I love modern Rome, the vibrant people, the noise, the smell, the rush of bicycles, carriages, and an occasional auto, the Piazza Farnese, Santa Maria in Trastevere, the train rides down to the beaches at Ostia, the open-air cafes. My sketchbook is always open when I walk through the city. It’s probably blasphemous to say so, but I like modern Rome because it reminds me so much of Chicago.
As for Fascist Rome, the Rome of the crowds shouting “Duce! Duce!” in the Piazza Venezia, Siobahn says it perfectly, “frigging musical comedy.”
Maybe Mussolini has made the trains run on time, but I can’t imagine anything more alien to this city than the Fascist pretense at order and discipline. The Romans love a show and II Duce provides a show. Otherwise, the city goes on its own languid, corrupt, charming way. The popes were unable to change it. Surely a second-rate journalist won’t be able to change it.
Not all Americans here agree.
Siobahn was the girl from Dublin, as brilliant a woman as I’ve ever known, intelligent, funny, outrageous. She was the daughter of a “barrister,” which is what they call a lawyer (imitating the English, I used to tell her), and had inherited from her father a contentious legal mind and, by her own admission, a skill at obscene, profane, and scatological language of which most men would be justly proud.
I find that the only time I quoted such language in my diary was in her comment about the Fascists—and even there I cleaned it up, although she did say “frigging” occasionally when she wanted to tease me.
The first day at the pensione Siobahn discovered I was shocked by her vocabulary. So, naturally, she did all she could for the rest of my time in Rome to shock me even more.
I did not say so in my diary, but, vocabulary aside, she might well have been a product of Canaryville, April Cronin with a brogue.
She was supposed to be studying music in Rome, piano with a “wee gombeen man over in Trastevere who can’t keep his filthy hands off my pure Catholic body.”
“I sympathize with his temptation.”
“Go long with you, you may be a Yank, but you’re still an Irish Catholic when it comes to women.”
There were a number of participles and adjectives that I have omitted from that quote.
To show her I was not, I swept her into my arms, kissed her solidly, and caressed her forcefully. Which was exactly what she wanted.
“You’re a great terrible rapist,” she protested insincerely. Again I censor her exact words.
Music was not her main interest in Rome, however. In fact, she was relatively indifferent to it. “My father is after getting me out of Dublin because he thinks I’m a hellion and it’s safer to have a hellion daughter in Rome than in Dublin.”
That was perhaps not altogether true either. Siobahn was given to raising hell all right—wading in Roman fountains long before Fellini thought of it, drinking wine all afternoon, flirting with every male she encountered at the English Tea Shop at the foot of the Spanish Steps (quoting Keats as she did so)—but, with one exception, chances of getting her into bed were minimal to nonexistent.
“I’m a great frigging Irish prude,” she would announce, “terrified of sex and men and the whole frigging reproductive process.”
She was a wondrous Irish beauty, a figure from a Pre-Raphaelite painting: pale cream skin, long, shiny black hair, a lithesome figure that hinted at both delicacy and strength, rich blue eyes. More ethereal perhaps than April Cronin, whose exact appearance I could not always recall as the summer wore on (I had virtuously left my sketches of her at home).
“You will make some Irishman a fine, lustful wife,” I would respond.
“I might and then again I might not.” She would tilt her chin up defiantly and pour us some more wine, a small draft for me and a very large one for her.
“Ah, sure,” I’d imitate her brogue, “you’d at least keep the bed warm on a damp Dublin evening.”
“If I were after letting him sleep in my bed.”
“If you were my woman, Siobahn, you’d have no choice in the matter.”
“We’d have to see about that, wouldn’t we now?…And would you ever stop drawing those frigging pictures of me? It interferes with enjoying this wonderful Frascati.”
She filled up both our glasses; I closed my notebook and put it on the empty chair between us.
“You’re the boss, ma’am.”
“Sure, I’m not worth drawing.”
“You must know better than that, Siobahn.” I toasted her gravely.
“I don’t at all, at all,” she insisted. “I’m just a fat Irish cow.”
I think she half believed that nonsense.
I didn’t save any of my sketches of her either, a fact I now profoundly regret.
She was too much for me altogether—too smart, too quick, too unpredictable. And, looking back on it, she was too confused about who she was and what she wanted out of life. She was fun and she was a torment.
“You’d be after having a Yank girlfriend,” she insisted that afternoon as we strolled down the Via Veneto, not quite the smart street it would later become or the tourist trap it would still later turn into. “Some immoral Protestant girl with a big body, no doubt.”
(I continue to edit her expressions.)
“Woman, I do not.”
Well, April wasn’t Protestant.
“You’re just using me for your own pleasure while you’re away from home.”
“If it is pleasure I’m after I’d be using you a lot more…and aren’t you having a fella drinking his heart away in a Dublin pub waiting for you to come back?”
“I do not,” she insisted rather too quickly.
It was a hot, languid day. When we arrived back at our pensione behind the Street of the Covered Shops, everyone was at their siesta, the only sensible way to pass the Roman afternoon.
