The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (27 page)

“But what if the poor old bastard wants you, needs you? What if he dies?”

“I’ve been there already,” she said, remembering how they had got the land away from her where it had all happened, she had signed the papers at Colonna’s on the Piazza del Popolo and heard how the gun’s roar faded along with the crash of the leaves.

“That isn’t good enough!” said Hartwell, but her gray regard upon him was simply accidental, like meeting the eyes in a painting.

So there was no way around her.

I’ll go myself, thought Hartwell, halfway down the Scotch. In the name of humanity somebody had to, and it seemed, for one sustained, sustaining moment, that he actually would. He would go out of the apartment, reach his car, drive to the nearest telephone, call the airport for space on the first plane to New York. He could smell the seared asphalt of a New York summer, could see soot lingering on windowsills in the coarse sunlight, feel the lean of the cab turning into the hospital drive, every building in an island aspect, turning freely. An afternoon of dying. … A strange face in the door’s dwindling square, rising above the muted murmur of a hospital at twilight. “I have come from your wife. You must understand she would come if she could, but she cannot. You must understand that she loves you, she said so. I heard her say so. She has been unavoidably detained … restrained? … stained? … maimed?”

Then he knew it was time to go. He picked up all the documents, and put the last swallow down. The stairs were below. “Lunch with me this week.” “Poor George, I think I upset you.”

Poor George (he kept hearing it). Poor George, poor George, poor George. …

PART FIVE

14

But she had never said Poor Jim, though he, too, had gone down that very stairway as shaken as he had ever been in his life or would ever be. Their parting had torn him desperately—she saw it; it was visible. And all this on the first day of sun.

“Love … love … love …” The word kept striking over and again like some gigantic showpiece of a clock promptly, voraciously, at work to mark midnight, though actually it was noon. Returning to her was what he kept talking about. “Yes, yes, I’ll always be here,” she replied.

But this total motion once begun carried him rapidly down and away,
cortile
and fountain, stairway and hidden turning—the illusion was dropping off like a play he had been in, when, at the last flight’s turning, he came to an abrupt halt and stood confronting someone who had just come through the open
portone
and was now looking about for mailboxes or buzzers, a fresh-faced young man whose clear candid eyes had not yet known what stamped a line between the brows.

He was wearing a tropical-weight suit that would have been too optimistic yesterday, but was exactly right today. Second-year university, just arrived this morning, Jim Wilbourne thought, holding to the banister. The young man seemed to have brought the sun. Jim Wilbourne, fresh air from the
portone
fanning his winter-pale cheek, thought for the first time in months of shirts that never got really white and suits that got stained at the cleaners, of maids that stole not only books but rifled drawers for socks and handkerchiefs, of rooms that never got warm enough and martinis that never got cold enough and bills unfairly rendered, of the landlord’s endless complaints and self-delighting rages, the doctor’s prescriptions that never worked, the waste of life itself to say nothing of fine economic theory.
He coughed—by now a habit—and saw, as if it belonged to someone else, his hand at rest on the stone banister, the fingers stained from smoking, the cuff faintly gray, distinctly frayed. He felt battered, and shabby and old, and here was someone to block not only the flow of his grief, but the motion of his salvaging operation, that was to say, the direction of his return; for every step now was bringing him physically closer to the land he had had to come abroad to discover, the land where things rest on solid ground and reasons may be had upon request and business is conducted in the expected manner. It all meant more than he had ever suspected it did.

“Could you possibly tell me—you are an American, aren’t you—I don’t speak much Italian, none at all, in fact—maybe you even know who I’m looking for—does a Mrs. Ingram live here?”

“She isn’t here just now, at least I don’t think so. Come to think of it, she’s out of the city, at least for the time being.”

He grasped at remembering how she felt about it—about these people who kept coming. She did not like it; he knew that much. But a boy like this one, anybody on earth would want to see a boy like that. He retreated from her particular complexities, the subtly ramified turnings were a sharp renewal of pain, the whats and whys he could of course if necessary deal in had always been basically outside his character, foreign to him, in the way a clear effective answer was not foreign whether it was true or not.

“Very odd. I got her address just before leaving from the States.”

“When was that?”

“Oh—ten days ago.”

“Well, then, that explains it. She’s only left a couple of weeks back, or so I understand.”

