The Night Villa

by Carol Goodman

  Phineas, although trembling with fear, obeyed me. I expected at any moment that Calatoria and her women would come swarming into the chamber, like ants swarming over their prey. And indeed we escaped only moments before they arrived. We ran up the tunnel marked with a lyre in the dark, because, as I told Phineas, we couldn’t risk any of the women seeing a light. At each turning I felt along the wall for the mark that would tell me which way to go, knowing always that if we made the wrong turn we would plunge to our deaths. Behind us we could hear the wild cries of the maenads as they fell upon Telesforus. Although I had hated him, I hoped now that I had killed him so that he would not be aware of what was happening to his body. I imagined that I could hear the crack of his bones and smell his blood. So distracted was I by these images of his dismembering that when we came to the last turning I couldn’t for a moment remember which way to go.

  “Two faces of women,” Phineas said after he himself had felt each mark. “One appears to be smiling. Shouldn’t we go this way?” He began walking down that path, but I pulled him down to his hands and knees so that we could feel along the ground for any sudden drops. We had only gone a few feet when I heard a sound behind me that made my blood freeze.

  “So you have betrayed me after I raised you as my own. You are no better than your mother.”

  I turned around and saw Calatoria standing above us—her long hair matted with blood and gore and her dress ripped from her shoulder so that one breast was bare. I thought that it, too, was stained with blood. She held a torch in one hand and a short sword in the other.

  I think, though, that what shocked me the most was the look in Calatoria’s eyes—not anger or madness, but hurt and disappointment. Had she really thought of me as a daughter? But in the very next instant I saw that her eyes were fixed on the scroll sticking up from my bag.

  “That is my property,” she screamed. And I realized that while Calatoria might think of me as her own, I was just another piece of property to her—and of less value than the roll of papyrus in my bag.

  I withdrew the scroll from the bag before she could reach it and held it over my head. I had realized that the path Phineas and I had chosen was the wrong one. The figure of Night was the one who had been smiling. Just past where we crouched lay the pit.

  As Calatoria dropped her torch and lunged for the scroll I let it drop from my hands. For a moment some errant draft caught it and seemed to hold the scroll aloft in the air. As Calatoria’s fingers touched it, she, too, seemed suspended in midair. Her foot touched the edge of the pit and she groped in the air for purchase. She spun around and her arms reached for me. I still could have caught her.

  May God forgive me for not saving her.

  She fell backward into the pit. When Phineas picked up her torch and held it over the pit we could see her staring up at us, her mouth and eyes wide open and her hair writhing around her head like a nest of snakes. A gorgon. When I close my eyes at night it’s that face I see. I am afraid that when I close my eyes for the last time it’s the face I’ll spend eternity with.

  “We have to go,” Phineas said. His words came as though from a long way away even though he stood at my side and spoke in my ear. “Can’t you feel the ground shaking? It’s getting worse.”

  I realized he was right. I turned to him and saw he was still staring into the pit. The scroll. He was staring at the scroll. But then he shook himself like a man waking from a bad dream and looked at me.

  “It’s caused enough death,” he said and then, taking my hand, he led us out of the wrong path and into the right path and up to the surface.

  At first I thought we had reached another dead end. There was no light at the end of the tunnel and no freshening breeze. Our torch flickered and gasped in the noxious air. It’s just that night has fallen, I thought as we came out of the tunnel, but I had never seen a night such as this one. We came into the open but the air was full of smoke and foul vapors. When I looked up there were no stars in the sky. Instead above us the slope of Vesuvius was covered with patches of fire. The top of the mountain was engulfed in a boiling cloud of smoke. It was what I imagined Hades would look like. Perhaps we really had taken the wrong turning.

  “The worst of the cloud is still in the east,” Phineas said, “but it is moving this way. We have to find the road to Neapolis. You said it was close.”

  I turned to him and saw he was covered with soot and I realized that a fine layer of ash was falling from the sky covering everything. I looked around me, but could find no familiar landmarks. Everything had been transformed. I closed my eyes and tried to picture where we were.

  “The coast road should be to our left,” I said, pointing in that direction.

  Then he said, “Listen. Can you hear people?”

  It was hard to hear anything over the moans and rumbles of the mountain, as though from a living beast, but I thought he might be right. Footsteps, voices, the frightened neighing of horses—all came through the thick smoke. He took my hand again and we stumbled through the dark until we began bumping into others. I almost wished we hadn’t. The people we met looked like the shades of the dead, stumbling along and staring out of their ash-stained faces with wide, horrified eyes. I half expected to meet Calatoria and Telesforus among them and I began to believe that we ourselves were already dead. All night we marched with that legion of the dead. At one point, there was a louder roar from the mountain and turning around we saw a wave of fire moving down the slope toward the lights of the town. A wind blew in its wake, a wind that felt like the breath of Hades himself. I felt the hairs in my nose singe and the spit in my mouth evaporate. Then the lights of Herculaneum were gone.

