The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (31 page)

Eric and Ben were both well into manhood that year, and were so future conscious they seemed to be talking about it even when they weren’t saying anything. Ben had decided on literature, had finished a master’s at Sewanee and was going on to Yale, while Eric had just stood law-school exams at Emory. He was in some considerable debate about whether he shouldn’t go into literary studies, too, for unlike Ben, whose interest was scholarly, he wanted to be a writer, and he had some elaborate theory that actually studying literature reduced the possibility of your being able to write it. Ben saw his point and, though he did not entirely agree, felt that law might just be the right choice—it put you in touch with how things actually worked. “Depending, of course, on whether you tend to fiction or poetry. It would be more important in regard to fiction because the facts matter so much more.” So they trod along ahead of us—through London sights, their heels coming down in tandem. They might have been two dons in an Oxford street, debating something. Next to come were Jamie and me, and behind, at times, Donald and Mayfred.

I was so fond of Jamie those days. I felt for him in a family way, almost motherly. When he said he wanted a night in Monte Carlo, I sided with him, just as I had about going at least once to the picture show in London. Why shouldn’t he have his way? Jamie said one museum a day was enough. I felt the same. He was all different directions with himself: too tall, too thin, big feet, small head. Once I caught his hand. “Don’t worry,” I said, “everything good will happen to you.” The way I remember it, we looked back just then, and
there came Mayfred, alone. She caught up with us. We were standing on a street corner near Hyde Park and, for a change, it was sunny. “Donald’s gone home,” she said cheerfully. “He said tell you all goodbye.”

We hadn’t seen her all day. We were due to leave for France the next morning. She told us, for one thing, that Donald had persistent headaches and thought he ought to see about it. He seemed, as far as we could tell, to have limitless supplies of money, and had once taken us all for dinner at the Savoy, where only Mayfred could move into all that glitter with an air of belonging to it. He didn’t like to bring up his illness and trouble us, Mayfred explained. “Maybe it was too much honeymoon for him,” Eric speculated to me in private. I had to say I didn’t know. I did know that Jamie had come out like the English sun—unexpected, but marvelously bright.

I held out for Jamie and Monte Carlo. He wasn’t an intellectual like Ben and Eric. He would listen while they finished up a bottle of wine and then would start looking around the restaurant. “That lady didn’t have anything but snails and bread,” he would say, or, of a couple leaving, “He didn’t even know that girl when they came in.” He was just being a small-town boy. But with Mayfred he must have been different; she laughed so much. “What do they talk about?” Ben asked me, perplexed. “Ask them,” I advised. “You think they’d tell me?” “I doubt it,” I said. “They wouldn’t know what to say,” I added. “They would just tell you the last things they said.” “You mean like, why do they call it the Seine if they don’t seine for fish in it? Real funny.”

Jamie got worried about Mayfred in Paris because the son of the hotel owner, a young Frenchman so charming he looked like somebody had made him up whole cloth, wanted to take her out. She finally consented with some trepidation on our part, especially from Ben, who in this case posed as her uncle, with strict orders from her father. The Frenchman, named Paul something, was not disturbed in the least: Ben fitted right in with his ideas of how things ought to
be. So Mayfred went out with him, looking, except for her sunny hair, more French than the natives—we all had to admit being proud of her. I, also, had invitations, but none so elegant. “What happened?” we all asked, the next day. “Nothing,” she insisted. “We just went to this little nightclub place near some school … begins with an ‘S.’” “The Sorbonne,” said Ben, whose bemusement, at that moment, peaked. “Then what?” Eric asked. “Well, nothing. You just eat something, then talk and have some wine and get up and dance. They dance different. Like this.” She locked her hands together in air. “He thought he couldn’t talk good enough for me in English, but it was OK.” Paul sent her some
marrons glacés
, which she opened on the train south, and Jamie munched one with happy jaws. Paul had not suited him. It was soon after that, he and Mayfred began their pairing off. In Jamie’s mind we were moving on to Monte Carlo, and had been ever since London. The first thing he did was find out how to get to the Casino.

