Set This House on Fire (39 page)

“She’s in a state of shock,” Maggie informed me. There was a touch of awe in her voice, which had the vacant intonation of Southern California. “She’s full of phenobarbital. Jeepers, the poor girl—”

“Oh, Peter,” Rosemarie broke in with trembling lips. “Oh, Peter—” And then she halted, her eyes round, goose pimples sheathing her marble arms, unable to speak.

“God,” I said, “God, Rosemarie. I—I just don’t know what to say.” No state of human emotion renders me so fatuous as bereavement; vainly I sought the proper words to comfort her.

“It’s all so—so
impossible,”
she managed to say finally; her eyes suddenly opened wide, lighting up her face briefly with a look of such stunned wonder and disbelief that she appeared for a moment half-crazed. “He just couldn’t have done that, Peter. Couldn’t have.
Couldn’t
have. I know him!” Then, standing there, she thrust her face into her hands and once more began to weep.

“Rosemarie—” I murmured. Beneath my touch her skin was like a toad’s, pulsing wildly, moist, cold as ice.

“She’s in a state of shock,” Maggie repeated. “Alonzo wants to get her to Rome as soon as possible.”

“Where is Alonzo?” I said.

“He went to Naples to see the American consul or somebody about—well, you know, about
arrangements,
I guess.”

“Is he coming back?” I said. Cripps alone was the one who I felt might bring a touch of sanity to this bedlam.

“There, baby,” Maggie was saying to Rosemarie, patting her heaving shoulders. “Don’t cry, baby. Everything’s going to be all right.” She glanced up at me. “No. Everybody’s leaving. Sol Kirschorn heard right away about what happened and he sent a telegram from Rome. I saw it. It said: ‘Get out of town
subito.
Repeat
subito.’
I guess he didn’t want to get mixed up in everything. There, baby sweet, everything’s going to be all right. Come on now, let’s go out and get into the car.”

Rosemarie raised her head, her mouth working wordlessly, and gazed at me. For an instant I had an awful vision of her sorrow: her black eye alone was witness to the loyalty she still bore for him, far beyond the memories of his misdeeds, his clouts and bruises, and his unfaithfulness. What part of him she was grieving for I could not tell: how grieves the lady fair of such a man as Mason? But I had a quick sad vision, as I say, and I guessed she must be grieving for the times when he made love to her in the night, or when she whispered “Muffin” to his sleeping tousled face, or those mornings when, in the first fever of love, he appeared to her a staunch knight, not only rich but tender, too, and alive and quivering with promise. Her arm rose in a sudden nervous gesture to her hair; her tresses became dislodged, unloosing a bunch of bobby pins which skittered to the floor. “Peter,” she said imploringly, “he didn’t do these things. I
know.
He just—”

“Come on, baby sweet,” said Maggie.

Rosemarie’s hand rested chilly upon mine; again she tried to make her mouth say words, but her lips moved soundlessly, and with a great shudder she turned and walked—hobbled, I should say, so tortured was her progress—across the tiles toward the door. I watched her go: a good girl, she seemed to me, victimized by Mason even to the point of this towering grief, a kindly girl trailing a spoor of bobby pins from her disheveled golden hair and with a copy of
The New Yorker
crumpled clumsily beneath her arm.

“If you ask me,” murmured Maggie confidentially as she moved away after her, “the jerk deserved it. He must have been a
monster.
They say that girl didn’t have one unbroken bone left in her body.”

I lingered long enough outside to watch the movie folk go. Their escape was hasty and frantic; no military unit forced into sudden retreat could have made such a determined exit from the scene. In vans and trucks, in station wagons, on motorscooters, in Fiats, in Alfa Romeos and in Buick convertibles, they rumbled in caravan fashion like refugees from disaster past the palace door. At some point I remember feeling sorry that I would not see Cripps again. A bus full of technicians was the next to the last to pull out, trailed by an open car in which sat Gloria Mangiamele, still giggling over something, and Carleton Burns, whose haggard hound-dog face was upturned, taking a tremendous belt out of a bottle of Scotch. Not one of them had any kinship whatever with tragedy, and it was evident, for in less than a minute they were all past sight, leaving the street with its gleaming fireflies and flickering bats as quiet and serene as it had been under good King Roger of Sicily, a thousand years before.

