A Woman Without a Country
I SAW HER that spring between the third and fourth races at Campino with the Conte de Capra—the one with the mustache—drinking Campari at that nice easygoing track, with the mountains in the distance and beyond the mountains a mass of cumulus clouds that at home would have meant a tree-splitting thunderstorm by supper but that amounts to nothing over there. I next saw her at the Tennerhof in Kitzbühel, where a Frenchman was singing American cowboy songs to an audience that included the Queen of the Netherlands, but I never saw her in the mountains, and I don’t think she skied, but just went there, like so many others, for the crowds and the excitement. Then I saw her at the Lido, and again in Venice late one morning when I was taking a gondola to the station and she was sitting on the terrace of the Gritti, drinking coffee. I saw her at the Passion Play in Erl—not at the Passion Play, actually, but at the inn in the village, where you have lunch during the intermission, and I saw her at the horse show in the Piazza di Siena, and that autumn in Treviso, boarding the plane for London. Blooey.
But it all might have happened. She was one of those tireless wanderers who go to bed night after night to dream of bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. Although she came from a small lumber-mill town in the north where they manufactured wooden spoons, the kind of lonely place where international society is spawned, this had nothing to do with her wanderings. Her father was the mill agent, and the mill was owned by the Tonkin family—they owned a great deal, they owned whole counties, and their divorce proceedings were followed by the tabloids—and young Marchand Tonkin, learning the business, spent a month there and fell in love with Anne. She was a plain girl with a sweet and modest disposition—qualities that she never lost—and they were married at the end of a year. Though immensely rich, the Tonkins were poor-mouthed, and the young couple lived modestly in a small town near New York where Marchand worked in the family office. They had one child and lived a contented and uneventful life until one humid morning in the seventh year of their marriage.
Marchand had a meeting in New York, and he had to catch an early train, He planned to have breakfast in the city. It was about seven when he kissed Anne goodbye. She had not dressed and was lying in bed when she heard him grinding the starter on the car that he used to take to the station. Then she heard the front door open and he called up the stairs. The car wouldn’t start, and could she drive him to the station in the Buick? There was no time to dress, so she drew a jacket over her shoulders and drove him to the station. What was visible of her was properly clad, but below the jacket her nightgown was transparent. Marchand kissed her goodbye and urged her to get some clothes on, and she drove away from the station, but at the junction of Alewives Lane and Hill Street she ran out of gas.
She was stopped in front of the Beardens’, and they would give her some gasoline, she knew, or at least lend her a coat. She blew the horn and blew it and blew it, until she remembered that the Beardens were in Nassau. All she could do then was to wait in the car, virtually naked, until some friendly housewife came by and offered her help. First, Mary Pym drove by, and although Anne waved to her, she did not seem to notice. Then Julia Weed raced by, rushing Francis to the train, but she was going too fast to notice anything. Then Jack Burden, the village rake, who, without being signaled to or appealed to in any way, seemed drawn magnetically to the car. He stopped and asked if he could help. She got into his car—what else could she do—thinking of Lady Godiva and St. Agnes. The worst of it was that she didn’t seem able to wake up—to accomplish the transition between the shades of sleep and the lights of day. And it was a lightless day, close and oppressive, like the climate of a harrowing dream. Their driveway was sheltered from the road by some shrubbery, and when she got out of the car and thanked Jack Burden, he followed her up the steps and took advantage of her in the hallway, where they were discovered by Marchand when he came back to get his briefcase.
Marchand left the house then, and Anne never saw him again. He died of a heart attack in a New York hotel ten days later. Her parents-in-law sued for the custody of the only child, and during the trial Anne made the mistake, in her innocence, of blaming her malfeasance on the humidity. The tabloids picked this up—“IT WASN’T ME, IT WAS THE HUMIDITY”—and it swept the country. There was a popular song, “Humid Isabella.” It seemed that everywhere she went she heard them singing:
Oh, Humid Isabella
Never kissed a fellah
Unless there was moisture in the air,
But when the skies were cloudy,
She got very rowdy …
In the middle of the trial she surrendered her claims, put on smoked glasses, and sailed incognito for Genoa, the outcast of a society that seemed to her to modify its invincible censoriousness only with a ribald sense of humor.
Of course, she had a boodle—her sufferings were only spiritual—but she had been burned, and her memories were bitter. From what she knew of life she was entitled to forgiveness, but she had received none, and her own country, remembered across the Atlantic, seemed to have passed on her a moral judgment that was unrealistic and savage. She had been made a scapegoat; she had been pilloried; and because she was genuinely pure-hearted she was deeply incensed. She based her expatriation not on cultural but on moral grounds. By impersonating a European she meant to express her disapproval of what had gone on at home. She drifted all over Europe, but she finally bought a villa in Tavola-Calda, and spent at least half the year there. She not only learned Italian, she learned all the grunting noises and hand signals that accompany the language. In the dentist’s chair she would say “aiiee” instead of “ouch,” and she could wave a hornet away from her wineglass with great finesse. She was proprietary about her expatriation—it was her demesne, achieved through uncommon sorrow—and it irritated her to hear other foreigners speaking the language. Her villa was charming—nightingales sang in the oak trees, fountains played in the garden, and she stood on the highest terrace, her hair dyed the shade of bronze that was fashionable in Rome that year, calling down to her guests, “Bentornati. Quanto piacere!” but the image was never quite right. It seemed like a reproduction, with the slight imperfections that you find in an enlargement—the loss of quality. The sense was that she was not so much here in Italy as that she was no longer there in America.
She spent much of her time in the company of people who, like herself, claimed to be the victims of an astringent and repressive moral climate. Their hearts were on the shipping lanes, running away from home. She paid for her mobility with some loneliness. The party of friends she was planning to meet in Wiesbaden moved on without leaving an address. She looked for them in Heidelberg and Munich, but she never found them. Wedding invitations and weather reports (“Snow Blankets the Northeast U.S.”) made her terribly homesick. She continued to polish her impersonation of a European, and while her accomplishments were admirable, she remained morbidly sensitive to criticism and detested being taken for a tourist. One day at the end of the season in Venice, she took a train south, reaching Rome late on a hot September afternoon. Most of the people of Rome were asleep, and the only sign of life was the tourist buses, grinding tirelessly through the streets like some basic piece of engineering—like the drains or the light conduits. She gave her luggage check to a porter and described her bags to him in fluent Italian, but he seemed to see through her and he mumbled something about the Americans. Oh, there were so many. This irritated her and she snapped at him, “I am not an American.”