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THIRTY-FIVE

Until the end, Howard and I kept on making plans for future trips. The one that we were most looking forward to was aboard the Radisson line, starting from near home at Salerno and then on to the Greek islands and the Turkish coast. In exchange for our passage, I’d lecture on Greece and the islands, putting me in competition with my august friend Gough Whitlam, onetime prime minister of Australia and a classicist who had been doing pretty much the same thing for another line. Unfortunately, we never made that trip to the Greek islands but at least, years earlier, Howard and I had sailed the Aegean in a caique with Paul Newman whose wife, Joanne Woodward, jumped ship at the first stop and flew to London to attend the theater. Meanwhile, our arrival at each of a dozen islands was heralded by youthful voices shouting, in unison, POLE. NOO…MUN! How they knew we were aboard so nondescript a boat restores one’s belief in the Sirens who infested those waters when Ulysses himself sailed by. We also encountered some rather grim sirens when we put into port at Mykonos. A tall Giacometti-style woman vaulted aboard to introduce herself to Paul as a Hohenzollern princess of Prussia. She was swollen with ouzo not to mention imperial airs. “Get rid of her,” Paul kept muttering to me and Howard. We did our best but her long imperial limbs seemed made of fettuccine: we could never get a polite grip on her. Suddenly, this self-styled heiress to Frederick the Great slithered free of us and rushed into Paul’s stateroom where she relieved herself of what seemed to be a gallon of ouzo on his bunk. With that, Howard, who had a strong managerial side and spoke sailors’ Italian, shouted for the police to rescue POLE NOO MUN which they did. The imperial princess put up a fight worthy of her great ancestor Der Alte Fritz but she was soon shore-bound as our skipper weighed anchor and got us around the island. For a long time Mykonos gossip, I’m told, spoke of a royal romantic quarrel aboard our ship the Helena Pente while in port. Luckily, the princess proved to be our last perhapsburg.

The next morning we awakened to a science-fiction world. At the center of the island of Santorini—sometimes called Thera—there is a deep crater filled with blue-black water. Rising from the water were the sides of the volcano whose spectacular explosion in 1520 BC allegedly ended the Minoan civilization on nearby Crete and destroyed a fairly glittering civilization at Santorini.

Howard, Paul, and I rode donkeys to the top of what was left of the volcano. Archaeologists were only beginning their excavations of surprisingly well-preserved modern-looking buildings. Some still had their walls, murals, and roofs while tomatoes were in full bloom on the winding path to the top of the mountain. These tomatoes proved to be our breakfast.

Paul Newman and I in 1961 on the island of Delos where the god Apollo was born. Here we are saluting what is left of one of the monuments.

I had read a great deal about the eruption of Santorini before we arrived in the obsidian black crater of what had been the original volcano. The capital of the Minoan empire was Knossos on nearby Crete and as most of the Cretan palaces and villages including Knossos had been in ruins until Arthur Evans, a renowned archaeologist, who was perhaps too much school of Walt Disney, had undertaken extensive restorations which gave one a sense of what Walt Disney himself might have done had he been assigned to so vast a project. Purists hated the result. I was neutral because I had nothing to compare Evans’s work to. But Santorini the day that Howard, Paul, and I arrived at noon was very much like Herculaneum, the lava-buried city south of Naples where archaeologists are still restoring parts of the city to what it had looked like originally, right down to charred wood furniture and elaborate carbonized venetian blinds.

Santorini, a thousand years older than Herculaneum and Pompeii, is an even more vivid look at the past exactly as it was when the top of the mountain blew off and a city was smothered while villages were preserved with all sorts of food on their tables, excepting the tomato, a late arrival from Virginia.

