by Bill Barich
A snowstorm over the Rockies slowed down her flight to San Francisco. The trip took almost seven hours, but Anna flowed into the space of it with something like gratitude. She looked forward to being away from Manhattan for a while. Her life in the city had recently gone stale on her, and she was bored and restless, hungry for some change. Then, too, she was in the throes of breaking up with a man who was her first serious lover and companion since her divorce, and she felt glad to be spared the inevitable fallout from their affair, the accusations and wounded sentiments, the tears and rage—an entire catalog of sophisticated romantic despair that was, Anna believed, a hallmark of the century. Why was the air in America so filled with longing? She asked herself that sometimes. Longing seemed to blow about like pollen; it was as pervasive as the flu. She had suffered through an awful case of it herself once and had ended up paying a heavy price for her illusions.
She became anxious as the plane started its descent. She had not visited the farm since the cancer had been diagnosed and worried about her ability to cope. No longer could she indulge in a child’s view of her parents as immortals—she would be tested on this trip, and she felt extremely vulnerable. She had never lost anyone close to her, either, and dreaded the possibility that her mother might be dying. Her sense of family loyalty was unusually powerful and complex and stemmed from an ornately branching tangle of obligations that was another aspect of her ancestry. Claire Torelli had always been her staunchest ally in every struggle, offering a boundless and forgiving love; so Anna, who loved her just as fiercely in return, had arranged to remain in the valley for as long as she was needed, thanks to a sympathetic friend and business partner, Jane Weiss, who had volunteered to cover for her at the bookstore they owned and take care of her apartment. She and Jane were as intimate as sisters and often traded favors back and forth.
Her father was waiting for her at the airport gate, Victor Torelli in the flesh, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth and his face contorted and wary. Anna was shocked by how befuddled he seemed as he stood blinking forlornly in the bright lights of the terminal. He had aged terribly in the past few months and looked so fragile and agitated that she berated herself for not coming out to help him much sooner. His jittery fingers flew about and scratched at his cheek and his neck and burrowed blindly in his trousers, and she was so upset by the tic that she had to turn away.
The old man embraced her warmly, gathering her in, laying claim. She felt the raspy stubble on his cheek and smelled the tobacco worn into his clothes. “You look good, Anna,” he said, holding her at arm’s length to appraise her. She had dressed for the country in jeans and a leather jacket. “You got a new boyfriend or something?”
“Nope, no boyfriend at all.” It was uncanny, she thought. He had managed to insult her in under a minute.
On the freeway traveling north, he was better, more relaxed and in his element again behind the wheel. The truck was an extension of his personality, she realized, its seats torn and frayed and the dashboard littered with matchbooks, crumpled receipts, and scraps of paper scrawled with cryptic notes. Anna took the opportunity to study him in profile as he drove. His grand head gave him a curious nobility, something Roman and imperial, and his hair was snowy in what moonlight there was. She understood that her own reality had always been a secondary fact to him, less important than the fact that he had fathered her, and though she had often resented him for it in the past, she was overcome at the moment by a profound affection that soared beyond all such barriers and consumed her heart.
She watched him puff away on his Toscano while he served up an ornery recitation of rainfall statistics and perennial grudges, deliberately avoiding any talk about his wife because of the pain it would cause him.
“How’s Mother doing?” she asked him presently, unable to resist any longer.
His lips tightened. “Claire had a rough time today,” he told her, his expression somber. “That’s how it is. She goes up and down. But she’s happy you’re here, Anna.”
“Am I staying out at the farm?”
“Yes, ma’am. We just have the two bedrooms in town. I got the house fixed up real nice for you.”
“I’ll be lonely out there by myself.”
“The pruners will keep you company. There should be four or five boys working on the Chardonnay tomorrow.”
“Who’s on the crew this year?”
“Antonio Lopez is the only one I know. I don’t give a good goddam what goes on in that vineyard anymore. I’m tired of pissing money down a well.”
