Chapter I: Part 1

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MESSIAH

THE NOVELS OF GORE VIDAL

WILLIWAW 1946 · IN A YELLOW WOOD 1947 · THE CITY AND THE
PILLAR 1948 · THE SEASON OF COMFORT 1949 · A SEARCH FOR THE
KING 1950 · DARK GREEN, BRIGHT RED 1950 · THE JUDGMENT OF
PARIS 1952 · MESSIAH 1954.

MESSIAH

BY
GORE VIDAL

E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.
NEW YORK 1954

_Copyright, 1954, by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A._

FIRST EDITION

_No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without permission in writing
from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who wishes to quote brief passages in connection
with a review written for inclusion in
magazine or newspaper or radio broadcast._

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 54-5053

_For_
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

I sometimes think the day will come when all the modern nations
will adore a sort of American god, a god who will have been a man
that lived on earth and about whom much will have been written in
the popular press; and images of this god will be set up in the
churches, not as the imagination of each painter may fancy him,
not floating on a Veronica kerchief, but established, fixed once
and for all by photography. Yes, I foresee a photographed god,
wearing spectacles.

On that day civilization will have reached its peak and there
will be steam-propelled gondolas in Venice.

November, 1861: _The Goncourt Journals_

MESSIAH

1

_I envy those chroniclers who assert with reckless but sincere abandon: “I was there. I saw it happen. It happened thus.” Now I too, in every sense, was there, yet I cannot trust myself to identify with any accuracy the various events of my own life, no matter how vividly they may seem to survive in recollection ... if only because we are all, I think, betrayed by those eyes of memory which are as mutable and particular as the ones with which we regard the material world, the vision altering, as it so often does, from near in youth to far in age. And that I am by a devious and unexpected route arrived at a great old age is to me a source of some complacency, even on those bleak occasions when I find myself attending inadvertently the body’s dissolution, a process as imperceptible yet sure as one of those faint, persistent winds which shift the dunes of sand in that desert of dry Libya which burns, white and desolate, beyond the mountains I see from the window of my room, a window facing, aptly enough, the west where all the kings lie buried in their pride._

_I am also conscious that I lack the passion for the business of familiar life which is the central preoccupation of our race while, worse still, I have never acquired the habit of judging the usual deeds of men ... two inconvenient characteristics which render me uncertain whenever I attempt to recall the past, confounding me sadly with the knowledge that my recollections are, after all, tentative and private and only true in part._

_Then, finally, I have never found it easy to tell the truth, a temperamental infirmity due not so much to any wish or compulsion to distort reality that I might be reckoned virtuous but, rather, to a conception of the inconsequence of human activity which is ever in conflict with a profound love of those essential powers which result in human action, a paradox certainly, a dual vision which restrains me from easy judgments._

_I am tempted to affirm that historic truth is quite impossible, although I am willing to accept the philosophic notion that it may exist abstractly, perfect and remote in the imagination. A windy attic filled with lovely objects has always been my personal image of those absolutes Aristotle conceived with such mellifluous optimism ... and I have always liked the conceits of philosophy, the more extravagant the better. I am especially devoted to Parmenides who was so strenuously obsessed with the idea of totality that he was capable, finally, of declaring that nothing ever changed, that what has been must still exist if it is yet remembered and named, a metaphysical conception which will, I suspect, be of some use to me as I journey in memory back to that original crisis from which I have for so long traveled and to which, despite the peril, I must return._

_I do not say, then, that what I remember is all true but I can declare that what I shall recall is a relative truth as opposed to that monstrous testament the one-half world believes, entrenching deep thereby a mission at whose birth I officiated and one whose polished legend has since become the substantial illusion of a desperate race. That both mission and illusion were false, I alone can say with certainty, with sorrow, such being the unsuspected and terrible resolution of brave days. Only the crisis, which I shall record, was real._

_I have said I am not given to making judgments. That is not precise. It is true that in most “wicked” acts I have been able, with a little effort, to perceive the possibilities for good either in actual intention or (and to me more important) in uncalculated result; yet, ultimately, problems in ethics have never much concerned me: possibly because they have been the vital interest of so many others who, through custom, rule society, more agreeably than not. On that useful moral level I have been seldom, if ever, seriously engaged but once on another, more arduous plane I was forced to make a choice, to judge, to act: and act I did in such a way that I am still startled by the implications of my choice, of my life’s one judgment._

_I chose the light in preference to the dreamless dark, destroying my own place in the world, and then, more painful still, I chose the light in preference to that twilight region of indeterminate visions and ambiguities which most suited my nature, a realm where decision was impossible and where the potentialities of choice were endless and exquisite to contemplate. To desert these beloved ghosts and incalculable powers was the greater pain, but I have lived on, observing with ever-increasing intensity that blazing disk of fire which is the symbol as well as material source of the reality I have accepted entirely, despite the sure dominion in eternity of the dark other._

_But now, as my private day begins to fade, as the wind in the desert gathers in intensity, smoothing out the patterns in the sand, I shall attempt to evoke the true image of one who assumed with plausibility in an age of science the long-discarded robes of prophecy, prevailing at last through ritual death and becoming, to those who see the universe in man, that solemn idea which is yet called by its resonant and antique name, god._

