She shook his hand a second time. “I certainly will.”
After Sasha Digby rushed off, Iris floated upstairs to the first floor. （Not to be confused with the ground floor—this was Italy, after all.） Because marble was so extraordinarily heavy, you didn’t find any mesmerizing Bernini statuary up there, just paintings and ancient Roman artifacts and some splendidly decorated rooms. Iris knew them all well. She came here often. A gallery like that was like an opium den for her, packed with pleasure and revelation.
Today, however, she drifted from room to room and didn’t notice a thing. Her heart skipped and raced. She was bubbling over with some giddy froth of emotion she hardly dared to name. It was like the way a child felt on Christmas Eve, if Christmas were a tall, golden-haired man who already knew your name, who thought you were different from the other girls, who’d spent an hour working up the nerve just to say hello. She stopped in front of a painting of a woman who held a small, perfect unicorn in her lap, like a cat, and she stared at that woman and thought, I know exactly how you feel!
The rain let up. Sunshine lit the windows, the watery sunshine of springtime. Iris looked out onto the gardens below, the manicured hedges in their perfect, symmetrical designs. She could almost smell the damp green scent of the dripping leaves, the wet gravel, the rich earth. A patch of blue hung above. Everything glittered, so new and promising.
On a bench along one of the side paths sat a man and a woman, part hidden by the pattern of hedges. The man wore an overcoat and a fedora. The woman wore a raincoat and a plain, round black hat. They had crossed their legs, his right and her left, to form an intimate V. They seemed to be talking to each other, even though they were staring straight ahead, into the hedge across the path. The man was long and lean, and his suit was dark blue underneath his unbuttoned overcoat. Iris couldn’t see his hair beneath that fedora, nor the color of his eyes or the shape of his nose. She couldn’t even see the pinkness of his neck.
But she saw his hands, folded on top of his thigh, bony and enormous.
After a minute or two, the man rose and held out his hand to the woman, who took it and rose too. They walked off together, down the gravel path and out of sight behind a line of plane trees.
From the Borghese Gardens, it was a reasonably short walk down the grand, curving Via Vittorio Emmanuel to the US embassy, where Iris’s brother, Harry, worked, processing visas for desperate Jews （though never nearly enough）。
Farther down the road, and around a corner or two, Iris’s twin sister, Ruth, was modeling dresses for some fashion magazine. Unlike Iris, Ruth was tall, blond, and angular, as Aryan as they came, and she’d made quite a stir among the Italian houses since the two of them joined Harry in Rome last October. Ruth had said something over breakfast about the Spanish Steps, if the weather cleared, so they were probably setting up the cameras and the lights right now. Ruth told Iris she could come and watch, if she wanted. Iris said Sure, maybe. （When Ruth turned away to sip her coffee, Iris rolled her eyes.）
But Iris had to go somewhere. The zing of the Villa Borghese had gone flat for her, and God knew she couldn’t go walking around the gardens. With her luck, she’d run bang into Sasha Digby and his female companion. Maybe she’d find a café somewhere and order an espresso and take out her sketchbook. She marched out the entrance of the villa—nodded to the porter, who recognized her—down the steps, clickety clack, and no sooner did her foot hit the gravel than what do you know, a raindrop hit her smack on the nose.
By the time she reached the traffic whizzing down the Via Pinciana, the rain had decided it meant business. Iris stopped to open her umbrella and imagined the photography crew at the Spanish Steps rushing to pack up their equipment, while beautiful Ruth leapt for cover beneath a nearby awning.
Iris didn’t even notice the motorcycle tearing around the bend in the road until she stepped off the sidewalk to cross to the other side.
Ruth
June 1952
New York City
To be clear, my dinner engagement with Aunt Vivian and Uncle Charlie already existed in my appointment book before Sumner Fox paid me a visit this afternoon, so it’s not as if I’ve sought them out particularly to talk things over. It’s a regular appointment, dinner at their apartment on Fifth Avenue on the second Thursday of the month, assuming everybody’s in town—not because we’re particularly close but because none of us can figure out a way to break the habit without causing offense. Families, you know.
I’m only five minutes late when I hurry into the lobby and wave hello to the doorman—he’s got a thing for me, always lets me run straight up—but Aunt Vivian isn’t amused. She kisses me on both cheeks and says something snide about the sliding morals of the young.