The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (26 page)

“And did you know,” he was saying, “and did you fully realize, that Wilbourne got me to recommend him for an Italian-government grant? He was going to study the economic picture south of Naples—the self-sacrificing servant of his times, he was harkening to duty’s voice, he was going to leave the world a better place. Then what did he do but turn around and use that very grant as a lever to land his fat job back in the States.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Martha.

“But think what a hell of a position it put me in,” Hartwell complained.

“Well, why did you let him talk you into it?”

“I thought you wanted him here. I thought you—”

“You thought
I
did it?”

“Something like that.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” she said. “It was only that he did talk about it. I suppose, for a time, he considered staying on. He may even have believed that he meant to.”

“But you said you weren’t surprised.”

“I wasn’t… no … when he changed his mind, you mean? No, I wasn’t too surprised. He only existed in relation to Gordon.” There had always been the three of them, she thought; they had got stuck in the same frame forever.

“You mean destructively, of course,” George Hartwell grumbled. He wondered what portion of the service they had reached in mass, for though not a Catholic, he could hope that it was some deep and serious portion that could bite him up whole and take elaborate care to lift him back out of this pit he had blundered into on a fine Sunday morning.

“Did you see a little white-haired American lady on your way in?” Martha asked. “She was wearing a blue feather hat with a close veil over her hair and face and a matching blue coat. She was bow-legged.”

“Martha,” said Hartwell, “aren’t you going to spare me anything?”

He had begun to laugh. The whole thing was crazy, and probably had been all along. There wasn’t any little old lady in blue. That was one certain fact. It was something to tie to. In enabled him to keep on laughing.

But there had been no laughter for him at all from any source on that February day back in the winter when the phone rang in his office and the voice said,

“This is Gordon Ingram, Mr. Hartwell. May I see you for a short time?”

“Where are you? Where are you?” was all he could think of to say; that and, “Yes, Albergo Nazionale … of course, right away.”

To his amazement a chill like a streak of ice had run down his spine; he went out in no time, breaking three appointments, grabbing a cab rather than taking the car. Had the man already called his wife? Did she know? If so, she was likely driving blindly somewhere, fodder for the next highway crash; or more deliberately, walking straight off into the Tiber would do just as well. He felt himself in the grip of fates and furies. In the dank, gusty February day, every step seemed bringing him nearer to the moment when statues speak and old loves appear.

Albergo Nazionale ran inward from a discreet doorway. The rugs were heavy and the decor firm. He searched among the sofas, the coffee tables, the escritoires, the alcoves and bronze gods taming horses, for a shape ponderous and vast, a heavy thigh and a foot like an elephant’s, and toward the last he was spinning like a top and had whirled upon the desk clerk, saying, “I’m looking for a Signor Ingram,
un professore americano.”
But before he could get that out altogether, a hand touched his sleeve, and it was only Robert Inman, English and slight with sandy hair severely thinned, a classmate at Balliol. “I say, George, I’ve tried this makes three times to stop you, can’t have changed so much as all that, you know.” It could not have been Robert Inman who had telephoned. Yet it had been. There was no Ingram on the register.

George Hartwell lived through a weak Scotch in an armchair that threatened to swallow him whole, so small was he already in addition to feeling unreal, extended a dinner invitation, reviewed old histories, and afterward, still in bleary weather, he walked up to the Campidoglio and stood looking through a heavy iron grill at something he had remembered wondering at before, back in his early days in Rome, the enormous hand from the statue of an emperor, standing among other shards in the barred recess. It was the dumbness of
the detached gesture, there forever, suggesting not so much the body it was broken from as the sky it was lifted toward—one could be certain all through the centuries of similar skies. And with very little trouble he could find which step Gibbon was probably sitting on when he thought of
Decline and Fall
, but why do it unless perhaps he wanted to plant himself down on the cold stone and catch pneumonia? And what indeed did he have to think of that was a match for Gibbon? He had to realize that in missing three appointments at least—two of which had to do with Italian cultural organizations interested in cooperating with American exchange programs—he had not done a good thing and that now he would have to dictate letters explaining that his son was in an accident and that he had thought for a time of flying home. Anyway, it was too late now.

