Listening to him, I could not place what it was that struck me as unlikely in my brother’s anecdote. Something seemed off, but before I could pick it out the sister began to recommend things to see in Rome. She told us to make a point of seeing things we had already made a point of, mostly churches and church art. She was a woman who would recommend that one make it a point to see the Vatican. She made it clear that she had made up her mind about Nicholas and me, that we had not seen these things, that we were people who came to world capitals just to drink at good hotels.

She especially recommended a mural in Trastevere. She called it “Scenes from the Life of the Virgin.” I didn’t know if the artist had called it that or if someone else had later, but I was pretty sure that Nicholas and I had seen it. Not that I could tell from the woman’s description. She knew more about it than one could learn just by looking. She talked facts, talked technique; her description did not describe a thing that one could see. But she went on in a flat, unanimated voice, and as she did, I felt as if I was being read aloud to from a travel book, and not one that was first-rate. She knew more about the mural than I wanted to know, more than I wanted to hear, and I could tell that it was becoming more than Nicholas could bear.

“God help me,” my brother said to the man from San Francisco, “if I see one more Virgin Mary, I’m going to get knocked up.”

It must have been my brother’s tone that set the woman off. I cannot say that his tone had nothing in it to offend. The woman looked across the table at my brother and told him that she could not help it, she just had to say that he was the most affected creature she had ever come across.

That was her word; she called him a creature. She inflected the word by not inflecting it at all.

She made it a point to say it without style.

That the woman from San Francisco had just had to say this to him did not seem to come as a surprise to Nicholas.

“Of course, you can’t help it,” my brother said to the woman. “Of course, you have to say it.”

I noticed, because there was no way not to, that Nicholas was surpassing the woman in flatness of voice. He was far surpassing her. I had thought until then that I had heard my brother speak in every voice he had, even voices he did not, but I had not heard the voice that he was using with the woman. I had not before heard speech so stripped of ornament.

I told the woman that we had already seen the Scenes from the Life of the Virgin. I even called it that.