“Like I said, woman”—I imprisoned her in my arms—“if you were mine, you’d sleep in my bed and not just at night.”
“Great frigging Yank rapist,” she sighed.
Our embrace was more passionate than usual.
“I’m not so sure you could keep me in your bed,” she said with a gasp when we were finished. “But it would be interesting to find out, wouldn’t it now?”
“It would.”
“But it would have to be a damp day in Dublin for a valid experiment, if you take my meaning.”
She turned and ran down the corridor to her room.
I wondered what would happened if I followed her. I guess I was afraid to find out.
I went back to my room and, instead of taking a sensible nap, wrote another letter to April. I think I tore it up, but since I don’t remember the date of our conversation about a damp day in Dublin, I can’t be sure.
It was in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, though we didn’t know they were roaring yet. Given the way I came into the world, I can hardly claim that there was a sexual revolution in that decade. It’s been my observation that each older generation thinks that something has happened that has corrupted its young—a war, the automobile, jazz, prohibition—and each younger generation thinks that it has invented sex. Both conceits are at best exaggerations. The power of the reproductive urges and the agony of human loneliness being what they are, the young will experiment as much as they can. Free them from supervision and control, even for a few weeks, and their play will become passionate.
Still, there were changes in the Roaring Twenties. Women had the vote now and with it, through some chemistry I didn’t quite understand, the right to drink and smoke in public. The flapper was more sexually available and more explicit about her availability than her mother would have been. April Cronin, heaven knows, was more explicitly willing than either my mother or her mother would have been.
Yet, it was only a matter of degree and sometimes not much of a degree. I’m sure my mother seduced my father with the stained-glass window of St. Catherine’s Church lurking outside her window behind the oak tree (for which I am necessarily grateful to her), p
robably without any overt sexual conversation at all. And as for April Mae, a flapper she doubtless was, but an Irish Catholic (South Side) flapper, which made a big difference.
(I think I have been unfair earlier in this memoir to my father’s uncle, who was only a few years older than Dad. I suggested that he would have been shocked and dismayed at my “premature” arrival as a healthy six-pound boy. Now I think he probably smiled ruefully and wondered, perhaps with a laugh over the strange ways of God, whether I had been conceived in his rectory. He may even have shared my delight at the likelihood that I was indeed conceived there.)
That which existed between Siobahn and me in Rome those weeks was probably not untypical of any two young people free from family and community at any time in human history—save perhaps for my romantic restraint, of which to tell the truth I am not completely ashamed even now.
My chivalry (silver armor, black horse, red plume) was put to the ultimate test on an afternoon in late July, perhaps a week before I was to leave Rome. It was unbearably hot, the air still as though all the breezes were taking a siesta too. I awoke from a nap, drenched in sweat and sexually hungry. I wanted her and I wanted her now.
I pulled on shirt and trousers and tiptoed down to Siobahn’s room.
I hesitated at the door. I was about to do something that was wrong. Even sinful. Perhaps I ought to bravely resist the temptation.
It was not very sinful, however. And, besides, it was mostly a dream. Maybe completely a dream.
I wish I could say that I thought of my love for April and that caused me to hesitate. Alas for my purity, I had forgotten completely about her.
I knocked lightly on the door.
“Yes?”
“John.”
I heard the sound of the key being turned. The door opened. Siobahn, clad in a thin slip and looking tousled from her nap, peered out.
“What do you want?” she demanded.
“You.” I shoved the door open.
She stepped back, uncertain but not resistant.
I entered the room, closed the door and locked it, and captured her in a furious embrace.
Her heart was pounding beneath my hands, she was shivering with fright, but again she did not resist me.
I shoved the slip off her shoulders and continued my assault.
“Please,” she begged meekly. “Please, John, don’t.”
She sounded like she meant it.
She would not, perhaps could not, fight me off. But she still would rather not.
“I love you,” I said, at the moment believing it.
“I love you too,” she moaned, “but please, not now.”
“You mean that?”
“God help me, I do.”
There was, I knew, indeed a boy waiting in Dublin, someone she loved as much as I loved April. Lucky boy.
I drew the slip back over her breasts and restored its straps to her shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” I said, leading her to the single chair in the narrow room.
“I’m the one who should be saying that,” she said miserably.
I kissed her forehead. “I’ll never forget you,” I said, this time meaning it. “Or this moment.”
She shook her head. “You think me a terrible, terrible tease.”
“Woman, I do not. And the boy in Dublin is a lucky man.”
“Ah, sure”—her crooked grin returned—“so is that frigging lass in Chicago.”
When we said good-bye in the Stazzione Termini we exchanged home addresses and promised to stay in touch.
“I’m sorry, Johnnio,” she sighed.
“For what?”
“I’m not sure. But what’s the point in being Irish unless you can feel guilty at a leave-taking.”
“I have no complaints against you, Siobahn.”
“Nor I against you, God knows.” She kissed me lightly. “Does that lass who’s dying to see you back in Chicago play the piano now?”
“She’s not the kind who would die to see anyone. The harp, as a matter of fact. Two harps, one that she insists on calling Irish, thought I tell her it’s Gaelic.”