  We turned our backs on the dead city and trudged on through the night, through the smoke and ash. I never let go of Phineas’s hand because I was sure if I did I would be lost. When we reached Neapolis, he pulled me away from the crowds and we walked up a steep hill to a temple. When we reached the steps of the temple we turned around and saw the sun rising over the ruined ash-covered land, rising above the coast of Surrentum, touching the isle of Capreae and the water of the bay. I was amazed that the water was still blue and that the swallows were still alive, swooping through the bright air of a new day.

  Phineas left me on the steps of the temple to find water. While he was gone, I took out the statue he had given me of the goddess Isis, queen of heaven, and I brought it into the temple. I saw then that the temple was dedicated to Demeter, the mother who was willing to destroy the earth looking for her daughter. I gave the statue to her and prayed to her for forgiveness. I prayed that I might start anew and I prayed for Phineas, too, that he and I might find a new life together.

  And this I confess, too, that I still pray to her, along with the mother of our Savior. Even while I have spent my life dedicated to this new religion I still pray to all of them—Isis, Bona Dea, Demeter, Cybele, Astarte, and even Baneful Night, most dreaded of goddesses, but who carries in her arms Sleep and Death who give us peace at last. The temple that gave us shelter that morning has become a church and Phineas, after living as my husband for many years and converting to the new faith, has been dead these ten years now. The community of women I have lived with will go on and I begin to suspect that they will remember my name, but they won’t remember how I came here. How I was saved in the end by one fallible man’s love. That is a story I can trust to no man or woman living, so I entrust it to the dark in the hope that one day it might make its way back into the light, as I and my beloved were allowed to do, stumbling along a dark road, holding each other’s hand.

  THE NIGHT VILLA

  Carol Goodman

  A READER’S GUIDE

  A REGIONAL MUSE

  I’ve long had a penchant for choosing books based on their setting—whether prompted by a certain mood or because I planned to travel to a particular place—and eventually that reading habit translated itself into an obsession with place in the novels I write.

  It may have started with Eloise. When I
was nine years old, my family relocated from Philadelphia to New York. During the year my father was commuting to his new job, he sublet an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. One of the wonders of this new urban environment (along with proximity to the United Nations and a sixteenth-floor balcony, from which my teenaged brothers threw cherry bombs purchased in Chinatown) was the apartment’s library. “Nine hundred books!” the owner boasted (although I have wondered since who would actually count the books in their private library).

  Already a voracious reader at age nine, I was looking forward to exploring this immense collection but was disappointed to find that it contained only one children’s book. Luckily, that one book was Eloise by Kay Thompson, a book that could be read over and over again, pored over for the minute details in Hilary Knight’s line drawings. It even had a foldout diagram of Eloise’s peregrinations up and down the hotel elevators—especially fascinating to me since I was, for the first time in my life, riding an elevator every day. But what was best about Eloise was that its setting, the Plaza Hotel, was just a short cab ride away. We, too, could have tea in the Palm Court, over which Eloise’s portrait presided. My mother was happy to indulge my fascination with Eloise and the Plaza because she had a personal connection to the hotel. In her early twenties, she had worked at the information desk in the lobby and had delivered messages throughout the hotel—from the subbasements to the penthouse suites. When she told me these stories, her travels unfolded in my head like the elevator map in the book, her high heels trailing the red dash marks Eloise makes in her journeys. This confluence of book, real life, and personal history became three important narrative elements when I began my own fiction writing.

  Meanwhile, this new world of New York was one that I could see mirrored in many books—from The Cricket in Times Square to Freaky Friday. My favorite, though, was From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg. The appeal of this classic lies in the escape fantasy of running away from the pressures of growing up and finding a place of one’s own. Instead of a secret garden or a magical kingdom, the children in Konigsburg’s book take possession of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had visited there with my mother and eaten many a cafeteria lunch by the fountain of cavorting fauns where Claudia and Jamie Kincaid bathe and collect coins to maintain themselves. When I was thirteen, I was allowed to take the train into New York City by myself but only to board the Number 4 bus across from Penn Station and go directly to the Metropolitan Museum. Because this was the only destination I was allowed, and because the city drew me—as I would later read in another book, with its “enchanted metropolitan twilight”—I went to the Metropolitan Museum often, sometimes once a week. It became my personal escape valve.

  I could never eat lunch by the fountain without thinking of Claudia and Jamie bathing there, or pass the bed of Marie Antoinette without remembering that’s where they slept, or slip into the Egyptian tomb without remembering that that was where Claudia and Jamie hid from their schoolmates. Years later, when I entered the cafeteria and found that the cavernous room had been gutted of its fountain—presumably to make more space for diners—I felt like something had been scraped out of my own gut. I stood in the cafeteria line, fighting off tears, stupidly wondering where runaway children would take their baths now and where would they find pocket change. A sanctuary had been defiled—this place that had been hallowed by the strange alchemical mixture of history, imagination, and literature.

