“Well, at least we know Eleanor got a decent education, even if she did have to deal with rotten Boston weather,” Harold offered.

  Molly jumped in. “Eleanor, tell us about Smith. I’ve only ever driven through there.”

  “It’s lovely. A bit secluded, as you saw. Northampton is a small town. My father taught there so I suppose they had to take me.” She smiled and gave a little shrug as the others objected to her self-deprecation.

  “And Florence? How did you end up there?” Molly asked.

  Eleanor recounted her decision to study sculpture in Italy, how she’d taken for granted that the university would be a shield from Europe’s political turmoil. “By the time I understood what was really going on, I couldn’t get out. The American consulate had closed. The university suspended classes. So, I moved in with friends, and later hid out at a convent, of all places.”

  “And a professor helped her, too,” Talbot prompted, reaching for Eleanor’s hand, “and kept you for months, didn’t he?”

  “I stayed with him and his wife and their children for a while, yes, living in their attic. But after a point, I didn’t want to put them at risk. Any accusation that found its way to the authorities, the police, or the security apparatus could turn lethal. A classmate was hanged after his neighbor said he’d been seen with a communist. No proof. His neighbor just called up the police and that was it. Another—a beautiful artist named Patrizio whom I knew from university—was killed for the opposite reason. After the Allies landed and the Italians switched sides in the war, the new government went after fascist students first—as if they believed by killing off the evidence, they could pretend the terror hadn’t really happened, that the Black Shirts and Mussolini hadn’t created the god-awful mess they had.”

  “I would think you’d be eager to get out of there,” offered Harold, “to get back to normal life.”

  “Normal life,” Eleanor mused. “What would that be? My parents are gone. My brother was in the Navy and died in ‘43.”

  “Eleanor. I’m so sorry,” Molly offered, turning to her husband with a wince.

  “But I’m here. I can help, maybe,” Talbot finally said. “I try to bring a little normal to the situation, maybe even a little fun. Like getting together with the two of you.”

  “He’s wonderful medicine,” Eleanor agreed. “As are you both. Tell us more about the glamorous goings-on in New York, now that the war has ended.”

  . . .

  They dined with the Warrens three times in London, laughing with them through a production of Annie Get Your Gun in the West End. They were an easygoing couple and the visit was cordial, even if Talbot sensed Eleanor never fully relaxed. Throughout the excursion, a comment from a waiter, a question from a shopkeeper, seemed to throw her off for a second, inclining her to turn to Talbot, wide-eyed, for help. “The accents!” she cried, after a bus driver—a Scotsman—welcomed her to the trolley so incomprehensibly, she threw her hands in the air and fell helplessly into the first open seat. “All I hear are mumbles and consonants. It’s harder than when I first learned Italian.” Talbot laughed and promised to continue to serve as translator.

  The next morning, he and Harold met for breakfast to reminisce privately about the war, their memories still vivid of close calls and near-misses they would never disclose to the women. There was a sacredness in the recounting; it made the safety they now enjoyed feel that much more astonishing. Wonder of wonders, here they were, facing the rest of their lives without the high stakes.

  Harold reached for the cream, noting to Tal that no amount of that and sugar could make this thing the English called coffee drinkable. “Forget all the bomb damage. Crappy coffee tells me it will be awhile before our former Allies are really back on their feet. But anyway—Eleanor. Wow. She’s a peach. But what in hell was she thinking, staying in Italy like she did?”

  “Naïveté, Hal. She was so consumed by her studies, she was oblivious to what was going on around her. She had a tight group of friends she says were smart and fascinating—and they all seemed to reinforce the idea to one another that they were immune from the threat around them—that things would return to normal. She’s young, remember. We’ve got ten years on her.”

  “So maybe that’s it… the age difference,” began Harold.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Tal, she doesn’t seem comfortable with us. Maybe it’s because we’re older, or because we’re kinda provincial compared to her. We don’t speak Italian or French. Just good ole American.”

