What a Thing, to Keep a Wolf in a Cage!

MRS. BOWMAN, THE SMALL, dark American woman walking up the Via Aurelia Antica in the sauterne Roman sunlight, was glad that she had worn the good brown pumps with the low French heels. “Take the Monteverdi bus from the Piazza Fiume,” Mrs. Wigham, the British journalist resident in Rome, had said on the phone. “After that, it’s a twenty-minute walk.” But of course it was turning out to be a very British twenty-minute walk, as the American had suspected it might.

Visiting Italian villas, if one had no car and must watch long cab fares, had a technique of its own. One had to be dressed to cope with the crammed filobus, the dodging between motorcycles on the steep walk afterward, the long, cobbled approaches to the houses themselves. But once there the amour-propre might have to cope with a room full of signoras dressed with their usual black and white graffito perfection or, worse still, with those of one’s own countrywomen who traveled preserved in some mysterious, transportable amber of their own native conveniences. Well, the new coat and the brown shoes would about do. She smiled to herself, remembering that she had read somewhere that a lady always traveled in brown.

The road was walled on each side, so that the sun scarcely glinted on the occasional green Vespa, red Lambretta or on herself, the only pedestrian. Here was a door set tight in the wall—number four, and number three had been minutes back. Number twenty-two might well be another mile away. Well, time is not time in Italy, she reminded herself. “My time is your time,” she sang under her breath, and walked on. After a while she came to the top of a hill and saw four priests approaching from the opposite direction, walking along in their inevitably coupled way. From above, the four black discs of their hats, with the round, center hubs of crown, looked like the flattened-out wheels of some ancient bas-relief vehicle. The wheels of the church, she thought, and crossed the road.

“Per favore,” she faltered. “Il numero ventidue—e lontano?” In a flood of smiles and gestures they waved her on. High above her head the embankments hid the greenery, making the way seem endless. From the dust of the road came the deciduous, stony smell of antiquity. Her lowered eyes caught sight of a pebble, smooth and egg-shaped, rather like the white jelly-bean stones her younger boy at home in the States had in his collection. She passed it, hesitated, and went back for it. I found it on the Via Amelia Antica, she would tell him. On Easter Sunday afternoon.

At home it would still be morning. Her boys, released from the school chapel, would be at dinner in the commons or horsing in the yard. It was a habit she had not been able to break, these six months away—this counting back to what time it was over there. She hadn’t wanted to go, she hadn’t. But “Go!” all the others on the faculty had said. After all—a sabbatical. Once in seven years. “And four of those a widow,” they must have whispered behind her. “Perhaps…over there…” Well, they would find her the same as before her sea change. At forty, forty-one, to range the world like a honing girl, the eye liquid, the breast a cave, was no more decent abroad than it would have been at home. One learned to be alone over here, as one had back there. It was like baggage. She slipped the stone into her pocket and went on.

At last she came to the high iron gates of number twenty-two. They swung open, released by the invisible keeper in the hut at the side, and at the end of a driveway shorter than most she came to the house—nothing of museum grandeur about it, like others she had visited, but low, extended in a comfortable way and about the size of her house at home. No one was about. “Ciao!” she would have liked to have called, but did not. “Hello?” she said, and waited. “Hell-lo-o.”

Mrs. Wigham came round the corner of her house, neatly gray-haired, sweatered and skirted in dun, a sensible Englishwoman at home in her garden, in whatever country that garden might be. “Ah, Mrs. Bowman, so happy to meet you,” she said. “The Maywoods wrote me about you. On leave from your post, they tell me.” They shook hands. “Sociology, is it not?” said Mrs. Wigham. “Are you going to be studying us for a book?”

“No,” said the American, laughing. “I tell myself I’m seeing and being.”

“Oh, well. No one ever does much work in Rome.” Mrs. Wigham led the way, past potting sheds, up a brief staircase, into the house and out again. “Two of your compatriots are here this afternoon,” she said. “A lady from Hollywood, perhaps you know her? Her husband owns a film company, something like that.” She mentioned a name, one of the pioneer, supercolossal names.

