave boy, obeying the command of reason, arrive at the same conclusion. There can’t be such a thing as an aristocratic philosophy; once philosophy starts getting exclusive, like neo-Platonism, it turns into a cult, with secret doctrines and initiates.

  Then, bang, here in Paris, I find I’m really isolated. Not only don’t I share a language (my French is lousy, to my great surprise) with most of the people I see, or a social background, or a political outlook, but we don’t have in common the most elementary rules of conduct that I thought were shared by our whole sub-species. In a minute I will tell you what I mean. Those cheesy hotels. Perhaps dormitory life should have prepared me for the shock. But I must have been lucky in school and college. No, Mother, I don’t mean stealing or homosexuality. Do you know why I had to get an apartment? Why I had to retreat into my present private world? Something I’ve already spoken of. Those communal toilets.

  It started in that military hotel. Every morning when I went to move my bowels, after waiting my turn, I found the bowl all smeared and streaked with excrement. Sometimes the previous user hadn’t bothered to flush it at all; there would be those turds in the bowl and a smell, naturally. I would flush and open the window to air the place out before sitting down; the seat was often warm from the bottom of the last guy who had defecated. It made me nauseous, but I said to myself that these were Air Force men: maybe you had to expect that they would have been toughened up, living in barracks.

  But when I moved, it was the same. There were the same oily streaks of evil-smelling shit on the porcelain; sometimes the bowl would be all splashed, even the underside of the toilet seat would be splashed, because the last occupant had had diarrhea. You know; the Paris trots. If it turned out that I only had to pee (squeamishness was making me constipated), I would find myself in a quandary: whether to carefully clean off the filth with that rubber brush and wash the underside of the toilet seat with wet toilet paper or just to pee and flush and walk out. Well, I never could bring myself to accept the second alternative. I had to clean up for the next person. Even though I felt there was something degrading about stooping, literally, to do it. And the smell would make me gag, unless I held my breath. How did you ever stand it, Mother, washing my diapers? I remember (or did you tell me?) that when I had done Number Two, you always washed them out yourself before sending them to the diaper service. I wonder if everyone did. And, if I recall, it was years before I was housebroken.

  Anyway, while laving the “lavatory,” far from giving myself a merit badge for public service, I felt furtive. What would anyone think if they found me? Actually once a girl did find me, swabbing away with toilet paper; in that hotel, the john door didn’t bolt. She hastily withdrew. At least she couldn’t know that it was somebody else’s shit I was laboriously removing. That was what I told myself when I met her afterwards in the hall.

  I couldn’t understand why I should have this complex about being caught in the act. Was I afraid of what a wig-picker might say? Or embarrassed at being a Boy Scout? I tried to examine my motives. Was I cleaning up somebody else’s shit for fear that the next person would think it was mine? There might be an element of that, I admitted. But if I had been promised that nobody would see me issuing from the toilet. I would still have cleaned it. I would have cleaned it if I knew that the hotel was going to be demolished five minutes later by a hydrogen bomb.

  Of course, Mother, I could have left it for the chambermaid. Or rung the bell and asked her to do it. One morning, in the hotel on the rue de la Harpe, while I was hovering in my room, waiting for the coast to be clear, I heard someone go into the toilet and then come right out again, banging the door; resolute steps marched to the hall telephone, and a voice, speaking good French, told the management to send somebody up instantly to clean the toilet on the fifth floor, it was filthy, disgusting. … Probably the whole floor was listening, and pretty soon the chambermaid came running. I fell in love, abjectly (and maybe I wasn’t the only one), with the owner of that voice—it was a woman, that was all I ever knew. She must have checked out that same day.

  But I could never have emulated her. Lack of courage, I suppose. Plus the feeling that I would rather be a menial myself than assume that some other menial should take work like that in her stride. That was why it disgusted me that that chambermaid I mentioned should leap to the task with alacrity just because I had tipped her. At that point I had the right to think that if she could do it for me, why not for everybody?

  The worst of those hotels, though, was realizing that some of my predecessors on the hot seat had been girls and women. That killed me. Knowing that about them. I would see a plump little Irish girl come tripping out of the toilet and go in and find her excrement waiting in the bowl, practically steaming, like horse turds. In my last hotel there was an old Englishwoman on my floor that the desk clerk said was a writer; I used to hear her typing sometimes in her room. If I saw her returning from the jakes, I would turn around and postpone answering the call of Nature, so that I wouldn’t have to follow her in and compromise her dignity. It was compromised enough, I felt, by her having to run the gauntlet every morning to attend to her needs: between 8:00 A.M. and 9:30 A.M., in that circuit, every door on the corridor is stealthily ajar, and the inhabitant is crouched like a runner to make the dash down the hall when he hears the chain pulled.

  Actually it got so I was using the toilet in American Express every time I went for my mail and urinals on the street and in cafés. I developed a horror of identifying the faces I was finding every morning in the bowl; I preferred them to remain anonymous. Finding pubic hairs in the communal bathtub never bothered me particularly.

