The Love Philtre

I had just turned, for a last glance around the hotel room to make sure my wife and I had left nothing behind, when the phone rang.

"Milan calling, sir," the operator said.

"For me?" I said in surprise. I knew nobody in Milan. "Who is it?"

"Vittorio," a voice at the other end said. "Vittorio Adamello."

I blinked at the gleaming blue of Lake Como outside the window of the hotel in which my wife and I had just spent three days. It did not seem possible that I had heard correctly.

"Who?" I said again.

"Vittorio Adamello," the voice said impatiently. "I must see you at once."

I could not quite believe it. I had last seen Vittorio Adamello three weeks before, in the supermarket on the main street of the small Connecticut town in which we both live. He had just learned that my wife and I were going to Italy for a month, and he had wished us both a pleasant holiday in his native land.

"Where are you calling from?" I said.

"The airport outside Milan," he said. "I just flew over from New York. I must see you at once."

"How did you know where we are?"

"My brother Frank gave me your itinerary," Vittorio Adamello said. "There's a bus to Como in about an hour. It gets up there around noon. It is of the utmost importance that I see you."

"We won't be here when you arrive," I said. "We're just leaving. My wife is already downstairs in the car with the luggage. We're driving down to Milan to catch the two-o'clock train to Venice. Why don't you stay right there in Milan and meet us in the restaurant at the railroad station for lunch?"

"All right," Vittorio Adamello said. "But please do not fail me. It is very urgent."

I did not doubt it. My wife and I had been worried about the Adamellos for more than a year.

We had met Frank Adamello and his wife Rosa soon after we moved to Connecticut. He was a violinist with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and they lived in a modernistic house about an eighth of a mile up the road from us. The Adamellos were our closest neighbors. They were also a charming couple, warm, attractive and gay. There was something about them -- a kind of relaxed fitting together, so to speak -- that made it impossible to imagine them married to anybody but each other. You never thought of them as individuals. Frank and Rosa Adamello were, as much as any couple I have ever known, a team. Knowing them was a very pleasant experience.

About two years after we became neighbors and friends, Frank Adamello brought his younger brother to America. The boy, who was not quite 21 and named Vittorio, had just graduated with honors from the University of Padua, and he wanted to become a doctor. His brother Frank, who had prospered in America and was now a citizen, felt there were much better medical schools in his adopted country than in Italy, and he wanted Vittorio to have the best.

When young Vittorio arrived, Frank rented a room for him near the medical school in New York. Every now and then the boy came out to Connecticut to spend a weekend with his brother and sister-in-law. He was, however, an industrious student, and he usually spent these Saturdays and Sundays locked away with his medical books in the Adamello guest room.

As a result, during Vittorio's first three years in America, while my wife and I continued to see as much of Frank and Rosa as we ever did, we rarely saw young Vittorio. I was quite surprised, therefore, one Saturday morning when he was in his last year at medical school, to see Vittorio Adamello coming up my driveway.

"Hello," he said shyly when I opened the door for him. "May I come in and talk for a few minutes?"

"Of course," I said. "I'm afraid, though, that the only one you'll be able to talk to is me. My wife just drove into the village with Rosa to do some shopping."

"I know," Vittorio said. "That is why I came now. I wanted to talk to you alone."

I was puzzled. I did not know this tall, awkward young man terribly well.

"What did you want to talk to me about?" I said.

"You know my brother's house, of course," Vittorio Adamello said. "I've been wondering what you think of it?"

I hesitated. It seemed an odd question.

"Why, I think it's a very nice house."

"You do not think there is anything peculiar about it?"

"Well, when you're dealing with modernistic houses," I said cautiously, "I suppose it's all a matter of taste. Personally, I've never been very keen on--"

"I do not mean that."

"Perhaps you'd better tell me what you do mean."

"It is a beautiful house," Vittorio Adamello said. "Everything in it is the most modern and new. And yet it does not have a nursery."

It was a subject my wife and I had discussed many times since we had met Frank and Rosa Adamello. We knew, from the way they treated our two small boys, that they liked children. Rosa, who was not a career girl, had plenty of time on her hands. And the Adamellos could certainly afford to raise a family. We had often wondered why they hadn't.

"Yes, I've noticed that Frank's house doesn't have a nursery," I said. "What about it?"

"That is what I have come to ask you."

