“Don’t ask me how I felt,” she said. “That’s what everybody has asked me and I don’t know yet.”
She put her hand on top of his in a gesture not romantic, maternal perhaps, and Sam suddenly felt something like tears simmering. Tears. It almost made him laugh out loud. He couldn’t recall that particular feeling of arriving tears once in his whole life, not even as boy.
“I got this for you,” she said, when the ice cream she’d ordered arrived. She stuck her spoon in the butterscotch ball and reached across the table, putting the spoon to his lips.
“Eat, eat,” she said, laughing, and he took the spoon from her.
“Where is the place your parents died?” she asked.
“South of Florence,” he said. “It’s a small place, not even a town, on the side of a hill near Orvieto.”
“And you’ve been back there?”
“Never,” he said.
“You should go.”
“That’s what your mother told me,” he said, finishing his ice cream, and he was just about to ask her to go someplace, to a movie or a park or her apartment, when she picked up her backpack, weighted with books, leaned over, and kissed his cheek.
“I’m so happy we’ve met.”
She wrote her telephone number on a napkin. “Are you here for long?”
“Maybe,” Sam said. “I haven’t decided.”
“If you stay, I hope you’ll call.”
He watched her walk down the street, past the cafés and shops, her pale yellow dress lifting in the light wind, her black hair striped silver from the sun. And when she’d disappeared around the corner, he paid the bill and hailed a taxi for Logan Airport.
As it turned out, there were two seats in coach on the 7 p.m. Delta flight to Milan. Round trip was less expensive, so he chose at random the morning of September 16 as the return date, paid full fare, and was asleep before takeoff from Boston. His plan was to take the same trip they had taken with James and Lucy, by train from Milan to Orvieto.
“Holiday,” he gave as the purpose of his visit to the officer checking passports at Malpensa Airport in Milan. “Holiday,” from holy day.
On the train, he’d looked the word up in the tiny dictionary he carried—looked up “holy” from the Old English hal or hole. Holiday was the right definition for this voyage or excursion, this odyssey, he thought, traveling to Orvieto.
He had read about Orvieto in The Rough Guide: Italy, at the edge of Umbria, east of the Tiber, rising high above the valley as if it were a city hanging from the sky. The description was familiar to Sam’s childhood memory of his first sight of Orvieto from the train, so when the the city filled the window next to where he was sitting, the breath went out of him.
The conductor stepped outside of the train ahead of Sam.
“Orvieto?” he asked.
Sam nodded.
“American.” This seemed to please the conductor, a small, rigid man, maybe in his early fifties, with sun-washed hair the color of sand, deep watery blue eyes, a long sad face, although he was smiling.
“Okay, okay,” he said, climbing back aboard, waving to the engineer.
It was three in the afternoon. Hot and dry, an oven wind blowing from the south. Sam walked to the end of the platform in the direction the train had gone, headed to Rome, looking out over the yellow fields scattered with squat, craggy olive trees.
The station was a squarish stone structure, the building empty except for a young man in blue jeans stretched out on his back on the flat bed of a baggage cart, his cap pulled over his eyes, his legs crossed at the ankle. He showed no sign of interest in company until Sam started to walk in his direction. Then he pushed his cap back on his head and sat up on his elbow.
“Taxi?”
“No taxi,” Sam said.
“Funicular?”
Sam shook his head.
“American,” the man said with some disappointment, pulling the cap back down over his eyes.
Sam planned to walk.
The Danesi house must have been located in the hills overlooking the train tracks, hilly but not hilly enough to take the funicular. The McWilliamses had walked up a hill to the house, but it wasn’t terribly high or Sam would have remembered.
He walked over to the baggage cart.
“Danesi?” he asked.
The young man lifted his cap, his eyes squinting into glittering sunlight, which slipped under the roof of the station.
“Danesi,” he said, raising his hands in a gesture of what-can-I-say? “Danesi here. Danesi there. Many Danesi in Orvieto.”
