Without Reservations (36 page)

In the narrow streets of Siena I felt all the same things: excitement, pleasure, and the safety of anonymity. It was as though the girl who loved Halloween and the woman who had just arrived in Siena were standing together, enjoying this medieval parade.

How odd, I thought, that within minutes of arriving in this remote Tuscan hill town I—or perhaps it would be accurate to say
we
—should feel so utterly at home.

The next day I set out to find a bookstore I recalled from my visit to Siena with the tour group. Marta and I had discovered the shop about a half hour before we were to leave for Perugia. To our surprise, it had a phenomenal collection of hard-to-find books, many available in English. Marta and I were able to spend only a few minutes there, but I’d written down the address, along with a note to seek it out when I returned. Unfortunately the note and address were lost somewhere along the line. However, Siena was a small town and I knew that in the course of wandering around I’d stumble across the bookshop.

I didn’t have to stumble very long. About five minutes after leaving the old converted palazzo where I’d taken a room, I found the shop. It was near the Via di Città, a central street where many
of the best antiques and pottery shops were clustered. When I pushed open the heavy door to the shop, the familiar dusty smell of old paper and leather greeted me like a welcoming friend.

My intention was to look for books on Siena’s history. I was particularly interested in learning more about the famous Palio, a savage horse race dating back to the 1600s that still takes place twice a year in Siena’s main square, Piazza del Campo. But I never made it to the history section; I was waylaid by Jane Eyre.

Miss Eyre lay primly on a table along with two other women I knew and loved: Elizabeth Bennet and Dorothea Brooke. I considered the three of them old friends. To me they were the grown-up versions of the three girls who’d helped me through my childhood and adolescence: Jo March and Nancy Drew and the orphaned Mary Lennox, whose secret garden still exists in my head as a real place.

I saw all of them as curious, independent girls and women who through necessity went out in search of their destinies. I also was not unaware that all—with the exception of Elizabeth Bennet—were bereft of one or both of their parents; through death, through absence, through sickness. Growing up—and well past that—they were my companions and sometimes my grief counselors. So even though I was on holiday in Italy I could not pass by Jane Eyre without stopping to say hello.

I stood at the table skimming the book’s pages, stopping to reread this passage and that, as though I had no hidden agenda. But a part of me, I knew, was searching for a specific passage; the one describing the rainy night when the orphaned, ten-year-old Jane is delivered by carriage, alone and frightened, to the austere Lowood School. It still sent chills through me, the thought of Jane’s abrupt introduction into yet another cruel reality of the unprotected, motherless child.

I found what I was looking for on page seventy-five. As I read the words, I relived young Jane’s first encounter with Lowood and the stern woman who approached the carriage:

“ ‘Is there a little girl called Jane Eyre here?’ she asked. I answered ‘Yes,’ and was then lifted out; my trunk was handed down, and the coach instantly drove away.”

By this time I was sniffling and fighting back the tears. I got out a Kleenex and was dabbing at my eyes when a male voice, a very proper-sounding British voice, said, “See here, if you get the pages wet, you’ll have to buy the book.”

Startled, I looked up. The owner of the voice was a big man, tall and muscular, with thick reddish hair and a strong face dominated by a hawklike nose and a quizzical expression. In his arms he carried several heavy books that kept getting tangled with the hornrimmed eyeglasses hanging from a cord around his neck.

“I was planning to buy the book anyway,” I said sheepishly, thinking he was the shop owner.

“Well then, you’re in the clear, aren’t you?”

Was he serious? Or making fun of me? I couldn’t tell. Either way I found him annoying and was about to tell him so when he interrupted.

“Alas, I wasn’t so lucky. A week or two past, I dropped a book I was looking through, broke the spine—the owner made me pay for it. Worse luck, it was a book I can’t abide.”

“What book was it?” I asked, unable to beat back my curiosity.

“The
Decameron.
Paid a pretty penny for it, too. But that’s water over the dam, isn’t it? What have you there?” he asked, looking at the open book I held.

I hesitated, slightly embarrassed. The
Decameron
vs.
Jane Eyre?
No contest, I thought. But then my deep affection for the Brontë book took over, chasing away the snob in me.
“Jane Eyre,”
I said,
catching myself just as I was about to add the word “sir”—as Jane might have done when addressing Mr. Rochester.

“Ah, yes. Quite a good book, that. It’s held up rather well, don’t you think?”

I was about to answer when an avalanche of books—the ones he held in his arms—began crashing to the floor. The noise attracted the attention of everyone in the shop, including a salesclerk who ran over and breathlessly asked, “Is everything all right, signore?”

“Yes, yes, quite all right, thanks,” said the red-haired man who, stooping to gather up the books, seemed unfazed by the commotion he’d created.

I knelt down to help him. “I guess you’ll have to buy all these books now,” I said, smiling, hoping he’d get the joke.