"I'm afraid I don't understand."

"Neither do I," Vittorio Adamello said. "In Italy, all our relatives have large families. Italians always have large families. Frank and Rosa have now been married seven years, but they have no children. When they built this house, they made no room in the plans for a nursery. I have been visiting them every weekend for three years, but never once do I hear them talk of children to come." Vittorio Adamello shook his head. "It is very distressing," he said. "I would like to know the reason."

"Why don't you ask Frank?"

"I cannot," he said. "I am the younger brother. It is something one cannot ask an older brother. That is why I have come to you."

For a moment I did not grasp what he meant. When I did, I shook my head in protest.

"Oh, now, look," I said. "I couldn't do a thing like that."

"You are one of my brother Frank's best friends," Vittorio Adamello said. "To whom else can I appeal?"

An hour later, when my wife came home from the village, I told her about Vittorio's visit. And I had my second surprise of the day.

"Good!" she said. "I'm glad you promised him you'd ask Frank."

"You mean to say," I said in astonishment, "you approve of the way that great big overgrown medical student wormed out of me a promise to poke my nose into his brother's affairs?"

"Of course I do," my wife said. "I've been dying to know for almost five years why the Adamellos don't have any children. Besides, I think they've both been acting a bit peculiar these last few weeks. Go on over right now and ask Frank."

"I'll do nothing of the sort," I said irritably. "And what do you mean, they've both been acting a bit peculiar?"

"You know how close they are," my wife said. "We've always remarked, from the moment we met them, that they were a team rather than a couple of individual people. Well, these last few weeks I've sensed a change. All of a sudden, there's a gap, a sort of space between them, if you know what I mean. Both of them, Rosa as well as Frank, seem to be worried about something, and I'm willing to bet it's connected in some way with this visit you've just had from Vittorio. Are you going over?"

"Not now," I said. "I want to think this thing through, and decide on some way to approach him."

By Monday morning, when I ran into Frank Adamello on the 9:14 train to New York, I had decided the most sensible approach was complete honesty.

"Your kid brother Vittorio came over to see me on Saturday," I said after I dropped into the seat beside Frank. "We had a talk."

"Really?" Frank said. "What about?"

I told him. As he listened, I began to understand more clearly what my wife had meant when she said the Adamellos had been acting a bit peculiar. I also began to regret my decision to be completely honest. I could see that my wife was absolutely right. The Adamellos obviously had something troublesome on their minds. As I talked, Frank sat slumped down in the train seat, staring fixedly at the folded newspaper in his lap. Even as I cursed myself inwardly for yielding to young Vittorio's request, and tried to ease the words in which I reported our conversation to his brother, I could see the muscles in the side of Frank Adamello's jaw ripple. He seemed to be holding himself together around some inner pain.

"I suppose I should have told Vittorio it's none of my business and let it go at that," I concluded lamely. "But frankly, since I know how much you and Rosa like children, once Vittorio raised the subject I couldn't help worrying about the same thing he's apparently worried about. Is something wrong, Frank?"

"I don't know," Frank Adamello said, scowling at his newspaper, and he hesitated. I didn't blame him. It is not the sort of thing one man likes to tell another, even when that other man is his friend. "We've been to doctors, of course," he said slowly. "Half a dozen of them. They all say the same thing: there's nothing wrong with either of us so far as having children is concerned, but there's something definitely wrong with Rosa's heart. It would be dangerous for her to become pregnant. So, according to the doctors, nature takes care of it by seeing to it that she doesn't."

I had never heard of such a thing. But there are many things about medicine that are a mystery to me, and this was hardly the moment to discuss my ignorance. I cleared my throat.

"A great many people who want children and can't have them, Frank, solve the problem by adoption."

"We've been all through that," Frank Adamello said. "But Rosa said it wouldn't be the same." He hesitated again, and then Frank Adamello said something that surprised me even more than his account of what the doctors had said. "You can tell Vittorio that Rosa is absolutely firm about wanting children of her own, or none at all."

That night, after I had reported this conversation to my wife, I asked her if, next Saturday, she would do me a favor and convey the gist of it to Vittorio Adamello. I wanted to discharge my promise without getting further involved. My wife shook her head.

