“And,” said Agnese, “Filumena and I would make flower-chains to put around your neck and we’d go for walks on the Parade.”
Bodo barked happily, nodding his head up and down.
Agnese continued, “But Mamma loves Mino best, so you mustn’t be jealous, Bodo. Mamma loves Mino because he knows everything. She told him the date of her birth and he looked up at the ceiling a moment and said ‘That was a Monday.’ Papa asked him why a leap-year comes every four years and Mino made it as clear to him as two-times-two-makes-four.”
I said, “Mino has given me permission to tell you a secret about him.”
“Mino’s going to get married!” cried Filumena.
“Of course, Mino’s going to get married. So are we all, but Mino’s too young yet. No, the secret is that he’s getting out patents for some games he’s invented and they’re going to sweep the country like mahjong. They’re going to be in every home like parcheesi and jackstraws and he’s going to be very rich.”
“Oh!” cried the girls.
“But you aren’t going to forget us, are you, Mino?”
“No,” said Mino, dazed.
“You aren’t going to forget that we loved you before you were rich?”
“Another secret,” I announced. “He’s started inventing a practical boot so that he can climb mountains and go skating—and dance!”
Applause and cheers.
The shepherd’s pie was delicious.
Agnese said to Mino, “And you’re going to give Bodo some beautiful dog biscuits, and you’re going to give Filumena a sewing machine that doesn’t break down all the time?”
“And,” continued Filumena, “you’re going to give Agnese some singing lessons with Maestro del Valle, and you’re going to give your sister a turquoise pin because she was born in July. What are you going to give Theophilus?”
“I know what I want,” I said. “I want Mino to invite us all to lunch the first Saturday in August, 1927—the same place, the same people, the same things to eat, the same friendships.”
Bodo said “Amen”; everybody said “Amen” and Mino added “I will.”
Now we were eating prune whip. The conversation became less general. While I was talking to Rosa Bodo was asking Agnese about her interest in singing. All I was able to overhear was the name of Mozart. Bodo was suggesting to her a riddle that she was to put to Mino. He did not tell her the answer.
“Mino,” she said, “you must answer this riddle: what connection is there between the names of our host today and the composer I love best, Mozart?”
Mino looked up at the ceiling a moment and then smiled. “Theophilus is one who loves God in Greek and Amadeus is one who loves God in Latin.”
Applause and delighted wonder, especially mine.
“Bodo told me to ask you,” she added modestly.
“And Mozart knew it well,” added Bodo. “Sometimes he would sign his middle name in Greek or in Latin or in German. What would the German be, Mino?”
“I don’t know much German, but . . . liebe . . . and Gott—oh, I have it: Gottlieb.”
More applause. Miss Ailsa had been standing behind me. The Scots love learning.
Agnese addressed Mino again. “And does my name mean ‘lamb’?”
Mino shot a glance at me, but turned back to her. “It could come from that, but many people think it comes from an earlier word, from the Greek hagne that means ‘pure.’ ”
Tears started to her eyes. “Filumena, please kiss Mino on the forehead for me.”
“Indeed, I will,” said Filumena and did so.
We were all a little exhausted by these surprises and wonders and fell silent while the coffee was placed before us. (Five cents extra. )
Rosa whispered to me. “I think you know someone who’s sitting over there in that corner.”
“Hilary Jones!—Who’s he with?”
“That’s his wife. They’ve come together again. She’s Italian, but she’s not Roman Catholic. She’s Italian and Jewish. She’s Agnese’s best friend too. We’re all best friends. Her name’s Rachele.”
“How’s Linda?”
“She’s home with them. She’s out of the hospital.”
When my guests took their leave (Bodo whispering, “You should hear the conversation I’m accustomed to at luncheon!”) I crossed and shook hands with Hill.
“Teddie, I’d like you to meet my wife, Rachele.”
“Very happy to meet you, Mrs. Jones. How’s Linda?”
“She’s much better, much better. She’s at home with us now.”
