NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (34 page)

Ellen turned to Sam while he was striving to disentangle his long legs from the baby like shell of the little car. “Sammy,” she cried, “these are the ones!”

They confronted him now, not cold or inhospitable in the
least, but wary, like forewarned children, waiting for proof that he had not come from the bank or the government.

“Buon giorno,”
he said uneasily. The little boy sat still on the man’s shoulders, gazing down from that height as unsmiling as his parents and with the same smoldering black eyes. Sam stuck out his hand, although it felt as awkward and artificial at the end of his arm as a divining rod. “
Sono un amico di
Nick. Nick diGrasso.” Desperately he turned to Ellen. “Was that right? I wasn’t ready to start talking.”

But the man was pressing his hand with his own, which felt as though it had been carved from oak. His brown face was wrinkling like a bent leather glove.
“Benvenuto,”
he said,
“benvenuto a
Santa Maria dei Fiori.”

I’ll be damned, Sam said to himself. It works! “What do you know,” he said to his wife. “I can understand. He says ‘Welcome.’”

Ellen was already exchanging greetings with the little boy, who dimpled at her as his father swung him down to the ground, and his mother, suddenly worried about appearances, bent to wipe the child’s nose. Ellen had learned the boy’s name at once and was rummaging in her handbag for more of those candy bars, cooing at the child, “Eh, Gian Paolo,
cioccolata
!” and demanding belatedly if his mother objected to his being stuffed with Hershey bars.

Sam reached quickly into the car for the camera which Ellen’s father had given them for a going-away present. At once the family began to primp, as though they had gotten dressed up for a ceremonial family photograph. Sam did not wait, but while Ugo Fannini dug his thick calloused fingers into his tough wiry hair in an effort to pull it into place, and his wife tucked her child’s blouse into his shorts and pulled up the dangling folds of his heavy woolen stockings from his clodhoppers, he clicked, wound, clicked. Ellen said angrily, “Has it occurred to you that you’re invading their privacy?”

“They don’t seem to mind,” Sam replied, and then said to the Fanninis, pointing to the camera, “
Per
Nicolò O.K.?”

Ugo Fannini nodded animatedly and said something Sam could not catch.

Ellen explained, a little tight-lipped, “They’d like us to come up to their house.”

Sam extended his hand to the little boy, who was already leading the way, waving them on with his Hershey bars.

They had to climb up one more hillside which a jeep could hardly have mounted. The path proceeded jaggedly through the woods at sharp herringbone angles, unsupported by wall or balustrade. Its flagstones, embedded in dirt and enlaced with wandering roots, were worn hollow, like the pavings of an old church, by generations of plodding feet.

“We’re in a different country, at last,” he said to his wife. “I can feel it under my feet.”

But Ellen was conversing earnestly with Ugo’s wife, leaving Sam to tramp along stolidly with Ugo and the skittering little boy. He wanted to ask, but did not know how, if these trees through which they were making their arduous way were the chestnut grove that Nick had asked him to examine. He had looked up the word “chestnut” earlier, in their cabin, when Ellen hadn’t been watching, but now it escaped him completely. Still, these must be the trees. They were old, potent, sturdy as the people who chose to remain among them. Greening once again and twinkling in the clear spring light, they rose splendidly through the thin mountainous air toward the blue bowl of the sky.

Then the stone-and-plaster cottage came into view just below the crest of the hillside. At the final few steps Ugo Fannini reached down, as though it were something that was always done, like crossing yourself, and clasped his boy’s hand to swing him up these last couple of feet. For a moment Sam was stabbed with a queer pang of irrational envy.

The sound of their coming had roused a silky-haired hunting dog and the older Fanninis too, who came out together from a barn which faced the farmhouse and was tied to it by a rotting, unpainted grape arbor under which stood an uneven work table, a wooden bench and several copper kettles. The old lady (no more than sixty, maybe, but she could have passed for eighty) began to shell peas nervously, more to keep her hands occupied than to finish the task, revealing as she smiled—the wrinkles around her eyes deepening into channels—that it was she and not her husband whom Ugo resembled.