  If this is the way things are, Mother, how am I going to be able to take the Army? I don’t mind latrines, which are sort of natural. What’s horrible to me is the combination of (relatively) modern plumbing and beastly squalor. But animals are more dainty. They hide their turds whenever they can. Except herd animals like cows and sheep. Well, horses. But that was what I kept thinking: how much more fastidious animals were. I remembered how I used to say that I preferred animals to people, which worried you.

  Don’t imagine that I was living on some Parisian skid row. Or in some of the Beat hotels, which at least might have been amusing. All my places were on the fringe of respectability. The clientele was mainly students who looked as if they came from middle-class families, where presumably you’re taught not to be physically offensive to others. The way you taught me. You taught me so long
ago that I feel as if I’d always known instinctively to clean the toilet after myself. I.e., to look and see if it was necessary. Something I did automatically, without thinking about it, like brushing my teeth in the morning or using a handkerchief or a Kleenex when I had to blow my nose.

  After a while, I began to speculate about my fellow-residents. So far as I could tell from the evidence, the majority either didn’t mind leaving traces of themselves or else didn’t notice. They just went in, did their business, and exited, pulling the chain, without waiting to see whether the water flushed. But how was it possible not to notice the traces of the guy before you and, noticing, not to react? Could humanity be divided into people who noticed and people who didn’t? If so, there was no common world.

  That thought really depressed me. If there was no agreement on a primary matter like that, then it was useless to look for agreement on “higher” principles. And I couldn’t help feeling moral about it—judging my predecessors in the toilet in a highly unfavorable way. A shitty lot. I was glad I was different from them. I mean, that there was somebody around that had a better standard of communal living and that that somebody happened to be me. But if I really believed in equality, why was I glad to be the exception? I ought to feel sad and in fact I did—both at the same time.

  I guessed I had finally found what was making me so furtive about my one-man sanitation drive—it was undemocratic. I actually began to worry that the guy or girl who came after me, finding the toilet practically sparkling and a fresh breeze blowing in, would resent the implied criticism of the prevailing mores. On the other hand, I hoped I was starting a trend. Like you, Ma. You’re always hoping people will copy you, giving them little object-lessons. You think you’re not but you are. Along this line, I went to the Prisunic and bought a can of spray deodorizer; at that point I was staying in a hotel where the facilities had no window. I left it beside the toilet, and somebody promptly stole it. What for?

  In reality some of the other denizens did get irritated with me. Because I took so long. They would bang on the door or rattle the knob. But flushing and then waiting for the tank to refill and then flushing again takes a little while; with those old toilets, you can’t hurry it. Not to mention the actual cleaning and airing. Then I would weigh the need of the person outside against my own desire to do the job right. Some days there would be layers of faeces, like geological deposits—the bottom one hard and dry and scaly and practically impossible to scrape off without Ajax or Dutch Cleanser, which naturally was not supplied. If I was feeling energetic and nobody was waiting to get in, I would clean the brush too, to the best of my ability.

  Do you think I could be slightly deranged? It was as if all those rituals were a sort of apology on my part to the rest of the world. An apology for being what I am, the kind of young pharisee whose mother has taught him to clean the toilet. As though I was willing to slave for my values to excuse myself for holding them. Yes. It occurs to me that I must have got this from you. Which is why I feel I can harangue you on this malodorous theme.

  But maybe it was not such a bad thing, finally, my initiation. Like the bishop washing the feet of twelve selected paupers from the Old Men’s Home—do you remember, we saw that in a town outside Rome at Eastertime four years ago? A lesson in humility. Only that was rather a token performance; the old men’s feet, we noticed, were clean to start with. The trouble with me is that I check my helpful impulses—giving up my seat in the Métro, for instance—when I notice that nobody else does it. My greatest weakness is the fear of appearing ridiculous. Or is that just because I am young? If I saw an old man painstakingly cleaning the toilet, I would respect him for it. Maybe my bug about equality is just the shame of being different. I will have to think about that.

  Dear Ma, I am getting sleepy. Forgive this gloomy epistle. I’ve omitted the things I like in Paris. Above all, the sky. It’s always in motion, with clouds racing across it, which is exhilarating, a real Olympian combat. You hardly ever see that at home. Or in Italy. When I’m depressed, I climb up to the Pantheon and look at the sky.

  How is the babbo, by the way? Have you heard from him? He keeps writing me with anxious offers of advice and help. Telling me to look up people he used to know twenty years ago. As if I could. One of his suggestions was that I should call Malraux. To get him to talk to my professors. And he sends me the names of cheap restaurants that no longer exist. One thing, according to him, that I must be sure to do while I am here is have an affair with a Frenchwoman. …

  Much love to Bob. Are there any art books he would like me to get him? How is the campaign going? Dag and I are going to watch the election on TV at a café. I think the French would secretly like Goldwater to get in—to prove that America is the way they imagine it.

