The House in Amalfi (18 page)

“Capri was the home of gods in ancient times, even before the Roman emperors,” he said in his thin, quiet voice. “It has always been a mystical place submerged beneath a layer of hedonism. It has not changed.”

Of course he was right. You felt Capri’s secretive underlayers as you sailed around its limestone cliffs peering into the many caves, knowing that it had scarcely changed since those early Roman times and that the summer life floating over it was only a temporary thing. That come winter it would be left alone to dwell in the past again. Capri offered all visitors exactly what they were looking for. If they were clever enough, they would seek and find more than was on the surface; they would find antiquity and myths, stories of dryads and centaurs and nymphs, princes and pirates and Renaissance courtiers, mermaids and poets, writers and artists. At heart Capri would never change.

“And did you find what you were seeking in Nico?” Mifune asked.

There was no need to tell him what had happened; he sensed that I had been foolish. “Nico is a charming young
man,” I said warily. “He was a delightful companion—for an afternoon.”

“Wisdom sometimes comes slowly, and with it pain,” he replied. “Your father knew about such pain.”

I stared at him, surprised. “You mean Jon-Boy fell in love and got hurt?” I asked.

“Your father had the same charm Nico has,” he said. “He loved many women. And women loved him.”

I waited for him to expand on that, but he did not. I gave him the envelope addressed to Lorenzo Pirata.

“I will take this to the Castello right away,” he said. “I will come back later and we will walk through your garden again and discuss its future.” He smiled for the first time that morning, a lovely toothless smile that lit up his milky eyes, animating his face until he almost looked the way I remembered when he was younger. “But now it is
you
who are the artist,” he teased. “It is Lamour who will teach Mifune the new ways.”

“No one will ever teach you anything,” I said. “And I would be honored if you would have tea with me this afternoon. We can go through the garden then, and make our plans.”

He bowed his acceptance and left, walking hesitantly, silent as a cat, back through the garden to the elevator, because he had finally admitted the steps were too much for him.

Jammy had been gone a couple of weeks and I missed her. I’d bought a laptop computer, but e-mail, though instant, isn’t the same as real-life contact. Too restless to paint my room, I got in the car and drove into Pirata, to the Amalfitano. Aldo greeted me cheerfully, pulling out my chair and whisking crumbs off my usual table.

“Signora Lamour?” he said with a cheeky little grin at using my first name. “We know each other well enough now, signora,” he added, “now that you live here.”

“Indeed we do, Aldo,” I said, ordering a cappuccino and the
sfogliatelle.
I’d gained five pounds since Jammy left, my clothes no longer hung on me, and I even had a few curves, no doubt due to the amount of pasta I was eating.

I sipped the cappuccino, as usual getting froth on my nose. I was thinking about what Mifune had said about Jon-Boy: that he was a lot like Nico. Jon-Boy was the same kind of charming, good-looking man who attracted women wherever he went. Of course I wasn’t looking for my father in Nico; I’d simply been hankering after a bit of attention, a few compliments, a little kiss on the hand.

I waved good-bye to Aldo, then drove into Amalfi to shop. I was early enough to find a parking space, and I walked down the narrow hilly streets toward the waterfront. In a small dark store I found my sheets. They were a beautiful soft cotton with
the hems embroidered in blue and green hydrangeas and I thought they would go well with my soon-to-be-apricot walls. I bought a pair of raspberry-colored thong sandals, then ate a pistachio ice cream from the
gelateria
on the harbor, its sludgy green color telling me it was the real thing and not made with artificial flavoring and bright fake color. Tucked away in a corner I found an old woman sitting on the steps selling eggs. Beautiful speckled-brown eggs, exactly the kind I would like my own chickens to lay.

“Signora,” I said, “I will take a dozen of your beautiful eggs.” She gave me a dazzling smile as she wrapped each egg individually in a twist of newspaper before placing it gently in my straw basket. I suddenly had a brainstorm. “Signora,” I said, “I wish to buy the same kind of chickens that lay these beautiful eggs.”

Her glance was shrewder this time. She told me she might just have some of those very same hens for sale and of course a rooster, because everyone knew that with chickens you needed a rooster. I hadn’t known until she told me, but I agreed that of course I would need a rooster, too. Soon a deal was struck for four hens and a rooster at a price that seemed reasonable. It was arranged that I would pick up my chickens in the parking lot the next morning at seven sharp. We shook hands and she murmured a blessing and I took my eggs and drove back to Pirata, to Umberto’s general store, to buy chicken wire and stakes for my new chicken run. I also ordered a small coop so they could have their very own house.

Coming out of Umberto’s, I bumped into Aurora. Our eyes met; then she pushed past me into the store without so much as a
“ciao.”
I sighed. I didn’t need a fortune-teller to let me know I was among the enemy. I wondered what I had done to deserve her hatred. I had no claims on her father. Nor on her brother. Besides, “love,” whether for father or brother or family
or lover, could only go so far. This girl was the most insecure, unstable person I had ever met.

I drove quickly back home to spend the afternoon hammering stakes into the rocky ground behind the house for my chicken run. Winding the wire netting around the stakes was a bit more difficult than I’d thought. I kept getting it snagged, but I struggled through, pinching my finger in the pliers and scratching my elbow on the wire. Dripping blood, I decided my chicken run looked decidedly ragged. The netting looped unevenly and the stakes stuck out at odd angles. I sighed. It would have to do for now.

