The Beaufort Sisters

by Jon Cleary

  ‘Your mother and I were engaged for twelve months before we were married. A decent long engagement we had in my day.’

  Sally had not tried to explain: because she had no explanation that would satisfy him and she was not a good liar. ‘We’ll be happy, Daddy. That’s all that matters.’

  And she fervently hoped so. Having committed herself to the marriage, she was determined to make the best of it. Except for his family background she really did not have anything to complain about in Philip. Having told herself that, she then, because she was always so honest with herself, admitted it was not much of a basis for marriage. She loved him, but she knew it was not the sort of love that – well, that Nina had felt for Tim. She had loved Michele, but that had brought her only intermittent happiness; and she could not imagine Philip’s being as cruel and callous as Michele had sometimes been. So she tried for happiness as she might have tried to win the Mille Miglia, determinedly and with a certain physical recklessness.

  She had had little experience of men in bed. She had been made love to by a Yale man when she had been at Vassar. He was studying law and he had seduced her as if he were trying to win a case before a jury; he had advanced point by point and climaxed his argument with a pounding that would have had him charged with assault had he actually been in court. Her only other encounter with a male lover had been a French racing driver at Le Mans, where she had gone to watch the running of the Twenty-Four-Hours race. He had had none of the finesse she had expected and she had emerged from the bed feeling she had been driven round it in lap record time. After those two experiences she had shied away from men in bed.

  Philip made love to her gently the first night. Any man, taking the place of a former lover, knows there must be a comparison, even if only subconsciously. To take the place of a woman as lover was a handicap that might have made him brutal or impotent. Instead of which he was compassionate, if also passionate when the moment was right. She fell asleep in his arms, convinced she was going to be happy.

  They set up house in Philip’s apartment in an old palazzo on The Corso. Sally had had no experience of housekeeping, having always employed a woman to look after her and Michele. So Philip’s housekeeper was kept on. Lucia Giuffre was a plump plain woman who knew who her new mistress was and decided that the apartment was not sufficiently grand for such a rich girl.

  ‘There is an apartment above us, signora. It is much bigger, it is where the family lived in Mussolini’s day. You and I could make it into something beautiful for Signor Mann.’

  It troubled Sally that, though she had married Philip under his real name, they were still known in Rome as Signor and Signora Mann. ‘That would take a lot of money, Lucia.’

  Lucia spread her hands: if Signora Mann didn’t have money, who did? ‘What is money for, signora?’

  Sally had always been the most indifferent of the sisters towards the family wealth. She had indulged herself with her cars and her plane, signing cheques without ever giving a thought as to what her bank balance might be. Yet her extravagances were intermittent and over a year she probably spent no more than Nina or Margaret. She was not a determined, or even a conscious, profligate. But as Lucia had just said, what was money for if not to spend?

  So the Manns moved up into the larger apartment, but it never became one of the salons of Rome. Sally did not have the skills of Nina or Margaret as a hostess; she was glad that Philip liked to keep a low profile in both business and social life. They never became part of the growing American colony in Rome and she began to enjoy their comparative anonymity. Then she found she was pregnant.

  ‘Are you glad, Philip?’ She was happy with him, happier than she had expected to be. She loved him, though not in the passionate, fascinated way she had loved Michele.

  He lifted her hand, kissed the inside of her wrist: such gentle intimacies endeared him to her. He did nothing with a flourish, being always quiet and restrained; but he was not a dull husband and lover and there were always quiet gestures and expressions to tell her how much he loved her. For his part he now did love her; or more so than he had expected. He patted her belly.

  ‘He’s the best thing that’s happened to us.’

  You’re sure it’s going to be a he?’

  He smiled. ‘I don’t really care. Maybe a girl would be better.’

  Because a girl could escape from the Mafia. She did not say it, because she did not want to hurt him. She still was not able to accept his background, but she kept pushing the problem to the back of her mind. If any emissaries from Chicago came to Rome, she never met them or even knew of them. Philip saw them at his office out at EUR, where he had taken a suite because, he said, he could not work in the dingy offices available in the centre of the city. She sometimes wondered if his going out to EUR was to keep his Chicago connections completely separate from his life with her. She had noticed that at their occasional small dinner parties very few Americans were on the guest list.

