preferred moderns like Miro and Klee; and that anyway, painting was just interior decoration, which didn’t really interest him. He scrawled several pages in this cornered-rat vein, mailed them off, and then went vagabonding around Europe, forsaking his classes and his hope of a graduate degree.
When he got back to Florence, he found a cheering letter from the professor.
…I don’t know what will become of you. Obviously art was a false lead. I think it did you good to get hot on some subject. If you can only shake off your lethargy and find something that truly engages you, you may yet go far. I am an old traffic cop, and standing here on my corner I have seen many Chevrolets and Fords go by. It’s not hard for me to recognize the occasional Cadillac. Only this one seems badly stalled.
I’ve written about you to Dr. Aaron Jastrow, who lives outside Siena. You know of him. He wrote
That was how Byron happened to call on Dr. Jastrow. He took a bus to Siena, a three-hour run up a rutted scary mountain road. Twice before he had visited the bizarre little town, all red towers and battlements and narrow crooked streets, set around a gaudy zebra-striped cathedral, on a hilltop amid rolling green and brown Tuscan vineyards. Its main claim to fame, aside from the quasi-Byzantine church art he had studied there, was a peculiar annual horse race called the Palio, which he had heard about but never seen.
At first glance, the girl at the wheel of the old blue convertible made no strong impression on him: an oval face, dark enough so that he first took her for an Italian, dark hair, enormous sunglasses, a pink sweater over an open white shirt. Beside her sat a blond man covering a yawn with a long white hand.
“Hi! Byron Henry?”
“Yes.”
“Hop in the back. I’m Natalie Jastrow. This is Leslie Slote. He works in our embassy in Paris, and he’s visiting my uncle.”
Byron did not much impress the girl either. What Natalie Jastrow saw through the dark glasses was a slender lounger, obviously American, with red glints in his heavy brown hair; he was propped against the wall of the Hotel Continental in the sun, smoking a cigarette, his legs loosely crossed. The light gray jacket, dark slacks, and maroon tie were faintly dandyish. The forehead under the hair was wide, the long slanting jaws narrow, the face pallid. He looked like what he was — a collegiate drone, a rather handsome one. Natalie had brushed these off by the dozen in earlier years.
As they wound through narrow canyons of crooked ancient red-brown houses and drove out into the countryside, Byron idly asked Slote about his embassy work. The Foreign Service man told him he was posted in the political section and was studying Russian and Polish, hoping for an assignment to Moscow or Warsaw. Sitting in the car, Slote appeared very tall; later Byron saw that he himself was taller than Slote; the Foreign Service officer had a long trunk but medium-size legs. Slote’s thick blond hair grew to a peak over a high forehead and narrow pinkish face; the light blue eyes behind rimless glasses were alert and penetrating, and his thin lips were compressed as though with habitual resolve. All the time they drove, he held a large black pipe in his hand or in his mouth, not smoking it. It occurred to Byron that the Foreign Service might be a pleasant career, offering travel, adventure, and encounters with important people. But when Slote mentioned that he was a Rhodes Scholar, Byron decided not to pursue the topic.
Jastrow lived in a yellow stucco villa on a steep hillside, with a fine view of the cathedral and Siena’s red towers and tile roofs. It was a drive of about twenty minutes from town. Byron hurried after the girl and Slote through a terraced flowering garden full of black-stained plaster statues.
“Well, there you are!” The voice was high, authoritative, and impatient, with a faint foreign note in the pronouncing of the
Two sights struck Byron as they entered a long beamed living room: a painting of a red-robed Saint Francis with arms outstretched, on a background of gold, taking up a good part of one wall, and far down the long sitting room on a red silk couch, a bearded little man in a light gray suit, who looked at his watch, stood, and came toward them coughing.
“This is Byron Henry, Aaron,” the girl said.
