A Summer In Europe

by Marilyn Brant

  “Just-ah in time!” the lady cook said, pulling out a piping hot pan of freshly baked bread twists.

  The aroma was overwhelmingly delicious, like strolling into a bakery and actually being wrapped up in a warm bread roll. Despite not being a foodie like Hester or Aunt Bea, Gwen wasn’t immune to the scrumptiousness of the scent.

  “You try it with olive oil, yes?” Guido suggested, smacking his lips. “You will like. I know.”

  As the lady cook was sliding the steaming twists onto small paper plates for each of them, the side door swung open and Thoreau slipped through it. “I heard a rumor—” he began.

  The lady cook laughed and handed him a plate with a bread twist.

  Thoreau kissed her on the cheek—both sides—in return.

  Hester, Guido and the lady cook began chatting about something while nibbling on their hot bread. Thoreau brushed both his twist and Gwen’s with a strip of golden oil and pointed toward the door. “Shall we take a stroll?” he asked her.

  She nodded. And, after thanking the generous cook, they stepped out onto the walkway near the hotel and began meandering on the floral path alongside the lake.

  Gwen blew on her twist and took a small bite. “Ohh ... mmm.”

  “Heaven, isn’t it?” Thoreau said.

  “Is it me, or does everything taste better in Italy?”

  He laughed. “It’s not just you. But every country has its specialty. We claim some outstanding curries in London, and you’ve never had shepherd’s pie until you’ve tasted my mum’s.”

  “Iowa has ... great corn on the cob. That’s mostly what the state is known for, at least as far as food. Field of Dreams was filmed there, and the book The Bridges of Madison County was set there, too.”

  “Haven’t read it,” Thoreau admitted. “Emerson may have. The man reads everything. I’ll have to ask him if he owns a copy.”

  “Speaking of books, did you hear that Hester is writing a novel?” she said. “She was telling Zenia about it yesterday. It’s so wonderful of her to be undertaking something ambitious like that at age ninety.”

  “Well, she has a lot to offer the world.” He took a big bite of his twist but, after swallowing, he said, “ ‘How vain it is to sit down to write if you have not stood up to live.’ ” He looked pleased with this latest quote. “Henry David Thoreau.”

  Gwen rolled her eyes. “You and your brother.”

  He grinned. “We’re a troublesome pair, aren’t we? Have we been bothering you too much? I know Emerson has a tendency to be a pest, but you don’t mind us really, do you?”

  She didn’t immediately answer. Then, “It’s not that I mind. It’s just that I’m not sure I fit with either you or Emerson. I’m not even sure I fit anywhere on this tour,” she admitted. “Certainly not with your crowd. Your lady friends are very ... protective of their time with you.”

  He smiled at her gently. “Louisa is in a cold, loveless marriage, Gwen. I can empathize with that as I have less than fond memories of my ex-wife. So, in Louisa’s case, I realize she needs a little hand-holding and, sometimes, she can be a bit clingy and cliquish. But she’s rather nice when you get to know her. Cynthia, however—” He shook his head. “She’s what you Americans would call ‘a piece of work.’ She’s not someone who’s easy to encapsulate. If she likes a person, she can be very kind and giving. If she doesn’t, she can be ... oh, how to best describe it?” He paused and thought. “Kind of a bitch.”

  Laughter Gwen couldn’t control bubbled out of her. “Thoreau.”

  “Well, it’s true,” he said, laughing as well. “In some ways she’s just a hurt little girl—wanting love or, barring that, wanting revenge. She was incandescent with rage when her father left her mother—not as a kid, but four years ago when she was just forty. To her it was the most grievous smack of disloyalty a person could give to another. And she’s most certainly a firm believer in loyalty. She seems to be warming to you. A little.”

  Interesting, Gwen thought. But she still wasn’t going to be a big Cynthia fan.

