The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (24 page)

“Well, if she could just—” Grace Hartwell broke off, fighting traffic for dear life. She and Martha were quite solidified in not wanting to hear just what Dorothy’s experience had been.

When she dropped Dorothy off, she drove around for a time among the quiet streets above the city, also above the weather, for up here it seemed clear and cold, and glimpses of the city showed below them framed in a long reach of purple cloud.

“You didn’t mind my bringing Rita?” she asked Martha.

“No,” said Martha, and then she said, “I see a lot of Jim, you know.”

“I thought something like that, this afternoon, I don’t know why. I really cannot think why. I think it was when she asked you for that pin. Isn’t that amazing? Well, I won’t tell George.”

“I know you won’t,” said Martha.

“I just hate seeing nice people get hurt,” said Grace somewhat shyly. She and George had fallen in love at a college dance. They had never, they did not need to tell you, loved anybody else but each other.

“I don’t know who is supposed to be ‘nice people,’” said Martha with a little laugh.

Grace did not answer and Martha added, “I don’t want, I honestly do not want, to embarrass George in any way.”

“Why, it’s possible he won’t ever hear about it at all. Unless everybody does. Or unless the marriage breaks up or something. Is that what you want to happen?”

Martha fell completely silent. This was the trouble with the run of women, considered as a tribe, with their husbands—George, Jim and Richard—to talk about and other families to analyze. How they assembled all those alert, kind-tongued comparisons! How instantly they got through an enormous pot of tea and a platter of pastries! How they went right straight to the point, or what they considered to be the only point possible. To Martha it was not the point at all. The fact of her trusting Grace was the more remarkable in that she understood, even in advance, that they would from now on in some way be foreign to each other.

“I don’t know that I want anything to happen,” said Martha.

“Rita came over,” said Grace, “to talk about—”

“Oh, do stop it,” said Martha, laughing, but somewhat put out as well. “You’re trying to say it wasn’t about me.”

“You know, I honestly feel tired of it already,” Grace said. She paused. “I think of it all as we were, as you and George and I always have been, all these years. I’m going to do that,” she reiterated, and began to accelerate. Pulling her chin up sharply, a habit for preserving her chin line, and gripping the wheel with her hands in worn pigskin gloves, she went swinging and swirling down the Gianicolo, past the high balustraded walls of those tall terra-cotta villas. She remained firm and skillful—a safe driver—her reddish-brown hair, streaked with gray, drawn up rather too tall from her wide freckled brow so forthrightly furrowed (like many people with warm, expressive faces, the thin-skin texture of nice women, she was prematurely lined). But now, Martha noticed, her face looked strained, as well.

“Confidences are a burden, I know,” said Martha. “I’m sorry, Grace.”

“It isn’t keeping secrets I mind. You know that. No, it isn’t that at all.”

Martha did not ask her to define things further, for to encounter love of the innocent, protective sort that George and Grace Hartwell offered her and that she had in the past found so necessary and comforting seemed to her now somewhat like a risk, certainly an embarrassment, almost a sort of doom. Grace did not press any further observations upon her, did not kiss her when she was ready to get out of the car. She waved and smiled—there was something touching about it, a sort of gallantry, and Martha was sensitive to the exaggeration, the hint of selfishness, which this reaction contained. She did not blame Grace, but she read her accurately. She was protective of her husband, the sensitive area was here, and here, also, was written plainly that Martha was more of a help to George Hartwell than she herself had known. Somehow she thinks now I’m in bad faith and she in good, Martha saw. Does she think I can live for George Hartwell?

She took off her damp topcoat and the hat with which she had honored the tea and saw on the telephone pad a note saying the Signor Wilbourne had called.

10

“Martha?”

Whether at home or in the office, at whatever time of day, the name, her own, coming at her with the curious, semi-hoarse catch in it, seemed to fall through her hearing and onward, entering deep spaces within her. She listened as though she had never heard it before, and almost at times forgot to answer. Hurried, he was generally going on, anyway, to what he meant to tell her; the clatter of some bar in the background, he would be shifting whatever clutch of books or briefcase he had with him to unfold a scrap of paper and read an address. Then she would write it down. There were streets she’d never heard of, areas she did not know existed, bare-swept rooms at the tops of narrow stairs, the murmur of apartment life
from some other floor or some distance back of this one, the sounds of the street. The wires of small electric stoves glowed across the dim twilights of these rooms, and if she reached them first, she would sit quietly waiting for him to come, drawing the heater close to warm her damp feet, wearing one of the plain tweed suits she wore to work, her scarf and coat hung up, her face bent seriously forward. She thought of nothing, nothing at all.

