The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (30 page)

It started with ringing phones.

Eric calling one spring morning to say, “You know, the idea Jamie had last night down at Ben’s about going to Europe? Well, why don’t we do it?”

“This summer’s impossible,” I said. “I’m supposed to help Papa in the law office.”

“He can get Sister to help him—” That was Eric’s sister, Chessie, one way of making sure she didn’t decide to go with us. “You all will have to pay her a little, but she wants a job. Think it over, Ella Mason, but not for very long. Mayfred wants to, and Ben sounds serious, and there’s Jamie and you makes five. Ben knows a travel agent in Birmingham. He thinks we might even get reduced rates, but we have to hurry. We should have thought this up sooner.”

His light voice went racing on. He read a lot. I didn’t even have to ask him where we’d go. He and Ben would plan it; both young men who studied things, knew things, read, talked, quoted. We’d go where they wanted to go, love what they planned, admire them. Jamie was younger, my uncle Gale’s son, but he was forming that year—he was becoming grown-up. Would he be like them? There was nothing else to be but like them, if at all possible. No one in his right mind would question that.

Ringing phones. … “Oh, I’m thrilled to death! What did your folks say? It’s not all that expensive what with the exchange, not as much as staying here and going somewhere like the Smokies. You can pay for the trip over with what you’d save.”

We meant to go by ship. Mayfred, who read up on the latest things, wanted to fly, but nobody would hear to it. The boat was what people talked about when they mentioned their trip. It was a phrase: “On the boat going over. … On the boat coming back. …” The train was what we’d take to New York, or maybe we could fly. Mayfred, once redirected, began to plan everybody’s clothes. She knew what things were drip-dry and crushproof. On and on she forged through slick-paged magazines.

“It’ll take the first two years of law practice to pay for it, but it might be worth it,” said Eric.
“J’ai très hâte d’y aller
,” said Ben. The little French he knew was a lot more than ours.

Eric was about twenty-five that summer, just finishing law school, having been delayed a year or so by his army service. I wasn’t but
nineteen. The real reason I had hesitated about going was a boy from Tuscaloosa I’d been dating up at the university last fall, but things were running down with him, even though I didn’t want to admit it. I didn’t love him so much as I wanted him to love me, and that’s no good, as Eric himself told me. Ben was riding high, having got part of his thesis accepted for publication in the
Sewanee Review
. He had written on “The Lost Ladies of Edgar Allan Poe” and this piece was the chapter on “Ulalume.” I pointed out they weren’t so much lost as dead, or sealed up half-dead in tombs, but Ben didn’t see the humor in that.

The syringa were blooming that year, and the spirea and bridal wreath. The flags had come and gone, but not the wisteria, prettier than anybody could remember. All our mothers doted on their yards, while not a one of us ever raised so much as a petunia. No need to. We called one another from bower to bower. Our cars kept floating us through soft spring twilights. Travel folders were everywhere and Ben had scratched up enough French grammars to go around so we could practice some phrases. He thought we ought at least to know how to order in a restaurant and ask for stationery and soap in a hotel. Or buy stamps and find the bathroom. He was on to what to say to cab drivers when somebody mentioned that we were spending all this time on French without knowing a word of Italian. What did
they
say for hello, or how much does it cost, or which way to the post office? Ben said we didn’t have time for Italian. He thought the people you had to measure up to were the French. What Italians thought of you didn’t matter all that much. We were generally over at Eric’s house because his mother was away visiting his married sister Edith and the grandchildren, and Eric’s father couldn’t have cared less if we had drinks of real whiskey in the evening. In fact, he was often out playing poker and doing the same thing himself.

The Masons had a grand house. (Mason was Mama’s maiden name and so my middle one.) I loved the house especially when nobody was in it but all of us. It was white, two-story with big highceilinged
rooms. The tree branches laced across it by moonlight, so that you could only see patches of it. Mama was always saying they ought to thin things out, take out half the shrubs and at least three trees (she would even say which trees), but Cousin Fred, Eric’s father, liked all that shaggy growth. Once inside, the house took you over—it liked us all—and we were often back in the big kitchen after supper, fixing drinks, or sitting out on the side porch, making jokes and talking about Europe. One evening it would be peculiar things about the English, and the next, French food, how much we meant to spend on it, and so on. We had a long argument about Mont St. Michel, which Ben had read about in a book by Henry Adams, but everybody else, though coaxed into reading at least part of the book, thought it was too far up there and we’d better stick around Paris. We hoped Ben would forget it: he was bossy when he got his head set. We wanted just to see Ver-sigh and Fontaine-blow.

