Eleanor had begun to keep a bit of distance from Talbot, steering clear while he paced, refraining from asking for updates on his case because it could launch him into a rant he could only soothe with Jim Beam. She reminded him daily that she believed him, that she would stand by him, despite his betrayal, despite the vicious way he was depicted in the newspapers that subjected her to wide-eyed stares at work. She didn’t take her colleagues into her confidence, still greeting any attempt to draw her out with a chilly smile. She did take a call from Reverend Grant, the rector of St. John’s, who offered her whatever she needed—a visit, conversation, prayer, or simply an ear so she could express how she was feeling in a private, confidential way. This surprised her, his direct acknowledgement of the Bentleys’ crisis, and his promise that she would be safe expressing herself to him. She thanked the reverend, sincerely, who promised he would call again in a few days to check on her.

  Mostly, she turned to Caroline for support and Rémy, when he was around. Having her husband’s loyalty questioned, the breadth of his indiscretions so publicly exposed, left her feeling vulnerable and exhausted in a way that surprised her. So, as she had done throughout her marriage, Eleanor decided she needed a few days away—to take a weekend in New York. She told Tal she needed some uninterrupted, private time to think about her current situation and what she needed to do about it. She called George and asked if he could be on call in case Talbot needed anything. After making a few other arrangements, she booked her train passage—not inviting Caroline to come along—and informed her husband she was heading out of town. Her plan struck Talbot as utterly unreasonable.

  “You just went up there in April,” he protested, “and you’re taking another vacation?”

  “Not a vacation, Talbot. I need a break. I know you’re dealing with a lot, but so am I. And I need a few days to myself to sort things out, without your pacing the halls. Without this simmering anger.”

  He looked at her in a way he never had before, unsure of himself, vulnerable.

  “Sort things out? Are you coming back?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Talbot, I’m not leaving you. I’m taking a breather. I’m used to you traveling and going to work every day. We’ve been in this townhouse together every day for a month. It’s hard to think about what I need, what I ought to expect, when you’re there right in front of me all the time and I’m so damn worried about you.”

  He nodded, his eyes clouded.

  “George is around—so are the Auclairs—and they’ve both said they can bring over dinner or just stop in if you need them too. I’ll be home Sunday night. There’s nothing happening with your case this weekend so it seems like a good time for me to see my friends and let down.”

  He nodded again and said he understood.

  . . .

  Friday, June 24, 1960

  New York, NY

  Eleanor took a bigger suitcase than usual, blaming it on an uncertain weather forecast that suggested she might need sweaters and rain gear. From her bureau drawer, she withdrew the Cheney briefcase, which had safely weathered the search of her home. She reached under her lingerie for the key ring she stowed there, but couldn’t find it. Patting the lace, slowly at first then a bit frantically, she felt under the piles but found nothing. Had the keys somehow tumbled down behind the drawer? She would have to worry about that later. She lifted the briefcase and placed it inside her Samsonite, covering it with her clothes and snapping the locks shut before Tal saw what she was doing.

  When the taxi arrived to take her to her train, she felt a pinch of conscience, seeing Tal standing in the doorway, beleaguered, alone. “Call Caroline and Rémy,” she said as she kissed him goodbye. “They’ll be good company.”

  Three hours later, she stepped from the train at Penn Station, disappearing into the crowd of afternoon commuters weaving toward the subway. She caught the train to Brooklyn, riding as far as Borough Hall. She climbed the stairs to the street, circled the block, then returned to the station, descending to the subway platform a second time, joining the handful of people leaning against the columns and station walls. Together, they boarded the next train, one going the same direction as the one she’d just stepped off minutes earlier.

