The Train to Orvieto

by Novelli, Rebecca J. ;

  THE TRAIN TO ORVIETO

  THE TRAIN TO ORVIETO

  Rebecca J. Novelli

  Black Heron Press

  Post Office Box 13396

  Mill Creek, Washington 98082

  www.blackheronpress.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Rebecca J. Novelli. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The Train to Orvieto is a work of fiction. All characters that appear in this book are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN (print): 978-1-936364-23-7

  ISBN (ebook): 978-1-936364-22-0

  Black Heron Press

  Post Office Box 13396

  Mill Creek, Washington 98082

  www.blackheronpress.com

  For Billy

  All the more pleasurable, then, to mock the witlessness of those who believe that with present power it is possible to extinguish the future’s memory…

  —Tacitus, Annals, 4.35.5

  THE TRAIN TO ORVIETO

  ORVIETO

  At the top of a volcanic outcropping nearly a thousand feet high and hidden behind walls of yellowed stone, the town of Orvieto arises from its distant past. Tourists move through its narrow streets and quaint shops, imagining the shouts of long ago artisans and traders. Like pilgrims at a shrine, they believe that ancient verities can be found within our ruins and that by drawing close to our past, they will know truth. Their preposterous quest is doomed.

  Inside the Duomo, with the famous golden façade, Signorelli’s 15th Century fresco depicts the damned in hell. See in the lower right corner where the face of Signorelli’s beautiful lover is contorted in suffering? This was his vengeance for her infidelity. Six centuries later her betrayal is remembered, but no one asks whether Signorelli was faithful to her, whether he deserved her loyalty. That the answer is uncertain isn’t easily accepted and may cause unwelcome controversy. For us it is enough to say, “She dishonored him,” and continue on our way. This is how we keep faith with truth.

  In the museum near the Duomo, tourists marvel at an exhibit of amphorae exhumed from the ancient caves formed in the crumbling tufa on which our town rests. Some of these vessels are thought to contain wine. The more adventurous want to taste it, while the timid fear that it’s poisonous. It’s likely turned to vinegar by now, but the amphorae remain sealed and the exact nature of their contents uncertain.

  In the afternoons tourists can be seen following a guide along a steep path leading to the base of our outcropping. There they will visit the Etruscan necropolises, tombs frescoed in silent accounts of sumptuous banquets and passionate assignations. Whether the beautiful people pictured there lived as they were depicted or whether their memory was confined in a palace of wishes remains unknown.

  Memory is easily confused with truth. Memory is that half-drowned survivor heaved up on the uncertain shore of awareness. It offers an account of what happened when the ship foundered on treacherous shoals or ran aground in the gale. Was there a mutiny? Murderous pirates? Or was the captain drunk and the cargo and crew lost to negligence? Because no one remains to contradict the captain’s story, what he remembers becomes truth. Given the choice, tourists almost always prefer pirates and mutinies, so the castaway need not fear contradiction.

  We Orvietani have a word for tourists. We call them stranieri. It means foreigner, outsider, alien. More importantly, it means someone who doesn’t—and never will—share our memory of what we know to be true. Indeed, on certain feast days we offer one another our own good luck toast: “To fine memories and the best wine: may you never have to share them with stranieri.” This is how we have lived with one another for centuries, our memories entangled like a vine that engulfs a house, choking off the original structure in favor of its own.

  What I tell you about Willa, my mother, and our family, and about those we knew and loved is only the account of this half-drowned survivor. Is it the truth? The truth never mattered.

  I. GABRIELE

  1

  ERHART, OHIO, JUNE 1934

  Darkness fell just past nine, and the humid evening curled still and breathless around The Pavilion, enveloped by sounds of crickets, frogs, and a nearby brook. Fireflies competed with lanterns and stars until the rising moon, round as a lemon slice, lifted above the trees and bathed in silver-gold the hardwood dance floor and the two twirling figures in the center. My mother, Willa Carver, and her father, Howard Carver, had just begun the first waltz. The party celebrated my mother’s twentieth birthday and her graduation from Miss Waltham’s, where young women were prepared for “thoughtful and gracious living” and where for two years she had studied drawing and painting, art history, home management, and the Italian language. Formal debuts were unheard of in small, midwestern towns like Erhart, Ohio, but her party nevertheless affirmed her emergence into a somewhat awkward status that conferred adult privileges and freedoms without actually permitting them.

