Beautiful Ruins (25 page)

(
Dee Moray reclines on a beach chair on the Riviera with her quiet, handsome Italian companion, Pasquale, reading the trades until Pasquale kisses her and goes off to play tennis on this court jutting out of the cliffs—
)

“Any questions?”

“Hmm. I’m sorry?”

“Any questions about what I’ve just told you?”

“No.” She followed the fat cop down a hallway.

“This might not be the best time,” he said, and glanced back at her over his shoulder as they walked. “But I noticed that you’re not wearing a wedding ring. I wondered if maybe sometime you might want to have dinner . . . the legal system can be really confusing and it can help to have someone who—”

(
The hotel concierge brings a phone to the beach. Dee Moray removes her sun hat and puts the phone to her ear. It’s Dick!
Hello, love
, he says,
I trust you’re as beautiful as ever
—
)

The cop turned and handed her a card with his phone number on it. “I understand this is a tough time, but in case you feel like going out sometime.”

She stared at the card.

(
Dee Moray sighs:
I saw
The Exorcist,
Dick
.
Oh Jesus,
he says,
that shite? You know how to hurt a fellow. No
, she tells him gently,
it’s not exactly the Bard.
Dick laughs.
Listen, darling, I’ve got this play I thought we might do together
—
)

The cop reached for the door. Debra took a deep, ragged breath and followed him inside.

Pat was sitting on a folding chair in an empty room, head in his hands, fingers lost in those currents of wavy brown hair. He pushed his hair aside and looked up at her; those eyes. No one understood how much they were in this together, Pat and her. We’re lost in this thing, Dee thought. There was a small abrasion on his forehead, almost like a carpet burn. Otherwise, he looked fine. Irresistible—his father’s son.

He leaned back and crossed his arms. “Hey,” he said, mouth rising up in that sly
what-are-you-doing-here
smile. “So how was your date?”

14

The Witches of Porto Vergogna

April 1962

Porto Vergogna, Italy

P
asquale slept through the next morning. When he finally woke, the sun had already crested the cliffs behind the town. He climbed the stairs to the third floor and the dark room where Dee Moray had stayed. Had she really just been here? Had he really been in Rome just yesterday, driving with the maniac Richard Burton? It felt as if time had shifted, warped. He looked around the small stone-walled room. It was all hers now. Other guests would stay here, but this would always be Dee Moray’s room. Pasquale threw open the shutters and light poured in. He took a deep breath, but smelled only sea air. Then he picked up Alvis Bender’s unfinished book from the nightstand and thumbed through the pages. Any day now, Alvis would show up to resume writing in that room. But the room would never belong to him again.

Pasquale returned to his room on the second floor and got dressed. On his desk he saw the photograph of Dee Moray and the other laughing woman. He picked it up. The photo didn’t begin to capture Dee’s sheer presence, not the way he remembered it: her graceful height and the long rise of her neck and deep pools of those eyes, and the quality of movement that seemed so different from other people, lithe and energetic, no wasted action. He held the photo close to his face. He liked the way Dee was laughing in the picture, her hand on the other woman’s arm, both of them just beginning to double over. The photographer had caught them at a
real
moment, breaking up in laughter over something no one else would ever know. Pasquale carried the photo downstairs and slid it into the corner of a framed painting of olives in the tiny hallway between the hotel and the
trattoria
. He imagined showing his American guests the photo and then feigning nonchalance: sure, he would say, film stars occasionally stayed at the Adequate View. They liked the quiet. And the cliff tennis.

He stared into the photo and thought about Richard Burton again. The man had so many women. Was he even interested in Dee? He would take her to Switzerland for the abortion, and then what? He would never marry her.

And suddenly he had a vision of himself going to Portovenere, knocking on her hotel room door.
Dee, marry me. I will raise your child
as my own.
It was ridiculous—thinking that she would marry someone she’d just met, that she would ever marry him. And then he thought of Amedea and was filled with shame. Who was he to think badly of Richard Burton? This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.

He needed coffee. Pasquale went into the small dining room, which was full of late-morning light, the shutters thrown open. It was unusual for this time of day; his Aunt Valeria waited for the late afternoon to open the shutters. She was sitting at one of the tables, drinking a glass of wine. That was odd for eleven in the morning, too. She looked up. Her eyes were red. “Pasquale,” she said, her voice cracking. “Last night . . . your mother—” She looked at the floor.

