The streets were warm and wet with rain, so recently departed that the eaves dripped on Iris’s hair and shoulders and speckled her dress. As if she cared! She dodged around pedestrians and raindrops, hurried down streets and around corners, crossed the Tiber as twilight settled over the domes and rooftops of Rome. She reached Sasha’s apartment in record time, not quite half an hour, shivering a little from the evening breeze on her wet skin.
Iris loved the street where Sasha lived. It was one of those quiet, ancient side streets you sometimes found in Rome, tucked around the corner from some grand boulevard packed with shops and achingly fashionable shoppers. She loved the damp, sleepy air and the trees and especially the buildings, tall and pale and curiously austere, so that you couldn’t help but imagine what rich woods and frescoed walls existed inside. The first time Sasha unlocked the heavy, iron-barred door and ushered Iris into the vestibule and the courtyard beyond it, she thought she had never been so enchanted. She told Sasha it was like a secret garden, a fairy palace. In the late evening when they returned from Tivoli, she and Sasha had tangled together in the shadows beneath an orange tree. Iris had fallen asleep and Sasha woke her sometime during the night to carry her upstairs. The memory hurt her ribs. She actually pressed her hand there, at the intersection of bone, as she pressed the button next to his name on the brass plate. She waited for a minute before she pressed it again, although she knew he wasn’t there. Of course not. He’d be working at the embassy, working through the night, sleeping on the sofa. Nobody in the entire consulate worked harder than Sasha Digby, Harry told them. This used to make her so proud.
She rang the bell a third time and looked up and down the street. Night had arrived, everything was dark. A streetlamp gleamed against the wet cobblestones. Iris opened her pocketbook and pulled out one of the pages she’d rescued yesterday, a sketch of the fa?ade of the Pantheon, ripped at a careless diagonal across the top. She turned it over and wrote a note to Sasha, which she folded twice into a small square and slipped into the letterbox.
When she returned home, Harry had gone, and Ruth was cleaning the dishes in her kimono. Iris stood in the kitchen doorway and said, “So what did you tell Harry?”
A cigarette dangled from the corner of Ruth’s mouth. She didn’t trouble to remove it, or even to turn in Iris’s direction. “I’m not a snitch, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said, and those were the last words either of them spoke to each other for three whole days.
The next day, Ruth started packing up the apartment.
She dragged the steamer trunks from their duty as sofa tables and opened them up. She sorted through clothes and books—discarded the unwanted into a pile she took to the convent around the corner. Everything that didn’t belong exclusively to Iris got packed or given away. Harry took all the wine and gin and mixers; the Sisters of the Sacred Heart took all the rest. Ruth was ruthless. She was a virago of organization. While Iris reclined on the sofa—which, like the rest of the furniture, came with the apartment—and leafed through a magazine, Ruth marched from cupboard to drawer, kitchen to bathroom, and emptied every sign of their habitation.
The day after that, she cleaned.
Binding her head in a matronly scarf, Ruth put on her oldest dress and set to work with mop and brush and buckets full of soapy water. Iris watched her in amazement. Because they weren’t talking to each other, she couldn’t ask what had brought on this fit of domesticity. Was Ruth trying to scour the floorboards or something more elusive? All this ferocious hygiene, what did it mean? Ruth scrubbed silently on. The apartment took on the smell of lemons and vinegar. The radio scratched away on its shelf. At some point, Ruth stopped midstroke and lifted her head to listen. Iris folded up the magazine and walked to the radio, where she turned up the volume dial. A familiar Italian voice shouted into the bare, acidic stillness of the living room. Every time it paused for breath, some crowd roared to fill the void. To Iris’s ears, it was a joyless roar. You’d have thought those Fascists would be ecstatic to go to war against the plutocrats, but they weren’t. Something was missing. It was the roar of patriotic duty, not fervor. Iris thought of the two men in black shirts the other day and wondered if their voices made up some tiny part of that noise. She turned to the window and shut it, even though they couldn’t actually hear the crowd from here. Mussolini would be speaking from a balcony in the Palazzo Venezia, which was over a mile away and thankfully out of earshot.
The next day, Iris woke to the sound of Ruth rattling around the kitchen cabinets. She opened the shutters to the gray, warm sky, but the morning air didn’t revive her. The same sick despair clung to the organs in her middle. The same ache inside her chest.
Iris put on her dressing gown and wandered into the living room. She checked the front door—no folded note, no envelope pushed under the crack. Of course not. She turned her head to hear the noise from the open doorway to the kitchen, where Ruth seemed to be making coffee, by the clink of the percolator lid.
All around her, the apartment was bare. Ruth’s steamer trunk sat in the middle of the floor. Iris’s trunk sat against the wall next to her room, waiting to be filled. Today was the eleventh of June, and the SS Antigone departed from the pier in Civitavecchia at noon tomorrow.
Iris walked to the kitchen and stopped in the doorway. Ruth was slicing bread for toast and didn’t turn. The percolator made comforting noises nearby.
“Well?” said Ruth. “Out with it.”
“I was wondering if anyone’s called for me. Any letters or notes or anything.”
Ruth laid down the knife and turned her head. Her face was unexpectedly soft and full of sympathy.
“I’m sorry, pumpkin. Not that I know of.”
Iris nodded and walked toward her bedroom. She took hold of the handle of the steamer trunk and dragged it inside. She made her bed neatly and didn’t think about the April day when she slept with a man for the first time on this bed and decided she was in love. She figured it was best not to think about these things as you packed your clothes and shoes and your dear little objects, preparing to leave that man a few thousand miles behind you. There would be other men. Ruth seemed to flit from beau to beau without any travails of the heart. Iris folded her underthings into a bundle and imagined having sexual intercourse with a man who was not Sasha Digby. But this man continued stubbornly to be long and lanky, and his gold hair kept falling in his face as he made love to her. At least that face was blank. No eyes, no nose or mouth or chin—just a peculiar, blurred void that no amount of determined imagination could sketch in.
Harry took them out for a farewell dinner at their favorite restaurant. Ruth had insisted; Iris said she would rather not, but since she couldn’t come up with a plausible excuse, other than fatigue—the truth was, they had eaten here with Sasha once—off they went in their best dresses.
Harry wasn’t the most observant of men, and to be fair he’d been deeply distracted those past weeks, so it wasn’t until dessert that he noticed Iris hadn’t been saying much.
“Oh, our pumpkin’s got the blues, that’s all,” Ruth said.
“Aw, poor Iris. You’ll forget all about the bastard when you get home, believe me.”
Iris looked at Ruth. Ruth shrugged her shoulders.
“Don’t be silly,” Iris said. “I’m just tired, that’s all. I’ve been packing all day. I’ve forgotten about him already.”
Harry raised his glass. “Good for you. Take my advice, go home and find a nice American kid to fall in love with. You can’t trust these Italians anyway. Right, Ruthie?”
Ruth clinked her class against Harry’s. “Don’t I know it.”
“Too bad neither of you hit it off with Digby,” said Harry, lighting a cigarette. “I tried to lure him along tonight. No use.”
“Oh? What did he say?” Iris asked.
“Too busy, he said. Poor bastard’s been working night and day. Catches a few winks on the sofa and he’s back at his desk. I don’t know what they’ve got him doing, but it’s just about killing him.”