The Gallery Read online

  —My mother said I was very high-strung.

  The Neapolitan flounced out with a broom and swept up the splinters. The signorina drew another double vermouth setting it quite a length from his elbow. He watched the cold superiority creep over her face as pettishly she stroked her furpiece. She looked at him the way a nun regards the convent cat who has just made a mess in the parlor. He laughed to cover his chagrin, but he didn’t care much for the sound of his laugh. It trailed into a cough, and he started thinking up some more ways to get in touch with the signorina. She was only a foot away from him, but she seemed to be receding into an icy planet. He had the impression that she’d continue to sell him double vermouths till closing time, but that she considered him just some maggot in boots and suntans that had wriggled out of the cracks in the arcade. And with this thought his elbow flinched into a spasm that sent the third glass jingling to the floor.

  —I guess the point is to drink it, he said, laughing again.

  Out came the broom; a fourth vermouth was poured. Panicky, he lifted it to his lips, noticing that his whole arm vibrated like a drunkard’s who laces a towel round his neck to guide a pick-me-up to his mouth in the morning. He closed his eyes and swallowed three doubles in a row. He waited, leaning his red face in his hands, till he could feel the stuff flickering in his gut with an uneasy flame. The tremors in his muscles gave one final flip and ironed out into a kind of feverish peace. He lifted his glance to look at the signorina, but she’d moved off to wait on some New Zealand soldier at the far end of the bar. Where she’d been standing, he now saw his own face in the mirror behind the tiers of wine bottles.

  —Michael Patrick, he said, how even your own mother could have loved you? . . .

  For his was a face pretty much like everyone else’s who isn’t anybody in America and less than that in the army. His eyes were raw from a week’s drinking; his cheeks looked burnt from the inside by a fire without point or focus. And his body, slim and lithe, was good enough to draw fire from Jerry and to dish it out in return. His cap was set on his head, not at the jive angle that young parachutists love but strategically, to mask the fact that at twenty-seven he was losing his hair, but fast. He couldn’t bear to look at himself, and he didn’t see how anybody else would want to either. Naturally this signorina had moved away. He was just another GI who’d been on the line and was going back to it. There were thousands in Naples like him, except that they pretended to be surer of themselves. They had the ability, in place of his tired negation, to dramatize themselves for the appropriate minute. They hadn’t yet seen the pointlessness of themselves.

  Nevertheless he moved toward the signorina with his empty glass. As long as he could afford to buy her rotten vermouth, she’d have to serve him. He pushed his glass almost imperiously into her folded hands. This brought a smile to her face, her small pointed teeth looking as though they’d nip her own lips, or whomever she kissed.

  Michael Patrick had an envy of Italians, seeing a certain kinship between them and the Irish. But the Irish stayed hurt all their lives; the Italians had a bounce-back in them. All his life he’d been silent, waiting and listening for some cue that would set him off on one of those oily harangues that people vent at wakes, twisting their rhetoric and loving it for its own cadence and invention. But after months of being alone with himself a reserve of chatter had been dammed up in him, punctuated with shellfire. He so wanted to talk on and on just for the joy of creating sentences! But he couldn’t talk to himself. Nor did he want what is known as polite conversation. He wondered if in all Naples tonight there was someone to whom he could address himself, in whom he could find the function of an Ear, an Ear that would listen him out of himself till there’d be nothing more to say. Actually he had nothing special to say—a mere loving recitation of facts about himself, the flight of the plane from the evac hospital, his thoughts while circling over Rome. And after that he might start on the old days in Easton, Pennsylvania, on his brother who always did him dirt in their partnership in the seed business. His life was bursting to be released to someone, someone who would really listen to him. Words —they meant so little, but he felt like a bottle with a narrow opening that must be drained drop by drop. He wanted to purge himself by talking. After that he might feel like reaching forward with his mouth opened for a kiss . . . .

  She poured him another vermouth. In grabbing for the chit to pay her, he spilled everything he had in his breast pocket over the top of the bar. The two opera tickets lay face up before her.

  —If you’d like to come tonight, he said in a rush. If your father would let you. . . . It’s La Bohème.

