She finds a shady bench where she spends half an hour studying prepositions. Susan’s Italian is a force of nature. She’s fearless. She speaks fast. Slow, no one understands you, even if you’re grammatically correct. She studied diligently all winter and frequently meets Annetta for a walk, Nicolà for lunch, and Riccardo for drinks. With each she speaks Italian the whole visit. She knows it must be painful for Riccardo—translation is his métier—but they have good laughs at her bloopers and often he comes home for dinner.
She’s learned even more by volunteering at the hospital. She only fills water glasses, helps postsurgical patients take slow steps down the hall, and sometimes, when someone asks, reads the paper aloud, much to her benefit and to the amusement of the person in bed listening. She gets corrected, and remembers the next time. She’s known all over the hospital for the flowers that now greet everyone in the waiting room.
She glances up at Palazzo Pitti and nods. Yes, how stupid of me, she thinks. Of course! The garden design was meant to be seen from there. The perspective would be encompassing. She’s a speck on the path, but the Medici clan had the godlike view without the inconvenient mud. She walks around a grand stone-rimmed pond. If we stay at Villa Assunta, she thinks, we need water. Not a plain swimming pool; certainly no lap pool. Something natural, a local pietra serena stone surround with, what, something tall at the end with cascading water. Draw and dream, wander and look.
Camille remains at the apartment, uncharacteristically blow-drying her hair into a light flip, attempting to use eyeliner and mascara, and dressing with care, even wiping every speck of dirt off her boots. She walks out in pursuit of a wild (for her) notion. At Prada, she stares in the window. She saw them yesterday. She’s intimidated by the tiny sleek woman in black who greets her at the door and stays right beside her as she tries to look around casually. Susan has explained that hovering is service, not suspicion. They’re being helpful. Something, she said, we’re just not used to. Camille points to the shoes she admires, covets actually, in the window. “Thirty-nine?” she asks.
Ten minutes later, they’re hers, dark red velvet shoes with a slender ankle strap and a quite high heel. Knee be damned. Now she’ll have to invent an occasion to wear them. After the initial formality, seeing Camille’s obvious excitement, the sales attendant became friendly and showed Camille a python-skin clutch purse the same color as the shoes. She bought that, too.
After her impulse purchases, she spends the morning in the vortex of American twentieth-century art, a just-opened exhibit of the Kandinsky-Pollock era at the Strozzi. Here’s much of the art she’s taught to undergrads. In this lofty setting, the synergy among the paintings hums. After months of renaissance art, this stark return to her own time startles her. She’s stopped and mesmerized by the Rothkos, five of them so wondrously lit that they seem alive from inside. She spends an hour inhaling their seeming simplicity. One looks like the surface of the moon with space behind. Really, it’s just gray and white, but how luminous and grainy and opaque and mysterious. She’s happy. She stares long at a Helen Frankenthaler, one of the few women represented. She loves Frankenthaler. A serious boy of perhaps fourteen walks with the rented audio from painting to painting. He’s intent on the Duchamps. She loved Charlie’s years of awakening to art; this boy feels that quickening, too. Their eyes meet for a moment and he smiles. She smiles, too. A small exchange that makes her eyes sting with tears.
Laughing to herself over the exuberant art, the red shoes, the boy, the promising air, she walks to Mercato Centrale, where she meets Julia and Susan for lunch. Julia spent the morning at a cooking class there, though she didn’t learn much. She’s long since mastered pasta making, as well as the easy panna cotta and boring tiramisu.
The Mercato, a paradigm upscale food court, swarms with people, even off season. What a range—mini-shops serving hamburger, lampredotto (don’t ask), truffled pasta, Sicilian pastries, divine mozzarellas. They move from counter to counter, taking little plates to a table, then visiting another enticing counter and dashing back. A good southerner, Susan opts for fried. She passes around her plate of crispy zucchini, calamari, carrots, potatoes, squash flowers, and balls of fried bread. Julia analyzes her cauliflower and guanciale pasta, a good one to remember for cold weather. Trying to move beyond her comfort zone, Camille surveys, with a bit of uncertainty, her order—black polenta with grilled octopus. She is afraid the octopus will taste like rubber bands, but it is delicious.
