The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (14 page)

“Oh yes, the impression was a strong one. Also I am interested in Moral Rearmament. In England now there are so many thinking in this way. Now I oppose war and I will never eat meat again.
Carne? Mai!”

It was not surprising, then, that they had pasta for lunch, followed by an omelet. Thompson sat at the head of the table.

“You should go to Greece,” Thompson said to Bill. “Don’t you plan to?”

“Greece isn’t my field,” Bill explained. “And of course my fellowship—”

“Fields and fellowships,” said Thompson and gulped down some wine. “Fellowships and fields.”

Bill remarked with a wry smile that Thompson himself had had one or two grants. “Oh, live on ‘em!” Thompson cried. “Absolutely live on ‘em. You people keep coming up the mountain—coming up the mountain. We must make it all work. How else?” His eye roved savagely around until it lighted on Judy: she felt as if her clothes were cracking suddenly away at the seams. Still observing her, Thompson said to Bill, “I’ll tell you a subject that ten years ago I wouldn’t have given a second thought to—at your age I would have derided it. The relation of art to economics.”

“Oh, Lord, no,” said Bill at once. “Not after ‘The Byzantine Aesthetic.’”

“Very odd,” said Thompson; “I feel exactly the same about one subject as the other.” He sighed. “Well, don’t tell Eakins on me, will you?”

“He’d think I was joking,” Bill said.

“That summer in Paris,” Thompson said, “when we met Eakins. When was that?” He addressed his wife. Madame Thompson had said nothing, it seemed to Judy, since her remark about the meat the prince would not eat; but now she began with patient, devoted, humorless accuracy to trace out what was wanted. Her voice rolled out in heavily muffled phrases, like something amplified through clouds.

“It vas in 1927, the summer Eugene, your secretary for ten years, had died at Cologne of pneumonia on the last day of February. You decided to bring three articles later called ‘Some Aspects of the Renaissance’—”

“God!” Bill breathed, showing that he recognized the title.

“—to rewrite in Paris. After Eugene’s death you thought alvays of the sculptures in the Louvre.”

Memory rushed into Thompson, a back-lashing wave. The wine of that long ago summer seemed to be crisping his tongue. “Oh yes, and there was Eakins wanting all the same books as I in the Bibliotheque Nationale. He carried a sandwich in his briefcase. Very poor. One meal a day. Some
poule
or other was giving him that. No fellowships then. Nothing but fields. Some very green.” He gave a short laugh. “I don’t say he
read
the books, of course. That might be asking too much of Eakins.”

The maid was putting the dessert around, a
crème caramel
. Thompson said he never ate dessert and went shuffling out in his carpet slippers. They all sat eating in silence. The princess said she would soon be going down for a swim if the Owens would care to join her. “I know I shouldn’t so soon after eating, but the walk is good for me.” She drew herself in smartly. Bill’s refusal included the hint that he intended to have more of a talk with Thompson before the visit was over. “Oh, but he has gone to rest,” they all said. “He must have his rest.”

Bill looked concerned, and the prince promised to take him into the library, where Thompson would certainly come the moment he got up. Then the prince took Judy out to see his roses. The garden was in back of the castle ruins, in a sheltered area between the mountain
and the ruined wall, opening out toward the south. The prince had gone to a great deal of trouble. Roses were especially hard to cultivate in Italy. But he had admired them so in England. His were ravishing—broad blooms of pink, white, red, and yellow. Here they could distinctly hear the sea.

In the pauses between his bits of information the prince looked inquiringly at Judy as if he was wondering if there was something else he could do for himself. His life so far would have been like the sweep of a windshield wiper. Of course, he was a prince; of course, he had a villa and a castle, with the daughter of a famous man for his wife and roses and two beautiful children, and Moral Rearmament and English flannels, and if the peasants did not understand, he sent them away. If that was not enough, he did not eat the meat. Was there something else?

