The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (33 page)

Mayfred had bought a lot of things. She had an eye for what she could wear with what, and she would pick up pieces of this and that for putting costumes and accessories together. She had to get some extra luggage and it was Jamie, of course, who promised to see it sent safely to her, through a shipping company in Rome. His two thousand dollars was coming in handy, was all I could think.

Hot, I couldn’t sleep, so I went out in the sitting room to find a magazine. Ben was up. The three men usually took a large room together, taking turns for the extra cot. Ever since we got the news, Ben had had what Eric called his “family mood.” Now he called me over. “I can’t let those kids go down there alone,” he said. “They seem like children to me—and Jamie … about all he can say is
grazie
and
quanto”
“Then let’s all go,” I said, “I’ve given up sleeping for tonight, anyway.”

“Eric’s hooked on Florence,” said Ben. “Can’t you tell? He counts the cypresses on every knoll. He can spot a Delia Robbia a block off. If I make him leave three days early, he’ll never forgive me. Besides, our reservations in that hotel can’t be changed. We called for Jamie and they’re full. He’s staying third-class somewhere till we all come. I don’t mind doing that. Then we’ll all meet up just the way we planned, have our week in Rome and go catch the boat from Naples.” “I think they could make it on their own,” I said. “It’s just that you’d worry every minute.” He grinned; “Our father for the duration,” was what Eric called him. “I know I’m that way,” he said.

Another thing was that Ben had been getting little caches of letters at various points along our trek from his girl friend Sylvia, the one he’d been dating up at Sewanee. She was getting a job in New York that fall that would be convenient to Yale. She wrote a spidery hand on thick rippled stationery, cream colored, and had promised
in her last dispatch, received in Paris, to write to Rome. Ben could have had an itch for that. But mainly he was that way, careful and concerned. He had in mind what we all felt, that just as absolutely anything could be done by Mayfred, so could absolutely anything happen to her. He also knew what we all knew: that if the Colosseum started falling on her, Jamie would leap bodily under the rocks.

At 2
A.M
. it was too much for me to think about. I went to bed and was so exhausted, I didn’t even hear Mayfred leave.

I woke up about ten with a low tapping on my door. It was Eric. “Is this the sleep of the just?” he asked me as I opened the door. The air in the corridor was fresh; it must have rained in the night. No one was about. All the guests, I supposed, were well out into the day’s routine, seeing what next tour was on the list. On a trip you were always planning something. Ben planned for us. He kept a little notebook.

Standing in my doorway alone with Eric, in a loose robe with a cool morning breeze and my hair not even combed, I suddenly laughed. Eric laughed, too. “I’m glad they’re gone,” he said, and looked past my shoulder.

I dressed and went out with him for some breakfast, cappuccino and croissants at a café in the Signoria. We didn’t talk much. It was terrible, in the sense of the Mason Skinner Marshall and Phillips sense of family, even to think you were glad they were gone, let alone say it. I took Eric’s silence as one of his ironies, what he was best at. He would say, for instance, if you were discussing somebody’s problem that wouldn’t ever have a solution, “It’s time somebody died.” There wasn’t much to say after that. Another time, when his daddy got into a rage with a next-door neighbor over their property line, Eric said, “You’d better marry her.” Once he put things in an extreme light, nobody could talk about them anymore. Saying “I’m glad they’re gone” was like that.

But it was a break. I thought of the way I’d been seeing them. How Jamie’s becoming had been impressing me, every day more. How Mayfred was a kind of spirit, grown bigger than life. How Ben’s
dominance now seemed not worrisome, but princely, his heritage. We were into a Renaissance of ourselves, I wanted to say, but was afraid they wouldn’t see it the way I did. Only Eric had eluded me. What was he becoming? For once he didn’t have to discuss Poe’s idea of women, or the Southern code of honor, or Henry James’s views of France and England.

As for me, I was, at least, sure that my style had changed. I had bought my little linen blouses and loose skirts, my sandals and braided silver bracelets. “That’s great on you!” Mayfred had cried. “Now try this one!” On the streets, Italians passed me too close not to be noticed; they murmured musically in my ear, saying I didn’t know just what; waiters leaned on my shoulder to describe dishes of the day.

