Henry calmed her down, and slowly brought the cup to her lips. “Drink.”
Don’t drink it, Vitto wanted to say, unsure why. Because every day has its night. Because what goes up must come down. Because memories can cut as much as they cure. And because he’d learned through the war that life too often was fool’s gold. Rays of a beautiful sunrise led to rivers of blood. Under lush canopies of evergreen forest, combat stained the silent snow cherry red. Craters and limbs pocked fields and countryside. Last words traveled on breezes choked with smoke and death.
Mary sipped from the cup. She closed her eyes, swallowed, then took a deep breath. Her shoulders sagged, relaxed. She sipped again, eyes still closed, while her husband waited, watching her as if she were a coma patient starting to regain life. And then she opened her eyes, turning toward her husband.
“Henry.”
She’d said his name before, but this was different. This mention brought moisture to his eyes. He put his hands on her shoulders as if testing her, making sure she was real. Because how real are we if we can’t remember? Vitto thought of his mother. Or if we bury our memories and refuse to remember? He thought of Valerie as he watched Henry lean toward his wife with an intimacy he now craved. “Mary? Do you know where we are?”
“We’re at the Tuscany Hotel, dear.” She smiled, wide-eyed and seemingly clearheaded as she took in the entirety of the piazza and the fountain and the colorful doors that circled it all. Her husband nodded, unclenched his jaw, and then wrapped his arms around her slight shoulders.
Vitto stared at the two of them, both slumped with age yet somehow now renewed with life.
Water is life. Water is death.
He shook the thought away and reached down for the cup that Mary had unknowingly dropped to the stones. He approached the fountain, lowered the mug over the edge.
Then the screaming began.
Vitto placed the empty cup on the fountain ledge and hurried toward the spiral staircase, taking two and three steps at a time. John was no longer an annoying sidecar with an overactive mouth, but a fellow soldier in need of help. He followed the screams to room 246 and found John sitting up in bed, wedged into the corner, fighting something unseen, screaming, “I can’t feel my toes.”
Vitto grabbed at his flailing hands, secured them both, and talked John down, telling him repeatedly that “It’s not real . . . It’s not real.” Knowing darn well that it was real, or at least it had been. And the memories were real—memories that didn’t need to come up. Memories the shock therapy had kept at bay until the fountain water had set them free again.
John sweated, panting on Vitto’s shoulder, so close Vitto could feel his big heart pounding. Vitto rubbed his back, and big John started talking as the Caravaggio replica stared—as if listening too—from across the room.
“The Nazis came out of nowhere, Gandy. We were in the Ardennes Forest. Tired. They broke through our front, surrounded us at Bastogne. We didn’t know what was going on. There were Nazi paratroopers falling from the sky, Nazis speaking English, disguising themselves as Americans.”
A shadowed silhouette appeared in the doorway, and Valerie called Vitto’s name. He raised his hand, held her at bay at the threshold, and encouraged John to continue.
“They were dropping like flies all around me, Gandy. Snow so deep I could hardly lift my legs. They spread rumors to scare us—massacres at Malmedy, Stavelot, soldiers and civilians. Turned out they weren’t just rumors, and that was worse. My pals called me yellow every day just to needle me, Gandy, but they were still my pals, you know?” Vitto nodded, knew all too well. “They kept dropping all around me. Beaty got shot in the head, and then a tank ran over him.”
He grabbed Vitto by the shoulders, pulled him down so their faces were inches apart. “I wasn’t gonna die like the rest of ’em. I wasn’t. So I dropped down in the snow, facedown, until I was nearly frozen solid.
“The Nazis were all around. Foreign voices in the air. Boots crunching. I played dead, Gandy. One of ’em nudged me with his boot.”
John’s breathing had slowed. His arms relaxed. He chuckled, dry-swallowed a memory. “I fooled ’em, Gandy.” He wiped his face, smiled. “They moved on. That was brave, wasn’t it?”
Vitto nodded. “It was brave, John.”