At the end of this day, then, I came back to the Kinsolvings’. For God knows what obscure motives I closed the big wooden doors behind me: perhaps only to shut out the far-off incessant doom-tolling bell, perhaps to insulate myself, no matter with what tem-porariness, from the town itself with its hovering commingled burden of gloom, of fright, of menace. The courtyard lay deserted and still, littered with paper and cartons and other debris of leave-taking. My eyes automatically searched the ceiling: high in the air the imprisoned bird still sought freedom through the moonlit fleur-de-lis of glass, yet with a less frantic fluttering of its wings now, almost feebly, and soon it would plummet down to these gouged-out and desecrated tiles, where it would die. Its plight, which had touched me before, moved me not at all now. I felt as drained of emotion as if there had been piped away from my bones and tissues all strength and all will; I was as limp and as pliant as a green reed beneath the streaming water. I heard the sound of feet tramping above: Am I accurate in recalling that I expected Mason to appear on the balcony, flapping at me his lean long arm, with a querulous “Petesy” on his lips insisting that I join him in a drink? As a matter of fact, for a deranged moment I did think it was he—they were of the same height—but it was only a local workman, one of Fausto’s minions, who came out through Mason’s door, pitching downstairs a boxload of rubbish with an inane, instinctive
“Prego,”
and casting me a lip-curled glance of disdain.

I went through the green door, where in the glow of a single dim light Cass’ living room lay untouched and silent in its squalid disarray. It was quiet; no one was at home. Not a thing had altered since the night before: soggy clothesline, easel with its dangling doll, scattered comic books, cigar butts, bottles—each occupied still its own grubby disordered place. The smell of the place was riper, gamier; as I switched on the overhead light three big fat mice catapulted like fuzzy musketballs from the table, making sharp separate reports as they hit the floor then scuttled for shelter behind the wainscoting. Nothing here, though, discouraged my hunger; remembering that somewhere around I had glimpsed a room that looked like a kitchen, I began to prowl around on the top floor, barking my shins, lighting matches as I went. Finally I saw an ancient icebox in the hallway and opened it: the ice had long since melted and the interior was warm and damp and sour-smelling, harboring within its gummy, unclean shelves a single tepid Coca-Cola, a bottle of infants’ vitamin solution, and a desiccated piece of cheese. I squeezed out a few drops of the vitamins into the Coca-Cola and took this, together with the cheese, back into the living room. There I unearthed half a loaf of bread; it was bone-stale, but I ate it, too, as I sat there sunk in a condition of pulpy, emotionless inertia. For a long while I sat, wondering what to do next.

At last—it was dead of nightfall by then, close to nine it must have been—I heard the sound of voices down past the garden and beyond the swimming pool. Remote at first, they sounded like the voices of shrill and quarreling women, but as they came nearer the high piping notes defined themselves as the noise of children. I heard feet below tumbling across the flagstone walks of the garden, there was a swishing in the bushes and a patter and a sound of banging doors. Then on the stairway I heard their strident calls, in English and Italian, ascending, until at last with a noisy scuffle on the hallway landing they burst into the living room like children everywhere on a summer night—panting and damp-browed, scratching mosquito bites. Trailing hard behind them was Poppy, holding in her arms the youngest little boy, who was fast asleep, heedless of the racket.

“Peggy!” Poppy commanded sternly. “Timothy! Felicia! Everybody to bed! I’m not going to have any
arguments!”
I arose and coughed. “Oh, Mr. Leverett, it’s you!” she exclaimed. A faded bandanna covered her hair; she looked worn and haggard and unhappy. Her pretty little face was of that fragile and transparent sort which like litmus paper responds to every mood: the shadows of weariness beneath her eyes were like smudges of soot. “Have you seen Cass?” she cried, wide-mouthed. In her voice was an anguished plea, a wail, with no nonsense about it and no refinements; she was like a three-year-old who had lost her doll. “Have you seen him? I’ve looked for him everywhere! I haven’t seen him since last
night!”

One of the children began to howl. “Mommy, I want some
cioccolato!”
Another took up the cry.
“Cioccolato!”
And in the space of a wink, right there before my eyes, a general tantrum ensued, all but the oldest girl—who sat gravely and primly in a chair—shrieking for chocolate at the top of their voices, joined by the baby in Poppy’s arms, who, terrified out of sleep, turned anabrupt and pullulating crimson and commenced screaming. I have always been reduced to bald despair by screaming children; I took out a cigarette and lit it, obscuring the sight in a cloud of smoke.