2

_Stars fell to earth in a blaze of light and, where they fell, monsters were born, hideous and blind._

_The first dozen years after the second of the modern wars were indeed “a time of divination,” as one religious writer unctuously described them. Not a day passed but that some omen or portent was remarked by an anxious race, suspecting war. At first, the newspapers delightedly reported these marvels, getting the details all wrong but communicating that sense of awfulness which was to increase as the years of peace uneasily lengthened until a frightened people demanded government action, the ultimate recourse in those innocent times._

_Yet these omens, obsessive and ubiquitous as they were, would not yield their secret order to any known system. For instance, much of the luminous crockery which was seen in the sky was never entirely explained. And explanation, in the end, was all that the people required. It made no difference how extraordinary the explanation was, if only they could know what was happening: that the shining globes which raced in formation over Sioux Falls, South Dakota, were mere residents of the Andromeda Galaxy, at home in space, omnipotent and eternal in design, on a cultural visit to our planet ... if only this much could definitely be stated, the readers of newspapers would have felt secure, able in a few weeks’ time to turn their attention to other problems, the visitors from farther space forgotten. It made little difference whether these mysterious blobs of light were hallucinations, inter-galactic visitors or military weapons, the important thing was to explain them._

_To behold the inexplicable was perhaps the most unpleasant experience a human being of that age could know, and during that gaudy decade many wild phenomena were sighted and recorded._

_In daylight, glittering objects of bright silver maneuvered at unearthly speed over Washington, D. C., observed by hundreds, some few reliable. The government, with an air of spurious calm, mentioned weather balloons, atmospheric reflections, tricks-of-eye, hinting, to, as broadly as it dared, that a sizable minority of its citizens were probably subject to delusions and mass hysteria. This cynical view was prevalent inside the administration though it could not of course propound such a theory publicly since its own tenure was based, more or less solidly, on the franchise of those same hysterics and irresponsibles._

_Shortly after the mid-point of the century, the wonders increased, becoming daily more bizarre. The recent advance in atomic research and in jet-propulsion had made the Western world disagreeably aware of other planets and galaxies and the thought that we would soon be making expeditions into space was disquieting, if splendid, giving rise to the not illogical thought that life might be developing on other worlds somewhat more brilliantly than here at home and, further, that it was quite conceivable that we ourselves might receive visitors long before our own adventuring had begun in the starry blackness which contains our life, like a speck of phosphorus in a quiet sea. And since our people were (and no doubt still are) barbarous and drenched in superstition, like the dripping “Saved” at an old-time Texas baptism, it was generally felt that these odd creatures whose shining cars flashed through our poor heavens at such speed must, of necessity, be hostile and cruel and bent on world dominion, just like ourselves or at least our geographic neighbors._

_The evidence was horrific and plentiful:_

_In Berlin a flying object of unfamiliar design was seen to land by an old farmer who was so close to it that he could make out several little men twinkling behind an arc of windows. He fled, however, before they could eat him. Shortly after his breathless announcement to the newspapers, he was absorbed by an Asiatic government whose destiny it was at that time to regularize the part of humanity fortunate enough to live within its curiously elastic boundaries, both temporal and spiritual._

_In West Virginia, a creature ten feet tall, green with a red face and exuding a ghastly odor, was seen to stagger out of a luminous globe, temporarily grounded. He was observed by a woman and four boys, all of unquestionable probity; they fled before he could eat them. Later, in the company of sheriff and well-armed posse, they returned to the scene of horror only to find both monster and conveyance gone: but even the skeptical sheriff and his men could detect, quite plainly, an unfamiliar odor, sharp and sickening among the clean pines._

_This particular story was unique because it was the first to describe a visitor as being larger instead of smaller than a man, a significant proof of the growing anxiety: we could handle even the cleverest little creature but something huge, and green, with an awful odor ... it was too much._

_I myself, late one night in July of the mid-century, saw quite plainly from the eastern bank of the Hudson River where I lived, two red globes flickering in a cloudless sky. As I watched, one moved to a higher point at a forty-five-degree angle above the original plane which had contained them both. For several nights I watched these eccentric twins but then, carried away by enthusiasm, I began to confuse Mars and Saturn with my magic lights until at last I thought it wise to remain indoors, except for those brief days at summer’s end when I watched, as I always used to do, the lovely sudden silver arcs meteors plunging make._

_In later years, I learned that, concurrently with the celestial marvels, farm communities were reporting an unusual number of calves born two-headed, chickens hatched three-legged, and lambs born with human faces; but since the somewhat vague laws of mutation were more or less well understood by the farmers these curiosities did not alarm them: an earlier generation, however, would have known, instinctively, that so many irregularities forecast an ill future, full of spite._

_Eventually, all was satisfactorily explained or, quite as good, forgotten. Yet the real significance of these portents was not so much in the fact of their mysterious reality as in the profound effect they had upon a people who, despite their emphatic materialism, were as easily shattered by the unexpected as their ancestors who had, on other occasions, beheld eagles circling Capitoline Hill, observed the sky grow leaden on Golgotha, shivered in loud storms when the rain was red as blood and the wind full of toads, while in our own century, attended by a statesman-Pope, the sun did a dance over Portugal._