“Oh, yes, of course. No—I don’t know her,” said Mrs. Bowman.

“She’s here with a friend of hers sent me by our film man in London. A lady who writes for the films, I believe.” Mrs. Wigham, correspondent for a London daily, had that pale, weathered glance which was perhaps de rigueur for middle-aged British lady journalists. It had never seen mascara perhaps but, in a quietly topographical way, it had seen almost everything else. It rested thoughtfully now on Jane Bowman. “You know of her, possibly? A Miss Francine Moon?”

“No,” said Jane Bowman. “I, er—I’ve never been to Hollywood.” There, she thought. Was that snobbery or modesty? Have I established myself as sufficiently Eastern seaboard and impecunious? When abroad alone, particularly on one’s first trip, one had constantly to stifle this terrible desire to establish oneself, knowing full well that, with the British, any overtness about this would establish one all too well. She stared at Mrs. Wigham’s back as it led the way to the terrace. The most map-conscious people in the world, they were, yet they still alluded to the States as once they might have to Kenya—as to one of those vast but cozy terrae incognitae where certainly everybody knew everybody else.

But when they came out on the terrace and she was presented to the three ladies seated there in the magnificent light that made paintable even the debris of afternoon tea, she was less certain that “the States” was not the intimate terrain that her hostess had presumed it. On their left, the pleasant-faced elderly woman who had answered to the name of Miss Hulme with a brisk “Dew!” was surely English—hatted and caned and wrapped in woollens whose lines one was not meant to pursue. But it was the nearer of the two hatless American women opposite who caught her eye, who was limned in the light with a precision that defeated any tenderizing chiaroscuro of Roman air.

But of course, I do in a way know her, thought Jane. If I were sleepwalking in Arabia deserta and I opened my eyes on her image, I would know her. Gray tailleur, a “Ford” as Seventh Avenue calls it, lapel pin so expensively junk that it does not have to be real. Enormous alligator bag—for this is one of the things that must not be counterfeited—and yes, there are the matching shoes. Gold of bangled wrist, flint of ageless figure, perhaps forty, hair irrefragably gold and coiffed not ten minutes before, butterfly glasses with this year’s line of twisted gold at the bridge. How should I not know her—this artifact of North America, authentic in its way as the pebble I picked up back there on the road?

“Francine Moon,” said this person, reinforcing their hostess’s hummed introduction. One felt her to be a person who established herself immediately.

“Mrs. Bowman has been living in London for the past six months,” said Mrs. Wigham. She looked from one American to the other with the bright teatime glance of those for whom conversation was still an accredited pursuit.

“London!” said Miss Moon, attaching the word to herself as she might hook another trinket to the polyglot baubles at her wrist. She was still leaning forward, partially screening the second Californian, a sullenly handsome woman of about the same age, who had acknowledged Jane with a single dead-pan, dark blink, returning to brood behind a lean brown hand afire with one astounding jewel. “Where did you live when you were in London? I had the loveliest flat—on Hay Hill.”

“Oh, Pimlico, Chelsea,” said Jane. “But most of the time with friends in the Middle Temple,” she added demurely. Miss Moon looked doubtfully, then shrewdly at the two British women, suspecting that her own Mayfair-tempered armor might have been pierced in some recondite way.

“In the Law Courts!” said Miss Hulme. “But how—how delightful!” But “How amazing” was what she had begun to say. She and Mrs. Wigham exchanged glances. The Americans; they are everywhere. One has grown used, in the last fifty years, to their heiresses unlocking our dukedoms. But now, even into our sanctuaries they fall, topside up on their incredibly neat, unlineaged legs. Even into the Middle Temple have they fallen, blunt and indiscriminate as the bombs.

“You’ve just come down from Florence, have you not?” said Mrs. Wigham.

“Ah…Florence. I shall not manage it this time,” said Miss Hulme. Over her simple, elderly-sweet profile there passed that basking glaze which, at the mention of Florence, crept over the faces of all Londoners old enough to remember the days before the pound-sterling travel restrictions—a moment’s Zoroastrian magic, sluicing through fog.

