The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (19 page)

There was nothing to do till dinner, and she went upstairs again. The smell of cigarettes hung stagnant in the upper hall and from somewhere a shutter banged in the shifting wind. She pursued stair-ways and long halls, passed alcoves and sudden windows. Everything was as dark as her dream had been when it faded. A lance had whistled past her ear, and the impression persisted that she moved in a house of death.

PART TWO

5

In Rome that fall she stopped herself just before telling a friend that her husband had been wounded in an accident. This was very odd, for the fall was bright and sane, and she was at the time nearly eclipsed in cleaning up a lot of George Hartwell’s extra chores. The cultural effort had taken on new life that year; the lectures were well received, the social events congenial; pools, lakes, marshes of American goodwill were filling up everywhere, and all Italians, you would think at times, were eventually going to splash and mingle in them, and the world would never be the same again.

A letter from a lawyer came to Martha, suggesting a price for some property she had owned jointly with Gordon Ingram. It should have been settled long before; it was only since they had gone so happily into it—this small wooded crook of land beside a stream in New York State—that she could never bear to discuss it. But why wouldn’t he write me about it? she wondered. Why get somebody else? She sat with the letter and realized something: that if he had had an accident it would have been about here that it happened, right on this bit of land. There were some rocks and a stream below a slope, screened by maple trees.

At last she wrote: “Dear Gordon: Do take the property outright. I do not want any money for it. Will sign whatever transfer is necessary. Martha.”

But he could not stand brief notes, simple transactions, direct generosities. Her motives now would suspend him for days. When people dealt with him too quickly, he always suspected either that he had made them too good an offer, or that they were trying to shake away from him; and so, suspicious, obscurely grieved, he would begin to do what he called considering their own good; he would
feel it his duty to make a massive reevaluation; he would call all his friends. He would certainly call them all about Martha.

They had all discussed her to death, anyway; for years she had interested them more, it seemed, than they interested themselves. They had split her up and eaten her, some an arm and some a leg and some the joints of her fingers.

Sitting at her desk on a Sunday morning, in sunlight, Martha pressed her palm to her brow. Should she mail the letter at all, or write to the lawyer instead, agreeing to everything, or write to her own lawyer to take it over? And must all life, finally defeated, turn itself over with a long expiring grateful sigh into the hands of lawyers? No, she thought with sudden force. I will keep it a personal matter if both of us have to be accidentally wounded. It is, after all, my life.

So in the end she wrote two letters, one to the lawyer and one to Gordon Ingram. Once, before she had left the States for Italy, a year after her divorce, she had run squarely into him in New York, getting out of a taxi she had hailed, and before she could stop herself she had almost screamed, and that must have been terrible for him—poor Gordon. But she well knew that if she deceived herself by thinking she knew how he felt, she might act upon it, with sympathy, and trap herself, falling a victim of his pride.

It seemed to her in retrospect that while she debated her letter that Sunday morning, the sun went away; sensually, in recollection, she could almost feel it slipping from her hair, her cheek, her shoulder, and now Rome was deep in winter, with early dusks, blurred neon on the rush of shining streets.
Tramontana
, the wind from the mountains, struck bitterly, or heavy weather moved in from the sea; the great
campagna
around Rome became a dreary battlefield of contentious air, and one had to be sorry for the eager Americans, there for one year only, who now had to learn that a sunny, amiable, amusing, golden land had passed in one night into a dreary, damp, cold dungeon of a world where everybody was out to cheat them and none of them could get warm. Martha was used to it. She had been
there several years and she liked it. Far stranger to her had been that sudden shift of weather in Venice, back in the summer. It had plunged her, like a trapdoor opening under her feet, into a well of thought she could not yet get out of. She must have been deeply in it the very day when, going home in an early dark after tea with friends, she had run into Jim Wilbourne.

She had seen the Wilbournes fairly often during the fall. Rita Wilbourne, though somewhat more flamboyant than Martha cared to think about—she wore chunky jewelry, bright green and corals, colored shoes—was energetic in getting to know people. She studied Italian, learned it quickly, and took up a hobby—she would make ceramics. It had been a Grand Idea and now it was beginning to be a Great Success. All one room of the Wilbourne apartment had become a studio. It exuded the smell of solvents and plasters.

There had been intermittent invitations. George and Grace Hartwell, the Wilbournes and Martha Ingram often found that they had gravitated into the same corner at a party, or were ringing one another up to come over for supper on rainy Sundays. What did they talk about so much as the Cogginses?

Jean Coggins had a job in a glove shop on the Piazza di Spagna. About once a week, every young Italian in Rome made a point of coming in and buying gloves. Some did nothing but walk back and forth before the window for hours. The owner was having to expand.

Richard Coggins was the success of the entire cultural program. His Italian, once it quit rhyming like opera, was twice as fluent as anyone else’s; he learned, he learned! He was invited—a great coup for the American image—to address the opera company in Milan. His lectures were packed and ended with cheers and cries.
(Bravo! Bis, bis!)
Oh, no one had ever furnished more party talk than the Cogginses. Yet there was something enviable about their success.

One night at the Wilbournes’ apartment after dinner, Jim Wilbourne remarked, “Jean Coggins’s effect on Italian men began to
happen the minute the boat docked. It was spontaneous combustion. Do you remember Venice, Martha?”

Martha looked puzzled. She shook her head. The trouble was she remembered nothing but Venice; it was a puzzle that had never worked out for her; what exactly did he mean?

“There was some boy who kept the desk—Alfredo, his name was.”

“Oh, yes, the proprietor’s son.”

“What happened?” someone—Hartwell’s wife—wanted to know.

