What? I was stunned and simply said, “There you have it. I honestly don’t know, but Margaret Merrill has lived in Italy a long time. Maybe she knows. I wrote the poems with love. I would hope that survives translation, if that even happens. Is there another question?” What possessed her to interrupt my event? Recognizing her name, many turned to look at the possessed woman, now examining a notepad but with her chin raised. She appeared to look down to those of us far below. The mood broke and it was over.
Why didn’t I confront her? Why didn’t I? A character flaw, no doubt. My family just let things simmer until some burst of heat caused a sudden explosion. That’s me. That’s what I do. I was subdued at dinner after the reading. She took me out to a buzzy place full of politicos (ugh) where six men came over to say how they admired her exposé of the Mafia. She ordered oysters (ugh) and Champagne “to celebrate the beginning of a grand career.” Not a word about her jab.
Late, back at my hotel, I emailed Colin. Weird, weird. I think Margaret is jealous of ME. Don’t laugh!
The Friday night dinners have added four chapters to Julia’s Learning Italian. While she cooks all afternoon, she sets her laptop on the counter and chats with Chris. She chops, scoops onions and garlic into the pan to sauté, thinking he’s so close he can smell them sizzling. He tells her about the progress of this year’s pinot noir. The barrel tastings promise a super product. A few splats of olive oil pop out and she swabs off the screen. There—the big smile of Chris at his office in Napa. She likes his desk, two wine barrels topped with an irregular slab of redwood. He sits in a twirly bar chair of cowhide and horns. In a denim shirt, unlike the fitted clothes he wears in Italy, he looks western. His smile transmits across cyberspace the energy she knows well. He’s cooking with her as she tells him about the semolina gnocchi with parmigiano she’s sliding into the oven, about the duck breasts with balsamic reduction and orange peel she has ready to serve.
* * *
—
Twelve at table tonight. Susan has arranged small pots of white cyclamen down the middle, white plates, and a green cloth. She’s excited that Nicolà and Brian are coming. Camille has invited Chiara Bevilacqua, the bookstore owner, and her female partner, name yet unknown, plus Rowan, Annetta and Leo, Colin and Kit. Camille has been closed away all day, emerging at lunch to warm up a serving of leftover lasagne, which she took back to her room, promising she’d be on hand to open the wines and arrange the antipasti platter. Julia and Susan are excited for Camille. She’s working! After weeks of wheeling around in the air, dipping and circling and flying higher and swooping again, the silence in her room sounds like music to them.
“It’s full winter,” Julia tells Chris. “Fall was still hanging on when you left, but there’s been a distinct turn. We hear owls all night.” Julia pauses to look for a hot pad. “You should be here. Come back!” The just-braised broccolini mixed with the onions, garlic, and a couple of anchovies smells bitter, good bitter. Chris watches as she starts prepping, for tomorrow, a rolled turkey breast that Gilda at Hotel Santa Caterina demonstrated in the cooking class Julia attends two mornings a week. She slices the big breast almost through on opposite sides and flattens it out. “Gilda says stuff it with anything you want and I’m going to try various combinations but right now, I’m copying what she did, spreading a layer of ground veal, a layer of coarse bread crumbs, and some chopped pistachios.” She rolls it the long way and ties it with string in four places.
“You’re killing me, you know that.” Chris leans in close. “I’ll have pasta with jarred tomato sauce for dinner tonight. How will you write about this rolled thing for your book?”
“There’s a lot to say about turkey here. Tacchino. They are huge, if you buy a whole one. Twice the normal size. This breast alone looks like a whole turkey! And—I promise, you would not know you are eating turkey. It’s juicy and savory. I thought it was veal. Turkey sandwiches? Forget that! This is the best. And pistachios. I didn’t know they are used a lot in Tuscan recipes. I’m researching that. Why pistachios?”
“I don’t know. I thought they were just for breaking your fingernail on when they bring out a bowl with a Campari Soda. I’m missing you. You’re the only one I could discuss pistachios with for hours.” He hesitates. “Julia, I was wondering. Say no right away if I’m off base. Would you like for me to look up Lizzie in San Francisco, if she’s still there? I know you haven’t heard anything in months and I know you want to have time to get your life back, but you must ache about this.”
