The Stories of John Cheever Part 22

"I think it's all right, Officer," the secretary began. "I think it will..."

"Let's make sure," the policeman said, and he began to slap Francis' clothes, looking for what-pistols, knives, an ice pick? Finding nothing, he went off and the secretary began a nervous apology: "When you called on the telephone, Mr. Weed, you seemed very excited, and one of the doctor's patients has been threatening his life, and we have to be careful. If you want to go in now?" Francis pushed open a door connected to an electrical chime, and in the doctor's lair sat down heavily, blew his nose into a handkerchief, searched in his pockets for cigarettes, for matches, for something, and said hoa.r.s.ely, with tears in his eyes, "I'm in love, Dr. Herzog."

IT is a week or ten days later in Shady Hill. The seven-fourteen has come and gone, and here and there dinner is finished and the dishes are in the dish-was.h.i.+ng machine. The village hangs, morally and economically, from a thread; but it hangs by its thread in the evening light. Donald Goslin has begun to worry the "Moonlight Sonata" again. Marcato ma sempre pianissimo! He seems to be wringing out a wet bath towel, but the housemaid does not heed him. She is writing a letter to Arthur G.o.dfrey. In the cellar of his house, Francis Weed is building a coffee table. Dr. Herzog recommends woodwork as a therapy, and Francis finds some true consolation in the simple arithmetic involved and in the holy smell of new wood. Francis is happy. Upstairs, little Toby is crying, because he is tired. He puts off his cowboy hat, gloves, and fringed jacket, unbuckles the belt studded with gold and rubies, the silver bullets and holsters, slips off his suspenders, his checked s.h.i.+rt, and Levi's, and sits on the edge of his bed to pull off his high boots. Leaving this equipment in a heap, he goes to the closet and takes his s.p.a.ce suit off a nail. It is a struggle for him to get into the long tights, but he succeeds. He loops the magic cape over his shoulders and, climbing onto the footboard of his bed, he spreads his arms and flies the short distance to the floor, landing with a thump that is audible to everyone in the house but himself.

"Go home, Gertrude, go home," Mrs. Masterson says. "I told you to go home an hour ago, Gertrude. It's way past your suppertime, and your mother will be worried. Go home!" A door on the Babc.o.c.ks' terrace flies open, and out comes Mrs. Babc.o.c.k without any clothes on, pursued by a naked husband. (Their children are away at boarding school, and their terrace is screened by a hedge.) Over the terrace they go in at the kitchen door, as pa.s.sionate and handsome a nymph and satyr as you will find on any wall in Venice. Cutting the last of the roses in her garden, Julia hears old Mr. Nixon shouting at the squirrels in his bird-feeding station. "Rapscallions! Varmints! Avaunt and quit my sight!" A miserable cat wanders into the garden, sunk in spiritual and physical discomfort. Tied to its head is a small straw hat-a doll's hat-and it is securely b.u.t.toned into a doll's dress, from the skirts of which protrudes its long, hairy tail. As it walks, it shakes its feet, as if it had fallen into water.

"Here, p.u.s.s.y, p.u.s.s.y, p.u.s.s.y!" Julia calls.

"Here, p.u.s.s.y, here, poor p.u.s.s.y!" But the cat gives her a skeptical look and stumbles away in its skirts. The last to come is Jupiter. He prances through the tomato vines, holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.

THE d.u.c.h.eSS.

IF YOU SHOULD happen to be the son of a coal miner or were brought up (as I was) in a small town in Ma.s.sachusetts, the company of a ranking d.u.c.h.ess might excite some of those vulgar sentiments that have no place in fiction, but she was beautiful, after all, and beauty has nothing to do with rank. She was slender, but not thin. And rather tall. Her hair was ash blond, and her fine, clear brow belonged against that grandiose and shabby backdrop of limestone and marble, the Roman palace where she lived. It was hers, and, stepping from the shadows of her palace to walk along the river to early Ma.s.s, she never quite seemed to leave the grainy light. One would have been surprised but not alarmed to see her join the company of the stone saints and angels on the roof of Sant' Andrea della Valle. This was not the guidebook city but the Rome of today, whose charm is not the Coliseum in the moonlight, or the Spanish Stairs wet by a sudden shower, but the poignance of a great and an ancient city succ.u.mbing confusedly to change. We live in a world where the banks of even the most remote trout streams are beaten smooth by the boots of fishermen, and the music that drifts down from the medieval walls into the garden where we sit is an old recording of Vivienne Segal singing "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"; and Donna Carla lived, like you and me, with one foot in the past.

She was Donna Carla Malvolio-Pommodori, d.u.c.h.ess of Vevaqua-Perdere-Giusti, etc. She would have been considered fair anywhere, but in Rome her blue eyes, her pale skin, and her s.h.i.+ning hair were extraordinary. She spoke English, French, and Italian with equal style, but Italian was the only language she wrote correctly. She carried on her social correspondence in a kind of English: "Donna Carla thinks you for the flahers," "Donna Carla rekests the honor of your compagnie," etc. The first floor of her palace on the Tiber had been converted into shops, and she lived on the piano n.o.bile. The two upper floors had been rented out as apartments. This still left her with something like forty rooms.

