“The Searles are leaving,” he said when lunch was over, having sneezed and blown his nose all through the meal without uttering a word. “Just like that. They came to say good-bye.”
“Oh? Are they doing a new play?” said Natalie.
“They’re getting out. Lock, stock, and barrel. They’re moving every stick back to the States.”
“But doesn’t their lease run for—how many more years? Five?”
“Seven. They’re abandoning the lease. They can’t afford to get stuck here, they say, if the war spreads.” Jastrow morosely fingered his beard. “That’s one difference between leasing and buying. You just walk away. You don’t bother your head about what happens to the place. I must say they urged me to lease. I should have listened to them. But the purchase price was so cheap!”
Byron said, “Well, sir, if you think there’s any danger, your skin comes first.”
“I have no such fears. Neither have they. For them it’s a matter of business. We’ll have our coffee in the lemon house.” With a peevish toss of his head, he lapsed into silence.
The lemon house, a long glassed-in structure with a dirt floor, full of small potted citrus trees, looked out on a grand panorama of the town and the rounded brown hills. Sheltered here from cold winds that swept up the ravine, the trees throve in the pouring sunlight, and all winter long blossomed and bore fruit. Jastrow believed, contrary to every medical opinion, that the sweet heavy scent of the orange and lemon blooms was good for the asthma that hit him when he was nervous or angry. Possibly because he believed this, it tended to work. His wheezing stopped while they drank their coffee. The warm sun cheered him up. He said, “I predict they’ll sneak back in short order with their tails between their legs, and three vans of furniture toiling up the hill. They remind me of the people who used to go fleeing off Martha’s Vineyard at the first news of a hurricane. I sat through four hurricanes and thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle.”
Natalie said after he left, “He’s badly shaken.”
“I hope he gets shaken loose from here.”
“Dear, this house will go to rack and ruin if A.J. leaves it.”
“So what?”
“You’ve never owned anything, have you, Briny? Or saved any money. Once you have, you may understand.”
“Look, Natalie, A.J. had a windfall late in life and got carried away and bought himself a big Italian villa for a song, in a lonesome mountain town. All right. Suppose he walks away now? If he offers it for sale he’ll get something for it. Otherwise he can return after the war and put it back in shape. Or he can just forget it, and let it fall down. Easy come, easy go.”
“You see things so simply,” she said.
They were sitting side by side on a white wicker couch. He started to put his arm around her. “Stop that,” she said, catching her breath and deflecting his arm. “That’s too simple, too. Listen carefully, Byron. How old are you? Are you twenty-five yet? I’m twenty-seven.”
“I’m old enough for you, Natalie.”
“Old enough for what? To sleep with me? Don’t talk rubbish. The question is, what are you doing with yourself? I can teach at a university anytime. I’ve got my M.A. thesis almost finished. What have you got? A smile that drives me mad and a handsome head of hair. You’re brave, you’re gentle, but you just drifted here. You only stayed because of me. You’re killing time and you’re trained for nothing.”
“Natalie, how would you like to be married to a banker?”
“A what? A banker?”
He told her about his relatives and their bank in Washington. Hands folded in her lap, she beamed at him, her face aglow in the sunshine. “How does that sound?” he said.
“Oh, fine,” she said. “You’re really facing up to life at last. A stern, serious business, isn’t it? Tell me one thing.”
“What?”
“Tell me when you decided you liked me.”
“Don’t you want to discuss this bank idea?”
“Of course, dear. All in good time. When was it?”
“All right, I’ll tell you. When you took off your sunglasses.”
“My sunglasses? When was that?”
“Why, that first day, when we came into the villa with Slote. Don’t you remember? You had these big dark glasses on in the car, but then you took them off, and I could see your eyes.”
“So?”
“You asked me when I fell in love with you. I’m telling you.”
“But it’s so absurd. Like everything else you say and do. What did you know about me? Anyhow, my eyes must have been totally bloodshot. I’d been up till four, having one hellish row with Leslie. You struck me as nothing at all, dear, so I didn’t give a damn. Now look, you don’t really want to be a banker, do you?”
He said with an abashed grin, “Well, I did think of one other thing. But don’t laugh at me.”
“I won’t.”
“I thought of the Foreign Service. It’s interesting and it’s serving the country.”
“You and Leslie in the same service,” she said. “That would be a hot one.” She took his hand in a maternal way that depressed Byron. “This isn’t much fun for you, Briny dear, all this serious talk.”
“That’s okay,” Byron said. “Let’s go right on with it.”
For a moment she sat pondering, holding his hand in her lap, as she had in the Swedish ambassador’s limousine. “I’d better tell you what I really think. The trouble is you are trained for something. You’re a naval officer.”
“That’s the one thing I’m not, and that I’ve made a career of not being.”
“You already have a commission.”
“I’m just a lowly reserve. That’s nothing.”
“If the war goes on, you’ll be called up. You’ll stay in for years. That’s what you’ll probably be in the end, from sheer inertia, and family custom, and the passing of time.”
“I can resign my reserve commission tomorrow. Shall I?”
