by Pat Conroy
“Please shut up, Mike,” Ledare said. “Listen to yourself. Bragging about being in People magazine for God’s sake. It’s too pathetic.”
“I’ll say what I want to say. Look at Jack. So self-righteous and smug. For what, Jack? For what goddamn reason? You burn the check up like you’re Francis of fucking Assisi. But here’s what I’ve learned, pal. I make that check large enough, I keep adding the figures, and eventually I’ll hit the price when you go to your knees and give me a blow job.”
“You’re gonna be writing a long time before you hit that number, Mike,” I replied, smiling in an attempt to defuse the tension at the table. But Mike seemed hell-bent to continue the frontal assault.
“You sneer at me. You sneer at Capers Middleton, whose only sin is trying to make South Carolina a better place to live. We may not live up to your high fucking standards, Jack, but none of our wives ever went up on the bridge. All of our girls are still walking around with their Gucci bags and credit cards. None of them had to be fished out of the river. Sorry to be so blunt, ol’ pal. But those are the facts.”
I closed my eyes and did not open them until I felt under control. I wanted to lunge across the table at Mike and beat his face in until my fist ran with his blood. Then I thought about Leah and Shyla and did not respond to Mike’s attack.
“Go ahead, Jack,” Ledare said calmly. “Kill him. He deserves it.”
“I’m sorry,” Mike said suddenly. “Jesus, I’m sorry, Jack. That wasn’t me that said that. Open your eyes. You can see remorse written all over me. R-E-M-O-R-S-E. Remorse. As pure as it comes. I swear to you, Jack. That wasn’t me talking. No one loved Shyla more than I did. You gotta give me that.”
I opened my eyes and said, “I give you that. You loved Shyla and that’s the only reason I’m not drowning your sorry ass in the Grand Canal.”
“Let me drown his ass,” said Ledare. “Boys get to have all the fun.”
“Great line,” Mike said. “Write it down and I’ll get it typed up in the morning. That’ll go in the screenplay.”
The evening ended. As we walked back to the Gritti Palace, Mike tried to undo the damage and was perfectly charming and even made me laugh a little.
I said nothing and contented myself with listening to Mike. I knew him well enough to understand that jokes and laughter were part of his elaborate ritual of apology. But beneath my laughter, my mind was spinning. I had to return to Rome to warn Jordan Elliott that Mike Hess was hot on his trail.
Chapter Five
I drove Martha to the Rome airport, and once there she checked and rechecked her tickets to South Carolina as soldiers from the Italian Army walked by her carrying machine guns.
“I’ll never get used to all these machine guns in airports,” she said.
“It cuts down on shoplifting,” I said. “Let me buy you a cappuccino here. They won’t let me go to the gate with you.”
“Because of terrorism.”
“I guess. The Red Brigade’s about petered out. But the PLO’s still frisky. Libya’s making noise. The IRA’s around. Even a liberation movement in Corsica.”
“Why do you live here with all this going on?”
“Wasn’t Atlanta the murder capital of the U.S. last year?”
“Yes, but the airport’s perfectly safe,” she said.
We bought cappuccinos and watched a group of brilliantly clad Saudis enter the building and pass a large contingent from Ghana swathed in their native finery. It seemed a citizen from every country would pass you by if you only stood in the Rome airport long enough, and this connection to the whole world never failed to thrill me. I could smell the love of travel here and feel that rush of adrenaline in travelers as they glanced up at departure boards and studied the small numbers on their neatly inscribed tickets. An airport was a place where I could actually see time move. People sifted through doors and gates like sand through an hourglass.
“I don’t have to tell you this, Jack. Leah’s a magnificent child. You’re doing a splendid job.”
“I’m just watching, Martha. She’s raising herself.”
“I wish you’d bring her back home.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, as softly as I could. “I’m sorry, Martha.”
“I can promise there’ll be no scenes.”
“How can you promise that? Not with your father.”
