The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (13 page)

Bill was always thorough—he was anything but aimless, but in this matter he became something he had never been before: he grew crafty as hell. He plotted the right people to write and the best month for them to receive a letter. He considered the number of paragraphs which should go by before Thompson was even mentioned. In some cases Thompsons name was not even allowed to appear; yet his presence (such was Bill’s skill) would breathe from every word. Pressure could be brought to bear in some cases: Bill had not been in the academic world fifteen years for nothing; and everything in American life is, in the long run, as we all know, competitive. He poked fun at his scheming mind—yet the goal was important to him, and he pressed forward in an innocent, blood-thirsty way, as if it were a game he had to win.

At last, in May, just when it seemed that nothing would happen, a letter arrived from a Professor Eakins, Bill’s mentor in graduate school. “By the way,” Eakins wrote (after a certain number of paragraphs had gone by), “I had a letter from Thompson recently saying
that if any one of my students would be in the neighborhood of Genoa during June, he would be most welcome at the villa. I could think of no one I would rather have call on him than you, Bill. Of course, if you are planning to be in Sicily at that time, you’ll let me know, so that—”

But Bill was not planning to be anywhere near Sicily in June.

From Genoa, in June, Bill and Judy had gone straight to the village in the mountains nearest to Thompson’s villa. This village was the usual take-off point for people who went to see Thompson. Judy had pointed out that another village nearby had, according to the guide-book, a more interesting church, with a cosmatesque cloister and a work in the baptistry attributed by some to Donatello (Judy loved Donatello), but Bill decided that this was no time for anything unorthodox. So they went to the usual village.

All kind of legends were attached to the place. Some people had waited there for a week or more in the only halfway decent
pensione
, had dispatched all the proper credentials to the villa, but had never received any word at all. They had finally had to leave, looking out of the rear window of the taxi all the way to the station, until the mountain shut out the village forever. But no one could ever be personally encountered to whom anything of the sort had happened, and Bill had decided that it was only a Kafka-like nightmare which had accrued of itself to the Thompson image—he put it out of his mind by force.

He refused to recall it, even after he and Judy had sat waiting in the village for two days. He read the books he had brought to read, and Judy typed the chapter she had brought to type; then they proofread it together. They went out in the evenings and ate out-doors before a little restaurant under a string of colored lights. Here Judy, who got on rather well in Italian, answered all the waiter’s questions about their son Henry, who had nine years and was now in care of his aunt in the
Stati Uniti
. The waiter said that she was much too young to have a nine-year-old son, and that her husband was a great scholar—one could see it
subito
. Judy enjoyed herself and
drank up most of the wine. Light lingered in the mountains. They walked around and looked down at the view, an aspect of a splendid, darkening valley.

Bill threw himself down on a bench. Perhaps, he reflected aloud, Eakins was the wrong one to recommend him to Thompson. Who, after all, valued Eakins’ work as highly as Eakins did? Eakins’ large, fleshy, cultivated face all but materialized, with the thin, iron-gray hair and the thin waxed mustaches. It could be that Thompson thought so little of Eakins that any letter from or about Eakins could easily be tossed aside.

As he sat torturing himself this way, Judy leaned her elbows on the rough wall, looking far down at some twinkling lights. She said that if only they were religious instead of scholastic they would have come off better, since anyone at all could get an audience with the Pope. In fact, the problem seemed to be how to get out of one. In Rome, you might just pull a thread by accident and wind up buying a black veil and checking to see if you had the right gloves and shoes.

Bill said that scholastic was not the right word; it particularly connoted the Middle Ages. As Judy had finished only two years of college, Bill often had to put her right about things.

On their return to the
pensione
, the maid ran out and handed them a letter.
“Earrivata
,” she said. It was somewhat embarrassing to be clearly seen through. Nonetheless, Bill’s hour had struck. He and Judy were invited to lunch with Thompson on the following day.

Instead of driving their own car up to the villa, they took a taxi, as the proprietor of the
pensione
advised. He said that the way was extremely steep and dangerous. There were falling rocks, sharp curves, few markers. Their tires might be cut to pieces on the stones. Their water might boil away out of the radiator. They might lose the way entirely.

“How symbolic can you get?” Bill remarked. “Besides, his brother probably owns the taxi.”

But all the proprietor said proved to be literally true. Bill and Judy were flung against each other several times on the curves. As the road threaded higher and higher, they dared not look out of the windows.

“I have to keep reminding myself,” said Bill, shuddering away from a frightful declivity, “that this road may be leading me to the Thrace mosaics.”

Judy knew about those mosaics, all from having typed so many letters. She knew as much as anybody. How they had been whatever the polite word was for smuggled out of the Middle East; how large the sums were that had gone for them, some over tables and some under; how museums and authorities of every nation could agree on no one but Thompson to receive them. Now they were at the villa. Some visitors had been allowed to peep at them, some even to have a brief try, as with a jigsaw puzzle, at matching this to that—a foot here, an arm there, and what prestige when the thing was talked about afterward!

“If only you could see them,” Judy said.

“I can’t think of any reason why I shouldn’t,” Bill said. The road had stabilized somewhat and he spoke with greater confidence, leaning back and crossing his legs. Judy smoothed her hair and agreed with him, then they were there.

The road flattened; a green plateau appeared before them, and set in it, at a fair distance, the villa. It looked like a photograph of itself. The tawny, bare facade was facing directly toward them. A colonnade ran out toward the left like a strong arm; it broke and softened the long savage drop of the mountain behind and framed in a half-embrace the grassy courtyard. There in the background, a hundred yards or so behind the villa, hung the ruin, the old castle. Rough and craggy, it was unused except artistically, as a backdrop, or to show people through (some visitors had reported being shown through), or perhaps for children to play in. Thompson’s daughter, whose husband, the Prince of Gaeta, owned the villa, was said to have two children, and as if to prove that this was so, they at once appeared, a boy
and girl, dressed in identical loose gray pinafores and long black stockings. They came out from among the shadows of the colonnade.

