Morton had not lied exactly. Just as he had answered her that day, the first pages contained miscellaneous unrelated scenes, sketches for possible characters, citations from books he was reading. Every so often he inserted notes from his doctors’ appointments: “Grubman says it’s the Coumadin that makes me bruise so easily.” From Pam, his physical therapist: “Suck in my abdomen when I get up out of bed in the morning, it will help with the back. Always sleep with a bed pillow under the knees. Stretch, stretch, stretch.”
Twenty-some pages in, a different kind of sentence erupted. “All these notes and fragments only confirm my emptiness,” he said, apparently out of nowhere. “I’m writing here to avoid writing”—and he was off.
Back at the pensione, Costanza had read through the entries from the time before they met. She listened in, or so it felt, as Morton battled his black moods and worried whether his return to the city had been a mistake. She watched him agonize over his writer’s block; she saw him fight, then quickly make up, with an old editor friend; and she saw him struggle with Howard, who kept trying—and failing—to get him to go out into the world.
Then she came to that April:
A remarkable astonishing thing has happened: Howard, for once in his life, was actually right about something.
On his last visit into town my brother apparently noticed an invitation to one of Nathan’s book parties on my desk. I haven’t gone to those things in years. Howard—the sneak—made a mental note and then simply appeared here last night at five.
This was as far as she had read. Now, after taking another sip of wine, she continued:
The party was down in the Village, at that place run by the Italian department at NYU—I’d been to a lecture there about Moravia a few lifetimes ago. There was a spread of Chiantis and cheeses I would have loved at least to sample; instead I stuck to a glass of bubbly water and some nutritionist-sanctioned carrot sticks.
At one point Nathan, very likely egged on by Howard, came up to me and said, “You know there’s someone here you might be interested to meet.”
“Oh,” I said. “Why is that?”
“Because she’s interesting.”
He gestured toward the drinks table. “She’s standing just over there.”
Interesting is not the first word I would have used to describe this woman. I would have said, She is striking. Unusually striking. Very refined features, golden hair, eyes with focus and clarity. Lips pale and slightly chapped, maybe from being bitten or gnawed at. A good body, though this I had to deduce, since it was hidden under a skirt and big full sweater. Too much of both, the sweater especially.
That was interesting: a beauty who hides her beauty in yards of fabric. The opposite of all those leggy black-clad publishing girls.
“Costanza translates from English into Italian,” Nathan said. “Maybe we can convince her to take on your next book,” he said, “which will be done when…?”
“When it’s done,” she offered kindly.
We fell into some very natural talk. I discovered that she is half-Italian, half-American. She grew up there, not here. The American father is dead, the Italian mother, she said, is “very much alive.”
An American father, but an Italian last name? “After my father died,” she said, “my mother changed my last name to hers. A bit peculiar, until you know the story.”
It may have been the voice, with its slight softening old-world accent. Those sparkling green eyes. The slightly stiff way she carried herself. That intriguing reserve. It was hard for me to take my own eyes off her.
These pages disconcerted Costanza. She could think of many reasons why. Discovering that she had been observed—studied—like this was unsettling. Then there was hearing Morton’s voice again, which made him seem so alive. And the way the diary allowed her to go back in time, yet bring with her everything she knew that followed. She could think of no other circumstance in her life where she’d been able to do that. Maybe in dreams. Only in dreams.
She remembered that first conversation, though not in such detail. She had just moved to New York. It had been another of her sudden impulses, but within weeks she had received assignments for two books to translate. She had rented an apartment in the East Village and she had begun to go out. She had found Morton to be magnetic; trim and with abundant silver hair, he had eyes that even on that first meeting ranged from icy to inky blue. Later on she would be able to read his moods, to predict the imminent return of the black feelings he wrote about, or his anger, merely by noting a subtle shift in those eyes. He spoke confidently, as though no person (no woman, no man either) could possibly be immune to his attention, once he had turned it on. Yet his demeanor had a quality of respect to it too. A modesty. The slant of his questions suggested he was genuinely interested in hearing what she had to say. She didn’t often meet men like that. Not men her age, Italian or American. He reminded her of her father. He had a similar touch of old-fashioned decorum. And hauntedness.
Eventually she would learn that this Morton was still much under the influence of his illness and his unsettled life. In time a more autocratic, more complicated Morton, a steelier and colder Morton, would emerge.
She was surprised to receive a phone call from him the next morning. It took her several minutes to realize that he was interested in her in that way. Her cousin Cristina always used to tell her that she was unaware of the effect she had on men.
April 25th
Well, it wasn’t as easy as I thought. After a little stab at holding back, I simply called and asked her out. And do you know what she answered: Why?
Why? It never occurred to me that I would have to explain (it’s funny how unused I have become to people other than Howard asking me simple questions like Why?). Because I found you intriguing, I said. Because I went back to Natalia Ginzburg as you recommended, and liked a lot of what I read. Because I thought we could, I don’t know, talk. It came out more like “I dunno”; I sounded like I was seventeen.
At her end of the phone: a long excruciating silence.
To be doing this at my age. To be feeling this.
Then she said, All right.
