by Joseph Kanon
We got out at San Marcuola and walked the rest of the way to the ghetto, Claudia’s high heels clicking loudly on the pavement. Away from the canal the streets became somber and dingy, and people stared openly at our clothes, the corsage almost startling here. Then up the narrow calle where her aunt used to gossip window to window, and over the bridge, ducking our heads in the low sottopasso to the open campo, as stark as before, the trees just beginning to bud. She stood for a minute, looking. No one passed us, the only campo in Venice that seemed lifeless, left behind.
“I always say I’ll never come here again, and then I come back,” she said.
We went over to a bench in front of what had been the old people’s home. She sat for a minute with her back against the wall, then leaned forward and took off her shoes.
“ Mama mia, these shoes. What?”
“ Mama mia,” I said, grinning. “A real Italian.”
“Ha, like the others,” she said, rubbing her foot. “At Signor Howard’s, speaking English. You don’t know real Italians.”
“I married one, didn’t I?”
She stared at the campo. “I don’t feel Italian here. Something else. They didn’t think we were Italian when they came for us.” She sat back, frowning. “Why do I come here? It’s always the same.”
“Maybe that’s why.”
“No, it’s foolish. But at the Gritti I thought, what am I doing here? My father can’t see me here.”
“But he can here?”
“No, that’s why it’s so foolish. But I wish he could. I thought, Today I wish he could see me. This dress. These shoes. Married. Just to show him I am alive. He never expected to see that.” She paused. “Well, did I? I never thought I’d leave that place. And now, flowers,” she said, touching the corsage. “So maybe I came to see myself. All dressed up. Show off to the neighbors.”
I lit cigarettes for us. “Maybe you will see somebody. You never know.”
She shook her head, the empty campo its own answer, then pointed across to one of the tall buildings. “That’s where it would have been, the wedding. See the windows on the third floor? There. And then after, a party somewhere. Big, with everybody. He liked parties.”
“Would he have liked me?” I said, just making conversation.
She shook her head, smiling. “No.”
“No?”
“No.” Laughing now, a private joke.
“Why not?”
“You’re not Jewish.”
“Part.”
She waved this away. “Americans. It’s different.”
“How?”
“It’s different.” She turned, a new idea. “And now me. I’m American too, yes? Passport, everything?”
“Everything.”
“I forgot about the passport,” she said. “Now I can go anywhere.”
“Almost worth getting married for.”
“He would have liked that, anyway. You know, for him, that generation, America was like a dream.” She looked again at the synagogue windows. “He would have made a big fuss. Introducing you. All the relatives.”
I kept looking at the campo, saying nothing.
“Well,” she said, moving somewhere else in her mind.
“Are you sorry it wasn’t like that?”
“Me? I’m supposed to be dead. Sometimes, at the Gritti, it’s easy to forget. Then I come here and I see it again.” She opened her hand to the square. “We’re all supposed to be dead. Not married, dead.” She paused. “And now who’s dead? The man who killed him. So that’s one thing I did for my father.”
“He can’t see that either,” I said.
“No, but I’m glad. I’m glad it was me.”
“It wasn’t you,” I said quietly.
“Yes, both of us. Do you think they’d take one of us without the other?”
I glanced at her, suddenly back in the registrar’s office. “Nobody’s taking anybody.”
“No. Well,” she said, getting up, dropping the cigarette, “not today. Anyway, such talk. On a wedding day. Of course, it’s not that kind of wedding, is it?” she said, nodding toward the windows again, where the relatives would have been.
“What kind is it?”
She ground out the cigarette with her toe. “Our kind.”
We walked toward the station, intending to get a taxi back, and in a few minutes were on the Lista di Espagna, crowded with people just off the train.
“Let’s go back there,” she said, pointing to the hotel on the side street where we’d first made love. “Do you want to?”
“Do you?”
“Yes. Not your mother’s house. There.”
The desk clerk raised his eyebrows at Claudia’s corsage, as if we were newlyweds from Maestre who’d wandered into the wrong place, but he gave us a key. Claudia was playful on the stairs, backing me against the wall on the landing, the way we’d been that first time, too eager to open the door. But the room was different, stuffy, in the back, and we had to draw the blinds against sun this time, not the cold rain that had made us feel hidden away, illicit. When she took off her clothes, first unpinning the flowers, I thought of her unbuttoning her blouse that day, the jolt of it, before anything happened. Before we were different. She felt it too, I think, that sudden moment of everything being different, because she looked for one second as if she might dart away, but then she stepped over to me, naked, and pressed herself against me, and that was the same again, different but the same.
We made love in a kind of rush, grabbing, so that our minds were free of everything but what was happening to our skin. You could feel it being pushed away, every thought crowded out by physical excitement, gathering speed, until sex was something happening to us, not in our control at all. When she came, a ragged burst of gasps in my ear, the sound seemed dragged out of her, involuntary, and then I was coming too, almost surprised by it, as if I’d been caught in some unwilled convulsion. I stayed in her afterward, not sure it was over, then finally rolled off, blinking at the ceiling, returning, still not thinking about anything. The way she’d once described it, something to prove you’re alive, just feeling it. When she’d told me it could be anyone, as long as you could feel it.
