by Susan Shreve
The models wandered around the room, winding in and out among the chairs, some with clients, actresses, young wealthy women, an elderly woman too old to buy new shoes with her assistant.
“I feel like a pound dog, Mama,” Franny said. “Like I might as well tear off my clothes and sit naked while everyone pretends not to notice but is actually noticing that I have pimples the size of marshmallows all over my face.”
“Your face isn’t breaking out, Franny, and I don’t even think anyone notices that you’re here. They’re all too involved with themselves.”
“They notice. I am going to be personally responsible for the end of Signor Ferragamo’s shoe business.”
Franny had never felt so exposed. At the Valentine’s Dance, she had been humiliated among friends who had formed better opinions of her in elementary school, and those opinions could not have been completely ruined by the toilet paper incident no matter how awful it had been.
Here she was among strangers staring at her under their liquid-shadowed eyelids, no doubt wondering what so homely a girl in such clunky shoes and a deeply ugly jumper was doing in Florence, Italy, at the elegant shop of Salvatore Ferragamo.
The question she was considering was whether to leave the shop immediately and get lost in Florence without a word of Italian except sì and no. Or to stay and die of humiliation.
But just as Franny had decided to bolt, Salvatore Ferragamo burst into the front door of the shoe shop and hurried across the marble floor.
“Buongiorno,” he said gruffly, his arms extended in a gesture of hello.
“Francine,” he said as if he had known her for years. “My child, my daughter, my heart.”
And he kissed her hand. All around the room, the elegant long-necked women turned their swan heads toward the cheerful commotion.
POSSIBILITIES
Margaret pushed open the heavy door to Ferragamo’s and walked onto the narrow sidewalk across the street from the Ponte Vecchio as the cars whipped by, close enough to touch.
“That was amazing,” she said.
Franny, shivering in the cool, damp air of early spring, pressed her fists into the pockets of her jacket.
“He just loved you, Franny.”
Franny hardly knew what to say.
“Didn’t you think he was wonderful?” Margaret grabbed Franny’s elbow, dashing across the street between the cars thundering in their direction.
“Aren’t you glad we came?” she asked.
Franny stepped onto the curb, moving into the busy pedestrian traffic, away from the cars.
“You’re so quiet, darling.”
“I just am,” Franny said, too bewildered by what had happened, how unexpected Signor Ferragamo had been with her, uncertain of what to say.
Margaret pulled her toward her, kissed the top of her head.
“Of course, darling,” she said. “It wasn’t at all what I had expected.”
The picture in Franny’s mind was the look on the faces of the women, the models and actresses and wealthy women dressed off the pages of Vogue magazine, when Salvatore Ferragamo rushed in the room and kissed her on both cheeks, both cheeks the way her mother did, as if we were related.
“Did you notice the look of astonishment on the faces of those terrible women when he kissed you?”
And Franny smiled.
They pushed into the middle of the crowds, finding space to squeeze in two abreast.
“Sal-va-tore Fer-ra-gamo,” Margaret sang.
“Mama!”
“No one speaks English.”
“Salvatore Ferragamo? They’ll understand it when you sing his name.”
Margaret led Franny out of the crowds of people shopping midday, taking her in the direction of the stores.
“Tell me you’re glad you came,” she said, “and not just to be free of your class at Easterbrook but to be here with me and Signor Ferragamo.”
“I’m glad for today,” Franny said, leaning into her mother’s shoulder. “He made me feel like a giant.”
Margaret laughed. “Not a giant. A princess.”
“A wealthy princess.”
“A movie star.”
“Marilyn Monroe.”
“Not Marilyn Monroe,” Margaret said. “June Allyson.”
“Marlene Dietrich.” Franny struck a pose, an invisible cigarette between her lips.
They pushed through the crowd of tourists to the bridge.
The Ponte Vecchio was a bridge over the River Arno with jewelry and leather in tiny shops with large windows lining either side of the bridge. Franny and Margaret walked along the bridge, looking at the shops on one side and crossing to the other, passing by kiosks of leather and Florentine paper, religious artifacts, scarves, and jewelry from goldsmiths and silversmiths, cameos set in earrings and necklaces and bracelets, white raised figures, usually with the head of a woman against a sepia background. Franny chose one for her grandmother Hall, a bracelet for herself and one for Boots. At her mother’s insistence she added one for Eleanor.
She had not discussed Eleanor’s betrayal with her mother. Already Margaret Hall was too involved in Franny’s life to tell her about crushes and daydreams and boyfriends who would never turn out to be real.
“I’m sort of done with Eleanor,” she told her now. “She’s not been a good friend. Just a cousin I didn’t choose to have.”
“What did she do?” Margaret asked.
“Just stuff, Mama. Girls’ stuff.”
Although it struck Franny that Eleanor had not done anything so terrible. How was she to know that Franny’s mind was full of pictures of Mikey Houston, of dancing with Mikey, sharing a root beer float at the soda shop, walking hand in hand down College Street?
She hadn’t thought about Mikey Houston once since she’d left Ohio, not even on the plane when she had nothing but time to think.
