When Mama became ill, of course, all this ceased to matter. There was some talk about trying to defer my admission for a year, but that never came to anything, and Mama herself seemed quite confident that I would receive a superior education at Edgar Lee Masters, where she continued to teach art history till she became too ill to go on, and where the classes were small and where I would be taught by real professors, not graduate assistants acting as section leaders.
As nearly as I can remember no one in our family ever mentioned Harvard again, except to say something derogatory about it, but when we were cleaning out Mama’s things after her death I discovered, in the back of her closet, a stack of old Harvard magazines. Thirteen, a baker’s dozen, a year’s subscription plus an incentive copy. She must have subscribed right after I’d been accepted, and then she hadn’t been able to bring herself to throw them out. I didn’t untie the twine with which she had tied them up. I just carried them out to the garbage and dumped them. But it was a long time before I could shake the feeling that Harvard Yard, which I’d never visited, was a magical place, a charmed circle in which all the good things of life were concentrated, as in an alembic; and that there was another me out there, a ghostly double who’d made love to Fabio Fabbriani on the beach in Sardegna, who’d gone to Harvard, who’d apprenticed with Roger Eglantine in London, who’d been profiled in a Dewar’s ad, and who’d gone on to become the first woman to head the conservation department at the Library of Congress—a me who mattered to the world.
Which of us doesn’t have a similar ghostly double wandering around somewhere out there in the big wide world? A self from whom we parted company long ago, at some unlikely crossroads? But do we ever encounter these ghostly selves? Do our worlds ever intersect? I can’t believe it. The one is too impermeable, the other too fine, too subtle.
And yet something like that happened to me as I walked down the long drive, between rows of poplars, to I Tatti. I imagined a young woman running down the lane to meet me as if she’d been waiting for me. Under a raincoat that sparkled as if it had been made out of fish scales she was wearing a lemon yellow silk suit with a low-cut shawl collar. I recognized her at once: my second self, my ghostly double. She kissed both my cheeks and put her hands on my shoulders, sizing me up. “Look at you,” she said. “You look like a gypsy, like a tinker. Here, let me fix your hair.” She snapped the rubber band that held my pony tail, fluffed my hair and tied it back with a scarf as yellow as her suit, took a pair of sunglasses out of her handbag and shoved the temples into my hair so that the frames rested on top of my head. She made me take off my windbreaker, held it by the sleeves, twirled it over once and threw it over my shoulders, tucking the sleeves together in the front, like tucking in a pair of socks. “There,” she seemed to say. “That’s better. Let’s go in now, we can talk later.”
I Tatti was much as I remembered it from my interview with the kindly wrinkled old professor. The rooms were small and dark with low ceilings, more like a nineteenth-century American farmhouse than an Italian villa, and there was a card catalog like the ones in a library. But the rooms were full of people talking in a very unlibrarylike way—men in shirtsleeves talking seriously, smoking seriously, laughing and joking seriously, too. The atmosphere was one of suppressed excitement, and I had the feeling that I’d intruded into a special place where I wasn’t supposed to be—the bridge of a ship during a storm, the cockpit of a plane that’s just lost an engine, the command headquarters during a battle, the base camp for an assault on Mount Everest. Or perhaps just a cocktail party to which I hadn’t been invited. But Margeaux—my ghostly double—was right at home.
The only other woman in the room turned out to be Mrs. Steckley, the director’s wife, who put a tray of sandwiches into my hands and asked me to pass it around and then bring it back to the kitchen, which I did.
I was on my third tray of sandwiches when Margeaux took the tray from me and handed it to one of the graduate-student types I’d seen in the breakfast room at the pensione and told him to pass it around and then take it to the kitchen, which he did.
Margeaux was so at the center of everything, so consulted about everything, so admired by everyone that there was no chance to be alone with her. But I found myself waiting around on the periphery wondering if I was going to be given an assignment. I had, I think, been hoping for a line to stand in, a line leading to a window at which volunteers could sign up for active duty, but there was no line, no window, nothing to do but wait around the edges and listen, as I sometimes found myself doing at cocktail parties. The conversation was mostly personal, which was reassuring if not edifying—who’d been able to come and who hadn’t, who was staying at I Tatti itself, who was staying in Fiesole, who’d been left to fend for himself.
About midafternoon the door marked “Private” opened and Professor Steckley himself appeared and spoke for half an hour about the challenge of coordinating the American relief efforts with those of the Italian government. When he had finished he smiled, spoke briefly to me, and then disappeared again. I hadn’t been forgotten. In fact I’d been given an important assignment: I was going to translate for Professor Eugene Chapin, from the Houghton Library at Harvard, who was arriving from Boston that evening. It wasn’t exactly what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t too bad: I was a sailor on the ship, a member of the crew, a soldier in the army, part of the support team, one of the boys. At the very least I was an invited guest at the party.
I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the city, trying to imagine what it had been like during the flood itself. In places the water in the narrow streets had been thirty feet high, traveling at forty miles per hour. It was incomprehensible. Many of the streets had been cleared, but in the low-lying Santa Croce quarter it was still impossible to walk without boots. Bulldozers were plowing their way through the worst debris, and everywhere I went shopkeepers were shoveling mud out into the streets, where it was picked up by trucks that dumped the mud back into the Arno. I thought at the time that this was pretty stupid, because it would only make the riverbed shallower. (The practice was stopped a few days later.)
