Troub—Helen Boylston—always complained that I was at my mother’s beck and call. She was right, of course. Still, the situation was desperate. My father was sick. My mother was sick. They had to have help. Who else could they turn to but me? But the matter was more complicated than that. It was time to leave Albania, and both Troub and I knew it. We had gone to Tirana in 1926 because we wanted to get away from the madness of American commercial life and back to a time where life was slower and sweeter, where both of us (Troub was a writer, too) could write and read and soak in the primitive world around us. I suppose in some ways we were joining the great exodus of American writers who sought refuge in Europe in the twenties—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, all of whom, and others, were in Paris when Troub and I were there. The two of us had met on a train to Poland in 1920, I a writer for the Red Cross, Troub a Red Cross nurse on her way from an assignment in Albania.
