In fact, that was how they devised this weekend—Sasha lifted his head from the pillow one afternoon and announced he wasn’t just going to hang around his apartment with Iris from Friday to Sunday, or run the risk of bumping into somebody should they venture outside. He had a friend who had a villa in Tivoli, he told her on the twenty-second of April—a friend willing to let Sasha spend the weekend there with whomever he pleased. Nobody at the embassy would know. He could borrow Harry’s car without raising any suspicions, because so far as her siblings would know, Iris had already gone off on her drawing holiday with some friends from the American Academy in Rome. Why, it was airtight! Not even Agatha Christie could have devised a better plan.
Even the weather conspired with them. Seven consecutive days of rain dampened Iris’s spirits in the last week of April, but when she walked out of the doctor’s office on the second of May a free woman, except for a cane, which was really rather stylish, the clouds parted and the sun poured down, and Iris spread out her arms and knew that everything would work out perfectly.
The next day, a Friday, she packed a small valise with sundresses and toothbrush and Pond’s cream and said good-bye to Ruth. Ruth stopped her at the door and asked if she was forgetting something?
“No, I don’t think so. What am I missing?”
Ruth made a cynical smile and nodded to the desk in the corner. “Your sketchbook and charcoals, maybe?”
The cynical smile worried Iris all the way over to Sasha’s apartment on Via Terrenzio, near the Vatican. She let herself in with the key he’d loaned her and fretted until he met her at the small trattoria around the corner for dinner at half past seven.
“You’re worried about a smile, darling?”
“You’d have to know Ruth. It’s this particular smile she wears when she knows something you don’t.”
“But she doesn’t know something you don’t.”
“Be serious.”
“Well, who cares, anyway? It’s about time she knows about us, if you ask me. Harry, too. We can’t go sneaking around forever.”
“Oh? Just when do you plan on telling them, then?”
He reached across the table and took her hand. “We’ll know when it’s time.”
Now it was Saturday, the fourth of May, and they were hurtling around some hairpin turn toward this ancient yellow-brown town nestled into the neck of the Sabine Hills. Behind them, the Roman countryside spread out in a quilt of new green fields. The sun beat down on Iris’s head. The draft streamed through her hair and filled her lungs. The land was so beautiful, her eyes ached with it. She would remember this drive forever. She’d remember the smell of exhaust and of asphalt, and the delicate green scent of spring.
The villa wasn’t much, after all. It sat a mile from the center of town, up on the hillside overlooking the falls, and the view was the best thing about it. The privy was outdoors. The kitchen sink had a pump handle. Needless to say, there wasn’t an icebox or a stovetop in sight. Iris wandered from room to room—hall, living room, snug bedroom, walls of pink stucco, dark, monastic furniture, old books, sunshine, dust—everywhere the smell of centuries—and declared she loved it.
“It’s rustic, all right. Like camping,” Sasha said.
“You’re the camping type, are you?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m the type, exactly, but my brother and I used to climb up around the Adirondacks in August, while Dad watched his horses run at Saratoga.”
Iris clasped her hands. “Your father has racehorses?”
“Why not? Profit in pursuit of trophies.”
“No. You’re not going to ruin horses for me. They’re noble and beautiful, I don’t care what you say.”
He stood in the middle of the pink stucco living room, blinking at the dust and at her. He opened his arms. “Come here.”
Iris launched herself at his chest. Her feet flew through the air in a loop or two before he settled her back to earth. “Horses should do useful things,” he said, “not race each other around some crummy dirt track for the amusement of the wealthy.”
“And the gamblers. Don’t forget all those poor people losing their wages at the pari-mutuel window.”
“You see what I mean?”
She shook her head against his shirt. Her arms still looped around his neck; his arms circled her waist. She felt the thud of his heart and the tingle of gin on his breath. （He’d packed a Thermos for the drive.） “They’re still noble and beautiful, and it’s noble and beautiful to want to run fast. They can’t help it. It’s who they are.”