sleep and the lights of day. And it was a lightless day, close and oppressive, like the climate of a harrowing dream. Their driveway was sheltered from the road by some shrubbery, and when she got out of the car and thanked Jack Burden, he followed her up the steps and took advantage of her in the hallway, where they were discovered by Marchand when he came back to get his briefcase.
Marchand left the house then, and Anne never saw him again. He died of a heart attack in a New York hotel ten days later. Her parents-in-law sued for the custody of the only child, and during the trial Anne made the mistake, in her innocence, of blaming her malfeasance on the humidity. The tabloids picked this up?“IT WASN’T ME, IT WAS THE HUMIDITY”?and it swept the country. There was a popular song, “Humid Isabella.” It seemed that everywhere she went she heard them singing:
Oh, Humid Isabella
Never kissed a fellah
Unless there was moisture in the air,
But when the skies were cloudy,
She got very rowdy.
In the middle of the trial she surrendered her claims, put on smoked glasses, and sailed incognito for Genoa, the outcast of a society that seemed to her to modify its invincible censoriousness only with a ribald sense of humor.
Of course, she had a boodle?her sufferings were only spiritual?but she had been burned, and her memories were bitter. From what she knew of life she was entitled to forgiveness, but she had received none, and her own country, remembered across the Atlantic, seemed to have passed on her a moral judgment that was unrealistic and savage. She had been made a scapegoat; she had been pilloried; and because she was genuinely pure-hearted she was deeply incensed. She based her expatriation not on cultural but on moral grounds. By impersonating a European she meant to express her disapproval of what had gone on at home. She drifted all over Europe, but she finally bought a villa in Tavola-Calda, and spent at least half the year there. She not only learned Italian, she learned all the grunting noises and hand signals that accompany the language. In the dentist’s chair she would say “aiiee” instead of “ouch,” and she could wave a hornet away from her wineglass with great finesse. She was proprietary about her expatriation?it was her demesne, achieved through uncommon sorrow?and it irritated her to hear other foreigners speaking the language. Her villa was charming?nightingales sang in the oak trees, fountains played in the garden, and she stood on the highest terrace, her hair dyed the shade of bronze that was fashionable in Rome that year, calling down to her guests, “Bentornati. Quanto piacere!” but the image was never quite right. It seemed like a reproduction, with the slight imperfections that you find in an enlargement?the loss of quality. The sense was that she was not so much here in Italy as that she was no longer there in America.
She spent much of her time in the company of people who, like herself, claimed to be the victims of an astringent and repressive moral climate. Their hearts were on the shipping lanes, running away from home. She paid for her mobility with some loneliness. The party of friends she was planning to meet in Wiesbaden moved on without leaving an address. She looked for them in Heidelberg and Munich, but she never found them. Wedding invitations and weather reports (“Snow Blankets the Northeast U. S.”) made her terribly homesick. She continued to polish her impersonation of a European, and while her accomplishments were admirable, she remained morbidly sensitive to criticism and detested being taken for a tourist. One day at the end of the season in Venice, she took a train south, reaching Rome late on a hot September afternoon. Most of the people of Rome were asleep, and the only sign of life was the tourist buses, grinding tirelessly through the streets like some basic piece of engineering?like the drains or the light conduits. She gave her luggage check to a porter and described her bags to him in fluent Italian, but he seemed to see through her and he mumbled something about the Americans. Oh, there were so many. This irritated her and she snapped at him, “I am not an American.”
“Excuse me, signora,” he said. “What, then, is your country?”
“I am,” she said, “a Greek.”
The enormity, the tragedy of her lie staggered her. What have I done? she asked herself wildly. Her passport was as green as grass, and she traveled under the protectorate of the Great Seal of the United States. Why had she lied about such an important part of her identity?
She took a cab to a hotel on the Via Veneto, sent her bags upstairs, and went into the bar for a drink. There was a single American at the bar?a white-haired man wearing a hearing aid. He was alone, he seemed lonely, and finally he turned to the table where she sat and asked most courteously if she was American.
“Yes.
“How come you speak the language?”
“I live here.”
“Stebbins,” he said, “Charlie Stebbins. Philadelphia.”
“How do you do,” she said, “Where in Philadelphia?”
“Well, I was born in Philadelphia,” he said, “but I haven’t been back in forty years. Shoshone,
