The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (8 page)

“The thing that impresses me most, Noel,” she wrote, “is that nothing beyond Clara ever seems to be required of her here. I do wonder if anything beyond her would ever be required of her. Young married girls her age, with one or two children, always seem to have a nurse for them; a maid does all the cooking. There are mothers and mothers-in-law competing to keep the little ones at odd hours. I doubt if these young wives ever plan a single meal.

“Clara is able to pass every day here, as she does at home, doing simple things that please her. But the difference is that here, instead of being always alone or with the family, she has all of Florence for company, and seems no different from the rest. Every afternoon she dresses in her pretty clothes and we walk to an outdoor café to meet with some young friends of the Naccarellis. You would be amazed how like them she has become. She looks more Italian every day. They prattle. About what? Well, as far as I can follow—Clara’s Italian is so much better than mine—about movie stars, pet dogs, some kind of car called Alfa Romeo and what man is handsomer than what other man.

“I understand that usually in the summer all these people go to the sea, where they spend every day for a month or two swimming and lying in the sun. They would all be there now if Fabrizio’s courtship had not so greatly engaged their interest. Courtship is the only word for it. If you could see how he adores Clara and how often he mentions the very same things that we love in her: her gentleness, her sweetness and goodness. I had expected things to come to some conclusion long before now, but nothing of the sort seems to occur, and now the thought of separating the two of them begins to seem more and more wrong to me, every day. …”

This letter provoked a transatlantic phone call. Mrs. Johnson went to the lobby to talk so Clara wouldn’t hear her. She knew what
the first words would be. To Noel Johnson, the world was made of brass tacks, and coming down to them was his specialty.

“Margaret, are you thinking that Clara should marry this boy?”

“I’m only trying to let things take their natural course.”

“Natural
course!” Even at such a distance, he could make her jump.

“I’m with her constantly, Noel. I don’t mean they’re left to themselves. I only mean to say I can’t wrench her away from him now. I tried it. Honestly I did. It was too much for her. I saw that.”

“But surely you’ve talked to these people, Margaret. You must have told them all about her. Don’t any of them speak English?” It would seem unbelievable to Noel Johnson that she or anyone related to him in any way would have learned to communicate in any language but English. He would be sure they had got everything wrong.

“I’ve tried to explain everything fully,” she assured him. Well, hadn’t she? Was it her fault a cannon had gone off just when she meant to explain?

Across the thousands of miles she heard his breath and read its quality: he had hesitated. Her heart gave a leap.

“Would I encourage anything that would put an ocean between Clara and me?”

She had scored again. Mrs. Johnson’s deepest rebellion against her husband had occurred when he had wanted to put Clara in a sort of “school” for “people like her.” The rift between them on that occasion had been a serious one, and though it was smoothed over in time and never mentioned subsequently, Noel Johnson might still not be averse to putting distances between his daughter and him.

“They’re just after her money, Margaret.”

“No, Noel—I wrote you about that. They
have
money.” She shut her eyes tightly. “And nobody wants to come to America, either.”

When she put down the phone a few minutes later, Mrs. Johnson had won a concession. Things should proceed along their natural course, very well. But she was to make no permanent decision until Noel himself could be with her. His coming, at the moment, was
next to impossible. Business was pressing. One of the entertainers employed to advertise the world’s finest smoke on a national network had been called up by the Un-American Activities Committee. The finest brains in the company were being exercised far into the night. It would not do for the American public to conclude they were inhaling Communism with every puff on a well-known brand. This could happen; it could ruin them. Noel would go to Washington in the coming week. It would be three weeks at least until he could be with her. Then—well, she could leave the decision up to him. If it involved bringing Clara home with them, he would take the responsibility of it on himself.

Noel and Margaret Johnson gravely wished each other good luck over the transatlantic wire, and each resumed the burden of his separate enterprise.

“Where’d you go, Mother?” Clara wanted to know as soon as Mrs. Johnson returned.

“You’ll never guess. I’ve been talking with Daddy on the long-distance phone!”

“Oh!” Clara looked up. She had been sitting on a footstool shoved back against the wall of her mother’s room, writing in her diary. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know that’s who it was,” she lied.

“But I wanted to talk to him, too!”

“What would you have said?”

“I would have said …” She hesitated, thinking hard, staring past her mother into the opposite wall, her young brow contracting faintly. “I would have said,
‘Ciao. Come stai?’”

“Would Daddy have understood?”

“I would have told him,” Clara said faithfully.

After that she said nothing more but leaned her head against the wall, and forgetful of father, mother and diary, she stared before her with parted lips, dreaming.

Oh, my God, Margaret Johnson thought. How glad I am that Noel is coming to get me out of this!

10

After her husband’s telephone call, Margaret Johnson went to bed in as dutiful and obedient a frame of mind as any husband of whatever nationality could wish for. She awoke flaming with new anxiety, confronted by the simplest truth in the world.

If Noel Johnson came to Florence, he would spoil everything. She must have known that all along.

He might not mean to—she gave him the benefit of the doubt. But he would do it. Given a good three days, her dream would all lie in little bright bits on the floor like the remains of the biggest and most beautiful Christmas-tree ornament in the world.

For one thing, there was nothing in the entire Florentine day that would not seem especially designed to irritate Noel Johnson. From the coffee he would be asked to drink in the morning, right through the siesta, when every shop, including his prospective son-in-law’s, shut up at the very hour when they could be making the most money, up through midnight, when mothers were still abroad with their babies in the garrulous streets—he would have no time whatso-ever for this inefficient way of life. Was there any possible formation of stone and paint hereabout that would not remind him uncomfortably of the Catholic church? In what frame of mind would he be cast by Fabrizio’s cuffless trousers, little pointed shoes and carefully dressed hair? No, three days was a generous estimate; he would send everything sky-high long before that. And though he might regret it, he would never be able to see what he had done that was wrong.

