Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel

by James Markert

  It wasn’t his blabbering about the water being a placebo that angered him—this was the second day in a row the man had pulled this stunt. But as soon as Tuffant mentioned Magdalena, Vitto stopped cold. Valerie took a step forward, and the nearby guests stared. Even Robert looked up from his sculpture, which had, in recent days, begun to take the shape of a woman Vitto suspected was Magdalena. Robert had never sculpted his wife before. He’d always said it was impossible to capture her beauty—“only a god could do so,” he’d once said—but it sure looked as if he was trying now.

  Vitto strode toward Tuffant. “What about Magdalena?”

  Tuffant pushed thin-framed glasses up his blade-like nose and smiled like a chimp that had just been fed a banana in a menagerie. “Why did she jump from that cliff? That’s the story, is it not?”

  “I’d like you to leave,” said Vitto. “Right now.”

  “Why was there never a story written about her death? Just a meager mention in the obituaries.”

  Because, at the time, Robert threatened to kill any reporter who tried. But Vitto said, “Some reporters showed the respect that was due.”

  “A devout Catholic who selfishly took her own life.”

  “She slipped,” Vitto said, tight-jawed. “It was an accident.”

  Tuffant let out a quick laugh, a burst like a punch in the air. “Tell yourself that if it makes you feel better. A slip on purpose, I’d say, Mr. Gandy. Who in their right mind would venture so close to the cliffs without having the notion of going over?”

  “Get out.” It was Valerie who’d said it now, storming across the piazza with bow in hand, gripping it as if preparing to strike. Valerie may have been aware of Magdalena’s flaws, but she was also quick to take up for her. “Get out now.”

  “Or what?”

  She got as far as raising her elbow to strike him before catching herself. She lowered the bow but didn’t retreat.

  The reporter looked back to Vitto. “A future story will, no doubt, cover all these questions, Mr. Gandy. I’ll be happy to present your take on them if you will allow me an interview.”

  Robert had moved away from his statue, shuffling close but not too close to the reporter, still holding his hammer and chisel but showing no sign of using them. He might have threatened reporters years ago, but he was no threat today. Vitto noticed for the first time, in the sunlight spilling over the hotel’s crenellations, that his father looked frail and uncertain, no longer equipped to fight his own fight. Even when struggling with Alzheimer’s, his physical appearance had never wavered from that of a warrior, of the god he’d always claimed to be. But now he just stood there looking . . . old.

  Tuffant paused as if hoping he’d get more of a reaction out of Robert and even seemed disappointed when he didn’t. So he again faced Vitto, who looked ready to fight right there in front of everyone. “Your mother was famous, was she not? Artists traveled continents to be around her.” He turned in a slow circle, gesturing toward each wing of the hotel. “To be around this. But who was she? Where did she come from? That’s what I want to know.”

  Vitto took a threatening step toward the man, who took one back and pointed at the fountain. “This isn’t the only story, Mr. Gandy. Stories start from something. They aren’t birthed from midair. Your mother came from Italy. From Florence. A foundling baby left at an orphanage with no marks to identify her. She was adopted by a man named Francesco Lippi, a painter who suddenly found fortune and a bit of fame because of her. His muse.”

  “Get out.” It was Juba this time, walking across the piazza like a man on a mission. The hotel guests watched nervously, backing away as Juba said it again, this time like a rumble of thunder. “Get out before I throw you out.”

  “Or throw me off the cliff!” spat Tuffant.

  Juba froze. The accusation had clearly been meant—and taken—as more than a threat.

  Tuffant knew something. And then it hit Vitto; he’d heard the name before. Tuffant—that was the name of the slick-haired, suspendered reporter who’d gone over the cliffs in the early twenties, his body broken and disfigured on the rocks below. Melvin Tuffant. The hotel’s tragedy had obviously been rekindled in the person of Melvin’s son, Landry, who was grown now and had grabbed hold of the thread the father had dropped prematurely.

