The House in Amalfi (39 page)

I had left a note for Lorenzo inviting him to dinner at my house at eight o’clock. I’d brought back a basket of goodies from Rome, chosen carefully for their ease and speed of preparation. There was a mixture of wild mushrooms—my favorite—that I planned on sautéing and serving on slices of toasted brioche. There was the thin grass green asparagus I’d baste with olive oil, sprinkle with Parmesan cheese, then roast quickly in the oven. I bought veal escallops that I was told needed just a minute on each side in the frying pan, after which I should add a sprinkle of lemon juice and fresh herbs. I confess I cheated a little, buying Umberto’s homemade gnocchi as well as his famous pesto sauce. I also bought ice cream, pistachio of course, plus mocha and vanilla—the like of which is never better than from Giolitti near the Pantheon. I had it packed in a container with ice, then drove too fast all the way back to Amalfi—a four-hour drive—praying it would not melt.

This time I put my simple meal together perfectly. I dressed in my new very female finery, then went out and surveyed my terrace table. The cobalt blue cloth picked up blue in the Vietri-tiled bench, and the napkins were sunshine yellow. The goblets were a deep shiny blue also, and I’d filled an old yellow enamel jug with daisies. No fancy silver and crystal for me. At heart I was a country girl.

Lorenzo arrived promptly, bounding down the
scalatinella,
managing to look distinguished in just a simple linen shirt and white pants. He stared at me, then at the table, and said, bemused, “I don’t know which is more beautiful, you or your table.”

He held me at arm’s length, looking at me in my new incarnation, then said, “Oh God, oh God, how lovely you are,” and I was in his arms and he was kissing me. I was kissing him back and passion flared between us like the red spark at the heart of a flame. It was ironic, I thought, as I led him up to my apricot bedroom, that after all my efforts I couldn’t wait for him to pull off my lovely new dress so I could be naked in his arms.

Dinner was forgotten as we fell together onto my big new bed, devouring each other with our eyes and then our mouths, stroking, touching, kissing, tasting. Making love to Lorenzo was so much better than any meal I could ever cook, and I told him so. “Then let’s have dessert,” he said, and we started all over again.

Much later, with me in my old white cotton bathrobe and Lorenzo wrapped in a towel, our hair still wet from the shower and my new hairdo completely wrecked, we wandered down to the belvedere, clutching a bottle of champagne and two glasses. We sat holding hands, listening to the purr of the sea, watching a pale moon rising.

Contentment flowed like wine between our linked hands. I thought how wonderful life would be if I could spend the rest of it with Lorenzo. It hadn’t turned out quite the way I had planned it, with the new hair, the new dress, the sophisticated new look. I was back to the package I’d arrived as—which was quite simply myself.

I took a deep breath. It was now or never. “Do you have any idea of how much I love you?” I said in a very quiet voice, because I was so nervous that’s all I could manage.

His brilliant blue eyes met mine. “You know I love you, too, Lamour.”

“Am I considered your mistress then? Like the pretty little Naples opera singer with your grandfather? The one whose house this was before it became mine?”

“I suppose we could call you that, if you wish.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I do
not
wish, Lorenzo Pirata. I want you to marry me.” I stopped. “Oh God, that’s all wrong. What I meant to say was, Lorenzo Pirata, will you please marry me, because I love you the way no other woman will ever love you in your whole entire life, and I mean that sincerely and utterly, because I can’t get you out of my mind and I don’t want to and anyhow, if you say no I’ll probably run away and never return here again and I’ll end up in Chicago building gardens for other people and never having one of my own and never loving anybody and I’ll be all alone.” I looked him in the eye. “And I’ll be afraid without you.”

It all came out in a rush, all my love and fears.
“Tesoro,”
he said gently. “I am so much older. Did you never consider that when you are still young, I will be an old man? How many good years might we have left together? Five, ten? Twenty, if we are lucky?”

“Twenty years is a lifetime when you have love,” I said fiercely.

“How can I ask you to marry me, my darling Lamour? God knows I need you in my life, but how can I be selfish and take your best years from you?”

“My best years would be the ones we spend together,” I said. “I won’t ask you again, Lorenzo. I’ve laid my cards on the table. Now it’s up to you.”

He swept me into his arms. “How could I ever give you up,” he whispered into my cloud of hair. “You bring sanity into my life. You bring gaiety and youth and energy; you strip
me of all my worldly conceits and make me human. Dear God, Lamour, you have no idea of the agony I’ve gone through, imagining life without you.”

“Well then,” I said, practical even in an emergency like this, “you don’t have to, do you?”

And he laughed and said, “Lamour Harrington, will you please marry me?”

Of course I said yes.

We never did get around to that special dinner that night, and the Alberta Ferreti lay in a heap on the bedroom floor. Somehow, it didn’t seem to matter.

Lorenzo has given me Daisy as a wedding present. And there’s more. With Mifune’s connivance he secretly built a little barn for my cow in the meadow behind the Castello. Of course because of Mifune it looks more like a Japanese teahouse imported to Italy, set among an arrangement of geometric grassy squares.

The cow is beautiful, if you can call a cow beautiful. But yes, Daisy is quite definitely lovely. She’s a creamy color, with soft brown eyes and long lashes that I told Lorenzo reminded me of my first love, Angelo.

When I go to visit Daisy, which I do each morning and evening, leading her from the meadow to the barn to be milked, she nuzzles my hand with her soft mouth. I know I shouldn’t do this because it’s too silly to kiss a cow, but I confess I drop a happy buss on that last velvet bit of fur just before her nose begins. She already answers to her name and I plan on taking milking lessons, even though Lorenzo has installed a milking machine, all steel and switches and suction. It does the job efficiently; nevertheless, I intend to learn how to milk Daisy by hand. That way I’ll still keep up my rather tattered image of the self-sufficient woman. Don’t even ask about the chickens. Let’s just say I may never eat another egg.

