The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (23 page)

“You must remember, my dear, that Gordon only got interested in finance through having to manage property you were left with. He saw what a sorry mess things were in where you and your sister were concerned and he so interested himself that he could now earn fifty thousand a year as a market analyst, that is, if he cared to. Your sister Annette says she never goes to bed without thanking God for Gordon Ingram.”

In Martha’s view her sister Annette was a near illiterate who would have gone on comparing prices of soap powders if she had a million dollars. She felt a blind white tumult stir inside, the intellectual frustration, of always being—she could only think deliberately, but how was one to know that—misunderstood.

“I think it’s wonderful how well he manages money, but that wasn’t the point of what I was saying.”

“Why don’t we take our coffee elsewhere, if you’re agreeable.” In the
carrozza
he hailed for them in the narrow empty street, he conversed intelligently about the city, telling her in the course of some chance recollection several things she didn’t know. And in the
carrozza
she experienced the tug of motion as one doesn’t in a car, and the easy sway of the wheels, the creak of leather. He handed her down in
a comfortable way. “Well, and what a pleasant thing to do!” Moving her toward a quiet café, “Shall we just have some coffee here?”

How charming they would all be, she thought, if only one could utterly surrender the right ever to disagree with them. She wished she could have sat in the handsome bar, all white rococo and gilt, and bring him out on some old story or other: reminiscence, that was what they loved, but she had desperately to try once more, for the bar was teeming with Italians: he was all she had of America here.

“I only wish that someone would admit that a man can be as wonderful as a saint to everyone in the world, but behave like a tyrant to one person.”

He gave her a quiet gray look. “I cannot see anything tyrannical about Gordon wishing you to have your share of this property settlement.”

“I only want to be forgotten,” she said.

“Surely a rather singular wish.”

It was right there on the table that she signed it. She remembered the crash of the gun down by the stream’s edge. The ink flowed easily from the pen. It was only, she thought, a question of money. His hands in receiving documents were extremely adept.

“There will of course be other papers,” he said. “They will reach you through the mail.”

8

And all this time in the thick or cutting weather of that winter she had been blown adrift about the city, usually going to put in a social appearance somewhere that the Hartwells didn’t have time for, and when George saw her as he did see her once, driving by in his little car—she was on the Veneto—it gave him the odd sensation that all was not well. As if to confirm it she stopped still and laughed. The sight was pleasant, but the idea worrying; she had told him something
even back that far about the Boston lawyer, whom he had actually seen her having cocktails with at the Flora, but, in the days that followed the laugh, he fell to wondering what his responsibility was. He recalled the sudden break in her walking there by the high wall just past the embassy, and the giant twin baroque cupids playing with a basin into which a fountain gently spilled, and thought that if Martha was in New York she would be swelling some psychiatrist’s income by now, a thing he withdrew himself from even considering. He sat meditating evenings before a Florentine fireplace covered with Delia Robbia cherubs, a full-length angel or two that he called his “dancing girls,” and with sighs of joy sank his stone-chilled feet deeply into hot water poured into a copper pot that his wife had bought from a peasant in the Abruzzo and that was someday going to be filled to abundance with bronze chrysanthemums in some white American home among the flaming autumn hills, but right now … she poured another boiling kettle in. “I wish to heaven you would find out definitely once and for all that of course she does have a lover. Or even two or three. Or decide that you want her yourself. Just tell me please, so I don’t have to overhear it at the opera.” “It’s too hot,” he protested for the third time. “You don’t have to scald me. And anyway, I hope she does have somebody if he’s the right sort. I just don’t want her jumping out of a top window of the Colosseum, or off St. Peter’s balcony, or even her own terrace, for Christ’s sake. You know about the suicide we had in Germany.” “But why should she—” “I don’t know, I can’t tell. It’s just a feeling I have.”