Back in their apartment, she unwraps the shoes. Holding them up in each hand, she waves them about in dance steps. “Cha-cha-cha!” Everyone tries them on. Camille feels a twinge in her knee just looking at them. “I’m going to lose five and get a black dress. I’m turning seventy in April.” My work is burgeoning, she thinks. I’m taking a cue from Susan. More fitted clothes, brighter colors. And more rigor, like Julia. No more endless poring over art books. Work!
She’s done shopping for now. Late this afternoon and tomorrow morning, she has tickets to the Uffizi, where she plans to feast her eyes and fill her notebook.
Susan takes off to explore artisan shops on the Oltrarno, the other side of the Arno. Having eaten too much, Julia announces that she needs a “renaissance nap.”
My appointment is quick. Doctor smiling and pleased! Oh, sweet! Colin and I are in Florence overnight. We will dine with our American neighbors. They’re all set up in a river-view apartment Susan found. When she called, she said Camille has stepped far out of line—ordering octopus and shopping Prada. Her breakout in art has loosened other tethers. (Not to mention the still unexplained sex on the sofa she toasted on our trip.) As in Venice, they’re all over town. Susan called from an “uber-trendy” café near the Pitti Palace that she spotted after leaving the Boboli Gardens. They were sitting outside drinking Campari Sodas at five in the afternoon. We’re meeting at eight and I hope they’re not wobbly!
After my appointment, Colin still had work to do. The palazzo restoration is stalled by the discovery of a fresco in a vast room slated to be divided into three rooms. The architect’s nightmare. Now a pack of experts must evaluate the painting. At a glance, I’d say Colin is in for trouble; an entire wall looks to have ravishing depictions of Botticelli-like graces carrying a long flower chain toward the Virgin, who’s reaching down for the blossoms as she ascends into the sky. Colin thinks to make that wall a long wide hall, reducing the size he’s planned for the bedrooms. I think they’ve just added a bundle of money to the property value. (Architect Kit speaking, of course.)
I’m back in the hotel, thumbing through notes, organizing, and sometimes just gazing out at Piazza Tornabuoni. Such a handsome space. I’m at a level view with eight different styles of renaissance windows. In moments like this, I’m close to Margaret, who fiercely loved architecture. We used to sit in the sun at Caffè Rivoire overlooking Piazza della Signoria, ordering glasses of orange juice, talking about each building around that piazza that has seen everything from the burning of Savonarola to the installation of a brassy Jeff Koons statue next to the David (a copy). All the tourists in the world come there, but Margaret didn’t notice. “Look up,” she’d admonish. Or, she’d look straight through them. Energy streamed out of Margaret. Just sitting there like anyone else, she had a force that even the waiter recognized. Solicitous, he was, instead of abrupt. In all the time I knew her, until she died at seventy-five, she never changed an iota, except that her clothes became more eccentric. As I mentioned before, I thought she had a thing for Colin. She used to bring over a printout of a recent Renzo Piano or Zaha Hadid design and sit shoulder to shoulder with him, going over the specs and discussing whether the human element was subsumed to the design and how the light must play inside.
* * *
—
I turn her manuscript to the end, where she has tucked in a letter, addressed, stamped but not sealed. Calhoun Green. A law office, Green, Green, & Schwartz in Richmond, Virginia. She obviously—it’s y
ellowed—didn’t mail it. Should I?
Were the contents of the suitcase meant for me? She said she’d be back in the fall. After she returned to Washington, we heard less and less and then nothing, and then everything.
