The Italian Lover

by Robert Hellenga

  “Woody,” Margot said, “that’s not funny.”

  But Miranda was laughing.

  “Miranda thinks it’s funny,” Woody said.

  “No, I don’t,” Miranda said, wiping her eyes with a napkin. “It’s not funny at all, that’s what’s so funny.”

  They called a cab from the apartment. Woody banged Miranda’s big suitcase down the stairs. It was like sending a daughter off to college, Margot thought. Who knew what adventures lay in store for her? Woody’d been through it before. Three daughters. She thought of her father waving to her at O’Hare when she left for Italy. She’d never lived at home again. Her father had sold the house in Chicago and moved to Texas to raise avocados. Her sisters had moved to California and Florida. And then her father had sold the avocado grove and gone to India. He’d stopped to see her on the way. On his last day in Florence he went to see Bruno Bruni, his wife’s lover, and then in the afternoon he and Margot walked from Fiesole to Settignano, but he never told Margot what he and Bruni had said to each other. He’d been cremated before she and her sisters arrived in Assam. In a Hindu ceremony. His ashes had been scattered in the Brahmaputra, a river so wide Margot hadn’t been able to see the other shore. But she remembered his eyes searching for her in the airport, finally focusing on her just as she went through the last door.

  Protestant Cemetery

  Beryl Gardiner walked from the comfortable apartment she and Michael had rented on Via Pietrapiana to the American Church on Via Bernardo Rucellai. She walked along the river because, although it was a longer route, it was simpler than trying to find her way through the city center. She could have taken a taxi, but she needed the exercise, wanted to get out. She wore her sensible walking shoes till she got to a little roundabout at the end of Via Rucellai and then changed into the navy blue pumps she’d bought because they were an exact match for her new pin-striped coat dress and because she needed cheering up. As an art history major she’d taken three years of Italian at Smith, and this was her third extended stay in Italy, but she found life in Italian very stressful. It was one thing to buy shoes and dresses on Via Tornabuoni, where everyone spoke English; it was quite another to schedule a doctor’s appointment for Michael at the Policlinico and to shop in the pizzicheria in Piazza San Pier Maggiore and at the Mercato Sant’Ambrogio and at the little ortomercato in Via degli Albizi. They could have lived in a hotel, but the idea of spending three months in a hotel had been too depressing.

  She was lonely too. There were chatty letters from their daughter in Philadelphia, with pictures of the two grandchildren, and telephone calls from their son in Princeton. There were dinners with Esther and with the Italian assistant director, but she had no friends here, no gossips. The shooting script had been locked down for a week, but Michael still spent most of his time at the production office, and he’d skipped the doctor’s appointment that Beryl had managed to schedule and then reschedule for him, so she knew that he wouldn’t get his leuprolide injection unless she escorted him personally to the Policlinico.

  So the sight of the church was refreshing, reassuring: nineteenth century, Victorian, like the Episcopal churches you find in English villages or in wealthy suburbs in the United States, like the church Beryl had grown up with in Upstate New York, her father’s church—an oasis, a comfortable respite, smelling of old incense. The kneelers were like the new kneelers in St. Francis, but older, and softer.

  It was the third Sunday after Epiphany, a down time in the Christian year—Christmas a distant memory, Easter not yet on the horizon. Beryl didn’t pay much attention to the lessons, which were read by members of the congregation, but the gospel was one of her favorites—the wedding at Cana. The old words washed over her. Water into wine. A lot of wine. Six water pots, each one holding two or three firkins. Filled to the brim. Beryl looked around. How many of her fellow worshippers knew what a firkin was? It’s half a kilderkin. Eleven gallons. Beryl knew these things because her father had been an Episcopal priest—he would have been made bishop if he hadn’t had a heart attack—and this was the sort of thing they’d talked about at the dinner table when she was a child. She’d done the calculations in her head then, and she redid them now: A firkin was 11 gallons. So somewhere between 12 water pots × 11 = 132 and 18 water pots × 11 = 198 gallons of wine. It must have been quite a wedding reception. They’d already finished off the wine provided for the party. Now they had another four or five hundred bottles!