  They had been married six months before Tony Gentleman came to Rome to see his daughter-in-law for the first time. Lucas had flown over the first week after they had returned from Paris. He had got on well with Philip, asked him about his business, seemed satisfied with whatever answers Philip had given him, then returned home. Once a week he phoned Sally, shouting and grumbling at the bad connections, always ending with the same question: when was she coming home for a visit? To which Sally, always with the thought that Chicago was only a few hundred miles north of Kansas City, said soon, Daddy, soon.

  Tony Gentleman never used the phone unless he had to, though his daughter-in-law did not know that. He knew the dangers of a wire-tap, a hazard that never entered her head. Tony Gentleman was a rare capo: in all his life he had been arrested only twice but never indicted. His record was clean, but he knew the FBI did not regard him as a model citizen and J. Edgar Hoover was once known to have kicked one of his pet dogs in a fit of temper when Tony Gentleman’s name was mentioned. So he never committed anything important to the United States mail, figuring that neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night was as hazardous as the FBI; and for the past year he never made any business phone calls unless unavoidable and no overseas calls at all. All his communications to his son in Rome were delivered by hand by a courier who flew the Atlantic once a week.

  He arrived in Rome seemingly without company; but two of his security guards had travelled separately in economy class. He had travelled a roundabou troute: Chicago, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Montreal, Paris, Rome: along the way he had lost any tail the FBI might have had on him. He travelled on a passport that said he was Carlo Borzello, a native of Palermo, Sicily, but an American citizen. He told no one that the main reason for the hiding of his real identity was not to escape the attentions of the law but to avoid embarrassing his son. He wanted nothing so much in life now as respectability for Philip. It did not occur to him that he would have given him more chance of respectability if he had disowned him.

  Sally was cautiously friendly in her welcome of the old man. He did not look dangerous; though she was not sure what she had expected. Philip had had no photos of his father; because Tony Gentleman, if it could be avoided, did not stand in front of cameras, no matter who Was operating them. This extremely well-dressed, silver-haired man looked every bit as distinguished as her own father, perhaps even more so. The rough, uneducated voice was the letdown: he sounded just as she had expected. She read her own sense of menace into the soft hoarse voice.

  He shook her hand, awkwardly: he had none of his son’s social graces. ‘You’re a lovely girl. Philip is very lucky. Right?’

  ‘I told you that, Dad.’ Philip was hiding his shock at how old his father had become in the year since he had seen him last. ‘Let’s get out to the car. You look tired.’

  ‘A little. It’s a long way to come.’ His limp seemed to have increased; he leaned on a silver-topped stick. ‘I think I oughta retire, go to Florida to live. Chicago ain’t the right climate, a man my age.’


  Driving into Rome Sally, for want of something better to say, said, ‘Are you going to visit Sicily too?’

  The old man looked at Philip, then back at Sally. ‘You know anything about Sicily? It ain’t a place to go back to.’

  He said no more and Sally, still trying, for Philip’s sake, to do her bit, plunged on: ‘I believe you’ve met my sister Margaret.’ He looked at her again: not blankly, yet with no expression. ‘Mrs Minett.’

  ‘Just a little business. For her husband.’ She had the feeling that he was speaking carefully, one eye on Philip. ‘A nice girl.’

  That night the three of them dined in the apartment. Lucia, dressed in her best black, supervised the meal; her nephew, in black livery and white gloves, served the meal. Tony Gentleman was impressed.

  ‘You got a nice place. Very grand.’ He waited till Lucia and her nephew had retired from the dining room. ‘When I was a little kid, I work in a big house in Palermo. Cleaning the pots and pans. I never see the inside of the house, nothing but the kitchen. But I remember the servants used to come into the kitchen dressed like that feller. The white gloves and all.’

  ‘You’ve come a long way,’ said Philip. ‘Enjoy it all, Dad.’