She would hear his footsteps on the stair striking, as his voice on the phone did, directly against her hearing, but when the door opened she would scarcely look up, if at all, and he on his part gave her scarcely more than a passing glance, turning almost at once to put his coat up. Yet the confrontation, as brief as that, was absolute and profound. It was far more ancient than Rome.

“Is it okay here? Is it all right?” To a listener, he might have been a landlord speaking. She sat with her hands quietly placed beside her. “Its like the others. There’s nothing to say about it, is there?” “Well, it’s never warm enough. Someday we’ll …” “Do what?” “I don’t know. Go right into the Excelsior, I guess. Say to hell with it.” “But I like it here.” “You’re a
romana.”

His cheek, the high bone that crossed in a straight, horizontal line, pressed coldly against her own; it was damp from the outside air. His hands warmed momentarily beneath her jacket. His quick remarks, murmured at her, blurred off into her hearing—stones thrown in the sea. In the long upswing of her breath she forgot to answer, and tumbled back easily with him against the bed’s length. “God, there’s never enough time!” “Forget it.” “Yes … I will … yes. …”

In these beginnings, she often marveled to know if she was being made love to or softly mauled by a panther, and that marveling itself could dwindle, vanishing into the twin bars of the electric fire or the flicker of a white shirt upon a chair. She could reach the point of wondering at nothing.

Yet something—some word from without them both did come to her—either then or in recollection of those widely spaced-out little
rooms hidden among the crooked roofs of Rome, where the mists curled by and thought stood still and useless, desiccated, crumbling, and perishing; it was only a phrase: “Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night.” It fell through her consciousness as her own name had done, catching fire, mounting to incandescence, vanishing in a slow vast cloudy image silently among the gray skies.

Sometimes he gave her coarse Italian brandy to drink out of a bottle he might have found time to stop in a bar and buy, and she sometimes had thought of stuffing bread and cheese in her bag, but they were mainly almost without civility—there was never any glass for the brandy or any knife for the cheese, and if anyone had hung a picture or brought in a flower or two their consciousness of each other might have received, if not a killing blow, at least a heavy abrasion.

She asked him once why he did not simply come to her, but there was something about Rome he instinctively knew from the start and chose to sidestep. Ravenous for gossip, the Romans looked for it in certain chosen hunting fields—nothing would induce them to rummage around in the poorer quarters of Trastevere or wonder what went on out near San Lorenzo. And anyway—

And anyway, she understood. It was merely a question, perhaps, of furniture. The time or two he did stop by her place, ringing her up from a tobacco shop or restaurant nearby, they almost always disagreed about something. Disagreed was not quite the word; it was a surprise to her that she still found him, after everything that went on, somewhat difficult to talk to. She remembered the times in Venice and later in Rome that she had sparred with him, fighting at something intractable in his nature, and the thought of getting into that sort of thing anymore made her draw back. She just didn’t want to. Perhaps it was a surprise to him that she never asked him anything anymore; she never tried to track him down. Did he miss that, or didn’t he? Did he ask himself? And if he had would he have known what to answer? He was busy—that was one thing, of course. Committees had been set up—there was a modest stir about economic planning on certain American lines proceeding at a level far
below the top governmental rank, only in educational circles, but still—He thought of plunging off into fieldwork, studying possibilities of industry in the south of Italy. “Then you might never come back,” said Martha. “You mean to Rome?” “Oh, no, I meant—it’s a separate world.” She did not think he would ever do it. “You don’t think I’ll ever do it, do you?” She seemed even to herself to have drifted away for a time, and finally murmured or thought she had said, “I don’t know.” She was tired herself, with mimeograph ink on her hands and a whole new library list to set up, and her brain gone numb at so much bandying about of phrases like “the American image abroad.” “What did you say?” he asked her. “I said I don’t know.” She rallied. “It’s a worthwhile project, certainly.” “Thank you, Mrs. Ingram.” His tone stung her; she glanced up and tears came to her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said with a certain stubborn slant on the words.

