have been on the afternoon of my fourth or fifth day in Port Warwick that my father, retired now from the shipyard, took me for a long ride around town in his car. We traveled all the old avenues, many of them strange to me now (the largest and most venerable trees seem to be the first victims of a municipal renascence: not only the magnolias but the oaks and elms had fallen, in a process of rebuilding that made way for, among other things, the first Bauhaus-inspired Pentecostal Holiness church in Dixie), and we had beer and pigs’ knuckles behind the flyspecked glass of Jake Eisenman’s grill, which alone amid the Laundromats and Serv-ur-Selfs and Howard Johnsons resisted change, resisted neon and plastic and chrome, resisted sanitation and a new clientele (the old young gang was still at it, sallow-faced and now balding amid the pool cues and the verdigris-tinged spittoons, still yacking about poontang and pussy, white and dark, though now also about that contortionist legal maneuver, the pride of Byrd-land, called interposition, which would surely keep the niggers in their place), and afterwards, a touch beery and afloat in the bright September heat, we made a brief circuit of the harbor and drove slowly alongside the blue and spectacular bay. It was a clear day, slightly hazed far out where gray gigantic cruisers and tankers rode at anchor, but salt-smelling, transparent and magical, white with sparkling gulls. We went past a beach where muddy-legged boys were out digging clams, and children played on the sand within reach of plump bandannaed mothers, suntan-oiled and glistening like seals. A motorboat, soundless upon the far reaches of the water, cleft the tide between twin silver parabolas of spray. For a brief instant pleasurably lost, I felt caught up in a reverie of years long past—flapping sails and smell of tar and clamshells cool and gritty in the hand—which changeless childhood seascape, even here, even now, seemed to elude and deny the marauding clutch of progress. A stoplight halted us, precipitately: it was the old man’s spine-chilling knack always to slam on the brakes thus, with no margin for error and at the last moment of truth.
And as we stopped there, he said: “Son, you’ve been mighty down in the mouth since you’ve been home. What’s the matter? Woman trouble?”
What could I tell him? Yes and no; it was woman trouble, but it was some other trouble more profound and unsettling which was at the root of that, and, having told no one else about Sambuco, I could not force myself to speak to him about it, either. I murmured something about the humidity.
Then (psychic weatherman) he said: “I know. I know, Peter. These are miserable times.” The light changed and we heaved forth with a lurch. “They are miserable times. Empty times. Mediocre times. You can almost sniff the rot in the air. And what is more, they are going to get worse. Do you know that? Read Carlyle. Read Gibbon. Get times like these when men go whoring off after false gods, and the fourth or fifth best is best, and newness and slickness and thrills are all—and what do you come to at last? Moral and spiritual anarchy, that’s what. Then political anarchy. Then what? Dictatorship! We’ve already got one in this state,” he added, and spat out the name of that proconsul of the commonwealth whose works had kept him in a state of tense outrage for thirty years.
Rare and prodigious man, my father. Had he been born in the North I think he might very well have been an old-style radical. As it was—a good Episcopalian, whose circumstances had located him within the purlieus of the most stiff-necked parish this side of Canterbury—he had managed to work out a shaky compromise between his honest piety, on the one hand, and his enlarged human views, on the other, and the resulting tension had helped to make him the only true liberal I think I have ever known. To be one of this breed in New York is childishly simple; to be one