  Beryl smiled inwardly. She loved miracles. Her faith came easily to her, in part because she was not too particular about what she believed. What she aimed at was not a creed but a general affirmation that ultimate reality—whatever is out there—is consistent with her inner reality: full of purpose and intention and love. She stuck with the Episcopal Church because she wanted to tie this general affirmation to something specific, give it an institutional home, locate it in the cycle of the church year that had always given shape to her life, and to life in general—Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and then back to Advent. You always knew what to do. You weren’t simply at the mercy of your emotions. It was like getting dressed up for a party, or a funeral. Maybe you didn’t feel like going. But you put on the appropriate clothes and you went, and if it was a party you had a good time, and if it was a funeral you grieved.

  What was the alternative? Existentialism? She’d seen through the existentialists from the beginning, in her French class at Smith. What to tell Sartre’s poor young man who didn’t know whether to join the resistance or look after his mother? As far as Beryl was concerned, the young man’s dilemma just demonstrated that there were values out there. If you just made them up as you went along, there wouldn’t be any dilemmas. Everybody knew that, whatever they claimed. Almost everybody. There were very few exceptions—a few madmen, Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment, or Meursault in L’Étranger. Those were the only ones she could think of.

  The congregation was sparse, but not embarrassingly sparse. Beryl could see the pillars of the church scattered among the nave, like the pillars that held up the roof. A handful of men and women whose expensive tailored clothes distinguished them from the tourists. She recognized them, and she knew, without a word being spoken, that they had already recognized her.

  In his sermon the priest—who turned out to be an interim priest—said the usual things about Cana: it was Christ’s first public miracle; it confirmed marriage as a sacrament; and so on. Beryl didn’t expect much from sermons. She’d heard too many of them. But marriage was very much on her mind. Her own marriage. What Michael wanted, it seemed to Beryl, was to make one last film and then die, get it over with. He was embarrassed by his condition. She could understand that. He wasn’t incontinent, but his body was leaking. He wasn’t impotent; he could still get it up, but he couldn’t keep it up. And once he started the leuprolide, he wouldn’t be able to get it up at all. What she couldn’t understand was that after all these years he was too embarrassed to trust her. In sickness and in health—that’s what she cared about. But for the first time Beryl was starting to think that things might not work out. This was a new feeling for her. In her experience things had always worked out, one way or another, always arrived at a happy ending. Her mother had gone away for a while, like Margot Harrington’s mother, but then she’d come back.

  The sermon came to an end, and the priest plunged into the Mass. Beryl was not inclined to bewail her manifold sins and wickedness, nor did she feel unworthy to gather up the crumbs under the table, but she joined in the holy mysteries wholeheartedly, the way she did everything else: “We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies.”

  At the coffee hour, in the rectory behind the church, Beryl was greeted warmly and got a good look at herself as others saw her: a handsome woman who had money and good taste, and who was also a good person, just the sort of person you’d like to have on your committee, and by the time the coffee h
our was over she’d been invited to serve on the search committee for a new priest. “Well,” she said to the senior warden, who’d been sounding her out, “I suppose it makes a kind of sense: my father was active in the national church, and I have a lot of contacts in Los Angeles and New York.” And then she said, “This is where Margot Harrington’s mother met her Italian lover, isn’t it?”

  The senior warden, who was also the headmaster of the American Academy of Florence, laughed.

  “It just occurred to me,” Beryl said. “My husband’s directing the film.” She looked around. “I don’t see anyone here today who fits the bill.”

  The senior warden laughed again. “Miss Harrington’s a lovely woman,” he said, “but ever since she wrote that book, we’ve had no end of American women looking for that man!”

