Dedication
For
Bobby Hofmann
God of laughter and humor
Loyal first reader
Uncle
For
Mickey Keys
Goddess of music and kindness
Aunt
For
Gary Markert
God of smiles and friendliness
Uncle
For
Private John Robert Markert
God of bravery and courage
Company C, Eighth Armored Division
Paw Paw
Epigraph
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.
—Albert Einstein
Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero
Memory is the mother of all wisdom.
—Aeschylus
I’ve given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.
—Elie Wiesel
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The Tuscany Hotel
Before
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
After
A Note from the Author
Discussion Questions
Acknowledgments
An Excerpt from What Blooms From Dust Before
About the Author
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Also by James Markert
Copyright
Before
1866
Florence, Italy
The foundling wheel turned inward with a groan, and the young nurse stifled a scream.
She had extinguished the wall sconce seconds before, unsettled as always by the plunge into darkness, her nervousness heightened tonight by a thunder and lightning storm that had relentlessly shaken the walls for nearly two hours. The overhead bell chimed, signaling the new arrival. The echo drifted. Hurried footsteps filled the void.
Candlelight rounded a curved corner of stone, and suddenly in the glow next to her stood the familiar face of her mentor, brown eyes and black hair concealed under a nurse’s cap.
“A midnight baby?” asked Nurse Cioni.
The young nurse nodded and glanced toward the wheel, where an infant lay silent and swaddled. Why isn’t it crying? She’d only been at the Ospedale degli Innocenti for four weeks but had retrieved enough of the unwanted from the wheel to know the answer—the baby was either sleeping or already dead. Most likely the latter, for most of the sleeping babies awakened and cried as the wheel turned inward. No matter how well they greased the cogs and softened the tiny bed with folded blankets, the quick trip from outside to in was apparently a startling one.
Her voice quivered. “Who would leave a baby during this storm? It was as if the heavens were falling.”
“Well, the storm is over now, Nurse Pratesi, so calm yourself. Did you see her? Nurse Pratesi, did you see?”
The young nurse glanced toward the hospital’s entrance. She’d forgotten. Probably too late now, but she hurried for the wooden door anyway and stepped out into the cool night air, where low stars had begun to show themselves behind a trail of dark, rapidly moving clouds. Wind whistled through the grand loggia and shadows moved inside its arches and columns. She listened for fleeing footsteps, which often trailed across the cobbled piazza as mothers sprinted away in shame. Except for a distant rumble of thunder, she heard nothing. She was too late, this mother too fast, too eager to leave her burden behind.
She returned inside. Nurse Cioni now stood at the wheel, watching curiously.
“Is it alive?”
“Yes, come look. And it’s a girl.” The older nurse opened a ledger, placed it on a wooden table beside the wheel, and readied her quill. “Any sign of the mother?”
“No. She’s gone.”
“What time did it arrive?”
“A girl, you said, Nurse Cioni. Not an it.” She looked down, fearing she’d just overstepped her bounds with her retort. She swallowed over the lump in her throat, glanced to the clock resting on the table. “She arrived at exactly midnight.”
The clock now showed a couple of minutes past.
The young nurse looked to the cold, stone floor, folding and unfolding her trembling hands. Why were they shaking? Why couldn’t she bring herself to look at it? At her! Because the baby wasn’t crying. Because she for some reason felt already connected to her. Because the clock . . .
Nurse Pratesi straightened her posture and spoke with confidence. “She arrived only seconds after I blew out the candle. I extinguish the candle at exactly midnight.”
The older nurse shook her head, annoyed for some reason, most likely because she’d been awakened at such an hour. But how could anyone have fallen asleep during that wicked display of thunder and lightning?
They were quiet for a few moments, long enough for them both to hear the clicking of the old circular wall clock hanging above the arched entrance. They stared at each other, listened to the tick-tick, trying to make sense of it.
Nurse Cioni said, “When did that clock start working?”
Nurse Pratesi stared at it, at the thin hands as they clicked. The clock, a donation from a Dutch clockmaker, hadn’t worked in more than a hundred years, having stopped during an equally violent storm in the spring of 1761. And now here it was suddenly ticking again.
Nurse Cioni held up her candle for a closer look at the wall clock. The hands showed a time of two thirteen.
“It was frozen at midnight, was it not?” asked Nurse Pratesi.
“For over a century,” the older nurse mumbled, unblinking. “It must have started again at the beginning of the storm.”
Nurse Cioni placed down her candle and scribbled in the ledger.
The baby. A streak of orange caught the young nurse’s eye. She stepped closer to the wheel. The baby had hair like fire and eyes green as plump olives. Still no crying. She smiled, and the baby mirrored it. Were babies this young even aware enough to smile? She’d certainly never seen one smile while inside the wheel. She lifted the infant from the blankets and cradled her in her arms. The closeness brought sudden warmth to her heart. There was no time to be melancholy—she’d been warned of that the first day. The babies were much better off here at the Hospital of the Innocents than abandoned on the streets of Florence.