“Glory be to God!”
“And that Mick who’s pining away in the Dublin pub, does he have red hair?”
“He does, the bastard. And he’s in no pub, let me tell you. He’s probably chasing some West of Ireland slut out in Salt Hill.”
We both laughed, sad at our parting, but not brokenhearted. At all, at all, as she would have said.
We exchanged marriage announcements and still exchange Christmas cards. My wife and I visited her and her family in Dublin when we made our first trip there after the war. She had not changed much, not even her vocabulary, and was obviously happily married. The electricity between us had not changed either.
I was still proud of my restraint. And regretful too.
I was miserable, lonely, frustrated on the ride back to Naples.
But life was quickly renewed when Paola checked me on board the Rex and showed me to a cabin with three bunks, though she assured me with a twitch of her eyebrow that I would be the only one in the cabin for the trip.
Diminutive Paola, with dark flashing eyes and an exquisite little body, a bright, budding flower, was not only willing to be seduced; she did everything she could to seduce me on the week-long trip from Naples back to New York. I enjoyed her assaults, truth to tell, and enjoyed my own tactics to keep her at bay. Alas for her, I felt no longing for that sumptuous form, even when it was naked in my cabin, posing at her insistence for my art, with her Carmelite scapular lying contentedly between her large breasts.
My son, whose obsession with such art exceeds mine, has catalogued those operas, in his insolent, insensitive script, as “Nude with Scapular, Watercolor,” “Nude with Scapular, Sketch #1,” and so on up to Sketch #5. They are as close to pornographic as any of my paintings have ever come. They are not saved by the scapular, incidentally; it only makes the drawings more lecherous. They are salvaged rather by the innocence in her dark eyes, an innocence that I think was really there and not a phenomenon I saw because I wanted to see it.
Why did I keep those drawings, which might well be thought to be incriminating, and destroyed portraits of Laura and Siobahn that would have seemed, I’m sure, totally innocent?
Probably because the two latter young women had been a threat to my virtue, such as it was, and Paola was an innocent amusement.
Infinitely adaptable survivor that she was, she adjusted to the role, demanding only that I paint a watercolor for her.
I would have had no guilty feelings at all, if she had not wept when I gave her the finished painting.
At twenty-five, I thought I was a mature man of the world, perhaps (in my despondent moments) too old for my fresh young April flower.
Now I realize I was a callow, blundering youth.
Yet there was some slight hint of maturity in my behavior that glorious summer—a summer in which, as I’m sure is obvious, I was gloriously happy despite (and maybe because of) my romantic problems and uncertainties.
As evidence that I was not completely juvenile, I cite this passage in my diary, written on my penultimate day on the Rex.
I’m thinking now about New York and then Chicago. Who will I want to call when I disembark? My parents, to assure them that I’m home safe and sound (and with some guilt for having deprived them of my presence in lives which will certainly not last too much longer).
Friends? Jim Clancy, naturally, to see if he has managed to keep himself out of trouble while I’ve been away.
Who else?
Do I have no friends?
That can’t be true. At work, in the neighborhood, in the troop, there are many men who would claim that I was their friend. But I have not missed them, and I suspect that they have hardly noticed my absence. I’m a pleasant enough fellow, but I have no deep friendships. The only friend I worry about is one who is utterly dependent on me.
I suppose the situation is the result of being the
only son of loving parents. I never really have needed anyone else.
Perhaps I should marry soon, lest I turn into an utterly secure bachelor who needs and wants no intimacy in his life.
That would be almost as bad as hell.
Maybe that’s what hell is.
I phoned Jim from my room in the Taft, immediately after my call to my parents.
“Hey, Johnny, swell to have you back. You meet any great girls on your trip?”
He sounded more agitated than ever before, almost frenzied. Had something gone wrong?
“A few. What’s been happening in your life?”
“Banged up the Duesy. Momma was furious. Threatened to take it away from me, but she calmed down.”
“That all?”
“Well, there’s a great new strip joint on State Street, really swell stuff. I know you don’t like that kind of thing, but it’s sensational.”
“Oh?”
“And a nigger cathouse on Thirty-fifth street. You really ought to let me take you there. Niggers enjoy it, they don’t have moral hang-ups like white women.”
“I don’t think so…what about April?”
“April? Oh, she wouldn’t dream of sleeping with me. If she would, I’d stay away from the nigger hookers. Well, maybe I would. Men have their needs, you know.”
“Did she take your ring?”
My heart did indeed seem to be in my throat.
“The ring? Oh, no. She didn’t take it but she didn’t say she wouldn’t. So, I keep trying. I think she’ll take it by Labor Day. She sure is a swell girl. Maybe when you get back, you can put in a good word for me. She really likes you. Keeps asking if I hear from you. I tell her you don’t write much.”
She hadn’t said either yes or no.
I sat there on the edge of my bed, staring at the phone.
Nothing had been solved at all.
27
“She turned him down as gently as she could.” Clarice Powers was dancing more closely to me than she had before I left for Europe. I drew her even closer to me, pressing her breasts against my chest. She did not resist.
Younger Than Springtime Page 28