Now she was leaning over me, propped up on one arm, touching my face.
“We still have this, don’t we?” she said, not waiting for an answer, bending down to kiss me.
“You’re all red,” I said, reaching up and running my hand over the tops of her breasts, still flushed, as if she had a birthmark.
She smiled a little, feeling my fingers, her eyes on mine. “You should marry me.”
“Okay.”
“We could spend our wedding night here.”
“We could,” I said, my fingers still tracing a line across her chest.
For a second she gave in to the stroking, closing her eyes. Then she opened them again and stared down at me. “You’re not sorry?”
I shook my head, turning my hand over, brushing her with the back of it. “I’ll marry you again,” I said. “Would that do it?”
She nodded. “For all the other reasons. For those.”
I let my hand drop, then reached up with both arms and pulled her to me, kissing her, and for a while it really was the same again, but different.
We tried to sleep, lazy after sex, but the voices from the Lista di Espagna funneled into the calle, seeping through the window like dust, and neither of us really wanted to stay. Instead, like real honeymooners, we took a gondola, winding through the back canals until we lost our sense of direction, content to watch people crossing bridges over our heads, moving at their land pace while we drifted below. Sometimes they stopped to look at us, pointing at Claudia’s corsage, so that, mirrorlike, we became part of each other’s scenery. By the time the gondolier got back on the Grand Canal the sun was setting, the water gold and pastel, and he threw out his arms in an ecco gesture, as if he had arranged it for us, a wedding gift.
After the Gritti lunch, it seemed extravagant to go o
ut, but the house in Dorsoduro felt confining, filled with ghosts, and Claudia said she wanted to do something American, so we ended up going to Lucille’s, just behind Campo San Fantin. The club had opened during the occupation, a little piece of home, and the customers were still mostly soldiers, on leave from bases in the Veneto or attached to one of the Allied offices that hadn’t yet packed up and gone. It had the borrowed, pretend quality of places like it in Germany-America till you walked out the door-and most of the locals avoided it.
When we got there, it was only half full. The band was finishing its first set, so the house lights were down, the other customers just shadows in the smoky darkness. At the table next to ours everyone was in uniform, drinking beer. Lucille, the colored singer who fronted the place, was doing “Easy Living,” trying to pass as Billie Holiday, with a flower in her hair. The soldiers next to us stared at Claudia when we sat down, someone approachable, the kind of girl who went to jazz clubs, and for a second I stiffened, then laughed at myself, a cartoon reaction: That’s my wife.
Lucille finished, and through the applause I heard one of the soldiers say, “Hey”-not flirting, trying to get our attention.
“Hey,” he said again, “remember us?” Moving his finger between him and his friend. “The island that was closed. Jim and Mario.”
“Torcello,” Claudia said, smiling. “Yes. You’re still here?”
“Last day,” one of them said. “Hey, let us buy you a beer.”
Claudia held up her left hand, wiggling her ring finger. “Ask him,” she said, nodding to me.
“What did I tell you?” one said to the other, then leaned forward, taking me in. “That’s great. When?”
“Today.”
“Today? Fucking A,” the GI said, then dipped his head in apology to Claudia. “Congratulations.” He signaled the waiter, then moved his chair closer, half joining us at the small club table. We shook hands.
“I have to tell you, I knew it. I said to him, what else would they come out here for? I mean, with the restaurant closed. We cleared out, remember?”
“I remember.”
Claudia, who seemed to be enjoying herself, shook hands with both of them.
“Mario?” she said.
“Calabrese. My grandfather.”
“Ah,” she said, pointing to herself. “Romana.”
The beers arrived, hers in a glass. She lifted it to them. “ Salute,” she said, smiling, the party we hadn’t had at the Gritti. “So they sent you here? You speak Italian?”
“Two words, maybe. My father didn’t want us to-”
He stopped, afraid of offending, and just then Lucille stood up again, this time for a comic, sexy version of “The Frim Fram Sauce,” flirting with the audience, coating each word with innuendo. Claudia tried to follow it, taking her cues from Jim and Mario, who laughed at all the right places, but inevitably her reactions were late, one step behind, foreign.
“What’s chiffafa?” she asked Mario as we applauded. “A vegetable?”
He laughed. “It’s just jive,” he said, almost shouting. The band had started playing, without Lucille, so people talked above it, the small room noisy. He pointed at Claudia’s wedding ring. “So does this mean you’re going to the States?”
“What do you think, will I like it?”
“Like it? You’re gonna love it. It’s the States.”
“Yes? Which one are you from?”
I sat back watching, not really listening. New York had everything-the big shows, everything. It never stopped, not like here, where they rolled the streets up-well, canals, rolled the canals up. Jim laughed, trying to picture this, then both soldiers turned to Claudia to tell her about things she had to see, things she’d like because they liked them. GI talk. America now a movie to them, shinier than anything they’d ever known. And why not? I smiled to myself, enjoying the breezy descriptions, Claudia’s face as she listened, pretending to be wide-eyed, the sort of girl they might want to take back themselves. There were more drinks. Mario asked her to dance, if it was all right with me.
