The house actually looked pretty good. The grass out front was green and trimmed. Window boxes showed colorful blooms. Valerie wasn’t one to sit back and wait. She’d organized blood drives, sold war bonds, and kept her own victory garden on the side of the house. Back in February, about the time Vitto was marching through Holland, she’d taken a factory job to help pay the bills.
“Your father’s broke, Vitto,” she’d written. “His finances aren’t what they once were. And they certainly aren’t what his ledger claims. Turns out he’s forgotten how to do simple math.”
Vitto exhaled around the cigarette butt, spat it to the sidewalk, and crushed it under his boot. The front door flew open as if she had sensed him. Or maybe she’d been waiting in the reading chair next to the window—if not for him, for the daily mail. There she stood in a flowery yellow-and-red dress that ended at the knees, hair done up like he remembered, lips painted red, one hand trying to conceal her shock, the other clutching her stomach. She stepped out onto the porch, one hand still holding on to the screen door, as if afraid to test the waters.
“William, come quick,” she called over her shoulder. “Get your grandfather. Your father is home!”
She took a step, and another, and then hurried down the front stoop and across the yard. He dropped the bags in time to catch her. He staggered at first, but then her momentum spun him into a swift circle of laughter and tears. He gathered her in his arms, the underside of her thighs settled into his open hands like a final puzzle piece restored, and he spun her again and again until they collapsed, laughing, in the middle of the front yard. Coopus had been right after all. Surprise was the way to go.
On the train he’d wondered if his face was capable of smiling again or if his heart would ever thrum warm, but Valerie brought about both in an instant. Some of her hair came undone, tickling his neck as she kissed him on the lips and face so rapidly he could hardly keep up. He wanted to ask her when she had started smoking, because he could smell it, but her perfume overrode the tobacco smell, enveloped and brought him back.
Neighbors stepped from their homes, pointed, equally happy that Vittorio Gandy had finally come home. Robert was just looking at it all wrong; a Gandy living with the public wasn’t a negative thing. The hotel might be closed down, but their name was still held up on that pedestal.
The screen door closed. Valerie stood from the grass, wiped her dress, and beckoned. Vitto swallowed hard, fought back tears. His boy was five years old now, with unruly chestnut hair that now resembled his own.
“William, come on now. Don’t be shy.” Valerie waved him toward her.
William shook his head, defiant.
Vitto stood beside her. “It’s okay. He couldn’t walk straight the last time I saw him.”
The boy moved slowly down the steps, then ran behind his mother’s leg, burying his face in the waves of her dress.
Vitto hunkered down, blinking back tears—couldn’t get over the running—now eye level to his son.
Valerie coaxed the boy out until one of his eyes showed. “William, it’s your daddy.”
“Not my daddy,” said William, hiding again.
Vitto’s heart skipped. He’d prepared for this, but hearing it weighed heavy. Uncle Sam had stolen time he’d never get back.
“William, don’t say that,” she said. “This is your daddy.”
“Not my daddy.”
“It’s okay, Val. Don’t push it.”
The screen door opened again. Vitto locked eyes with Robert Gandy on the porch, anticipating the fatherly embrace he’d imagined after every bloody battle across Europe. Same embrace he’d hoped for as a child, when he’d imagine being wrapped up in those strong sculptor’s arms, smelling stone dust and pipe smoke on Robert’s loose, half-buttoned shirts. Embraces like the ones he’d share with Magdalena and all the regular hotel guests every time they’d return, but rarely with his son.
Certainly the war would change things.
There he was a few dozen steps away, still larger than life, long silver hair flowing. Vitto nodded toward his old man, then took a step in his direction.
Robert didn’t return the nod. He looked at Valerie as if confused.
She said, “Vitto, there’s something I didn’t tell you in the letters.”
Vitto looked from his wife—and his son who didn’t remember him—to his father, who stared as if he didn’t know who he was.
And then Robert confirmed it, his voice agitated and paranoid.
“Who are you? Valerie, who is this man? Should I call the police?”
