rubies, the silver bullets and holsters, slips off his suspenders, his checked shirt, and Levi’s, and sits on the edge of his bed to pull off his high boots. Leaving this equipment in a heap, he goes to the closet and takes his space suit off a nail. It is a struggle for him to get into the long tights, but he succeeds. He loops the magic cape over his shoulders and, climbing onto the footboard of his bed, he spreads his arms and flies the short distance to the floor, landing with a thump that is audible to everyone in the house but himself.
“Go home, Gertrude, go home,” Mrs. Masterson says. “I told you to go home an hour ago, Gertrude. It’s way past your suppertime, and your mother will be worried. Go home!” A door on the Babcocks’ terrace flies open, and out comes Mrs. Babcock without any clothes on, pursued by a naked husband. (Their children are away at boarding school, and their terrace is screened by a hedge.) Over the terrace they go in at the kitchen door, as passionate and handsome a nymph and satyr as you will find on any wall in Venice. Cutting the last of the roses in her garden, Julia hears old Mr. Nixon shouting at the squirrels in his bird-feeding station. “Rapscallions! Varmints! Avaunt and quit my sight!” A miserable cat wanders into the garden, sunk in spiritual and physical discomfort. Tied to its head is a small straw hat?a doll’s hat?and it is securely buttoned into a doll’s dress, from the skirts of which protrudes its long, hairy tail. As it walks, it shakes its feet, as if it had fallen into water.
“Here, pussy, pussy, pussy!” Julia calls.
“Here, pussy, here, poor pussy!” But the cat gives her a skeptical look and stumbles away in its skirts. The last to come is Jupiter. He prances through the tomato vines, holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper. Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains. THE DUCHESS
IF YOU SHOULD happen to be the son of a coal miner or were brought up (as I was) in a small town in Massachusetts, the company of a ranking duchess might excite some of those vulgar sentiments that have no place in fiction, but she was beautiful, after all, and beauty has nothing to do with rank. She was slender, but not thin. And rather tall. Her hair was ash blond, and her fine, clear brow belonged against that grandiose and shabby backdrop of limestone and marble, the Roman palace where she lived. It was hers, and, stepping from the shadows of her palace to walk along the river to early Mass, she never quite seemed to leave the grainy light. One would have been surprised but not alarmed to see her join the company of the stone saints and angels on the roof of Sant’ Andrea della Valle. This was not the guidebook city but the Rome of today, whose charm is not the Coliseum in the moonlight, or the Spanish Stairs wet by a sudden shower, but the poignance of a great and an ancient city succumbing confusedly to change. We live in a world where the banks of even the most remote trout streams are beaten smooth by the boots of fishermen, and the music that drifts down from the medieval walls into the garden where we sit is an old recording of Vivienne Segal singing “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”; and Donna Carla lived, like you and me, with one foot in the past.
She was Donna Carla Malvolio-Pommodori, Duchess of Vevaqua-Perdere-Giusti, etc. She would have been considered fair anywhere, but in Rome her blue eyes, her pale skin, and her shining hair were extraordinary. She spoke English, French, and Italian with equal style, but Italian was the only language she wrote correctly. She carried on her social correspondence in a kind of English: “Donna Carla thinks you for the flahers,” “Donna Carla rekests the honor of your compagnie,” etc. The first floor of her palace on the Tiber had been converted into shops, and she lived on the piano nobile. The two upper floors had been rented out as apartments. This still left her with something like forty rooms.
Most guidebooks carry the family history, in small print, and you can’t travel in Italy without coming on those piles of masonry that Malvolio-Pommodoris have scattered everywhere, from Venice to Calabria. There were the three popes, the doge, and the thirty-six cardinals, as well as many avaricious, bloodthirsty, and dishonest nobles. Don Camillo married the Princess Pleves, and after she had given him three sons he had her excommunicated, on a rigged charge of adultery, and seized all her lands. Don Camillo and his sons were butchered at dinner by assassins who had been hired by their host, Don Camillo’s uncle Marcantonio. Marcantonio was strangled by Cosimo’s men, and Cosimo was poisoned by his nephew Antonio. The palace in Rome had had an oubliette?a dungeon below a chamber whose floor operated on the principle of a seesaw. If you walked or were pushed beyond the axis, you went howling down for good into the bone pit. All this was long before the nineteenth century, when the upper stories were remodeled into apartments. Donna Carla’s grandparents were exemplary Roman nobles, They were even prudish, and had the erotic frescoes in the ballroom rectified. They were commemorated by a marble portrait statue in the smoking room. It was life-size and showed them as they might have appeared for a walk on the Lungo-Tevere?marble hats, marble gloves, a marble walking stick. He even had a marble fur collar on his marble coat. The most corrupt and tasteless park commissioner could not have been bribed to give it space.
Donna Carla was born in the family village of Vevaqua, in Tuscany, where her parents lived for many years in a kind of exile. Her father was simple in his tastes, bold, pious, just, and the heir to an immense patrimony. Hunting in England as a young man, he had a bad spill. His arms and legs were broken, his skull was fractured, and several vertebrae were smashed. His parents took what was then the long trip from Rome to England, and waited three days for their brilliant son to regain consciousness. It was thought he would never walk again. His recuperative powers were exceptional, but it was two years before he took a step. Then, wasted, leaning on two sticks and half supported by a busty nurse named Winifred-Mae Bolton, he crossed the threshold of the nursing home into the garden. He held his head up, smiled his quick smile, and moved haltingly, as if he were delayed by his pleasure in the garden and the air, and not by his infirmity. It was six months before he could return to Rome, and he returned with the news that he was going to marry Winifred-Mae Bolton. She had given him?literally?his life, and what, as a good nobleman, could he do but give her his? The consternation in Rome, Milan, and Paris was indescribable. His parents wept, but they were up against that single-minded concern for probity that had appeared in his character when he was a boy. His father, who loved him as he loved his own life, said that Winifred-Mae would not enter the gates of Rome so long as he lived, and she did not.
Donna Carla’s mother was a large cheerful woman with a coronet of yellow-reddish hair and a very broad manner. The only Italian she ever learned was “prego” and “grazie,” and she pronounced these “prygo” and “gryzia.” During the years in exile in Vevaqua, she worked in the garden. Her taste in formal gardening was colored by the railroad-station gardens of England, and she spelled out her husband’s name?Cosimo?in pansies and set it in a heart-shaped bed of artichokes. She liked to fry fish and chips, for which the peasants thought she was crazy. The only evidence that the Duke may have regretted his marriage was an occasional?a charming?look of bewilderment on his handsome face. With his wife he was always loving, courteous, and protective. Donna Carla was twelve years old when her grandparents died. After a period of mourning, she, Winifred-Mae, and the Duke entered Rome by the gate of Santa Maria del Popolo.
Winifred-Mae had probably, by then, seen enough of ducal gigantism not to exclaim over the size of the palace on the Tiber. Their first night in Rome set the pattern for their life there. “Now that we’re back in a city again,” she said, “with all the shops and all, I’ll go out and buy a bit of fresh fish, shall I, ducky, and fry it for
