The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (34 page)

He opened the door a little wider. “Ella Mason—” he began. Maybe he was sick. I caught his arm. The whole intensity of my
young life in that moment shook free of everything but Eric. It was as though I’d traveled miles to find him. I came inside and we kissed, and then I was sitting apart from him on the edge of the bed and he in a chair, and a letter, official-looking, the top of the envelope torn open in a ragged line, lay on a high black-marble-topped table with bowed legs, between us. He said to read it and I did, and put it back where I found it.

It said that Eric had failed his law exams. That in view of the family connection with the university (his father had gone there and some cousin was head of the board of trustees), a special meeting had been held to grant his repeating the term’s work so as to graduate in the fall, but the evidences of his negligence were too numerous and the vote had gone against it. I remember saying something like, “Anybody can fail exams—” as I knew people who had, but knew, also, that those people weren’t “us,” not one of our class or connection, not kin to the brilliant Ben, or nephew of a governor, or descended from a great Civil War general.

“All year long,” he said, “I’ve been acting like a fool, as if I expected to get by. This last semester especially. It all seemed too easy. It is easy. It’s easy and boring. I was fencing blindfold with somebody so far beneath me it wasn’t worth the trouble to look at him. The only way to keep the interest up was to see how close I could come without damage. Well, I ran right into it, head on. God, does it serve me right. I’d read books Ben was reading, follow his interests, instead of boning over law. But I wanted the degree. Hot damn, I wanted it!”

“Another school,” I said. “You can transfer credits and start over.”

“This won’t go away.”

“Everybody loves you,” I faltered, adding, “Especially me.”

He almost laughed, at my youngness, I guess, but then said, “Ella Mason,” as gently as feathers falling, and came to hold me a while, but not like before, the way we’d been. We sat down on the bed and then fell back on it and I could hear his heart’s steady thumping under his shirt. But it wasn’t the beat of a lover’s heart just then; it
was more like the echo of a distant bell or the near march of a clock, and I fell to looking over his shoulder.

It was a curious room, one I guess they wouldn’t have rented to anybody if Rome hadn’t been, as they told us, so full. The shutters were closed on something that suggested more of a courtyard than the outside as no streak or glimmer of light came through, and the bed was huge, with a great dark tall rectangle of a headboard and a footboard only slightly lower. There were brass sconces set ornamentally around the moldings, looking down, cupids and fawns and smiling goat faces, with bulbs concealed in them, though the only light came from the one dim lamp on the bedside table. There were heavy, dark engravings of Rome—by Piranesi or somebody like that—the avenues, the monuments, the river. And one panel of small pictures in a series showed some familiar scenes in Florence.

My thoughts, unable to reach Eric’s, kept wandering off tourist fashion among the myth faces peeking from the sconces, laughing down, among the walks of Rome—the arched bridge over the Tiber where life-size angels stood poised; the rise of the Palatine, mysterious among trees; the horseman on the Campidoglio, his hand outstretched; and Florence, beckoning still. I couldn’t keep my mind at any one set with all such around me, and Eric, besides, had gone back to the table and was writing a letter on hotel stationery. When my caught breath turned to a little cry, he looked up and said, “It’s my problem, Ella Mason. Just let me handle it.” He came to stand by me, and pressed my head against him, then lifted my face by the chin. “Don’t go talking about it. Promise.” I promised.

I wandered back through the labyrinth, thinking I’d be lost in there forever like a Poe lady. Damn Ben, I thought, he’s too above it all for anybody to fall in love or fail an examination. I’m better off lost, at this rate. So thinking, I turned a corner and stepped out into the hotel lobby.

It was Jamie’s and Ben’s assumption that Eric had picked up some girl and gone home with her. I never told them better. Let them think that.

* * *

“Your Mama wrote you a letter about some chickens once, how she counted children like counting chickens,” Eric said, thirty years later. “Do you remember that?”

We fell to remembering Mama. “There’s nobody like her,” I said. “She has long talks with Papa. They started a year or so after he died. I wish I could talk to him.”

“What would you say?”

“I’d ask him to look up Howard. See’f he’s doing all right.”

