Sign Languages (18 page)

Alice worried about the flowers laid flat by the water. She hoped the sun wouldn't come out suddenly and scald everything.

Back inside she dressed quickly in pants and a long-sleeve shirt. She gently opened the bedroom door and watched Evan under a pile of covers, only the top of his head showing.

“Hey, you going back to sleep?”

Evan moved his legs but didn't turn over.

“Come on, let's clean up outside. I think we can save most of the flowers. Come on, you won't believe the stuff washed up out there. I think there's a tennis racket in the willow over the creek.”

She waited, smiling, for Evan to speak. She wanted his help. She pictured them raking up the trash, cursing the ants they'd never considered when they'd decided to move south. She would have liked his direction about the side fence that now leaned downstream at an odd angle. How do we straighten this? What's the plan? You, she thought, are the one with those sorts of ideas.

“Hey, come on.” She waited. “I'll be outside. Come on out when you're ready.”

But when he did appear, hours later, he only waved and sat on the steps drinking a beer. Alice saw his face and knew that whatever had always been the matter had gotten worse. She smiled at him and waved her rake. “The ants'll eat you alive!”

All afternoon she forayed off the porch to work in a frenzy before the ants forced her to the faucet. She raked up huge piles of trash.

She was ashamed she felt better when Evan walked around to the front. To check out water marks, she thought. She considered the cat in the current and felt warm with embarrassment. It was too silly. It was a sentimental image from Walt Disney. The cat pawing the dark water. Its teeth bared at the struggle. It could be a poster for a child's room; though probably too frightening. She considered some possible captions: “Just Keeping Your Head Above Water,” “Hang In There.”

She bent over to slap at the ants covering her tennis shoes. God, Alice, you are a silly girl.

May 2039

The thin old woman stopped to catch her breath, which came in shallow pants fogging the chill air. She set her net bag down and stepped off the narrow road to look first up the hill and then down to the monastery already hidden by the pines. She nodded and smiled in recollection of the monk jabbering away at her. She had bought soap and honey and fingered the lovely carved saints no bigger than the palm of her hand.

“You always speak the best Italian,” he had said.

And Alice had quoted the florid passage from some ancient poet that was inscribed over the entrance to the church. It was a ritual between them. Every two weeks for sixteen years.

Alice picked up her bag and crossed the mountain road to the side sloping down toward the river valley. She held on to pine saplings until she reached a level spot behind a large rock. She pulled down her pants and then her panties, the cold air chilling her hips. She peed only a brief burst. Then she wiped with a Kleenex from her pocket and reached forward to hide it under a rock. There was another there already and Alice laughed. She carefully worked her way back up the hill to the road.

She bent to her task, the bag slapping her leg. The monk had asked about her sister who had visited at Christmas. And Alice had laughed and reminded him it was her daughter. They had both enjoyed his transparent deceit.

She walked and tried to breathe deeply. She took in the odor of roasted meats from the roadside restaurant ahead. Farther up the hill she could see the stone fence of the first decrepit hotel that overlooked the Arno valley below. But Alice couldn't forget what had happened earlier. She had risen long before Claudia, their housekeeper. She had made bitter instant coffee, listened at Evan's door, and come out onto the small veranda perched above their yard. Only a sliver of the dull red river showed far below and at a distance of some miles.

Lifting the already lukewarm coffee to her dry lips, she had looked down and seen very clearly the head of a cat, chin down, eyes shut, wet. Paddling furiously. Alice involuntarily closed her own eyes but they saw only the morning light made red, the minute detritus of a night's sleep passing like odd shaped bacteria under her lids.

She had never owned a cat. Allergies, she thought. She had never seen a cat swim. She was surprised by the vividness of detail.

Later, passing through Vallombrosa, walking easily downhill toward the monastery, she had changed direction, marched quickly into a bar where the locals usually waited for the bus down the mountain into Firenze. The old men were smoking and talking about the flood. There were no old women, of course. Some of the men nodded at her. The bartender shook her hand and asked about her husband.

