Hill Towns (21 page)

“And you can’t give him that?”

“No. He hates my guts, worse than his mother does, even, and I’m bored to death with him. I can’t give him me, and I suppose that’s what he has always needed, even if he thinks he doesn’t. The fact is, Miss Cat, none of us are willing, in our deepest hearts, to give up the vital, die-without, gut things for our children. Nothing but our lives. That’s the easy part.”

“That’s hard stuff, Sam,” I said, but somehow the words comforted me.

“About the only thing I really try very hard not to do is lie,” Sam Forrest said.

On the way back to the Cavalieri Hilton in the cab Sam called for me, I had another bad attack of the fear. I was bumping along in relative quiet, having lucked into another of Rome’s rare air-conditioned taxis with a marginally sane driver; I was leaning back against the seat and thinking of the past few hours I had spent in Sam’s studio while he sketched furiously. My mind was slack, cooled. And then it flew at me like a rattler uncoiling and struck deep into my throat. I shut my eyes and clenched my fists against it, trying to draw fast, shallow breaths through my nose. I clamped my mouth shut lest I cry out, a thing I have always done when the fear strikes suddenly and monstrously, but I need not have bothered. I could not have spoken; the poison had paralyzed my throat.

I think it was so bad because I had not felt it for a day or so, and I had been in circumstances in which I could 170 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

surely have expected to: on foot in the great open piazzas of Rome, literally drowning in a surf of people. But I had not been alone then. Joe had been with me. And Sam.

When I felt the taxi start up the winding road that led up Monte Mario, some of the paralyzing terror faded, and by the time we reached the gates of the Hilton I was able to open my eyes and wipe the cold sweat off my face and push the clammy hair off my forehead.

“
Grazie
,” I croaked to the driver when he opened my door.

Sam had paid him back in the Campo Fiori. All that remained for me to do was flee to the vast, quiet chill of the lobby, and I did. As I went in through the heavy glass doors, the thought stabbed me: I had, because of my tight-shut eyes, missed the incredible panorama of Rome from the mountain.

I would not see it again. We would leave by train, at midnight. I was surprised at the desolation I felt at the thought.

What had this place meant to me but fear and disorientation?

But I knew there had been more. There had been exalta-tion, too, and laughter, the beginning of something else. But I could not name that yet.

And then I remembered: Sam and Ada were having us to dinner at the rooftop restaurant before our train left, and I would see Rome again from there. See Sam and Ada once more, and Yolanda Whitney. I felt a small frisson of real pleasure. Strangers they had all been to me two days ago and, essentially, still were; I would not see them again after tonight. But for a small, intense time, they had been my community in this place. My tribe, my pack. Out of all these noisome, alien people, they had been
my
people. The huge and ancient and somehow terrible meaning of the word

“community”

HILL TOWNS / 171

burst over me, stopping me dead in my flight to the elevator.

It was everything; it was life.

I smiled at myself in the elevator’s mirrored sides on the soundless rush up. I’m seeing my crowd for dinner tonight, I said silently to the rumpled woman with the too-large eyes who looked back at me.

When I reached the room, Maria Gerard opened the door almost before I got my key into the lock. She was still in the wrinkled red sundress she had worn at lunch, and her round face was pale and worried.

“What is it?” I said, looking past her into the room. It was dim with the kind of hot dimness a room gets when mercilessly white-hot light outside is shuttered out, though the air-conditioning was nearly cold. The room seemed to be full of people. I blinked, to accustom my eyes to the gloom.

Colin lay on the sofa, his foot pillowed on the arm. His ankle was bound in an Ace bandage, and his bare toes looked fish-white in the gloom. A pair of crutches was propped against the desk, and he had a washcloth over his eyes. On one side of the bed Joe was propped up against pillows with his shirt off. There were towels on his bare chest, and another washcloth on his forehead. Ada Forrest sat on the other side of the bed with a bowl of ice on the night table beside her.

The television set was on, but the volume was turned off;
Mr. Ed
, insane in this place even without the dubbed Italian, flickered in the gloom. Somehow a talking horse was no stranger than this stricken group in my room in the Cavalieri Hilton.

“Everything’s OK, or will be,” Maria said hastily, before I could draw breath with which to speak. My face must have been terrible, with the dregs of the ride’s sick fear still on it and the new alarm just blooming there.