“Your husband?” Eric wasn’t sure of the name.

I guess joking about your husband’s death isn’t quite the thing. I met Howard on a trip to Texas after we got home from abroad. I was visiting my roommate. Whatever else Eric did for me, our time together had made me ready for more. I pined for him alone, but what I looked was ripe and ready for practically anybody. So Howard said. He was a widower with a Texas-size fortune. When he said I looked like a good breeder, I didn’t even get mad. That’s how he knew I’d do. Still, it took a while. I kept wanting Eric, wanting my old dream: my brilliant cousins, princely, cavalier.

Howard and I had two sons, in their twenties now. Howard got killed in a jeep accident out on his cattle ranch. Don’t think I didn’t get married again, to a wild California boy ten years younger. It lasted six months exactly.

“What about that other one?” Eric asked me. “Number two.”

I had got the divorce papers the same day they called to say Howard’s tombstone had arrived. “Well, you know, Eric, I always was a little bit crazy.”

“You thought he was cute.”

“I guess so.”

“You and I,” said Eric, smooth as silk into the deep silent darkness that now was ours—even the towers seemed to have folded up and gone home—“we never worked it out, did we?”

“I never knew if you really wanted to. I did, God knows. I wouldn’t marry Howard for over a year because of you.”

“I stayed undecided about everything. One thing that’s not is a marrying frame of mind.”

“Then you left for Europe.”

“I felt I’d missed the boat for everywhere else. War service, then that law school thing. It was too late for me. And nothing was of interest. I could move but not with much conviction. I felt for you—maybe more than you know—but you were moving on already. You know, Ella Mason, you never are still.”

“But you could have told me that!”

“I think I did, one way or another. You sat still and fidgeted.” He laughed.

It’s true that energy is my middle name.

The lights along the river were dim and so little was moving past by now they seemed fixed and distant, stars from some long-dead galaxy, maybe. I think I slept. Then I heard Eric.

“I think back so often to the five of us—you and Ben, Jamie and Mayfred and me. There was something I could never get out of mind. You remember when we were planning everything about Europe, Europe, Europe before we left, and you’d all come over to my house and we’d sit out on the side porch, listening to Ben mainly, but with Jamie asking some questions like, ‘Do they have bathtubs like us?’ Remember that? You would snuggle down in one of those canvas chairs like a sling, and Ben was in the big armchair—Daddy’s—and Jamie sort of sprawled around on the couch among the travel folders, when we heard the front gate scrape on the sidewalk and heard the way it would clatter when it closed. A warm night and the streetlight filtering in patterns through the trees and shrubs and a smell of honeysuckle from where it was all baled up on the yard fence and a cape jessamine outside, I remember that, too—white flowers in among the leaves. And steps on the walk. They stopped, then they walked again, and Ben got up (I should have) and unlatched the screen. If you didn’t latch the screen it wouldn’t shut. Mayfred came in. Jamie said, ‘Why’d you stop on the walk, Mayfred?’ She said, ‘There was this toadfrog. I almost stepped on
him.’ Then she was among us, walking in, one of us. I was sitting back in the corner, watching, and I felt, If I live to be a thousand, I’ll never feel more love than I do this minute. Love of these, my blood, and this place, here. I could close my eyes for years and hear the gate scrape, the steps pause, the door latch and unlatch, hear her say, ‘There was this toadfrog …’ I would want literally to embrace that one minute, hold it forever.”

“But you’re not there,” I said into the dark. “You’re here. Where we were. You chose it.”

“There’s no denying that,” was all he answered.

We had sailed from Naples, a sad day under mist, with Vesuvius hardly visible and a damp clinging to everything—the end of summer. We couldn’t even make out the outlines of the ship, an Italian-line monster from those days called the
Independence
. It towered white over us and we tunneled in. The crossing was rainy and drab. Crossed emotions played around among us, while Ben, noble and aware, tried to be our mast. He read aloud to us, discussed, joked, tried to get our attention.

Jamie wanted to argue about Catholicism. It didn’t suit Ben for him to drift that way. Ben was headed toward Anglican belief: that’s what his Sylvia was, not to mention T.S. Eliot. But Jamie had met an American Jesuit from Indiana in Rome and chummed around with him; they’d even gone to the beach. “You’re wrong about that,” I heard him tell Ben. “I’m going to prove it by Father Rogers when we get home.”

