Frank Herbert Read online

  Mrs. Gruntey looked at Pepina. “Your charming wife”—she put the sound of doves around the word— “telephoned me last night and suggested I rent it for the play.”

  “I’m the brazen one,” Pepina said.

  “I’ve bought the theater,” Mrs. Gruntey said. “I detest fooling with leases. There’s an army of workmen in there right now, cleaning up the place. The tickets for our play went on sale at one o’clock today.”

  Everyone in the room began to show interest.

  “Tickets?” Roger asked.

  “I had them printed this morning,” Mrs. Gruntey said.

  “How’re they going?” Pepina asked.

  “Like hotcakes,” Mrs. Gruntey said. “I once heard there was nothing like being banned in Boston to make a bestseller out of a poor book.” She looked around the room, smiling. “Well, the word is around town that the Anti-Vice League pushed us off the campus.”

  “But I’ve been fired,” Roger said.

  “And I’ve hired you,” Mrs. Gruntey said. “I can afford it.”

  Roger shook his head from side to side. “And every cent I make, those two vultures, Trelawney and Coleman, will take away from me. You heard them say they were going to sue.”

  “Oh, now,” Mrs. Gruntey said. “About that. I forgot to mention that I went up to Coleman’s office with my attorney this morning. It seems those two vultures, as you call them, went around telling everybody you and Pepina weren’t married. My attorney asked them how they’d like a slander suit.”

  Mrs. Gruntey thrust her head forward belligerently.

  “One peep out of the League or Coleman, and I said you’d sue them until they’d have to mortgage the college to pay you off. President Coleman even went so far as to offer you back your job. I said you might consider it, if the salary was right. The president and Mr. Trelawney weren’t speaking to each other when we left.”

  Roger frowned and looked down at the floor. “Mrs. Gruntey …” He blushed. “You’ve been wonderful to us, and we don’t deserve it.” He looked up. “I have a confession to make. It’s about your play. You see …”

  Mrs. Gruntey raised a hand. “You mean about its being so funny?

  Roger nodded. “Yes … and …” He paused.

  How I’ve misjudged this woman, he thought.

  “I know,” Mrs. Gruntey said. “Lincoln told me. I guess it hurt my feelings for a while; then I remembered something Amos always said. He said the best thing in the world a person could do is to make other people laugh.”

  Mrs. Gruntey smiled around at the room.

  Pepina stood up from her rocking chair.

  “Roger, my premonition is gone.”

  “How can it be?” Roger asked. “Nothing has happened. I mean, the baby hasn’t …”

  “Silly,” Pepina said. “It wasn’t a real premonition. It was just the baby. I’ve never been pregnant before. I didn’t know how it felt to be an expectant mother.” She smiled. “It’s just like a premonition.”

  Mrs. Gruntey walked over and put an arm around Pepina’s shoulder. “This really calls for a celebration. Lincoln, what is a good saying for this moment?”

  Lincoln, who had been opening the case of beer, stood up. He cocked his head on one side, thought for a moment.

  “Toi hoy nun lei hoi.” He flashed white teeth in a grin. “Sin is a difficult thing with which to part.”

  A Lesson in History

  Rome’s morning clamor penetrated a fifth-floor room of the Hotel Serfilia, awakened Charles Howorth. He got out of bed, closed the windows. This muted the outside noises enough that he became conscious of water hissing in the shower and the sound of Katherine slapping her skin as she bathed. He glanced at her bed. It had a neat, pulled-together look, almost as though there had been an attempt to conceal its use. Beyond it, on the folding stand, her large suitcase stood open like a giant brown toad waiting for a fly. Charles yawned, turned back to the view. This room was two floors higher than the one he’d had during the war. Up here, he saw tiled tiers of roofs instead of other walls. And up the river, he could make out a curve of the round stone shadow that was Castel Sant’Angelo, Hadrian’s tomb.

