“So many presents,” I said. “When is your daughter’s birthday?” There was a silence. He seemed uncertain of the answer. Wouldn’t a real father know when his daughter’s birthday is? Perhaps he just forgot, the way papà often forgets how old I am.
Losine cleared his throat and coughed, as if he had something important to say. “I won’t ask you to try all of these clothes on again, but,” he said clearing his throat, “tonight would you wear the green dress for dinner? It would please me very much to see how it looks now that it has been altered.” I thought this request was as peculiar as those he had already made, but what reason could I give for refusing to try on one dress? It was small thing and it seemed to be so very important to him.
The zipper on the dress was invisible when it was fully closed. Doubts crossed my mind: What if Michel Losine doesn’t really have a daughter? What if he has another reason for buying these clothes? The dress flowed gently over my body. I felt as if I belonged to it, as if it possessed me. I reached toward my suitcase to touch my own clothes, the clothes from my real life, the life that was slipping away from me.
Losine smiled when he saw me. “Lovely.” He wheeled me into the dining room and helped me into a chair. I spread a white linen napkin over my lap, and Losine sat down across from me. “I have something to show you,” he said. “Close your eyes and hold out your hand.” I complied, but kept my eyelids slightly open so I could watch what he was doing. In my palm he put something soft, slightly textured, with a tender surface. “You may look now.” The small, grey suede pouch was tied with a yellow satin ribbon. “Open it.” Inside, I found a pair of gold earrings, two small circles of pearls and diamonds surrounding a large emerald. A thin, gold chain hung from the pouch. I pulled out a matching pendant. “Try them on.” His hand shook as he took out a cigarette.
“Are these for your daughter’s birthday, too?”
Losine raised his hand to still my questions. “I know it’s a nuisance, but, please, if you wouldn’t mind very much, may I see how the pendant looks without your corno?” I thought about Grazia’s warning and about Bruno. I’ll put the corno back on as soon as he sees the necklace. It will be right here next to me. “I assure you this will be my last request,” Losine said.
“Just for a few minutes.” I put on the earrings and the pendant. Losine looked at me, but he saw someone else.
“You remind me very much of Willa.” It was the first time he had mentioned mamma’s name. “Would you like to keep them?”
“No!” I was frightened. “No, thank you.” Arrangements. Clothes. Jewelry. I felt like a fairy tale princess locked in a tower of secrets. Grazia was right. The secrets of the dead are sfortunati. I wished that I had burned the letters before papà found them. I took off the earrings and held them out to Losine. “I have no place to wear these. Please. Your daughter should have them or someone else who will enjoy them.” Losine remained where he was, his hands in his lap. I put the earrings back in the pouch and set the pouch on the table between us, forgetting that I was still wearing the pendant. “They’re too much.”
He looked at me steadily. “Accepting a gift would make you feel obligated,” he said softly, “and you don’t want to feel obligated. Is that right?” My fears seemed selfish and hurtful.
“Grazia always says, ‘Things betray you into keeping them. Later, they simply betray you.’”
“Your Grazia takes an unnecessarily dark view.” Losine took out another cigarette. With trembling hands, he lit it, and inhaled. “Could you not simply enjoy beautiful things for the pleasure they give?”
“Not these.” I didn’t want to be alone with him any longer. If only Joey were here.
“Consider this: You’ve given me a great deal of help today, and I am the one who is obligated to you. Wouldn’t that make us even?” I moved the pouch closer to him. He left it on the table between us.
“I can’t stay here,” I said. I pushed myself away from the table. “I want to leave.”
“Very well, but please do try some scampi first,” he replied lightly. He filled my glass with wine. “It’s best at the moment it’s ready.” He seemed to be laughing and serious at once. “Such a simple antipasto wouldn’t burden you with too weighty an obligation, would it?” I felt very young and uncertain. Disoriented. He went to the kitchen. When he returned, he put a portion of the scampi on my plate, then sat down and raised his glass. “As my father used to say, ‘May your health and convictions outlast your compromises.’” His eyelids fluttered, as if he were casting a spell.