“Florence!” said Miss Moon. “I’ve been up there for two weeks. Doing some research. Historical stuff. They’re all mad for Italy on the Coast, you know.”

“The Coast?” said Miss Hulme.

“The West Coast of America, Enid,” said Mrs. Wigham.

“Well,” said Miss Moon. “I was getting some simply marvelous stuff for my people when Mira here wired me from Garmisch, insisting that I come and stand by her in Rome. She gets so bored, you know—where there’s no skiing.”

Mira, impassive, blinked once, an animal pricking slightly to the mention of its name. It was enough of a movement to refract the stone that studded her hand like a king’s seal. This then was the wife of that California magnate who perhaps had caught an imported starlet as she rose, or had been caught by her as she faded. Under its wiry, black karakul hair, this was a face that had never been personal enough for real beauty perhaps and was now a little too worn for lushness. But, short-nosed and impenetrably planed, it had been that central European cat-face which did well with pictures and with men, which one saw now and then framed in marabou on little girls sitting like spoiled goddesses next to their mothers on the East Bronx train. She wore a coat clipped by couturier scissors but dusty, even dirty, and her scuffed sandals showed a split in one sole. Visiting people of no importance to her, she had abjured even conventional grooming, but the seedlets that hung from her ears had an ineffable grape-bloom and were, Jane saw suddenly, black pearls. It was a pity that Mrs. Wigham, obviously not one for the nuances of dress, might not know how subtly she was being insulted. For this woman was dressed, in a way that the Miss Moons would never dare, with the down-at-the-heel effrontery of the woman who, even in her bath, wears a diamond as big as the Ritz.

“Rome has its attractions,” said Mrs. Wigham. “But I fear skiing is not one of them.”

“Rome!” said Miss Moon. “I have to keep telling Mira now it’s got it all over poor Paris. Sixteen times she’s crossed, and this is the first time anybody’s been able to drag her here.”

“More tea?” said Mrs. Wigham to Mira.

“She hates tea,” said Miss Moon. Again Mira blinked, and this time it was as if she had twitched a ridge of skin to remove a fly. “When she’s skiing she won’t even smoke. She’s marvelous at it. Dedicated.” She turned to shake her head at Mira, to look enviously at the body, still good, still lithe, that moved now, with the humility of the admired, in its rattan chair. Suddenly Mira took out a mirror and stared at it intensely, moving one hand around her eye sockets. Her face pursed in a spasm of regret. She put the mirror away.

“Tarrible for the skin,” she said.

“What…tea?” said Miss Hulme.

“The wind and the sun on the slopes, you know,” said Miss Moon. “But she will do it.” And leaning forward, they could all see the white mask left by the goggles and, radiating through it, the lines of strain, flash burns from the agony of the sport.

“But faces are more interesting as they gather life-lines, don’t you think?” said Miss Hulme.

Mira stared, unflickering, into space. Then she stood up, flinging out a hip, in a voiceless sex-contempt for women whom nature had not permitted to know what else a face may gather. She spoke, apparently to Miss Moon. “They have ordered that cab yet? You know I have a date at six-thirty.”

From Mrs. Wigham’s flush it was clear that “they” had been “she,” but her face retained its smile with only a slight shift, as if she had quickly substituted a spare. “Giuseppe is ringing about now, I should imagine. One doesn’t order anything ahead here, don’t you see. Italians don’t have our sense of promptness. Miss Moon will have found all this out, I fancy.” The rapid flutter of her tongue was meant to imply that she had perceived rudeness and risen above it, but now it was she, Jane thought, who wasted a nuance.

“I alwess like to rest before a date,” said Mira. The word “date” seemed to stir her to an anticipatory sleekness. She stretched a long leg in front of her, reared her chin and bosom. Then, uneasily, her fingers returned to explore her eye sockets, as if she were learning an unwelcome Braille. Not once had she looked at anyone directly. Jane had never seen a woman whom it was possible to observe so indiscreetly, without danger of the counterglance, the sudden swerve of rapport.