  Tuffant pointed at Juba. “I know what you did, and I’ll prove it. There was a fire at Lippi’s house the night Magdalena fled Pienza. She was ushered away by Robert Gandy and a mysterious man with skin so black some confused him with the shadows. Lippi burned inside that house, but I have suspicions he was already dead.”

  He backed away from Juba, unknowingly toward the rim of the fountain. “I’ve sent letters to Pienza. I learn more daily. I’ll prove what my father couldn’t.”

  “And do what with it?” asked Valerie. “Magdalena is already gone.”

  Tuffant held his finger up. “Well then, perhaps she’ll burn in hell for multiple sins, suicide being the least of—”

  His sentence ended in a squawk as Vitto reached for him, grabbing Tuffant’s extended finger and pulling it back until it popped. Valerie covered her mouth and then William’s eyes; he’d sidled up against her leg during all the commotion. Vitto pulled Tuffant’s arm around to his back and duck-walked him to the fountain, where he kicked his legs out from under him, and forced his head over the rim, Tuffant’s chest resting against the wet blue-and-yellow tiles.

  Vitto dunked the reporter’s face and head into the water, held it down for a couple seconds, and then lifted it back up. “Drink.” He did it again and again. “Lap it up like the dog you are.” Water streamed from Tuffant’s face as Vitto lifted his head again, clutching it by the loose strands of the reporter’s greasy hair.

  “Stop,” Tuffant gurgled, choking.

  “Drink!” Vitto hissed, only vaguely aware of the shouts behind him, the sound of William crying. He wished not only memories but also a storm front of nightmares on the man. But part of him couldn’t help wondering, did Mamma have something to do with Melvin Tuffant’s death?

  “Vitto, stop.” Valerie’s arms clutched his. And Juba’s. And John’s. They pulled him away as the reporter gained his equilibrium on the side of the fountain, positioning broken glasses on his nose. Blood leaked from Tuffant’s chin where it must have hit the tiles on one of the plunges. He wiped it with a soaked shirtsleeve.

  “I’ll be back, Gandy. I’ll shut this place down.”

  * * *

  Vitto found Juba behind the bar that night after last call, cleaning wineglasses that already looked clean.

  The game of truth and lies had been played at midnight as usual. But after the stress of the day with the reporter, attendance had been sparse, with many guests shuffling off to bed instead of the piazza. Vitto had stayed away, aware that most of the guests had steered clear of him after what he’d done to Tuffant inside that fountain. Some of them during the day had even given their medicine a second look before drinking, as if it was now tainted or, at worst, littered with a strand of Tuffant’s hair or remnants from his broken glasses.

  Vitto sat on a stool now while Juba poured him a glass of red. He poured himself a glass as well and leaned forward with his elbows on the bar top, ready to take on any questions Vitto might conjure. They drank for a minute, watching each other from their respective sides of the bar. Vitto finally said, “Did you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Push that reporter’s father off the cliff? Back in the twenties?”

  Juba swallowed wine, said decisively, “No.”

  Vitto didn’t know whether he believed Juba or not, but he’d known him long enough to know he wouldn’t get any more out of him. Juba was a vault stuck inside of a vault and he’d swallowed the key long ago. “You would have done anything to protect my mother?”

  Juba nodded, wiped his mouth. “Still would.”

  “Why’d she jump?”

  “She slipped.”

  “No she didn’t,” said Vitto. “I can handl
e you and Dad and even Father Embry concealing the truth like you’ve always done, but what I won’t take is a full-out lie. Why’d she jump?”

  Juba sighed and flicked a bread crumb off the bar. “She was troubled.”

  “Not at the beginning.”

  “She got worse as the years went by.”

  “Why? What troubled her?”

  “Her past. And who she was.”

  “What past? And who was she, Juba?”

  “She was your mother.”

  Vitto downed his wine and pushed it forward for a refill, which Juba poured, but with hesitation and the kind of glance a father might give to a son when something needed to be monitored.

  Vitto pressed. “What happened in Pienza?”