"Vittorio came to you as a young man asking the help of an older man," she (continued on page 66) Love Philtre (continued from page 22) said. "It would be wrong for a woman to interfere. I think you must keep it on a man-to-man basis. Frank is going to New York on Saturday for a rehearsal, and as soon as Rosa and I drive off to the village to do our shopping, I'm sure Vittorio will hurry down to see you."

My wife was right. Saturday morning, 10 minutes after she left the house, I was repeating to Vittorio Adamello in my own living room the upsetting reason why his brother and sister-in-law had not yet raised a family and, according to Frank Adamello, never would.

"The medical aspects of it sound a little strange to me," I said. "But Frank assured me half a dozen doctors had given him and Rosa the same diagnosis, so I suppose it's sound enough. In any event, as a medical student you're in a much better position to know about that than I am."

Vittorio Adamello nodded and scowled at his large, powerful hands. I had the impression that he was struggling with the information I had brought him and, in view of it, trying to reach some sort of decision. The sun, striking him in profile and at an angle, made me suddenly aware of something I had never realized before: Vittorio Adamello was an extremely handsome young man. Finally, with a gesture that seemed to indicate he had reached a decision, he looked up.

"The medical aspects are indeed, as you put it, strange," he said. "If Frank is willing to take a certain amount of risk, however, I think they are not insoluble. Would you tell that to my brother?"

"Why don't you tell him yourself?" I said. "You're staying in the same house with him."

"It is, as I said last week, a subject a younger brother cannot discuss with an older brother," Vittorio Adamello said. "I ask you please, as my brother's friend, to tell him that I said, if he is willing to take a certain amount of risk, the medical aspects of his and Rosa's problem are not, in my opinion, insoluble."

An hour later, when my wife came home and I had told her about Vittorio's request, I asked her if she could figure out what was behind it.

"I don't know what's behind it," my wife said thoughtfully. "But I can tell you, because it seems pretty obvious, what's happening on the surface."

"What's that?"

"The Adamello brothers are trying to say something to one another. They don't want to say it directly. Perhaps they can't. So they are using you as their communications system. It may be puzzling, and even annoying, but it doesn't seem to me to be too much to do for a friend. I think you ought to give Vittorio's message to Frank."

I did, on the 9:14 Monday morning. His reaction to the message was the most peculiar thing that had happened thus far. First he looked delighted. Then he looked frightened. And for a long time he just sat there, chewing his lower lip, staring blindly out the train window, and obviously struggling with the message I had brought him in an effort to reach some sort of decision. I was reminded of a child -- whose delight in the receipt of a wonderful present has been shattered by the donor's advice that it might at any moment explode -- trying to make up its mind whether to keep or return the alluring but dangerous gift. Just before our train pulled into Grand Central, Frank Adamello seemed to make up his mind.

"Please tell my brother," he said in a low voice, without looking at me, "that in spite of the risk, I give him my permission to make the attempt."

I neither understood nor liked the word risk. I made that perfectly clear the following Saturday, when I conveyed Frank's message to his younger brother, and then I asked for an explanation. Vittorio said he was sorry, but he was not at liberty to enlighten me. My wife did, two days later, when I came home from New York.

"Rosa came down the hill this afternoon for a cup of coffee," she said. "Between sips she dropped the rather startling news that there's a chance she might finally be able to have children."

"But according to the doctors she and Frank consulted, I thought it was impossible for her to become pregnant?"

"That's what Rosa thought, too."

"Why does she think differently now?"

"Because of Vittorio. According to the doctors, what has prevented Rosa from becoming pregnant up to now is her heart condition. Well, Vittorio, who seems to be more than just a brilliant medical student, has made a study of Rosa's heart condition, and he thinks he can cure it."

"How?"

"By changing the chemistry of her blood. It seems to be a matter of putting into Rosa's blood stream certain chemicals that are not there now. Some of these she can take with her food. Others Vittorio will have to inject into her veins. The whole process, according to Vittorio's calculations, should take about three months."

I stared at my wife for several long, silent moments. She is not a woman who is given to talking nonsense, or repeating the nonsense other people talk.

"Look," I said finally. "Do you believe this claptrap?"

"No, and I don't think Rosa does, either. But apparently Vittorio is being very persuasive."

"What about Frank?"

"He seems to be for it."

"I guess that explains the messages I've been carrying back and forth between them."

"Not quite," my wife said. "If all that's involved here is this preposterous scheme of Vittorio's, why couldn't he and Frank discuss it face to face?"

