by Susan Shreve
“Mama.” She touched her mother’s hand in the dark.
“I heard,” Margaret Hall said. “We should move to another pensione tomorrow morning and leave the del Santos to their privacy.”
“Why?” Franny asked.
“Because our arrival seems to have caused some alarm.”
“Maybe the child is always like this. They rent out rooms so they must be used to it.”
“It’s beginning to make me feel uncomfortable,” Margaret said.
“Filippo is going to explain to me what’s the matter with the child next time I see him.”
“In the meantime, I won’t be sleeping at all.”
“Sorry,” Signora del Santo said when Franny and her mother stopped by the kitchen to say good morning.
“Sorry for noise,” Signor del Santo said. “We give medicine.”
“No problem,” Margaret Hall said. “We’re just on our way to the café for breakfast.”
“Please forgive,” Signora said. “No more noise.”
“It’s fine,” Franny said. “It didn’t bother us.”
She looked around for Filippo but he seemed to have left.
They walked down the tilting narrow steps to the courtyard, across the courtyard to the café, and ordered muddy coffee and croissants. Margaret Hall picked up a newspaper in Italian and Franny read the English guidebook they had purchased at the station.
“Can you read Italian?” Franny asked.
“I can sense it. I grew up speaking French and English and Danish. So French helps because it’s also a Romance language.”
She pointed out a photograph of a painting by Michelangelo on the front page of the newspaper.
“I know without speaking Italian that something has happened to this painting by Michelangelo — and I guess that it was either stolen from a church in Rome or damaged,” she was explaining as Filippo del Santo wandered into the café, picked up a newspaper, ordered a coffee, and drank it quickly at the bar, stopping by their table as he left.
“So today you see Salvatore, yes?” Filippo asked. “My aunt tells me that you have an appointment with Salvatore for new shoes. He makes very nice shoes. Expensive.”
“We do have an appointment with Signor Ferragamo,” Margaret said.
“He is my father’s cousin. Very good man. Very famous.”
Filippo pulled an empty chair from another table and sat down between them.
“Mind if I sit with you?”
“Not at all.” Margaret folded the newspaper in her lap.
“So I tell you something, yes?”
“Please,” Margaret said.
“I am a painter although very young. Only seventeen.” He pushed his chair back, resting it on two legs. “And you?” he asked Franny.
“My age?”
He nodded.
“Almost fifteen,” she said, which was almost true.
“Fifteen is good,” Filippo said, resting his chin in his hand, looking so directly at Franny that she turned away.
“I was thinking, maybe I could paint you,” he said. “You have excellent bones.”
“Oh?” Franny said, awkward with such attention.
“Mainly, I paint landscapes of Firenze.”
He pointed to the other side of the foundling hospital.
“I paint outside in the hills of Firenze, looking over the city at the tops of things. But now I’m taking a class at my academy for painting the figure and you have a face that is different than all the faces in Firenze.” He paused as if he were thinking of a word. “A precise face. I like that very much.”
“That’s very nice of you,” Margaret Hall said, chillier than she usually was. “But we’ll only be in Florence for another day or two and then to Rome and home.”
“That is agreeable. It doesn’t take long to draw the idea of a face. Two hours would be fine. Do you maybe have two hours?”
“I do,” Franny said quickly. “This afternoon after I see Ferragamo.”
“Good,” Filippo said. “You come to my studio which is there.” He pointed across the courtyard. “Third floor. There is a doorbell.”
He got up to leave.
“You were going to tell us about the del Santos’ little girl.”
“Yes, you are right. She has brain damage from falling out the window when she was a baby and they keep her hidden. But you will see her. Only they will not take her outside to public view.”
“Because of how she looks?” Franny asked.
“She looks very beautiful but she cannot talk, cannot hear. Only scream,” he said again. “She is not normal.”
“Very sad,” Franny said.
“Sometimes if you are different than other people, they don’t like you, you know?” he said, returning the chair he had borrowed.
“I do know,” Franny said, and she wondered, had he noticed that she was different, and was he being abnormally kind to her because he felt sorry.
“So later, you will let me draw your face, yes?”
“Yes,” Franny said. “I’ll ring the bell.”
“The answer is no,” Margaret Hall said after he had gone. “He is not going to draw your face in his studio this afternoon.”
Franny thrust her hands in the pockets of her coat and walked toward the river, just ahead of her mother.
They walked along the front, the river splashing against the banks, cars and cycles whipping by the narrow sidewalks, the air dank with exhaust.
“Just my face?” she asked. “Not exactly dangerous.”
“He’s a stranger and I’m not sure about him.”
“I am sure.”
“You don’t know anything about him, Franny.”
“I know he’s been sweet to me,” she said.
“What you don’t know about artists is this,” Margaret Hall began. “Models for artists in figure classes are nude because the artist is learning about the body.”
“You can be sure that I won’t be nude,” Franny said crisply. “He is drawing my face.”
Franny walked ahead along the crowded sidewalk, damp from the river heavy in the air, conscious of her mother behind her, but solitary as if a thread between them had been snipped.