Temporary generators provided what electricity there was, which wasn’t much, and drinking water had to be brought in by truck. None of the bars or restaurants were open in the centro, except at the station.
I was seeing what I had come to see, and I was going to be a part of what I wanted to be a part of—a government car would be picking us up at the pensione in the morning—but I couldn’t help contrasting myself with Margeaux: beautiful, confident, successful. I couldn’t imagine Margeaux wandering around the city looking for an inexpensive pensione because she couldn’t afford the Pensione Medici in Fiesole. I couldn’t imagine Margeaux worrying about what impression she’d make on some V.I.P. from the Houghton Library, and I couldn’t imagine Margeaux squatting to pee behind some bushes in the Piazza dAzeglio, which is what I had to do because there was no place else to go except the station, which was too far away.
I located a couple of hotels that had managed to remain open, but they were having a hard time providing for the few guests that remained, stranded, since the flood, and they were not inexpensive. The only alternative to the Pensione Medici was to join the mud angels, the hundreds of students from all over Europe who were flocking to Florence to be part of the scene. And a very important part they turned out to be. They were the ones who put on gas masks and went down into the poisonous atmosphere of the basement of the Biblioteca Nazionale to remove the books and archival material (and they were the ones who stayed on, long after the big shots at I Tatti had left, to carry the stinking mud, one bucket at a time, out of the cellars of the shops and apartments in the center.) Sleeping quarters had been set up for them in boxcars behind the station, and food was provided by the government. They built fires on the walkways between the tracks, they slept and fornicated on blankets and bedrolls when they weren’t playing their guitars and singing.
> I found this picture, sketched for me by a waiter in the station cafeteria, mildly depressing. I won’t say it didn’t appeal to me, but to tell you the truth, twenty-nine is just a little too old for that sort of thing. Somewhere along the way I’d lost something. I’d crossed the border into another country. My visa had been canceled. I couldn’t go back. I only hoped I’d gained something, too.
Professor Chapin was a recognizable academic type—ragg sweater, sleeves pushed up to his elbows, leather patches on the jacket slung over his shoulder like Jack Kennedy’s. I hadn’t spotted him the night before because I’d been expecting a kindly wrinkled old guy like the professor who’d interviewed me for my Harvard application, and he hadn’t spotted me . . . Well, I don’t know why he hadn’t spotted me. In any case we didn’t get paired up until a car arrived for us in the morning—we were waiting in front of the pensione—and the driver called our names.
Chapin knew a little Italian, but not enough to keep up with the driver, who spoke rapidly, and the car was soon filled with male energy as the two of them, ignoring each other, competed for my attention, one in English, one in Italian. By the time we reached Prato, our first stop, I was feeling light headed. You’ve got to remember that I’m the sort of girl who’s always been praised for her good sense of humor.
Chapin was an acquisitions librarian, not a conservator, and I gathered that he’d pulled some strings to get to Florence. To be perfectly honest, his conservation skills turned out to be about as good as his Italian: not very. But he was one of those men who can’t admit that there’s a single thing he can’t do, as I discovered when we reached our first destination, a furniture warehouse on the outskirts of town.
Chapin surprised me by leaping out of the car, introducing himself to the first person we encountered, and asking to be taken immediately to the principale, to whom he introduced himself at greater length: a visitor from Harvard University, a representative of the Committee to Rescue Italian Art . . . here by the invitation of the Italian government . . . to offer his services . . . and so on. This speech, which he had evidently memorized, tripped off his tongue so quickly that the principale, and everyone else present, assuming that he spoke Italian fluently, began to speak rapidly about the business at hand. At this point I had to take over, though I’m not sure Professor Chapin ever quite understood this. He certainly made the best use of the little Italian at his command, and as we toured the premises he had a way of looking everything over and pronouncing it buono, or bene, as if he were bestowing his blessing.
As it turned out, the student volunteers were interleaving books with the Italian equivalent of Saran Wrap.
“Buono. Bene.” Chapin nodded his approval.
But plastic, of course, won’t allow moisture to evaporate. What was needed was paper towels, or even toilet paper, to absorb the moisture. All the books that had been interleaved with plastic wrap would have to be redone or they would soon be sprouting whiskers of mold. “It’s a good thing I’ve got you along,” Chapin said, “to look after the technical details.”
Everywhere we went Professor Chapin made his little speech and offered his blessings and left the “technical details” to me. At Pistoia, for example, the wet books were being dusted with talcum powder to speed up the drying. But paper is porous. Once talc dries on a page it is impossible to remove without washing the paper in clean water and scrubbing it off with a stiff brush, which can damage the fibers. At Siena disbound books were being washed in hot water, which will destroy the sizing. At the monastery of the Certosa loose pages were being washed in an alum-water solution to disinfect them, but alum will create an acid condition in paper that will cause more problems in the future. In Arezzo student volunteers were pressing vellum leaves between plates of glass where they would certainly have begun to mold in a few days. I showed them how to stretch the vellum in order to dehydrate it and allow it to contract under controlled tension.