“Did you always hate him?” she asked gently. “Even when you were a child? Our houses backed up to each other.”
“No, I only got to hate him after I really got to know the guy. I think it started when he sat shiva when Shyla married me.”
“My mother begged him not to.”
“And so when he sat shiva for a second time after Shyla’s death my high regard for him only increased.”
“He’s a good Jew. He was right to sit shiva then.”
“And he was dead fucking wrong to do it after she married me,” I exploded.
“Again, he thought he was being a good Jew.”
“And a bad human being. Do you like your father, Martha? Shyla sure didn’t.”
Martha was thoughtful for a moment.
“I respect him, Jack. Pity him. For all he’s been through.”
“Whatever he went through, he’s sure as hell paid the world back in spades.”
“He says that your keeping him away from his granddaughter’s the cruelest thing he’s faced,” Martha said.
“Good. Jack McCall surges past World War II in a nose-to-nose race to see who can make George Fox suffer most.”
“He can’t help who he is or what makes him suffer,” Martha said.
“Neither can I, Martha. Now it’s time to get you through security.”
At the security gate, we embraced and held each other for a long moment.
“I appreciate your doing this, Martha. It was a grand gesture. You took a chance, and I appreciate it.”
“I hope it’s only the start. We’d like Leah to be part of our life, Jack. My mother wants to see you badly.”
“Tell her thanks. I’ll think about it.”
“You and Shyla, Jack,” Martha said wonderingly. “I never knew what made it work.”
“Neither did anyone else,” I said as Martha turned toward the opaque gazes of five heavily armed airport guards.
I returned to my apartment and spent the rest of the day working on the article about Venice and the Gritti Palace. I like writing about strange cities and cuisines because it keeps me at arm’s length from the subjects that are too close to me.
To capture the sense of place in each country I visit, I work hard at turning homesickness into a kind of scripture as I describe what the native-born cherish most about their own countries. Writing about Venice always presents a challenge. The city is a peacock tail unfurled in the Adriatic and the sheer infinity of its water-dazzled charms makes you long for a new secret language brimming with untried words that can only be used when describing Venice to strangers. Venice has always brought me face to face with the insufficiency of language when confronted by such timeless beauty. I’ve put in the hours trying to make the overvisited city mine and mine alone. I’ve tried to notice things that would surprise even Venetians.
When I finished, I typed out four recipes I had received from different Venetian chefs, then addressed the article to the editor of The Sophisticated Traveler at The New York Times. Having given the package to the portiere I walked across the Tiber to the shul Leah attended once a week.
Leah came out surrounded by other children, the boys all wearing delicate little yarmulkes, small as mittens. She ran toward me when she saw me and I picked her up and spun us both around in the street.
“Did Aunt Martha catch her plane?” Leah asked. “I just love her, Daddy. We had so much to talk about.”
“She worships you, sweetheart. But so does everyone else.”
“She asked me a question I couldn’t answer,” she said as we began to walk.
“What was it?”
“A
m I Jewish, Daddy?” Leah asked. “Martha asked me that and the rabbi asks it all the time. The rabbi doesn’t like it that I go to a Catholic school.”
“Suor Rosaria doesn’t like it that you go to shul. But according to Jewish law, you’re Jewish.”
“But you?” she asked. “According to you, what am I?”
“I don’t know, Leah,” I admitted as we walked through the noisy streets of Trastevere toward the river. “Religion’s strange to me. I grew up Catholic, yet the Church hurt me. It damaged me and made me afraid of the world. But it also filled me with wonder. Your mother was a Jew and proud of it. She’d want you raised as a Jew, so that’s why I send you to shul.”
“What do you want me to be?”
“What I want is not important. You can choose for yourself. What I’d like is for you to study both and reject both.”
“Do they worship different gods?” she asked.
