The Train to Orvieto

by Novelli, Rebecca J. ;

  “Is it my turn?” Lawrence asked Willa, his eyes fixed on his own feet. The pockets of his boy’s jacket strained to contain his hands.

  “Would you like to dance?” Willa said. Lawrence worked his jaw like an old man trying to remember something he has forgotten. Finally, he nodded. She put her hand on his shoulder and held his sweaty left hand in hers. “Put your other hand against my back,” she told him. The music began. “Are you enjoying my party?”

  “That’s a pretty dress.”

  “Thank you. Did your mother tell you to say that?”

  Lawrence nodded. “She says your dress looks ‘risky.’” “

  Really? What do you think?”

  “My mom says you’re not beautiful and that you’ve got that long Carver nose and that space between your front teeth like aunt Ruth’s, but you still fascinate men.” Willa knew the women talked about her, but this was the first time she had known what they said. If I fascinate men, surely I must be beautiful enough, she thought.

  “Is that so?”

  Lawrence nodded again vigorously while he counted aloud to the music.

  “And do I fascinate you?” She was curious about what he would say.

  “No.” He looked around as if to find an escape. Seeing none, he took a deep breath. “My mom says you can bewitch men with your voice because they want to hear you talk.” He stepped on her foot. “Sorry.”

  It pleased Willa to be thought bewitching. “Do you want to hear me talk?”

  “Not if bewitch is something bad. My mom says I only have to dance with you for one dance because it’s your party.”

  Willa laughed. “Only one?” She glanced at Lawrence’s mother. “Let’s make it worth your while then.”

  2

  Willa waited before her tall, wooden easel while Maestro Ottaviani arranged a still life on the table in front of her. The scarred wooden floor of the cramped studio creaked under his footsteps. Stacked in the corners and on any available surface, Maestro Ottaviani’s drawings and paintings seemed disordered, but Willa knew he could find any work immediately when he wanted to demonstrate to her the meaning of grisaille, sfumato, or chiaroscuro, words he pronounced like poems or incantations, words shimmering with possibilities. In the uneven and peeling white of the walls that were crowded higgledy-piggledy with Maestro Ottaviani’s drawings, in the programs and advertisements from the shows he had held in Italy scattered about the tiny studio, Willa saw a world that fit her idea of the artist she wanted to become. She picked up one of the programs. On the back it said that Maestro Ottaviani had “received the very highest honors at the internationally famous and most distinguished art school in all of Italy.”

  “What school in Italy did you attend?” she said.

  He glanced at her. “Aspetta. Work now,” he said. “Not talk.” He returned to the still life he had arranged—a cracked marble ball, dead flowers in a thin vase, a skull with a hole in the back of the cranium, a walking stick, a small mirror, an open book—and then went to his easel.

  “Now, draw together,” he said. “

  I’d rather paint,” Willa said.

  “First, draw. After, paint. Must discover life inside—even in object. Object dead. Artist must give life. No life. No art.”

  When he drew, Maestro Ottaviani’s eyes seemed filled with light. With a few, quick strokes he reproduced not only the forms on the table, but also something more, something Willa was learning to notice. While he imparted to her the nature of line, value, and hue, Maestro Ottaviani confided to Willa other secrets as well.

  “Cara, you have the amore for l’arte Italiana,” he told her. “It means we share una fortuna,” a destiny, a fate. “I will show you my drawings.” Signor Ottaviani removed the charcoal stick from Willa’s hands and gazed at her. “They are…how you say in English…molto personale.” Very personal. The moment hung between them, until, with a slight shrug suggestive perhaps of the futility of love and beauty, Maestro Ottaviani opened a black portfolio and took out his drawings of a famous soprano, who was popularly known in Italy as La Voce. “In my desegni,” he said, “I show my experience of l’amore and la sofferenza,” love and suffering. He wiped a tear away. “She spurned me for a tenor.” He looked at Willa and smiled. “Now that you know everything, cara, you may call me Ottavio.”