Jastrow took Byron’s hand in two dry little paws and peered up at him with prominent wavering eyes. Jastrow’s head was large, his shoulders slight; he had aging freckled skin, light straight hair, and a heavy nose reddened by a cold. The neatly trimmed beard was all gray. “Columbia ’38, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, well, come along.” He went off down the room, buttoning the flapping folds of his double-breasted suit. “Come here, Byron.” Plucking the stopper out of a heavy crystal decanter, he carefully poured amber wine into four glasses. “Come Leslie, Natalie. We don’t take wine during the day, Byron, but this is an occasion.” He held up his glass. “To Mr. Byron Henry, eminent hater of the Italian Renaissance.”
Byron laughed. “Is that what Dr. Milano wrote? I’ll drink to that.”
Jastrow took one sip, put down his glass, and looked at his watch. Seeing the professor wanted to get at his lunch, Byron tossed off the sherry like a shot of rye. Jastrow exclaimed with a delighted smile, “Ah! One, two, three. Good lad. Come along, Natalie. Leslie, take your glass to the table.”
It was a spare lunch: nothing but vegetables with white rice, then cheese and fruit. The service was on fine old china, maroon and gold. A small, gray-headed Italian woman passed the food. The tall dining room windows stood open to the garden, the view of Siena, and a flood of pale sunshine. Gusts of cool air came in as they ate.
When they first sat, the girl said, “What have you got against the Italian Renaissance, Byron?”
“That’s a long story.”
“Tell us,” said Jastrow in a classroom voice, laying a thumb across his smiling mouth.
Byron hesitated. Jastrow and the Rhodes Scholar made him uneasy. The girl disconcerted him more. Removing her glasses, she had disclosed big slanted dark eyes, gleaming with bold intelligence. She had a soft large mouth, painted a bit too orange, in a bony face. Natalie was regarding him with a satiric look, as though she had already concluded that he was a fool; and Byron was not fool enough to miss that.
“Maybe I’ve had too much of it,” he said. “I started out fascinated. I’m ending up snowed under and bored. I realize much of the art is brilliant, but there’s a lot of overrated garbage amid the works of genius. My main objection is that I can’t take the mixture of paganism and Christianity. I don’t believe David looked like Apollo, or Moses like Jupiter, or Mary like every Renaissance artist’s mistress with a borrowed baby on her lap. Maybe they couldn’t help showing Bible Jews as local Italians or pseudo-Greeks, but—” Byron dried up for a moment, seeing his listeners’ amused looks. “Look, I’m not saying any of this is important criticism. I guess it just shows I got into the wrong field. But what has any of it to do with Christianity? That’s what sticks in my craw. Supposing Christ came back to earth and visited the Uffizi, or Saint Peter’s? The Christ of your book, Dr. Jastrow, the poor idealistic Jewish preacher from the back hills? That’s the Lord I grew up with. My father’s a religious man; we had to read a chapter of the Bible every morning at home. Why, Christ wouldn’t even suspect the stuff related to himself and his teachings.” Natalie Jastrow was regarding him with an almost motherly smile. He said brusquely to her, “Okay. You asked me what I had against the Italian Renaissance. I’ve told you.”
“Well, it’s a point of view,” she said.
Eyes twinkling behind his glasses, Slote lit his pipe, and said between puffs, “Don’t fold up, Byron, there are others who have taken your position. A good name for it is Protestantism.”
“Byron’s main point is accurate.” Dr. Jastrow sounded kindly, dancing his little fingers together. “The Italian Renaissance was a great blossoming of art and ideas, Byron, that occurred when paganism and the Hebrew spirit — in its Christian expression — briefly fertilized instead of fighting each other. It was a hybrid growth, true, but some hybrids are stronger than either parent, you know. Witness the mule.”
“Yes, sir,” said Byron, “and mules are sterile.”
Amused surprise flashed on Natalie Jastrow’s face, and her enormous dark eyes flickered to Leslie Slote, and back to Byron.
“Well said. Just so.” Jastrow nodded in a pleased way. “The Renaissance indeed couldn’t reproduce itself, and it died off, while the pagan and Hebrew spirits went their separate immortal ways. But that mule’s bones are