“No, he's the same. Good days and bad days.” She ordered a vermouth because it was the first bottle her eyes lighted on. The surprise of the taste so early almost choked her. She had looked at herself in the mirror behind the bottles.

Now Alice crossed the road. “She looks exactly like you. As lovely as they come,” the monk had said, complimenting Alice and Elizabeth. She had nodded, thanked him for his kindness.

Today she was not so fearful of sudden traffic, Italian men attacking the curves in small cars. The flood below kept the road deserted. It had for a week now. The old men in the bar read the Milano newspapers aloud to one another. Worst flood in eighty years. The Ufizzi damaged. Damage in the millions. Church frescoes awash and destroyed. They swore, slapped their knees. She had had one more vermouth—this one almost tasteless compared to the first.

The huge redheaded woman who owned the restaurant knew her and seated her in the window in the light. A warmer place for an old woman, Alice thought. She ordered roasted chicken from the spit and a liter of the local white wine. She knew she should go on home and eat something more sensible than the greasy chicken. But instead she took a long drink and smiled, wondering if she were becoming a lush.

Perhaps she and Elizabeth had come to look alike. Mutual osmosis. At Christmas, they had sat near the fireplace. Another warm place for old women.

Elizabeth was an old woman. Sixty-three. The adoption agency had been unsure of her exact birthday, so Alice had chosen November first for no good reason.

“How is he?” Elizabeth had asked in the concerned voice she manufactured only for him, for questions about Evan.

Alice had been thinking about the ten copies of her new book on technical writing Elizabeth had insisted on bringing from Boston. Alice had told her earlier about her latest idea for a book expanding the chapters on grant writing and proposals. But now they talked about Evan, Alice trying not to manufacture any tone at all. She didn't think she was successful.

She chewed the juicy chicken slowly. But she drank the second glass of wine in one long swallow. He should have died long ago, she thought. I am not being cruel; it's the truth. Three heart attacks ago.

Afterward the thin old woman walked up the hill in a bit of a daze. She stopped again and drank one last vermouth, almost deciding she would begin a tradition. She talked loudly with the old men about the flood. She imagined the odd swimming cat again.

It was two o'clock when she climbed the stone steps up from the road to their small house. Her legs ached. Her head was light and seemed pumped full of the cold spring air. Swept clear by breezes.

Alice stood at the edge of the small yard and looked past the serpentine road to the slice of river. The sun had come out a couple of times but had now gone behind dark low clouds threatening a continuation of the past week's deluge.

Finally the wines neither jumbled things more nor sorted things out. What she had settled on for years was duty responsibility mixed with moments of pity and devotion—this almost in a religious sense; the closest she came to religion. She sometimes supposed all of this might be love. But she as often doubted that. Now the doctors said the most recent advances in chemical treatment could insure him five or ten more years.

Alice half turned to look up at the house behind her. She had almost forgotten him for some years after they adopted Elizabeth. Consciously and with devotion she had become the child's mother. But he was never the father. It was not the arena he chose. Instead he wrestled great accomplishments from the work he seemed to despise. He kept at it with frightening obstinacy because the pain seemed to provide something of value. This she had reasoned out long ago.

The old woman's mind was full of trick mirrors. And knowing this, she dismissed practically everything that wasn't about the girl or her own work. She knew for certain he had never been cruel to any living thing except himself. He had struggled like some hopeless addict. He had become his only reason to wake up, eat, go to work, have heart attacks, come here to find Santa Maria del Fiore.

Alice turned back to look into the valley. Once she must have hated him or respected him. Maybe, she thought, that's not the right order. Even now she would like to be able to ball it all up into something she might call love. Lately she desired some single word of summation. She was not restless without it, but she thought it couldn't hurt anything.

She wondered if it was God and religion he looked for when, up until last year, he had been able to take the bus almost daily down the mountain to II Duomo. She saw the sullen face, the bright eyes across a dinner table. It did not seem the face of a pilgrim; but what did she know? Five or ten more years. If he had died with the first heart attack, he would have put his head down on his desk. His hands in his lap. The second and he would have stopped mowing, sat on the damp grass, his legs spread out touching a bed of turk's cap.

