“Stazione,” I said. “Hotel Mona Lisa.”
My fear was completely gone by now and I was trying to concentrate on my anger. I wanted to have a showdown with my aunt, but it was hard to hang on to my anger with this cheerful couple talking at me in Italian, asking questions I couldn’t really understand, though I did manage to convey the basic information: I’d come to Florence with my aunt, got on the wrong bus. I didn’t try to explain Severino or the gasket company in Sesto Fiorentino.
I walked back to the hotel from the station. I knew the way. It was the last time I’d be walking this way, but I didn’t make any special effort to memorize the route. I didn’t need to. It was already imprinted on my brain.
Severino was at the hotel. Surprise. Duh! I could see that the bed had been unmade and then loosely made up again, and suddenly everything became clear. No wonder my aunt never got back from Sesto till six o’clock; no wonder she always needed to take a nap when she did get back.
The evaluation: What did you think was happening? What did other people think was happening? Were there any misunderstandings? Did you discuss your responses to what had happened?
What did I think was happening? What I was thinking was that it was about as awkward a moment as there could be. I was thinking that Severino had been humping my aunt—not dry humping her either—and I was thinking that my aunt was afraid. Afraid of me, afraid that she’d broken something that couldn’t be mended. I could see pleading in her eyes, and I realize now that my response at that moment would determine not only our relationship in the future, but also the kind of person I was going to become. It was like having a good angel on one shoulder and an evil angel on the other. The evil angel was telling me to wrap a wet leather strap around my aunt’s head and wait for it to dry and tighten up and crush her skull. The good angel was telling me that I’d been a fool all along, from the moment I first saw Severino in the lobby of the Hotel Mona Lisa. The good angel was telling me to keep my mouth shut.
The resolution: Did you resolve the complication? What did you decide to do? If you didn’t resolve the complication, how did you handle your feelings? How did you change to deal with the new status quo? How did other people change?
No. We didn’t resolve the complication. What did we decide to do? Nothing. We just finished the bottle of wine that was on the table, and I gave them an edited version of my adventure, and we talked about the things we were going to do in September when Severino came to Carthage with the retooling crew. But to tell you the truth, I wasn’t interested.
Actually, we did do one thing. Before he left Severino got out a copy of TuttoCittà, which was in a drawer with the Florence phone book. TuttoCittà contains detailed maps of every part of the city, and it also has a map that shows all the bus routes. Severino opened it up on the desk and traced the route of the number twenty-three bus all the way from the stop by the post office to the station, on out past the wholesale produce market into zone industriali, and then right off the edge of the map.
“You went out into the unknown,” Severino said, putting TuttoCittà back in the drawer. “Beyond the boundaries of the known world. And you made it back safe and sound.”
Concluding with a point: In your conclusion you should describe what you have learned and what your reader should have learned from your experience. Not the “moral” of the story, like the morals in Aesop’s fables, but something that brings closure, some insight or understanding that goes beyond the obvious.
I don’t know about closure or going beyond the obvious, and I’m not sure what I learned, but this is what happened. Severino never answered my letter, but he wrote to my aunt. He would not be coming with the Italian crew in September to install the new machinery and do the retooling. He was needed at the plant in Sesto Fiorentino. He asked my aunt to pass his greetings on to me.
My aunt showed me the letter. We were sitting on the large deck at the back of her second-story apartment downtown. It was August, and I was leaving for Ann Arbor at the end of the month. The deck was full of flowers—window boxes with trailing geraniums, large Italian pots with verbena and petunias; a tomato plant in one of the Italian pots was covered with yellow blossoms and tiny red grape tomatoes. We were drinking a glass of white wine, which I was not allowed to do at home, and I was glad, at that moment, that I’d held my tongue back at Hotel Mona Lisa, glad that I hadn’t lashed out at my aunt. I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her how much I appreciated all the things she’d done for me over the years. I wanted to tell her what a good aunt she was.
It was six o’clock when I finished my glass of wine, which was warm by now. “I’ve got to go home,” I said.
“Thanks for coming,” she said.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” I said. “Maybe we could bike out to the forest preserve.”