“Mira’s husband phones her every night,” said Miss Moon. “Think of it!” Behind the great, clear wings of her glasses she appraised the other women, their dowdy innocence, with marmoset eyes. “Every single night she’s been away! All the way from Beverly Hills!”

“Indeed!” said Mrs. Wigham, who was the friend of more than one dexterous marchesa and had looked on Mussolini’s paramour hanging wry-mouthed in the public square. She rose. “Let us take a look at the garden until the cab arrives,” she said firmly. “I must show you our irrigation system. It’s quite unique.”

“Ah yes, how lovely,” said Miss Hulme, rising also. “I hope to persuade your Giuseppe to sell me an oleander. I must have a present for my little Signorina Necci before I leave for home.”

“No!” said Mira. She kicked one shoe against a chair leg, dislodging some gravel from the sole. “I must be back at the hotel at six!”

But Mrs. Wigham had already handed Miss Hulme her cane. “Oh, yes,” she murmured. “Giuseppe has developed a very good nursery business on his own.” And somehow, between the vague smoke of her chitchat and a guerrilla flanking of Miss Hulme’s cane, the three Americans found themselves maneuvered off the terrace, onto a path that meandered far and bournless into the flat surrounding field.

It was a narrow path, hardly more than a rut in the yellow earth, hedged by currant bushes hair-do high and by low clouds of European daisies, their delicate nets set at nylon level, their perfect, flock-pattern faces, scratchier than in Botticelli, tipped ingenuously toward the sun. Miss Hulme headed the line, and her progress was slow. Her cane probed; her enthusiasm, inflected with the remorseless lilt of solfège, paused at each planting. Behind her, Mira stumped, taking a step from the hip, when she was able. Miss Moon followed, placing each spike heel with safari decision, turning to flash encouragement to Mrs. Wigham and Jane.

Moving thus crabwise, she was still able to give them a précis of herself. Hearing Jane tell Mrs. Wigham that she had two boys in school, Miss Moon remarked that she had once been a housewife herself. “Married to a script-writer,” she said. “Years and years of never using my mind!” Then she had chanced to make some suggestions on a script and it had turned out that she was a born natural. “Ah, then you are one of those writer-teams,” said Mrs. Wigham. But it seemed that Miss Moon had ditched the husband—who had not been a natural. She had been in pictures ever since. The work she was doing now was really a luxury of the intellect that she had had to allow herself at last. For, said Miss Moon, whacking viciously at an artichoke plant that had caught her skirt on a spire, her mind was having its revenge for all those fallow years. It had become an instrument that gave her no rest.

“Take Mira,” she said. Ahead Mira, face lowered as if to butt, breathed mutinously near Miss Hulme. “There’s a girl who knows four languages. And one of those real low singing voices. But all she wants to do is ski like mad and dance all night. Never reads a book or uses her mind.”

Mrs. Wigham peered watchfully at Mira, so very near, so extremely close to Miss Hulme. “Sounds frightfully nice,” she said. “Don’t you think so, Mrs. Bowman?”

“Yes, indeed I do,” said Jane.

“Well, of course, she goes in for domesticity like mad at home.” Miss Moon’s tone was huffy. “Her husband’s a great stickler for maturity. Everybody is, with us.”

Suddenly the path ended abruptly and they found themselves in front of a large, dirty green pool, the path having led them to the front of the house.

“Dear me,” said Mrs. Wigham. “You have left us so far behind.” She hurried toward the two women ahead at the brink of the pool, and it was thus impossible to say to whom she had addressed this last. Slipping neatly between Mira and Miss Hulme, she embarked on an explanation of the pool as a vestige of the great hydraulic systems of antiquity; waving a brisk hand, she displayed the horizon, on whose line one might just see, or imagine, the worn arches of the aqueducts, marching with ruined step toward classical Rome.

Mira gazed morosely at a stone faun that reared from the center of the pool and made a modest return of water to it on a basic principle. She inhaled ominously in her throat, so that one saw the fine, black ciliar fur of her nostrils. “Francine. Here is not yet that cab.”

