Since as a writer I’ve ranged about from fifth century BC to most of our relatively brief American story I am quite used to the plunge into the past, often prompted by newly revealed ruins. At fourteen when sent off to the most uncongenial Los Alamos Ranch School I ignored as much as was possible the horses not to mention most of my fellow students (William Burroughs had come and gone by the time I arrived). And so I was left with the school library where, to the horror of the teachers, I read my way through the Yale edition of Shakespeare; then, with pick and shovel, I took over a nearby Indian Pueblo ruin and excavated the original ground level in the course of a season to the bewilderment, commingled with loathing, of an ahistorical faculty chosen for their hearty Theodore Rooseveltian love of the great wild west outdoors. I’ve disliked TR, the spiritual founder of Los Alamos, to this day. Happily my excavations exempted me from mindless games. Then, after the Easter vacation of 1940 I went “home” to the Potomac Palisades manse of Mr. and Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss where I told her that the headmaster of the Ranch School was a remarkably busy pederast. Nina chose to disbelieve me by which time I had no interest at all in her opinion on any subject. More to the point, that was the spring when the Nazis occupied France and we were flung into history with a vengeance. Luckily, Gene also hated Los Alamos, particularly the Auchincloss-size bills that he had to pay, and so I was shipped off to Exeter, a place in real time. My last look at my “dig” was emblematic of all art. What I had so painstakingly dug up had been crudely filled in with desert dust. I still retained some pieces of ancient pottery.
But on a vivid blue day overlooking the sea there were few tourists at Santorini so one could wander about in rooms unoccupied for several thousand years. While Howard and Paul drank beer at a taverna nearby, I was pacing off rooms. Measuring doors—how short the people must have been. Every now and then I had a fleeting glimpse of one of them just around a corner only to find that he had been painted on a wall. But what had gone on in the house? Had it doubled as a shop? Thus the compulsive historical mind feeds itself on potsherds. And not much else. At that time Santorini had both too much history and too little…There were those who believed that it was Atlantis similarly destroyed; others believed that mainland Crete had been Atlantis. Before one chose either tale there would have to be some overarching holistic reason not yet revealed by the archaeological shovel. Or a flash of intuition. But none came, and so we sailed away on the Helena and none of us ever came back and a world starting to form in my mind simply aborted, as indeed had the “real” one under the volcano.
My father’s death was celebrated by a perfectly emblematic event: the first Americans had landed on the moon. Father and son equally gasped as a hollow voice told us that this was a small step for a man but a giant step for mankind. There had been much discussion about what sort of a step it would prove to be: there were those who maintained that the moon was enveloped in a shroud of dust and that the first man to set foot on the surface would promptly disappear from view. But he did not. The dust was only a few inches thick framed by the black sky that enfolded this sterile globe about which our race had speculated since we first left the primordial ooze for the tumultuous planetary air that, as we stared at the television set, it looked as if we might soon abandon for the oxygenless lunar landscape stepping-stone, if nothing else, to outer space and the ultimate encounter with the Big Bang, our true origin where, at last, we could meet ourselves and—merge? Or would time—our time at least—have a stop as a circular eternity swallows us up?
The physics and metaphysics were fascinating to contemplate. Unfortunately we were given little time to contemplate this greatest of events. Pentagon machinery had overtaken the moon; we had surpassed the Communists was the general theme of the celebration of what was happening. The whole world was ours—and other worlds, too. Gene, who disliked boasting, switched off the sound. But I was in a mood for boasting. I told him that after Kennedy was elected president he asked a number of us to write him what should be the principal goals of his administration: the exploration of space, I declared. Science fiction has a loyal audience. The Russians had already got into space with Sputnik. Rather cynically, I had noted that since it was generally agreed that most earthly problems were not going to be solved by the governments now in place a total break with the planet would not only divert everyone’s attention but literally open new vistas.