“What should we get for Aunt Estelle?” Margaret was searching through the silver jewelry. “Not the cameos. Her taste is too plain for cameos.”
“I suggest nothing,” Franny said.
Her mother had picked up a wide silver cuff and was trying it on her wrist.
“What’s your problem with Estelle, Franny?”
“I got to dislike her after she had been staying with us for about four hundred days.”
“A month.” Margaret purchased the bracelet for Estelle although she continued to wear it on her own wrist.
“It felt like forever.”
Margaret shrugged.
“Estelle’s a little pushy but she is my sister and I love her.”
“She has too many opinions,” Franny said.
Franny was unwilling to admit she’d been jealous of Estelle settled at the kitchen table, stealing her mother, leaving Franny with a sick longing in her stomach and a bad temper as Estelle and her mother giggled over tea and secrets every afternoon.
Maybe she would say nothing. Estelle was in New York. Franny was in Italy and the sun above them was brilliant, almost warm. Her heart was racing with happiness.
“I love Florence,” she said, picking out a leather box she’d fill with Italian currency for Zeke and a bright blue silk tie for her father.
Margaret was trying on a leather jacket.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“You look like a motorcycle driver from Akron,” Franny said. “Sort of tough.”
“That’s because in America, only motorcyclists wear leather. In Europe, women think it’s feminine and elegant.”
She bought the jacket, folded it into her satchel.
“What do you think, Franny? Would you wear this in Easterbrook?”
“Not a chance,” Franny said.
“Well, I will.”
Their satchels full, they wandered along the River Arno toward the Uffizi Gallery and the Piazza della Signoria where Margaret wanted to see the replica of Michelangelo’s statue of the David.
Franny had seen the picture in the guidebook of David with his big head and long ar
ms, but she had never been to a gallery except once to the Metropolitan in New York with Estelle, who insisted that she see the Impressionist painters with their fuzzy blue paintings and the mummy collection and Egyptian artifacts, and wouldn’t stop for lunch in the cafeteria. So Franny associated art with hunger and on a second trip had refused to go to the Museum of Modern Art in favor of ice skating with her father.
“David of David and Goliath,” Margaret said, slipping her arm through Franny’s. “I wish I’d taught you the stories in the Old Testament.”
The only sculpture Franny knew was the small statue of Benjamin Wicks, born and died in Easterbrook, Ohio, honored as a native son with a statue in the center of the square for inventing something having to do with grain mills.
“There he is,” Margaret Hall said, slipping into the crowd surrounding Michelangelo’s David looming above them, sunlight glittering across his broad face, his marble curls, the enormous muscles of his arms.
Franny stood back, away from the tourists as they moved in a slow circle around the statue, their heads turned upward toward his face, conscious of her own heartbeat.
Something in the size of the sculpture stirred and excited her, in the raw force of the David, as if in his stillness, he were about to burst out of his marble body into the crowd surrounding him.
Her mother kept art books and loved looking at them almost as much as her fashion magazines, so Franny had seen a photograph of David and other sculptures, paintings, and buildings, including the Duomo and Ghiberti’s bronze doors. But standing in the piazza, less anonymous among these strangers than she sometimes felt at home, a new future suddenly seemed possible. Not in a particular way, but it was as if there was an air bubble of possibility in her bloodstream.
Since the Valentine’s Dance, she had been in the process of becoming somebody beyond her parents’ belief in her or Zeke’s dependence or her own limited sense of the girl she’d been in elementary school.
Walking along the river, across the bridge, Franny and Margaret wandered through the Boboli Gardens on a hillside overlooking Florence, lacing their way through gardens of statues and obelisks and benches where they lay, the sun on their faces, looking into the sky. They took a taxi to dinner at the Osteria di Santo Spirito, which Margaret had read about in the guidebook, and drank wine and talked about their day.
When they returned to the del Santos’ apartment, late, after dinner, the streets were still crowded with people, the night had turned soft and warm for early April.
“It’s so alive,” Margaret said, “as if there’s too much to see and do and talk about to go to bed.”
“I wish we could stay up all night, just go to a café and look at people,” Franny said.
“Aren’t you tired?”
“Not really.”
“I’m exhausted even though today turned out to be surprisingly sweet.” She brushed the hair out of Franny’s face with her long fingers. “You know, it could have been awful at Ferragamo’s. I was afraid it might be awful for you,” Margaret said, sinking onto the bed, fully clothed. She covered her eyes with her arm. “You need to go to bed, darling. Tomorrow Signor Ferragamo fits you with a last.”
“I can’t sleep,” Franny said, turning off the overhead light in the bedroom, leaving only the small light on beside her bed.
“And I can’t stay awake any longer unless that child starts wailing again,” her mother said. “Why don’t you read?”
But Franny had no intention of reading.
She sat on top of the blankets fully clothed, waiting, and when Margaret Hall’s breathing had deepened to little sighs, she slipped out of the room.
Down the hall, she could hear the del Santos talking and she stood just outside the door to her bedroom listening.
The sounds of Ana Maria whimpering were coming from the next room. The bathroom was just beyond it. If the del Santos happened to catch her opening the door, she could say that she had mistaken Ana Maria’s room for the bathroom. Easy enough, she thought, and after all, what was she to think with the sounds coming off and on from that room? What did anyone who stayed in the del Santos’ guest room think, and why was this child kept a secret?