I returned his toast with unsteady hands. When I tried to eat, my fork tapped against the plate, and the sauce dripped on the white tablecloth. I wiped the spot with my napkin.
“Never mind. It’s not important,” Losine said.
I spread the napkin on my lap once more and leaned over my plate. The scampi was very good. And so was the wine. I began to eat, oblivious to the quantity.
Losine put more scampi on my plate. “At least you like my cooking, even if you can’t accept my gift.” He refilled his own glass and nibbled at the single scampi on his fork. Turning it slightly, he contemplated the creature that he would soon devour. “Tell me, what made you decide to leave Orvieto?”
“I wanted to do things that I couldn’t do in Orvieto.” I pressed the white napkin to my lips. “And I want to live in a different place.”
“I see.” Losine nibbled another bit of scampi and chewed it slowly.
“Mostly, I didn’t want my father and Bruno to decide what I can be.” I didn’t know why I had revealed such private information about papà and Bruno. He makes it easy to say too much. I took another sip of wine. I must be more careful.
“So, you are a person who intends to make her own decisions.” Losine said this declaratively. Unambiguously. As though my decision was understandable and reasonable. It seemed to me the first time that anyone had heard me. My decision to leave Orvieto already seemed clearer. Right. I realized that there was something wounded about Losine, but also something kind. I understood why mamma had cared for him so much.
“Papà and Bruno said I was selfish for leaving. Do you think it’s selfish?” I said with my mouth full. I was hungrier than I had realized.
“Why would I object to your ambitions?” The Milanese really are different, I thought. Losine poured more wine into my glass. At that moment I was glad that I had eaten with gypsies, that I hadn’t changed my dress, and that I had met mamma’s amante.
“Mamma wanted me to go to university,” I said.
“Why was that, do you think?” He poured some water into my glass.
“I think she lost her dreams and didn’t want me to lose mine.” Losine nodded. I took the last bite of my scampi.
Losine touched the pouch with his fingertips and inhaled the way people do when they are going to talk about something that is important to them. “Tell me,” he said leaning closer, almost whispering, as if the subject did not bear his speaking of it aloud. “When did Willa die?”
I wasn’t sure that he had even asked the question. Did I imagine it? He must have asked. Otherwise, why would I consider telling him when mamma died?
“In August.”
“Recently, then.” He was quiet. He seemed almost naked, as if he had dropped a disguise. He looked down at his hands and back at me. “Yes, very well. Under the circumstances, it is extremely kind of you to have agreed to try on the earrings.” He ran his fingers over the pouch. “Still, I can’t help but feel these should be yours. Would you do me the kindness of putting them on again so I could see them once more?” At that moment I wished only to escape from his palpable and overwhelming sorrow, from his boundless grief. I think I would have done anything to get away from it, and I did do something that was cruel and that I’m ashamed of: I changed the subject to something tangential, irrelevant, as if I hadn’t understand the real meaning of his request and the need that prompted it.
“After university I’m going to marry my fiancé,” I sa
id. “We’ll live in Orvieto and run my family’s business. We’re going to have our own family, so I wouldn’t wear them.” I reached for my wine glass. “Anyway, you promised you’d make no more requests.”
“But didn’t you just say you were not going back to Orvieto?”
Against my will, my eyes filled with tears. “Why did you say that?”
“I believe it was you who said you wanted to leave Orvieto, and just now you said you intended to go back.” I tried not to cry. “Will you do both?” Tears fell onto the dress.
Losine came to my side. “What upsets you so much?”
“Bruno left me.” Losine came and put his arms around me and held me gently. “After we were lovers…in Firenze. He wouldn’t tell me why, and I don’t know.”
Losine kissed my bruised temple. “You believe that it was your fault?”
“Yes. It seemed very right at the time, but now I don’t know.” Losine handed me his handkerchief.
“Sometimes,” he said, “a young man is inexperienced and doesn’t know how to treat the woman he loves.” I looked up at him. “He feels an urgency to make love, but then he doesn’t know what to do after that, so he feels weak and uncertain. He becomes frightened and so he runs away. It takes time to learn to be un’amante.” He continued to hold my hand.
