At dinner that night Dr. Jastrow hardly spoke, ate less than usual, and drank two extra glasses of wine. In this household, where things were so monotonously the same day after day, night after night, the first extra glass was an event, the second a bombshell. Natalie finally said, “Aaron, what was that visit about today?”
Jastrow came out of an abstracted stare with a little headshake. “Strangely enough, Giuseppe again.”
Giuseppe was the assistant gardener, whom he had recently discharged: a scrawny, lazy, stupid old drunkard with wiry black hairs on his big knobby purple nose. Giuseppe had left open the gate through which the donkey had entered. He was always committing such misdemeanors. Jastrow had lost his temper over the destroyed chapter and the ravaged vegetable beds, had been unable to write for two days, and had suffered bad indigestion.
“How does that officer know Giuseppe?” Byron said.
“That’s the odd part. He’s from the alien registration bureau in Florence, yet he mentioned Giuseppe’s nine children, the difficulty of finding work nowadays, and so forth. When I said I’d rehire him, that ended it. He just handed me the registration papers with a victorious grin.” Jastrow sighed and laid his napkin on the table. “I’ve put up with Giuseppe all these years, I really don’t mind. I’m rather tired. Tell Maria I’ll have my fruit and cheese in the study.”
Natalie said when the professor was gone, “Let’s bring the coffee to my room.”
“Sure. Great.”
Never before had she invited him there. Sometimes in his room above he could hear her moving about, a tantalizing, faint, lovely noise. He followed her upstairs with a jumping pulse.
“I live in a big candy box,” she said with a self-conscious look, opening a heavy door. “Aaron bought the place furnished, you know, and left it just the way the lady of the house had it. Ridiculous for me, but—”
She snapped on a light. It was an enormous room, painted pink, with pink and gilt furniture, pink painted cupids on a blue and gold ceiling, pink silk draperies, and a huge double bed covered in frilly pink satin. Dark Natalie, in the old brown wool dress she wore on chilly evenings, looked decidedly odd in this Watteau setting. But Byron found the contrast as exciting as everything else about her. She lit the log fire in the marble fireplace carved with Roman figures, and they sat in facing armchairs, taking coffee from the low table between them.
“Why do you suppose Aaron’s so upset?” Natalie said, settling comfortably in the large chair and pulling the long pleated skirt far down over her beautiful legs. “Giuseppe’s an old story. Actually it was a mistake to fire him. He knows all about the water connections and the electric lines, much more than Tomaso. And he’s really good at the topiary work, even if he is a dirty old drunk.”
“A.J. was coerced, Natalie.” She bit her lip, nodding. Byron added, “We’re at the mercy of these people, A.J. even more than you and me. He owns property, he’s stuck here.”
“Oh, the Italians are all right. They’re not Germans.”
“Mussolini’s no bargain. Berel gave A.J. the right advice. Get out!”
Natalie smiled. “Lekh lekha. My God, how far off that all seems. I wonder how he is.” Her smile faded. “I’ve shut Warsaw from my mind. Or tried to.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“How about you, Briny? Do you ever think about it?”
“Some. I keep dreaming about it.”
“Oh, God, so do I. That hospital—I go round and round in it, night after night—”
“When Warsaw fell,” Byron said, “it hit me hard.” He told Natalie about the Wannsee episode. At his description of the waiter’s sudden turnabout, she laughed bitterly. “Your father sounds superb.”
“He’s all right.”
“He must think I’m a vampire who all but lured you to your death.”
“We haven’t talked about you.”
Sudden gloom shadowed Natalie’s face. She poured more coffee for both of them. “Stir the fire, Briny. I’m cold. Giuseppe’s brought in green wood, as usual.”
He made the fire flare, and threw on it a light log from a blighted tree, which quickly blazed. “Ah, that’s good!” She jumped up, turned off the electric chandelier, and stood by the fire, looking at the flames. “That moment in the railroad station,” she nervously burst out, “when they took away the Jews! I still can’t face it. That was one reason I was so nasty at Königsberg. I was in torture. I kept thinking that I could have done something. Suppose I’d stepped forward, said I was Jewish, forced the issue? Suppose we’d all created a scandal? It might have made a difference. But we calmly went to the train, and they trudged off the other way.”
Byron said, “We might have lost you and Mark Hartley. The thing was touch and go.”
