William looked up when Vitto struck a match to light his cigarette but looked back down to his little black car before his father let the match flame burn down to his fingertip.
“Vitto!” Valerie knocked the match away before it burned him too badly, stomping it into the hardwood even though it had gone out before it hit the floor. “Maybe you should see someone. Talk to someone. I read that the new VA hospitals are dealing with . . . this.”
He smoked, said nothing.
On the coffee table was a scattering of magazines: Woman’s Illustrated, Woman’s Own, Everywoman, The Homemaker, Popular Photography, and LIFE. Robert sat in an armchair flipping through an issue of Cavalcade with a pinup girl on the cover, and periodically he’d sketch across the ledger on his lap. “Mamma would have made him write down his ideas.”
“What ideas?”
“The ones he gets before he storms out the door to sculpt. Maybe he should keep a paper and pencil in his pocket along with that picture of Mom.”
Valerie nodded like she agreed but turned it back on him. “Maybe you should start painting again.”
“Maybe you should start playing again.”
She backed away, wiped her eyes. He’d said it with more force than he’d meant to, but the apology that wanted to bubble up just wouldn’t. Somehow it couldn’t, because she didn’t know and didn’t understand. And he’d seen her violin in the corner of the bedroom with dust on it. Before, he’d never witnessed a day gone by when she hadn’t played it. He was convinced it was her playing and Juba’s voice that had kept Magdalena going as long as she did.
Truth was, red had always been his favorite color. He’d never done a painting that didn’t involve at least some shade of it. But all the blood he’d seen—blood so red it didn’t seem real—had ruined it. Now he feared that if he saw wet red paint it would turn to blood and he’d start thinking of dead soldiers.
A car backfired on the street, a loud pop like gunfire that sent Vitto out of his chair. He clutched Valerie around the waist and hurried her across the room, into the kitchen, and under the table. “Don’t move.” Next he grabbed William, who yelled because he’d dropped his stethoscope in the hallway. “Stay with your mother. Keep your head down. You hear me?” William nodded, crying along with his mother. Finally he walked Robert into the kitchen and helped him under the table. Once he had all three under cover, he corralled them close—too roughly by the sound of their groans and whimpering—and then lay down on top of all three. “Stay quiet,” he urged them. “Keep your heads down.”
William was crying, loudly.
“Vitto, you’re hurting him.”
“Keep him quiet! They’re gonna hear him.”
“Vitto, there’s nobody out there.”
Robert bit Vitto’s wrist, screamed, “Maggie! Somebody go tell Magdalena!”
* * *
In bed that night, Vitto and Valerie lay with their backs to each other.
“Val.”
She rolled toward him. “Yes.”
“Hold me.” She scooted closer, draped her arm lazily across his side, and after a minute—he could tell she was gathering the courage—clutched his hand, stitching her fingers inside his like they used to on walks.
* * *
The next morning the four of them had bacon and eggs at the kitchen table. William suggested they hold hands, and he said a quick prayer.
They dug in, eating silently, utensils clicking against plates.
Vitto poured himself a glass of red wine and placed it right next to his orange juice. Valerie and Robert watched him drink it. Neither said a word.
* * *
On night seven, Vitto dreamt of the Tuscany Hotel.
He was eleven and Valerie was a week away from it. She was chasing him through the arcaded brick walkways behind the hotel. Wind from the Pacific wreaked havoc on her hair as she ran, wooden tennis racquet in hand. He was faster, but at that time she was taller than him, with longer legs, and had proven months ago that she could catch him on distance—she’d just beaten him in a set of tennis. So he turned the chase into a series of quick sprints, ducking this way and that, in and out of the rows of Italian cypress trees that soared tall and skinny toward the azure sky, centurion like; they often pretended the trees were Roman soldiers and their tennis racquets were swords.
