The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (22 page)

After some time, Hartwell said, “Intentionally crazy, I take it?”

“It’s necessary,” she finally replied.

At this Hartwell stopped drinking coffee, perhaps forever.

“What are you thinking?” she asked him.

“I think the weather is better,” he said.

“That isn’t what you think,” she said gently, and gently, too, she went so far as to pick up the letter and place it—most untrust-worthily—upon the table.

A small bell in a small church rang close by. It had a lovely clear sound and one actually looked about, expecting to see it, as though for a bird that had burst out singing.

“If only you could have got by without Wilbourne!” Hartwell cried, astonishing himself.

Martha built a pyramid out of burned matches beside the milk pitcher. “He’s gone. And anyway, what was it to you?”

“I didn’t like him,” said Hartwell arbitrarily. “This has happened before. It’s nothing new. Those tall young men …” It had happened all his life, in fact; he never having been one of them. At Harvard he had seen them, in the clothes of that day, older, of course, than himself, their strong easy step moving down corridors. And at Oxford,
English tall with heavier bone structure, their big knees ruddy and tough in the blear cold. Now they were younger and would be younger still, but the story was still the same. “One expects such brilliance, and what happens? A moderately adequate work program, someone dear to me damaged—” she gave him a glance but did not stop him “—and now this headache of an apartment going on and on into the summer.”

They had wrecked the apartment when they left, Jim and Rita Wilbourne. The parquet, the mirrors, the plumbing, the furniture. It was a vengeance on the landlord, whose nature was infernal and who had made their life a grating misery for the whole year. Now Hartwell had to listen to the landlord; he came once or twice a week to Hartwell’s office; he would come tomorrow.
“Signor console, devi capire che sono un uomo giusto e gentile
. … You must understand I am a just and honorable man.” The world was smeared and damaged, and Martha’s craziness obsessed him, the more because she having completed herself he was in some ways crazier than she, else why would he let the landlord in for these interminable visits complaining of something that he could be said to be responsible for only in the vague sense of directing an American program in which Jim Wilbourne had, for a short time, taken part?

“You are linking me, George,” she half teased him, “to what the Wilbournes did to the landlord. Is that reasonable?”

“No, it isn’t. It isn’t reasonable at all. It just happens to be the truth, that’s all. And anyway, you didn’t see it—you didn’t get the guided tour after they carried out the crime and ran away to Naples in the night. Carelessness is one thing, disorder left by people who aren’t so tidy, something not at all nice about it, smelly maybe, but still human. But Rita and Jim Wilbourne had taken hammers, crowbars, scissors … !” He had begun, somewhat ludicrously, to shout.

Martha thought it was time somebody repaid a Roman landlord in kind, though anything short of crucifixion seemed genteel, but even to think of a Roman landlord seemed out of place in the timeless non-bitterness of a Sunday morning full of sun.

“If he found that was the only way to get even,” she said, “there may even have been some logic in it. I’m sure he got no more than even, and maybe no less. You forget he was an economist, so that might have something to do with the way he felt. I really don’t pretend to know.”

“I’m sure you would know more than I would,” Hartwell said, somewhat recovering himself.

“I know he was the only one who could deal with Gordon Ingram—I do know that. But I never thought of him as smashing apartments up, though now that you mention it—”

The little church bell stopped ringing about then, and she wondered at Hartwell, this stupor of moral horror in his face, and predicted, the instant before he did it, that he would ask for a drink. She went and got it, drifting free and anchorless through her apartment, then going off to rearrange some flower pots, having no more ties than a mobile, invisibly suspended in the sun. Yet she was kind enough to reassure him. “If my judgment of him is worth anything, he seemed more quiet than not.”

“Quietly murderous?” Hartwell murmured, and fell into the Scotch with a sigh.