  “Yes. Wall Street bankers with backgrounds in signals intelligence are notoriously sheltered rubes. You don’t have a clue about the world so I never should have subjected her to you two.”

  Harold smiled, shrugging his shoulders as if to say he had no other explanation to offer.

  “Harold, to tell you the truth, I don’t think it’s her age or even how long she’s been away from the U.S. I think it’s that she’s just been through hell. She left home and never saw her family again. She practically lived underground during the war. And she hasn’t recovered from it. She’s still in pieces. She’s broken. She covers it up pretty well most of the time, with this great job she has at the preeminent museum in Florence. She’s got a lot to be proud of, making her way as she has. But man, it’s made her so cautious, so wary about everything. She doesn’t entirely trust me yet. But I love her and hope she’s almost on the other side of this. She’s got a lot of healing to do.”

  “And you intend to be the agent of this healing?”

  “I do. If she’ll have me. I’ve never known anyone like her, Harold. There’s just so much to her. She’s brilliant. The stuff she knows about art and art history—it just pours out of her. And how easily she speaks Italian and French…”

  “Her English seems a bit rusty,” Harold observed.

  Talbot laughed. “Yeah. She didn’t use it for seven years.”

  “Unbelievable what she’s been through,” said Harold.

  The men sat companionably for the next few minutes, the waitress bringing a fresh basket of pastries and offering more coffee, which they declined.

  “So, the one thing,” Talbot finally said, “is she’s still keeping me at arm’s length if you know what I mean. She has this real flirty side to her that comes out when she’s had a few. But there’s a line she doesn’t cross. And you know, I’m trying to appreciate that.”

  “You always were one to take on ambitious projects and a traumatized, orphaned American seems right up your alley, Talbot. But let me suggest something. Take Eleanor back to States where she can sink some roots in familiar ground. She needs to remember who she is after all this time overseas, get away from the disruption here, the destroyed buildings, the displaced people, the food shortages. A dose of normal, boring life would do her good, I think.”

  “That’s exactly the plan, Harold, absolutely. But she’s so attached to Florence, it’s like wrenching her from a lover. Still, I think I can do it. I’ll remind her that the U.S. is not exactly a cultural wasteland.”

  . . .

  “You were a champ, putting up with my friends for an entire week,” Talbot said as they settled into the train that would take them to Dover, the first leg of their return trip to Florence. “I know it was a lot. Thanks for being willing to dive in.”

  “The Warrens are lovely,” Eleanor responded. “I hope we see them again.”

  “Yeah. Me too. Maybe on their side of the pond next time.”

  “Now what is that supposed to mean?” she asked, wide-eyed, head cocked to one side.

  “I have news,” he said simply.

  He explained that on his trip to Berlin, just before their holiday in London, he’d met with U.S. military intelligence, and learned they were about to boot him out; they were handing him over to the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA was taking over coordination of America’s intelligence gathering. It was a step up, he said, the country needing its most experienced hands to join the fledgling operation aimed principally at getting eyes and ears on the ground in the Soviet Union now that they were no longer allies.

  “I turned in the transfer paperwork and submitted my final reports before we left,” he told her. “I have about six weeks before I have to be in DC.”

  “You’re leaving then,” she said, her face inscrutable.

  “I have to go, yes, but my new orders clarified some things for me. Really, really important things. I should have done this months ago and I wish this were a more romantic setting—but Eleanor, I’m hoping you’ll come with me. As my wife.”

  Rather than receive his proposal of marriage with ebullience or tears of joy, Eleanor became contemplative, crossing her arms, head still cocked, looking out the window of the train car to the horizon as if she were reasoning through a math equation. Finally, she turned back to him and reached both hands for his.

  “Yes, I will,” she finally said, her expression serious. “But I have questions.”

  At this, Talbot let out a laugh and pulled her into his arms, deeply relieved that she agreed to be his. Hands on either side of her face, he kissed her and told her to ask away, whatever questions she had.