He got dressed for dinner better than he had since the Savoy. Mayfred seemed to know a lot about the gambling places, but her attitude was different from his. Jamie was bird-dogging toward the moment; she was just curious. “I’ve got to trail along,” Eric said after dinner, “just to see the show.” “Not only that,” said Ben, “we might have to stop him in case he gets too carried away. We might have to bail him out.” When we three, following up the rear (this was Jamie’s night), entered the discreetly glittering rotunda, stepped on thick carpets beneath the giant, multiprismed chandeliers, heard the low chant of the croupier, the click of roulette, the rustle of money at the bank, and saw the bright rhythmic movements of dealers and wheels and stacks of chips, it was still Jamie’s face that was the sight worth watching. All was mirrored there. Straight from the bank, he visited card tables and wheels, played the blind dealing machine—chemin-de-fer—and finally turned, a small sum to the good, to his real goal: roulette. Eric had by then lost a hundred francs or so, but I had about made up for it, and Ben wouldn’t play at all. “It’s my Presbyterian
side,” he told us. His mother had been one of those. “It’s known as ‘riotous living,’” he added.

It wasn’t riotous at first, but it was before we left, because Jamie, once he advanced on the roulette, with Mayfred beside him—she was wearing some sort of gold blouse with long peasant sleeves and a low-cut neck she had picked up cheap in a shop that afternoon, and was not speaking to him but instead, with a gesture so European you’d think she’d been born there, slipping her arm through his just at the wrist and leaning her head back a little—was giving off the glow of somebody so magically aided by a presence every inch his own that he could not and would not lose. Jamie, in fact, looked suddenly aristocratic, overbred, like a Russian greyhound or a Rumanian prince. Both Eric and I suspended our own operations to watch. The little ball went clicking around as the wheel spun. Black. Red. And red. Back to black. All wins. People stopped to look on. Two losses, then the wins again, continuing. Mayfred had a look of curious bliss around her mouth—she looked like a cat in process of a good purr. The take mounted.

Ben called Eric and me aside. “It’s going on all night,” he said. We all sat down at the little gold and white marble bar and ordered Perriers.

“Well,” said Eric, “what did he start with?”

“Couldn’t have been much,” said Ben, “if I didn’t miss anything. He didn’t change more than a couple of hundred at the desk.”

“That sounds like a lot to me,” said Eric.

“I mean,” said Ben, “it won’t ruin him to lose it all.”

“You got us into this,” said Eric to me.

“Oh, gosh, I know it. But look. He’s having the time of his life.”

Everybody in the room had stopped to watch Jamie’s luck. Some people were laughing. He had a way of stopping everybody and saying, “What’s
that
mean?” as if only English could or ought to be spoken in the entire world. Some man near us said,
“Le cavalier de l’Okla-hum,”
and another answered,
“Du Texas, plutôt.”
Then he took three more in a row and they were silent.

It was Mayfred who made him stop. It seemed like she had an adding machine in her head. All of a sudden she told him something, whispered in his ear. When he shook his head, she caught his hand. When he pulled away, she grabbed his arm. When he lifted his arm, she came up with it, right off the floor. For a minute I thought they were both going to fall over into the roulette wheel.

“You got to stop, Jamie!” Mayfred said in the loudest Alabama voice I guess they’d ever be liable to hear that side of the ocean. It was curdling, like cheering for ‘Bama against Ole Miss in the Sugar Bowl. “I don’t have to stop!” he yelled right back. “If you don’t stop,” Mayfred shouted, “I’ll never speak to you again, Jamie Marshall, as long as I live!”

The croupier looked helpless, and everybody in the room was turning away like they didn’t see us, while through a thin door at the end of the room, a man in black tie was approaching who could only be called the “management.” Ben was already pulling Jamie toward the bank. “Cash it in now. We’ll go along to another one … maybe tomorrow we can …” It was like pulling a stubborn calf across the lot, but he finally made it with some help from Mayfred, who stood over Jamie while he counted everything to the last sou. She made us all take a taxi back to the hotel because she said it was common knowledge when you won a lot they sent somebody out to rob you, first thing. Next day she couldn’t rest till she got Jamie to change the francs into traveler’s checks, U.S. He had won well over two thousand dollars, all told.