On Thursday I picked her up at her apartment in the East Village. Old kilims, a sofa covered with a printed Genoese fabric, a wall of thumbtacked drawings, quotations written out on three-by-five cards. “I’m experienced at improvising homes for myself,” she said. “It’s the flip side of a wandering spirit.”
Even though she grew up near Genoa, she spent summers in Tuscany, where her grandfather had an old farmhouse. Her summers were a mixture of country and “town” (imagine thinking of Florence as a town), where she used to stay in a pensione with her father and spend the weekend looking at paintings and sculpture.
She said that she was drawn to the backgrounds of those pictures, the fantastical roads and cities that hover in the distance of religious paintings and certain portraits. Most people think of them as an afterthought, she said, but for her they were the main attraction. I asked if that was connected to her wandering spirit, and she said that she hadn’t put that together before. I said, “But it’s so apparent.”
I loved watching her think. It made her more radiant, if that’s possible.
She said that whenever she goes to a notable place—a ruin, a monument—she always turns away from it, to see the secondary view. In great houses she likes the kitchens and attics best. She’s captivated by the provenance of paintings, footnotes in biographies. Her favorite part of a menu is the side dishes; on trains she prefers to ride facing backward.
“I prefer to ride forward,” I said. “That way, I can fool myself into believing I know what lies ahead in life.”
“So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all these years!”
I laughed. She laughed. Then I asked if she was seeing anyone romantically.
“Not at the moment. What about you?”
“That depends.” I held her eye.
“On what?”
“On you.”<
br />
Costanza knew she was right to limit her reading. She had not brought more pages with her, and she was glad.
* * *
By the time Andrew found his way back to the pensione, it was past three o’clock, easily the latest he had stayed out on his own since he and Henry had come to Florence. As soon as he stepped onto the via Tornabuoni, he saw his father standing in front of the palazzo, looking up and down the street impatiently.
The central feature that father and son shared was their thick hair, peppered now with gray in Henry’s case, a deep chestnut in Andrew’s. Most everything else about them was different. Andrew was a tall, spider-limbed boy whose imperfect complexion upholstered the bones of what in a few years seemed likely to be a handsome, possibly even notably handsome, face. Henry by contrast had a wide forehead, sharp, miss-nothing eyes, and a thick beard topped by a beak of a nose that looked as though its maker had been called away to a more important job halfway through; yet he was the sort of man people invariably noticed, mainly on account of his unbridled vitality. He was a pot on a constant flame, sometimes simmering, sometimes bubbling, or bubbling over. Some people found Henry’s vitality contagious, some people were oppressed by it, but no one responded to him with indifference.
Henry had changed out of his lecturing jacket and tie and was wearing a pair of khakis, a dark blue shirt, and comfortable shoes. His hurrying shoes, Andrew thought of them. Wearing his hurrying shoes while having to stand still put Henry’s mind and body in torqued conflict. Often the very sight of those shoes would cause Andrew himself to hurry. But not at the moment. At the moment Andrew decided to take a picture of his father. Calmly he turned on his camera and zoomed in on Henry’s face, where a scowl was implanted in his dense beard. Andrew captured the scowl—three times—then walked across the street and tapped his father on the shoulder.
“There you are. I’ve been worried. You’re turning into your mother, Andrew. She was perennially late, especially near the end.”
The end: as though she had died.
“You keep encouraging me to go out”—Andrew shrugged—“so I went out.”
Henry frowned. “Day after day I leave you suggestions, and day after day all you do is go for a run and sit there in the pensione. I accept that you’re not much of an adventurer. That’s more Justin’s thing.”
Nearly every time Justin’s name came up, Henry’s face darkened. He behaved as though traveling without Justin were like traveling without a limb.
Andrew was relieved that Henry didn’t ask where he’d been.
“Have you eaten?”
Andrew nodded. “But I can sit with you.”
“Angelo made me a sandwich,” Henry said, his vexation receding. “Things are opening again in a few minutes—I know you’ve been wanting to go see the Fra Angelicos at San Marco. What do you say to heading over that way? And afterward I thought we might look for some shirts. I know how you like your Italian shirts.”
Andrew had never said a word about wanting to see the Fra Angelicos at San Marco; he didn’t even know what they were. And it was Justin who liked Italian shirts—it was Justin who liked things.
“Sounds good,” Andrew said, because sometimes it was simply easier to agree.
For the second time that day Andrew headed up the via Tornabuoni. He didn’t walk alongside his father, as he had with Costanza, but behind him. Henry, in his hurrying shoes, wasn’t interested in the experience of getting from one place to another. He wasn’t interested in the shop fronts, the street life, the light, the language. He was interested in getting where he was going, fast.
He was also interested in being prepared when he got there, and preparing Andrew in turn. Henry was a devourer of guidebooks (still!) and books on travel, history, architecture, and art, and as they headed to San Marco, he asked and answered his own questions in a rapid-fire staccato delivery, first into the air alongside him and then, when he realized Andrew was lagging behind, back over his shoulder: “—Patron? Cosimo il Vecchio. Architect? Michelozzo. Period of transformation of buildings? Fifteen years from 1437 forward. Special feature? First public library in Europe. Most famous prior? Savonarola, and we know what came of him. Most famous friar-painters? Fra Bartolomeo and Fra Angelico. Better of the two?”