Sam leaned against the cart. He had the young man’s attention now. He had sat up and was swinging his legs over the sides, pointing to himself in an exaggerated gesture.
“Danesi,” he said proudly. “I am Antonio Danesi.”
“Do you know Gió?” Sam asked.
Antonio Danesi looked at Sam, cocking his head, folding his arms across his chest. He was small and young and handsome, and Sam could tell from the sweet smell of liquor on the hot wind that he was also a little drunk.
“Gió.” The young man pursed his lips, nodding his head north, in the direction of Florence. “Gió Danesi.”
Antonio walked around the side of the station, motioning for Sam to follow. “You come with me, Mr. American,” he said, laughing.
There was a narrow cobblestone path through the low brush at the front of the station that led up a hill directly in front of them. The hills surrounding the station were brown and rounded like anthills, the brush dry, low to the ground, clustered with brilliant scarlet desert flowers. Antonio had taken a cigarette and offered it to Sam, who took a drag, not inhaling, but pleased to have the company of Antonio, a shared cigarette, the heavy, sweet smell of Italian tobacco, the odor of a burning bush in the unforgiving heat.
The path, marked by an occasional crucifix or a painted replica of the benevolent Virgin Mary set behind glass and nailed to a tree, was not an easy walking path, winding, steep, the stones unevenly placed, the ground dusty. At the top of the first anthill, Antonio stopped, spread out his arms, and pointed to a small cluster of buildings scattered on the next hill. Tiny colored houses ran up the side of the hill, a toy village, a sprinkling of trees and yellow flowers. Beyond, the funicular looming above him crawled up the hill to Orvieto.
Gió Danesi stood behind the bar at a small trattoria on the edge of town, his back to them, making coffee. He was surprisingly tall—that was Sam’s first impression—and striking in his darkness, wearing a white starched shirt with the sleeves rolled up, black trousers, his hair long, over his collar and straight, a demeanor of gentle repose.
“Gió,” the young man said.
Gió turned toward them, smiling at Antonio, passing the cup of coffee to an elderly woman with her marketing in a string bag, a black shawl loose around her shoulders. She looked over at Sam suspiciously.
“American?” she asked.
Sam smiled and nodded.
“Gió,” Antonio said, a kind of bark in his voice. He pointed to Sam. “Your friend.”
Gió came from behind the counter. “My friend?” he asked.
“Do you speak English?” Sam asked.
Gió gave a shake of his shoulders. “A little bit,” he said.
Sam was breathless with excitement. “I’m Sam McWilliams,” he said.
“Yes,” Gió said patiently.
“When I was a little boy, I came to your house after an accident.”
“Accident?” Gió asked. “Accident. Yes?”
“There was a bomb.”
“A bomb.”
“A bomb,” the elderly woman said, pleased to join the conversation, clapping her hands together, making a hard flat sound. “Like that. Bomb.”
Gió looked at Sam, his face changing. He was taller than Sam, even leaning
with his back against the counter, his brow wrinkled, a hand across his lips.
“Bomb,” he said, his eyes narrowing in thought. “In the train. I know.” His face took on a sudden dark intensity. “The American boy.”
And then he caught his breath, his eyes softening, flooding with tears. He grabbed Sam in his arms and kissed him on the head and turning to the elderly woman, he raised his hands in a gesture of despair, his head shaking back and forth as if the full force of the explosion in Orvieto had finally come to him in the presence of Sam as a young man.
The house was the same—a sand-colored stucco cottage washed in white light, at the top of a long, dusty road. Sam remembered the road—not the walk up to the house, but the drive down in Mr. Blake’s long American car, Gió at the bottom of the hill standing in a field of sunflowers, his palms over his eyes.
