Interesting Women

coffee as we sat on creaky red couches in a long room filled with books and Chinese vases as tall as I was. Leaning in a corner beside a television was one of those old-fashioned high bicycles. Federico was tired from driving, and stretched out for a nap while the princess took Mom and me on a tour of the palace. First she showed us a round brick tower that was a gift from an empress of Russia. The empress had been a guest in the palace, and her thank-you present was a Russian tower. After that we walked through dark rooms with marble floors and piled furniture covered with sheets; some rooms had chandeliers and some had ceilings painted with scenes from mythology, and one very big room held nine—I counted them—grand pianos. I tried to play one and it just rattled. We passed through a sort of pantry where in the wall were built dozens of wooden drawers with the Latin names of herbs on them in black Gothic letters: she told us it used to be the pharmacy for the household. Then there was a room full of things from Africa: shields, masks, and even a stuffed shark. But the best was when the princess ducked into a bathroom and came out with a bulgy plastic shopping bag that turned out to have crowns in it: six real crowns or diadems, as Mom called them, made out of real gold set with blood-red stones that were Sicilian coral. They had been bridal crowns for women in the family, and nobody in the world had a collection like that, and it was kept in the bathroom because no thief would think of looking there. The princess set one on my head, and I performed a pirouette and a curtsy for her, and she laughed and told us about a German governess she had when she was my age. This strict governess ruled her life completely, except for an hour a day when she could run wild. She could do anything she liked in that hour—be rude, wet, filthy—and the only rule was not to get killed. I liked this story very much, and the princess, too. You could still see the wilderness twinkling far inside her blue eyes.

Back in the room with the Chinese vases, the prince had arrived and was chatting with Federico. They stood up when we came in, and the prince kissed the air over my mother’s hand and mine too, and looked at Mom and then said to Fede that he didn’t deserve his good fortune. The prince was tall and had straight gray hair down to his shoulders. He wore khaki pants and a pair of old sneakers, and was tanned as dark as the fishermen on Favignana. Federico had told Mom in the car that the prince was seventy years old and that he stayed young through wickedness; that he was a famous viveur who led the princess quite a life. I thought that he looked not wicked but kind and that, gray hair or not, he and the princess were the most exciting people I had ever met. He sat down and took my mother’s hand between both of his and said in a soft voice that she was a work of art, and that if she didn’t mind he would talk to Federico but look at her. The grown-ups all laughed at that, the princess more than anyone, and I noticed how straight her spine was as she sat on the red couch, like a queen on a chessboard.

I wandered around looking at some old model planes on the bookshelves while the grown-ups drank whiskey and Federico and the prince talked about their fishing adventures together in Kenya long ago. Then they all started gossiping about people they knew, and I tried to make myself invisible so I could listen. In fact they forgot about me for a while and began to tell stories about young wives playing tricks on old husbands, about husbands fooling around in Africa with beautiful African girls, about a new medicine made in Cuba from sugarcane that knocked the spots off Viagra, and about a woman who had such huge breast implants that she couldn’t go deep sea diving. They went on talking, and I heard the princess say to my mother: “It’s only fair to explain to you, my dear, that I have a very particular kind of marriage. I have to take care of both my husband and his fidanzate—his girlfriends. Otherwise he makes a muddle of things.”

“It seems perfectly reasonable to me,” said Mom. “But it’s delicate work.”

“There are diplomats in my family,” said the princess. “And a couple of saints.” She smiled, and both women glanced at me. Then the princess called me over and slipped her arm around my waist and told me that if I promised to visit her at Christmas she’d stuff me with cassata, a celestial pudding that looked like a white mountain, and only ever tasted good in Palermo.

On the way to the airport, Mom said: “That marvelous woman. Why does she put up with it? Why does she stay?”

“What woman?” I asked, though I knew she was talking about the princess.

Then Federico, who was smoking a cigarette and driving very fast in and out of traffic, said: “She stays because he is marvelous, too. And she’s actually quite happy. If you think otherwise, you’ve missed the point.”

“And what point is that?” asked Mom coldly.

“The point of everything you saw this weekend.”

Mom said, in a still colder voice, that she hadn’t known that this was supposed to be an educational tour, but that even a benighted foreigner like herself could grasp that the main theme over the last two days had been simple inhumanity. Imagine, she said, singing hymns while you slaughtered tuna. Or being a wife who felt it was her duty to help out a husband’s outrageous affairs. She grabbed up her hair and