"I don't know."

"Neither do I," my wife said. "It seems to me logical to assume, therefore, that this scheme about Rosa's blood stream is only a cover-up for something deeper, something Frank and his brother really couldn't discuss face to face. Where are you going?"

"Up the hill," I said. "I want to have a little talk with Rosa."

She was not, however, at home.

"Rosa just drove Vittorio down to the station," Frank said after he opened the door for me. "Vittorio came out for dinner, but he has to get back to New York tonight because he's got an exam in the morning."

I decided not to waste words.

"This crackpot scheme about changing the chemistry of Rosa's blood," I said. "You're not going to let her and Vittorio go through with it, are you?"

"Why not?"

I stared at him. Frank Adamello avoided my glance.

"Why not?" I repeated. "Because medicine is nothing for amateurs to fool around with," I snapped. "Because this is a ridiculous theory invented by an inexperienced boy, and if you allow him to try it out on your wife, it may damn well kill her, that's why not!"

Frank Adamello's jaw twitched, as though a twinge of pain had raced through it.

"Rosa wants children," he said in a low voice. "She's waited seven years for them, ever since we got married. She's not going to wait much longer. If she cannot have children, Rosa says she would rather be dead."

For several stunned moments I didn't know what to say. I felt like a man who volunteers to cash a small check for a friend and finds himself unexpectedly involved in a bank robbery. It had never occurred to me that these two warm, gay, charming people, this man and woman who on the surface appeared to be so close that I had always thought of them not as individuals but as a team, had actually been driven so far apart by a problem that in the lives of most people never even arises.

"It seems to me," I said uncomfortably, "the least you can do is check this theory of Vittorio's with a few reputable doctors and hear what they have to say."

Frank Adamello shook his head.

"I don't want to hear what the reputable doctors have to say," he said. "I've (continued on page 78) Love Philtre (continued from page 66) got to believe that this scheme of Vittorio's is going to work. If it doesn't -- --" Frank Adamello paused, and he shrugged helplessly. "If you love someone very much, you don't want her to die," he said. "But you want her to be happy, too." He paused again, and he drew a long, deep, tired breath. "Unless Rosa has a child soon," Frank Adamello said quietly, "there won't be anything left to keep us together."

Two days later Vittorio gave up his room in New York and moved into the Adamello house. Every minute of the day that he could spare from his classes, to which he now commuted, Vittorio Adamello spent with his sister-in-law Rosa. According to my wife, who got her information from Rosa, Vittorio measured out her food, mixed in the various chemicals, forced her to stick to a schedule of mild exercise and prolonged rest periods, gave her the necessary injections, and kept a complete record of the entire process in a set of black leather notebooks which he carried in a locked briefcase.

I found the whole thing a trifle unreal. My emotions alternated between a strange conviction that it was all a hoax, that absolutely nothing was happening in the house on the hill, and the nervous feeling that I should report it to the police. I might have done it, too, if it were not for the fact that one day, about a month after the strange experiment began, my wife made an interesting discovery.

"Rosa rang me up this morning," she said when I came home. "Her car was down at the garage for its regular thousand-mile checkup, and Vittorio had to catch the 11:32 to New York because he had a one-o'clock class, so Rosa asked if I would run him down to the train, and pick him up when he came out again on the 4:10. I managed to get him to the 11:32, but it was a pretty tight squeeze, and in all the rush, Vittorio forgot his briefcase in our car. I didn't notice it until I got back to the house, when the briefcase fell out of the car as I opened the door. It fell with quite a bang. The lock snapped open, and those black leather notebooks tumbled out." My wife paused. "Those notebooks," she said, "are blank."

I didn't bother to express, or even analyze, my astonishment. I could tell from my wife's face that there was more to come.

"By the time I drove down to the 4:10 to pick up Vittorio," she said, "I'd had almost five hours of putting two and two together. As soon as Vittorio stepped off the train, I could see he'd had almost five hours of panic. His first question, as soon as I handed him the briefcase and he saw the lock was snapped, told me clearly that I'd been putting my twos and twos together correctly."

"What was Vittorio's first question?" I said.

"He wanted to know if I'd told Rosa the notebooks were blank."

"Had you?"

"Of course not," my wife said. "It seemed silly to give away a piece of information as valuable as that for free. I wanted to swap."

"For what?"

