A Rather Lovely Inheritance (11 page)

The last bedroom we called the Japanese Room, with its wallpaper of pagodas and little ladies with paper umbrellas crossing arched bridges. All four rooms were laid out in a row, one after another, flanked by the balcony on the outside, parallel to the hallway on the inside. The three guest rooms had to share a bathroom at the end of the hall, a pale, sea-foam green, with the same kind of old-fashioned toilet and a narrower tub. Some of the floor tiles were loose.

We went back downstairs, and discovered a door at the foot of each staircase.The one on the right was only a closet, with nothing in it but an awful-looking old mop.The door on the left led to a dining room with heavy, dusty red draperies, drawn together; and a long table with eight hideous-looking chairs with high backs made of carved wooden snakelike squiggles.

Beyond the dining room was the kitchen, which had a door leading outside to a small enclosed porch with a bench, and a shelf containing kitchen-garden tools—a basket, watering can, snippers, gloves. The porch had an outdoor stone staircase that went past those climbing jasmine vines and ended at an herb patch.

The kitchen was most in need of repair, having an ancient black stove, a sink with rusty tap, an old-fashioned icebox, and a pantry. A staircase beside the pantry led down to a wine cellar, with rickety steps that felt more like a ladder. Jeremy flashed his light around, and we examined a few dusty bottles of some old port and sherry, but the racks were mostly empty, strung with elaborately thick spiderwebs that made me dread coming across their architects.

“Looks like Aunt Pen and her chums drank up all the wine,” Jeremy said approvingly. I was still worrying about finding a monster spider colony, so I was glad to leave the cellar.

We returned to the dining room, and Jeremy pulled back the drapery, which raised a cloud of dust, making us cough, but it was worth it—there were French doors that opened onto a slate patio with big terracotta flowerpots, a cast-iron table and chairs, and, a few steps down, an old tiled swimming pool filled with nothing but leaves.

The pool was rimmed on the far side with dense shrubbery, where the property stopped abruptly. Cautiously we went out and peered beyond the shrubbery, and there we discovered that this villa, like the olive trees we’d seen all along the way, was simply clinging to a patch of earth on a cliff, one dollhouse among many. There were houses above us, houses below us, all perched on terraced “steps” that gazed out at the gorgeous Mediterranean Sea.The fiery orange sun was just slipping softly into the sweet blue sea far below, leaving a rippling golden path across the waves to the horizon, connecting land to sea in the mind’s eye.

“Oh, Jeremy!” I breathed. “Isn’t it beautiful? Aren’t you so happy, to be so lucky?”

“Yes,” he said softly. “And yes, and yes.”

I closed my eyes and sighed.When I opened them he was smiling at me.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” he asked. “The garage, my girl.”

I gave him a sideways squint. “Thought you’d
never
ask,” I said. “See how cool I’ve been about it?” We dashed across the lawn to the garage.

It was a silly-looking shed, an absurd, relatively pint-sized replica of the house, only it wore its roof at a rakish angle, like a hat on a tipsy guest. Jeremy had to lift a wooden arm that barricaded its double doors. The oak doors were surprisingly heavy and didn’t hang quite level, but we managed to shove them open. Jeremy led the way in, shining his flashlight ahead, and I followed. But then he stopped short so suddenly that I collided with him, crashing into his back.

“What is it?” I cried.

“A houseguest,” he said in a falsely calm voice. “Look.”

There was a car in there all right, with its front facing us. But when Jeremy aimed his light across its hood, two red eyes were staring back at us.They weren’t like any eyes you’d want to see on a living creature. They looked unearthly, unblinking, like a stranger from Mars. While I stood there watching, however, the serpent uncoiled itself and shyly slithered across the hood, down to the ground, and made haste for a hole in the stone wall through which some light shone, indicating how it had gotten in there in the first place. Expertly, it vanished.

“Snake!” I said unnecessarily, in a pip-squeak of a voice.

“There goes your first possession,” Jeremy said, sweeping his light in an arc around the car. One of the headlights was broken, and looked as if it was stuffed with hay. I hoped it wasn’t the snake’s nest. I found myself tiptoeing, stepping quickly and lightly so that my feet wouldn’t be in one place too long for any other snakes to glide over.