“We could stop off in the southern part of France on our way to Italy,” was Eric’s idea. “It’s where all the painting comes from.”

“I’d rather see the paintings,” said Mayfred. “They’re mostly in Paris, aren’t they?”

“That’s not the point,” said Ben.

Jamie was holding out for one night in Monte Carlo.

Jamie had shot up like a weed a few years back and had just never filled out. He used to regard us all as slightly opposed to him, as though none of us could possibly want to do what he most liked. He made, at times, common cause with Mayfred, who was kin to us only by a thread so complicated I wouldn’t dream of untangling it.

Mayfred was a grand-looking girl. Ben said it once, “She’s got class.” He said that when we were first debating whether to ask her along or not (if not her, then my roommate from Texas would be invited), and had decided that we had to ask Mayfred or smother her, because we couldn’t have stopped talking about our plans if our lives depended on it and she was always around. The afternoon Ben made that remark about her, we were just the three of us—Ben, Eric and me—out to help Mama about the annual lining of the tennis
court, and had stopped to sit on a bench, being sweaty and needing some shade to catch our breath in. So he said that in his meditative way, hitting the edge of a tennis racket on the ground between his feet and occasionally sighting down it to see if it had warped during a winter in the press. And Eric, after a silence in which he looked off to one side until you thought he hadn’t heard (this being his way), said, “You’d think the rest of us had no class at all.” “Of course we have, we just never mention it,” said Ben. So we’d clicked again. I always loved that to happen.

Mayfred had a boyfriend named Donald Bailey, who came over from Georgia and took her out every Saturday night. He was fairly nice-looking was about all we knew, and Eric thought he was dumb.

“I wonder how Mayfred is going to get along without Donald,” Ben said.

“I can’t tell if she really likes him or not,” I said. “She never talks about him.”

“She just likes to have somebody,” Ben said tersely, a thread of disapproval in his voice, the way he could do.

Papa was crazy about Mayfred. “You can’t tell what she thinks about anything and she never misses a trick,” he said. His unspoken thought was that I was always misjudging things. “Don’t you
see
, Ella Mason,” he would say. But are things all that easy to see?

“Do you remember,” I said to Eric on the terrace, this long after, “much about Papa?”

“What about him?”

“He wanted me to be different someway.”

“Different how?”

“More like Mayfred,” I said, and laughed, making it clear that I was deliberately shooting past the mark, because really I didn’t know where it was.

“Well,” said Eric, looking past me out to where the lights were brightening along the Arno, the towers standing out clearly in the dusky air, “I liked you the way you were.”

It was good, hearing him say that. The understanding that I wanted might not come. But I had a chance, I thought, and groped for what to say, when Eric rose to suggest dinner, a really good restaurant he knew, not far away; we could even walk.

… “Have you been to the Piazza? No, of course, you haven’t had time. Well, don’t go. It’s covered with tourists and pigeon shit. They’ve moved all the real statues inside except the Cellini. Go look at that and leave quick. …”

“You must remember Jamie, though, how he put his head in his hands our first day in Italy and cried, ‘I was just being nice to him and he took all the money!’ Poor Jamie, I think something else was wrong with him, not just a couple of thousand lire.”

“You think so, but what?”

“Well, Mayfred had made it plain that Donald was her choice of a man, though not present. And of course there was Ben. …” My voice stopped just before I stepped on a crack in the sidewalk.

“Ben had just got into Yale that spring before we left. He was hitching to a
fu
ture, man!” It was just as well Eric said it.

“So that left poor Jamie out of everything, didn’t it? He was young, another year in college to go, and nothing really outstanding about him, so he thought, and nobody he could pair with.”

“There were you and me.”

“You and me,” I repeated. It would take a book to describe how I said that. Half question, half echo, a total wondering what to say next. How, after all, did
he
mean it? It wasn’t like me to say nothing. “He might just have wondered what
we
had?”

“He might have,” said Eric. In the corner of the white-plastered restaurant, where he was known and welcomed, he was enjoying grilled chicken and artichokes. But suddenly he put down his fork, a pause like a solstice. He looked past my shoulder: Eric’s way.

