The Liar's Wife (39 page)

Paola came over and shook her finger at Gregory. “Are you going to eat or just discuss, discuss, discuss?”

“We will, I hope, Paola, do both. What do you recommend?”

“It's very warm today, so a cold tomato soup, some chilled prawns with garlic and parsley, and then a wonderful goat cheese which I found in the market in Orvieto. For dessert, a lemon ice.”

“A summer meal from a dream of summer,” Gregory said.

Theresa remembered that he had used a similar phrase about the horse. “The Tuscan dream of the white horse.” Was it that he believed that everything good was only a dream, only unsusceptible to loss or snatching if you called it a dream, out loud?

“Gregory, you are a failed poet,” Paola said.

“A failure in many things,” he said.

“But in greatness of the heart, a very great success.” She turned to Theresa. “My daughter has many troubles of the mind, and Gregory helped her to find the right doctor, the right medication. She has very nearly a normal life now, and it is all because of him. And what can I
do in return? Recommend chilled prawns and a lemon ice. Not, dear Gregory, what we would call a just recompense.”

“That's quite enough out of you, Paola, when my tongue is hanging out waiting for the tomato soup.”

Money, Theresa thought. He was able to do good because of money. It made so many things easier. She wondered what it made more difficult, as it was reputed to do.

“I have good news,” he said. “The cousin of a cousin … he happens to be a cousin of a cousin of the man who cleans my drains … has arranged for us to be let into Santa Maria dei Servi later in the week.” Theresa clapped her hands and actually said, “Oh goody,” and was embarrassed, until Gregory laughed with her.

“How wonderful that you can be as pleased as a child by what will, after all, be your life's work. I think it is the most fortunate thing in the world to be able to make a living doing what you love.”

“I've always thought that was such a strange phrase,” Theresa said. “Making a living. As if living was something that could be made. Or not made. And all because of money.”

“Money,” said Gregory. “Let's not think of money until at least the sun has set.” He raised his glass of Pinot Grigio. “To not thinking about money,” he said.

“Agreed. And thank you, Gregory, for everything.”

He lowered his head and said, “My dear.”

The next five days were peaceful and harmonious. She breakfasted at her café, took a picnic on the walls, or treated herself to a
ceci
pizza—unless Gregory had phoned to invite her to Paola's. She worked four hours in the morning, sometimes in archives, where she would leave with dusty fingers and a cache of information which she believed would be of no use to her but which she equally believed she had to have examined. She lunched, napped, and then worked until dark, when she had a late dinner and took herself to bed, exhausted, pleased with herself and the sense of days well spent. Some days she talked to almost no one; some days Chiara was free for a coffee or a drink, but some days Theresa didn't come home until she was off duty.

She wanted to take another look at the Rose Annunciation, just to refresh her spirits, hoping that sitting in front of it in the dim quiet would inspire her to focus her thoughts and coalesce some of her ideas. The day before, at lunch, Gregory had asked her what she thought she might write about for her dissertation. He had said it very lightly and calmly, and this allowed her to speak calmly, in a way she never could have to anyone else, particularly anyone at Yale. Something about him suggested a large leisure, space and time for things to unwind themselves; the exact opposite of the professional anxiety that was part of her academic life.

“I have very conflicting ideas. I want to look closely at the work, and what I most like is doing formal analyses, so after I see the other Annunciations I could certainly do some sort of comparison, but I find it so difficult to write about what I see in a way that's not stultifyingly boring. I could do a monograph, but that's very out of fashion: it certainly wouldn't help my job prospects. It's very difficult, Gregory, to find the right words for what is beautiful. And yet that's what I have to do, or, as my old professor says, things get lost if you don't nail them down in writing. I could go in a completely different direction,” she said, eager to speak, using him only as a wall on which to project her ideas, not noticing the marks that might already be there. “I'm very interested that a lot of the restoration work done on the Civitalis was done in the thirties. I'd like to explore what the aesthetics of restoration were under Fascism. Restoration is always about a view of history, and I wonder how that played out then. Civitali seems the antithesis of that overlarge Roman aesthetic, that Mussolini brand of looming, but anyway it might be interesting.”

