Lambrusco (30 page)

“What did she do to this man called Ace?”

“It wasn't him. Although in my opinion, it should have been. He knew he hadn't hit that ball. And he was standing there, this cheap little cheat of a man, with this look on his face, this look of joy, and he was saying, over and over, ‘I won! I won! I won!' Like he was talking himself into it. The guy she went after was the club official in charge of measuring those distances. The one who decided it wasn't her ball. To her credit, when she went at him, she remembered to put down her club. It could have been worse. He was a big guy, not much older than she was. Did she tell you that at her convent school they taught boxing in their athletics program? They had a gymnasium. Boxing for girls. The nuns were keen on rowing, you see. The school was near a river and they competed for all sorts of boat prizes with other schools. They were always interested in building upper-body strength. Of course, with Annmarie, it all went into golf, not oars. She hates the water.”

“She didn't tell me that,” I said.

“The man she punched, and it was only one punch—no, it was two; it was one to one side of the head and then a second, to the other side—was taken to a hospital in an ambulance. It didn't look good, with all that blood, but nosebleeds often look worse than they are. We'll never know if she knocked him out, or if he was shamming about that. He claimed later she had broken his nose and made him partially blind in one eye. Also, that she had injured his spine. A knob in his spine was displaced, he claimed. He swore when he went down, he'd landed on a rock, extremely hard, and everyone believed him. No one stopped to think that the last thing you'd find on a
putting green,
which was where the ball landed, was a big rock. A putting green by its very definition is the smoothest surface on the course. It's the place where the little hole in the ground is, where the ball's supposed to go, in the end.”

“Did she go to jail?”

“No. Her club hired a whole pack of lawyers. A sort of squad, you might say. But the thing was on its way to trial. There would have been headlines, none of them in her favor. A lady golfer slugging an innocent clubman out of fury at finding herself a loser, on the Fourth of July. The other club was dying to get her into court. Eventually, the United States Army got wind of it. They put two and two together, and they took a look at her, and asked all kinds of people who knew her all kinds of questions, and then they found out she speaks Italian. And that was that. The army had her arrest record wiped clean.”

“You're a good storyteller,” I said, getting the feeling he'd come to the end.

“Only when I'm telling the truth.”

“You made me think of her as a fighter. Strong.”

“I wanted to be able to marry her before she went into training. It didn't work out. Would you like to know how many years it's been since I began to try getting divorced? Fifteen, give or take a few months. My own day in court, I've been waiting for, for fifteen years.”

“Your wife doesn't believe in divorce?”

“She believes in waiting for me to not want one anymore. But that's not part of the story. We couldn't marry, and then she shipped out.”

“And here we are.”

“Yes.”

“After the hospital, she'll go home.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe to Arizona.”

“Yes. It's sunny there. The desert. She can rest.”

“Maybe one day she'll go back to the golf place where they cheated her.”

“She can't.”

“Broken arms heal.”

“That's not it. They banned her. If she puts one foot on their property ever again, the police will turn up and believe me, a scene will be made. I almost forgot to tell you the part where, after she threw her punches, she found it essential to pick up her golf club and go over to the table where the trophy was, the winner's trophy. She swung the club against it before anyone could stop her. Did I tell you it was made of glass?”

“You left out the glass.”

“It was a glass flagpole about two feet high on a wooden pedestal. The pole in fact was a golf club. Attached to it was a glass American flag. Extremely fine glass, very thin, very expensive, with all the right colors and stars and stripes of the actual flag.”

“Well, it was your Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

“It most definitely was. It's against the law in America to do anything violent to a flag.”

All along, I kept glancing toward that figure on the bed, watching for movement, any type of movement at all, a fluttering of the eyelids, a turn of the head or a leg beneath the covers, or a change in that slow, light breathing. She didn't stir.

Even though one ear was covered, she wasn't deaf. Maybe she was listening. Maybe her ears were storing everything up. Everything that was said here might come back to her later like a recording on a phonograph record. “They kept talking about me,” she might say to herself. “They talked about me like I wasn't there.”

Another silence. The silence after a long story.

“Thank you for not letting that onion hit me,” I said.

“You're welcome.”

“I just remembered something else. Thank you for giving me morphine. It made a big difference. I had a good night's sleep. Thank you for rescuing me from the bottom of that hill.”

“You're welcome. She was the reason I was in the area. They had her in Folcore, had I mentioned that?”

“No.”

“I don't know what I would have done if she'd been in that town when they bombed it.”

“She's alive. Isn't that the only thing that counts? Everyone is either dead or alive.”

“Now you're the one who's not acknowledging complications. There are complications.”

“For the living, I suppose. I must tell you, I don't recall your name. I'm sorry. I should have told you when I first came in. But I didn't.”

