He sets down the receiver and clears his throat.
“If you’ll follow me, ladies,” he says, and he leads us through the archway into the club, where the world-famous Bobby Blue Orchestra tunes up to the rhythm of a dozen popping champagne corks.
Iris
April 1940
Rome, Italy
When Ruth stumbled out of her bedroom and asked where Iris was going, Iris told her a lie.
“Just for a walk,” she said.
Ruth looked her up and down, from the top of her dark, curling head, to her pink lipstick to her blue dress with the Peter Pan collar, crutches, stockings, leather slingback shoe, and plaster cast held an inch or two above the floorboards. When she returned to Iris’s face, she wore that tiny smile at the corner of her mouth. Ruth tightened the belt on her purple silk kimono. “Is that so?”
“I need a little fresh air, that’s all.”
“Sure you do. What about a hand with those stairs?”
Iris hesitated. “All right.”
Ruth lent her a steadying hand down the stairs and held the doors for her. Iris thanked her and started off down the sidewalk.
Ruth called after her, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”
Iris couldn’t remember a time when Ruth wasn’t the prettiest, the cleverest, the most athletic of the Macallister twins. It simply went without saying!
Although people said it anyway. They’d remarked on it all the time, when Ruth and Iris were growing up. The twins would sit side by side at the dinner table or on the beach or astride their ponies, and Ruth’s blond hair would catch the light and just shimmer, or she would open her mouth and say something brilliant, or she would leap off somewhere gracefully and long leggedly, and Iris would be left behind with her frizzy curls the color of dirt, her tied tongue, her pale and chubby limbs.
A couple of months before the day that would mark the end of their old lives, Ruth and Iris had gone out sailing with their father and Grandpa Walker, who was their mother’s father. (Harry had been forced to stay at home and polish the silver, on account of some misdemeanor.) Iris had always liked her grandfather. He didn’t talk much—leaving most communication to the women in his life—but he was calm and thoughtful and seemed to find the same things funny that Iris did. He had been in the garment business and made a killing during the war, and he and Granny Walker had invested some of their spoils in a rambling, half-timbered, brand-new pile in Glen Cove, Long Island, so their daughters could learn to sail and play tennis and meet all the right sorts. And it worked! The oldest had duly married a nice stockbroker from a good family—Harry and Ruth and Iris were born—the stock market set records practically every day. Nobody could say that the Walkers’ investment hadn’t made a solid return, indeed.
Anyway, there they were, the halcyon end of summer of the halcyon final year of the Roaring Twenties. They’d been out cruising in Long Island Sound for a few hours, all the way down to Orient Point and back again. Ruth was an enthusiastic sailor—absolutely fearless. She shimmied up the mainmast and leaned out over the side as they heeled; she managed sheets confidently and relished the shivering of the sails as they changed tack. Her hair whipped in the wind; her bare skin glowed in the sunshine. As they approached the harbor, the breeze picked up, stronger and stronger until it was almost a gale. The boat tore through the water at a steep angle, foam flying from the bow, and Ruth screamed with delight. Iris sat paralyzed in the stern and prayed they wouldn’t capsize. Next to her, Daddy held the tiller with a firm, delicate touch and told her not to worry.
Sure enough, they cruised right into the calm of the harbor a half hour later and moored without incident. But while they were loading up the car to drive back to Stoneywild—this was the name the Walkers had given to their infant estate—Iris happened to pass by Grandpa Walker just as he said to her father, “That’s some girl, that Ruth of yours. Hope you’ve got yourself a good baseball bat.”
Daddy had laughed. “She’s a beauty, all right. Poor little Iris.”
Iris hadn’t stuck around to hear what Grandpa Walker thought of that, or maybe she just didn’t remember. But she did remember those words poor little Iris. They had whacked her like an electric shock. True, she’d heard that kind of observation plenty of times before—pretty much everybody was dazzled by Ruth and felt only pity for Iris, if they noticed her at all. But she’d never before heard Daddy call her poor little Iris. Until now, Daddy had always treated the two of them with strict evenhandedness. Everyone else might exclaim over Ruth’s beauty and brains and spirit and then turn politely to Iris and squint up his face with the effort of conjuring a compliment, but Daddy never failed to dole out his admiration in equal shares. So it shocked Iris to learn the truth. What he really thought of his two daughters.
As it turned out, of course, those were among the last words she ever heard from her father, so they echoed in Iris’s head ever after—poor little Iris, the diminutive to Ruth’s superlative.
So maybe that was why Iris climbed laboriously down all those stairs and hobbled with her crutches and her plaster cast to the Vespri Siciliani to meet Sasha Digby for coffee. To Sasha, she wasn’t poor little Iris. She was dolce Iris. Yesterday evening, he’d looked at Ruth as if she were loathsome, and he’d turned to Iris and kissed her hand. Iris would have hobbled ten miles to meet Sasha Digby for coffee, but luckily he chose the café with consideration for her injuries, and she only had to hobble a couple of hundred yards before she arrived there at ten minutes past eleven, a little breathless.
Sasha rushed out from beneath the awning to help her with her crutches. He almost carried her to her seat. He called the waiter and ordered her a cappuccino and a piece of olive oil cake, specialty of the house, and he beamed at her.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come. I thought it was too much trouble.”
“Of course not. I need a little fresh air.”
“Then I was worried about all those stairs.”
“Ruth helped me.”
“Oh, of course.” The smile drooped a little. “Did you tell her where you were going?”
Iris hesitated for an instant before she decided that she would never lie to this man, ever. “No,” she said firmly.
“Why not?”
“Because she thinks she should protect me, for some reason.”
The smile ratcheted back up. “I can’t imagine why.”
“I’m not as innocent as I look, you know. I’ve read Balzac.”
“I know. I saw you in the museum, remember?” He leaned forward. “Let them think what they want, I say. Let them underestimate you.”
Before Iris could come up with anything to reply to that, the waiter arrived with the coffee and the cake. Sasha asked did she mind if he smoked. She said of course not.
“But you don’t smoke, do you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I never wanted to.” The cappuccino was almost too hot to sip, but Iris tasted it anyway. It was so much easier to pay attention to coffee than to Sasha. He was so big and electric! And they were sitting so close! This was nothing like sitting together in the hospital. This was like a man and a woman who were interested in each other, meeting for coffee to find out just how interested they really were. Sasha’s long legs stretched out past the opposite edge of the round table. His shoulder nearly touched hers. He wore a conservative suit of navy blue, probably the same one he’d worn at the Villa Borghese. His big, bony fingers struck the match and lit the cigarette that stuck from his mouth.
Iris liked the shape of his hand and the smell of strong Italian coffee and the proximity of his leg to hers. She loved his eyes, even though she wasn’t looking at them.
“Tell me about Spain,” she said.
“Spain? What about it?”
“Why did you go?”
He made a ribbon of smoke. “It was the thing to do, I guess. If you were a young fellow just out of college, impatient with injustice—”