Winds of War (45 page)

* * *

“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 a 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 Jastrows. 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.

“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? Would 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.”