“No, honey. I think it’s the same cat. Look, I know I’m going to pay for this in the future. You’ll grow up without religious roots and when you’re eighteen I’ll find you dressed in saffron Hare Krishna robes with your head shaved, chanting Hindi, and playing a tambourine in the Atlanta airport.”
“I just want to know if I’m a Jew or a Catholic.”
“You pick, darling.” And I squeezed her hand.
“Martha says that I’m a Jew.”
“If that’s what you want to be, then that’s what you are. I’d love for you to be Jewish. Nothing would irritate my family more.”
“What’s South Carolina like?” Leah asked, changing the subject.
“Horrible. Very ugly and depressing to look at. It smells bad all the time and the ground’s covered with rattlesnakes. It has laws making all children slaves from the time they’re born until they’re eighteen. The state doesn’t allow ice cream or candy to be sold inside the state line and requires all kids to eat five pounds of brussels sprouts a day.”
“I hate brussels sprouts.”
“That’s only the start. All kittens and puppy dogs are drowned as soon as they’re born. Stuff like that. You never want to go there. Trust me.”
“Aunt Martha said it was beautiful and that she wanted me to come visit her next summer. May I go?” We walked on without my responding.
“What kind of ice cream do you want?” I asked as we walked into the bar near the Piazza Trilussa. “Limone o fragola?”
“Fragola,” she said, “but that didn’t answer my question.”
“You want to eat five pounds of brussels sprouts a day and be sold into slavery?”
“You just say those things so I won’t ask about Mama.”
We ate our cones in silence. Mine was hazelnut, which reminds me of smoke and ice and darkness. Leah had chosen the strawberry ice cream today. Each day, she alternated between the taste of lemons and strawberries; it was one way she brought a sense of order and structure to her motherless life.
On the Ponte Sisto, we stopped and looked down at the Tiber, its flow quickening as it neared the rapids close to the Isola Tiberina. Two elderly fishermen were casting their lines into the river, but I knew I lacked the raw physical courage required to eat a fish caught in those impure waters. Even in the softest light, the Tiber looked rheumy and colicky.
“I know all about Mama,” Leah said, licking her cone.
“If Martha said one word …”
“She didn’t,” Leah jumped in quickly. “I’ve known for a long time now.”
“How’d you find out?” I said, careful not to look at her, keeping my eyes on the fishermen.
“I heard Maria talking to the portiere,” she said. “They didn’t know I was listening.”
“What did they say?”
“That Mama killed herself by jumping off a bridge,” Leah said, and as the words came out of my pretty, over-serious daughter, I could feel the ruthless slipping of my heart. She tried to say it matter-of-factly, but the words resonated with the awful authority of Shyla’s act. At that very moment, I knew that by treating her as an equal, I had robbed her of any chance of being a child. Worse, I had allowed Leah to mother me, stealing from a generous, eager child what my own mother had rarely been known to offer me. I had let Leah carry my implacable sorrow, and turned her childhood into a duty.
“Maria said my mother was burning in hell. That’s what happens to people who kill themselves.”
“No,” I said, kneeling beside her and gathering her to me. I tried to see if she was crying, but could see nothing through my own tears.
“Your mother was the sweetest, finest woman I’ve ever met, Leah. No God would ever hurt a woman that decent and good. No God would say a word to a woman who suffered so much. If a God like that exists, I spit on that God. Do you understand?”
“No,” she said.
“Your mother had periods of great sadness,” I whispered. “She would feel them coming and warn me that she was going away for a while. But she’d be back. There were doctors, hospitals. They gave her pills, did everything they could; and she’d always come back. Except the last time.”
“She must have been very sad, Daddy,” Leah said, crying openly now.
“She was.”
“Couldn’t you help her?”
“I tried to help her, Leah. You can be sure of that.”
“Was it me? Was she unhappy when I was born?” Leah asked.
I knelt and held her close again, letting her cry long and hard, and waited for her to slow down before I spoke.