  “Just like the man said. Me and your father helped her escape.”

  “Why did she need to escape?”

  “That man Lippi beat on her.”

  “There’s more. Did she set that house on fire? Was Lippi inside? Did she steal his money?”

  Juba stared across the piazza to where Robert had paused his chiseling to stare at the moonlit statue. Vitto changed course, nodded toward his father in the distance. “I heard you two arguing earlier.”

  “Is that not allowed?”

  “It was heated. What was it about?”

  “Something we disagree on.” A pause. “I promised him I wouldn’t tell you . . . yet.”

  “Which means you might.”

  Juba nodded. “Which means I might. If your father doesn’t soon come to his senses.”

  “About?”

  “About all of this.”

  Vitto finished his second glass in two gulps and made as if to step from the stool and approach his father.

  Juba’s voice stopped him. “Don’t. He won’t talk to you about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s not ready.”

  “Look at him, Juba. He’s thin. He’s pale. He’s weak. I’ve never seen him like this. His mind might be whole again, but his body is taking the brunt. These weeks have somehow taken off years.”

  “Let him deal with it in his own way, Vitto.”

  “Deal with what?”

  “His mortality.”

  Vitto laughed, folded his arms. “He once told me he was immortal.”

  Juba started to say something but stopped. Vitto looked from Juba to his father. “Why could he never love me?”

  “He loves you, Vitto.”

  “Then why did he never show it? He was always consumed with his work. And he never really had any real interest in my paintings. I could tell. He’d just nod and walk away while others stared in amazement.”

  “But it wasn’t like . . . Vitto, it’s complicated.”

  Vitto laughed. “Yes, it is.”

  “He couldn’t—” Juba stopped.

  “Couldn’t what?”

  “Couldn’t see it the way others did.” Juba gathered himself, lowered his voice but not his intensity. “He’s color-blind, Vitto.” He paused to let that sink in. “He at one time wanted to be a painter, but from the beginning, he could never see color. Flowers were gray. Grass was gray. The sky was white. Clothing, shoes, anything he set his eyes upon, he saw only white and black and shades of gray at best.”

  A lump formed in Vitto’s throat, and he gave it a moment to settle, although his heart fluttered like a caged bird. “So that’s why he turned to carving stone.”

  “Yes, Vitto. That is why he turned to carving stone. He was brilliant. And then he found your mother and become even more brilliant. They became . . .”

  Vitto watched Juba, who looked away, having already said too much—much more than he’d ever leaked before. Perhaps they were all dealing with their mortality. The two of them went silent for a minute, both watching Robert watch his statue. And then Robert surprised them both by placing his hands on the woman’s hip—Magdalena’s hip—and shoving. The half-finished sculpture rocked, then began to topple.

  “What’s he doing?” Vitto moved toward his father, but this time Juba grabbed his arm.

  “Let him be.”

  The marble statue he’d been working on for months now lay in chunks around the pedestal. Robert cursed and swore and kicked one of the smaller marble pieces across the travertine. He dropped the chisel and hammer and walked slump-shouldered toward the first-floor room where he’d been staying since their arrival—the same one he and Magdalena had used their entire lives. The one with the door the color of goldenrod.

  “I’m surprised it took him this long.”

  “To do what?”

  “To give up on the notion that she could be recreated,” said Juba. “I told him not to try. But he had to see for himself.”

  Seventeen

  “You’re not well, Vitto.”

  What burned him more than the words was the fact that Valerie couldn’t look at him as she said them, sitting on the side of the bed, hands folded on her lap, facing the far wall as William slept.

  She was right. He was not well. But hearing it from her lips was not the medicine he needed, the medicine he’d hoped for after nearly drowning Landry Tuffant in the fountain. After again instilling fear in his family.

  “I’ll go,” he’d said, hoping she’d respond with, “No, don’t. Please.” But she hadn’t. She’d just nodded silently, and so he’d gone. Not from the hotel—as confused as he was about things, he couldn’t bring himself to leave the hotel, and he truly believed Valerie knew that. Otherwise, perhaps she would have stopped him.