  3

  Nearly two weeks after Willa’s party, Mr. Carver summoned his wife and daughter to the living room after the Sunday evening dinner. He closed the sliding doors into the front hallway, a sign that he intended to discuss an important matter, and sat down in his maroon-leather wing chair. With deliberate slowness, he took his pipe from the rack on the mahogany side table next to him. Mrs. Carver made herself comfortable on the chintz-covered couch and took up her needlepoint, a familiar gesture that signaled she was listening. Willa sat in the caned rocking chair, her feet planted firmly on the Aubusson rug. She and her mother waited while Mr. Carver covered the bowl of his pipe with his hand, blew through the stem, and then took several fingers-full of his favorite Mapleton tobacco and tamped it into the bowl. At last, he struck a long wooden match, lit the tobacco, and puffed several times. Satisfied, he turned to Willa.

  “I believe you received a proposal of marriage. Is that correct?”

  “Two.” Willa examined her fingernails closely, picking at a bit of skin near the middle fingernail of her left hand.

  “Two! Gracious me.” Mrs. Carver threaded a length of red yarn through the eye of a large, blunt needle. “Who was the second?”

  “At my party, Eddie and Chip both proposed to me,” Willa said. Mr. Carver puffed on his pipe.

  “You might have told us,” Mrs. Carver said, inserting her needle into the canvas picture of a large Christmas package with a red bow. “Lovely boys. Fine families. Good prospects, too. Both of them.” Willa recognized her mother’s tone as identical to the one she used when discussing pork chops with the butcher. “Which did you accept?”

  “Mmm.” Willa picked at the hangnail and bit the piece of skin off.

  “What was your response?” Mr. Carver said.

  “No.” Willa pulled her feet up and hugged her knees. “I said ‘no.’”

  “Because?”

  “My own prospects interest me more.”

  Mr. Carver exhaled slowly and lowered his pipe. “And these are?”

  “I’m going to be an artist…in Italy.” Willa unwound herself and settled in the rocker.

  Mr. Carver held his pipe in one hand and observed his daughter carefully. Mrs. Carver held her needle in the air like an exclamation point. “Italy? What about your reputation?”

  “The art schools in Firenze and Roma have fine reputations,” Willa said, emphasizing the Italian pronunciation of the names of the two cities.

  Mr. Carver sucked on his pipe. “I thought you said you planned to become a teacher, not a vagabond.”

  “I meant only if I were starving.” Willa shifted in the rocker again without finding a comfortable position,

  “If?” Mr. Carver gave Willa a severe look. “A young woman in a foreign country with no family, no husband, no connections, and no means of support is certain to starve. Likely worse.”

  “I’ll be fine, daddy.” Willa crossed her legs tailor-fashion. “Italy is a very good country for artists. Much better than here.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more of this, do you understand?” Mr. Carver said.

  “Daddy’s cousin’s daughter taught first grade and lived at home until she got married, and she’s perfectly happy,” Mrs. Carver said. “She paints in her spare time.” She smiled at Willa. “And what’s more, she’s going to have a baby.”

  Willa made a face. “Not that silly Janet?”

  “Please don’t take that attitude, dear. It’s unbecoming.” Mrs. Carver held her canvas up to the lamp. “How do you like it?”

  “Ruth!”

  Mrs. Carver paused with her needlework and looked at her husband. “I am listening, Howard.”

  “If
this is some idea you’ve gotten from that Ottaviani fellow…” Mr. Carver put his pipe down on the metal tray with a clang. “Ruth, did you check his references?”

  “You won’t find a better husband than either Chip or Eddie in all of Italy,” Mrs. Carver said, adjusting the stitches in the canvas with her needle. Willa studied her bare toes.

  “Maestro Ottaviani says I’m a true artist and that I must follow my gift.”

  “You tell Maestro Ottaviani that these are hard times for us as well as other people and that you’re going to get a job,” Mr. Carver said. “I’m not paying him real money to give you silly ideas.”