  ‘Oh, I’m gonna do that. You live like this back in Kansas City, Sally?’

  ‘No white gloves.’ She knew Philip would not want her to call his father Mr Gentleman; but she could not bring herself to call him Dad. ‘Philip loves the life style here. I think he’s an old Roman senator at heart.’

  ‘You wanna stay on here?’ The old man looked at his son.

  ‘We’re making a good life here. Neither of us wants to go home to America.’

  The old man looked at his daughter-in-law. ‘You too? You don’t wanna go home to your father some time?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She wasn’t quite sure whether it was a lie or not; she still occasionally thought of Kansas City with nostalgia, still missed her father and her sisters. ‘Not to live there, I mean.’

  Tony Gentleman nodded to himself. ‘I can’t complain, I guess. I run away from Sicily, I don’t never wanna go back. I just can’t understand people running away from America, that’s all. I mean, people who ain’t gotta run away.’

  He stayed in Rome a week, enjoying the company of his son and daughter-in-law. But it was obvious that he was uncomfortable, insecure; he missed the security of the house where he had lived for the past ten years on the North Side of Chicago. He could not imagine anyone’s wanting to run away from America; but he had settled for the smallest piece of territory, a house behind a high wall that shut out what America stood for. He was dying and he wanted to die in the only place where he could be certain of being honoured as a ‘man of respect’ in his own house.

  He kissed them both at the airport, holding his son tighter and longer than he did Sally. But he did not ignore her. ‘God bless you with the baby. How soon will it be?’

  ‘Just over two months. We’ll call you the minute he arrives.’

  ‘He? You want a son?’

  It had been a slip of the tongue. ‘A boy, a girl, it doesn’t matter. Just so long as it’s healthy.’

  ‘You can’t ask for more,’ he said, who had no health left.

  He left them and limped away through the gate and out to the plane. Sally saw two men pause and wait for him and help him up the steps and thought how considerate it was of them. Then she looked at Philip and saw the tears running down his cheeks.

  A month later the phone rang in the apartment: it was Chicago, the first time ever. The caller told Philip his father was dying.

  ‘I’ll catch tonight’s plane. Will you be all right?’

  She was glad that he did not ask her to go with him. ‘Don’t worry, darling. I’m as healthy as a horse. I’ll call you every night. What’s your father’s number?’

  It was only later that she noticed he had not given her the number. ‘No, I’ll call you. Every night.’

  He rang her twenty-four hours later and even through the bad connection she could hear the grief in his voice. ‘Dad died an hour after I got here. He was consicous when I saw him, so at least I got to say goodbye to him.’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling. How long will you be staying?’

  ‘The funeral is the day after tomorrow. Then there’ll be the estate to be looked into. Sally – ’ There was a long pause and she thought they had lost their connection. Then: ‘You wouldn’t come over here? Just for a month or two, have the baby here? There’s a lot I have to attend to – ’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She put her hand on her stomach, glad of the baby therein. ‘I just couldn’t face all that travelling, not now.’

  Again the silence; then: ‘Sure. I shouldn’t have asked.’

  He called every night during the next week, promising each time to be on his way home in a day or two – ‘There’s so much to be done. I’m trying to wrap it up as quickly as I can. Be patient, darling. Another day or two, that’s all.’

  On the Saturday the phone rang at noon. But it wasn’t Philip: it was Michele. ‘Darling – ’ The sweet husky voice had not changed. ‘I’m in Rome just for the weekend, on my way to Paris. Can you and Philip have dinner or something?’

  Sally shivered with panic, looked down at her swollen belly. She could not let Michele see her like this. Michele had never liked children nor even the sight of pregnant women – ‘They look disgustingly ugly. Filling up the world with too many people.’ To meet Michele looking like this would be disastrous, humiliating. And yet she could not resist the lure of the darktoned voice.

  ‘Michele – ’ She wanted to be firm, to tell her to go to hell; but she could not. ‘I wouldn’t be good company. Philip is in Chicago – his father’s just died. And I’m – I’m pregnant. Eight months gone.’

