by Pat Conroy
“It certainly is, Martha.”
“I didn’t think you’d actually show.”
“If I hadn’t, you’d have ambushed Leah one day when she was out walking in the piazza.”
“You’re right. That’s exactly what I would’ve done. What a beautiful young girl she’s turned into.”
“I don’t want to be your friend, Martha,” I said. “What in the fuck are you doing here, and why are you trying to reenter my life? I’ve made it abundantly clear that I didn’t want to see you or any of your family again.”
“Are you ever going to come back to the South? Are you ever going to show Leah where she really comes from?”
“That’s none of your business,” I answered.
“I was once your sister-in-law. I admit I never knew you well, but I liked you, Jack. Almost all of us did.”
“It seems to me that the last time I saw you, Martha, you were testifying in a court of law that I was unfit to raise Leah.”
Martha lowered her eyes and studied the menu for a brief moment. I motioned for Freddie to bring us a bottle of wine, and he arrived a moment later and opened a chilled bottle of Gavi dei Gavi.
“That was a terrible mistake,” she said emotionally. “My parents were distraught when Shyla killed herself. Surely you can understand that and have some compassion for them. Leah was their only link with Shyla and the past.”
“I’d have had more compassion for them if they’d shown the slightest bit toward me.”
“I think my whole family had a breakdown after Shyla’s death, Jack,” Martha said. “Everybody blamed you for what happened. Myself included. We thought if you’d been a good enough husband, my sister would never have gone off the bridge. No one blames you for anything now … except, of course, my father.”
“Give me some good news,” I said. “Tell me that son of a bitch is dead.”
“I love my father very much and I resent you talking about him that way.”
“Tough shit.”
“My father’s a very unhappy man,” Martha said, leaning across the table toward me. “But he’s got good reasons for his unhappiness and you know that as well as anyone.”
“Just for the record. I hate your dutiful daughter routine and you don’t have to act like a public relations firm for your parents. Now let’s order.”
When Freddie came over, he studied Martha’s face.
“Sorella di Shyla?” Freddie asked me.
“Martha, meet Freddie. He had a crush on your sister.”
“Ah, Martha. Your sister was such a beauty. Such sunshine. You look so much like her,” Freddie said, bowing deeply.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Freddie. You’re very famous in South Carolina.”
“We have some nice fat mussels, Jack. Fresh anchovies, very nice. Calamari fritti. What would Martha like? Maybe pasta all’amatriciana?”
“I’d love to start with the pasta, Freddie,” Martha said.
“Anything for the sister of Shyla. Welcome to the trattoria. Come back a thousand times. Mussels for you, Signor Jack. Trust Freddie.”
Freddie moved back toward the kitchen checking every table as he passed, and I smiled at his proficiency. Freddie was like a staff sergeant in the army; others enjoy greater status, but without him the whole operation would come to a grinding halt.
I turned and looked at Martha, seeing those soft luminous features she shared with her sister. She had the same doe-eyed self-conscious beauty that in Shyla was edgy and explosive. In Martha, it held its breath, tiptoed into view, took one by surprise whenever she released that tightly coiled spring that controlled the nerve centers of her own quiet uncertainty. Even makeup could not hide the trapped, distracted girl masquerading with pearls and a black dress as a woman of the world.
“My father still blames you for Shyla’s death,” Martha said. “It’s only fair that you know that.”
“You know, Martha,” I said wearily, “I always thought I’d make a great son-in-law. Fishing trips. Card games. That kind of shit. And I get stuck with that dreary, juiceless, raggedy-assed father of yours. I could never figure him out. But you know all this. You grew up in that hothouse of pain.”
“Why do you hate me for loving my father?” she asked.
“Because of your pathetic lack of honesty. The awful and dangerous pretense of loyalty. He’s been poison for you just like he was poison for Shyla and your mother. The women in his life cluster around him, protect him, find virtue in his bitterness. You don’t love him. You pity him. The way I do. Yet I’ve rarely met a grander shit on earth.”
“Why do you hate him so much?”
“I pity the dreadful son of a bitch.”
“He doesn’t need your pity.”
“Then he’s welcome to my hatred.”
Freddie arrived with Martha’s pasta and my mussels and his arrival was both propitious and welcome. Her dish was sharp, spicy, and even had the forbidden pleasure of containing the flesh of hogs. Though a committed Jew, Martha found no reason to follow the dietary laws handed down in Leviticus. For most of her adult life she had fought border skirmishes with her parents over the pig and the oyster. Judaism was precious to her, but she could not pretend to be observant of its many dietary laws.
“May I try one of your mussels?” she asked.
“Pure trayf,” I said, passing her one.
“But delicious,” she said as she ate it.
“What’re you doing here, Martha?” I asked. “You haven’t quite answered that very basic question.”
“I want to understand why my sister leapt to her death. I want someone to explain to me why her life had become so desperate when she seemed to have so much going for her. Nothing about it makes sense. My parents won’t talk about it.”
“I can understand that. I haven’t told Leah that her mother committed suicide. I just never could quite get my mouth right to tell her about the bridge. It’s been hard enough to tell her that her mama’s dead.”