172 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“My God, what happened to Joe? What’s wrong with Colin? Was there an accident?”

I could see it, somehow; the taxi and the other car flying together in a glittering shower of glass and a scream of rent metal; people shrieking and babbling; the blatting klaxon of the European emergency vehicles that I hated so….

“Not unless you call two grown-up little boys showing off and almost killing themselves an accident,” Maria said, and I heard the anger in her voice then, below the fading fear. I went across the room and sat down on Joe’s side of the bed and simply looked at him. He looked back, tried to smile, and closed his eyes. I thought there was more aversion to meeting my gaze than weakness in it. I looked at Ada Forrest.

“Is somebody going to tell me about it?” I said.

She shook her sleek silver head ruefully and smiled. She was cool and perfectly ordered in her black gauze.

“Everybody wanted to go to the Baths and the Catacombs and the Circus Maximus,” she said, “so we got a cab and went to the Circus first. It was terribly hot; I can’t remember Rome like this many times. I thought then we probably ought not be doing it. When we got to the Circus, there was practically nobody around, and we went out onto the field, or whatever you call it, and Joe and Colin—they were just teasing, really….” She paused.

“Joe gave a magnificent salute to the crowd and yelled

‘
Morituri te salutamus
!’ and Colin said ‘I dare you!’ and they looked at each other and took off around the track in a footrace,” Maria finished. “Isn’t that cute? Isn’t it adorable?

In a hundred-plus-degree heat? It’s a very good thing Colin fell and sprained his ankle; otherwise Joe would be dead of heat stroke or heart failure. I

HILL TOWNS / 173

thought he was, for a while. We’ve just gotten back from the hospital. See Rome and die.”

“Oh, honey,” I said to Joe, and he just shook his head, eyes still closed.

I touched his cheek. It was cold and clammy. But his chest, under my hand, rose and fell tranquilly. I looked up at Ada.

“How bad is it?”

“Not so very, I don’t think,” she said, smiling her enigmatic little half smile. “I took them to Salvator Mundi, in the Janiculum. It’s the one Sam and I know best. It’s staffed by a lovely order of Irish nuns, very kind and matter-of-fact. They got us a doctor straight-away, and he gave Joe some fluids in his arm and X-rayed Colin’s ankle. Joe will be fine in a few hours, if he stays quiet and keeps drinking water and juice. Colin has a pretty nasty sprain. He’s going to have to stay off it as much as possible for the next day or two. After that, he’s to use the crutches and keep the walking to a minimum. No permanent damage, though.”

“Well, thank God for that,” I said, trying not to think of the days of driving and walking ahead. What would we do now?

“Oh, yes,” Maria said, still angry. “He’ll be well in time for the summer Olympics. Maybe even in time to sprain the other ankle in Tuscany.”

“I’ve said I was sorry a thousand times,” Colin said weakly from under his washcloth. “I don’t know what else you want me to say. Yes, it was stupid. Yes, it fucks up the rest of the trip, unless you and Cat want to carry me through Venice and Florence and Tuscany. No, I don’t know yet what we’re going to do, but if you’ll lay off me until the pain medicine takes effect, I’ll try to make some plans. It really hurts like a sonofabitch.”

174 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

His voice was querulous, like a child in need of adult sympathy but getting none. I saw a quick sheen of tears spring into Maria’s eyes. She went over to the windows and pulled the curtains aside and stood looking out at the fading day. I patted Joe’s chest and got up and went over to stand beside her.

“Don’t worry about it, love,” I said. “If worse comes to worst, we’ll just stay in Rome until he can get around better.

He can rest and you can look after him and you and I and Joe can see all the things we were going to miss—”

“I don’t think I could stand another night at that hotel,”

Maria quavered. “Cat, you simply cannot imagine how hot it is. We’ve been pulling our mattresses up on the roof and sleeping there….”

“Well, then, we’ll move you up here,” I said. “It may be Disney World, but one thing it is, is cool. And we can swim.”

“We couldn’t begin to afford it.” She would not be comforted.

“Nice try, but no cigar,” Joe said. His voice was thin and bored. “I’ve already called down about staying on. They can’t even accommodate us past tonight, much less Maria and Colin. July, you know. Tourist season. They are desolate, but
che posso fare
?”