  A quick delight coursed over her face, like all the women in the world when a treat is offered them.

  —Ma . . . , she whispered back, senza papà non potrei.

  The fat Neapolitan made a clucking noise in his throat.

  —O my back, Michael Patrick said, raising his voice. You Ginso girls are all alike. You automatically assume that every GI wants to get in your pants. . . . And of course you’re right.

  He put out his hand and touched the wolf’s head that bit its own tail and clasped her furpiece. She straightened up, and he saw that she was looking at his fingernails, bitten back so far that they formed mangled halfmoons.

  —Listen, he said, trying to force the stridency out of his voice. I’m not pulling any hero stuff on you. But this is my last night in Napoli. Do you know where I’m going tomorrow? I don’t look forward to it. . . . Oh I know you’ve all been bombed here. But this is different. . . . I’ll be out there all alone with the noise, running through hell all by myself. It’s different. You have no idea of how alone it is. And while I was there last month, I dreamed of all the things I’d do if I ever got back to Napoli. . . . And here I am, and nothing’s panning out the way I hoped it would. . . . I feel like a kid reaching for jam on a shelf that’s too high up. And I don’t know what it really is I’m reaching for. Maybe life itself. . . . Do you suppose maybe I’m already dead? What would you do if I touched you? I’m in a dream from which I can’t wake up. . . . Capeesh?

  —Cosa? she asked, and he realized that coquetry wasn’t atrophied in her.

  —Now if I was an officer, you’d be nicer to me. I haven’t got any gum or chocolates. Just me and two opera tickets and some cigarettes.

  He knew he was hitting too gloomy a strain. So he drank another vermouth and lit a cigarette. He carried his butts in a small plastic case. Inside the transparent cover was the picture of a dark girl he’d found when his company looted a farmhouse near Poggibonsi. He’d never had a steady girl in his life like all the other GI’s.

  —È bella La Bohème, she said, stroking her fur speculatively.

  —No, I don’t know whatall about music, he said, re-establishing himself on her plane. In the States I was too busy for it. Then when I hit Oran, all the cravings of my life caught up with me. Like a disease when you stop treatment in the middle of the cure. One day at the Red Cross in Oran I found out that the music expresses all that I look for and never find. . . . I don’t see very much to our own music. You see, it doesn’t give me that feeling of watching someone die, and you can’t do anything to help.

  She began to sing “Pistol-Packin’ Momma.”

  —O my back! he said excitedly. That’s what I mean. I hate that goddam tune. It reminds me of a fat old bitch jigtiming on the edge of her grave. She’s wearing black lace stockings, she’s tearing off her corset, she’s kicking off her shoes, and the paint is running down her face.

  —È bella, però, la musica americana, she said, and sang it through again.

  With another vermouth in his hand Michael Patrick walked to the entrance of the bar and looked out into the arcade. The hour was close to sunset and the place was humming like an anthill. A lounging kid screamed, Wanna eat, Joe? Old ladies in black passed on the arms of their daughters. Neapolitan doctors and lawyers swarmed by arm in arm from their offices, gesticulating and complaining. And Michael Patrick saw that sun
light in this arcade had a thick swooning texture like tried gold melting. The vermouth was now well into his brain, his nerves no longer snapped. He began to taste that half-mulled feeling of time deliciously unrolling before him. This reaching out in vain was only felt when he tried to mesh himself with the gears of other people. When he was drinking alone, he was aware of certain untapped potentialities in himself. But when he talked to others, something in him went limp and kept sneering at him that he was alone alone alone and wrapped in some inaccessible womb, that nobody else really cared, or that they were doubled up with secret laughter at the sight of him.

  These long-felt nibblings of defeat so enraged him that he spun round in his boots and went back to the bar. The signorina had been watching him where he stood between her and the setting sun. This time he broached her almost in ardor.

  —Tell me the difference between your life and mine. Don’t answer, even if you could. . . . It’s a question of time. . . . But how important that is, like looking back over a hundred years after you’ve lived through them. . . . I suppose you’ve got a fidanzato? A little Ginso who’s a P/W in Africa?