The next thing, as they saw it, was to keep Jamie out of the Casino. Ben haggled a long time over lunch, and Eric, who was good at scheming, figured out a way to get up to a village in the hills where there was a Matisse chapel he couldn’t live longer without seeing. And Mayfred took to handholding and even gave Jamie on the sly (I caught her at it) a little nibbling kiss or two. What did they care? I wondered. I thought he should get to go back and lose it all.

It was up in the mountain village that afternoon that I blundered in where I’d rather not have gone. I had come out of the chapel
where Ben and Eric were deep in discussion of whether Matisse could ever place in the front rank of French art, and had climbed part of the slope nearby where a narrow stair ran up to a small square with a dry stone fountain. Beyond that, in the French manner, was a small café with a striped awning and a few tables. From somewhere I heard Jamie’s voice, saying, “I know, but what’d you do it for?” “Well, what does anybody do anything for? I wanted to.” “But what would you want to
for
, Mayfred?” “Same reason you’d want to sometime.” “I wouldn’t want to except to be with you.” “Well, I’m right here, aren’t I? You got your wish.” “What I wish is you hadn’t done it.” It was bound to be marrying Donald that he meant. He had a frown that would come at times between his light eyebrows. I came to associate it with Mayfred. How she was running him. When they stepped around the corner of the path, holding hands (immediately dropped), I saw that frown. Did I have to dislike Mayfred, the way she was acting? The funny thing was, I didn’t even know.

We lingered around the village and ate there, and the bus was late, so we never made it back to the Casino. By then all Jamie seemed to like was being with Mayfred, and the frown disappeared.

Walking back to the apartment, passing darkened doorways, picking up pieces of Eric’s past like fragments in the street.

“… And then you did or didn’t marry her, and she died and left you the legacy. …”

“Oh, we did get married, all right, the anticlimax of a number of years. I wish you could have known her. The marriage was civil. She was afraid the family would cause a row if she wanted to leave me anything. That was when she knew she hadn’t had long to live. Not that it was any great fortune. She had some property out near Pasquallo, a little town near here. I sold it. I had to fight them in court for a while, but it did eventually clear up.”

“You’ve worked, too, for this other family? …”

“The Rinaldi. You must have got all this from Ben, though maybe I wrote you, too. They were friends of hers. It’s all connections here,
like anywhere else. Right now they’re all at the sea below Genoa. I’d be there, too, but I’d some business in town, and you were coming. It’s the export side I’ve helped them with. I do know English, and a little law, in spite of all.”

“So it’s a regular Italian life,” I mused, climbing stairs, entering his
salotto
, where I saw again the woman’s picture in a silver frame. Was that her, the one who had died? “Was she blond?” I asked, moving as curiously through his life as a child through a new room.

“Giana, you mean? No, part Sardinian, dark as they come. Oh, you mean her. No, that’s Lisa, one of the Rinaldi, Paolo’s sister … that’s him up there.”

I saw then, over a bookshelf, a man’s enlarged photo: tweed jacket, pipe, all in the English style.

“So what else, Ella Mason?” His voice was amused at me.

“She’s pretty,” I said.

“Very pretty,” he agreed.

We drifted out to the terrace once more.

It is time I talked about Ben and Eric, about how it was with me and with them and with the three of us.

When I look back on pictures of myself in those days, I see a girl in shorts, weighing a few pounds more than she thought she should, low-set, with a womanly cast to her body, chopped-off reddish hair and a wide, freckled, almost boyish grin, happy to be posing between two tall boys, who happened to be her cousins, smiling their white tentative smiles. Ben and Eric. They were smart. They were fun. They did everything right. And most of all, they admitted me. I was the audience they needed.

I had to run to keep up. I read Poe because of Ben’s thesis, and Wallace Stevens because Eric liked his poetry. I even, finding him referred to at times, tried to read Plato. (Ben studied Greek.) But what I did was not of much interest to them. Still, they wanted me around. Sometimes Ben made a point of “conversing” with me—what courses, what books, et cetera—but he made me feel like a
high-school student. Eric, seldom bothering with me, was more on my level when he did. To each other, they talked at a gallop. Literature turned them on; their ideas flowed, ran back and forth like a current. I loved hearing them.