They chatted and taught each other expressions in Italian and English as they drove south, each laughing at the other’s mistakes. Gregorio said they could not even consider leaving Italy without seeing the leaning tower, so he made a stop in Pisa, where he borrowed Iris’s camera to take a picture of her and Auntie Rosa standing on the lawn of the Piazza dei Miracoli, posed so that it would look like they were holding up the tower with their arms. Then they went on to Florence, where she stood speechless in front of the copy of Michelangelo’s David, in Piazza della Signoria, which was even more impressive than she had imagined, and strolled over the Arno river on the Ponte Vecchio. She fell in love with the brightly dyed kid gloves displayed in a shop window, and couldn’t resist buying a red pair for herself, and a purple pair for Lily. The gloves were stunning, though Iris realized they would offer little insulation against the frigid winter temperatures of upstate New York. Frivolous accessories were not something to which Iris or Lily were accustomed, but maybe the time had come for them to learn to enjoy something for its useless beauty.
Gregorio, who refused to let the women pay for any of their meals or accommodations, treated them to pizzas for dinner and one last gelato in Santa Marinella where they would spend their last night, to be close to the airport. They strolled back to their pensione slowly, arms locked in a threesome, with Auntie Rosa in the middle. As they were walking, Iris felt a nudge in her ribs, as Auntie Rosa said in a perfectly audible whisper, “Let me tell you, if I had met a doctor like Gregorio back when I was in nursing school, I certainly might have considered settling down! Mamma mia!”
Gregorio smiled and said, “I’m sure those surgeons had a hard time concentrating on what they were doing, with your big brown eyes watching them over your mask!”
“Ha! They did used to compliment me, but I was always too busy to listen. And now it’s too late. Remember, kids, it’s later than you think.” She sighed, then added, “We Capotostis all have the occhi dell’amore! Iris has them, too, only green. Look at Gregorio, Iris. Show him those Capotosti eyes!”
Iris looked at the ground, then over Auntie Rosa’s head at Gregorio.
“It’s true,” he said. She blushed, and glanced away. “The eyes of love.”
They entered the pensione, and Auntie Rosa kissed Gregorio on both cheeks. “Thank you for the dinner, Gregorio,” she said, still grasping Iris’s arm. “Grazie. For everything. Buona notte e buon riposo.”
“You sleep well, too,” he replied.
“Good night, Gregorio,” Iris said. “Grazie!”
“The pleasure is mine, Iris. Sogni d’oro, fiorellino mio,” he replied, kissing her on both cheeks.
Iris blushed an even deeper shade of red, as Auntie Rosa ushered her down the corridor to the room they were sharing. “Did you hear that? ‘My little flower,’ that’s what he called you!” she said, giggling like a teenager.
“How sweet,” said Iris, looking over her shoulder. Gregorio still stood where they had left him. He blew her a kiss on two fingers and nodded.
“When you will arrive home, perhaps you will find a letter waiting for you,” Gregorio whispered in her ear after she and Auntie Rosa had checked in for their flight.
“A letter? From you?” Iris said. How did he know she loved letters? “What will the letter say?”
“You will see. And you will write to me what you will think, va bene?”
Instead of waiting for an answer, he bent to kiss her on her cheeks. Iris could never remember if it was the left cheek first, or the right, and what with all her false moves, first in one direction, then the other, her lips ended up directly in front of his, touched by his, kissed by his. She shied, embarrassed by her clumsiness, her cheeks burning and her lips tingling from the tickle of his whiskers, then glanced at Auntie Rosa, who was pretending to be preoccupied with checking their boarding passes and passports. Gregorio smiled, then opened his arms for a farewell hug. She stepped toward him, and let him cradle her for a moment in a gentle embrace. His body felt solid and reassuring against hers; there was none of that horny pressing she loathed in guys her age. She liked his clean, masculine scent, which reminded her of the last espresso they had just shared and the pipe he had puffed on earlier. She stood still but stiff, with her ear resting against his chest, and thought that if she didn’t have a plane to catch, she might very well have enjoyed standing like that for a bit, feeling the steady beating of his heart which both provoked and soothed the agitation coursing through her body.