“That's all right. In America I was called
Tom Tully.
”

“Yes. I remember. She told me that.”

“If you like, you can call me Enrico. Honestly, I don't mind.”

“May I confide in you, something personal?”

“Finally. Please.”

“I would have liked to have been her mother-in-law. I had thought about that. You might call it a daydream. I had pictured her in my family. Is that upsetting to you?”

“I can only answer that I wish my own mother would feel the same way.”

“Perhaps I should adopt you.”

“I'm too old.”

“Tullio,” I said. “Tullio Tomasini. That's it. You worked at a golf place. What's the name of it?”

“Hatfield. The Hatfield Country Club, in Hatfield, Connecticut.”

Another H. I didn't feel like wasting the breath to try pronouncing it. I said, “You told them you were a Protestant. Irish, but a Protestant. Looking like what you look like, you got away with that?”

“I was younger then. I was better at being able to function within rules set up by someone else, even rules that were wrong. I did what I felt I had to. It's hard to be an immigrant in America. I worked in the office. I was good at my job. They wanted to keep me.”

“You met her there. She told me that.”

“I did. She was only fifteen. She used to sneak in to play, early in the morning. Very early. In the dark, sometimes. She lived near the course. Her school was near it, too. A born golfer. Did she tell you where she got her first set of clubs? No? From her nuns.”

“Did she ask for them?”

“No. She had wanted to take up archery. She wanted a bow and arrow, and she begged them to make it a school sport, like boxing. She put up a good argument, Greek goddesses and things. But they thought, given her personality, it might not be a good idea to arm her. So they thought, oh, let's try golf. She was the only girl who took it up, but there were a couple of nuns who knew a few things about it.”

“They were unusual? Or are all American Sisters like that?”

“They were unusual. They never knew about…us. No one did. We never…she and I…I never said a word to her, personally, until after she graduated. Until after she got the offer at the club in Arizona. I waited. She was so young. I was married. I married at eighteen. My wife—it was an arranged marriage. A business deal between our fathers. I was just a kid. It was…it was…you can't imagine what it's like to be in love when you're not supposed to be.”

I sat still. I imagined my face as a mask with no expression. Another silence.

“Even in winter, Annmarie would be out on the course,” he said. “Always secretly. I'd get there early and pretend I didn't know. Pretend that every move she made, I wasn't watching. She knew I was watching. She used to dip golf balls in cans of paint so she could see them in the snow. Eventually, the people who ran the club realized the talent she had, and let her play there whenever she wanted. In fact, she was given free lessons. But they never let her have member privileges. She couldn't go inside any of the buildings, not even to use the bathroom.”

“She resented that, I imagine,” I said.

“She didn't complain. She just wanted to be a golfer. Were you told that when Folcore was bombed, the only place they hit was the tower?”

“I was told, yes. You were there when Marcellina mentioned it. That tower has an interesting history, by the way.”

He didn't care about that. “The tower,” he said, “was where they made her a prisoner. They raped her. There. I've said it, too.”

One more silence. I sensed the tension, all through him, of holding back. A big force. A terrible, enormous containment, volcano-like: the silence of a volcano that was not erupting, but should have been.

“Signora Fantini!” came a voice from the other side of the door. Annunziata. “Signora Fantini and Tulli! Both of you! Come! We have lunch! Hurry before the partisans and my family devour everything!”

I
FOUND HIM ALONE,
away from the house and the tents, on the other side of a high pile of post-bombardment debris. The Galimbertis had been cleaning up. Possessions of theirs had been carefully, admirably stacked—ruined chairs, bed frames, cabinets, mattresses, boards, rugs, all sorts of things—like a bonfire waiting to be lit.

Everywhere one went in Italy, debris.

He was sitting on a rock near something that appeared to be another piece of junk. But as I went closer, I recognized it: the long-handled cart I'd had a ride in from the bottom of the Folcore hill. The Galimbertis must have decided to save it. It was upside down, with one wheel missing and one all right. A chunk of the base was gone. One end was badly splintered, in a strange, ragged way.

Going out to him from the house was like switching in a program from one opera to another. Even as the echoes of the song I'd just sung resounded in my head, I'd bear in on the next one, changing roles, tones, moods, in a way that seemed, to other people, effortless. At the start of every song, in the spotlight, it was necessary to believe no others had gone before.

No others. There he was, like the song at the end of the show, the best one, the one I'd been saving. The one I'd feared I'd never manage to get to.

No one was present to watch us. He could look at me. He didn't have to tell me he was pleased and relieved that I'd come. I could see it.

He was a changed man. It seemed that his normal process of aging had speeded up, turning his hair grayer. The eyebrows Beppi used to call caterpillars looked as if they'd thinned out considerably; the familiar black-and-gray tweed was still there, but not in the same measure. There, too, gray was winning. New wrinkles had come into his forehead and around his eyes. He wasn't wearing his jacket, but he'd not changed his clothes since San Guarino.

