“We took a vote, and most said nine o’clock.”
“Fine.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” Just go away.
Cowboy Cane tipped his hat, thanked him.
“But tell me,” Vitto said. “Did you really get hit by a train?”
He winked. “Far as you know.”
Vitto watched him walk away, and a minute later Cane was down on the piazza spreading the news about the new time for last call. Vitto was about to return to the room when John approached, smelling like bread dough and garlic.
“Hey, Gandy. Got a minute?” He didn’t wait for a response. “We’re pals, right?”
“Sure.”
“Well, you know how me and Beverly have been getting along real good? I was thinking about asking for her hand in marriage.”
“Sounds like the logical next step, John.”
“You think so, Gandy?”
“You spend every waking minute together, John.”
“Good.” He rubbed his hands together. “That’s good. That’s what Valerie said too.”
“You asked her first?”
John nodded. “She said to go get your opinion. Said it’d be good for you. How’d you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Ask Valerie.”
“I said, will you marry me? She said yes, that she’d always known we would.”
“That’s good, Gandy. That’s good information. You think Beverly will say the same thing?”
“I don’t know what Beverly will say, John. You’ve been lying to her since you met her.”
John looked flummoxed. He scratched his head, chewed on his lip. “That I have. So you think I should stop pretending to have those war nightmares at night?”
“I think you hooked her a long time ago, John. You can probably cut off the playacting.”
“Okay.” He rubbed his hands together. “But I like the attention, Gandy. She gets right up on the bed with me and falls asleep. I smile the rest of the night, even when she snores.”
Vitto shook his head, wished he’d sneaked outside the hotel before he’d become the morning’s sounding board. John said, “Did you get down on one knee or both?”
“One knee, John. Who would get down on both? Who would do that?”
“I don’t know, Gandy. I’ve never done this before.” John stepped away, nodding, seemingly satisfied with how their talk had gone. “Just want to get it right, you know?”
“I think someone’s calling you from the kitchen, John.”
“Oh, okay.” John moved down the gallery, then turned suddenly. “Thanks, Gandy.”
“Sure.”
“But when are you gonna cut out the playacting?”
John clearly meant it as a joke, but when Vitto didn’t smile, John’s melted away, and he returned to the kitchen.
The February sun felt good, at least, so Vitto walked discreetly down the spiral staircase and out the hotel’s entrance while everyone else was busy eating and talking. Last month he’d cleaned out the Leopoldini—the month before that, the vineyard. For the last week he’d been working on the hotel walls, filling in the exterior cracks where mortar had crumbled loose and weeds and vines had taken over.
After an hour in the sun, he admitted to himself that things weren’t so bad; he felt peaceful almost. The sky was azure and cloudless, the stones glistening like a ripened peach, the field grasses golden and green. As it had been since he was little, every color was like a dollop or smear of paint, sharp and vivid and wet. The whole earth seemed like a freshly painted canvas yet to dry, and now he knew his father couldn’t see it.
Vitto pulled a vine from the cracks beneath the stone wall and dropped it into the basket at his feet. He moved down the wall toward another cluster of vines and began to pull those. He looked over his shoulder at the sound of laughter.
Down the hill to his right, an elderly couple walked hand in hand in between the vineyard rows. He didn’t know them; too many had arrived in the past months for him to meet them all. Many were widows and widowers, but a number had arrived as couples, some married for decades, fifty to sixty years even. But only rarely, Vitto had noticed, did both husband and wife need to drink the medicine; usually it was one or the other. Maybe that was nature’s way of keeping at least one wheel on the track. But Vitto had also noticed that it was usually the spouse unafflicted by the memory disease who showed the most joy at the rebirth. After dark times, sad times—how awful to have your spouse of fifty years not even know who you are—it was like they’d been given again the gift of their loved one, and to Hades with the consequences.
The couple stopped as the monks began chanting down over the hillside. Vitto listened, too, like he’d done as a boy, imitating his mother’s actions. She had never failed to stop whatever she was doing when the monks prayed. After a moment he left the basket of pulled vines on the sidewalk and followed the sound of their rhythmic voices.
He climbed the olive grove steps and watched from atop the hillside. To his right he could see the cliffs from which his mother had leapt to her death. Below lay the lake, the scattered buildings of the monastery, and the stone monastery church. Beyond that was the Pacific Ocean and the endless horizon.
He sat for a while on the hilltop and listened but then felt called to go closer. He lowered himself over the lip of the terrace, which dropped steeply—what Magdalena had called dangerously—toward the valley below. What made it dangerous was the rocks and the craggy, uneven ground. But instead of using the paved walkway bordering the creek—as Magdalena had done daily when she’d walk to the church for confession—he and Valerie and Dixon and Deats used to navigate straight down the hillside, using the rocks and grassy shelves, made slippery by ocean mist, as steps.
Vitto made his way down the rocky slope and moved across the knee-high field of grass toward the lake below and the stone buildings of the monastery. The church was just inside the gates, to the left. He passed through the open doorway, touched fingers in the font, crossed himself, and genuflected before entering the back pew. It had been years since he’d entered any kind of church—since his mother’s death, in fact. She’d been the one to bring him faithfully every Sunday since the day he was born, either here or to Father Embry’s little church in town. But the familiar motions came back to him without his having to think.
