Set This House on Fire (16 page)

Then, padding swiftly again across the gleaming floor—a short little man, stiffly erect—he was gone, leaving behind him, amid the shambles of the room and upon the hectic evening, the strange girlish scent of gardenias.

Much later, still shaken, unable to sleep, I sat in the library with the radio turned down low and leafed half-blindly through a copy of
Town & Country,
Through the windows blew the faint smell of bloom and fern and flowers, the sound of frogs in the meadow and katydids, and in the woods a whippoorwill, broadcasting sweet, piercing word of impending summer. Mason came in after a while wearing an ornately figured bathrobe and a broad, derisive grin.

“Well, it was quite a show, wasn’t it, Pierre?” he said.

I would like to have answered but the words, whatever they were to be, refused to leave my lips. I kept looking at the magazine. It was the first of its kind I had ever seen, and it seemed to be full of pale, scrawny people propped on shooting sticks or studying horses. I was close to tears.

“Mason,” I said finally, with a strained effort at levity, “why doesn’t Wendy get something somebody can read?”

But then I saw that he was face-down on a couch sobbing desperately into the pillows, and so, not knowing what else to say, I let him go on weeping.

After a while I dozed off. There was a sound in my ears, it seemed, of ten thousand alpine horns—slumberous, dim, muted from afar—while in a distant airy room of the mansion populated by whispers, by the footsteps of people I could not name, there came an incessant shuffling and rustling, as of someone packing for immediate flight. “Always love your mother,” I thought I heard Wendy murmur, but then, “Peter Leverett! Oh, Peter! Peter Leverett!” a voice called far above me. “Wake up! It’s
way
past time!” And I forced my eyelids apart, dreaming for a while that it was Wendy’s face hovering over me, until, pushing off the shroud of slumber, I blinked, still half-dozing, and felt the hands of Rosemarie de Laframboise urging me awake, in the dead of night, in Sambuco.

“Don’t feel too bad about it, Peter,” Rosemarie was saying, “perhaps the poor man will get all right. You know, I’ve read about people who lie in a coma for just years and years …” She faltered, as if with the sudden knowledge that this was no consolation to me at all. “… and still live.” We were standing at the front entrance of the Bella Vista, where she had waited for me while I hurriedly bathed and shaved and put on my best suit. She had waited patiently, too, while I telephoned the hospital at Naples and learned from whom I took to be some nursing sister, a frosty tight-lipped woman, that di Lieto, still sunk in his dark unflagging slumber, his broken skull packed in ice, was in that condition whose outcome only the Heavenly Father Himself could fathom or influence. As a parting shot—something steely in her voice told me she knew I was an Episcopalian—she enjoined me to prayer, and it was the look on my face, I suppose, prayerful and disconsolate, that caused Rosemarie with all the good will in the world to implant in my mind the vision of di Lieto lying supine, his hair slowly graying, oblivious of all, fed through some miserable tube until doomsday. “I mean,” she added hastily then, “what I mean is that this doesn’t mean he’s necessarily going to
die,
you know.”

“I know,” I said forlornly.

“Just try to forget about it, Peter,” she went on. “I know it must have been a horrible shock to you, but if you—if you can just for a moment conceive of it not as something so personal, but as only a—oh, I don’t know, a tiny little thing in the great working-out of the universe. Did you ever read
The Prophet,
by Kahlil Gibran?” Her voice was very sad.