Eric and I wandered across the river, following narrow streets lined with great stone palaces, seeing them open into small piazzas whose names were not well-known. We had lunch in a friendly place with a curtain of thin twisted metal sticks in the open door, an amber-colored dog lying on the marble floor near the serving table. We ordered favorite things without looking at the menu. We drank white wine. “This is fun,” I suddenly said. He turned to me. Out of his private distance, he seemed to be looking down at me. “I think so, too.”

He suddenly switched on to me, like somebody searching and finding with the lens of a camera. He began to ask me things. What did you think of that, Ella Mason? What about this, Ella Mason? Ella Mason, did you think Ben was right when he said?… I could hardly swing on to what was being asked of me, thick and fast. But he seemed to like my answers, actually to listen. Not that all those years I’d been dumb as a stone. I had prattled quite a lot. It’s just that they never treated me one to one, the way Eric was doing now. We talked for nearly an hour, then, with no one left in the restaurant but us, stopped as suddenly as we’d started. Eric said, “That’s a pretty dress.”

The sun was strong outside. The dog was asleep near the door. Even the one remaining waiter was drowsing on his feet. It was the shutting-up time for everything and we went out into streets blanked out with metal shutters. We hugged the shady side and went single file back to home base, as we’d come to call it, wherever we stayed.

A Vespa snarled by and I stepped into a cool courtyard to avoid it. I found myself in a large yawning mouth, mysterious as a cave, shadowy, with the trickling sound of a fountain and the glimmer in the depths of water running through ferns and moss. Along the interior of the street wall, fragments of ancient sculpture, found, I guess, when they’d built the palazzo, had been set into the masonry. One was a horse, neck and shoulder, another an arm holding a shield and a third at about my height the profile of a woman, a nymph or some such. Eric stopped to look at each, for, as Ben had said, Eric loved everything there, and then he said, “Come here, Ella Mason.” I stood where he wanted, by the little sculptured relief, and he took my face and turned it to look at it closer. Then with a strong hand (I remembered tennis), he pressed my face against the stone face and held it for a moment. The stone bit into my flesh and that was the first time that Eric, bending deliberately to do so, kissed me on the mouth. He had held one side of me against the wall, so that I couldn’t raise my arm to him, and the other arm was pinned down by his elbow; the hand that pressed my face into the stone was that one, so that I couldn’t move closer to him, as I wanted to do, and when he dropped away suddenly, turned on his heel and walked rapidly away, I could only hasten to follow, my voice gone, my pulses all throbbing together. I remember my anger, the old dreams about him and Ben stirred to life again, thinking,
If he thinks he can just walk away
, and knowing with anger, too,
It’s got to be now
, as if in the walled land of kinship, thicker in our illustrious connection than any fortress in Europe, a door had creaked open at last. Eric, Eric, Eric. I’m always seeing your retreating heels, how they looked angry. But why? It was worth coming for, after thirty years, to ask that. …

“That day you kissed me in the street, the first time,” I asked him. Night on the terrace, a bottle of Chianti between our chairs. “You walked away. Were you angry? Your heels looked angry. I can see them still.”

“The trip in the first place,” he said, “it had to do with you partly. Maybe you didn’t understand that. We were outward bound, leaving you, a sister in a sense. We’d talked about it.”

“I adored you so,” I said. “I think I was less than a sister, more like a dog.”

“For a little while you weren’t either one.” He found my hand in the dark. “It was a wonderful little while.”

Memories: Eric in the empty corridor of the pensione. How Italy folds up and goes to sleep from two to four. His not looking back for me, going straight to his door. The door closing, but no key turning and me turning the door handle and stepping in. And he at the window already with his back to me and how he heard the sliding latch on the door—I slid it with my hands behind me—heard it click shut and turned. His face and mine, what we knew. Betraying Ben.

