Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel

by James Markert

  Hearing nothing, he turned the knob and let himself in to find Robert in bed, his frail frame like rocky indentations beneath the white sheets. His mouth was open, his closed eyes lost in shadowed sockets. Vitto hurried bedside, fearing the worst, but then noticed the gentle rise and fall of Robert’s chest and sighed in relief. Just sleeping. Thread yet to be cut. Every so often he’d flinch as if a dream or nightmare had clutched him, but otherwise, he was calm, peaceful almost. Under the care of Hypnos, the god of sleep, the twin to Thanatos—death. By the look of it, near the end of one’s thread, there was not much to differentiate the two.

  For thirty minutes Vitto sat bedside, watching his father and wondering if he’d ever found out about the threat to Magdalena, if he and Juba had had a hand in the death of the Cornolli brothers.

  His father had told him once about the boatman, the mythical ferryman called Charon, who carried the deceased souls of the underworld across the River Styx. Coins were placed over the mouth or the eyes of the dead to pay for the journey. A smile bubbled up at the thought of it, and then a full-out laugh when he imagined his mother holding a machine gun and talking the Cornolli brothers down.

  Robert slept on, mouth open, drooling slightly, so Vitto wiped his chin with the corner of the sheet and made his way to the door. He turned again toward the bed before leaving and noticed how it now swallowed him.

  And also how, after all these years alone, Robert still slept on the far left side of it, leaving the right side open for Magdalena.

  * * *

  “Vitto, have we not been over this before?” asked Father Embry as dusk cast prisms of color through the stained-glass windows of his church and onto the front pew, where they both now sat. “I can’t speak about the confessions of others.”

  “But Mamma visited you daily near the end. And I know she’d begun drinking the water.”

  Father Embry rubbed his hands together, didn’t deny it. “Her heart was heavy, Vittorio.”

  “Did she tell you she was going to jump?”

  “No.”

  “If we never found her body . . . how do we know she went over the cliff? How do we know she even went into the water?”

  “Some things we just know. Your father took to the ocean immediately, convinced that’s where she’d gone. He searched for days . . . I shouldn’t be telling you this. You should ask him.”

  “He’s asleep. And I want to know now.”

  “He and Juba searched the ocean for days and nights without returning to shore. We thought we’d lost them as well, but on the fourth morning they returned. Your father climbed out of that boat, his skin beaten by the sun, but otherwise glowing. His smile showed peace. Contentment. I asked if they’d found her, and he said yes, but I looked to their boat and saw nothing. He explained that they hadn’t found her body, but in the sunrise that morning, in the shimmer coming off the ripples, he’d both seen and felt her.”

  “How could he see the sunrise? He can’t see color.”

  “But he did on that morning, Vittorio. And that’s how he knew. She’d gone back home . . . somehow.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Did your parents not tell you where they were found as infants?”

  “No. They? Only that Mamma was abandoned.”

  Father Embry stiffened in the pew, crossed himself. “Perhaps I’ve overstepped my bounds.”

  “Perhaps you should step the rest of the way, then,” said Vitto. “I can see in your eyes that you want to. That you, too, have been burdened by all of this.”

  Father Embry cleared his throat. “Very well. Your mother was found by a woman on the banks of the Arno River in Florence. Swaddled right next to the water, a few feet from the Ponte Vecchio. The woman—we don’t know who she was—carried her to the Hospital of Innocents, the orphanage where she was raised.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Juba told me. I don’t know how he found it out.”

  “But you said ‘they’ were found?”

  He hesitated. “Your father was adopted as well—also abandoned and found next to water, a river in Alabama. The man who would adopt him heard his cries while hunting. The water was lapping at his feet when they spotted him. And as far as we could backtrack, he and Magdalena seemed to have been found on the same day. Both of them deposited right there by the water. There was a great storm the night before. The heavens rumbled, and lightning split the sky.” He glanced toward the altar, then looked back. He had more to tell. “Juba, he was an orphan as well. Found next to a river in the Sudan, in Africa.”

  “The same time?”

  “That’s a little harder to ascertain, but we think so. Juba traveled back to the village where he was born—he was actually named after that village. And the elders there spoke of a great storm that happened around the time that Juba was found—a storm so violent they said lightning split the heavens.”

  Vitto didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing while Father Embry kissed his cross and whispered a silent prayer. Then he asked, “Do you believe in miracles?”

  Father Embry grinned at Vitto. “Yes.”

  “Do you think that’s what could be happening here? With the water?”

  “I think it would be foolish to try and quantify exactly what is happening here, Vitto, and what has happened in the past. The question you asked me so often as a kid . . .”

  “Where do we go when we die? Do you finally have my answer?”

  Father Embry paused, smiled. “To heaven, of course.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  “Well, what if I said I didn’t know for sure?”

  “You don’t?”

  “What, am I supposed to know that with certainty because I wear these robes?”

  “I thought they put you closer to God than the rest of us.”

  “Vitto, at my age, the only thing I’m closer to is death, and I won’t know the answer to your question for sure until then. But don’t be so consumed with the cutting of the thread, Vitto. Focus on the thread itself.”