“Oh Jesus, no,” I said. We paused to light cigarettes at the bottom of the steps that led into the front courtyard of the Bella Vista. Roses were in bloom here; the night was fragrant and warm and starless. Mild clouds drifted over the moon, leaving a hint in the air of reluctant and improbable rain. It would be sunny and hot again tomorrow. I felt wobbly, depleted still, as if in my recent half-hearted, muddled sleep I had not slept at all, but had walked endless distances, hefted huge burdens, battled giants. Yet as Rosemarie’s face, vast and beautiful, moved downward toward the flame in my cupped palm, obscuring the scent of roses with some strong sweet perfume of her own, it seemed that my mind was oddly keen and alert—that old beaten and buffaloed sensitivity again—and with a stab of recognition I knew I had seen her face before: it was of course Wendy’s, about which I was in no hurry to draw any Freudian parallels, but even more so it was an exact replica in composite of all of the faces of those at last fetched-up virgins gazing out at me impassive and gentle from a thousand Sunday society pages, their features all but indistinguishable one from another by the soft standardized look in their eyes, so completely American, of conventional morals and moneyed security.
The Prophet.
It was indeed a Finch College notion of poetry, and I could have laughed aloud, except for the fact that now, as she drew back her head, it occurred to me why Rosemarie seemed so sad. She was Mason’s “mistress” (I felt she would be the first to put quotation marks around the word), and something abstracted, insecure, and fumbling about her, despite all her smooth big beauty, made me sense that she had come to feel ashamed of the role, or perhaps afraid of it, and yearned for that lost, irretrievable image of herself, gazing out chastely from the engagement pages of the
New York Times.
Was I indulging in unfair prejudgment? I don’t think so. Besides, as she turned to take my arm and as we stepped out into the cobbled village road, light from a street lamp fell full upon her and I could see for the first time the shiny blue bruise beneath her eye, where Mason had socked her.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come and wake you sooner,” she said as we walked along, “but you looked like you needed sleep so badly, poor boy. Mason agreed with me. I hope you didn’t mind.”

“Not at all,” I said. “Thanks for coming for me.”

“I’ll bet you could stand a drink.”

“I could do more with some food,” I said. I was famished. I had had nothing to eat all day, except for the bun in Formia, and that seemed years ago. “I wonder if you all have anything, or if I should try to get something at—”

“Oh, Peter, how absurd!” she broke in. “Of course we have just oodles of things to eat. You must be famished! And Mason drove over to the PX in Naples today, and just brought back literally tons of provisions. Oh, steaks and chopped meat and packages and packages of frozen foods. And
milk,
Peter, real honest-to-God milk in bottles! Mason says it’s flown down from Germany. I drank a whole quart this evening in place of cocktails. Really.”

“The PX?” I began. “But how—”

“Oh, you know he was a pilot during the war. He established PX privileges in Naples as soon as we got here.”

“A pilot? But what—” Once again I halted, perplexed for an instant but quickly perplexed no longer as a horde of recollections about Mason came tumbling back. I think I must have suppressed a groan. “I mean I didn’t know being an ex—an expilot gave you PX privileges. Unless you were still in. He must have some kind of deal, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know, Peter,” she said in a faraway tone. “Those things are so complicated to me. Anyway,” she said, her voice brightening, “we have just everything to eat. Just God’s own quantity. How would a nice sirloin steak appeal to you?”

I was about to reply with enthusiasm when out from a dimly lit alleyway hopped a crouched and ragged figure that approached us with a husky snuffling noise—a series of rich, porcine grunts that caused Rosemarie to stop and grow rigid in her tracks, clutching my wrist in a sudden powerful grip as she uttered a gasp of alarm. But the subhuman noise, I could tell, came only from my dragoman of the afternoon, Saverio, as he grappled with speech: his flat red face bobbed toward us, fat tongue wagging in the lacuna between his snaggled teeth, and he managed to roar out a phrase in incomprehensible dialect, his features all smiles and glowing, like some inebriate Halloween pumpkin.

“Oh, it’s that
idiot!”
Rosemarie gasped. “Tell him to go away.”

“He’s harmless,” I said. “Besides, I can’t understand him. Speak
slowly,
Saverio.”

“Buonasera, signora!”
he howled at Rosemarie.
“Buonasera, padrone!
Look there, signora, I have polished your Cadillac machine!”

Rosemarie shuddered as we moved on. “Ugh! He reminds me of a Charles Addams cartoon. What on earth is he saying?”

Beside us, parked against a wall bordering the shadowy and narrow street, was a convertible Cadillac so red and vulgar and immense that for a moment, although I must have once or twice seen its prototype in Rome, I could hardly believe my eyes. Around it, as around us now, hung the damp and ancient smell of the village, yet the car clearly exuded its own smell—of new paint and plastic and rubber, of volatile newness, of all of the witchery of Michigan—and Saverio had labored until it sparkled in the night like some mountainous ruby.

“He said he has polished your car,” I told Rosemarie. “Is it really yours?”