The radiator cap on the taxi had been removed for the journey, and Bill and Judy now chugged at a decorous pace into the courtyard, trailing a long plume of smoke. A dark man wearing English flannels came out of the villa and hastened to the colonnade, taking from behind a pillar a large green watering can. He poured water into the radiator of the taxi, then the cab driver handed him the radiator cap through the window, and he screwed it in place.
“E il principe,”
said the driver, over his shoulder. The prince himself!

“Buon giorno,”
said the prince to the driver, sticking his head through the window.

“Buon giorno, signor principe,”
returned the driver.

“Notizie?”

Judy knew enough to follow that the prince was asking what was new and the driver was saying that nothing much was going on. Then the driver gave the prince a package of letters tied with a string.

The prince greeted his guests in English, opening the car door for them. The children had joined him and were standing nearby, side by side, looking at the newcomers, with dark eyes, brilliant in their pale, inquisitive faces.

“Perhaps,” said the prince, “you’d like to see our position before going inside?” He led the way across the courtyard to the right, where they saw the land drop completely away. Portions of a road, perhaps their own, could be seen arranged in broken bits along the sheer slopes, and far below, between boulders, they saw the silent blue and white curling of the sea.

They were received in a small sitting room furnished with much-sat-in overstuffed furniture and opening out on a large terrace. The prince had them sit down and the two children, having been already formally presented in the courtyard, tucked themselves away on stools. Though they did not stare, they certainly watched: two more, they were clearly saying to themselves, had arrived.

Flashing dark, affable smiles, the prince said that he sometimes rode back down to the village with the taxi driver but that it must be hot below. Judy and Bill agreed: the nights were cool but at midday especially it was indeed hot below. Presently Madame Thompson came in—one said “Madame” instead of “Mrs.” or “Signora” possibly to give her the Continental flavor she deserved, though she was not French but German, and Thompson was American. Her long straight gray hair was screwed into a loose knot at the back. She was wrapped in a coarse white shawl. They should all move out to the terrace, she suggested, because the view was “vunderful.” They moved out to the terrace and soon two young women came in. The one with the tray of aperitifs was a servant; the other, the one wearing bracelets and smoking a cigarette, was Thompson’s daughter, the princess.

From the opposite end of the terrace, making all turn, Thompson himself strode in.

He was grizzly and vigorous, with heavy brown hands. He wore a cardigan, crumpled trousers that looked about to fall down, and carpet slippers. He advanced to the center of the group and halted, squinting in the strong sun.

Judy dared not look at Bill. She had seen him at many other rungs of the ladder, looking both fearful and hopeful, both nervous and brave, in desperate proportions only Bill could concoct, and her heart had gone out to him. But now, as he confronted the Great Man at last, she looked elsewhere. She knew that he was transferring his glass to his left hand; she knew that his grasp would be damp, shaky, and cold.

Almost as much as for Bill, however, Judy was anxious for herself. Why, she now wondered, had she thought it necessary to look so well? Bill, in carefully pressed flannels, with crisp graying hair and heavy glasses, looked as American as naturally as a Chinaman looked Chinese, but with her the thing had taken some doing, and, inspired by the idea of helping him, she had worked at it hard. Brushes and bottles and God knows what had got into it and what with her best costume, a cream-colored linen sheath with loose matching jacket, a
strand of pearls, gold earrings, and shimmering brown hair, she looked ready to be mounted in an enlargement on a handsome page; but what had that to do with scholarship? The princess and her mother, Judy felt certain, did not own one lipstick between them. They dressed like peasants, forgetting the whole thing.

It’s only that I know how little I know to talk about, Judy thought. That’s why I was so careful. What if they found out about all those books I haven’t read? She shook hands with Thompson, but didn’t say anything: she only smiled.

Bill, who used to be good at tennis—he and Judy had met one summer on a tennis court—found a means of cutting off the small talk with an opening question like a serve, something about a recent comparison of Byzantine and Roman portraiture. A moment later he was trotting off at Thompson’s side, off toward the library, while words like monograph and research grant, Harvard and Cambridge, frothed about in their wake.

Judy was left alone with the family.

She asked them about their daily routine. The princess said she went down each afternoon to bathe in the sea. “But how do you get down?” Judy wanted to know. “Oh, by a stairway in back of the castle. It’s quite a walk, but good for my figure.” “Then do you walk back up?” “Oh no. There’s a ski lift a half-mile from the beach. It lands me on a plateau, a sort of meadow. Beautiful. You’ve no idea. In the spring it is covered with flowers. I love it. Then I walk back through the castle and home.”

“So there’s skiing here, too?” she asked the prince.

“Oh no!” said the prince.

“He brought an old ski lift home from the Dolomites,” the princess explained. “Just so I could ride up from the beach.”

“Do you have a farm here?” Judy asked.

“Oh no!” said the prince.

“He did at one time,” said the princess.

“At one time, I did, yes. Then I spent some years in England. In England they are all so kind to the animals. Oh, very kind. When I
came back for the first time I saw how cruel our peasants were. Not that they meant to be cruel. Yet they were—they were cruel! I tried to change them. But they would not change. So at last I sold the animals and sent away all the peasants.”

“That’s one solution,” Judy agreed.

“He vill never eat the meat,” said Madame Thompson. She smiled, deeply, like the Mona Lisa. “Never!”