The Stories of John Cheever (62 page)

There were already German patrols in the streets. It was a long walk up the river, and they were very conspicuous—the weeping Englishwoman, the Duke with his stick, and the graceful daughter. How mysterious life must have seemed at that moment! The Duke moved slowly and had to stop now and then to rest, but though he was in pain, he did not show it. With his head up and a price on it, he looked around alertly, as if he had stopped to observe or admire some change in his old city. They crossed the river by separate bridges and met at a barbershop, where they were taken into a cellar and disguised. Their skin was stained and their hair was dyed. They left Rome before dawn, concealed in a load of furniture, and that evening reached a small village in the mountains, where they were hidden in a farmhouse cellar.

The village was shelled twice, but only a few buildings and barns on the outskirts were destroyed. The farmhouse was searched a dozen times, by Germans and Fascists, but the Duke was always warned long in advance. In the village, they were known as Signor and Signora Giusti, and it was Winifred-Mae who chafed at this incognito. She was the Duchess Malvolio-Pommodori, and she wanted it known. Donna Carla liked being Carla Giusti. She went one day, as Carla Giusti, to the washing trough and spent a pleasant morning cleaning her clothes and gossiping with the other women. When she got back to the farm, Winifred-Mae was furious. She was Donna Carla; she must not forget it. A few days later, Winifred Mae saw Donna Carla being taught by a woman at the fountain how to carry a copper vase on her head, and she called her daughter into the house and gave her another fierce lecture on rank. Donna Carla was always malleable and obedient, but without losing her freshness, and she never tried to carry a
conca
again.

When Rome was liberated, the family returned to the city, to find that the Germans had sacked the palace; and they then retired to an estate in the south and waited there for the war to end. The Duke was invited to help in the formation of a government, but he declined this invitation, claiming to be too old; the fact was that he supported, if not the King, the concept of monarchy. The paintings and the rest of the family treasure were found in a salt mine and returned to the palace. Cecil Smith came back, put on his paper cuffs, and resumed the administration of the family fortune, which had come through the war intact. Suitors began to call on Donna Carla.

In the second year after the war, a hundred and seventeen suitors came to the palace. These were straight and honest men, crooked men, men suffering from hemophilia, and many cousins. It was Donna Carla’s prerogative to propose marriage, and she saw them all to the door without hinting at the subject. This was a class of men whose disinheritedness was grandiose. Lying in bed in the Excelsior Hotel, they dreamed of what her wealth could do. The castle roof was repaired. Plumbing was installed at last. The garden bloomed. The saddle horses were fat and sleek. When she saw them to the door without having mentioned the subject of marriage, she offended them and she offended their dreams. She sent them back to a leaky castle and a ruined garden; she turned them out into the stormy weather of impoverished rank. Many of them were angry, but they kept on coming. She turned away so many suitors that she was finally summoned to the Vatican, where the Holy Father refreshed her sense of responsibility toward her family and its ancient name.

Considering that Winifred-Mae had upset the aristocratic applecart, she took a surprisingly fervid interest in the lineage of Donna Carla’s suitors, and championed her favorites as they came. There was some hard feeling between the mother and daughter on this score, and—from Winifred-Mae—some hard words. More and more suitors came, and the more persistent and needy returned, but the subject of marriage was still not mentioned. Donna Carla’s father-confessor then suggested that she see a psychiatrist, and she was willing. She was never unwilling. He made an appointment for her with a devout and elderly doctor who practiced within the Catholic faith. He had been a friend of Croce’s, and a large cabinet photograph of the philosopher hung on one of the dark walls of his office, but this may have been wasted on Donna Carla. He offered the Duchess a chair, and then, after some questioning, invited her to lie down on his couch. This was a massive piece of furniture, covered with worn leather and dating back to the earlier days of Freud. She walked gracefully toward the couch, and then turned and said, “But it is not possible for me to lie down in the presence of a gentleman.” The doctor could see her point; it was a true impasse. She seemed to look longingly at the couch, but she could not change the facts of her upbringing, and so they said goodbye.

