Father Panin
I tore up the note and ordered lunch. Egon had never been in Rome. His mother he said he had never seen. He had been brought up in a school. One day Father Panin came to the school and said he was going to Rome to see his mother.
I wondered what kind of story I was going to get out of this thing. Was Egon's mother an international spy? Did she dress in black net and wear big picture hats and did strong men tremble at her smallest whim? Would sinister figures follow us to Rome? Was I in danger of my life? Why wasn't I armed? Who was Father Panin? Egon, was he boy or midget? His baggage was one small hat bag of battered leather. Did it contain a human head? Nonsense!
Of course, it contained something valuable. Perhaps the Medici head… a jeweled bust of Pope Leo… made by Cellini, now lost for many years… stolen. It could be. I lit a fresh pipe and wondered if Egon's mother was a blonde. Would she try and use me as tool in her game… whatever it was?
The tobacco tasted good, the train ran. Egon came to me.
“Could I go to the sandbox?”
“Sandbox?”
“That's what we called it in school.”
I took him to the little boys' room. I looked over the train. Many sinister faces filled the train. They could be anything. Jewel crooks, spies, Greek gun kings, white slavers, and of course just people; but I hated to admit the last.
All night I dreamed of dreadful exciting things. By morning I decided Egon's mother was a well-made red-head with eyes that drove men mad. Even Egon looked better in the morning… he was painting his name with toothpaste on the train window. I pitied the squalid contentment of peasants that the train ran past. I dreamed of adventure, of cold austere beauty like cream-colored ceramic sculpture. Then we were near Rome, grass biting upward on old ruins and turning to ivy on the towers, and beggars standing, peddling trash, with the red, bare, rheumatic feet of parrots.
I took a taxi to the hotel. It was a shabby, run-down place. A man tried to steal my bag. I told him to scram you bum, in impeccable Italian; he turned out to be the hotel clerk.
Egon's mother was out. She was, he said, a bareback rider in a small circus touring the outskirts of Rome. Very clever, I thought… till I saw her. She was a faded, tired girl, with tired eyes and red, swollen hands. She was very shy.
“You are Egon?” she said to the boy.
“I am Egon,” said the child.
“You are kind,” she said to me.
“I guess so,” I said. “Tell me, do you know Father Panin well?”
“No… his name was given to me by people who sell tickets and bring children to their parents. He is their agent in Budapest.”
“Did it cost much?” I asked her.
“I have been saving for two years to bring Egon to me. My husband he died, a fall from the high wire… but now we are together. Egon and myself. Poor but together.”
I lied. “There is some of your money left over… enough for a dinner. I would like to take you and Egon out to dinner.”
“But you must not spend too much.”
Egon said, “Where is the sandbox?”
“What?” asked Egon's mother.
“Let me,” I said, taking Egon by the arm…
We had dinner that night after the show. Egon's mother wasn't a very good bareback rider. She tried hard, and it was not much of a circus… but she really wasn't very good.
Egon and his mother ate as if they had been hungry a long time. I am sure they had been. I was so angry at Father Panin that I ordered a Moët and Chandon wine to cheer us up. It held us fine until the main dish came.
I suppose I should have been too angry to enjoy it… but I enjoyed it very much. Egon had two helpings and he had learned to call the sandbox the powder room; after all, I couldn't always be with him…
For some reason Egon's mother wanted frogs' legs American. She had once heard of them from her husband who claimed to have eaten them in Texas…
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