Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

  23

  THE TELEPHONE RANG, AS usual, at seven in the morning, to wake him up. Dazedly, he got out of bed and prepared to shave. It was only while he was putting the lather on his face that he remembered that he was not going to the studio that morning. He stared blearily at his reflection in the mirror, the lather making him look bearded, like a disreputable old man, broken and disfigured by a lifetime of dissipation. He washed the lather off and dried his face and looked at himself again. Now he didn’t seem like an old man any more, but his face was disagreeably webbed under his eyes and unhealthily pale. Annoyed with himself for not having remembered to cancel the operator’s call the night before, he got back into bed. He made himself stay under the covers for an hour, but he couldn’t sleep, and he finally got up and called for his breakfast.

  He didn’t open the newspapers that the waiter brought in with him, in case there was anything in them about the funeral of Despière. The less he thought about Despière today and in the days to come, the better for the control of his nerves. As he drank his coffee, it occurred to him that he had nearly four hours to wait before his appointment with Bresach. He thought of the other guests of the hotel, breakfasting, like him, at this hour in their rooms, and preparing to set out and enjoy the wonders of the city. This morning, he thought, for a few hours, I, too, will be a tourist. It may be the last chance I get. He went over to the desk and got the old 1928 Baedeker and propped it on the table in front of him as he sipped his coffee and ate his sugared roll.

  The idea of touring Rome, even for a morning, by the aid of a guidebook that had been published in 1928 was a pleasant one. In the stiff, proper prose, the city of thirty years ago seemed more orderly, more leisurely, more substantial than the city of today. In that city nothing very bad could happen to you. The only real danger in 1928, it seemed, was that you might overtip the natives.

  He read at random, Under Churches and Learned Institutions, there was a paragraph headed Guide-Lecturers (English or English-speaking) Prof. L. Reynaud, Via Flavia 6; Signora P. Canali, Via Vittorio Veneto 146; Mr. T. B. Englefield, Via Cesare Beccaria 94; Miss Grace Wonnacott, Via dei Gracchi 134…

  That’s what I need, he thought, in this city—a guide-lecturer (English or English-speaking) to explain it all. What would Signora P. Canali have to say, across the thirty years, about her compatriots Veronica Rienzi and Barzelli and Tucino, how would Miss Grace Wonnacott, that English lady of Via dei Gracchi 134, describe that complex descendant of Irish immigrants, Maurice Delaney?

  Lead me among the monuments, Mr. T. B. Englefield, show me the stones where love and ambition are buried, take me to the very spots where the rape, the crucifixion took place, where the last cries were uttered, where rose the shouts of triumph, where the kings marched before their assassins, where the gladiators amused the multitudes. I have friends who amuse the multitudes, and in not too different a way, and who also pay an extreme price when they lose.

  Idly, Jack turned the page.

  PLAN OF VISIT

  2nd day. Walk from Sant’Onofrio through the Passeggiata Margherita to San Pietro in Montorio and there await the sunset…

  And there await the sunset.

  How peaceful, Jack though, sipping his coffee, to await the sunset in 1928 at San Pietro in Montorio.

  The telephone rang. It had a tinny, impatient sound, as though the operator hadn’t slept well the night before and was irritated with the world this morning. Jack leaned over and picked up the phone.

  It was Carlotta. “I’m sorry to call you so early,” she said, speaking quickly, crowding the words in, “but I wanted to get hold of you before you went out. They haven’t let me in to see Maurice yet and I wondered…”

  “He’s all right,” Jack said. “He got your roses.”

  “Jack,” she said, “don’t be so short with me. Please. I want to see you. It’s ridiculous, both of us in the same hotel, after so many years…Will you take me to lunch?”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I have an appointment at noon.”

  “What’re you doing until then?”

  “Sightseeing.”

  “Where?”

  “The Sistine Chapel.” It was the first thing that came into his head.

  “Isn’t that remarkable,” Carlotta said. “That’s just where I’m going this morning.”

  “When did you decide that?”