He rushed past her to the hall and pushed open Antonia’s door. The shutters and windows were open in here, too, sea air and sunlight filling the room. She lay on her back, a bouquet of gray hair on the pillow behind her, mouth twisted slightly open, a bird’s hooked beak. The pillows were fluffed behind her head, the blanket pulled neatly to her shoulders and folded once, as if already prepared for the funeral. Her skin was waxy, as if it had been scrubbed.

The room smelled like soap.

Valeria was standing behind him. Had she discovered her sister dead . . . and then cleaned the room? It made no sense. Pasquale turned to his aunt. “Why didn’t you tell me this last night, when I got back?”

“It was time, Pasquale,” Valeria said. Tears slid through the scablands of her old face. “Now you can go marry the American.” Valeria’s chin fell to her chest, like an exhausted courier who has delivered some vital message. “It was what she wanted,” the old woman rasped.

Pasquale looked at the pillows behind his mother and at the empty cup on her bedside table. “Oh, Zia,” he said, “what have you done?”

He lifted her chin and in her eyes he could see the whole thing:
The two women listening at the window while he talked to Dee Moray, understanding none of it; his mother insisting—as she had for months—that it was her time to die, that Pasquale needed to leave Porto Vergogna to find a wife; his Aunt Valeria making one last desperate attempt, when she’d tried to get the sick American woman to stay,
with her witch’s story about how no one ever died young here; his mother asking Valeria over and over (“Help me, Sister”),
begging her, hectoring—

“No, you didn’t—”

Before he could finish, Valeria slumped to the ground. And Pasquale turned with disbelief toward his dead mother. “Oh, Mamma,” Pasquale said simply. It was all so pointless, so ignorant; how could they misconstrue so completely what was happening around them? He turned to his sobbing aunt, reached down, and took her face between his hands. He could barely see her dark, wrinkled skin through the blur of his own tears.

“What . . . did you do?”

Then Valeria told him everything: how Pasquale’s mother had been asking for release ever since Carlo died and had even tried to suffocate herself with a pillow. Valeria had talked her out of it, but Antonia persisted until Valeria promised her that, when her older sister could stand the pain no more, she would help. This week, she had called in this solemn promise. Again, Valeria said no, but Antonia said that she could never understand because she wasn’t a mother, that she wanted to die rather than burden Pasquale anymore, that he would never leave Porto Vergogna so long as she was alive. So Valeria did as she’d asked, baked some lye into a loaf of bread. Then Antonia had Valeria leave the hotel for an hour, so that she would have no part in her sin. Valeria tried once more to talk her out of it, but Antonia said she was at peace, knowing that if she went now, Pasquale could go off with the beautiful American—

“Listen to me,” Pasquale said. “The American girl? She loves the other man who was here, the British actor. She doesn’t care about me. This was for nothing!” Valeria sobbed again and fell against his leg, and Pasquale stared down at her bucking, thrashing shoulders, until pity overwhelmed him. Pity, and love for his mother, who would have wanted him to do what he did next: he patted Valeria’s wiry nest of hair and said, “I’m sorry, Zia.” He looked back at his mother, lying against the fluffed pillows, as if in solemn approval.

Valeria spent the day in her room, weeping, while Pasquale sat on the patio smoking and drinking wine. At dusk he went with Valeria and wrapped his mother tight in a sheet and a blanket, Pasquale giving one last gentle kiss to her cold forehead before covering her face.
What man ever really knows his mother?
She’d had an entire life before him, including two other sons, the brothers he’d never known. She’d survived losing them in the war, and losing her husband. Who was he to decide that she wasn’t ready, that she should linger here a bit longer? She was done. Perhaps it was even good that his mother believed he would run off with some beautiful American when she was gone.

The next morning, Tomasso the Communist helped Pasquale carry Antonia’s body to his boat. Pasquale hadn’t noticed how frail his mother had gotten until he had to carry her this way, his hands beneath her bony, birdlike shoulders. Valeria peeked out from her doorway and said a quiet good-bye to her sister. The other fishermen and their wives lined the piazza and gave Pasquale their condolences—“She’s with Carlo now,” and “Sweet Antonia,” and “God rest”—and Pasquale gave them a small nod from the boat as Tomasso once again pulled the boat motor to life and chugged them out of the cove.

“It was her time,” Tomasso said as he steered through the dark water.

Pasquale faced forward to keep from having to talk anymore, from having to see his mother’s shrouded body. He felt grateful at the way the salty chop stung his eyes.