A white-jacketed servingman came from the house, a Maltese cat nosing between his legs. Mrs. Wigham questioned him in Italian. He spread his hands. Mrs. Wigham sighed and took out a handkerchief. Dabbing her lips with it, as if to blot them free of the hopelessly sweet jelly of Italian, she turned to Mira. “It will take a little time. Meanwhile…perhaps you’d like to see the house.”

“Yes, may we?” said Jane, with the smoothness of the tourist who knows the rates of exchange. She wondered whether the others knew that they were being asked if they wished to wash their hands.

At that moment the cat, rubbing against Mrs. Wigham’s legs, slid also against Mira’s. With an electric recoil, Mira screamed and kicked it. The cat, flung several paces, humped and spat. Giuseppe, his mouth open, ran forward and picked it up in his arms.

Mrs. Wigham, immobile, used the handkerchief again to press her lips together. But it was too much for Miss Hulme, who rose telescopic in her suddenly military woollens, her hat a shako, her cheeks a murderous pink. “Really,” she said, “but really this cannot be b—!” Her fist rose, the fist with the cane. Ah, thought Jane. She is. She is going to. The cane came down, an inch into the ground, missing Mira’s foot by a hair.

There was a moment’s silence. For Jane it was a moment of the deepest overtone, that ecstasy of the traveler who realizes that for once he is looking at what he came for. In a moment of almost alcoholic percipience she saw all the inward threads of the mise en scène; she saw the Reuters world of Mrs. Wigham, with a fringe of Vatican red; she saw the metro-golden shine of California knocked against the Bayswater Road; down at the bottom she saw even her own little East Coast eye.

And now, it seemed almost as if Mira were going to make apology. Her head dropped to one side, her shoulder moved circularly, as if it wished to rub against Mrs. Wigham as had the cat. “I hate them,” she said. “On the plane a woman have one in a box, and it claw me from hip to thigh.” She bent and peeled her skirt upward to the waist, extending the thigh as a queen might her hand at levee. “On the United Air Lines,” she said.

Behind Mrs. Wigham, Giuseppe stared with interest over the head of the cat. Mrs. Wigham moved indefinably, and Giuseppe retired in haste, leaving the door open behind him. Since she had not turned her head, her manner too had its touch of the royal. “Do let us go in,” she said. “Cyril and James will have got back from their walk. They will be so delighted to meet you. And perhaps you would sing for us. Your friend tells us you have a charming voice.”

Mira dropped her skirt down.

“Do,” said Miss Hulme, rallying, although her hat retained its outrage. She paused to right it, to make amends. “A little Purcell, perhaps. I do so love the old madrigals. Or a ballad?”

Mira swung her head suspiciously to one side. She thinks she is being chivied, thought Jane. Or like an animal that must be persuaded it has not behaved badly.

Mrs. Wigham moved the door in invitation. Through it Jane saw the room beyond, recognizing the tone of the afternoon that might have been had she and Mrs. Wigham been alone. Tables confused under books, worn couches blotted with pillows and stained with periodicals, all the familiar droppings of the intellect, in the international sitting room of the mind. From an unseen corner came the sounds of gentlemen.

Mira stirred unexpectedly. “All right, I will sing.” Her head rose, in the diva’s pause. “I will sing—Brahms’s Lullaby.” She advanced for entry, and Mrs. Wigham and Miss Hulme moved politely aside. She bent her head. “It is not needful,” she said, almost jovial, and it seemed she was awkwardly attempting a joke. “It is not needful to wait for me because I am the star.” And, as mutely, they all turned to follow her in, there at last was the cab.

Mira crossed to it without ceremony, leaving their farewells to Miss Moon. “Yes, perhaps so,” said Mrs. Wigham to Jane, who thought it wise to share the cab. “We must have our chat another time.” As the cab door closed, she leaned across Jane, to the others. “Cyril will be desolute not to have met you. And I have so enjoyed our afternoon.” And from her smile, wide as a salmon’s, as the cab drove off, it appeared that he would, that she had.