Alice imagined the river; brought it up close as if her eyes were some sort of telephoto lens capable of great magnification. And she imagined herself floating downstream and into the city. She drifted through the flooded streets to the beautiful building that housed the Chamber of Commerce. She had scheduled a series of lectures to give on proposal writing. She would translate two chapters from the book Elizabeth had brought and adapt them to the Italian bureaucracy. Then she'd photocopy them and hand them out. She knew exactly what she'd say. She wanted the river to fall quickly and the city to dry out. Now proposals, requests for aid, would be more in order than ever before.

The particulars of the memory never came to him. Only the broadest terms. More an emotion, a passing feeling, than anything visual. It was like those involuntary shudders an aunt or uncle long ago would have explained by saying, “Rabbit ran across my grave.”

Evan looked out the window and down at the thin old woman. He watched her idly swing the net bag. Claudia sang somewhere in the house, the melody was low and guttural.

The feeble man wiped his sweaty face with a dish towel he kept in the pocket of his bathrobe. It was the new medicine. It came on like this in the early afternoon and, again, late at night. Soon the towel would be soaked, smelling of ammonia, and he would call Claudia for another. After this bout was over he would bathe, change his clothes, and lie down.

But the effort would be great. The towel remained poised without touching his forehead and cheeks. His skin splotched and oily. Raw from the salty water, from too many baths, the confines of stiff, newly washed clothes.

Instead he crossed the room to his bed but didn't lie down. He stood by the foot of it. Then he stretched out to reach the stuffed chair first with his hands, pulling his tired legs after.

The feeble man considered his body. The joints ached. The sweat poured everywhere, collecting at his waist to puddle at his crotch. The room, no matter the careful cleaning and airing given it by Claudia, smelled of him. He inhaled deeply and paid attention to the overflowing bookcases, the nearby table piled high with drawings by him and others. The walls at both sides of the window were covered with photographs and reproductions of paintings. In some of the photos he could barely make himself out. In all of them there was the massive red-tiled dome of the cathedral.

But this was all he did now. Look at, not examine. He didn't need to. He knew everything there was to know about Santa Maria del Fiore. II Duomo. Filippo Brunelleschi's church of the dome. Since the beginning he had loved to say that name, Filippo Brunelleschi. And all the other names, too. The more obscure men, stonemasons. Some leaving only the faintest mark on the sandstone, the pietra serena. Serene stone.

Bathed in sweat, snared by aches, the man remembered walking under the dome or up the steep steps to stand on the roof. At some point they gave him free rein. He had sketched it from every angle in his desperately poor hand. They had let him wander the obscure passageways. The rough interior walls hidden in the dark for hundreds of years. The mason's marks. A piece of frayed rope. The hidden holes for block and tackle.

He tried to love it as he first had coming out of a twilit, narrow street and into its presence. And on the best days he could sit for some time not noticing himself soaked and smelling. He was almost the architect.

But eventually he saw it happen from all points of view. It rose slowly in the air and turned just as slowly as if he could hold one of those vast wooden models of it in the Museo dell'Opera in his hands and rotate it. But the loving play of perspective was not there at all. For just as slowly it came apart at its joints. The cupola ascended higher, the naves slaked off and floated away. Everything in fluid motion and regular and slow—some metronome set on the particular swing of a grandfather's clock.

He no longer cried out so Claudia or his wife rushed in to him. He either sat still or more often rose from the stuffed chair and lay on the bed, pulling the wilted sheet and quilt up to his neck. The feeble man feeling like a child. His emaciated body a boy's body tormented by some sort of flu whose fever explained the drenching sweat.

He recalled that his initial feelings about the cathedral had been unmolested for a while. Before the advent of whatever it was that always acted as some potent distillate ungluing this and that in his life. Leaving the boy ill in his bed, the puzzle spread out on the quilt near his hands, unassembled.