Two
“Dr. Aimes thinks it’s something called Alzheimer’s disease.”
Vitto chewed the last bite of his ham sandwich and watched out the kitchen window, where his father stood on a quaint backyard patio of stone and mosaic tiles, staring at a tall slab of marble, carving tools in hand. Two minutes ago, he’d gotten up from the table in a rush, as if an idea had struck him. He’d yet to start chipping away at the stone.
“Vitto, did you hear what I said?” Valerie cleared her throat. “Dr. Aimes says it might be what he calls Alzheimer’s. I’ve never heard of it before, but apparently it happens to people. It’s not just hardening of the—”
“What’s he doing?”
She shifted in her chair. “He does that every day. An idea strikes him. He rushes out to sculpt, and then he forgets.”
“Forgets what?”
“The idea.” She nodded toward the window. “And then he stands there trying to remember.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“In hindsight, he was showing signs before you left. Repeating things he told us five minutes prior. Calling William by your name. Misplacing his tools. Two months ago he cut his mouth up real good. Got confused in the middle of the night, grabbed a razor to brush his teeth. Now I hide the razor, shave him myself. Fights me like the dickens some mornings.”
Vitto watched his wife, perhaps for too long because she caught him staring.
“What?”
“Nothing.” But it was far from nothing. He’d been staring at her in awe but was afraid to say it—in awe because of her pretty face he wanted to touch but somehow couldn’t or shouldn’t, in awe because of those blue eyes that still looked as bright as liquid paint, in awe because of who she still was, that comforting soul, even as a child, who had always seemed to be a bandage for things in need of bandaging. Like Juba, he thought, just like Juba, wondering why it had taken a war and back to realize it.
Nothing was a far cry from what he felt, but in the saying of it, that one simple yet complex word, he realized there was something in him the war hadn’t been able to touch or, in the way Val now eyed him, change—his inability to verbalize what he felt, his refusal to show his emotions. She claimed it had started when Magdalena died, but he reckoned that flaw might have started way before that.
Vitto scooted his chair back and struck up a cigarette, spotting William watching cautiously from the hallway. “Come here, boy.” He patted the seat next to him, his fingernails dirty with soil or blood—the weathered hands of a soldier now instead of a painter.
William moved with caution, then took the seat in between his parents.
Vitto exhaled up toward the ceiling, watched his son, who still seemed afraid to watch him back. “I got something for you.” He opened a pouch on his belt and removed a hand grenade. Valerie jumped in her seat, and William’s eyes swelled. “It’s a dud,” he said to his wife, then pointed at the grenade. “It’s German. Took it off a Nazi I killed outside of Ossenberg. We were taking this factory—”
“Vittorio!”
He stopped, tapped the grenade—had the full attention of his son now. “Anyway. Kraut’s name was Wilhelm. German equivalent of William. I think.” Valerie looked away. He said to the boy, “Go on. It’s yours.”
William grinned. “What’s it do?”
Vitto stuck the cigarette in his mouth, put his hands together, and then blew them apart. H
e smiled because his son finally did. “It blows stuff up.”
“Vitto, that’s enough.”
William took the grenade and hurried down the hall toward his bedroom. Vitto resumed watching his father out the window. “Why doesn’t he write stuff down? Like Mamma did.”
“He’s stubborn. And he’s all too aware of the similarities.”
“How long does he stand like that?”
“Five, sometimes ten.”
“Hours?”
“Minutes.” She folded and unfolded her hands. He took the pack of cigarettes from his pocket and slid it across the table, along with the lighter, but she looked away. “I don’t smoke,” she said before tapping one out and lighting it like it wasn’t her first. She slid the pack back across the table, inhaled like an expert. “Just a couple a day. To take the edge off.” She exhaled through slightly parted lips, leaving a red lipstick stain on the butt. For some reason he was in awe of that too.
