clothes on. Nothing.”
Kate rang for Assunta, and when the maid came in she ordered whiskey and ice, in very rapid Italian. “It’s just another way of looking at things, Uncle George,” she said.
“No, it isn’t,” Uncle George said. “It isn’t natural. Not even in locker rooms. There’s very few men who’d choose to parade around a locker room stark naked if a towel was handy. It’s not natural. Everywhere you look. Up on the roofs. At the main traffic intersections. When I was coming over here, I passed through a little garden?playground, I guess you’d say?and right in the middle of it, right in the middle of all these little children, is one of these men without anything on.”
“Will you have some whiskey?”
“Yes, please… The boat sails on Saturday, Katie, and I want you and the boy to come home with me.”
“I don’t want Charlie to leave,” Kate said.
“He wants to leave?don’t you, Charlie? He wrote me a nice letter. Nicely worded, and he’s got a nice handwriting. That was a nice letter, Charlie. I showed it to the high-school superintendent, and he said you can enter the Krasbie high school whenever you want. And I want you to come, too, Kate. It’s your home, and you’ve only got one. The trouble with you, Katie, is that when you were a kid they used to make fun of you in Krasbie, and you just started running, that’s all, and you never stopped.”
“If that’s true?and it may be,” she said quickly, “why should I want to go back to a place where I will seem ridiculous.”
“Oh, Katie, you won’t seem ridiculous. I’ll take care of that.”
“I want to go home, Mama,” Charlie said. He was sitting on a stool by the fireplace?not so straight-backed any more. “I’m homesick all the time.”
“How could you possibly be homesick for America?” Her voice was very sharp. “You’ve never seen it. This is your home.”
“How do you mean?”
“Your home is with your mother.”
“There’s more to it than that, Mama. I feel strange here all the time. Everybody on the street speaking a different language.”
“You’ve never even tried to learn Italian.”
“Even if I had, it wouldn’t make any difference. It would still sound strange. I mean, it would still remind me that it wasn’t my language. I just don’t understand the people, Mama. I like them all right, but I just don’t understand them. I never know what they’re going to do next.”
“Why don’t you try and understand them?”
“Oh, I do, but I’m no genius, and you don’t understand them, either. I’ve heard you say so, and sometimes you’re homesick, too, I know. I can tell by the way you look.”
“Homesickness is nothing,” she said angrily. “It is absolutely nothing. Fifty per cent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. But I don’t suppose you’re old enough to understand. When you’re in one place and long to be in another, it isn’t as simple as taking a boat. You don’t really long for another country. You long for something in yourself that you don’t have, or haven’t been able to find.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that, Mama. I just mean if I was with people who spoke my language, people who understood me, I’d be more comfortable.”
“If comfort is all you expect to get out of life, God help you.”
Then the doorbell rang and Assunta answered it. Kate glanced at her watch and saw that it was five after eight. It was also the first Thursday in the month. Before she could get out an explanation, they had started down the sala, with the old Duke of Rome in the lead, holding some flowers in his left hand. A little behind him was the Duchess, his wife?a tall, willowy, gray-haired woman wearing a lot of jewelry that had been given to the family by Francis I. An assortment of nobles brought up the rear, looking like a country circus, gorgeous and travel-worn. The Duke gave Kate her flowers. They all bowed vaguely to her company and went out through the kitchen, with its smell of gas leaks, to the service door.
“Oh, Giuseppe the barber he gotta the cash,” Uncle George sang loudly, “He gotta the bigga the blacka mustache.” He waited for someone to laugh, and when no one did he asked, “What was that?”
Kate told him, but her eyes were brighter, and he noticed this.