  Love to you, Mother, from your errant son,

  Pierrot le Fou

  Greek Fire

  PETER WAS TAKING HIS plant for a walk. This morning the sun was out, for a change, and he was cutting his class. He carried it, swaying, in its pot down the flight of steps, his private companionway, that led from the rue Monsieur-le-Prince to the rue Antoine-Dubois—a mew populated by cats where Brigitte Bardot had lived in La Vérité. He was a past master of short cuts as well as circuitous ways; though he had not yet traveled by sewer, he liked to pretend that some implacable Javert was trailing him. He came out onto the boulevard St.-Germain, greeted the statue of Danton, and stopped to look in the windows of the bookshops selling medical textbooks, colored anatomical charts, and dangling cardboard skeletons.

  This uninviting merchandise exercised a gruesome attraction on Peter, who, if he could believe his family, was a known hypochondriac. The quarter where he had elected to live was dominated by the dark carcass of the old École de Médecine, around which, like suckers, had sprung up a commerce in surgical equipment, wheel chairs, orthopedic pulleys, sputum basins, artificial limbs, as well as these bookstores containing yellowing treatises on every disease he could imagine himself catching, including le grand mal. The main School of Medicine had moved to a modern building on the rue Jacob, which was why he seldom saw students around here—only an occasional browser leafing through dusty textbooks; it was as if his whole neighborhood had been put up in formaldehyde, like gallstones or those crusty corns and giant bunions he sometimes studied in the half-curtained window of a corn-cutter over near the Carrefour Bac.

  At the traffic light, he decided to turn up the rue de Tournon, his favorite street, and walk on the sunny side; there were too many hurrying pedestrians on the boulevard St.-Germain, making it hard for him to clear a path for the tall plant with its crowning glory of pale new leaves unfurling like little umbrellas. It was a member of the ivy family, as you could tell from its name—Fatshedera—although, unlike the English clan, it did not creep or clamber but stood upright. He had bought it at Les Halles on a Friday afternoon; at five o’clock the public was let into the weekly potted-plant markets, after the florists had made their selections. It pleased him that in Paris there was a “day” for every kind of thing, as in the first chapter of Genesis: Friday at Les Halles for potted plants and Tuesday for cut flowers, Sunday morning, on the quai aux Fleurs, for birds; there was even a dog market somewhere on Wednesdays. The Parisian apportionment of the week made him think of Italy, where articles of consumption were grouped, amusingly, into families resembling riddles, as, for example, the family that included salt, matches, stamps, and tobacco (bought from the tabaccaio) or the chicken family that included eggs, rabbits, and mushrooms; his father liked to remember a store in Rome that carried pork in the winter and straw hats in the summer.

  The plant-seller had warned Peter that the Fatshedera did not like too much light—which should have made it an ideal tenant for his apartment. But after a month’s residence there, looking out on the air shaft, it had grown long, leggy, and despondent, like its master. Its growth was all tending upward, to the crown, like that of trees in the jungle. The leaves at the base were falling off, one by one,
and though he had been carefully irritating the stem at the base to promote new sideward growth, it had been ignoring this prodding on his part and just kept getting taller, weed-like, till he had finally had this idea of taking it for walks, once or twice a week, depending on the weather. It did not seem to mind drafts, and the outdoor temperature on a sunny day in late November was not appreciably colder than the indoor temperature chez him. He thought he was beginning to note signs of gratitude in the invalid for the trouble he was taking; a little bump near the base where he had been poking it with his knife seemed about to produce a stalk or pedicel, and there was a detectable return of chlorophyll, like a green flush to the cheeks of the shut-in. He spoke to it persuasively—sometimes out loud—urging it to grow. So far, he had resisted giving it a shot of fertilizer, because a mildewed American manual he had acquired on the quais—How to Care for Your House Plants—cautioned against giving fertilizer except to “healthy subjects.” That would be like giving a gourmet dinner to a starving person—the old parable of the talents.

  How to Care for Your House Plants was full of housewifely pointers that appealed to his frugality, like the column he used to enjoy in the Rocky Port weekly Sentinel where readers exchanged recipes for removing berry stains from clothing and keeping squirrels out of the bird-feeding tray. He wondered what dull adventures it had had before coming to lodge on his bookshelf: had it traveled from Montclair to Stuttgart to Châteauroux in the trunk of some Army wife, along with The Joy of Cooking, “Getting the Most out of Your Waring Blendor,” “How to Use Your Singer,” and instructions, with diagram, for carving Thanksgiving turkey? Obedient to its recommendations, he had started some dish-gardens in his Stygian lair from dried lentils, slices of carrots, and grapefruit pips, setting them out in saucers under his student lamp, equipped with a seventy-five-watt bulb—his landlady had confiscated the 150-watt bulb he had put in originally. Every day he moved the positions of the saucers, so that they would share the light equally, determined not to show partiality in the vegetable kingdom, though already he preferred the lacy carrot. These dish-gardens reminded him of the primary grades: the avocado and grapefruit plants on the broad window sill the class used to water, the acorns he used to hoard, and the interesting fear (which his mother had finally scouted) that a cherry stone he had swallowed would turn into a tree branching out of his mouth.