“But suppose we get in the war? What then? Wouldn’t you fight?”
“There’s nothing else to do then.”
She put her hand in his hair, and yanked it. “Yes, that’s how your mind works. Well, I love you for that, and for other things, but Byron, I’m not going to be the wife of a naval officer. I can’t think of a more ridiculous and awful existence for me. I wouldn’t marry a test pilot either, or an actor, don’t you understand?”
“It’s no issue, I tell you, I’ll never be a naval officer—what the devil? Now what? Why are you crying?”
She dashed the sudden tears from her face with the back of her hand, smiling. “Oh, shut up. This is an insane conversation. The more I try to make sense, the wilder it all gets. All I know is that I’m crazy about you. If it’s a dead end, who cares? I obviously thrive on dead ends. No, not now, love, really, no—” She gasped the last words as he firmly took her in his arms.
There was nobody in sight. Beyond the glass there was only the panorama of hills and town, and inside the lemon house silence and the heavy sweet scent of the blossoms. They kissed and kissed, touching and holding and gripping each other. Soon Natalie happened to glance up and there stood the gardener Giuseppe outside the glass, leaning on a wheelbarrow full of cuttings, watching. With a squinting inebriated leer, he wiped a sleeve of his sweater across his knobbed nose, and obscenely winked.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” she said, yanking angrily at her skirt. The gardener showed sparse foul teeth in a grin and trundled the wheelbarrow away. Byron sat flushed, dazed, and dishevelled, looking after him.
“Well, there goes our little secret, sweetheart. Kissing and smooching under glass! What’s happened to me? This whole thing is a plain brute attraction between two people isolated together too long.” She leaped to her feet and pulled at his hand. “But I love you. I can’t help it. I don’t want to help it. Oh, that son of a bitch Giuseppe! Come, let’s get back to the rock pile. We must.”
Jastrow called from his study as they came into the house, ?
??Natalie, where is your letter? May I read it?”
“What letter, A.J.? I didn’t get any mail.”
“Are you sure? I have one from your mother. She says she’s written you another and much longer one. Come read this. It’s important.”
He waved a flimsy airmail sheet as Byron went upstairs.
There were only half a dozen lines in her mother’s neat featureless writing, a Manhattan public school script:
Dear Aaron:
We would both appreciate it if you would urge Natalie to come home. Louis took that story of her trip to Poland very hard. The doctor even thinks that it may have been the cause of this attack. I’ve written Natalie all about it. You may as well read that letter, there’s no sense in my repeating the whole terrible story. In retrospect, we were very lucky. Louis seems in no immediate danger, but that’s all the doctor will tell us.
We’re all wondering how long you yourself intend to stay on in Italy. Don’t you feel it’s dangerous? I know that you and Louis have been out of touch all these years, but still he does worry about you. You’re his one brother.
Love,
Sophie and Louis
Natalie checked the mail piled on her desk in the library, but there was only one letter for her, from Slote. Looking up from his work, Byron saw her sombre expression. “What is it, Natalie?”
“It’s my father. I may have to leave.”
The letter from her mother arrived two days later. Meantime Natalie resumed a certain aloofness toward Byron, though she still wore the brooch, and looked at him with changed eyes.
She took the long and somewhat frantic account of her father’s heart attack to Jastrow, who was having his tea by the fire in the study, wrapped in a shawl. He shook his head sympathetically over it and handed it back to her. Gazing at the fire and sipping tea, he said, “You had better go.”
“Oh, I think so. I’m practically packed.” “What was Louis’s trouble last time? Was it this bad?”
The brothers were deeply estranged—Natalie did not know exactly why—and this breaking of their long tacit silence about her father gave her an awkward, unpleasant sensation.
“No, not really. The trouble was my announcement that I was in love with Leslie. Papa got awfully weak and had breathing difficulty and a blackout episode. But he wasn’t hospitalized that time.”
Jastrow pensively fingered his beard. “He’s only sixty-one. You know, it gets to be suspenseful, Natalie, this question of whose heredity you’ve got. Our mother’s family mostly popped off in their fifties. But Father’s two brothers both made it past ninety and he reached eighty-eight. My teeth are like my father’s. I have excellent teeth. Louis always had a lot of trouble with his teeth, the way Mama did.” Jastrow became aware of the girl’s dark watchful regard. He made a little apologetic gesture with both hands. “You’re thinking what a self-centered old horror A.J. is.”
“But I wasn’t thinking that at all.”
Jastrow put on cotton gloves to poke at the fire and throw on a fresh log. He was vain about his small finely shaped hands. “You won’t come back. I know that. Life will get difficult here. Possibly I could go to New Mexico or Arizona. But they’re such dull, arid, zero-culture places! The thought of trying to write there!” He gave a deep sigh, almost a groan. “No doubt my books aren’t that important. Still, the work is what keeps me going.”
“Your books are important, A.J.”
“Are they? Why?”