“Well, they were hitting it off so well that she wanted me to persuade Martha—you must remember this, Martha—to stay on a day or so, so that her parents would let her stay, too. The only catch was she didn’t want me to mention Alfredo: it seems the Cogginses believe that Italian men are incorrigibly passionate or something. She nagged me until I promised to do it, but the only excuse I could think of was to say I was interested in her myself.”

Everyone laughed. “So what happened?” they wanted to know.

“Well, I got nowhere with Martha. She got out of it very well.”

“What did you say?” Hartwell asked her.

“I forget”—she let Jim Wilbourne finish his story.

“She said she’d like to stay on, but she had some appointments or other—very grand she was.”

Hartwell, after a hard week, had had a drink or two more than usual. He gave Martha a hug. “I love this girl.”

“But I was in the dark myself,” Martha protested. She soon followed Rita into the next room to look at her workshop.

“So she tried to be philosophic, which for a Coggins is something of a strain, to put it mildly. She went off in the rain with Alfredo, off in Venice somewhere, and called it a day.”

“I wouldn’t have thought these two colors would go at all,” Martha said to Rita, who had joined her. “But you’ve made them work.”

“Yes, but Italians are so bold with their colors. I think it must be something in the sunlight here—when there’s any sun, of course.”
She picked up two sections, handle and basin, from an unfinished hors d’oeuvres dish. “You see, you wouldn’t think that would do well, but I find the more I experiment—” Her bracelets jingled together as her hands moved. They were thin, quick, nervous hands with tinted nails. Grace Hartwell had told Martha that the Wilbournes were expecting a child. Why is George such a puritan? Martha wondered. You’d think I’d struck a blow for freedom by keeping lovers apart.

“Did you, by any chance,” Martha asked Rita, “know a Professor Ingram at Barnard?”

“Oh, yes, but not at Barnard. I went to Columbia. He teaches there occasionally, one semester every so often. Yes, I not only knew him, but we were sure for a time that you must be the former Mrs. Ingram. She’s somewhere in Italy. It’s odd your asking that.”

“I’d just recalled when we were talking of Venice that Jim mentioned him to me there. And several other times,” she lied, “people have assumed that he—I never met this person, of course.”

“But beginning to feel you know him rather too well?”

“I also heard he had been in some sort of accident last summer. Did you know anything about that?”

“Oh, that must be another Ingram still. No, unless something happened just recently—”

The ceramics were laid out in a bare, chilly servant’s room on a large makeshift table, strips of wallboard held up by a smaller table underneath and supported on either end by chairs. The effect was of a transferred American look, makeshift and practical, at no pains not to negate the parquet floor, a scrolled mirror now layered with cement dust. A small French escritoire had been pushed into a corner, and beside it, a gilded baroque angel holding a torch stood face to the wall. The room had probably been intended as a smoking or drawing room off the
salotto
. They had dined on frozen shrimp from the PX, and only in here with the ceramics was the odor escapable. Why would anyone buy frozen American shrimp in Italy? Martha had wanted to ask, but had not. It had been answered, anyway, at
dinner; Rita was afraid of the filth in the markets. But the markets were not filthy, Martha thought, murmuring how delicious it was.

“Hey, Martha!” Hartwell again.

“We’re busy,” Rita called.

“Information required,” Grace Hartwell said.

“They always want you to tell them things, don’t they?” said Rita with a moment of woman’s sympathy. “If I were you, I wouldn’t.”

Martha came to the doorway, her shawl tugged around her. Her hands felt cold. Hartwell was lighting his third cigar. Would he not, singlehanded, eventually drive out both shrimp and ceramics smell? “Martha, I thought
scirocco
was a wind. Jim here says it’s not. He says in Venice it’s nothing but heavy weather. Now you settle it.”

“I believe it’s an African wind,” she said, “and causes storms all along the coasts, but sometimes the wind doesn’t get as far as Venice, especially in the summer, so then you have heavy weather and rain.”

Jim Wilbourne laughed. “You mean it is and it isn’t.”

“I guess that makes you both right,” she agreed, and smiled.

All their faces were momentarily turned to her. There was some way, she realized, in which, in that moment, she drew them, the two men primarily, and because of the men, inevitably, the women, as well. She would have as soon dropped from her the complex self that was for them, in separate ways, her force, dropped it off like a shawl on the threshold and walked away. But where? Toward other eyes, of course, who could look, be looked at, in a new and simpler way. Why not? The coil of her own being held her, and she could not; that was all.

Yet the possibility continued to tease her mind until the night she ran into Jim Wilbourne, down in the low Renaissance quarter of the city, in the windy, misty, December cold. In brushing past they recognized each other, and for some reason, startled, she slipped on an uneven paving stone, so that he caught her back from falling. Then he asked her into a café and they had a drink together. She felt she was seeing him after a long absence.

He had changed somewhat; she noticed it at once. He was paler than in Venice, no longer seemed so well turned out, needed a better haircut, had a cold. He was complaining about Italian medicine; it was his wife’s having a miscarriage only a week or so after their dinner party that had got them so sensitive to these matters. Martha thought how soon the bright young Americans began to look tarnished here. The Wilbournes had had some squabble with the land-lord about their apartment. He had believed that Rita, who had begun to sell her ceramics, was obviously using the place for business purposes, so he drew up papers demanding either eviction or a larger rent. Martha had heard this through the grapevine, in the same way she had learned that there had been some disagreement with American friends about a car. All these were the familiar complications of Roman life, which only the Cogginses seemed to escape.
Their
landlord had dreamed of an opera career when young, and as a result brought them fresh cheeses from the country, goat’s milk, ropes of sausages. The Wilbournes, stubbornly American, were running against the Italian grain, so of course everything was going wrong. Yet Jim Wilbourne did work hard; it was this that Hartwell always said, as though making up for something.