The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (6 page)

“Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded.

Clara, who was still absorbed in being adored by the policeman, could not credit her misfortune at having run into her mother. Mrs. Johnson took her arm and marched her straight back across the street. Crowds were thronging against them from every direction. A vender shook a fistful of cheap leather bags before them; there seemed no escaping him. Mrs. Johnson veered to the right, entering a quiet street where there were no shops and where Fabrizio would not be likely to pass, returning to work after siesta.

“Where were you going, Clara?”

“To get some ice cream,” Clara pouted.

“There’s ice cream all around the hotel. Now you know we never tell each other stories, Clara.”

“I was looking for you,” said Clara.

“But how did you know where I was?” asked Mrs. Johnson.

They had entered the street of the illustrious Tuscans. “Galileo, Dante Alighieri, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Michelangelo …” chanted Clara.

This is not my day, sighed Mrs. Johnson to herself.

She was right about this; alighting from her taxi with Clara before the Grand Hotel, she heard a cry behind her.

“Why, Mar-gar-et John-son!”

Two ladies from Winston-Salem stood laughing before her. They were sisters—Meg Kirby and Henrietta Mulverhill—a chatty, plumpish pair whose husbands had presented them both with a summer abroad.

Now they were terribly excited. They had no idea she would be here still. They had heard she was in Rome by now. What a coincidence! They simply couldn’t get over it! Wasn’t it wonderful what you could buy here? Linens! Leather-lined bags! So cheap! If only she could see what just this morning—! And how was Clara?

Constrained to go over to the Excelsior—their hotel, just across the street—for tea, Margaret Johnson sat like a creature in a net and felt her strength ebb from her. The handsome salon echoed with Winston-Salem news, gossip, exact quotations, laughter, and during it all, Clara became again her old familiar little lost self, oblivious, searching through her purse, leafing for pictures in the guidebooks on the tea table, only looking up to say, “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am.”

“Well, it’s just so difficult to pick out a hat for Noel without him here to try it on,” said Mrs. Johnson. “I tried it once in Washington, and—” I’ve been blinded, she thought, the image of her daughter constant in the corner of her vision. Blinded—by what? By beauty, art, strangeness, freedom. By romance, by sun—yes, by hope itself.

By the time she had shaken the ladies, making excuses about dinner but with a promise to call by for them tomorrow, and had reached at long last her hotel room, her headache had grown steadily worse. She yearned to shed her street clothes, take aspirin and soak in a long bath. Clara passed sulking ahead of her through the ante-room, through the larger bedroom, the bath and into her own small room. Mrs. Johnson tossed her bag and hat on the bed and, slipping out of her shoes, stepped into a pair of scuffs. A rap at the outer door revealed a servant with a long florist’s box. Carrying the box, Mrs. Johnson crossed the bath to her daughter’s room.

Through the weeks that they had dallied here, Clara’s room had gradually filled with gifts from Fabrizio. A baby elephant of green china, its howdah enlarged to contain brightly wrapped sweets, grinned from a tabletop. A stuffed dog, Fabrizio’s idea of Ronnie, sat near Clara’s pillow. On her wrist a charm bracelet was slowly filling with golden miniature animals and tiny musical instruments. She did not have to be told that another gift had arrived, but observed from a glance at the label, as her mother had not, that the flowers were for both of them. Then she filled a tall vase with water. Chores of this sort fell to her at home.

Mrs. Johnson sat down on the bed.

Clara happily read the small card. “It says, ‘Naccarelli,’” she announced.

Then she began to arrange the flowers in the vase. They were rather remarkable flowers, Mrs. Johnson thought—a species of lily apparently highly regarded here, though with their enormous naked stamens, based in a back-curling, waxen petal, they had always struck her as being rather blatantly phallic. Observing some in a shop window soon after they had arrived in Florence, it had come to her to wonder then if Italians took sex so much for granted that they hardly thought about it at all, as separate, that is, from anything else in life. Time had passed, and the question, more personal now, still stood unanswered.

