Crossing to Safety (31 page)

Just the same, if we had wanted a maid, a driver, a cook, a
sarta,
a concubine, a faithful follower until the first better opportunity showed, we could have had that girl for a thousand lire a day. She would have abandoned her gas pumps and climbed into the car in the clothes she wore, not asking where we were going so long as it was somewhere not Gubbio. We regretted afterward that we hadn’t asked her. It would have been interesting to see her expression when she found herself expected to stand respectfully before the Della Robbia lunettes in the Pazzi Chapel, or asked to wait with the car outside Santa Maria Novella.

There was another time, after the mildest winter in memory had relaxed and the valley of the Arno was greening and the blossoms bursting out and the river running bank full, when we drove to Arezzo to see the Piero della Francesca paintings, and then came back through the hills, stopping at Sansepolcro, where we routed out a sacristan or some such and got him to open the chapel in which Piero’s resurrected Christ started up behind the tomb and the sleeping drunks who had been set to watch it.

Until then there had been a good deal of frivolity in us, a springtime response to the blossoms and the mild, clear air. But Piero’s Christ knocked it out of us like an elbow in the solar plexus. That gloomy, stricken face permitted no forgetful high spirits. It was not the face of a god reclaiming his suspended immortality, but the face of a man who until a moment ago had been thoroughly and horribly dead, and still had the smell of death in his clothes and the terror of death in his mind. If resurrection had taken place, it had not yet been comprehended.

Three of us were moved to respect, perhaps awe, by that painting, but Charity thought, or pretended to think, that it was another instance of an artist resorting to shock for his effects. Instead of trying to paint the joy, the beatification, the wonder that would naturally accompany the triumph over death—an uplifting idea if there ever was one—Piero had chosen to do it backwards, upside down. She thought he was anti-human in his scornful portraits of the drunken soldiers, and anti-God in his portrait of Christ. It seemed to her an arrogant painting. Instead of showing pity for human suffering it insisted on grinding down on the shocking details. Instead of trying to paint the joyfulness of Christ’s sacrifice Piero almost seemed to call it hopeless. Why hadn’t he, if only by a gleam in the sky or the glimpsed feather of an angel’s wing, put in
anything
that suggested the immediacy of heaven and release? And what
terrible
eyes this Christ had!

We did not argue with her. She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones. But I noticed that Sally stood a long while on her crutches in front of that painting propped temporarily against a frame of raw two-by-fours. She studied it soberly, with something like recognition or acknowledgment in her eyes, as if those who have been dead understand things that will never be understood by those who have only lived.

In the sunny, unseasonably warm afternoon we came back along the spine of the mountains on a crooked, little-traveled road. The hillsides oozed, the gulches gushed water, here and there the road was invaded by slides.
Attenzione,
said a sign.
Sassi Caduti.
Then we came around a bend and were stopped by a gang of men gathered in the middle of the road, surrounding one who held his right wrist in his left hand, supporting against his bloodstained shirt a right hand that was smashed, swollen, smeared with blood and mud.

They swarmed around us, all talking at once, too fast and too loud and too many at a time for me to understand. The hurt man stood alone, holding his wrist, and dripped blood into the road.

“Più lentamente, per favore,”
I said.
“Non così in fretta. Non capisco.”

But if I had enough Italian to ask them to slow down, and if they did slow down some—no Italian on the scene of an
incidente
can slow down
much
—I didn’t have enough to understand what they were saying. It was Sally, cranking down the rear window, who finally talked to them. They wanted us to take the hurt man to his village, eight kilometers further on.

We had a hasty discussion about space, while the men outside listened to our strange tongue and interrupted us in theirs. The Fiat, barely adequate for four small people, already held three large ones and one medium-sized one. At first Sid insisted that he would get out and stay here while we took the man in, after which we could come back and get him. But I was afraid that the man might pass out, or need to be carried, and I might not be able to handle him alone. Sally couldn’t be left behind on her crutches. Charity couldn’t either, though she was willing and though she probably would have been safe enough. But when she got out and stood by the car, tall and striking and dressed like the queen of the gypsies, I saw a couple of workmen behind her wag their heads and wink, appraising her like men admiring a horse. So in the end we decided that Charity and Sid would cram into the front seat with me, and the hurt man could ride in back with Sally. For five miles it ought to be bearable.