“Yes, I know. Leslie prevented that. He stood his ground, at least, though he was shaking like a leaf. He did his plain duty. But those other ambassadors and chargés—well—”
Natalie had begun to pace. “And my family in Medzice! When I picture those kind, good people in the clutches of the Germans—but what’s the use? It’s futile, it’s sickening, to dwell on that.” She threw up her hand in a despairing gesture and dropped in her chair, sitting on her legs with her skirt spread over them. Nothing of her was visible in the firelight but her face and her tensely clasped hands. She stared at the fire. “Speaking of old Slote,” she said after a long pause, in an entirely different tone, “what do you think of his proposal to make an honest woman of me?”
“I’m not surprised.”
“You’re not? I’m stunned. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”
“He told me in Berlin he might marry you. He’d be crazy not to, if he could.”
“Well, he’s had that option open to him for a hell of a long time, dear.” She poured coffee and sipped, looking darkly at him over the rim of the cup. “Had a big discussion about me in Berlin, you two gentlemen, did you?”
“Not a big discussion. He mentioned that you were just as surly to him that last day in Königsberg as you’d been to me.”
“I was feeling absolutely horrible that day, Briny.”
“Well, that’s all right. I thought I might have offended you somehow, so I asked him.”
“This is getting interesting. What else did Slote say about me?”
The low, vibrant voice, the amused glinting of her eyes in the firelight, stirred Byron. “That you were no girl for me to get involved with, and that he hadn’t known an hour’s peace of mind since he first laid eyes on you.”
She uttered a low gloating laugh. “Two accurate statements, my pet. Tell me more.”
“That’s about it. It was the same conversation in which he gave me the reading list.”
“Yes, and wasn’t that pure Slote? Coming it over you with his book learning! An illuminating little incident, that. Didn’t he really tell you all about us? About him and me?”
Byron shook his head.
Natalie said, “You wouldn’t go and get us some brandy, would you? I think I’d like a little brandy.”
He raced down the stairs and up again, returning with a bottle and two shimmering snifters. Swirling the brandy round and round in her hands, looking into the balloon glass and rarely raising her eyes at him, Natalie broke loose with a surprising rush of words about her affair with Leslie Slote. It took her a long time. Byron said little, interrupting only to throw more wood on the fire. It was a familiar tale of a clever older man having fun with a girl and getting snared into a real passion. Resolving to marry him, she had made his life a misery. He didn’t want to marry her, she said, simply because she was Jewish and it would be awkward for his career. That was all his clouds of words had ever come to. At last, with this letter, after thirty months, she had him where she wanted him.
Byron hated every word of the story, yet he was fascinated, and grateful. The closemouthed girl was taking him into her life. These words, which couldn’t be unsaid, were ending the strange tension between them since Warsaw, their own l
ittle phony war—the long hostile silences in the library, her holing up in her room, her odd snappish condescension. As she talked, they were growing intimate as they never had become in a month of adventuring through Poland.
Everything about this girl interested him. If it was the account of her affair with another man, let it be that! At least Byron was talking about Natalie Jastrow with Natalie Jastrow, and this was what he had been starved for. He was hearing this sweet rough voice with its occasional New Yorkisms, and he could watch the play of her free gesturing hand in the firelight, the swoop and sudden stop in the air of flat palm and fingers, her visible signature.
Natalie Jastrow was the one person he had ever met who meant as much to him as his father did. In the same way, almost, he hungered to talk to his father, to listen to him, to be with him, even though he had to resist and withdraw, even though he knew that in almost every conversation he either offended or disappointed Victor Henry. His mother he took for granted, a warm presence, cloying in her affection, annoying in her kittenish changeability. His father was terrific, and in that way Natalie was terrific, entirely aside from being a tall dark girl whom he had hopelessly craved to seize in his arms since the first hour they had met.
“Well, there you have it,” Natalie said. “This mess has been endless, but that’s the general idea. How about some more of Aaron’s brandy? Wouldn’t you like some? It’s awfully good brandy. Funny, I usually don’t care for it.”
Byron poured more for both of them, though his glass wasn’t empty.
“What I’ve been puzzling about all day,” she said after a sip, “is why Leslie is throwing in the towel now. The trouble is, I think I know.”
“He’s lonesome for you,” Byron said.