_Considering the unmistakable nature of these signs, it is curious how few suspected the truth: that a new mission had been conceived out of the race’s need, the hour of its birth already determined by a conjunction of terrible new stars._

_It is true of course that the established churches duly noted these spectacular happenings and, rather slyly, used them to enhance that abstract power from which their own mystical but vigorous authority was descended. The more secular, if no less mystical, dogmas ... descended variously from an ill-tempered social philosopher of the nineteenth century and an energetic, unreasonably confident mental therapist, also a product of that century’s decline ... maintained, in the one case, that fireworks had been set off by vindictive employers to bedazzle the poor workers for undefined but patently wicked ends, and, in the other case, that the fiery objects represented a kind of atavistic recessional to the childish world of marvels; a theory which was developed even further in a widely quoted paper by an ingenious disciple of the dead therapist. According to this worthy, the universe was the womb in symbol and the blazing lights which many people thought they saw were only a form of hallucination, hearking back to some prenatal memory of ovaries bursting with a hostile potential life which would, in time, become sibling rivals. The writer demanded that the government place all who had seen flying objects under three years’ close observation to determine to what extent sibling rivalry, or the absence of it (the proposition worked equally well either way) had affected them in life. Although this bold synthesis was universally admired and subsequently read into the Congressional Record by a lady Representative who had herself undergone nine years’ analysis with striking results, the government refused to act._

3

_But although nearly every human institution took cognizance of these signs and auguries, none guessed the truth, and those few individuals who had begun to suspect what might be happening preferred not to speak out; if only because, despite much private analysis and self-questioning, it was not a time in which to circulate ideas which might prove disagreeable to any minority, no matter how lunatic. The body politic was more than usually upset by signs of non-conformity. The atmosphere was not unlike that of Britain during the mad hour of Titus Oates._

_Precisely why my countrymen behaved so frantically is a problem for those historians used to the grand, eternal view of human events. I have often thought, though, that much of our national irritability was closely related to the unexpected and reluctant custody of the world the second war had pressed upon the confused grandchildren of a proud, agrarian, isolated people, both indifferent and strange to the ways of other cultures._

_More to the point, however, was the attitude of our intellectuals who constituted at this time a small, militantly undistinguished minority, directly descended in spirit if not in fact from that rhetorical eighteenth-century Swiss whose romantic and mystical love for humanity was magically achieved through a somewhat obsessive preoccupation with himself. His passion for self-analysis flourished in our mid-century, at least among the articulate few who were capable of analysis and who, in time, like their great ancestor, chose the ear of the world for their confessional._

_Men of letters lugubriously described their own deviations (usually apolitical or sexual, seldom aesthetic), while painters worked devotedly at depicting unique inner worlds which were not accessible to others except in a state of purest empathy hardly to be achieved without a little fakery in a selfish world. It was, finally, the accepted criterion that art’s single function was the fullest expression of a private vision ... which was true enough though the visions of men lacking genius are not without a certain gloom. Genius, in this time, was quite as rare as in any other and, to its credit, it was not a self-admiring age ... critics found merit only in criticism, a singular approach which was to amuse the serious for several decades._

_Led by artists, the intellectuals voiced their guilt at innumerable cocktail parties where it was accepted as an article of faith that each had a burden of guilt which could, once recognized, be exorcised; the means of recognition were expensive but rewarding: a trained and sympathetic listener would give the malaise a name and reveal its genesis; then, through confession (and occasionally “reliving”) the guilt would vanish along with asthma, impotence and eczema. The process, of course, was not easy. To facilitate therapy, it became the custom among the cleverer people to set aside all the traditional artifices of society so that both friends and strangers could confess to one another their worst deeds, their most squalid fantasies in a series of competitive monologues conducted with arduous sincerity and surprisingly successful on every level but that of communication._

_I am sure that this sort of catharsis was not entirely valueless: many of the self-obsessed undoubtedly experienced relief when dispensing secrets ... it was certainly an instructive shock for them to find that even their most repellent aberrations were accepted quite perfunctorily by strangers too intent on their own problems to be outraged, or even very interested. This discovery was not always cheering. There is a certain dignity and excitement in possessing a dangerous secret life. To lose it in maturity is hard ... and once promiscuously shared, it does become ordinary, no more troublesome than obvious dentures._

_Many cherished private hells were forever lost in those garrulous years and the vacuum each left was invariably filled with a boredom which, in its turn, could only be dispelled by faith. As a result, the pursuit of the absolute, in one guise or another, became the main preoccupation of these romanticists who professed with some pride a mistrust of the reason, derived quite legitimately from their own stunning incapacity to assimilate the social changes created by machinery, their particular Lucifer. They rejected the idea of the reflective mind, arguing that since both logic and science had failed to establish the first cause of the universe or (more important) humanity’s significance, only the emotions could reveal to us the nature of reality, the key to meaning. That it was actually no real concern of this race why or when or how the universe came into being was an attitude never, so far as I can recall, expressed by the serious-minded of the day. Their searching, however, was not simply the result of curiosity; it was more than that: it was an emotional, senseless plunging into the void, into the unknowable and the irrelevant. It became, finally, the burden of life, the blight among the flowers: the mystery which must be revealed, even at the expense of life. It was a terrible crisis, made doubly hard since the eschewal of logic left only one path clear to the heart of the dilemma: the way of the mystic, and even to the least sensible it was sadly apparent that, lacking a superior and dedicated organization, one man’s revelation is not apt to be of much use to another._