"Another piece of information," my wife said. "I told Vittorio I'd say nothing to Rosa about my discovery if he'd answer one question."

"Did he?"

"Yes," my wife said. "I now know what it was Frank and Vittorio were really discussing when they were sending all those messages through you." She paused again. "When Frank told you that the doctors said there was nothing wrong with him or Rosa so far as having children is concerned, but there was something definitely wrong with Rosa's heart, Frank was lying. There is nothing wrong with Rosa's heart or, for that matter, all the rest of her. The trouble, according to the doctors, is Frank. Rosa is perfectly capable of bearing children. Frank, unfortunately, is incapable of siring them."

In the sudden silence, it seemed to me I could almost hear the missing pieces of the puzzle falling into place.

"This whole so-called experiment," I said slowly. "This whole silly business of changing the chemical content of Rosa's blood stream ----"

"Is nothing but camouflage," my wife said. "Neither Vittorio nor Frank believes in it. It's just a gag, something they invented as a cover for throwing Rosa and Vittorio together."

She had taken the words out of my mouth, and yet I was shocked to hear them spoken aloud.

"Frank told you himself," my wife continued, "that he and Rosa have reached a point in their relationship where he knows that unless she has a child soon, there will be nothing left to hold them together." My wife shrugged. "Since Frank can't give her a child----"

"He's arranged to throw her into the arms of someone who can do what he can't," I said slowly. "His own brother."

"Precisely," my wife said.

"Do they think they can get away with it?"

"Apparently," my wife said with another shrug. "Or I don't think they would try it. Up to now, at any rate, Rosa seems to have fallen for it. She thinks Vittorio is changing the chemical content of her blood stream so that her heart condition will be cured and she will be able to become pregnant by her husband."

"But sooner or later she's bound to find out this is not so!"

"By that time," my wife said, "I think the conspirators are hoping she will be pregnant by Vittorio."

"Well," I said grimly, "they're wrong."

"How do you know?"

"Because I know Rosa," I said. "And she's not that kind of girl. She may want children desperately enough to risk her life. And she may even be gullible enough to believe this silly business about changing the chemical content of her blood by diet and injections. But at a certain point, if this scheme is going to work, Vittorio will have to abandon the diet and the injections, and resort to the traditional method. It is precisely at this point that Vittorio is going to get his handsome face slapped."

My wife gave me a funny little look.

"I suppose it is precisely for this sort of situation," she said, "that the phrase wait and see was invented."

I could have wished, during the three months that followed, for a more efficient invention. We waited, but saw nothing. Nothing new, that is. Rosa and Vittorio were together constantly. Vittorio continued acting out the elaborate pretense of the experiment. And Rosa, so far as my wife and I could see, continued to be completely taken in by it.

The only noticeable change, from the moment my wife and I discovered the experiment was a fraud, took place not in the house on the hill, but in our own. While neither of us had uttered a word to bring the situation into existence, it became perfectly obvious before long that my wife and I were on opposite sides of the fence about Rosa's virtue.

I did not believe Vittorio would be successful. My wife did.

"You men are much more sentimental about technical fidelity," she said. "You can't seem to get it through your heads that there are situations, and this seems to me to be one of them, when it is a good deal like refusing, for purely sentimental reasons, to take a new road when the old one, to which you've always been accustomed, has been washed out by an act of God."

Acts of God were very much on my mind the Saturday morning, almost four months after the experiment began, when Rosa Adamello called up during breakfast to announce in a voice quivering with excitement that she was going into New York to be examined by one of the obstetricians who had previously declared it was impossible for her to have children. I was pleased to note, when my wife put down the phone, that she seemed shaken.

"Rosa says that, according to Vittorio's black notebooks, the process of changing the chemical content of her blood was completed six weeks ago, so the obstetrician should have some good news for her today." My wife scowled at me across the breakfast table. "But you and I know those notebooks are blank!"

"Vittorio obviously didn't show them to her," I said. "He merely told Rosa what he wanted her to believe they contain." I was not surprised to detect a note of smugness in my voice as I added, "In any case, Rosa is still obviously unaware that the whole preposterous thing was a fake, so you can guess for yourself what kind of news the obstetrician will have for her after he finishes examining her. I'm sorry that Rosa will be disappointed, but I'm glad that I judged her correctly when I said she wasn't that kind of girl." I poured myself another cup of coffee. "Did Rosa have anything else to say?"