  Twelve years ago, he thought. It made him feel old, vacant … like one of those echoing grocery warehouses leased by the Howorth Chain Stores where nothing ever happened but the trundling in and out of food. Endless passage of food. But a quickened pulse told him that those seventeen weeks of wartime Rome still hovered in his memory. Something different had happened. He frowned, crossed to the dresser, and began brushing his hair. The bristles dug into his scalp. A narrow, golf-tanned face and ice-blue eyes stared back at him from the mirror: a stranger’s face because the repressions of twelve years separated it from the memories pressing out through his eyes. He could see behind him in the mirror the metallic ivory décor of the room, his own rumpled bed.

  “Dora Pucetti,” he whispered. Immediately, he felt foolish, soiled.

  Early in his life, High Church and wealthy parents had stretched polite distance between the self of Charles Howorth and the brute nature of his body. He had carried that balancing tension within him for thirty-two years.

  Until the seventeen weeks with carnal, erotic Dora Pucetti.

  But the war had moved on, taking Major Charles Howorth with it. He’d rebuilt his inner defenses. The memory of Dora had become encysted to keep it from disturbing the polite balance.

  And the war had ended, and he had gone home.

  Katherine noted, in time, that something not of guns and fighting had happened to Charles overseas. Mention of Rome brought a clouding of his eyes, a straying attention. The marriage bed had become more of a service to an animal—a frenzied animal that appeared to be hunting something lost. The slow patience of a wife with too much leisure—and an accumulation of probing observations—had finally revealed the encysted memory of Dora as surely as if it had been a physical tumor.

  Rome … another woman. That was the shape of the thing in Charles.

  Katherine had pushed through this vacation over all his objections. “Everybody’s going to Italy this year, Charles,” she’d said.

  “The more reason to go somewhere else!”

  “We have to go somewhere, you know.”

  “Why?”

  Katherine had won mainly because Charles had become tired of arguing. (Besides, Lorna Philpott had been there last year, and the Philpotts were going again this year. “And what will Lorna and I talk about if I don’t go?”) When she’d started using those damn bores, the Philpotts, for an argument, Charles had thrown up his hands. But once the decision had been made, he’d been filled with a remorse he couldn’t explain.

  So the Howorths had come to Rome, a tourist-crowded city. And a mix-up in reservations had forced them to take rooms in the hotel where Charles had lived for seventeen weeks during the war. It was the kind of coincidence that alerted all of Charles’ religious fears. For three days he’d managed to crowd his time with tourism—ruins, bars, dinners, shopping. But last night he’d dreamed of cannon fire the way it had sounded at Lacata. And this morning, the street noises had set him off. The clock of memory he’d thought safely broken and thrown away had begun its precarious ticking. It persisted while he dressed.

  Right down below us two floors—309—that’s where I was the night they threw Dora into my room and nailed the door shut.

  He’d been wide awake in his bed, smoking in the dark, his mind filled with fatalistic musings. The door had slammed open with an eruption of light from the hall. A dark figure had been thrust into the room—all shadow against the glare. Then the door had been closed—the pounding, the drunken laughter. And in the dark room, a voluptuous female voice saying, “They geev you to me!” He’d snapped on the bedlight and, in its dull yellowness, had seen Dora wearing nothing but a pair of black lace panties. She’d swayed drunkenly, advanced on the bed.

  And Charles remembered her eyes: black holes, undrunk in that gorgeous drunken body.

  It h
ad been surprising how easily civilization, High Church, everything had just peeled away, leaving only a man and a woman.

  And Charles remembered the things she’d asked for: coffee, chocolate, cigarettes. These had been easy to get for a major in the quartermaster corps.

  Now that he was wallowing in the memory—letting his body dress itself—Charles recalled tiny details about Dora: the wild hair that grew beneath her left ear, the white scar on her thigh. Bur her eyes intruded in every memory: the lithe body might be abandoned to passion, but the eyes still measured things, weighed values.

  Coffee, chocolate, cigarettes. And once, ten pounds of powdered milk and a case of spam.

  Katherine called from the bathroom, interrupted his reverie: “You awake, Charles?”

  It took him a moment to come up through the mists that separated past and present. “Yes, I’m awake.” He finished buttoning his shirt.