_Quantities of venerable attitudes were abandoned and much of the preceding century’s “eternal truths and verities” which had cast, rock-like, so formidable and dense a shadow, were found, upon examination, to be so much sand, suitable for the construction of fantastic edifices but not durable, nor safe from the sea’s tide._

_But the issue was joined: dubious art was fashioned, authorities were invoked, dreams given countenance and systems constructed on the evidence of private illumination._

_For a time, political and social action seemed to offer a way out, or in. Foreign civil wars, foreign social experiments were served with a ferocity difficult to comprehend; but later, when the wars and experiments went wrong, revealing, after such high hopes, the perennial human inability to order society, a disillusion resulted, bitterly resolved in numerous cases by the assumption of some mystical dogma, preferably one so quaintly rich with history, so sweeping and unreasonable in its claims as to be thoroughly acceptable to the saddened romanticist who wanted, above all else, to feel, to know without reasoning._

_So in these portentous times, only the scientists were content as they constructed ever more fabulous machines with which to split the invisible kernels of life while the anti-scientifics leaped nervously from one absolute to another ... now rushing to the old for grace, now to the new for salvation, no two of them really agreeing on anything except the need for agreement, for the last knowledge ... and that, finally, was the prevailing note of the age; since reason had been declared insufficient, only a mystic could provide the answer, only he could mark the boundaries of life with a final authority, inscrutably revealed. It was so perfectly clear. All that was lacking was the man._

ONE

1

The garden was at its best that first week in the month of June. The peonies were more opulent than usual and I walked slowly through the green light on the terrace above the white river, enjoying the heavy odor of peonies and of new roses rambling in hedges.

The Hudson was calm, no ripple revealed that slow tide which even here, miles to the north of the sea, rises brackishly at the moon’s disposition. Across the river the Catskills, water-blue, emerged sharply from the summer’s green as though the earth in one vivid thrust had attempted sky, fusing the two elements into yet another, richer blue ... but the sky was only framed, not really touched, and the blue of hills was darker than the pale sky with its protean clouds all shaped by wind, like the stuff of auguries and human dreaming.

The sky that day was like an idiot’s mind, wild with odd clouds, but lovely too, guileless, natural, allusive.

I did not want to go in to lunch, although there was no choice in the matter. I had arrived at one o’clock; I was expected at one-thirty. Meanwhile, avoiding the house until the last possible moment, I had taken a neighbor’s privilege of strolling alone about the garden; the house behind me was gray and austere, granitic, more English than Hudson Valley. The grounds swept softly down toward the river nearly a mile away. A vista had been cleared from the central terrace, a little like the one at Versailles but more rustic, less royal. Dark green trees covered the hills to left and right of the sweep of lawn and meadow. No other house could be seen. Even the railroad between the terrace and the water was invisible, hidden by a bluff ... only its sound and an occasional blur of smoke upon the blue marked that machine’s essential passage.

I breathed the air of early summer gladly, voluptuously. I lived my life in seasonal concert with this river and, after grim March and confusing sharp April, the knowledge that at last the leaves were foliaged and the days warm was quite enough to create in me a mood of euphoria, of marvelous serenity. I contemplated love affairs. I prepared to meet strangers. The summer and I would celebrate our triumph soon; but, until the proper moment, I was a spectator: the summer love as yet unknown to me, the last dark blooming of peonies amid the wreckage of white lilacs still some weeks away, held in the future with my love. I could only anticipate; I savored my disengagement in this garden.

But then it was time to go in and I turned my back resolutely on the river and ascended the wide stone steps to the brick terrace which fronted the house on the river side, pausing only to break the stem of a white and pink peony, regretting immediately what I had done: brutally, I had wished to possess the summer, to fix the instant, to bear with me into the house a fragment of the day. It was wrong; and I stood for a moment at the French door holding the great peony in my hand, its odor like a dozen roses, like all the summers I had ever known. But it was impractical. I could not stuff it into my buttonhole for it was as large as a baby’s head while I was fairly certain that my hostess would be less than pleased to receive at my hands one of her best peonies, cut too short even to place in water. Obscurely displeased with myself and the day, I plunged the flower deep into a hedge of boxwood until not even a glimmer of white showed through the dense dark green to betray me: then, like a murderer, the assaulted day part-spoiling, I went inside.

2

“You have been malingering in the garden,” she said, offering me her face like a painted plate to kiss. “I saw you from the window.”

“Saw me ravage the flowers?”

“They all do,” she said obscurely, and led me after her into the drawing room, an oblong full of light from French windows opening upon the terrace. I was surprised to see that she was alone.