Val said, “Sometimes he forgets where the bathroom is. Your father. I’ve had to help change him more than once.” By the looks of it, she’d been taking care of two toddlers instead of one. Bags under her eyes, lines where there didn’t used to be. Under the makeup was wear and tear; if guilt were a knife, he would have felt the cut from it. She pointed at her father-in-law with her cigarette. Robert had once been a king in both of their eyes. “Doctor said Alzheimer’s is when something goes wrong with brain cells in older people. Basically your father’s brain is dying before the rest of him.”
Vitto reached across the table, offered his hand, and she took it. Tears pooled in her eyes. She laughed it away, although nothing seemed funny.
“You didn’t get laid off at the factory, did you?”
She shook her head, exhaled. She’d quit to take care of Robert. “He was starting to hurt himself. It’d be safer to leave William home alone.”
“What’d you do with William while you worked?”
“Took him with me. First Lady Roosevelt talked her husband into forming government nurseries while the women worked. Lot of the factories had them for the employees.”
“But not for adults.”
“Not for adults.” She inhaled hard, exhaled harder.
He squeezed her hand. “You look good, Val.”
That laugh again—the laugh that wasn’t a laugh, but more like an anxious hiccup. She put a fist in the air, pumped it facetiously. “Good ol’ Rosie the Riveter.” Truthfully, there hadn’t been too many women riveters, and none named Rosie. “Poster child in makeup,” she said of Rosie, the government-engineered propaganda campaign centered on making women look tough yet still feminine. “They were afraid the war at home was going to make us too masculine. Our factory even gave us lessons on how to apply makeup. Keeping our women looking their best was necessary for morale. Or so they told us.” She finished her cigarette and smashed the butt into the plate Robert had left before he’d hurried outside. “They would have laid me off anyway. They laid all the women off as soon as the men got back. Of course, they were only paying us half what the men made.”
She slithered her hand from his grip; he wondered if he’d been clutching it too tightly. He’d missed what she’d said last. A memory had flashed, him clutching the hand of a soldier named Hankhorner who’d been shot by enemy fire and was clinging to the tank as it tumbled through the snow. My hand was frozen. I tried to hold on. Hankhorner had gone down into the white puff, and the tank had pressed him under.
“Vitto? Where’d you just go?”
He chewed his lip, lit another cigarette. Outside, his father slammed the hammer to the ground, unsuccessfully stabbed the tooth chisel into the stone, and then kicked it into the grass. He stormed inside, teary eyed, slamming the door behind him.
Valerie was up in a flash, coaxing him toward the chair William had vacated moments ago. Robert wiped his eyes as she rubbed his back, and then he took a swing at her, not to hit but to brush her arm away. “. . . Off me . . .”
“Hey.” Vitto stood.
Valerie cautioned him. “Vitto, stop. It’s nothing. He’s angry. Sit back down.”
Robert stared at Valerie, his apology evident in his weary eyes. He pointed at Vitto. “Who’s he? Your boyfriend?”
“That’s Vittorio. Your son, Robert. My husband.”
“Oh.” He looked at his son with something akin to recognition.
“He’s just returned from the war,” she said. “From Europe.”
“My son.” Robert, still strong as an ox, put a hand on Vitto’s shoulder and patted it twice, just as he had in this very kitchen an hour ago. “You should change out of that uniform. It stinks.” Robert pointed out the window. “I’m working on a new sculpture.”
“I see that.” Vitto looked away; it was too painful to see his father like this.
“It’s . . . it’s . . .” Robert scratched his head, digging for a thought. His eyes brightened. “We should tell your mother you’re home! Maggie!”
Vitto locked eyes with Val. Maggie, Magdalena to everyone else—Robert had built the Tuscany Hotel for her—had been dead now for six years. Valerie put an arm around her father-in-law and sat him back down. “Magdalena’s gone, Robert.”
“Gone? Where?”
“She’s dead. Robert, your wife passed away.” He looked shocked. Her death had shaken him to the core; he’d wept over her grave. Truth be told, though he’d sculpted after her passing, he’d produced nothing worthy of what he’d done when she was alive. How could he not remember? And now Valerie spoke so matter-of-factly about it. Like it was an everyday occurrence. “She’s buried at the hotel near the poppy field.” She rubbed his back again. Robert nodded, tears in his eyes, like it had just begun to sink in. She pointed to his shirt. “Her picture is in your pocket, remember? Right there.”