The refrain was legendary. “Haven’t I heard that before?” Anna asked him, teasing.
“Could be. Anybody as old as I am is bound to repeat himself every now and then.”
Yet he talked on. The field hands were not as trustworthy as they used to be, he said, and it was a hassle to hire even a few honest fellows. Half the men in vineyard work had no notion what the hell they were supposed to be doing, they got drunk and ran off on you, they were responsible for annoyance and misery, they left their dogs in your care, they were always begging for another chance, and when you came right down to it, he continued, the soil itself seemed to have lost some of its richness and vigor and felt thin and grainy if you sifted it through your fingers—and so on and so forth until it dawned on Anna that he might actually be asking her for some assistance in his devious, roundabout way.
“Maybe I should go over the account books while I’m here,” she proposed cautiously. “You might have missed a thing or two.”
She expected a thunderclap and a parting of the clouds, but all he said was, “Maybe so.”
It was past ten o’clock when they turned onto Carson Valley Road. The roar of freeway traffic dropped away, and Anna sat up, alert to the sudden stillness all around them. Lowering her window a crack, she heard frogs croaking in puddles and ditches and breathed in the pungent menthol scent of some eucalyptus trees planted along the road as a windbreak. She could remember riding by this very property in her school bus, cowed into obedience by the no-nonsense driver, a beefy woman who combed back her hair in a greasy ducktail and handed out jellybeans to well-behaved passengers every Friday. The next farm up belonged to Charlie Grimes, her father’s best friend. A famous prankster, Grimes had entertained the neighborhood kids with his dimestore magic tricks, teaching Anna the proper method for hiding a whoopee cushion and fooling her with a plastic King Tut that kept jumping out of his little magnetic coffin.
“What’s Charlie Grimes been up to?” she asked.
The old man chuckled. “He got it into his head that he’s an artist. He painted a mural on his barn to attract the tourists to his winery.”
“Did it work?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. He stole the whole goddam setup from Walt Disney.”
Within minutes, they were headed down the familiar dirt road to the home place and soon pulled into the circular drive. The only light in all the pitch-black night was a lone bulb that cast a hazy halo on the porch of the house. Anna got out of the truck and shivered in the cool, unruffled air. Her father hobbled up the stairs with her suitcases and opened the front door onto an interior so slovenly and wrecked that the farm might well have been taken for abandoned. Thick layers of dust covered every surface, mice had chewed through the kitchen pantry and left a trail of tiny turds across the counters, and the fridge was crowded with bowls of leftover food that had solidified or decomposed beyond recognition. The unrivaled chaos suggested a fall from grace to Anna, and the blame, she thought, was obviously the old man’s.
He knew it, too. “Whatever you do,” he warned her, his fingers jittery again, “don’t you dare mention this to your mother. I’ve been meaning to clean up, but I get so goddam busy.”
She was about to say, But you never cleaned house in your life! Instead, she bit her tongue. For the first time ever, she pitied him.
As if to absolve himself, he proved to her that he had indeed done a few things to make the place more habitable. He showed her
some cans of soup on a shelf, tomato and chicken noodle. There were supplies of coffee, milk, soda, and bread. She had grape jelly, butter, and sugar. He switched on the heat for her and fussed with the oak logs that he’d stacked on a pile of kindling in the parlor fireplace. He had laid out clean sheets and a patchwork quilt in her old bedroom upstairs, too, but Anna still couldn’t bring herself to bestow the praise on him that he seemed to think he deserved.
He gave her the keys to the family’s fancy car, a boatlike Taurus for church outings, and drew her a map with an arrow aimed at Quail Court. “Come in the afternoon tomorrow,” he instructed her. “That’s a good time of day for your mother. She should have some energy then.” He added a phone number below the map. “The furnace has been acting up on me. If it cuts out, call my vineyard manager.”
She looked out at the bunkhouse trailer. It was completely dark. “He’s asleep.”
“Well, wake up the son of a bitch.”