  “Will we marry here? Or in the United States? I would prefer something small… so perhaps here, or maybe it should be in the States—to make sure there aren’t legal questions. And do we have money for this? Can we afford to marry? Do we need papers?”

  . . .

  Two weeks later, much to the chagrin of Talbot’s mother who had hoped to stage competitively extravagant nuptials inside St. Phillips Cathedral in Atlanta, they were married by a U.S. Army chaplain inside the vast Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. Preparing for the ceremony had proven complicated and not because of the challenge of finding a suitable dress or a florist to create the bouquet. Eleanor’s passport had gone missing years earlier, she said, a victim of her many moves during the war. She had only a tattered birth certificate, written in longhand and signed by the doctor who had delivered her at home. After some back and forth with Washington, given that her parents were no longer living and unavailable to help, the State Department issued Eleanor a U.S. diplomatic passport, with its attendant rights and privileges. The chaplain had helped greatly in securing the passport and the local paperwork for an Italian wedding: Tal was one of many American officers who’d found their brides while on assignment on foreign soil and the chaplain had learned his way around the landscape.

  They did not advertise to the parish priest of the great Catholic cathedral that theirs was a Protestant ceremony; he stood across the transept, watching throughout, realizing as he heard the short, simple ceremony that lacked wine and wafer, that he had been wrong to allow these Americans and their unadorned Christianity into this sacred space. The only witnesses for the ceremony were eight members of Talbot’s working group who were charmed by Eleanor and Talbot’s happenstance romance and were looking very much forward to the celebration in the Hotel Minerva bar that would follow.

  When the chaplain pronounced them wed, Talbot leaned in to kiss his bride, seeing tears gathered in her eyes. Eleanor was as raw and emotional as he had ever seen her. Finally, he believed, she would open herself fully, unreservedly, to him. As they made their way down the long aisle of the cathedral toward the massive wooden doors, her arm linked securely in his, he lifted his eyes toward heaven, grateful for this most holy moment. Above, in the balcony that ringed the sanctuary, a man skittered behind a pillar—Italian, well dressed. A church official perhaps? He turned to Eleanor and knew she spotted the uninvited guest, too. The welling tears spilled down her cheeks as she bit her lip, causing Talbot to resent that this outsider’s intrusion had spoiled an otherwise perfect moment with his lovely, tender wife.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  1947

  Washington, DC

  As Talbot hoped, Eleanor’s guardedness receded in their first years of their marriage. They returned to the States alongside thousands of veterans, all of them flush with relief at having survived the war, infused with optimism about what lay ahead. The Bentleys set up house in a sunny one-room apartment in Georgetown tucked into an historic building that faced the Potomac. The built-in bookshelves offered an ideal place to display the small collection of art pieces Eleanor had shepherded from Italy: a small oil of the Ponte Vecchio a classmate had painted, a clay sculpture of a starling that represented her best work, a blue and white painted tile Talbot had brought her from Lisbon set up on a small easel, and a small art deco box, cross-hatched in black and gold. Talbot had bought it from a merchant in the portico of the Uffizi, presenting it to Eleanor with her engagement ring inside. It was the perfect size to store the matchbooks she continued to collect from restaurants across the city. She hoped one day to add an example of abstract expressionism to the collection, even if it was just a framed print.

  She and Tal scoured second hand shops for furniture, got to know the grocer on the corner, and professed their faith in front of congregants at St. John’s Episcopal Church. While Talbot charted his course in the CIA, Eleanor learned her way around the city, map in hand. Her artistic appetite was satisfied by the collections within the Smithsonian’s growing portfolio of museums.

  Talbot made a point to get out of the office early every so often, so she could guide him through her newest discoveries in the city. He savored the tours she curated especially for him, much like she had done in Florence when they first met, walking him through galleries to explain the significance of a piece by Andrea del Verrocchio or Brunelleschi. He trailed her through the National Gallery and its rooms of Old Master portraiture, reaching for her hand as she interpreted an artist’s brush technique, the use of light, why the Rembrandts, in particular, pulsated from the canvas as they did.