Natalie shook her head. “Leslie Slote behaved disgustingly on the Praha road. I despised him for it, and I let him know I did. That was the turnaround. He’s been chasing me ever since. I guess in a way I’ve been running, too. I haven’t even answered half his letters.”
Byron said, “You’ve always exaggerated that whole thing. All he did—”
“Shut up, Byron. Don’t be mealymouthed with me. All he did was turn yellow and use me as an excuse. He hid behind my skirts. The Swedish ambassador all but laughed in his face.” She tossed off most of her brandy. “Look, physical courage isn’t something you can help. It isn’t even important nowadays. You can be a world leader and a cringing sneak. That’s what Hitler probably is. Still, it happened. It happened. I’m not saying I won’t marry Leslie Slote because shellfire made him panic. After all, he behaved well enough at the railroad station. But I do say that’s why he’s proposing to me. This is his way of apologizing and being a man. It’s not quite the answer to my maidenly prayers.”
“It’s what you want.”
“Well, I don’t know. There are complications. There’s my family. My parents had wild fits when I told them I was in love with a Christian. My father took to his bed for a week, though that bit of melodrama left me unmoved. Well, now there’s that whole fight again. And Leslie’s proposal is odd. It’s not very specific as to time and place. If I wrote him back yes, he might well get on his bicycle again.”
“If he’s really that kind of fool, which I doubt very much,” Byron said, “you could just let him bicycle away.”
“Then there’s Aaron.”
“He’s not your problem. He ought to get out of Italy in any case.”
“He’s very reluctant to go.”
“Well, he survived while we were away.”
“Oh, that’s what you think. You should have seen the library and study when I got back. Chaos. And he hadn’t written anything in weeks. Aaron should have gotten married ages ago. He didn’t, and he needs a lot of fussing and petting. He can’t even sharpen a pencil properly.”
Byron wondered whether Natalie’s irritable garrulity was due to the brandy. She was gesturing broadly, talking breathlessly, and her eyes were wild. “And there’s still another complication, you know. The biggest.”
“What’s that?”
She stared at him. “Don’t you know what it is, Briny? Haven’t you any idea? Not the faintest inkling? Come on now. Stop it.”
He said or rather stammered, because the sudden penetrating sexuality in Natalie Jastrow’s glance made him drunk, “I don’t think I do.”
“All right then, I’ll tell you. You’ve done it, you devil, and you know it. You’ve done what you’ve wanted to do from the first day you came here. I’m in love with you.” She peered at him, her eyes shining and enormous. “Ye gods, what a dumb stunned face. Don’t you believe me?”
Very hoarsely he said, “I just hope it’s true.”
He got out of his chair, and went to her. She jumped up and they embraced. “Oh God,” she said, clinging to him, and she kissed him and kissed him. “You have such a marvellous mouth,” she muttered. She thrust her hands in his hair, she caressed his face. “Such a nice smile. Such fine hands. I love to watch your hands. I love the way you move. You’re so sweet.” It was like a hundred daydreams Byron had had, but far more intense and confusing and delicious. She was rubbing against him in crude sensual delight, almost like a cat. The brown wool dress was scratchy in his hands. The perfume of her hair couldn’t be daydreamed, nor the moist warm sweet breath of her mouth. Above all gleamed the inconceivable wonder that all this was happening. They stood embraced by the crackling flames, kissing, saying broken foolish sentences, whispering, laughing, kissing, and kissing again.
Natalie pulled away. She ran a few steps and faced him, her eyes blazing. “Well, all right. I had to do that or die. I’ve never felt anything like this in my life, Byron, this maddening pull to you. I’ve been fighting it off and fighting it off because it’s no damn good, you know. You’re a boy. I won’t have it. Not a Christian. Not again. And besides—” she put both hands over her face. “Oh. Oh! Don’t look at me like that, Briny! Go out of my bedroom.” Byron turned to go, on legs almost caving under him. He wanted to please her.
She said in the next breath, “Christ, you’re a gentleman. It’s one of the unbelievable things about you. Would you rather stay? My darling, my love, I don’t want to put you out, I want to talk some more, but I want to make some sense, that’s all. And I don’t want to make any false moves. I’ll do anything you say. I absolutely adore you.”
He looked at her standing in the firelight in the long wool dress with her arms crossed, one leg out to a side, one hip thrust out, a typical Natalie pose. He was dazed with happiness beyond imagining, and flooded with gratitude for being alive. “Listen—would you think of marrying me?” Byron said.
