The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (12 page)

But alack, George, when
he
had written, had only just returned from going to Tuxapoka to Cousin Elec’s funeral. He was full of heavy family reminiscence. All the fine old stock was dying out, look at the world today. His own children had suffered from the weakening of those values which he and Theresa had always taken for granted,
and as for his grandchildren (he had one so far, still in diapers), he shuddered to think that the true meaning of character might never dawn on them at all. A life of gentility and principle such as Cousin Elec had lived had to be known at first hand. …

Poor George! The only boy, the family darling. Together with her mother, both of them tense with worry lest things should somehow go wrong, Theresa had seen him through the right college, into the right fraternity, and though pursued by various girls and various mamas of girls, safely married to the right sort, however much in the early years of that match his wife, Anne, had not seemed to understand poor George. Could it just be, Theresa wondered, that Anne had understood only too well, and that George all along was extraordinary only in the degree to which he was dull?

As for Cousin Alexander Carraway, the only thing Theresa could remember at the moment about him (except his paper knife) was that he had had exceptionally long hands and feet and one night about one o’clock in the morning the whole Stubblefield family had been aroused to go next door at Cousin Emma’s call—first Papa, then Mother, then Theresa and George. There they all did their uttermost to help Cousin Elec get a cramp out of his foot. He had hobbled downstairs into the parlor, in his agony, and was sitting, wrapped in his bathrobe, on a footstool. He held his long clenched foot in both hands, and this and his contorted face—he was trying heroically not to cry out—made him look like a large skinny old monkey. They all surrounded him, the family circle, Theresa and George as solemn as if they were watching the cat have kittens, and Cousin Emma running back and forth with a kettle of hot water which she poured steaming into a white enameled pan. “Can you think of anything to do?” she kept repeating. “I hate to call the doctor but if this keeps up I’ll just have to! Can you think of anything to do?” “You might treat it like hiccups,” said Papa. “Drop a cold key down his back.” “I just hope this happens to you someday,” said Cousin Elec, who was not at his best. “Poor Cousin Elec,” George said. He was younger than Theresa: she remembered looking down
and seeing his great round eyes, while at the same time she was dimly aware that her mother and father were not unamused. “Poor Cousin Elec.”

Now, here they both were, still the same, George full of round-eyed woe, and Cousin Emma in despair. Theresa shifted to a new page.

“Of course [George’s letter continued], there are practical problems to be considered. Cousin Emma is alone in that big old house and won’t hear to parting from it. Robbie and Beryl tried their best to persuade her to come and stay with them, and Anne and I have told her she’s more than welcome here, but I think she feels that she might be an imposition, especially as long as our Rosie is still in high school. The other possibility is to make arrangements for her to let out one or two of the rooms to some teacher of good family or one of those solitary old ladies that Tuxapoka is populated with—Miss Edna Whitaker, for example. But there is more in this than meets the eye. A new bathroom would certainly have to be put in. The wallpaper in the back bedroom is literally crumbling off. …” (Theresa skipped a page of details about the house.) “I hope if you have any ideas along these lines you will write me about them. I may settle on some makeshift arrangements for the summer and wait until you return in the fall so we can work out together the best…”

I really shouldn’t have smoked a cigarette so early in the day, thought Theresa, it always makes me sick. I’ll start sneezing in a minute, sitting on these cold steps. She got up, standing uncertainly for a moment, then moving aside to let go past her, talking, a group of young men. They wore shoes with pointed toes, odd to American eyes, and narrow trousers, and their hair looked unnaturally black and slick. Yet here they were obviously thought to be handsome, and felt themselves to be so. Just then a man approached her with a tray of cheap cameos, Parker fountain pens, rosaries, papal portraits. “No,” said Theresa. “No, no!” she said. The man did not wish to leave. He knew how to spread himself against the borders of the space that had to separate them. Carrozza rides in the park, the
Colosseum by moonlight, he specialized … Theresa turned away to escape, and climbed to a higher landing where the steps divided in two. There she walked to the far left and leaned on a vacant section of banister, while the vendor picked himself another well-dressed American lady, carrying a camera and a handsome alligator bag, ascending the steps alone. Was he ever successful, Theresa wondered. The lady with the alligator bag registered interest, doubt, then indignation; at last, alarm. She cast about as though looking for a policeman: this really shouldn’t be allowed! Finally, she scurried away up the steps.

Theresa Stubblefield, still holding the family letters in one hand, realized that her whole trip to Europe was viewed in family circles as an interlude between Cousin Elec’s death and “doing something” about Cousin Emma. They were even, Anne and George, probably thinking themselves very considerate in not hinting that she really should cut out “one or two countries” and come home in August to get Cousin Emma’s house ready before the teachers came to Tuxapoka in September. Of course, it wasn’t Anne and George’s fault that one family crisis seemed to follow another, and weren’t they always emphasizing that they really didn’t know what they would do without Theresa?
The trouble is
, Theresa thought,
that while everything that happens there is supposed to matter supremely, nothing here is supposed even to exist. They would not care if all of Europe were to sink into the ocean tomorrow. It never registered with them that I had time to read all of Balzac, Dickens, and Stendhal while Papa was dying, not to mention everything in the city library after Mother’s operation. It would have been exactly the same to them if I had read through all twenty-six volumes of Elsie Dinsmore
.

She arranged the letters carefully, one on top of the other. Then, with a motion so suddenly violent that she amazed herself, she tore them in two.

“Signora?”

She became aware that two Italian workmen, carrying a large azalea pot, were standing before her and wanted her to move so that they could begin arranging a new row of the display.