  Thoreau told her a few details more about the ladies but, though Gwen appreciated getting some insight into these two women and was now less inclined to use the term “Britsicles” as a nickname, she couldn’t deny it was Thoreau’s brother she really wanted to hear about. They kept circling around him conversationally. She wasn’t sure whether Thoreau had picked up on her interest in discussing Emerson and wanted to deflect her away from that, or if he simply didn’t realize her degree of fascination with the man.

  She thought back on their dinner after the Capri visit, when she’d had her first really good look at the brothers. While Thoreau had been polite, he hadn’t been nearly as attentive as Emerson had been. The latter seemed to notice everything about her, although he hadn’t tried to engage her in conversation. He must have been studying her even then, no doubt as one of his scientific experiments. She wondered what his impressions had been of her that night in the Sorrento ristorante. Had he liked how she looked? Had he picked up on all of her nervous habits? Had he tried to figure out what they meant?

  As always, she reached up to feel her right earring, touching it as she did several times per day and remembering her mother. But when she did the same with her left one, her fingers grasped only a naked earlobe. She stopped, midstep, on the circuitous lake path, feeling for the earring more carefully and, when she couldn’t locate it, combing through her hair with her fingers in hopes of finding it caught there.

  “Oh, no ...” she breathed.

  Thoreau, who’d stopped walking when she had stopped, said, “Did you lose something? An earring?”

  She nodded, on the verge of panicking. Her mom’s earring. “Oh, no,” she said again, trying to keep her voice from shaking, but her heart pounded like timpani and her vision blurred at the thought of having lost it.

  “What does it look like?” Thoreau asked.

  She motioned for him to look at the other earring, still in place, then she bit her lip to prevent her cry from coming out and searched frantically on the walkway around her and a few steps behind. Find it! She had to find it!

  “Be still for a moment,” he commanded, sweeping her hair off her left shoulder with one hand and picking at something near her neck. “Here.” He detached an object and held it up to her. “It was caught in your jumper.”

  She let out a huge breath she’d been holding. “Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. I—I was so scared—” She paused to inhale and exhale several times and say a mental thanks to her friend Kathy, who’d gone shopping with her in the spring and insisted she buy this light knit summer sweater (a “jumper,” apparently, in British-speak), with holes perfect in size on which to hook an earring.

  Thoreau was staring strangely at her. “You were scared. Why was that? Why are these earrings so special to you?”

  “I, um—they were my mom’s,” she sputtered, still trying to slow her racing heart. “She gave them to me or, rather, she would have, if she’d lived until I was Sweet Sixteen,”... and ready for love, Gwen added to herself. That was what her mom had always said. She tried to explain to Thoreau that having them on was a little bit like having a piece of her mom always with her. That it reminded her of her parents and their love for one another. Of course she didn’t tell him that wearing them was like a talisman of hope that she would one day find the same devoted love. She refastened the fishhook wire, getting the earring back on again, and checking both sides several times to make sure they were secure.

  “I have a few items of my father’s that I feel that way about,” Thoreau said kindly. “They’re irreplaceable to me, but they don’t bring him back. Some days I’m tempted to put every single sentimental piece in a box and just stuff them in the attic because, at times, the memories are more sad than happy, and they keep me from moving on. Especially when I start comparing my father’s life and happiness in love with my own disaster.”

  “Do you really think of your situation as such a ‘disaster’?” she asked
him. “I know you’ve been having some challenging times with your girlfriend, but it’s not like you’re avoiding making a commitment to her, right? You just needed time away to reflect.”

  He grinned. “You make me sound like a remarkably sensible man. I suspect Amanda would paint a very different portrait of me, however.”

  They headed back to find the hotel guests fully awake and roaming around the scenic property. Colin Pickering was out in the back garden photographing floral clusters. Gwen learned from Thoreau that her hunch about the older gentleman was correct.

  “He’s suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s. He’s been on a quest for the past several months to take hundreds of photos to remember the things he loved best in his life.” He sighed, regarding the man with compassion. “Colin had traveled a great deal when he was a younger man, and this trip features many of his favorite sites.”

  As they neared the entrance, she was about to ask Thoreau a few more questions about Colin and his life, but she heard something that made her pause ... and listen. A piano. The sound coming from the hotel lobby.