“She’ll be along presently. She’s upstairs changing.”

“Who?”

“Iris Mortimer ... didn’t I tell you? It’s the whole reason.”

Clarissa nodded slyly from the chair opposite me. A warm wind crossed the room and the white curtains billowed like spinnakers in a regatta. I breathed the warm odor of flowers, of burned ash remnants from the fireplace: the room shone with silver and porcelain. Clarissa was rich despite the wars and crises that had marked our days, leaving the usual scars upon us, like trees whose cross-sections bear a familial resemblance of concentric rings, recalling in detail the weather of past years ... at least those few rings we shared in common, or Clarissa, by her own admission, was twenty-two hundred years old with an uncommonly good memory. None of us had ever questioned her too closely about her past. There is no reason to suspect, however, that she was insincere. Since she felt she had lived that great length of time and since her recollections were remarkably interesting and plausible she was much in demand as a conversationalist and adviser, especially useful in those plots which require great shrewdness and daring. It was perfectly apparent that she was involved in some such plot at the moment.

I looked at her thoughtfully before I casually rose to take the bait of mystery she had trailed so perfunctorily before me. She knew her man. She knew I would not be difficult in the early stages of any adventure.

“Whole reason?” I repeated.

“I can say no more!” said Clarissa with a melodramatic emphasis which my deliberately casual tone did not entirely justify. “You’ll love Iris, though.”

I wondered whether loving Iris, or pretending to love Iris, was to be the summer’s game. But before I could inquire further, Clarissa, secure in her mystery, asked me idly about my work and, as idly, I answered her, the exchange perfunctory yet easy, for we were used to one another.

“I am tracking him down,” I said. “There is so little to go on, but what there is is quite fascinating, especially Ammianus.”

“Fairly reliable, as military men go,” said Clarissa, suddenly emerging from her polite indifference: any reference to the past she had known always interested her, only the present seemed to bore her, at least that ordinary unusable present which did not contain promising material for one of her elaborate human games.

“Did you know him?” I never accepted, literally, Clarissa’s unique age: two thousand years is an unlikely span of life even for a woman of her sturdy unimaginativeness; yet there was no ignoring the fact that she _seemed_ to have lived that long, and that her references to obscure episodes, where ascertainable, were nearly always right and, more convincing still, where they differed from history’s records, differed on the side of plausibility ... the work of a memory or a mind completely unsuperstitious and unenthusiastic: (she _was_ literal; she was, excepting always her central fantasy, matter-of-fact. To her the death or Caesar was the logical outcome of a system of taxation which has not been preserved for us except in quaintly obscure references; while the virtue of the Roman republic and the ambitions of celebrated politicians, she set aside as being of only minor importance: currency and taxation were her forte and she managed to reduce all the martial splendor of ancient days to an economic level).

She had one other obsession, however, and my reference to Ammianus reminded her of it.

“The Christians!” she exclaimed significantly; then she paused; I waited. Her conversation at times resembled chapter-headings chosen haphazardly from an assortment of Victorial novels. “_They_ hated him.”

“Ammianus?”

“No, your man Julian. It _is_ the Emperor Julian you are writing about.”

“Reading about.”

“Ah, you _will_ write about him,” she said with an abstracted pythoness stare which suggested that I was indefatigable in my eccentric purpose which, for some years, had been the study of history in a minor key.

“Of course they hated him. As well they should have ... that’s the whole point to my work.”

“Unreliable, the lot of them. There is no decent history from the time they came to Rome up until that fat little Englishman ... you know, the one who lived in Switzerland ... with rather _staring_ eyes.”

“Gibbon.”

“Yes, that one. Of course he got all the facts wrong, poor man, but at least he tried. The facts of course were all gone by then. They saw to that ... burning things, rewriting things ... not that I really ever _read_ them ... you know how I am about reading: I prefer a mystery novel any day. But at least Gibbon got the tone right.”

“Yet....”

“Of course Julian was something of a prig, you know. He _posed_ continually and he wasn’t ... what do they call him now? an apostate. He _never_ renounced Christianity.”

“He what ...”

Clarissa in her queer way took pleasure in rearranging all accepted information. I shall never know whether she did it deliberately to mystify or whether her versions were, in fact, the forgotten reality.

“He was a perfectly good Christian _au fond_ despite his peculiar diet. He was a vegetarian for some years but wouldn’t eat beans, as I recall, because he thought they contained the souls of the dead, an old orphic notion.”

“Which is hardly Christian.”