Beverly had joined Valerie at the doorway. Upon sight of her, John sat straighter on the bed. For John’s sake and Beverly’s ears, Vitto emphasized his next point by prodding a finger into John’s thick chest. “You held the lines, John. You did your part to slow them down until Patton arrived.”
John nodded as if reassuring himself. He dry-swallowed again and wiped his cheeks as relief washed over him. Vitto stood from where he’d been kneeling on the bed, but John clutched his arm hard before he could step away. “I feel better now, Gandy.”
“Good,” said Vitto.
John’s eyes locked on his. “I mean I feel better now. Like a poison’s been drained away.”
Vitto pulled his arm away at the same time John released him—message given and received. He still wasn’t going to drink from that fountain. William stood in front of Valerie, her hands on his shoulders. Vitto hadn’t noticed him in the shadows earlier and couldn’t bring himself to look at him now. He felt claustrophobic, chest tight, heart racing. He moved past his wife and son and Beverly out onto the gallery overlooking the piazza, where two more elderly couples had joined Mary and Henry and now Robert at the fountain.
“Mommy, look.” William pointed over the roof and front portico.
In the distance, headlights from another car bounced over the hotel’s bridge, two blurs in a field of darkness, growing large. Up ahead, rounding a curve of cypress trees, another car approached. Vitto hurried down the stairs, light-headed, running on fumes. When had he last eaten? Or slept? He nearly tripped on the tiles as he stepped down to the piazza. The wine he’d consumed caught up to him in a rush. He staggered toward the fountain, where Robert was in the middle of a deep embrace with an elderly man Vitto knew all too well.
Juba’s skin was the color of coffee grounds, his halo of hair as white as the fountain’s statue, his back still broad and straight. His velvety basso voice had carried easily down to the monastery below, echoing across the piazza every night for decades.
Robert and Juba patted backs and then took each other in, arms’ length apart. Was Juba like the other new arrivals, coming to drink from the fountain to restore memories lost? No, he looked too eager, too aware; he was returning to work. An opera-caliber singer and musician, yes, but even better known at the hotel as the pourer of drinks, the tender of bar, the man whose nightly shout of “last call” stopped guests in their tracks.
Valerie had once referred to him as the embodiment of a hug.
“Vitto,” he said, stepping away from Robert, arms open for an embrace.
“Juba!” Valerie shouted. Juba turned from Vitto toward the girl who’d come to call him father after her parents left her. Valerie ran across the piazza to steal the hug Vitto wasn’t yet ready to give, mostly because he could no longer see straight, but also because he couldn’t believe what he was seeing was real.
Despite Juba’s age—he had to be at least eighty—he still appeared strong and vibrant. Valerie jumped into the man’s arms, and together they spun in a swift circle. He pretended to squeeze the life from her and then placed her down gently on the travertine stones. Vitto noticed she had her violin and bow in hand. Has she had them with her all the time?
“Play,” Juba told Valerie, eyeing the instrument. “Go on. What are you waiting for?”
Vitto blinked to steady himself, saw a flash of Valerie as a twelve-year-old, playing for him and Juba inside the stone Leopoldino where the olives were pressed—Juba claimed her playing actually increased the oil yield—as dust motes floated through rays of light penetrating the wood-slatted windows.
Vitto blinked again, and the memory was gone. But Juba was home. And Robert didn’t look surprised. As if the two old men had been
in cahoots.
Mary and Henry danced hand in hand around the fountain like youngsters as Valerie slid bow across strings, the sound resonating through them all, a swollen hum that blanketed the piazza. Vitto took an unsteady step as an elderly man emerged from the shadows of the portico, escorted by someone who could have been his son or grandson. Behind them two elderly women arrived, each with a suitcase that matched their paisley coats. Outside the piazza, at the front of the hotel, two more car doors closed.
Vitto’s knees wobbled, his vision blurred. How many more guests would there be?
Valerie stopped playing. “Go on,” she said to Juba. “What are you waiting for?”