  “Someone’s playing,” she said. She listened some more. It was a classical piece. Beethoven, maybe. Not performed by a virtuoso—it wasn’t flawless—but it was more than merely competent. “Whoever that is, they’re quite good.”

  Thoreau paused to listen, smiling at first, then scowling. “He’s such a bloody show-off,” Thoreau mumbled.

  Gwen shot him a sharp look. There was only one person he could mean. “That’s your brother? He can play piano, too?”

  Thoreau rolled his eyes like the irritated elder sibling he was. He ushered her into the lobby and approached Emerson, who was playing a sonata with feeling in one corner of the room. A few hotel patrons hung around the edges of the lobby listening, and Gwen’s heart fluttered at the sound of his passion for the instrument. Ralph Waldo “Emerson” Edwards: a guy of many talents, numerous skills and surprising depth. A modern-day Renaissance man.

  Her companion was not nearly so impressed, however. “He’s always carrying on about the connection between physics and music. Blah, blah, blah ... more of his theories,” Thoreau said loudly, unable to disguise his mockery.

  The music stopped.

  “Not theories, brother, but scientific and mathematical principles.” Emerson wiggled his fingers at Thoreau then placed them on the keys again. “He just hates that I’m a better musician than he is. You should hear him on saxophone.” He grimaced. “Sounds like an animal’s execution the way he plays.”

  “What?!” Thoreau said, indignant. “Oh, bugger off.” Then, whispering in Gwen’s ear, he added, “He’s right, I’m dreadful, but I’d never admit that to him. Passive-aggressive and denial privileges of being the eldest.”

  She laughed and Emerson shot them a semivenomous look. “What’s the bastard saying now?”

  “Don’t tell him,” Thoreau warned as he strode away, grinning.

  “I’ll kick your bum later,” Emerson called after him.

  “Like hell,” his brother called back. And, then, he was out of earshot.

  Gwen walked over to Emerson as the small crowd of hotel visitors that had been listening to him dispersed. “Sorry to scare away your audience,” she said. “You play wonderfully.”

  He shrugged. “It’s no big trick. The oscillations of each note are absolutely mathematical. If you know the starting tone, you can figure out the remaining notes easily with relative pitch. And harmonics are a simple equation of—”

  “I know,” she murmured. “I know the relationships are very logical, very reasonable and, yet—”

  “Thank you!” He plunked a white key for emphasis. “Thoreau is full of rubbish. It’s nice to talk to someone, finally, who understands.”

  “You didn’t let me finish,” she said. “The relationships may be mathematical, but music is more than math.”

  “We give it meaning, perhaps. Ascribe meaning onto it. But I think the meaning is innate. A function of the math itself. And our response to the beauty of those mathematical relationships when we listen is hardwired into our DNA. Call it math, call it music—it’s the same,” he replied.

  She considered this but knew she’d need more time to lay out a convincing argument or even be sure of her own position. Did she agree? Disagree? She briefly debated her options and figured she needed more proof. That aside, her most disturbing questions were these: Why had she never had such a discussion with another person before? More specifically, why didn’t she have conversations like this with Richard?

  Before she could even open her mouth to explain her inability to immediately comment, Emerson met her gaze. His eyes were so illumined by the intensity he felt on the subject, it rendered her speechless. His facial expression mirrored physically what she felt privately about music. She wasn’t alone in her passion.

  With a sweep of his palm, he ran his fingertips up the keyboard, offering it to her. “You wish to play?”

  “Oh, no ... I can’t. I don’t know how to play piano.”

  A look of astonishment flitted across his face. “You’re too interested in music not to play something. Don’t tell me you only play your iPod, Gwen. What’s your instrument?”

  He asked this as if it weren’t a question packed with sentiment or tinged with her personal fears. She swallowed. “It used to be violin. But—But it’s been a long, long time.”

  “Hmm. It’s a nice choice, though. And string theory is much easier to demonstrate with a violin than with a piano.”

