The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (32 page)

I think of little things they did. Such as Ben coming back from Sewanee with a small Roman statue, copy of something Greek—Apollo, I think—just a fragment, a head, turned aside, shoulders and a part of a back. His professor had given it to him as a special mark of favor. He set it on his favorite pigeonhole desk, to stay there, it would seem, for always, to be seen always by the rest of us—by me.

Such as Eric ordering his “secondhand but good condition” set of Henry James’s novels with prefaces, saying, “I know this is corny, but it’s what I wanted,” making space in his Mama’s old upright secretary with glass-front bookshelves above, and my feeling that they’d always be there. I strummed my fingers across the spines lettered in gold. Someday I would draw down one or another to read them. No hurry.

Such as the three of us packing Mama’s picnic basket (it seems my folks were the ones with the practical things—tennis court, croquet set; though Jamie’s set up a badminton court at one time, it didn’t take) to take to a place called Beulah Woods for a spring day in the sun near a creek where water ran clear over white limestone, then plunged off into a swimming hole. Ben sat on a bedspread reading Ransom’s poetry aloud and we gossiped about the latest town scandal, involving a druggist, a real-estate deal where some property went cheap to him, though it seemed now that his wife had been part of the bargain, being lent out on a regular basis to the man who sold him the property. The druggist was a newcomer. A man we all knew in town had been after the property and was now threatening to sue. “Do you think it was written in the deed, so many nights a week she goes off to work the property out,” Ben speculated. “Do you think they calculated the interest?” It wasn’t the first time our talk had run toward sexual things; in a small town, secrets didn’t often get kept for long.

More than once I’d dreamed that someday Ben or Eric one would ask me somewhere alone. A few years before the picnic, romping through our big old rambling house at twilight with Jamie, who loved playing hide-and-seek, I had run into the guest room, where Ben was standing in the half dark by the bed. He was looking at something he’d found there in the twilight, some book or ornament, and I mistook him for Jamie and threw my arms around him crying, “Caught you!” We fell over the bed together and rolled for a moment before I knew then it was Ben, but knew I’d wanted it to be; or didn’t I really know all along it was Ben, but pretended I didn’t? Without a doubt when his weight came down over me, I knew I wanted it to be there. I felt his body, for a moment so entirely present, draw back and up. Then he stood, turning away, leaving. “You better grow up,” was what I think he said. Lingering feelings made me want to seek him out the next day or so. Sulky, I wanted to say, “I
am
growing up.” But another time he said, “We’re cousins, you know.”

Eric for a while dated a girl from one of the next towns. She used to ask him over to parties and they would drive to Birmingham sometimes, but he never had her over to Martinsville. Ben, that summer we went to Europe, let it be known he was writing and getting letters from a girl at Sewanee. She was a pianist named Sylvia. “You want to hear music played softly in the ‘drawing room,’” I clowned at him. “‘Just a song at twilight.’” “Now, Ella Mason, you behave,” he said.

I had boys to take me places. I could flirt and I got a rush at dances and I could go off the next to the highest diving board and was good in doubles. Once I went on strike from Ben and Eric for over a week. I was going with that boy from Tuscaloosa and I had begun to think he was the right one and get ideas. Why fool around with my cousins? But I missed them. I went around one afternoon. They were talking out on the porch. The record player was going inside, something of Berlioz’s that Ben was onto. They waited till it finished before they’d speak to me. Then Eric, smiling from the
depths of a chair, said, “Hey, Ella Mason,” and Ben, getting up to unlatch the screen, said, “Ella Mason, where on earth have you been?” I’d have to think they were glad.

Ben was dark. He had straight, dark-brown hair, dry-looking in the sun, growing thick at the brow, but flat at night when he put a damp comb through it, and darker. It fitted close to his head like a monk’s hood. He wore large glasses with lucite rims. Eric had sandy hair, softly appealing and always mussed. He didn’t bother much with his looks. In the day they scuffed around in open-throated shirts and loafers, crinkled seersucker pants, or shorts; tennis shoes when they played were always dirty white. At night, when they cleaned up, it was still casual but fresh laundered. But when they dressed, in shirts and ties with an inch of white cuff laid crisp against their brown hands: they were splendid!

