“Prove yourself to whom?”
Vitto chewed on it, looked away. “I choked my wife.” He said it deadpan, and then his jaw trembled. “I saw it. Men break.”
“Yes, they do. And it isn’t assumed anymore that those men had any prewar neurosis. It was the war that caused it. There’s only so much the mind can handle, Mr. Gandy. There are hospitals going up across the country for the veterans. Psychiatrists are coming from the asylums.”
“I’m not a lunatic.”
“Of course not. And you’ve nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Who said I was ashamed?”
The doctor’s pat on the back was unnecessary, but it felt good. And the next thing Vitto knew, he was in one of the beds wearing skivvies and socks, in between two soldiers who were out cold. The sheets were warm, tucked under his armpits.
A nurse with blue eyes stuck a needle in his arm, and he accidentally called her Valerie, which drew a cute chuckle and a correction. “It’s Dolores. Is Valerie your wife?”
He nodded. His head was heavy, floaty. He felt drunk all of a sudden, and his words slurred when he told her Val made him laugh. Always had, since they were little.
The nurse patted his hand. “Your shakes are gone.”
He nodded, grinned, didn’t even recall having had the shakes. Maybe because it had become the norm.
A minute later he was snoring like the rest of the room.
Vitto slept, but his memories did not.
* * *
“I’m finished, Mamma.”
Eight-year-old Vitto hurries to his mother in the middle of the hotel piazza, where she’s just finished posing for an artist from France. “I’m finished,” he repeats, gripping her arm. She playfully runs along with him to find his father, who is carving a replica of Giambologna’s Hercules and Nessus.
“He’s finished, Robert. Robert, Vitto is finished with the turquoise room. Robert!”
Finally Robert pauses in his chiseling to find them watching. “What is it, love?”
She writes something in her journal and slides it back into her pocket. “Vitto. He’s finished in the turquoise room.”
Robert smiles toward Vitto, although not exactly at him, and then wipes white dust from his hands and his hairy, muscled wrists. Wrists muscled like the rest of him. Muscled like Vitto one day hopes to be. “Let’s have a look then.”
Vitto pulls Magdalena along. Robert looks annoyed and preoccupied until she takes his arm and pulls him much like Vitto pulled her, at which point Robert laughs. When he’s in one of his sculpting modes—the ones where nothing else around him exists—it is sometimes necessary to pull and tug.
They near the room with the vibrantly colored turquoise door, and Vitto opens it—slowly, theatrically, like the actors and actresses who frequent the hotel might do, were they in his little shoes. The distinctive smell of egg tempera and fresh plaster hits them like a wall. Vitto has spent three months on the wall fresco, a perfect copy of the School of Athens, by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael. Vitto opens the door wider to let more air and light into the room, and then he points to his version of the masterpiece, a copy of which he stared at for ten minutes weeks ago before storing it in his memory to be duplicated.
Magdalena covers her mouth with a shaking right hand. “Oh Vitto. It’s . . . beautiful. Exactly like the original, except better. Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because you painted it.” She gets out her journal and scribbles something in it—hastily, but with pride in her smile.
A great shadow covers the floor. Juba has entered, his massive body clogging the doorway and shutting off the sunlight behind it. “Oh Vitto. Marvelous. It’s breathtaking.” He pants, pretending to be literally out of breath, and then places a heavy hand on Robert’s shoulder. Robert is the only one at the hotel who stands as tall and strong as Juba, who is as black as Robert’s statues are white.
But Robert stares at the wall with his jaw clenched. He forces a smile, nods at his son as if to say, Well done, and then ducks out of the room.
* * *
“Every man has his breaking point. No one is immune, Mr. Gandy.”
Vitto opened his eyes, rolled his head to the side, slow motion.
The brown eyes of a sandy-haired soldier on the bed beside him stared. “He tell you that?”
“Who?”
“Dr. Cushings,” said the soldier. “Every man has his breaking point?”