Since as a writer I’ve ranged about from fifth century BC to most of our relatively brief American story I am quite used to the plunge into the past, often prompted by newly revealed ruins. At fourteen when sent off to the most uncongenial Los Alamos Ranch School I ignored as much as was possible the horses not to mention most of my fellow students (William Burroughs had come and gone by the time I arrived). And so I was left with the school library where, to the horror of the teachers, I read my way through the Yale edition of Shakespeare; then, with pick and shovel, I took over a nearby Indian Pueblo ruin and excavated the original ground level in the course of a season to the bewilderment, commingled with loathing, of an ahistorical faculty chosen for their hearty Theodore Rooseveltian love of the great wild west outdoors. I’ve disliked TR, the spiritual founder of Los Alamos, to this day. Happily my excavations exempted me from mindless games. Then, after the Easter vacation of 1940 I went “home” to the Potomac Palisades manse of Mr. and Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss where I told her that the headmaster of the Ranch School was a remarkably busy pederast. Nina chose to disbelieve me by which time I had no interest at all in her opinion on any subject. More to the point, that was the spring when the Nazis occupied France and we were flung into history with a vengeance. Luckily, Gene also hated Los Alamos, particularly the Auchincloss-size bills that he had to pay, and so I was shipped off to Exeter, a place in real time. My last look at my “dig” was emblematic of all art. What I had so painstakingly dug up had been crudely filled in with desert dust. I still retained some pieces of ancient pottery.

But on a vivid blue day overlooking the sea there were few tourists at Santorini so one could wander about in rooms unoccupied for several thousand years. While Howard and Paul drank beer at a taverna nearby, I was pacing off rooms. Measuring doors—how short the people must have been. Every now and then I had a fleeting glimpse of one of them just around a corner only to find that he had been painted on a wall. But what had gone on in the house? Had it doubled as a shop? Thus the compulsive historical mind feeds itself on potsherds. And not much else. At that time Santorini had both too much history and too little…There were those who believed that it was Atlantis similarly destroyed; others believed that mainland Crete had been Atlantis. Before one chose either tale there would have to be some overarching holistic reason not yet revealed by the archaeological shovel. Or a flash of intuition. But none came, and so we sailed away on the Helena and none of us ever came back and a world starting to form in my mind simply aborted, as indeed had the “real” one under the volcano.

My father’s death was celebrated by a perfectly emblematic event: the first Americans had landed on the moon. Father and son equally gasped as a hollow voice told us that this was a small step for a man but a giant step for mankind. There had been much discussion about what sort of a step it would prove to be: there were those who maintained that the moon was enveloped in a shroud of dust and that the first man to set foot on the surface would promptly disappear from view. But he did not. The dust was only a few inches thick framed by the black sky that enfolded this sterile globe about which our race had speculated since we first left the primordial ooze for the tumultuous planetary air that, as we stared at the television set, it looked as if we might soon abandon for the oxygenless lunar landscape stepping-stone, if nothing else, to outer space and the ultimate encounter with the Big Bang, our true origin where, at last, we could meet ourselves and—merge? Or would time—our time at least—have a stop as a circular eternity swallows us up?

The physics and metaphysics were fascinating to contemplate. Unfortunately we were given little time to contemplate this greatest of events. Pentagon machinery had overtaken the moon; we had surpassed the Communists was the general theme of the celebration of what was happening. The whole world was ours—and other worlds, too. Gene, who disliked boasting, switched off the sound. But I was in a mood for boasting. I told him that after Kennedy was elected president he asked a number of us to write him what should be the principal goals of his administration: the exploration of space, I declared. Science fiction has a loyal audience. The Russians had already got into space with Sputnik. Rather cynically, I had noted that since it was generally agreed that most earthly problems were not going to be solved by the governments now in place a total break with the planet would not only divert everyone’s attention but literally open new vistas.

Gene was amused: “I can just see the wars over who gets the mineral rights to the moon.” But he was delighted to be still alive at that moment. He liked to recall how as director of air commerce he had launched an aerial salute to the Wright brothers involving most of the aircraft in the nation. “I always knew we were headed for the moon and beyond but I never thought that I would live to see it.” He did by some months.

He had been struck at New Year’s by an odd pneumonia. X-rays revealed lung cancer. For someone who neither smoked nor drank and could still fit into his West Point uniform Gene was given to a host of illnesses, some quite mysterious. The fact that the lung cancer disappeared in a week or two meant that one of his mystery ailments had struck. When lungs were found to be clear, his mood changed to normal. To celebrate he smoked a small cigar, his first in several decades. But he resolutely refused his doctor-cousin’s excellent dry martini whose ingredients and shaker were always close to hand thanks to a well-trained nurse. Finally, the lung cancer made a mysterious brief reappearance. Then the ultimate non-mystery: he had cancer of the kidney and must be promptly operated upon. It was I who drank our doctor-cousin’s perfect martini. When the day of the operation broke, as always, at dawn to suit some arcane hospital timetable he set aside his chronic hypochondria (because he knew this was not a mystery but the real thing). He joked with the hospital functionary: Were they certain that they were going to remove the right kidney? His wife, Kit, an edgy woman in daily life, was endlessly serene in crisis. He was part-sedated when I left the hospital room. I waved at him—neither liked to be touched. He gave an odd gulp. On the television set a shadowy Richard Nixon was busy thanking Buzz and Biff and Joe, what sounded more like an Eskimo dog pack than astronauts far from earth. I slipped away.

