Collected Novels and Plays (5 page)

Xenia wiped cobwebs from her brow. “You say he
isn’t
dead?”

“No, of course he isn’t dead. Why?”

“You spoke as if he were, just then.”

“Well,” he smiled, “all that was several years ago. He’s much better now.”

The sculptress put her elbows on the table. “What a splendid head you have, Francis! I hadn’t realized. You must sit for me one day.”

Francis blushed.

She let him off easily, asking, “And does your father still send presents to women?”

“Oh yes! More than ever. You’ll meet him,” Francis was inspired to add, “and then he’ll send
you
presents!” It had struck him that Xenia belonged more in Mr. Tanning’s circle than in his own.

“Do you think so? What a matchmaker you are! You do it in just the style of my great-aunt.
‘Eugénie,’”
she mimicked,
“‘il faut que tu sois trés gentille envers ce jeune homme. C’est un parti, je t‘assure!’”

“You know,” Francis went on, “in a way I do think of him as dead. He’s been so ill, he’s still so weak. He’s more like one’s grandfather.”

Xenia frowned. He wondered if he was boring her.

“No, really,” he almost begged, “he’s a very sweet old man!”

“Why, he sounds perfectly charming!” she cried, beginning to laugh again. “I knew there was a mystery about you, Francis! Here we all thought you were one of us, a poor young writer trying to make ends meet on Via Margutta! If it weren’t so funny, I’d honestly be annoyed! I’m glad to see you blushing! How dare you allow me to pay my share all the times we’ve gone out!”

He shook his head wistfully. “I loved it, I loved it. I felt it was
me
you liked ….”

“Ah, now you’re being silly,” said Xenia, summoning the waiter. “Of course it’s you I like.” Francis detected on her face a faint irrepressible smile of self-congratulation, as when, in a fairy-tale, the maiden who has been kind to the toad is rewarded by its transformation into a prince. “No, no!” Xenia whisked the check beyond his reach. “I invited
you
to lunch.”

“You’re dreadful!” he moaned.

“Don’t wring your hands. Are you busy tomorrow evening?”

“No …”

She rose. “Then you may call for me at eight o’clock, and take me in a carriage to the Orso, which is the only
cuisine soignée
in Rome. I’ve been eating far too much
pasta
in places like this.” Xenia glanced about with distance, as if for the first time, at flies, chipped plaster, the dirty fingernails of waiters, cats. “We shall have some good French wine and I’ll be wearing a fantastic Paris dress. You
see, there are things I’ve had to hide from you, thinking you were poor! Agreed? Mind you phone ahead for a table. And put on some long pants. Where do you go now?”

“To the travel agent, I suppose.”

“Ah! Well, the thing to do there,” Xenia needn’t have said but did, “is get yourself a cabin in first class. Then you can invite Jane and me for dinner every night! Isn’t that a splendid solution?”

Hilarious, they parted on the street.

He knew now that he couldn’t sail with Xenia. In whatever way he
had thought, by letting her know the worst about him, to check the wildfire progress of their intimacy, he saw how miserably he had failed. She liked him more than ever. Not that Francis objected to intimacy with Xenia as a thing in itself; she was clever, wise, easygoing—but here he stopped, feeling abruptly weakened and worn and used. He did object. “I am not up to
it,” he said aloud to his reflection in a shop-window, a dim transparency of a young man. He watched a woman’s hand reach through curtains to remove from the display an oddly shaped bit of coral; it had been glowing up through his glassed image like an enthusiasm, and now it was gone. No, life was too difficult.

It was far simpler, upon hearing that a first-class cabin could be had on a ship sailing the following evening, to take it; to spend the interim feverishly packing, telephoning a dozen people, letting Xenia and Jane believe, if they so wished, that no other passage was available for the next four weeks; finally to catch the afternoon train for Naples and glide, exhausted, out into the gleaming wastes. Francis made his arrangements with the ease of a sleepwalker.

In twenty-four hours he had nothing left to do. With luggage already at the station, his landlady pacified, flowers sent to Xenia, a final
grappa
with a silent Jane—all this behind him—he strolled through the shuttered city, fingering his passport and ticket and rather too much Italian money. Had he done the wrong thing? Mightn’t he turn round, go back to the Piazza del Popólo, find Jane still at the table where he had left her, chin
in hand? The sky was so blue, the buildings so astonishingly solid, all shades of orange and brown, stones beautifully streaked from their long embrace of weather—what possible meaning could his departure hold? He wasn’t leaving, he had never arrived. He had nothing to show for it, nothing of Rome had rubbed off on him.