Natalie sat leaning her chin on a fist, groping for an honest and precise answer. She said after a pause, “Of course they’re extremely readable, and often brilliant, but that’s not their distinction. Their originality lies in the spirit. The books are very Jewish. In a creditable, unsentimental way, in substance and in attitude. They’ve made me, at least, realize how very much Christendom owes this bizarre little folk we belong to. It’s surprising how much of that you’ve gotten even into the Constantine book.”
Her words had a remarkable effect on Aaron Jastrow. He smiled tremulously, his eyes misted, and he all at once did look strikingly Jewish—the mouth, the nose, the expression, the soft white hand at his beard, were all features of a hatless little rabbi. He spoke in a soft shaky voice. “Of course you know exactly what to say to please me.”
“That’s what I think, Aaron.”
“Well, bless you. I’ve evolved into a pagan, a materialist, and a hedonist—and I fell in love with the grandeur of Christianity and of Jesus long long ago—but none of that has made me less Jewish. Nobody else in the family will accept that, your father least of all. I’m so grateful that you can. I truly think that the books on Constantine and Luther will round out the picture. I want to get them done. In my way I’m bearing witness, as my rabbinic forebears did in theirs. Though no doubt they’d be horrified by me.” He studied her face. He smiled, and his eyes began to twinkle. “How long after you left would Byron remain? He gives me such a secure feeling, just by being here.”
“Give him a raise in salary. That’ll convince him more than anything. He’s never earned a penny before.”
Jastrow pursed his lips, rounded his eyes, and tilted his head. Many years of living in Italy showed in the mannerism. “I have to watch my money now. We’ll see. My strong impression is, actually, that you’ll marry Leslie once you get back there, and—oh, stop blushing and looking so coy. Have I hit it?”
“Never mind, A.J.”
“I’m sure if Byron were aware of that, he’d be more likely to stay on.” Jastrow stroked his beard, smiling at her.
“Good God, Aaron! Do you expect me to tell Byron Henry I’m going to marry Slote, just to make him stay with you?”
“Why, my dear, whoever suggested such a thing? Wait—my point is—” Jastrow stretched out a hand and looked after her, utterly astonished at her abrupt walkout.
20
HOLY cow!” Byron exclaimed. “There’s my father, or his double.”
“Where?” said Natalie. Her flight was delayed, and they were drinking coffee in the Rome airport at a table outside a little café; the same café where they had lunched before setting off for Warsaw.
“Inside that ring of carabinieri over there.”
He pointed to a group of men leaving the terminal, escorted by six deferential police officers. Some of the party wore the green uniform of the foreign ministry; the rest were in civilian clothes. The military bearing of a short broad-shouldered man, in a pepper-and-salt suit and soft hat, had caught Byron’s eye. He stood, saying, “Can it be him? But why the devil didn’t he write or wire me that he was coming to Italy? I’ll take a look.”
“Briny!”
He was starting to lope away; he stopped short. “Yes?”
“If it is your father—I’m so tacky and sooty from that horrible train ride, and he’s obviously busy.” Natalie, usually so self-assured, suddenly looked confused and nervous, in an appealing, pathetic way. “I wasn’t expecting this. I’d rather meet him another time.”
“Well, let’s see if it’s him.”
Victor Henry heard the voice behind him just as the party reached the exit doors. “Dad! Dad! Wait up!”
Recognizing the voice, Pug turned, waved, and asked his escort from the ministry to wait for him. “D’accordo.” The Italian smiled and bowed, eyeing sharply the young man who was hurrying up. “I will see to your luggage, Commander, and meet you outside. There is plenty of time.”
The father and son clasped hands. “Well, how about this?” Victor Henry said, looking up at Byron’s face, with affection he usually concealed when less surprised.
“What’s up, Dad? Couldn’t you let me know you were coming?”
“It happened sudden-like. I intended to ring you tonight. What are you doing down here in Rome?”
“Natalie’s going home. Her father’s sick.”
“Oh? Has she left already?”
“No. That’s her, sitting over there.”
“That’s the famous Natalie Jastrow? The one in gray?”
/> “No, further over, in black. With the big hat.”
Victor Henry caught a new proprietary note in his son’s voice. The listless, hangdog air of his Berlin days had given way to a confident glance and a straighter back. “You’re looking mighty bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” Pug said.
“I feel marvellous.”
“I’d like to meet that girl.” The father suddenly strode toward her, so fast that Byron had to take a running step or two to catch up. There was no stopping him. They came and faced Natalie, who remained seated, hands clasped in her lap.
“Natalie, this is Dad.”
With such a flat introduction these two people, the opposed poles in Byron’s life, all at once confronted each other. Natalie offered her hand to Byron’s father, looked him in the eye, and waited for him to speak. At first sight, Victor Henry was taken by this weary-looking travel-stained girl with the dark eyes and gaunt face. She was not the legendary adventurous Jewess he had built up in his imagination; she had an everyday American look; but withal there was a certain exotic aura, and a strong calm feminine presence. She must be feeling highly self-conscious, he thought, but there was no sign of it. In her slight smile as he took her hand, there was even a trace of reflected affection for Byron.