They rode down through Trastevere in silence. A darkness invested the cab, as if they rode through the white, siesta-stricken streets on the black, plangent core of Mira’s impatience. As they crossed the Tiber she muttered, “I like to rest before a date!” and Miss Moon replied, “Well, you are resting. In the cab,” in that reasonable tone, half-toady, half-governess, which made Jane wonder at the exact terms of her standing by Mira in Rome. As they rounded the immense white sugar loaf of the Victor Emanuel monument, Miss Moon remarked that they were not far from where the Roman wolf was kept in its cage. Because of Romulus and Remus—of course, they knew that story? Mira shook her head, intent on twisting her ring in time to the wheels. Miss Moon told the story of Romulus and Remus. “And so, ever since,” she concluded, “they keep a wolf, a female wolf, in a cage in the middle of Rome.”

“What you mean a wolf!” Mira turned from the window. She stopped twisting the ring. That’s what gives her such a queer intentness, thought Jane. She only does one thing at a time.

“What I said, dear. A real she-wolf, just like the one Romulus and Remus had. In a cage in the heart of Rome.”

Mira grunted. “What hearts, these people! She does not give suck now, yes?”

“Well, of course not!” said Miss Moon. “It’s just a symbol, dear. And they only keep one.”

“Fine people!” said Mira. “What a thing!”

“Mira has the dearest little girl at home,” said Miss Moon, as if to explain this tenderness on the part of one who had just kicked a cat. “The dearest little four-and-a-half-year-old girl. Just crazy for her mummy. Just pining for her mummy to come home.”

Well, no six-o’clock cab will get her there, thought Jane. She rubbed the stone in her pocket with a secret, appeasing touch.

Mira ignored this, bristling with some dark, libertarian sympathy that was as powerful as had been her impatience. “Crazy people!” she said. “What a thing!” When the cab drew up at the entrance of the Excelsior, she stood by unheeding while Miss Moon, over Jane’s protest and with the alertness of a lady in waiting, paid the very large fare. As they stood on the steps twilight fawned upon them, tangling their lashes with yellow, and from inside the hotel they heard, like a finger drawn across the backbone, the fine tinkle of evening pursuits. Mira blinked, breathing hard. “What a thing!” she said, deep in her throat, before she turned and went inside. “What a thing, to keep a wolf in a cage!”

Left together on the steps of the gleaming entrance, Miss Moon and Jane each turned, hand held out, ready to make off. For there was nothing, each said to herself with an oblique inward glance, certainly nothing that they had in common.

“Well—”said Miss Moon.

“So pleased—” said Jane.

But it was that perilously soft hour of all great cities in the spring, when the evening rises to a sound like the tearing of silk and it is better not to be alone, to have some plan.

“Care to join me in a drink?” said Miss Moon.

“Well—perhaps just one,” said Jane. I can’t refuse, she told herself. I must buy her a drink, because of that fare. After that it will be time for the eight o’clock sitting at the pensione. And after that I can sit on the balcony, on the pretty side, the Pincio side, and write letters home. Or I can ask that nice girl at the next table to have a granita di caffè at Doney’s. “Shall we go next door to the Flore?” she said. “Or if you’d like a walk—perhaps the Café Greco?” She was faintly proud of knowing both.

“Oh, no, let’s go in here,” said Miss Moon. As they entered the Excelsior her face brightened. “All California’s here on spring location,” she said, sotto voce, as she led Jane to a table near the door of the huge lounge, and they sat down. “And this is the bar that gets the play.”

At the bar itself there was only a solitary young man, his tall legs wrapped around the bar stool, his blond, “clean-cut American” good looks bent in moody profile over his glass, his tweed back turned away from the groups settled here and there in cushioned niches, as if he uncomfortably knew none of them. It was clear that these others all knew, or knew of, each other. Not that everyone talked to everyone else. But as new people entered conversations were arrested: foursomes spoke deeply among themselves but their glances were asymmetric, and as couples rose, scattering nods, and strode from the arena, a buzz formed behind them. And to the careful watcher, there was still another unity. The women—the wives, that is, for most left hands bore a shock of light—were not all young, but they were younger. The men were beautifully textured as puddings in their minimizing pin-stripe cases, and their cheeks were flanks freshly pummeled by the steam bath, but their wives were their daughters. Opposite them the women sat narrow in luminous sheaths, their shoulders soft explosions of fur, their faces unclenching and closing, automatic as fans.