  This amused her, of course. “Yes, that’s what I always say, too.”

  He swiveled on the bench, his whole body toward her. “No need to use that sarcastic tone. The concept isn’t as tricky as everyone seems to think.” He grinned and mimed finger-picking a violin. “When you pluck a violin string, it will vibrate more wildly if it’s plucked vigorously than if it’s plucked gently, right?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s precisely what one would expect. And so it is in our great universe,” he explained. “Just as the strings on an instrument respond to different vibrational patterns, causing different notes at varying decibels, the tiny superstrings that make up our cosmos, when strummed in particular ways, create different masses or force charges. String theory shows us that everything from the Big Bang’s primordial fireball to the movement of subatomic quarks operate under one master equation. That the principles governing all aspects of the universe—from the massive to the minute—are the same.”

  “As it is with the galaxies, so it is with the violin,” she said, intoxicated by this correlation, although still not quite understanding what it had to do with his earlier hypothesis.

  “Yes,” he replied, turning back to the piano and playing a quick run on it ending with a flourish in the form of a minor trill. “As it is with this keyboard, so it is with planetary orbits and the tiniest of particles.”

  “And you say this is true of all things, Emerson? What of poetry ... or chess?”

  “You’d best speak to my brother if you want to talk of chess,” he said dryly, playing one last run before standing up and facing her fully. “But poetry, I know a bit about. Remember your Shakespeare,” he said. “Think of The Merchant of Venice, that scene when Shylock’s daughter had just eloped with Lorenzo. The new couple is sitting in the moonlight when the musicians enter. You know the section? She tells Lorenzo that the sweetness of the music never makes her merry, and he responds—”

  “By saying the sadness she feels is because her spirit is so attentive to the music,” Gwen finished for him. She knew this passage.

  “Exactly. Her spirit is calling out to the celestial powers in response. The notes pierce her soul. It was a long-held Elizabethan assumption that the musical harmony of the planets, stars and moons was a manifestation of the universal order—the order God created when He made heaven and earth. In other words, the music of the spheres. In the play, Lorenzo reminds his new wife that music has the power to affect even the
wild beasts and to calm even the most rambunctious of them. That if a man has no music in him, he is not someone to be trusted. Nothing good in nature is immune to its power.”

  “I see ... I think,” she said, pausing.

  There was much in this discussion that unnerved her, not the least of which was that Emerson was a man who elicited chaos within her and, yet, he proposed a worldview of perfect order, rationality and interconnectedness. It was the diametric opposite of her feelings toward Richard. With her boyfriend back home, the world should have made sense, but she found it didn’t quite. With Emerson, it definitely shouldn’t have, but—oddly—it sort of seemed to.

  She tried to summarize what she thought she understood about his premise. “So, you’re saying it’s a given that the arts reflect human emotion and our response to their influence is profound. Not only because the arts are intrinsically meaningful, but because we’re physiologically compelled to find good rhymes, clear harmonies, well-proportioned drawings or sculptures, et cetera, to be aesthetically pleasing. That this pleasure is a powerful scientific truth, so strong that it connects us to the universe itself... .”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding. “Keep going.”

  She took a deep breath. “The pull of music, literature or painting on us is like the plucking of a string. Literally, in the case of music. Sometimes gently, sometimes vigorously, but it always causes a reaction. Our innate response brings us in synchronized harmony with the elements in nature—from the smallest atomic particle to the largest heavenly body. We’re connected through these vibrations to nature and to each other. So, really, everything’s connected.”

  Emerson looked at her anew—approvingly, inquisitively and only partially like she was an interesting “experiment” he was studying. “Why, Gwendolyn Reese,” he murmured. “I do believe you’re rather brilliant.”

  She smiled at him, shyly at first, then wholeheartedly. Not really believing she could ever match him intellectually, in spite of her own analytical gifts, and still puzzling through his presumption that math and music were one and the same. But she appreciated that in this area, at least, she could hold her own. A passion for music created its own special understanding. One that gave her a key to further unlocking the other disciplines.