The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (16 page)

“I was lucky to find you in. I think of you Romans being always in motion, especially from May on. The mountains or the sea. Going off somewhere interesting.”

“He’s being absurd,” Evaline explained to Dorothy. “No, if you must know, I’m here nearly all the time these days. You’ll get out of me all the reasons why.” She thus reminded him, as she turned away for the drinks, that he had invited her to dine with him that evening, so getting himself asked to one of her little cocktail gatherings beforehand. Evaline being charming and parceled out at one of her own parties was one thing; Evaline as she would shortly be across a narrow table from him, pouring out her various troubles, complexes, illnesses, labyrinthine relationships, was another. He couldn’t count on just happening to laugh when she finished being witty, just happening to cloud over when the theme was tragic; that would be pushing his luck. No, he would have to listen.

“Listen,” he said urgently to the girl. The pace of the chatter had stepped up in the room behind. The knots of guests were now mainly standing, except for a jet-haired Roman girl settled in an armchair with men hovering about her on hassocks and smaller chairs. Soon
they would finish this round and take a notion to disperse, gather up hats and purses, go scattering out into the open.

“Listen.” He caught the girl by the elbow and steered her aside, out of the central area of the garden, back turned toward the company. He noticed how light she was and how maneuverable. Her head turned to him with a sort of serene attentiveness, and he remembered the quiet fall of the blossoms.

“Do you know Evaline well?” It was a similar question to her own, but she had been making conversation; he was not.

“I’ve known her off and on for years. Five in all, I guess.” She added, “She’s been very kind to me.”

“Oh, stop it.” He almost snapped. “What I mean is, do you see her alone, and if so, does she confide in you? She must. She confides in everyone.”

The girl nodded. “I’ve noticed that. A few times—yes, I would say she’s been confidential.” She risked something. “I don’t like so much confidence.”

“I know, I know. Italian lovers, money problems, quarrels, defections of friends …” Now he had got her with him, and she actually grinned. He continued, “Has she mentioned her husband?”

“Well, often—yes, I’d say very often, but always rather distantly. I long ago decided he must have been a myth.”

“I’m having dinner with her, right after this, taking her out somewhere. Does she know? I keep asking myself. Does she know he’s dead?”

“Good Lord, no! At least, I think not.”

“Why?”

“Well, she’d have said. She’d have called up everybody, right away.”

“I assumed she would have been told. But then he did marry again, and Rome is a long way off.” He walked away with the girl at his elbow; they had really drifted now, apart from the gathering. “I came early to this party, for just that reason, to mention it, offer condolences, whatever people do. She never seemed aware of it. No
opening of any kind. Yet it happened over a month ago, in London.” He stared down at his feet in deep preoccupation, a business habit. “Well,” he demanded of her, “what would you conclude?”

“I think that everybody must have thought that someone else had told her.”

“Just as I have. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes. Just as you have.”

They turned to find Evaline before them once more, their fresh drinks hospitably extended in either hand. “Here you are, you two.” She was beaming upon them, but implicit in the smile was the knowledge that he was safely landed as her escort for the evening. The restaurant she would suggest was already selected. It would be nice to be seen with him. She could afford to pretend to Dorothy that, seeing the two of them alone out there, she had assumed a flirtation was in progress. Charles Webley and Dorothy dutifully took their glasses.

The predictable moment arrived. The guests were flowing out to say their good-bys, remarking on the wisteria, a choice conversation piece, and Evaline, full of a loving glow on its behalf, told the history of how it had been planted there, what narrow escapes it had had, what she had done to make it flourish and flower.

“They bloom twice, you know. Oh yes, indeed. Early, and late.”

She saw she had gained the center of the party and was holding it. To make the most of it, she nudged the last phrase into a double meaning, as though it referred to women, to all women, herself especially. She then touched her hand to the gathered silks above her heart.

The party caught the idea and laughed gaily, as she had meant them to, and Charles Webley and the girl Dorothy involuntarily struck glances. All was said, framed and frozen, in that instant’s communication, and as one they turned off in opposite ways.