The air was cool inside the darkened space. Sunlight cast prisms of color through the stained glass. Stone columns soared toward a vaulted ceiling and the fresco Vitto had painted as a teenager. The chanting brought him back, the candles and incense enveloped him like a cocoon, and he sat with his head lowered, chin to his chest, until the midday prayer was over and the monks silently shuffled out. He didn’t open his eyes until he felt bony fingers on his shoulder.
“Come for confession, Vitto?” Father Embry said.
He looked up in surprise. “No, Father.” He twisted in the pew to look up at the old priest. “But this isn’t your church. Why are you here?”
“I like the chanting.” The old monk patted Vitto’s shoulder and sat in the pew across the central aisle. “And I, too, go to confession here.”
At ninety, Father Embry’s face was more wrinkled than Vitto remembered, his posture a little more stooped, but his brown, comforting eyes had not changed. His mind and soul seemed untouched by the age that marked the rest of him.
“My mother came to you for confession,” said Vitto, fishing. “What would she talk about?”
“Her confessions, Vitto, were exactly that. Her confessions.”
Vitto nodded; he’d figured as much. I know she jumped. She didn’t slip. He remembered the priest on the day of his mother’s burial, more nervous and emotional than Vitto had ever seen him. Father Embry had choked up halfway through his eulogy, specifically after he’d said that “Magdalena is not inside that coffin”—he’d paused to gather himself—“but has been reunited with the gods.” And then he’d cleared his throat to correct himself. “With God.” Now he
was looking up at the frescoed ceiling as if to avoid Vitto’s eyes.
“Have you picked up a brush since your return, Vitto?”
“I have not.”
“And why is that?”
“Has Valerie been to see you?”
“She has.” The priest held up his hands up as if guilty. “I admit it. And she asked me to come talk to you. To get you painting again. She believes that is what will fill the void.”
“And what do you think?”
“I don’t disagree. But I told her I wouldn’t come to you. I’d wait until you came to me.”
“That’s not why I came down here, though. I didn’t even know you’d be here.”
“Then why did you come down here, Vitto?”
Vitto folded and unfolded his hands, wrangling with his thoughts until he nearly stood and left. “There’s a reporter snooping,” he finally said.
“There seems to be more than one reporter snooping at the hotel of late.”
“But this one dug deeper,” said Vitto. “Wanted to know more than just the present.” He looked across the aisle and waited for Father Embry to look his way, which he eventually did. “He said Mother is in hell for jumping off that cliff. Was what she did a sin? I know she jumped.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Was it a sin? Killing herself like that?”
“Was it a sin nearly drowning that reporter for saying something you should have had the strength to ignore?”
“I suppose. Want me to say a few Hail Marys?”
“It’s never a bad idea.”
“But is she in hell? Is that how it works?”
Father Embry’s jaw quivered, but then he pursed his lips and steadied himself in the pew. “This reporter . . . seems pretty sure of things he knows nothing about.”
“At the funeral,” said Vitto, treading carefully, “you said she was called home. What did you mean?”
“She was dying, Vitto, on the inside and out. Her time on earth had come to an end.”
Vitto stared at him, wanting to prod more but knowing from experience that Father Embry often spoke in riddles. If he were to tug one way, Father Embry would pull the other way. No matter how he peeled that apple, he’d never get to the core. So he just asked, “What do you think of all this?”
“All what, Vitto?”
“That fountain. The water acting like medicine, curing people’s Alzheimer’s or whatever it is. You believe it?”
“What’s there to believe, Vitto, when it’s right before our eyes?”
“But how do you explain it?”
“I don’t. How do you explain the weather? The changing of the seasons?”
“I’d imagine it has something to do with the world turning.”
Father Embry laughed, mouth closed as if to muffle it.
“What’s funny?”
“A story your mother once told,” he said, “decades ago.” He waved his hand dismissively, and after Vitto insisted on hearing it, he told it. “Your mother won last call many more times than she lost. She had so many stories that most guessed as lies but she’d insist were true, and we’d let it go. She’d carry her journals with her and read from them. This particular one—you know of Hades and Zeus and Poseidon?”
“The three brothers,” said Vitto. “The Olympians. After they won the great war with the Titans, they drew lots to see who would rule what.”
Father Embry nodded. “Zeus got the sky, Poseidon the sea.”
“And Hades the underworld.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Well, one night your mother told us a story about Hades, how he became captivated by the beauty of a woman named Persephone. So he kidnapped her. Carried her right down to the underworld to be his wife, and as your mother told it she went kicking and screaming. Once there, she begged and begged to be returned to the world above. And meanwhile, Persephone’s mother, Demeter—”
“The goddess of grain and growing things.”