Vitto nodded, looked up at the ceiling. Didn’t feel like making friends. In war, friends were made only to die. Dixon and Deats, two of his friends from before the war, were both dead. Dixon fought for the segregated Ninety-Second in Italy and died in the Apennines. Deats lost his life in Iwo Jima. Their parents had been loyal guests of the hotel—Mr. Dixon was a respected Negro writer and Mr. Deats was a scientist. Vitto used to play hide-and-seek with their boys at the hotel until the sun went down, at which point they’d play with flashlights or candles. If Valerie wasn’t busy practicing violin, she’d play, too, and the four of them had made quite a team. He wondered what had become of their bodies.
“I’m John. John Johnson. The men, they used to call me Johnny Two-Times. But one John will do.”
Vitto kept his eyes to the ceiling. “Nice to meet you, John.”
“Sometimes they’d call me John Squared. Or John to the Second Power. You know, because of—”
“I got it, John.”
“Oh, okay.” The bed creaked under the man’s bulk.
Vitto spied him from the corner of his eye. John looked like one of those farm boys who could lift a tractor over his head. Hands big enough to crack a pencil in half when he wrote. He sighed, rolled his head back to his roommate. “How long you been here, John?”
“Who, me?”
“Yeah, you.”
“Six weeks. You know why they put me beside you?”
“No.”
“I’m a barrel of sunshine. And I’m at the end of my stay. They thought maybe I could shine some light on you.”
Vitto noticed for the first time that John had some patches of hair missing on his head, near the temples and above the ear. Or not really missing, but much thinner than the thicket of hair around them.
John sensed his question. “Shock therapy. Hair ain’t growing back for some reason, but at least my nightmares are gone. Most of the memories, too, although Dr. Cushings said they might resurface upon the right stimulant.”
“They literally shocked you?”
John made a bee-sting sound and grinned. “Electric stimulation of the brain. Gave me a brain seizure, more or less.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Nah—well, not much. Still got a little jaw pain and some headaches, but it’s getting better.” John rotated to his side, faced him like they were two girls at a slumber party. He and Valerie would face each other and talk like that after their picnics in the poppy field. “Your wife sure is a pretty.”
Vitto flinched. “How do you know my wife?”
“Met her yesterday.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“I wasn’t here yesterday.”
“You were sleeping. She stopped by with your son and your dad. But your dad had some kind of panic attack, and she took him home.”
Vitto let it soak in. “How long have I been here?”
“Three days.”
Three days? Vitto faced the ceiling again, felt sleepy. His right arm showed the nicks of more than one needle, and he now vaguely remembered taking some pills by mouth.
“They call it narcosis therapy,” said John. “They’ll keep you mostly asleep for weeks. Deep sleep too—like twenty hours a day. In between they’ll run some personality tests.”
“What’d they give me?”
“Barbiturates. Sodium Pentothal. Sodium bromide. You still scream out at night.”
Vitto clenched his jaw, couldn’t remember.
“You’re Gandy, right?”
“Yes? D
o we know each other?”
“No. Says right there on your chart. Vittorio Gandy, I like that. You Italian or something?”
“No.”
“Huh. Figured you might be.”
“Well, sort of. My mother was from Florence, then Pienza. In Tuscany.” He was silent for a moment, didn’t feel like talking anymore. Didn’t feel like explaining his mother.
John said, “You one of the Gandys? Like from the hotel?”
After a beat, Vitto confirmed, sleepy. “You been there?”
“No. Always wanted to, though. Heard it was the place to be, especially in the twenties.” He paused. “Hey, Gandy, is it true that that reporter jumped from the cliffs way back when? Or was he pushed?”
Vitto rolled the other way, ignored the question, hoping it wouldn’t be followed by one about the woman who might or might not have jumped twenty years later.
* * *
“Where do we go when we die?”
Father Embry smiles without showing his teeth, the same expression he always shows when Vitto asks him that question. “Well, to heaven, of course.” Then he ruffles Vitto’s hair and continues conversing with the guests scattered across the piazza, some singing, some playing their instruments, others painting and acting and tinkering with various inventions.
