Embedded in this short section is a reference to a story told to me in different versions when I was on the island of Elba gathering information for Tourmaline,   The story, which concerns the 1944 liberation of the island by the 9th French Colonial Division, didn't make it into official histories of the war. I didn't have room in Tourmaline to tell it at length. But I couldn't not tell it at length, in some form. Hence this spin-off, leading who knows where . . . —J.S.

 

The woman known to others as Mrs. Rundel is riding on a dirty train through a dirty landscape in America. Mrs. Philip Rundel—with her cap of hair a blend of gray and white and streaks of satin black, her face fitting neatly inside the frame of her curls, dark pools of flesh completing the circles of her wide dark eyes, her right eyebrow raised at a sharp angle, pushed upward by a chronically swollen lachrymal gland, her overlapping front teeth hidden beneath the beak of her mouth—this is who she has become, a woman…