It made him nervous. He decided to buy something, some small token to take home, a testimonial, a scar. At such moments Francis had the knack of vanishing into the spending of money as into his own room, where none might follow. Across the square a metal shutter went up. He hastened toward the shop, only an hour left before his train.

It was a shop filled with antiquities, which he and Jane had often visited together. They would squint at intaglios, coins, terra-cotta oil-lamps, fragments of pots and statuary, and at length, no purchase made, smile wistfully into the dim corner where the fat old proprietor sat, conveying to him that his things were very fine but, alas, very costly. They were rarely either, to Francis’s mind. But the game amused him.

He played it, however, in a different spirit this afternoon. After greeting the old man and reassuring him that no harm had come to the Signorina, Francis bent over glass cases, peered up at shelves, in an almost fearful excitement. The objects seemed to have come alive, to be trembling with the possibility of his possessing them. By the end of a half-hour in which he had smoked three cigarettes, he asked if there was anything he hadn’t seen.

The old man made a show of thought, then rose with a wheeze to open a cupboard behind him. Francis watched, elated. He felt in his bones that a treasure would appear.

A big box was placed on the counter. “Since today you are alone,” said the old man craftily, and opened it.
“Ecco, signore!”

Inside, carelessly thrown together, were perhaps a hundred phalluses, of clay, of marble, some primitive—the old man chose one of these and held it high, croaking, “Etruscan! Votive!”—others (“Roman! Artistic!”) monumental and detailed, evidently chipped from sculpture under whichever Pope had been responsible for fig-leaves. Was it Urban? Or Innocent? Francis stared into the box, his mind blank. Then, coming to himself,
“Ah no,” he said.
“Questo non é interessante.”

The shopkeeper courteously ignored this remark. What he had in mind, Francis explained in his clumsy Italian, was something small, precious, something that he might offer as a gift, yes, to the Signorina.

Had the old man understood? What gift more precious? He might have been musing, as with a quizzical smile he made a third selection, this one winged and erect.
“Porta fortuna!”
he nodded, and Francis lost his temper.

How exasperating, how Italian, the old man was!
Porta fortuna
,
indeed!—the phrase served up in connection with any miserable accident. You had only to stumble and fall upon slimy cobblestones, or break a glass and have to pay for it, and up would come a crone or a smiling waiter to observe that the misfortune was sure to bring you good luck. Why, your own grandmother might die, or yourself, a little black bug of a priest shutting your
eyes—from nowhere the dry voice would be heard:
porta fortuna!

“That ring, for instance,” Francis icily pointed it out, “please show it to me,” and shut his eyes until he felt it resting in his palm. It looked Greek, of soft gold, with an owl in relief, and very small, a child’s ring, found in the grave of a dead child. It barely fitted over the first joint of his third finger, and would not be dislodged, causing his hand to suggest a detail from some Renaissance portrait. “How much does it
cost?”

Being gold, and of the fourth century, it could be had—the old man calculated, dissembling his stupefaction, the sale by now certain—for no less than fifty thousand lire.

“Here is forty thousand.
Va bene?”

“Ma, signore mio
—!” A wheedling note, a rolling back of eyes.

“Very well!” cried Francis, who loathed haggling but felt called upon to do it in Europe. He caught with pleasure the old man’s look of frustration, that of an actor whose finest scene has been struck from the script. Throwing down the five implausible bills, rose and umber with protraits of Dante, Francis added, “I am leaving at once for America!”

What had passed in the shop seemed to have removed any alternative. He hurried out into the dazzling square.

And in the taxi, and on the train to Naples, his back to fountain and cypress; throughout the nightmare of customs, squabble and tip; and before falling at last asleep in his gently rocking cabin, he found that it soothed him to study the ring. The hand that wore it lay relaxed all night under the coarse pillow, gathering up each dream of touching or rejecting that Francis, awake, tried not to entertain.