  “Two seconds ago.” She laughed. Her laughter was composed and friendly. “May I come along with you?”

  Why not, Jack thought. Everything else has happened to me in Rome, I might as well visit the Sistine Chapel with my ex-wife. “I’ll be down in the lobby in fifteen minutes,” he said. “Can you be ready?”

  “Of course,” she said. “You remember how fast I dress.”

  Remember, Jack thought, as he hung up. Women use that word as a club.

  He went into the bathroom, and for the second time that morning, put the old man disguise of lather on his face.

  She was in the lobby when he came out of the elevator. She was talking to another woman and she didn’t see him for a moment and he had an opportunity to study her and observe what the years had done to her. She had put on weight and the old, flickering sharpness of her face was gone. Her beauty had diminished, but without leaving signs of bitterness in the process. By some magic of time, the jittery neurotic she had been when he had last seen her had been transformed into a robust and sunny matron. As he looked at her, conversing brightly with the other woman, it occurred to Jack that if he were asked to describe her now he would use the old-fashioned phrase, a comely woman.

  Her hair, which had gone through the usual spectrum of Hollywood colors, now seemed a faded and natural blonde, and she filled, a little too completely, with an outmoded generosity of flesh, her smart dark gray suit. Looking at the smiling, firm-skinned, full face and the over-womanly body, Jack remembered the choice that a Frenchwoman had once told him ladies over thirty-five had to make—between the face and the derrière. Either you dieted and exercised, the woman had said, and kept your behind slender and allowed your face to grow haggard and lined, or you opted for your face and let your behind spread. Carlotta had clearly opted for her face. Wisely, Jack thought.

  When he came up to her, the fuss of introductions to the other woman, a Princess Miranello, who had a long upper lip and prominent gums and a Back Bay accent, made the meeting conventional and without embarrassment.

  “I’ll meet you at one o’clock for lunch,” Carlotta said to the other woman.

  “Well,” the princess said, making what Jack imagined she thought was an arch face in his direction, “if you have a better offer…”

  “I have no better offers,” Carlotta said. “See you at one.” She put her hand lightly on Jack’s arm and they started out of the hotel together.

  “Who’s the princess?” Jack asked.

  “Maggie Fahnstock, of Boston. She’s an old friend of mine. She knows all about you. She thinks it’s awfully moving, our meeting each other like this in Rome, after so long…” Carlotta’s tone was light and amused. “Are you awfully moved?”

  “Awfully,” Jack said. He saw Guido waiting beside the Fiat across the street and waved to him. Guido jumped into the car and started to turn against the traffic toward the hotel.

  “She’s seen you before,” Carlotta said. “In a restaurant the other night, with two men. She examined you carefully. She said you looked like a happy man.”

  “Good old Maggie,” Jack said. “That sterling judge of Character.”

  “She also thought you looked very handsome,” Carlotta said, without coquetry. “She said you looked as though you’d be good for another twenty years. She asked me why I left you.”

  “What did you say to that?”

  “I told her that I didn’t leave you,” Carlotta said. “You left me.”

  “It’s amazing,” Jack said, “how many different opinions eyewitnesses can have of the same accident.”

  Guido drove up to the door and
Jack helped Carlotta into the car, before getting in himself.

  “Cinecittà?” Guido asked.

  “San Pietro,” Jack said.

  Guido looked up into the rear-view mirror, to make sure that Jack was not joking. Then, reassured, he put the car into gear and swung out into the street.

  On the way to the Vatican, Carlotta talked about herself. She talked in a chatty, friendly way, as though Jack were an old acquaintance, and no more than that, with whom she could gossip freely and inconsequentially. She had married Kutzer, the head of the studio, she told Jack, a year after her divorce from Jack had become final. Jack nodded. He had read about it and had debated with himself about sending a cablegram. He had not sent the cablegram.

