A nicer, quieter, cozier place to stay simply does not exist, not certainly anyplace within the confines of New London, Connecticut, than the new Holiday Inn over on the west side of town just one an a half blocks from where Blacke Avenue intersects Dekker Drive. The traffic is light, it's just enough off the major interstate routes to keep the sounds of it from spilling into the rooms to disturb the guests' repose. The nights are therefore characterized by just such a slumberous dreamy half real state as the weary traveler requires. They arrive here full of care perhaps, often even woe, certainly strained and burdened with much traveling. Few if any local residents ever discover where it is they're going; it is the day to day plight of citizens in residence to never know the destinations of their more restless counterparts, transients everywhere but wherever it is they finally end up. It cannot be said except in half a jest that anybody really ever comes to New London with the aim of remaining there; no, it will be found that they nearly always pass right through, as if such places had been designated by fate to be centers of osmosis, so that one, if choosing to think of them at all, need think nowhere beyond the most primitive membrane. Not that anything about New London is in any sense primitive: far from it, the town is bright, sophisticated, urbane if limited, and above all else modern. No convenience can be said not to be at any passer-by's disposal, most especially at the Holiday Inn.
On a chilly November evening in 1952 it was understood without so much as a word needing to be spoken that it would rain before the night was over. Anyone could tell that from even a cursory examination of the sky. Several people paused in their passage through this part of town to gaze at what appeared to be a poor blind robin with a clipped left wing trying frantically to get off the ground, failing ever again to achieve so much as an airborne foot. The bird apparently had strayed at some point onto the median strip down the center of Blacke Avenue, perhaps it had made a summer home amid the quaint pretty laurel bushes which dotted the lush green grass between the east and west bound lanes of the avenue. If one looked long and studiously enough doubtless he could discover a nest tucked into the raised branches of one of these lovely dying laurels. In the thick of summer the lush deep green leaves would have naturally hidden any robin's nest; now the crackling scratchy brown would afford a deathly kind of camouflage. One could not help wondering: were there more robins about? In the nest starving perhaps? Or already dead, their death yet unknown to the poor blind parent bird struggling perhaps to get back to them with food? Or where they now but ghosts to this robin's memory, having already flown south? Who, besides, or what, had clipped its wing? Why had it gone blind, if indeed it was blind? It certainly seemed blind, its poor stumbling gait attested to if not outright blindness then most definitely a dangerously inadequate eyesight. Should one just kill it and have done with its unhappy situation? Or did it even exist? Every passing traveler has seen it, but its existence is not automatically or necessarily thereby confirmed.
It could be seen only as a dot -- a smudge of rusted brown -- from the rear windows of the Holiday Inn, at a diagonal from it. An ancient man looked out a window, presumably at the apparition, presumably in an attempt to imbue it with some sort of an identity. This man, guest as he was, for the night, at the Holiday Inn, was of an immense old age -- the kind of age about which some local nightclub comic, such as one Dandy Markel, appearing nightly in the Holly Room lounge of the Holiday Inn, might say "he was so old his wrinkles had wrinkles, his gray hairs were turning gray, his liver spots had liver spots," and so on, making quite explicit what a more gifted comic might elect to leave to his audience's imagination. This old gentleman (for, without a thought for their true characters or anything else about them, it is axiomatically taken that guests of the Holiday Inn are ladies and gentlemen, not mere men and women), having pulled back the pale green curtains, stood staring down, from the fourth floor of the Holiday Inn, from room number 417, at the rear of the building and hence given a diagonal view of the median strip along Blacke Avenue (Dekker Drive, on which the Holiday Inn is technically located, that is to say in accordance with post office regulations and due to the location of its front door, has no median strip), at the busy little smudge on the deep hued grass as its color was being coagulated into the devouring ground beneath it. He smiled, this old gentleman.
"A single leaf," he mumbled in a yet lyrical voice still rich and melodious. "Move in the wind, old leaf, flutter about all you can, soon enough the wind will sever you from the grass, as the gentle rain did from the tree. Keep fast that dot of rust on your breast, old leaf, even if you twist and curl till every vein is cracked, still keep that precious dot of life, of death life, of autumn red. How mightily you struggle to stay your last plot of ground. How beautiful your struggle. Keep fast, old friend. Old leaf."
A rap on the door took the old man away from his reverie. Releasing the curtain, but only after a respectful nod in the direction of the median strip, the old man turned and, turning, asked of the visitor "Yes, what is it?"
"Mr. Santayana?" the visitor, in a young man's voice, no doubt that of a bellhop perhaps on his premier run at this profession, asked with a raised tone not quite a call but above a simple statement.
"Yes, what is it?" the old gentleman repeated his initial inquiry.
"Sir, I was asked to remind you of your supper --"
"Dinner," the young bellhop was corrected.
"Yes, I mean dinner, sir. At three-thirty on the dot, sir."
