Georgie moistened the boy’s lips with some water, and Bibber regained consciousness long enough to throw his arms around his father. The pathos of seeing the burden of grave illness on someone so innocent and so young made Georgie cry. There was a tumultuous power of love in that small room, and he had to subdue his feelings lest he harm the boy with the force of his embrace. They clung to one another. Then Georgie called the doctor. He called ten times, and each time he heard the idiotic and frustrating busy signal. Then he called the hospital and asked for an ambulance. He wrapped the boy in a blanket and carried him down the stairs, enormously grateful to have this much to do. The ambulance was there in a few minutes.
Jill had stopped long enough to have a drink with one of her assistants, and came in a half hour later. “Hail the conquering hero!” she called as she stepped into the empty house. “We shall have our hearing, and the scurvy rascals are on the run. Even Felici appeared to be moved by my eloquence, and Carter said that I should have been an advocate. I was simply stupendous.”
ITEM: “INTL PD FLORENCE VIA RCA 22 23 9:35 AMELIA FAXON CHIDCHESTER CARE AMEXCO: BIBBER DIED OF PNEUMONIA ON THURSDAY. CAN YOU RETURN OR MAY I COME TO YOU LOVE JILL”
Amelia Faxon Chidchester was staying with her old friend Louisa Trefaldi, in Fiesole. She bicycled down into Florence late in the afternoon of the twenty-third of January. Her bicycle was an old, high-seated Dutheil, and it elevated her a little above the small cars. She bumped imperturbably through some of the worst traffic in the world. Her life was threatened every few minutes by a Vespa or a trolley, but she yielded to no one, and the look on her ruddy face was serene. Elevated, moving with that somnambulistic pace of a cyclist, smiling gently at the death that menaced her at every intersection, she looked a little supernatural, and it may have been that she thought she was. Her smile was sweet, inscrutable, and adamantine, and you felt that, had she been knocked off her bicycle, this expression, as she sailed through the air, would not lose its patience. She pumped over a bridge, dismounted gracefully, and walked along the river to the American Express office. Here she barked out her greetings in Italian, anxious to disassociate herself from the horseless American cowboys and above all from her own kind, the truly lost and unwanted, who move like leaves around the edges of the world, gathering only long enough to wait in line and see if there is any mail. The place was crowded, and she read her tragic cable in the middle of the crowd. You could not, from her expression, have guessed its content. She sighed deeply and raised her face. She seemed ennobled. She wrote her reply at once: “NON POSSO TORNARE TANTT BACI FERVIDI. MELEE.”
“Dearest darling,” she wrote that evening. “I was frightfully sorry to have your tragic news. I can only thank God that I didn’t know him better, but my experience in these matters is rather extensive, and I have come to a time of life when I do not especially like to dwell upon the subject of passing away. There is no street I walk on, no building or painting I see here that doesn’t remind me of Berenson, dear Berenson. The last time I saw him, I sat at his feet and asked if he had a magic carpet what picture in the whole wide world would he ask to be transported to. Without a moment’s hesitation he chose the Raphael Madonna in The Hermitage. It is not possible for me to return. The truth will out, and the truth is that I don’t like my own countrymen. As for your coming over, I am now staying with dear Louisa and, as you know, with her two is company, three is a crowd. Perhaps in the autumn, when your loss is not so painful, we might meet in Paris for a few days and revisit some of our old haunts.”
GEORGIE WAS CRUSHED by the death of his son. He blamed Jill, which was cruel and unreasonable, and it seemed, in the end, that he could be both. Jill went to Reno at his request and got a consent decree. It was all made by Georgie to seem like a punishment. Later on she got a job with a textbook publishing firm in Cleveland. Her acumen and her charm were swiftly recognized and she was very successful, but she didn’t marry again, or hadn’t married when I last had any news. The last I heard was from Georgie, who telephoned one night and said that we must get together for lunch. It was about eleven. I think he was drunk. He hadn’t married again either, and from the bitterness with which he spoke of women that night I guessed that he never would. He told me about Jill’s job in Cleveland and said that Mrs. Chidchester was bicycling across Scotland. I thought then how inferior he was to Jill, how immature. When I agreed to call him about lunch he gave me his telephone number at the shipyard, his extension there, the telephone number of his apartment, the telephone number of a cottage he had in Connecticut, and the telephone number of the club where he lunched and played cards. I wrote all these numbers on a piece of paper and when we said goodbye I dropped the paper into a wastebasket.
Metamorphoses
LARRY ACTAEON WAS BUILT along classical lines: curly hair, a triangulated nose, and a large and supple body, and he had what might be described as a Periclean interest in innovation. He designed his own sailboat (it had a list to port), ran for mayor (he was defeated), bred a Finnish wolf bitch to a German shepherd dog (the American Kennel Club refused to list the breed), and organized a drag hunt in Bullet Park, where he lived with his charming wife and three children. He was a partner in the investment-banking firm of Lothard and Williams, where he was esteemed for his shrewd and boisterous disposition.
Lothard and Williams was a highly conservative shop with an unmatched reputation for probity, but it was unconventional in one respect. One of the partners was a woman. This was a widow named Mrs. Vuiton. Her husband had been a senior partner, and when he died she had asked to be taken into the firm. In her favor were her intelligence, her beauty, and the fact that, had she withdrawn her husband’s interest from the partnership, it would have been missed. Lothard, the most conservative of them all, supported her candidacy, and she was taken in. Her intellect was formidable, and was fortified by her formidable and immaculate beauty. She was a stunning woman, in her middle thirties, and brought more than her share of business to the firm. Larry didn’t dislike her—he didn’t quite dare to—but that her good looks and her musical voice were more effective in banking than his own shrewd and boisterous manner made him at least uneasy.
The partners in Lothard and Williams—they were seven—had their private offices arranged around the central offices of Mr. Lothard. They had the usual old-fashioned appurtenances—walnut desks, portraits of dead partners, dark walls and carpets. The six male partners all wore watch chains, stickpins, and high-crowned hats. Larry sat one afternoon in this atmosphere of calculated gloom, weighing the problems of a long-term bond issue that was in the house and having a slow sale, and suddenly it crossed his mind that they might unload the entire issue on a pension-fund customer. Moved by his enthusiasm, his boisterousness, he strode through Mr. Lothard’s outer office and impetuously opened the inner door. There was Mrs. Vuiton, wearing nothing but a string of beads. Mr. Lothard was at her side wearing a wristwatch. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry!” Larry said, and he closed the door and returned to his own desk.