Free The Receptionist by Janet Groth

was wearing only a light raincoat and the station thermometer showed six degrees Celsius. But Penelope was prompt, driving up to the curb at 6:03 in a dusty, almost new Alfa Romeo, which I later discovered belongs to Muriel but which she doesn’t drive.
    Penelope, a woman of about fifty-five with a mild, pleasant face, no makeup, and short, light brown hair, shrugged off the half-hour drive involved in fetching me and the still longer drive involved in taking me back to Cortona at the end of the evening. “I expect we’ll be fairly merry by then,” she said. “We’ll scarcely notice.”
    I asked how Penelope, a Scot, a sculptor and painter, had come to purchase the thirteenth-century church she and Muriel were renovating. She said that years before, when she was living in Rome, she had been told that the Catholic Church was selling many of its smaller holdings in Italy; a friend took her to the local bishop, who helped her to accomplish the purchase.
    We now arrived at the walled town of Oliveto, above which the house is situated. She paused to show me a small chapel at a crossroads.
    “ Th at chapel consecrates the spot where the last plague victim died—about the period of I promessi sposi, ” she said, turning up the steep hill of their drive. “So Muriel and I like to say we live above the plague line.”
    Muriel, looking nice in a black chiffon skirt with a touch of what may have been feathers or fur at the hem and a beaded black mohair sweater, greeted me with a hug. Both she and Penelope seemed pleased over my present to them of Moët & Chandon. We discussed whether to have champagne immediately or wait for the other guests, deciding to wait a bit (it was just quarter of seven). Muriel said that they had been glued to the television following the swiftly unfolding events in Romania and that if I didn’t mind they would like to watch the news at seven o’clock. I said I’d like to and asked what the latest information was. Both mentioned in shocked tones the mounting death toll being attributed to troops still faithful to the repressive Ceausescu, who’d been executed that afternoon. Muriel at one point broke out bitterly, “Seventy thousand dead and there the survivors sit, without so much as an aspirin.”
    We then ascended to Muriel’s bedroom and watched a half hour of almost unrelieved bad news. Violence in the Romanian city of Timisoara. Muriel was worried about a young friend who lives there—a translator of her books—who had just had a baby. Violence in Jerusalem. Candlelit masses in the streets of Prague and Bucharest. In a brief nod to the good news of the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a snippet of Leonard Bernstein conducting a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth at the Brandenburg Gate. Th en, back to the grim, with a captured kidnapper telecasting an appeal to his Italian cohorts to give themselves up and restore their victim to his family unharmed.
    Afterward we came down to Penelope’s bedroom/sitting room and attempted to get into a more festive frame of mind. Th e room was cheerful, featuring chintz and pillows and Christmas decorations. I commented on two oil portraits, asking if they were done by Penelope. I was told the one of Muriel, in profile, was. “It belongs to Penny,” said Muriel. Th en she added, “She hasn’t given it to me.” She said that the other, showing a young and dashing Penelope, had been done by a friend in Rome.
    Somehow, Muriel got going on Africa—not Rhodesia, site of her unhappy marriage, but South Africa and South Africans. She became so heated about it that Penelope asked, with a laugh, “What other nationalities are there, I wonder, we can banish wholesale?” It seemed that Australians, too, aroused Muriel’s ire. “I never met one who wasn’t vulgar in the extreme—look at Germaine [Greer], for example, although I quite like her. I have to send word ahead if I’m going to see her to ask them to get her to please leave out the