Judy noticed this, but felt the lack of anything to suggest to him. She stood wondering whether, since the peasants and the animals were gone, the roses too were financed by the foundations, but she decided this line of thought was ungracious.

The children appeared from nowhere. “Now they will take you round the castle, if you like,” the prince kindly said. “It is mainly in shadow, so you won’t grow tired. But mind you don’t let them tempt you to climb. They love it, but they are like cats. Say, ‘No, no, come down!’”

He turned away, toward nothing.

Clambering around the castle, Judy came on a sort of enclosure, sunlit and quiet. She could smell warm earth beneath the grass. The air was sweet and soft, what Italians called
dolce
. There were some beautiful old broken chunks of ruin lying scattered about. Judy sat down on some ruined steps and rested her chin in her palm. The children called to her out of a tower but she said, “No, no, come down,” so they did. The sky was radiant and gentle. She could glimpse the children at intervals, running past empty window gaps, until at last they leaped down on the grass before her.

Suddenly from behind the children, at a notch in the wall, the princess rose up. She was climbing; though as they could not see her feet, she seemed to be rising like a planet. She was rubbing her wet hair with a towel, and the sense and movement of the sea were about her.

Stopping still, she addressed a volley of Italian to the children. It would have been hard to convince anyone that her father was from Minnesota. Judy made out
“Che hai?” “Cattivo, tu!” and “Dammelo!”
which meant, she reasoned, that the children had something they shouldn’t have which now was to be given to their mother. Then, as they at first hung back with their fists stuffed in the pockets of their pinafores, but finally obeyed, going forward and reaching out toward the princess, Judy glimpsed handful after handful of flashing blue stones, the purest, most vibrant blue she had ever seen. The color seemed to prank about the air for a moment with the freakish skip of lightning.

“Was the ski lift working?” a voice cried. Thompson himself was striding out to find them among the ruins. The princess came down from the wall and sat down quickly on a large fallen cornice. She had taken the stones, like eggs, in her towel, and now she quickly concealed them in it as well.

“It was working but not very well. It goes very
piano
. It also runs at an
angolo.”

“We must send Giuseppe down to look at the motor,” Thompson said. “How was the sea?”

“Strong, but right,” said the princess.

Judy saw from her watch that it was nearly three. Bill must be going nuts in the library, she knew; and here was Thompson grasping her arm and hustling her along a narrow path. They entered the villa by a side door and were at once standing facing one another in a narrow room with the remains of old frescoes peeling from the walls, a Renaissance chest in the corner, and a cold swept fireplace.

Thompson placed a hand like a bear’s paw beneath her chin; his coarse thumb, raking down her cheek from temple to chin, all but
left, she felt, a long scar. “Beauty,” he remarked. His hand fell away and whatever she was expecting next did not occur.

“My husband,” said Judy, “is waiting to see you. You know, don’t you, that he is a terribly important scholar?”

“So Eakins said … but then I’ve never especially liked Eakins, do you? He says these things for some purpose. It is rather like playing cards. Perhaps it’s all true. How am I to know? I was never a scholar.” He confided this last somewhat eagerly, as though it had been the reason for finding her, and having her believe it mattered to him, Judy could not think why. He leaned back against the chest and folded his long arms. “You think I have to go and talk to him?” he debated with her. “You think that is the important thing?”

“I don’t know. Oh, I really don’t know!” She burst out with this—undoubtedly, the wrong thing—quite unexpectedly, surprising herself.

“Ummm,” said Thompson, thinking it over. His eyes—large, pale, old, and, she supposed, ugly—searched hers. Unreasonable pain filled her for a moment: she longed to comfort him, but before she could think of how to, he tilted her head to an angle that pleased him, kissed her brow, and shambled off, though in truth he seemed to trail a length of broken chain.

She was left to lose her way alone.

