Krasbie toward the middle of March. Instead, he asked the old man to take him home and let him be an American boy. The timing was perfect. Uncle George had just retired from the fertilizer factory and had always wanted to bring Kate and her son home. Within two weeks he was on board a ship bound for Naples.
Streeter, of course, knew nothing of this. But he had suspected that there was some tension between Charlie and his mother. The boy’s hoedown American clothes, the poses he took as a rail splitter, pitcher, and cowboy, and his mother’s very Italianate manners implied room for sizable disagreement, at least, and, going there one Sunday afternoon, Streeter stepped into a quarrel. Assunta, the maid, let him in, but he stopped at the door of the sala when he heard Kate and her son shouting at one another in anger. Streeter could not retreat. Assunta had gone on ahead to say he was there, and all he could do was wait in the vestibule. Kate came out to him then?she was crying?and said, in Italian, that she could not give him a lesson that afternoon. She was sorry. Something had come up, and there had not been time to telephone him. He felt like a fool, confronted with her tears, holding his grammar, his copybook, and I Promessi Sposi under one arm. He said it didn’t matter about the lesson, it was nothing, and could he come on Tuesday? She said yes, yes, would he come on Tuesday?and would he come on Thursday, not for a lesson but to do her a favor? “My father’s brother?my Uncle George?is coming, to try and take Charlie home. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I can do. But I would appreciate it if there was a man here; I would feel so much better if I weren’t alone. You don’t have to say anything or do anything but sit in a chair and have a drink, but I would feel so much better if I weren’t alone.”
Streeter agreed to come, and went away then, wondering what kind of a life it was she led if she had to count in an emergency on a stranger like him. With his lesson canceled and nothing else that he had to do, he took a walk up the river as far as the Ministry of the Marine, and then came back through a neighborhood that was neither new nor old nor anything else you could specify. Because it was Sunday afternoon, the houses were mostly shut. The streets were deserted. When he passed anyone, it was usually a family group returning from an excursion to the zoo. There were also a few of those lonely men and women carrying pastry boxes that you see everywhere in the world at dusk on Sunday?unmarried aunts and uncles going out to tea with their relations and bringing a little pastry to sweeten the call. But mostly he was alone, mostly there was no sound but his own footsteps and, in the distance, the iron ringing of iron trolley-car wheels on iron tracks?a lonely sound on Sunday afternoons for many Americans; a lonely one for him, anyhow, and reminding him of some friendless, loveless, galling Sunday in his youth. As he came closer to the city, there were more lights and people?flowers and the noise of talk?and under the gate of Santa Maria del Popolo a whore spoke to him. She was a beautiful young woman, but he told her, in his broken Italian, that he had a friend, and walked on.
Crossing the Piazza, he saw a man struck by a car. The noise was loud?that surprising loudness of our bones when they are dealt a mortal blow. The driver of the car slipped out of his seat and ran up the Pincian Hill. The victim lay in a heap on the paving, a shabbily dressed man but with a lot of oil in his black, wavy hair, which must have been his pride. A crowd gathered?not solemn at all, although a few women crossed themselves?and everyone began to talk excitedly. The crowd, garrulous, absorbed in its own opinions and indifferent, it seemed, to the dying man, was so thick that when the police came they had to push and struggle to reach the victim. With the words of the whore still in his ears, Streeter wondered why it was that they regarded a human life as something of such dubious value.
He turned away from the Piazza then, toward the river, and, passing the Tomb of Augustus, he noticed a young man calling to a cat and offering it something to eat. The cat was one of those thousands of millions that live in the ruins of Rome and eat leftover spaghetti, and the man was offering the cat a piece of bread. Then, as the cat approached him, the man took a firecracker out of his pocket, put it into the piece of bread, and lit the fuse. He put the bread on the sidewalk, and just as the cat took it the powder exploded. The animal let out a hellish shriek and leaped into the air, its body all twisted, and then it streaked over the wall and was lost in the darkness of Augustus’ Tomb. The man laughed at his trick, and so did several people who had been watching.
Streeter’s first instinct was to box the man’s ears and teach him not to feed lighted firecrackers to stray cats. But, with such an appreciative audience, this would have amounted to an international incident, and he realized there wasn’t anything he could do. The people who had laughed at the prank were good and kind?most of them affectionate parents. You might have seen them earlier in the day on the Palatine, picking violets.
Streeter walked on into a dark street and heard at his back the hoofs and trappings of horses?it sounded like cavalry?and stepped aside to let a hearse and a mourner’s carriage pass. The hearse was drawn by two pairs of bays with black plumes. The driver wore funerary livery, with an admiral’s hat, and had the brutish red face of a drunken horse thief. The hearse banged, slammed, and rattled over the stones in such a loose-jointed way that the poor soul it carried must have been in a terrible state of disarrangement, and the mourner’s carriage that followed was empty. The friends of the dead man had probably been too late or had got the wrong date or had forgotten the whole thing, as was so often the case in Rome. Off the hearse and carriage rattled toward the Servian Gate.
Streeter knew one thing then: He did not want to die in Rome. He was in excellent health and had no reason to think about death; nevertheless, he was afraid. Back at his flat, he poured some whiskey and water into a glass and stepped out onto his balcony. He watched the night fall and the street lights go on with complete bewilderment at his own feelings. He did not want to die in Rome. The power of this idea could only stem from ignorance and stupidity, he told himself?for what could such a fear represent but the inability to respond to the force of life? He reproached himself with arguments and consoled himself with whiskey, but in the middle of the night he was waked by the noise of a carriage and horses’ hoofs, and again he sweated with fear. The hearse, the horse thief, and the empty mourner’s carriage, he thought, were rattling back, under his balcony. He got up out of bed and went to the window to see, but it was only two empty carriages going back to the stables.
WHEN UNCLE GEORGE LANDED in Naples, on Tuesday, he was excited and in a good humor. His purpose in coming abroad was twofold?to bring Charlie and Kate home, and to take a vacation, the first in forty-three years. A friend of his in Krasbie who had been to Italy had written an itinerary for him: “Stay at the Royal in Naples. Go to the National Museum. Have a drink in the Galleria Umberto. Eat supper at the California. Good American food. Take the Roncari auto-pullman in the morning for Rome. This goes through two interesting villages and stops at Nero’s villa. In Rome stay at the Excelsior. Make reservations in advance.”
On Wednesday morning, Uncle George got up early and went down to the hotel dining room. “Orange juice and ham and eggs,” he said to the waiter. The waiter brought him orange juice, coffee, and a roll. “Where’s my ham and eggs?” Uncle George asked, and then realized, when the waiter bowed and smiled, that the man did not understand English. He got out his phrase book, but there was nothing about ham and eggs. “You gotta no hamma?” he asked loudly. “You gotta no eggsa?” The waiter went on smiling and bowing, and Uncle George gave up. He ate the breakfast he hadn’t ordered, gave the waiter a twenty-lira tip, cashed four hundred dollars’