The Duke was growing old. It was getting more and more difficult for him to walk, but this pain did not change his handsomeness and seemed only to increase his vitality. When people saw him, they thought: How nice it will be to eat a cutlet, take a swim, or climb a mountain; how pleasant, after all, life is. He passed on to Donna Carla his probity, and his ideal of a simple and elegant life. He ate plain fare off fine dishes, wore fine clothes in third-class train carriages, and, on the trip to Vevaqua, ate his simple lunch out of a basket. He kept—at great expense—his paintings cleaned and in good condition, but the dust covers on the chairs and chandeliers in the reception rooms had not been removed for years. Donna Carla began to interest herself in what she would inherit, and spent some time going over the ledgers in Cecil Smith’s office. The impropriety of a beautiful Roman noblewoman’s studying ledgers at a desk caused some gossip, and may have been the turning point in her reputation.

THERE WAS
a turning point. Her life was not especially solitary, but her shy gracefulness gave this impression, and she had made enemies of enough of her former suitors to be the butt of gossip. It was said that the Duke’s probity was miserliness and that the family’s simple tastes were lunatic. It was said that the family ate bread crusts and canned sardines, and had only one electric-light bulb in the whole palace. It was said that they had gone crazy—all three of them—and would leave their billions to the dogs. Someone else said Donna Carla had been arrested for shoplifting on the Via Nazionale. Someone had seen her pick up a ten-lira piece on the Corso and put it in her bag. When Luigi, the old butler, collapsed on the street one day and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, someone said that the doctors at the clinic had found him dying of starvation.

The Communist party got on the band wagon and began to attack Donna Carla as the archetype of dying feudalism. A Communist deputy in the Chamber made a speech saying that the sufferings of Italy would not be over until the Duchessina was dead. The village of Vevaqua voted Communist in the local elections. She went there after the harvest to audit the accounts. Her father was too frail and Smith was busy. She traveled third-class, as she had been taught. The old calash and the shabby coachman were waiting for her at the station. Clouds of dust came from the leather cushions when she sat down. As the carriage was entering an olive grove below the walls of the village, someone threw a rock. It struck Donna Carla on the shoulder. Another stone struck her on the thigh and another on the breast. The coachman’s hat was knocked off, and he whipped the horse, but the horse was too used to pulling a plow to change his pace. Then a stone hit the coachman on the forehead and blood spurted out. Blinded with blood, he dropped the reins. The horse moved over to the side of the road and began to eat grass. Donna Carla got out of the calash. The men in the olive grove ran off. She bound up the coachman’s head with a scarf, took up the reins, and drove the old carriage up into the village, where “
DEATH TO DONNA CARLA! DEATH TO THE DUCHESS
!” was written everywhere. The streets were deserted. The servants in the castle were loyal, and they dressed her cuts and bruises, and they brought her tea, and cried. When she began the audit in the morning, the tenants came in, one by one, and she did not mention the incident. With grace and patience she went over the accounts with men she recognized as her assailants. Three days later she drove back through the olive grove and took the train, third-class, to Rome.

But her reputation in Rome was not improved by this incident. Someone said that she had turned a starving child away from her door, that her avarice was pathological. She was smuggling her paintings into England and amassing a fortune there. She was selling the jewels. Noble Roman property owners are expected to be sharp, but stories of unusual dishonesty were fabricated and circulated about Donna Carla. It was also said that she was losing her looks. She was growing old. People disputed about her age. She was twenty-eight. She was thirty-two. She was thirty-six. She was thirty-eight. And she was still a familiar figure on the Lungo-Tevere, as grave and lovely as ever, with her shining hair and her half smile. But what was the truth? What would a German prince, a suitor with a leaky palace, find if he went there for tea?