“Look! There’s Sylvia Fairchild!” Miss Moon spoke out of the side of her mouth. She raised her sharp chin with a brilliant smile that faded as it was doubtfully returned. Quickly she redistributed the smile to one far corner, waved briefly to another. She took a vengeful sip of her Martini. “Believe it or not—she used to do my nails at Marshall Field’s.” The Martini sank farther, and she leaned back with a sigh. “Pretty soon I’ll have to go upstairs and pound that typewriter. I simply have to lock myself in.”

“Oh, you’re staying here?” said Jane.

“Well, no, but I have a place to work in Mira’s suite. She gets in a dreadful state when there’s no—when she gets bored. And I like to be where the play is, you never know.” One of the chattering groups strolled by, and Miss Moon leaned brightly toward Jane, speaking very distinctly. “For instance, I was just going to do a book, when I meet Mat Zipp, of Decca. Why do a book, he says, there’s more money in lyrics, and they’re shorter. So I do, and it turns out I’m a natural.” The group passed. She waved to the waiter for another drink. “So then,” she said in a lower tone, “so then what does he do but go and die on me, in a cab on the way to work. With my stuff in his briefcase, right there in the cab.”

“Oh, my,” said Jane. In her childhood she had been much at the mercy of a little girl who was always wanting to play house. Now you just be old Mrs. Brown, Jane, and I’ll be Elise Harper, just married, and come to tea.

“So I do a narrative, weave all the stuff together, and almost sell Dolin and Markova on the idea of a ballet.” She took a sip of the second Martini. “Then they split up.”

“Oh, dear,” said Jane. It struck her that she was still not a very good Mrs. Brown.

Behind Miss Moon, at some distance, there was a mirror in which Jane could just see herself—rather unvarnished, tailored and small against all this princely down. Not quite plain Jane though, she told herself, and not quite yet, she thought, looking her age. At home, when she put on a bare-necked summer cotton and served gin-and-tonic to the sprightlier clique of the faculty, it was often hardly credited that she was the mother of those two enormous boys.

“So then,” said Miss Moon heavily, “I’m at the Park Lane, and who do I bump into but Grofé. Get him for music and you’re set for the Festival Hall, everybody says. The English are suckers for Americana.”

Behind her own image in the mirror, Jane saw the bent head of the young man. He bit his lip and recrossed his legs, still staring into his drink. Alone and out of place here, she thought, like me. It would be nice to talk to him, although the idea was, of course, absurd. That was the worst of being on one’s own too long in a strange country, so far from the base of affections that steadied one at home. One dried up without some personal emotion; that was all it was. One could not forever be a lens. And at certain hours of the day one found oneself lingering with anyone, as she lingered here.

“Surely you know who Grofé is,” said Miss Moon.

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Jane. “Philip Morris. I mean the commercial. And isn’t he Vladimir Dukelsky for classical—oh, no, of course not—that’s Vernon Duke.” She thinks me an idiot, she thought, and I am to sit on here, waiting to hear how it was they didn’t get Grofé. For from the grim, antiphonal way Miss Moon drew on her glass, it was clear that they hadn’t.

“So then,” said Miss Moon, but she interrupted herself to twinkle a hand at someone who passed, to murmur an indistinct name.

I’ll grab the check and go now, thought Jane. For it was no longer funny to watch Miss Moon. It was like seeing those women who hovered secretly at other women’s dressing tables, to spray themselves avidly and cheaply with another person’s scent.

I’ll take the check and go now. She glanced at her watch. It was seven, that hour here when even the windows of pensione bedrooms were violet frames that turned one inside to say Look! to the empty room, to lie face downward, ears stopped against the bell-shake of evening, and say Listen! to the vacant bed. The hour when an experienced traveler knows better than to corner himself there. The hour when the lens turns upon oneself.

