by Susan Shreve
On their first morning in Florence, the day they were to meet with Ferragamo, they walked down the stone steps of the pensione and across the courtyard, glancing up at the apartment where Signor and Signora del Santo were drinking their coffee on the balcony, the shutters of their living room open although the weather was quite cool.
They had taken a seat at a small table in the café across the courtyard when a sound came from the open window of the del Santos’ apartment.
“What a strange loon-like sound,” Margaret Hall said. “Like a child.”
“Whatever is making that noise, the del Santos are still sitting on the balcony acting as if it’s perfectly normal,” Franny said.
Margaret looked up.
“Maybe it’s their sick child.”
The day was sunny and blue, the courtyard bustling with children in brown uniforms on their way to school, the sounds of their high-pitched voices like birdcalls in the soft Florentine air.
A tall, slender man, maybe younger than a man but no longer a boy, came down the steps from the pensione and strode across the courtyard into the café, picked up a newspaper, and ordered a coffee. Close up, Franny guessed he was about eighteen, with straight black hair worn long, over his ears, and olive skin, high cheekbones, a seriousness about him. Franny watched him out of the corner of her eye. The second time the “loon” sound came from the del Santos’ open window, he glanced up and shook his head, saying something in Italian to the waiter, whom he seemed to know.
“Pretty boy,” Margaret Hall said, looking up from the fashion magazine she had taken from her satchel, always carrying the new issue of one or another fashion magazine.
Pretty boy was her mother’s term for handsome.
Margaret Hall sat at an angle, her legs crossed, her head turned in such a way that seemed posed, glancing at the young man.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“I’m thinking about that little girl,” Franny said.
“And the boy with a newspaper?” her mother said.
“Man with a newspaper.”
“No, he’s a boy worth thinking about!”
They ordered another coffee and biscuits, unaccustomed to such a small breakfast.
The boy uncrossed his legs, stretched them out in front so his feet touched the leg of Franny’s chair and she could no longer see his face, which was covered by the newspaper.
“I’m so glad you were willing to come with me, Franny,” Margaret was saying.
“As if you would have come without me?”
Her mother laughed.
“I wouldn’t have come at all, of course.”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings about this trip, Mama, but I came with you because I had told my friends at Easterbrook that I was coming,” Franny said. “That’s all. I am not particularly interested in the shoes.”
“Of course, darling,” Margaret said. “And I came because Signor Ferragamo is a gift who dropped in our laps from heaven.”
Franny shrugged.
She wasn’t thinking about shoes. She didn’t want sightseeing or conversations with Signor Salvatore Ferragamo. She didn’t want to go to dances in Easterbrook any more than she had ever wanted dances. If anything, she simply wished her mother had brought her to Italy for the fun of it. Just the fun of it.
But here they were sitting in a small café near an old hospital drinking very black and muddy coffee waiting for eleven o’clock.
“We’ll see Signor Ferragamo and then we’ll look around Florence and go to dinner and then back here.”
Margaret looked over at Franny, who had slid down in her chair and was sitting with her long hair more or less spread across her face like a scarf.
Although it was too late for a reversal of plans, Franny wondered, should she tell her mother that she had never wanted to have shoes made in the first place? That she hadn’t mentioned a desire for shoes, not even the ill-fated silver shoes stuffed with toilet paper? These choices all began with her mother’s longings and not her own.
She had come to Italy to escape the humiliations of high school. To be a girl, unlike every other girl at Easterbrook High, who got to go to Italy to have her shoes made. If only she could forget the part about the shoes.
When Franny got up to leave, the child — if it was a child — was making soft, irritable meows from the second floor of the pensione, and the del Santos were still sitting in the open window with their coffee as if it were a perfectly normal morning and the crying was music to their ears.
“I think I’m going back to my room to change.” Franny hoped the boy with a newspaper didn’t see her limp out of the café.
What else would he notice but her damaged leg and orthopedic shoes?
Another couple in the café had summoned a waitress and, pointing to the del Santos’ apartment, must have asked what was going on with the child.
The waitress shook her head, moving her hands back and forth to indicate “No, no, no,” she would not answer. It was none of their business.
Walking alone across the courtyard, stepping cautiously over the uneven cobblestones, Franny felt a sudden surge of independence.
She saw herself at a distance, alone in a strange city without the language to negotiate its streets, and at that small moment a sense of her own future was like the taste of honey on her tongue.
She could live in Florence in the del Santos’ pensione. She would find a way to befriend the boy in the café, maybe work in the café as a waitress.
Dear Eleanor, she would write to her cousin. I have decided to stay in Florence, tired of high school, tired of Easterbrook. But really I’m staying because I have a job and a new boyfriend and sometime I’ll probably come home, but I read in one of my mother’s magazines about a girl who went to Chile to live for a while and skipped high school and went straight to college. Hope you and Mikey are great. FH
Franny walked up the marble steps to the second floor of the apartment and knocked on the del Santos’ door, walking in without waiting for someone to answer. The child was crying still but softly with short gasps and Franny could tell that the sounds came from behind the closed door to the next room.