  Willa looked up, wounded.

  “Perhaps later, if you still want to go abroad and the economy gets better, we could think about another trip,” Mrs. Carver said. She brushed some pieces of yarn from her work. “Or you could go to Italy on your honeymoon. The museums are excellent.” Mr. Carver grunted and emptied his pipe, filling the room with a sweet-smelling odor of just-burned tobacco that would turn acrid by morning if Mrs. Carver forgot to wash his ashtray.

  Willa felt as if her dreams were being stolen from her. “You mean you won’t pay for my lessons, then?” She began to cry.

  “I won’t pay for someone to fill your head with this nonsense,” Mr. Carver said.

  “But daddy, I have a real future as an artist. Don’t you believe in me?” Before he could answer, she rushed from the room, leaving the door open behind her.

  Willa found work first as a babysitter, then as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, and finally as a salesclerk at Reynard’s Department Store. At each, she was found sketching when she should have prevented a child from wandering into a pond, when she should have kept track of patients’ appointments, when she should have been attentive to the correct change for twenty dollars. Asked why she had been fired from these legitimate jobs, Willa explained that she had been thinking about a drawing or a painting she was working on. Meanwhile, she continued her lessons with Maestro Ottaviani under a new and secret arrangement in which they bartered his teaching her drawing, painting and Italian in exchange for her teaching him English. Alone in her room, she memorized Italian verses by Leopardi from a book Maestro Ottaviani had given her just as Italian students learned them in school. Maestro Ottaviani had also given her a copy of Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, The Betrothed, inscribed with a declaration of his love.

  A week later, when Mr. Carver came home from work, he heard Willa reciting Leopardi aloud. “What’s that you’re saying?”

  “Poetry, daddy.” She sighed. “Did you know that Leopardi is the greatest Italian poet since Dante?”

  “No, but I think I know where you can get a job as a secretary.”

  Willa thought of the series of paintings she was working on, how very much she wanted to finish them. Stopping her work seemed to her akin to giving up on life, but she knew it was better not to mention her work just then, especially not in a way that sounded like what her father called “melodramatic.”

  That same evening as they were preparing dinner, Mrs. Carver said to Willa, “When I was your age, we didn’t do just as we pleased. We were grateful for whatever our parents could do and we did for ourselves.” Willa knew the rest.

  “But I do help you and daddy,” she said, her voice edged with irritation as she jerked a drawer open and took out a peeler. There was a brief silence before she began peeling the pile of carrots that lay on the counter. “Wasn’t there ever anything you ever really wanted to do?”

  “I wanted to marry your father,” Mrs. Carver replied as she shelled peas.

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  Mrs. Carver wiped her hands on her apron. She seemed to glow at the memory. “When I was your age…no, younger…I wanted to be on the stage. A great actress. You probably can’t imagine me doing such a thing.”

  Willa stopped peeling and looked at her mother. “No, I can’t.”

  “In my day, respectable girls didn’t go off alone and join the theater,” Mrs. Carver continued.

  Willa ran the peeler the length of a carrot letting the skin drop onto the counter. “Why didn’t you go anyway?”

  “I preferred the local productions—musicals and such.” A distant look crossed Mrs. Carver’s face. “This one evening–we had just done A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Pavilion—after we took our bows, a handsome young man stood up and handed me an armful of red roses. I had noticed him before because he sat in the front row at every performance. He followed me all the way backstage. ‘My name is Herbert,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to marry you.’ Just like that. I still remember that moment every time I smell roses. He said that first he had to go away on an important business matter…I remember this clearly…and that he would write to me. He made me promise to wait for him. All that summer we exchanged letters, and then in the last letter he said he had completed his business and that he would be coming back for me just as he’d promised.”

  “But he didn’t.” Willa said. She laid the peeled carrots in a line like fallen soldiers.

  “Many years later after my parents died, I learned that he had continued to write to me. I found several of his letters in my father’s desk drawer. The letters were addressed to me and they had been opened. He wrote that he was now certain that he could make his fortune and asked me to go away with him. ‘Now I can give you everything you could want.’ That’s what the last letter said.”