Susanna, smaller than he had imagined her, whirled through the house on her short, plump chair legs with dishes and glasses and pots of tomato sauce and thick crusty rosemary bread with olive oil and anchovies, oregano from the garden outside the window, bottles of red wine. She spoke very little English, and moved too quickly, in any case, to speak directly even to Gió, but the music of Italian was swimming through the hot, claustrophobic air. Somehow by noon the long table was set, glasses of wildflowers winding down the center, and a banquet of people, mostly young, Sam’s age, several children, streamed through the front door, filling the small cottage to its full measure of space.
Sam stood at the door with Gió.
“This is my brother Filippo,” Gió said, and there was Filippo and his shy wife, Marisa, a baby in each arm, kissing Sam on both cheeks.
“My sister Beatrice,” Gió said.
Beatrice, younger than Sam, with lovely thick brown lips and sun-colored cheeks, took his hand and kissed the fingers.
“My sister Patrizia speaks good English,” Gió said. Patrizia had come from Florence, taking off work for the afternoon to see Sam McWilliams, the bad dream of their childhood, rise from the dead of memory.
“We are so happy you remember us,” Patrizia said.
She turned to her mother, saying, “He remember us, Mamma.”
And Susanna passed a glass of wine to Sam, raised her hands in the air, throwing kisses to the sky.
“Remember, remember,” she repeated in English.
At dinner he told them about his life with Charlotte and Oliver and Julia, with his grandfather and Noli. He told them about Plum & Jaggers, how the stories had come from his parents’ deaths, about his childhood collecting stories of terrorism, and about Rebecca Frankel. They listened, Patrizia translating, sometimes with laughter and tears, their eyes fixed on Sam as if he were some kind of miracle.
“The other children will come to Orvieto?” Filippo asked. “The girl, the boy, the baby girl.” He smiled. “See, I remember.”
“Not now,” Sam said.
“They must come,” Gió said.
“Maybe,” Sam said. “Maybe they will.”
He had called them from Boston before he left and then from Milan, but the answering machine was on, the message the same, Oliver’s crisp voice: “Please leave your name and number and we’ll return your call.”
Perhaps they had gone to Grand Rapids or Washington or to the farm.
But even if they had answered, he had no plans to speak with them. He’d hang up when he heard one of them say “Hello.” They would know it was him.
After lunch, Sam slept. The room where Susanna put him was very small, with white walls and a starched white spread, a blue-and-white Delia Robbia Virgin in a circle of colored fruit over the cot, the shutters closed against the heat.
Day fell into night without his stirring, and when he did get up, his head swirling with the wine, the taste of garlic thick in his crusty mouth, it was dark outside.
Gió was at the kitchen table drinking an espresso, his chin resting in his hand.
“I was drunk,” Sam said.
“Very drunk.” Gió laughed. “It’s good.”
“Not so good for me.” Sam sat in a chair across from Gió, running his hands through his hair. On the table, a red ceramic bowl was filled with small yellow cakes and he took one and then another.
“What time is it?” he asked.
Gió held up five fingers.
“Five in the morning? What are you doing up?”
Gió smiled.
“I watch out for you,” he said.
For a long time they sat in a comfortable silence, watching the flat lemon sun come over the horizon, obscuring the details of the landscape.
“I go to work soon,” Gió said.
“I’ll come with you.”
“To work?”
“Is there work for me to do?”
“Work?” Gió laughed hard. “Scrubbing, washing dishes, taking garbage. Not good work for you.”
“I’ll do it,” Sam said.
“You stay here, then?” Gió asked, taking Sam’s head in an arm grip, tousling his hair, giving his chin a gentle box. “Good. You stay here. This is your new home.”
Sam had fallen into an agreeable pattern so familiar it was difficult for him to remember what his life had been like with Plum & Jaggers, as if he were beginning again as a child to whom nothing has happened but a simple repetitive life of dependency and pleasure. He loved his room in the Danesi house, getting up at dawn, making his bed, pressing the crisp white coverlet with his hands until the wrinkles were gone. And then he’d stand in the doorway to admire the purity of the place where he had slept. Nothing on the walls but the blue-and-white ceramic Virgin, a tangerine rag rug on the tile floor.