She knew she was right. Filippo del Santo was only interested in her face.
Their appointment with Signor Ferragamo was early, before the clients and models arrived, so the Halls would have the showroom to themselves.
Signor Strolla opened the door, even less friendly than the day before.
“Nine o’clock on the dot,” he said. “Very early.”
He ushered them to the velvet couch in the center of the room, set at an angle so Franny could see herself in profile. She had dressed carefully that morning, choosing a full plaid skirt even though it made her hips look larger and a tight white angora sweater and kneesocks. It was still cool enough in Italy in the morning for wool clothes.
Signor Strolla brought a silver tray of sparkling water in wine glasses and small cookies in the shape of stars on a silver dish. Behind him, a model with short hair, cropped close to her head like a black cap, a taupe wool skirt gathered at the waist, and a white silk shell, followed, stopping at the couch where Franny and her mother were sitting.
“Signor Ferragamo arrive soon,” Signor Strolla said, setting the tray down and turning, his leather soles snapping against the marble as he crossed the room and disappeared.
The model smiled. “Buongiorno!” she said, and raising her arms slowly in a wide arch like a ballerina, she pointed to the shoes she was wearing. They were black patent pumps with a beige toe, a low square heel on which she turned, lifting the toe off the ground.
“For you, Signorina, new shoes. Very beautiful for girls.”
And then she walked across the marble floor following Signor Strolla’s steps and through the mirrored door.
“She doesn’t shave under her arms?” Franny asked. “All that curly hair and she puts her arms in the air like she’s proud of it.”
Margaret Hall laughed.
“It’s the custom in Europe. Women don’t necessarily shave under their arms. It’s considered sexy and normal.” “Normal?”
“Normal,” her mother said. “What did you think of the shoes she was modeling?”
“Not pretty!”
The model had returned with a new pair of shoes, baby doll flats in soft black leather with round toes and a tiny pink grosgrain ribbon in the middle.
“I love those,” Margaret said. “More girly.”
“I like them better,” Franny said.
“It’s good?” the model asked.
“Yes,” Franny said. “Very good.”
The model slipped out of the room again, and Franny found her mind falling into a scene of a dance in Easterbrook, the big spring dance held at the Knights of Columbus Hall decorated with pastel paper flowers, the dance floor painted blue as if the dancers were moving across the surface of a lake.
Franny was walking into the dance late, after the music had started, wearing a pale pink strapless with a full skirt to her calf and the black baby doll shoes with a pink ribbon to match the dress.
In her daydream, she stopped at the refreshment table, took a cup of Jell-O juice with ginger ale, and, leaning against the table, sipping her drink, she assessed the dancers. Eleanor had arrived in a brown dress, a little too tight at the top, her hair frizzed. She was alone without Mikey.
“Oh jeez, Franny,” she’d say in honest surprise. “You look so pretty.”
In the corner, Boots was sitting in her confirmation look-alike dress. Franny’s friends from elementary school were rushing over, excited to see her, happy at how confident she had become since her trip to Italy.
Behind her, Filippo del Santo, visiting from Florence, slipped his arm around her waist.
Signor Ferragamo sat on a stool beside the couch.
A last, he explained, was like a pattern for a dress. If you have a pattern, you can make many, many dresses from that pattern. He drew around her feet on a piece of butcher paper on the floor. And then he measured the length and width of her feet, following the lines of the little crippled toes.
“We will straighten these toes inside the shoe so they will flatten out and not stick up and still feel fine,” he said. “And then we will turn the shoe so it leans a little inward and you can walk flat and straight.”
He pulled gently at her toes, trying to straighten them, determining how straight he could make them to fit inside the shoes. He put his hand on the floor and asked her to stand on it with one foot, moving his hand this way and that to check how it would feel for the foot if his hand were a shoe. He had her stand and walk barefoot away from him and then back, checking her balance, checking the lift on the orthopedic shoes she always wore, checking the undeveloped leg, measuring its circumference.
Each time he gave Franny a new task, he would enclose her hand in both of his and tell her she was an angel.
“There,” Signor Ferragamo said finally. “We are done. All you need to do now is choose lovely shoes in magazines and send me a picture and I will make them for you.”
And he lifted her feet in his hands and laid them on his knee.
It was midmorning when they left the Ferragamo showroom and walked along the river, their shoulders brushing, their eyes half closed against the brightness of the sun. They crossed the glittering square of the Uffizi and took a table in an open café.
“You don’t think I’ll see Signor Ferragamo again?”
“I don’t know that. He lives a long way from us.”
“I’d like to give him something, then,” Franny said. “A present to thank him.”
They sat at the café for a while with a coffee and cookies, silent with each other, a kind of sweet sadness in the air, and Franny wasn’t sure whether the sadness came from her mother or the day itself or that they were leaving soon to go back to Easterbrook.
She was homesick not for home but for this place that she was leaving. Not only Florence or Signor Ferragamo or even Filippo del Santo, who grew larger and larger in her imagination.