“Isn’t that part of it? No? Well in any case the first proclamation of Paris was intended ...” but I was never to hear Julian’s intent for Iris was in the doorway, slender, dressed in white, her hair dark and drawn back in a classical line from her calm face: she was handsome and not at all what I had expected, but then Clarissa had, as usual, not given me much lead. Iris Mortimer was my own age, I guessed, about thirty, and although hardly a beauty she moved with such ease, spoke with such softness, created such an air of serenity that one gave her perhaps more credit for the possession of beauty than an American devoted to regular features ought, in all accuracy, to have done: the impression was one of lightness, of this month of June in fact ... I linger over her description a little worriedly, conscious that I am not really getting her right (at least as she appeared to me that afternoon) for the simple reason that our lives were to become so desperately involved in the next few years and my memories of her are now encrusted with so much emotion that any attempt to evoke her as she actually was when I first saw her in that drawing room some fifty years ago is not unlike the work of a restorer of paintings removing layers of glaze and grime in an attempt to reveal an original pattern in all its freshness somewhere beneath ... except that a restorer of course is a workman who has presumably no prejudice and, too, he did not create the original image only to attend its subsequent distortion, as the passionate do in life; for the Iris of that day was, I suppose, no less and no more than what she was to become; it was merely that I could not suspect the bizarre course our future was to take. I had no premonition of our mythic roles, though the temptation is almost overpowering to assert, darkly, that even on the occasion of our first meeting _I knew_. The truth is that we met; we became friends; we lunched amiably and the future cast not one shadow across the mahogany table around which we sat, listening to Clarissa and eating fresh shad caught in the river that morning.

“Eugene here is interested in Julian,” said our hostess, lifting a spring asparagus to her mouth with her fingers.

“Julian who?”

“The Emperor of Rome. I forget his family name but he was a nephew, I think, of Constantius, who was dreary too though not such a bore as Julian. Iris, try the asparagus. We get them from the garden.”

Iris tried an asparagus and Clarissa recalled that the Emperor Augustus’s favorite saying was: “Quick as boiled asparagus.” It developed that _he_ had been something of a bore, too. “Hopelessly involved in office work. Of course it’s all terribly important, no doubt of that ... after all the entire Empire was based on a first-rate filing system; yet, all in all, it’s hardly _glamorous_.”

“Whom _did_ you prefer?” asked Iris, smiling at me: she too was aware of our hostess’s obsession; whether or not she believed is a different matter. I assumed not; yet the assumption of truth is perhaps, for human purposes, the same as truth itself, at least to the obsessed.

“None of the obvious ones,” said Clarissa, squinting near-sightedly at the window through which a pair of yellow-spangled birds were mating on the wing like eccentric comets against the green of box. “But of course, I didn’t know everyone, darling. Only a few. Not all of them were accessible. Some never dined out. Some that did go out were impossible and then of course I traveled a good deal. I loved Alexandria and wintered there for over two hundred years, missing a great deal of the unpleasantness at Rome, the _unstability_ of those tiresome generals ... although Vitellius was great fun, at least as a young man. I never saw him when he was Emperor that time, for five minutes wasn’t it? Died of greed. Such an appetite! On one occasion as a young man he ate an entire side of beef at my place in Baiae. Ah, Baiae, I do miss it. Much nicer than Bath or Biarritz and certainly more interesting than Newport was. I had several houses there over the years. Once when Senator Tullius Cicero was traveling with that poisonous daughter of his, they stopped....”

We listened attentively as one always did to Clarissa ... does? I wonder if she is still alive: if she is, then perhaps the miracle has indeed taken place and one human being has finally avoided the usual fate. It is an amiable miracle to contemplate.

Lunch ended without any signs of that revelation which Clarissa had led me to expect. Nothing was said which seemed to possess even a secret significance. Wondering idly whether or not Clarissa might, after all, be entirely mad, I followed the two women back into the drawing room where we had our coffee in a warm mood of satiety made only faintly disagreeable for me by that mild nausea which I always used to experience when I drank too much wine at lunch: now of course I never see wine, only the Arabs’ mint tea and their sandy bitter coffee which I have come to like.

A warm breeze fluttered the curtains: the noise of insects responding to the sun’s increasing heat droned all upon the same note, dry and insistent, a bass to the coloratura of birds, while the scent of flowers filled the airy room and I detected lilies as well as peonies, their odor almost too sweet, quite drowning the more delicate rose, the pale Hudson lilac.

Clarissa reminisced idly. She possessed a passion for minor detail which was often a good deal more interesting than her usual talks on currency devaluation.

Neither Iris nor I spoke much; it was as if we were both awaiting some word from Clarissa which would throw into immediate relief this luncheon, this day, this meeting of strangers. But Clarissa only gossiped on; at last, when I was beginning to go over in my mind the various formulae which make departure easy, our hostess, as though aware that she had drawn out too long the overture, said abruptly, “Eugene, show Iris the garden. She has never seen it before.” And then, heartily firing fragments of sentences at us as though in explanation of this move of hers, she left the room, indicating that the rest was up to us.

Puzzled, we both went onto the terrace and into the yellow afternoon. We walked slowly down the steps towards the rose arbors, a long series of trellis arches forming a tunnel of green, bright with new flowers and ending in a cement fountain of ugly tile with a bench beside it, shaded by elms.

We got to facts. By the time we had burrowed through the roses to the bench, we had exchanged those basic bits of information which usually make the rest fall (often incorrectly) into some pattern, a foundation for those various architectures people together are pleased to build to celebrate friendship or enmity or love or, on very special occasions, in the case of a grand affair, one of those fine palaces with rooms for all three, and much else besides.