  “Somerset Maugham identified it,” Eleanor said as they stood before Rembrandt’s portrait entitled A Polish Nobleman. “He writes about these aspiring painters in Of Human Bondage, toiling away in Paris, making little progress, and one concludes the greatest portrait painters paint both man and his soul—the man, the physical being, but his emotions and passion as well. That’s the difference. Painting with the heart, as Maugham wrote.”

  Talbot found her depth, her intelligence, her beauty, distracting and stirring. He was proud of her and proud she was with him. On warm evenings, after their tours of the galleries, they often enjoyed a picnic dinner—simple sandwiches and a thermos of tea. They would linger on a bench near the Reflecting Pool, the Lincoln Memorial to one side and the Washington Monument to the other, the humming, growing city extending beyond.

  “Reminds me of my bread and cheese dinners in Florence—before the war,” she said the first time they picnicked there. “Sitting in the piazza, thinking our great thoughts. It was all theoretical—what Hitler and Mussolini were doing.”

  Talbot studied her, imagining the girl she had been in 1938, how easily she could have been lost to the violence that overtook Europe. “Did the university just wall you off from news from the outside world?”

  “We weren’t paying attention. We knew Jewish students left school because of the new laws. We just didn’t know what to make of it. When the Black Shirts high-stepped across the plaza, we didn’t take them seriously. Italy, with Mussolini, was theatre. Big gestures—literally!—and passion. The soldiers seemed like boys playacting. We thought sane voices would prevail before anything went sideways. We never imagined the school doors would close.”

  “Dictators are not easily deterred.”

  “Gosh, Tal, now that you mention it, Mussolini was kind of opinionated. And Hitler—not the best team player—always wanting to do it his way.” Eleanor stood and paced in front of the bench, a hand stroking her chin. “I had not considered this, but you may be correct. The next time I’m in the middle of a worldwide conflict, I shall keep in mind that dictators tend to…dictate, not cooperate and I shall plan accordingly.”

  He loved this part of her, giving as good as she got, the playfulness that emerged more and more. She had finally grown to trust him, he believed, and it spilled over to their physical connection which had improved vastly since the early, fumbling days. She responded to his advances always and had begun to take the initiative herself. Some mornings she climbed into the shower with him, insisting it was only because she wanted to conserve water, before pulling his hips to hers. More than once after dinner, she appeared in front of him as he read the evening paper, silk robe open, nothing underneath, waiting until he noticed, then laughing at his shocked face. “I thought you were doing the dinner dishes,” he managed to blurt on one occasion.

  “It seems I’m finished. But if you’re not interested I can keep myself busy.”

  As a younger man, Talbot had encountered women like this, frank in their sexual interest. He had never imagined he would find it in his wife. It felt like an undeserved gift.

  Many Fridays, they met for cocktails and long discursive dinners with a growing circle of friends. They often walked Rock Creek Park on Saturday mornings, occasionally running into people Talbot knew from his office. Sundays, they slipped into the pew at St. John’s right across the street from the White House, exchanging winks as they tallied the number of politicians, journalists, and other self-important types who tended to arrive just as the bells chimed eleven, ensuring their attendance would be duly noted by the greatest number of parishioners. In addition to DC celebrities, the sanctuary was filled with scores of young families—so many that the nursery committee was forever pleading for more volunteers to cope with the boom. Given his Episcopal upbringing, it was all quite familiar to Talbot, who volunteered to usher every quarter or so and always wanted to stay for the monthly coffee hour after the service. Eleanor, who had not been raised in a church, took a little time to warm up to the whole idea. She found the rector, Reverend Leslie Grant, who’d served as a chaplain in the war, approachable and warm, even if some of his assertions about righteous living tended toward the simplistic. But she found his sermons and her nascent exposure to a church community helped her better understand the prevailing post-war perspective—the twin ideas that the country was blessed by God and therefore knew what was best for the rest of the world.