Natalie’s eyes popped wide open and her mouth dropped. Byron could not help it; he burst out laughing at the comic change of her face, and that made her laugh crazily too. She came to him, almost flung herself at him, still laughing so uproariously that she could hardly manage to kiss him. “God in heaven,” she gasped, twining him in her arms, “you’re incredible. That’s two proposals in one day for la Jastrow! It never rains but it pours, eh?”
“I’m serious,” he said. “I don’t know why we’re laughing. I want to marry you. It’s always seemed preposterous, but if you really do love me—”
“It is preposterous”—Natalie spoke with her lips to his cheek—“preposterous beyond words, but where you’re concerned I appear to be quite mindless, and perhaps—well! Nobody can say you’re a beardless boy, anyway! Quite sandpapery, aren’t you?” She kissed him once more, hard, and loosened her arms. “The first idea was right. You leave. Goodnight, darling. I know you’re serious, and I’m terribly touched. One thing we’ve got in this godforsaken place is time, all the time in the world.”
In the darkness, on his narrow bed in the tiny attic room, Byron lay wide awake. For a while he heard her moving about below, then the house was silent. He could still taste Natalie’s lips. His hands smelled of her perfume. Outside in the valley donkeys hee-hawed to each other across the echoing slopes, a misguided rooster haile
d a dawn hours away, and dogs barked. There came a rush of wind and a long drumming of rain on the tiles, and after a while water dripped into the pail near his bed, under the worst leak. The rain passed, moonlight shafted faint and blue through the little round window, the pattering in the pail ceased, and still Byron lay with open eyes, trying to believe it, trying to separate his dreams and fantasies of half a year from the real hour when Natalie Jastrow had overwhelmed him with endearments. Now his feverish mind ran on what he must do next. The window was turning violet when he fell asleep in a jumble of ideas and resolves, ranging from medical school and short-story writing to the banking business in Washington. Some distant cousins of his mother did control a bank.
“Hi, Natalie.”
“Oh, hi there. Sleep well?”
It was almost eleven when he hurried into the library. Byron was a hardened slugabed, but he had not come down this late before. Three books lay open on Natalie’s desk, and she was typing away. She gave him one ardent glance and went on with her work. Byron found on his desk a mass of first-draft pages heavily scribbled with Jastrow’s corrections, to which was clipped a note in red crayon: Let me have this material at lunch, please.
“A.J. looked in here ten minutes ago,” Natalie said, “and made vile noises.”
Byron counted the pages. “He’s going to make viler ones at lunch. I’m sorry, but I didn’t close my eyes till dawn.”
“Didn’t you?” she said, with a secret little smile. “I slept exceedingly well.”
With a quick shuffling of papers and carbon he began to type, straining his eyes at Jastrow’s scrawl. A hand ran through his hair and rested warmly on his neck. “Let’s see.” She stood over him, looking down at him with affectionate amusement. Pinned on the old brown dress over her left breast was the gold brooch with purple stones from Warsaw. She had never before worn it. She glanced through the pages and took a few. “Poor Briny, why couldn’t you sleep? Never mind, type your head off, and so will I.”
They did not finish the work before lunch, but by then, as it turned out, Dr. Jastrow had other things on his mind. At noon, an enormous white Lancia rattled the gravel outside the villa. Byron and Natalie could hear the rich voice of Tom Searle and the warm hard laugh of his wife. Celebrated American actors, the Searles had been living off and on for fifteen years in a hilltop villa not far from Jastrow’s. The woman painted and gardened, while the man built brick walls and did the cooking. Endlessly they read old plays, new plays, and novels that might become plays. Other celebrities came to Siena just to see them. Through them Jastrow had met and entertained Maugham, Berenson, Gertrude Lawrence, and Picasso. A retired college professor would have been a minnow among these big fish; but the success of A Jew’s Jesus had put him fairly in their company. He loved being part of the celebrities’ group, though he grumbled about the interference with his work. He often drove down to Florence with the Searles to meet their friends, and Natalie and Byron thought the actors might be passing by now to fetch him off. But coming down for lunch, they found A.J. alone in the drawing room, sneezing, red-nosed, and waving an emptied sherry glass. He complained that they were late. In fact they were a bit early.