The students, fortunately, accepted my advice cheerfully.
After ten days of Chapin’s “Buono, bene” I was fed up, and the enormity of the task was beginning to get me down. What was needed was a better heat supply to speed up the drying. Everywhere we’d been the heat had come from literally hundreds of space heaters of every shape and size, spread out on warehouse floors, in museum lobbies, in the basements of train stations, anywhere space could be found. When I mentioned this to Matteo, our driver, he thought for a moment and then, his face lighting up, suggested that we apply to the Agenzia Coltivazione Tabacchi in Perugia, where his brother worked. The tobacco leaves, he said, were dried in huge ovens, big as barns. We were on our way to Arezzo at the time, but the matter seemed so urgent that I didn’t want to put it off even one day, or to go through official channels.
The Agenzia is located just north of town. Professor Chapin introduced himself and asked to be taken to the principale, to whom he made his little speech: he was a visitor from Harvard University, a representative of the Committee to Rescue Italian Art, etc. The principale turned out to be most helpful. The drying barns could be made available at once and could be used till the middle of December, when the next crop was ready to be cured. Everything would be at our disposal. It was the least he could do. He only wished that he had thought of it himself. He offered us cigarettes, which we accepted. I gave mine to Matteo, who had wanted me to tell the boss what a good worker his brother was.
We were shown around the drying barns by a factor to whom I gave very explicit instructions about temperature and relative humidity. When we returned two days later several truckloads of books had already been placed on the great drying racks that rose up almost fifty feet, like giant Christmas trees. Everything had been done according to my instructions, but many of the books had begun to smell like ammonia. I told the factor that this was probably caused by bacteria in the paper and recommended that the relative humidity be increased to 80 percent for the first four hours of the drying period and then lowered to 15 percent for the next four days; I also recommended lowering the temperature of the ovens to thirty-seven degrees Celsius when the humidity was lowered. When we returned four days later the ammonia smell was gone. I suspected that the sizing on the paper had reacted to something in the contaminated floodwater, but there was no time for a proper analysis. The treatment had worked; that was enough, more than enough. It was in fact a very gratifying moment, and we congratulated ourselves and drank a glass of grappa in the office of the principale. The factor and Matteo, too.
“Buono. Bene.” For once Professor Chapin—“Jed”—was right. It was good, very good, and we were in high spirits. On the way back to Florence Matteo taught us an Italian song that had been popular in the United States for a while, involving the sounds of various musical instruments: trumpet, flute, trombone, saxophone, whistle. Professor Chapin—Jed—put his hand on my leg, just above my knee, and asked if I’d be angry if he asked me to go to bed with him.
Does every woman’s heart pound like mine when she’s propositioned, even when she sees it coming, as I had? I’d seen it coming for a couple of days, but I was taken by surprise anyway.
We were coming into Florence, past the Certosa, which we had visited only the day before. Professor Chapin still had his hand on my leg, not moving, paralyzed, like a stone. Was his heart pounding, too? I could feel tears rising to my eyes, like water rising in a cup. I closed my eyes, and when I closed them I saw a map of the United States, all the states different colors, pastels, and Illinois, my state, in light green, and I wondered if it was green on all the maps or just on this one. I could almost see our house on the map, Papa in the driveway in a new forest green Cadillac, and me on the swing in the backyard, waiting for him, swinging higher and higher while he unloads the trunk of the car, pretending not to notice me, looking every which way as he removes from the car a basket of tomatoes from the market and a flat of avocados, and finally spearing me with his gaze. I was thinking, No man will ever love me as much as Pa
pa does, and I was crying not because I was angry or would be angry, but because I wasn’t or wouldn’t be.
Margeaux was waiting for us in the lobby of the pensione when we got back to Fiesole. We left Jed standing in front of the pensione, waiting for an answer, and went directly to my room. Margeaux looked très élégante in a simple sheath dress that pulled up over her knees when she sat down on the edge of the bed; I, of course, looked frazzled.
I told her, my ghostly double, the whole story from beginning to end. She made the comments I usually avoided making.
“He’s not a bad person,” I began, “but he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
She dismissed this observation with a wave of her hand. “He’s all Harvard,” she said. “Lowell House, double summa in history and poli sci, M.A. in history, Ph.D. in library science. He doesn’t need to know what he’s doing.”
“Oh, come off it. He spent three years at the University of Minnesota after he got his degree, and the way he talks about it you’d think he’d been in prison.”
“Old money,” she said. “Family’s filthy, lives in Ipswich. He felt lost so far from home base.”
“I know all about it. I know his whole life story.”
“You’re frightened, aren’t you.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Why should I be frightened?”
“He’s a man, he wants you.”
“Nonsense. I’m a little upset, that’s all, but I’m certainly not frightened.”
“What are you going to tell him at dinner?”
“Tell him? I don’t see why I should tell him anything.”
“Once he’s popped the question,” she said, “you’ve got to say yes or no.”
The Sixteen Pleasures Page 6