second-class status they always had under the kings and the popes. Well, we survived seventeen centuries of that. We have a lot of wisdom and doctrine for coping with it.”
Slote shook his head. “You love to spin such talk, I know, but I wish you would do it on the next boat home.”
“But I’m quite serious, Leslie,” Jastrow said with a faintly puckish smile. “You rang wild alarms when Mussolini passed the anti-Jewish laws. They proved a joke.”
“They’re on the books, if the Germans ever press him to use them.”
“The Italians loathe and fear the Germans to a man. Even if by some mischance there is a war, Italy won’t fight. Siena may well be as safe a place as any.”
“I doubt that Natalie’s parents think so.”
“She can go home tomorrow. Perhaps she finds Siena slightly more attractive than Miami Beach.”
“I’m thinking of going,” the girl said. “But not because I’m afraid of war or of Hitler. There are things that bother me more.”
“I daresay,” Jastrow said.
Slote’s face turned astonishingly red. His pipe lay smoking on an ashtray, and he was playing with a yellow pencil he had taken from a pocket, turning it in one fist. The pencil stopped turning.
Jastrow stood. “Byron, come along.”
They left the girl and the scarlet-faced man at the table, glowering at each other.
Books filled the shelves of a small wood-panelled library, and stood in piles on the desk and on the floor. Over a marble fireplace a stiff Sienese madonna and child hung, blue and pink on gold; a tiny painting in a large gilded frame. “Berenson says it’s a Duccio,” Jastrow observed, with a little wave at the painting, “and that’s enough for me. It’s not authenticated. Now then. You sit there, in the light, so that I can see you. Just put those magazines on the floor. Good. Is that a comfortable chair? Fine.” He sighed and laid a thumb against his lower lip. “Now, Byron, why didn’t you go to the Naval Academy? Aren’t you proud of your father?”
Byron sat up in his chair. “I think my father may be Chief of Naval Operations one day.”
“Isn’t he worth emulating?”
“My brother Warren’s doing that. I’m just not interested.”
“Dr. Milano wrote that you took a naval reserve course and obtained a commission.”
“It made my father feel good.”
“And you’ve had no second thoughts about the Navy? It’s not too late yet.”
Byron shook his head, smiling. Jastrow lit a cigarette, studying Byron’s face. The young man said, “Do you really like living in Italy, sir?”
“Well, I was ordered to a warm climate. I did first visit Florida, Arizona, southern California, and the French Riviera.” The professor spoke these place-names with an irony that wrote them off, one by one, as ridiculous or disagreeable. “Italy is beautiful, quiet, and cheap.”
“You don’t mind making your home in a Fascist country?”
Jastrow’s smile was indulgent. “There are good and bad things in all political systems.”
“How did you ever come to write
“Oh, no, but it got me here.” Jastrow spoke somewhat smugly. “I was using the Bible in a course on ancient history, you see. And as a boy in Poland I’d been a Talmud scholar, so in teaching the New Testament I tended to stress the rabbinic sources that Jesus and Paul used. This novelty seemed to fascinate Yale juniors. I cobbled up a book, with the working title
“I don’t know. I couldn’t be more up in the air.”
“Do you want a job?”
Byron was taken aback. “Well, I guess maybe I do, sir.”
Jastrow ambled to his desk and searched through a pile of books, taking off his glasses and holding the titles very close to his face. “I had a fine researcher, a boy from Yale, but his parents called him home, afraid of a war — ah, here we are. Can I interest you, for twenty dollars a week, in the Emperor Constantine? This is a good general biography to start with.”
“Sir, I’ve flunked more history courses—”
“I see. You don’t want the job.”
The young man took the thick book and turned it dubiously in his hands. “No. I’ll try it. Thank you.”
“Oh, you will, will you? When you say you have no aptitude? Why?”
“Well, for the money, and to be around you.” This was true enough, though it omitted a third good reason: Natalie Jastrow.
Jastrow looked stern, and then burst out laughing. “We’ll give it a try.”
The letter his parents received from him some time later about the girl — which elicited Victor Henry’s strong answer — was unintentionally misleading. There was a love affair going on, but Natalie’s lover was Leslie Slote. His letters came two or three times a week: long fat white Foreign Service envelopes, addressed in an elongated stiff hand, in brown ink, with stamps stuck over the government frank. Byron hated the sight of them.
He was spending hours every day with her in the huge second-floor room that was Jastrow’s main library. Her desk was there. She answered letters, typed manuscripts, and with the Italian woman managed the household. Byron worked at the long library table, reading up on Constantine, checking facts, and drawing maps of the emperor’s military campaigns. Whenever he raised his eyes he saw the smooth face bent over the desk, the shapely bones highlighted by sunshine, or on dark days by a lamp. There was also the ever-present view of her long pretty legs in a sheen of silk. Natalie dressed in dun wool, and was all business with him; she used almost no paint once Slote left, combed her hair back in a heavy bun, and talked to Byron with offhand dryness. Still, his infatuation took quick root and grew rankly.
She was the first American girl he had spoken to in months; and they were thrown together for many hours a day, just the two of them in the book-lined room. This was reason enough for him to feel attracted to her. But she impressed him, too. Natalie Jastrow talked to her famous uncle as to a mental equal. Her range of knowledge and ideas humiliated Byron, and yet there was nothing bookish about her. Girls in his experience were lightweights, fools for a smile and a bit of flattery. They had doted on him at college, and in Florence too. Byron was something of an Adonis, indolent and not hotly interested; and unlike Warren, he had absorbed some of his father’s straitlaced ideas. He thought Natalie was a dark jewel of intellect and loveliness, blazing away all unnoticed here in the Italian back hills. As for her indifference to him, it seemed in order. He had no thought of trying to break it down.
He did things he had never done before. He stole a little pale blue handkerchief of hers and sat at night in his hotel room in town, sniffing it. Once he ate half a cake she had left on her desk, because it bore the mark of her teeth. When she missed the cake, he calmly lied about it. Altogether he was in a bad way. Natalie Jastrow seemed to sense nothing of this. Byron had a hard shell of inscrutability, grown in boyhood to protect his laziness and school failures from his exacting father.
They chatted a lot, of course, and sometimes drove out in the hills for a picnic lunch, when she would slightly warm to him over a bottle of wine, treating him more like a younger brother. He soon got at the main facts of her romance. She had gone to the Sorbonne for graduate work in sociology. Jastrow had written about her to Slote, a former pupil. A fulminating love affair had ensued, and Natalie had stormily quit Paris, and lived for a while with her parents in Florida. Then she had come back to Europe to work for her uncle; also, Byron surmised, to be near Slote for another try. The Rhodes Scholar had now received orders to Warsaw, and Natalie was planning to visit him there in July while Jastrow took his summer holiday in the Greek islands.
On one of their picnics, as he poured the last of the wine into her glass, Byron ventured a direct probe. “Natalie, do you like your job?”
She sat on a blanket, hugging her legs in a heavy checked skirt, looking out over a valley of brown wintry vineyards. With an arch questioning look, cocking her head, she said, “Oh, it’s a job. Why?”
“It seems to me you’re wasting away here.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Byron. You do peculiar things when you’re in love.” His response to this was a dull
