Free News from the World by Paula Fox Page A

defeated. When he spoke, his Italian accent was strong, as though he’d just debarked on Ellis Island. Later I heard that he had been the model for Mellors, the gamekeeper in Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
    Robin told us more about Angelo when we were in the car. He kept a potter’s wheel inside the shed, and when he wasn’t gambling in the barn casino he would throw pots. I never saw one, though we visited Frieda often.
    At some point, I learned that Frieda and Angelo had been denied American citizenship because they were living together illicitly. In 1950 they married, and soon after were forgiven by the government and allowed to become American citizens.
    After Robin and Peg left Taos, we heard about Dorothy Brett from Frieda. She had sailed to Australia with the Lawrences, and Frieda said, “One morning on the voyage, she began to follow Lawrence into the toilet. That’s when I had to put my foot down.” She laughed unrestrainedly, as she was apt to do about many things.
    After the first few visits to her, I guessed why she had me sit next to her always, and why she stared at me so intensely. I resembled her daughter Barbara, she said.
    I wondered whether she missed her children all the time, or only at intense moments. But Lawrence had taken up all her attention, she told us, smiling as though at someone who stood just behind us. I shivered.
    Angelo was bitter, I felt, because he was lonely and wanted to live the rest of his life in his own country. He went often to the barn to gamble away Frieda’s money.
    It was there at the gambling hell that I learned that a rich easterner had bought an old ranch to use as a second home. It was the first time I had heard those two fateful words, “second home.” It was the start of a community of second homes in New Mexico.

    Richard and I frequently drove to a ranch where we would rent desert ponies for an afternoon ride. We would sit on a corral fence watching them move around, some boisterously kicking up their hind legs, most plumply calm.
    After we’d chosen our mounts, we would ride into the trackless desert. Tumbleweed would blow suddenly across the sand. The wind would drop. Then it would start up again as though it had yet another word to say.
    One time I caught sight of a sidewinder rattlesnake zig-zagging swiftly toward my pony. Richard had seen it at the same moment and rode to my side. These ponies, he told me, were used to snakes and knew how to dance out of their way. When I glanced back to where we had been, I saw no snake, only a corkscrew ridge in the sand.
    Toward the end of our second month, I picked up our mail at the Taos post office. So far, there hadn’t been much mail for us. But today there was a long business envelope addressed to Richard. I opened it. It was from one of the heads of the agency where we had both worked in New York. I read the short paragraph.
    A company vice-president had written it, saying that he hoped that Richard was enjoying his long vacation. He was looking forward to his return. There were a number of new accounts to be dealt with.
    I returned to the tack room and silently held out the letter to Richard. After he had read it, I recall saying, “You told me you had quit for good.” He answered no, he had always expected to return to the agency. Where had I gotten the idea that he had left it permanently? When I think back to that moment, I still feel my wretched bewilderment.

    Years later, after Richard and I had been parted for many years, I went to a dinner party in Manhattan. I heard Diana Trilling, whom I had just met that evening, claim that when it came to writing about nature, Norman Mailer had it all over D. H. Lawrence.
    I groaned, I imagined, quietly. But Mrs. Trilling heard me. She rose from the dinner table and marched directly out of the apartment, the door slamming behind her.
    The violence of her departure was mortifying. I blushed. The poet