“Experienced lovers don’t do that?”
“It’s unkind, but understandable. Love is often very frightening.” Gilda and the Duke? Were they frightened? Losine leaned back slightly and waited, holding my hand in his. I looked at his hand, trying to center my thoughts: the raised veins running across the tendons toward his fingers; the thin, almost flat, gold watch on his wrist; the minute stitching of the monogrammed French cuff of his shirt; the initials on his gold cufflink: GBL. GBL? Does he have more than one name?
“Would you like to have your dinner now? I’ve made veal chops. Dessert will be a surprise. Do you like surprises?”
“No. I want to know what’s happening.”
“But you must like surprises or you wouldn’t have left Orvieto.” He was right again. I began to trust him. He went into the kitchen. I looked down at my plate: delicate, blue porcelain bordered in silver. Losine returned with a platter and served me a veal chop. I cut it with my fork and took a bite. To this day I remember its exquisite taste. I took another bite.
“Why aren’t the initials on your cufflinks yours?” I said after I had drunk some more wine.
He inhaled deeply. “They’re made from gold buttons on a jacket that belonged to my wife, Greta. The initials are hers.”
I set my fork down. “You didn’t say you had a wife. Where is she?”
“On the contrary, I said that my wife is dead.” His pale eyes reminded me of shattered china.
“What happened to her?” I was afraid he would tell me.
“This isn’t the right time for a difficult story.”
Are those your wife’s dresses in the armadio?” I reached for the pouch. “And this jewelry—did it belong to your wife, too?” He didn’t answer. I took off the pendant and turned it over. On the back I saw the inscription, a W and an M entwined.
“Yes. They were Willa’s,” he said.
“Is that why you’re trying to give them to me?”
He looked away for a moment and was quiet. He spoke softly. “Fina, those who can’t bear their memories must be forgiven if they sometimes try to make new ones just so they can go on.”
“I read your letters, if that’s what you want to know.”
He looked anxious. “Did you bring them?”
I glanced at the fireplace and made my decision: I would betray papà. “Only one,” I said. “Papà burned the rest.” There, I had told mamma’s amante about papà, something I had no right to tell him, something he had no right to know. Not from me.
Losine remained silent for a time. “So, that’s all that’s left.”
“Of what?”
He gestured toward the wall where the painting of the fish hung. “Willa gave me this painting for my birthday the last time we were together. We both loved it. She was very ill. She had come here to see a specialist. We found out that she—we—had very little time.” He stood up. “I want to show you something.” He helped me into the wheelchair, and pushed it into the room where I had slept. He threw open the doors of the armadio, touched the clothes, buried his face in the dresses. “These belonged to Willa.” He wheeled me over to the paintings of the garden and pointed to the initials in the corners: WCM, ’48. I hadn’t noticed them. “Willa painted these when we planned the garden,” Losine said. “They’re paintings of what we both wanted. Full of our hopes for the garden and more.” He wheeled me outside onto the terrace. “You can see that I had it built exactly as she painted it.” He pushed my wheelchair into his bedroom. The door to a large mahagony cupboard had been left open; inside, were stacks of perfectly folded shirts. He stopped next to a bureau. On it were two silver-framed pictures. “My wife, Greta. Our son, Paul. Before the War.” He spoke their names as though they were prayers and then answered a question I hadn’t asked: “They died in the camps.”
He handed me the second photograph. “Willa brought you here several times when you were very young. I doubt you’d remember.” He pointed to the picture. “Here you are with your mother outside on the terrace the day we first talked about the garden.” It was as if he were begging me to acknowledge them, their relationship, their affair, to say that it mattered, to say that I accepted it. He wanted me to make it real, witness it, share it with him. I looked at the photograph of mamma and me standing together, mamma wearing a suit, I in my best dress, holding her hand, but I only remembered mamma’s hat, the red one with the black veil.
“She looks happy,” I said. Losine took a faded photograph from his wallet.
