“Digby. Sasha Digby. Works in the visa section with me.”
“Well, I’ll be sure to write him a note.” Ruth patted the blanket covering Iris’s leg. “Where is he, anyway?”
“Digby? He’s gone back to the embassy. He’s a hard worker, stays late every night.” Harry took out his cigarette case.
“Put that away,” Ruth said. “We’re in a hospital.”
“So?”
“So what if you light up an oxygen container by accident?”
Harry flicked his Zippo lighter. “I’ll take my chances, all right? If ever a man needed a cigarette . . .”
Ruth turned back to Iris. “What were you thinking, pumpkin? I mean honestly. Isn’t it just like you to cross the street without looking first. Head in the clouds.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Of course you didn’t mean to. You never do. Harry, what about this Digby fellow? Would it be all right to ask him to dinner or something? I feel something’s called for.”
“Sure, why not? He’s a good man. They say—”
A soft knock sounded on the door. A blond head poked around the edge.
“Hello? Mind if I join you? Nurse said it was family only, but I talked my way through.”
“Digby! Man of the hour. Come on in, it’s a real party.”
Sasha Digby stepped inside the room, looking exceptionally tall and golden. He lifted his hands, which both held bottles of champagne. “Managed to smuggle these in for the invalid. How is she?”
“Just fine,” Iris croaked.
“Broken ankle, sixteen stitches, and black and blue all over,” said Ruth. “Otherwise she’s just fine. Thanks to you.”
“Just grateful I happened along at the right instant.” Sasha looked tenderly at Iris with his ultrablue eyes. “Fright of my life when I saw you step off that curb.”
Possibly Iris was going to die of humiliation. She lay there on her white hospital sheets—in her green hospital pajamas—trapped beneath Sasha Digby’s sympathetic blue gaze. Thank God she hadn’t looked in a mirror yet. Meanwhile, Ruth was still wearing the tangerine dress from the fashion shoot, scarlet lips, blond hair curled and glossy.
“I’m so sorry,” Iris said.
“Sorry? Sorry for what? I’m sorry.” He held out his hand to Ruth across the bed. “Sasha Digby. We met at the reception a couple of weeks ago.”
Ruth half rose from her armchair to take his hand. “What reception was that?”
“You remember, Ruthie. At the residence.” Harry winked at Sasha. “Too sauced, I guess.”
“No, I remember now. Right at the end, wasn’t it?”
Sasha shrugged his rangy shoulders, set down one of the champagne bottles, and removed the foil from the other. “I arrived late, I’m afraid. Cups anywhere?”
“What are we celebrating, exactly?” Ruth asked.
“We are celebrating life, Miss Macallister.” Sasha eased out the cork with the gentlest of pops. “The fact that we’re all still in it.”
Harry, having scrounged cups from the tray on the bedside table, held one out beneath the neck of the bottle. “I’ll drink to that.”
Sasha poured champagne into each glass—Harry ducked into the corridor and came back with a third and a fourth—and everybody cried joyously, To life!
Iris spent a week and a half in the hospital, because the nice Italian doctor didn’t trust her not to overdo it on her broken ankle, which he’d set with such care and attention. In all that time, she never once looked in the mirror, although she read four novels and sketched portraits for all the nurses.
Nearly every day, right around noon, Sasha Digby arrived with a bouquet of flowers. Each time, it was a new variety—tulips, lilies, orange blossom, roses the most beautiful shade of blush pink. He pulled up a chair and asked how she was feeling, told her the news, shared funny stories about Harry in the embassy—a real clown, your brother, but a good man, smarter than he lets on—and that kind of thing. Day by day their conversation went a little deeper, edged a little closer to the intimate. Exactly one week after the accident, Sasha folded up the Herald-Tribune—he was reading aloud a review of an art exhibition recently opened in Florence—and said, “I’m awfully sorry about your mother. Harry told me what happened.”
“Thank you.”
“You must miss her.”
“It’s not as bad as it used to be. She wasn’t herself after Da—after our father died. My grandparents raised us, really. And then our aunt got married and took over a little.”
“That would be Vivian Schuyler, wouldn’t it?”
Iris was startled enough to look him right in the eyes. “How did you know?”
“Oh, small world. I guess you’ve met my mother, Elsie Adams. She’s a van der Wahl by birth. Practically grew up with your uncle.”
Iris felt a little dizzy. “Then you know everybody back home.”
“Oh, not everybody. We moved around when I was young. My father’s in the oil business. He and my mother divorced when I was ten or eleven, I guess.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We all have our sorrows, don’t we? Yours greater than mine, I think.”
“It doesn’t matter how great they are. Sorrow’s sorrow.”
He sat back in his chair.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“You.”
But he caressed the word. Iris looked at the window and then down at her lap. She thought Ruth would handle this so much better. Ruth would know what to say. Ask him about himself, that’s what Ruth would tell her to do, if Ruth could whisper in her ear right now.
“Sasha.” Iris paused. “That’s not your real name, is it?”
“Hold on a moment.”
Sasha set aside the newspaper and walked to the door, which he closed without a sound. He crossed the room to the window, opened it halfway, sat back down, and lit a cigarette. Only when he’d taken a long drag and exhaled again did he contemplate the ceiling and say, “My real name—and you can’t tell a soul—promise me, Iris.”
“I promise.”
“Cross your heart.”
Iris crossed her heart.
He leaned his head toward her and spoke in a stage whisper. “Cornelius Alexander Digby.”
“That’s awful.”
“Named for my father, who was named for my grandfather. Father being the old throwback he was, there wasn’t any question of naming me something else. But my mother insisted on calling me Sasha. Probably it’s why they divorced, in the end. The affairs he could pretend not to notice, but the nickname just rankled.”
Iris couldn’t help laughing. It was the tone of his voice, as if he were gossiping about film stars or something, not his own parents. She thought it was almost worth breaking her ankle to sit in a private room with this tall Apollo and laugh, the way you laughed with a friend of long standing—someone you trusted. Then the laughter died away. Iris glanced at his face—the thoughtful way he dragged on his cigarette, looking at her.
“You’d better put that out,” she said. “The nurse will come back any minute, especially if she sees the door closed.”
“Oh, hang the nurse.” But he rose anyway and stubbed out the cigarette on the windowsill.
“You’re awfully sweet to visit me like this. I hope you’re not feeling guilty.”
“I am feeling guilty, but that’s not the reason I visit you.” He tossed the spent cigarette out the window and came to sit on the edge of the bed. With his thumb he brushed the bruise on her cheek. “You have a black eye, did you know that?”
Iris gasped and threw her hand up to cover the eye in question. “Nobody told me!”
“Don’t worry, I’ve seen worse. It wasn’t a direct hit. Anyway, you still look beautiful.” Now he touched the bandage on her forehead that covered eight stitches near her hairline. “The thing about growing up everywhere, you don’t feel you belong anywhere. You see things, terrible things, people living—no, existing, hardly even that—just surviving in the most abject conditions, and when you return to a place like East Hampton, for example, and the Schuylers and the van der Wahls playing endless tennis at the club, drinking endless silly cocktails and having conversations that—well, you know what I mean, don’t you? It’s as if they can’t see anything beyond their little world and the little people in it—”