Knights and Dragons

PART ONE

1

Martha Ingram had come to Rome to escape something: George Hartwell had been certain of it from the first. He was not at all surprised to learn that the something was her divorced husband. Martha seldom spoke of him, or of the ten years she had spent with him. It was as though she feared if she touched any part of it, he would rise up out of the ground and snap at her. As it was he could sometimes be heard clear across the ocean, rumbling and growling, breathing out complaining letters and worried messengers, though what had stirred him up was not clear. Perhaps he was bored, thought Hartwell, who never wanted to meet the bastard, having grown fond of Martha in his fussy, fatherly way. He was her superior at the U.S. cultural office and saw her almost every day, to his pleasure.

The bastard himself Hartwell had also seen in a photograph that Martha had shown him, drawing it from her purse while lunching with him in a restaurant. But why carry his picture around? Hartwell wondered. Well, they had been talking of dogs the other day, she explained with a little apologetic shrug and smile, and there was the dachshund she had been so fond of, there on the floor. But Hartwell, staring, was arrested by the man—that huge figure, sitting in the heavy chair with some sort of tapestry behind, the gross hands
placed on the armrests, the shaggy head and big, awkwardly tilted feet. Martha’s husband! It made no sense to think about, for Martha was bright and cordial, neither slow nor light-headed, and she had a sheer look that Hartwell almost couldn’t stand; he guessed it was what went with being vulnerable. “He looks German,” protested Hartwell. She thought he meant the dog. “Dear old Jonesie,” she said. Hartwell chuckled uneasily. “No, I meant him,” he said. “Oh. Oh, yes. Well, no, Gordon is American, but it’s funny your saying that. He studied in Germany and his first wife was German.” “What happened to her?” Martha tucked the photograph away. “She died. … I was Gordon’s student,” she added, as though this explained something.

Why did the man keep worrying her? Why did she let him do it? Hartwell did not know, but the fact was, it did go on.

But sometimes the large figure with the shaggy head left her alone and she would be fine, and then she would get a letter from a lawyer she’d never heard of, speaking of some small lacerating matter, or an envelope addressed in a black scrawl with nothing but a clipping inside on a political issue, every word like a needle stab, considering that he knew (and never agreed with) how she felt about things. And if one thought of all the papers he had gone shuffling through to find just the right degree of what he wanted! And sometimes some admirer of his would come to Rome and say he wasn’t eating at all well and would she please reconsider. “He never ate well,” she would answer. “Only large quantities of poor food.” She thought of all the hours spent carefully stirring canned cream of mushroom soup. And yet—thinker, teacher, scholar, writer, financial expert and heaven knew what else—he had been considered great and good, and these people were, she understood, his friends. She tried to be equable and kind, and give them the right things to drink—tea or Cinzano or Scotch—and show them around the city. “But
he
never says he would be better off if I were there,” she would make them admit. “He never says it to you or me or anyone.” Then she would be unsteady for a week or two.

Nobody can change this, she decided; it will always be this way. But she grasped George Hartwell’s sympathy, and knew that when he gave her some commission outside Rome, it was really done as a favor and made her, at least, unreachable for a time.

“Do you want to go to Genoa?” he asked her. It was June.

He was sitting at his large friendly disorderly desk in the corner office of the consulate, and he was round and cherublike, except for a tough scraggle of thin red hair. There was always a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth. He scrambled around among manila folders. “Arriving in Genoa,” he explained, “cultural-exchange people, heading eventually for Rome. But in the meantime they’ve excuses for wanting to see Milano, Padova, Lago di Como, perhaps going on to Venice. Italian very weak, but learning. Guide with car would be great help.”

“But who are they?” She always had a feeling of hope about moving toward total strangers, as if they would tell her something good and new, and she would go away with them forever. She took the files as he found them for her. “Coggins … what an odd name. Richard Coggins and wife, Dorothy, and daughter, Jean.”

“That’s the ones. Some friend of the family’s wrote Grace about them. We’ve got to do something a little extra for them, but it just so happens I have to go to Florence.”

Martha smiled. George’s wife, Grace, out of an excess of niceness, was always getting them into things. She wanted everyone to be happy; she wanted things to “work out.” And so it followed, since she herself was away in Sicily, that one wound up having to be helpful for a week or two to a family named Coggins. “Mr. Coggins is an expert on opera, George, no kidding. Did you know that? Look, it says so here.”