He ran on down the stairs. The boy fell in step with him and they went out together. The fountain at the corner played with the simple delight of a child. “You see, I have this package, rather valuable, I think. I would have telephoned, but didn’t know the language well enough—the idea scared me off. Now I’ve gone and rented this car
to go to Naples in, that scares me, too, but I guess I’ll make it. I just wonder what to do with the package.”

“Mail it—why not? Care of the consulate. She works there. Your hotel would do it, insured, everything.”

“Did you know her well, then? You see, I’m her nephew, by marriage, that is. When I was a boy, younger than now at least, she used to—”

“Listen, it’s too bad you and I can’t have a coffee or something, but I happen to be going to catch a plane.”

They shook hands and parted. He had begun to feel that another moment’s delay would have mired him there forever, that he had snatched back to himself in a desperate motion his very life. Walking rapidly, he turned a corner. He went into a bar for coffee and was standing, leaning his elbow on the smooth surface and stirring when somebody said, “Hi, Jim!” and he looked up and there was Jean Coggins. She was eating a croissant and gave him a big grin, whiskery with crumbs. He laughed in some way he had not laughed for a year. “What d’you know?” he asked. As usual, she didn’t know anything back of yesterday. “I was going down to Capri yesterday, but it rained. It even hailed! And the storm last night! Now look at it. Wouldn’t it kill you?” “It shouldn’t be allowed.” He paid for her bill and his and while doing so wondered if at any time during the entire year in Italy she had ever actually paid for anything. She skimmed along beside him for a short way, going on like a little talking dog; he soon lost track of what she was saying; she always bored him—everything named Coggins bored him, but she was at least fresh and pretty. Walking, he flung an arm around her. “I heard from Alfredo,” she said, “you remember in Venice?” “I remember something about some stamps,” he said. She giggled.

(Because that day they got back from the Lido, with Martha out somewhere, or so the proprietor said, and the weather getting dim, the air covered with a closing sort of brightness, she had tried to buy stamps at the desk, feeling herself all salty in the turns of her head and creases of her arms, but the proprietor said he was out of stamps
and Jim Wilbourne, going up the stairway, heard her, though he was already a flight up and half across the lobby, and he said, “I’ve got some stamps, so just stop by number something and I’ll let you have them,” but when she went and scratched at the door and thought he said come in, he was asleep—she must have known they weren’t talking entirely about stamps, yet when he woke up, scarcely knowing in the air’s heaviness, the languor the surf had brought on and the boat ride back, the lingering salt smell, exactly where he was, and saw her, he could not remember who she was, but said at once, “My God, you’ve got the whitest teeth I ever saw,” and pulled her down under his arm. But she didn’t want to. She liked fighting, scuffling, maybe it was what she felt like, maybe it was because he was what she told him right out, an Older Man, which made him laugh, though on the street that day coming out of the bar, almost exactly a year later, it wouldn’t have been funny one bit, not one little bit, and then she had bitten him, too, which was what he got for mentioning her teeth. Otherwise, she might not have thought about it. He had cuffed her. “Let’s stay on,” she said, “I love this place. All across Italy and couldn’t even swim. That old lake was slimy. Anyway, I’m in love with the boy at the desk. Get them to let us stay.” “You mean get rid of your parents,” he said, “that’s what you’re driving at. Or is it her, too?” “You mean Martha? Well, she makes me feel dumb, but she’s okay.” She came up on one elbow in sudden inspiration. “She likes you.” “Oh, stop it.” “I know.” “How do you know?” “I just know. I always know. I can tell.” “But maybe it’s you that I—” “But it’s Alfredo that I—” “Alfredo? Who’s that?” “You don’t ever listen. The boy at the desk.” She had squirmed out from under and run off, snatching up a whole block of stamps off the table—he actually had had some stamps, though this surprised him, and later in the pensione, walking around restless as a big animal in the lowering weather, he had heard her talking, chattering away to the boy who kept the desk, sure enough, right halfway down on the service stairs, and the little maids stepped over and around them with a smile.
“Ti voglio bene, non ti amo. Dimmi, dimmi
—
Ti voglio bene.”
One way to learn the
language. He thumbed an ancient German magazine, restless in an alcove, and saw Martha Ingram go by; she had come in and quietly bathed and dressed, he supposed; her hair was gleaming, damp and freshly up; her scent floated in the darkening corridor; she did not see him, rounding the stairs unconsciously in the cloud of her own particular silence. Some guy had given her one hell of a time. He thought of following her, to talk, to what? He flipped the magazine aside; his thoughts roved, constricted in dark hallways. …)

“I’ve got his picture, want to see?” “I don’t have time, honey.” Next she would be getting his advice. She loved getting advice about herself. He told her goodbye, taking a sharp turn away. Would he ever see her again? The thought hardly brushed him.