“You know, Mama,” Franny said, taking the last cookie from the plate of cookies they had ordered. “I like myself better here than I did in Easterbrook, so I have this lonely feeling about leaving.”
“I understand that,” Margaret said.
Franny rested her chin in her hands.
“I guess I can take the self I like back to Easterbrook with me, can’t I?”
“Of course,” her mother said. “You don’t need to leave it here.”
A waiter came bringing Margaret another coffee, a ham sandwich, and a sweet, and Franny checked her watch.
“I’m going to Filippo’s studio now,” Franny said finally, finishing her coffee.
Margaret Hall took out a cigarette, tapped it on the table, and lit it.
“He said it would take a couple of hours to draw my face. I could meet you at the pensione.”
“I was thinking we’d go out for the rest of the day, maybe on a bus trip to Fiesole.”
“I don’t want to go to Fiesole.”
“That’s fine,” her mother said. “We will do something depending on what we decide when you come back.”
She settled into her chair, put her feet on the chair which Franny had left, and took a Danish novel out of her satchel.
“If you actually do get back in two or three hours, then we can make a plan.”
“I’ll be back,” Franny said. “Nothing is going to happen to me.”
Her mother shrugged and opened the book in her lap.
“I’ll wait for you here,” she said. “And Franny, be careful.”
LINE DRAWING
Franny walked along the Arno, turning left away from the river on her way back to the piazza where Filippo del Santo’s studio was located.
At a café near the Duomo, she stopped for more coffee. “Caffè con latte,” she said, standing up at the bar, one foot on the brass railing in the manner of the other customers. She reached into her backpack for lire.
She needed ammunition to meet Filippo in his studio. A bathroom so she could look at herself in the mirror to check whether her face had broken out, whether her hair was full and framed the excellent bones of her face.
Excellent bones. Her father remarked on her good bones, but Franny had always believed he was desperately searching for something complimentary to say about her looks and bones was all that came to mind.
Now a stranger, a painter in search of a subject had noticed her bones and remarked on their excellence.
“Bathroom?” she asked the man behind the counter and he pointed to the back of the café.
The room was dark even with the light on, so it was difficult to assess her face, even the way her hair fell around it down to her shoulders, but she was pleased with what she saw. She was prettier than she had been yesterday, last week, just that morning before she left the del Santos’. Odd, she thought, how a face can change in no time at all.
Filippo answered the doorbell in seconds as if he had been waiting for Franny at the top of the stairs, two long flights of them, to the third-floor studio where he worked on his landscape paintings in a tiny room flooded with light.
“I go to Fiesole and look at Firenze from on high,” he said to Franny. “And then I go to this window and paint what I see.”
She followed him to the window.
“And there I see the beautiful Duomo and the bronze doors of Ghiberti — we will go look at them. Real doors, you see.”
He opened a drawer and took out some drawings in pencil.
“In art, you need to reproduce reality first, so I must learn to draw the human body,” he said. “But what I love is the human face.”
He spread the drawings over the wooden table in the middle of the room.
“Now you see. These are in order, all my work in this class since last September.”
There were nudes — many of them of one man, short, skinny, long spaghetti arms, and in the drawings he wa
s standing or lying on his side or holding his head with his hand, sitting on a table with his legs dangling, cross-legged.
“You have to see the muscles and the bones and what happens to the body when you bend or sit or stand or lie.”
“Why is there only one man?”
“He is a model and paid for doing this. Also one woman.”
He opened another box and took out a set of drawings of a woman with long hair, fleshy with a plump belly, a long nose, and flat cheeks.
Franny knew nothing about art, nothing about drawing. She had no inclination whatever to reproduce what she saw. But the idea of an ordinary person going into a class of students, taking off his clothes and lying or standing or sitting for hours while students examined his nakedness in detail, was as foreign to Franny as the Italian language.
“Do you know these people? I mean personally, like friends.”
“No, I don’t know them. They are only models and we draw them.”
He reached over and touched her chin.
“What I like about your face is the cheekbones, high like little mountains, and your eyes, so far apart and large, not like the Italian women I know with eyes closer together and Madonna faces, especially in Firenze.”
Franny slipped into a chair, breathless and dizzy. Maybe it was the wine the night before or her meeting with Ferragamo or maybe the attention to her face, something she had never imagined, and even now could not believe, that this young, handsome man would have such an interest in her ordinary face.
No one in Easterbrook had ever noticed.
“So,” Filippo del Santo said. “You sit there and I will make a sketch.”
He pulled over a stool, situated Franny so she was directly in front of him, the light on her face, her feet on the rungs of the stool, her hands in her lap. He ran his finger gently down her spine.
“Sit straight,” he said. “Don’t move. I want a full-on face.”
“Smiling?”
“Natural,” he said.
“Not smiling then,” she said.
“You don’t smile?”
“If I try I feel self-conscious.”
She watched him, the way his hands moved across the sketch paper, the way he looked at her, a thoughtful expression as though he actually was considering Franny as a person, as a girl, a young woman.