Quietly, she went over to the door to Ana Maria’s room and turned the knob. The door was locked but there was resistance in the knob when she tried to turn it as if someone were holding on. When she dropped her hand, the knob continued to turn back and forth, faster and faster, and then there came a kind of animal moan like the sound she had once heard coming from the Buckleys’ dog when he’d been hit by a car on College Street.
She headed quickly toward the bathroom, as if that had been her destination in the first place, passing Signora del Santo on the run down the hall.
The light from the kitchen spread into the corridor, illuminating an expression of alarm on Signora’s face.
Franny ducked into the bathroom as if with purpose, locking the door, waiting until she heard the footsteps pass by.
But the footsteps didn’t come.
She waited on the open toilet seat where she sat, fully dressed, but there was no sound, no sound even from the kitchen where people had been talking and laughing.
She washed her face, her hands, splattered her hair with cold water and ran her fingers through it.
And then she opened the door.
Signora del Santo was standing in the hall, a tall woman, very thin with a pretty face, but hardened as if her face were baked clay.
“Come!” she said, indicating the kitchen. “We have a party.”
Signor del Santo was sitting at the kitchen table, his feet up on a chair eating a pear. Cheese and crusty bread and brown pears were on a long tray on the table.
Leaning against the stove, where a pot smelling of tomatoes was simmering, was the young man from the café that morning.
“Wine?” Signor del Santo asked. “Would you like wine?”
“No thank you,” Franny said although she did want wine.
“No wine,” he said to everyone.
“Oh yes, Uncle Mario, our visitor will have wine in honor of this occasion at our house.”
The young man spoke English.
Franny could feel the blood rushing to her face, and smiled in spite of her reserve.
He poured a glass of wine and passed it across the table.
“Salute,” he said. “I am Filippo del Santo and this you know already is my uncle and aunt.”
“I saw you today at the café,” Franny said.
“Yes, and I saw you too with your mother. Very nice,” he said.
The sound of his name rolled off her tongue like cream.
Filippo del Santo.
Signora del Santo was saying something to the men in Italian, saying it crossly.
“I will translate,” Filippo del Santo said. “My aunt and uncle have a daughter called Ana Maria and at night she must be locked in her room for her own protection. I will tell you more sometime later.”
“I tried to get in her room by accident, thinking it was the bathroom,” Franny said. “Now I know and it won’t happen again.”
She was drinking wine too quickly out of nervousness and it rushed to her head, thinning her brain, her legs suddenly spaghetti.
“No worry.” Filippo was smiling at his uncle. “No worry, yes, Uncle Mario?”
“Sì,” Mario agreed, offering more wine.
“Sit down here with me,” Filippo said. “I will practice my English.”
Franny slipped into a chair next to him.
“Cheese or pears?” He pushed the plate toward Franny. “Pears are excellent.”
He cut a slender piece of cheese and pear, putting the cheese on the slice of pear, reached across the table, and put it in Franny’s mouth.
“Good, yes?” Filippo asked.
“Lovely,” Franny said, getting up from the table. It was time to leave and she was perhaps light-headed with wine, or perhaps with a kind of power that had risen in Florence with this family, with this yo
ung man. She was alone, unobserved, and for the first time in her life, she felt equal to the possibilities.
“I should go,” she said, the image of Filippo del Santo leaning over to put a piece of pear in her mouth still in her mind. Nothing so intimate had ever happened to her.
Margaret Hall was awake when Franny, woozy with wine, came in the room.
She was reading a Danish novel. She often read books in Danish and it pleased Franny, the Danishness of her mother.
“Where have you been?”
Franny checked her face in the mirror over the dresser to see if it had broken out with nerves.
“That man we saw at the café, you remember?”
“The pretty boy with a newspaper?”
“That one,” Franny said. “Filippo del Santo.”
“Lucky you. A romance in Florence.”
“Not exactly a romance,” Franny said. “He was in the kitchen with his aunt and uncle and we talked. That’s all.”
“Still nice, darling. I always like a possibility in my life.”
Franny slipped out of her clothes, into her pajamas, and climbed into bed.
“What do you mean by possibility?” Franny asked.
“Just something that makes me feel hopeful, as if good things might happen.”
Franny had an urge to tell her mother about the pear — that Filippo had put a slice of pear with cheese in her mouth just now. That she could still taste it. That he’d reached over and with his fingers had popped it into her mouth as if she and Filippo had known each other always.
It had seemed like the most natural thing in the world but when Franny thought about it later, over and over again, she wondered whether she should have said, “No. No pears.”
At first Franny couldn’t fall asleep, her mind spinning with the day, with the evening in the del Santos’ kitchen, with Filippo, and then she must have dozed off because she awoke in the middle of the night to a commotion.
First she heard Signora del Santo’s footsteps running down the corridor from her bedroom next to the kitchen, and then a shattering scream, and Signor del Santo just outside her door, “Shhh, Shhh, Shhh.” Maybe to Signora, maybe to Ana Maria.
And then silence.