Most guidebooks carry the family history, in small print, and you can't travel in Italy without coming on those piles of masonry that Malvolio-Pommodoris have scattered everywhere, from Venice to Calabria. There were the three popes, the doge, and the thirty-six cardinals, as well as many avaricious, bloodthirsty, and dishonest n.o.bles. Don Camillo married the Princess Pleves, and after she had given him three sons he had her excommunicated, on a rigged charge of adultery, and seized all her lands. Don Camillo and his sons were butchered at dinner by a.s.sa.s.sins who had been hired by their host, Don Camillo's uncle Marcantonio. Marcantonio was strangled by Cosimo's men, and Cosimo was poisoned by his nephew Antonio. The palace in Rome had had an oubliette-a dungeon below a chamber whose floor operated on the principle of a seesaw. If you walked or were pushed beyond the axis, you went howling down for good into the bone pit. All this was long before the nineteenth century, when the upper stories were remodeled into apartments. Donna Carla's grandparents were exemplary Roman n.o.bles, They were even prudish, and had the erotic frescoes in the ballroom rectified. They were commemorated by a marble portrait statue in the smoking room. It was life-size and showed them as they might have appeared for a walk on the Lungo-Tevere-marble hats, marble gloves, a marble walking stick. He even had a marble fur collar on his marble coat. The most corrupt and tasteless park commissioner could not have been bribed to give it s.p.a.ce.

Donna Carla was born in the family village of Vevaqua, in Tuscany, where her parents lived for many years in a kind of exile. Her father was simple in his tastes, bold, pious, just, and the heir to an immense patrimony. Hunting in England as a young man, he had a bad spill. His arms and legs were broken, his skull was fractured, and several vertebrae were smashed. His parents took what was then the long trip from Rome to England, and waited three days for their brilliant son to regain consciousness. It was thought he would never walk again. His recuperative powers were exceptional, but it was two years before he took a step. Then, wasted, leaning on two sticks and half supported by a busty nurse named Winifred-Mae Bolton, he crossed the threshold of the nursing home into the garden. He held his head up, smiled his quick smile, and moved haltingly, as if he were delayed by his pleasure in the garden and the air, and not by his infirmity. It was six months before he could return to Rome, and he returned with the news that he was going to marry Winifred-Mae Bolton. She had given him-literally-his life, and what, as a good n.o.bleman, could he do but give her his? The consternation in Rome, Milan, and Paris was indescribable. His parents wept, but they were up against that single-minded concern for probity that had appeared in his character when he was a boy. His father, who loved him as he loved his own life, said that Winifred-Mae would not enter the gates of Rome so long as he lived, and she did not.

Donna Carla's mother was a large cheerful woman with a coronet of yellow-reddish hair and a very broad manner. The only Italian she ever learned was "prego" and "grazie," and she p.r.o.nounced these "prygo" and "gryzia." During the years in exile in Vevaqua, she worked in the garden. Her taste in formal gardening was colored by the railroad-station gardens of England, and she spelled out her husband's name-Cosimo-in pansies and set it in a heart-shaped bed of artichokes. She liked to fry fish and chips, for which the peasants thought she was crazy. The only evidence that the Duke may have regretted his marriage was an occasional-a charming-look of bewilderment on his handsome face. With his wife he was always loving, courteous, and protective. Donna Carla was twelve years old when her grandparents died. After a period of mourning, she, Winifred-Mae, and the Duke entered Rome by the gate of Santa Maria del Popolo.

Winifred-Mae had probably, by then, seen enough of ducal gigantism not to exclaim over the size of the palace on the Tiber. Their first night in Rome set the pattern for their life there. "Now that we're back in a city again," she said, "with all the shops and all, I'll go out and buy a bit of fresh fish, shall I, ducky, and fry it for you the way I used to when you were in hospital?" Perfect love was in the Duke's smile of a.s.sent. In the fish market she squealed at the squid and the eels, but she found a nice piece of sole, and took it home and fried it, with some potatoes, in the kitchen, while the servants watched with tears in their eyes to see the fall of such a great house. After dinner, as had been the custom in Vevaqua, she sang. It was not true that, as her enemies said, she had sung ditties and kicked up her petticoats in English music halls. She had sung in music halls before she became a nurse, but she had sung the "Meditation" from Thais, and "The Road to Mandalay." Her display of talentlessness was exhaustive; it was stupendous. She seemed to hold her lack of talent up to the light for examination, and to stretch its seams. She flatted, and she sharped, and she strummed noisily on the piano, but she did all this with such perfect candor and self-a.s.surance that the performance was refres.h.i.+ng. The Duke beamed at these accomplishments of his wife, and did not seem in any way inclined to compare this entertainment with the days of his youth, when he had stood with his nursemaid on the ballroom balcony and seen a quadrille danced by one emperor, two kings, three queens, and a hundred and thirty-six grand dukes and grand d.u.c.h.esses. Winifred-Mae sang for an hour, and then they turned out the lights and went to bed. In those years, an owl had nested in the palace tower, and they could hear, above the drifting music of fountains, the belling of the owl. It reminded Winifred-Mae of England.