  Over the years, I’ve sought out or stumbled upon these happy meetings of place and book. I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac while driving cross-country to California and spent the summer in Los Angeles reading Nathanael West and Joan Didion. I spent a sleepless night in the Colorado Hotel that inspired Stephen King’s The Shining. The year I lived in the southern Adirondacks, I read more James Fenimore Cooper than I ever would have otherwise or ever will again. After a bad skid on the road to Glens Falls, I pulled into a water station and waited out the storm chatting with the clerk about the scene in The Last of the Mohicans where Hawk-eye and Uncas hid in a cave below a waterfall. He pointed out the exact spot described in the book from where we sat. I read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove in a U-Haul bound for Austin, Texas. This turned out not to be the best idea, though, because by the time I arrived in my new home, I was terrorized by the snakes, scorpions, and poisonous spiders that populate McMurtry’s Texas. Better was Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place, which made 1950s Austin sound as glamorous as Paris. For the next seven years that I lived there, whenever I smelled mimosa I thought of Brammer’s phrase “the heavy honied air.” When circumstances compelled me to return to Long Island, I was grateful to Alice Hoffman’s Seventh Heaven for transforming that most mundane of suburbs, Levittown, into a magical place. If she could find magic in Levittown, surely I could put up with living in Great Neck, which, after all, had its own literary lineage as Gatsby’s and Nick Carraway’s home.

  Certainly I knew by the time I started writing short stories and novels that setting was important to me, but I didn’t find my fictional country right away. When I began The Lake of Dead Languages, there wasn’t even a lake yet, just Dead Languages. For two years, I carried around this idea of a story about a Latin teacher living at an isolated boarding school with her young daughter before I knew where the story was set. Then, on a vacation to Mohonk House in the Shawangunks, while I was swimming in Mohonk Lake, I suddenly wondered what it would feel like to swim in that cold, cold water if you had lost someone you loved there. I knew then that the reason the teacher I had been trying to write about was so lost and lonely was that she had lost someone she loved in the lake and that when she swam there, she felt the pull of the cold water as the pull of that lost love.

  I followed The Lake of Dead Languages with a few other Upstate New York settings: a remote hotel in the Catskills in The Seduction of Water, a college much like Vassar for The Drowning Tree, and a premier artist colony in The Ghost Orchid.

  After that, I was determined to venture forth from the safety of home and set a novel outside my beloved New York. However, I’m not the kind of writer who can spin the globe and pick whatever place my finger lands on. For The Sonnet Lover, I needed a place with which I had history, that I wouldn’t mind getting to know better, one that would also resonate with the themes I’m most interested in. Luckily, my research for The Ghost Orchid had already paved the way. I’d fallen in love with the Italian Renaissance gardens I had studied to create the setting in that book, and during college I had spent a semester abroad in Rome studying the classics. I decided to set my next book in Italy.

  I had trepidation about setting a book on foreign soil, especially because I had neither the time nor the money (or child care) to go live in Italy for a year. Would I be able to absorb enough atmosphere from short visits supplemented by memories and reading to create a believable Italian setting? I decided to hedge my bets by setting the book at an American school housed in a Renaissance villa—an enclosed environment that I thought I could handle better than Italy at large. Then I booked a trip for my husband and our two daughters to go to Rome and Sorrento.

  I learned many important things on this trip (the first of three I took to Italy over the next two years). One was how very difficult it is to research a book while escorting two girls on their first trip to Italy without getting the Bad Mother of the Year Award. It was a constant balancing act between visiting a site I needed to research and finding the best gelato, between buying souvenirs and mapping out a route to the next important sight we needed to see.

  However, I did get to see Italy through the excited eyes of two young girls viewing its splendor for the first time. This brought back vivid memories of my junior year abroad and helped me realize the narrator of my new novel would be someone who went to Italy when she was young and who was forever marked by that experience.

  After The Sonnet Lover, I fully intended to scurry back to New York for my next book, but then I happened upon an interesting idea. Thi
s is the problem, I think, with setting out on an odyssey: you don’t always return home as quickly as planned. A friend of mine, Ross Scaife, professor of classics at the University of Kentucky, mentioned he was trying to get a grant to use MSI technology to read charred scrolls from Herculaneum, and I realized this provided a fictional way for me to “do” Herculaneum. I’d been there when I was a student in Italy, and I’d gone back to Pompeii on a family trip the year before. My own journey to The Night Villa had begun without my being aware of it.

  There should probably be an early warning system for writers—something equivalent to the slave who stands behind the Roman general in his chariot whispering “Remember you are mortal.” The trip to the Bay of Naples started badly, with a missed connection that turned an already brutally long flight into a twenty-four-hour ordeal. Still, I had in my mind a picture of the hotel I’d booked on Expedia.com as a welcome haven. I’d picked it because it was in an old convent overlooking the city, and it had a rooftop pool. How romantic! I thought. And what great material to stay in an actual fourteenth-century convent, and wouldn’t that pool feel delicious after twenty-four hours in the same clothes?

  When we arrived, though, we learned that the rooftop pool closed at five o’clock. And when we were shown to our room, I realized why they were called cells. Our room had been tastefully decorated, but there was no getting away from what it had originally been: a tiny, sealed, claustrophobic little cell, with one window overlooking a street so loud with motorcycle traffic that opening it only introduced the fumes of a Dantesque hell into the atmosphere. When I put my hand to the “air conditioner,” I felt something that might have been the dying breath of the last nun who lived and died in this airless cell, this Hell…well, you get the idea. Granted, I was jet-lagged at the time.