I read:
Cal, this is Margaret Merrill writing you. I’m sure you remember well. After so many years, I want to tell you that your child did not get swabbed out and rinsed away. I gave birth to a boy. Eight pounds. A shock of black hair, those blue eyes infants have that look like a deep summer night sky, little fists he waved as though fighting the air, a solid little loaf of sugar. I was twenty-one. I gave him up. Through an agency in New York, I selected a handsome naval architect, who looked somewhat like you but taller, and a musician who was rising rapidly in reputation. She wore her hair straight as a waterfall and had a lofty chin.
I know they were good parents. During the process, I obtained their names and then it was easy to locate their address on the Upper East Side.
I was working in the city. I would go to a corner café near their brownstone. Polished brass numbers on the door, seasonal flowers plugged into the small square by the steps. An iron fence around the plot. Careful people. Large brown eyes, her hair up now, sometimes escaping in wisps, the “mother” exited with the baby in one arm, the stroller in the other. How precisely she placed him, covering his feet with a soft white blanket, adjusting the cushion. She kissed his cheek. She was always smiling. She pushed right by the window where I sat.
Later, I’d see a nanny, a neat Filipino woman, walking with him along the sidewalk where he stopped to look at leaves and pointed at dogs, turning his open face up to the nanny to see if she recognized the wonder before them. He wore a yellow sweater with a boat stitched on it and polished oxfords, a little man, spirited, cunning and headlong. The nanny had to chase and grab constantly.
Twice I saw the father. The boy on his shoulder, bouncing as though he rode a horse. The father exaggerating his gait for the boy’s amusement. I was leaving the café and came face to face with them. The boy and I locked eyes for an instant and he smiled.
The last time was two days after his fourth birthday. A sweltering day in Manhattan. I’d given up and stepped outside the café when I saw him down the sidewalk zooming toward me on a scooter, propelling himself forward rapidly. He was an apparition. The pedestrians parting before him, his long curls blown back, his foot working against the pavement. The florist outside her shop called to him, “Whoa, Colin!” The newsstand agent greeted him, as did a bag lady. He passed by. He was out of a dream.
Four and a half years, then I was gone. Europe, reporting, some private government work, my novels. Maybe you’ve heard. Through my sources and later the Internet, I found snatches of information. The concerts, a gala hosted, an article on advances in submarine locators. Not much. Then, just last year, I was in Afghanistan working for the Times. I came across this on the wire service.
Colin Adams Knowles, 16, son of Amanda and Edward Knowles, died on August 5 following an accident while rock climbing at Yosemite National Park. He was a student at Horace Mann School, where he excelled in languages and literature. Adopted as an infant, Colin was loved by his family and many friends for his humor, exceptional intelligence, and infectious joie di vivre. In the future, he planned to study architecture. He was a talented pianist, enjoyed tennis and soccer, and was in training to scale Annapurna with a group of fellow hiking enthusiasts. His parents are joined in grief by grandparents Carlos and Josephine Alcazar and Sandra and Phillip Knowles, and by a younger sister, Josephine Amanda Knowles.
There. You never knew. Now you do. He lived the years he had. I live with him every day. Now you can have—and I don’t mean this ironically—the honor, too. Margaret
Colin says I must mail it. How can I? She didn’t. How can I not?
Life can be surreal. I’m churning with this dilemma and at the same time pulling up my chair at Cipolla Rossa and greeting Susan, Camille, and Julia, all high on the frescoes in their apartment and new hairstyles they got in a fancy salon and pistachio gelato and the Feltrinelli bookstore and the bunch of violets they brought me. Everyone buoyant. I remain placid in my loose dress, tight shoes, my legs feeling pumped full of air.
* * *
—
Colin and I stroll along the river back to our room. Over us, the transparent full moon, a soap bubble blown by a child. The friends decided to go back to the piazza for a late limoncello. Tomorrow we’ll all take the same train home to San Rocco. I’m amazed at the energy they continue to amass. They seem to have doubled in force since arrival. I’m walking back also with young Colin Knowles, cut short. My Colin turned silent for hours when he read the letter to Mark aka Calhoun Green. Margaret, why? If only she’d told us. How foolish I was to think she had the hots for Colin (thirty years younger), when she’d instead only taken what comfort she could by transferring a piece of her hurt and longing. Her lost Colin could have become a man like Colin. A writer is a namer. My Colin, architect, must have hit like a stun gun.