PRINCE BERNSTRASSER-FALCONBERG
went under the massive arch at five one Sunday afternoon, into a garden where there were some tangerine trees and a fountain. He was a man of forty-five, with three illegitimate children, and with a jolly mistress waiting for him at the Grand Hotel. Looking up at the walls of the palace, he could not help thinking of all the good Donna Carla’s wealth would do. He would pay his debts. He would buy a bathtub for his old mother. He would fix the roof. An old porter in yellow livery let him in, and Luigi opened a second pair of double doors, into a hall with a marble staircase. Donna Carla was waiting here in the dusk. “Awfully nice of you to come,” she said, in English. “Frightfully gloomy, isn’t it?” The fragile English music of her voice echoed lightly off the stones. The hall
was
gloomy, he could see, but this was only half the truth, and the Prince sensed at once that he was not supposed to notice that it was also stupendous. The young woman seemed to be appealing to him for some understanding of her embarrassment, of her dilemma at having to greet him in such surroundings, and of her wish to pretend that this was some quite ordinary hall, where two friends might meet on a Sunday afternoon. She gave him her hand, and apologized for her parents’ absence, saying that they were unwell. (This was not quite the truth; Winifred-Mae had a cold, but the old Duke had gone off to a double feature.)

The Prince was pleased to see that she was attractive, that she had on a velvet dress and some perfume. He wondered about her age, and saw that her face, that close, seemed quite pale and drawn.

“We have quite a walk ahead of us,” she said. “Shall we begin? The
salottino
, the only room where one can sit down, is at the other end of the palace, but one can’t use the back door, because then one makes a
brutta figura
….” They stepped from the hall into the cavernous picture gallery. The room was dimly lighted, its hundreds of chairs covered with chamois. The Prince wondered if he should mention the paintings, and tried to take his cue from the Duchess. She seemed to be waiting, but was she waiting for him to join her or waiting for a display of his sensibilities? He took a chance and stopped in front of a Bronzino and praised it. “He looks rather better now that he’s been cleaned,” she said. The Prince moved from the Bronzino to a Tintoretto. “I say,” she said, “shall we go on to someplace more comfortable?”

The next gallery was tapestries, and her one concession to these was to murmur, “Spanish. A frightful care. Moths and all that sort of thing.” When the Prince stopped to admire the contents of a cabinet, she joined him and explained the objects, and he caught for the first time a note of ambivalence in her apparent wish to be taken for a simple woman who lived in a flat. “Carved lapis lazuli,” she said. “The vase in the center is supposed to be the largest piece of lapis lazuli in the world.” Then, as if she sensed and regretted this weakening of her position, she asked, as they stepped into the next room, “Did you ever see so much rubbish?”

Here were the cradles of popes, the crimson sedan chairs of cardinals, the bread-and-butter presents of emperors, kings, and grand dukes piled up to the ceiling, and the Prince was confused by her embarrassment. What tack should he take? Her behavior was not what one would expect of an heiress, but was it, after all, so queer, so unreasonable? What strange attitudes might one not be forced into, saddled with a mile or more of paintings, burdened with the bulky evidence of four consecutive centuries of wealth and power? She might, playing in these icy rooms as a girl, have discovered in herself a considerable disinclination to live in a monument. In any event, she would have had to make a choice, for if she took this treasure seriously, it would mean living moment by moment with the past, as the rest of us live with our appetites and thirsts, and who would want to do that?

Their destination was a dark parlor. The Prince watched her stoop down to the baseboard and plug in a feeble lamp.

“I keep all the lamps unplugged, because the servants sometimes forget, and electricity is frightfully expensive in Rome.
There
we are!” she exclaimed, straightening up and gesturing hospitably to a sofa from which the worn velvet hung in rags. Above this was a portrait by Titian of the first Malvolio-Pommodori pope. “I make my tea on a spirit lamp, because in the time it takes the man to bring tea from the kitchen the water gets quite cold….”

They sat waiting for the kettle to boil. She handed him his tea and smiled, and he was touched, although he didn’t know why. But there seemed about this charming woman, as there was about so much that he admired in Rome, the threat of obsolescence. Her pallor was a little faded. Her nose was a little sharp. Her grace, her accent were close to excessive. She was not yet the kind of woman who carries her left hand adrift in midair, the little finger extended, as vulgar people are supposed to hold a teacup; her airs and graces were not yet mistaken, and through them the Prince thought he felt the beating of a healthy and decent heart. But he felt, at the same time, that her days ended inexorably in the damps of a lonely bed, and that much more of this life would transform her into that kind of wasted virgin whose musical voice has upon men the force of complete sexual discouragement.