Set This House on Fire (7 page)

By then it was midafternoon, but already above me the great peak on which Sambuco stood had obscured the westering sun, sending a vast blue shadow across the sea. Past the outermost limits of the shadow, where the light still shone, the water was as green as clover, but here toward shore it was a transparent blue, lakelike, upon which half a dozen little boats seemed not so much to float as to suspend, held up over the clear sandy bottom as if by invisible threads. Behind me in the lemon grove I could hear the faint sound of a girl’s voice singing. A splash of oars came across the water, and radio music from below in some fishing town, a shadow-town which never knew twilight or evening, and was forever eclipsed by a somber half-darkness at three in the afternoon. For maybe a quarter of an hour I sat listening to the voice among the lemon trees, the sound of oars and the radio, and gazed south down the jagged, glittering coast toward Sicily, which I could not see but which I knew was there, two hundred miles away over the smoky horizon. I felt bitterly exhausted, and whenever I thought of di Lieto a wave of desolation swept over me, but the view soothed me for a while. Without surf or turbulence or breakers’ roar, or the flash of winging gulls, it was a quieting seascape to look at, a sedative for weary nerves and bones.

I started up the car again and was about to make the turn-off on the road up to Sambuco, when I saw a girl standing there, her thumb out, hooking a ride.

Her children were with her; at least they looked like hers. They had been gathering flowers. As I came up to them and stopped, a trio of small rollicking cheers went up, my radiator smoked and fumed, and cornflowers, poppies, and wild roses sprouted all around me in the enveloping steam.

“Hello there!” the girl said. “I’ll bet you’re an American. My name’s Poppy Kinsolving.”

“I had an accident,” I said. “The name’s Leverett.”

“What a funny-looking car!”

“I had an accident!” I repeated.

“Oh
dear!
Are you all right?”

The cloud of steam swarmed away on the air and Poppy’s face appeared at the window beside me. Hardly larger than her little children, and so resembling all three that she seemed like their big sister, she propped her grubby hands on the door and gawked around the inside of the car.

“What a mess,” she said.

“It was this accident,” I went on to explain. “I was coming down the highway outside of Pompei and I hit this guy on a motorscooter and when I did all my baggage came—”

“Goodness, you’d think people would be a little more careful.”

“I
know
it!” I said indignantly. “This guy was blind in one eye, mind you. His legs had been broken, his elbow smashed, two fingers gone—”

“Oh the poor man. The poor
man!”
she exclaimed, her eyes growing round with horror. “That’s what I
mean.
I’d think you’d drive your car more carefully, Mr. Levenson. Every time I pick up the paper I read about some American hitting some Italian with his car. I think it’s just a shame the way people drive around in these irresponsible American cars. Is he still alive? I’d think you’d—”

“Leverett,” I put in. “The car’s British, an Austin. Look, what I mean is the guy
already
had one eye out when I hit him. He came out onto the highway on his
blind side,
from the
left.
And when I—”

“Oh the poor man. The poor
man!
What’s he doing now? Did someone take him to the hospital? Was there a priest there? I do hope he got the last rites.”

“I might have been killed myself,” I said feebly.

“I do hope he got the last rites. But he’s not going to die, is he? Stop it, Nicky!” She swatted lightly at her youngest child, a towheaded little boy of about two, who had begun to whine and tug at her skirts. Kneeling down, she began to lecture him in a soft, gentle voice, while the other two children put their flowers on the road and took command of the car, clambering over the trunk and hood and prowling all around me as they chattered away, inspecting the wreckage and then my baggage. I kept looking at Poppy. For an instant, in spite of all my distress and what she had said to me, I felt my mind becoming hopelessly entangled with her sweet face, her huge blue eyes, her disordered sweat-damp hair. Sunshine streamed down on her through the leaves of lemon trees. She was dressed in something resembling a flour sack, although I could tell that it was indeed a dress. In the freckled light, with the faintest mist of perspiration on her brow, there was something charming and stubbornly childlike about her, though not altogether sexless, and for the moment—urchin or nymph or whatever—she was exasperating and unbelievable. “You see, Nicky,” she was saying gravely, “grownups have important things to talk about and it’s almost impossible for Mother to say anything if you’re forever tugging at her nice clean skirt. Now there, darling, be quiet now and say hello to Mr. Levenson. Felicia! Timothy! Close up that suitcase!”