  She stared curiously into his eyes, having caught the word fidanzato. And she seemed to catch some of the virus of his desperation, for her hands lay quiet where they’d been fretting her furpiece.

  —You lucky lucky girl. . . . And that long stretch you’ve got ahead of you. . . . He’ll come home to you when the war’s over. Then you’ll have one of those Neapolitan weddings, which will be the last thing you’ll have to look forward to till a big black hearse pulls you through the streets. . . . O that long long time you’ve got ahead of you! You’ll both go walking arm in arm on summer evenings on Via Chiaia. You’ll stop for ice cream or caffè espresso. And each year there’ll be one more kid by your side. . . . How many rooms will you have? Maybe two, and one big bed with a picture of the Madonna of Pompei over it. She’ll watch you two kissing and fighting at night, and she’ll hear your cries when your kids are born. . . . I can see them now . . . Neapolitan kids I kind of liked even when they stole from me. . . . That’ll be your life. It’s not very much, but it’s life. And it’s more than GI’s think it is. . . .

  Michael Patrick had started to flail his arms about just like a Ginso. But his voice hadn’t risen out of that low weariness that always sounded as though he were going to cry. The signorina’s father had come out from behind the cash register, put both hands on his hips, and was watching them with a kind of sly benevolence. Neapolitans take their theater wherever they find it. The old man had a stomach that rippled and creased under a GI belt fastened into a rattail along his shiny pencil-striped pants. Then he made a motion, graceful and insinuating, that his daughter should serve a drink on the house.

  —Sometimes, said Michael Patrick, wiping his mouth with an olive-drab handkerchief, I like you Eyeties better than I do my own. There’s something . . . good . . . and gentle in most of you. . . . Where are we going in this war? . . . I don’t know, for all the orientation talks they used to give us. . . . There’s something about Italy and you Eyeties that gets me. There’s dirt and poverty here. . . . But there’s something else that gets me. Seems to survive your battered towns and your bitter men and your degraded women. . . . Why is all this? Why must it be? Something terrible has come into this world. . . .

  There was a small Kiwi listening now at the back of the bar. He wore tight shorts and a crazy beret. He leaned against his Marsala and cheered feebly:

  —Give em whatall, Yank!

  —Hi, Dig, Michael Patrick said listlessly.

  —Grazie, Nazi.

  —Prego, Dago.

  In his life Michael Patrick hadn’t said three sentences in a row. Yet here he was like a priest at the time for the monthly collection, ringing all the changes on a theme. The signorina’d been watching him with penetration. He took his vermouth and paced again restlessly to the door of the bar, where the iron shutters were rolled up over his head. His gait was easy now in those same polished boots in which he’d got trenchfoot.

  Through a sudden gap in the crowd he saw to the other arch of the arcade, to a flight of stairs down into Via Verdi. Up these bounded three Alpini lieutenants in their shorts and feathered sugarloaf caps. He mused on what it must be like to be an Italian soldier in August, 1944—half of them walking shyly around Naples, unable to have a girl because the Allies were paying twenty hundred lire; half of them in P/W stockades scattered from India to the States. Italian soldiers of a vanquished army, inured to the idea of patria and screaming throngs in Piazza Venezia and their names among the fallen on a bronze plate in the municipio. . . .

  And Michael Patrick saw the posters with which the arcade was spattered, urging the Neapolitans to join a hundred political parties, to drive out the king if they wanted white bread for their babies. And there were some hammer-and-sickles daubed in red on the walls. And there was a quotation from a Mussolini speech on the heroism of the people of Naples. The hysterical block letters had been half scratched out; there were mud and liquid streaks blotching the Duce’s ranting words.

  Office girls padded by him in their makeshift sandals. They had no stockings to wear. The fuzz and the sandfly bites showed on their dark legs. They crooned together in a misty passion, resting their heads on one another’s shoulders:

  Core, o core ’ngrato,

  T’aie pigliato ’a vita mia;

  Tutto è passato,

  E nun ’nce pienze chiù . . .

