XXXI Rich Tastes

I moved away from the chatter to the French windows. They stood open so that guests could pass through the heavy drapes to stand on a small balcony. Lake Michigan lay in front of me, a black hole in the fabric of the night, visible only as a blot between the winking lights of airplanes heading for O’Hare and headlights of cars on the road below. I shivered.

“Are you cold, Signora Warshawski? You shouldn’t linger in the night air.” Bertrand Rossy had come through the window behind me.

I turned. “I don’t often have the chance to see the view this clearly.”

“Since I’ve been remiss in attending to my guests, I can scarcely chide you for avoiding them, as well, but I hope you will join us now.” He held the curtain for me, giving me no choice really except to return to the gathering.

“Irina,” he called in English to a woman in a traditional maid’s uniform, “Signora Warshawski needs a glass of wine.”

“I gather you spent the day saving millions of dollars for your shareholders,” I said, also switching to English. “That must have been very gratifying, having the legislature support you so quickly.”

He laughed, his dimples showing. “Oh, I was there only as an observer. I was most impressed with Preston Janoff, most impressed. He is quite cool under attack.”

“An eleven-to-two vote in committee sounds like the attack of the tabby cats.”

He laughed again. “Attack of the tabby cats! What an original way you have of expressing yourself.”

“What is it, caro?” Fillida Rossy, who had come to me herself with a glass of wine, took her husband’s arm. “What is making you laugh so gaily?”

Rossy repeated my remark; Fillida smiled sweetly and echoed it again in English. “I must remember that. An attack of the tabby cats. Who were they attacking?”

I felt remarkably foolish and gulped my wine as Rossy explained the legislature’s vote.

“Ah, yes, you told me when you got in. How clever of you to know firsthand about these legislative matters, signora. I must wait for Bertrand’s reports.” She straightened his tie. “Darling, this lightning bolt is so bold, don’t you think?”

“How did you know the vote so exactly?” Rossy asked. “By more divination?”

“I saw the news in Janoff’s conference room. About other things I’m woefully ignorant.”

“Such as?” He pressed his wife’s fingers, an assurance that she was the real center of his attention.

“Such as why Louis Durham would need to meet with you at home after the vote. I didn’t think he and Ajax ’s senior staff were on such cozy terms. Or why that mattered to Joseph Posner.”

Fillida turned to me. “You are indeed an indovina, signora. I laughed when Bertrand said you had read his palm, but this is remarkable, that you know so much of our private business.”

Her voice was soft, uncritical, but under her poised, remote gaze I felt embarrassed. I had imagined this as a bold stroke; now it seemed merely crude.

Rossy spread his hands. “Life in Chicago is not so different after all from Bern and Zurich: here as there it seems that the personal touch with city governors is helpful in the smooth running of the company. As to Mr. Posner-one understands his disappointment after today’s vote.” He clasped my shoulder lightly, as Laura Bugatti, the attaché’s wife, joined us. “Allora. Why do we discuss matters which no one else understands?”

Before I could respond, two children of about five and six came in under the watchful eye of a woman in a grey nurse’s uniform. They were both very blond, the girl with a thick mane of hair down her back. They were dressed for bed in nightwear that had kept a team of embroiderers busy for a month. Fillida bent over to kiss them good night and to instruct them to say good night to Zia Laura and Zia Janet. Zia Laura was the attaché’s wife, Zia Janet the American novelist. Both came to kiss the children while Fillida smoothed her daughter’s long hair around her shoulders.

“Giulietta,” she said to the nanny, “we must put a rosemary rinse in Marguerita’s hair; it’s too coarse after a day in these Chicago winds.”

Bertrand scooped his daughter up to carry her off to bed. Fillida folded down the collar of her son’s pajama top and handed him to the nurse. “I will be in later, my darlings, but I must feed our guests or they will soon faint from hunger. Irina,” she added to the maid in the same soft voice, “I want to serve now.”

She asked Signor Bugatti to escort me in, giving his wife to the Swiss banker. On our way across the hall to the paneled dining room I stopped to admire an old grandfather clock, whose face showed the solar system. It struck nine as I was watching, and the sun and planets began revolving around the earth.

“Enchanting, isn’t it?” Signor Bugatti said. “Fillida has exquisite taste.”

If the paintings and little bits of sculpture lining the rooms were hers, she not only had exquisite taste but plenty of money to indulge it. She had a whimsical side, too: next to a child’s painting of the ocean she had placed snapshots of her children at the beach.

Laura exclaimed over it. “Oh, look, here’s your little Paolo at Samos last summer. He’s adorable! Are you letting him swim in Lake Michigan?”

“Please,” Fillida said, putting up a hand to adjust the photograph of her son. “He longs to go in. Don’t suggest it-the pollution!”

“Anyone who can brave the Adriatic can tolerate Lake Michigan,” the banker said, and everyone laughed. “Do you agree, Signora Warshawski?”

I smiled. “I often swim in the lake myself, but perhaps my system has built up a tolerance for our local pollution. At least we’ve never isolated cholera in our coastal waters here in Chicago.”

“Oh, but Samos, that’s not the same as Naples,” said the American novelist, the “Aunt Janet” who had kissed an unwilling Paolo good night a few minutes ago. “It’s so typical of an American to feel superior about life here without experiencing Europe. America has to be number one in everything, even clean coastal waters. In Europe, one cares much more for the well-rounded life.”

“So when a German firm becomes America ’s largest publisher, or a Swiss company buys Chicago ’s biggest insurer, they’re not really concerned with market domination?” I asked. “It’s a by-product of the well-rounded life?”

The banker laughed while Rossy, who’d just rejoined us-in a different, more subdued tie-said, “Perhaps Janet should have said that Europeans mask an interest in medals or winning behind a cloak of civilization. It’s bad manners to show off one’s accomplishments-they should emerge casually, by chance, under cover of other conversation.”

“Whereas Americans are confirmed braggarts,” the novelist persisted. “We’re rich, we’re powerful, everyone must bend to our way of doing things.”

Irina brought in mushroom soup, pale brown with cream drizzled in the shape of a mushroom cap. She was a silent, efficient woman whom I first assumed had come with the Rossys from Switzerland, until I realized that Fillida and Rossy always broke into English to talk to her.

The table conversation ran on in Italian for several caustic moments on the deficiencies of American power and American manners. I felt my hackles rise: it’s one of those funny things, that no one likes the family to be criticized by outsiders, even when the family is a collection of lunatics or bullies.

“So today’s vote in the Illinois legislature wasn’t about withholding life-insurance benefits from beneficiaries of Holocaust victims-it was about keeping America from imposing its standards on Europe?” I said.

The cultural attaché leaned across the table toward me. “In a manner of speaking, yes, signora. This black counselor-what is his name? Dur’am?-he makes a valid point in my eyes. Americans are so eager to condemn at a distance-the atrocities of a war which were truly atrocious, no one denies it-but Americans are not willing to examine their own atrocities at home, in the matter of Indians or of African slaves.”