The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (29 page)

“Ho un amico che sta morendo
… I have a friend who is dying.
Questa mattina ho ricevuto la notizia
… only this morning I received the news.”

“O signora!”
cried the floor cleaner.
“Mi displace
… I am so sorry!” He leaned toward her, his small-featured Latin face wrung instantly with pity. He, also, had lost friends.

“Mi amico era sempre buono … è buono … buono
”

It was then that George Hartwell appeared. The floor cleaner sprang to his feet.
“S’accomodi
… sit down,” said Hartwell.
“In nome di Dio.”

There was no one really around. The bright day was subdued to the decor of the great outdated windows, which made a humble group of them. And really, thought Hartwell, I’ve got no business here, what am I doing with these two people? Once I had a little kingdom here. It is stolen. It is gone. Should I tell them? Would they cry?

He sat and listened.

Now the sentiment, the inaccuracy, of the usual human statement was among them; irresistibly as weeds in a great ruin, it was springing up everywhere around what was being said of Gordon Ingram. His books, his wisdom, his circle of friends, his great heart, his sad
life. … Hartwell was translating everything to the floor cleaner, who had forgotten that he was a floor cleaner. He was, above all, a human being, and he accordingly began to weep.

George Hartwell told the lady in blue that Martha Ingram was out of town.

16

On a day that now seemed long, long ago, had seemed long ago, in fact, almost the precipitate instant its final event occurred, she had gone out of her apartment, which Jim Wilbourne had been in for an hour or so, for the last time. It was a matter of consideration to them both to give him time to get well away before she went out behind him, leaving rooms she could not for the moment bear to be alone in. She did not know that he had been delayed on the stair. She saw him, however, come out of the bar with Jean Coggins, laughing with her over something; she stepped back, almost from the curb into the street, which at that point was narrow, damp, still in winter shadow, and then a car passed and she looked up in time to see Gordon Ingram’s nephew driving by. She never doubted that was who it was. He had grown a lot, that was all. He did not see her; the car nosed into a turning that led away from her, away, she realized too late, icily, from her apartment. He had been there already; he had gone. From out of sight, in the chilly labyrinth where the sun would slowly seep in now and warm and dry and mellow through the long summer months, she heard Jean Coggins laugh. The boy had grown so much; she used to give him books and read to him: what college was he in, would no one tell her? She had stopped still—after her first futile steps, begun too late, of running after the car—in a small empty square. The direction of the car pulled against the direction of the laugh, in an exact mathematical pivot, herself being the central point of strain, and in this counterweight, she felt her life tear almost audibly, like ripping silk. She leaned against a wall and looked out
on the little empty space, an opening in the city. The sun brought out the smell of cigarettes, but no one was about; only dumb high doorways and shadows sliced at a clear, straight angle across a field of sun.

He was driven away from me, she thought: Jim Wilbourne did it; I know that it is true. I am no more than that meeting point of shadow and sun. It is everything there is I need to know, that I am that and that is me.

It was the complex of herself that her spirit in one motion abandoned; those intricate structures, having come to their own completion, were no longer habitable. She saw them crumble, sink and go under forever. And here was what was left: a line of dark across a field of sun.

When the small package arrived for Martha—a strand of pearls that had belonged to an aunt who had left them to her in memory of—she hardly read the letter, which was not from Gordon Ingram but from the nephew who was now in Greece. The lettering on the package had been done by Gordon Ingram. There was no message inside. She went carefully, in a gentle way, downstairs and laid the strand in the crevice of the palazzo wall, like an offering to life. She felt as a spirit might, rather clever, at being able to move an object or leave a footprint. Some Italian would be telling the story for many years, waving the pearls aloft.
“Dal cielo! Dal cielo! Son cadute dal cielo!”

George Hartwell’s saying to the lady in blue that Martha was out of town was no lie; perhaps he was incapable of telling one. She was driving to the sea to meet Roberto there, possibly the sister and the sister’s husband, possibly not; the plans were generous, promising and vague. She more and more arranged to do things alone, a curious tendency, for loneliness once had been a torment, whereas now she regarded almost everything her eyes fell on with an equal sense of companionship; her compatibility was with the world. The equality of it all could of course be in some purely intellectual, non-nervous
way disturbing. Things were not really equal, nor were people; one explanation might be that she simply did not care very deeply about anything; the emotional target she had once plainly furnished had disappeared. Was this another name for freedom? Freedom was certainly what it felt like. She bent with complete compassion, fleshless, invisible and absent, above the rapidly vanishing mortality of Gordon Ingram; at the same time she swung happily, even giddily (there went that streak again, the necessary madness), around the Colosseum, where the fresh glittering traffic, like a flight of gulls, joyous in the sunlight, seemed to float and lilt, fearless of collision. Children’s bones and women’s skulls had been dug up there and conjectures could be easily formed about what sort of undemocratic accidents had overtaken these fine people, but now the old ruin stood noble and ornamental to Rome, and views of it were precious to those apartments that overlooked it.

Faceless and nameless, the throng rushed on; they always had and would forever, as long as the city stood.

It was not Gordon Ingram who had died, nor was it Jim Wilbourne who was absent. It was herself, she thought. I am gone, she thought; they have taken me with them. I shall never return.

If only George Hartwell could understand that, he would know better about things; he could even bear them. But then, she saw, he might be compelled to trace a similar path in his own life; for knowing it arose merely, perhaps only, from being it. Let him be spared, she thought; let him be his poor human soul forever.

She was of those whom life had held a captive, and in freeing herself she had met dissolution, and was a friend now to any landscape, a companion to cloud and sky.