  “Bruno Bruni, that was his name. ‘A man who preyed on American women.’”

  “Yes. He was quite a character.”

  “He’s dead now?”

  “Oh, yes. Many years ago. He was seventy-five years old and still causing trouble.”

  On her way home Beryl thought she could see things more clearly. She’d buy the three-volume Moncrieff-Kilmartin translation of Proust she’d seen in the window of the Paperback Exchange. Museums in the morning, search committee three afternoons a week, Remembrance of Things Past in the evenings. That would get her through twelve weeks and then she’d get Michael back to Sloan-Kettering in New York where he belonged.

  Michael was alone in the production office at the convent when he heard the bell—Beryl bringing him some lunch; Beryl, who’d never lost faith in him, who loved him more for being “middling” than if he’d been Scorsese or Coppola or Steven Spielberg; Beryl, who washed out his stained underpants because she knew he didn’t want her to take them to the lavanderia.

  Middling. His first film had been his best. That was the hard fact he had to live with. After seventeen feature films he was still introduced—when he was introduced—as the director of The Lady with the Pet Dog. He’d shot it with a few friends from his acting class at NYU and a dozen extras. They hadn’t had a shooting script, not really, but he’d had every scene clearly in his mind, and what had started as a demo of what the film was going to be about turned into a full-length feature.

  Maybe it had worked because he’d internalized the Chekhov story, had come to see it as an extension of his own life. His father and his father’s secretary had been killed in a car crash in the Poconos when he and his mother had thought his father was at a convention in Chicago. His mother never got over it, and Michael didn’t think he’d ever get over it either, till he read “The Lady with the Pet Dog” in a Russian Lit class, and suddenly everything had become clear and he had to rethink everything he’d always believed about his parents’ marriage. He’d been a nervous wreck on the first day of the shoot, but the woman who was his assistant on this picture, fresh out of Smith College— somebody else’s girlfriend at the time—put her arm around him and said, “You can do it. You can do it. Just get up and put one foot in front of the other and drag your ass around.” That was Beryl. And now he and Beryl were the age of the protagonists in the story, Gurov and Anna.

  He opened the small door cut out of a big door that opened into the piazza. Beryl was wearing the glow she always had after church. The neck of a wine bottle, the cork pulled halfway out, poked out of the plastic Standa bag she was carrying. “I thought we’d have a picnic,” she said, smiling. “You need to keep up your strength.”

  “How much prosciutto can a man eat?” he asked. He seemed to have more energy than ever, but he was never hungry.

  She touched the back of his hand. “A lot,” she said.

  Beryl spread the picnic out on one of the folding tables in the big refectory: prosciutto, salami, day-old pane toscano that she’d kept wrapped in damp paper towels so it wouldn’t get too hard. Olives, olive oil, salt, cheese, a tomato. Paper napkins. Mineral water, frizzante.

  Michael saw his wife close her eyes as she said a silent grace. She poured a little olive oil on a piece of the hard bread and sprinkled it with a little salt, then prosciutto, cheese, tomato.

  “So,” she said, “how’s the storyboarding going?”

  Michael was redrawing some of the storyboards he’d done back in New York. He worked quickly, and the sketches were beautiful, with a life of their own. He didn’t do every scene, but he always acted out every scene, so he wouldn’t have to ask the actors to do something he couldn’t do himself.

  “Where are you going to shoot the bedroom scenes?”

  “In the chapel.”

  Beryl laughed.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s been deconsecrated.”

  “It’s just the idea of it. I guess it tickles me.” She started to fix a piece of bread for him, pouring a little olive oil on it. “Too bad you couldn’t afford a flood. It would have been nice to link the movie to a real historical event.”

  “I don’t want to get into it,” he said. “I read the script, not the book. The book doesn’t exist for me.”

  “It’s just that . . .”

  “Beryl,” he said.

  “Okay, okay. But you know what I worry about, Michael?”

  “What?”