“Shit,” I said. “Joe, how could you?” I said it softly, but Joe heard.

“I am extremely sorry to have discommoded you, Cat,” he said, in the same weary drawl. “Perhaps if you had been with us you might have exercised your well-known restraint and common sense and prevented our schoolboy excesses. But you were having your portrait done, I believe. Or was it your nails?”

I looked at him, speechless, and he flushed.

HILL TOWNS / 175

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve really been feeling awful. It was pretty frightening. I couldn’t breathe.”

So have I been feeling awful, I thought. So could I not breathe. So have I been pretty frightened. Enough to have just flat died of it, OK, Joe? But you know that, of course.

You’re the one who promised to look out for me while we were here.

I did not say it, though. Of course I didn’t. I don’t whine at Joe as a rule. And he must, indeed, have felt awful and been frightened. He could well have died out there under the fist of that terrible sun, died in an ancient white-bleached arena in Rome, all those miles from the Mountain, from me….

“We’ll work something out,” I said. “We have a late checkout. Let’s order something to eat, and something cool to drink, and talk about it.”

“Listen,” Ada Forrest said. “I’ve taken an awful liberty, but see what you think about this. I called Sam a minute ago from downstairs, and he thinks it’s a splendid idea. We’d like to come with you. We’d really like to do that. He can spell Joe driving, and with another man we can manage Colin with no problem at all, and we both know Venice and Florence and Tuscany; we can show you some things you might miss otherwise and introduce you to some people you’d enjoy. And it would give Sam a chance to work on Cat’s portrait in a much fuller, more leisurely way. He’s really excited about that. Will you let us do it? He’s packing for both of us now, and we’ll meet you at the station. You four can order up from room service. It’s quite good.”

We were all silent for a bit. I could not take it in….

“Of course, we won’t be at all offended if you’d rather not,” Ada said. “We can put you up at home if 176 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

need be, though I’m not sure how comfortable you’d be.

Just say the word, and I’ll call Sam back—”

“Oh, Ada,” Maria breathed. “You’re every bit the angel Mama said you were.”

“It would be the answer to a prayer,” I said. My heart lifted.

“It’s an awful imposition, I know, but if you really would—”

“It’s out of the question,” Joe said briskly. His face was pink now. “We couldn’t possibly impose on you further. I can handle the driving with no problem; it’s an automatic shift. I can read international road signs. Thanks, Ada, but—”

“No buts about it,” Colin said. “We accept. Joe, you’ve never driven the Autostrada. There’s no speed limit; you get these huge Lancias and Lamborghinis bombing by you at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. It’s horrifying. Not to mention trying to navigate Florence in July, or some of the roads in Tuscany. Or, my God, Siena. We can’t go unless it’s this way.”

“The car won’t hold us all,” Joe said tightly. “It’s a little Opel; it’s all I could get on short notice.”

“Well, if it will help, Yolanda has said she’d come with us,” Ada said. “She’s already called Hertz in Venice. They can get her another car; there was a cancellation. She knows the area. She’s driven it many times. And she wants to come.

CNN picked up her show, and she’s celebrating. She’s going to be much better company now. We’ll go in a caravan; Sam and I used to do it with friends when we were very young.

It’ll be like that again.”

“That might work,” Joe said.

“It
will
work,” Maria caroled. “And it will be such fun, like…like a college trip or something. How can I ever thank you?”

HILL TOWNS / 177

She rushed over to Ada Forrest and hugged her hard. Ada smiled and hugged her back.

“By having a lovely life,” she said, and I liked her as much in that instant as I ever have.

Late that night, after a not-so-bad room service dinner, Joe and Maria and Colin and I sat on a baggage cart at the Stazione Termini. It was nearly midnight, but there was no sight of Sam and Ada and none of Yolanda Whitney. Maria had gone back in a taxi and collected their luggage, and it was piled on the wagon with mine. We had, with the help of doormen and taxi drivers and pain pills and lavish tips, gotten Colin to the station and to the proper gate, and he half sat, half lay on the wagon, the bandaged foot elevated, his face white with pain but his spirits high with a forbidden combination of painkiller and wine. There was no sign of our train to Venice. It was to be, a porter said, considerably late.
Che posso fare
?