“Willa took this picture that same day. I think you were about two years old. I’ve always kept it with me.” In the photograph, Losine held me in his arms. We were laughing and waving at the camera. “We were very happy because that day we were together. A real family,” Losine said. I looked up from the photograph at our reflections in the mirror. The resemblance was clear, pentimenti of truths untold. I recognized a familiar feeling, something that flickered just beyond my consciousness and left me with an uneasy feeling of not being fully in possession of myself.
“And I am your daughter who lives someplace else.” I understood: this wasn’t a final errand for mamma’s sake. Instead, mamma had tried to send me home.
“Willa and I agreed that if you brought the letters, I would tell you. Are you sorry?” I hesitated, already aware of the changes that this knowledge would make in my life and in my memory of what had been real. If papà isn’t my father, how many other things that I’ve taken for truth are false, too? The truth contained just as many losses as the lies that had concealed it, made me someone who both existed and did not, a hostage to other people’s secrets. “Tell me, did I do the right thing?”
I felt for the corno. “My necklace….”
“You have another.” I understood his hope.
“My losses aren’t the same as yours. I can’t bring mamma back to you.”
“You’ve brought me even more than I could have wished for.”
“Does papà know?”
Losine sat down on his bed facing me. “At this point you are his daughter. Legally, you were his daughter when you were born. He was determined to make you his own so that Willa couldn’t leave him. He said that if Willa left, he would make sure we never saw you again.”
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
“That was almost twenty years ago, and circumstances were very different then. It was only a few years after the War. If I had tried to take you and Willa away—even to another country—Gabriele would have pursued us and revealed my whereabouts. I’m well known to the European authorities, and some…let’s just say that they would have welcomed any opportunity to make a case—any case—against me, and they would have succeeded. Gabriele k
new that. Monsignor Enrico was the only person who knew, the only one who could have given him the information. Willa and you and I would have always been exiles, moving from country to country, hiding, living under a constant threat of my arrest and of your being taken from us. You were innocent, yet the one most at risk, the one who would have suffered the most, had I been arrested. We didn’t want to subject you to such uncertainty. Secrecy seemed less damaging.”
“What about America?”
“It’s very difficult for a fugitive to emigrate to America. Gabriele would have exposed us, and Willa would have had no way to see you or Silvana or Raffaele until they were adults.”
“What kind of criminal are you?”
“I’m guilty of many things for which I could be prosecuted, but I’m the only one who can prosecute my real crimes. Have I violated the law? Let’s just say many of those same authorities have found it advantageous to themselves to have me do what I do for them. And they reward me very well for doing it. But I also know too much, and so they fear exposure. They wait and watch, aware of the danger I represent to them, and yet they are greedy for my help.”
I couldn’t be sure that what he said was true any more than I could be sure which of my two fathers was the real one: this father who gave us up—mamma and me—and waited to reveal himself to me? Or the father who pretended to be a real father and became what he had pretended? This father who lost his children or the father who stole another man’s child? And what of the secrecy that had kept me unknown to myself? What if the truths of our lives beg for consolation?
21
Losine arranged for Joey to go to school with me until my ankle healed. Each day Joey pushed my wheelchair and waited for me until my classes ended. Afterwards, we sat and talked until late in the afternoon. In the evenings, we ate dinner with Losine, and afterwards Joey played the piano while I studied. Our life together continued in this way even after I could walk again. We became a kind of family. A family of stranieri.
Of course, at that same time I was thinking about papà and how desperate he must have been to keep mamma from leaving him. I believed that papà had acted out of anguish and that he had carried on bravely in the face of doomed hopes and the certainty that his effort to keep mamma with him would ultimately fail. How much had it cost him to be reminded every day by my very presence that mamma had betrayed him? Despite the circumstances of my birth, he had been a loving father to me. Whatever his reasons had been and however wrong he was, papà had treated me as he would his own child. He had been the best father he could be to me. I believed that he loved me despite my origins. I still loved him and wanted us to be reconciled.
The Train to Orvieto Page 36