Lately he’d intentionally let her catch him, like he’d done the day before in the middle of the poppy field, when he pretended to trip and she rolled over him, ending up on her knees with a red flower stuck in her hair and both of them giggling. Today he would not be so easy. He took a tight turn at the hotel’s back corner, rounding the castle-like south tower that stretched three stories tall and nearly knocking over a guest and his painting easel—Why is he mixing those two particular colors together?—before taking a sharp right toward the grassy dip in the land that led to the olive groves. He had a plan to pluck one from the highest of the four terraces. Those were the best olives, in his opinion. Valerie favored the ones from the lower trees, although they were in agreement that the oil produced from either was delicious. The hotel was now famous along the coast for what they bottled daily, and likewise with the wines produced with the grapes from the hotel’s vineyards down below. Juba, the bartender and hotel manager, had promised them a plate of the oil for lunch with garlic and a variety of breads, and Magdalena was known to sneak them sips of wine when Robert wasn’t looking.
Vitto climbed the crooked stone steps on each terrace and stood defiant against the rippling wind when he reached the top. But as he went in search of the perfect olive—Valerie was at the bottom terrace doing the same—he saw his mother on the edge of the cliffs, the wind blowing her hair like flames. “Mamma? Don’t jump!” Rocks glistened below. Waves crashed, reached up for her.
“Vitto, look.”
Valerie stood next to him holding two plump, greenish-brown olives in front of her eyes. They laughed together. But good dreams rarely lasted for long. A Nazi ran out from behind the stone building where they pressed the olives into oil. He fired. Another Nazi came out from behind the building where they hung the grapes to dry.
Vitto stood frozen as they took Valerie away.
He looked toward the cliffs. Magdalena was gone too.
He sat up in bed, screaming. “It was only chocolate! I only gave him chocolate!”
“It’s okay.” Valerie was touching his shoulder, rubbing his back. She shushed him calm. “What chocolate, dear?”
He couldn’t say.
But the next morning he wrote that nightmare down, neatly folded the paper, and buried it in the backyard as Valerie watched from the kitchen window.
* * *
On day eight they ate lunch together—skillet-fried potatoes and some sausage Valerie put on buttery biscuits. Only the sound of them chewing permeated the increasingly awkward silence that had come upon the house since Vitto’s return.
Robert stared out the window as he chewed, and then he watched his fork as if he’d forgotten how to use it. Valerie snapped her fingers to get his attention and then showed him like one would a three-year-old. Robert resumed eating. He swallowed, said to Valerie, “Are there other people out there like me?”
“Yes.”
She left it at that and looked to be wrangling with issues of her own. As in, Are there other soldiers out there like Vitto?
William finished his food, asked to be excused. He put his plate in the sink and grabbed what looked to be a half-eaten bar of chocolate from the counter. “Can I finish this now?”
“Yes, honey.” She managed a smile. “But only if you give me a bite.”
Vitto momentarily froze, then jumped from his seat so fast the chair toppled. He knocked the chocolate bar from William’s hands and in doing so accidentally caught part of his son’s face.
“Vitto!” Valerie was up in a flash, kneeling with William, shielding him even, as Vitto looked from them to the chocolate bar now angled against the baseboard. William cried, buried his face i
n Valerie’s side.
Vitto approached the chocolate bar as if it were a land mine. He picked it up and tossed it in the trash. Without giving an explanation, he sat back down to finish his lunch, but not before he poured himself more wine and his wife and son disappeared down the hallway.
Robert sipped water, looked at Vitto. “Love is a choice. Not just an emotion.”
Vitto stared, gulped wine. “What are you talking about?”
“Just something your mother once said.”
Is that why it was so hard for you to ever show any affection?
Robert stared at a toothpick like he didn’t know what to do with it—his previous words seemingly forgotten. Just as he was about to put the toothpick in his nose, Vitto scooted over and grabbed it from him, showed him how to use it, just like Valerie had done with his fork. He slid the toothpick across the table, but instead of picking it back up, Robert flicked it to the floor and laughed, but the laugh didn’t last long. A few seconds later he was staring out the window at the statue he couldn’t seem to carve without his muse by his side.
