Collected Novels and Plays Read Free Page B

and see—she’ll
be
the fourth wife if they don’t take care!”
    “Think of wives outnumbering children,” said Jane.
    “Think of each wife lasting thirteen years.”
    She did, and called it creepy. As an art-historian Jane appreciated these formal touches, but her inner life—or whatever went on beneath her healthy sunburned face and black curls straining against combs—was a chaos. Or so Francis assumed. They spent hours together every day.
    Nevertheless each had warned the other that, back in America, they would most likely not be friends at all. Francis would settle in New York, Jane would marry her childhood sweetheart, now a graduate student at Harvard, and since neither of them really enjoyed traveling, that would be that. The great topic between them was less their love of monuments than their dislike of Italy, of Italians, of the Americans who pretended to feel at home there. They agreed vigorously
     as to the unreality of any given Italian. “Nothing but gesture and vanity,” Francis would say, “like a trip through a progressive school. Italians have never understood the difference between expression and self-expression. They have no feelings because they’re forever showing them off. Such people
are
unreal. No wonder they produced Pirandello.”
    “The men think of nothing but sex,” said Jane.
    “And they’re utter failures in bed.”
    “You don’t say!”
    “So Xenia tells me,” he hastened to add.
    “Speriamo!” She
often lapsed into Italian, not so much from ostentation as to poke fun at those who spoke nothing else.
    Alessandro Allori kept Jane in Italy. She had dutifully covered half the country in search of his work, and Francis once or twice, havingnothing better to do, went along. Whenever you passed a chapel without bothering to look at the dull dark unstarred painting above the altar, you were like as not neglecting an Allori. Francis had watched his friend, during a Sunday Mass in Pesaro, interrupt the Elevation by crossing in front of it—bareheaded
     in dirndl and sandals, her arms full of notebooks—on the heels of a corrupt sacristan whose genuflection she dared not imitate, only to find herself examining something truly awful, worse than Allori, a
scuola d’Ignoto.
Allori was awful enough, but what could she do? All the interesting painters had been snapped up by her colleagues. Still, when the Caravaggio wave was over, people would look about for new figures to rediscover. Jane took the view that
     Allori’s very unlikeliness gave him a certain advantage.
    What kept Francis in Italy? A hunch that he would be asked this question on his return had helped him dawdle there all through the winter and spring.
    Jane handed back the letter. “But who is Irene, really?”
    Cousin Irene? Stretching in the sun, he felt hungry and wondered if he could do justice to Mrs. Cheek. After what Enid had written, could anyone? She looked, he began, like a lady golfer, tanned, with small eyes. She was actually a cousin of the Tannings—at least her husband was—but the connection, and for that matter the Cheeks themselves, had played no part in Francis’s consciousness until the winter before he came to Europe. They turned up, as if
     from nowhere, in Hobe Sound—Irene and Charlie and two beagles, these last going directly into a kennel because Fern wouldn’t have them in the house. Francis understood that; the house was new, all marble with oyster-white carpeting—very Fern. Even the grass outside felt like paper and rustled dryly underfoot. To go on, Irene had brought her hostess a kind of Guatemalan fiesta dress, purple and orange, one that couldn’t have been worn as a joke—not
     at any rate by Fern, although Irene turned up for dinner that night in flesh-colored slacks and a silk T-shirt on which one of the beagles had been
painted
with a slipper in its mouth. Mr. Tanning did his best to makeup for Fern’s remoteness, Fern herself grew wild with jealousy, one thing led to