A Lady of Good Family (6 page)

She watched him go, his back stiff and straight in the black evening jacket. His clothes were not of the most recent fashion, and that added to a timelessness about him, a sense of age beyond his own youth, as if he walked surrounded by an invisible crowd of ancestors. They are never alone, these Europeans, Beatrix thought, even when they seem alone. A sudden urge made her want to call him back to her. She did not.

She looked to the side and saw young Mr. Whipple watching, disapproval on his face.

“That was your rescuing knight from the Borghese, wasn’t it?” Minnie, gliding effortlessly through the throng, came and sat on the marble bench next to Beatrix.

“Yes.”

“He has gone into the yellow salon. I just saw him with a young person who seems to be on warm and familiar terms with him.”

“It is none of my affair,” Beatrix said.

Is this how it begins? thought Minnie. With a Roman? Rome was so far from New York. Would she become one of those lonely mothers who received cards and foreign shawls and leather purses in the mail, but almost never saw her daughter? I want my daughter’s happiness, she told herself. And I want her close to me. Is it impossible to have both?

Minnie, herself an only child who had lost her own mother at a young age and had been for years separated from her husband, realized how dependent she had become on her daughter’s companionship. They began and ended each day together, could finish each other’s sentences, knew each other’s preferences and dislikes. To lose that closeness at a time of life when she was unlikely to find an intimate relationship—not that she wished to remarry—would be a difficult thing. Beatrix was so woven into the fabric of Minnie’s daily life that she thought she could hear that fabric tear when she saw Beatrix sitting with her Roman acquaintance.

Minnie considered the situation. A careful, calculating mother would, at this point, accept or at least plan for the inevitable and
make gentle and subtle inquires about the young man. He seemed well-bred, perfectly acceptable. But who was his family? What were his prospects? Minnie was alert only to the fact that her twenty-three-year-old daughter had never, as far as she could tell, been in love, and she was terribly vulnerable.

She held herself responsible for this, for her daughter’s childhood filled with the cold, bitter silences of an estranged husband and wife, that singular witnessing of the death of love rather than its inception. It is a shame, she thought, that children are born after the fact, after the passion.

No. She would make no inquiries about the Italian. He had a good face and good manners. That would have to be enough. Even if the coincidental meetings turned into a love affair and the affair went wrong and became heartbreak, her daughter would have experienced those days, even just minutes, that can make an entire lifetime worthwhile. She would have had what Edith called “heart history.”

As for marriage, for a daughter living in Italy, she could not force herself to think about it.

•   •   •   •

T
he next day began with a cloudburst. Rain glittered in the air, catching brief reflections of light like jewels shining in a woman’s dark hair. In the hotel’s dining room, voices were hushed and the waiters moved silently through the thick, humid atmosphere of white cloths, chandeliers, and silver services.

“Shall we cancel our sightseeing?” Edith asked, pouring cream into her coffee. She broke off a corner of buttered toast and
fed it to her little dog, who sat next to her chair, dark eyes large with longing.

“Fine with me,” Teddy grumbled. “Beastly weather. These eggs are cold. Waiter!”

The three women waited patiently as Teddy complained loudly to the waiter and demanded a fresh plate. The other diners in the hotel restaurant seemed evenly divided into two groups on this matter of service: the Americans and English nodded agreement, while the French and Germans smirked into their napkins. Since the hotel catered mostly to Americans, Teddy had a largely sympathetic cohort. Still, Beatrix was embarrassed. Why couldn’t her uncle eat as the Romans ate, a simple breakfast of bread and cheese or cold meat? Why insist on eating as New Yorkers did even when they were not in New York?

“As I was saying,” Edith continued, once the new plate of hot eggs arrived. “What shall we do today?”

“I think we should alter our plan to suit the day,” Minnie said, “and visit the catacombs instead of the forum. Stay out of the weather.”

“Another old pile of stones,” Teddy grumbled, forking eggs into his mouth.

“No, dear,” Edith said. “The catacombs are underground, so it should be called another old hole in the ground, by your standards.”

Teddy glared and pulled at his waistcoat. He always put on weight when he accompanied Edith abroad, sacrificing, he complained, his sturdy sportsman’s figure to Edith’s peripatetic whims. He missed his horses and his hounds.