“Mi displace, signora, ma … insomma…”

“Oh … put it there!” She indicated a spot a little distance away. They did not understand.
“Ponere … la.” A
little Latin, a little French. How one got along! The workmen exchanged a glance, a shrug. Then they obeyed her.
“Va bene, signora.”
They laughed as they returned down the steps in the sun.

Theresa was still holding the torn letters, half in either hand, and the flush was fading slowly from her brow. What a strong feeling had shaken her! She observed the irregular edges of paper, so crudely wrenched apart, and began to feel guilty. The Stubblefields, it was true, were proud and prominent, but how thin, how vulnerable was that pride it was so easy to prove, and how local was that prominence there was really no need to tell even them. But none could ever deny that the Stubblefields meant well; no one had ever challenged that the Stubblefields were good. Now out of their very letters, their sorrowful eyes, full of gentility and principle, appeared to be regarding Theresa, one of their own who had turned against them, and soft voices, so ready to forgive all, seemed to be saying, “Oh, Theresa, how
could
you?”

Wasn’t that exactly what they had said when, as a girl, she had fallen in love with Charlie Wharton, whose father had unfortunately been in the pen? Ever so softly, ever so distressed: “Oh, Theresa, how
could
you?” Never mind. That was long ago, over and done with, and right now something clearly had to be done about these letters.

Theresa moved forward, and leaning down she dropped the torn sheets into the azalea pot which the workmen had just left. But the matter was not so easily settled. What if the letters should blow away? One could not bear the thought of that which was personal to the Stubblefields chancing out on the steps where everyone passed, or maybe even into the piazza below to be run over by a motor scooter, walked over by the common herd, spit upon, picked up and
read, or—worst of all—returned to American Express by some conscientious tourist, where tomorrow, filthy, crumpled, bedraggled, but still legibly, faithfully relating Cousin Elec’s death and Cousin Emma’s grief, they might be produced to confront her.

Theresa moved a little closer to the azalea pot and sat down beside it. She covered the letters deftly, smoothing the earth above them and making sure that no trace of paper showed above the ground. The corner of Cousin Emma’s envelope caught on a root and had to be shoved under, a painful moment, as if a letter could feel anything—how absurd! Then Theresa realized, straightening up and rubbing dirt off her hand with a piece of Kleenex from her bag, that it was not the letters but the Stubblefields that she had torn apart and consigned to the earth. This was certainly the only explanation of why the whole curious sequence, now that it was complete, had made her feel so marvelously much better.

Well, I declare!
Theresa thought, astonished at herself, and in that moment it was as though she stood before the statue of some heroic classical woman whose dagger dripped with stony blood.
My goodness!
she thought, drowning in those blank exalted eyeballs:
Me!

So thrilled she could not, for a time, move on, she stood noting that this particular azalea was one of exceptional beauty. It was white, in outline as symmetrically developed as an oak tree, and blooming in every part with a ruffled, lacy purity. The azalea was, moreover, Theresa recalled, a Southern flower, one especially cultivated in Alabama. Why, the finest in the world were said to grow in Bellingrath Gardens near Mobile, though probably they had not heard about that in Rome.

Now Miss Theresa Stubblefield descended quickly, down, down, toward the swarming square, down toward the fountain and all the racket, into the Roman crowd. There she was lost at once in the swirl, nameless, anonymous, one more nice rich American tourist lady.

But she cast one last glance back to where the white azalea stood, blooming among all the others. By now the stone of the great staircase
was all but covered over. A group of young priests in scarlet cassocks went past, mounting with rapid, forward energy, weaving their way vividly aloft among the massed flowers. At the top of the steps the twin towers of a church rose, standing clearly outlined on the blue air. Some large white clouds, charged with pearly light, were passing overhead at a slow imperial pace.

Well, it certainly is beyond a doubt the most beautiful family funeral of them all!
thought Theresa.
And if they should ever object to what I did to them
, she thought, recalling the stone giantess with her dagger and the gouts of blood hanging thick and gravid upon it,
theyve only to read a little and learn that there have been those in my position who haven’t acted in half so considerate a way
.

The Visit

The children were playing through the long empty rooms of the villa, shuttered now against the sunlight during the hottest hour of the day. The great man had gone to take a nap.

Before she had come to Italy, Judy thought that siesta was the word all Latins used for a rest after lunch, but she had learned that you said this only in Spain. In Italy you went to
riposarsi
, and this was exactly what the great man had done.

It was unfortunate because Bill had built up so to this visit. To be invited to see Thompson was, for almost anyone in the academic world, the token of something superior; but in Bill’s particular field, it was the treasure, the X mark on the ancient map.

Judy often thought that Bill had an “and-then” sort of career. Graduate courses, a master’s degree. A dissertation, a doctorate. A teaching appointment, scholarly articles. And then, and then. Promotion, the dissertation published, and clearly ahead on the upward road they could discern the next goal: a second, solidly important, possibly even definitive book. A grant from the Foundation was a natural forward step, and Bill then got to take his wife to Italy for a year. In Italy, as all knew, was Thompson.

Bill and Judy Owens had arrived in October; now it was June. All year Bill had worked on his book, the ambitious one, all about ancient Roman portraiture; Judy had typed for him, and manuscript had piled up thickly. They went about looking at museums, at ancient ruins and new excavations. They met other attractive young American couples who were abroad on fellowships and scholarships, studied Italian, attended lectures, and frequently complained about not getting to know more of the natives.

But all the time Bill and Judy did not mistake what the real thread was, nor which and-then they were working on now. The book would get written somehow; but what prestige it would gain for Bill if only he had the right to make a personal reference to Thompson even once—and more than once would be overdoing it. Should it go in the introduction, or the preface, or the acknowledgments, or the text itself? This would depend on the nature of what Thompson, at last, yielded; and did it matter so much where the single drop of essence landed, when it would go to work for one anywhere, regardless?