“You’re crying.” The older nurse again glanced at the clock. “Check the wheel for any marks.”
Nurse Pratesi wiped her cheeks and looked inside the wheel. Often the parents—mostly the mothers—would leave a “mark” or token of recognition with the abandoned babies. Like a charm broken in half, with one piece left with the baby and the other kept by the parent. In hopes
that one day they can be reunited. The other half would offer proof. She searched the tousled blanket but discovered no such item. “I don’t see anything, Nurse Cioni.”
The older nurse didn’t respond; she was busy running her finger down a list of girl names. The finger stopped, tapped the worn list. “We’ll call her Magdalena.”
“And a surname?”
The two nurses studied each other. “Salvato?” Saved. They shook their heads simultaneously, Nurse Pratesi more emphatically. For some reason she now felt more saved than this baby. Though she had uttered her misgivings to no one, she had been on the verge of leaving the hospital in search of different work. But now . . .
“Fortuna?” the older nurse offered.
Nurse Pratesi shook her head. Luck didn’t seem right either. And then she looked up, eyes enlarged as a thought struck. “Rotile.” She didn’t form it as a question to her superior, but rather more of a statement of fact. “Magdalena Rotile.”
The older nurse pondered and then nodded in agreement. Magdalena of the Wheel. The younger nurse gathered courage. “You’re crying too.”
Nurse Cioni looked away, wiped her cheeks. “Hurry on. Find the wet nurse.”
One
November 1945
Gandy, California
Private First Class Vittorio Gandy walked the narrow sidewalk with a standard army duffel in each hand. The weight of the bags kept his hands from shaking.
American flags rippled from porches, bits of color under a low, gray November sky. Miss Cannon’s azalea bushes looked to be blooming, but up close the blooms were just dull remnants of confetti recent rains had glued to the branches. The war had ended months ago, the street parties making way for an uneasy postwar normalcy—a big collective breath of what now? The waiting of so many wives for husbands to return home. The grief of widows praying some mistake had been made.
Vitto sometimes wished he’d been among the latter. That kind of sleep could prove deep and untouched.
Wind moved the flags again. He focused on the rippled cadence, slowed his pace as his boots grew heavy, like mud still sucked on them. Maybe he should have warned her he was coming home today. Coopus had said to surprise her, but maybe that wasn’t a good thing. Even though Coopus was still officially counted among the living, most of Company C said the man had basically died in Merbeck. So why did I listen to a man who had no life behind his eyes? No fluctuation in his voice?
The last time Vitto had written Valerie had been almost two weeks ago, from Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, the place where it all had started after his enlistment in July of ’44. Back when the mail was censored and all the men were scrambling to get their wills done, when medics were poking them with this syringe and that—mandatory shots like bee stings. He’d been back in the States since September. Just waiting to be officially discharged, he’d told her in every letter, in response to her weekly question: “When are you coming home?”
Realizing he’d come to a complete stop in front of Mr. Campbell’s house, he urged his legs onward. Leaves skittered, and he flinched. His grip tightened on the duffel bags. Last night he’d dreamed of this moment, Valerie jumping into his arms right on the sidewalk, asking what was in the bags. In the dream he’d unzipped them and shown her all the dead soldiers inside, and she’d screamed.
“Just clothes,” he whispered as he walked. And K-rations. A shovel. The knife I took from that Nazi I killed at Unna. A dog barked from the Levenworths’ backyard. His eyes flicked to the sound. The beast sounded hungry, rabid. Vitto fingered the handgun hooked to his belt, but then an image flashed of little William taking his first steps across the living room floor. Steps free from those little braces he’d had to wear, the ones the doctor had put on him too early, concerned when his legs didn’t look to be growing straight. Steps that Vitto had missed. Steps he’d urgently encouraged the boy to take in the days leading up to his departure so he wouldn’t miss them. “Ticktock goes the clock, William.” The boy had been almost four and barely walking when he’d left—a delay they had worried about. And now, according to Val’s letters, he was sharp as a tack and walking fine. Without the braces.
Vitto stopped again on the sidewalk, knelt down, and buried the .45-caliber pistol in one of the bags, under the box of cigarettes.
Unlike most other artists he knew, he hadn’t been a smoker before the war. He’d smoked his first cigarette on the deck of the USS St. Cecelia as she cut through waves in the Atlantic. He’d coughed and choked on it before the wind took it out into the froth and Coopus laughed. England had been in the midst of a severe cigarette shortage when they arrived, and they’d handed them out to the dockmen at Southampton like they were dispersing gold.
A month later they’d been begging for them themselves.