  He decided to sleep in Mr. Carney’s old room on the second floor, one of the two that stored the wooden ships that he and the other kids used to sail on the creek, and brought with him a case of wine. His assault on the reporter had unsettled the majority of the guests and their visiting children, so he thought it best to be holed up for a while. He spent the next few hours cleaning dust from Carney’s ships, picking up each one in turn and eyeing it closely as he had when he was little.

  William should be floating these ships.

  But William was back to hiding, scared of his father yet again. That in itself was a dagger to Vitto’s heart, a sign that the father-son bond between him and Robert—the bond that wasn’t—had been successfully passed down. The best way to become a Gandy man, apparently, was to not be one. To shirk and avoid and distance yourself until the lack of communication felt comfortable. Which was why, at twenty-five years of age, he had just learned that his father was color-blind.

  He spent the rest of that night in that ship-filled room, drinking wine and contemplating the strange injustice of his very existence. That while Vitto had been blessed with eyes that could see and imagine the brightest, most robust of colors, his father saw nothing but black and whites and grays. And while Vitto had been blessed with a memory like a vault, like pictures frozen in his head, his mother often had trouble remembering her own friends’ names.

  What was denied to each parent had been given to him as gifts.

  More like a curse, he thought early the next morning, stepping out onto the gallery overlooking the piazza. Below him the elderly guests were out and about, eating breakfast on wrought-iron tables, playing cards, mingling, reading newspapers and magazines. A silver-haired woman finished off her milk and then slid her teeth back in her mouth. Unlike the guests in the hotel’s heyday, the current ones were usually up before the sun rose. And none of them seemed agitated or upset. Maybe they’d forgotten about what had happened with the reporter at the fountain. Or maybe they were just better than he was at moving on.

  Robert was down there too. Somehow he’d gotten another block of marble onto the piazza and cleaned up the remnants from the broken statue. Juba had probably helped. They’d once had a pulley-and-crane system for loading the marble from the seemingly endless supply kept in storage—perhaps that still worked. But now that the block was here, nothing was happening with it. Instead of carving the marble, Robert just stared at it, hammer and chisel in hand, as if the Alzheimer’s had returned.<
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  Valerie was down there, too, bustling from table to table, taking breakfast plates and stacking them and carrying them back to the kitchen. Every so often she’d glance up. He could tell she had spotted him, and he didn’t know what to do about that. He loved her more than ever, but for some reason he felt like he shouldn’t. She deserved better than him.

  Perhaps he would have been better off with a lobotomy.

  “Vitto.” He turned toward the voice. Cowboy Cane stood a few paces away, watching with a toothpick in his mouth. “Got a minute, partner?”

  “What is it?”

  Cowboy Cane had become the leader of the guests. Just last week he’d begun a weekly dance on Wednesday evenings. Now he tipped his hat, looking oddly nervous, which was strange considering how sure of himself Cane usually was. “I was talking with the other folks. Like what we heard with the hotel’s olden days, last call has become a special time for us all. We’re old, and we’ve got plenty of stories to tell.” He chuckled. “And I’ve even taken a liking to the wine of late.”

  To all the widows too, Vitto thought.

  Cane paused, long enough for Vitto to prompt him onward. “And?”

  “You noticed how early we get up? Well, that midnight time for last call is tough for many of us.”

  “Last call has always been at midnight.”

  “I understand that, and believe you me, us old folks don’t like change. But if the point of last call is to get everyone engaged in the telling of stories, attendance would be much improved by an earlier time. Not to mention the quality of the stories.”

  “Did you ask Robert about this?”

  “Sure did.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Said to go ask your wife.”

  “And what did she say?”

  The old man grinned. “Said to go ask you. Said it’d be good for you.”

  Of course she did. Vitto mulled on it, figured Cane wasn’t going anywhere until he got an answer he liked. “What time do you propose?”