Rome had intended never to make any acknowledgment of Winifred-Mae's existence, but a lovely d.u.c.h.essina who was also a billionairess was too good a thing to pa.s.s up, and it seemed that Donna Carla would be the richest woman in Europe. If suitors were to be presented to her, Winifred-Mae had to be considered, and she was called on by the high n.o.bility. She went on cooking, sewing, singing, and knitting; they got her on her own terms. She was a scandal. She asked n.o.ble callers into the kitchen while she popped a steak-and-kidney pie into the oven. She made cretonne slip covers for the furniture in the salouino. She complained, in explicit detail, about the old-fas.h.i.+oned plumbing in the palace. She installed a radio. At her insistence, the Duke employed as his secretary a young Englishman named Cecil Smith. Smith was not even liked by the English. Coming down the Spanish Stairs in the morning sun, he could remind you of the industrial Midlands. He smelled of Stoke-on-Trent. He was a tall man with brown curly hair parted and combed across his forehead like a drapery. He wore dark, ill-fitting clothes that were sent to him from England, and as a result of a fear of drafts and a fear of immodesty, he gave one the impression that he was buried in clothing. He wore nightcaps, undervests, m.u.f.flers, and rubbers, and the cuff of his long underwear could be seen when he reached out his cup for another spot of tea, which he took with Winifred-Mae. His manners were refined. He wore paper cuffs and an eyeshade in the Duke's office, and he fried sausages and potatoes on a gas ring in his flat.

But the sewing, the singing, the smell of fish and chips, and Cecil Smith had to be overlooked by the needy n.o.bility. The thought of what Donna Carla's grace and her billions could do to lubricate the aristocracy would make your heart thump. Potential suitors began coming up to the palace when she was thirteen or fourteen. She was pleasant to them all. She had even then the kind of inner gracefulness that was to make her so persuasive as a young woman. She was not a solemn girl, but hilarity seemed to lie outside her range, and some countess who had come to display her son remarked afterward that she was like the princess in the fairy tale-the princess who had never laughed. There must have been some truth in the observation, because it stuck; people repeated the remark, and what they meant was an atmosphere of sadness or captivity that one sensed in spite of her clear features and her light coloring.

THIS WAS in the thirties-a decade, in Italy, of marching in the streets, arrests, a.s.sa.s.sinations, and the loss of familiar lights. Cecil Smith returned to England when the war broke out. Very few suitors came to the palace in those days. The crippled Duke was an implacable anti-Fascist, and he told everyone that Il Duce was an abomination and an infection, but he was never molested or thrown into prison, as were some less outspoken men; this may have been because of his rank, his infirmities, or his popularity with the Romans. But when the war began, the family was forced into a complete retirement. They were thought, wrongly, to be in sympathy with the Allies, and were allowed to leave the palace only once a day, to go to late or early Ma.s.s at San Giovanni. They were in bed and asleep on the night of September 30, 1943. The owl was hooting. Luigi, the old butler, woke them and said there was a messenger in the hall. They dressed quickly and went down. The messenger was disguised as a farmer, but the Duke recognized the son of an old friend. He informed the Duke that the Germans were coming down the Via Ca.s.sia and were entering the city. The commanding general had put a price of a million lire on the Duke's head; it was the price of his intransigence. They were to go at once, on foot, to an address on the Janiculum. Winifred-Mae could hear the owl hooting in the tower, and she had never been so homesick for England. "I don't want to go, ducky," she said. "If they're going to kill us, let them kill us in our own beds." The Duke smiled kindly and opened the door for her onto one of the most troubled of Roman nights.

There were already German patrols in the streets. It was a long walk up the river, and they were very conspicuous-the weeping Englishwoman, the Duke with his stick, and the graceful daughter. How mysterious life must have seemed at that moment! The Duke moved slowly and had to stop now and then to rest, but though he was in pain, he did not show it. With his head up and a price on it, he looked around alertly, as if he had stopped to observe or admire some change in his old city. They crossed the river by separate bridges and met at a barbershop, where they were taken into a cellar and disguised. Their skin was stained and their hair was dyed. They left Rome before dawn, concealed in a load of furniture, and that evening reached a small village in the mountains, where they were hidden in a farmhouse cellar.

The village was sh.e.l.led twice, but only a few buildings and barns on the outskirts were destroyed. The farmhouse was searched a dozen times, by Germans and Fascists, but the Duke was always warned long in advance. In the village, they were known as Signor and Signora Giusti, and it was Winifred-Mae who chafed at this incognito. She was the d.u.c.h.ess Malvolio-Pommodori, and she wanted it known. Donna Carla liked being Carla Giusti. She went one day, as Carla Giusti, to the was.h.i.+ng trough and spent a pleasant morning cleaning her clothes and gossiping with the other women. When she got back to the farm, Winifred-Mae was furious. She was Donna Carla; she must not forget it. A few days later, Winifred-Mae saw Donna Carla being taught by a woman at the fountain how to carry a copper vase on her head, and she called her daughter into the house and gave her another fierce lecture on rank. Donna Carla was always malleable and obedient, but without losing her freshness, and she never tried to carry a conca again.