Then she was doing as she was told: proceeding to her gate and boarding her plane and stowing her belongings and buckling her seat belt and studying the instructions on a plastic card she had extracted from between an airsick bag and a glossy magazine in the seat pocket in front of her. The JFK-bound jumbo jet lumbered down the runway, gaining momentum until it finally hoisted itself into the air. Auntie Rosa, sitting next to her, made the sign of the cross. Iris followed her example, then pressed her forehead against the window, hoping the vibrations would go straight to her brain, and rattle her jumbled thoughts into place. Puffy clouds teased her with a game of peek-a-boo, alternately confiscating and surrendering the views of the contours and colors of the land and sea that receded into the distance as the plane banked and climbed, banked and climbed.
She reflected on how things which just days ago had seemed so foreign to her had already acquired a flavor of familiarity, and how the previously familiar now seemed part of another, remote world. She could hardly bring into focus the last image she had of Lily from the rearview mirror of her father’s car, lugging the garbage can she had sent rolling down the driveway as she drove away with her heart in her throat. Or of her mother’s face flushed with misplaced zealotry as she criticized Iris for the way she let her father and Auntie Rosa treat her, without ever sparing a word to thank her for looking after her youngest boys. Or of herself standing at the kitchen sink, staring at the Russian olive tree as she washed the supper dishes. Now she was going back there, she had no choice, but she knew the next time she looked out the window at that tree, its silvery leaves would remind her of the olive groves that dappled the hillsides of Tuscany and Liguria. She would tell the tree to bend closer, and she would whisper to it that she had found confirmation of what she had suspected all along: that they were both from the wrong family, both planted in the wrong place.
Iris was lugging her suitcases through the door, wondering how people who traveled adjusted to the reality of homecoming, when her jet lagged eyes were flagged down by an air mail envelope waving at her from the mail holder nailed to the kitchen wall. After all she had experienced abroad on the first real vacation of her life, the hope of finding a letter from Peter was one of the few things that made her want to walk into the house at all. The last time she had heard from him, she was still in Buffalo, and when she spotted the envelope, she was impressed that despite his chronic distraction, he had remembered to send the letter to Chestnut Crest, and not to her college dorm. He must have received some of her postcards already, and must be dying to know more about her trip. Maybe he would want to go to Italy someday, too. Maybe together, who could tell? She dropped her suitcases with a thud, shook the tension from her fingers, and reached for the envelope. She was intrigued to see that the handwriting was not Peter’s at all, and when she saw the Via Aerea stamp and the Genova Centrale postmark, she realized the letter must be from Gregorio. He had written, just as promised. She wondered how the heck the letter had beat her home.
Iris was anxious to read what he had been in such a rush to write her about, but resisted tearing the letter open on the spot. She wanted to settle in first, get her bearings, savor the fluttering feeling of curiosity mixed with anticipation. Lord knew there wouldn’t be much of that around here in the coming weeks. She sighed as she glanced around the kitchen where she would spend the summer evenings after work making dinner and cleaning up after her father and brothers. She realized how much she had enjoyed Gregorio’s chivalrous pampering: not once did he a
llow her to open a door, pay for an ice cream, or lift luggage. Maybe it was time her family started treating her like a lady, too, now that she had been to college and to Europe. Let one of them carry her suitcases to her room, she thought, leaving the bags by the door, and rushing upstairs before the unfamiliar feeling of expecting something from someone could abandon her.
The bed springs squeaked a tired welcome in the empty room, as Iris plopped down on the mattress, exhausted from twenty-four hours of travel, between flights and layovers. She ran her fingers over the Italian envelope in her hands, turning it over to examine it more closely, and found another thin air mail envelope stuck to the back flap; this one bore the unmistakable handwriting and overseas address of Peter Ponzio. Uplifted by the prospect of reading not one, but two letters, both from men overseas, Iris pulled herself up in the bed, scrunched up the pillow behind her back, and decided to open the letter from Peter first. She was surprised by the unusual amount of flattery directed toward her as she read through the run-on sentences of the first three poorly defined paragraphs whose sole purpose appeared to be the extolment of her beauty and virtues. The page was filled with so many compliments, that by the time Iris flipped it over to read the back (while nonetheless being irritated by his deplorable habit of scribbling on both sides of the cheap air mail paper he used), she was instinctively steeling herself for a “but.” She was not disappointed.