  At Grand Army Plaza, she left the train, took the stairs up to the street, and walked toward the plaza. She took a seat on the bench at the Soldiers and Sailors Arch, sitting quietly, feeling the sun on her face as she gazed at the memorial to the defenders of the Union, scanning the crowd on the street. Eventually, she removed her boiled wool jacket, folding it into her tote and replacing it with her cardigan. A few minutes later, she unpinned her pillbox hat and swapped it for a faded scarf, into which she tucked her blonde hair before knotting it under her chin. Prepared now, she stood and made her way back to the station where she caught another train, this one heading north—the direction from which she’d come. This she would ride all the way to the Bronx.

  She left the train at Arthur Avenue, relaxing a bit as the smell of fresh bread, the familiar hints of rosemary, wafted from the doorways of the line of restaurants in Little Italy. She walked a few blocks before arriving at Mario’s, where she spotted her dinner companion, already seated. She waved off the maitre d’ and approached the table.

  “My lovely,” he said, rising to place a soft kiss on her cheek, help her fit the suitcase under the table. “How was your trip, Mishie?”

  She winced and took a quick look around. “Don’t call me that here, Gilberto, please.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  Eleanor

  Many who heard the story of a teenaged Eleanor Halsey, traveling from her home in Massachusetts to virulently fascist Italy in 1938 to study art, questioned how in the world her mother could have been so ill-informed to allow it. Talbot’s onetime colleague in Turkey, Harold Warren was one. When he met Eleanor in London before the Bentleys married, his instincts told him there was another layer to this woman, that her unpracticed English pointed to a riddle he couldn’t quite unravel. The military chaplain who married them had raised a baffled eyebrow, pressing Eleanor why she hadn’t evacuated the minute Britain declared war in 1939. Americans were repeatedly, forcefully advised to leave, the chaplain insisted, and the chartered planes and ships marshaled for the evacuation were packed with sudden refugees leaving behind businesses, homes, entire lives. In comparison, Eleanor had had little to leave behind. Then there was Talbot’s mother, who always wondered about Eleanor, most especially because she never spoke of any relatives or shared much about her parents, beyond her stories of the unusual perch she’d enjoyed when artists came for a semester-in-residence at Smith. Wouldn’t an orphaned girl have an aunt or cousin somewhere inquiring as to her wellbeing? But as his mother found fault with every woman Talbot brought around, he paid little attention to the questions she raised.

  She had indeed left her home to study in Italy. That was true. She adored her life in Florence—the art history classes that reached back into the centuries to help her organize the random and disparate things she knew into discernible artistic movements and eras; the hours in the studio in the company of vibrant young friends more worldly than she, who encouraged her and bolstered her confidence. But more consequential than this, were the hours spent with her advisor. After their first wine-soaked dinner, when he’d offered to tutor her personally so she could stay in the program and in Florence, her schedule began to revolve around him. Her professor, she found, had far more than sculpting technique to teach her.

  Professor Cossutta—Gilberto, as he invited her to call him—was a favorite of his students, the females especially, sunglasses atop his head, pulling his wavy black hair from his face. When he was pleased with a particularly well-wrought sculpture, a clever question from a student, or a well-timed bawdy joke, his smile extended to his eyes, his pleasure and approval so total that his students were compelled to work as hard and as long as necessary to replicate it. Not quite forty, he was younger than most on faculty, often arriving to class with his tie slung around his neck, suit jacket draped over his tanned arm, white shirt unbuttoned to his breastbone. Why he always ran late was a topic of constant conjecture among both faculty and students.

  Early in the semester, Cossutta began to reserve vast swaths of time for Eleanor, bristling when students more capable pleaded for time on his schedule. She impressed him, he told her, with her determination, her courage in coming all this way to Florence, despite her limited background and the layered challenge of having to conduct herself in Italian. Their sessions in the studio typically began with Cossutta coaching, cajoling, pleading that she work more delicately, that she pay closer attention, that she not rush. He offered detailed explications of how she could correct her approach, his hands placed over hers as she worked the wax or clay.