He looked down, smiled, pulled out the color photograph. “Ah, yes,” he said. “There you are.”
Vitto caught a glimpse of his mother’s orange hair, like fire, but then it vanished inside his father’s cupped palm. Robert held the picture to his chest and petted it like he used to do to her back when he’d hug her.
Vitto clenched his jaw, soaked in his wife’s strength and courage. He knew firsthand the difficulty of telling someone a loved one had passed, and here she was doing it daily, over and over again like a timeless loop. And this was not just about a loved one, but the most loved one. The visitors at the hotel had often claimed that Robert and Magdalena had invented love.
And for him now, she died again every day.
William’s bedroom door opened. “Mommy, it rolls!” They turned at the sound of something heavy rattling on hardwood, and then the Nazi grenade stopped in the middle of the hallway next to the kitchen.
Vitto jumped from his chair, screamed, “Take cover,” and then threw his body on the grenade, colliding with the wall, knocking from a hook an oil painting of the Tuscany Hotel’s olive groves at sunset. It landed on his back, curved like a turtle shell to conceal the grenade.
William laughed at first and then cried, probably sensing the fear on Vitto’s face. Vitto looked up, checked the surroundings. A clock ticked in the hallway. “Is anybody hurt?”
Robert said, “Valerie, call the police. We have an intruder!”
Valerie lit another cigarette, exhaled toward the ceiling.
Three
The bed was no longer their own.
Despite Val’s attempts to prove otherwise, he was a visitor in his own home, a stranger in that bed. Three days now, and he’d yet to pick up where they’d left off the way she’d said they would at the train station the day he left for Camp Kilmer. The kiss she’d given him just before he boarded was a fingerprint on his mind, along with the aroma of the peach she’d eaten for lunch and the bright red poppy he’d pinned to her dress. The going-away gift she’d given him the night before—“just something to remember me by, Vitto”—was now a distant memory, a memory that had carried him through the war, only to find out now it was just that.
/> A memory.
He was not the same man she’d married, not the same boy with whom she’d fallen in love. She kissed him every night before bed, but he sensed fear in her eyes. He paced, checked out the windows, and the paranoia grew worse at sundown. Every night since his return, he’d woken from a nightmare, screaming loud enough to put both Robert and William into a frenzy of excitement, and it was up to Valerie to calm them all. And one by one she would, leaving her husband for last, rubbing his neck as they sat bedside, feet dangling, until he calmed enough to lie back down.
“Why do you sleep with your boots on, honey?”
“I got to be ready.”
He had a line of weapons on his dresser, all within arm’s reach of where he twisted and turned all night, refusing to sleep with the pillow he tossed on the floor before pulling the sheets back. There was the pistol, the knife, and, leaning against the wall, his machine gun. The knife had a stain on the blade that looked like rust but wasn’t.
“I don’t like guns in the house,” she told him on night three.
“Okay.”
By day five he’d yet to move them.
Valerie claimed he spent half the day in a daze, staring out the window at the street, but he didn’t remember.
“You want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
“About what happened over there.”
“No. Not much to talk about.”
William was on the floor playing with a toy doctor set—stethoscope and all—and he placed the little circular part on top of a toy Model T as if listening for a heartbeat, paying little attention to their conversation. “Thought you said he was sharp,” Vitto said to Valerie, who lowered the newspaper she’d been pretending to read. She looked so shocked at what he’d said aloud—he hadn’t meant for it to come out—that she said nothing, which was unlike her.
Saying nothing makes the chasm grow wider. Maybe Juba had said that once. Or maybe it was just something Juba would have said at that moment, now that saying nothing was slowly becoming the norm. True as it was, Vitto felt helpless to stop it. And there was nothing easier than saying nothing.
Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel Page 2