“I’d like that,” she said.
And that’s how it ended.
We’d both gone off the map, and I wasn’t sure either one of us would ever make it all the way back.
THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHTS
Julian Dijksterhuis stood by a half-opened door in the vaulted corridor, his shoulder blades pressing against the clean white wall like the runners of a sled. He wasn’t in anyone’s way, but he didn’t belong there, and the nurses kept suggesting that he would be more comfortable in the waiting room, or sitting with his wife.
“Thanks,” he said, flicking ashes off a cigarette, exhaling smoke through his nostrils, “but I think I’ll wait here.”
His wife, Hannah, was talking rapidly in a low voice in the room behind him. The sudden death of their six-year-old daughter, Dinah, had toppled her over the edge of sanity, and Julian hadn’t been there to catch her. Perhaps he’d even given her a little push, though God knows he hadn’t meant to. But she wouldn’t stop talking.
Her chatter had filled their three-bedroom apartment on Chestnut Street, spilled out into the hallway, down the stairwells and elevator shafts. “Keep an eye on her,” old Dr. Janacek had said, who lived just below them on the thirty-second floor. And she hadn’t slept. If he’d get her to bed by midnight, she’d be up again at twelve fifteen with a steaming cup of coffee, a cigarette smoking in the ashtray on the old rolltop desk in their bedroom, where she turned pages, made notes on index cards, and dozed a little from time to time.
Julian would pretend to sleep, until he couldn’t stand it any longer: “You’ve got to get some sleep. You’ve got to get some sleep.”
“I can’t sleep when you’re nagging at me all the time.”
“Lie down in bed, for Christ’s sake. And don’t drink so much coffee. How the hell could anyone sleep after twenty cups of coffee?”
“I need it.”
“You need rest—can’t you see that?”
“Just leave me alone. I don’t see how in the hell you can sleep so soundly.”
“Lay off, will you?”
That’s the way it had been between them for the last three weeks, and now he was waiting for the doctor to bring the forms that he would have to fill out before she could be admitted, involuntarily, to one of the psychiatric wards.
“An acute psychotic break,” the doctor had said on the phone, and Julian wondered how he had missed it, hadn’t read, so to speak, the large block capitals on the wall: ACUTE PSYCHOTIC BREAK. But over the years he had not only become accustomed to her unorthodox ways. He even took a kind of pride in them, as the English pride themselves on tolerating mild eccentricities. Has it ever occurred to you, Dijksterhuis, that your wife isn’t like other people? Yes, it had occurred to him. Regularly, in fact. It occurred to him when he climbed into bed with her at night, and when he climbed back out again in the morning. She was terrific in the sack, Aphrodite herself, fair ankled, soft armed, sweetly smiling, sweet smelling, quick glancing, laughter loving. Didn’t restrain herself there, or anywhere else, for that matter. That was the trouble. Lack of restraint—shapeless enthusiasms thrusting upward like the columns of books on the bedroom floor—pop psychology, hol
istic health, the Catholic Pentecostal movement, all interspersed with her classics: Teubners, Budés, red-and-green Loebs, OCTs. A temple under construction. Or perhaps in ruins.
Julian wrote out checks to Blackwell’s and Heffers and Kroch’s, and to the Cudahy Library at Loyola University, where she had matriculated in classics. Her fines were astronomical.
“Finish the degree, for Christ’s sake,” he advised her, “and why fart around with Plato and Augustine when you could be reading Homer or Ovid and Catullus?”
But she was a seeker; she sought to understand. “I want Truth, not Entertainment,” she said. “If I wanted Entertainment I’d lie in bed all day and fiddle with myself. That’s what you do with your detective stories.”
And she had a large heart. She brought home the lost souls who, drawn by invisible threads, sat next to her on the Howard Street L or the Michigan Avenue bus. Julian would feed them an omelet or a sandwich—and sometimes he gave them money—before sending them off into the night.
“Why do you pick up these creeps?”
“They’re human beings, Julie. They need help, just like you and me.”
