That was Saturday afternoon at his place. By Sunday afternoon at five o’clock, I’m safely belted into my seat on the Pan Am Strato Clipper transatlantic service, scheduled to stop in Boston before continuing across the ocean to Paris and then to Rome. On my lap, the Sunday paper features a photograph of our party at the Palmetto Club on the front of the society page, in which Miss Barbara Kingsley is singled out as “the up-and-coming model in New York these days.” I fed that caption myself to my old pal Joan on the social beat, and it gives me immense satisfaction—it always does—to see my words repeated back to me in sincere black and white.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been inside one of those new double-decker Boeing Stratocruisers, but I can’t recommend them enough. For one thing, they’re fast. We lift off from Idlewild bang on schedule at five p.m., and an hour later we descend from a thin layer of clouds to land in Boston to take on a few more passengers. You hardly even notice the change in altitude because they pressurize the cabin to sea level, and the noise of those four giant Pratt & Whitney propeller engines is no more than a droning annoyance. We land with scarcely a bump and roll to a magnificent stop near the terminal. The seating’s all first class, as it should be, and I paid extra for one of those sleeping berths up front, since we won’t land in Paris until the following afternoon and God knows I need a few decent hours of shut-eye. I settle back in my seat and peer idly out the window at the five passengers preparing to board. There’s a young couple that looks as if they’re headed on their honeymoon, bless them, all pink and bright the way you set off on adventures when you’re just a baby. A couple of dour businessmen in pin-striped suits and fedoras, not entering into the spirit of things at all. A grand dame speaks in an animated way to the head stewardess, telling her exactly how to do her job.
They find their seats—the stewardess bolts the door. The propellers whine, the airplane trundles back to the runway. It’s nearly seven o’clock in the evening and the sun is a molten pool to the west. I light a cigarette and stare out the window at America as it falls away below me. God only knows when I’ll see it again.
I haven’t returned to Rome in twelve years, not since I sailed away on that terrible day in June of 1940. The good ship Antigone was packed with desperate Americans and I had to share my second-class berth with a middle-aged artistic type of woman whose summer tour of Italy’s Renaissance treasures had been cut short almost before it began. I remember she was indignant about it all, as if she’d traveled to Italy that spring with no expectation whatsoever that her travels might be interrupted by a thing so inconvenient as war. In fact, she hadn’t wanted to go home at all—she’d kicked up a real fuss, she claimed proudly—but since the Italians were putting all the great paintings in storage and boarding up the museums, there was no point but to capitulate as rapidly as the French had. I found her complaints strangely soothing. She was one of those people who was happy to talk about herself and her troubles to a complete stranger and expected nothing more of you than the occasional sympathetic noise. She said she would go back just as soon as this awful business was over. Sometimes she asked about me, and what I was doing in Italy, and I made up extravagant lies about a love affair with a Russian émigré, a jealous Italian wife, some extremely valuable jewelry, a discreet apartment decorated in beautifully preserved Carracci frescoes, all of which she drank up like punch. When we docked in New York she insisted on exchanging addresses. I’m afraid I never answered her letter.
Dinner is catered by Maxim’s of Paris and lasts seven courses. I’m able to sleep a good six hours in my berth before being awakened by the happy, muffled cadence of the honeymooners consummating their union in the berth below, the darlings. I put on my robe and grope my way through the dimmed corridor to the ladies’ dressing room. When I return and part the curtains to peer through the little window, the first gray-green streaks of dawn have appeared on the vast dome of sky outside, and I think what a miracle it is that this disappearing sun should reappear so soon, and how clever of man to rush east to meet it. Then I suppose I fall asleep, because I wake to a series of hard bumps, followed by the sensation of falling, like you feel on the downslope of a roller coaster. I sit up in my berth. The heavy drone of the engines continues without interruption. Another hard bump nearly sends me flying. Somebody screams. I hear the stewardesses hurrying down the aisle, hushing everybody with nice calm melodious phrases. One of them attends to us nervous souls in the sleeping area, sticking our little heads out between the curtains, all panicky.
“Is something the matter?” asks a woman across the aisle with the voice of Brünhilde. I believe it’s the grande dame who boarded in Boston, all bosom and quivering neck—the one who will probably help pass out the life vests and prop up morale with her steadfast refusal to give her heirs the satisfaction of her passing.
“Just a little bumpy air, ma’am!” chirps the stew. “But I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to return to your seat and fasten the belt.”
Everybody groans—we’ve paid extra for the berths, damn it, and I imagine those honeymooners were counting on another hour or two before breakfast is served—but we put on our slippers and trudge obediently to our seats.
The next hour is almost the most harrowing of my life. We pass through a storm, one of those North Atlantic gales, and I imagine the wind will surely rip the engines from the wings—will rip the wings from the fuselage. The man sitting next to me just turns the pages of his newspaper, utterly unconcerned. At one point, when the stews come through to pass out chewing gum and ginger ale—I take both—he asks me if I’m a nervous flier.
“Not usually, but I’ve never flown through weather like this.”
“Don’t worry,” he replies. “The pilots are highly trained, and the airplane itself has endured numerous tests in weather far worse than this.”
He’s what you might call an ordinary man, so very ordinary that you wouldn’t even notice him unless he spoke to you. Five foot eight, dark, neatly trimmed hair, unexceptional suit, unexceptional face—you know the type I mean. He seems to affect a trace of an accent, but I can’t place it and don’t want to be so awkward as to ask. We exchange a few more observations. He asks if I’m flying for business or pleasure, and I tell him pleasure. I say I’m visiting a friend in Rome and turn back to the window. When we land in Paris, he takes his briefcase from the luggage cabinet above our heads, tips his hat, and wishes me a pleasant stay in Italy, and I think no more about him. I don’t think I could even recognize his face if you showed me a picture of it.