Peter (he wrote), was only human, and a pretty dumb one at that. He didn’t deserve someone as nice and pretty and smart and etc. etc. as Iris, who was obviously moving on, going to college, traveling to Italy, and who was he to hold her back? That realization had made him feel sad, and lonely, just like the girl from Liverpool he had met in a local pub, whose boyfriend had dumped her just two months after taking a job in London. He was confused (he wrote) and Iris’s letters only made it harder on him. He thought it best if she stopped writing for now, and maybe he would be more clear-headed when he came home for Christmas.
In his illiterate, incoherent way, Peter was breaking up with her. As her eyes automatically filled with tears, her father called up the stairs, inviting her to come down and have a cup of coffee with him and tell him all about her trip, but all Iris wanted was to be left alone to sort out her head and unpack the suitcases no one had brought up yet, then take a long, hot bath. The thought of her father catching her sniveling over a guy again and trying to console her, like he had when Rick Rotula dumped her, was enough to dry her tears, at least for now. She went downstairs to get the chat and coffee over with, feeling bad that she was not more excited to talk to her father.
“This here came in the mail,” he said, pointing to an envelope sitting next to the coffee cup he was filling for her. “I set it aside for you.”
“Thanks.” Iris took a sip of the steaming coffee, deciding that after developing a taste for espresso, she would start drinking it black. She picked up the letter, her hands shaking slightly when she saw it came from her university. “Must be my grades.” She looked at her father, as she sat on his bench and stirred evaporated milk into his coffee. Ripping the envelope open, she scanned the slip of paper inside.
“3.75!” she gasped. She had not botched her Chemistry final as badly as she had feared. With grades like that, she’d be able to get into any department, provided she ever managed to decide what course of study to follow.
““I’m not surprised,” her father said. “You always were smart.” He took a sip of coffee, lit a cigarette. “Now tell me about your trip.”
“That means I made the Dean’s List, Dad!” A surge of pride made Iris’s hands tremble. She placed the slip on the table, for her father to see.
“Can’t see much without my reading glasses,” he said. “So what did you see over in the Old Country? Who did your Auntie Rosa introduce you to?”
Iris wasn’t ready to talk about her trip yet. Her college life had seemed so far away, her relationship with Peter Ponzio so childish, while she was in Italy, being whisked here and there by Gregorio. All these letters were encroaching on the fresh thoughts and impressions she still had to metabolize before she could put them into words. She needed to catch up with herself, before she could update anyone else.
“I’m really beat, Dad,” she said. “And tomorrow is my first day of work.” But as soon she saw the disappointed look in her father’s eyes, she felt guilty for not wanting to sit and talk. Without her or Auntie Rosa around, he had probably been starving for a friendly ear at the end of the day. “Listen,” she said. “I learned a few fantastic recipes while I was over there. How about we invite Auntie Rosa and Uncle Alfred over for dinner tomorrow? I can make us a nice spaghetti dinner. Who cares if it’s not Sunday. In Italy, they eat pasta every day. Even twice a day.”
“All right, then. It’s a deal,” her father said. He took a long drag on his cigarette, exhaling the smoke in rings that floated to the ceiling.
Iris stood, poured the rest of her coffee down the drain, and rinsed out her cup, pausing a moment to stare at the Russian olive tree. She went to pick up the suitcases that still stood by the door.
“Let me give you a hand with those,” her father said, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray, and grabbing one of the suitcases.
“Thanks,” Iris said.
When they reached her bedroom and set the suitcases down, she pecked her father on the cheek. He wished her a good night, but when she closed the door, there was something in the way he looked at her that made her feel sorry for him. His anger seemed to have abandoned him, leaving him alone with his hurt and loss. She wondered how long it would last.