She had to recognize, for by turning her head she could even see what made a space for itself rather constantly in her mind—how the room just beyond the tall windows onto the terrace looked now. They would have both known a long chain of rooms like that from childhood on, known their quiet, with shadowy corners and silent chairs and pictures that look only at one another, ornaments of no earthly connection to anything one knows about or can remember, and known, too, the reason for their precise quality, even down to the slow wind of dust motes in the thin slant of winter sun, the cool rest the marble has in summer and the small light of the lamps: the reason being that somebody had been got rid of in them. In spite of her, their thoughts like profiles in a modern painting, merged and coalesced. She appeared as one of a long line of women who have rooms like this; invariably handsome, well dressed, detached, goalless,
they have struck at life where it lived, unnaturally, because it grew unbearable.

He recalled from his long-lost Missouri days, various women, their features indistinct but their spirits clear to transparency, who lived in shady white houses with green latticework under the porch where the land sloped away. In varying degrees of poverty and wealth, they gave up their lives day by day, like sand running through a visible hourglass, to some trembling cross old father or invalid brother or failure of a husband or marvelously distorted and deeply loved child. But out and away from this monotony, they ranged far and wide among friends of the town, accepted, beloved, understood, praised. He saw them shift through that lost world with the sureness of angels, and though he said to himself it was lost, the thought occurred to him that it was perhaps only he who was lost to it; for certainly it was there still: what made him think it wasn’t? It was still there and going on, and repeating moreover its one relentlessly beautiful message: that you had to stand what you couldn’t stand, or else you couldn’t live at all. And for the first time it came to him that Martha Ingram did not, any longer, exist. He felt a pang of missing her, as though sometime back somebody had come in the office and told him the bad news and he had done all the decent things.

Whereupon she looked at him, reflectively, through the sun, and all the fabric of his fantasy crumbled. At least in the warm intelligent effigy of the flesh she was still there and still able to get through to him. She was all but pointing out to him that he didn’t really know, how could he know just how it was? It was inhuman; it was monstrous—that was the first thing to know. Therefore, who was to say what she had or hadn’t had the right to do about it?

7

As to whether or not she was really there anymore, she could have said that she had simply become the winter past. Its positive motion against her, which seemed at times as blindly relentless as a natural force breaking up her own life, would always be with her. But it could not, unlike a natural force, ever be forgotten, for human faces had appeared in it and voices had cried to her, human motion had struck her down, and by these things, grasped at, sometimes only half understood, she had been changed for good and could never escape them. It had been a definitive season.

But why George Hartwell now had to rush back into its devastating glooms and vapors, the flicker of its firelights and quick gasps of its passions, so grotesquely lighted up in shadow play against the walls of his good and gentle heart—that she could not say. She did not really want to say. He seemed distant to her. She was fond of him. She could not have been any more or less than that if he had wanted her to, and he would never say so if he did, even, she supposed, to himself. She could, however, indulge him. He had his curiosity, so much a part of his affection—she could honor both by letting him in on things. She doubted if she would ever go so far as to say very much about the evening she had run into Jim Wilbourne on the Via de’ Portoghesi, but in a way by just recalling it, it could be in some way shared by George Hartwell’s openness in her direction, which she might have been leaning over to pat on the head, like a house pet. But then of course, he would want to get past all that as hastily as possible and on to the next thing, the next stone in her private torrent, and she guessed, looking back, that that would have been the Boston lawyer. In January, wasn’t it?

Yes, she could share that with George. She could even tell him about it, for she would not forget a single detail of it, even down to the gray suit the lawyer was wearing. He was all gray, in fact, all over, even to his cuff links, hair and tie, and his name was gray, as well—
Bartram Herbert. He was a close friend of Gordon Ingram’s. She had known him for years.