The Latin mind—how did it work? What did it think? She did not know, but as Clara stood arranging the flowers one at a time in the vase (there seemed to be a great number of them—far more than a dozen—in the box and all very large), the bad taste of the choice seemed, in any language, inescapable. The cold eye of Signor Naccarelli had selected this gift, she felt certain, not Fabrizio, and that thought, no less than the flowers themselves, was remarkably effective in short-circuiting romance. Could she be wrong in perceiving a kind of Latin logic at work—its basic quality factual, hard, direct? Even if nobody ever
put
it that way, it was there. And no matter what
she
might think, it was, like the
carrozza
driver, not in the least
ashamed. A demand was closer to being made than she liked to suppose. Exactly where, it seemed to say, did she think all this was leading? She looked at the stuffed dog, at the baby elephant who carried sweets so coyly, at the charm bracelet dancing on Claras wrist as her hand moved, setting in place one after another the stalks with their sensual bloom.

It’s simply that they are facing what I am hiding from, she thought.

“Come here, darling.”

She held out her hands to Clara and drew her down to the edge of the bed beside her. Unable to think of anything else to do, she lied wildly.

“Clara, I have just been to the doctor. That is where I went. I didn’t tell you—you’ve been having such a good time—but I’m not feeling well at all. The doctor says the air is very bad for me here and that I must leave. We will come back, of course. As soon as I feel better. I’m going to call for reservations and start packing at once. We will leave for Rome tonight.”

Later she nervously penned a note to the ladies at the Excelsior. Clara was not feeling well, she explained, and the doctor had advised their leaving. They would leave their address at American Express in Rome, though there was a chance they might have to go to the lakes for cooler weather.

7

To the traveler coming down from Florence to Rome in the summertime, the larger, more ancient city is bound to be a disappointment. It is bunglesome; nothing is orderly or planned; there is a tangle of electric wires and tramlines, a ceaseless clamor of traffic. The distances are long; the sun is hot. And if, in addition, the heart has been left behind as positively as a piece of baggage, the tourist is apt to suffer more than tourists generally do. Mrs. Johnson saw this
clearly in her daughter’s face. To make things worse, Clara never mentioned Florence or Fabrizio. Mrs. Johnson had only to think of those flowers to keep herself from mentioning either. They had come to see Rome, hadn’t they? Very well, Rome would be seen.

At night, after dinner, Mrs. Johnson assembled her guidebooks and mapped out strenuous tours. Cool cloisters opened before them, and the gleaming halls of the Vatican galleries. They were photographed in the spray of fountains and trailed by pairs of male prostitutes in the park. At Tivoli, Clara had a sunstroke in the ruin of a Roman villa. A goatherd came and helped her to the shade, fanned her with his hat and brought her some water. Mrs. Johnson was afraid for her to drink it. At dusk they walked out the hotel door and saw the whole city in the sunset from the top of the Spanish Steps. Couples stood linked and murmuring together, leaning against the parapets.

“When are we going back, Mother?” Clara asked in the dark.

“Back where?” said Mrs. Johnson vaguely.

“Back to Florence.”

“You want to go back?” said Mrs. Johnson, more vaguely still.

Clara did not reply. To a child, a promise is a promise, a sacred thing, the measure of love. “We will come back,” her mother had said. She had told Fabrizio so when he came to the station, called unexpectedly out of his shop with this thunderbolt tearing across his heart, clutching a demure mass of wild chrysanthemums and a tin of caramelle. While the train stood open-doored in the station, he had drawn Clara behind a post and kissed her. “We are coming back,” said Clara, and threw her arms around him. When he forced down her arms, he was crying, and there stood her mother.