We talked about Linda and Hill’s summer job in the public playgrounds and about the Materas and the Avonzino sisters.
Finally, “I want to ask you a question, Hill—and you, Mrs. Jones. I trust you not to think it’s just vulgar curiosity. I know that Agnese’s husband was drowned at sea. There must be many such widows in Newport, as there are all up and down the coast of New England. But I feel that she carries some particular burden—some additional burden. Am I right?”
They looked at one another in a kind of dismay.
Hill said, “It was terrible. . . . Nobody talks about it.”
“Forgive me. I’m sorry I asked.”
“There’s no reason you shouldn’t know,” said Rachele. “We all love her. Everybody loves her. You do see why everybody loves her, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes.”
“We all hope that that and her wonderful little boy and her singing—she sings beautifully, you know—will help her forget what happened. You tell Mr. North, Hilary.”
“Please . . . you tell him, Rachele.”
“He was on the crew of a submarine. It was way up in the north, like near Labrador. And the submarine struck a reef or something under the water and the machinery broke down. And the ice began to crush it. And the compartments got closed. They had air for a while, but they couldn’t get into the galley. . . . They had nothing to eat.”
We all looked at one another in silence.
“Airplanes were looking for them, of course. Then the ice moved away and they were found. Their bodies were brought back. Bobby’s buried in the Naval Cemetery on the Base.”
“Thank you.—I’m only free on Sunday afternoons. Can I call on you a week from tomorrow and see Linda?”
“Oh, yes. Please come to supper.”
“Thank you, I can’t stay to supper. Please write down your address, Hill. I’ll look forward to seeing you all at four-thirty.”
Throughout the following week I met one or other of the Materas every noon when I picked up my New York paper. Italians, all of us. On Sunday morning I called on Mino at nine.
“Buon giorno, Mino.”
“Buon giorno, professore.”
“Mino, I’m not going to ask you if you kept your promise to invite a girl to lunch yesterday. I don’t want to hear a word about it. From now on that’s your business. What shall we talk about today?”
He was smiling with a more than usual air of “a man who knows where he’s going” and I was answered. Young people are eager to be made to talk about themselves and to hear themselves discussed, but there is a limit—as they approach twenty—beyond which they shrink from such talk. Their interest in themselves becomes all inward. So I asked, “What shall we talk about today?”
“Professore, will you tell me what a college education gives a man?”
I spoke of the value of being required to devote yourself to subjects that at first seem foreign to your interests; of the value of being thrown among young men and young women of your own age, many of whom are as eager as you are to get the best of it; of the possibility—it’s only luck—of being brought into contact with born teachers, even with great teachers. I reminded him of Dante’s request to his guide Virgil. “Give me the food for which you have already given me the appetite.”
He was looking at me with urgent intensity. “Do you think I should go to college?”
“I’m not ready to answer that question. You are a v
ery remarkable young man, Mino. It is very possible that you have outgrown what an American university could give you. You have the appetite and you know where to find the food. You have triumphed over one handicap and the handicap was spur to the triumph. It may well be that you will triumph over this other handicap—the lack of a formal higher education.”
He lowered his voice and asked, “What do you think I lack most?”
I laughed and rose to go. “Mino, centuries ago a king in one of the countries near Greece had a daughter he loved very much. She seemed to be wasting away with some mysterious illness. So the old man journeyed to the great oracle at Delphi, bringing rich gifts, and asked the sibyl, ‘What can I do to make my daughter well?’ And the sibyl chewed the bay leaves and went into a trance and replied in verse, ‘Teach her mathematics and music.’ Well, you have the mathematics all right, but I miss in you that music.”
“Music?”
“Oh, I don’t mean what we call music. I mean the whole vast realm that’s represented by the Muses. You have your Dante—but the Divina Commedia and the Aeneid are the only works that I’ve seen here that are inspired by the Muses.”
He smiled at me, almost mischievously. “Wasn’t Urania the Muse of astronomy?”
“Oh, yes. I forgot her; but I stick to my point.”