Jammy and Matt will be here for the wedding. She told me she’s having one of those old-fashioned three-legged milkmaid
stools made for my wedding present. And I told her I expected something much more substantial, like at least a set of martini glasses. We’ll see.

And what about my so-called new independent, self-sufficient woman status? Well, it seems I’ve independenced myself right into a happy relationship. And after all, isn’t that what life is all about?

Nico took the news of our impending nuptials well. “The best man won,” he said, smiling, “even if it is my father. But then my father always beat me at everything.”

I thought there was an edge to his voice, but he was just being Nico, and we kissed gently—which was more than we’d ever done when he’d come romancing me.

“Pity it’s too late,” he said, giving me that familiar cheeky grin. “Just remember, never count me out, Lamour.”

“I’m counting myself out and don’t you forget it,” I told him smartly.

As for Aurora, my new half sister, she has lost some of the insecurities that plagued her and has become less dependent on her father and more of her own woman. She takes her medication and is back at the university, trying to cope with life. I call her every day to remind her that I am her sister and her friend and she can always rely on me to be there for her. She told me she keeps Jon-Boy’s picture at the side of her bed next to one of Lorenzo and Marella. “And also one of you,” she added sweetly.
“Mia sorella.”
She seemed to have forgotten the terrible night on the boat, and I believe she meant every word she said, including that she was happy I was marrying her father.

“Now you’ll never leave me,” she said, her insecurities surfacing once again, and I hastened to reassure her I never would.

“We’re all family now,” I said, and she laughed, a warm,
merry sound, and I knew she was glad. “Maybe there’ll even be more children now,” she said, giving me food for thought.

The idea of having Lorenzo’s children is a delicious one: a part of him that I can keep forever. More little half sisters and brothers, or nieces, nephews . . . I still can’t figure out exactly what the relationships would be, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Aurora will be aunt to my children, and when she marries I will be aunt to hers.

And what of Lorenzo, the man of my dreams? Or, as I told him quite honestly, he would have been the man of my dreams if I’d known earlier that he existed and could have dreamed about him. There’s a joy between us that’s impossible to capture in mere words. It’s in the glance across the crowded room, the telepathic way we seem to know each other’s thoughts, the hand reaching out to take mine when I suddenly feel lonely. It’s in the comforting weight of his arm around my shoulders as we take a stroll through Mifune’s wondrous gardens in the evening. It’s in his body, stretched along mine in bed at night, content after our lovemaking. It’s in the tenderness I feel whenever I watch him, unobserved, reading the newspaper in his tower with his glasses on the end of his nose, in his tenderness to sweet, ugly Affare, and in his competitiveness when we swim together across the bay. It’s in the passion I feel for him and he for me and the great comfort of a relationship where each puts the other first. Age no longer matters. We’ve agreed to take our happiness while we can and be very glad of it.

I have Jon-Boy to thank for teaching me what true love really is, though he himself never found it. Only, as he revealed in his diary, in me, his daughter. What a pity he never knew his other daughter; how different both their lives might have been. But there’s no point in going there anymore. I feel that Jon-Boy has finally given me permission to go on without him.

And that brings me to Mifune. My childhood friend, the spiritual man who advised me to be true to myself, to my own emotions and feelings. The earthy man who taught me that beautiful gardens only came about by dint of hard, dirty work, but that the end results can surpass all your dreams and provide nourishment for the soul and be a lasting legacy. As the gardens here at the Castello and at my little house will be his.

He grows daily more frail and more inward looking. I believe he’s searching his own soul before he has to go meet his ancestors. He has promised me he will be here for my wedding, and because of his strong spirit I believe he will honor that promise.

It’s late now, and the half moon is up, pinned with sparkling Venus, as Lorenzo says. He told me he’s buying a telescope so I can see it more clearly, see how it looks down on us lying in our big bed in the plain tower room that I love so much.

But here’s the secret I will never tell him: I love my little golden house in Amalfi even more than the Castello. And then I tell myself what a fortunate woman I am to be filled with so much love. Whoever would have thought it just a year ago?

But as my best friend, Jammy, says, that’s life, baby. You never know what it’s going to throw at you.

Read on for an excerpt
from Elizabeth Adler’s next book

AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER FROM
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS

It’s snowing, great white starry flakes that cling to my red hair like a tiara on a princess for all of a minute, before melting and running in icy drops down the back of my neck. My mother, who was a stickler for proper behavior for young ladies, would have said it was my own fault, I should have worn a hat to the funeral out of respect for the dead. Of course she was right, but since I don’t possess a hat, at least not one suitable for a funeral, I’d decided to do without.

So now here I am, standing with a small crowd of mourners at the graveside of Robert Waldo Hardwick, modern mogul, maker and loser of several fortunes and the proud winner of a knighthood, bestowed on him by Her Majesty the Queen, making him unto eternity, I suppose,
Sir
Robert Hardwick.

We are outside the Gothic, gray-stone church in the village of Lower Sneadley, Yorkshire, England. It’s a freezing cold April afternoon, with the wind whipping across the Pennines, chilling the blood of those of us who are still amongst the living. At least we assume we are, because by now all feeling is numbed. Even Bob’s dog, a small, stocky Jack Russell crouched next to me on his lead, looks frozen into stillness. He doesn’t even blink, just stares at the hole in the ground.

Shivering, my heart goes out to him, and to the poor
Brontë sisters, who lived in an icy parsonage in just such a village as this, not too many miles away. When I think of them on cold, candlelit nights, of their poor, chapped little mittened hands desperately scribbling down the thoughts that became their famous novels, I can only wonder at their stamina.