  “I worry that you’re not having fun. Why are you doing this if you don’t enjoy it?”

  Michael had to stop and think. “Because,” he said, “because I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Why don’t you come with me this afternoon to the Protestant Cemetery. I want to see Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s grave.”

  “A cemetery is the last place I want to visit.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What’s she doing here?”

  “She lived here. In Casa Guidi, by the Pitti Palace. She and Robert. We could go there instead. I’ll see if it’s open on Sundays.”

  “The Barretts of Wimpole Street. With Jennifer Jones and Sir John Gielgud.”

  “What a story. So romantic. I used to think that was our story.”

  “I’m sorry I’m such a disappointment in the romance department.”

  “Michael, you’ve never been a disappointment. Not ever. You know that. We’ve had a great life. Together. It’s all been good.”

  “And now it’s almost over.”

  “Death isn’t the worst thing.”

  “It is if you’re the one dying.”

  “The worst thing, Michael, the absolute worst, is not making the most of the time we have together. That’s what’s worse than dying. At least eat your prosciutto.”

  “I’m not hungry,” he said. “We’ll go to Venice. We’ll go at Easter. We’ve got to shut down anyway. Everyone’s got to be out of the hotels during Easter week. All the rooms were booked months in advance. The production crew’s going back to Rome.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Venice it is. It’s a date.”

  She leaned over and kissed the top of Michael’s head, and then she finished his bread and prosciutto and cheese and tomato.

  Beryl was so unused to being unhappy, or out of sorts, that she hardly knew what to do. When she got back to the apartment, which was only two minutes away from the production office in the convent, she turned on the television and sat in the big poltronaletto, an armchair that could be opened up to make a bed, a very comfortable bed. She couldn’t understand a word, but she could understand that Italian television is even stupider than American. She watched for a while anyway, and then, with the television still on, she looked through her guidebook till she found a page and a half on the Protestant Cemetery, which was listed as the “English Cemetery” in the index, though according to the book the cemetery had been built by the Swiss in 1827 and was still the property of the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church and administered through its “consistory.” When it was built it had met with a lot of opposition from local Catholics, who destroyed the first graves. The nearest Protestant Cemetery at the time had been in Leghorn, near Pisa.

  The most famous peopl
e buried there, after Elizabeth Barrett Browning, were Walter Savage Landor; Arthur Hugh Clough; Frances Trollope, mother of the novelist; and the famous American preacher Theodore Parker, whom she’d never heard of. She put the book on a coffee table and opened one of the big windows and looked down at the people walking up and down Via Pietrapiana. It wasn’t raining, but it was threatening. Good cemetery weather.

  She looked at her watch. Four o’clock. She must have dozed off. Michael was still at his office in the convent and she knew he wouldn’t be home till late. She had two chicken breasts in the refrigerator for supper. I don’t know what else to do, he’d said. And she’d thought he wasn’t afraid of death . . . Death isn’t such a bad thing, she thought, but neither is a little fear of death.

  She stopped by the Paperback Exchange on the way to the cemetery, but it was closed. She could see the translation of Proust in the window, all three volumes. She’d read “Combray” twice in English and once in French, but she’d never managed to make it through “Swann in Love,” maybe because she found Swann so exasperating. Swann needed professional help. He should have written to Ann Landers.

  She was thinking about the Brownings. At Smith she’d done a paper on Sonnets from the Portuguese, in the days before feminism. In those days EBB had been the heroine of a love story rather than a poet in her own right, and nowadays Beryl supposed you could find bad things to say about her marriage, but no one could maintain that she hadn’t thought she was happy with Robert. But how on earth had they managed to stay in love like that for so many years? Instead of reading Proust, she thought, maybe she’d get a biography of EBB and see for herself. Maybe she’d find a crack in their marriage, and maybe she wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. She had a project, a quest. She felt better already. And just at that moment the sun came out. When she looked down the street and up, she could see Fiesole.