The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (21 page)

“I never meant to injure you,” he said at last. “It’s only that—well, I suppose in this case it matters, keeping straight on things.”

Straight! She almost burst out laughing. Well, she thought somewhat wearily, all her rush toward him brought to a complete stop, she supposed he
had
gone to some high degree of concentrated effort to keep her straight. As for the straight of
him
, it was such another question, it made her dizzy to think about it. The truth about even so slight an episode as the Coggins girl alone would have quite likely baffled a detective force. And where, for that matter, had he been going tonight? In a return to her native aristocratic detachment, she could not bring herself to ask him things like this; perhaps it was because she did not really want to know.

She turned, finding her key in her bag, and tucking her hair up with one hand, unlatched the door. It was a small winter- and night-time door cut within the larger
portone
, and sprang easily back so that she stepped inside the dimly lighted interior at once. She looked back reluctantly to observe him. He had not pressed in behind her but stood as she had left him. It was only that one arm was thrown out against the door. The crumpled sleeve of his coat, the white inch of cuff, the set of his hand, pressed into her senses like the bite of a relief. His gaze, meeting hers, did not implore her for anything. His face was simply present, and would be, she recognized, as it had been for a long time now, present and closely with her whether she shut it out or not. From somewhere she had gained the strength to take it now, deliberately, whenever the moment came, between her two hands.

She nodded, and bending sideways to avoid the low frame, he stepped inside. The closing door made a soft definitive thud, echoing strongly within, but only once, dully, in the narrow street out-side. She mounted the long stairs, proceeded through corridors and turnings, archways and landings. She did not look back or speak, but moved quietly on ahead of him.

She had lived a year at least, she thought, since running into him in the Via de’ Portoghesi.

PART THREE

6

George Hartwell got the news in Milan. By then it was summer, summer even in Rome, which he had left only two days ago to help
maneuver the Milan office through a shake-up; and the weather finally pleased everyone. The old damp, closed medieval shrunken city, which had all but destroyed them, had evaporated in one hour of this glorious new season. And what could have happened in it that was not gone with it? he wondered, and read the letter once more.

On Sunday morning he was driving there. It’s the least I can do for her, he thought, just in case. In case of what? The road flickered up, the sea appeared and melted away and crashed in again. In case, in case, he thought, and soon might even make a song of it, and go bellowing as operatically as Richard Coggins all along the sea road south, past Santa Margherita, Portofino, with Tarquinia ahead and Santa Marinella … the plains, the mountains and the sea.

In some ways he wondered if it was a serious matter at all. Is any personal matter, he asked himself, a serious matter any longer? Isn’t a personal matter simply a bug in the machine? Get rid of it as quickly as possible, or one of the rockets in your space capsule might jam. Push button C with all due reverence, for any other one will be your doom. The sea grew pink, then crimson, then a blue so deep and devastating he thought he would give up all considerations and sit out several days on a rock. Then life would change, if we would do that. If every other person, every other week …

A Lambretta roared up out of a curve, all but shaving the paint from his left front fender. He did not slacken speed, but drove on. He was not going to go and sit on any rock, ever, not even if they dropped the bomb next week.

Martha Ingram, all this time, was serenely alone upon her terrace, drying her long hair in the sun. Observant as a cat in the morning still, she had just seen far down in the little square below, where the fountain twinkled, the last courier come and go, a rich little whitehaired lady from Connecticut, some cousin or friend (was it?) of Gordon Ingram’s—Martha could not remember her name. The sun stood at ten and a large daytime moon floated in the sky; pale, full-blown as a flower, it seemed a contrivance of the imaginary sort, fragilely mounted for effect. Was it because she could not remember
the name that she had not gone to the door? The name, actually, had been called to her attention no earlier than yesterday, when a note had come, written from the lady’s hotel—the Grand, of course, nothing less. (Martha had often thought that Gordon Ingram was in Rome and staying at the Grand, which would have suited him so; they had large fronded palms in the lobby, and the steps that broke the interior floor between the reception area and the lounge were so long you could never find the end of them.) Martha wondered what she had done with that note—she didn’t know.

Just now, through the beautiful weather, an hour earlier in the summer morning, the Italian messenger from the embassy had come with a dispatch case for her: she was to add a stack of reports for Hartwell and take them in the next morning. Well aware of the season, the Italian, whose name was Roberto, was amiable and conversant and invited her for an afternoon at the beach. He had his sister’s car, he said, by way of recommendation, and had recently visited the States. Martha agreed the beach would be nice; she had got together with him on several minor problems recently and had found him astute. He was, in a pleasant way, a sort of social spy; he could tell an
arrivato
a mile off, and he knew ways of isolating, or deflecting, people. If Hartwell had found some way of listening to someone like Roberto during the winter past, the Cogginses would not have leaped to such prominence in the cultural program that people now had the Americans all taped as opera lovers. So what Roberto was in turn going to want … questions like that flowed along easily with Roman life; they were what it was about. She thought of that gently sparkling sea and what a slow progress she had made toward it through heavy weather a year ago, back when it all began.

Going out, Roberto passed by the porter and the little lady in blue. Martha could hear by leaning over the terrace that the porter (whom she had bribed) was saying over and over,
“La Signora Ingram non ce … la Signora Ingram è fuori Roma!”
Robert stopped by the fountain; turning swiftly, he seemed to stamp himself with a kind of ease on his native air.
“Si, si, c’è
…
la signora c’è … l’ho appena
vista.’”
Then, catching some glance from the porter, he retreated.
“O, scusi … uno sbaglio. …”
He turned, a little gray Fiat, the sister’s car, no doubt, his goal, but the little lady shot after him, quick as a rabbit. She caught his sleeve. “I am looking for Mrs. Ingram. She lives here. Now would you be so kind.”
“Non parlo inglese, signora. Mi displace. …”
How quickly, Martha thought, they did solidify. She had always, from the first, had some knack of getting them on her side. But was it fair that poor little lady friends of the family should get the runaround?
Le prendono in giro
, Martha thought. They are leading her in a circle. A little more and she would go down and open the door, come what might.