She was specially fond of priests. Julian didn’t take much notice at first, not till the appearance of Father Axelrod, the Hyde Park opera buff, who wanted Julian to accompany him while he sang arias from Verdi and Paisiello. “This is a magnificent piano,” he liked to say, seating himself at the old Blüthner grand (with its eighty-five keys) that had once belonged to Julian’s Aunt Hattie, “a splendid instrument.”
There was an Episcopalian too who couldn’t sing a note. Frog-toned Father Jack from St. Chrysostom’s on Dearborn. “Smilin’ Jack,” as Julian called him, was a disciple of Wilhelm Reich, and for a time Hannah embraced a number of bizarre Reichian doctrines. Julian didn’t have the patience to listen to her explanations—Christ as genital man, putting it to Mary Magdalene, and so on. She embraced Father Jack as well, in an orgone energy accumulator, a coffinlike contraption made of alternating layers of steel wool and rock or glass-wool encased in panels of Celotex soft board. The metal sides of the accumulator were designed to reflect and concentrate the orgone energy radiated by its occupant, causing it to repenetrate the body through the pores and through respiration.
“Cancer, head colds, psychoses—it cures everything,” Father Jack claimed, “maybe even death, eventually.”
Hannah got a big kick out of it.
“Why do you listen to this stuff?” Julian asked her. “Do you think I want to hear this crap? I ought to go to the bishop; I could have that frog-voiced shyster defrocked, that croaking bastard.”
But the bishop had already received complaints from other sources. Father Jack decamped to Toledo, Ohio; Hannah began taking instruction from a Jesuit, Father Frank Neumiller, whom she met in the library at Loyola.
“She’s absolutely safe with me,” the old priest told Julian. “You can put your mind at ease.”
The police had picked her up in Old Town and taken her to the Passavant Pavilion of Northwestern Memorial Hospital, between Huron and Superior, half a mile south of the Dijksterhuis apartment. “They had to put her in restraints,” the doctor told him on the phone. “We can’t do a thing until you get down here.”
“In restraints?”
“A straitjacket.”
A clutch of horror at Julian’s chest.
She’d been talking gibberish on the phone when he woke up in the morning, speaking in tongues to Father Neumiller. He had gone into the bathroom and closed the door so he wouldn’t have to listen to her while he shaved.
“Take it easy,” he said later, lifting the filmy skirt of her silk breakfast dress and stroking her panties before he left for the Solomon Pharmacy to pick up a Sunday Times. “Calm down. Don’t get yourself all worked up. Try to get some rest. We’ve got to hold ourselves together.”
“ ‘The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,’ ” she said, “ ‘and His will is our peace.’ ”
E la sua voluntade è nostra pace. She wanted it on Dinah’s tombstone, and after a prolonged argument, he had given in.
“It’s Italian,” he explained to Mr. Stoneking at the monument company, turning over samples of different colored marble. RICHLY REWARDING—a plaque on the Formica counter—IS THE SPIRITUAL HARVEST OF A LIFE WELL LIVED. A MONUMENT SHOULD REVERENTLY AND BEAUTIFULLY EXPRESS THIS TRUTH.
“Don’t worry for a thing, Mister, I got two Eye-talians working for me in the shop right now. Master craftsmen. They’ll get it right if anybody can.”
“I want the accent right. Look—there’s one over the second e but not over the first.”
“I understand, Mister. That’s why we got these forms for you to print on, just the way you want it. In this business it don’t pay to make mistakes.”
Hannah had been raised a Free Methodist; her father, the minister of a hyperactive congregation in St. Joe, Michigan, whipped her for square dancing with her classmates in the fifth grade. And she never quite got over it. Julian taught her to drink and smoke and swear, and he dressed her in European lingerie, which they ordered from special catalogs—a merry widow, silk stockings, lacy tap pants, and wispy bikinis in raspberry, blush, chocolate. Her brother, a motorcycle evangelist, wouldn’t set his righteous foot in the Dijksterhuis apartment. But in spite of everything she remained, in Father Neumiller’s words, a deeply religious person. “Her faith will sustain her,” the priest said to Julian, “but what about you?”
