I WAS AWAY when Boobee and Grace arrived from Italy. The setting for our reunion was the station platform at Bullet Park, at seven-forty one Tuesday morning. It was very much a setting. Around a hundred commuters, mostly men, made up the cast. Here were tracks and ties and the sounds of engines, but the sense was much more of a ceremony than of journeys and separations. Our roles seemed fixed in the morning light, and since we would all return before dark, there was no sense of travel. It was the fixedness, the rectitude, of the scene that made Boobee’s appearance in his green plush hat and belted raincoat seem very alien. He shouted my name, bent down and gave me a bone-cracking embrace, and kissed me loudly on both cheeks. I could not have imagined how strange, wild, and indecent such a salutation would appear to be on the station platform at seven-forty. It was sensational. I think no one laughed. Several people looked away. One friend turned pale. Our loud conversation in a language other than English caused as much of a sensation. I suppose it was thought to be affected, discourteous, and unpatriotic, but I couldn’t tell Boobee to shut up or explain to him that in America if we talked in the morning we aimed at a sort of ritual banality. While my friends and neighbors talked about rotary lawn mowers and chemical fertilizers, Boobee praised the beauty of the landscape, the immaculateness of American women, and the pragmatism of American politics, and spoke of the horrors of a war with China. He kissed me goodbye on Madison Avenue. I think no one I knew was looking.
We had the Parlapianos for dinner soon after this, to introduce them to our friends. Boobee’s English was terrible. “May I drop onto you for staying together?” he would ask a woman, intending merely to sit at her side. He was, however, charming, and his spontaneity and his good looks carried him along. We were unable to introduce him to any Italians, since we knew none. In Bullet Park, the bulk of the small Italian population consisted of laborers and domestics. At the top of the heap was the DeCarlo family, who were successful and prosperous contractors, but whether perforce or by chance, they seemed never to have left the confines of the Italian colony. Boobee’s position was therefore ambiguous.
One Saturday morning he called to ask if I would help him with some shopping. He wanted to buy some blue jeans. He pronounced them “blugins,” and it was some time before I understood what he meant. He stopped at my house a few minutes later and drove me in to the village Army and Navy store. He had a large air-conditioned car covered with chromium, and he drove like a Roman. We were speaking Italian when we entered the store. At the sound of this language the clerk scowled as if he sensed shoplifting or check kiting.
“We want some blue jeans,” I said.
“Blugins,” said Boobee.
“What size?”
Boobee and I discussed the fact that we did not know his measurement in inches. The clerk took a tape measure from a drawer and passed it to me. “Measure him yourself,” he said. I measured Boobee and told the clerk the size. The clerk threw a pair of blue jeans on the counter, but they were not what Boobee had in mind. He explained at length and with gestures that he wanted something softer and paler. Then the proprietor, from the back of the store, shouted down the canyon of boxed work boots and denim shirts to his clerk, “Tell them it’s all we got. Where they come from they wear goatskins.”
Boobee understood. His nose seemed to get longer, as it did in every emotional crisis. He sighed. It had never occurred to me that in America a sovereign prince might be penalized for his foreignness. I had seen some anti-American feeling in Italy but nothing as crude as this, and anyhow I wasn’t a prince. In America, Prince Parlapiano was a wop.
“Thank you very much,” I said, and started for the door.
“Where you from, mister?” the clerk asked me.
“I live on Chilmark Lane,” I said.
“I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean where you from in Italy.”
We left the store and found what Boobee wanted in another place, but I saw that his life as an alien was hazardous. He might be Prince Parlapiano at some place like the Hotel Plaza, but struggling with the menu at Chock Full O’Nuts he would be an untouchable.
I DIDN’T SEE the Parlapianos for about a month, and when I did see Boobee again, on the station platform, he seemed to have made a good many friends, although his English showed no improvement. Then Grace called to say that her parents were paying a visit and would we come for cocktails. This was on a Saturday afternoon, and when we got there we found perhaps a dozen neighbors sitting around uncomfortably. Boobee had not caught on to the American cocktail hour. He was serving warm Campari and gumdrops. When I asked, in English, if I could have a Scotch, he asked what kind of Scotch I wanted. I said any Scotch would do. “Good!” he exclaimed. “Then I am giving you rye. Rye is the best Scotch, yes?” I only mention this to show that his grasp of our language and our customs was spotty.
Grace’s parents were an ungainly middle-aged couple from Indiana. “We come from Indiana,” said Mrs. Osborn, “but we are directly descended from the Osborns who settled in Williamsburg, Virginia, in the seventeenth century. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side was an officer in the Confederate Army and was decorated by General Lee. We have this club in Florida. We’re all scientists.”
“Is it Cape Kennedy?” I asked.
“Christian Scientists.”
I shifted to Mr. Osborn, who was a retired used-car dealer. He went on about their club. There were many millionaires among the members. The club had an eighteen-hole golf course, a marina, a college-educated dietitian, and an exacting admissions committee. He lowered his voice and, shielding his mouth with one hand, said, “We try to keep out the Jews and Italians.”
Boobee, standing in front of my wife, asked, “I am dropping down onto you for staying together?”
His mother-in-law, across the room, asked, “What did you say, Anthony?”
Boobee lowered his head. He seemed helpless. “I am asking Mrs. Duclose,” he said shyly, “if I could drop onto her.”