Crossing to Safety (28 page)

“
Che si fuggono,
” I say, and then, because I don’t want to add to her desolate mood, I say, “You weren’t the first to find your youth there. Remember Goethe?
Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühen?
And Milton? When he couldn’t stand any more English winters and English politics you know what he’d do? He’d eat an olive to remind him of Italy.”

“I don’t need any olives,” Sally says.

4

Once, at a Cambridge dinner party, I had an imaginary debate with the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who was holding forth on upward mobility. He called it “vertical peristalsis in society.” Obviously he liked the phrase; he thought he had invented something pretty good.

Since he had been born nameless in a nameless Russian village and had risen to become a member of the Council of the Russian Republic and secretary to Prime Minister Kerensky, I granted that he knew more about upward mobility than I did. I had only my own limited experience to generalize from, and three martinis to make me skeptical of other evidence. But I didn’t like his metaphor, and muttered to the lady on my left that social scientists should stick to semantically aseptic language, and leave metaphor to people who understood it.

Peristalsis, I informed this lady or someone else, consists of rhythmic contractions in a tube, such as the gut, that force matter in the tube to move along. In Sorokin’s trope, society was the tube and the individual the matter to be moved, and the tube did the work of moving him. I thought the individual had something to do with moving himself, not necessarily rhythmically.

And why that word “vertical”? Man being an upright animal, at least in his posture, any peristalsis he had going was bound to be vertical, unless we conceived him to be lying down, which there was no reason to do.

Finally, I had the impression that normal peristalsis worked downward, not upward. Upward peristalsis was reverse peristalsis, whose name was emesis. Did Professor Sorokin mean to suggest that he had been vomited up into revolutionary prominence, and later into an international reputation and a distinguished position on the Harvard faculty? Probably he didn’t. But there was no way out of his metaphorical difficulty. He couldn’t extricate himself by reversing directions and accepting the normal alimentary flow, for that not only ruined his upward metaphor but left him looking even worse than if he had been vomited up.

Professor Sorokin never figured in my life. I had never seen him before that night and I never saw him afterward; and our argument never took place except in my head and out of the corner of my mouth. But we had just returned from a Guggenheim year in Italy, and in Italy I had discovered, rather to my surprise, that I had myself been ferociously upward-mobile since my first day in school. In reducing my strenuous life to a social inevitability, and giving it that taint of routine communal digestion, Sorokin insulted me where I lived.

Until Italy, I had been too busy to notice what I was. I was learning, and interested in the learning. Or I was diving into a hole and pulling the hole in after me. Or I was simply trying to survive. But even in our most oppressed times, I was a cork held under, my impulse was always up.

According to Aunt Emily’s theories, I should probably have been led to walk in my father’s footsteps. I loved him, we got along, I worked off and on in the shop. There was no reason why I should not succeed him as proprietor and make a life out of transmissions, brake bands, ring jobs, lube jobs, yard chores, neighborhood barbecues, baseball, and beer. But I had no intention, ever, of doing that. It wasn’t snobbishness. I was never ashamed of him. Nothing in dusty Albuquerque led me to envious comparisons. I just expected more than Albuquerque offered. I took it for granted. And everybody important to me—my parents, my teachers, my professors in college, Sally when we met in Berkeley, and for that matter the Langs when we met in Madison—made the same assumption. I was headed somewhere.

Without knowing what I was after, I pursued it with the blind singlemindedness of a sperm hunting its target egg—now there is a metaphor I will accept. For a long time it was dark, and all I could do was swim for my life. Union and consummation finally took place in the fourth-floor front room of the Pensione Vespucci, an old palazzo on the Lungarno a little below the American consulate in Florence. There, one September morning, it hit me that things were altogether other than what they had been for a long time. Wherever it was that we were going, we had arrived, or at least come into the clear road.

Usually the bells from churches over on Bellosguardo awoke us at six, but this morning I awoke earlier, before dawn. For a while I lay on my back and sent my ears abroad in search of what had brought me awake. But I heard nothing, not the slightest whisper of
rumore
from the street that was practically never silent, no switching of trains in the stony distance, no bells or whistles, no snarl of a Vespa starting off up some alley, no footsteps on bare stone, no stir of our awakening house communicating itself through marble and plaster, no voices of early fishermen down in the trough of the river.

