PARTISAN REVIEW
odd, bedizened, little figure, alighting gallantly from the plane, mak–
ing a spot of color among the American businessmen, her vulturine
co-passengers, who were descending on Europe to "look after" their
investments. Conditions in Paris shocked these men, deep in their
business sense, and Miss Grabbe was dismayed also; her own invest–
ment had been swept away. She could not take up where she had
left off: people were dead or dispersed or in prison; her past stood
about her in fragments, a shattered face looming up here and there
like a house-wall in a bombed city; normalcy was far away. But
Miss Grabbe did not lack courage. She had learned how to say good–
bye and to look ahead for the next thing. Paris, she quickly decided,
was beautiful but done for, a shell from which the life had retreated
out into the suburbs where a few old friends still persisted, a shell
now inhabited by an alien existentialist gossip, and an alien troupe
of young men who cadged drinks from her in languid boredom and
made love only to each other. Her trip to Italy, therefore, had the
character of a farewell and a new beginning, and the hotel suite,
into which she now showed the two friends, resembled a branch of–
fice which had been opened but was not yet in full operation.
The wide
letto matrimoniale
in the bedroom, the washstand, and
the bidet with the towel over it, the dressing-table on which were
arranged, very neatly and charmingly, Miss Grabbe's toilet waters and
perfumes, her powders and lucite brush and comb, her lipsticks,
orange sticks, and tweezers, all had an air unmistakably functional,
to which the books and magazines, the cigarettes and pretty colored
postcards set out, invitingly, in the sitting room contributed their
share, so that it was not so surprising as it might have been to see,
when the balcony doors were opened, the figure of Mr. Sciarappa
lounging on the terrace, like a waiting client, with a copy of
Life.
This conception of his position, however, seemed not to have
struck Mr. Sciarappa. He was there, it seemed, simply for the prac–
tical joke of it, for their shrieks, for Miss Grabbe's discomfiture. He
laughed at them with candid merriment, saying,
acaro,
I give you
a surprise." The two friends had not seen him so lively since one
night in Milan when a tired fat woman, running for a tramcar, had
failed to catch it. He showed no inclination at all to step into the
role that stood there, ready for him to try on. He had come, he said,
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