As usual with him, the operation was a success. They had got all the cancer, they said. I didn’t know then that they seldom do. But I had now entered cancer valley, as I think of California. Thanks to the relentless atomic testing to the east of Los Angeles in Nevada we are all generously exposed to radiation. A final visit to the hospital room. The curious gray-yellow eyes were bright; he was puffing a slender cigar—this was not addiction or even pleasure but an odd defiance. I murmured to my stepmother I thought it a bad idea. She was rather hard: “It’s too late now.” I tried to hush her up. Surprisingly, she said, “It makes no difference—he’s still knocked out—he can’t understand you.” He actually laughed. “Of course I can. After all, I’ve still got cancer.” I’ll never know if she was right and at the conscious level of his brain he was already elsewhere or that he was compos mentis and did not seem to care what turn the conversation took.

A week or two later he was up and around: a full recovery I was told. He was also taking a variation of Dr. Niehans’s miracle sheep placenta, the same concoction that kept Somerset Maugham in not so rude health for far longer than anyone liked. I flew back to Rome.

The Roman winter of 1969–1970 was dismal for me due to Gene’s condition. He was being kept alive by the shots from Switzerland. During this glum period I seem to have published an essay a week, mostly in The New York Review of Books which had superseded, as predicted by Edmund Wilson, The New York Times Book Review. Howard and I had also rented a small flat in Klosters, a village in the canton of Graubünden, a few miles from Feldkirch in Austria, the town where my great-grandfather in 1848 had begun his emigration to the United States after first marrying Emma Carolina von Hartmann de Traxler of Lucerne. They settled in Racine, Wisconsin, sometimes referred to as Swissconsin. It is said that the first member of our family to arrive in the United States, Eugen Fidel Vidal, had been the only Swiss immigrant to fail in the cheese business in Wisconsin, but as he was, I know from documents, a graduate of the University of Lausanne, I still don’t know if he was actually a medical doctor as he had claimed to be. We do know that not long after settling his wife, Emma, one son, and two daughters in Racine he vanished for twenty years. Since these years coincided with our Civil War I assume that having left his native Austria to avoid conscription he felt no overpowering passion to join Mr. Lincoln’s army. During his absence, Emma supported her children by translating from newspapers and magazines for the American press. She was fluent in German, French, and Italian. She brought up her children with many Old World airs and graces. She also kept a casket filled with family coats of arms necessary to prove that she was a true member of the lower nobility and so eligible for membership in various grand societies.

In due course, Eugen returned with no tale to tell about his disappearance. One family story has it that Emma promptly put him in the poorhouse. But some of the cousinage have found their gravestones, side by side, in a Catholic cemetery at Racine. Her place of birth is given as Carthage. This was the best Racine could do with Cartagena where she had been born, thanks to the Peninsular War: She was a daughter of the Swiss captain of the Spanish king’s guard. Gene had no interest in history, his own or anyone else’s, so what he might have been told by his grandparents and others he had long since forgotten by the time I started asking questions. One aunt recalled having seen Eugen Fidel who spoke with a heavy German accent and every evening wore a frayed red velvet jacket. I have two small boxes containing slips of paper addressed to him by classmates from Lausanne, wishing him luck, presumably in the New World. I could find no references to medicine or any other profession in these slips of paper. I did discover that his maternal grandfather had been burgermeister of Feldkirch while family legend has it that Emma had had a falling out with the Jesuits who effectively governed Feldkirch from their vast monastery on a hill overlooking the town. The fight had to do with a contested piece of property, which she lost, thus explaining an anticlerical streak in the entire family ever since.