“What do you think, Beatrix?” Minnie asked.

Since there were gardens in neither the forum nor the catacombs, Beatrix didn’t really care which they visited. She’d had a sudden vision of leaves dancing overhead, boughs of oak reaching toward one another. There was a nest of robins in one of the branches, chirps rising in the breeze as the mother robin, worm in beak, landed on the edge of the nesting twigs to feed her brood. A memory. Bar Harbor in the spring. Such simplicity: strange to remember it amid the Michelangelos and Corinthian columns of Rome.

“It is decided, then,” Edith said, though it hadn’t been decided at all. “I’ll arrange for a guide. We leave in one hour.”

Exactly one hour later they walked out of their hotel and down the congested Corso to the church of San Sebastiano. The rain had turned to a fine drizzle, dulling the already dull colors of the ancient ochre city and muffling their steps.

Even on the widest streets of Rome, Beatrix felt hemmed in, confined. True, streets were congested in New York and some of the new buildings jutted up past a comfortable horizon. Even so, New York had more sky, more green, more sense of the presence of soil beneath the bricks. Rome, the eternal city, felt of artifice, contrivance, a kind of architectural stubbornness. We have always been here. We will always be here, the stones seemed to say.

The gray, rubble-strewn church of San Sebastiano on the Via Appia Antica was one of the smaller and older churches in the city. The facade had three arches supported by slender columns on the ground level and three large windows on the second level. It was in particularly bad repair in a city full of monuments in
bad repair, large cracks zigzagging over it like frozen lightning bolts.

“Not auspicious,” said Teddy. “However did you choose this place, Minnie?”

“The crypt has a Bernini I thought we might find interesting.”

The robin of spring simplicity sang in Beatrix’s imagination, a song of rising and falling chirps, so distinct it seemed strange to know they were sounding only in her memory. They seemed so real.

“And you will, I assure you.” Their guide stepped out of the shadows to greet them, a brown-robed, tonsured monk of indeterminate age. Cistercian. The order that brought the Inquisition to Rome. Beatrix felt both intrigued and slightly repulsed.

The monk greeted them in heavily accented English. “I am Brother Tommaso. I speak your language well. There is nothing worse than seeing a wonder and not being able to comprehend it because the words are a barrier. Is this not correct?” the monk asked.

“Absolutely correct,” Minnie agreed. “Are we to see wonders?”

The monk was tall and lean, with deep furrows in his face running from nose to chin. He had been handsome once in the way of Latin men, dark and intense with a springy walk suggestive of power. Beatrix wondered why he took vows, what he gave up, if he had regrets. Had there been a girl in his village, one who still mourned him? Perhaps another man’s wife who thought of him at night as her husband snored heavily at her side?

Beatrix had a thought, as fast as birdsong, an image of Amerigo in his home, a woman at his side, pressing her hands on his shoulders, and a thrust of jealousy made her gasp in surprise.

Foolishness, she told herself. Stop it.

“The wonder of the ages, of the earth itself,” the monk promised. “We will walk in single file. I will lead. Signor”—he nodded at Teddy Wharton—“will be last in file. Yes?” He addressed the question to Beatrix, not Mr. Wharton, as if he sensed her curiosity about him, her wandering thoughts.

“Agreed. Let’s get on with it.” Beatrix braced herself with a deep breath, dreading the closed, small places she was certain they would encounter.

Brother Tommaso pulled open the heavy wooden door and signaled them through. Inside, he gave each of them a candle and lit it.

“By the third level, we will be in darkness,” he said. “But there will be drafts, so guard your candle.”

Again, that odor of cat piss permeating everything. Rome was a city of cats; they slunk through the ruins in furry hordes, more sure of themselves than even the monk guide. We are outsiders, Beatrix thought for the hundredth time. They don’t like us, but they need us. We are yet one more invasion in their eternal city.

“These catacombs are the easiest to access, so there is much damage to them,” Brother Tommaso apologized. “Graffiti, stones carried away, sarcophagi smashed. As you see.” He held his candle higher, the better to illuminate the ravages of centuries of vandalism. The first level of the catacomb looked like a rubbish
pile. They kicked loosened stones out of their way as they walked, following the beacon of the monk’s candle.