On this day Vitto follows in Father Embry’s wake, which is more of a slow shuffle. As long as he can remember, the priest has been old, with white hair and face wrinkles that look like mud after it has baked and cracked under the sun. Except Father Embry’s face is always friendly, and when Vitto asks his mother why he’s always around, she tells him that it’s just a short bicycle ride from the rectory and that the hotel’s charm is infectious. She drives the hotel’s big Buick or rides her own bicycle daily to Father Embry’s church in town for confession, and sometimes Vitto goes with her. He waits in the front pew, staring upward, until his mother is finished confessing, and then he tells Father Embry that one day he will paint the church’s low-beamed ceiling like the Sistine Chapel. Father Embry usually laughs and tells him to talk to the monks at the monastery because their church has a better ceiling for painting.
“Father Embry, is there a heaven for pigeons?”
That smile again, along with the pause. “Yes, with millions of birds flying about.”
He only asks because every once in a while he’ll find a dead pigeon in the grass around the olive mill. The last one he kept in a wooden box once used to carry wine until the little corpse stank up the mill and his father yelled at him. “I told you to bury that! Not keep it as a pet, Vittorio!”
Vitto didn’t bury the bird, though. Not because he forgot—he only buried the memories that frightened him—but because he often conjures the nerve to do the exact opposite of what his father asks. He tells himself it’s because Robert never seems impressed by his colorful paintings, his copies of the Renaissance masters. But Vitto knows his real reasons to be much simpler. He learned early on that to get the good, it is sometimes necessary to bring about the bad. If he provokes his father’s temper, then Robert, who does have a soul beneath his hardened exterior, will most likely come in at bedtime to ruffle Vitto’s hair like Father Embry does and to whisper “Good night, son” as Vitto pretends to sleep.
And Vitto will smile into his pillow as Robert leaves the room.
* * *
“Father Embry says hello.”
Vitto’s head was heavy like a brick as he moved it on the pillow toward John. “What?”
“And he said to tell you, ‘To heaven, of course.’ What’s that mean anyway?”
“Father Embry. The local priest in my hometown.” He closed his eyes, didn’t feel like explaining, then became alert again. “He was here?”
“Stopped by an hour ago.” John smiled. “Looked as old as Moses might if he was still alive. Said every day you used to ask him where we go when we die.”
Vitto stared at the ceiling, wondered how many days he’d slept away.
“Valerie says hello too. Your wife.”
“I know who my wife is, John.”
“Anyway, she says hello.”
“You on a first-name basis now?”
“She said to call her Valerie. Says you call her Val. Didn’t mean nothing by it.” After a beat he said, “Your dad looks like a statue. Chiseled, like he just walked down from the pedestal. Except he’s old. How old is he?”
Vitto grunted. He didn’t know for certain, but he suspected his father was pushing eighty and might be older. He and Vitto’s mother had been unable to conceive for decades until, as Magdalena told it, they stopped trying, and “then there came you, Vitto.”
He looked at John. “How many days have I been here?”
“Eight.”
“My back hurts.”
“They rotate you around when you sleep, like a hog on a spit. Keeps the bedsores away. Said it would take four people to shift me around. Like moving a dead bear—that’s what Dr. Cushings said.”
“How many times has my wife come in?”
“Every day.” He chuckled, pointed to a spot next to the foot of the bed. “She doesn’t come any closer than there either. You must have scared her something awful. Almost like she tries to come when you’re asleep, so she won’t have to talk to you.”
Vitto turned away from John and closed his eyes.
* * *
“Finish the story, Mother. Please. Epimetheus and Prometheus.”
Magdalena smiles, sits back down on the bed. “Just a little longer. Ticktock goes the clock, Vittorio, and it’s getting late.”