He was silent a moment. “What do they do for us?”
I said briskly, “A school of the sympathies, of the emotions and passions, and of self-knowledge. Think it over. Mino, I can’t come next Sunday morning, but I’d like to be here the Sunday after that. Ave atque vale!” At the door I turned and asked, “By the way, do Agnese’s son and Rachele’s Linda come to call on you here?”
“They come and see Rosa and my mother, but they don’t come to see me.”
“Do you know much about the death of Agnese’s husband?”
“He was drowned at sea. That’s all I know.”
He was blushing. I guessed that he had invited Agnese to lunch on the day before. I waved my hand airily and said, “Cultivate the Muses! You are an Italian from Magna Graecia—you have probably lots of Greek blood in you also. Cultivate the Muses!”
In my Journal, from which I am refreshing my memory of these encounters, I find that I was assembling a “portrait” of Mino, as of so many others in these pages. I come upon a hastily written notation: “Mino’s handicap involves restrictions I had not foreseen. Not only is he aware that people do not talk to him ‘naturally,’ he has never received visits from the young children of his sister’s two best friends, and has probably not even seen them. The implication is that the children would be affected ‘morbidly’ by his accident. That consideration would not have arisen in Italy where the disfigured, the scrofulous, and the maimed are visible daily in the market-place—generally as beggars. Moreover, Mino seems not to have been told those details of Warrant Officer O’Brien’s death that had so distressed the Hilary Joneses and that were rendering life all but unendurable to his widow. In America the tragic background of life is hidden in cupboards, even from those who have come most starkly face to face with it. Should I some day point this out to Mino?”
On the following Sunday afternoon I called on Linda and her parents, carrying a small old-fashioned bouquet nestling in a lace-paper frill. Hilary, reunited with his wife, had become family-proud, which is always an engaging thing to see. Rachele’s family had come from the north of Italy, from the industrial region near Turin where girls of the working classes are brought up to enter the widening field of office workers and, when possible, to become schoolteachers. The little apartment was spotless and serious. Linda was still convalescent and a little wan, but delighted to receive company at tea. I was surprised to see what used to be called a “cottage piano” or a “yacht piano,” lacking an octave at the upper range and an octave in the bass.
“Do you play, Rachele?”
She let her husband answer. “She plays very well. She’s very popular at the boys’ clubs’ rallies. She sings too.”
“Usually on Sunday afternoon Agnese drops in with her Johnny. You don’t mind, do you?” asked Rachele.
“Oh, no,” I said. “I liked the Avonzino twins at once. Will you and Agnese sing for me?”
“We do sing duets. We each take two lessons a month from Maestro del Valle and he made us promise to sing every time anyone seriously asks us to. Are you serious, Theophilus?”
“Am I!”
“Then you’ll hear four of us. Our children have heard us practice so often at home that they know the music and sing with us. First we’ll sing alone, then we’ll sing again and they’ll join in. Please act as though it were a perfectly natural thing. We don’t want them to become self-conscious about it.”
Presently Agnese arrived with Johnny O’Brien, also almost four. I’m sure Johnny was a firehouse of energy at home, but like most fatherless small boys he was intimidated by two full-grown men. He sat wide-eyed by his mother. Agnese, apart from her vivacious sister, was subdued also. We talked about the lunch at the Scottish Tea Room and the glowing picture I had painted of Mino’s future. I assured them it was true. Agnese asked who Bodo was and what he “did.” I told them. All girls like one surprise a day.
“Then it was shocking our talking about him as a dog.”
“Oh, Agnese! You could see how pleased he was.”
When we’d finished tea I asked the girls to sing to us. They exchanged a glance and Rachele went to the piano. Each mother turned to her child, put her finger to her lip and whispered, “Later.” They sang Mendelssohn’s “Oh, That We Two Were Maying.” Mino should have heard that.
“Now we’ll do it again.”
The mothers sang softly; the children sang unabashed. I glanced at Hilary. So this was what he almost lost for Diana Bell!
