Free Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick

suspended until the doctor’s return. The inquirers were likely to be new clients, since the old ones were familiar with the rhythms of his departures; nor would it be necessary for Julian to monitor the telephone. Dr. Montalbano’s telephone was shut off in his absence, and anyhow all his clients, the old and the new, were treated in the most confidential and personal way, and were required to come to his door. A good number were responding to ads — Dr. Montalbano’s ads were many and various, some posted conventionally in newspapers, some merely hand-printed and tacked up in local pharmacies. But many more (swarms, Julian said) were there through word of mouth.
    Iris’s suitcase lay propped against the leg of a chair. The noise of four-engine propellers still lingered in her ears. Julian was past the first surprise, half an hour ago — his sister out of place, his sister who ought to have been where his mind had planted her, at home in California, far away; but here she was, her arms around his neck, kissing him all over his captured head, grinning at him. Julian shocked, confused, glad, unhappy. Suspicious.
    “It won’t be just you, will it?”
    “It
is
just me,” Iris said.
    “You mean so far. Dad’ll be right behind you, hiding out at the Ritz or somewhere — he wouldn’t’ve let you come alone.”
    “He didn’t. He thinks I’m in New York with Aunt Bea. It was supposed to
be
Aunt Bea. A fussy old thing, what could you possibly do with her? So I came instead.”
    Julian said, “And what can I possibly do with you?”
    “You can just let me look at you. At home we’ve been worrying that you’ve been starving in some attic, and well, you’re absolutely fat!”
    “If you wait on tables you get to see these outlanders grazing in one café after another all day —”
    Outlanders
. And wasn’t he one himself?
    “— and then,” Julian said, “they leave half their dinners untouched. I guess I’ve licked too many platters clean.”
    “Oh my poor Julian, you’ve been going without regular meals
    —” “Oh my poor Iris, you’ve just pronounced me too fat.”
    An offhand teasing parry, an echo of their childhood: it emboldened her. There were all those letters — he hadn’t relinquished their old connection — yet she had sensed something veiled in them: a muffling of her brother’s voice. Did he, after an immersion of three years, think himself grown into Europe?
    “I’ve brought you some money anyway,” she said, and instantly regretted it. She saw the beginning stir of a clutch of anger — it was in his neck. It bulged a little.
    “A bribe from dad —”
    “Nothing to do with dad. It’s that I don’t like to think of you needing things.”
    The bulge collapsed into a shrug. “I’ve got everything I need. Only gaze upon my vast holdings —”
    “And what happens after this Dr. Montalbano gets back?”
    “We’re thrown out, I suppose, Lili and me. But in the meantime we’ve got the run of the place, and it doesn’t cost us a penny.”
    “And afterward?”
    “Afterward takes care of itself.”
    Iris said, “You talk as if you’ve suddenly got religion, everything’s in God’s hands. Wouldn’t
that
surprise dad!”
    “What’s it to me what he thinks, I’m done with him. And I haven’t got religion. I’ve got Lili.”
    He had led her to a pair of double doors and pulled them open. A narrow balcony with an iron railing, and a stretch of Paris below. She looked down on a scattering of pedestrians, the strolling ones, the intent ones; a bare-shouldered woman tugging at a whining child. The whine a universal language. Everything else oddly wrong: the width of the pavement, the snout-nosed cars (at home they had winglike fins, like big metal sharks), the very bricks of the building opposite, and the languid tallness of its windows. Even the light seemed out of kilter, as if the sun had started out that morning mistakenly angled, a ship in the hands of an erratic