Gene was amused: “I can just see the wars over who gets the mineral rights to the moon.” But he was delighted to be still alive at that moment. He liked to recall how as director of air commerce he had launched an aerial salute to the Wright brothers involving most of the aircraft in the nation. “I always knew we were headed for the moon and beyond but I never thought that I would live to see it.” He did by some months.
He had been struck at New Year’s by an odd pneumonia. X-rays revealed lung cancer. For someone who neither smoked nor drank and could still fit into his West Point uniform Gene was given to a host of illnesses, some quite mysterious. The fact that the lung cancer disappeared in a week or two meant that one of his mystery ailments had struck. When lungs were found to be clear, his mood changed to normal. To celebrate he smoked a small cigar, his first in several decades. But he resolutely refused his doctor-cousin’s excellent dry martini whose ingredients and shaker were always close to hand thanks to a well-trained nurse. Finally, the lung cancer made a mysterious brief reappearance. Then the ultimate non-mystery: he had cancer of the kidney and must be promptly operated upon. It was I who drank our doctor-cousin’s perfect martini. When the day of the operation broke, as always, at dawn to suit some arcane hospital timetable he set aside his chronic hypochondria (because he knew this was not a mystery but the real thing). He joked with the hospital functionary: Were they certain that they were going to remove the right kidney? His wife, Kit, an edgy woman in daily life, was endlessly serene in crisis. He was part-sedated when I left the hospital room. I waved at him—neither liked to be touched. He gave an odd gulp. On the television set a shadowy Richard Nixon was busy thanking Buzz and Biff and Joe, what sounded more like an Eskimo dog pack than astronauts far from earth. I slipped away.
As usual with him, the operation was a success. They had got all the cancer, they said. I didn’t know then that they seldom do. But I had now entered cancer valley, as I think of California. Thanks to the relentless atomic testing to the east of Los Angeles in Nevada we are all generously exposed to radiation. A final visit to the hospital room. The curious gray-yellow eyes were bright; he was puffing a slender cigar—this was not addiction or even pleasure but an odd defiance. I murmured to my stepmother I thought it a bad idea. She was rather hard: “It’s too late now.” I tried to hush her up. Surprisingly, she said, “It makes no difference—he’s still knocked out—he can’t understand you.” He actually laughed. “Of course I can. After all, I’ve still got cancer.” I’ll never know if she was right and at the conscious level of his brain he was already elsewhere or that he was compos mentis and did not seem to care what turn the conversation took.
A week or two later he was up and around: a full recovery I was told. He was also taking a variation of Dr. Niehans’s miracle sheep placenta, the same concoction that kept Somerset Maugham in not so rude health for far longer than anyone liked. I flew back to Rome.
The Roman winter of 1969–1970 was dismal for me due to Gene’s condition. He was being kept alive by the shots from Switzerland. During this glum period I seem to have published an essay a week, mostly in The New York Review of Books which had superseded, as predicted by Edmund Wilson, The New York Times Book Review. Howard and I had also rented a small flat in Klosters, a village in the canton of Graubünden, a few miles from Feldkirch in Austria, the town where my great-grandfather in 1848 had begun his emigration to the United States after first marrying Emma Carolina von Hartmann de Traxler of Lucerne. They settled in Racine, Wisconsin, sometimes referred to as Swissconsin. It is said that the first member of our family to arrive in the United States, Eugen Fidel Vidal, had been the only Swiss immigrant to fail in the cheese business in Wisconsin, but as he was, I know from documents, a graduate of the University of Lausanne, I still don’t know if he was actually a medical doctor as he had claimed to be. We do know that not long after settling his wife, Emma, one son, and two daughters in Racine he vanished for twenty years. Since these years coincided with our Civil War I assume that having left his native Austria to avoid conscription he felt no overpowering passion to join Mr. Lincoln’s army. During his absence, Emma supported her children by translating from newspapers and magazines for the American press. She was fluent in German, French, and Italian. She brought up her children with many Old World airs and graces. She also kept a casket filled with family coats of arms necessary to prove that she was a true member of the lower nobility and so eligible for membership in various grand societies.