In La Spezia, Tomasso got a cart from the wharf watchman. He pushed Pasquale’s mother’s body through the street—like a sack of grain, Pasquale thought shamefully—until they finally arrived at the funeral home, and he made arrangements to have her buried next to his father as soon as a funeral mass could be arranged.

Then he went to see the cross-eyed priest who had presided at his father’s mass and burial. Already overwhelmed with confirmation season, the priest said he couldn’t possibly say a requiem mass until Friday, two days from now. How many people did Pasquale expect at the service? “Not many,” he said. The fishermen would come if he asked them; they would spit-flatten their thin hair, put on black coats, and stand with their serious wives while the priest intoned—
Antonia, requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine
—and afterward, the serious wives would bring food to the hotel. But the whole thing seemed to Pasquale so predictable, so earthbound and pointless. Of course it was exactly what she would have wanted, and so he made arrangements for the funeral mass, the priest making a notation on a ledger of some kind and looking up through his bifocals. And did Pasquale also want him to say
trigesimo
, the mass thirty days after the death to give the departed a final nudge into heaven? Fine, Pasquale said.

“Eccellente,”
Father Francisco said, and held out his hand. Pasquale took the hand to shake it, but the priest looked at him sternly—or at least one of his eyes did. Ah, Pasquale said, and he reached in his pocket and paid the man. The money disappeared beneath his cassock and the priest gave him a quick blessing.

Pasquale was in a daze as he walked back to the pier where Tomasso’s boat was moored. He climbed back in the grubby wooden shell. Pasquale felt terrible again that he had transported his mother this way. And then he recalled the strangest moment, almost at random: He was probably seven. He woke from an afternoon nap, disoriented about the time, and came downstairs to find his mother crying and his father comforting her. He stood outside their bedroom door and watched this, and for the first time Pasquale understood his parents as beings apart from him—that they had existed before he’d been alive. That’s when his father looked up and said, “Your grandmother has died,” and he assumed it was his mother’s mother; only later did he learn that it was his father’s mother. And yet
he
had been comforting
her
. And his mother looked up and said, “She is the lucky one, Pasquale. She’s with God now.” Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love. He put his face in his hands and Tomasso politely turned away as they motored away from La Spezia.

Back at the Adequate View, Valeria was nowhere to be found. Pasquale looked in her room, which was as cleaned and made up as his mother’s had been—as if no one had ever been there. The fishermen hadn’t taken her away; she must have hiked out on the steep trails behind the village. That night, the hotel felt like a crypt to Pasquale. He grabbed a bottle of wine from his parents’ cellar and sat in the empty
trattoria
. The fishermen all stayed away. Pasquale had always felt confined by his life—by his parents’ fearful lifestyle, by the Hotel Adequate View, by Porto Vergogna, by these things that seemed to hold him in place. Now he was chained only to the fact that he was completely alone.

Pasquale finished the wine and got another bottle. He sat at his table in the
trattoria
, staring at the photo of Dee Moray and the other woman, as the night bled out and he became drunk and dizzy, and still his aunt didn’t return, and at some point he must have fallen asleep, because he heard a boat and then the voice of God bellowed through his hotel lobby.

“Buon giorno!”
God called. “Carlo? Antonia? Where are you?” And Pasquale wanted to weep, because shouldn’t they be with God, his parents? Why was He asking for them, and in English? But finally Pasquale realized he was asleep and he lurched into consciousness, just as God switched back to Italian:
“Cosa
un ragazzo deve fare per ottenere una bevanda qui intorno?”
and Pasquale realized that, of course, it wasn’t God. Alvis Bender was in his hotel lobby first thing this morning, here for his yearly writing vacation, and asking in his sketchy Italian,
What’s a fella got to do to get a drink around here?

A
fter the war, Alvis Bender had been lost. He returned to Madison to teach English at Edgewood, a little liberal arts college, but he was sullen and rootless, prone to weeks of drunken depression. He felt none of the passion he’d once had for teaching, for the world of books. The Franciscans who ran the college tired quickly of his heavy drinking and Alvis went back to work for his father. By the early fifties, Bender Chevrolet was the biggest dealership in Wisconsin; Alvis’s father had opened new showrooms in Green Bay and Oshkosh, and was about to open a Pontiac dealership in suburban Chicago. Alvis made the most of his family’s prosperity, behaving in the auto business as he had at his little college and earning the nickname All Night Bender among the dealership secretaries and bookkeepers. The people around Alvis attributed his mood swings to what was euphemistically called “battle fatigue,” but when his father asked Alvis if he was shell-shocked, Alvis said, “I get shelled every day at happy hour, Dad.”