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.