He grunted—agreement or disagreement, who knew—and kissed her.
“Am I ever going to meet your father?” Iris asked.
“You only want to meet his horses. Admit it.”
“I want to meet everything that belongs to you.”
“My father doesn’t belong to me. He’d say it was the other way around. You’d be much better off meeting my mother. She’s a decent human being, even if she’s a prisoner of her class.”
“We’re all prisoners of something, aren’t we?”
“Is that so, Miss Macallister? And what are you a prisoner of?”
“Nothing!”
“That sister of yours, maybe?”
Iris was snug inside Sasha’s arms. He wore a shirt of crumpled white linen that smelled of cigarettes and perspiration, warm human smells, and his hair was straight and loose and flopped over his forehead. His eyes were the color of summer.
She said, “My father killed himself in 1929, after the crash. He’d lost all our money, and his clients’ money, and most of my grandparents’ money. We were broke after that, but pretending not to be broke. Mama didn’t take it well. She always liked to spend money. Closets full of clothes. She would take all these sleeping pills, things her doctor prescribed her. If it wasn’t for Aunt Vivian marrying Charles Schuyler, we couldn’t have gone to college. There was just no money, none at all. No father and no mother, really. So I guess I’m a prisoner of that.”
Sasha frowned at her.
To break the silence, Iris said, “That’s why Ruth and I—we’re so different, but we share this thing. We’re both prisoners of it. It holds us together, always. Does that make sense?”
Sasha swooped her up in his arms and carried her into the bedroom. The window faced south and the room was very hot, but Iris didn’t notice the heat until much later, when they lay sweating on top of the sheets and she couldn’t seem to get her breath back. She rolled off the mattress, opened the window, and returned to the bed to tuck herself back under his arm. He’d lit a languid cigarette in the meantime. She tugged at the fine gold hairs on his chest and asked what he was a prisoner of.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “You.”
Iris said she couldn’t possibly cook anything inside that primitive kitchen, so Sasha headed into town to fetch supplies. His skin was cold and damp after an improvised bath from a bucket of water pumped from the kitchen. They agreed to bathe in the stream at the corner of the garden from then on.
When the roar of Harry’s motor died away down the lane, Iris rose, washed off the sweat from her skin, and put her dress back on. Her hair tangled around her face, but when she looked inside her valise, she realized she’d forgotten her hairbrush, of all things. Sasha’s valise lay open on the floor next to the dresser. She looked inside and found a hairbrush under a folded shirt. Under the hairbrush was a thick manila envelope, of the type you found in offices, bound with a loop of twine that fastened around a clip.
Iris brushed her hair in the scrap of mirror above the dresser. Over the past few weeks her skin had acquired some pleasing color. Her short hair was thick and shiny, frizz in submission—curls in order that looked like disorder—little glimmers of Italian sunshine starting to streak through. Her large hazel eyes—by far her best feature, she’d always thought—sparkled back at her, rimmed with wet black lashes. She looked like a child, she knew, so heart-shaped and rose-skinned, and she also knew that her innocent face and delicate, curving figure—in contrast to Ruth’s—drove Sasha’s obsession for her. But her small mouth bowed downward. She brushed her curls a little too aggressively. Why should Sasha bring work with him this weekend? He’d had all week to clear his desk for their holiday together.
Don’t be childish, she told her childish reflection.
Then she set down the hairbrush and returned to Sasha’s valise. Carefully she disengaged the twine from its clip and opened the flap of the envelope.
They ate in the garden, on a small wrought-iron table and chairs, somewhat rusted. The garden was enclosed by a low wall of crumbling brick, and a gate at the back opened to the hills and the stream that rushed happily past. Sasha fiddled with the terra-cotta fountain, trying to make it work, but it was no use. He threw himself on the grass instead and stared up at the generous sky. Iris joined him.
“Tell me about your friend,” she said.
“What friend?”
“The friend who owns this place.”