by Irwin Shaw
Tucino was there, too, and his man Tasseti, and Barzelli and Delaney and Delaney’s wife, Clara. Stiles stood unsteadily near the bar, a lofty, wooden smile on his face. Jean-Baptiste Despière was in the middle of the room, making a group of three with Moss, Jack’s friend from the Embassy, and a young Italian movie director who had won a big prize in Venice the year before. Through it all, the Holts wandered, arm in arm, flushed with hospitality, embarrassed smiles flitting across their faces, pleased because back in Oklahoma City they never would have been able to give a party like this. Mrs. Holt was not yet drunk.
The volume of talk in the ornate room was at third-drink level, a base of masculine laughter swamped and curlicued by the massed choir of the soprano voice, shrilled by alcohol. Hunters and huntresses, excited by the abundance of game, firing at the slightest movement in the confused international foliage of conversation, the guests moved restlessly about, seeking new positions of advantage. When Jack was younger, when he was unmarried or between marriages and on the prowl for women, he had from time to time enjoyed these senseless conglomerations of people who had no connection to each other, who would, in all probability, never see each other again, who responded to no social necessity and composed no coherent social pattern. Or rather, the pattern was made and broken each night between seven and ten, a whole turbulent society, afloat on alcohol, born and buried, arriving and departing, loving, mating, despairing, wounding, flattering, and conspiring evening after evening in the capitals of the world. Tonight, Jack wasn’t interested, and he wondered how soon he might be able to slip away without offending the Holts. He had asked Veronica to come with him, but she had refused. “I have a connection with you for two weeks,” she had said, when they had parted at the hotel that afternoon, “and I want that it should be private. I do not want to waste it away at one of those parties. I do not even want to talk to anyone else these two weeks.” He had a date with her for dinner at nine thirty and he nursed his one drink, conscientiously remaining sober for her, thinking, I bet I’m the only one in the room who’s been threatened with murder this afternoon.
“Tel Aviv was wonderful,” one of the motherly New York ladies was saying, “even the mailmen are Jewish.”
“Take me, for example,” the young Italian movie director in the same group with Moss and Despière was saying, speaking in French, for Moss’s sake. “The two components of the Italian completely mingled. Look at the back of my head.” He turned from side to side, exhibiting the back of his head. “Flat. I was born in Venice of a Venetian father. The northern Italian is really Swiss, Alpine, Tyrolean, Bavarian, the flat, severe, nonspeculative, rather unaesthetic line. But my face—my mother was born in Calabria—see the orphan’s sad, dark eye, the southern spirit, the wit, the sudden bursts of energy, the long periods of languor. The northern Italian is practical, continuously energetic, and like most people who are too up-to-date, not particularly interesting in himself. The southerners are the dreamers, the philosophers, the abstract thinkers, the non-accomplishers, the residual, intellectual aurochs of Italy, who, if they were left alone would never have erected an electric dynamo or kept a locomotive in repair who would still be farming with a wooden plow and a team of an ox and an ass. It is the combination of the two elements, the dream and the fingers, that makes the explosive, hopeful Italian mixture, the decadence suddenly exploding into some new and startling idea. Don Quixote and Edison, Henry Ford and Benedetto Croce. At any moment, we are capable of astonishing discoveries. Even now, we can teach Europe many things. For example—see how much faster we recovered than anyone else after the war. Why? Because we admitted immediately that we were beaten. Defeat is as natural as anything else to Italians, it is like the weather, we accept it. That didn’t work, we said to ourselves, now let us go on to something else. The French, on the other hand, the rational French”—he looked mockingly at Despière—“keep pretending that they were not defeated. They are constantly standing in a challenging posture, they are listening defiantly for a voice that will say, ‘You lost.’ The French are so intent on defending the past, on illusory grounds, that they have not yet moved into the present. I will tell you something else about the Italians and the French. The world has forgiven us Italians our sins because we have forgiven ourselves so promptly. The French are unforgiven—listen to the bitterness in the voices of your English and American friends, even to this day—because the French cannot bring themselves to forgive themselves for anything—not for Stavisky, not for Blum, not for the Maginot Line, Petain, Laval, Doriot, the Milice, not even for de Gaulle, while the Italians gaily forgive themselves not only for their defeats, but for their victories—for Addis Ababa as well as Guernica, for Albania and Greece, for Mussolini and the King, for the invasion of France and the secret surrender after Sicily.”
Jack listened to the intelligent accented voice coming from the mobile Roman mouth, thinking, Where were you when Mussolini was on the balcony, how high did you raise your arm, friend?
“As for the Germans,” the director went on, waving his hands, chuckling, enjoying himself, his arguments, his audience of ex-enemies, “they, of course, have no need to forgive themselves anything. They were right, they feel, always right—do not events bear them out?—and they bowed only to superior force. They are a lucky people, the Germans, they are upheld by the two most powerful racial forces—self-righteousness and self-pity…”
Jack drifted on, away from the flood of half-truths, away from the handsome fluent man with his mane of coal-black hair, his neat, self-satisfied arrangement of categories—North, South, flat heads, round heads, the dreamers, the fingers, the defeated and undefeated, the forgiven and unforgiven, everything clear and manageable after the third drink.