His wife understood him. She sat over her
caffe latte
at her by-now-beloved window above the Arno, and while she thought of him, a peculiarly tender and generous smile played about her face.
“Clara,” she called gently, “have you written to Daddy recently?” Clara was splashing happily in the bathtub and did not hear her.

Soon Mrs. Johnson rose to get her cigarettes from the dresser, but stopped in the center of the room, where she stood with her hand to her brow for a long time, so enclosed in thought she could not have told where she was.

If she went back on her promise to Noel to do nothing until he came, the whole responsibility of action would be her own, and in the very moment of taking it, she would have to begin to lie. To lie in Winston-Salem was one thing, but to start lying to everybody in Italy—why, Italians were past masters at this sort of thing. Wouldn’t they see through her at once? Perhaps they already had.

She could never quite get it out of her mind that perhaps, indeed, they already had. Her heart had occasionally quite melted to the idea—especially after a glass of wine—that the Italian nature was so warm, so immediate, so intensely personal, that they had all perceived at once that Clara was a child and had loved her anyway, for what she was. They had not, after all, gone the dreary round from doctor to doctor, expert to expert, in the dwindling hope of finding some way to make the girl “normal.” They did not
think
, after all, in terms of IQ, “retarded mentality” and “adult capabilities.” And why, oh, why, Mrs. Johnson had often thought, since she, too, loved Clara for herself, should anyone think of another human being in the light of a set of terms?

But though she might warm to the thought—and since she never learned the answer she never wholly discarded it—she always came to the conclusion that she could not act upon it, and had to put it aside as being, for all practical purposes, useless. “Ridiculous,” she could almost hear Noel Johnson say. Mrs. Johnson came as near as she ever had in her life to wringing her hands. Oh, my God, she thought, if he comes here!

But she did not, that morning, seek out advice from any crew-cut diplomat or frosty-eyed Scot. At times she came flatly to the conclusion that she would stick to her promise to Noel because it was right
to do so—she believed in doing right—and that since it was right, no harm could come of it. At other times, she wished she could believe this.

In the afternoon, she accompanied Clara to keep an appointment at a café with Giuseppe’s wife, Franca, and another girl. She left the three of them enjoying pretty pastries and chattering happily of movie stars, dogs and the merits of the Alfa Romeo. Clara had learned so much Italian that Mrs. Johnson could no longer understand her.

Walking distractedly, back of the hotel, away from the river, she soon left the tourist-ridden areas behind her. She went thinking, unmindful of the people who looked up with curiosity as she passed. Her thought all had one center: her husband.

Never before had it seemed so crucial that she see him clearly. What was the truth about him? It had to be noted first of all, she believed, that Noel Johnson was in his own and everybody else’s opinion a good man. Meaning exactly what? Well, that he believed in his own goodness and the goodness of other people, and would have said, if asked, that there must be good people in Italy, Germany, Tasmania, even Russia. On these grounds he would reason correctly that the Naccarelli family might possibly be as nice as his wife said they were.

Still, he did not think—fundamentally, he doubted, and Margaret had often heard him express something of the sort—that Europeans really had as much sense as Americans. Intellect, education, art and all that sort of thing—well, maybe. But ordinary sense? Certainly he was in grave doubts here when it came to the Latin races. And come right down to it—in her thoughts she slipped easily into Noel’s familiar phrasing—didn’t his poor afflicted child have about as much sense already as any Italian? His first reaction would have been to answer right away: Probably she does.

Other resentments sprang easily to his mind when touched on this sensitive point. Americans had had to fight two awful wars to get Europeans out of their infernal messes. He had a right to some
sensitivity, anyone must admit. In the first war he had risked his life; his son had been wounded in the second; and if that were not enough, he could always remember his income tax. But there was no use getting really worked up. Some humor would prevail here, and he was not really going to lose sleep over something he couldn’t help.

But Clara, now—she could almost hear him saying—this thing of Clara. There Margaret Johnson could grieve for Noel almost more than for herself. Something had happened here that he was powerless to do anything about; a chance accident had turned into a persisting and delicate matter, affecting his own pretty little daughter in this final way. An ugly finality, and no decent way of disposing of it. A fact he had to live with, day after day. An abnormality; hence, to a man like himself, a source of horror. For wasn’t he dedicated, in his very nature, to “doing something about” whatever was not right?

How, she wondered, had Noel spent yesterday afternoon after he had replaced the telephone in his study at home? She could tell almost to a T, no crystal-ball gazing required. He would have wandered, thinking, about the rooms for a time, unable to put his mind on the next morning’s committee meeting. As important as it was that no Communist crooner should leave a pink smear on so American an outfit as their tobacco company, he would not have been able to concentrate. He likely would have entered the living room, only to find Clara’s dog, Ronnie, lying under the piano, a spot he favored during the hot months. They would have looked at each other, the two of them, disputing something. Then he would presently have found himself before the icebox, making a ham sandwich, perhaps, snapping the cap from a cold bottle of beer. Tilting beer into his mouth with one hand, eating with the other, he might later appear strolling about the yard. It might occur to him—she hoped it had—that he needed to speak to the yardman about watering the grass twice a week so it wouldn’t look like the Sahara Desert when they returned. When
they
returned! With Clara, or without her? Qualms swept her. Her heart went down like an elevator.