“You know, I first came to Italy in 1954. The War had only been over for nine years. But no one talked about it. They still don't, not really. The Italians like to believe that everything bad that happened under Fascism was forced upon them by the Germans. Just recently, I was at a dinner party with very close friends, all around my age, and they tried to come up with a definition of Fascism and said it was impossible. I thought: it's not impossible, it's about the abrogation of free speech, and civil rights, and the punishment of dissent by brute force. But I didn't
say anything because they had all lived through it and I had not. It's a very interesting idea, your idea about restoration under Fascism.”

“But I feel I'd be abandoning Civitali for a more general topic, and that makes me feel a bit guilty.”

“Well, of course you'll come back here when you decide. And please know that I would be honored to have you as a guest in my home if you need to stay in Lucca for an extended period. As you see, I have an almost shameful number of rooms.”

“That would be wonderful,” she said. His offer, made as they sat in his garden waiting for lunch, gave her a sense of relaxation that was supported by the sweet smell of the new hay. This was the atmosphere she lived in, a mood of calm lightness that surrounded her as she approached San Frediano. But as if it were a protective glass covering, like the glass cabinets Gregory had built for his Civitalis, it shattered as she approached the steps of the basilica and saw Ivo Allard, Sage, and two men, with identically shaved heads. One was wearing white jeans and a black T-shirt, the other black jeans and a white T-shirt. The jeans and the T-shirts were tight, emphasizing the well-muscled bodies of both men.

She didn't know if they would have greeted her if she hadn't greeted them first. Certainly, they didn't seem glad to see her.

“Taking in the great churches?” Ivo said, with something like a sneer.

“There's a wonderful Civitali Annunciation here,” she said.

“Oh, yes, but that's not the jewel of the crown here. We're here to see the mummy. Santa Zita. I believe the term is the ‘incorruptible body.' But I think of her as Mrs. Bates. Norman's mother. Right out of Hitchcock.”

Theresa didn't know what he was talking about, and he was quick to pounce on her puzzled look.

“Don't tell me you've never visited Mrs. Bates? Oh, my dear, you must. It's the biggest hoot in Lucca. Maybe in the whole of Tuscany.”

The woman who worked in the little shop where Theresa had bought a postcard of the Annunciation opened the door slowly, with a pronounced reluctance. Theresa understood why the woman would be
reluctant to welcome Ivo and his friends, but she wanted to say to her, I'm not with them, I'm not like them. I belong here.

Sage put her thin arm through Theresa's. “You've got to see this, honey, it's absolutely awesome.”

She steered her past the baptismal font to a side chapel, and brought her over to a glass casket. Sage, Ivo, and the two men, to whom Theresa had not been introduced, began to laugh, too loudly for a church, and Theresa was afraid the woman who had let them in would now feel it her right to throw them out. She didn't want to look in the glass casket, but she couldn't help herself. She also couldn't help looking away. She had rarely seen anything that made the horror of deadness so real. Lying inside the glass casket were the remains of the dead saint, the skeletal hands folded, a rosary threaded through the bone fingers, and on the grinning skull a veil and a wreath of flowers.

“You must definitely do something with this, Ivo,” said one of the men in what she assumed was a German accent. “Some kind of installation would be more than fabulous.”

“I'm way ahead of you, Hermann,” said Ivo. “I've already got sketches.

“She was a housemaid,” he said, “famous for her devotion to her employers. One day she left her stove to go and help the poor, and one of the other houseworkers, who was jealous of her employer's regard, ratted her out. But when the employer came back, angels were at the stove, baking the bread that Zita was supposed to be baking. Now she's the patron saint of lost keys. You pray to her if you've lost your keys. Particularly your house keys. I don't know whether she's good at car keys, it may not be her field.”

He was looking at Theresa with his sharp dark eyes, waiting for some kind of response. Was she supposed to laugh, was that a requirement? But it was his father, not Ivo, who was her benefactor. She owed him nothing. She was free not to laugh. She was free to walk away.