Then Anna was alone in the enormity of the house, rattling around in it just as she feared she would. She had almost nodded off during the ride up from the airport, but she was wired now, speeding past any jet lag. She talked to herself as she roamed from room to room downstairs, still in awe of the incredible mess, and when she spotted a bottle of homemade grappa in the kitchen, she poured herself a generous glass to calm her nerves. The first sip burned going down, but the second was much smoother, and the third was really very nice. She lit the kindling in the fireplace and pushed a couch up close to the hearth, feeling a rosy glow all through her. The fire gave her a wonderful sensation of being protected and brought back a memory of the time in her early teens when she and her brother Roger had put together a lean-to by the river from some cast-off barn siding, where they smoked a few purloined cigarettes, threw a jackknife at the trees, and concocted a never-to-be-executed Huck Finn plan to build a raft and drift downstream to meet their glorious destiny.
There was a snapshot of Roger in her mother’s picture gallery on the opposite wall. He was costumed as a Beatle on a long-ago Halloween, with a mop dyed black on his head—more like dreadlocks, Anna thought, than any style that the lads from Liverpool had ever sported. Roger was the Torelli clan’s free spirit, dedicated to having fun and thoroughly useless in any crisis, and she had always envied him enormously. While she sat chained to her desk and her homework during their school years, he was allowed to chase around with the Mexican kids in the fields, playing soccer or tag. Perfect Anna, he called her pointedly whenever the folks held her up to him as an example, and she supposed that she had deserved it—National Honor Society, captain of her volleyball team, editor of the school paper, Most Likely to Succeed, she was snobbish about her triumphs and desperate to escape from the rural confines of Carson Valley just as soon as she possibly could.
She had gone about that escape in a calculated way, in fact. Her first step was to get into Berkeley, and the second was convincing her parents to send her to Europe the summer before her junior year. Along with Jenny di Grazia, a girlfriend from the valley, she had spent a month touring France, Germany, and Italy. Another photo on the wall showed them posed together at a café in Montalcino, with a bottle of Brunello in front of them. Who had taken the shot? Ah, yes, it all came back to her—Guido, a skinny Renaissance faun, who wanted to practice his English on them. Guido had ringlets of hair and wore tight bell-bottoms in fluorescent green. He had invited them to zoom around Piazza Cavour on the back of his motor scooter, but only Jenny had risked a ride. Montalcino was dank and medieval, a walled Etruscan stronghold not far from Siena. The Torellis had reportedly originated there, but Anna, nosing around in a graveyard, could find only a single weathered headstone that suggested a link. The name Tomasso Torelli meant nothing to her father, though, when she told him about it on a postcard.
Cathedrals, frescoes, a midnight stroll along the Thames, the atmospheric Turners at the Tate; the radiant Madonnas at the Uffizi; liters of pilsner and bock in a Munich beer garden; the Tuileries, Monet, Van Gogh, Rimbaud—the incessant, seductive scheming of Europe’s huge complement of Guidos, Francos, and Helmuts, all of them hot to practice their corruptly faulty English on American girls and all of them rebuffed by Anna—she couldn’t vouch for Jenny, who had a habit of disappearing mysteriously from their various hostels and pensions—that journey had transformed her. It marked the precise moment in time when her longing was at its most acute, when she was most intolerant of her family and anything remotely connected to farming. She returned to college in the autumn feeling advanced and cosmopolitan and began dating Bud Wright, who had access to the big world she wished to be a part of. No photos of Bud were on display anymore, Anna noticed. Her mother must have packed him away, editing him out of her gallery like those corrupt cardinals who’d been banished from the Vatican museum and stored in a drafty cellar somewhere.