  ‘Oh, my love – no! Poor you.’

  That angered her, gave her strength. ‘No, not poor me. I’m looking forward to being a mother.’

  ‘Well – ’ There was no apology; but Michele was incapable of apology for anything. ‘Well, I’ll call you next time I’m in Rome.’

  She relented, not wanting to lose contact. ‘How are you? Are you – are you happy with Gaston?’

  ‘Are you happy with Philip?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said emphatically: to make the point to herself as well as to her ex-lover.

  ‘I’m glad. He’s a beautiful man – as men go.’ She chuckled; and Sally was surprised that it sounded dirty to her. ‘Oh, Gaston and I get along. I just don’t like Leopoldville, that’s all. But Gaston’s business keeps him there now. But he indulges me. This trip to Paris, for instance. Goodbye, darling. I’ll call you next time I come through.’

  She hung up and Sally sat there with the dead phone in her hand, feeling the trembling in her limbs and the nausea welling up in her throat. She longed for Philip’s comforting embrace. She wanted to call him, but she had no number. I’ll get his father’s number through directory enquiries in Chicago; but suddenly it was all too much effort. Instead she called Kansas City, the number that came so readily to mind.

  ‘Meg?’

  ‘Sally! What’s the matter! It’s only five-thirty in the morning here. Is something wrong with the baby?’

  ‘No-o.’ All at once she felt foolish. ‘I just – just wanted someone to talk to. Philip’s still in Chicago. You know his father died?’

  ‘I know. It was in the papers. There was a huge funeral.’

  ‘Philip wouldn’t have wanted that.’

  ‘I know. I’ve tried to call you twice, but couldn’t get through. Perhaps Philip wasn’t the one who decided about the funeral. I hate to say it, but every Mafia chief in the country was there. It was spread all over the newspapers and television.’

  ‘Did – were there any pictures of Philip?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. But he wore dark glasses and a moustache. You didn’t tell us he’d grown a moustache.’

  It had to be a false one: but she was not going to confess that, not even to Meg. ‘It’s rece
nt. Did Daddy recognize him?’

  ‘I don’t know. You know what he’s like – he rarely watches television. And you wouldn’t have recognized Philip from the newspaper photos. Don’t let it worry you, Sal – please. How’s the baby?’

  ‘Kicking.’ She felt ready to give birth right at this moment. Suddenly she broke: ‘Oh Meg, I wish I were home!’

  ‘Why don’t you come, then? No. No, if you feel like I felt with Martha you won’t want to get on a plane and come all this way. Look – I can’t come over, Emma is down with the measles and Martha looks as if she’s getting them. But I’ll ask Nina – ’

  ‘No, please don’t – I’ll be all right – ’

  But Margaret would take no arguments. Nina arrived two days later with Lucas and Prue. ‘You need all the moral support you can get,’ said Lucas. ‘What are these Italian doctors like?’

  ‘He was going to bring over the Mayo Clinic,’ said Prue. ‘Fly it over holus-bolus.’

  ‘The Mayo Clinic is not an obstetrical hospital,’ said Lucas.

  ‘You’re getting old, Daddy. Your sense of humour isn’t too sharp.’

  He smiled, accepting the joke against himself. ‘You’re right. Well, I must say you look beautiful, Mrs Mann. Nothing like a racing driver, thank God. You’re not still flying your damned airplane, I hope?’

  Sally was thrilled to see them all, though at first she had had misgivings about the arrival of her father. He looked well, though older. Nina looked elegant and composed, as if she had at last come to terms with her loss of Tim and Michael. Prue was gay and beautiful, already hinting at dangers ahead for men if not for herself. Sally once again felt a sense of security, only now aware of how much she had missed it. For now at least she did not feel adventurous.

  The apartment was big enough to accommodate them all: Lucia was a jelly of delight at having the signora’s family to look after. She had been worried for Signora Mann, not understanding how Signor Mann could remain away in America, even though his father had died, at a time like this. Then Philip came home two days later, minus moustache and dark glasses.