Julia put down her spoon. She didn’t answer.
“Hey, you there? Just an idea. I could go to her last address—didn’t you ask me if I knew the Scott and Sutter Street area?—and as quietly as possible see if I can find out anything.”
“Chris, Chris. Thank you. I do push back my worry, I have to, but I’m afraid of choosing to fall on my sword again.”
“Think about it.”
“Thank you. It’s wonderful that you offer. She’d think we sent a spy. You’re too sweet to think of it. But don’t…”
“What if I just case the hood?” How to read this? He heard her hesitate. “You’ve been through too many wringers. I don’t want to meddle.”
“Oh, here are the kittens. Can you see Ragazzo? Look how they’ve grown so fast.”
“Ah, subject over. Cue the kittens! Cute!”
Julia laughed. “Right. Let’s get back to our subjects. When I talk to you, when I’m with you, I’m just me, not a part of a zombie squad in Savannah! Speaking of, you know my daddy is coming for Christmas. We decided to stay here a few days, then go to Rome. Rome! I can’t wait. He wants to go to Naples, too.”
“You’re killing me again. What I’d give to spend the holidays in Rome with you. Does he know how lucky he is?”
“He does! Lizzie was the light of his life but now it’s back to me. You’ll meet him. He’s special, not just that he’s my father either. You’ll be with your boy for Christmas?” Lizzie at Christmas, salt packed in the gaping wound. Ghosts of Christmas past, indeed.
“Part of the time. He’s going up to Tahoe afterward, and I’m going to catch up on work so when I get to Italy in late March, I won’t have to worry.” They’ve finished their final polishing of the Friuli tour, which happens in April. It’s already fully booked.
“I’ve got to get moving on the dessert. Talk tomorrow?”
“I’m already waiting.”
’Tis the season of much to savor, beginning with San Rocco. Swags of lights, with bulbs that look saved from the 1940s, hang over the streets. The town government erected a decidedly pitiful and scraggly pine in the middle of the main piazza. School children decorated it with garlands of dried bow tie pasta sprayed gold and a few pine cones they’d gathered in the town park. The three women find it charming, such a counter to Christmas as they know it. No mall shops play carols on loop, no “O Holy Night” bringing tears to their eyes in the aisles of toys to be forgotten within twenty-four hours after Christmas. The pastry shop window glistens with rosy, purple, and apricot marzipan fruits, coils of almond pastry, puffs of cream-filled meringues, and glacéed kumquats and chestnuts. The weekly market features buckets of mistletoe and holly, a few fir trees (even more scraggly than the town tree), their roots wrapped in burlap and ready to plant after a brief season indoors. They’ll be adorned with small notes to Babbo Natale, chocolates, paper snowflakes, and a strand of blinking colored lights that might cause a fire at any minute. Churches display scenes of the nativity; some are elaborate renditions of renaissance paintings, some are formed from homey materials such as a matchbox for the manger and a shoebox for the plastic donkeys’ stalls. Camille is especially touched by wise men made of pipe cleaners and sheep made from steel wool and toothpicks.
The three friends love the early winter evenings in town, the bars crowded with merry people toasting, the mornings with shops full of women hunting and gathering for feasts, th
e charged air of festa. Susan meets Nicolà for hot chocolate. Camille takes Serena and Matilde to lunch at Hotel Santa Caterina. At Christmas, Julia never has not shopped for Wade and Lizzie (well, last year Lizzie was MIA); now she shops for her friends. No comforting yellow bathrobes. No dizzying cologne to dab under his delicious earlobes. At least she can buy lambskin gloves for her father, and pearl gray cashmere socks. Several books will be delivered to Chris, including a giant tome on Sicily. For Susan, a measuring tape in centimeters and inches, and a coral soft wool scarf that Julia can see flapping out the sunroof of the speeding Fiat. For Camille, sexy perfume she’d never buy for herself, musk and gardenia, and a glass quill with some bottles of artisan inks in violet, deep blue, and amber.
