His large pink face beaming, Harper Bryce waved to me from a table in the second row below the dais. Apologizing as I bumped my way through the clogged passageways between tables, I found my place at the last empty chair, right next to Harper. He was standing up, surveying the crowd.
“Full house,” he said. “Must be seven, eight hundred people.”
A jaundiced grin cut across his face. “First the funeral, now this.
Jeffries can really turn them out.”
I followed his eyes out across the ballroom, filled with well-dressed men and expensively dressed women, women with glittering smiles and bright-colored jewels. There was noise everywhere, glasses tinkling, shoes shuffling, chairs moving, and voices, hundreds of them, all talking at once, a deafening, unintelligible din, roaring in your ears like a thousand thoughts clam-oring for your undivided attention. Then, above it all, a sound at first like a flight of Canadian geese, then like a single blast from a fat schoolboy’s tuba. I turned around. Harper Bryce, his face buried in a white linen handkerchief, was blowing his nose.
“Every damn April,” he groused, a look of disgust on his face.
He folded the handkerchief and put it back in the breast pocket of his dark blue suit.
We were sitting at a table paid for by Harper’s newspaper. The publisher, Otto Rothstein, and his wife, Samantha, were seated on Harper’s left. Rothstein was short, stocky, with a thick neck, and hard, relentless eyes. He looked right at you when he talked, as if he were always trying to size you up. His wife was all legs and arms, with a concave chest and nothing at all where her hips should have been. She had large, mocking eyes, and the bored smile of a woman who could always think of a place she would rather be. When you were with her it was hard not to share her feeling.
The new editor of the paper, Archie Bailey, cheerful, unas-suming, and, according to Harper, one of the smartest newspa-permen he had ever met, was there with his wife, Rhoda, seven months pregnant with their first child. After I said hello to them both, I was introduced to an older, gray-haired man with a craggy forehead, heavy eyebrows, and a long, straight nose. Dark olive-colored skin stretched tight from his round cheekbones to his narrow, dimpled chin.
“Cesare Orsini,” Harper said, suddenly quite formal. As I leaned across the table and shook his soft, pliable hand, Harper added,
“Professor Orsini teaches at the University of Bologna. He’s the leading expert on Italian Renaissance literature. He’s here to give a series of lectures the paper is helping to sponsor.”
“Mr. Bryce overstates my qualification,” the professor remarked, an amused gleam in his eyes. “I’m just an old man who likes to read things written by people who died a long time ago. It makes me feel young.” His English was impeccable, with only a trace of an accent.
Next to Orsini was an attractive woman with quiet eyes and shoulder-length brown hair. She had the athletic look of someone who spent a lot of time on a golf course or a tennis court.
Lisa Laughlin, Harper explained, was the editor of the society page.
“It’s a great pleasure to meet you,” I said. There was something about her, something about the way she looked at me, that made me stop.
“It’s all right, Mr. Antonelli,” she said, laughing.
I tried to figure out why she was laughing, and I had the odd sense that it was something I should know.
“Joseph,” I said.
This only made her laugh more. “Joseph? Yes, of course,” she said as the laughter died away. “But, you see, Joseph, when I was thirteen and had a crush on you so bad it hurt, everyone called you Joe. Except my sister, who I hated, who called you Joey.”
I still did not know, and she took pity on my ignorance. “My maiden name was Frazier.”
I could have fallen through the floor. Suddenly I was eighteen again, with a butch haircut, two gray stripes on the sleeve of my red letterman sweater, wearing saddle shoes and peg pants, the captain of the high school football team, with a cocky smile but so pathetically self-conscious that I would not wear a short-sleeve shirt on the hottest day of the year because I thought I was skinny and that everyone would laugh. And then Jennifer Frazier, the best-looking girl in school, which meant the best-looking girl in the world, said she’d go out with me and I became a novitiate in the fine art of romantic failure.
I remembered it as if it had all just happened. We went to a party, and while everyone else ate and drank and talked, we stayed in the darkened corner of another room, dancing together as if the night was forever. She was tall and thin, with wide, almond-shaped eyes that changed color with the light, through several shades of brown, and, when everything was just right, to yellow.
She was gorgeous, and I was in love before I kissed her and doomed when I did. When I took her home, sometime after midnight, she lingered in my arms and with a bittersweet look I never forgot, told me that she would ask me to spend the night, but her mother wouldn’t like it. After Jennifer, I didn’t think I could ever fall in love again.
It took me a long time to get over Jennifer Frazier, and now that I was looking at her grown-up little sister and felt the blood rushing to my face and a surge of awkward embarrassment, I knew that I never really had.
“You were just a little kid,” I heard myself say. “A little kid with pigtails and rubber bands, braces on your teeth, a little, skinny kid who liked to play with frogs. You told me you hated boys.”
She smiled at me, and nodded. “And I haven’t changed a bit,”
she said. “And neither have you.”
Under the throbbing din, dozens of white-coated waiters, their eyes darting from large pewter-colored trays to the place on the table where they had to set the next dish, bustled around the cavernous room. At the end of a forgettable meal of lukewarm food, the dishes were removed and coffee was served.
Slowly tapping his fingers on the tablecloth, Professor Orsini seemed to be lost in thought. When he raised his eyes and found me watching, his cheeks flushed, as if he had been caught doing something he should not.
“I was just thinking about the Borgias,” he explained. His dark brown eyes sparkled and he began to gesture with his hands. “It has been said of them that they came into the world as a declaration of war against morality through incest and adultery.”
Everyone at the table stopped what they were doing. Orsini glanced from one to the other. “One of the Borgias became Pope, Alexander VI. His son, named, like myself, Cesare,” he remarked with a cunning smile, “was the one Machiavelli so much admired-or at least seemed to admire. Yes, yes, I know,” he said quickly. “It is unfortunate, but true. The Pope was not always so holy. He also had a daughter, Lucrezia, who was not so good, either.” With a sigh he opened his hands in a gesture of supplica-tion. “She had relations with several of her own family. Today, of course, the Borgias would be considered quite a dysfunctional family and no doubt required to undergo a lengthy process of psy-chological counseling. On the other hand, they did some truly amazing things. It is an interesting question, don’t you think, Mr.
Antonelli? I mean the connection, or perhaps I should say the tension, between conventional morality and the willingness to take great risks, to invent what Machiavelli called new modes and orders?”