Finally alone, she retrieved the pack of letters from Peter which she had stashed in Lily’s ex underwear drawer, and proceeded with the farewell ceremony she knew she must perform. Sitting cross-legged on her bed, she opened the letters one by one, in the order in which they had been written. Tears trickled down her cheeks as she recalled exactly where and when she had been the first time she had read each letter, and how it had made her feel. Though she had indulged in the habit of picking out some of her favorites and rereading them from time to time, she had never read through so many letters at one sitting, and her pangs of hurt were gradually blunted by page after page of uninteresting, barely legible script. By the twenty-forth letter, she had grown utterly annoyed with Peter’s sloppy handwriting and total disrespect for the most basic rules of grammar and punctuation. But it was another revelation which came to her for the first time that made her stop reading. Iris realized that the unarticulated feelings she had freely extrapolated from Peter’s words, and coaxed from between the lines he wrote were, for the most part, absent. Confused and angry with herself, she blew her nose, and picked up the letter from Gregorio.
Sniffing the envelope with her eyelids half-closed, Iris could swear she detected the same scent of tobacco mixed with espresso mixed with floor wax mixed with sea breeze she recalled from Gregorio’s house. She slid her finger under the flap, opened the envelope, and extracted three neatly creased sheets of white onionskin paper of the highest quality texture and cockle finish. She checked the date at the upper right-hand corner of the letter; the month and day were inverted, continental style, and she noted with surprise that it had been written the very day Gregorio had come to meet her and Auntie Rosa at the train station. Iris scanned the pages in her hand for a clue, an impression, a premonition, before reading the words. The irregular thickness of the elongated, upright letters suggested that Gregorio had probably used the antique gold fountain pen that had belonged to his father. Iris loved pens, and had spotted it right away, in its fancy holder on the writing desk in the study, when Isabella had shown her and Auntie Rosa around the apartment. The scene had made Iris fantasize about how lovely it would be to have a room just for study, and a writing desk, or at least a table and chair of her own.
Fingering the letter, she pictured Gregorio the evening they had first met, after dinner, after everyone else had gone to bed, stroking his goatee as he paced
back and forth in the balcony. Waving the sheets of translucent paper in front of her nose, she could smell the tobacco in the little leather pouch she had sniffed for the first time that day in Portofino; she could see him pluck tiny pinches of it using his thumb and first two fingers, and sprinkle them into the bowl of his pipe; she could observe the precision in his movements as he pressed down the tobacco with a little silver tool made specifically for the purpose; she could see the little clouds of smoke billowing from the pipe as he held a wooden match to the bowl. She wondered what musings might have been meandering through his mind as he puffed and paced and stroked, perhaps glancing down at the ships in the harbor, or across to the lights along the coast, or up at the stars and moon in the patch of velvety sky left unencumbered by the elegant palazzos of the respectable Genoese neighborhood perched above the city. She imagined those thoughts, whatever they might have been, prompting him to shuffle silently to the study, careful not to disturb the ladies’ sleep, in the padded felt slippers he and his mother wore around the house to polish the marble floors as they walked. She imagined him sitting, with a burgeoning sense of purpose, at the mahogany desk, taking a sheet of paper from its drawer, carefully setting his pipe in the brass nautical style ashtray so as not to spill its contents, unscrewing the lid from a bottle of India ink, dipping in the tip of the antique pen.
His cursive was fascinating to Iris’s eyes, but not simple to decipher. She did not attribute this to sloppiness, but to a European method of penmanship, as well as to Gregorio’s profession: illegible handwriting was quite possibly a trademark of physicians all across the globe. Iris did not mind the challenge, reasoning that it would prolong the joy of reading.
After the Italian greeting “Cara Iris,” Gregorio switched to English. The introductory paragraph informed her of his surprise and delight at having such a lovely young woman as a house guest, making Iris smile while impressing her with the impeccable structure of his sentences and the exactitude of his spelling and punctuation. She wondered how long it must have taken him to fill three full pages (front side only), how many times he must have stopped writing to search his vocabulary or consult a dictionary for the proper words with which to convey his thoughts. Not one word was crossed out in confusion, smudged with hesitation, or smeared with haste.
[Iris and Lily 01.0 - 03.0] The Complete Series Page 54