Iris was from the Middle West, from a rich suburb of Detroit. This interested me in many ways, for there still existed in those days a real disaffection between East and Midwest and Far West which is hard to conceive nowadays in that gray homogeneity which currently passes for a civilized nation. I was an Easterner, a New Yorker from the valley with Southern roots, and I felt instinctively that the outlanders were perhaps not entirely civilized. Needless to say, at the time, I would indignantly have denied this prejudice had someone attributed it to me, for those were the days of tolerance in which all prejudice had been banished, from conversation at least ... though of course to banish prejudice is a contradiction in terms since, by definition, prejudice means prejudgment, and though time and experience usually explode for us all the prejudgments of our first years, they exist, nevertheless, as part of our subconscious, a sabotaging, irrational force, causing us to commit strange crimes indeed, made so much worse because they are often secret even to ourselves. I was, then, prejudiced against the Midwesterner ... against the Californians too. I felt that the former especially was curiously hostile to freedom, to the interplay of that rational Western culture which I had so lovingly embraced in my boyhood and grown up with, always conscious of my citizenship in the world, of my role as a humble but appreciative voice in the long conversation. I resented the automobile manufacturers who thought only of manufacturing objects, who distrusted ideas, who feared the fine with the primitive intensity of implacable ignorance. Could this cool girl be from Detroit? From that same rich suburb which had provided me with a number of handsome vital classmates at school? Boys who had combined physical vigor with a resistance to all ideas but those of their suburb which could only be described as heroic considering the power of New England schools to crack even the toughest prejudices, at least on the rational level. That these boys did not possess a rational level had often occurred to me, though I did, grudgingly, admire, even in my scorn, their grace and strength as well as their confidence in that assembly line which had provided their parents with large suburban homes and themselves with a classical New England education which, unlike the rest of us, they’d managed to resist ... the whole main current of Western civilization eddying helplessly about these youths who stood, pleasantly firm, like so many rocks in a desperate channel.

Iris Mortimer was one of them. Having learned this there was nothing to do but find sufficient names between us to establish the beginnings of the rapport of class which, even in that late year of the mid-century, still existed: the dowdy aristocracy to which we belonged by virtue of financial security, at least in childhood, of education, of self-esteem and of houses where servants had been in some quantity before the second of the wars; all this we shared and of course those names in common of schoolmates, some from her region, others from mine, names which established us as being of an age. We avoided for some time any comment upon the names, withholding our true selves during the period of identification. I discovered too that she, like me, had remained unmarried, an exceptional state of affairs, for all the names we had mentioned represented two people now instead of one. Ours had been a reactionary generation which had attempted to combat the time of wars and disasters by a scrupulous observance of its grandparents’ customs, a direct reaction to the linking generation whose lives had been so entertainingly ornamented with self-conscious, untidy alliances, well-fortified by suspect gin. The result was no doubt classic but, at the same time; it was a little shocking: their children were decorous, subdued; they married early, conceived glumly, surrendered to the will of their own children in the interests of enlightened psychology; their lives enriched by the best gin in the better suburbs, safe among their own kind. Yet, miraculously, I had escaped and so apparently had Iris. Both, simultaneously, were aware of this: that sort of swift, unstated communication which briefly makes human relationships seem more potential, more meaningful than actually they are: it is the promise perhaps of a perfect harmony never to be achieved in life’s estate.

“You live here alone?” She indicated the wrong direction though taking in, correctly, the river on whose east bank I did live, a few miles to the north of Clarissa.

I nodded. “Entirely alone ... in an old house.”

She sighed. “No family?”

“None here. Not much anywhere else. A few in New Orleans, my family’s original base.” I waited for her to ask if I never got lonely living in a house on the river, remote from others; but she saw nothing extraordinary in this.

“It must be fine,” she said slowly. She broke a leaf off a flowering bush whose branch, heavy with blooming, quivered above our heads as we sat on the garden bench and watched the dim flash of goldfish in the muddy waters of the pond.

“I like it,” I said, a little disappointed that there was now no opportunity for me to construct one of my familiar defenses of a life alone: I had, in the five years since my days of travel had temporarily ended, many occasions on which to defend and glorify the solitary life I had chosen for myself beside this river. I had an ever-changing repertoire of feints and thrusts: for instance, with the hearty, I invariably questioned, gently of course, the virtue of a life in the city, confined to a small apartment with uninhibited babies and breathing daily large quantities of soot; or then I sometimes enjoyed assuming the prince of darkness pose, alone with his crimes in an ancient house, a figure which could, if necessary, be quickly altered to the more engaging one of remote observer of the ways of men, a stoic among his books, sustained by the recorded fragments of forgotten bloody days, evoking solemnly the pure essences of nobler times a chaste intelligence beyond the combat, a priest celebrating the cool memory of his race. My theater was extensive and I almost regretted that with Iris there was no need for even a brief curtain raiser, much less one of my exuberant galas.