Poor Bud Wright. He had impeccable breeding, a BMW, his own apartment, and nothing much in common, really, with Anna Torelli. She could see now that she had chosen him simply because he fit the fairy-tale stereotype she was pursuing, although she certainly didn’t understand it at the time. Bud came from a wealthy family in Palo Alto, the scion of stockbrokers, surgeons, and attorneys. His future was already clearly written, but Anna lacked the experience to read it. Handsome, intelligent, conversant enough with the arts to negotiate a university cocktail party, and possessed of a seven handicap at golf, he switched his major from history to prelaw as a senior and started down the path that had been prepared for him in his infancy. Anna knew no better than to be thrilled for him, and when he proposed to her before graduation she accepted on the spot against her father’s volubly expressed wishes and moved with him to Manhattan, where he entered law school at Columbia and they began what she imagined would be their perfect life together.
She poured out another splash of grappa. Could she ever have been so naive? The answer, sadly, was yes. Without any encouragement from Bud, she had turned herself into a dutiful young wife committed to forwarding her husband’s career. She shopped for silver and china, decorated their place à la mode, signed up for some tennis lessons, subscribed to Vogue, and even clipped gourmet recipes from the Times magazine section and pasted them in a notebook. When Bud joined a powerful corporate firm, she hosted elaborate formal dinner parties for his influential associates, slick and oily men whose very presence at her table made her want to throw up. The only elements missing from her carefully constructed fantasy were the three perfect children she hoped to have, but she and Bud had no luck in that department, going through a miscarriage and an ectopic pregnancy early on. Anna never managed to conceive again, despite their heroic efforts; and for a full ten years she had carried on in the role she had assigned herself until the whole rusty load of continuity came crashing down.
The collapse of the marriage was a terrible embarrassment for her. She had never failed at anything before, had never made a fool of herself in public. People assured her that she was fortunate not to have any kids, but Anna wasn’t so certain. At times, she still felt a yawning emptiness in her that she could barely tolerate, although the sensation never lasted long. More often she cherished the new life she had built for herself, valuing her freedom and independence. That was the source of her recent head-butting with Sam McNally, the first man since her divorce to hold her interest for more than a couple of weeks. But Sam had started pressing her for some kind of relationship, with rules and boundaries, and she had decided, however reluctantly, to stop seeing him for a while. She told herself that she didn’t love him enough, but in truth she mistrusted the very concept of romantic love and believed it was merely a useful fiction human beings had invented to explain their inexplicable attachments.
She slept on the couch that night, bundled in the quilt from upstairs, and woke to a morning of hard frost. The fire had guttered out, and the house was freezing cold. Anna bumped up the thermostat, but the furnace had quit on her just as her prophet of a father had predicted. Why hadn’t he repaired it, t
hen? That was an easy one—because repairs cost money. Furious with the old man, she phoned the number he had given her and left a message on an answering machine. The vineyard manager was probably already at work in the fields, she thought, as she stood by a window and took in the landscape, remembering how beautiful the valley could be in winter. It looked as though the lightest possible snow had fallen to turn the ground everywhere a silvery white, and the river was like a blue-black ribbon of ink pulsing along the western edge of the farm. Five Mexicans were pruning in a block of Chardonnay near the creek, Antonio Lopez among them, and they resembled figures in a Brueghel painting, deep in concentration and oblivious of the crows and ravens sailing about them in graceful arcs.
In the ruined kitchen, Anna made herself a pot of coffee. She browsed in a hall closet, discovered an old navy peacoat, and put it on for some added warmth. Her father had neglected to lay in any extra firewood, naturally, so she was reduced to burning some yellowed copies of the Valley Herald rolled into logs. She stayed close to the hearth until she heard a stagey clomping of boots on the porch, followed by a dramatic fit of coughing. The local farmers liked to announce themselves that way instead of ringing the doorbell, so Anna rose from the couch and opened the front door on a lean, wiry, oddly elegant man, whose posture had a trace of the military in it. His close-cropped hair was flecked with gray, and he wore a down vest over a red flannel shirt. There was a searching wildness in his eyes, but at the same time he held himself rigidly in check, as if his every word and action were being tallied somewhere and maybe even judged.