He sat with his shoulders hunched: a smaller Ugo, a new sight.

He was rumpled, soiled, a mess. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and little blotches of dry, faded blood were here and there on both forearms, blended into his skin, like an old man's brown age spots. It wasn't his own blood—just stains.

“Will you look at that wagon?” I said, as if I'd never seen it before. “It looks like a shark came all the way here, somehow, and took a bite from it.”

“Maybe one did. I wouldn't be surprised if there are sharks in the Adriatic now. They're probably as hungry as I was. If the ladies hadn't given me a meal, I might have started eating that wood myself.”

“How are you, Ugo?”

“It doesn't matter how I am.”

He looked up at the sky, scanning it carefully, as if to assure himself that there weren't any planes. There was no sound, but he might have feared that a new, silent type of bomber was up there. Why couldn't I read his thoughts? Why couldn't people do that, with certain people?

The cart didn't give way when I sat down at the edge. I was grateful for that. I had never been alone with Ugo before.

He said, “Did you eat?”

“In the kitchen. There's only one bowl. People are taking turns with it.”

“I had mine in a tin cup in the tent.”

“It was good.”

“It was delicious. I was worried about you, Lucia.”

“I was worried about you, too. Isn't it strange that we're here at the house of gangsters? Did you know that a couple of Galimbertis tried to rob the restaurant?”

“Better to be a gangster than a Fascist. I trust them. They're all partisans now. The boys who were shot aren't doing very well. But they'll pull through. They're fantasizing about the places they're going to steal from when the war is over. It keeps them going. Aldo's is off-limits to them, now that they know us. They swore it.”

“That's good to hear. So you're living like a bachelor these days. They told me Eliana went home to her mountain to see what damage there is, with all those houses on the side of a cliff.”

“They're probably not there any longer. She's with Enzo. They want me to join them. I was just trying to decide what to do.”

“Deciding between what?”

“A long list. They want me in Folcore. Here, they want me to stay. I've got plenty to handle in those tents. And some Americans showed up a little while ago and asked me to go with them to Forli to take a look at some GIs in bad shape. They haven't got a medic, and they can't find anyone else, and that's the place I'm inclined to choose. It's not far, and I'll be able to get supplies there. Some, I was able to acquire in Cassaromilia. I plundered the one physician's office. Do you know what happened there?”

I didn't want to talk about Cassaromilia. “Poor Forli,” I said. “For the rest of time, all it will ever be is Mussolini's hometown.”

“Maybe not. People will pretend they've forgotten all about him.”

“What's happening, Ugo? I haven't had any news.”

“Mussolini's being protected by Germans. No one is dead yet whom we would like to be dead. Remember how everyone thought, after the Americans landed, it would be only a matter of a couple of weeks, or a couple of months at most, that this war would keep going?”

“That seems like a long time ago.”

“It's going to be a long time more. No one had stopped to consider just how badly the Germans in this country want this country. And more of them are coming all the time.”

I didn't want to talk about the war. I wanted him to stop talking to me with this detachment, this aloofness. There was nothing coming from him that was personal in any way, not even the kind of personal that should have been there as Aldo's cousin, the only family Aldo had, not counting me and Beppi and Marcellina. Aldo and Ugo, like brothers, the two of them the only children of parents who had died. No one else, just Ugo. All those years.

And no questions from him—not, where have you been, how are you coping with your anxiety about Beppi, how is the pain from your bruises, why are you dressed as you are, how do you like wearing pants?

Just, did you eat? The one thing Italians ask each other all the time. As commonplace as breathing.

“Ugo,” I said. “Something has happened to me. There's no song in my head.”

“I thought you went on strike.”

“Not inside. I kept singing to myself, sometimes out loud. But now there's nothing. I've run out of songs. When I try to listen to myself, inside, all I hear is silence.”

I wondered if I sounded like a patient, describing symptoms.

“The songs will come back. I don't know when,” he said.

“I was in the house with the Americans. Tullio and Annamaria. I know everything.”

“She's had a hard time of it.”

He had shut himself away. He could have been speaking to a colleague, a partisan, a Galimberti, anyone who'd happened by, Polpo, a farmer.

“Are you very worried about Beppi?” I said.

“Of course I am.”

I thought, should I tell him what I know—the deaf girl, Assunta of the eggs, the chicken house, how I'd thought of it, how I'd been trying and trying to get there? I was on the verge of spilling out everything, but then I stopped myself.

I was too far from Ugo to touch him by simply reaching out an arm. I wanted to take hold of his shoulders and get rid of that slump of his. I wanted to put my hands on his face. I wanted to touch those new wrinkles and make them go away. And the wrinkles of his clothes, as well.

