28<4
PARTISAN REVIEW
ing a face that was just visible to me over the wooden bench in
front, so that it was not by his clothes that I knew him as an
American; and neither by his gestures nor speech, for he was alone.
A good face, this old man's face, with its thatch of white hair, and
with the decency and kindness in it that is also so American. But
again it was the American boy-man, with old age displaying itself as
the withered face of an adolescent. But there was also something
else visible beneath the well-fed contours: the grey bleak Protestant
lines that Grant Wood has painted in his "American Gothic." The'
American Gothic may belong for the most part to our past, but the
residue of this past still seems to lie beneath the smooth middle-class
features of the elderly American travelers, and even the Helen
Hokinson lady,
if
she is not too fat, will show these pinched lines,
at least when you see her against the background of Italy.
Nothing was more startling among the great flood of tourists
than the number of grown young men traveling with their mothers,
apparently content to pass nearly every waking moment in Mother's
company, even while meeting the adventure of Europe. A typical pair
were Gene and his mother, whom I met in a bus traveling through
Tuscany. The bus itself was a slice of the respectable American mid–
dle class: mothers, daughters, sons, and maiden aunts; and it was
with something of a shock that I heard this mincing voice from the
back of the car saying "I'll sit with Mother," as he offered his seat
to a lady; and with the thought, "Well, here we go again," I turned
around to see a nice-looking young man, with the soft American
face, probably in his early thirties, and beside him his mother, a lady
with the prim and tidy lines of the American Gothic. When the
bus stopped at an inn for lunch, Gene and I were put at the same
table, and we struck up a conversation. He talked very readily, with
the incessant flow of trivialities that is supposed to characterize
woman's chatter, and before the trip was over I felt I knew nearly
every detail in the daily round of his life back home. Siena, Pisa,
Lucca; the dusty and beautiful landscape of Tuscany rolled by
outside the window while Gene's talk unrolled the cinema of his life
in Schenectady, N. Y., where he was surrounded by the middle-aged
ladies, Mother's friends, who came for tea or bridge. Mother and
Mother's friends-that seemed to be his life. Where was Father
in all this? Father must be dead, or the emotional equivalent. I