  The two dancers dipped and turned in front of the musicians, ten local men, friends of Mr. Carver, who were seated in the band shell at one end of the dance floor. According to family stories, Mr. Carver had hired the conductor from nearby Oberlin Conservatory for the evening.

  “With a little professional direction you won’t be able to tell them from the Cleveland Symphony,” he had promised Willa and Ruth, his wife.

  “Spending money on a conductor in times like these! What will people think of us?” Ruth had said, mindful of how many of their friends had been affected by what historians and economists would later call The Great Depression.

  “I don’t care what they think,” Mr. Carver told her. “We’re going to do this right or not at all!”

  The Pavilion and its transformations typically marked the seasons in Erhart. Thus, on December first, the volunteer fire department removed the hardwood platform to expose the basin below and then flooded it to create a frozen rink for ice-skating and the Holiday Ball. The reigning “Winter Princesses”—Willa had been one the previous year—arrived in a sleigh pulled by three horses and driven by the mayor dressed as Santa. The sleigh glided to the center of the ice rink and stopped next to a Christmas tree, which was felled for the occasion and remained there throughout the holiday season while several reindeer wintered in a nearby field. In its promotional literature, the Erhart Chamber of Commerce labeled the entire Winter Festival “a popular regional attraction.” More importantly and more often, The Pavilion was the site of the most significant passages in the lives of the citizens of Erhart. For many, including Willa, it was there that they first noticed the direction of the compass that would guide them toward their dreams.

  As they passed in front of the refreshment table, Mr. Carver twirled Willa out under his hand. Over his shoulder Willa saw “Aunt” Leonie, her mother’s spinster cousin and an English teacher at Erhart High School, sitting on a folding chair and knitting a tiny sailor suit. Against Aunt Leonie’s stasis, Willa felt her own liquidity, as if she had joints and muscles unbounded by gravity, as if she were made of moving water. She knew that her pale gown of violet silk chiffon, the skirt layered like butterfly wings beneath a ruched bodice, contributed to the watery impression and emphasized her rosy skin, already freckled from the sun, though summer would not officially begin for two weeks. Her thick, auburn curls fell over her shoulders and flashed in the moonlight. Earlier that afternoon, she had gathered pink roses and dianthus from her mother’s garden and had woven them into a crown held in place with grandmother Carver’s mother-of-pearl combs.

  Willa and her father swept past Willa’s cousin Lawre
nce, who had just turned twelve and whose too-small suit revealed several inches of his ankles and wrists. Prodded by his mother’s elbow, he raised a cup of punch in their direction. Willa giggled.

  “Daddy, look! Lawrence has one white sock and one black one.” Mr. Carver glanced at his nephew and then at his nephew’s mother.

  “My sister looks like she’s missing more than socks,” Mr. Carver said.

  “She expected nothing and gave up early,” Willa said dryly.

  “Nonsense. She married a rich man. He’s a terrible bore, but she has everything she could want.”

  “But she wanted to be a singer.” Willa twirled again.

  “She had no voice,” Mr. Carver said. “It’s better this way.” They swirled past Aunt Leonie once more. Mr. Carver drew back and winked at his daughter.

  “I suppose you’d say Aunt Leonie has lost something, too.”

  Willa looked at her father. “Her sailor, the one grandpa wouldn’t let her marry.”

  “That story isn’t true, at least not entirely. She had other chances,” Mr. Carver said.

  “She gave them all up to knit for other people’s babies.”

  Mr. Carver smiled at his daughter over his bow tie. “Perhaps Aunt Leonie likes what she’s doing. Have you ever thought of that?” Willa shook her head. “I take it, then, that you don’t intend to give up anything.”

  Willa held her father’s gaze, smiling. “No. Nothing.” Mr. Carver chuckled and turned his daughter around and around until some of the guests began to clap.

  “I guess your dad isn’t such a bad dancer after all.”