“I hope we don’t surprise a rabid raccoon or something,” I said nervously. But Jeremy was moving closer to the car, shining his light on a silver hood ornament that looked like a snorting giant lizard leaping on its hind legs.

“My God,” he breathed. “It is. I can’t believe it, but it is.”

“Is what?” I asked nervously.

“It’s a Dragonetta!” Jeremy said triumphantly, as he circled around it with excitement, examining the steering wheel and the rearview mirrors and the door handles. “From the look of it I’d say it’s a 1936. I’ll bet Aunt Pen was the first owner, too, which is incredible luck.” He peered inside. “Rather neglected, though.Whoa, I’ll bet that’s the original horsehair upholstery. Looks like mice have been lodging here, but, thankfully, nobody’s home now. But they tore up some of the leather, and shit all over it.”

“Don’t touch it,” I said, remembering some obscure thing I’d read.

“I never touch mouse shit,” he said gravely.

“No, the horsehair,” I said. “I think you can get anthrax from it.”

“Nonsense,” he said, getting more warmed up about the car by the minute. “This could be fixed. My God, an original Dragonetta. What a find.The engines on these cars were big for the time, and the body was light, framed in wood, made by hand.The power and lightness mean it just flies down the road.Those engines were built to last forever, back in the days before all the good ones went into airplanes.” He was still halfway through the window, peering in, but now he backed himself out and looked at me almost sternly.

“Do you know how lucky you are to inherit a car like this?” he demanded.

“Why? Is it worth a lot of money?” I asked.

“Oh, you’d have to put some serious cash into it to make it worth a lot,” he said dismissively. “It’s not the money, my dear child. It’s that you are one of maybe ten people in the entire world who have one.” Then suddenly he grinned. “Have I actually found the one antique that I know more about than you?”

“That’s right!” I conceded. It was something I’d almost forgotten: his boyish love of great cars. As a kid he’d collected magazine photos of “orphans,” or vintage cars with nameplates that were no longer made, like Packards, REOs, Franklins. He could reel off car statistics—year first made, year last made, engine size, performance ratings—the way most kids quote baseball statistics. When he spoke about his favorite autos, his normal noncommittal reserve gave way to a radiant exuberance that he didn’t exhibit for anything else. But, as I recalled, he’d kept this passion a secret from the grown-ups, perhaps anticipating his father’s disapproval.

“Jeremy,” I said, “did you ever tell Aunt Penelope how much you love antique cars?”

“Hmmm?” he said distractedly, still examining it. “Of course not. Why should I? Who would have guessed she was harboring one of these babies all these years?”

We examined the car closely together. It truly was ever so elegant, with a cobalt-blue body, a wide, luxurious dark interior of fine leather and horsehair seats, a wooden dashboard and huge steering wheel and all those other glamorous things that nobody puts in cars anymore. A good old auto with an air of loyalty. It deserved to be fixed up and loved. I understood how Jeremy felt—as if we’d found a prize racehorse neglected in an old barn; you wanted to give the animal a decent brushing, feeding and proper home.

With great enthusiasm we went through the glove compartment and perused some faded maps on tissue-thin paper that was practically disintegrating right before our eyes.

“These are the Alps!” I said in delight.“Wonder if she was a skier? Hemingway was sliding around Europe in Aunt Penelope’s day! He used to go to remote areas with no lifts where you had to walk all the way up the mountain just to ski down it. He said it gave you the kind of legs that made you a good skier. Hey, there are pencil markings on some of the roads. Looks like she trekked all the way through France, Italy, and Switzerland.”

I was sitting on the passenger side, when my foot knocked something under the seat. I reached down and, very carefully, dragged out the object and examined it. A wooden toy soldier, made of cylindrical pegs all threaded through with string, connecting the forearms, upper arms, lower legs, thighs, feet, hands, and torso to the head, so that if you pulled up his hat, you could make his arms and legs jump at the elbow and knee joints, and his little round head wobbled back and forth, all making an amusing clacking noise. He had painted black eyes and a moustache, and a red nose and mouth and apple-red cheeks.

“Look, Jeremy!” I said, playing with the strings. “It’s a toy soldier.”

“Is it valuable?” he asked.