"They're coming back on the 2:34," my wife said. "They'll stop in here on their way home from the station."

"Good," I said. "We'll be waiting."

I think we would have done it with less wear and tear on our nerves if we had not been completely astonished, shortly after lunch, by the arrival of Vittorio Adamello.

"What are you doing here?" I said. "I thought you'd gone into New York with Frank and Rosa?"

"Oh, no," the handsome young medical student said uncomfortably. "I -- I couldn't do that." He glanced at his watch, and compared it with the clock over the fireplace. "I've been waiting up at the house, but I -- I ----" He paused, and drew a deep breath. "Do you mind if I wait here?"

"Of course not," my wife said. "Sit down and be comfortable."

He sat down, but he could not make himself comfortable. All afternoon, when he was not looking at his watch, Vittorio Adamello kept squirming in his chair and staring morosely out the window, while the tension in our living room mounted steadily, like steam pressure in a boiler. Even though I secretly enjoyed his discomfort, because it underscored my conviction that he knew as surely as I did that his plan had failed. I was acutely aware that the knowledge of its failure would come as a terrible blow to Rosa. For almost four months she had so obviously believed completely, with all her heart, in something that we all knew was a hoax. I could not escape the unhappy conviction that the return of Rosa and Frank from New York would be one of the most depressing events I had ever witnessed or participated in.

I cannot remember when I have ever been more completely wrong.

"Good Lord!" my wife said when we finally heard the Adamello car turning into our driveway. "Is that singing I hear?"

It was. And several moments later, as Frank and Rosa leaped from their car, we heard more of it.

"It worked!" Frank shouted jubilantly. "Rosa is pregnant!"

Things became somewhat confused during the next few minutes. I remember clearly, however, in spite of the daze into which my shocked astonishment had flung me, that the excited discussion which followed included endlessly repeated references to the look of amazement on the face of the obstetrician.

"He couldn't believe it!" Rosa cried gleefully.

Neither could I. But for different reasons. My confidence in Rosa Adamello, my certainty that in the crucial moment of revelation she would resist Vittorio's advances, had not been based entirely on what I recognized in myself as a perhaps prudish repugnance for a scheme that, no matter how worthy its ultimate aim, nevertheless called for a man to perform temporarily the marital duties of his own brother. My confidence in Rosa had been based largely on what I felt about her as a person.

She was a small girl, with a round, delicately molded face in which the enormous eyes, because of her great vivacity, seemed to twinkle like lanterns. And like lanterns, there was a refreshing simplicity and directness about the warm glow she shed on those she allowed to come close to her. For four years, ever since we had become neighbors and friends, Rosa Adamello had admitted me and my wife to that small circle. For four years I had been entranced by her warmth, and delighted with her simplicity and directness.

I saw now that I had misjudged her. Rosa Adamello's warmth was only skin deep. Her simplicity and directness were spurious. At heart, she was obviously as accomplished a cold-blooded schemer as her husband Frank and her brother-in-law Vittorio.

All three of them knew precisely what had happened. And all three of them knew that my wife and I knew precisely what had happened. Yet here they were, in my own living room, acting out with their enthusiastic congratulations the embarrassing pretense that Rosa was carrying Frank's child because Vittorio, by means of a brilliant medical experiment, had removed the barrier that had previously kept husband and wife from fulfillment.

After a while, I began to find the spectacle distasteful. I walked out to the kitchen and left by the back door.

I did not see Rosa for almost two months. Then one day, pushing my shopping cart around a rack in the local supermarket, I found myself facing Rosa in front of the dry cereals. Pregnancy, I had once read, is the time of a woman's greatest beauty. Looking at Rosa Adamello, I could well believe it. The child she was carrying had already begun to distort her figure, but her face had never looked lovelier. The old warmth, the quality that had captured me from the very beginning, seemed to surround her like a visible glow. I found it difficult, as I watched her smile at me with obvious pleasure in the unexpected meeting, to believe what I knew about her.

"You've been avoiding me," she said, and then, with the directness that had always charmed me, she added, "I think I know why, too."

"Yes," I said, "I think you do."

"If you put it that way," Rosa said, "I suppose there's no point in my trying to explain."

"No," I said, "I suppose there isn't."