The Cousins

I could say that on the train from Milan to Florence, I recalled the events of thirty summers ago and the curious affair of my cousin Eric. But it wouldn’t be true. I had Eric somewhere in my mind all the time, a constant. But he was never quite definable, and like a puzzle no one could ever solve, he bothered me. More recently, I had felt a restlessness I kept trying without success to lose, and I had begun to see Eric as its source.

The incident that had triggered my journey to find him had occurred while lunching with my cousin Ben in New York, his saying, “I always thought in some way I can’t pin down—it was your fault we lost Eric.” Surprising myself, I had felt stricken at the remark as though the point of a cold dagger had reached a vital spot. There was a story my cousins used to tell, out in the swing, under the shade trees, about a man found dead with no clues but a bloody shirt and a small pool of water on the floor beside him. Insoluble mystery. Answer: he was stabbed with a Dagger of Ice! I looked up from eating bay scallops.
“My
fault! Why?”

Ben gave some vague response, something about Eric’s need for staying indifferent, no matter what. “But he could do that in spite of me,” I protested. “Couldn’t he?”

“Oh, forget it.” He filled my glass. “I sometimes speculate out loud, Ella Mason.”

Just before that he had remarked how good I was looking—good for a widow just turned fifty, I think he meant. But once he got my restlessness so stirred up, I couldn’t lose it. I wanted calming, absolving. I wanted freeing and only Eric—since it was he I was in some way to blame for, or he to blame for me—could do that. So I came alone to Italy, where I had not been for thirty years.

For a while in Milan, spending a day or so to get over jet lag, I wondered if the country existed anymore in the way I remembered it. Maybe, even back then, I had invented the feelings I had, the magic I had wanted to see. But on the train to Florence, riding through the June morning, I saw a little town from the window in the bright, slightly hazy distance. I don’t know what town it was. It seemed built all of a whitish stone, with a church, part of a wall cupping round one side and a piazza with a few people moving across it. With that sight and its stillness in the distance and its sudden vanishing as the train whisked past, I caught my breath and knew it had all been real. So it still was, and would remain. I hadn’t invented anything.

From the point of that glimpsed white village, spreading outward through my memory, all its veins and arteries, the whole summer woke up again, like a person coming out of a trance.

Sealed, fleet, the train was rocking on. I closed my eyes with the image of the village, lying fresh and gentle against my mind’s eye. I didn’t have to try, to know that everything from then would start living now.

Once at the hotel and unpacked, with my dim lamp and clean bathroom and view of a garden—Eric had reserved all this for me: we had written and talked—I placed my telephone call.
“Pronto,”
said the strange voice. “Signor Mason,” I said. “Ella Mason, is that you?” So there was his own Alabama voice, not a bit changed. “It’s me,” I said, “tired from the train.” “Take a nap. I’ll call for you at seven.”

Whatever Southerners are, there are ways they don’t change, the same manners to count on, the same tone of voice, never lost. Eric was older than I by about five years. I remember he taught me to play tennis, not so much how to play because we all knew that, as what not to do. Tennis manners. I had wanted to keep running after balls for him when they rolled outside the court but he stopped me from doing that. He would take them up himself and stroke them underhand to his opponent across the net. “Once in a while’s all right,” he said. “Just go sit down, Ella Mason.” It was his way of saying there was always a right way to do things. I was only about ten. The next year it was something else I was doing wrong, I guess, because I always had a lot to learn. My cousins had this constant fondness about them. They didn’t mind telling what they knew.

Waking in Florence in the late afternoon, wondering where I was, then catching on. The air was still and warm. It had the slight haziness in the brightness that I had seen from the train, and that I had lost in the bother of the station, the hastening of the taxi through the annoyance of crowds and narrow streets, across the Arno. The little hotel, a pensione, really, was out near the Pitti Palace.

Even out so short a distance from the center, Florence could seem the town of thirty years ago, or even the way it must have been in the Brownings’ time, narrow streets and the light that way and the same flowers and gravel walks in the gardens. Not that much changes if you build with stone. Not until I saw the stooped gray man hastening through the pensione door did I get slapped by change, in the face. How could Eric look like that? Not that I hadn’t had photographs, letters. He at once circled me, embracing, my head right against him, sight of him temporarily lost in that. As was his of me, I realized, thinking of all those lines I must have added, along with twenty extra pounds and a high count of gray among the reddish-brown hair. So we both got bruised by the sight of each other, and hung together, to blot each other out and soothe the hurt.

The shock was only momentary. We were too glad to see each other. We went some streets away, parked his car and climbed about
six flights of stone stairs. His place had a view over the river, first a great luxurious room opening past the entrance, then a terrace beyond. There were paintings, dark furniture, divans and chairs covered with good, rich fabric. A blond woman’s picture in a silver frame—poised, lovely. Through an alcove, the glimpse of an impressive desk, spread with papers, a telephone. You’d be forced to say he’d done well.

“It’s cooler outside on the terrace,” Eric said, coming in with drinks. “You’ll like it over the river.” So we went out there and talked. I was getting used to him now. His profile hadn’t changed. It was firm, regular, Cousin Lucy Skinner’s all over. That was his mother. We were just third cousins. Kissing kin. I sat answering questions. How long would it take, I wondered, to get around to the heart of things? To whatever had carried him away, and what had brought me here?

We’d been brought up together back in Martinsville, Alabama, not far from Birmingham. There was our connection and not much else in that little town of seven thousand and something. Or so we thought. And so we would have everybody else think. We did, though, despite a certain snobbishness—or maybe because of it—have a lot of fun. There were three leading families, in some way “connected.” Eric and I had had the same great-grandfather. His mother’s side were distant cousins, too. Families who had gone on living around there, through the centuries. Many were the stories and wide-ranged the knowledge, though it was mainly of local interest. As a way of living, I always told myself, it might have gone on for us, too, right through the present and into an endless future, except for that trip we took that summer.