“Not terribly. They’re pretty common, but it’s old; I’d say it was made on the Continent between the two world wars”—I turned the soldier upside down so I could see the bottoms of his black-booted feet—“Yes, in France.”

Jeremy was checking out the trunk of the car, which he called “the boot,” where he found a picnic basket, outfitted in wicker and leather with old crystal champagne flutes in it and an ancient rusty winescrew and some old salt and pepper shakers.

“Could this buggy actually be drivable again?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. I liked the idea of tootling around slowly in a car, instead of rushing about to run errands. Jeremy patted the car affectionately as he walked past it. For pete’s sake, he didn’t even act this excited over the villa.

We continued our tour of the garage, with Jeremy going around announcing whatever else he found—rusty rakes, shovels and other gardening equipment, old folding chairs. I kept taking notes as we had with the house, for the inventory of the estate. But I began to feel a creeping, familiar feeling of foreboding stealing over me, there in the presence of Great-Aunt Penelope’s loyal old auto, which had been young and vital when she was. Now the car was rusting away, still waiting for a driver who would never come back. It struck me now, in a more real way, that Aunt Penelope, who had once been so alive, was gone.And if she could die, then so could I, and Jeremy, and everybody I knew and loved.

Erik calls this Historian’s Melancholy. It hits you at odd times, but you know it when it strikes. Every so often, when you’re sitting in the dead zone of the library where all the old books end up, or an antiques shop when you come across an old pocket-watch engraved from one stranger to another with a dedication that was so personal to the owner but means nothing to anybody else—all at once it dawns on you that these are really just the used, worn-out detritus of some dead person’s life. Whose owner was just like you, believing he’d live forever.

And suddenly the dank smell, the darkness and the dust freak you out and you want to run as fast as you can, outdoors into the light, where you can gulp lots of air and reassure yourself that you’re not dead yet. Erik says it’s healthy—because it’s life warning you that death is no good, that you’ve come too close, and you the living shouldn’t be wallowing in the dust of the dead, but should be out conducting your own life in the sunlight. (And drinking and carousing, Timothy would add.)

I didn’t run out of the garage, but I fell silent. “Well!” Jeremy exclaimed, dusting off his hands, when he was done. I handed him the pages of my inventory notes, and he said that Severine would review it and her office would type it up officially. With great reverence he closed the garage doors and brought down the wooden arm that held them shut.

“You okay?” he inquired, looking quizzical. “You’re awfully quiet.”

“Yes,” I said, glad to be outside with other living things, like those fragrant blossoms and stalwart trees. I thought of Aunt Penelope, with her deep, throaty laugh and her love of gossip. I said, “Life is awfully short, isn’t it? One minute Aunt Penelope’s a gay young flapper, and the next thing you know...”

Light broke across his face, and he took me by the hand and said, “I know. But come on, darling. Brace up, Aunt Penelope would say. We’ve miles to go before we sleep. Let’s take one last look out the back before we go.”

We crossed the lawn, which was already wet with dew or whatever it is that steals across the grass at night. The sun’s golden path on the water had vanished; now the moon left a silver trail in its place.You could imagine silvery fish swimming under that silvery trail, on their way out to the wider sea.We paused, gazing in companionable silence, and the sky grew darker around us, but like children we didn’t really notice until suddenly, it seemed, it was night. The flowers began to give off that mysteriously intense night scent.The air had the mingled songs of late birds, cicadas, crickets, and I thought I might even have heard an owl hoot.

And then, while we stood there, lights started to go on, one by one at first, in the other villas around us. There was something sweet and comforting about seeing other homes nestled into the rocks and cliffs, lighting their lamps and twinkling at us like stars. Signs of life, and hope, like votive candles in a dark church. Finally it was dark enough to make us both sigh like kids who know they have to go indoors now. Jeremy shone his circle of light ahead of us.

As we crossed the lawn I mused that Jeremy would move in here someday, with a new wife, surely, and they’d have kids scampering on the lawn who’d have to be called in at night. One of them would be sent out to the garage to greet me, dotty old maiden aunt Penny, who’d come sputtering up in her silly old car to visit. I could see it now, how hard I’d work to be funny and cheerful. The image made me sick.