He walked a bit and in passing near the post office saw the Wilbourne car, which was now fairly well-known in Rome because so much had got stolen off it at one time or another and certain quarrels had centered about it as it had once been jointly owned with another couple who complained that the Wilbournes (though the car was in their possession each time it was rifled) insisted that the expense of each misfortune be shared and shared alike. The body was a sort of dirty cream, which Hartwell did not like, possibly because he did not like the Wilbournes, so why be called upon to stop and wait and why, when Jim Wilbourne appeared alone, ask him into the German beer hall nearby to share a stein and bend his ear about this odd thing—this misunderstood telephone call—as if by talking about it, it would be just odd and nothing more. And it seemed, too, that only by talking could he say that from the first he had felt a concern for Martha, that she had stirred his sympathies from the first and he had learned her story a little at a time. This, too, he judged, was only a way of talking about people for once, instead of programs, programs—one built up a kind of ravenous appetite for individuals, for the old-time town life he, back in Missouri, had had once and called the past. He was winding up by saying, “Of course, don’t repeat any of this to Martha,” and there was a
certain kind of pause hanging in the air, and Jim Wilbourne carefully lighted a cigarette behind his hands, worrying the match five or six times before it went out, and Hartwell thought, Oh, God, oh, my God, having caught it on one side now I’m catching it on the other. I didn’t know and yet I must have known.

He also thought, She is not this important to me, for all this about her to happen in one afternoon.

Neurotic to the last notch, she had dragged him into her exile’s paranoia as into a whirlpool. He foresaw the time when the only individuals would be neurotics. They were the only people who still had the nerve to demand an answer. He doubted if Jim Wilbourne was neurotic or that he would qualify as an individual, but he without a doubt had a sort of nerve balance that so obviously related him to women it seemed in the most general sense to be a specific of blessing, like rain or sun, and why shouldn’t she, in common with everybody else, have sun and rain? Who was to rule her out of golden shores? But with her there would always be more to it than that. Hartwell had blundered into this picture and now he wanted out.

“Did you ever know this guy?” Jim Wilbourne asked.

“Who, her husband? Well, only by reputation. He was at one time a leading American philosopher, or that was the direction he took early on. There were a couple of books … some theories of goodness, relating action to idealism … something like that. I remember one of them excited me. I read half of it standing in the college library one afternoon. …” One long-ago fall afternoon at Harvard. What reaches out of nowhere to touch and claim us? At a certain age, on a certain sort of afternoon, it may be any book we pick out from a shelf. “But perhaps you’ve read it, too.”

“Oh, Lord, no. I read practically nothing out of my field. I know that’s not a good thing. It makes me laugh to think—I’d laid all sort of plans for doing some catching up on reading in Italy, after I learned the language, of course.” He ended by coughing badly.

“You have learned it,” Hartwell said, complimenting effort.

“Damned near killed me. It was a hell of a lot of work.”

“You’re telling me.” Hartwell gulped his way into a second beer.

At the end of the encounter, catching a cab back to the office, refusing a ride, Hartwell felt outdone and silly. He envied Jim Wilbourne his cool intelligence, his quick judgments, his refusal to drink too much. I am the world’s most useless citizen, he thought, an impractical cultural product, a detached hand reaching out, certainly changing nothing, not even touching anything. I am the emperor of Rome—I shall be stabbed in a corridor.

He longed for his own warm table and his wife’s brown eyes, under whose regard he had so often reassembled his soul.

13

“There was always something rather depressing to me,” said Hartwell with a laugh, “about all those damn ceramics. She kept on turning them out as if her life depended on it, and every one of them was in the worst possible taste.”

“She knew the market back in the States,” Martha said kindly. “I think that’s what she had in mind.”

“It’s no wonder the Italians preyed on them. There was something about some chickens.”