There was neither response nor any detectable rustle within the room, so after a respectable pause the young bellhop refrained his earlier remark. "Sir," he said, "it is now exactly three-thirty precisely, on the dot, sir. P.M., that is."
"Thank you, young man," the old gentleman answered, at which the young bellhop hurried away, on down the hall, to his next appointment of the afternoon. A moment later the old gentleman emerged from room 417, beckoned by the long corridor to venture deeper into the building's interior. He found the carpet difficult to negotiate, however, its thickness, a characteristic understood axiomatically by hosts and guests of the Holiday Inn alike to be highly recommended, offered greater resistance to his shuffling gait than padded comfort to his step. He felt as if he were in some lush tropic forested with deep grasses, never minding the earthen instead of grasseous color of the carpeting. Somewhere in southern Italy perhaps, or on the Azores off Spain. Somewhere he was known to have been during his long lifespan.
Pressing a button eased his labored trek, opening, as it did, the tiny compartment of elevator to him, getting him away from the dubious comfort of that manner of carpeting into which "one sinks" like into a ravine. Another button closed the elevator off from the corridor. This Mr. George Santayana giggled a furtive giggle, apparently bemused by the elevator; indeed, he paused between floors, actually stopping the elevator in its downward flight for no apparent motive save simply being in it.
"Containment," he sighed in a whisper, then let the mechanism resume its normal operation until he found himself deposited in the man lobby, the subject, evidently, of some controversy among a concerned group of people all collected about the elevator door in various poses indicative either of arrested motion or of kinetic impulse, both derived, it would seem, from some common source: concern for Mr. Santayana's safety and well-being apparently.
"Were you frightened?" somebody asked him.
"Frightened?" he repeated inquisitively, as if to hint that, being a human being, in this universe, the question were therefore redundant.
"We thought you were stuck," another explained, seeming to have homed in on the irony of the earlier question.
To this, however, the old gentleman nodded his head and smiled. "No other place," he said, "is so far removed from the earth. Stuck, did you say? Decidedly an interesting perspective, since from where I was, for that one lonely moment, I was alone un-stuck. The fastness, as it were, was with all of you I'm afraid. It is no accident one feels weightless in an elevator. But thank you all for your concern. However, even an old worn out man come home to die does not manage it between floors, any more than between cultures. Eventually one will have you, the other disown you."
"Just goes to show you," someone quipped, "a man can't be in two places at once!" A few laughs ensued, but quickly died.
"Perhaps it might better be put," the old man ventured to correct his youthful interloper, "to say he cannot remain in both places together."
"Couldn't agree more," the interloper admitted, "so I'll have to agree less," he added after a split-second pause. A few of the politer people laughed as the elevator door shut, then they were gone, leaving only the old man and his interloper.
"I got a million more where these came from," the young man pointed out, though not enthusiastically. "You might want to thank me for the warning," he said with a wink.
"I really must be off," the old gentleman said, "my dinner awaits me. Not that my priorities allow for food above human company, but, if you'll allow me a turn at modest humor, I've yet to meet a person who didn't improve with age nor a meal which did. So if you'll excuse me, young man."
"Sure," the young man said, "and have a nice dinner. The food's good here, you'll like it. Oh, one thing -- favor, if you don't mind," he called as the old gentleman began walking away.
"Yes, what is it?" the old gentleman asked, turning once more to face the young man.
"Would you be my guest for the evening, my personal guest."
"I don't comprehend you, I'm afraid," the old man explained.
"In the Holly Room, that's the lounge. I work there. I hesitate to say it, but actually I perform there."
"In what capacity?"
"I'm a comedian," the young man said. "My name is Dandy Markel -- the weird thing is, that's my real name. Oh it's not a name you're ever likely to hear again, I know that; and it's no great honor to be my personal guest. The truth is -- yeah: okay, yeah -- the truth is I've yet to find anyone willing to be my personal guest. So it's no great honor mister. See, I'm not really funny. I used to be, but now I'm not. What it is: now I have to be funny, whereas before I didn't. It makes a lot of difference. I used to enjoy people, now I'm scared of them. It used to make me feel good to see them laugh and know I'd done it. Now, they can destroy me, just like squashing a bug. Just by not laughing. You see what it is? They're no longer free not to laugh, any more than I'm free not to joke. I expect them to laugh, they expect me to make them laugh. I hate it. I swear to God I hate it. I keep saying -- each night -- 'Tonight's it! No more! This is my last gig! I've had it, I'm getting out!' I keep saying that. I just keep right on saying it. Like there's no tomorrow. I'll be here till they fire me, who am I kidding? Get it: who am I kidding? I always manage to somehow get just one or two real laughs: real, genuine laughs. Don't think I mean loud belly laughs, I don't. I mean small, quiet laughs, the kind where the person nods their head while they're laughing and I know, no matter how small their laugh, I succeeded. So I go on. But all I do is grope around up there on stage like I couldn't see for the spotlight, like it blinded not my eyes but my tongue. Sometimes I'm convinced I'm talking another language and it scares me, because I don't know what I've said once I've said it, so I can't possibly know if it really was funny or not, can I?"