Along with numerous essays I was novel-writing again, in longhand on yellow legal pads which were then typed up by an eccentric American woman who had worked for a time for Lawrence Durrell and had many stories to tell, mostly about his apparently prodigious capacity in the kitchen and at the dinner table. Briefly, she had been involved with a Jewish American and they had moved to Tel Aviv, where she had expected a brilliant intellectual life like nineteenth-century Prague. “Instead,” she grumbled, “it’s just another hopelessly incompetent Mediterranean city like Rome.” In the end she moved back to Rome and a lifetime of irritability. Since I had no expectations of Rome other than its history, in which I was marinated from what seems like birth, what bored her enchanted me. But in the end I, too, was bored and so was Howard. From Klosters I did some research in the files of St. Stephen’s Church. Although birth and death certificates were missing, there was a full record of everyone’s marriages. Apparently in the 1580s we moved on south to Friuli, to a village called Forni a Voltri where we lived until, as the record bleakly puts it, the father of Eugen Fidel returned home to “the empire”…to Feldkirch where the Vidals had a prosperous pharmaceutical business with a number of outlets including, I assume, Forni a Voltri and Venice itself. When my father died he left me a stained-glass medallion with a picture of a bearded man wearing a hat. Back of him are jewel-like vases containing drugs. A man wearing a sword waits patiently for his fix. The man at the counter is my ancestor Caspar Vidall and the date is 1589. On my first visit to Feldkirch I visited the shop with its vast cellars where every sort of chemical had been stored. My last trip to Feldkirch revealed that the tradition-loving Austrians had torn down Vidalhaus, built in 1300. I did learn that another interesting family had lived there in our time: the Frei family who later emigrated to Chile where two members became president. The medallion which has passed from eldest son to eldest son since the 1500s is all that is left of our time in the Austrian empire.

The Freis had, I am told, the best pastry shop in Feldkirch. I suggested to a dull biographer that he write the current Frei for information but, alas, because I had begun my first memoir with an ironic joke about memoirs being “tissues of lies” he assumed that everything I’d written in my own memoir was a lie to be relentlessly probed by his resolute dullness. The biographer, himself Jewish, was positive we were Spanish Jews who had converted in the fourteenth century at the time the family business began in Feldkirch. I thought this romantic and thought no more about it. Then on October 2, 1990, one Robert E. Wachs wrote: “Dear Mr. Vidal, I came upon something which may be of interest to you. I was walking through the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris last week, and saw in the Jewish section of that cemetery a gravestone for Vidal-Bouvier. The name struck me because I seem to recall that you are related to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, but assumed that Bouvier was Catholic, and that neither Vidal nor Bouvier was Jewish.”

Since the death of the apothecary Caspar Vidall, this stained-glass medallion from 1589 has descended from eldest son to eldest son until 1969 when my father died and the medallion came to me. Caspar presumably lived in Vidalhaus in Feldkirch, Vorarlberg (Austria), where he can be seen at work preparing some sort of potion for a carriage-trade gentleman. My one visit to Vidalhaus was in the 1960s and I was struck by the huge cellars where the drugs from a network of such shops extended across the then Austro-Hungarian empire all the way down to Friuli and Venice. The family Vital was Romanisch and a branch still lives in the Engadin. Under fascism Mussolini insisted that the mountain folk add vowels to their names so Vital became Vitale; the “t” had become a “d” as early as the 1580s. Also at home in Vidalhaus was a family of pastry makers called Frei; they emigrated to Chile where, in recent years, two of them became president.

I’ve always known that Vidal was a name Jews took in troubled times since the Latin root vita vitalis for Vidal in Italian means “life,” as does the Hebrew Chaim. Though my quarrel with Bobby K. had ended my friendship with Jackie I couldn’t resist sending her a copy of the letter with the note: “I’d heard about me but not about you.” I fear she did not sprint to the letter box to confess. Now my far-flung readers have come up with a more plausible origin of name and family. I’d always taken it for granted that we were Romanish people placed in the Alps by Tiberius to defend the frontiers. The Romano Raetians are the smallest Swiss minority with their own difficult Latinate dialect honored by Swiss law. Recently, I received a letter from a reader in Sent, a town near Saint Moritz in the Engadine valley. Mr. Not Vital wrote, “I was astounded and very proud to read that you are a Raetoromansh, so am I. During lunch with my mother here in Sent, I told her that your grandfather was Felix Vidal. She looked at me: ‘Fila Vidal [Fila is Felix in English] left Sent for America.’ ” Unfortunately, my grandfather Felix Vidal was born in Racine, Wisconsin, the son of Eugen Fidel Vidal born in Feldkirch in 1820 who emigrated in 1848. How best to claim so exotic a heritage!