The letter unlocked dark Margaret: a child kept secret. And after, she carried secrets forward into her life.
When the kitchen phone rang, we all looked at each other. What? I was at Villa Assunta for dinner (Colin in London until tomorrow). We moved into the living room for dessert. As I grow, I gravitate toward big soft chairs. This one reminds me of Tito, who used to warm his big feet at the fire as Luisa knitted scratchy red scarves. As I shift the cushion, I think I catch a whiff of his cigar smoke and the odd smell he gave off of freshly cut wood. We’re discussing baby names. Lorenzo, Silvia, Flavia, Luca, Ettore, Lia. I like names with character. From a Trevor novel, I remember an aunt Fitzeustace, but who would dare saddle a child with that? They all like Della, which keeps sounding right to me, though Colin likes Junas, lofty and statuesque. (Not as romantic in English—Eunice.)
“Tatiana,” Susan suggests. “She would be a dancer.” On the eighth ring, Susan dashes to answer; no one ever uses the landline. “For you, Julia,” she calls. At the door, she adds, “Man. With a southern accent. But not Cleve.”
Julia grimaces as she takes the call. We continue to talk but overhear Julia’s side of the conversation.
“This is Julia.”
“Wade! How did you find this number?” She waves from the doorway, mouth wide open, shaking her head, gesturing a thumbs-down.
“I guess that’s true. No place to hide anymore.” She laughs without laughing.
“I’m listening.”
“That’s right. My friend went to check on her…”
“Well, he made it his business.”
“A friend, a good friend. Anyway, that’s not the point. He’s willing to look further, but I haven’t agreed yet.”
“Wait. He doesn’t think it’s his business. He was willing to do it for me.”
“Wade, calm down. You do what you will. He’s trying to help.”
“Well, go. You’ve made that trip how many times?”
“She’s gone dark before.”
“I said go. I’ll tell Chris you’re going.”
“Yes, Chris. He has a name. I work with him, if you need an explanation.”
“Of course if you go I want to hear back.”
“I do not want Daddy making that trip. It’s too much for him. You know how she feels ganged up on, how she makes it our fault for being there.”
“The last address we had. And there was that friend who called us when she was arrested. You could look for her. Honor Blackwell, I believe.”
“What? Wait, what? Wade, have you lost your mind?”
“This is beyond belief. I don’t have any idea what to say, so I won’t say anything. I am going to hang up…”
“The house? Well, that is totally up to Daddy. It’s his house.”
“Oh, please. What are you talking about? We lived there forever. He even
paid the property taxes. You’re not entitled to be reimbursed for maintenance. What’s wrong with you?”
“No. No. And no. I’m hanging up.” Julia clicks off the phone and comes back to the living room with her face in her hands. “Was he always without a clue? How did I not see him all those years?”
“You okay?” Susan asks. “What the hell is happening? We heard you. Probably should have shut the door but we were afraid. I knew it was Wade when I answered. We were scared of really bad news.”
“Anything from him is bad news. I told Daddy what Chris found out. He ran into Wade at the club bar. They started talking and Daddy let him know that Lizzie is missing. Now Wade is all over going to California and searching for her. Once again.”
“Well, let him go. Why not?” I ask. “Something may have happened to her.”
“I don’t doubt that and, yes, he’s going. That’s fine. She can smash his heart all over again. The other news—this is unbelievable—the girlfriend is pregnant. How tacky. Rose something. She’s about half his age. How addle-brained can he get? Oh, second chance! He actually said that. What a cliché. Get this—he suggested that she move into our house, which doesn’t even belong to us. Or that he move out and Daddy pays him back for all the improvements we’ve made over the years. And, oh, she’s anxious for everything to remain friendly. Christ. Does that just beat anything?”
Women in Sunlight Page 28