He settles his head back into the pillow and wonders if his father will come ruffle his hair tonight. He can hear him carving out on the piazza now; the echoing of that chisel and hammer is the music that lulls Vitto to sleep most nights whether his father visits or not. But today he ventured too close to the cliffs after Robert warned him not to, and Robert’s tanned face got all red when he yelled.
Magdalena shushes him softly, as if she somehow knows he has loud thoughts running through his head. “Zeus now reigned over all the earth. He tasked Epimetheus to create animals, and his brother, Prometheus, to create man. Epimetheus was very enthusiastic and created all the animals before Prometheus had even decided what mankind should be like. By then Epimetheus had already used all the gifts on the animals. This angered Prometheus so much that he stole fire from Zeus and gave it to man. Zeus didn’t like this, so he chained Prometheus to a mountain. Then he had a beautiful woman created and gave her to Epimetheus as his bride. She was the very first woman.”
“What happened to Adam and Eve?”
“Well, this is just a different story.”
“Like the ones everybody tells at last call?”
“Yes. Sure. Anyway, when Pandora came to Epimetheus she brought a box the gods had given her.” She pauses, sighs, pulls her journal from her pocket, and reads to herself for a few minutes while Vitto waits. This he is used to. Sometimes his mother forgets her own stories, and it seems to be happening more of late. But now she resumes with gusto. “In that box, Zeus had put a little of each of the gods’ powers, and he told her not to open it. But Pandora couldn’t help herself; she was curious. So she opened the box. And you know what came out?”
“Powers?”
“All the evils in the world,” she says, referring to her journal again. “Like pride and envy. Greed and suffering. Bad things like that. Pandora slammed the lid on the box before everything could get out. She kept it closed until a day when Pandora heard whispering coming from the box. And do you know what was whispering?”
“More bad stuff?”
“No. It was hope. And it wanted out.”
“So did they let it out?”
“Yes, and hope was released into the world.” She stands, tucks him in tight, makes sure she has her journal. He asks for one more story, but she kisses his forehead and whispers, “Ticktock goes the clock, Vitto.”
She leaves the room, and he closes his eyes.
But Robert Gandy chisels all night long.
* * *
Dr. Cushings knelt on the floor, touched the corner of his mouth. His fingers came back bloody.
Vitto flexed his right hand, settled his head into the pillow. His heart raced; he couldn’t believe he’d done it. But he’d told himself, If that doctor mentions chemical hypnosis again, I’m gonna paste him. And so he had, one good shot across the jaw, and now he lay completely drained.
“Oh dear,” said Nurse Dolores, helping the doctor from the floor. John was out of his bed, too, standing Dr. Cushings upright. Nurse Dolores gave Vitto the angry eye and said to the doctor, “Let’s get you a chair.”
But the doctor had mentioned hope. As in “our last.”
Dr. Cushings politely waved her away. “I’m fine, Dolores.” Vitto felt the doctor’s hand on his ankle, patting it. “You rest now, Mr. Gandy.”
Vitto suddenly sat up and screamed loud enough to wake half the room—words about chocolate bars and black smoke and naked bodies stacked liked cordwood.
Dolores was bedside in an instant with ether on a cloth, and she quickly placed it over his mouth.
He eased back on the pillow, eyelids fluttered.
As he nodded off, he could have sworn he heard Johnny Two-Times crying.
* * *
Even in the waning light of the loft, her eyes are so blue he doubts he could mix a color true enough to duplicate them. To even hint at their warmth, the same warmth now covering his chest like a blanket.
“Tell me a story, Vitto.”
And so he does.
* * *
“They didn’t do the hypnosis with me.”
John sat on the side of his bed in civilian clothes—dusty work boots, slacks, and a red-and-black checkered shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, arms all bulky strength and farm fat.
Vitto was groggy. “They letting you out?”
John laughed. “Ain’t a prison, Gandy. Free to go whenever. But yes, they released me yesterday. I told you that.”
He closed his eyes, squeezed hard, tried to remember.
Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel Page 4