Corridors, wrongly chosen, led her to a room, a door, a small courtyard, a stretch of gravel, a dry fountain. She walked halfway to the fountain and turned to look back at the façade, which like the other was sunburned and bare. It was surmounted by a noble crest, slightly askew—the prince’s doubtless. I should have told Thompson, she thought, that the children had got into the mosaics, but suppose it wasn’t true? How could you say such a thing and not make an idiot of yourself if you were wrong?

As she stood, her shadow lying faithfully beside her in the uncompromising sun, a door in the wing to her left swung open and two Hindus, splendidly dressed, the man in a tailored dark suit wearing a scarlet turban, the woman in a delicate spangled sari that prickled
over the gravel, walked past the fountain, past Judy, and disappeared through a door in the façade. She had raised her hand to them, she had called, but they had not looked up.

Bill was disappointed to the point of despair by his visit, which had yielded him only a scant half-hour with Thompson and a dusty monograph, published in 1928. Even the subject matter—Greek vase painting—was not in Bill’s field. Thompson had told him seriously that for a man of his age, he had a wonderful liver. If Eakins had lived in Europe as long as he (Thompson) had, his (Eakins’) liver would look like a bloody sponge.

“He’s an organized disappointment,” Bill complained, “and not very well organized at that. He didn’t want to talk to me because he can’t compete any more. He’s completely out of the swim.”

“I liked him,” said Judy. “I just loved him, in fact.”

“Doubtless. He has a taste for pretty girls. You overdid it, dressing so well. Did he chase you through the upstairs ballroom? That’s what it’s used for nowadays.”

The taxi having reappeared for them promptly at four, they were now speeding down the mountain at a suicidal clip; they clung to straps beside the windows, where many a scholarly pair had clung before. Leaping rocks and whipping around curves, the cab clanged like a factory.

“The children had got into the mosaics,” Judy shouted.

“What?” Bill yelled. And when she repeated it, “That can’t be true,” he answered.

“Did you see the Hindu couple?” she asked, as they sped through a silent green valley.

“No,” said Bill. “And please don’t describe them.” He said that he had a headache and was getting sick. He wondered if they would return alive.

From the corner of her eye, Judy saw a huge boulder, dislodged by their wheels, float out into a white gorge with the leisure of a dream.

The Pincian Gate

It seemed to her impossible that you could, here in mid-twentieth century, enter a medieval wall through a tiny gate, having pulled an iron chain to jangle a bell high above you, be shouted at hoarsely to
“Vieni, vieni!”
and, having climbed a twisting narrow flight that smelled of Roman masonry—chilly the year round, exactly as it must have been in Byron’s day—confront across the threshold the face of a boy you went to school with back in Arkansas. Only it was a little more complex than that. Sara thought that it was useless coincidence to have remembered Gowan Palmer from school; to all present purposes, he was just a nice man she and her husband had met a year ago at a party here in Rome. As for those bygone days, he seemed to like Sara and Paul in spite of having known them forever, and none of them had the bad taste of people who reminisce. She learned by way of somebody else that he had been married to a New York girl she would probably never see, just as she discovered that it was no romantic notion that had lured him to take a damp three rooms in the Roman wall near the Pincio, but a leftover lease from a fellow-artist, now in Greece, who wanted the place occupied even at a loss.

As for the problems he was now drifting into—financial, emotional, artistic, and otherwise—she would bet she was far more aware of them than he. She was always hearing things against him now, and this, in view of her and Paul’s conviction that his work was about to break over into the big-name cluster, seemed particularly a shame. He had had for some months the air and countenance of an artist considered the best by the best. Sara had got the impression that people-who-knew, the experts, had so far spoken of his work only among themselves but would let the outside world in on it whenever they happened to think of it. As this, so far as she could see, was the only way in which a lay person could know about excellence in modern art, she had no complaints about it and rejoiced in Gowan’s right to it.

In his studio now, out of the sun, she shivered and put on her jacket, while Gowan shook iron filings off a cushion and offered to heat up the espresso. He had been on a sculpture kick, as he called it, during the winter months, and she found herself angling to talk to him through a forest of elongated shapes in heavily beaten iron.