Juba grinned like he’d never thought he’d be asked, although it was clear, with the two suitcases beside him, that he was here to stay and had been brought back for a reason. He cleared his throat. His chest expanded like a windswept sail, and then out came the deep, rumbling voice from the hotel’s vibrant past, the one that had echoed every night at midnight from behind the bar, beneath the ticking wall clock Magdalena had taken from the Hospital of the Innocents in Florence decades ago. Everyone on the piazza turned to listen.
“Last call,” he said once, pausing briefly as the words reverberated out like a shock wave. He continued: “Last call at the Tuscany Hotel.”
And then Vitto blacked out.
Eleven
December at the Tuscany Hotel often brought warm sunshine. And now, nearly two weeks after Juba returned to his familiar post behind the piazza’s bar, it had ushered in yet more guests. The count had reached ninety-seven, and most of those were out mingling on the cool stones surrounding the fountain that had suddenly given them back their lives.
The past two days, they’d averaged twenty new arrivals, and John, who was adding delicious ideas daily to his menu, had the kitchen running to near capacity. Robert had hired men to clean out the rooms and refurbish them with new bed linens. When Vitto cornered his father on the cost, insisting he know how it was all being paid for, Robert let him in on a secret known only by himself and Juba.
Robert had indeed swept through what he’d inherited from his father’s oil fields and quarries, especially in the last few years after Magdalena’s death, when the Depression had run its course, the guests had dwindled to a trickle, and his mind had begun to fragment. But apparently Magdalena had possessed a healthy stash that Robert had never touched—money that had made money while Robert spent all of Cotton’s, money he’d refused to spend until he could think of a way it could honor her memory, money he’d truthfully forgotten about until the earthquake and the moment of lucidity that led him back to the hotel in a fit of inspiration. This, he told Vitto, was what Magdalena would have wanted. The hotel had closed down after her tragic death, but her death was giving it life again.
Vitto still had questions. “Where did Mamma get the money?”
“She brought it with her from Italy, Vitto. From Pienza.”
“And how did she make all this money there as a teen? As an orphan?”
“An orphan who was adopted by a painter who had become quite rich by the time she left.”
The time she left—another story altogether that had never fully been explained. Which had brought him back to Juba, another source of mystery.
“Where has Juba been all these years? How did he know to come back?”
“He’s been traveling the world, Vitto. And never so far that he couldn’t feel the hotel’s heart start beating again. Now, enough with the questions. Enjoy the day. Enjoy the excitement.”
Excitement, perhaps, but not the kind Vitto used to know. These days the growing crowd made him claustrophobic and confused. Day by day, guest by guest, he witnessed the change in them after drinking from the fountain. With some it was instant. Others took longer, hours in some cases.
And one gentleman, a former cattle rancher named Cane whose son had driven him from Dallas, Texas, had waited half a day for the water to take effect. The son had been hustling him back to the car, crying fraud, when Mr. Cane stopped suddenly in front of the Cupid statue and started crying. Tears streaking his lined face, he confessed that he wanted to go fishing like the two of them used to. He called his son by name—Garrett—when apparently he hadn’t done so in over a year. In what must have been a poke at an inside joke, he even snickered and offered to bait the hook. Then, while Garrett stood speechless, he thanked his son for his months of painstaking care, which he vowed would no longer be necessary. He urged his son to go on back to the wife and kids, insisting that he’d found his new home. The two tough men embraced right there in front of the statue.
The son stayed for two more days, just to make sure, and then returned to Texas, promising to write often and bring the family back for a visit. Mr. Cane waved as his son pulled away from the hotel, even stood there watching until the car was a blip bounding over the bridge in the distance. But truth be told, as he would reveal later to Valerie, he couldn’t wait to get back into the hotel and the game of bocce he’d promised Ms. Thomerson, the widow he’d met the day before on the arcaded walkway overlooking the ocean, the one with the silver hair and brown eyes and faint birthmark on the left side of her neck that looked like a key. The one whose room had a door the color of the pineapples his own mother used to put on her upside-down cakes.