When Rome was liberated, the family returned to the city, to find that the Germans had sacked the palace; and they then retired to an estate in the south and waited there for the war to end. The Duke was invited to help in the formation of a government, but he declined this invitation, claiming to be too old; the fact was that he supported, if not the King, the concept of monarchy. The paintings and the rest of the family treasure were found in a salt mine and returned to the palace. Cecil Smith came back, put on his paper cuffs, and resumed the administration of the family fortune, which had come through the war intact. Suitors began to call on Donna Carla.

In the second year after the war, a hundred and seventeen suitors came to the palace. These were straight and honest men, crooked men, men suffering from hemophilia, and many cousins. It was Donna Carla's prerogative to propose marriage, and she saw them all to the door without hinting at the subject. This was a cla.s.s of men whose disinheritedness was grandiose. Lying in bed in the Excelsior Hotel, they dreamed of what her wealth could do. The castle roof was repaired. Plumbing was installed at last. The garden bloomed. The saddle horses were fat and sleek. When she saw them to the door without having mentioned the subject of marriage, she offended them and she offended their dreams. She sent them back to a leaky castle and a ruined garden; she turned them out into the stormy weather of impoverished rank. Many of them were angry, but they kept on coming. She turned away so many suitors that she was finally summoned to the Vatican, where the Holy Father refreshed her sense of responsibility toward her family and its ancient name.

Considering that Winifred-Mae had upset the aristocratic applecart, she took a surprisingly fervid interest in the lineage of Donna Carla's suitors, and championed her favorites as they came. There was some hard feeling between the mother and daughter on this score, and-from Winifred-Mae-some hard words. More and more suitors came, and the more persistent and needy returned, but the subject of marriage was still not mentioned. Donna Carla's father-confessor then suggested that she see a psychiatrist, and she was willing. She was never unwilling. He made an appointment for her with a devout and elderly doctor who practiced within the Catholic faith. He had been a friend of Croce's, and a large cabinet photograph of the philosopher hung on one of the dark walls of his office, but this may have been wasted on Donna Carla. He offered the d.u.c.h.ess a chair, and then, after some questioning, invited her to lie down on his couch. This was a ma.s.sive piece of furniture, covered with worn leather and dating back to the earlier days of Freud. She walked gracefully toward the couch, and then turned and said, "But it is not possible for me to lie down in the presence of a gentleman." The doctor could see her point; it was a true impa.s.se. She seemed to look longingly at the couch, but she could not change the facts of her upbringing, and so they said goodbye.

The Duke was growing old. It was getting more and more difficult for him to walk, but this pain did not change his handsomeness and seemed only to increase his vitality. When people saw him, they thought: How nice it will be to eat a cutlet, take a swim, or climb a mountain; how pleasant, after all, life is. He pa.s.sed on to Donna Carla his probity, and his ideal of a simple and elegant life. He ate plain fare off fine dishes, wore fine clothes in third-cla.s.s train carriages, and, on the trip to Vevaqua, ate his simple lunch out of a basket. He kept-at great expense-his paintings cleaned and in good condition, but the dust covers on the chairs and chandeliers in the reception rooms had not been removed for years. Donna Carla began to interest herself in what she would inherit, and spent some time going over the ledgers in Cecil Smith's office. The impropriety of a beautiful Roman n.o.blewoman's studying ledgers at a desk caused some gossip, and may have been the turning point in her reputation.

THERE was a turning point. Her life was not especially solitary, but her shy gracefulness gave this impression, and she had made enemies of enough of her former suitors to be the b.u.t.t of gossip. It was said that the Duke's probity was miserliness and that the family's simple tastes were lunatic. It was said that the family ate bread crusts and canned sardines, and had only one electric-light bulb in the whole palace. It was said that they had gone crazy-all three of them-and would leave their billions to the dogs. Someone else said Donna Carla had been arrested for shoplifting on the Via n.a.z.ionale. Someone had seen her pick up a ten-lira piece on the Corso and put it in her bag. When Luigi, the old butler, collapsed on the street one day and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, someone said that the doctors at the clinic had found him dying of starvation.

The Communist party got on the band wagon and began to attack Donna Carla as the archetype of dying feudalism. A Communist deputy in the Chamber made a speech saying that the sufferings of Italy would not be over until the d.u.c.h.essina was dead. The village of Vevaqua voted Communist in the local elections. She went there after the harvest to audit the accounts. Her father was too frail and Smith was busy. She traveled third-cla.s.s, as she had been taught. The old calash and the shabby coachman were waiting for her at the station. Clouds of dust came from the leather cus.h.i.+ons when she sat down. As the carriage was entering an olive grove below the walls of the village, someone threw a rock. It struck Donna Carla on the shoulder. Another stone struck her on the thigh and another on the breast. The coachman's hat was knocked off, and he whipped the horse, but the horse was too used to pulling a plow to change his pace. Then a stone hit the coachman on the forehead and blood spurted out. Blinded with blood, he dropped the reins. The horse moved over to the side of the road and began to eat gra.s.s. Donna Carla got out of the calash. The men in the olive grove ran off. She bound up the coachman's head with a scarf, took up the reins, and drove the old carriage up into the village, where "DEATH TO DONNA CARLA! DEATH TO THE d.u.c.h.eSS!" was written everywhere. The streets were deserted. The servants in the castle were loyal, and they dressed her cuts and bruises, and they brought her tea, and cried. When she began the audit in the morning, the tenants came in, one by one, and she did not mention the incident. With grace and patience she went over the accounts with men she recognized as her a.s.sailants. Three days later she drove back through the olive grove and took the train, third-cla.s.s, to Rome.