An old bathrobe he had bought in Missouri to take with him to Oxford, where it had been his heart’s comfort and one sure joy, was hugged round his shoulders, and cupids, winged but bodiless, alternating with rich purple clusters of grapes and gently prancing unicorns, looked down upon him from the low, beamed Rinascimento ceiling, justly famed. Their palazzo was listed in guidebooks and it seemed a shame that they could never remember once having been warm in it. His wife was bundled up in sweaters and an old ski jacket;
she even sometimes wore gloves indoors in the damper weather, and George himself was turning into an alcoholic just from trying to get enough whiskey in himself to keep out the vicious mists. A glass of Bourbon sat beside him on the marble floor.

9

What George Hartwell now recognized that in those days he must have been fighting off was no more than what Martha herself had spent so long fighting off—that around one corner he was going to run headlong into Jim Wilbourne. He told himself he was afraid she had got mixed up with an Italian, though it might not in the long run perhaps mean very much—Italians generally left the American women they made love to, or so ran the prevailing superstition. The question of her divorce would have been in it from the first, thus practically guaranteeing she would get hurt. But then he worried, too, that it might be the English, or the Americans, whom one counted on really to mean it, or so the legends went, and hence might get lulled into trusting too implicitly for anything. That might be more damaging in the long run.

“Who is it?” he came right out at lunch once and asked her. “Who is it, Martha?” But as he had not led up to this demand in any way, she assumed, quite naturally, that he was referring to somebody who had just passed their table and told him a name they both knew of a girl from Siena who used to work at the consulate but had had to return home to live with her aunt, but what was she now doing back in Rome. He said he didn’t know.

The day was misty and the light blurred, lavender and close all day, dim as the smoke from the chestnut braziers, on the branched trees of the Villa Borghese, where the gravel smashed damply under the thin soles of Roman shoes. The crowds flowed out, engulfing and persistent; a passing tram blocked out whatever one might have thought one saw. Hartwell gave up worrying; suicide seemed out—
she looked invariably blooming. He had enough to bother him, what with new government directives that occasioned the reorganization of the entire staff (by a miracle he stabilized himself, Martha and one or two others he wanted to keep upon the shaky scaffolding until it quieted down—these earth tremors left everybody panting). Then there was the thing of the ambassador’s getting poison off the ceiling paint—
Ceiling paint? No
Roman ever believed this, just as no American ever doubted it. Solemn assurances eventually were rendered by a U.S. medical staff that the thing had actually taken place. The Romans howled. You could judge how close you came to being permanent here by how much you doubted it.

Martha forgot to come one evening and help Grace Hartwell out with the Cogginses, who had to be invited somewhere occasionally; they had to be acknowledged or clamors went up from their admirers. George made a monstrous effort and kept them out of the festival plans now being talked in reference to Spoleto where no one who remotely resembled them would be included, a thing they would never have understood. Martha rang up late, excusing herself on the grounds of some trouble with her maid. Maid trouble was always a standard excuse among Americans, and though it seemed almost Italian to lie to close friends, Grace Hartwell accepted it not to risk upsetting George.

“You abandoned me, just the same,” she told Martha. “And that girl now is into some trouble over her work permit.”

“She never had one at all,” said Martha, who knew the straight of the story. “She agreed to help at the shop or be allowed to hang around just to learn Italian. She wanted experience instead of money.”

“I don’t know how much experience she got,” said Grace, “or for that matter had already, but the proprietor had a fight with his relatives, who are all out of work, and say she’s taking food out of their mouths and now she’s been reported somewhere. The Cogginses seem to have got her out of it just by having so many friends at the Istituto Musicale di Roma, but now she’s out of work.”

“Unemployment is on the rise,” said Martha flippantly, making Grace cross.

“There is so little for young people in Rome,” said Grace, “they don’t know what to do with her. It seems all the young Italians—”

“They can always send her back,” said Martha.