The old man did not smile. He seemed to have grown up out of
the ground like the grapevine before which he stood, gnarling, twisting and darkening over the years, his skin seaming with the seasons like the tough bark of a deeply rooted vine. Even his clothing—the shapeless beret wedged between his ears, the blue work shirt bleached almost white, the flannel trousers flapping over the frayed carpet slippers—seemed always to have been a part of him, and added to the sense he gave off, almost like an odor, of stolid permanence. His gaze, fixed and impersonal as he attended, with no sign of interest or comprehension, to his son’s rapid introductions, came from but one eye, for the other had been enucleated. In its place he had plugged a colorless twist of cotton wadding, the end protruding villainously from the socket into which it had been stuffed.

The forbidding gaze from his one blue eye was more than patriarchal; it was ferociously piratical. Or maybe, Sam thought, I am romanticizing. But the next instant, as Ugo was saying something about Nicolò, the old man leaped upon Sam.

The dark wrinkles of his face splitting into a smile, old Fannini began to pummel, pinch and shake him, all the while emitting a startling highpitched wheeze. It was an ardent greeting—it could be nothing else—for the old man slapped Sam’s cheek affectionately and even tugged at the point of his short beard, cackling, “Hey,
barba, barba
! Hey,
barbato
!”

Sam wanted desperately to thrust aside the old man, who was no longer just a carving of someone’s idea of a father but a live peasant, smelling powerfully of dried sweat, garlic fumes and stale pipe tobacco. But he dared not move. As he submitted passively to the embrace, little Gian Paolo jumped up and down, like his barking dog, which was careering wildly, leaping into the air as if possessed. His grandmother stood expressionlessly by his mother, her wrinkled hands folded before the waistband of her apron. His father, Ugo, was conversing rapidly and jerkily with Ellen.

Sam muttered to her, “Would you please get this old man off my back?”

But Ugo was taking hold, talking loudly to his father and, over his shoulder, more slowly to Ellen.

“Sam,” she said. “Grandpa is deaf. He thought his son said you were Nick, when he was only saying that you were from Nick.”

The old man released him, his eye gone suddenly blank and guarded again.

Sam put his hand to his face. “What was that business of grabbing my beard?”

“Just teasing. He hadn’t seen you since you were eleven—I mean Nick, of course.”

Sam could not exactly brush off the old man’s lingering imprint, not with everyone looking at him as though in truth he had suddenly been changed into someone else. The grandfather had resumed his original stance, exactly as though he had never done that wild capering, and so completely unembarrassed by it that now, only moments later, Sam could hardly bring himself to believe that he hadn’t imagined the entire episode.

“Now that you’ve had your fun,” he said to Ellen, a little more stiffly than he had intended, “would you ask Ugo if he’d mind showing me around?”

Motioning to him to follow, Ugo trudged off, the tawny dog trotting along at the rundown heels of his fiber sandals.

Ugo led him up behind the house on a sloping path through the vegetable garden until they had attained the highest point of the diGrasso land. From this small clearing they had a spectacular view. Had they been giants they could have leaped, it seemed, over the beets, cabbages and beans and landed directly on the roof of the Fannini cottage; and from there one more great bound would have taken them yet farther down, to the dome of the monastery beside which stood, alone on the dusty piazza, his little toy of a car, glittering in the spring sun, and far below that, sharply separated from them by the jagged white lightning of the mountain stream whose torrent they had crossed on the way up, the rooftop tiles of the little village of Santa Maria. What was more, it was easy to discern, with the aid of the defining sweeps of Ugo’s arm, the limits of the diGrasso property, the grove of chestnut trees which Nick had spoken of with such deserved enthusiasm. It was a fine few acres, but it was hardly likely that the property could be put to much better use than that which the Fannini family was making of it now.

With the aid of gestures and a few English words, Ugo explained, stumbling and reddening, that he was frightened by the
implications of the Kellers’ visit. Was Nick unhappy with the terms under which the Fanninis were living on his property? Did he have something new in mind?

Sam tried to protest that he was not in on Nick’s big decisions, that he was simply looking the place over for Nick.

“What you do?” Ugo asked, pointing to Sam’s hands. He wanted to know, it appeared, what Sam did for a living. Sam did his best to explain what a city planner was, but he might as well have tried to explain bird watching or polo playing to Ugo, who, Sam feared, understood only that his visitor was some kind of landlord’s agent.