  Willa laughed. “Daddy, you’re a wonderful dancer.”

  “It’s you, honey. You make me remember how I used to dance with your mother. Right here. We were just twenty—like you,” he continued with a sweep of his hand. “One evening we stopped over there by that wall to look at Orion. That’s when I proposed to Ruth. Didn’t think about it. Just said, ‘Ruth, I’ll die if you don’t marry me.’ Imagine!” The music stopped and the guests clapped again. “There’s Maestro Ottaviani. I believe he’s been waiting since the music started for a turn with you.”

  Willa glanced at her drawing teacher, a slender man, nearly thirty, elegant despite his inexpensive suit. A recent émigré, Maestro Ottaviani had taught both drawing and Italian at Miss Waltham’s, and Mrs. Carver had insisted that Willa continue her lessons with him, though it had been Mr. Carver who questioned that expense. Willa had already noticed Maestro Ottaviani and took a certain pleasure in his uninterrupted gaze. He was holding a gift.

  “Punch?” Mr. Carver said. They entered a covered structure where Mrs. Carver had set a dozen tables for ten covered with pastel linens, silverware, and china, all of which had to be rented in Cleveland. The roses in the centerpieces were from Mrs. Carver’s garden. The menu consisted of Willa’s favorites: roast chicken, potato salad, peas, and, for dessert, chocolate cake with frosting roses and raspberry sherbet all prepared by Mrs. Carver and Belle, the housekeeper. Willa paused at the buffet table and stuck her finger into the frosting at the back of the cake, pulled her finger out and licked it. She walked around the table nearby, this one piled with gifts, some from as far away as Memphis, Chicago, New York, even California.

  Another cousin approached them with cups of punch, balancing carefully in her white dress and first high heels.

  “Oh, champagne, please,” Willa said waving the cups away.

  “Willa! You have to wait until you’re twenty one.”

  “Tonight I can do what I want.” Willa wanted—no, assumed—the possibility of living in a state of artistic enchantment in the same way most people in Erhart believed in God and rising early. Her desire to exist in an unhampered, creative state was the scale on which she weighed the desirability of any choice or decision about her present and her future.

  Maestro Ottaviani appeared in front of her. “Tanti auguri.” He held out a white package tied with pink grosgrain ribbon.

  She smiled. “What a lovely surprise. Grazie mille, Signor Ottaviani.”

  He looked into her eyes, his expression buoyant but uncertain. “First open. Then the grazie,” he told her. Willa sat down on a nearby chair. Maestro Ottaviani sat next to her, adjusting his chair so that it touched hers. Willa pulled at the ribbon and let it drop into her lap, then tore away the thin tissue. The book was bound in leather the color of lapis lazuli. Willa ran her fingers over the gold sun embossed on the cover, touched the raised silver moon on the back, let the blank pages play between her fingers. “For your disegni, Maestro,” Ottaviani said.

  Willa understood the Italian word for drawings. Indeed, under Maestro Ottaviani’s tutelage, she had become quite fluent in Italian. “What a beautiful sketchbook. Thank you.” As an artist Willa intended to make her ideas and feelings manifest in her work and to live a life dedicated to art, beauty and love. Such things were difficult to explain to most people, particularly in Erhart, but Maestro Ottaviani had understood from the very first day of her classes with him and had helped her to express her intentions on paper and canvas.

  “The artist’s art is the artist himself,” Maestro Ottaviani had often said. He understood her aspirations better than anyone else, Willa felt, because he was Italian, and Italians were a very empathetic and artistic people. Maestro Ottaviani put one hand over hers and touched his chest with the other. “Art is the emozioni, the things of the heart and the soul.”

  Willa squeezed his hand and smiled, pleased that he thought that the ideas and images in her heart and soul should be recorded, that what was within her mattered. She hugged the album. “Bellissimo.”

  Maestro Ottaviani leaned so near that she felt the warmth of his breath next to her ear when he spoke. She kissed him quickly on the cheek, then set the sketchbook on an empty chair and stood up.

  “I make dance with you now,” Maestro Ottaviani said, “and we make talk together about art…and…our friendship.” He led her outside to the dance floor.