His friends pushed and lifted the man in. He held his mangled hand carefully and did not raise his eyes except for one brief flash around the interior. I saw him take in Sally’s legs, in their braces, hanging lifeless from the edge of the seat. One swift glance to see the face that went with those legs, a glance quick and surprised, and then he was looking down again, and never looked back up until we stopped. His shirt and the front of his pants were bloody, and blood and mud were drying into a crust on his hand.

We tried getting Charity in beside me and Sid beside her, but there was no room. So she got out, Sid got in, and Charity crawled in on top of him, her head jammed against the ceiling, her neck cramped, her voice full of cheerful assurances that it was all right, it was fine. “Only don’t dawdle around!” she said over my head.

Sid’s leg was so tight against me that I had trouble reaching the gearshift lever. To a chorus of advice we pulled away, edged around the slide the men had been clearing, and went on up the road.

“How’s it go?” I said, to all and sundry.

“Fine, fine,” they said. The car filled with the smells of sweat and blood and garlic, and Sally opened a rear window. The hurt man said nothing, and Sally said nothing to him. Seeing his grim, unshaven, rocklike face and downcast eyes in the rear view mirror, I understood why. He invited neither conversation nor sympathy. Once or twice, when we hit rough patches of road, I heard squeaks from Charity, jammed against the ceiling on my right. I drove somewhere between fast and carefully, unable to decide which was better.

After seven kilometers I saw the village on a hilltop to the right. The road that turned off to it was a wet clay cart-track with a grassy crown. Not at all sure we could get up there—it might be like climbing a greased pole—I turned off, but the man in back squawked in a raven’s voice,
“Qua! Qua!”

I stopped. “Tell him I think we should take him up,” I said to Sally. “Ask him if there’s a doctor or first-aid station or
farmacia
up there.”

“Qua!”
the man said. He was trying to fumble open the door without letting go the wrist of his hurt hand.

“Dov’ è la sua casa?”
Sally said.
“Dove si trova un dottore? Un medico?
Oh, how do you say it?
Ce ne uno lassù?”

The man continued to fumble at the door handle, which he didn’t know how to work. I reached back and opened the door for him and he lurched out and stood. He was a man of perhaps fifty, gray and weathered as a boulder, thick in the shoulders. His eyes, suspicious and quick under heavy brows, darted across the car to where Sid and then Charity came untangling out of the cramped front seat. When he looked back at me I had a little tingling shock. He had the eyes of Piero’s Christ—and what was that? Regional type unchanged since the sixteenth century? Community of pain? Or merely suggestion from my own hyperstimulated imagination?

The man said something—grunt or
grazie
?—and with his bad hand cradled against his stomach started off up the track that led in a long steady incline up the hill until it disappeared among walls and buildings.

“Wait!” Charity called after him. “Oh, we can’t let him
walk
!
Signore!
Hey!”

The man walked on, his right shoulder low, and did not look back.

“Oh,
shoot!
” Charity said, distracted. “What are we going to do? Drive after him, Larry. We can’t just let him walk away. That’s a
terrible
looking hand. Drive after him. Hurry. We’ll stay here.”

“I don’t think he wants any more help.”

“But he needs it, whether he wants it or not. He could lose his hand, and what would a workman like him do with only one hand? He’s got to have a
doctor.
They’ll probably just soak his hand in dirty water and wrap it in a rag, or poultice it with
cow
manure!”

“What would we do?” Sid said. “Tackle him, and load him back in by force?”

“Oh,” Charity said, “why did you let him out?”

“Because he
wanted
out,” I said.

The man had reached the foot of the long slope and started up it. He walked steadily, leaning into the hill. Charity said no more, but I could hear her boiling. After a minute or two she climbed into the back seat beside Sally, Sid got in beside me, and we drove on.