But her reputation in Rome was not improved by this incident. Someone said that she had turned a starving child away from her door, that her avarice was pathological. She was smuggling her paintings into England and ama.s.sing a fortune there. She was selling the jewels. n.o.ble Roman property owners are expected to be sharp, but stories of unusual dishonesty were fabricated and circulated about Donna Carla, It was also said that she was losing her looks. She was growing old. People disputed about her age. She was twenty-eight. She was thirty-two. She was thirty-six. She was thirty-eight. And she was still a familiar figure on the Lungo-Tevere, as grave and lovely as ever, with her s.h.i.+ning hair and her half smile. But what was the truth? What would a German prince, a suitor with a leaky palace, find if he went there for tea?

PRINCE BERNSTRa.s.sER-FALCONBERG went under the ma.s.sive arch at five one Sunday afternoon, into a garden where there were some tangerine trees and a fountain. He was a man of forty-five, with three illegitimate children, and with a jolly mistress waiting for him at the Grand Hotel. Looking up at the walls of the palace, he could not help thinking of all the good Donna Carla's wealth would do. He would pay his debts. He would buy a bathtub for his old mother. He would fix the roof. An old porter in yellow livery let him in, and Luigi opened a second pair of double doors, into a hall with a marble staircase. Donna Carla was waiting here in the dusk. "Awfully nice of you to come," she said, in English. "Frightfully gloomy, isn't it?" The fragile English music of her voice echoed lightly off the stones. The hall was gloomy, he could see, but this was only half the truth, and the Prince sensed at once that he was not supposed to notice that it was also stupendous. The young woman seemed to be appealing to him for some understanding of her embarra.s.sment, of her dilemma at having to greet him in such surroundings, and of her wish to pretend that this was some quite ordinary hall, where two friends might meet on a Sunday afternoon. She gave him her hand, and apologized for her parents' absence, saying that they were unwell. (This was not quite the truth; Winifred-Mae had a cold, but the old Duke had gone off to a double feature.) The Prince was pleased to see that she was attractive, that she had on a velvet dress and some perfume. He wondered about her age, and saw that her face, that close, seemed quite pale and drawn.

"We have quite a walk ahead of us," she said. "Shall we begin? The salottino, the only room where one can sit down, is at the other end of the palace, but one can't use the back door, because then one makes a brutta figura..." They stepped from the hall into the cavernous picture gallery. The room was dimly lighted, its hundreds of chairs covered with chamois. The Prince wondered if he should mention the paintings, and tried to take his cue from the d.u.c.h.ess. She seemed to be waiting, but was she waiting for him to join her or waiting for a display of his sensibilities? He took a chance and stopped in front of a Bronzino and praised it. "He looks rather better now that he's been cleaned," she said. The Prince moved from the Bronzino to a Tintoretto. "I say," she said, "shall we go on to someplace more comfortable?"

The next gallery was tapestries, and her one concession to these was to murmur, "Spanish. A frightful care. Moths and all that sort of thing." When the Prince stopped to admire the contents of a cabinet, she joined him and explained the objects, and he caught for the first time a note of ambivalence in her apparent wish to be taken for a simple woman who lived in a flat. "Carved lapis lazuli," she said. "The vase in the center is supposed to be the largest piece of lapis lazuli in the world." Then, as if she sensed and regretted this weakening of her position, she asked, as they stepped into the next room, "Did you ever see so much rubbish?"

Here were the cradles of popes, the crimson sedan chairs of cardinals, the bread-and-b.u.t.ter presents of emperors, kings, and grand dukes piled up to the ceiling, and the Prince was confused by her embarra.s.sment. What tack should he take? Her behavior was not what one would expect of an heiress, but was it, after all, so queer, so unreasonable? What strange att.i.tudes might one not be forced into, saddled with a mile or more of paintings, burdened with the bulky evidence of four consecutive centuries of wealth and power? She might, playing in these icy rooms as a girl, have discovered in herself a considerable disinclination to live in a monument. In any event, she would have had to make a choice, for if she took this treasure seriously, it would mean living moment by moment with the past, as the rest of us live with our appet.i.tes and thirsts, and who would want to do that?

Their destination was a dark parlor. The Prince watched her stoop down to the baseboard and plug in a feeble lamp.

"I keep all the lamps unplugged, because the servants sometimes forget, and electricity is frightfully expensive in Rome. There we are!" she exclaimed, straightening up and gesturing hospitably to a sofa from which the worn velvet hung in rags. Above this was a portrait by t.i.tian of the first Malvolio-Pommodori pope. "I make my tea on a spirit lamp, because in the time it takes the man to bring tea from the kitchen the water gets quite cold."