"I'm sorry about that," she said. "I'd much rather we continued to be friends." She paused, but I could think of nothing to say. "Since that's not possible," she continued, "I'd like to tell you something that I think, because we once were friends, you're entitled to know."

"What's that?" I said.

"No woman can do what I did," Rosa Adamello said quietly, "unless she loves a man more than she loves anything else in the world, including the opinions of her friends."

She turned her cart, moved it around mine, and walked off down the aisle. Watching her go, I was suddenly assailed by so many tangled emotions that I considered myself fortunate to be able to identify one: sympathy for her husband.

Poor Frank. The risk that both he and Vittorio had foreseen from the very beginning, the danger that had lurked just below the surface of their plot from the moment it was hatched, had caught up with him. Rosa was getting at last what she had always wanted more than life itself: a child. In the process of arranging for her to have it, however, Frank had lost her to the man who had helped him: she had fallen in love with Vittorio.

They were all obviously waiting until the baby was born before Rosa divorced Frank and married Vittorio. I did not much enjoy the waiting process. For this reason, almost six months later, when my wife and I were about to leave for our holiday in Italy and Rosa was expecting the baby momentarily, I did not go up the hill but used the telephone to say goodbye to the people with whom I had once been so friendly.

Now, three weeks later, driving down from Lake Como to meet Vittorio Adamello at the railroad station in Milan, I could think of only one reason that would bring the young medical student to Italy so unexpectedly: something had gone wrong with Rosa's pregnancy.

"No, no, nothing has gone wrong," Vittorio said impatiently after we had all exchanged greetings in the restaurant and I, somewhat nervously, had asked the anxious question. "Rosa gave birth two days ago," Vittorio said. "A boy. Six pounds, nine ounces."

"How wonderful!" my wife said. "Congratulations!"

I added my own congratulations, and then asked why, instead of remaining at the mother's side in Connecticut, he had come to Italy.

"I have come to find work in a hospital as an intern, and then I will set up my medical practice here," Vittorio said. "I can no longer remain in America. Rosa says it is impossible."

Somewhat belatedly, it seemed, Rosa was becoming aware of the outrageous aspects of what she had done.

"In other words," I said, "as soon as you've got yourself settled here, and Rosa and the baby are strong enough, they're coming over here to join you. Is that it?"

Vittorio shook his head.

"That is how I thought it would be," he said. "Until two days ago, when the baby was born. Then----" He paused, and he brought his troubled glance from the far corner of the restaurant, and he fixed it on me and my wife. "In the hospital I said to Rosa now we can talk to Frank about a divorce and we will be able to get married, but Rosa looked at me and she said quietly there will be no divorce. Frank has finished helping to put you through medical school, Rosa said. You are now ready to become a doctor. Go to Italy, she said. They need doctors in Italy. But the baby, I said. It is my child. Rosa shook her head. No, she said. It is Frank's child, she said. Frank's and mine. We needed help, she said, and you are a member of the family, so Frank and I let you help us. But now we don't need any more help. Neither do you. We've both graduated, Rosa said to me, go to Italy."

Vittorio's voice stopped, and he shook his head as though to fling away the puzzling recollection. I was no less puzzled, but I could not fling the problem away

"You told me, when you telephoned this morning to Lake Como," I said, "that it was very urgent for you to see me."

"Yes," Vittorio said. "Rosa suggested it."

"Rosa suggested that you come to see me here in Italy?" I said in astonishment.

The handsome young man nodded.

"I told her in the hospital I did not understand why she was acting this way to me. I thought she loved me. I thought that was why she consented in the first place. Then, when the baby is born, she suddenly says she does not love me! If she does not love me, how could she do what she did?"

"Well," my wife said slowly, "I'm afraid that's going to be a little difficult to explain."

"Not for your husband," Vittorio Adamello said. "Rosa said your husband could explain it to me, because she once explained it to him."

My wife turned from the puzzled young man to stare at me with even greater puzzlement.

"You can?" she said incredulously.

"Why, yes," I said with a sudden smile, because at last I understood. I had not misjudged Rosa Adamello after all. "I'm pretty sure I can explain it."

But I paused for a moment. I did not want to make any mistakes. I wanted to get the words right, exactly as Rosa Adamello had uttered them, in front of the dry cereals in our supermarket, when she had tried to tell me how far a woman will go in order to save her marriage to the man she loves.