She went to her room, hung up two skirts in the narrow closet, crossed the hall to the bathroom, splashed water on her face, and put her hair in a soft bun on top of her head so her face looked thinner and older.
She said hello to the del Santos, now in the kitchen, Signora del Santo washing up, Signor del Santo ready to leave for work in his cap and jacket.
He smiled and Signora handed Franny a ripe brown and yellow pear.
“Sit,” Signora del Santo said, pointing to the kitchen table.
Franny sat on the edge of a wooden chair.
“Will I get to meet the baby?” Franny asked.
“Ana Maria seek.”
She pointed to her head to indicate the head was Ana Maria’s problem.
“Later maybe,” Franny said, “when I get back from my appointment.”
Signora del Santo smiled.
“Sì, sì,” she said. “Later, later …”
From the window of their bedroom, Franny watched her mother walk across the courtyard. She liked to watch her mother in high heels, more like an athlete than a model, although she looked prettier to Franny than the models in the magazines her mother loved to look at. She had a long stride, swinging her arms, her body like a dancer’s in its grace, and she walked quickly unless she was next to Franny, who could not move fast enough to keep up.
Halfway across the courtyard, Margaret Hall was talking to an older man in a suit, small, with gray curly hair, a newspaper under his arm. Franny couldn’t see his face.
Her mother reached in her purse, took out something, perhaps a map, and they looked at it together, speaking easily back and forth so he must have spoken English. Her mother touched his shoulder as they parted, waved upstairs probably to Signora del Santo, and Franny heard her high heels clicking along the ceramic tile floor of the de
l Santos’ apartment.
“Hello, darling.” She dropped her purse and the Italian fashion magazine on the bed. “We have to leave soon. It’s just after ten and I don’t know how long the walk to Ferragamo’s will take us.”
“Who was that man you were talking to?” Franny asked, dropping onto the bed, the exhaustion of travel overtaking her.
“Dr. Vincente.”
“Did he speak English?”
“A bit. He’s a doctor who knows the del Santos so I asked him about the child.” She pulled the sweater she was wearing over her head. “He told me she was injured from a fall out of the window, and she is deaf, so she doesn’t know the sounds she makes.” “Fell out of this apartment?”
“And onto the courtyard.” Her mother checked through the clothes still folded in her suitcase, taking out a navy blue double-breasted jacket. “And that boy with the newspaper, you know.”
“I remember,” Franny smiled.
“Well, he is Filippo, the del Santos’ nephew, so he lives here.”
She slipped out of her trousers and shook out a straight skirt.
“With us?”
She nodded.
“Signor Vincente showed me the directions to Ferragamo’s on the map. He said the shop is fancy so I’m changing to something dressier.”
“What about me?”
“You could wear the dress I got you, the jumper with my Chinese jacket that Uncle Douglas brought me the last time he was in China.”
“So she fell out of the window when?” Franny asked.
“Just after she learned to walk.”
“And how come they keep her in that room?”
“Signor Vincente says they are ashamed that she fell out the window,” Margaret said, slipping the pencil skirt over her head.
“Is that weird?”
“Not if you’re a parent, darling. You blame yourself.”
Franny changed to a thin wool herringbone jumper with a scooped neck, sleeveless, and she wore it with a blouse.
“Do you want any makeup?” her mother asked.
“You only have mascara.”
“I brought lipstick in case you wanted it.”
“This isn’t exactly a fashion show, is it?”
Franny had a picture in her mind of slender crepe-paper models, their arms raised above their heads, their bodies twisted like dancers, their shoes with twig-thin heels and sprinkled with jewels. A picture like the ones she’d seen in her mother’s stack of issues of Vogue magazine.
“Do you own any pairs of Ferragamo’s shoes?” Franny asked as they went down the marble stairs to the courtyard.
“Only movie stars own Ferragamo shoes in the United States.”
“Movie stars, models, and me,” Franny said. “This is crazy.”
Her mother laughed.
“Too late, darling. We’re committed.”
They walked across the courtyard and up the narrow streets to the Duomo, the green, white, and pink marble façade shimmering in the sunlight.
“Are we going in?” Franny asked.
“Later when we have more time,” her mother said, turning toward the Piazza Santa Maria Novella with its gothic church.
Franny slipped her arm through her mother’s to keep her balance on the cobblestone streets, and Margaret read from the guidebook she was following, pointing out this church and that palace as they walked by the old cemetery next to the basilica.
They headed toward the River Arno to the end of the Via de’ Tornabuoni, where the shop of Salvatore Ferragamo was located in the Palazzo Spini Feroni, a large palace bought by Ferragamo in 1938 after he left Hollywood and returned to Italy to set up shop in Florence.
Franny was struck by the way the women on the street were dressed, the boxy jackets and short skirts on the square-shaped women, high heels, no jewelry, little makeup. Always a scarf with the orange earth tones of the Florentine landscape as if these women were in uniform, but elegant in a way that Franny had never seen in Easterbrook except with her mother.
The palace was on the street with a very narrow sidewalk facing the river.
In order to gain access, Margaret Hall rang a doorbell and waited.
“Why would they have a doorbell to get into a store?” “It’s a specialty store.”