“Ella Mason,” Eric said, “if that boy doesn’t like you, he’s not worth worrying about.” He had put his arm around me coming out of the picture show. I ought to drop it, a tired romance, but couldn’t quite. Not till that moment. Then I did.

“Those boys,” said Mr. Felix Gresham from across the street. “Getting time they started earning something ‘stead of all time settin’ around.” He used to come over and tell Mama everything he thought, though no kin to anybody. “I reckon there’s time enough for that,” Mama said. “Now going off to France,” said Mr. Gresham, as though that spoke for itself. “Not just France,” Mama said, “England, too, and Italy.” “Ain’t nothing in France,” said Mr. Gresham. “I don’t know if there is or not,” said Mama. “I never have been.” She meant that to hush him up, but the truth is, Mr. Gresham might have been to France in World War I. I never thought to ask. Now he’s dead.

Eric and Ben. I guess I was in love with both of them. Wouldn’t it be nice, I used to think, if one were my brother and the other my brother’s best friend, and then I could just quietly and without so much as thinking about it find myself marrying the friend (now which would I choose for which?) and so we could go on forever? At
other times, frustrated, I suppose, by their never changing toward me, I would plan on doing something spectacular, finding a Yankee, for instance, so impressive and brilliant and established in some important career that they’d have to listen to him, learn what he was doing and what he thought and what he knew, while I sat silent and poised throughout the conversation, the cat that ate the cream, though of course too polite to show satisfaction. Fantasies, one by one, would sing to me for a little while.

At Christmas vacation before our summer abroad, just before Ben got accepted to Yale and just while Eric was getting bored with law school, there was a quarrel. I didn’t know the details, but they went back to school with things still unsettled among us. I got friendly with Jamie then, more than before. He was down at Tuscaloosa, like me. It’s when I got to know Mayfred better, on weekends at home. Why bother with Eric and Ben? It had been a poor season. One letter came from Ben and I answered it, saying that I had come to like Jamie and Mayfred so much; their parents were always giving parties and we were having a grand time. In answer I got a long, serious letter about time passing and what it did, how we must remember that what we had was always going to be a part of ourselves. That he thought of jonquils coming up now and how they always looked like jonquils, just absent for a time, and how the roots stayed the same. He was looking forward, he said, to spring and coming home.

Just for fun I sat down and wrote him a love letter. I said he was a fool and a dunce and didn’t he know while he was writing out all these ideas that I was a live young woman and only a second cousin and that through the years while he was talking about Yeats, Proust and Edgar Allan Poe that I was longing to have my arms around him the way they were when we fell over in the bed that twilight romping with Jamie and why in the ever-loving world couldn’t he see me as I was, a live girl, instead of a cousin-spinster, listening to him and Eric make brilliant conversation? Was he trying to turn me into an old maid? Wasn’t he supposed, at least, to be intelligent? So why couldn’t he see what I was really like? But I didn’t mail it. I didn’t because for
one thing, I doubted that I meant it. Suppose, by a miracle, Ben said, “You’re right, every word.” What about Eric? I started dating somebody new at school. I tore the letter up.

Eric called soon after. He just thought it would do him good to say hello. Studying for long hours wasn’t his favorite sport. He’d heard from Ben; the hard feelings were over; he was ready for spring holidays already. I said, “I hope to be in town, but I’m really not sure.” A week later I forgot a date with the boy I thought I liked. The earlier one showed up again. Hadn’t I liked him, after all? How to be sure? I bought a new straw hat, white-and-navy for Easter, with a ribbon down the back, and came home.

Just before Easter, Jamie’s parents gave a party for us all. There had been a cold snap and we were all inside, with purplish-red punch and a buffet laid out. Jamie’s folks had this relatively new house, with new carpets and furnishings, and the family dismay ran to what a big mortgage they were carrying and how it would never be paid out. Meantime his mother (no kin) looked completely unworried as she arranged tables that seemed to have been copied from magazines. I came alone, having had to help Papa with some typing, and so saw Ben and Eric for the first time, though we’d talked on the phone.

