And then, abruptly, he began laughing and told me about the time the barrel of wine broke in the front room, and I fell silent with my own thoughts again, and only half listened; I had heard this story before, I had heard it as a child when I was growing up and learning to be an American. I had learned quite well. On the telephone last December, Rebecca had said to me, “I don’t care if the children spend Christmas with you. Christmas is yours.”
Ah. And I had thought it was ours.
I had thought, in my silly sentimental notion of us and America, that everything was ours to share together. I had thought the gold in the streets was there for all of us to pick up, to pulverize, to toss over our shoulders like magic dust so that we could soar up over the tenements — Christ, her voice on that Pass-A-Grille beach as she read Peter Pan aloud to my sons, that Jewgirl voice I had first heard in a smoky toilet on Staten Island, and can still hear now in the dead of night when I awaken with a start and stare sightlessly into my bedroom and hear below the murmur of water against the rotting pilings of the old house.
Grandpa, I said aloud again (we were talking simultaneously now, I don’t think either of us was hearing or listening), I still hate myself for having led Rebecca to the showers, and washed her clean, and stuffed her into a boxcar for transportation to the ovens and later picked her teeth of gold. Grandpa, I think I stayed with her as long as I did because I wanted to prove to Honest Abe that only in America could a Jew and a Gentile live happily ever after, show him he’d been wrong. But he was right, the prick, and I can’t stop believing I’ve betrayed not only Rebecca and the kids, but also an ideal I loved almost as much.
“Ah, Ignazio,” he said, “that Christmas Day, to tink of steal a chestnut? No, this wassa no right. I come out the house, I walk to where Pino lives, together we go on top the hill, we can see Don Leonardo’s house, everything blows on the hillside, we talk about America ”
“Grandpa,” I said, “was I wrong? Should I have stayed? It was a lie, Grandpa, but where the hell is the truth?”
“And first,” he said, “when I come here, I say to myself, I say to Pino, no good. We go home. We go back tomorrow the other side. What gold? Where is this gold Bardoni says? In the subway? In the mud? No, Ignazio, was terrible this America.”
“Grandpa,” I said, “don’t die.”
“And the noise. Madonna mia, che rumore! I tink I never get used. I swear, Ignazio, I woulda go back if I no meet you grandma. Ah, che bellezza! Oh, I see her, I fall in love....”
“Please don’t die on me,” I said. “You’re the connection.”
We both fell silent then.
We were silent for a long time. The sun was up. I had not realized the sun was up. I snapped open the lid of my watch and felt for the time. It was a quarter to twelve. Had the sun been up that long?
“Ignazio?” my grandfather said.
“Yes, Grandpa?”
“Ah,” he said.
“Ah,” I said, and smiled.
I did not know where his semiconscious meanderings had led him, or whether or not he had reached any conclusions. I knew only that he was still alive, and his voice sounded strong, and that was good enough.
“Wassa time I no like this country,” he said. “You believe that, Ignazio?”
“I believe it,” I said.
“Wassa time I tink Ma che? I’m spose to make this place my home? Issa no gold here. Ignazio?”
“Yes, Grandpa.”
“I’ma verra rich man, I have good life here. Wassa true what Bardoni told me in Fiormonte. Le strade qui sono veramente lastricate d’oro.”
He died in the next instant. A massive hemorrhage exploded somewhere inside his brain and killed him at once.
Head and out.
I can do it on a piano. But there’s no tying up half a lifetime with a bright yellow ribbon, there’s no taking it home. I spend a lot of time wondering about it, but so far there’ve been no moments of truth, no dazzling revelations. Maybe those moments come only to people who can see. Or maybe it’s enough to recognize the lies; maybe the truth will come in its own good time.
My son, Andrew, when he was in elementary school and kids were asking him what religion he was, used to answer, “I’m nothing.” Then, when he grew weary of the response “You have to be something,” he took to saying, “I’m a gorilla.” When I asked him what that meant, he said, “It means the same thing; it means I’m nothing. Only this way, I don’t have to explain.”
I would like to explain. I owe an explanation. I’ve kept you here for hours now, and probably haven’t entertained you at all. Anyway, my bag of tricks is running out, I haven’t a fresh triplet in my head. So let me explain. Pretend you’re a movie producer for a moment. Just read the synopsis, and forget the rest. It’s the chord chart that matters, anyway, and not the geography of the performance.
I still try to link them together all the time — the failure of my marriage, and the failure of the myth. I try to find a connection, but each time I think I’ve obviated my guilt by blaming the divorce on a success that could only have happened in America, I recognize I’m only telling myself another lie. I try not to lie to myself these days. So, for whatever it’s worth (Rebecca, friends, enemies, relatives), I was the one who eroded the marriage, I was the one who left wife and family, I was the one who done us in. The butler is innocent. I’m the culprit. So much for that.
As for the rest...
Once upon a time, I wanted to be an American. I wanted to do all the things Americans in the movies did, especially if they could see. I wanted to come off my yacht and stroll up the dock wearing a blue blazer with a family crest stitched to the breast pocket. I wanted to come off the tennis courts after a vigorous set, I wanted to visit my polo ponies in the stables, and ski dangerous mountain slopes, and tell hair-raising tales in the lodge afterward while I sipped mulled wine or buttered rum. I wanted to throw enormous lawn parties, I wanted my wife to sit in a wide-brimmed floppy hat, gin and tonic in a pale white hand, children shouting in the distance as a governess discreetly cautioned silence, my beloved bride kissing one or another of her short-pantsed, knee-socksed darlings when he ran up to her, laughing him away with a “Run along now, dearest, Mummy’s talking.” I wanted family to be family, and friends to be friends, and friends to be family, and immigrants to be Wasps, and Wasps to be all those people who lived and loved within a six-mile radius of the luxurious house I had built of solid gold mined in the streets.
And I became American, more or less, though I never did any of the things sighted people can do, but that was hoping for much too much, really, wasn’t it? Even this land of the free and home of the brave can do nothing for the congenitally blind, although it can come a long way toward helping them to realize dreams. My own dream was vague but nonetheless glowing, and whereas I realize now it was only a dream, there were times when I thought it had leaped that uncertain line between illusion and reality to become a joyous fact. When I first heard “Ballad for Americans” in 1940, for example, it seemed to me the exultant, triumphant cry of a people who had finally come through. Even the “Czech and double-check” was an echo of an “Amos ’n’ Andy” catch phrase. We had made it, I believed; we were ready to fulfill our promise of greatness; we were at last a true family. From that moment on, the grandsons of Russians would dance la cucaracha with the granddaughters of Norwegians; Negroes would sing the Marseillaise on Saint Patrick’s Day as they marched up Fifth Avenue side by side with Swedes; on Columbus Day, in the bars along Third Avenue, Germans and Finns would toast the Year of the Butterfly, and croon gypsy lullabies; and on Christmas Day, Jews and Seventh-Day Adventists would give praise to Buddha, while atheists and agnostics carried gifts to the altar.