“And…so then?” said Jane.

But Miss Moon was looking elsewhere again, and this time with such a different, such an unrehearsed expression that Jane looked around too. It was Mira, standing at the entrance. Groomed now for people of importance, she had made herself, as women did, to be as like them as possible. Her dress was luminous too, cut with pale cleverness to conceal where it could no longer insist, and she stood encircled in a huge riband of fur. She looked sleeker and, in a powdery way, older. Perhaps she had seen this in some mirror before leaving, for now she reached up uncertainly and rumpled her tamed hair, as if to declare the girl she had been against the woman she was. She walked forward with a mannequin’s glide, her smile full for the room, then turned her back to it and, with an eager, a crescent leaning, slipped her hand through the arm of the young man at the bar.

He looked up, then stood up, and on his face, handsomer even than in profile, one saw the snow marks of the goggles on the brown skin. But where the white circles on Mira’s face were fretted like rose windows, his were still smooth. He was about thirty, that age when, with Americans, one often glimpses the young man looking through the palings of the man, and in his look, lightened with relief but somehow hangdog, one caught this now. As he and Mira left the bar, Mira saw the two women, Jane and Miss Moon. For the first time she really saw them. She looked directly into their eyes and she smiled. Then she and the young man passed by them, walking slowly down the long room, and although Mira, nodding here and there with narrowed eyes, clung softly and proudly to the crook of his arm, it seemed almost that he was paraded on hers. A buzz formed behind them.

“She’s a fool.” Miss Moon breathed this to herself. Behind her glasses her eyes were bright and fixed. “It’ll be all over the Coast in twenty-four hours.”

Now the couple neared them again, in their return passage down the room. The young man’s face was warm. Mira was still faintly smiling, and although this time the smile, fixed on the door, was for neither of the two women, to Jane, trembling suddenly in her tailored suit with a shock that was bitter and sororal, it came as if it was. Almost a grimace, it showed its teeth to an invisible mirror, denying with the lips the secret lines that a body must gather—the crow’s feet of the armpit, the dented apple of the belly, the mapped crease, fine leather too long folded, that forms between the breasts. As Mira passed her on the arm of the young man, her scent remained for a moment behind. It rested on Jane as if it were her own.

At the door, Mira and the young man paused. A rush of lilac came to them from the outside, and Mira’s fur slid from shoulder to waist, a dropped calyx. The young man replaced it carefully. Her lips parted, watching him. It was a beautiful fur, manipulable as smoke. Before the arts of the furrier had dappled it, it might have been just the color of wolf.

Left together by the flicking of the door, the two women stared at one another.

“Traveling alone?” said Miss Moon.

Jane nodded.

“Divorced too?”

“No,” said Jane. “I’m a widow.” Her head lifted. “I have two boys.”

Miss Moon seemed not to have heard this last. “Care to—join forces for dinner?”

No, thought Jane. Don’t settle for anybody’s company. As she does. As she has. Not yet. She gazed past Miss Moon, saw herself in the mirror, and looked quickly away. “Thanks,” she said, and her voice was kind. “I’m afraid…I have work to do too.”

“Oh, you work,” said Miss Moon eagerly. “What do you do?”

“I teach,” said Jane. “In a university.” I teach, an echo said inside her, and of course at home I have the two boys. And suddenly the echo, her breath, something, rammed itself hard against her chest, inside. Not enough, it said, beating behind the mapped crease between her breasts. Not enough. What a thing, it said, crying. What a thing!

“Well, back to the salt mines for us, eh?” said Miss Moon. Her voice was matey, unbearable. Just as if she too had smelled the scent, had heard the thing crying. As if she knew too that Jane, staring into the big, winged glasses, could see the two poor eyes beating against the glass.

And now they stood up quickly, gathered their purses and signaled for the waiter. When he came, they paid him with a dispatch unusual to women, and the lire notes left lying in his saucer were large enough for anybody here. For now they could not part quickly enough. For now, each said to herself, the other’s company was no longer to be borne. No, it was not to be borne. Not now. Now that they both knew what it was they had in common.