Now smoking was as regular as breathing. Vitto lit a cigarette, wedged it between his chapped lips, and zipped up the bag. When he stood back up he got light-headed. Shouldn’t have bypassed breakfast. But with his nervous stomach at the train station, even the sight of coffee had made him queasy. He regripped the duffel bags and let the cigarette smolder as he walked the final block toward home.
In the left breast pocket of his uniform was a picture of Valerie on their wedding day six years prior. White dress and brunette curls pinned high in a Rita Hayworth updo. Eyes blue as the oceans he used to paint. Sculpted lips as if carved from one of his father’s statues. Lips made to fit his own, as he’d told her at thirteen, the final nudge needed to get her permission to plant one on her right there on the hotel’s piazza, carefully concealed behind one of the sculptures as dusk cast giant shadows across the travertine.
When he’d kissed her at the train station, he’d promised it wouldn’t be their last. After that he’d sometimes kissed his machine gun before battle. One time he’d kissed the tank for good luck. He’d kissed Stevenson’s bloody forehead right before he closed his eyes in the town of Rheinberg. He wondered how Valerie would kiss him now. Like the young, vibrant man she remembered or the shell that now returned?
He slowed his pace again, inhaled on the cigarette without touching it. Remembered that first night on the St. Cecelia, when the waves had made half the men sick. Vitto had been sitting on his bunk in the dark, using the flashlight to stare at Val’s picture—unbent and fresh at that point—when Private Beacher dipped his head of black hair down from the top bunk and blew cigarette smoke in his face.
* * *
“She’s a doll.”
“Yeah.” Vitto smiled, looked up into the drifting smoke tendrils.
Beacher’s eyes were ornery. “I’ll gladly be the one to give her the news, Gandy.”
“What news?”
“That her man died in battle.” Beacher’s cigarette glowed amber. They were only supposed to smoke on the deck. “Don’t worry. I’ll treat her good. You know, I’ll be a good father to your son.”
And then his head disappeared. The bunk creaked heavy as Beacher shifted to get comfortable, and a few minutes later the goon was snoring. Vitto was too stunned to retaliate—it was the first of many instances that told him war didn’t always exist in the real world—and didn’t sleep all night. In hindsight, he should have grabbed his .45 and blown a hole through that top bunk.
Later, Vitto swore to Coopus that Beacher had tried to get him killed in battle. Twice.
“Why would he do that, Gandy?”
“He wants to steal my wife and kid.”
Other than shaking his head, Coopus didn’t have an answer for that. Beacher was odd, but he never tried to get Vitto killed again, although he did return home with one less arm.
* * *
Vitto stopped in front of their driveway, a nubby concrete appendage leading to the small one-story brick house he’d bought after his father’s Tuscany Hotel closed at the tail end of the Depression. He and Valerie had tried for years to get his father to come live with them—pointing out that the hotel wasn’t going to suddenly come back to life. But Sir Robert Gandy was stubborn and had re
fused every time they offered, choosing instead to live alone at the once-opulent hotel that now swallowed him. “Someone has to guard the artwork,” he’d said. “Someone has to keep the mice out.” Even the lure of living with his new grandson, William, hadn’t worked. Then suddenly, the week before Vitto left for training at Camp Kilmer, Robert had finally agreed because “It’s what Maggie would have wanted.”
“Living in squalor,” his father had muttered, standing before Vitto’s house with his suitcases in hand, his long white hair wild in the wind, his sculpting equipment weighing down the back of Vitto’s Ford Model A pickup with the yellow rims and the sleek running board that Robert refused to use.
“It’s not as bad as that, Dad.”
“Sure it is.”
Robert had insisted that he’d gone from his own hotel to a hole in the wall. “Well, it’s my hole in the wall,” Vitto had answered, grabbing his old man’s bags. “But it’s still your town.” A town, according to Val’s letters, that had been there for Val and Robert the entire time Vitto had been overseas, much as it had rallied in support after Magdalena’s death. “Not a week goes by that a neighbor doesn’t knock on the door asking if we need anything, Vitto.”
Robert had bought the land for the town he named Gandy after returning from his trip to Italy in the 1880s, the one where he’d met Vitto’s mother, Magdalena. Robert’s father, Cotton Gandy, had willed his only son his quarry and oil fortune, and Robert had spent every bit of it over the decades, first starting the town, then building the hotel.
All for a girl.
Vitto inhaled on the cigarette, wondered what his father looked like now. He’d sired Vitto very late in life and had already been walking hunched over before Vitto left for the war. Valerie hadn’t mentioned him much in her letters, saying only that he spent most of his days out back carving on stone, turning their meager backyard into a snippet of what his hotel once had been, and complaining about having to live in what they were now calling a subdivision. Even though the houses were spaced out enough to grow whatever was needed, Robert said they might as well be living in tenements.
Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel Page 1