Nevertheless Ugo was polite. Sam was truly pleased to be able to explain, even haltingly, how he would tell Nick that his property was in good hands.

Sam was pleased, too, with the knowledge that he was not kidding himself. There was really no more practical use for this mountainside than the maintenance of the Fannini family. The chestnut trees looked healthy, but there weren’t enough of them to log, and in any event the hauling would be too hard; it was a glorious site for skiers, but again it was much too far from any place remotely fashionable; and the land itself, although you could keep a kitchen garden or even a subsistence farm of sorts, was too steeply pitched for anything more ambitious than what the Fanninis were doing. Nick’s best bet would be to leave things as they were, even if the Fanninis paid him no more than a couple of dollars a month.

Scrambling down the garden path with Ugo, Sam found himself disposed to admire the simple improvements the Fanninis had made in the years since Nick’s departure—the freshly plastered walls, the new timber supports for the trellis, the drainage ditches dug behind the old folks’ living quarters to protect them from flash floods.

Ellen, on her knees in the dust, had been playing with Gian Paolo, the boy laughing shrilly as he sought insincerely to flee, his mother red with pleasure, the grandparents watching remotely in the shade.

“He’s a love! A perfect love!” Ellen cried as the shadows of the two men fell athwart her and the child. “These are nice people,
aren’t they, Sam? I’m so glad we came. Did you have any trouble making yourself understood?”

Sam shook his head.

“Signora Fannini wants to show us through the house—she’s been waiting. Come, let’s go.” And she nodded to Ugo’s wife, who led the way into her cramped parlor.

The ceiling was so low that Sam had to duck. Indeed, there was hardly room for the six of them and the little boy, but as they moved on to the kitchen, with its massive wood-burning stove, and to the one bedroom, dominated by a high narrow bed and a loud chromo of the weeping Christ above Gian Paolo’s ancient blackened crib, he could not resist the foretaste of his description of this tour when he returned to his colleagues on Post Street.

Their hosts seemed more dutiful than proud. It was only when Ugo took them across to the other building, which sheltered both his old parents and his cow, that he lost his taciturnity.

Flinging open the split door to display the somnolent beast, which was indoors because it had only recently calved, Ugo said, proudly,
“Nostro migliore possessione.”

Sam would have liked to see how the old people lived, in the dirt-floored one room separated from the cow by a partition and warmed by the heat of the beast, but Ugo’s mother unexpectedly barred the way. Wrenching her veined hands, she shook her head violently and muttered something that Sam could not catch.

“It’s not fit, she says,” Ellen said.

“What’s not fit?”

“Their home. For visitors.”

“Then let’s say our goodbyes and shove off.”

But Ugo was bringing out wine and setting a tray on the table under the arbor. This was the real proof, Sam felt, that they were being regarded not as accomplices of a far-off landlord, but almost as friends. Ugo wiped the dark bottle carefully before drawing the cork, his wife pressed water tumblers on them, and little Gian Paolo helped his grandmother pass a dish of hard speckled cookies. Only the grandfather stood aloof, wineglass in hand, his blue eye shaded by his beret and by the trellis under which he remained.

“Salute!”
Sam said boldly, raising his glass. Then he turned to his wife. “How am I doing?”

“This is our chance to ask for that souvenir—the pictures, remember?”

Sam was suddenly touched by a vague sense of alarm. “I wouldn’t do that. Nick can get along—”

“Nonsense. Didn’t you see all those old pictures by Gian Paolo’s crib? They’re of the diGrasso family, not of these people.”

Before he could ask how she was so sure, Ellen had proceeded with an explanation of Nick’s request. Ugo and his wife listened intently. Then Ugo said something to his wife, who hastened back into the house, wiping her hands on her skirt.

“You see? They’re probably glad to get rid of the pictures and to send Nick something a little special at the same time.”

It was too late to argue. Sam gave Ugo an American cigarette (the old man declined with the merest horizontal gesture), and they were lighting up when Ugo’s wife returned, bearing a green embossed box the size of a Whitman’s Sampler.

“Ecco!”
said Ugo Fannini. He opened it for Ellen, saying something about how glad they were to return these pictures Nick had left behind. “With our compliments.” At these words, Gian Paolo burst into tears and, as Ugo cried out in mortification, pounded his fists against his father’s leg.