you the way I used to when you were in hospital?” Perfect love was in the Duke’s smile of assent. In the fish market she squealed at the squid and the eels, but she found a nice piece of sole, and took it home and fried it, with some potatoes, in the kitchen, while the servants watched with tears in their eyes to see the fall of such a great house. After dinner, as had been the custom in Vevaqua, she sang. It was not true that, as her enemies said, she had sung ditties and kicked up her petticoats in English music halls. She had sung in music halls before she became a nurse, but she had sung the “Meditation” from Thais, and “The Road to Mandalay.” Her display of talentlessness was exhaustive; it was stupendous. She seemed to hold her lack of talent up to the light for examination, and to stretch its seams. She flatted, and she sharped, and she strummed noisily on the piano, but she did all this with such perfect candor and self-assurance that the performance was refreshing. The Duke beamed at these accomplishments of his wife, and did not seem in any way inclined to compare this entertainment with the days of his youth, when he had stood with his nursemaid on the ballroom balcony and seen a quadrille danced by one emperor, two kings, three queens, and a hundred and thirty-six grand dukes and grand duchesses. Winifred- Mae sang for an hour, and then they turned out the lights and went to bed. In those years, an owl had nested in the palace tower, and they could hear, above the drifting music of fountains, the belling of the owl. It reminded Winifred-Mae of England.
Rome had intended never to make any acknowledgment of Winifred-Mae’s existence, but a lovely duchessina who was also a billionairess was too good a thing to pass up, and it seemed that Donna Carla would be the richest woman in Europe. If suitors were to be presented to her, Winifred-Mae had to be considered, and she was called on by the high nobility. She went on cooking, sewing, singing, and knitting; they got her on her own terms. She was a scandal. She asked noble callers into the kitchen while she popped a steak-and-kidney pie into the oven. She made cretonne slip covers for the furniture in the salouino. She complained, in explicit detail, about the old-fashioned plumbing in the palace. She installed a radio. At her insistence, the Duke employed as his secretary a young Englishman named Cecil Smith. Smith was not even liked by the English. Coming down the Spanish Stairs in the morning sun, he could remind you of the industrial Midlands. He smelled of Stoke-on-Trent. He was a tall man with brown curly hair parted and combed across his forehead like a drapery. He wore dark, ill-fitting clothes that were sent to him from England, and as a result of a fear of drafts and a fear of immodesty, he gave one the impression that he was buried in clothing. He wore nightcaps, undervests, mufflers, and rubbers, and the cuff of his long underwear could be seen when he reached out his cup for another spot of tea, which he took with Winifred- Mae. His manners were refined. He wore paper cuffs and an eyeshade in the Duke’s office, and he fried sausages and potatoes on a gas ring in his flat.
But the sewing, the singing, the smell of fish and chips, and Cecil Smith had to be overlooked by the needy nobility. The thought of what Donna Carla’s grace and her billions could do to lubricate the aristocracy would make your heart thump. Potential suitors began coming up to the palace when she was thirteen or fourteen. She was pleasant to them all. She had even then the kind of inner gracefulness that was to make her so persuasive as a young woman. She was not a solemn girl, but hilarity seemed to lie outside her range, and some countess who had come to display her son remarked afterward that she was like the princess in the fairy tale?the princess who had never laughed. There must have been some truth in the observation, because it stuck; people repeated the remark, and what they meant was an atmosphere of sadness or captivity that one sensed in spite of her clear features and her light coloring.
THIS WAS in the thirties?a decade, in Italy, of marching in the streets, arrests, assassinations, and the loss of familiar lights. Cecil Smith returned to England when the war broke out. Very few suitors came to the palace in those days. The crippled Duke was an implacable anti-Fascist, and he told everyone that Il Duce was an abomination and an infection, but he was never molested or thrown into prison, as were some less outspoken men; this may have been because of his rank, his infirmities, or his popularity with the Romans. But when the war began, the family was forced into a complete retirement. They were thought, wrongly, to be in sympathy with the Allies, and were allowed to leave the palace only once a day, to go to late or early Mass at San Giovanni. They were in bed and asleep on the night of September 30, 1943. The owl was hooting. Luigi, the old butler, woke them and said there was a messenger in the hall. They dressed quickly and went down. The messenger was disguised as a farmer, but the Duke recognized the son of an old friend. He informed the Duke that the Germans were coming down the Via Cassia and were entering the city. The commanding general had put a price of a million lire on the Duke’s head; it was the price of his intransigence. They were to go at once, on foot, to an address on the Janiculum. Winifred-Mae could hear the owl hooting in the tower, and she had never been so homesick for England. “I don’t want to go, ducky,” she said. “If they’re going to kill us, let them kill us in our own beds.” The Duke smiled kindly and opened the door for her onto one of the most troubled of Roman nights.
There were already German patrols in the streets. It was a long walk up the river, and they were very conspicuous?the weeping Englishwoman, the Duke with his stick, and the graceful daughter. How mysterious life must have seemed at that moment! The Duke moved slowly and had to stop now and then to rest, but though he was in pain, he did not show it. With his head up and a price on it, he looked around alertly, as if he had stopped to observe or admire some change in his old city. They crossed the river by separate bridges and met at a barbershop, where they were taken into a cellar and disguised. Their skin was stained and their hair was dyed. They left Rome before dawn, concealed in a load of furniture, and that evening reached a small village in the mountains, where they were hidden in a farmhouse cellar.
The village was shelled twice, but only a few buildings and barns on the outskirts were destroyed. The farmhouse was searched a dozen times, by Germans and Fascists, but the Duke was always warned long in advance. In the village, they were known as Signor and Signora Giusti, and it was Winifred-Mae who chafed at this incognito. She was the Duchess Malvolio-Pommodori, and she wanted it known. Donna Carla liked being Carla Giusti. She went one day, as Carla Giusti, to the washing trough and spent a pleasant morning cleaning her clothes and gossiping with the other women. When she got back to the farm, Winifred-Mae was furious. She was Donna Carla; she must not forget it. A few days later, Winifred-Mae saw Donna Carla being taught by a woman at the fountain how to carry a copper vase on her head, and she called her daughter into the house and gave her another fierce lecture on rank. Donna Carla was always malleable and obedient, but without losing her freshness, and she never tried to carry a conca again.
When Rome was liberated, the family returned to the city, to find that the Germans had sacked the palace; and they then retired to an estate in the south and waited there for the war to end. The Duke was invited to help in the formation of a government, but he declined this invitation, claiming to be too old; the fact was that he supported, if not the King, the concept of monarchy. The paintings and the rest of the family treasure were found in a salt mine and returned to the palace. Cecil Smith came back, put on his paper cuffs, and resumed the administration of the family fortune, which had come through the war intact. Suitors began to call on Donna Carla.
In the second year after the war, a hundred and seventeen suitors came to the palace. These were straight and honest men, crooked men, men suffering from hemophilia, and many cousins. It was Donna Carla’s prerogative to propose marriage, and she saw them all to the door without hinting at the subject. This was a class of men whose disinheritedness was grandiose. Lying in bed in the Excelsior Hotel, they dreamed of what her