“There never was a baby loved like your mother loved you. Her eyes filled up with love whenever she looked at you. She couldn’t keep her hands off you, wanted to breast-feed you forever. Shyla loved every single thing about you.”
“Then why, Daddy? Why?”
“I don’t know, darling. But I’ll try to tell you everything I understand. I promise if you’ll remove the strawberry ice cream cone from the back of my neck.”
We both laughed and dried each other’s tears with the napkins that had come with the cones. I knelt down on one knee and let Leah wipe the ice cream from my shirt and neck. Two diminutive nuns approached us on the bridge, and when I made eye contact with one of them, she looked to the ground, shy as a whelk.
“Do you think it hurt?” Leah asked. “When she hit the water?”
“I don’t think she was feeling much. She’d taken a bunch of pills before driving to the bridge.”
“The bridge, Daddy,” she said. “Was it higher than this?”
“Much higher.”
“Do you think she was thinking of the night at the beach? When the house fell into the sea? When she fell in love with you?”
“No, darling. She had just come to a time in her life when she couldn’t go on.”
“It’s too sad. It’s just too sad,” Leah said.
“That’s why I couldn’t tell you. That’s why I never wanted this day to come. Why didn’t you ask me all this when you found out?”
“I knew you’d cry, Daddy. I didn’t want to make you unhappy.”
“It’s my job to be unhappy,” I said, stroking her dark hair. “You don’t have to worry about me. Tell me everything you’re thinking.”
“That’s not what you said. You said our job was to worry about each other.”
I picked my precious child up in my arms, squeezed her tightly, then hoisted her onto my broad shoulders.
“Now you know, kid. You’ll be learning to live with your mama’s death for the rest of your life. But me and you are a team and we’re gonna have a hell of a good time. Got it?”
“Got it,” Leah said, still crying.
“Did you say any of this to Aunt Martha?”
“No, I thought you’d get mad at her. I want to visit her. I want to meet the rest of my family, Daddy,” she said, with all the equanimity of a stubbornly precocious child.
Chapter Six
Before dawn the next morning, Leah crawled into my bed and snuggled up to me, her form curving against my back, deft and suppl
e as a kitten. She stroked my hair with her hand until we both fell asleep again. No words needed to be said and I marveled at the very strength of this child.
When we finally awoke, I realized how late it was and gently shook Leah.
“You’ve got to get ready. Maria’s taking you to visit her family in the country today.”
“Why don’t you come with us?” she said as she jumped out of bed after giving me a big hug.
“I’ll come later,” I promised. “I’ve got some business in Rome to take care of first.”
“Maria’s already here,” Leah said. “Smell the coffee.”
After I put them on a bus to Maria’s village, I walked down the Via dei Giubbonari still feeling bruised and shaken by the reality of what Leah now knew.
I walked through the Jewish Ghetto, past the theater of Marcellus, where a homeless man was living beneath a black arch among a nation of cats. The man was schizophrenic and harmless and I had seen old women in the neighborhood feeding leftover pasta from the same bowls to both the man and the cats.
I cut over to the Via di San Teodoro, then across the Circus Maximus, and strolled the length of the rose garden at the beginning of the Aventine hill. The garden offered a panoramic view of both the Circus Maximus and the Palatine hill with its earth-colored broken palaces stretching along the ridge of the hill like a ruined alphabet.
I turned and surveyed the part of the city I’d just walked through, picking a spot among the roses where I could see if anyone had followed me. At times I felt foolish doing this, but the sudden appearance of Pericle Starraci in the piazza and Mike’s plan for the film seemed to confirm the rightness of my caution.
I left the rose garden and walked past the orangerie, where mothers entertained their small children and tourists took pictures of themselves with the Vatican captured in miniature far up the Tiber. When I passed Santa Sabina, I ducked into the courtyard and pretended to study the fragmentary mosaic over the nave of the church while looking again for a merciless stranger who might discover the whereabouts of Jordan Elliott because of my own lack of prudence.