* * *
—
Colin brings in loads of wood for tonight. I’m through arranging cypress boughs along the mantel. He’s kept a fire going all day while we’ve transformed the downstairs for our party.
Colin cleared space in the living and dining rooms and set up borrowed folding tables on either end of our usual table for twelve. Now we can squeeze in twenty-two at our Christmas Eve-Eve splash. For music, my Irish expat friends, Brendan and Sally. He brings his guitar and she sings like an angel. He’s good at stirring everyone to participate. Leo and Annetta will help me roast big pork loins in their fireplace, and this afternoon, I picked up the historic, epic hazelnut roulade, sure to be for Julia the highlight of the party. This many for dinner is normal in Tuscany but a big effort for me. Oh, wait, I forgot Riccardo, our translator friend who works for the Vatican and comes up only on weekends. That’s twenty-three. I’ll have to squeeze in one more place setting.
* * *
—
Gianni picks up Cleve Hadley outside customs at Fiumicino and heads right back to Villa Assunta, where Julia paces, alternating waiting at the front window and dashing back to the oven where she’s baking her father’s favorite lemon pound cake. He’ll be exhausted, she thinks, and turns down his bed. The same bed Chris…She puts a pot of fragrant mint, sage, and thyme on his bedside table with a carafe of water, and even small chocolates, like at a fine hotel.
Cleve will stay through Christmas, and then he and Julia will travel for a week. He wants to visit the Italian Geographic Society Library and to wander in the Vatican corridors where he loved the globes and early maps when he was a young man on his first trip. He plans to have tea at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj and to have a Negroni overlooking the Piazza Navona rain or shine.
Susan will train it to Milano tomorrow to meet her daughters. They’ll rent a car and drive straight to San Cassiano, a mountain village in the Dolomites, for Christmas. After a couple of days, they’re planning to explore the Trentino-Alto Adige area. I can only imagine Susan in a rented car careening over the Falzarego Pass, which has got to be close to seven thousand feet. She’ll bring them to San Rocco only for a weekend, starting a round of musical chairs, overlapping with Camille but not Julia. The daughters will get to meet Julia for dinner when Susan takes them to Rome on their way home.
Camille’s Charlie, with daughter Ingrid, will arrive late Christmas Day from his wife’s family in Copenhagen, Charlie taking the room across from Julia’s father, and Ingrid sleeping in the never-used back bedroom. Charlie’s wife, Lara, will join them after a couple of days. Camille plans to take them to Venice for New Year’s Eve.
Susan has arranged hotels and pickups and even someone to come clean Villa Assunta twice a week during the onslaught. No one can keep the others’ crazy schedules straight. They’ll be home by Little Christmas. That they know.
We leave for Florida tomorrow, as soon as we clear up the chaos after our party.
* * *
—
Camille and Susan are ready to deck the halls. They’ve already dropped off white roses for the party tonight. Susan pulls into Villa Assunta with the car packed and one of the puny local Christmas trees tied to the Fiat roof. At the special Christmas market, they’ve picked out painted ceramic balls, tinsel, strings of tiny bells the kittens will go wild for, and sparklers. For Julia, they have a box of marrons glacés, a pair of pink quartz earrings made by a local designer, and a contraption that squeezes juice from the bones of fowl. Not likely to become a household favorite, but the novelty appealed to them and that’s what Christmas presents are about, right, the Oh lord, what is that? moment. Susan lugs in a crate of clementines just up from Sicily, and Camille stands the tree in a terra-cotta pot and drags it into the living room. Julia already has placed around the downstairs three vases of rose hips and holly laden with red berries. Susan gathers more holly from the slope toward Leo’s house and arranges wands of it with the long-stemmed white roses for the dining room. The fir draped with tinsel and a string of lights makes Susan want to sing “Silent Night,” so she does. Camille and Julia laugh in the kitchen. The villa sparkles.
It sparkles more with the entrance of Cleve Hadley. Julia whoo-hoos and throws her arms around him, dancing him up and down the entrance hall, while Susan and Camille help Gianni with Cleve’s coat and bag. He looks like Julia’s father should. Fine-boned like her, hair in shocks the color of ice, a neat pointed beard. Fit and tanned, he’s small and precise but gives the definite impression that he is just right.