“The landlord’s cousins kept some chickens out on the terrace next door, which was disturbing,” Martha related, “and then when the Wilbournes got an order through the
condominio
to remove the chickens, they put some ducks there, instead. The Wilbournes killed and ate the ducks. That was not as bad, however, as the fight over the electric bill.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Hartwell. “Even we had one of those. Martha, you never had a fight with Italians in your life.”

“Never,” said Martha, “but then I never tried setting up a business.”

“I’m frankly glad as hell they’re gone,” said Hartwell. “If she started a business,” he went on unwisely, “it was probably out of desperation.
She never seemed very well. If a vote of sympathy was taken, she’d get mine.”

They had taken Rita Wilbourne for a drive one day to Tivoli—he and his wife—and had discovered near there in the low mountains a meadow full of flowers. It was as close to a miracle as they could have hoped for, for it was misty when they left Rome and raining when they returned, but here she grew excited and jumped out of the car and walked out into the sun. Hartwell and his wife Grace sat in the car and spoke of her; she was unhappy, displaced in life and alone far too much.

She had walked on away from them, here and there, in a brightly striped raincoat, always with her back to them, so that it was easy to imagine she might be crying. She talked about too many different things. Grace Hartwell worried about her. “Men like Jim Wilbourne are difficult,” she said. “They’re bitter, for one thing. I dislike bitter men—they are nothing but a drain.” Yet when Rita came back to the car she had not been crying at all that Hartwell could see. She had found some bits of mosaic to copy in the bramble-covered remains of something—a villa, a bath, a tower—a whole acanthus leaf done in marble; her eyes were flat, bright, almost black; she was like a wound-up doll. She said it was marvelous to see the sun; she said it was wonderful to find a meadow full of flowers; she said it was quite unusual to find a whole acanthus leaf in marble. Who was she to demand George Hartwell’s fealty? She was an American girl who happened to be walking across a meadow near Tivoli; she thought automatically of what she could do with what she found there. Martha Ingram hardly heard him when he spoke of sympathizing with her; she correctly judged that he was attacking Jim Wilbourne.

“What have you got against Jim? I doubt his being so bad as you think. There was nothing whatever bad about him, in an extraordinary sense.”

“Yes,” said Hartwell, “but who do you think is? Always expecting Gordon Ingram, of course?”

She fell silent; he wondered if he had got to her. Self-appointed and meddlesome, she could certainly call him, but he would stop her if it killed him, he thought, and it probably would. It was then she flashed at him with sudden definition, like an explosion of tinder.

“But I love them both. Haven’t you understood that was the reason for it all?”

And the one to be stopped was himself.

He sat and mopped his brow as though in a period of truce, by himself, at least, much needed.

So they finally turned to business, having worn each other out.

The papers came out of her desk and he was leaning close to the shadow of the terrace wall to glance at some notes she could and did explain from memory—one thing clearly emerging from all this, like a negative from a slow developer, was how excellent she was; she seemed to have got up one morning and put her work on like a new dress. People were always calling George Hartwell up to tell him in assorted languages how lucky he was to have her, how lucky the United States of America was to have her, and in truth he himself had to marvel at how intelligently she could appear at varied distances in the conversation of
salotti, terrazzi, giardini
. He thought she would grow the torch of liberty out of her hand any day now, or at least show up photographed in some sleek expensive magazine, a model of the career woman abroad. She might even eclipse him: had he thought of that? He thought of it now, and decided that it did not supremely matter. In view of his long ambitious years, what a surprising thing, right now, to learn this about himself. Grace in leaving had been brimful of talk about their son, graduating at home, the solemn black mortarboard procession stretching and contracting, winding beneath green elms, every sun splotch another sort of hope and promise; the twin tears in Grace’s eyes meant grandchildren beyond a doubt. Even when packing to leave, her son’s future was infinitely exploding within her. She at some unknown hour had acquiesced to something: the shift in women’s ambitions—true
augur of the world. It was known to all, George realized, how much he drank, and Martha now was fetching him another, moving in and out among the azaleas. The truth at last emerges (he took the glass), but it had been there, relentlessly forming all this while.