Not accustomed to the neutral response, I stammered something about the pleasures of gardens; Iris’s calm indifference saved me from what might have been a truly mawkish outburst calculated to interest her at any cost (mawkish because, I am confident, that none of our deepest wishes or deeds is, finally, when honestly declared, very wonderful or mysterious: simplicity not complexity is at the center of our being; fortunately the trembling “I” is seldom revealed, even to paid listeners, for, conscious of the appalling directness of our needs, we wisely disguise their nature with a legerdemain of peculiar cunning). Much of Iris’s attraction for me ... and at the beginning that attraction did exist ... was that one did not need to discuss so many things: of course the better charades were not called into being which, creatively speaking, was a pity; but then it was a relief _not_ to pretend and, better still, a relief not to begin the business of plumbing shallows under the illusion that a treasure chest of truth might be found on the mind’s sea floor ... a grim ritual which was popular in those years, especially in the suburbs and housing projects where the mental therapists were ubiquitous and busy.

With Iris, one did not suspend, even at a cocktail party, the usual artifices of society. All was understood, or seemed to be, which is exactly the same thing. We talked about ourselves as though of absent strangers. Then: “Have you known Clarissa long?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I met her only last winter.”

“Then this is your first visit here? to the valley?”

“The first,” she smiled, “but it’s a little like home, you know. I don’t mean Detroit, but a memory of home, got from books.”

I thought so too. Then she added that she did not read any longer and I was a little relieved; somehow with Iris one wanted not to talk about books or the past. So much of her charm was that she was entirely in the present. It was her gift, perhaps her finest quality, to invest the moment with a significance which in recollection did not exist except as a blurred impression of excitement. She created this merely by existing. I was never to learn the trick, for her conversation was not, in itself, interesting and her actions were usually calculable in advance, making all the more unusual her peculiar effect. She asked me politely about my work, giving me then the useful knowledge that, though she was interested in what _I_ was doing, she was not much interested in the life of the Emperor Julian.

I made it short. “I want to do a biography of him. I’ve always liked history and so, when I settled down in the house, I chose Julian as my work.”

“A life’s work?”

“Hardly. But another few years. It’s the reading which I most enjoy, and that’s treacherous. There is so much of interest to read that it seems a waste of time and energy to write anything ... especially if it’s to be only a reflection of reflections.”

“Then why do it?”

“Something to say, I suppose; or at least the desire to define and illuminate ... from one’s own point of view, of course.”

“Then why ... Julian?”

Something in the way she said the name convinced me she had forgotten who he was if she had ever known.

“The apostasy; the last stand of paganism against Christianity.”

She looked truly interested, for the first time. “They killed him, didn’t they?”

“No, he died in battle. Had he lived longer he might at least have kept the Empire divided between the old gods and the new messiah. Unfortunately his early death was their death, the end of the gods.”

“Except they returned as saints.”

“Yes, a few found a place in Christianity, assuming new names.”

“Mother of God,” she murmured thoughtfully.

“An unchristian concept, one would have thought,” I added, though the beautiful illogic had been explained to me again and again by Catholics: how God could and could not at the same time possess a mother, that gleaming queen of heaven, entirely regnant in those days.

“I have often thought about these things,” she said, diffidently. “I’m afraid I’m not much of a student but it fascinates me. I’ve been out in California for the past few years, working. I was on a fashion magazine.” The note was exactly right: she knew precisely what that world meant and she was neither apologetic nor pleased. We both resisted the impulse to begin the names again, threading our way through the maze of fashion, through that frantic world of the peripheral arts.

“You kept away from Vedanta?” A group of transplanted English writers at this time had taken to oriental mysticism with great eagerness, an atonement no doubt for their careers as movie writers. Swamis and temples abounded among the billboards and orange trees; but since it was _the_ way for some it was, for those few at least, honorable.

“I came close.” She laughed. “But there was too much to read and even then I always felt that it didn’t work for us, for Americans, I mean. It’s probably quite logical and familiar to Asiatics, but we come from a different line, with a different history; their responses aren’t ours. But I did feel it was possible for others, which is a great deal.”

“Because so much is really _not_ possible?”

“Exactly. But then I know very little about these things.” She was direct: no implication that what she did not know either did not exist or was not worth the knowing, the traditional response in the fashionable world.

“Are you working now?”

She shook her head. “No, I gave it up. The magazine sent somebody to take my place out there (I didn’t have the 'personality’ they wanted) and so I came on to New York where I’ve never really been, except for week ends from school. The magazine had some idea that I might work into the New York office, but I was through. I have worked.”

“And had enough?”

“For that sort of thing, yes. So I’ve gone out a lot in New York, met many people; thought a little....” She twisted the leaf that she still held in her fingers, her eyes vague as though focused on the leaf’s faint shadow which fell in depth upon her dress, part upon her dress and more on a tree’s branch ending finally in a tiny fragment of shadow on the ground, like the bottom step of a frail staircase of air.

“And here you are, at Clarissa’s.”

“What an extraordinary woman she is!” The eyes were turned upon me, hazel eyes, very clear, the whites luminous with youth.

“She collects people, but not according to any of the usual criteria. She makes them all fit, somehow, but what it is they fit, what design, no one knows. I don’t know, that is.”

“I suppose I was collected. Though it might have been the other way around, since I am sure she interests me more than I do her.”

“There is no way of telling.”

“Anyway, I’m pleased she asked me here.”