:Walking by the Arno, watching a white-and-green scull stroking by into the twilight, the rower a boy or girl in white and green, growing dimmer to the rhythm of the long oars, vanishing into arrow shape, the pencil thickness, then movement without substance, on. …

:A trek the next afternoon through twisted streets to a famous chapel. Sitting quiet in a cloister, drinking in the symmetry, the silence. Holding hands. “‘D’ is for Donatello,” said Eric. “‘D’ for Delia Robbia,” I said. “‘M’ for Michelangelo,” he continued. “‘M’ for Medici.” “‘L’ for Leonardo.” “I can’t think of an ‘L,’” I gave up. “Lumbago. There’s an old master.” “Worse than Jamie.” We were always going home again.

:Running into the manager of the pensione one morning in the corridor. He’d solemnly bowed to us and kissed my hand.
“Bella ragazza,”
he remarked. “The way life ought to be,” said Eric. I thought we might be free forever, but from what?

At the train station waiting the departure we were supposed to take for Rome, “Why do we have to go?” I pleaded. “Why can’t we just stay here?”

“Use your common sense, Ella Mason.”

“I don’t have any.”

He squeezed my shoulder. “We’ll get by all right,” he said. “That is, if you don’t let on.”

I promised not to. Rather languidly I watched the landscape slide past as we glided south. I would obey Eric, I thought, for always. “Once I wrote a love letter to you,” I said. “I wrote it at night by candlelight at home one summer. I tore it up.”

“You told me that,” he recalled, “but you said you couldn’t remember if it was to me or Ben.”

“I just remembered,” I said. “It was you. …”

“Why did we ever leave?” I asked Eric in the dead of the night, a blackness now. “Why did we ever decide we had to go to Rome?”

“I didn’t think of it as even a choice,” he said. “But at that point, how could I know what was there, ahead?”

We got off the train feeling small—at least, I did. Ben was standing there, looking around him, tall, searching for us, then seeing. But no Jamie. Something to ask. I wondered if he’d gone back with Mayfred. “No, he’s running around Rome.” The big smooth station, echoing, open to the warm day. “Hundreds of churches,” Ben went on. “Millions. He’s checking them off.” He helped us in a taxi with the skill of somebody who’d lived in Rome for ten years, and gave the address. “He’s got to do something now that Mayfred’s gone. It’s getting like something he might take seriously, is all. Finding out what Catholics believe. He’s either losing all his money, or falling in love, or getting religion.”

“He didn’t lose any money,” said Eric. “He made some.”

“Well, it’s the same thing,” said Ben, always right and not wanting to argue with us. He seemed a lot older than the two of us, at least to me. Ben was tall.

We had mail in Rome; Ben brought it to the table that night. I read Mama’s aloud to them: “‘When I think of you children over there, I count you all like my own chickens out in the yard, thinking I’ve got to go out in the dark and make sure the gate’s locked because not a one ought to get out of there. To me, you’re all my own, and thinking of chickens is my way of saying prayers for you to be safe at home again.’”

“You’d think we were off in a war,” said Eric.

“It’s a bold metaphor,” said Ben, pouring wine for us, “but that never stopped Cousin Charlotte.”

I wanted to giggle at Mama, as I usually did, but instead my eyes filled with tears, surprising me, and a minute more and I would have dared to snap at Ben. But, Eric, who had got some mail, too, abruptly got up and left the table. I almost ran after him, but intent on what I’d promised about not letting on to Ben, I stayed and finished dinner. He had been pale, white. Ben thought he might be sick. He didn’t return. We didn’t know.

Jamie and Ben finally went to bed. “He’ll come back when he wants to,” said Ben.

I waited till their door had closed, and then, possessed, I crept out to the front desk. “Signor Mason,” I said, “the one with the
capelli leggero
—” My Italian came from the dictionary straight to the listener. I found out later I had said that Eric’s hair didn’t weigh much. Still, they understood. He had taken a room, someone who spoke English explained. He wanted to be alone. I said he might be sick, and I guess they could read my face, because I was guided by a porter in a blue working jacket and cloth shoes, into a labyrinth. Italian buildings, I knew by now, are constructed like dreams. There are passages departing from central hallways, stairs that twist back upon themselves, dark silent doors. My guide stopped before one.
“Ecco,”
he said, and left. I knocked softly, and the door eventually cracked open. “Oh, it’s you.” “Eric. Are you all right? I didn’t know …”