He flew in in the afternoon, to Ciampino, just as his telegram had said he would. She did not meet the plane, and had even decided that she would leave the city for Naples, but unable to make herself do so, showed up exactly where he had asked her to, the Flora lobby near the Porta Pinciana. She even arrived on the exact hour, clasped his hand with a pale smile and turned her chilly cheek for a token kiss. He took her down to have a drink with him in the bar. Next he ordered a cab to Ranieri’s (had he reserved by cable, she wondered?), which is an old-fashioned Roman restaurant where the carpets sink deeply in and the soft chandeliers swing low and the waiters murmur in French, bending at monsieur’s elbow, and he said (this being the kind of place his voice was best adapted to), “Gordon feels some income should be set up from the land for you. It is on his conscience because you may remember that some of your parents’ legacy went into the original purchase. It was not noted in the deed of sale, and indeed could not be. This is only a matter of personal conscience, as I’m sure you must appreciate correctly.”

She was wearing a stern black suit and noticed, in a discreet but enormous mirror in a heavy frame, how pale she looked, though perhaps it was only the lighting, how subdued she sat, almost clipped out with scissors. She watched the neat insertion of his pointed spoon in the melon he had discovered on the menu and was now enjoying, and longed to say, “But you and Gordon were directors in that trust company that failed in the crash—I heard all about it—and somehow you never got precisely ruined, though of course ‘ruined’ was the word you used for yourself, but it was never visible.” But she did not. She wondered if it was not too easy to suspect dishonesty where people are really only loyally seconding one another’s ideas, echoing one another’s politics and views of humanity that sound despicable, only to prove their common ground of affection. Then she said, “I think the trouble with all these messages, these visitors and plans and letters and schemes, is that everyone is looking at
things only as Gordon sees them.” His glance was sheer genius. “Oh, not at all, my dear. If it’s what you feel, why that’s unfortunate, but certainly in Mrs. Herbert’s—Ruth’s—view and my own, you and Gordon were simply too dissimilar to manage a happy arrangement.” Dissimilar! She tried desperately to keep the word from clanging in her head. Had Gordon really poisoned the dog, as she suspected? she wanted to ask, for certainly the vet had told her so, clear and round, and he had said, “If you think I will stoop to so much as answer this degrading nonsense. The dog was not poisoned. They are either confused or are deliberately telling you something to cover some mistake on their own part.” There was, of course, another word like dissimilar: incompatible. “I have often wondered, however, granting the fact that no one can really say what causes such desperate conditions in a marriage that divorce is the only way out—I have often wondered what I did to turn all Gordon’s friends against me. Why did you hate me so much?”

“It looked that way to you, did it?” He took a small sip of French wine. “I can see how it might. We all felt, you see—protective of Gordon. He has meant, through the years, so much.” “So you wanted him back to yourselves?” “There was some sort of reaction.” “There certainly was,” Martha agreed. “I wanted to love you,” she added. “I’m sure we made it difficult for you,” he admitted. “I, for one, was somewhat conscious of it at the time. I tried, in some way, do you remember, to make amends.” “I remember,” she said, “that you took me down to see the fish pond.” “So I did.” He smiled. “And wasn’t that pleasant for you?” “Yes,” she said, “but it was scarcely more than decent. You never said anything to let me know you saw the difficulties I was half drowning in, with everyone else.” “Well, but wouldn’t that have been disloyal to Gordon?”

There was the thin sound of his spoon touching down on the plate, and she said, “I suppose now that this bit of land is turning out to have some value I have not heard about.”

“There is no attempt afoot to give you less than every cent that could possibly be due you.”

“I did not mean there was,” she said. Good God! she thought, how old he makes me feel. “I only meant that I have a reasonable interest in business.”

“Well, then, you may as well know that the area is being opened up as suburban property—quite in the junior executive line. Maybe you aren’t familiar with the term.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Has someone else got to you, then?”

“Oh, no, it’s only that I guessed that I was being treated rather well for there not to be better than average sums involved.” I shouldn’t have said that, she thought. Of course, I make them angry. They don’t like it, of course, they don’t like it, and why do I do it? “Listen,” she said intensely, “I’m sorry. I never meant to—”