But her faith hadn’t sustained her, and now she was in trouble, and Julian was in trouble too. He didn’t want her committed, locked up in the loony bin like his Aunt Hattie. Twenty-five years in a nuthouse on the outskirts of Kalamazoo, eating like a horse. Hannah was a good eater too, but she stayed slim on plain lettuce and broiled calves’ liver that Julian bought for her at a Greek meat market on Jackson and Halsted. Twenty-five years in a nuthouse with no exercise, and she’d be as big as Aunt Hat, whose upper arms hung down over her elbows, and he’d be sixty. Too late. He had to do something now, tonight, had to explain Dinah’s death to her in a language she could understand. But how could he explain it to himself? He couldn’t do it in English. Greek or Latin either.
In the small waiting room at the end of the corridor he could see Father Neumiller trying to interest Sara, Dinah’s older sister, in a magazine. He was turning pages, pointing with his square index finger. But Sara was boy-crazy, interested in one thing only. She spent her allowance on teen magazines and record albums that made Julian’s head reel. She chewed gum to mask the odor of tobacco and powdered the hickeys on her neck. Backseat work. The son of her ninth-grade science teacher. “A Boys Town dropout,” Julian said to Hannah.
He spoke to the boy’s father at a school open house. “Not to worry, Mr. Dijksterhuis. They’re a couple of good kids. It’s the chemistry of adolescence.”
But Julian worried. She had become silent and unresponsive when he read to her at night or tried to tell her a story. He was piqued. He fancied himself a regular Demodocus, a teller of tales, an old-style raconteur. “Once upon a time,” his stories began, “there were two little girls named Seremonda and Duva, who lived in a village halfway between the east and the west.” And what adventures they had, traveling south to the Mediterranean—Olympus, Ilium, Ithaka, Phaeacia, Uruk, Rome—and north to the halls of Hrothgar, to Heorot, to Camelot and Asgard. Thus did he keep his children from their play and his wife from her own quest for Truth, which she sought to exantlate from the deepest wells. But now there was only Sara, and Julian wished that she had died instead of Dinah. This thought was like a tumor pressing against the back of his brain, distorting his vision.
Sara was staring sullenly at Father Neumiller’s shiny bald head, just as she stared at Julian when he tried to talk to her about her schoolwork or sex or the importance of scales and arpeggios. Her piano lessons were nonnegotiable, and despite a show of reluctance, she played well on Aunt Hattie’s piano: Chopin, Schumann, Cyril Scott. And duets with Julian. They made their w
ay through the Brahms waltzes like two people walking freely on firm ground. “It’s marvelous, really,” Dr. Janacek said to Julian in the elevator one day, “but don’t hurry the opening measures so—poco andante, poco andante.”
Julian had given her lessons at home for the first four years before enrolling her at the Chicago Music Conservatory, where he himself coached would-be professionals on a lethargic Steinway B and lectured on the history of music in the late middle ages.
Father Neumiller closed the magazine and slapped it down on the table. Julian was sorry now that he had phoned the old priest, who lived in the Jesuit residence at Loyola. But he had panicked when he’d learned that Hannah had cracked up. And who else could he have called on a Sunday evening? He ground out a cigarette on the green tile floor and hitched up his beltless trousers. He’d lost weight since Dinah’s death, couldn’t eat though he was as empty inside as an open grave, a ravenous darkness.
“God has touched you,” Father Neumiller had said to him the night before the funeral. “He’s touched us all; but when we won’t respond, sometimes he has to knock down our house of cards. It’s the only way he can get through to us.”
“Now, Frank, what in the hell is that supposed to mean?” Julian had been drunk. “This is God’s way of touching me? Is that what you’re getting at? We’re in the hand of God, and God crumples up his fist? That’s rich. God so loved little Dinah that he couldn’t wait to crush her against his stony bosom, to break her little arms and legs? Christ almighty, you’re out of your mind.”
“You’ve got to open up your heart. God is knocking at the door of your heart, and you’ve got to open up and let him in.”
“I like you, Father, but you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground. Now finish your Postum and clear out. I’ll call a cab.”
The Truth About Death Page 23