When we left Gibraltar, the potted palms were retired again, the lines were put up, and the ship’s orchestra began to play. It remained rough and dreary. Brimmer was in the bar at half past twelve looking very absent-minded, and I suppose he missed Mme. Troyan. I didn’t see him again until after dinner, when he joined me in the bar. Something, sorrow I suppose, was on his mind, and when I began to talk about Nantucket (where we had both spent some summers) his immense reservoirs of courtesy seemed taxed. He excused himself and left; half an hour later I saw that he was drinking in the lounge with the mysterious businesswoman and her secretary.
It was the bartender who had first identified this couple as, a “Roman businesswoman” and her secretary. Then, when it appeared that she spoke a crude mixture of Spanish and Italian, the bartender decided that she was a Brazilian—although the purser told me that she was traveling on a Greek passport. The secretary was a hard-faced blonde, and the businesswoman was herself a figure of such astonishing unsavoriness—you might say evil—that no one spoke to her, not even the waiters. Her hair was dyed black, her eyes were made up to look like the eyes of a viper, her voice was guttural, and whatever her business was, it had stripped her of any appeal as a human being. These two were in the bar every night, drinking gin and speaking a jumble of languages. They were never with anyone else until Brimmer joined them that evening.
This new arrangement excited my deepest and my most natural disapproval. I was talking with the Southern family when, perhaps an hour later, the secretary strayed into the bar alone and ordered whiskey. She seemed so distraught that rather than entertain any obscene suspicions about Brimmer, I lit up the whole scene with an artificial optimism and talked intently with the Southerners about real estate. But when I went below I could tell that the businesswoman was in Brimmer’s cabin. They made quite a lot of noise, and at one point they seemed to fall out of bed. There was a loud thump. I could have knocked on the door—like Carrie Nation—ordering them to desist, but who would have seemed the most ridiculous?
But I could not sleep. It has been my experience, my observation, that the kind of personality that emerges from this sort of promiscuity embodies an especial degree of human failure. I say observation and experience because I would not want to accept the tenets of any other authority—any preconception that would diminish the feeling of life as a perilous moral adventure. It is difficult to be a man, I think; but the difficulties are not insuperable. Yet if we relax our vigilance for a moment we pay an exorbitant price. I have never seen such a relationship as that between Brimmer and the businesswoman that was not based on bitterness, irresolution, and cowardice—the very opposites of love—and any such indulgence on my part would, I was sure, turn my hair white in a moment, destroy the pigmentation in my eyes, incline me to simper, and leave a hairy tail coiled in my pants. I knew no one who had hit on such a way of life except as an expression of inadequacy—a shocking and repugnant unwillingness to cope with the generous forces of life. Brimmer was my friend and consequently enough of a man to make him deeply ashamed of what he was doing. And with this as my consolation I went to sleep.
He was in the bar at twelve-thirty the next day, but I did not speak to him. I drank my gin with a German businessman who had boarded the ship at Lisbon. It may have been because my German friend was dull that I kept scrutinizing Brimmer for some telling fault—insipidity or bitterness in his voice. But even the full weight of my prejudice, which was immense, could not project, as I would have liked, traces of his human failure. He was just the same. The businesswoman and her secretary rejoined one another after dinner, and Brimmer joined the Southern family, who were either so obtuse or so naive that they had seen nothing and had no objection to letting Brimmer dance with Sister and walk her around in the rain.
I DID NOT speak to him for the rest of the voyage. We docked at Naples at seven o’clock on a rainy morning, and when I had cleared customs and was leaving the port with my bags, Brimmer called to me. He was with a good-looking, leggy blonde who must have been twenty years younger than he, and he asked if they could drive me up to Rome. Why I accepted, why I arose with such agility over my massive disapproval, seems to have been, in retrospect, a dislike of loneliness. I did not want to take the train alone to Rome. I accepted their offer and drove with them to Rome, stopping in Terracina for lunch. They were driving up to Florence in the morning, and since this was my destination, I went on with them.
Considering Brimmer’s winning ways with animals and small children—they were all captivated—and his partiality (as I was to discover later) to the Franciscan forms of prayer, it might be worth recounting what happened that day when we turned off the road and drove up into Assisi for lunch. Portents mean nothing, but the truth is that when we begin a journey in Italy to a clap of thunder and a sky nearly black with swallows we pay more emotional attention to this spectacle than we would at home. The weather had been fair all that morning, but as we turned off toward Assisi a wind began to blow, and even before we reached the gates of the town the sky was dark. We had lunch at an inn near the duomo with a view of the valley and a good view of the storm as it came up the road and struck the holy city. It was darkness, wind, and rain of an unusual suddenness and density. There was an awning over the window where we sat and a palm tree in a garden below us, and while we ate our lunch we saw both the awning and the palm tree picked to pieces by the wind. When we finished lunch it was like night in the streets. A young brother let us into the duomo, but it was too dark to see the Cimabues. Then the brother took us to the sacristy and unlocked the door. The moment Brimmer entered that holy place the windows exploded under the force of the wind, and it was only by some kind of luck that we were not all cut to pieces by the glass that flew against the chest where the relics are stored. For the moment or two that the door was opened, the wind ranged through the church, extinguishing every candle in the place, and it took Brimmer and me and the brother, all pulling, to get the door shut again. Then the brother hurried off for help, and we climbed to the upper church. As we drove out of Assisi the wind fell, and looking back I saw the clouds pass over the town and the place fill up and shine with the light of day.
WE SAID GOODBYE in Florence and I did not see Brimmer again. It was the leggy blonde who wrote to me in July or August, when I had returned to the United States and our farm in New Hampshire. She wrote from a hospital in Zurich, and the letter had been forwarded from my address in Florence. “Poor Brimmer is dying,” she wrote. “And if you could get up here to see him I know it would make him very happy. He often speaks of you, and I know you were one of his best friends. I am enclosing some papers that might interest you since you are a writer. The doctors do not think he can live another week….” To refer to me as a friend exposed what must have been the immensity of his loneliness; and it seemed all along that I had known he was going to die, that his promiscuity was a relationship not to life but to death. That was in the afternoon—it was four or five—the light glancing, and that gratifying stillness in the air that falls over the back country with the earliest signs of night. I didn’t tell my wife. Why should I? She never knew Brimmer and why introduce death into such a tranquil scene? What I remember feeling was gladness. The letter was six weeks old. He would be dead.