Agnese said, “For a bazaar at my church we learned some parts of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater.”
They sang two terzets of that; first alone, then with the children. Pergolesi should have heard that.
Newport is full of surprises. I was learning that perhaps the Ninth City is nearer to the Fifth—perhaps to the Second—than any of the others.
When we had taken our leave I walked to her house door with Agnese, hand in hand with Johnny.
“You have a beautiful voice, Agnese.”
“Thank you.”
“I think that Maestro del Valle must have ambitious plans for you.”
“He does. He has offered to give me regular lessons without fees. With my pension and my daily job I could pay for them, but I have no ambition.”
“No ambition,” I repeated, meditatively.
“Have you ever suffered terribly, Theophilus?”
“No.”
She murmured, “Johnny, music, and submission to the will of God . . . they . . . they hold me.”
I ventured a very rash remark, still meditatively. “The War left behind many hundreds of thousands of young widows.”
She answered quickly, “There are some aspects of my husband’s death that I cannot talk about with anybody—not with Rosa or Rachele, not even with my mother or Filumena. Please, don’t . . . say . . .”
“Look, Johnny, do you see what I see?”
“What?”
I pointed.
“A candy store?”
“Open on Sunday too! When I went to call on Linda I took her a present. I didn’t know that you were going to be there. Come up to the window and see what you’d like.”
It was what used to be called a “notions” store. In one corner of the window were toys—model planes, boats, and automobiles.
Johnny began pointing, jumping up and down. “Look! Look, Mr. North! There’s a submarine, my daddy’s submarine. Can I have that?”
I turned to Agnese. She gave me a harrowed glance of appeal and shook her head. “Johnny,” I said, “today’s Sunday. When I was a boy my father never let us buy toys on Sunday. Sunday we went to church, but no games and no toys.” So I marched in and bought some chocolates. When we reac
hed the Avonzino home, he said goodbye nicely and went into the house.
Agnese stood with one hand on the swinging gate. She said, “I think you have urged Benjy—I mean, Mino—to ask me to lunch?”
“Before I ever knew that the Avonzino sisters existed, I urged him to bring any girl or girls he knew to the Scottish Tea Room. I then urged him to bring any girl, preferably a different girl in order to widen his acquaintance, on the following Saturday. He said no word to me about inviting you.”
“I have had to tell him that I cannot accept such invitations again. I admire Mino, as we all do; but weekly meetings in a public place like that are not suitable. . . . Theophilus, do not tell anyone what I am about to say: I am a very unhappy woman. I am not capable even of friendship. Everything is just play-acting. I shall be helped, I know”—and she pointed with forefinger from an otherwise motionless hand to the zenith—“but I must wait patiently for that.”
“Please go on play-acting for Johnny’s sake. I don’t mean by going to lunches with Mino, but by seeing some of us in groups from time to time. I think Bodo is planning a kind of picnic, but his car can hold only four and I know he wants to see Mino and yourself again. . . .” She did not raise her eyes from the ground. I waited; finally I added, “I do not know your intolerable burden, Agnese; but I do know that you do not wish it to be a shadow on Johnny’s life forever.”
She looked at me, frightened; then said abruptly, “Thank you for walking home with us. Oh, yes, I am happy to meet Mino anywhere when there are others in the company.” She put out her hand. “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Agnese.”
At seven o’clock I telephoned Bodo. You could always catch him dressing for some dinner party.
“Grüss Gott, Herr Baron.”
“Grüss Gott in Ewigkeit.”
“What time is your dinner engagement tonight?”
“Eight-fifteen. Why?”
“When could I meet you in the Muenchinger-King bar to lay a plan before you?”
“Is seven-thirty too soon?”
“See you then.”
Diplomats are punctual. Bodo was wearing what we used to call in college his “glad rags.” He was dining at the Naval War College with some visiting “brass,” admirals of all nations—decorations (known to the lower ranks as “fruit salad”) and everything. Quite a sight!
Theophilus North Page 26