“I've got to take a look at the Annunciation,” she said.

“What a good girl you are,” said Ivo. “No wonder the old man's crazy about you. See you at the opening, I understand you're Pa's date.”

“I look forward to it,” she said. She felt that it wasn't wrong to lie
politely in that way. But it was a complete lie; she dreaded going to the opening, and she was made uneasy by Ivo's calling her Gregory's date. But that, of course, was what he wanted. To make her uneasy. Congratulations, Ivo, she wanted to say. You've wrecked my peace.

She wanted to run away from them, but she knew that they were watching her and so she walked very slowly towards the chapel where the Annunciation was. It was 4:30 but the sun was still high, and it fell through the white octagonal panes of the window and struck the rose-colored dress of the Madonna with a soft clarity. She took her binoculars from her bag; she wanted to study the modeling around the lips.

She needed to take in the Madonna's calm. She felt the contact with Ivo and his friends a defilement; and she felt foolish that she'd never known about the horrible mummy just near the entrance of the church where she had come day after day. They were right, of course, to mock the whole thing: the “incorruptible body,” the wreath of flowers and the bridal veil on the grinning skull, the legends and the devotions and the foolish credulous belief. She wanted to say: it has nothing to do with me, I have nothing to do with it, and, more important, it has nothing to do with Civitali.

She heard a low rumble in the main part of the church. Ten or twelve women, most of them at least in their seventies, two of them younger, plainer, wearing head scarves and cheap shoes, were saying the rosary. If they came into the chapel where she was sitting, if they knelt before the Madonna, they would be inhabiting a different universe than the one she inhabited, a universe where style and provenance and restoration and attribution were the coin of the realm, and the subject matter, the Virgin visited by an Angel, was entirely beside the point. But to these women it was the point, they based their lives on it, as Civitali had. So was she in fact closer to Ivo and his friends than to these women? And to Civitali, who had created these figures as objects of devotion, as objects of believing prayer? She felt a sudden shame, as if she had no right to be there, no more right than Ivo and his friends. What would Civitali say to her if he appeared now, in the basilica, looking through her binoculars while, a few feet away, old women prayed the rosary? Would he have said, “You understand nothing of what it
was I did. Nothing at all. I made what I made for them, not you.” Was Civitali, in his beliefs, closer to the people who prayed to the mummy than to her, who believed in nothing?

The Annunciation happened to be in a church, but it would have served her purposes as well if it were in a museum or a private house. Better, perhaps. She wouldn't have dreamed of praying to the Virgin. She was not someone who prayed. If she believed in transcendence, it was the transcendent power of beauty. There was no one she could speak to among the dead who she believed could make anything happen in the world or in her life. She did not even speak to her poor dead father, whom she could not imagine, even in eternity, having any effect at all.

She thought she would buy something new to wear to Ivo's opening; all her clothes seemed too floral and girlish and unurbane. But the prices in the shops on the Fillungo terrified her. She decided on a long scarf, which she thought would at least add an element of seriousness to her dress. Only after she'd paid for it did she realize that it was a deep rose color, almost the color of the Rose Annuciation's dress. She bought a bottle of nail polish that pleased her by matching the scarf almost exactly. She polished her toenails. She remembered the first time she'd ever done that, when she and Maura went to Florida. Was that almost two years ago? Where would she be in two years?

Gregory was waiting for her in the lobby. He was pacing up and down, eating up the small space with his long legs, his jerky strides. She knew that he was nervous. He was nearly silent on the ten-minute walk to the gallery. She wanted to say, “It will be fine, everything will be fine.” But she had no confidence that those words were, in fact, true.

The gallery was actually a private museum, founded by a local industrialist Gregory didn't know much about. It had been a palazzo built by a Renaissance banker, and the outside kept its ancient look, but once they were in the door, the present and the future declared themselves with a breezy insistence. The walls were white, and there were video displays flashing from every wall, and flashing signs recommending small plates for early to late luncheon. She saw immediately that
she and Gregory were overdressed; everyone else was in jeans, except for some of the women, who wore short skirts that fitted their buttocks like bandages.