Crowned Heads by Thomas Tryon

could you expect? I gave her money to have the wheel repaired, and she went off, the bicycle bumping and veering crazily.
    “After my meal I sat in the arbor, watching the villa and thinking about my ‘interview’ with Fedora. It was likely to be the only one I would get, but what a disappointment. I thought that what in her had once been a witty and endearing irony had turned to bitterness, to petty meanness that was far from the exalted realm where I, to say nothing of thousands of others, had ensconced her. The goddess was a harpy. Still, the familiar famous face haunted me. I thought about the remark I’d overheard about Gloria Swanson’s wrinkles: She hasn’t got them, you know. By my calculation Fedora was at this time in her late seventies; but she looked no more than fifty or fifty-five, an incredible manifestation of age retardation. Some years earlier I had done a magazine piece on gerontology and it was inevitable that the name of Emmanuel Vando had come up. It was only in recent decades that further steps had been taken in the direction which the doctor pioneered. In the 1960s it was steroid hormones, in the seventies it’s something they call prostaglandins, or PG, which while naturally derivative from animal glands, has been found to be available through chemical manufacture. These synthetic estrogens, or ‘duplicate compounds,’ as they are known in scientific circles, had been first announced by Vando when he read a paper to the Société de Pharmacopée in Basel shortly after the start of World War II. Rumor and fad and beauty parlor theories had done much to damage his reputation, but the truth was that Pope Pius XII owed his long good health to the injection of substances from cow’s placenta into the bloodstream, while Churchill’s vitality through the stress of the war was claimed to be partially the result of similar treatments. Also, whatever one might say about Vando the mountebank, the fact remained that it was he who had initiated a new phase of scientific inquiry, and if Fedora was a result of his theories, I decided she was a good one.
    “In consequence of our latest meeting, though, I found myself suffering from acute dislike of her cavalier ways, and next morning I was still fuming over the bicycle business. Resuming my watch, I saw that the same daily schedule was in force up at the villa. Kritos came and swept and watered, then, precisely at eleven, the countess was wheeled out and placed under the canopy, where she sat watching the view. Mrs. Balfour came and read to her; the music played from inside. At the end of the hour Fedora appeared and they traded places. Promptly at one the reading ended and the countess was taken inside. I saw no one for the remainder of the afternoon. That evening I ate the dinner Mrs. Vasos had prepared, veal and peppers with the inevitable rice, a salad, and bread, cheese, and wine. I could get tired of Greek cooking, I thought, sitting in my arbor and watching the sunset. When darkness fell, the usual lights shone at the windows up at the villa and I felt depressed. I’d drunk not merely my usual half bottle of wine, but almost a full one, and I was feeling desolate. I wondered what the hell I was doing on that island by myself, without friends or company, all in the name of an interview with someone I’d now taken a violent dislike to, and I made up my mind to call it quits and take the boat to Athens. But then something happened that changed everything.
    “It was after ten that night. I was reading in the only comfortable chair in the room, when I heard rapid footsteps in the road, then an impatient rapping on the door. I opened it and there stood Fedora. She was wearing a half-buttoned red shirt and a dark skirt, and looked disheveled. Quite out of breath, she stared at me without saying anything, then brushed by and came in, and stood pressing her crossed hands on her chest, as if trying to get control of herself. She hardly glanced at me, but