“Stop it!” Poppy shrilled. “Stop it, children! Blazes!” Her chest and shoulders heaved, and she was on the brink of tears. “Just stop it now,” she implored, as the children quieted down. “You can’t have any chocolate. There isn’t any. There just isn’t any. I’ve
told
you. Now you’ve got to go to bed.” She began to whimper herself as she rocked the crying baby in her arms.
“Haven’t
you seen Cass?” she said, turning back to me, beseeching me in a way that made me feel she thought I really had seen him.

“No, I haven’t,” I said. “Can I—”

“Did you hear what happened today?” she said with an awed, frightened look. “Isn’t it awful? Isn’t it just the awfulest thing you ever heard of in your life?”

“What happened, Mommy?” said Timothy. He was running his hand around in an empty sardine can, licking off gobs of congealed green olive oil from his fingers; he looked so famished I could hardly blame him. “Tell me what happened, Mommy,” he persisted in a casual, artless voice.

“
I
know what happened,” said Peggy from her dangle-legged perch on the chair. One eyebrow was raised, her lips turned down in sly superiority: she was a jewel of a little girl, with sparkling eyes and resplendent golden hair. “Old Nasty-face Flagg jumped—”

“Taci!”
Poppy commanded. “You just close up your mouth, Peggy Kinsolving! Just for that you’re all going to bed right now, you hear! Downstairs, right away!” With a blandly probing finger stuck up inside, she checked the condition of the baby’s diaper. “Oh dear, he’s got full pants again. I just
changed
you,” she crooned to the little boy, “and now you’ve gone and done it again, Nicky. You little pumpkin pie.” She pressed her nose against the child’s, smilingly clucking and fussing. Her voice was a brief sweet carol of delight. “Yes ’urn did, I just
changed
you,” she cooed, wiping her finger on her skirt, her distress drowned in the fount of maternal love. Then all of a sudden she herded the children together and, with the baby on her shoulder blinking drowsily at me over pink jowls, marched the brood downstairs, caroling sweetly all the way as if nothing had ever troubled her.

But when she returned ten minutes later she seemed as rattled and distraught as before. Gusty little spasms shook her as she talked and wandered aimlessly around the room. “I just couldn’t believe it at first, when I got up this morning. I just couldn’t believe my ears! But it was true. Everything was so funny when I got up. And you, Mr. Leverett, there you were—”

“Call me Peter,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you hear me? When I came into the room and woke you up? I thought you were Cass. He sleeps there sometimes when he’s been up late and doesn’t want to wake me. I shook you and you rolled over and groaned. I was greatly taken aback, I will say.” She paused, twisting a damp handkerchief in her fists. “Of course, we’re delighted to have you,” she said politely.

“Where did it all happen?” I put in.

“You mean what—Oh dear—” She flushed and a look of pain came over her face. “Oh dear, it’s so awful. I just couldn’t find out anything. But I saw Mr. Alonzo Cripps just before he left, and he said that it occurred on the path going to Tramonti, just outside of town. There’s an upper path and a lower path, and I think he said it occurred on the upper—no, maybe it was the lower. Anyway, some peasants found her on this path this morning and they lifted her up and took the poor creature to a house just inside the walls.” Her voice broke off, a tremor passed through her, and two tears slid slowly down her cheeks. “Oh it’s so awful! Jiminy Christmas, it’s like out of the Dark Ages or something. I mean, Mason and all. I mean he was an evil cruel man and all, and he persecuted and took advantage of Cass’ condition and everything but, golly, Mr.—Peter—it’s just so hard to believe
that.
He must have become
crazed.”
All at once she broke down and fell to sobbing into the tiny handkerchief, helplessly and weakly.

“How is the girl, Poppy?” I said. “Francesca. How is she? Do you know?”

“She’s going to die,” she said with a moan, still sobbing. “That’s what they all say up the street. Oh, I wish I could find Cass!” She wore blue jeans now, there was a charm bracelet of yellow gold around her wrist; frail, hipless, with baggy socks and a smear of grease on her cheek, she looked like a pretty teen-ager who had fallen off a bicycle and was nursing her humiliation. My heart was wrung with sympathy for her. I glanced around at the proliferating mess of the room, which, I supposed, she tried somehow to cope with: that she should be a mother four times over touched me with awe and bafflement. I put my hand on her shoulder. “Take it easy, Poppy,” I said, “he’ll be back soon.”