A lot of the residents were playing bocce these days. Juba had cut a small court into the grass between the two pools on the south side of the hotel. Around the pools, which were in the process of being cleaned, a dozen men and women could be found at any given time—lounging, playing cards, and talking of better days, days they’d never thought to see again.
Vitto’s heart should have been warmed by it all, but there was something about all this newfound happiness that cut him like a wound. When he watched Valerie and Juba carry a tray from door to door every morning and pass out little cups of everyone’s “medicine,” he felt the wound gape. He didn’t trust what was happening around him—didn’t trust the smiles. And when he tried to smile along with them, especially whenever his wife and kid were brave enough to be around him, it physically pained him to do so. Pained him even to talk, and looking people in the eye became harder by the day. His happiness had been buried beneath too much blood and mud and blown body parts. His happiness had flown the instant he made his first kill and Coopus cheered it.
He couldn’t deny, however, that the hotel was full of life again, albeit a different kind of life than that generated by the artists, musicians, and scientists who once graced the piazza. It should have fixed him. Should have made him whole again. Like his father, he had loved the congregating, loved the atmosphere of laughter and gaiety and drinks clinking. The feeling he’d get from it all was something he’d never been able to put a finger on, other than calling it happiness.
But everything felt different now. The more people arrived, the more Vitto wanted to run from them. Which was why each of the past two mornings, after struggling to grasp even an hour of uninterrupted sleep from the nightmares, he’d taken the ax and cutters from the maintenance shed and climbed the terraces to clean out the weeds and brambles and saplings from the olive groves. Hard labor under the sun helped take his mind off of things, and having something to do kept him from drinking wine all day. He did occasionally take a sip from the kitchen sink, which dispensed normal water, but he refused to drink the water from the fountain.
He knew it was winter, with daytime temperatures in the sixties, but the constant sun made it seem almost like summer. His face was sunburned, as was the back of his neck, and it felt good. Every so often, as he worked, he’d glance toward the cliffs overlooking the Pacific. How long would it take to hit the rocks below if he were to jump? How long had it taken the reporter to hit those rocks back in the spring of ’21?
“The tragedy at the Tuscany Hotel,” the headlines had called it. What was the reporter’s name—Melvin something, started with a T? No one knew for sure whether he jumped or was pushed—or what Magdalena’s role i
n the tragedy had been, if any. It had only been a rumor that she was out there with him when he went over—a cruel rumor never really put to rest until she, too, went off the cliff almost twenty years later.
From his vantage point on the terraces, Vitto could see the monastery down below. A few of the monks looked like brown inkblots as they tended to their grapevines. Vitto planned on cleaning out the hotel’s vineyard next—if he hadn’t jumped into the ocean by then. He sat on a patch he’d cleared and wiped sweat from his brow, feeling childish for the nightmare he’d literally buried early in the morning before the sun rose, the mound of dirt visible in the distance from where he now sat. What would Valerie think of him still clinging to that juvenile habit, even now as a grown adult? But it comforted him like a blanket would. Like he was a child sucking his thumb or Johnny Two-Times gnawing on his fingernails.
Vitto was parched, dehydrated, and too thin. Everyone claimed to love John’s cooking, and pleasant food smells now constantly wafted from the kitchen—bubbling meats and roasting vegetables and simmering pasta sauce—but to Vitto it smelled like mud. Like bloodstained snow and mud. Once that death smell got into your nose, no amount of sneezing or blowing could get it out. Yesterday morning Valerie had attempted conversation as he’d crossed the piazza toward the maintenance shed for his cutters. “Bread smells good, doesn’t it, Vitto?” What had he told her? “Smells like mud, Val.” And then he’d walked on. The wine he’d had for breakfast had made his mouth dry, and the sun, as good as it felt on his shoulders, had given him a headache.
He figured four seconds—five, tops—to hit the rocks below. High tide would take him out into the ocean. Low tide would leave him with the shells and rocks and washed-up litter and dead fish. Main thing keeping him from it was William, not wanting his son to have the same confused feelings he’d had when Magdalena went over. As in, did he have anything to do with why she did it? Was there anything, in hindsight, he could have done to stop it?
Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel Page 10