At the trattoria, he washed dishes in water so hot his hands turned bright red—mustard-yellow dinner plates, olive-green dishes for antipasto, tiny white espresso cups. It gave him aesthetic satisfaction to watch the stack of dishes, the colors of the earth, fill up at the end of the day, waiting for the next.
At night he wrote postcards to Miriam Frankel, love letters he wouldn’t send, accumulating at the bottom of his bookbag.
Dear Miriam, he wrote on the first postcard, a picture of the Piazza XXIX Marzo in Orvieto. Thank you in particular for the ice cream. I had no idea I’d be so fond of butterscotch. Yours, Sam McWilliams
When he thought of her, which he often did, he saw her lovely face half covered with shiny black curls. She was licking the sugar from her palm.
Shortly after he arrived in Orvieto, he had called his grandfather in Grand Rapids, hoping in fact for news of his siblings.
“It’s Sam,” he said when his grandfather failed to recognize his voice. “We must have a bad connection.”
But it wasn’t the connection.
“I don’t know Sam,” William said in a thin voice with an unfamiliar edge of impatience. “You must have gotten the wrong number.”
One evening after work at the trattoria, still light although quite late, the sun crouching in the corner of the village, Sam asked Gió to show him where the lunch car had exploded.
“You really want to see?” Gió was hesitant.
“Why do you ask?” Sam said. “Is it something I shouldn’t see?”
Gió shook his head.
“Nothing is there,” he said.
The train tracks came closest to the village in the hills below Orvieto to the north, and it was there at a bend of track headed toward the station that the event had happened.
Sam and Gió walked off the hilly path that they took every day back and forth from the trattoria to the Danesis’ house, across a field with low brush and lavender wildflowers, to the bend in the tracks.
“There,” Gió said. “The train stopped there.”
“And where were we?” Sam asked. “The children.”
“Here,” Gió said. “Where you are standing.”
Th
ey were halfway between the tracks and the cluster of small farms, including the Danesi’s above them, although Orvieto itself was no longer visible, and so it seemed as if nothing were there, certainly no sound but the sounds of birds, the crackling of dry grass, nothing but train tracks and open field.
Sam folded his arms across his chest.
“You see,” Gió said apologetically. “Nothing is here.”
“It happened a long time ago,” Sam said quietly.
“Yes, a long time,” Gió said, but he seemed unhappy that there was no evidence.
The next morning there was a dust storm. Italy had gone weeks without rain, a heat wave out of northern Africa. The vegetation everywhere was struggling for life.
Sam woke up at dawn, a roaring wind filling his perfect room with dark brown sand. He had slept poorly, with bad dreams he couldn’t remember, and wakened with an articulated question for Gió, who was sitting with his parents at the long wooden table, already awake and eating when Sam came into the kitchen.
He poured himself a small cup of ink-black coffee and sat down next to Gió.
What he wanted to know was where the bodies from the explosion had been placed. Surely the people who died must have been somewhere on that hill, moved there by the medics before they were taken to a mortuary. Sam knew that his parents’ bodies had traveled on the plane with them from Florence to Brussels to New York—his grandfather had promised Charlotte—that they were buried in East Grand Rapids Memorial Cemetery, where he’d been only once, and that was before they had moved to Washington. Maybe there had been a funeral, but if so, Sam had not attended it. And he had never asked questions, protecting his grandparents from a conversation they didn’t wish to have.
Gió turned to his mother, speaking to her in Italian.
“You really want to see?” he asked Sam after his mother had spoken. “Mama kept the newspapers.”
Sam studied the front page of the Corriere della Sera for June 12, a large picture of the wrecked train—and on the jump, page 5, two other pictures faded yellow, one of a medic on his haunches next to a line of swaddled bodies, lying side by side along the bend in the track. The other of a boy, not Sam—he checked carefully—sitting on the hill, his head resting on his knees, his arms over his head, as if he were expecting a second disaster.
Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 21