I took a long, luxurious shower. I stuck a Band-Aid on my raw elbow and got dressed. I went downstairs feeling pleased with the day’s accomplishments.

Mifune arrived for tea wearing his Japanese straw gardening hat and bearing a bottle of sake in a beautiful wooden box, and a pair of wooden sake cups.

“Mifune, this is such a treat!” I exclaimed, making him welcome as a guest in my home for the first time. First, we walked the garden, deciding where to cut back the undergrowth and how to simplify things and how to bring stillness and serenity back again.

Later, I warmed the sake on the stove and he poured it into our wooden cups. We raised them to each other in a solemn toast.

“To our happy meeting again, Mifune,” I said. “This is the best thing that’s happened to me in years.” I knew he could see I meant it.

“To you, Lamour,” he said, “and to your future happiness. Wherever you might be.”

I looked at him, surprised because there was no more “wherever” in my life. I was here to stay.

The sake loosened my tongue and I talked to him about my
life in Chicago and about what had happened to my marriage.

“It’s that old problem love, Mifune,” I said seriously. “It lets you down every time. Look what happened with Jon-Boy. I loved him so much and yet he left me, too. He came back here and got on with his life, and told me to get on with mine. Tell me, was that any way for a father to behave?”

I was voicing the feelings I had kept repressed all these years. My sense of abandonment when Jon-Boy had left me again and those long nights when I was just a little girl waiting for him to come home. “So you see, nothing much has changed,” I said. “Here I am, all alone again. Perhaps that’s just the way I’m meant to be, Mifune, a woman alone.”

“Jon-Boy would want you to be happy,
cara
,” he said quietly. “You know he loved many women, but his little girl was the true love of his life.”

“If only I could believe that,” I said longingly, because it would have been so nice to believe I had been the center of his world.

“It is the truth.” Mifune paused for a moment, like a man editing his thoughts. Then he said carefully, “Jon-Boy loved one woman very much, but as always with Jon-Boy, she was the wrong woman.”

“Tell me about her,” I said eagerly, thinking that at last I was on the track of something.

Again he thought for a long time before he spoke. I sipped my sake and listened to the sound of the sea, letting my old friend take his time, though by now I was burning with curiosity.

“He met her in Rome,” Mifune said. “She was very beautiful. She had long black hair that hung straight and shiny as a blackbird’s wing to her waist. She would wash it, then sit out here on the terrace, letting it dry in the sun. Your father would look at her as though he had never seen such beauty in
his life. He was a man besotted with love, crazy for her. And she . . . well, she enjoyed him. You know Jon-Boy, handsome, a charmer, fun to be with . . . what was not to enjoy? But love? No, I don’t think she ever loved him. And that was your father’s big mistake. Women had always loved him; he couldn’t believe that this one did not. She dangled him from the tips of her pretty red-nailed fingers and drove him crazy.”

He finished his sake in a gulp, then got slowly to his feet. I rushed to help him. “And then what?” I asked urgently. “What happened to her, Mifune?”

“And then it was over,” he said. “One day she was here; the next she was gone. I never saw her again.”

“But didn’t Jon-Boy?”

He shrugged his thin shoulders as we walked together to the elevator that would take him back up the cliff to the Castello. “I cannot say, Lamour. I was just the gardener. I knew nothing.”

“At least tell me her name,” I pleaded.

The elevator opened and Mifune got in. We bowed politely to each other. I looked pleadingly into his eyes. “You
must
tell me,” I said. “I need to know.”

But he shook his head; then the doors closed and he was wafted away from me, up to heaven, which was the way I had always thought of the Castello Pirata’s gardens. Leaving me alone to spend a long restless night alone, wondering about the black-haired woman Jon-Boy had loved.

I was up before dawn and in the Amalfi parking lot promptly at seven the next morning, waiting for my chicken delivery. I paced around, sniffing the morning air like a pointer, enjoying its cool freshness before the noontime heat. At ten past seven I consulted my watch. It was late, but I thought perhaps they’d had trouble rounding up the chickens. By seven-fifteen I was pacing, wondering whether the signora with the great smile and astute bargaining power had misunderstood me. Or I her? Had she mentioned some other day? No, I was sure it was this morning. But what if she’d meant next week? What else might she have misunderstood? What if she showed up with five
dead
chickens, ready to be plucked and put in the oven? My thoughts were running wild, but just then a shabby dirt-spattered truck chugged into the lot and an old man with a lined brown face in bright blue overalls and a flat cap got out.

I heard a great clucking coming from the back of the truck and ran toward him “Signore, signore, it is I who bought the chickens,” I called, smiling.

“Sì, sì, signora.”
He shook my hand briefly. His was crusty and hard, a farmer’s hand. “Where is your truck?” he asked. I waved a hand at my little Fiat and saw his brows raise to meet his cap.

“I thought we could put them in the backseat,” I said,
though truthfully I hadn’t even considered the problem of getting four hens and a rooster home. Muttering under his breath, he said
“Va bene, va bene”
and plucked a couple of chickens from the back. He tucked them, squawking loudly, under his arms and headed for my car.

I followed him, panicked. I’d expected they would come in a nice neat crate, and now I was going to have to share the ride home with, quite literally, a bunch of free-range chickens!

“Wait! Wait!” I called, running after him, but he already had the door open and the chickens inside. He slammed the door and they stared at me through the window, obviously as surprised as I was by this turn of events. As if in protest, they turned up their tail feathers and deposited neat little greenish piles on my car seat.