The old gentleman inclined his head in an elegant, old worldly bow and exclaimed in as dignified a voice as if he were addressing a monarch, "I should be delighted to attend this evening's performance as your honored guest. Have them reserve the best table in the house for Mr. George Santayana if you please, for -- what hour?"
"Eight o'clock," replied the comedian.
"Eight o'clock it is then. In the meantime, a most propitious evening to you young man."
"And to you too, Mr. Santayana."
In the course of the evening, long after the old gentleman shuffled off to his dinner, and the young comedian hurried to rehearse his act, eight o'clock came around, as if it were a somewhat sleazy traveling salesman soliciting buyers for dubious, perhaps stolen wares. No two clocks passed gave the same exact indication of time, so that, mysteriously, it seemed to go forward and backward, the corridor a spurious date line, the clocks trying to make the old gentleman think he arrived in the Holly Room lounge earlier than he left the dining room, where he had been since diner. Leaving relativity out of this, he thought briefly as he opened the lounge door onto a brightly dimmed room filled with small square tables with richly padded chairs veneered over top of spindly legs, bright spot lights recessed here and there amid an otherwise blank ceiling, a long bar with black padded front panels, smoky veined mirror tiles complete from ceiling to floor behind the bar, and a good many people scattered around in varying stages of motion - leaving relativity out, it is not possible to end up a step behind the first one you took. Never mind this business of falling behind two for every one forward you take. With this thought in mind, of no particular significance, he pushed himself across the threshold.
He had no more than been announced than a woman somewhere protested something about a Panama hat. "He doesn't wear one," she insisted, "so he cannot be George Santayana! Besides, his face is too round, he is too short and, furthermore, George Santayana is at this very moment, I quite assure you, in Italy! The man is an imposter, pure and simple!"
The old gentleman trudged undaunted to the table reserved in his name, deep in thought though. Puzzlement of an extraordinary degree puffed his cheeks, if only incidentally, as it puckered his lips upward toward his nose and lowered his brow. He looked, as he walked and even after seating himself, at as many faces as he could comfortably take in, searching each face diligently for some answer. Finally, he looked down at his table and asked if it could be, if this thing could be true.
"Is is possible I'm not who I thought I was?" he asked very earnestly. "It felt so right to be...to be him...me...to be the great philosopher Santayana. The ideas, the changes in ideas down through the years, the nominalism, Schopenhauer's pessimism, given way to James' pragmatism, in turn to Heidegger's phenomenology. The beauty, the 'truth,' the two worlds, two cultures, the being drawn into both, held nowhere, void of final resolution: all of it, I felt it, experienced it, understood it. I lived it. Yet you say I am not he. For want of a Panama hat, I am not Santayana. Is existence that trivial that a mere hat determines a man's true identity? I never till this moment considered the possibility that I might not be him. I just assumed. I became him because it seemed right I should. Now I don't know. I ventured all the way from Italy, an old man, home to die. Not really home though. Ought that not perhaps to have been my clue, that I consider myself having a home? Is there such an oddity as a 'home' for the true philosopher? Perhaps that was the give-away: not the want of a hat but the sense of belonging somewhere. My eye was not keen enough to see it. I must apologize to one and all present."
There was a hush as he arose from his seat, and as he glanced around the room, this hush continued as he offered one apology to all the people collectively. Only as he started to go did it dissipate, this hush, become filled until it could not withstand the pressure.
"No, please stay," they all said. "Please: let us apologize, if anyone, not you. Only please stay: you're our guest -- remember?"
Momentarily, the old gentleman bowed his head in acceptance of the general request. Wanting very much to go, he sat down again and remained for the show. Dandy Markel had never been less amusing in his life. The whole episode had so unnerved him as to dissipate any hope he might have entertained of being brilliant. Most of the audience had left long before his routine was over, only a very few remaining beyond a respectable time.
"I wish I had never seen you," Dandy Markel informed the old gentleman after the show had ended. "You made it so I have to leave now. Not one person nodded tonight. I'd hoped this would be my one last chance to stay, to stay for good. It proved just the opposite. I suppose there's a principle in that somewhere, but I'm too heartsick to look for it just now."
"No, there is none," the old gentleman said. "I came home to die," he went on to say, "now I find I can't. There's no joy in that discovery. I'm going to turn in now young man, this has been a trying experience for me."
"Yeah," observed Dandy Markel, "me three!"
Inside, the darkness helped the old gentleman to sleep, as it helped Dandy Markel count his tears alone in his dressing room as he gathered up his belongings. Outside, the darkness was real, and as proof it covered leaves and dead grasses and prickly laurel bushes, all in the median strip of the highway, taking hold too of a feather and pulling down so hard on it that the frantic chirping mouth of the bird let fatal drops of rain collect in its throat, while the eerie green myopic glow of the big Holiday Inn sign stretched from down the side street to watch.