“Does she know that I’m alive? That she has an aunt and two grandparents who love her?”
“A vague idea,” I said. “But I’m encouraging pure amnesia. Please don’t look pious. Last time I saw the people you just mentioned was in a South Carolina court of law. If memory serves, each one of you testified I was incompetent to raise my only child. I’ve raised a beautiful kid. A magical one. I did it without the help of any of you.”
“You think it’s right that you punish us the rest of our lives by refusing to let us see Leah?” she asked.
“Yes, I think it’s right. I think it’s justice. Do you remember the generous amount of visitation I’d have been allowed had your parents won their lawsuit?”
“They asked the court that you not be allowed any visitation,” Martha said, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply. “They know how wrong they were. They would like another chance.”
At that moment Freddie arrived at the table with two grilled sea bream. He prepared the fish for presentation at the table side, removing the head of both fish with a flick of the knife. Then he skinned the bream and lifted the backbone from each one of them as though lifting a violin out of its case. Preparing Martha’s first, he placed the white translucent fillet across her plate and moistened it with green olive oil and half a lemon. He performed the same ablutions for mine.
“You will cry,” Freddie said, “it is so good.”
“Did I order fish?” Martha asked when Freddie left the table.
“You looked like a fish kind of person. He has great intuition and he always likes to surprise me.”
As she ate, Martha frequently stared past me and when she talked, she was agitated and kept brushing an imaginary lock of hair from her eyes. Hers was a guileless face, registering every emotion, and I could read it like a page of newsprint. Something was not right with Martha that had nothing to do with the complex emotions aroused by our awkward reunion. The lines in her forehead warned me of trouble on my flanks. Since leaving the South, I had learned th
e intricacies and tricks of a life on the run and I knew well how to read the secret language of ambush.
“Excuse me for a second,” I said, rising and walking to the men’s room. I called home and talked to Maria and made her check on Leah. Maria returned to report that Leah was sleeping like an angel, and I breathed easier.
When I came out of the men’s room, Freddie motioned for me to come into the kitchen. Among the jostling disciplined movement of cooks and waiters, Freddie whispered: “There’s a man eating outside who asks many questions about you, Jack. He asks Emilio if you are bad to Leah. Emilio no like.”
“Tell Emilio thanks, Freddie,” I said as I moved out of the kitchen and passed down the entranceway of the trattoria, to where Signor Fortunato himself greeted his guests.
Looking outside to the enclosed area where tables were set up, I spotted Pericle Starraci looking into the interior of the restaurant. The private investigator was gesturing to someone on the inside.
When I returned to the table, Martha had almost finished her fish course.
“This is the best fish I’ve ever eaten anywhere. By far,” she said.
“That was Shyla’s favorite. That’s why Freddie brought it to you.”
“Why don’t you see anyone from your past, Jack?” she asked.
“Because I’m not fond of my past,” I said. “It fills me with horror to think about it, ergo, I don’t.”
Martha leaned forward. “I see. You’ve got a love-hate relationship with your family, your friends, even the South.”
“No,” I answered. “I’m unusual in that respect. I have a hate-hate relationship with the South.”
“It’s dangerous to second-guess where you were born,” Martha said, and again I caught her looking over my shoulder to the tables outside.
“When do you leave Rome, Martha?”
“After I see Leah and after you tell me how my parents can get back in your good graces.”
“Talked to a rental agent?” I asked. “You could be here for years.”
“I’ve got every right to see Leah. You can’t stop me from that.”
“Yes, I can. And instead of threatening me or challenging me, I’d take on a conciliatory note. I’ve arranged my life so I can leave this city tonight and take up residence in another country with relative ease. I live like a man on the run because I fear encounters such as these. I don’t need you in my life and my daughter certainly doesn’t need you.”
“She’s my niece,” Martha said.
“She’s a lot of people’s niece—I’m perfectly consistent—none of my brothers get to see her, either. I’m raising Leah so she can be screwed up by only one single relative. That’s me. My family’s fucked up and your family’s fucked up. But I carefully devised a life so that this condition of perpetual damage will not pass to my kid.”
“My parents both cry when they talk about Leah. They cry when they realize it’s been so many years since they’ve seen her.”
“Good,” I said, smiling. “My heart leaps like a doe in the forest when I think of your parents weeping. They can cry all they want.”
“They say not seeing Leah’s worse than what happened to them during the war.”
“Please,” I said, putting my face into my hands, tiring of the effort to be pleasant to my wife’s only sister. “In your family, if you talk about mowing the lawn or sewing a button on a shirt or rotating the wheels on a car, you always end up in Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. Talk about going out for a burger and a milkshake or catching a movie on TV and the next thing you know, bingo, we’re on a cattle car moving through Eastern Europe.”
“I’m really sorry, Jack, if my parents overemphasized the Holocaust in your presence,” Martha shot back angrily. “My parents suffered terribly. They suffer to this very day.”
“They didn’t suffer as much as your sister did,” I answered. “As much as my wife did.”
“How can you make such comparisons?”
“Because Shyla’s dead and your parents are still alive. The way I keep a scorecard, she wins the grand sweepstakes.”