3.
“Run into the next room, dearest, and bring me a little cushion. Oh my, there I go! You couldn’t have been more than six, the day you said to me, ‘Mummy, running’s not so easy as you make it sound.’ Thank you, I’ll fix it. It goes in the small of my back. Oh, and while you’re up, if you wouldn’t mind emptying your ashtray—that’s a good boy.

“But I didn’t
want
you to know that I’d been ill. It was too pathetic in the first place, catching measles at my age. I still haven’t thought how it happened. I hadn’t been anywhere, I hadn’t kissed any children. No, if I felt you’d come back to New York on my account, well, I’d never have forgiven myself. I didn’t need you. And luckily you were so occupied with your own affairs that you thought
nothing of those weeks in which I wasn’t up to writing more than a line. I know that sounds full of self-pity but it’s not meant that way. I’m honestly and truly glad that you weren’t worried. It’s a sign that we have a normal friendly relationship. Didn’t I write you, when you first went to Europe, the things Annette Woodruff said to me? ‘I just don’t understand,’ she said,
‘how
you can let Francis go
away like this. He’s all you have!’ Now there’s a woman with four children, all of them married, with families. She spends at least two months out of the year with each child. I’ve never wanted to be that kind of mother and I hope you’ll let me know the day you catch me at it. I said that to Annette. I said, ‘Francis is a grown man now, old enough to do as he thinks best. I will never interfere with his life. The only reward I want is the
gratitude and respect I get from him, for knowing how to leave him absolutely alone.’

“There’s a nice letter from Annette on the dresser. You can read it and tear it up before you go. I’ve answered it.

“It’s perfectly true, at one time I did need you. I needed all the help I could get. And you helped me, way beyond your twelve years—I want you to believe that. You’ll remember also, I never kept you from visiting your father whenever you wished. It was your own sweetness, Son, that
decided you to spend so much time with me. I did my best to make it easy for you. Did you once see me shed a tear, that whole time? And I know
now that I was right, seeing how close you and your father have grown. He’s a very sick and a very unhappy man, Francis. He needs all the love you can give him. I forgave him long ago.

“That life was never for me. People still stay, ‘Oh Vinnie,
how
can you bear living in this little hole, all alone, after those years in that beautiful house full of servants and friends?’ For the longest time nobody’d believe that I liked it. ‘At least move back to Savannah,’ they’d say, ‘where your friends are.’ And always wanting me to meet some charming new man. No thank you! If the finest man
in the world proposed to me, I’d turn him down. I can read as late as I like, get up when I’m good and ready. There’s that little hot-plate in the pantry where I can cook rice or grits or an egg. You may not believe it, but I’ve found peace of mind more precious than riches. I feel sorry for Ben now, from the bottom of my heart.

“You’d better prepare yourself for a great shock tomorrow, when you go out to the Cottage. He didn’t stop in town last month, on his way through, but I wrote you about the evening we had in the fall. Of course we went to Pavilion, and I doubt that he ate three mouthfuls. Oh, he got a little tight and started in on how he’d always love me. You know, the old story. I just smiled and squeezed his hand. You could see he was at the end of his
strength.
How
he survived the winter I don’t know. He told Larry Buchanan years ago that he literally couldn’t bear up under the strain of a divorce from Fern. And now, just when you’d think he’d really settle down, want to live quietly and simply—suddenly there’s Irene Cheek and Natalie Bigelow and this new Englishwoman who latched onto him in Jamaica, all fussing over him, giving him that false flattery he thrives on! I thank God
you’re
not susceptible to it, Son. You’re one of the most level-headed people I know.

“Why can’t people learn to face the truth? I didn’t
have
to let these gray streaks show. But believe me, if I began touching them up, I’m the one who’d be fooled. Those other women are so pathetic!

“Run along now, you have a lot to do. Give Daddy my love and have a nice long visit with him. Do get a haircut, as a favor to me, will you? And don’t worry. I’ll be on my feet in a day or two. I
love
my presents. And it’s,” she kissed him,
“so
wonderful to have you back. Wait! I put some lipstick on your chin. Bend down, I’ve a Kleenex right here.”

These were a few of the things Francis’s mother said to him on the occasion of their first meeting in over two years. Glancing back from her bedroom door, he saw that she had already put on her glasses and reopened her book, squaring her shoulders as she began to read. It was a gesture he had forgotten, and it touched him as much as any she had made all afternoon.