Soni pieni li camini
Delli veri patriotti
E di buoni citadini
Evviva Sampiero!
Lorna accepted my explanation, but then on the Saturday night following my return from France came back from a rehearsal and started up again. Why had Dagger come back two days ahead of me?
I told you I went to Chartres.
Our Lady of Chartres.
In the morning I left for Hyde Park without speaking.
Dudley hasn’t been to Corsica.
Dudley every chance he gets (though not fat) snacks on oily English peanut butter and grainy gray Scottish oatcakes in the pastel cylinders Tessa gets for him; Dudley staggers toward a sinking flyball in right field; Dudley after an emergency asthma refill at the Sunday chemist in Piccadilly stands with me watching marchers in summer ’68 going Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! as if gloating, and Dudley says flatly, By their lights I’m apolitical.
Dudley swims with me once a week at Swiss Cottage where on him the easily agitated water of the championship pool is like ballast that evens the straining cadence of his weighty limbs to a grace unlike his normal upright frame, strokes side by side with me, not racing, lazy in the kick like me — and Tessa flickers in the lane between us, though I think even at this late date he no more than Lorna or Jenny can know.
I set her to find those four lines of Burns, the bonnie winding banks, Bruce’s martial ranks and Carrick spear.
And here is Dudley in the distended tropics of this Corsican cassette beyond Jenny’s fingers on the family Royal portable (two carbons this time please), Dudley stating Montrose had German troops as well, but just might (as this woman of mine Mary said, though it was unlikely) have recruited from the Faeroe Isles, for though the Faeroes are off the main route they were Danish from the fourteenth century and by the sixteenth were often molested by English adventurers, which might but probably would not include the sober royalist Montrose who in any cassette was a Scot. I ask if drawing and quartering meant Montrose got castrated too.
Jenny, the following unfilmed untaped words have a place, believe me:
ME: Why was Mary here to see Mike?
DAG: To say hello from her brother.
ME: Who’s he?
DAG: Scottish Nationalist Party. SNP for paranoid. Thinks his mail is opened.
ME: Don’t tell me this kid Mike’s in the SNP.
DAG: Neither is Mary’s brother now. He was running a theater in Edinburgh last I heard.
ME: Must have been very special news for Mary to stop here.
DAG: She was going to Sardinia.
ME: This isn’t the direct route.
DAG: Got any postcards left?
ME: I gave Melanie three to mail.
DAG: So Mike said.
ME: Mike?
And this too, Jenny, to explain why Corsica ends here:
Morning again. Dagger thought of Alba in his sleep. At breakfast Mike and Dagger stand at a table across the dining hall examining the Beaulieu. The girl from fortress and café—Marie — comes in and speaks to Mike; looks over the long breakfast tables; sees me. Dagger tries to talk to her but she speaks to Mike, who follows her out.
A half hour later I’m upstairs in the men’s dorm floor writing, always slowly, when Dagger comes and says, Here I was going to phone Alba to see how she was, and she’s phoned me. She had false labor. She’s kind of scared.
He thinks we have to leave.
I speak of the east side of the island, and the town where Paoli and Napoleon’s father were; and down on the coast the ghosts of those mosquitoes are lost in the growing fields the Algerian colons reclaimed.
11
I could not settle down. I appreciate foreign shower equipment, but I’m not quite a transient. But just as you must not worry about your breathing when you first go under with a tank on your back, so now I must act evenly. My aims had found objects.
The letter left on Aut’s desk would lead him to question Claire, who would then think of her lost and found keys and my running upstairs at Monty’s with my beard damp and coming back down with the two pages she’d seen but not really with my excuse for momentarily leaving, namely to get something upstairs to show her. On May 24 Dagger had known of the group we found Friday night, May 28. Also three moments in the May 16 Softball Game showed certain arresting faces. Yet Aut, Dagger said, would not hear about our initiative from him — so Claire was acting on her own. And to judge from Monty Graf’s hints about Claire, she wasn’t acting on her own for Aut’s sake.
I, a New York babysitter, switched on the small TV and presently a Stonehenge commercial appeared, which put me in mind of my effort all these years of London nights to dream certain preconsidered dreams when asleep, in order to explore them.
I hadn’t turned up the sound.
I got up.
I went to the kitchen. By my list of calls was a stamped envelope addressed to Rose. The calls from Monty and Claire had preceded my drink with them, so no need to phone. Gilda and the stabbing seemed so far away I felt sad. My mother’s call was as far outside my present problem as the packed envelope to Rose that Sub had overlooked when he left.
I would, however, phone June.
Lorna addresses her envelopes before writing the letters. In the late fifties she would not succeed in writing the letters. I might hear the fridge door smack open; the longer it stayed open the less likely she was to remove anything from the fridge. One night she bolted into the front hall and out of the house and when she didn’t come back in the few minutes it would take to go to the pillar box at the end of the road, I went to the kitchen and found four empty red-and-blue-edged airmail envelopes addressed to the States — to her mother, her nephew, her one-time music teacher she still had a crush on, and the Metropohtan Museum of Art, and she hadn’t written a word beyond those addresses, not even the order for Christmas cards from the museum.
I dialed June.
I hung up and returned slowly to the living room hoping to approach what had come into mind in such a way that it would not have vanished after all. But it was gone. Earlier today I’d noted only that those pages left Sunday morning on Sub’s desk when I departed for the airport were gone, and in noting this I’d never thought what had happened to the thing I’d left on top of them as a paperweight and had last thought of when I’d got up to phone the charter man and had recalled his number and so had not needed my address book which I’d put on top of those pages Saturday night.
It wasn’t anywhere.
I phoned June, who answered in the middle of the first ring. I said, You can tell them I have a list of all the addresses in that address book.
She didn’t understand. She said would I meet her at ten tomorrow morning on a subway platform two stops past the stop near Sub’s. She said she was worried. There was a pause. I heard Ruby moan, cry out; I heard covers whip, then a bump. At June’s end there were men’s voices; she said with put-on affection, OK darling the Film Archives at ten to ten, I don’t know what they’ve got on tonight, think shorts by Léger, Genet, light and lively male shorts, darling.
I said, You don’t mean tonight, do you? Of course not, darling, came June’s voice, staying so cool her strength felt warm.
In the morning where you said.
I like you I like you. She hung up.
Something genuine there?
I was making things happen.