He had been leaning against her mantelpiece talking down to where she sat in the depths of a wing chair, sometimes toying with objects—small statuary, glass clusters, and paperweights—distributed on the marble surface. When he pulled her up against him by way of breaking off a conversation that had come to nothing, his elbow struck a china image to the floor. The apartment was rented furnished, only half such things were hers and this was not. He helped her clean the fragments and must have said a dozen times how much he regretted it, asking, too, “What was it?” “A little saint, or maybe goddess … I don’t know.” “If you don’t know, then maybe it wasn’t so good, after all.” She smiled at the compliment. “I wish we were back in some starved little room,” she said, “where nothing can get broken.” “So do I,” he agreed, and left soon after.

Reflecting, she was not long in coming upon the truth the little rooms made plain: that they had struck a bargain that lay deeply below the level of ordinary speech; in fact, that in rising toward realization in the world where things were said, it only ran terrible risks of crippling and loss.

And yet one afternoon, when the rain stopped and there was even a red streak of late sun in the clear simple street below, she felt gentle and happy and asked him to walk down in the street for just a little way. And then when he consented a dog trotted up and put its nose in her palm; it would have laid all of life at her feet like a bone. A cat purred near the open furnace of a pizzeria, which burned like a deepset eye of fire in the stony non-color of a winter day, and a child ran out with bare arms in the cold, its mother following after, shouting
“Pino! Pino!”
and holding up a little coat. When they left the pizzeria, he lighted a cigarette leaning against a damp wall and said all right, all right, if she wanted to they would go away for the weekend somewhere. She looked up, startled and gratified, as though at an unexpected gift. It had been somewhat offhandedly thrust at her and yet its true substance was with it.

11

They drove to the sea in what started out to be fine weather but thickened over damply. Nevertheless, he had been full of a run of recklessly funny talk and stories ever since he got off the tram and crossed the sunlit street to meet her, way out near the Laterano, and the mood persisted. The feeling between them was, though nobody had mentioned it, that they would never be back at all. They took turns driving.

Martha admired the artichoke fields warm in the new sun and recalled a peasant who had plowed up a whole Aphrodite in his field and didn’t know what to do with her, for if he told anybody his little farm would be made an archaeological area; he wouldn’t get to raise any more artichokes for a decade or two. So he and his family kept hiding the statue and every now and then someone would be smuggled in to have a go at wondering how much could be got for her in devious ways and the whole thing went on for a year or so, but in the end the farmer buried her again and let her rest in peace; he could
never decide whom he could trust, for everybody had a different theory, told a different story and offered him a different sum. He then went back to raising artichokes. “So every field I see I think of Aphrodite under it,” said Martha. This was not true, but she did think of it now—the small compact mindless lovely head, the blank blind exalted eyes, deep in the dark earth. “Imagine finding Aphrodite and not knowing what to do with her,” he said. He began to cough.

The racking of this particular cough had gone on for weeks now. He said he would never understand Martha for never being sick. The Wilbournes were always in the thick of illnesses; there had not only been Rita’s miscarriage, which had afflicted him with a tenacious sort of despair, a sense of waste and reasonlessness, the worse for being almost totally abstract. What kind of home could be had in this city, in this entire country? (Here the sun, distinctly weakening, had about faded out; he seemed to be grasping for it.) The Italians didn’t even have a word for home.
Casa
. It was where you hung your hat, and slept, and froze, and tried to keep from dying. Oh, Lord, thought Martha, getting weary of him. To her, Rome was a magnificent city in any weather and she moved in it easily with friends in four languages at least—she had not been Gordon Ingram’s student for nothing. The city’s elegant, bitter surfaces were hers naturally, as a result of his taste and judgment, and there were people about who knew this, in their own way of knowing, from the instant she stepped across the threshold of a
salotto
. She had luck, as well. She rented from a contessa in Padova, who counted her a friend; if she told all this to Jim Wilbourne he would class her with the Cogginses who had got invited to a
vendemmia
in Frascati a short time after they arrived.