“Yes. Demeter grew distraught after her daughter disappeared. She roamed the earth in search of her. And that was a disaster, because nothing would grow while she was searching. There was no wheat, no barley, no fruit. So rather than let the world starve, Zeus ordered his brother Hades to return Persephone. And he agreed, which meant that Demeter would allow the earth to bloom again. But there was a problem. It turned out that while in the underworld, Persephone had already eaten the seeds of a pomegranate.”
“So?”
“Vitto, anyone who tasted the food in the land of the dead could not return to the land of the living.”
“You speak of this as if you believe it.”
“I speak of it as an intriguing story that I’d eventually like to finish.”
“I’m sorry. Go on.”
“Well, as a compromise, Zeus allowed Persephone to spend a portion of the year with her mother and the other portion of the year in the underworld with Hades. During the months when she returns to her mother, the world grows green and warm and plentiful. That’s spring and summer, you see?” Vitto nodded because he got it, but he didn’t really see the point. “And in the months when Persephone returns to Hades, the world darkens and cools.” He clapped his hands together. “Fall and winter. Her comings and goings explain the changing of the seasons, and the queen of the dead also becomes the goddess of spring.”
“So you just explained the changing of the seasons.”
“Did I? Or did I just tell you a good story—a Greek myth your mother believed to her dying day.”
“My mother was a strict Catholic.”
“And so am I.”
“Then how did she believe in all these Greek myths? She told me one daily, if not more often.”
“Their ideas were not so different from our own, Vitto. Take the afterlife, for instance. The ancients believed that the spirits of the dead were separated into the just and unjust. The good were taken to Elysium, the bad to the torments of Tartarus. So there was reward and punishment, the idea of immortality of the soul. Plato advanced things even further. His rewards and punishments for life lived on earth are quite similar to the Christian notions of judgment after death. And I’d say the church’s idea of purgatory, at least as it was imagined in the Middle Ages, conveniently resembles the idea of the underworld’s Acheron River. A place of sorrow and pain where souls are purified after death.”
“Sounds familiar. So maybe I died in the war after all.”
“And this is now your purgatory?”
“It sure isn’t my Elysium.”
Father Embry smiled.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He looked down, eyed Vitto again. “You could make this into your Elysium if you wanted to.”
“You been talking to John? This some kind of barrel of sunshine or barrel of stones talk?”
“I don’t know what this is, Vitto.” Father Embry shook his head and laughed as he stood, using the pew back as a crutch. He grunted straight. “And to answer your earlier question, whether that fountain water is really helping to restore memory—yes, I believe it. And do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because I believe in miracles, Vitto. I’ve seen them. And I believe that not everything can be explained the way your mother explained the changes of the seasons. I do not believe your mother is in hell, or Hades, or Tartarus, or whatever you want to call it. I believe she had her reasons for what she did. And yes, I believe you should start painting again.” He held up an arthritic finger, which in the colorful stained-glass light looked more like a hooked talon. “In fact, I think it’s imperative that you start painting again. I’m tired of seeing you walk the hotel grounds in a posture of doom and gloom.” He pointed to the ceiling fresco. “You painted this. Do you remember?”
“Of course I do.” It had taken him eleven months.
“Create, Vitto. Create.”
“I copied, Father Embry. I didn’t create; I copied. Everything I’ve ever painted was a reproduction of a work by some
old master. Some legend of the Renaissance. I had the ability to see something and duplicate it perfectly. And what I did might have brought joy to others, but not to me.”
“So why did you do it?”
“You know why I did it.”
“To gain the favor of your father.”
“Yes, to gain his favor. His approval. To earn a ‘job well done’ from the great Renaissance man. But I never could, and now I know why. Juba told me. Father Embry, why did no one ever tell me my father could not see color—couldn’t truly see my paintings. You knew, didn’t you?”
“He had his reasons.”
Knowing he’d get no further with that line of questioning, Vitto tried a different tack. “Why are you watching the fountain so closely? You’re watching the guests drink that water as if you’re waiting for something. What is it? Is the water doing something to these people besides restoring their memory?”
“I don’t know, Vitto.”
“But why do you suspect it might?” And then it hit him. “Did my mother drink from that fountain? Was she drinking from that fountain before she died?”
Eighteen
“You’re slowly killing yourself.”
Vitto stormed across the piazza toward where his father leaned back in a wooden chair, eyeing the slab of untouched marble. “Don’t deny it.”
Robert leaned forward, suddenly too old to stand quickly. “Hush, boy.”
“Mamma drank from that fountain.”
“Lower your voice.” Robert surveyed the piazza, then grabbed Vitto by the elbow and walked him into the shadows nearby. When a cluster of guests emerged from the same spot, he redirected Vitto outside the hotel, where more guests played bocce and croquet. He redirected him again, this time along the wall toward the ocean. The thwack of a tennis ball echoed in the distance. Ocean breeze whipped Robert’s hair into a frenzy. And even though he appeared even weaker than he had yesterday, his hands still proved strong as he braced them on Vitto’s shoulders and looked deep into his eyes.
“Who told you this? Juba? Father Embry?”
“I guessed it. Father Embry was unable to deny it.” Vitto stepped out from under his father’s grip. “It was Juba who told me you’ve never been able to see color. Why did you never tell me?”
Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel Page 17