  Kutzer had divorced his wife, settling close to a million dollars on her, and married Carlotta. “I was at the bottom,” she said, but flatly, without emotion. “I was in despair about you. The only parts I could get were degrading and my reputation was so bad that even in Hollywood the only parties I could get invited to were for drunks and fairies and dope addicts.” She laughed lightly, without regret or self-criticism, like a woman speaking of some innocent failing she remembered from her childhood. “He was the most faithful man I ever met,” Carlotta said. “I was his girl for seven years and then he waited nearly another ten years for me to finish with you—and in all the time I was with you he never as much as held my hand or talked to me about anything but work, when I was on the lot—and then one day he called me and said it was absurd for me to ruin myself the way I was doing and that he wanted to marry me. I had a terrible hangover that morning and I would’ve done anything to be left alone so I said yes. And it turned out that he gave me the happiest years of my life until he died. You knew about that, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Jack said. He had read in the newspapers two or three years before that Kutzer had dropped dead walking up the stairs to his office one evening after dinner. Taciturn, brutal, intelligent, rich, faithful, overworked. A thousand people had turned out for his funeral, most of them glad that he was dead. The happiest years of Carlotta’s life…

  “People have different periods of their life when they are made to be happy,” Carlotta was saying. “Some people between twenty and thirty. Others between thirty and forty. Others never, I suppose. I found out that I was made to be happy after forty.”

  “Lucky you,” Jack said.

  “How about you?” she asked. “What’s your best period?”

  The best period. It would have been easy to say. Starting the night of the dog and the Cadillac in the driveway, going through the mornings in the California garden and the calls from Delaney, that different, whole, exuberant Delaney, and ending with the war. But he didn’t say it. It was gone and no good would come of dwelling on it. “I haven’t figured it out yet,” he said.

  “Are you surprised I said I was in despair when we broke up?” Carlotta asked.

  “Mildly.”

  “What did you think I was?”

  “Well,” Jack said, “if I had to put it in a word, the word would be rapacious.”

  Carlotta looked away from him, out the window. “That’s not such a nice word, is it?”

  “No,” Jack said, “it’s not”

  “I didn’t want you to go away,” Carlotta said, turning back to him, looking at him gravely, “and the lawyers suggested that if I made it cost you too much, you might reconsider, you wouldn’t act hastily…”

  “In love,” Jack said, “it’s always wise to consult a lawyer.”

  “Don’t make fun of me, Jack,” she said. “You told me over the phone you didn’t hate me.”

  “I didn’t say anything about not hating your lawyer, though. It’s a funny thing, I don’t seem to remember—even when you knew I wasn’t coming back, that you cabled me saying it was all a trick, you were returning my money…”

  “I wanted to punish you,” she said. “And by then I was in too deep. And I was worried about money. I never saved any, and I was on the way down. A man can always take care of himself.”

  “I took care of myself magnificently,” Jack said. “Some years I even manage to buy two suits a year.”

  “I had to have the security,” Carlotta said, and for a moment her voice was sullen and complaining and made Jack remember the day at the hospital in Virginia. “The way things were going then, in two more years I would’ve been a whore,” she said. “Oh, not one of those on a street-corner or in a house, but a whore just the same.” She smiled brutally. “Your stocks and bonds saved me from that. Did Wall Street ever do a better turn than that? You ought to be delighted you managed to save me.”

  “I am,” Jack said, flatly. “That’s what I am—delighted.”

  “I don’t need money any more,” Carlotta said. “Kutzer saw to that. So if you’re ever in trouble, you know where to come—for a loan.”

  Jack laughed.

  “Have it your own way,” she said, shrugging. “Don’t come to me. Listen, Jack, you’re not going to hurt me. I told you—this is my time to be happy.”

  “I am well known,” Jack said, “as a man who likes all his wives to be happy.”

  “You’re antagonistic, Jack,” she said. “I’d hoped it would be different. I had hoped that when we met we’d be friends. After all, after so many years…”

  Jack said nothing.

  “You don’t like the word friends,” she said.

  “I neither like it nor dislike it.”

  “It won’t hurt me,” Carlotta said. “I can’t be hurt any more. But until you learn to think of me as a friend, you will never be completely happy.”