She never saw any friends, messengers, from the States anymore. She never read her mail. And when the little lady looked up, she ducked cleverly behind the parapet of the terrace, bringing her hair, which she had just shaken damp from the wet scarf to dry, down with her. She loved the warmth on the back of her neck, the sun’s heat reaching to the roots of her hair, through the fabric of her dress. Who would leave it for a minute to descend three stone flights that still smelled like winter?

So the rich lady cousin went away in her fitted blue summer coat with the funny squat legs V-ing down from the broad behind into the tiny feet in their specially ordered shoes. What a world of shopping, the kind these ladies did, came back to Martha as she watched her go. And there was her loud English to the porter (the louder we speak the more chance we have), and then for the sweeter part, her brave attempt at Italian:
“Voglio parlare con la Signora Ingram, per cortesia.”
It was as if someone had said that if the lady’s duty lay in climbing a mountain at once, she would not even have stopped to change clothes.

The porter was not touched in the least.
“No, signora. La Signora Ingram non ce. L’appartamento è Vuoto.”
They went on and on, their voices in counterpoint, echoing in the wide-open hallways below, now touching the fountain, now climbing to the terrace. If I could think of her name, Martha thought, I might weaken and let her in.
Surely she has nothing to do with, knows nothing about, the property in New York State that they must have got me to sign something in regard to or they would not now be so determined to get me to sign something releasing it. You would think they had found a deposit of gold and diamonds six inches beneath the soil, though it is quite possible that I am holding up a real-estate development. Who can tell what goes on back in that green dream across the Atlantic?

The porter kindly called a cab. Now he would earn two ways—the tip from the lady and Martha’s bribe. All he had to do was be as adamant as a barred door, which was his true nature, anyway. The lady rode off in her hat of blue-dyed feathers with the tight veil, fitting sleekly as it had been carefully planned to do, over her white hair, her two million wrinkles. She held her neck up straight, giving orders to the driver, an indomitable little white duck.

If I could have thought of her name, I would have let her in, thought Martha as the cab disappeared from the square. She wasn’t as bad as the rest of them, I do remember that. Martha knew, too, by the slight degree of feeling by which even mad people recognize character, as though fingers upon a fine string in the dark had discovered a knot in it, that the lady in blue was not indulging in ugly suspicions as to if and why lies had been told her. She was saying that she simply did not know. That was all.

Oh, mythical bird, vanishing American lady! She had been, Martha felt certain, the last courier.

Martha picked up her hairbrush and, drawing her chair close to the edge of the terrace, she began to brush her hair. The bells had begun to ring, and she had put her hair up, when George Hartwell drew up in the square below, hot and rumpled and jaded, hitching up the hand brake sharply. So I was right to have the papers ready for him, Martha thought, but it wasn’t especially the papers he had come there for. He tossed his hat aside and sat down in the sun.

He held out a letter to her, though it had come to him. “Your sister says you don’t answer your mail,” he told her, stirring the coffee
she brought him. “She also wants you to know that Gordon Ingram is very sick. He is in New York Hospital.”

“I haven’t answered much mail recently,” Martha admitted. “I’ve scarcely read my mail at all.”

A long silence grew up between them. Hartwell’s wife was in the States attending their son’s graduation from prep school in Massachusetts. Everyone had begun to be displaced. The Wilbournes were gone, Jim to take a job on some new economic council for advising private industry, and Rita to open a ceramics shop, having shipped loads of material, not quite legally, through embassy channels. They had left their flat in a mess, having sneaked out unexpectedly three days early. Hartwell still had calls from the landlord. The parquet was ruined, the mirrors …

How was it that the sun seemed literally to warm one’s heart? Hartwell now thought kindly of Martha Ingram’s husband for the first time in his life. The poor old bastard, was what he thought. A man that age. Quite likely he’s dying.

“So will you consider going there?” he asked her. “It can be arranged.”

In the sun her hair shimmered like a fine web. Hartwell had once said about Martha Ingram when he was drunk, “Being from Spring-field, Missouri, I am moved by women with grave gray eyes,” which, as everyone told him, made no sense at all. It was a flight that failed. He had had some reference to his mother, aunt, some old magazine picture, or advertisement, maybe, showing a lady who wore her long hair up, face partly turned aside, serious and quiet. It was his way of worrying out loud. For his wife had speculated that there was undoubtedly a man in her life, but who? Hartwell used to think it over in the office alone and then wad paper up and hurl it at the wastebasket.

A slight movement just now of a curtain through one of the terrace windows made him think of Jim Wilbourne’s even, somewhat longish, smoothly observant face, his nervous gesture of banging the heel of a resoled American shoe against a desk or chair leg when he
talked, his cough and cigarettes and short hoarse laugh. Anybody, thought Hartwell, but Jim Wilbourne. Yet there she was, shining and fair, surfaced out of a long hard winter.

“Going there?” she repeated, as if he had mentioned a space ride. “Its nothing he’s suggested. Don’t tell me she said that.”

“No,” Hartwell admitted, “but look at it, anyway. … You haven’t even read it.” She had taken it, but it was lying on her lap. When she moved, it slid to the terrace and she did not pick it up.

“But I know, anyway,” she said. “The last time I saw him was in Venice. He did not even look my way.”

“Venice! Your husband was not in Venice,” Hartwell corrected her with a slightly chilly feeling.

She tucked one foot meditatively beneath her. “You see how crazy I am,” she pointed out.