When Andrew didn’t answer, Henry turned around. “Well?”
“This feels like a class, Dad. You want to be my teacher? Wouldn’t you say I have enough of those already in my life?”
“I want to be a student. The truth is, if I could do it all over again…”
Andrew came to a standstill. Therefore so did Henry. Andrew looked at his father’s face to see if he was serious. “You wouldn’t be a doctor?”
Henry shrugged. “It could be this city,” he said, gesturing. “It’s so … infinite. It’s so … what’s that phrase of Justin’s? It’s so my way. Everything about it. The history. The art and architecture. So much began here, so much ingenuity, so many ideas. It makes me think, I don’t know, of all the possibilities in life…”
Andrew was perplexed. “I can’t imagine you as anything other than a doctor.”
“Yes, but I can,” Henry said. “Left to my own devices, I might have become a historian, or an art historian. I might have been a musician, who knows?”
“Dad, you’re tone-deaf.”
“I guess that’s where Justin comes in. He expresses enough music for the rest of us.”
Father and son resumed walking, this time more slowly and in silence. Andrew wondered whether something had gone badly at the conference that morning. His father not a doctor? Who (what) was his father if not a doctor?
When they reached San Marco, Henry opened his guidebook and consulted a map of the building. “The place to start is with the Fra Angelicos upstairs,” he said, sounding more like himself. “They’re the main attraction, though I wouldn’t mind seeing Savonarola’s hair shirt. A piece of underwear five hundred years old. How crazy is that?”
The largest Fra Angelico Annunciation was waiting for them right at the top of the stairs. On the left-hand side of the fresco an angel, having alighted on a colonnaded portico, was lowering himself into a gentle bow, his arms crossed elegantly in front of his chest. With his bent knee and his wings still up, it seemed clear that he had just arrived. Fra Angelico had chosen to paint the moment just before the angel was to deliver the news to Mary, who was sitting on a sturdy wooden stool, her own arms crossed in front of her plain tunic, her face in meticulous three-quarter view.
“Can you imagine what it must have felt like to be able to come and tell this woman that she was pregnant, and pregnant with this of all babies?” Henry said. “I think it’s brilliant the way he draws us into the angel’s mind.”
To Andrew the angel looked blank, impassive. A messenger, not much more. He thought that Mary was deeper. She appeared to be both worried and curious, as if she knew something significant was about to happen to her.
They moved on to the dormitory and began to tour the monks’ cells, each of which had its own small private fresco. There were more than forty of these paintings, which seemed to hover on the white plaster walls like projections, or dreams. The rooms appealed to Andrew. He would have liked to be left alone in one of them for just an hour, or half an hour; but Henry, consulting his book, was rattling off the subjects and the probable painters of each fresco, his pace picking up giddily until they came to another Annunciation.
In this version Mary was on her knees, and the angel was standing and looking down on her. The painting gave off a visceral sense of waiting. And it slowed Henry down. Very little slowed Henry down.
Andrew studied his father studying the fresco. “I guess you can relate.”
Henry looked at him.
“You’re like the angel. You get to tell women they’re pregnant.”
Henry glanced at the painting, then back at his son. “I don’t just tell them they’re pregnant. I make them pregnant.”
Andrew let out a long, though nearly
silent, sigh. A private sigh.
Henry trailed out of the cubicle and into the hallway, and Andrew trailed after him. Standing ahead of them in the corridor, looking into one of the monks’ cells and intensely studying a painting, was Costanza.
Andrew felt his heart twist. With her linen and her pale skin and golden hair, she looked like a modern variation on one of the Marys in the frescoes. Henry was charging directly toward her, oblivious; Andrew was several steps behind. Just as she was about to turn forward, Andrew quickly unhooked the red velvet rope that limited access to the cells and darted inside one of them.
The next thing Andrew knew there was a loud clunk. From the sound of it, Henry had plowed right into her, and something had tumbled to the ground.
“Mi scusi. I didn’t see you. I was—”
“In a rush, apparently.”
Andrew peered around the edge of the wall. Henry had bent down to collect a small bag that had gone flying.
“I hope it’s not broken,” Henry said.
“My shoulder?”
“Your package.” Henry handed it to her. “Please tell me it’s not fragile.”
“It’s a book.” She took it out of its bag and examined it.
Henry glanced at the title: Lives of the Artists. “Vasari seems to think Fra Angelico was some kind of saint, crying when he started in on a crucifixion. He brings out the preacher in him—all that talk about painters who paint holy subjects needing to be holy themselves.”
“You disagree?” she asked.
“I don’t agree or disagree. It’s just not what I look for in pictures. I look for technique, psychology, drama. Subjects that are translatable beyond the stories they depict. I think that’s what makes a great painting. Universality, applicability. Religion, by itself, leaves me cold.”
He was actually saying all this to someone he didn’t know—to her?
She didn’t seem fazed: “All religion?”
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