“You’re a lucky guy,” Jim said, stuck with me now. “Want us to clear out?”
“No, she’s having fun,” I said, looking at her on the floor, doing a foxtrot with Mario.
“Some place, huh? Like being home.”
I looked at her again, my chest suddenly tight. My wife. Of course we’d have to go back sometime. But even in this ersatz version in San Fantin she seemed out of place. America was about easy happiness, chiffafa, as casual as picking up a girl in a club. I thought of the look in her eyes that afternoon as she had stared across the empty campo. What would she do with it there, her old life? Pretend it didn’t exist, like Bertie, until it started to grow inside her?
Mario finished with a surprise twirl, so they were laughing as they came off the floor. When her laugh stopped suddenly, cut off, we all looked at her, then followed her gaze toward the back of the room.
“See a ghost?” Jim said.
“No, no, sorry,” she said, sitting down. “It’s nothing.”
But my eye had caught him now too, the mustache neatly brushed, sitting against the wall in a double-breasted suit, on the town. A woman was with him, her back to us, and I tried to look away before he saw me. Not Signora Cavallini. Maybe a friend from Maestre. Lucille’s was a kind of Maestre-no one his wife knew would come here. I felt embarrassed, as if I had opened the wrong door by mistake.
“He’s coming over,” Claudia said.
I turned, expecting some version of a man of the world wink, an elbow nudge, but instead he was smiling, delighted.
“Signor Miller. So you like the jazz too? All the young people, it seems,” he said, waving his hand toward his table, where the woman had turned to face us.
Giulia. For a second I simply stared, too surprised to move, then she was nodding and I had to nod back. She was dressed for a night out, lipstick and earrings, no trace of mourning. To see Cavallini? In a place where no one would see them. But neither of them seemed disconcerted by our being there. Cavallini was taking Claudia’s hand, greeting her.
“Please, you’ll join us?”
“Oh, but-” Claudia fluttered, spreading her hands to Jim and Mario, clearly unnerved by the idea of sitting with Cavallini.
“That’s okay,” Mario said. “We were just having a beer. You go sit with your friends. I mean, what the hell, your wedding day.”
“How?” Cavallini said.
“Claudia and I were married today,” I said to him.
He looked at me, speechless for a moment, then fell back on form, taking up Claudia’s hand again with a flourish. “Signora Miller. My very best wishes,” he said, the English sounding curiously like a translation. He turned to me. “So. You didn’t wait for your mother?”
“We didn’t wait for anybody. We just thought it was time.”
“Yes, I know how that is. Everything for the family, and really you want to be alone.” I thought of his wife, an unlikely candidate for elopement. “And now here we are, more people. But at least have some wine with us to celebrate?” He glanced at the table of beer bottles.
“That would be nice,” I said, shooting a look at Claudia.
Cavallini extended the invitation to the GIs too, but they begged off, so it was just the four of us at the little table in the back.
“Giulia, what do you think? Married today,” Cavallini said, waving his hand at us, then summoning the waiter for more chairs.
“Yes?” Giulia said to me, taken aback. And then, for an instant, a look that was more than surprise, a question mark, a change of plan. “So. That’s wonderful. You didn’t tell anyone?”
“Ah, no secrets from the Questura,” Cavallini said, joking. “You see how we find you out, even here.”
I laughed, but Claudia barely managed a smile. When the chairs were brought, she sat at the edge of hers, as if she were afraid of accidentally touching Cavallini’s leg. It was an awkward table. Giulia talked about jazz, popular at t
he university because it had to be clandestine, almost a link with the Allies. Cavallini asked about the wedding. Finally the bottle arrived and Cavallini made a toast to our future.
“Yes, the future,” Claudia said, edgy.
“And what will it be?” Cavallini said pleasantly.
Claudia shrugged.
“You don’t know? But women always know. They’re the ones with the plan. The men-” He opened his hand, all of us feckless.
“America, I suppose,” she said. “It depends on Adam.”
“Ha, already a wife. My wife too. Everything depends on me, as long as it’s what she wants,” he said, raising his glass to Claudia.
I glanced quickly at Giulia, surprised he’d mentioned his wife. Maybe not a girl from Maestre after all.
“You could leave Venice?” Giulia said. “You know, I thought I could, and then at university I missed it. Terra firma, nothing moves. I missed the water.”
“Not everyone likes the water,” Cavallini said. “Maybe it’s different for Signora Miller.” He nodded at her new name. “When you can’t swim-”
“How do you know that?” Claudia said, off-guard.
“I’m sorry,” he said, genial. “It’s not true?”
“No, it’s true, but how do you know? You asked someone that?”
“No, no, Signor Miller mentioned it. We were talking about boats. He said you didn’t like boats, only the vaporetto.”
“She’s getting better,” I said, jumping in. “Today we took a gondola ride and she wasn’t nervous at all.”
“So you think I’m always the bloodhound?” Cavallini said, amused.
“Your men were asking questions at the hotel,” I said, explaining. “Checking times.”