  After concluding the technical work, they often remained in the studio late into the night, lingering over cups of cooling tea and the occasional bottle of wine. He asked about her upbringing, her parents, her town, saying he wanted to know her better, what drove her, and what was important to her. He often digressed into lengthy analyses of the current moment, insisting the world was at a turning point that would change the map forever. She listened patiently, absorbing his perspective, believing him wise.

  “Why do you rip through this, my lovely?” he asked urgently one night, as she struggled to mold a piece of clay into something recognizable. A bird, she hoped, a starling—but it was not coming. “There is no parade at the finish line. There’s no value in going quickly and recklessly as you do. This is crude. You rob the piece… the entire moment of creation … of its elegance. In your desperation, you forfeit the creative joy you seek.”

  It was not the first time he had sounded this theme, but this night, it was tinged with disapproval that felt personal to her. It was past midnight and she was bone tired, her long days filled with demands she could not seem to meet. She dropped her arms at her sides, her modeling knife clattering to the floor, tears gathering in her eyes.

  “My lovely,” Cossutta said gently, bending to pick up the knife. “Stop. Do not pound the clay to make it submit. Seduce it.” He stood behind her, placing his hand on her hip, so close she felt his whispered breath on her neck. “We learn what it wants to be, my dear. We wait for it to speak. Then we coax it into form.”

  And at this, she gave in, to her art, to the professor’s long seduction, leaning back, feeling him press into her as he encircled her with his arms.

  . . .

  Evenings in the studio soon gave way to assignations at an inn with a lovely view of the Arno, not that they spent much time gazing at the river. It was always the same room, a standing arrangement with the innkeeper, she later realized. Gilberto was married with two small children, but he reassured his young lover that his family was no impediment. When his wife turned up at the studio one night to find her husband uncorking a bottle of wine and his student wearing only her sculpting smock, she apologized for disturbing them and backed out the door, telling her husband she would take the soup she’d brought him back home and leave it on the stove.

  “Don’t look so shocked, my lovely,” Cossutta said after she left. “My wife prefers this—my involvements with students—to a permanent mistress, someone long-term as most men choose. Mistresses, after a few years, forget their place, develop a sense of entitlement—showing up at family parties or at Mass on holidays, demanding attention. But my wife knows there is no danger of that, as my students are here for just a season, enriching my life as you are doing now.”

  She nodded but stayed mute, confused and hurt by his casual appraisal of this intense thing between them. Gilberto was relentlessly possessive with her, always wanting to shape her plans for the day, to know who she’d eaten lunch with, hear what her classmates were saying about the bellicose Hitler, glean news from the letters her mother sent. She had learned when she wasn’t properly forthcoming with him, when she was vague or slow in answering what she believed to be mundane questions, simply because she was tired or her mind was elsewhere, she paid a price. He withdrew, criticizing her harshly in class and keeping his distance, skipping their private sessions in the studio. So she grew acutely attentive to him, developing antennae that read the signal embedded in a raised eyebrow or a narrowed eye, acquiescing to the rhythm he set in their relationship.

  When they were alone, he kept his hand on her, stroking her arm, gripping behind her neck, praising her looks that he found so startling, so unusual—the light blue eyes, the flaxen hair, the pale skin so unlike, he said, the Mediterranean women he was accustomed to. He developed an extended ritual of freeing her long hair from the bun she usually wore for school, of running his fingers through it to loosen the pins, gripping her skull with his long fingers, pressing. Then he would undress her, assessing aloud the vigor and quality of her response to him, evaluating her always. She, in turn, became more expressive, more demonstrative and daring because pleasing him—eliciting that look of complete pleasure and approval on his face—had become the most important thing to her. This would prove to him, she believed, that theirs was more than a casual affair that would run its course over a school term.