They sat waiting for the kettle to boil. She handed him his tea and smiled, and he was touched, although he didn't know why. But there seemed about this charming woman, as there was about so much that he admired in Rome, the threat of obsolescence. Her pallor was a little faded. Her nose was a little sharp. Her grace, her accent were close to excessive. She was not yet the kind of woman who carries her left hand adrift in midair, the little finger extended, as vulgar people are supposed to hold a teacup; her airs and graces were not yet mistaken, and through them the Prince thought he felt the beating of a healthy and decent heart. But he felt, at the same time, that her days ended inexorably in the damps of a lonely bed, and that much more of this life would transform her into that kind of wasted virgin whose musical voice has upon men the force of complete s.e.xual discouragement.

"My mother regrets that she was unable to come to Rome," the Prince said, "but she asked me to express to you her hope that you will someday visit us in our country."

"How nice," Donna Carla said. "And please thank your mother. I don't believe we've ever met, but I do recall your cousins Otto and Friedrich, when they were in school here, and please remember me to them when you return.

"You should visit my country, Donna Carla."

"Oh, I would adore to, but I can't leave Rome, as things stand now. There is so much to do. There are the twenty shops downstairs and the flats overhead. Drains are forever bursting, and the pigeons nest in the tiles; I have to go to Tuscany for the harvests. There's never a minute."

"We have much in common, Donna Carla."

"Yes?"

"Painting. I love painting. It is the love of my life."

"Is that so?"

"I would love to live as you do, in a great house where one finds-how can I say it?-the true luminousness of art."

"Would you really? I can't say that I like it much myself. Oh, I can see the virtues in a pretty picture of a vase of flowers, but there's nothing like that here. Everywhere I look I see b.l.o.o.d.y crucifixions, nakedness, and cruelty." She drew her shawl closer. "I really don't like it."

"You know why I am here, Donna Carla?"

"Quite."

"I come from a good family. I am not young, but I am strong. I..."

"Quite," she said. "Will you have some more tea."

"Thank you." Her smile, when she pa.s.sed him his cup, was an open appeal to keep the conversation general, and he thought of his old mother, the Princess, taking her bath in a pail. But there was some persuasiveness, some triumphant intelligence in her smile that also made him feel, with shame, the stupidity and rudeness of his quest. Why should she want to buy his mother a bathtub? Why should she want to fix his roof? Why had he been told everything about the d.u.c.h.ess but the fact that she was sensible? He could see her point. Indeed, he could see more. He saw how idle the gossip had been. This "swindler," this "miser," this "shoplifter" was no more than a pleasant woman who used her head. He knew the kind of suitors who had preceded him-more often than not with a mistress waiting at the hotel-and why shouldn't they have excited her suspicions? He knew the brilliant society she had neglected; he knew its grim card parties, its elegant and malicious dinners, its tedium, not relieved in any way by butlers in livery and torchlit gardens. How sensible of her to have stayed home. She was a sensible woman-much too sensible to be interested in him-and what lay at the heart of the mystery was her brains. No one would have expected to find blooming in ancient Rome this flower of common sense.

He talked with her for twenty minutes. Then she rang for Luigi and asked him to show the Prince to the door.

IT CAME WITH a crash, the old Duke's death. Reading Joseph Conrad in the salottino one night, he got up to get an ashtray and fell down dead. His cigarette burned in the carpet long after his heart had stopped beating. Luigi found him. Winifred-Mae was hysterical. A cardinal with acolytes rushed to the palace, but it was too late. The Duke was buried in the great Renaissance tomb, surrounded by ruined gardens, on the Appia Antica, and half the aristocracy of Europe went into mourning. Winifred-Mae was shattered. She planned to return to England, but, having packed her bags, she found she was too ill to travel. She drank gin for her indigestion. She railed at the servants, she railed at Donna Carla for not having married, and then, after three months of being a widow, she died.

Every day for thirty days after her mother's death, Donna Carla left the palace in the morning for early Ma.s.s and then went out to the family tomb. Sometimes she drove. Sometimes she took a bus. Her mourning veil was so heavy that her features could hardly be seen. She went rain or s.h.i.+ne, said her prayers, and was seen wandering in the garden in a thunderstorm. It made one sad to see her on the Lungo-Tevere; there seemed to be such finality to her black clothes. It made everyone sad-the beggars and the women who sold chestnuts. She had loved her parents too well. Something had gone wrong. Now she would spend the rest of her life-how easy this was to imagine-between the palace and the tomb. But at the end of thirty days Donna Carla went to her father-confessor and asked to see His Holiness. A few days later, she went to the Vatican. She did not go bowling through the Piazza San Pietro in a hired limousine, wiping off her lipstick with a piece of Kleenex. She parked her dusty little car near the fountains and went through the gates on foot. She kissed His Holiness's ring, curtsied gracefully to the floor, and said, "I wish to marry Cecil Smith."