But seeing that she had made Grace Hartwell angry, an almost impossible feat, she invited Grace and Dorothy Coggins to tea at Babbington’s on the Piazza di Spagna. They were joined by Rita Wilbourne, who had been at Grace’s. Dorothy Coggins said she used to come here often before Jean left the glove shop, which was right across the street. Grace Hartwell gave full attention to Rita, who always looked tentative in Italy, rather like an ailing bird, but who, at least today, was subdued in what she wore, a navy dress and dark beret. Grace seemed to feel that given enough scones to eat she might actually be fixed in place in some way so far lacking. But Rita protested that she felt much better since some friends took her up to Switzerland, a civilized country.

Martha, who liked Grace and often used to confide in her, now felt herself so utterly bored she wondered if she could make it through to a second cup of tea, when suddenly, as if a signal had been given, they all found themselves deeply involved in talking about a new couple who had just come out from the States. They were soon examining these people in about every verbal way that exists, briskly, amiably, with enormous, almost profound curiosity, not at all unkindly, hoping for the best and not missing anything, from the two children’s immediate cleverness with the language (they reminded Grace of
English
children. “Oh, yes, you’re right,” Martha enthusiastically agreed. “It’s their
socks!”)
to the woman’s new U.S. clothes and probable family background, somewhat superior, they thought, to the husband’s, who had worn a huge Western hat (he taught in Texas) down the Via Nazionale and was trailed around by knots of people, some of whom believed him to be a famous movie director. This was really rather funny, when one considered
that he was actually an authority on Virgil, though Grace said she did not know which was funnier, to consider an authority on Virgil in a cowboy hat on the Via Nazionale, or in Texas in any sort of headgear, and Dorothy Coggins said that Texas was getting way way up, culturally speaking; that remark only proved what an ancient Roman Grace was getting to be. And Rita said that Jim loathed Italian hats and would not have one. Martha did not recall he ever had a hat at all.

“Richard doesn’t mind anything Italian,” said Dorothy. “He’s simply gone on the place. Jean has a modeling job now,” she told Martha. “I thought at first I’d have to arrange for her to go home. She was running around too much, meeting too many of these boys who just hang around places. I don’t know what they do. I can never understand. Their families are well off, I suppose, but still I—You got it for her, didn’t you, Martha?” “Why, no,” said Martha, “I don’t think so.” “She mentioned you to that designer—what’s her name—Rossi. The little elegant one on the Via Boncompagni, and you were just the right one for her to know. She had to lose fifteen pounds—she ate nothing but salami for ten days. They were to call you up and she was sure—” “They didn’t, but it’s all right.” “She thinks you got it for her.” “Well, I—” Martha suddenly knew nothing to say. It looked clever of Jean to go to that one shop and mention her; but it had been perhaps merely luck. It was the sort of haphazard luck the girl had. “She admires you so,” said Dorothy Coggins with house-wifely openness. “She always did. It really is amazing,” she added. “I can’t see anything amazing about it,” said Grace with her generous laugh. They had all paused and were looking, with more admiration than not, at Martha, and Rita said, “What a lovely pin—I must borrow it sometime to copy it.” It was something she had had forever. She felt silent and alone in a certain shared secrecy with the pin—its quiet upcurving taste enclosing amethysts—and though she said she would lend it to Rita sometime she had no intention of doing so.

The women sat together, in their best suits and hats, shoes damp from the streets, handbags beside them at a corner table, while the
early dusk came on and the soupy traffic thickened outside. The ceiling was low, dark, and beamed in the English manner, the place a favorite haunt of the quieter English colony. The Brownings might have just gone out. Yet under the distant assurance of even that name lurked some grisly Renaissance tale. Martha found her gloves and asked for the check.

Afterward she drove with Grace to carry Dorothy Coggins up the Gianicolo to the American Academy to meet her husband. They left Rita to catch a cab home. “It will be a blessing,” said Dorothy as Grace fended through traffic, “if she has another baby as soon as she can. She’s not going to be happy until she does. I know that from my own experience.”