“I don’t know if he’s going to die or not,” I said. “I’ve got to call Naples and find out. Is there a phone up at Sambuco?”

“There’s one at the cafe, I think. And at the hotel. At the Bella Vista. Oh, do you know who’s staying up there now? All these movie stars! They’re making a movie up there. And down in Amalfi. There’s Carleton Burns and Alice Adair and Alonzo Cripps—you know, the noted director—and there’s Gloria Mangi-amele, too. Burns is an old pill and so is Alice Adair but I love Mr. Cripps. I’ve talked to every one of them. That is, a little bit, anyway. Mason Flagg knows them all—at least he knew Mr. Cripps—and they’re always drinking up in Mason’s apartment and of course we can’t avoid them, living downstairs and seeing so much of Mason and all. Are you a friend of Mason’s?” She paused to regard me gravely, quizzically, and, I thought, with some suspicion.

“Well, I—”

“You don’t look like one of Mason’s friends.”

“What do you mean by
that?”
I said.

“Oh nothing. That is, I mean, well—you look so
ordinary,
if you know what I mean.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

“Oh no,” she said, flushing a little. “Really, I mean, you look very nice. Only his circle of acquaintance is just so glamorous, that’s all. They’re all connected with the movies, you see, and you—” She paused. A sudden look of consternation, of trouble, passed across her face. “Oh, I think that Mason Flagg’s a terrible man!” she burst out. “He’s just wicked and terrible. A wicked and terrible, phony creep!”

“How come?” I said. There was something painfully familiar about this speech. It had been four years since I had seen Mason; yet now, gloom piling up on gloom, it occurred to me that it had been the height of folly to hope that Mason had changed, after all. “What’s old Mason up to now?”

“Well, I won’t tell you, you’re such a good friend of his and all —” Her nose wrinkled in disgust. “But if you could just see how he’s
dominated
Cass and taken advantage of his condition and all, so that sometimes I’m just at my wit’s end—”

“What do you mean?” I said, puzzled. “Who’s Cass?”

But the trouble, a fleeting feather of a thing, had vanished, and she was back on the movie stars again. “I don’t think Cass can stand any of them, except maybe Mr. Alonzo Cripps. Cass even thinks he’s funny-looking, though. I can understand him not liking Carleton Burns. What a pill! And Mr. Alonzo Cripps is so sweet and
so
funny. He gave Nicky a box of
dolci
the other day. He’s such a peach. And so brilliant as a director. But that Alice Adair! She’s so prissy and stuck-up. I don’t think she means to be, but she is just the same. Phooey on her, anyway …”

As she prattled on, a giddy feeling came over me. I shut my eyes tightly while she talked, misery and fatigue creeping through me in a slow malarial chill. I was suddenly conscious of the smell of lemons, far off a steady splash of oars above the chatterbox noise at my side. “Gloria Mangiamele is some potatoes, I’ll tell you. You should see the way the boys’ eyes light up when she walks through the piazza. Mr. Cripps says she makes more money than any movie star in the world, because of Italian taxes or something. Oh, I’ll bet you’re the man that Mason’s been expecting! You’ll meet all of them! Mr. Levenson, what’s the matter? Wake up! Timothy, get out of Mr. Levenson’s face!” My eyelids popped open, and I beheld two eyes as white and round as ping-pong balls, and a chocolate-smeared grin an inch before my nose. “What’s your name?” Timothy said.

“To hell with it,” I said, starting the motor. “You kids get the hell out of here.”

“Oh, there’s Cass!” I heard Poppy say. “Children, here come Daddy and Peggy. They caught up with us.”

I halted, turning. Up the road hand in hand with another child came Cass Kinsolving, who was singing a song:

“Oh, we went to the animal fair,

All the birds and the beasts were there;

Carleton Burns was drunk by turns

And so was Alice Adair.”

A poisonous black cigar protruded from his mouth even as he sang; with his free hand he clutched a half-empty bottle of wine, uncorked for use. Over his shoulder was slung a knapsack stuffed with what appeared to be wet bathing suits, and the sack was dripping. In dungaree pants and nondescript sport shirt, a smudged beret aslant over his forehead, he approached us with a freewheeling, jaunty, nautical stride, still singing—

“Mangiamele with the luscious belly …”

—and nearing us now, seeing the mutilated car, ceased his song and stopped in his tracks with a slow, wondering, half-whispered “
Ho-ly
Jesus!”