“A rich store?”
“An Italian store.”
The man who answered the door was small with an impressive hooked nose and very thin, wearing a gray suit that fit him like a glove, Margaret said.
“It’s way too tight,” Franny said later to her mother. “I could see everything as if he were naked, and when he sits down, it’ll rip in the seat.”
He introduced himself as Signor Strolla and did not extend his hand.
“We’re here to see Signor Salvatore Ferragamo,” Margaret said coolly, as if nothing in the grandeur fazed her as it did Franny. “I am Margaret Hall from the United States and Signor Ferragamo is expecting us.” She turned to Franny. “This is my daughter, Francine.”
“Yes,” Signor Strolla said. “Come in.”
He stepped aside.
The store was nothing like a shop or a city store, which was what Franny knew of glamorous in Cleveland, Ohio. It was more like a stage set. A very large room with marble floors, walls painted with frescoes of landscapes, a painting of a contemporary Madonna in a gold frame.
There were very few shoes. At least very few were on display. Four pairs, each arranged on its own pedestal built in the shape of a column. The furnishings were spare — a long, narrow wood table in the middle of the room, a pair of lavender shoes displayed next to a tall silver vase with a single white rose on a crimson scarf, a brown velvet couch with a curved back and carved wood with silk pillows, two on the couch, some on the floor. And high-back chairs in which elegant women were sitting dressed as if they were going to a tea dance or a funeral, or maybe the Halls had arrived in the middle of a play.
The room was hushed, almost soundless. “I’m bolting,” Franny whispered as the man in the tight suit scanned the room, looking just beyond the Halls as if they were not quite important enough to look at directly.
Her mother shot Franny a look that said, Too late to change your mind now! and Get hold of yourself and Don’t ruin this morning!
Franny considered the long walk on marble between the entrance door and the empty velvet chairs to which Signor Strolla gestured. Everyone in the room would stare at her when they heard the sound of her shoes on marble. They’d raise their eyebrows.
She was flushed with shame. Her heavy shoes, like the metal-shod hooves of a horse, clomped across the room, hammering the marble with every uneven step, like a rhinoceros, she said later to her mother, limping past the long, thin models and the movie stars with fleshy breasts.
“Please make yourself at ease.” Signor Strolla bowed slightly in his tight suit. “Signor Ferragamo will be here presently.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt more ugly in my lifetime of ugliness,” Franny whispered to her mother.
She sat down in a chair high off the ground with a curved springy velvet seat and arms, feeling square and uncomfortable.
She was in the process of turning into a freak. She could feel it happening inside out, feel herself growing wider and wider, her hips spreading until they fell Jell-O-like off the sides of the plushy chair. Her face was exploding in blemishes, her herringbone jumper with the puffy-sleeved blouse made her look like a bowl of mayonnaise. She could hear her hair frizz as if it had received an electrical shock, her eyebrows spread across her forehead forming a single thick black line over her eyes.
Any moment, the ocean of tears forming behind her eyeballs from sheer frustration and embarrassment was going to spill down her cheeks.
“Who are these people?” Franny asked. “It feels as if I’m the freak in a movie.”
Her mother leaned slightly forward so she wouldn’t need to raise her voice.
“The woman in gray,” her mother said close to her ear, “the one w
ith near shaved hair and that blanket which is supposed to be a coat, is probably modeling the alligator shoes she’s wearing for the movie stars sitting around the room waiting to see Signor Ferragamo.” She patted Franny’s knee. “But he’ll see us first.”
“I want to go home.”
By home she meant Easterbrook, not the apartments next to the foundling hospital.
This trip had been a terrible mistake.
“I think the woman in fuchsia is also a model,” her mother continued. “And she’s walking back and forth in front of those two actresses — they have to be actresses in their nightgown dresses with all that costume jewelry — modeling those gold strappy shoes that only a greyhound puppy has thin enough ankles to wear.”
“I’m only interested in leaving this place right now,” Franny said in a stage whisper.
In her mind, Franny was negotiating with the God of the Episcopalians next door to their house in Easterbrook or the Fates or the heroes of Greek mythology who lived on Mt. Olympus, the ones she’d loved in eighth grade.
So listen, God, Franny was saying to herself. I promise to forget these high-top oxfords with the big lift. I’ll never complain again and if you’ll be good enough to get me out of here and home, I’ll even go to the dances.
She took a deep breath.
Not all the dances but let’s say one, maybe even two a year and I’ll wear the orthopedic shoes and go to Cleveland with my mother to buy formal dresses for the dances if you’ll just make it possible for me to leave immediately by train or taxicab for Rome.
Her mother had taken down the lavender shoes on the long table and was trying one of them on her left foot.
So, God, the only way to accomplish this is to approach my mother with a problem. Maybe a thunderstorm or a tornado or World War III could start immediately in Florence so we’d be in an emergency situation and have to leave. Amen, she added, hoping that would help.
Her mother was replacing the lavender shoe on the top of the column where it had been displayed.
“I’m exploding,” Franny said in a stage whisper. “And you’ll be humiliated if you’re sitting here with me when I erupt.”