I worried about Eric; I longed for Eric; I strolled the decks and stood by Eric at the rail. He looked with gray eyes out at the gray sea. He said, “You know, Ella Mason, I don’t give a damn if Jamie joins the Catholic Church or not.” “Me either,” I agreed. We kissed in the dark beneath the lifeboats, and made love once in the cabin while Ben and Jamie were at the movies, but in a furtive way, as if the grown people were at church. Ben read aloud to us from a book on Hadrian’s Villa, where we’d all been. There was a half day of sun.

I went to the pool to swim, and up came Jamie, out of the water. He was skinny, string beans and spaghetti. “Ella Mason,” he said in his dark croak of a voice, “I’ll never be the same again.” I was tired of all of them, even Jamie. “Then gain some weight,” I snapped, and went pretty off the diving board.

Ben knew about the law-school thing. The first day out, coming from the writing lounge, I saw Eric and Ben standing together in a corner of an enclosed deck. Ben had a letter in his hand, and just from one glance I recognized the stationery of the hotel where we’d stayed in Rome and knew it was the letter Eric had been writing. I heard Ben. “You say it’s not important, but I know it is—I knew that last Christmas.” And Eric, “Think what you like, it’s not to me.” And Ben, “What you feel about it, that’s not what matters. There’s a right way of looking at it. Only to make you see it.” And Eric, “You’d better give up. You never will.”

What kept me in my tracks was something multiple, yet single, the way a number can contain powers and elements that have gone into its making and can be unfolded, opened up, nearly forever. Ambition and why some had it, success and failure and what the difference was and why you had to notice it at all. These matters, back and forth across the net, were what was going on.

What had stopped me in the first place, though, and chilled me, was that they sounded angry. I knew they had quarreled last Christmas; was this why? It must have been. Ben’s anger was attack and Eric’s self-defense, defiance. Hadn’t they always been like brothers? Yes, and they were standing so, intent, a little apart, in hot debate, like two officers locked in different plans of attack at dawn, stubbornly held to the point of fury. Ben’s position, based on rightness, classical and firm. Enforced by what he was. And Eric’s wrong, except in and for himself, for holding on to himself. How to defend that? He couldn’t, but he did. And equally. They were just looking up and seeing me, and nervous at my intrusion I stepped across the high shipboard sill to the deck, missed clearing it and fell sprawling.
“Oh, Ella Mason!” they cried at once, and picked me up, the way they always had.

One more thing I remember from that ship. It was Ben, finding me one night after dinner alone in the lounge. Everyone was below: we were docking in the morning. He sat down and lighted his pipe. “It’s all passed so fast, don’t you think?” he said. There was such a jumble in my mind still, I didn’t answer. All I could hear was Eric saying, after we’d made love, “It’s got to stop now. I’ve got to find some shape to things. There was promise, promises. You’ve got to see we’re saying they’re worthless, that nothing matters.” What did matter to me, except Eric? “I wish I’d never come,” I burst out at Ben, childish, hurting him, I guess. How much did Ben know? He never said. He came close and put his arm around me. “You’re the sister I never had,” he said. “I hope you change your mind about it.” I said I was sorry and snuffled awhile into his shoulder. When I looked up, I saw his love. So maybe he did know, and forgave us. He kissed my forehead.

At the New York pier, who should show up but Mayfred.

She was crisp in black and white, her long blond hair wind shaken, her laughter a wholesome joy. “Y’all look just terrible,” she told us with a friendly giggle, and as usual made us straighten up, tuck our tummies in and look like quality. Jamie forgot religion, and Eric quit worrying over a missing bag, and Ben said, “Well, look who’s here!” “How’s Donald?” I asked her. I figured he was either all right or dead. The first was true. They didn’t have to do a brain-tumor operation; all he’d had was a pinched nerve at the base of his cortex. “What’s a cortex?” Jamie asked. “It sounds too personal to inquire,” said Eric, and right then they brought him his bag.