Vitto finished his plate and scooted back in his chair, noticing that his father’s shoes were on the wrong feet, although tied fairly well.
An hour later Vitto had passed out on the bed, drunk from wine. Valerie covered him up.
In the middle of the night, William walked into the bedroom and climbed up in between them with wet pajamas. Vitto startled awake, grabbed for his knife.
Valerie slept the rest of the night with William on the couch.
* * *
On night nine, at four in the morning, Vitto jumped out of bed and hurried to the window. He put on his helmet—dented from a graze he’d taken in Nennig—ran to Valerie’s side of the bed, cradled her in his arms, and ran down the hallway to the kitchen, where he pushed her under the table and lay on top of her.
“I gotcha,” he whispered. “Shh. I gotcha.” He rubbed her hair, told her the bombing would be over soon.
At that moment, Robert walked in and poured himself a bowl of Cheerios. Vitto wondered when the name had changed—they’d been CheeriOats before the war. Robert sat at the table with his cereal, his bare feet inches from his son’s arm, held protectively over his wife.
She whispered, “Sometimes he gets confused. Thinks night is day and day is night.”
Robert finished his cereal and started a pot of coffee.
Valerie went back to bed. Vitto watched her walk down the hallway, in awe of how she could do that after what he’d just done, in awe of how she could be so immune to things most would find unnerving, in awe because maybe he finally realized how much of who she was had been thrust upon her at such an early age—left by her parents at the hotel like she was an orphan, like his mother, left to be raised by the hotel like it was some person in and of itself.
Vitto joined his father for a cup.
Robert said, “Sugar?”
Vitto said, “No. Thanks.”
Nothing else was said between them as they sipped.
* * *
On night fourteen, Vitto had another nightmare.
An enemy plane flew overhead, unseen in the dark, but engine loud. Bullets cleaved mud, stole leaves from branches. Soldiers screamed and smoke cleared and he straddled a young Nazi on the ground—couldn’t have been more than eighteen. They sent them out young toward the end.
Vitto sheathed his knife and put his hands around the boy’s neck. “Blut und Ehre,” the boy hissed. Vitto blinked, and the Hitler youth turned into a major from the Waffen-SS, silver-gray lightning bolts on the collar, gray eyes bulging as he tried to pry Vitto’s hands away. Vitto blinked again, held it longer, wished it all gone. He heard violin music, beautiful music from Valerie’s hands—he always swore he did his best painting while listening to her play.
He opened his eyes. He was on his knees atop the bed, straddling Valerie’s waist. His hands held her throat. Her face red, her arms flailed, weak hands against his strong wrists.
William stood in the doorway, watching. Crying. Screaming, “You’re not my daddy.”
Vitto cried, too, and then his hands eased when he realized it wasn’t a nightmare any longer and the neck in his grip was real. The love of his life. Best friend since childhood.
Valerie gasped for air as he lay beside her, breathing heavy. Breaths palpable, both of them, eyes glued to the ceiling as the moon blinked outside. Vitto gulped, swallowed over the lump in his throat, his heart and soul all bundled together into one big convoluted knot.
From the doorway, William said, “Mommy.”
Vitto got out of bed, dressed in his army uniform, from helmet to boots, and then approached Valerie’s side and apologized.
She pushed away from him, and William did the same. She didn’t stop him when he left the room either.
He walked out the front door, started up the Ford truck, and drove himself to the local veteran’s hospital with the windows open to clear his head, dog tags jangling from the rearview mirror like wind chimes.
Four
Vitto wasn’t alone.
After the interview by the white-jacketed doctor with the kind smile and thin-framed glasses, he was escorted into a vast room with metal beds lining all four walls and nurses busy in the middle. Electricity hummed above, lights dimmed. Standard white sheets tucked snug around bodies that moved very little—ex-soldiers sleeping and snoring, echoing like in a cavern.