“Mr. Levenson hit a man on a motorscooter,” Poppy said.

“Wow!” Cass said. “He sure did!”

“And knocked out his eyes and broke his legs and cut off two fingers and they don’t know if he’s going to live or not.”

“Wait a minute—” I began to mutter angrily. “And the name’s
Leverett.”

“Jesus. You poor guy,” Cass said to me. It was the sympathy I had been waiting for and I turned to him gratefully, introducing myself as Mason’s friend. He took a pull from the wine bottle and propped his hands on his hips, surveying the car with a bleak, mournful expression. Sunlight glinted in white disks from his spectacles, giving him an owlish look, and one peculiarly out of place in view of the rest of him, which conveyed at once a vigorous outdoor expression of strength, even of brawn. He was not tall but everywhere solidly muscled, and now as he leaned slightly forward with his look of intent and sensitive concern he appeared like some stevedore turned scholar, or perhaps the other way around. He was thirty or a little more, but lines that looked like marks of trial and labor were like small lacerations on his face. “You must have really cold-cocked him,” he said. “You can see the poor bugger’s ass-end still printed in your radiator. A bloody amazing intaglio. It’s a wonder you can still get the car up these hills. What did you do to him?”

He nodded solemnly, sucked on his cigar, and gave satisfying little grunts of commiseration as I briefly told him what had happened. The littlest boy, Nicky, played nearby at the side of the road, but Poppy and the other children had climbed part way up the slope through the lemon grove. “Here’s one!” “Here’s another!” I heard them cry, in far-off chirrups of delight and discovery.

“You poor, thrice-crossed, luckless bastard,” he murmured finally, when I had finished my recital. He spoke with such fellowfeeling and compassion that I wanted to embrace him on the spot.

“It’s just unbelievable,” I went on bitterly. “They don’t license these jerks, you know. They let some half-wit with half his eyesight gone get on one of these machines, and that’s
it,
buddy. None of them has any insurance and even if it’s their fault you’re up the creek if they’ve smashed up your car. God knows I’m sorry I laid him out like I did, I don’t want him to suffer any more than his crazy old grandmother does, but after all I’m no millionaire and every time I think of this peasant smashing my front end like this—I’m not insured for that kind of damage and God knows what it’ll cost me—every time I think of that it burns me up!”

What he said next was not precisely sanctimonious, but its touch of reasoned mercy did not at all harmonize with my resentment. I felt somewhat betrayed.

He stroked his neck and sighed. “Yes I know,” he said, “it’s mighty tough.” Then after a pause he added: “I don’t know. Those people down there on the plain, they’re so lousy poor, I doubt any of them could afford a license, even if there were such a thing. All those songs about bella Napoli, bella campagna, say otherwise, but I don’t think most of those people get a hell of a lot of fun out of life. I suppose a ride on a borrowed motor scooter is a big thing for some of them. They get all jazzed up and I guess something like this is bound to happen once in a while.” Then as if suddenly aware of the thought running through my mind
(you bleeding-heart)
he said: “Well, I know that’s one hell of a consoling thing to say to you now. Here, what you need is a slug of Sambuco
rosso”

But I turned down the wine bottle he held out toward me. “I’ve got to get up to Mason’s,” I said shortly. “I’m sorry I don’t have room enough to take you all up.”

Poppy, perched in the distance on the branch of a lemon tree, called down from the orchard above us. “Mr. Levenson! Mr. Levenson!”

“Yes?” I said.

“It’s
Leverett,
Poppy, for God sake!” Cass shouted.

“What did you
say,
darling?”

“Leverett! Leverett! L-e-v-e-r-e-t-t!”

“Well, Mr. Leverett!” she cried. “When you see Rosemarie de Laframboise! Do you hear me, Mr. Leverett! When you see Rosemarie! You know, Mason’s girl! When you see Rosemarie when you get up to Sambuco will you ask her something for me!”

Her shrill little voice grew dim; we could barely hear her.

“Do you understand me, Mr. Leverett!”

“No, Poppy, dammit!” Cass yelled. “We can’t hear you. Come down!”

“Yasker alendus cheska!” And something else, in a remote caroling voice, that sounded like “Fullishagold!”

“What’s she talking about?” I asked him. “Who’s this Rosemarie? De Laframboise?”