Day by day, Clara followed after Mrs. Johnson’s decisive heels, always at the same silent distance, like a good little dog. In the Roman Forum, urged on by the guidebook, Mrs. Johnson sought out the ruins of “an ancient basilica containing the earliest known Christian frescoes.” They may have been the earliest, but to Mrs. Johnson they looked no better than the smeary pictures of Clara’s
Sunday-school days. She studied them one at a time, consulting her book. When she looked up, Clara was gone. She called once or twice and hastened out into the sun. The ruins before her offered many a convenient hiding place. She ran about in a maze of paths and ancient pavings, until finally, there before her, not really very far away, she saw her daughter sitting on a fallen block of marble with her back turned. She was bent forward and weeping. The angle of her head and shoulders, her gathered limbs, though pained was not pitiful. And arrested by this, Mrs. Johnson did not call again, but stood observing how something of a warm, classic dignity had come to this girl, and no matter whether she could do long division or not, she was a woman.

To Mrs. Johnson’s credit she waited quietly while Clara straightened herself and dried her eyes. Then the two walked together through the ruin of an open court with a quiet rectangular pool. They went out of the Forum and crossed a busy street to a sidewalk café, where they both had coffee. In all the crash and clang of the tramlines and the hurry of the crowds there was no chance to speak.

A boy came by, a beggar, scrawny, in clothing deliberately over-sized and poor, the trousers held up by a cord, rolled at the cuffs, the bare feet splayed and filthy. A jut of black hair set his swart face in a frame, and the eyes, large, abject, imploring, did not meet now, perhaps had never met, another’s. He mumbled some ritualistic phrases and put out a hand that seemed permanently shriveled into the wrist; the tension, the smear and fear that money was, was in it. In Italy, especially in Rome, Mrs. Johnson had gone through many states of mind about beggars, all the way from, Poor things, why doesn’t the church do something? to, How revolting, why don’t they ever let us alone? So she had been known to give them as much as a thousand lire or spurn them like dogs. But something inside her had tired. Clara hardly noticed the child at all; exactly like an Italian, she took a ten-lire piece out of the change on the table and dropped it in his palm. And Mrs. Johnson, in the same way that people crossed themselves with a dabble of holy water in the churches, found herself
doing the same thing. He passed on, table by table, and then entered the ceaseless weaving of the crowd, hidden, reappearing, vanishing, lost.

She closed her eyes and, with a sigh that was both qualm and relief, she surrendered.

A lull fell in the traffic. “Clara,” she said, “we will go back to Florence tomorrow.”

8

It wasn’t that simple, of course. Nobody with a dream should come to Italy. No matter how dead and buried the dream is thought to be, in Italy it will rise and walk again. Margaret Johnson had a dream, though she thought reality had long ago destroyed it. The dream was that Clara would one day be perfectly well. It was here that Italy had attacked her, and it was this that her surrender involved.

Then “surrender” is the wrong word, too. Women like Margaret Johnson do not surrender; they simply take up another line of campaign. She would go poised into combat, for she knew already that the person who undertakes to believe in a dream pursues a course that is dangerous and lonely. She knew because she had done it before.

The truth was that when Clara was fourteen and had been removed from school two years previously, Mrs. Johnson had decided to believe that there was not anything the matter with her. It was September, and Noel Johnson was away on a business trip and conference that would last a month. Their son was already away at college. The opportunity was too good to be missed. She chose a school in an entirely new section of town; she told a charming pack of lies and got Clara enrolled there under most favorable conditions. The next two weeks were probably the happiest of her life. With other mothers, she sat waiting in her car at the curb until the bright crowd came breasting across the campus: Clara’s new red tarn was the sign
to watch for. At night the two of them got supper in the kitchen while Clara told all her stories. Later they did homework, sitting on the sofa under the lamp.

Three teachers came to call at different times. They were puzzled, but were persuaded to be patient. Two days before Noel Johnson was due to come home, Mrs. Johnson was invited to see the principal. Some inquiries, he said, had been felt necessary. He had wished to be understanding, and rather than take the evidence from other reports had done some careful testing of his own under the most favorable circumstances: the child had suspected nothing.