In Pontassieve I looked halfheartedly for a
farmacia,
knowing that in Italy pharmacists treat minor injuries and bandage wounds. But it was getting late, the traffic was thick, we were all tired from a too-long drive in that sardine can of a car. Seeing nothing on the main street, I went on through without a further search. With only monosyllabic communication, we eased down into the traffic of suburban Florence, crossed the river and climbed the hill, turned left short of San Miniato, and stopped in front of the Langs’ villa. Politely, they suggested that we stop for a drink. We pleaded fatigue. Hastily, almost curtly, we said good-bye for that day.

“Bad ending,” I said to Sally as we threaded the little walled streets toward the Viale Galileo. “Good start, bad ending.”

“She wanted to help.”

“Of course. We all did.”

“It frustrates her when she can’t.”

“You can say that again. Lie down. Shut up. I want to
help
you.”

“You exaggerate,” Sally said wearily. “Charity hates pain, and you could see in every move he made how much pain he was in. A rock must have come down on his hand—it was just mangled. And did you notice how stoical he was? Not a whimper or a blink. He just closed around his pain and set his teeth. But you could tell by the way he moved.”

We circled with the traffic around the Piazzale Galileo and into the Viale Machiavelli, heading toward Porta Romana. “Well,” I said, “she can blame it on the Artist Upstairs. How’s she going to count only sunny hours if He keeps throwing things like that in her path?”

“You know she doesn’t really believe that Pollyanna theory. She knows about the unsunny hours. She was more upset than any of us. She always is when anybody is sick or hurt or unhappy.”

“I suppose,” I said. “Hell, I don’t have to suppose, I know. She just made me sore with her suggestion that I’d abandoned the poor guy on the roadside.”

For a while the cars were thick and I couldn’t talk. Sally sat in back, holding onto the strap I had rigged back there. Down the Petrarca we had fairly clear sailing. “Did you notice his eyes?” I said.

“Yes! Yes, weren’t they awful? So gloomy and set inward, as if they couldn’t see out at all, they could only see in, toward the pain he had bundled up inside.”

A Vespa cut around me, ducked in front so that I rode the brake, and darted off between two cars ahead. “Tell me something,” I said.

“What?”

“When you remember today, what will you remember best, the spring countryside, and the company of friends, or Piero’s Christ and that workman with the mangled hand?”

She thought a minute. “All of it,” she said. “It wouldn’t be complete or real if you left out any part of it, would it?”

“Go to the head of the class,” I said.

I raise my eyes. Sally’s legs hang quiet in their braces, her feet are placed precisely on the metal step of her chair. The sunlight lies diagonally across her breast, the shadows of leaves or thoughts move on her face.

“Do you remember Christmas Eve?”

“All those red hats.”

“More than red hats. Remember the torches along the river, and in sconces on the walls? And what an icy, glittering, transparent night it was? How the whole city bloomed with light when we went up to the Piazzale for the view? And all the churches. Even grim old San Lorenzo was festive. You must have pushed me miles in the wheelchair that night, from one church to another, and every one with what looked like two dozen bishops and archbishops and cardinals saying mass, and thousands of people coming in and out, and hoisting their children on their shoulders for a better view. Lang was enchanted. She thought we must live that way every day.”

She sits looking down at her hands. Then her eyes come up and meet mine. She sighs and tightens her mouth and smiles a bleak little smile. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were all walking down the Tornabuoni right now, on our way to look at all the Ghirlandaios in the Santa Trinita, and watch the red hats and the brocade doing mumbo-jumbo around the altar?”

Her face says she is unconvinced by memory and unpersuaded by wishfulness. She throws her eyes and her fingers skyward and says, in imitation of Assunta’s croak,
“Pazienza!”
Her hand reaches for the canes leaning against her chair. “Will you get me up? I’d better go, before we start.”

5

Going up the hill she is attentive to the woods we climb through. When we first saw this hill in 1938, before the Langs had bought the farms that contained it, it was only in the first stage of metamorphosis from pasture back to forest. Now it is authentic woods, mostly maple, beech, and white and yellow birch. All through, among the larger trees, tall saplings as thick as a man’s arm or leg have been shade-killed, and many, in falling, have got hung up in the trees around them. They give the woods the look of an Uccello or Piero battle painting with long slanted lances; and those dark angled lines, with the bursts and patches of sun that penetrate the leaves, create precisely the illusion of depth that Uccello and Piero were after. We seem to see a great distance into the trees, though it can’t be more than fifty yards to where the hill rises steeply and shuts off the view.