Wood smoke, confetti, and the smell of snow and manure spun on the wind on the changeable day when they were married, in Vevaqua. She entered the church as Donna Carla Malvolio-Pommodori, d.u.c.h.ess of Vevaqua-Perdere-Giusti, etc., and came out Mrs. Cecil Smith. She was radiant. They returned to Rome, and she took an office adjoining his, and shared the administration of the estate and the work of distributing her income among convents, hospitals, and the poor. Their first son-Cecil Smith, Jr.-was born a year after their marriage, and a year later they had a daughter, Jocelyn. Donna Carla was cursed in every leaky castle in Europe, but surely s.h.i.+ning choirs of angels in heaven will sing of Mrs. Cecil Smith.

THE SCARLET MOVING VAN.

Goodbye to the mortal boredom of distributing a skinny chicken to a family of seven and all the other rites of the hill towns. I don't mean the real hill towns-a.s.sisi or Perugia or Saracinesco, perched on a three-thousand-foot crag, with walls the dispiriting gray of s.h.i.+rt cardboards and mustard lichen blooming on the crooked roofs. The land, in fact, was flat, the houses frame. This was in the eastern United States, and the kind of place where most of us live. It was the unincorporated towns.h.i.+p of B_______, with a population of perhaps two hundred married couples, all of them with dogs and children, and many of them with servants; it resembled a hill town only in a manner of speaking, in that the ailing, the disheartened, and the poor could not ascend the steep moral path that formed its natural defense, and the moment any of the inhabitants became infected with unhappiness or discontent, they sensed the hopelessness of existing on such a high spiritual alt.i.tude, and went to live in the plain. Life was unprecedentedly comfortable and tranquil. B________ was exclusively for the felicitous. The housewives kissed their husbands tenderly in the morning and pa.s.sionately at nightfall. In nearly every house there were love, graciousness, and high hopes. The schools were excellent, the roads were smooth, the drains and other services were ideal, and one spring evening at dusk an immense scarlet moving van with gold lettering on its sides came up the street and stopped in the front of the Marple house, which had been empty then for three months.

The gilt and scarlet of the van, bright even in the twilight, was an inspired attempt to disguise the true sorrowfulness of wandering. "We Carry Loads and Part Loads to All Far-Distant Places," said the gold letters on the sides, and this legend had the effect of a distant train whistle. Martha Folkestone, who lived next door, watched through a window as the portables of her new neighbors were carried across the porch. "That looks like real Chippendale," she said, "although it's hard to tell in this light. They have two children. They seem like nice people. Oh, I wish there was something I could bring them to make them feel at home. Do you think they'd like flowers? I suppose we could ask them for a drink. Do you think they'd like a drink? Would you want to go over and ask them if they'd like a drink?"

Later, when the furniture was all indoors and the van had gone, Charlie Folkestone crossed the lawn between the two houses and introduced himself to Peaches and Gee-Gee. This is what he saw. Peaches was peaches-blond and warm, with a low-cut dress and a luminous front. Gee-Gee had been a handsome man, and perhaps still was, although his yellow curls were thin. His face seemed both angelic and menacing. He had never (Charlie learned later) been a boxer, but his eyes were slightly squinted and his square, handsome forehead had the conformation of layers of scar tissue. You might have said that his look was thoughtful until you realized that he was not a thoughtful man. It was the earnest and contained look of those who are a little hard of hearing or a little stupid.

They would be delighted to have a drink. They would be right over. Peaches wanted to put on some lipstick and say good night to the children, and then they would be right over. They came right over, and what seemed to be an unusually pleasant evening began. The Folkestones had been worried about who their new neighbors would be, and to find a couple as sympathetic as Gee-Gee and Peaches made them very high-spirited. Like everyone else, they loved to express an opinion about their neighbors, and Gee-Gee and Peaches were, naturally, interested. It was the beginning of a friends.h.i.+p, and the Folkestones overlooked their usual concern with time and sobriety. It got late-it was past midnight-and Charlie did not notice how much whiskey was being poured or that Gee-Gee seemed to be getting drunk. Gee-Gee became very quiet-he dropped out of the conversation-and then he suddenly interrupted Martha in a flat, unpleasant drawl.

"G.o.d, but you're stuffy people," he said.

"Oh, no, Gee-Gee!" Peaches said. "Not on our first night!"

"You've had too much to drink, Gee-Gee," Charlie said.

"Like h.e.l.l I have," said Gee-Gee. He bent over and began to unlace his shoes. "I haven't had half enough."

"Please, Gee-Gee, please," Peaches said.

"I have to teach them, honey," Gee-Gee said. "They've got to learn."

Then he stood up and, with the cunning and dexterity of a drunk, got out of most of his clothing before anyone could stop him.

"Get out of here," Charlie said.

"The pleasure's all mine, neighbor," said Gee-Gee. He kicked over a hammered-bra.s.s umbrella stand on his way out the door.

"Oh, I'm frightfully sorry!" Peaches said, "I feel terribly about this!"

"Don't worry, my dear," Martha said. "He's probably very tired, and we've all had too much to drink."