Eric looked older, a little worn. I saw something drawn in the way he laughed, a sort of restraint about him. He was standing aside and looking at a point where no one and nothing were. But he came to when I spoke and gave that laugh and then a hug. Ben was busy “conversing” with a couple in town who had somebody at Sewanee, too. He smoked a pipe now, I noticed, smelly when we hugged. He had soon come to join Eric and me, and it was at that moment, the three of us standing together for the first time since Christmas, and change having been mentioned at least once by way of Ben’s letter, that I knew some tension was mounting, bringing obscure moments with it. We turned to one another but did not speak readily about anything. I had thought I was the only one, sensitive to something imagined—having “vapors,” as somebody called it—but I could tell
we were all at a loss for some reason none of us knew. Because if Ben and Eric knew, articulate as they were, they would have said so. In the silence so suddenly fallen, something was ticking.

Maybe, I thought, they just don’t like Martinsville anymore. They always said that parties were dull and squirmed out of them when they could. I lay awake thinking, They’ll move on soon; I won’t see them again.

It was the next morning Eric called and we all grasped for Europe like the drowning, clinging to what we could.

After Monte Carlo, we left France by train and came down to Florence. The streets were narrow there and we joked about going single file like Indians. “What I need is moccasins,” said Jamie, who was always blundering over the uneven paving stones. At the Uffizi, the second day, Eric, in a trance before Botticelli, fell silent. Could we ever get him to speak again? Hardly a word. Five in number, we leaned over the balustrades along the Arno, all silent then from the weariness of sight-seeing, and the heat, and there I heard it once more, the ticking of something hidden among us. Was it to deny it we decided to take the photograph? We had taken a lot, but this one, I think, was special. I have it still. It was in the Piazza Signoria.

“Which monument?” we kept asking. Ben wanted Donatello’s lion, and Eric the steps of the Old Palace. Jamie wanted Cosimo I on his horse. I wanted the
Perseus
of Cellini, and Mayfred the
Rape of the Sabines
. So Ben made straws out of toothpicks and we drew and Mayfred won. We got lined up and Ben framed us. Then we had to find somebody, a slim Italian boy as it turned out, to snap us for a few hundred lire. It seemed we were proving something serious and good, and smiled with our straight family smiles, Jamie with his arm around Mayfred, and she with her smart new straw sun hat held to the back of her head, and me between Ben and Eric, arms entwined. A photo outlasts everybody, and this one with the frantic scene behind us, the moving torso of the warrior holding high the prey
while we smiled our ordinary smiles—it was a period, the end of a phase.

Not that the photograph itself caused the end of anything. Donald Bailey caused it. He telephoned the pensione that night from Atlanta to say he was in the hospital, gravely ill, something they might have to operate for any day, some sort of brain tumor was what they were afraid of. Mayfred said she’d come.

We all got stunned. Ben and Eric and I straggled off together while she and Jamie went to the upstairs sitting room and sat in the corner. “Honest to God,” said Eric, “I just didn’t know Donald Bailey had a brain.”“He had headaches,” said Ben. “Oh, I knew he had a head,” said Eric. “We could see that.”

By night it was settled. Mayfred would fly back from Rome. Once again she got us to promise secrecy—how she did that I don’t know, the youngest one and yet not even Ben could prevail on her one way or the other. By now she had spent most of her money. Donald, we knew, was rich; he came of a rich family and had, furthermore, money of his own. So if she wanted to fly back from Rome, the ticket, already purchased, would be waiting for her. Mayfred got to be privileged, in my opinion, because none of us knew her family too well. Her father was a blood cousin but not too highly regarded—he was thought to be a rather silly man who “traveled” and dealt with “all sorts of people”—and her mother was from “off,” a Georgia girl, fluttery. If it had been my folks and if I had started all this wild marrying and flying off, Ben would have been on the phone to Martinsville by sundown.

One thing in the Mayfred departure that went without question: Jamie would go to Rome to see her off. We couldn’t have sealed him in or held him with ropes. He had got on to something new in Italy, or so I felt, because where before then had we seen in gallery after gallery, strong men, young and old, with enraptured eyes, enthralled before a woman’s painted image, wanting nothing? What he had got was an idea of devotion. It fitted him. It suited. He would do anything for Mayfred and want nothing. If she had got pregnant and
told him she was a virgin, he would have sworn to it before the Inquisition. It could positively alarm you for him to see him satisfied with the feelings he had found. Long after I went to bed, he was at the door or in the corridor with Mayfred, discussing baggage and calling a hotel in Rome to get a reservation for when he saw her off.