Peter Carey - Parrot and Olivier in America

Later in the afternoon when it was very hot and I was admitting to myself I had turned our pine shelves into an ugly misshapen thing, Mathilde interrupted me. About the bed she passed no comment, saying only that our two hunters had come upon a group of deer, and his lordship, somehow imagining he would be arrested as a poacher, would not raise the gun.

Then had the plucky Mrs. Watkins snatched the weapon from him and shot the creature through the heart. For having thus secured our dinner she was berated, in her first language which sounded to her much crueler than her second-she heard that she was a foolish woman and would face the magistrate for her crime, and on and on.

Abandoning my sorry carpentry, I caught the poor sore horse and put him back into the wagonette and then Mrs. Watkins and I set off together to secure our game. I cut off two legs and we took the remainder to the inn at Harlem Heights where the landlord, a Dutchman nicknamed Pegs, pretended he did not want it. In the end I settled for a bottle of brandy, for I had no time for butchering today.

Our house was not normally a place of high emotion, and the day had been exhausting, and yet the smell of roasting venison seemed to improve all of us, not least Watkins who, sitting on one of our two chairs, was very busy with the nose bag, as they used to say at home.

As for himself, he clearly took notice of the variety of boxes and crates we assembled at our table, but when he was invited to take a chair he did not protest.

Apart from that, he was gracious in every way. He took possession of his captain's chair and engaged with every one of us, not least the printer and the colorist who boarded with us. They, for their part, were charmed by him, his interest and knowledge of their country often surpassing their own. My own response was perhaps more complicated for I heard the same tone he had used in Philadelphia to ask a prisoner, "Do you think the yard annexed to your cell is necessary for your health?"

Indeed, you will read a very different account of the dinner in his own book, for in the so-called appendix there are five pages titled "An Account of Settlers at Harlem." (I have taken care not to repeat any of those very original observations, they are his alone and shall not be poached by me.)

When he had finished eating, he rose and proposed a toast to all of us, in both French and English, very charmingly using words like stonkered which produced much merriment. He spoke beautifully, with a grace as distinctive as the minuet. Standing in his carefully darned stockings he specifically noted the quality of cooking which was superior to anything he had tasted in any home for the previous year, although in fact the meal was very simple, there being, besides the venison, a salad of wild greens and last year's potatoes. He spoke most enthusiastically about the construction of the house and its picturesque position, and if he could not bring himself to praise the wine, he made the effort to tell us how it reminded him of a journey to the Loire and the most delightful little village which must be no more than a mile from the place where the grapes were grown.

I did not mind that he admired the grain of our table but not the table itself. He was a noble, after all. Also, this was a man whose entire soul had been pulled out of him as if it were a long thin gut of shrimp. A fellow must admire both his courage and his grace.

Finally, however, I understood that he intended to say nothing about the most remarkable aspect of our situation-that the ruined Watkins and his wife had produced art which his lordship knew-because I told him so-were being sold in Paris at prices one could hardly credit. He also knew that my wife was now painting whatever she pleased, not to flatter the vanity of clients who would not know a painting from a potato but in order to plumb the luminous mystery of New York light. As he remained silent on these two foundations of my life, I became annoyed.

BETWEEN THE HOUSE and the Hudson there lay buried a long shelf of what is known to ignorant laborers as Manhattan shitz, a diamond-hard gray rock which thrust itself forward from the topsoil and thus, with walls of earth bound hard with roots, left clear a most perfect place which had been named, not by deliberation but by common usage Picnic Rock.

It was here M. de Garmont and I retired after our meal of venison, each carrying our brandy in the only vessels available, two sturdy teacups such as you find in the town cafes.

It was at that hour, when the last skerrick of color had left the water and it lay below us lapping in its secret life, while above us the night sky, in fact or in imagination, showed the deepest darkest stain of blue. I could just trace the outline of the farther shore which I knew to be the Palisades, those cliffs which in the morning, in the eastern sun, would glow a luminous gold. So here we sat, in Paradise I thought, with our backs against the grassy bank, our legs stretched out, savoring our brandy and the aroma of fresh-cut lemon which-Mathilde thought this a wild extravagance-my companion used to keep away mosquitoes.

He sipped his brandy a second time and said it was made pleasingly rounded by the thickness of the vessel which he was far too polite to call a cup. He finally understood, he said, that certain brandies must have always been intended for vessels such as these ones whose thick walls served to counterfeit viscosity and therefore became part of the taste.

In short, the drink was rough enough to blind a sailor.

The bats, swooping low, added their black wings to the uncertain patchwork of the other blacks. The screech owl began, as usual, and I was somehow pleased my companion did not ask its name for he would have disagreed with it. I had already transcribed his essay on the problem of naming plants and birds in new countries and how screech owl and prickly bush, for instance, sounded like the language of children.

The brandy was not half bad if you would be patient with it.

"So," said he. "I have arrived here at an important moment in your life."

"You have."

"A fork in the road, I think it is called."

"It is."

"You have a business."

"Yes," I said, thinking, He is finally going to acknowledge what is going on here before his very nose where he finds us, like the first people on earth, recording the nature of our inheritance.

"The business of art," he insisted.

"It is a business of the highest sort."

He was quiet.

"Do you not agree?" I asked him, for I was truly impatient with his politeness and evasion and if he talked about the art as he had talked about the brandy I would break his neck.

Finally, he said, "Dear chap, no one else will tell you, so forgive me. The paintings are awful."

I laughed.

"You are in love. The paintings are awful. I lie in bed in that bare room and there is nowhere else for my eyes to go. I have studied them for hours."

"They are not exactly paintings."

"I agree," he said.

"She is experimenting with the New York light."

"The same sun shines on everything. It is the same light here as in France. It would be ridiculous to believe any different."

He appeared to be looking at the sky. At first I was furious and then I thought, He is shortsighted. He cannot even see the stars, poor devil.

"When you love a woman you impute to her the virtues you desire."

I thought again, Poor devil. He loved Miss Godefroy to distraction. He loved all the damned Godefroys. He would sit at table looking from one tight face to the next, smiling with his happiness.

"Come to Paris," he said suddenly.

I had heard him very well, but I answered the way fools do, "What?"

"I will pay for you."

"And leave this?"

"You are a remarkable man," he said at last. "You have discovered your own genius. When you leave America you will still be a remarkable man. You have a house here. Well, I will set you up in one at home."