  “Don’t you wonder…about going with him, I mean?”

  “Life is what really happens to us, dear. It’s just a memory. Besides, I’m very happy, probably happier than I would have been with him. Think of it this way: if Herbert had come back, you and your brother would never have been born.”

  That summer Mr. and Mrs. Carver continued to nibble at Willa’s artistic ambitions like moths in a wool coat, and Willa continued to refuse the invitations from young men Ruth Carver considered “perfectly suitable,” unconcerned that she might fulfill her mother’s prediction of permanent spinsterhood. Mrs. Carver often reminded Willa that art “is a pleasure that leads to poverty.” At Willa’s insistence, the Carvers attended a traveling art exhibition of “modern” paintings in Cleveland. Mr. Carver gazed at a Toulouse Lautrec for several minutes and then said to Willa, “Clearly, an artist’s life is squalid and erratic. Artists are almost never recognized before they die, so they can’t make a living. And it says right here that Lautrec was independently wealthy. And a hunchback.”

  “They’re always men, too,” Mrs. Carver added. “You’d have no one to talk to.”

  Willa saw something different in Lautrec, namely, an escape from the constraints of Erhart, and she decided that escape must be her subject, her art, her life’s work. Under Maestro Ottaviani’s tutelage, she produced increasingly abstract works in which the viewer could identify disconnected body parts—principally breasts and penises—in a maelstrom of sweeping colors. She began to paint at night in the studio she had arranged in the unfinished attic, feverish images of monkey spirits dressed in orange shirts and rising out of peacefully sleeping bodies, of cars toppling off bridges into roiling waters, and of coffins both empty and full.

  “Do you paint like that because you’re crazy,” Roy, her brother, asked one evening at dinner, “or because you can’t paint very well?”

  “I paint what I feel,” Willa replied without looking at him. “

  She’s using her imagination, honey,” Ruth Carver added.

  “In that case, she should imagine a real job,” Mr. Carver said, “because she must have one by two weeks from today.”

  “Perhaps it’s time for a checkup, too,” Mrs. Carver said. She had consulted among her friends, mothers of more predictable daughters, and these conversations, Willa knew, produced in her mother an intense, unremitting anxiety. The next morning, Willa went straight to Maestro Ottaviani’s studio.

  “They want me to stop painting,” Willa sobbed into Maestro Ottaviani’s sympathetic embrace. That very day, Maestro Ottaviani re
quested a meeting with Mr. Carver. When the two men met, he asked for Willa’s hand in marriage, suggested that his request was a mere formality, and then inquired about the status of Willa’s dowry. Mr. Carver asked for time to consider his proposal.

  “What did he say, daddy?” Willa asked after the meeting.

  “Let’s just say that the amount of your dowry was foremost in his mind.”

  “It’s just an Italian custom, daddy.”

  “He’s impecunious.”

  “He’s an artist.”

  “Whatever he is, he’s unsuitable. I think it’s time we settled you somewhere that you can study art if that’s what you want. Get it out of your system.”

  Seldom does the answer to an urgent question present itself as though the gods had been listening and immediately dispatched their special envoy, but, in fact, that is exactly what happened. The following week, Lily Handel, the wife of Mr. Carver’s law partner, invited the Carvers to meet her cousin, Isabella Farnese. Because she was well connected in artistic circles in Florence, Signora Farnese had been invited to speak on the subject of “Italian Art Yesterday and Today” at the annual Women’s League luncheon at the Pavilion, a benefit for needy families. Her accent reflected her American upbringing, but her ochre silk skirt and gauzy blouse with patterns reminiscent of the markings of a tabby cat, her paisley shawl drawn aside to reveal finely wrought gold jewelry, and her exquisite leather shoes were entirely Florentine. Willa imagined the Signora’s daily life as one of Byzantine magnificence and frequent changes of clothing.