Down stone steps, slippery with damp, hollowed in their centers from millennia of footsteps. Beatrix already longed for the light, for openness. The passage was so narrow she would have touched both walls had she spread her arms.

“The catacombs are carved from tufa,” Brother Tommaso said in a practiced voice. “Volcanic rock is soft, easy to shape. You may pick up one of the stones and scratch it with your fingernail. Test it.”

Beatrix did. It flaked, leaving grit under her nail. No nourishment in it, she thought. Nothing could take root there, even if there were light, perhaps not even moss or lichen. It was good only for the already dead.

“Come,” said the monk. They stepped into deeper shadow, and then into darkness, their candles lighting the way.

The second level was a little wider than the stair passage had been, and lined on either side with what seemed like shelves carved into the rock itself. “These cubicula were carved in the fourth century. This is where the bodies were laid to rest,” Tommaso said. “At one time there would have been hundreds in these catacombs, but alas, there has always been a market for relics, for crushed bone and mummy powder.” He sighed at the general gullibility of a frail humanity.

Beatrix, adjusting to the darkness and feeling slightly freed by it, felt an impulse to find a bone, to bring it back to Bar Harbor and crush it into powder, to feed that powder to the rambling
rose that splayed against the south wall of the house. Would the rose know that it was now part Roman?

Minnie had more practical concerns. “How did they die, the people laid to rest in this catacomb?”

“Lions in the Colosseum, probably,” Teddy said with relish.

“Some martyrs, yes,” the monk said. “Others, perhaps the Roman fever. Perhaps a plague. Who knows? Death comes to us all, no matter what the path.”

Minnie held her candle close enough to her face that Beatrix could see her expression. She’s thinking of Father, Beatrix thought. The divorce. A different kind of death.

They moved deeper into the darkness. “The mausoleum of Marcus Clodius Hermes,” said Brother Tommaso, holding his candle high to illuminate the cubicula. “See the paintings here, on the entrance wall. A funeral banquet.”

Beatrix stepped closer to the wall, moved her candle in a circle as she studied the ancient faded wall painting of wealthy Romans dressed in flowing tunics and heavy earrings, reclining before tables spread with clusters of grapes, haunches of meat.

“And the miracle of the calling out of Cerasa’s demons.” The monk paused before another section of the painted wall.

“Cerasa’s demons?” Edith asked, interested. She had been quiet until now, breathing slightly heavily behind Beatrix. “Ah, yes, the man in the cave. Christ cast out his demons and they went into a herd of pigs and then over a cliff, squealing.”

“You are not a believer,” Tommaso said quietly.

“I am not a disbeliever. We must both be content with that.”

“I thought there would be . . . remains. Skeletons. That kind of thing,” Teddy said, plainly disappointed.

“In many of the catacombs, yes, there are. But not in San Sebastiano. They have all been removed. Reburied or looted.” The monk, slightly taller than Teddy, peered down at him, his gaze a reprimand for desiring the grotesque over the merely antique.

By now Beatrix’s eyes had adjusted to the thick darkness. She could see in the way she thought seeds underground saw, with their whole being, not just a single sense. She could see the cold emanating from the underground stone walls, the warmth in the center of the passageway where they stood clustered together. Time itself seemed visible, the long marches of centuries floating in the motes illuminated by their candles. The candles themselves seemed like a constellation of distant suns. Invisible planets circling them in the swirling darkness.

She thought she saw a movement in a corner shadow, movement where none of them stood, and had a sensation of being observed. They who had come to see wonders were in fact being watched by some invisible presence—she could feel it. She thought she heard the patter of feet, felt some rough furred animal of shin height rush past her. A cat, she told herself. Only a cat.

Edith’s little dog whimpered, and Beatrix heard, rather than saw, Edith bend down to pick it up and stroke it for comfort.

“Now we will see the painting of the Gorgon’s head, the Triglia, or funeral banquet room, and the Platonica, where Peter and Paul were buried,” said Brother Tommaso. He held his candle at
an angle that illuminated his sharp cheekbones and made black caverns of his eyes. His face had become skeletal through a trick of light.