“That we should be floating somebody here to lecture the Italians on opera,” George Hartwell complained. “Any six waiters in any one of a hundred trattorias in Rome can go right into the sextet from
Lucia
for fifty lire each. Italian women scream arias during child-birth. What can we tell any Italian about opera?”

“I wonder,” said Martha, “if they listen to us about anything.”

“Martha! That’s the remark we don’t ever make!” But he laughed, anyway, shuffling papers. “Here we are. The others make a little more sense. … James E. Wilbourne and wife, Rita. No children. Economist … thesis brought out as book—
New Economic Patterns in
… et cetera. He won’t stick with the group much, as is more interested in factories than art galleries.”

“Maybe the worst of the Cogginses is their name.”

“You’ll go, then?”

“Yes, I’ll go.”

“Atta girl.”

But, certainly, she thought, moving through the sharp June shadows under the trees around the consulate, something will happen to change these plans—there will be a cable in the hall or someone will have come here. She entered her summer-still apartment through all the devious stairways, corridors and
cortili
that led to it. “Sequestered,” George Hartwell called her, as though knowing it was not the big terrace and the view alone she had considered in taking a place one needed maps and even a compass to reach. The sun and the traffic noises were all outside, beyond the windows. There was no cable, no telephone message, but—she almost laughed—a letter. She recognized the heavy black slant of the writing and slowly, the laugh fading, slit it open. To her surprise the envelope was empty. There was nothing in it at all. He had probably meant to put a clipping in; it was a natural mistake, she thought, but some sort of menace was what she felt, being permanently lodged in the mind of a person whose love had turned to rejection. “Forget it,” Hartwell had advised her. “Everybody has something to forget.” But, alas, she was intellectually as well as emotionally tenacious and she had, furthermore, her question to address to the sky: how can love, in the first place, turn into hate, and how can I, so trapped in hatred, not suffer for it?

In his apartment, the expensive, oak-paneled, high-ceilinged place in New York’s upper Seventies, crusted with books and littered with
ashtrays, she had lived out a life of corners, and tiny chores had lengthened before her like shadows drawn out into a sun slant; she had worn sweaters that shrank in the back and colored blouses that faded or white ones that turned gray, had entertained noble feelings toward all his friends and tried to get in step with the ponderous designs he put life to, like training a hippopotamus to jump through hoops. There had been the long rainy afternoons, the kindness of the porter, the illness of the dog, the thin slashing of the brass elevator doors, the walks in the park. She still felt small in doorways. Not wanting to spend a lot, he had had her watched by a cut-rate detective agency, whose agent she had not only discovered at it, but made friends with.

She crumpled the empty envelope and dropped it in the wastebasket, bringing herself up with a determined shake rather like a shudder.

2

Martha Ingram would always remember the first sight she had of her new Americans at the dock in Genoa. She got a chance to look them over before they saw her. She had to smile—it was so obviously “them.” They stood together in clothes that had seen too much of the insides of suitcases and small metal closets in ship cabins; they were pale from getting up early after an almost sleepless night at sea, and the early breakfast after the boat had gone still, the worry over the luggage, would have made them almost sick. The voyage was already a memory; they waved halfheartedly, in a puzzled way, to a couple who, for ten days, must have seemed their most intimate friends. They formed their little huddle, their baggage piling slowly up around them, while the elder of the two men—Mr. Coggins, beyond a doubt—dealt out hundred-lire notes to the porters, all of whom said that wasn’t enough. The Coggins girl’s slip was too long; she was holding a tennis racket in a wooden press. She looked as if
she had just got off the train for summer camp. Her mother had put on one white glove. The young man, Wilbourne, gloomy in a tropical-weight tan suit, seemed hung over. Was this Mrs. Wilbourne sprinting up from behind, her hand to her brow as if she had forgotten something? But it was somebody else, a dark girl who ran off crying, “Oh, Eleanor!” Mr. Coggins had graying hair that stood up in a two-week-old bristle. His lips were struggling with a language he believed he knew well. He understood opera, didn’t he?
“Scusatemi, per favore
. …”