  “So you’re saying you have doubt about what you’ve always told me?”

  “No, Vitto, I have faith. And I believe that faith implies a bit of doubt.” He smiled again. “Otherwise instead of belief we’d call it fact. I think it’s the bit of doubt that makes it most interesting, don’t you think?” The priest leaned back in the pew and peered at Vitto over his spectacles. “Oh dear. You seem even more confused now. Perhaps I haven’t done my job very well.”

  “You believe in God, right?”

  “I do.”

  “My mother was raised Catholic, in Italy. After she moved here, she attended church regularly—daily, even, near the end. Dad rarely went to church. But they both spoke often about the ancients—the Greek and Roman gods. They told me stories about them and spoke as if they truly believed in them too.”

  Father Embry clenched his jaw like he was holding something in. Vitto said, “I guess I’ve never been sure what I should believe in. What is wrong and what is right. God or the gods.”

  “It’s the belief in something, Vitto, that keeps us going.” He gestured in the direction of the hotel. “Even if that something is just hope. Or a cause. A mission.”

  The sun dropped lower outside the church, moving the colorful prism of reflected light through the stained glass, shifting it from the altar to the steps leading up to it. Vitto stood and approached the colorful light slanting from the northern window. He put his hand through the floating dust motes, watched his wrist and fingers turn red and green and purple and gold. Then he turned toward the pew where Father Embry still sat. “I know my mother came to confession every day. But did my father ever come? Did Juba?”

  Father Embry watched him curiously. “Yes.”

  “How often?”

  “Just the once.”

  “When?”

  “I think you know, Vitto.” Again, the smile. “They’d do anything to protect your mother.” Father Embry nodded, offered noth
ing more.

  “Will they be forgiven? I hear Hades isn’t pretty for those who’ve committed a crime. Tartarus is a constant torture. And then, of course, there’s hell . . .”

  “Focus on the thread, Vittorio. The thread.”

  Vitto turned to go, his footfalls echoing off the arched ceiling. But Father Embry’s words carried behind him. “Your father has served his penance for whatever he may or may not have done, as you have served yours. Go on now. If you want to make it more official I can add ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers. You’re forgiven as well, Vitto. Is that not part of the reason you came down here?”

  He couldn’t deny it. Even now the memories flashed: the woman he’d accidentally shot during the war, the concentration camp survivor eating his chocolate bar, dunking Landry Tuffant’s head repeatedly into the fountain water, his hands around the neck of the only woman he’d ever loved . . .

  “Thank you.”

  * * *

  “You never told me you were an orphan.”

  Juba filled two glasses of wine and slid one across the bar top to Vitto. “Does that change your opinion of me?”

  “No.”

  “Then consider it unnecessary information.” Juba gulped half of his wine, when typically he barely sipped the red and white he poured nightly. “I assume you’ve been to see the good father.”

  “Did you see it too? When you and Dad went out in search of her body, did the sunrise my father saw convince you too?”

  “It did. It was a feeling similar to the calm we’d all felt when we sat together in the boat.”

  “Which boat?”

  “The one we left Italy in.”

  “When Father first saw the color orange? Mamma’s hair.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What brought you to California, though? To this land. These cliffs?”

  “It’s just where the waters eventually brought us, Vittorio. Not everything has a clear-cut answer.”

  “I don’t believe you. I know where you went in the years the hotel was closed. Why did you go there?”

  Juba sighed heavily, resigned. “Why? Perhaps the same reason you just visited the church. For answers?”

  “But why there?”

  Juba finished his wine, glanced at the wall clock. “Why did I go to Greece? To Athens? To the temples of Poseidon and Zeus? To Olympia? And to the village where I was born?”

  Vitto chuckled. Juba poured himself more wine. “What?”

  “I really didn’t know where you went—until now. It’s the first time I’ve ever been able to trick you, Juba.”

  “The first time I’ve ever allowed it, Vittorio. Glad that you’re amused. I knew you didn’t know because I never told anyone, even your father.”

  “How did you know to return?”

  “The same reason birds know when it’s time to fly south for the winter.”

  “You felt it getting colder?”

  Juba folded his powerful arms across his even more powerful chest. “You should have been a comedian, Vitto.”

  “Why did you go to those places?”

  Juba’s eyes burrowed into his. “If I tell you, will you promise to not ask more?”

  “If you insist.”

  “Every journey needs a road map.”

  “You always talk in riddles, Juba. What does that even mean?”

  “That sounded like a question.”

  “Because it was. Look, I understand why you went to Africa, but why to those temples of the gods? And what road map?”

  “Have you ever been to Athens, to the temple of Poseidon, and overlooked the sea on three sides?”

  “You know that I haven’t.”

  “Let’s just say it’s not too different from the view here.”

  “So you’re saying this hotel is a temple? The final piece on some map . . . to where?”

  Juba shrugged again. “To home?”

  Vitto laughed, finished his wine, and slid off the stool. “Infuriating as always, Juba.” He pointed to the wall behind the bar. “Now tell me about the clock. Why was it so important to my mother that she took it with her from the orphanage, to Pienza, and then across the ocean to the coastal town of Gandy, California?”