  It was time to move on someplace else. The opera didn’t begin for another hour, yet an infantry itch was in his legs. He hadn’t found the Ear he wanted. The vermouth had heated him to the bubbling slow gold of the broiling sun in the arcade. The tune that the girls had sung invaded him with a yearning stronger than his tentative desire for the smug little signorina with her furpiece, pitiful as an Easter hat on a hungry whore.

  Michael Patrick set down his glass with a gesture that he strove to make as calm as possible. He took the girl’s hand. Her father sighed noisily behind the cash register. She didn’t withdraw her hand, though a remoteness which veiled her eyes showed a disappointment that he hadn’t played her game her way.

  —Good-by to you and your lousy vermouth. I don’t know what I’ll do with the other opera ticket. . . . And when I say good-by, I mean addio. . . . There’ll be so many others who’ll come in this bar and plank down twenty-four lire for vermouth. . . . But how sick you must be of all of us, the whole goddam crowd with their trousers tucked into their buckled boots, their shoulder patches, their yelling, and their cussing. . . . But anyhow I never rumpled your hair or made a pass at your breasts. . . . I’ll remember you longer than you’ll remember me. . . . Why? Because you’ll be one of the last things I saw in Naples. . . . Next week, a few hundred miles north of here, there’s something waiting for me with my name on it. . . . I feel it.

  The father raised his hands to heaven with the soft horror of a Jew.

  —Well, said Michael Patrick, avoiding his own smile in the mirror, there are worse places to be buried than in Italy. In the summer the ground is warm and dry, and the GI mattress cover seals in the rot and stink. . . . But . . . I wish someone would tell me why I must go up to Florence when life’s all around me here.

  He clapped his hand over his mouth, tasting the dank tobacco on his blunt fingernails. This was the same hand that had sold seed packets to housewives in Easton, Pennsylvania, that had jerked the trigger of his carbine, that had slipped Tedeschi watches off the sprawled hushed bodies of Feldwebels, that had cooked a chicken in an OP at Frosinone. He pushed his cap a little farther back on his head—to where the hair began to fade out—and went off into the arcade.

  The sun knifed his eyes, dilated from Vermouth. Blinking, he hated the fierce Neapolitan sun. Until he hit the light, he’d been at just the right stage, but he knew how margins are: you exceed them because you’re always reaching for a horizon.

  Pigeons were scooping down through the domed skylight of the arcade, scudd
ing mockingly through the grates where the glass used to be, dropping their white excretions on the stone parquet. They had a meditative way of calling one another that carried like a ground bass under the squeaking hurrying human beings below them.

  The vermouth he’d drunk was pressing on his abdomen, so he nosed out a dark slit opening off the arcade into a garden with a fountain. It was cool in this court within a court. And since no housewives were screaming to one another across the balconies, Michael Patrick stood on the rim of the fountain, unbuttoned his trousers, and drilled the dead water in the pool.

  —Mamma mia! a voice cried behind his shoulder. Ecco le porcherie pubbliche che fanno gli Alleati!

  Hastily he righted his fly and tottered back off the fountain. A woman in a soiled house dress was scolding at him from a balcony. She had a baby by the hand and a smile on her big face as though the whole world was among the category of her children. Her child wrapped its little legs around the gratings and waved at Michael Patrick, whose face got redder than ever.

  —Joel Gimme caramelle! the baby called.

  —Ma stai zitto! the woman shrieked, slapping its little head.

  Then with another wave the two whisked behind the long shutter of the balcony door.

  He’d have liked to call them back to talk to him for a little while, yet he was ashamed that they’d surprised him going about his business. Something in the woman’s face had been so innocent of meanness, something easy and strong in the sloppy braid of her hair about her temples. She reminded him of all the good mothers he’d ever known, who go about their childbearing and cooking and slavery with a comic abstraction and a delight in what they are doing. He knew that she loved her child. And something told him that at the very moment of her railing, she’d loved himself too. But now she’d gone back into her house. Probably on the stove she had a kettle of pasta cooking, making supper for her man and the other children. Anyhow she’d gone.