  By the standards of Erhart, Willa already enjoyed artistic success. She had sold some of her paintings—figurative oils of children and small watercolor landscapes–to her parents’ friends and acquaintances and at church bazaars. She had also received a few small commissions to document the homes and gardens of Erhart’s more prosperous citizens. With Maestro Ottaviani’s encouragement, however, she imagined something more for herself as an artist, something more significant that she could not name yet, but that she would surely find in Italy, in places like Roma or Firenze, where Maestro Ottaviani had studied art himself.

  “You and I…we paint together in Firenze,” Maestro Ottaviani said to her. “Later in Roma. I have friends. We will be together. I teach you.”

  “I want to study in Italy,” Willa said, “but my father doesn’t think it’s important.”

  “I talk to him…how you say?…man with man.”

  When the music ended, Willa and Maestro Ottaviani paused at the edge of the dance floor. Immediately, Eddie Ingersoll, who would soon take over his father’s business as the Security Insurance, Ltd. broker in Erhart, asked Willa for the next dance.

  “I’ve got something important to tell you,” Eddie said breathlessly, his hair and tie askew. He led her to the edge of the dance floor, and they looked outward toward the darkened land. Moonlight etched the fringe of clouds floating just above the horizon and silhouetted the shapes of the trees. “Willa, I’ve always been in love with you…and besides we’ve known each other since we were in elementary school….”

  “I already know what you’re going to say.” Willa pushed her hair back. “You have a job.”

  Eddie nodded. “…and our families are friends…and my father gave me his old Packard, too, and I just asked to speak to your father.” He rushed on. “Now that I can support us, I want us to get married. Your father will approve, Willa. I know he will. I know we’re meant to be together.” He paused for breath. “We can settle right here in Erhart just as soon as you can plan our wedding. In
fact, I saw a house for sale on Greenleaf Avenue. Want to take a look after the party?”

  Though they had gone to the high school prom together, Willa was surprised by Eddie’s proposal. She had never considered their marrying a possibility. “Oh, Eddie, it’s a beautiful evening. I don’t want to spoil it.”

  “Spoil it? How?”

  “I’m going to be leaving Erhart.” At that very moment she had become certain. “I’m going to be an artist.”

  “But how can we get married if you’re not here?”

  Chip Larson, another classmate, approached them, his left hand still bandaged from an injury in a recent motorcycle accident. People shook their heads and said that Chip preferred fast engines to good sense and one day if he didn’t stop...well, one day, things would end badly. The orchestra struck up a jitterbug. “Hey Ingersoll! Willa’s my girl!” Chip sped off toward the center of the dance floor with Willa in his arms.

  “That Ingersoll can’t even find a beat,” Chip said. “Watch this!” He whirled in front of her. The guests whistled, urging him on. When the orchestra stopped, he did a cartwheel and landed in the splits. He wiped his hands on his pants. “So, whadja think of that?”

  Willa considered—and not for the last time—her effect on men. She had become aware of her own power and so had others. Earlier the saleslady in downtown Cleveland had commented that the gown Willa had chosen for her party “makes you look like Helen of Troy.”

  Willa’s dress did set her apart from other girls, those whose customary clouds of white suggested not so much epics as christenings, first communions, weddings, and, of course, virginity. Perhaps it was obvious to some of those present that Willa didn’t share their acceptable aspirations. Perhaps Willa’s rejection of what was expected of her called up their long-suppressed memories of possibilities foreclosed or lives not lived. Perhaps her rejection raised a more troubling question: What if one had had the courage to bear the risks of one’s true desires and had been willing to endure the terrors of opportunity? In this way, Willa left some feeling uncomfortable, off balance, as if their idea of themselves and their secure place in the world had tilted without warning, spilled them out onto the empty shores of forsaken dreams and the companionship of regret. And among a very few, Willa’s rejection of what was customary, symbolized by that party dress, represented an even more threatening possibility: Could one, in defiance of custom, inertia, and expectation—still, even now—change and become that larger being one had once believed oneself to be? And so it was that these guests clucked and whispered among themselves about Willa’s “risqué costume” and the unhappy fate it foretold.