  “If you’ve gone in for Christian Science,” Jack said, “this is a queer place for it. St. Peter’s is staring us in the face.”

  “Whatever you think of me,” she said, “I’m glad I got this chance of seeing you. To ask you to forgive me…”

  “Where do I begin?” Jack said brutally.

  “…for that day in the hospital in Virginia,” Carlotta said, ignoring his question. “It’s haunted me. It was the worst performance of my life. I came there to assuage you, to promise you that everything would be all right when you got out, to tell you I loved you, and then, when I saw you, I felt so guilty I couldn’t say a word I’d prepared. I let myself be a selfish, stupid, whining bitch. I knew what I was doing and somehow I couldn’t stop it. I cried all the way back to Washington in the train.”

  “It was a short ride,” Jack said, unmoved.

  The car stopped and they got out and Jack told Guido, in French, to wait for them, they probably wouldn’t be too long.

  “On this stone, I shall build my church,” Jack said, as he and Carlotta went across the colonnaded piazza, and alongside the cathedral toward the chapel.

  “In the book,” Jack said, touching the Baedeker, “it says the best light for viewing the chapel is in the morning.” He squinted up critically through the wintry grayness. “Maybe they mean a morning in June. We go everywhere at the wrong time, don’t we?”

  He had been there twice before, on other visits, but each time the place had been crowded and the effect of the paintings had been diluted by his consciousness of the sightseers shuffling and whispering about him. This morning, there were very few people there, two men in black sitting silently on the benches along the side and a student or two moving quietly from time to time across the bare floor. Now the full impact of the room hit him. The effect was not like the effect that any other work of art had had on him. It was like peering down into the deep crater of a volcano, momentarily quiet, but secretly dangerous, unpredictable, explosive, beneath its calm surface.

  The effect was not religious, either. Actually, he decided, it was antireligious. He could believe in Michelangelo after looking at the ceiling of the chapel, but he could not believe in God.

  Flesh, the paintings announced, flesh. Man is flesh, God is flesh, man makes man, man makes God, all mysteries are equal, the sibyls and the prophets are equally right, equally wrong, bel
ieve in any one of them at your peril. On the scroll of the Delphic sibyl, if only your eyes were keen enough to make it out, is the same message that covers the pages of Zacharias’ book—“I am guessing.”

  And on the wall behind the altar, the bodies of the aged athletes writhing in the Last Judgment, below the shadowy figure of Christ high under the vault, repeated a similar message. The saved souls on the right hand of Christ were indistinguishable by any marks of merit or holiness from the damned souls being dragged down to hell on Christ’s left hand. Salvation was the caprice of the usher who made out the seating plan on the last day.

  The painting made him remember another painting—Titian? Tiepolo?—that he had seen once in Milan. It was called La Fortuna, if he remembered correctly, Chance, Luck, Fate, and it was of a beautiful woman striding along, with her left breast bare. From the nipple of the bare breast spouted a stream of milk which was being drunk by a group of happy, smiling men, the lucky ones of life. Charming and ludicrous and arbitrary nourishment. But to the right of the beautiful woman, there was a group of men in agony, who were being driven along, scourged by a whip that the woman held in her right hand. The unlucky ones. The ones who came in at the wrong time or who had bought the wrong ticket and who got the dry right teat and the whip. Equally arbitrary. Put that up in your church, Jack thought. It makes just as much sense. Call it the First and Last and Only Important Judgment, and pile the altar in front of it with votive offerings.

  Looking at Michelangelo’s huge dark painting, Jack was reminded, more than anything else, of photographs he had seen, just after the war, of thousands of naked women being paraded before SS doctors in the German concentration camps. The doctors examined the women briefly, decided within ten seconds whether the women were useful for work or for whatever other purposes the Germans used women like that, and made a sign. The women he had saved were put into one line and lived that day. The women he put into the other line were sent to the furnace. Maybe, thought Jack, staring at the smoky whirl of bodies behind the altar, God is an SS doctor, and Michelangelo had advance information.