“Well, it’s Mason’s,” she replied, with what sounded like a note of apology. “The color really is—frightening, isn’t it? And it
is
too large,” she added thoughtfully. As we passed on by the car she gave a gentle caress to one of the fenders; the machine was so enormous that it seemed capable, through some weird mechanical parturition, of having given birth to the midget Italian car parked at its side. “Mason’s right about it, you know. He said that when we drive through some of the country villages the peasants couldn’t be more startled if we had rolled down the main street on the
Queen Elizabeth”
She made a self-conscious giggle.

At my prompting, then, Rosemarie handed Saverio a few lire (“I didn’t ask him to polish it,” she said at first, but seemed genuinely regretful when, after telling her that it was the custom for Americans to take such minor extortions with good grace, I added a solemn commentary on the poverty of this southern land); the creature flapped away into the shadows, and a few steps later we arrived at the doorway to Mason’s palace just as a church bell deep within the town sounded the last half-hour before midnight. As I pushed against the massive door, a large enclosed courtyard presented itself to view: its vaulted ceiling, supported by graceful fluted columns, disappeared into the shadows high above us where a trapped swallow swooped and fluttered and a skylight in the shape of a fleur-de-lis allowed a vestige of sudden moonlight to pass through. “The tiles,” I said, looking toward the floor, “they’re beautiful.” And they were: the entire surface of the floor was emblazoned with a remarkable pattern of interlocking circles of red and blue that gave an effect of receding perspective at once colorful, slightly dizzying, and resplendent; yet as I accustomed my eyes to the place I could tell that something was wrong here and then saw that it was only the tangle of cameras and arc lamps and booms which emerged from the shadows. “They were shooting here today,” Rosemarie explained as we walked across the courtyard. “I can tell,” I replied. Wide streaks crisscrossed the tiles where the wheels of the spidery machines had rolled back and forth, gouging out ugly channels in the clay. “You know Fausto owns this palace, too, and he was furious when he saw what they had done to the tiles,” said Rosemarie, as if she had sensed my dismay, “but when Herb Wingate—he’s the unit manager—told him they would pay for it, he was just like a happy little dog.”

Now as we approached the balustrade which led, I gathered, to Mason’s living quarters high above, the courtyard became a resonant sounding board; a hell of a racket broke loose. From the regions upstairs, muffled yet distinct behind the alabaster walls, came the noise of a tinkling piano, feet thumping, a high falsetto voice singing above it all, then wave upon wave of hysterical laughter. Close by us, from a doorway at the level at which we were standing and so loud that each crashing bass note had the effect of the tread of elephants, a phonograph erupted the opening bars from the overture to
Don Giovanni.
Together, none of the sounds made any sense; I felt deafened, and I had the childish urge to stick my fingers in my ears. But Rosemarie clutched me by the hand then and, as we climbed the stairs up and away from the acoustical trap, the music all around became discreet and reasonable, as if someone had jumped up to turn the volume down.

“That’s where the Kinsolvings live,” she said, pointing down past the forest of movie equipment to the doorway we had just passed. “They were there when we arrived last spring. It was Cass—didn’t you say you met him?—who was the first American we met when we got here. He’s—” She hesitated. “Well, he’s—he’s really quite odd.”

“You mean that guy—that drunk I met this afternoon on the road? The guy with the Tarheel accent that runs off at the mouth?”

“Oh, Peter, he’s a mess. He’s—” She paused, made a strained little laugh. “Forget it,” she said.

I would have forgotten it, too, except for the honest concern, the worry in her voice, which made me say: “What’s the trouble? Outside of the booze, that is.”

“Oh nothing,” she said. Then she nervously grasped my wrist. “He
is
such a terrible drunkard. And—well, he’s sort of southern and odd and, oh, I don’t know,
lower class,
if you know what I mean. A real—well, a real psychopathic, I think. Then there’s—there’s this girl, an Italian girl that he and Mason—” Abruptly she flushed, turning a bright crimson, and chewed her lip. “Oh nothing,” she said hoarsely, shaking her head. “Nothing. Nothing, Peter. Just forget it.”

“You can tell me if—” I began.

“No,” she said quickly. “Please. Just forget it.”

For a moment she seemed so agitated that I shared a bit of her concern. But she obviously was determined to drop the matter—and she tried to.

Yet she was unable to stop brooding. “It’s the funniest thing, when we first met him he tried to make himself out as a famous painter. Imagine!” She mentioned a notorious young expatriate artist of whom I had heard. “Imagine! When he’s nothing but—” Her voice trailed off and she gave a shudder.