“Ben said it was my fault we ‘lost’ you. That’s how he put it. He told me that in New York, the last time I saw him, six weeks ago. He wouldn’t explain. Do you understand what he meant?”

“‘Lost,’ am I? It’s news to me.”

“Well, you know, not at home. Not even in the States. Is that to do with me?”

“We’ll go back and talk.” He pointed to my plate. “Eat your supper, Ella Mason,” he said.

My mind began wandering pleasantly. I fell to remembering the surprise Mayfred had handed us all when we got to New York. We had come up on the train, having gone up to Chattanooga to catch the Southern. Three days in New York and we would board the
Queen Mary
for Southampton. “Too romantic for anything,” Mama had warbled on the phone. (“Elsa Stephens says, ‘Too romantic for anything,’” she said at the table. “No, Mama, you said that. I heard you.” “Well, I don’t care who said it, it’s true.”) On the second afternoon in New York, Mayfred vanished with something vague she had to do. “Well, you know she’s always tracking down dresses,” Jamie told me. “I think she wants her hair restyled somewhere,” I said. But not till we were having drinks in the hotel bar before dinner did Mayfred show up with Donald Bailey! She had, in addition to Donald, a new dress and a new hairstyle, and the three things looked to me about of equal value, I was thinking, when she suddenly announced with an earsplitting smile, “We’re married!” There was a total silence, broken at last by Donald, who said with a shuffling around of feet and gestures, “It’s just so I could come along with y’all, if y’all don’t mind.” Another silence followed, broken by Eric, who said he guessed it was one excuse for having champagne.

Mayfred and Donald had actually got married across the state line in Georgia two weeks before. Mayfred didn’t want to discuss it because, she said, everybody was so taken up with talking about Europe, she wouldn’t have been able to get a word in edgewise. “You better go straight and call yo’ Mama,” said Ben. “Either you do, or I will.”

Mayfred’s smile fell to ashes and she sloshed out champagne. “She can’t do a thing about it till we get back home! She’ll want me to explain everything. Don’t y’all make me … please!”

I noticed that so far Mayfred never made common cause with any one of us, but always spoke to the group: y’all. It also occurred to me both then and now that that was what had actually saved her. If one of us had got involved in pleading for her with Ben, he would have overruled us. But Mayfred, a lesser cousin, was keeping a distance. She could have said—and I thought she was on the verge of it—that she’d gone to a lot of trouble to satisfy us; she might have just brought him along without benefit of ceremony.

So we added Donald Bailey. Unbeknownst to us, reservations had been found for him, and though he had to share a four-berth, tourist-class cabin with three strange men, after a day out certain swaps were effected, and he wound up in second class with Mayfred. Eric overheard a conversation between Jamie and Donald, which he passed on to me. Jamie: “Don’t you really think this is a funny way to spend a honeymoon?” Donald: “It just was the best I could do.”

He was a polite squarish sort of boy with heavy, dark lashes. He and Mayfred used to stroll off together regularly after the noon meal on board. It was a serene crossing, for the weather cleared two days out of New York, and we could spend a lot of time on deck, playing shuffleboard and betting on races with wooden horses run by the purser. (I forgot to say everybody in our family but Ben’s branch were inveterate gamblers and had played poker in the club car all the way up to New York on the train.) After lunch every day Mayfred got seasick, and Donald in true husbandly fashion would take her to whichever side the wind was not blowing against and let her throw up neatly over the rail, like a cat. Then she’d be all right. Later, when you’d see them together, they were always talking and laughing. But with us she was quiet and trim, with her fashion-blank look, and he was just quiet. He all but said “Ma’am” and “Sir.” As a result of Mayfred’s marriage, I was thrown a lot with Eric, Ben and Jamie. “I think one of you ought to get married,” I told them. “Just temporarily, so I wouldn’t feel like the only girl.” Ben promised to take a look around and Eric seemed not to have heard. It was Jamie who couldn’t joke about it. He had set himself to make a pair, in some sort of way,
with Mayfred, I felt. I don’t know how seriously he took her. Things run deep in our family—that’s what you have to know. Eric said out of the blue, “I’m wondering when they had time to see each other. Mayfred spent all her time with us.” (We were prowling through the Tate Gallery.) “Those Saturday night dates,” I said, studying Turner. At times she would show up with us, without Donald, not saying much, attentive and smooth, making company. Ben told her she looked Parisian.