“My father thinks Shyla would never have killed herself if she’d married a Jewish man.”
“And you still wonder why I don’t let my daughter visit your parents?”
“Why do you think Shyla killed herself, Jack?” Martha asked.
“I don’t know. She started having hallucinations, I know that, but she wouldn’t talk about them. She knew they’d go away eventually. They went away okay. When she went off the bridge.”
“Did she ever tell you about the hallucinations she had as a child?”
“No. She didn’t say a word about the ones she had while she was married. She kept her craziness private.”
“I know what those hallucinations were, Jack.”
I looked straight into her eyes. “I don’t know how to put this more gently. But so what?”
“My mother wants to see you, Jack,” Martha said. “That’s why I’m here. She thinks she knows why Shyla did it. She wants to tell you herself.”
“Ruth,” I said, tasting the word, “Ruth. I used to think she was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen.”
“She’s getting older.”
“I was in love with your mother when I was growing up.”
“But it was your mother who was the town legend.”
“One feels guilt about lusting after one’s own mother. I felt none lusting after yours.”
“My mother knows they were wrong to try to take Leah away from you. They did it out of grief and fury and fear. My mother knows and my father’ll never admit it, but he knows it too.”
“Come to dinner tomorrow night, Martha,” I said, abruptly. “Come and you can meet your niece.”
Martha pulled my head to her and kissed me on the cheek.
“Leave Pericle behind. You don’t need the son of a bitch any longer.”
Martha blushed as I turned toward the open patio and waved to the private detective cowering below an arrangement of flowers.
“I’ve got to do a little preliminary work with Leah about her family tree.”
“One more thing, Jack.”
“Quick, before I change my mind.”
“My mother said to tell you that she killed Shyla and she’s as guilty as if she’d pulled the trigger herself.”
“Why would she say that?” I asked, stunned.
“She wants to tell you herself, Jack. Face to face. Here or back in America.”
“Let me think about it,” I said. “I’m going to Venice tomorrow. You’re welcome to stay in the apartment and get to know Leah. Please don’t tell her about Shyla yet. I still have to work out when is the right time to tell her that her mother killed herself.”
When I arrived home Maria was already asleep and Leah had fallen asleep in my bed. Her face in repose made me fill up with such amazing tenderness that I wondered if all fathers drank in so hungrily the features of their children. I had memorized every line and contour of her profile; to me it was a secret text of nonpareil beauty. It was beyond my capacity to imagine how to form the words to tell this lovely child that her mother had jumped to her death because she had found life far too agonizing to endure.
The secret of her mother’s death lay between us and it was no accident that I had chosen the city of Rome as our place of exile. The pretty walkways over the Tiber were all low and it was a hard city to kill yourself in by jumping off a bridge.
Chapter Three
Since moving to Italy, I have written eight articles about the city of Venice for seven different magazines. Venice is a meal ticket for travel writers, and I love it because it is the only city I have ever come to that is more wonderful than my first preconception of it. It transforms me, uplifts me, as I move through the canals and search for those elusive verbal equivalents that will conjure the tremulous magic of the city to readers who will be invisible to me forever.
As I stepped aboard the taxi acquei, I inhaled the sea air, a punge
nt combination of winds from the Adriatic and catastrophic pollution that threatened the very existence of Venice. The varnished mahogany boat began to move along the Grand Canal, and I noted that fever and sewage were still hanging tough in the city. The gondolas we passed moved dreamlike above the water like black, misshapen swans from bouts of whimsy and nightmare. The sun broke out from behind a cloud bank, and I witnessed again the moment when Venice changed for me the nature of light. Light was beautiful everywhere, but only in Venice did it complete itself fully. In the city where the mirror was invented, each palace along the canal preened like snowflakes in their unholdable images of water.
I registered at the Gritti Palace Hotel, one of the finest hotels to grace this capricious, balustraded city. On the Gritti’s terrace, I took my position at the best place on the planet to consume a dry martini. Looking out at the river traffic, I lifted my glass and toasted all the heavenly hosts that dwelt beneath the columns of the Maria della Salute across the waterway. I had written a small hymn of praise to the Gritti that had appeared in Esquire magazine and the manager of the hotel had always treated me like visiting royalty whenever I came to the city. There is something of the whore in every travel writer and I worried about it everywhere except Venice. The Gritti Palace has that caressed, combed-over, fussed-about quality that is the mark of all great hotels. Its work is done in secret, and its staff, unseen but competent, lives to make you happy.
So, at the point where Byzantium and Europe join hands, I sat alone in the city of masks, holding my drink and waiting for the arrival of two childhood friends. For the second time in less than forty-eight hours I would come face to face with my past. But Venice was enough of an imaginary retreat from the world to make me ready for almost anything. As I sat studying the shapes of flamboyant palaces, the city looked as though a troupe of organ grinders and manic chess players had designed it for the praise of glassblowers. Its celebration of pure whimsy made it a playground and a conundrum, a place where decadence had both a field day and a day off. It always made me wish I was a flashier, less serious man.
“Buon giorno,” the concierge of the hotel said, handing me a note. “Come sta?”