  Juba stared at him, incredulous, his jaws like a vault, then suddenly they softened. And even more suddenly, Vitto almost didn’t want to know. It was as if Juba—and not only him but also Father Embry and even Robert—all sensed the end of something was at hand, and that was why they were willing to talk about things they’d previously kept secret.

  “That clock hung on the wall of the Hospital of Innocents for more than a century,” said Juba. “I was told that there was a great clash of thunder and a bright stroke of lightning one evening at midnight, rendering the clock suddenly useless. The hands no longer moved, no matter what was tried. But they left it up anyway, for show, its hands stuck perpetually at midnight.”

  He chuckled. “It became a tradition for the nurses, whenever a new foundling was left, to refer to it jokingly as ‘another midnight baby.’”

  Vitto watched the clock tick behind the bar, as he’d seen it tick his entire life, although he couldn’t help but wonder if those hands were now ticking more slowly than normal, like an aging heart. “I could venture a guess, but when did it start working again?”

  “During the storm the night your mother was left in that wheel.”

  “The same night my father was found during a similar storm here in the States,” said Vitto. “And you in Africa. Storms don’t reach that far, Juba.”

  “Apparently this one did, and all those who witnessed it thought the heavens were about to open up and collapse onto the earth.”

  “And that clock has been ticking ever since?”

  “Yes.”

  Vitto opened his wallet and tossed a couple of bills atop the counter.

  “Your money is no good here, Vitto.”

  “For your travels then. But tell me one more thing. If the clock started about the time Mother was born, did you expect it to stop again upon her death?”

  “I did.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  “No. It didn’t.”

  Thirty-Five

  Vitto restlessly stared at the ceiling of their room for an hour before giving up on sleep. In the middle of the night, he found himself out on the piazza painting while everyone slept.

  The image of Melvin Tuffant leaning against a recently emptied barrel of whiskey stuck in his mind, so he painted that. He’d leave it on the easel for Landry to find in the morning—an olive branch in the form of a memory, a moment in time encased in oil and brushstrokes.

  He managed to fall asleep soon after finishing the piece and dreamed of wind and sound, the rhythmic chinking of chisel into stone carrying through the open window and hugging him like only the best of memory senses could. The hammering didn’t last long, but long enough, and in the morning, he was as surprised as the rest of the guests on the piazza to find Robert’s slab of marble covered by a large brown cloth, the same one he’d often use to catch the shavings and chunks and dust.

  The sounds last night hadn’t been a dream after all. As whispers would have it, Robert had emerged from his room before sunup and carved something into that stone—something he’d immediately covered with the brown cloth. And just as Vitto was about to pull the cloth away to reveal what had been done to the marble, Robert’s voice stopped him.

  “Not yet.” He was hunkered into a wheelchair, and John stood behind it.

  “Morning, Gandy.”

  Vitto nodded toward John and said to his dad, “Then when?”

  “When I’m gone.” Robert grinned, coughed into a hand of bones. “My final masterpiece.”

  “Could you get any more morbid? You speak as if this is your last day on earth.”

  “I’ve always wondered if my pieces would go up in value after I’m gone.”

  “Have you had your medicine this morning?”

  “I’ve had my water.” He bec
koned to Vitto—and Valerie and William, who had stepped up behind him. “Come.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “For a ride.”

  “Where?”

  “Down memory lane,” said Robert. “La passeggiata. Do you remember the Sunday evening strolls?” Vitto nodded, and Robert explained to John how, once a week, everyone in the hotel used to dress up and stroll leisurely around the grounds, socializing and drinking as the sun dipped under the horizon.

  John looked eager to move along; he pushed the wheelchair across the piazza’s travertine toward the arches of the front entrance. The rest of them walked behind as Robert regaled them with detailed descriptions of the hotel’s construction—where in Tuscany the stones had come from, the size and weight of each block, the time it had taken to build each wall and the piazza, and even the planning of each window and flower box. The four corner turrets had been the final touches to a lifelong dream, a vision, a love letter to Magdalena and the Italian Renaissance.

  A temple, Vitto thought, holding hands with both Valerie and William as they followed Robert’s wheelchair along the outskirts of the hotel and listened to more stories about everything they passed—picnics and Tuscany-themed festivals in the poppy field, poolside parties and evening tennis matches, strolls atop the cliffs, olive and grape harvests, the making of oils and wines and food.

  “Oh Vitto, the foods we ate.” Robert glanced over his shoulder. “Your food is just as good, John.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Gandy.”

  “But the parties, the courses—so many courses, eating this and that throughout the day. And the desserts . . .” He trailed off as if he’d lost his train of thought, which he did two more times before they stopped outside the entrance to the southern wing, where the olive mill loomed in front of the terraced grove of trees.

  They all watched Robert—several of the guests had joined them along the way, a few of whom had written everything he’d said into their daily journals—and he appeared ready to say more but didn’t. Instead, he stared out toward the ocean.

  “Take me down there.”

  Vitto told Robert it wasn’t a good idea in his condition to go down to the cliffs.