I take my time examining them, these nephews and niece I’ve never met. Iris’s kids. Their features are blurred, as if the photographer moved his hand at the exact instant of the shutter’s opening. Still, you can gather in the grosser details. Their hair glimmers in various states of blondness, like their father, and their neat, old-fashioned clothes are exactly the kind of uniform I imagine Iris would dress them in.
My finger touches the small, glossy rectangle and traces the outline of a face, a tiny ear, a smear of hair so blond it might be white. A hand that clutches the fingers of the little boy who stands next to her, whose face seems to have been caught in the act of turning toward her to say something. A smocked dress that comes just to her knees, and the plump little knees themselves, and the white socks with the ruffle and the black Mary Jane shoes, like the ones I used to wear when I was small.
My niece. And I don’t even know her name. I didn’t even know she existed. She would have been born in Moscow, I guess, after they defected.
As for the boy who holds her hand—the oldest of them, the tallest. This would be their firstborn, the son they conceived in the first mad dash of infatuation. I always knew he’d be the spit of his father, and I believe I’m right. You can see it in the outline of him, the way he stands, the hint of a strong brow, the probable blue eyes. Aunt Vivian told me they named him after Sasha, but you can’t address a young boy as Cornelius Alexander, so they call him Kip—or did. A mere tiny, secret bud in his mother’s womb when I last saw Iris—desperately in love, her whole heart stolen so that not a single piece of it remained to forgive me, her sister.
I lie in bed for a bit, staring at the ceiling, while the early summer dawn colors the air. Until I realize I’m not going to fall asleep, not now. I rise and pad down the gray hallway to the foyer, where my pocketbook lies on the hall table on which I tossed it a few hours ago.
I open up the pocketbook and rattle around in there until I discover what I’m looking for—not the postcard or the tissue-thin airmail envelope, but the small, rectangular ecru card with the raised black type that said simply c. sumner fox, and beneath it a telephone number from a Washington exchange. Underneath that, in precise letters, Fox had written Empire Hotel, room 808.
I carry the card to the telephone in the kitchen and lift the receiver. At twenty-six minutes past five o’clock, I dial up the Empire Hotel and ask the switchboard operator for room 808.
He answers on the second ring. “Fox,” he says, like a voice you hear on the radio.
“Mr. Fox, it’s Ruth Macallister. I’m so sorry to bother you at such a disagreeable hour.”
“Not at all. Is something the matter?”
“Not as such. It’s just that I’ve got a little confession to make.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he says.
Iris
May 1940
Rome, Italy
The first thing Harry did when he got his posting to Rome, he bought a three-year-old Ford Cabriolet convertible cheap from some young widow in Hemel Hempstead and had it shipped across the ocean. The car had belonged to her husband before he’d succumbed to sepsis acquired from a mosquito bite—just like President Coolidge’s poor son, except that was a blister—and Iris thought the deceased must have been an interesting fellow, because the car was bright red like a candy apple and had an engine Harry described as souped up. Iris wasn’t sure of the particulars, but souped up apparently meant loud and fast, such that you couldn’t fail to notice this machine, whether it was parked along the street or zipping past you on some highway. It was a swell car, all right.
Iris loved going for drives in Harry’s convertible. She loved the wind in her hair and the sensation of speed, and the snug, fateful feeling of hurtling down some stretch of highway in a vehicle beyond your control. She loved it more than ever now that Sasha was at the wheel, and she sat next to him, and somewhere ahead lay a crumbling house on a sunbaked hillside where she and Sasha would spend the weekend.
If she had to confess, Iris would’ve told you that she rather enjoyed carrying on a secret love affair right beneath Ruth’s sharp, perfect nose. (Iris’s nose was decidedly snub, although Sasha called it adorable.) The secret was part of the fun! They’d go out to dinner, for example, the four of them, and Iris and Sasha would carry on a little flirtation of the feet under the table; or else Sasha’s hand would slide underneath her dress, and Iris had to keep her face absolutely straight while he fondled her right there in the restaurant in front of everybody, while Harry told some story about the Swiss consul. Or they’d meet at some diplomatic party—those officials and their wives, all they ever did was meet and drink—and Sasha would flirt outrageously with some woman on one side of the room, to keep up appearances, while Iris did her best to flirt with someone on the other side, until by some prearranged signal they’d steal out separately to meet in the fragrant, darkened corner of a courtyard or a hallway and kiss the daylights out of each other, or worse. Or they’d bump into each other quite by accident in the Vatican museum, say, or the ruins of the ancient Roman agora, or even the Villa Borghese again, and experience all the riches of Western civilization, which they later discussed over coffee or lunch or the pillow of Sasha’s bed.
Best of all were the times when Sasha rang the telephone around eleven o’clock in the morning and asked whether the coast was clear, and Iris would say yea or nay, depending on the proximity of Ruth. If yea, then Sasha arrived in a taxi fifteen minutes later, and they spent the next hour or two in bed, or on the sofa, or really anywhere a person wearing a plaster cast on her leg can have sexual intercourse with another person without discomfort or outright injury. Iris learned to speak up boldly and ask for a pillow or a change of position or a load off, for God’s sake. Sasha always complied. He was terribly considerate, if also insatiable. After the first hasty bout, he liked to stalk naked around the apartment, mixing drinks for both of them, while Iris lay back and watched him happily. She told him he was like a cat, always prowling except when he was sleeping. He’d drink a couple of gin and tonics, maybe three if he was especially thirsty, while they talked about everything, the state of the world, capitalism, communism, Spain, East Hampton, Schuylers and van der Wahls and Digbys, where they would go on holiday.
In fact, that was how they devised this weekend—Sasha lifted his head from the pillow one afternoon and announced he wasn’t just going to hang around his apartment with Iris from Friday to Sunday, or run the risk of bumping into somebody should they venture outside. He had a friend who had a villa in Tivoli, he told her on the twenty-second of April—a friend willing to let Sasha spend the weekend there with whomever he pleased. Nobody at the embassy would know. He could borrow Harry’s car without raising any suspicions, because so far as her siblings would know, Iris had already gone off on her drawing holiday with some friends from the American Academy in Rome. Why, it was airtight! Not even Agatha Christie could have devised a better plan.
Even the weather conspired with them. Seven consecutive days of rain dampened Iris’s spirits in the last week of April, but when she walked out of the doctor’s office on the second of May a free woman, except for a cane, which was really rather stylish, the clouds parted and the sun poured down, and Iris spread out her arms and knew that everything would work out perfectly.
The next day, a Friday, she packed a small valise with sundresses and toothbrush and Pond’s cream and said good-bye to Ruth. Ruth stopped her at the door and asked if she was forgetting something?
“No, I don’t think so. What am I missing?”
Ruth made a cynical smile and nodded to the desk in the corner. “Your sketchbook and charcoals, maybe?”
The cynical smile worried Iris all the way over to Sasha’s apartment on Via Terrenzio, near the Vatican. She let herself in with the key he’d loaned her and fretted until he met her at the small trattoria around the corner for dinner at half past seven.