"Oh, no," Peaches said. "It always happens. Everywhere. We've moved eight times in the last eight years, and there's never been anyone to say goodbye to us. Not a soul. Oh, he was a beautiful man when I first knew him! You never saw anyone so fine and strong and generous. They called him the Greek G.o.d at college. That's why he's called Gee-Gee. He was All-America twice, but he was never a money player-he always played straight out of his heart. Everybody loved him. Now it's all gone, but I tell myself that I once had the love of a good man. I don't think many women have known that kind of love. Oh, I wish he'd come back. I wish he'd be the way he was. The night before last, when we were packing up the dishes in the old house, he got drunk and I slapped him in the face, and I shouted at him, 'Come back! Come back! Come back to me, Gee-Gee!' But he didn't listen. He didn't hear me. He doesn't hear anyone any more-not even the voices of his children. I ask myself every day what I've done to be punished so cruelly."

"I'm sorry, my dear!" Martha said.

"You won't be around to say goodbye when we go," Peaches said. "We'll last a year. You wait and see. Some people have tender farewell parties, but even the garbage man in the last place was glad to see us go." With a grace and resignation that transcended the ruined evening, she began to gather up the clothing that her husband had scattered on the rug. "Each time we move, I think that the change will be good for him," she said. "When we got here tonight, it all looked so pretty and quiet that I thought he might change. Well, you don't have to ask us again. You know what it's like."

A FEW DAYS or perhaps a week later, Charlie saw Gee-Gee on the station platform in the morning and saw how completely personable his neighbor was when he was sober. B_______ was not an easy place to conquer, but Gee-Gee seemed already to have won the affectionate respect of his neighbors. Charlie could see, as he watched him standing in the sun among the other commuters, that he would be asked to join everything. Gee-Gee greeted Charlie heartily, and there was no trace of the ugliness he had shown that night. Indeed, it was impossible to believe that this charming and handsome man had been so offensive. In the morning light, and surrounded by new friends, he seemed to challenge the memory. He seemed almost able to transfer the blame onto Charlie.

Arrangements for the social initiation of the new couple were unusually rapid and elaborate, and began with a dinner party at the Watermans'. Charlie was already at the party when Gee-Gee and Peaches came in, and they came in like royalty. Arm in arm, radiant and beautiful, they seemed, at the moment of their entrance, to make the evening. It was a large party, and Charlie hardly saw them until they went in to dinner. He sat close to Peaches, but Gee-Gee was at the other end of the table. They were halfway through dessert when Gee-Gee's flat and unpleasant drawl sounded, like a parade command, over the general conversation.

"What a G.o.d-d.a.m.ned bunch of stuffed s.h.i.+rts!" he said. "Let's put a little vitality into the conversation, shall we?" He sprang onto the center of the table and began to sing a dirty song and dance a jig. Women screamed. Dishes were upset and broken. Dresses were ruined. Peaches pled to her wayward husband. The effect of this outrageous performance was to empty the dining room of everyone but Gee-Gee and Charlie.

"Get down off there, Gee-Gee," Charlie said.

"I have to teach them," Gee-Gee said. "I've got to teach them."

"You're not teaching anybody anything but the fact that you're rotten drunk."

"They've got to learn," Gee-Gee said. "I've got to teach them." He got down off the table, breaking a few more dishes, and wandered out into the kitchen, where he embraced the cook, and then went on out into the night.

ONE MIGHT have thought that this was warning enough to a worldly community, but unusual amounts of forgiveness were extended to Gee-Gee. One liked him, and there was always the chance that he might not misbehave. There was always his charming figure in the morning light to confound his enemies, but it began to seem more and more like a lure that would let him into houses where he could break the crockery. Forgiveness was not what he wanted, and if he seemed to have failed at offending the sensibilities of his hostess he would increase and complicate his outrageousness. No one had ever seen anything like it. He undressed at the Bilkers'. At the Levys' he drop-kicked a bowl of soft cheese onto the ceiling. He danced the Highland fling in his underpants, set fire to wastebaskets, and swung on the Townsends' chandelier-that famous chandelier. Inside of six weeks, there was not a house in B_______ where he was welcome.

The Folkestones still saw him, of course-saw him in his garden in the evening and talked to him across the hedge. Charlie was greatly troubled at the spectacle of someone falling so swiftly from grace, and he would have liked to help. He and Martha talked with Peaches, but Peaches was without hope. She did not understand what had happened to her Adonis, and that was as far as her intelligence took her. Now and then some innocent stranger from the next town or perhaps some newcomer would be taken with Gee-Gee and ask him to dinner. The performance was always the same, the dishes were always broken. The Folkestones were neighbors-there was this ancient bond-and Charlie may have thought that he could save the man. When Gee-Gee and Peaches quarreled, sometimes she telephoned Charlie and asked his protection. He went there one summer evening after she had telephoned. The quarrel was over; Peaches was reading a comic book in the living room, and Gee-Gee was sitting at the dining-room table with a drink in his hand. Charlie stood over his friend.

"Gee-Gee."

"Yes."

"Will you go on the wagon?"

"No."

"Will you go on the wagon if I go on the wagon?"

"No."

"Will you go to a psychiatrist?"

"Why? I know myself. I only have to play it out."