  Only much later did she recognize that Cossutta’s intensity stemmed only partly from his attraction to her, far more from his commitment to shape her, to ensure she absorbed his outlook on the world. Over their many hours together, he taught her the particulars of various political systems—democracy and capitalism, communism, socialism, the dictatorships that dotted Africa and of course, fascism—answering her questions and slowly coaxing her views into alignment with his. Familiar only with the system she’d been raised in, she was astounded at all she learned, savoring their back and forth that made her feel intellectually mature and worldly.

  “Could Patrizio be right, do you think?” she asked as they lazed on the bed at the inn. They had skipped class in favor of a long afternoon together. Having emptied two bottles of Amarone, they would not be heading back to the studio.

  “Right in what way?” asked Gilberto.

  “That done right, the Fascist system ensures the correct leaders hold power, leaders who make decisions that protect the people from corrupting influences.”

  Cossutta laughed. “You were raised to know better,” he chided. “Surely you know how Marx and Lenin destroy Patrizio’s argument.”

  “Still,” she smiled. “I love hearing you lay it out. When you answer my questions, it dispels my doubts.”

  Six months later, as Hitler’s tanks rolled into Poland and Mussolini crowed in celebration from his balcony in Rome, she found Gilberto in his office, where they whispered in growing alarm behind his closed door. He cautioned her to watch herself, to avoid the authorities whose intolerance of any perceived opposition would only grow. Afraid and deeply in his thrall, she looked to him for direction, willing to do anything he asked. And what he asked, finally, after months of indoctrination, was for her to relinquish everything she knew, to take on what he called a life of higher purpose and honor, to help rid the world of the dangerous, oppressive ideologies he had outlined for her, the wrong thinking that had closed the university and threatened their safety. It was, after all, what had brought her to Florence in the first place.

  “The world needs you now, my lovely,” he told her. “With your clever brain and your creativity and the glorious way you look, doors will swing wide for you.”

  She could be anything, he said, French, Swiss, even American. So, with the help of a folder of information produced by Gilberto’s network and an extended tutelage in American history, Marisha Yahontov, child of Vyatka, Russia—now called Kirov, Soviet Union—became Boston-born Eleanor Halsey.

  . . .

  When Marisha’s fevered interest to study painting first asserted itself, her mother, Svetlana, considered how it might be leveraged to the party’s benefit and by extension, her own. A true believer, Svetlana had cheered the Bolshevik takeover in 1917, earning a post on the local soviet where she’d served twenty years and giving her access to better housing, better food, and a better education for her children—a living example that some comrades are indeed more equal than others. Svetlana survived the party purge by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—the NKVD—that began in 1936, perhaps because she was female but probably because Stalin had fewer eyes on Kirov, his focus more on rivals in the Supreme Soviet and the Red Army. Although hundreds of thousands of committed communists were eliminated—scores of people Svetlana had known and worked with were executed or sent to the Gulags—Svetlana clung to her belief in the rightness of the Soviet system. When Marisha asked to go to Italy to study art, Svetlana immediately consulted the local committee, believing the request would be seen as evidence of Svetlana’s own loyalty and commitment: she was willing to send her young daughter into Fascist Italy to be used however the state wished. It was up to the committee to approve and endorse such a plan and secure the papers the girl would need to travel. After discussions within that soviet, and endorsement by higher-ranking committees, it was determined that another pair of eyes in Florence could be useful, aiding in intelligence gathering as Mussolini grew more erratic and hostile. Marisha would study sculpture while monitoring student attitudes toward Mussolini and, tangentially, Hitler.

  Marisha had responded tearfully, protesting she wanted to study oil painting in Rome, not sculpture in Florence. She was dreadful with clay, she cried. Her mother had responded with an angry retort and a sharp slap to her cheek.

  “You are being given a gift, Mishie. Do you know how unusual it is for a girl like you to be given permission to leave the country to attend university? A handful of people are allowed to do this, only the most talented and committed, who will bring honor to the homeland. You are not needed in Rome. You will go to Florence or you won’t go anywhere. Besides, you are no better with oils than with clay.”