Clara Delaney, alone against a brocaded wall, was pretending to smile at the conversation of a group near her who were speaking in Italian. She caught Jack’s eye and waved to him. He went over to her and kissed her cheek. She was a plain waxy woman, yellowed, angular and spare, well over forty, who had been Delaney’s secretary through two of Delaney’s other marriages. She had prominent, slightly hyperthyroid, dark eyes, hungry and permanently insulted.
“How are things, Jack?” she asked, her voice dry, unmusical. “How is the family? How do you keep looking so young? Don’t you ever come back to America any more?”
Jack answered the questions as best he could, noticing that even as he talked Clara kept peering nervously over his shoulder at Delaney and Barzelli and Tucino, who were speaking together near the bar. It hasn’t changed in all the years, Jack thought, Clara’s always by herself, making her solitary patrol, suffering her solitary wounds, spying on her husband from afar, like a soldier surveying the actions of enemy forces in the field.
“How do you like Rome?” Jack asked, lapsing immediately into banality, the world’s inevitable tribute to Clara Delaney.
“I hate it,” Clara said. “They’re so insincere. You never hear a sincere word spoken. And it’s the same old story with him—” She indicated Barzelli and her husband with a bitter twist of her head. “The leading-lady disease. He can’t keep his hands off them. If he made a picture with Ubangis, he’d have to crawl into bed with the nigger playing the Cannibal Queen.”
“Now, Clara,” Jack said soothingly, “I’m sure you’re making things up.”
“Hah!” Clara snorted briefly, her yellowish eyes fixed on her husband. “Making things up! If I told you where I found lipstick stains.”
Clara had never been famous as a woman who kept her troubles to herself, and Jack saw that the years had not made her more discreet. He made a sympathetic, noncommittal noise, anxious to avoid further revelations.
“I’m telling you, Jack,” Clara went on, rasping, “if he didn’t need me so badly, I’d’ve left him years ago. I swear I would. By God, if this picture is a success, I think I’ll do it. Then let him see who’ll hold his hand and baby him and tell him he’s still a great man when the reviews come out, no matter what the bastards say. Do yo
u know, when his last picture opened in New York, he sat in his room and cried like an infant for three days. That’s when he calls for me,” she said, with bleak satisfaction, “that’s when he calls me his only love, that’s when he says he’d die without me. When he’s sore and bleeding and wondering where it all went to. Now, look at him—the money’s coming in for a couple of months, everybody’s saying, Yes, Signor Delaney, no, Signor Delaney, whatever you say, Signor Delaney, and listening to his stories and laughing at his jokes, and he forgets that he ever cried for three days, he forgets what he owes me, he’s so damned cocky he doesn’t even bother to wipe the lipstick off when he comes home at night.”
“Now, Clara,” Jack said, feeling committed, out of friendship, to a healing word, “it isn’t as though you didn’t know he was a difficult man when you married him. You better than anyone.”
“I know, I know,” Clara said. “The years I lied for him to all those women. Just the way that Hilda of his is lying to me for him now. But you’d think a man’d give up finally, wouldn’t you—you’d think that a man would improve. After all, he’s fifty-six years old. How about you?” She peered at Jack harshly. “You don’t drive your wife crazy, do you?”
“Well,” Jack said carefully, “we have our problems like everybody else.”
“Nobody has problems like me,” Clara said flatly. “Look at that one.” Her mouth curled in distaste as she indicated Barzelli, standing close to Delaney, her shoulder just touching his. “That common fat Italian. I’d like to see what she’s going to look like when she’s my age. And they’re shameless. They let everybody know. The whole damned city. He doesn’t care what anybody says about him.”
That used to be one of the best things about him, Jack thought, he never cared what anybody said about him.
“It’s not as though he has to go out of the house,” Clara went on. “He’s crazy about me. Ask him, he’ll tell you. God knows, I’m no beauty and I never was, but I still have the body of a young girl…” She stopped and glared at Jack, waiting for him to contradict her, to tell her that she did not have the body of a young girl. Elaborately, Jack lit a cigarette. “We have a passionate relationship,” Clara said loudly. “Like young lovers in the full flush of youth. He can’t get enough of me.” She hesitated. “Sometimes,” she added. “Some months.”
Rome, Jack thought uneasily. Everybody confesses in Rome. To me. There must be a particular absolving look on my face these days.
“And it’s not only that,” Clara continued, chapter one thousand in the endless book of love, self-pity, self-justification, jealousy, longing, possession that she had begun the day she walked, a young, unbeautiful woman, into the office in the studio in Hollywood and said, “Mr. Delaney, they sent me over from the stenographic pool.” She dropped her voice, as though she had secret information, for Jack’s ears only, and he had to move closer to hear her, above the roar of conversation all around them. “There’s the work. Who do you think helps him with the scripts? Who do you think helped him rewrite this picture?”