Nothing but Sally’s soft purr beside me and the ticking of the clock, sounds so near and comfortable and reassuring that they accentuated the hush into which they fell. In the bed that was still strange to me I lay listening for outside sounds that I was not sure I could interpret, and I had a thrilling sense of the safety of
hereness
and the close dark. It didn’t really matter what noise out there had caught my sleeping ear. Sally breathed quietly beside me. The clock ticked us toward morning.

Then I woke up another notch. Clock? We had no clock. Then what was I hearing? Holding my breath, I listened.
Tick-tick-ticket-tick-tickety-tick-tick,
not one clock but many, unsynchronized. I brought my watch to my ear: inaudible an inch away. But the faint, hurrying, ratchety, dry ticking went on.

Folding back the covers, I went to the French doors, opened one, and stepped out onto the roof terrace. The night was lighter than the room, and the ticking was much louder, hastier, its rhythms more broken—such a sound as several children might make running sticks at different speeds along a picket fence a block away. I went to the balustrade and looked down into the street, and
ecco
, there it came, a bobbing line of lanterns that curved off the Vittoria Bridge and came on up the Lungarno toward the city. Every lantern swung from a two-wheeled cart, and beside every cart walked a man, and drawing every cart was a donkey whose hasty feet ticked on the pavement.

The swinging lanterns threw exaggerated shadows of spoked wheels, scissoring legs, and long donkey ears onto the stone parapet of the river. Below the pattering and ticking of hoofs, now that sounds were not partly cut off by the jut of the roof, I heard the grit and grate of iron tires on pavement, the squeak of axles, scattered talk, a laugh. When someone stopped to light a cigarette, his face bloomed red for a moment in the flare of the match.

I sprang back inside, stopping long enough to unlatch the other half of the doors and leave both sides standing open. When I snapped on the bed light, Sally lifted her head. “What is it?”

“I’m going to pick you up,” I said. “The quilt too. Up we go.”

I scooped her out of the bed, gathered the quilt over her legs, and started for the doors. “But what is it?” she cried, alarmed. “Is there a fire? What’s the matter?”

“No fire,” I said. “No time either. I might be gone. You’ve got to see it.”

On the balustrade I set her down, wrapped the quilt around her, and got my arm around her to hold her. Her arm came around my neck before she dared look down.

I needn’t have worried that the procession would be over. It was still ticking and grating past, a half mile of moving lights and half-seen shapes of men and donkeys and loaded carts that constantly renewed itself off the bridge.

“Oh, look at them!” Sally breathed. Inside my arm she was warm with sleep. “What are they, do you know?”

“Market carts, I guess. Bringing in the zucchini and
carciofi
.”

“They’re beautiful! How did you know about them?”

“I didn’t. I heard their hoofs going tickety-tickety.”

“Isn’t it a nice sound. Like Ferde Grofé.”

“Better than the farm trucks banging in toward Faneuil Hall.”

We watched for quite a while, and still the stream turned in off the bridge and the lanterns swung past. My feet were getting cold, and were punctured by the gravel embedded in the roof.

“Have you seen enough? Want to go in?”

“Oh, not yet! Let’s see how long it goes on.”

“Sure you’re not cold?”

“Not a bit.” Then her hand went up and down my back, pressing the cold cloth of my pajamas to my skin. “But
you
are! You’re freezing. Come under the quilt.”

My feet were killing me, but she was so enchanted by what was passing below us that I couldn’t have admitted it. Anything she was enchanted by she was entitled to. I came under the quilt.

“Better?”

“Great. You’re like a heating pad.”

“It’s my warm heart. Feel it.”

I did. I stood there on my icy feet with my arm around her and her breast in my hand, and such a sudden flood of complex feeling went through me that I could have groaned and ground my teeth. Thin and eager, she crowded against me, and I was acutely aware how under the quilt her pipestem legs hung lifeless from the balustrade. A hundred what-ifs and might-have-beens swung in my skull as the lanterns swung in the street. I kissed her. “Cold nose,” I said. “Healthy dog.”

Eventually the procession of carts tailed off to occasional hurrying stragglers. The lanterns had lost their luminance, the street was gray with daylight, we could see the mounded vegetables, the boxes and sacks of onions, potatoes, or artichokes on the carts. The sky had paled, silhouetting the hills across the river from Bellosguardo to the Belvedere. Against the shadowed hills were the curves of streets, angles of red roofs, black spires of cypresses. Down in the river bottom two fishermen with long poles had appeared, and were throwing their lines into the meager stream that flowed below the weir.