Goldenrod and raspberry bushes crowd the shoulders of the road, which has been washed in the rains and kicked into a washboard by spinning tires. Moe grinds the gears, shifting. We climb steeply, then level off a little. Sally’s warped hand clings to my sleeve. Her eyes never leave the woods. She says nothing.

Now the paddock with its stake-and-rider fence opens on the right, a green opening hewn out of the trees. This is one of Charity’s works, a facility for the grandchildren as they grow. Farther up the hill, a half mile beyond the house, there is another—a meadow two or three acres in extent, bulldozed flat and planted to grass, designed to be a playing field for soccer and softball. It would not surprise me to find, when we go through this afternoon on our way to the picnic, that Charity has erected bleachers for the old folks to sit in while they watch competitions among the family young. She does not think small.

As we reach the turn by the stable I see that the gate is open. A girl in jeans sits a sorrel horse just outside it. From the front seat Hallie waves and calls. “Hello, Margie!”

The girl’s arm comes up, she stares nearsightedly, her rather sullen face is broken by a flash of very white teeth.

“Oh, is that Margie?” Sally says. “Why, she’s all grown up!” She waves, we all wave, but Moe does not stop. He challenges the hill somewhat grimly. Our tires chatter for a few yards, and then we level out on the grass before the front door of Ridge House.

Moe hops out and opens the door on Sally’s side. She pokes her canes out and rests them against the car, and when he starts to hold them for her she shakes her head at him with a smile. Laboriously she lifts her feet with her hands, one at a time, to the edge. Bracing herself on one cane, she pushes with her good hand, stands up, bends to lock her knees, gathers in the other cane, and stands straight. I see her eyes go to the closed front door.

“Mom will be on the terrace,” Hallie says.

There is no walk. We go around the house on the dense, closely mown grass. The mountain ash that Sid and I planted the year they moved up here has grown to be twenty feet high. Near it a wild apple, growing from below the wall that holds the hilltop in, leans its load of green nubbins over the lawn.

We round the corner and there is Charity’s view, first imagined and then created in defiance of the genius of this country, which tried always to hide itself in trees. Broken by an occasional tall maple or birch that she had the cutters leave for visual effect, the hill drops away, furred with raspberry and dense hardwood seedlings, to the untouched woods below. The view swoops down and then levels to the lakeshore, across the lake and its far meadows, then up again to broken hills, the blue mountain ridge, the sky with traveling snow-white clouds. It is the sort of high blue day that Charity must have had in mind when she imagined and began to expose what she would see from this hill.

And there she sits who made it—there
they
sit, or half recline, she in a lounge with a steamer rug over her legs, he on the grass in his faded summer khaki. They have not heard us. Charity’s face is turned toward the outline of Mount Mansfield on the horizon, and seen from the rear and half in profile she looks as stony as the mountain. Something in the set of her head and the stiffness of her neck says
no,
says refusal, says obstinate rejection. Sid, leaning on his elbow with his eyes slanted up at her averted face, slaps his flat hand against the ground as if baffled.

Then they hear us. Their faces turn. Sid leaps to his feet, nimble as a young man, and comes yelling across the lawn. I get an instant impression—not much changed, a little older, only a little gray, in good shape, still a formidable physical presence, his voice the remembered musical, slightly metallic tenor—and brace myself for the crushing of the hand and the greeting.

But I am also aware, even in the violence of his welcome, of the other part of this reunion: Sally floundering forward, all but running on her canes, her uncontrollable iron legs trying to keep up with the crutches; and on the lounge Charity half rising toward their awkward, maimed meeting, her face a thin wedge, and on it that incredible, gleaming, ardent smile, a transfiguration, a bursting to the surface of pure delight, uncomplicated love.

Now we are finally here. This, in all its painful ambiguity, is what we came for.