Ah, Jack thought, criminals everywhere, penciling their nameless conjoined crimes.
“We think like one mind,” Clara whispered. “When we work together, we’re closer even than when we’re in bed. And then he goes on the set and there’s another of those fat whores waving her behind and I might as well be dead. He forgets the days and nights of work, he forgets…” She sniffled. Then she brightened self-consciously. “I’m not a complainer,” she said. “I never complained before and I’m not going to start now. And this time, it’s going to be worth it. You’ve read the script, haven’t you? You’ve seen the picture?”
“Yes,” Jack said.
“It’s beautiful,” Clara said, pleading. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Yes,” Jack said. “Beautiful.”
“It’s going to make all the difference, this one,” Clara said, almost confidently. “This is going to put him right on top. Don’t you think so?”
“No doubt about it,” said Jack. There was nothing in his relationship with Delaney that committed him to honesty with Delaney’s wife.
“You know, they’re after him to sign a three-picture deal right here in Rome,” Clara said proudly.
“Mr. Holt told me something about it,” Jack said.
“I’m looking for an apartment,” Clara said, “on a year-round basis. With a good cook. Give him something to come home to at night. If he has security like that, I have an idea he’d settle down more. The last few years’ve been so—” She stopped, looked thoughtfully across the room at Delaney and Barzelli. “You know what I’m going to do, Jack. I’m going to get out of here. He hates it when he feels I’m being possessive. I’ll just slip out. You have to know how to handle a man like that, Jack, you have to know when to stand in his way and when you mustn’t. Don’t tell anybody I’m leaving.” She sidled toward the door through the throng of guests, then vanished, unnoticed. Two hours later Delaney might peer around hazily, wondering where she was, then shrug and go off with Barzelli, relieved that there were no excuses to be made to her for sending her home alone.
Jack sighed. And there was a time, he thought, when I believed people went to parties to enjoy themselves.
He felt a light touch on his arm. It was Mrs. Holt, accompanied, as always, by her husband. “It was so thoughtful of you to come,” Mrs. Holt said, in her wispy, apologetic voice. “There must be so many things you have to do in Rome, so many people you must see…”
“Not at all,” Jack said, shaking hands with Holt. Holt was in a dinner jacket of raw silk, obviously made in Rome, and Mrs. Holt was the only woman in the room in an evening gown. It was a girlish, wispy blue, to go with her voice, and her shoulders were covered with a tulle shawl. Her hands kept wandering upwards as she kept arranging and rearranging the shawl. “I hardly know anybody,” Jack said. “By the way, Sam, about that thing we talked about last night…”
“Oh, yes,” Holt said, with a quick, worried sideways glance at his wife. “If it’s too much trouble…”
“I talked to someone at the Consulate,” Jack said. “A Mr. Kern. You might drop in on him. I think perhaps he can help a bit.”
Holt beamed. “Now, that was friendly of you, Jack,” he said. “To do it so fast.”
“There’s some information he has to have,” Jack said, net prepared to warn Holt more definitely than that. “I thought it might be better if you talked to him personally.”
“Of course, of course,” Holt said. “It’s about the adoption papers,” he explained to Mrs. Holt.
“They have such sad eyes,” Mrs. Holt said, her own eyes blurring a little with tears. “They’re so polite, it breaks your heart. I couldn’t sleep all night, after the last visit, poor little tragic ladies and gentlemen in those horrible black clothes. I would like to take them all to my bosom.”
“Jack,” Holt said, “I’d like to ask you a question—are you committed to the government for life?”
“Well,” Jack said, puzzled, “I hadn’t really thought about it, I guess. They don’t have chains on me, if that’s what you mean…”
“What I’m driving at,” Holt said, “is, if something—uh—something advantageous, something very advantageous—came up, would you have an open mind on it?”
“I suppose so,” Jack said, wondering if Holt was going to offer him a job on the basis of the hour in the night club and the walk along the Tiber the night before. “I guess I’m as open-minded as the next man. I haven’t thought about it.” He smiled. “Nothing very advantageous has come up for about ten years.”
“Good,” Holt said crisply, as though Jack had just shaken hands on a deal. “I’m glad to hear that.”
“I want to tell you something, Jack,” Mrs. Holt said. “When we got home last night, Sam said to me, I like that young man. He’s solid. He’s not like most of the Americans you meet who’ve lived abroad for years—light and smart-alecky and cynical.” She beamed at Jack, decorating him officially with her
husband’s approval.
“Well,” Jack said gravely, “that is nice to hear. Especially the young man part.”
“I don’t know how old you are, Jack,” said Mrs. Holt, “but you leave a young impression.”
“Thank you, Bertha,” Jack said, thinking, Maybe I ought to get her to talk to Bresach on my behalf.
“Please feel free to drop in here anytime, Jack,” Holt said. “New you know the way. You’re always welcome. And”—he looked around him with pride at the assemblage of guests drinking his liquor—“there’s no telling who you’re likely to meet up with here.”