After a tour of the house, Julia takes him into the kitchen, where she has soup and bruschetta ready. He’s enchanted. “In all my years, I’ve never seen a dining room this completely charming, even in Savannah where there are some spectacular dining rooms. You could step into the garden fresco, go traipsing through the rose arbor. Imagine how many people have had the same thought over the decades they’ve dined in there. Oh, this soup is just what the doctor ordered.”
Though the flight was smooth, he’s rattled by traveling for seventeen hours. The chickpea and pasta soup sends them all into a nap mode. “This olive oil, what makes it green?” Julia tells him more than he ever imagined about olive oil, the qualities and history and milling. “Tastes good, too.” He smiles.
“We should squeeze in a rest,” Susan says. “We have to be ready to party tonight.” Cleve raises his eyebrows but nods. Julia settles her father into his room. She and Susan are off to town for hair appointments. Cleve showers, then flops on the bed and falls into a delicious jet-lag sleep.
Camille has no intention of resting for more than fifteen minutes. Finally, finally, only this week her project broke open and she’s reveling in the experience of intense focus, a heady sensation of catapulting forward. Maybe it was the email she received from Charlie: Mom, I looked at the paintings in the attic. What a shame that you stored your talent up there. I’ve had waves of guilt. All that care you lavished on me! The paintings were dusty but luminous and moving. I’ve taken them downstairs and cleaned them. I’m having a great time hanging them in the hall, in the dining room, and one over the bed in your—now our—bedroom. That would be my favorite—a mirror on a weathered wall reflecting a lighted open doorway with mysterious objects that are not quite identifiable.
Ah, a beckoning or foreboding doorway even back then. She hung on to that for days, still circling, still fearful. She could toss off a small watercolor of Susan’s single pom-pom yellow chrysanthemum leaning in a tall glass, or an architectural detail of the stone surround of the living room fireplace. Rowan admired those, encouraged her, and still she waited. But the end of the year is coming, another year rolling toward her, its undertow already felt in her shoulders, the emptiness of her stomach, the small of her back. Too many year-ends hurtling off into oblivion. Now she feels an impatience with herself. A needle poking.
Three nights ago, she woke up at four and crept into her studio. All the materials neatly organized. Too neatly? She surveyed stacks of paper, tubes and brushes and pencils and canvases. My arsenal, she mused. She pulled her robe tight and sat down. “Time to begin.” She spoke aloud. A legendary nun once painted in the house, Grazia had told them. On close examination, Camil
le had found that the claws and feet of the black and white bird on the fresco formed the initials NM. Clever nun. Nameless, but how many lives she touched.
In the night, Camille paints a door frame on a piece of her handmade paper. She pauses for a long time, then animates the door with private symbols, writing that looks chipped through instead of painted, and some writing that goes backward. The shawl on the woman in the dining room fresco becomes an abstract pattern reminiscent of the mosaics in Aquileia in Friuli: along the edge, tile-shaped squares like Scarpa’s. Ink. Watercolor. Oil. On impulse, she glues a page on top of another, then another, fifteen, a stack. Now the door is thick. An object, not a painting. Light, though. Tears spill as she works. This is beyond where she thought she could go. She loves the look. She has made a strange artifact. A paper door, a mysterious new entity, not sculpture, not book, not painting. She recognizes that she has made something entirely her. Flesh of my flesh. New.
The creature from the black lagoon, she laughs, cools off from the white heat of her worktop. She inspects the rough deckle edges all around, thinking of a sealed scrapbook, a ship’s log at the bottom of a trunk, the diary she kept at nine, its lost key. She dips her finest brush into burnt umber and adds a thin border at the bottom. Where to stop? When is enough enough? She blends the smallest dab of blue into white to make a washed-out tint like the thin light of the sky when the sun is blazing. That faint shade surrounds the rest of the door. CT she inks in at the bottom, and then she adds #1.
Women in Sunlight Page 23