The doctor’s questions followed him: “Do you often feel jittery? Feel soreness? Are you having trouble sleeping at night? Do you feel paranoid? Do you have memory loss? Depression? Nightmares? Tremors in the hands and legs?”
Vitto had checked just about every box, and the doctor had scribbled notes, nodded. Battle fatigue was what he called it. Combat exhaustion.
“Not all psychiatrists have accepted it, Mr. Gandy, but this is a very real thing, this war trauma,” said the doctor. “It’s what we used to call shell shock or hysteria. It’s no longer considered cowardice when a soldier refuses to go back into battle.”
“Private Paris was a goldbrick,” said Vitto.
“I don’t know this soldier you speak of, but he was hardly a shirker, Mr. Gandy. The horrors of battle can be indescribable. You’re given a gun and sent to kill, while all around you your friends are shot down. Arms and legs blown off.” Perhaps he was trying to get a reaction, but Vitto didn’t give it. “You’re hungry, filthy, leg weary, and exhausted.”
“General Patton would slap ’em. Call ’em yellow. Insist there was nothing wrong and order them back out there. Some didn’t have the guts.”
“Or they did but lost it. Unlike some of the others, it didn’t hit you until after the war.”
“I never had the guts.”
“You had the guts to admit yourself here.”
“My father thought war might be good for me.”
This seemed to stump the doctor. “Says here you were drafted.”
“I was, but I was considering enlisting anyway. He said I needed to make my katabasis.” He could tell the doctor didn’t know what it was. “It’s Greek. The hero’s journey to the land of the dead. The underworld.” The doctor raised his eyebrows as if confused and wanting more. Vitto said, “The ancients called it Hades. Odysseus went there. Heracles. Orpheus.”
“You’re comparing yourself to the Greek gods?”
Vitto chuckled; it felt weird because he hadn’t done it in so long. “My father used to think he was a god.”
“And now?”
Vitto shrugged. He didn’t know what his father thought now that his brain was mush. He wondered if, even with a clear head, Robert would come visit him in the hospital. Come visit the son he’d never wanted. The son he’d always seen as more of a rival.
“I have a photographic memory,” said Vitto, his train of thought all over the place.
“So you have a good memory? And it’s—”
“Not just good. Memories are like photographs for me. They’re frozen in time, and they n
ever go away. Make up some random numbers, Doc.”
“Like what?”
“Numbers—like a hundred of them. Tell ’em to me and I’ll repeat ’em back to you. In the exact order.”
“Because your mind can take a picture of them?”
“More or less.”
“Perhaps this is one reason the war still chases you?”
“I bury my nightmares.”
“I can’t say I agree with—”
“No, I mean literally. I write them down, then bury them in the ground.”
“And this works?”
“Did when I was young.”
“But not now? Because combat exhaustion is different, Mr. Gandy. It’s—”
“I see color too,” said Vitto. “Vivid color. That’s my other gift. Color to me is alive—always has been.”
The doctor was ready to take more notes. “Explain, please.”
“It’s the way I’ve always seen it, even when I was little. Anything colored almost seems to move by itself, like it’s alive. Or sometimes it’s so vibrant it looks wet. Like the world itself is just on the verge of melting. Like a teary eye getting ready to drip.”
“Like paint.”
“Yes.”
“It says here you’re a painter.”
“Was.”
“You don’t paint anymore?”
“Too bloody. These experiences I’m reliving . . . It’s like I’m seeing them again in living color.”
“So you plan to bury them all? In the ground?”
“You sound like my wife.”
“She doesn’t approve?”
“She always thought it was silly. She’s not one to bury anything.”
“Figuratively or literally?”
“Either,” said Vitto. “Neither.”
The doctor scratched notes across his pad and looked up for more.
Vitto said, “I used the war as my quest for knowledge.”
“And did you find it?”
“I wanted to prove myself.”
Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel Page 3