  “Do you want the shower?”

  “I took one last night.”

  Katherine came out of the bathroom fully dressed. Her round face with its frame of careful blonde hair was blank behind its mask of makeup: the face of a dove, the mouth arranged to say coo. She wore one of her knitted suits—the pale blue one—rigid as armor over the foundation garment.

  “Did you sleep well?” she asked.

  He stood before the mirror, plugging in his electric razor. “Certainly. Always sleep well.”

  She raised her voice above the razor’s buzzing: “You tossed around so much last night, I thought you might’ve had a nightmare.”

  He saw her eyes in the mirror, weighing him. No sympathy. That occurred only in her voice while the eyes abstained. Again, he thought of Dora’s eyes: never soft. She’d loved with her body but not with her eyes. Charles put away the razor, knotted his tie.

  “All ready?” asked Katherine.

  He slipped into his coat, touched his hair once more with the brush, then replaced the brush in its leather case.

  “All ready.”

  “I’m glad we’re getting an early start,” she said.

  He took his homburg and the camera from the dresser as they left, closed the door with a solid thump. There was yellow light in the hall: gently blending, gently unexciting. They made polished walking movements down the dull carpet footing. He wore the hat (it felt light in front, lacking the military eagle) slanted at a sculptured angle across his forehead. Underneath the brim: the ice-blue eyes without pardon, the golf-tanned face. Hands dark and leashed. (And the rest of him beneath the refined tailoring: a sun-shunning powder white.)

  Polished, polished movements.

  “This seems to be a very nice hotel,” said Katherine.

  “They’ve been making money here since the war,” he said.

  “Oh? You know this hotel?”

  “It was our BOQ.”

  “What a fascinating coincidence! Why didn’t you say something before?”

  “Didn’t think it was important.”

  “Charles, everything you did here was important.”

  He cleared his throat. “Crrhummmph.”

  The end of the hall opened into a skylighted space with potted green plants and elaborate iron scrollwork across the elevator well. Charles pressed the ivory button. Presently, something clanked below them. There came a grinding humming. He cast a seeking glance around, objecting to what he saw without finding a specific object of objection.

  Katherine watched him: waiting, unsympathetic eyes—eyes of a dove intent upon its morsel.

  “This place must be full of memories for you,” she said.

  “Just another hotel,” he said.

  “But you’d just liberated Rome, and the people must’ve been so grateful. I’ll bet you did lots of fascinating things.”

  Again he cleared his throat. “We fought a war.”

  “But not all the time. Not every minute.”

  He turned, stared at her, encountered the probing eyes. “Sometimes we ate, and sometimes we slept.” And he thought: We should’ve gone someplace else … back to France. Rome belongs to a time better forgotten.

  “Does the hotel look the same?” she asked.

  “All redecorated.” Again he studied his surroundings. “You can bet they did it with dollars.” He became aware that the elevator sounds had stopped, and he pressed the buttons.

  “So many tourists,” she said. (Sweet moist pressing voice!) “But I’m so glad we finally came. Your stories about the war made me so curious.”

  He darted a sidelong glance at her. I never mentioned Rome … except to say that we came through here.

  She said: “Anyway, I’m tired of France.”

  There’s no way she could possibly know about Dora, he thought. And he said: “It was quite a bit different here during the war.”

  “One would imagine,” she said.

  A feeling of bitter distaste for this place welled up in Charles. He fought down an involuntary shudder.

  “You look tired,” said Katherine. “Are you sure you want to go out today? Perhaps you should just rest in …”

  “Of course I want to go out! Not tired. Just hungry. Where’s that damned elevator?” He leaned his thumb against the ivory button.

  Remorse at the outburst came over him. She’s just trying to be kind. I must learn to control my temper. I must be kinder to Katherine and put Dora out of my mind. Katherine is soft, sweet, tender sympathy. She never smells of sex and sweat. I must be kinder.

  Now the elevator resumed its sounds: a humming, mechanical awareness. The cage arose out of the depths, operated by a gnome-faced little man in a blue uniform. The Howorths entered, relaxed in the iron well.

