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“Was your wife beautiful?”

“Oh, she was very beautiful.”

“You Americans are so self-indulgent about grief. How long has she been dead?”

“Six weeks.”

“Last week you said three.”

“You can see for yourself, I’ve lost all sense of time.”

“Well now, you’ve got to get back on your feet. There are times when you have to cut—cut your losses. What’s the expression? Spin the thing off. I’ve got some good brandy in my room. Come have a drink when the boy is asleep. You have to share a double bed with him, don’t you?”

“They’re trying to find us two singles.”

“Isn’t he restless? Children kick a lot.”

“He’s a quiet sleeper. I can’t sleep anyway. I lie there reading.”

“We can find you something better than that to do at night,” she said. “What’s the use of brooding. She’s gone.”

She was certainly gone. That was fully confirmed now. She had written me from Sicily. On Saturday, only yesterday, when I stopped at the Ritz to ask for mail, I was given her letter. This was why I was not at my best on Sunday; I’d been up all night studying Renata’s words. If I couldn’t attend very closely to Miss Rebecca Volsted, this furiously white limping woman, it was because I was suffering. I might almost have wished that Roger weren’t such a good child. He did not even kick in his sleep. He gave me no headaches. He was a dear little boy.

Renata and Flonzaley had gotten married in Milan and they were honeymooning in Sicily. I suppose they went to Taormina. She didn’t specify. She wrote, “You are the best person to leave Roger with. You’ve proved often that you love him for his own sake and never used him to get at me. Mother is too busy to look after him. You don’t think so now, but you’ll get over this and remain a good friend. You’ll be sore and bitter and call me a scheming dirty cunt—that’s how you talk when you’re burned up. But you’ve got justice in your heart, Charles. You owe me something and you know it. You had your chance to do right by me. You missed it! Oh, you missed it! I couldn’t get you started doing right!” Renata burst into mourning. I had spoiled it. “The role you got me into was the palooka role. I was your marvelous sex-clown. You had me cooking dinner in a top hat, and my behind bare.” Not so, not so, that was her own idea. “I was a good sport and let you have your fun. I enjoyed myself, too. I didn’t deny you anything. You denied me plenty, though. You wouldn’t remember that I was the mother of a boy. You showed me off in London as your spectacular lay from Chicago, that Toddling town. The Chancellor of the Exchequer gave me a private feel. He did, the bastard. I let it pass because of the former greatness of Britain. But he wouldn’t have done it if I had been your wife. You put me in the whore position. I don’t think you have to be a professor of anatomy to connect the ass with the heart. If you had acted as though I had a heart in my breast just like your distinguished highness the Chevalier Citrine, we might have made it. Ah Charlie, I’ll never forget how you smuggled Cuban cigars for me from Montreal. You put Cyrus the Great bands on them. You were kind and funny. I believed you when you said that a peculiar foot needed a peculiar shoe and that we were shoe and foot, foot and shoe together. Why, if you had only thought the obvious thing, ‘This is a kid who grew up in hotel lobbies, and her mother never was married,’ you would have married me in every city hall and church in America and given me some protection, finally. This Rudolf Steiner you’ve been driving me crazy with says, I think, that if you’re a man this time, you’ll be reincarnated as a woman, and that the ether body (not that I’m sure what an ether body is; it’s the vital part that makes the body live, isn’t it?) is always of the other sex. But if you’re going to be a woman in your next life, you’ve got a lot to learn in between. I’ll tell you something anyway. Many a woman would admit, if she was honest, that what she’d really adore is a man made up of many men, a composite lover