Caleb turned toward her, his voice sharp. “If I stepped into a church right now, the walls would come crumbling down around me.”
        Emma flinched at his gruffness, chastening herself for making him the object of her vain and childish desires, for disregarding her mother's most obvious lesson, that a man's brief sweetness would lead only to endless chores, and a whole lot of bitterness. She recalled Caleb's cold kiss at their courthouse wedding, how afterwards he'd walked her down to the Norfolk and Western station to show her where he would work now that he'd been promoted to grading Tidewater coal. Standing in the railroad hub, they looked up a steep street shadowed by East River Mountain. Caleb pointed to a white, stone bank tower that looked like a church steeple, saying, “That's Italian stonework. It looks just like some of the buildings you see in Italy.”
        Emma waited quietly in the dying firelight, certain now that Caleb's mind was far away from her, in some Italian hill town, where she imagined all the women were fine-boned and wore red silk scarves and walked gracefully up steep streets lined with buildings so beautiful they resembled churches. She began to envy Caleb's first wife, the lovely one who suffered the austerities of illness, died and still lingered in Caleb's memory. Emma looked down at her own callused hands and thick waist, feeling disconnected, unworthy, plain as a brown overcoat heaped on the ground beside her husband.
        “I wouldn't mind going back to Pompeii.” Caleb's voice was gentle again. “After I'd seen enough churches, I bought a ticket to the ruins. The day I went, a farmer was burning trash on the hillside, and I could hardly see where I was going through all the ashes in the air.”
        Emma didn't think she'd like Pompeii. Trudging over tumbled stones through hot, cindered air wouldn't be much different from walking through a coal camp in the height of summer. As he told of walking the loose cobble stoned streets lined with ancient, caved-in houses, she felt lost and sweaty. But she held her tongue, grateful that he was talking again.
        “I hired an old Neopolitan guide,” Caleb said. “He took me to the house where no women were allowed to go and led me down a hallway lined with square rooms, each one fitted with a single, stone bed. Above the doorways, there were frescoes covered with white clothes. The old man started lifting them one by one so that I could see. The first was of a naked woman perched on a man's chest.” He described the faded frescoes of bare, plump women of pleasure, making love in various positions. One lay on her side with a man curled behind her, tracing her spine; another crouched before a man with her hand on his head, as though giving him a blessing. “The guide said that the girls working in the brothel would howl like wolves out their windows at night to generate business from the streets. He said he knew of a real woman he could call for me.”
        “What did you say?”
        “I told him to go away.”
        “Why would you want to be alone in an old house full of dirty pictures?” Emma asked.

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