(Would she ever see him again? The thought did not brush her at all. What did pass through her mind—erroneously, anyone but Jean Coggins would have thought—she did not know a word like that—was a memory of one day she was in Rossi’s, the fashion shop where she worked on the Via Boncompagni, and had just taken ten thousand lire from the till—and not for the first time—to lend to a
ragazzo
who took pictures on the Via Veneto and was always a little bit behind, though he kept a nice
seicento
. She would have put it back before the lunch hour was over at four, but the signora found it gone and was about to fire her, though she denied having done it except as a loan to her mother’s
donna di servizio
, who had forgotten money for the shopping and had passed by on the way to the market. She would bring it right back from home. She faded off toward the back of the shop, for the signora was waggling her head darkly and working away in an undertone.
Figurati!
And while she was in the back, way back where the brocade curtains and satin wallpaper faded out completely and there were only the brown-wrapped packages of stuffs,
tessuti
, stacked up in corners of a bare room with a gas jet and a little espresso machine and snips and threads strewn about the floor, she heard a voice outside and it was Martha Ingram and the signora was saying with great
gentilezza
, “O, signora, the American girl you sent me, the Signorina Co-gins …” and then she heard,
in the level quiet poised educated voice, almost like a murmur, “Oh, no, there was some mistake about that. I never sent her to you, signora, there was some mistake. … However,
nondimeno
. … I am sure she is very good …
è una brava ragazza, sono sicura. …”
And then there was something about some gloves.
Addio
, she thought in Italian.
Adesso comincia la musica
… now the music will really begin. She thought of running out the back door. She liked working up near the Veneto, where it was fun. And then the Signora Rossi herself appeared in her trim black dress with her nails all beautifully
madreperla
and her gold Florentine snake bracelet with the garnet eyes and her sleek jet hair scrolled to the side and her eyes that were always asking how many
mila
lire, and she twitched at the curtain and said, “Signora Co-gins, you are a liar—it is always
la stessa cosa
. … You have given the money to that
paparazzo
, and the money was not even yours, but mine. It would have been
gentile
indeed if you had first asked me if
I
—
io, io
—had had some debt or other to pay.
Davvero
. But, then, I do not drive you out to Frascati in a
seicento
—not often, do I? No, not at all. But as for using the name of Signora Ingram,
mia cliente
, to Come into
mia casa di moda
…”

It went on and on like this, a ruffling stream of Italian, unending; as though she had stuck her head in a fountain, it went pouring past her ears. And then she remembered, out of her scolded-child exterior, that pensione in Venice, and Jim Wilbourne this time, rather than Alfredo—the dim concept of the faceless three of them—him and her and Martha Ingram—afloat within those rain-darkening corridors and stairways. She remembered tumbling on the damp bed and how he was taller than she and that made her restless in some indefinable way, so she said what was true: “She likes you.” “Oh, stop it.” “I know.” “How do you know?” “I just know. I always know. I can tell.” For the truth was she was not at all a liar: she was far more honest than anybody she knew. It was the signora who had said all along, just because she said she knew Martha Ingram, that she had been sent there by Martha Ingram, who was close to the ambassador, and the signora could tell more lies while selling a new
gown than Jean Coggins had ever told in her life, and another truth she knew was that Martha Ingram was bound to come in and “tell on her” someday to the signora. It had been a certainty, a hateful certainty, because women like Martha would always fasten to one man at a time. She remembered her awe of Martha Ingram, her even wishing in some minor way to be like her. And then she saw it all, in a flash; perhaps, like that, she turned all the way into her own grown-up self, and would never want to be like anybody else again, for she suddenly pushed out of the corner where a tatter of frayed curtain concealed a dreary little delivery entrance from even being glimpsed by accident by anyone in the elegant
negozio
, started up and flung herself full height, baring her teeth like a fox, and spit out at the signora,
“Che vuole? Non sono una donna di servizio
. I am not a servant.
Faccio come voglio
… I will do as I like.
Faccio come mi pare
… I will do as I please.
Che vuole?”