He did. “I was planning to buy them anyway,” he said, returning my smile.

“Well, then. You’re in the clear, aren’t you?”

We both laughed at the sudden reversal of roles. Then, as I helped him carry his books to the cashier’s desk, he stopped and asked, “Aren’t you forgetting something?” He nodded in the direction of the English table where
Jane Eyre
resided.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, the word “sir” slipping out before I could edit it.

“You’re welcome,” he said, looking either puzzled or amused, I couldn’t decide which.

At the cashier’s desk I noted the authors of the books he had selected: Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Brendan Behan, Sean O’Casey; all Irish writers. I started to say something, but by this time he was halfway out the door.

It wasn’t until we were on the street that he introduced himself. His name was Harold Ladley and he asked if I would like to join
him for tea. “I know a nice spot nearby,” he said, leading the way back to the narrow, winding Via di Città. Within minutes we were seated at a table in the Victoria Tea Room. It was a small place with tiny tables and chairs barely able to accommodate someone of his size.

But Hal Ladley, as I would learn over time, had a way of fitting comfortably into whatever situation presented itself to him. Whether it was a chair too small or an ill-fitting social gathering, he found a way to adapt and enjoy himself. I found it a very appealing quality.

Over tea and sandwiches I learned that Hal Ladley was not a tourist. He lived in Italy, in the nearby Chianti area.

“We Brits call it Chiantishire,” he said, “because so many of us have moved here.” At the moment his house was being occupied for two weeks by his honeymooning niece; it was his wedding gift to her. “So for the next fortnight I’m a nomad,” he said. For the time being he was staying at a friend’s house in Greve, a small village about a half-hour’s drive from Siena.

A former professor of mathematics, Hal had left his university position in London after receiving a small inheritance from an aunt. “She was always a great one for saying that it was your time, not your money, that you should spend wisely.”

“So, how do you spend your time wisely here in Chiantishire?” I asked.

“I travel. I cook. I have visitors. And I read a fair amount. But not anything to do with mathematics. Right now I’m working my way through the Irish writers.”

“Yes, I noticed that back in the bookshop.”

“So, ye read my book titles, did ye?” he said, smiling and leaning forward across the table. “And have ye an opinion of them?”

“No,” I said. “No opinion about the books. But I have one about the reader. I think anyone who reads Joyce and Beckett—and is a mathematician to boot—must be very smart.”

“And now I’ve gone and disabused you of that notion, have I?”

“Time will tell,” I said. We both began laughing, but not because anything witty had been said. What had happened, I think, was we each recognized how much at ease we were with the other and that put us—at least it put me—in a good mood.

Later that evening, while walking alone through the town square, I found myself thinking of Casablanca; particularly of the final scene when Bogart’s Rick says to Claude Raines’s Inspector Renault, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

It was how I felt about Hal Ladley. And, I hoped, how he felt about me. But real friendships, I knew, are as rare as happy childhoods.

Over the next several days, Hal and I saw a lot of each other. Often we would spend the day driving through the beautiful Chianti countryside, taking the narrow, meandering Strada Chiantigiana instead of the modern highway. We’d drive through the valley, its sloping hillsides planted with silvery green olive trees and rows of vineyards, stopping to take a walk or have lunch or sample the local wine along the way. Hal, who knew the area and its history, was a perfect guide.

To my surprise, he also turned out to be a perfect traveling
companion. Deep down, though, I recognized it was not so much Hal’s aptitude for the give-and-take of such an arrangement that surprised me; it was my own. Although our inner clocks were totally mismatched—Hal liked to start the day late and dine at nine or nine-thirty; I was at my best early in the morning and disliked eating after 7:30 in the evening—I adapted as easily to his schedule as he did, in turn, to mine. It wasn’t that we had discussions and made decisions about such things; whatever Hal and I did together just happened spontaneously and, despite our differences, was more often than not agreeable to the both of us.

Sometimes, driving home at the end of the day, we wouldn’t talk at all. We’d just sit in the car, perfectly comfortable with the silence, enjoying the view or listening to music. Other times we never stopped talking. We talked about everything, from how to make the best bread soup to the reasons why Communism failed. And sometimes, usually after a glass or two of wine, we talked about our personal lives.

Hal told me about growing up in Oxfordshire and going off to study mathematics. His father, a mathematician who’d proved some well-known theorem or other, had been influential in Hal’s choice of vocation. “I think I always knew it was not a true passion of mine,” Hal said one day. “That it was a case of the son following the father.”

We exchanged, too—but did not dwell on—our personal histories. Married young, divorced young, no children; that was Hal’s summation, more or less, of his family life. My description to him was almost as brief. Married young, divorced in my early forties, two sons, now grown. With anyone else I would have thought it strange, these shorthand versions of our lives. But it seemed right for us.