Upstream, the river’s pewtery shine was spanned by the bridges— Vespucci, Carraia, the sweet catenary curve of Santa Trinita, all of them recently rebuilt from the stones the Germans had left in the river; and beyond those, blocking any further view, the crowded ocher-and-umber buildings and the enclosed causeway of the Ponte Vecchio. It was like looking upriver into the pour of history, seeing backward toward the beginnings of modern civilization.

I would get used to ancient history in the next ten years, when we traveled a lot, and Florence, choked with crowds and automobiles, would lose some of its glamor. But right then, history-less and green, gawky newcomer and pretender to the culture of my kind, I watched the city and the river grow into daylight reality and could hardly believe that it was Sally and Larry Morgan, people I knew, who were on that balcony taking it in.

By the time I had carried Sally back to bed, got my slippers on, and put the water heater in the pitcher to make hot water for tea, the bells had begun over on Bellosguardo, a polyphony in four or five voices. They had rung out over many centuries of blood and striving, and I intended to learn from the city they rang into wakefulness. There would be whole long afternoons and evenings with no manuscripts to read and no hackwork to write. We could learn Italian, we could read about the Medici, we could walk the streets that Leonardo and Galileo had walked, we could catch up with the Renaissance and grow into our world and ourselves. At past forty, with a daughter starting college, we could begin.

Now the incomparable Florentine
rumore della strada
was growing, coming with the fresh morning air through the open doors. The voice of the Vespa was heard in the land. Bubbles were rising along the heating element submerged in the pitcher. I set out two cups and a tea bag. Propped against the carved headboard with a plaster
putto
looking down on her from the corner of the ceiling, Sally watched me.

“Can you believe we’ve got a whole year of this ahead of us?”

“It gives me the intellectual bends.”

She studied me as if she suspected hidden meanings, and after a moment shook her head slightly and made an apologetic mouth. “I should think. You’ve had to work so hard, so long.”

I poured hot water into the cup with the tea bag, and said nothing. Sally thinks too much. She has guilt feelings for what God has done to her.

“Well, you have,” she said. “Look, you even have to make tea. I should at least be able to do that. You didn’t come over here to be a kitchen maid.”

I moved the tea bag into the other cup and poured the cup full. “Look at yourself. Let’s get something straight, once and for all. Repeat after me: ‘I am not the millstone around your neck.’ ”

Shrugging and smiling, she finally repeated it. “I am not the millstone around your neck.”

“ ‘I am not the cross you bear.’ ”

“I am not the cross you bear.”

“ ‘I never
have
been the cross you bear.’ ”

“Oh, come on, let’s not go clear overboard.”

“No say, no tea. No tickee, no laundlee.”

“All right. I never have been. I hope.”

I handed her the cup, and she lay with it close to her lips. Her breath blew the steam across the cup toward me. “Let’s pretend it was that debt that was your cross,” she said. “Can you realize it’s over with? It’s like waking up and finding a big ugly birthmark has vanished overnight. They hated it as much as we did. Remember Charity, when you handed her the last check? ‘Thank goodness, now we can just be
friends
again!’ They’d have cancelled it ten years ago if we’d let them.”

“If we had, would you feel this good now?”

“No, of course not. But I hated it that you were so driven. If it hadn’t been for that, we might have been able to do this years ago.”

“I survived. We all survived. We couldn’t have come on account of Lang, anyway.”

“Maybe not. I wonder how she’s liking Mills by now?”

“That is not something that’s going to keep me awake nights. My selfish mind is on the
vita nuova.
I give you John Simon Guggenheim.”

We drank to John Simon in Bigelow’s English Breakfast.

“You’ve got a resilient temperament, Mister Morgan,” Sally said.

“I have to compensate for a woman who lives in constant anxiety, depression, and alarm.”

Her eyes registered a question: Was I serious? She decided I wasn’t. A warm, rich smile began to gather and take over her face. “Not any more,” she said. Just at that moment the sun looked over Bellosguardo and a pinkish beam came flat through the doors. Sally, the pillows, the headboard, the wall, the
putto
in the ceiling corner, all blushed. Sally set her cup on the bed table and scowled at me. “Why are you over there? How can I kiss you if you’re clear across the room?”