  Breakfast in the hotel dining room: silver sugar service, Roman eagles on the cups and plates. Wide reaches of round white tablecloths, spotting of dark heads. Sleepy gliding of help.

  A murmurous, expensive clinking.

  “This damn coffee tastes of licorice!” said Charles. “They always use too many spices! And they’ve put some hot stuff on my eggs.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Katherine.

  “You’d think they could understand a simple order! I told him I wanted plain fried eggs.”

  “They do things so differently here,” she said.

  “Huh! Things have sure as hell changed since the war! Krauts took everything with ’em. Even cleaned out the food. We had to feed everybody!”

  “It must’ve been hard for you. Helping so many hungry people.” Watching eyes. “But weren’t they grateful?”

  Hah! Grateful! Stealing everything they could lay their hands on! Begging! He began to feel drunk with anger. An image of Dora arose in his mind. Whatever happened to her? He wiped his mouth with the napkin, pushed the image aside. By now—if she’s still alive—she’ll be a fat slattern surrounded by squalling brats.

  “But it must’ve been interesting here during the war,” said Katherine.

  Charles took a deep breath, stared around the room, seeking an object to catch his attention. The balcony. “Our flag hung right over there from that balcony.”

  “I find it hard to picture you here during the war,” she said. “What did you do with your spare time?”

  He waved a hand. “Nothing.”

  A woman walked past under the balcony. The proud swinging motion of her young body caught his eye, and against his will, the image of Dora returned. She walked like that. And she used to say, “What’s a woman without a man?” That’s one thing about these Italians: their women know how to treat a man. He cleared his throat. These are thoughts I must not think! And he became aware that Katherine had spoken.

  “I asked you about these tables, dear,” she said.

  “Eh?”

  “Did you have these same tables here during the war?”

  “These?” He nudged the table. A dollop of water spilled from his glass. Damn waiter keeps them too full! “No. These are new. We had stuff we liberated from some fascist’s palace.”

  Katherine moved her gaze around t
he room. “The women are beautiful here,” she said. “Don’t you think so?”

  He shrugged.

  “Rome is famous for its beautiful women,” she said. “Did you meet any beautiful women during the war?”

  “Too busy,” he said. “Didn’t notice.”

  He shot a glance at her, looked away. Could she know? Nonsense! No way for her to know.

  Katherine stirred more cream into her coffee. “Did you have anything in particular in mind for today?”

  “Nothing special. I want to get some more pictures at the Forum before we go on up to Florence. Never had a camera with me during the war.”

  And a good thing I didn’t have a camera, he thought. I’d probably have taken pictures of Dora, maybe saved one. He passed a hand in front of his eyes, looking at the marks in his palm. God! How she used to tread the bed like it was a trampoline! Bouncing! Not a stitch on! Hair flying! Jumping up and down on the bed like it was a trampoline. And laughing. “You like to see me like this. Yes you do.”

  “Perhaps we could look at antiques this morning,” said Katherine. “I heard about a little shop off the Via Magdalena.”

  His eyes shorted across sudden attention. “Antiques? Oh, now, I …”

  “Just to look. I feel like browsing.”

  “Katherine, I am remembering the carpets from Brussels.”

  Little S’s beside her mouth. “You know I didn’t get cheated very much.”

  He stared at her armor-tortured bustline. “Cheated, though.”

  Kinder, he thought. This is not being kinder.

  “We could go for a little while this morning,” he said. “They tell me afternoon light’s best in the Forum.”

  And he thought: It’s not much she’s asking.

  “Sometimes you’re very sweet, Charles,” she said.

  “Huh!” Yet he smiled a sad, heavy smile.

  Some cars filled Charles with metal dread. This astonishing taxi made his skin crawl. It was old, high, neck-jerking—driven by a gawky, leather-skinned creature with a great Franz Josef mustache. But it had been the only taxi at the stand outside the hotel.

  We should’ve waited for another one. Rice on the seats. A wedding? Do they have that custom here? I never learned.