I felt warmed, steadied. It wasn't just the vegetable soup in my belly. I wanted to take him by the hand and say, oh, all the choices you have of where to go, don't be concerned about them, I'll make everything simple for you.

I wanted to do the same thing I'd done when I'd been here at the Galimbertis' before—the same thing with two differences. This time, Ugo would be with me, hurrying away furtively, and no one would know about it. Just stealing away, feeling sure of ourselves. Feeling youthful, even.

Oh—there would have to be another difference. I wouldn't choose the same route.

There'd be a new one, not near Cassaromilia, and, in fact, not anywhere near Mengo. Couldn't Beppi wait a little longer for me? In spite of a possible female Ballardini enchantment, wasn't he safe and not sitting in a corner alone, miserably, stinking of poultry, begging God to send his mother to him? He wasn't in danger! He wasn't a little boy!

There came rising up in my mind a picture of the map of Italy, which I could scrutinize as if planning an ordinary excursion, as if this were an unexpected holiday—a free day, no problems, no responsibilities, no danger, where shall we go?

The map held no starting point, since I didn't know my exact location. I thought only of the future. To Venice? South, down the coast, San Marino, Ancona? Tuscany? Florence? Arezzo? All the way down to Siena?

South was safer. North was
nazifascisti.
What about Umbria, tucked in the center? As if war were not everywhere. As if we could set out on foot and discover a waiting car, loaded with gas, key in the ignition. Not Ugo's car. It had been bombed in San Guarino. I remembered that.

“The car's coming, Lucia,” Ugo said.

I'd been so carried away by my fantasy—imagining myself beside him, driving away, the window rolled down, fresh air pouring in, my head against his shoulder, no one else on the road, no tanks, no trucks, no roadblocks, no soldiers, neither dead nor alive, nothing in the trees but leaves and branches—it made sense to me that Ugo must have entered into it, must have known what I was thinking.

What he'd meant by a car was an ambulance. The one for Annmarie.

It was American, dusty, drab green, boxy, with an escort of a small squadron of jeeps coming up behind it, as slowly as a line of turtles, spitting exhaust smoke, one at a time in the narrow lane: four of them. A convoy. They were friendly, but it felt like an invasion.

“I don't suppose the American intelligence officer told you that Annamaria, as you call her, is important,” said Ugo quietly, as if it were difficult for him to take me into his confidence, and he feared he might be eavesdropped on. As if the rock beneath him had ears. “Or, more specifically,” he continued, “she has connections in high places. A general, here in Italy. It seems she taught him to play golf, some time ago, somewhere in the American desert.”

His voice had fallen to almost a whisper. He seemed afraid.

Why, he's been injured, too, I thought. Dear God, he's not just exhausted. He's not just shutting himself away from me. He's been injured in his nerves, in his self, in his soul.

The war had got inside him. He'd never planned on being a war doctor.

“Ugo,” I said. “You need…you need…”

“What, Lucia?” he said. “What is it?”

I didn't answer. I didn't know how to say what he needed. “Me,” I wanted to say.

A change took place in his expression, softening the lines of his face. He was the old Ugo, restored in a flash, coming toward me, remembering everything. It was joy that lit up his eyes when he held out his arms to me.

Yes, joy. All it would have taken was one step to be in those arms.

A commotion rose from the tents and the house—a big welcome for the rescue party. I sprang to my feet and let out a gasping little cry. I felt as if I were ready to leap through the air, from the edge of a roof, or the top of a tree, or a cliff, like Eliana's family's house. Eliana! Eliana would have said I'd go to hell for loving Ugo. And so would he, for loving me back. But there was no Eliana. There wasn't any Aldo, either. There wasn't anyone else in all the world.

A shout! It came from behind Ugo, beyond the huge pile of debris, that bonfire-like stack, sitting there waiting for a match.

“Mama! Mama! Are you here? Where are you? Mama!”

Beppi burst into view like a wholly different kind of explosion.

Oh.

Nothing was wrong with him. He looked fit, glowing, in clothes I'd never seen before, a green wool vest, a plaid shirt opened jauntily at the neck. He was freshly shaven but his hair was long, too long, a little messy. He'd put on weight around his middle. How could anyone put on weight in this war? He looked as if he'd been very well fed. He looked as if he'd been eating a great deal of chicken.

Not a mark on him, not a bruise.

“Here I am! I got a ride in a jeep! With Americans! They let me drive it part of the way! Ugo! Mama!
Ciao!
Mama! Isn't that Roncuzzi's jacket? What are you doing back here?”

“Talking,” said Ugo. “Talking!”

“I found you! Here I am!”

Throwing out his arms he took in both of us. He was big enough to do that.

“Don't cry, Mama. I knew it. I knew you would cry. Are you mad at me? You are! I knew it!”