“Ah, Jack. My friend,” Savo said, “I have such beautiful things to sell you. You have such good taste, but you have no money.”
I put my hand on the shoulder of a Venetian gentleman made of wood and exactly my height who guarded the entrance to the antique shop.
“Let me buy the Venetian. For all the rent I have paid you, the price should be nominal.”
“For you, a special price,” Savo said, winking at Ledare. “Twelve thousand dollars.”
“I could buy a real Venetian for less than that,” I said. “The price is outrageous.”
“Yes, but it is better to be robbed by a friend than an enemy, no?”
His brother, Spiro, came out from the back of the store, where he had been doing the accounts. Spiro was far more demonstrative than his brother and he embraced me and kissed me on both cheeks.
“Do not kiss him, Spiro,” said Savo, “until after he pays his rent.”
“My brother is only joking. Do not take him seriously,” Spiro said. “Americans are very sensitive, my brother. They do not understand Balkan humor.”
“That was Balkan humor?” I said. “No wonder you immigrated to Italy.”
“This beauty, this bell’americana,” Spiro said, kissing Ledare’s hand. “You have answered our prayers. You plan to marry my poor tenant.”
“You boys have to work on him,” Ledare said. “He hasn’t even asked me for a date yet.”
“We’re childhood friends,” I said. “The Raskovic brothers are handsome thieves who call themselves landlords.”
“Ah, Jack,” Spiro said, pointing to a photograph taken in the early fifties of the brothers standing in a group of beautiful men and women including Gloria Swanson. “We were beautiful when young.”
“Once we were part of a salon, signore,” Savo said, “where the only ticket for admittance was attractiveness.”
Spiro said, “The mirror used to be my best friend. Now it is an assassin.”
“Here is my rent for the next three months,” I said.
“Ah, music,” Savo said, smiling at his brother. “The sound of a check being written.”
“Ah, a symphony,” Spiro agreed. “May the bella donna always find her way back to our doorstep.”
“The streets of Rome are far more beautiful when you walk upon them, signora,” said Savo.
“Marry him,” Spiro said. “Take him off our hands.”
“Gentlemen,” I protested.
“You nauseate me,” Savo said as we moved toward the door of the store. “American men know nothing of romance. Women need praise, poetry …”
“Sounds good to me,” Ledare said and both men kissed her hand as we departed. “You boys keep working on Jack here.”
On the Via dei Foraggi, I showed Ledare the second-floor apartment where we had spent our first year in Italy and the small piazza on the Via dei Fienili where the neighborhood first took us in and made us welcome. It was in this piazza that I had begun to feel taken care of in the Roman way. When I brought Leah shopping, the bread lady, Martina, would cut her a piece of pizza bianca; Roberto, who ran the alimentari, would slice her a hunk of Parmesan cheese; and Adele, who sold the freshest, most carefully selected vegetables, would carve a piece of snow-white fennel for Leah to chew on when she had finished the cheese. It was these Romans who had taught Leah to speak the Italian language with the most authentic Roman dialect and they had done it by committee. And so they had thought it was an act of treachery and snobbery when I moved with Leah to the Piazza Farnese. Adele, the vegetable lady, had wept when we came to make our farewells. But now Adele called out my name when she saw me. As she asked about Leah, I saw her rough hands were still stained with chlorophyll from trimming the stalks of artichokes, and she told Ledare all about Leah’s love of wild strawberries and raspberries in season. I finished shopping for our evening meal and was about to leave the piazza to go to lunch with Ledare when I saw Natasha, the girl with the white dog. She was taller and prettier than the last time I had seen her. When I rented the place on the Via dei Foraggi, the girl with the white dog, as Leah called her then, was the first person we had met in the neighborhood. I was looking for a place to shop when Natasha had stepped out of her apartment house to walk her dog, a well-groomed terrier that had the bearing of an old aristocrat and the paranoia of a small animal that spent his life avoiding crowds.
I tried to talk to her in my elementary Italian, made, no doubt, even stranger by my South Carolina accent. I said good afternoon, explaining I was an American and was new in the neighborhood, that my child was three years old, and her name was Leah, and that I would like some information about shopping. After this long soliloquy, I had exhausted both myself and my rudimentary knowledge of the language. The girl with the white dog had thrown her head back and laughed.
“The hell with it,” I had said. “I’ll find the goddamn stores myself.”
“I speak English,” the girl had replied. “My mother is Italian and my father works for UPI.”
“Please never tell him what I just said to you. I beg your pardon. My name is Jack McCall.”
“Natasha Jones,” the girl had said. “Let me take you around to all the shops and introduce you. People are very charming here once they get to know you.”
Quietly I approached Natasha.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Aren’t you Sophia Loren?”
Natasha spun around, saw me, and laughed. “Signor McCall, you never come back to the piazza to visit,” Natasha said. “Leah will be an old woman when I see her next.”
“This is Ledare Ansley, a friend of mine from the States,” I said.
Natasha curtsied nicely and said, “Did you know Leah’s mother?”
“Very well. All of us grew up together.”
“Did Signor McCall always tell jokes?” she said, not looking at me.
“Always,” Ledare answered.
“And they were never funny at all.”
“Not once,” said Ledare.
“Then he has not changed,” Natasha said, giving me a sly grin.
“Natasha is in love with me,” I explained to Ledare. “It often happens with young girls when they meet handsome, dashing adult men.”
“Do not believe a word he says, signora,” Natasha said.
“Never have,” said Ledare.
“You miss me, don’t you, Natasha?” I asked.
“Not at all. Bianco misses you,” she said, gesturing toward her dog.
“Just Bianco?” I asked.
“Yes, just Bianco. Of that I am certain,” she said.
“Come over and listen to the new Bruce Springsteen tapes Leah got,” I said. “She’d love to see you.”
“Perhaps I will,” Natasha said, walking away with her dog toward the Via di San Teodoro.
A motorcycle backfired in the next street and an old man fell to the ground, covering the back of his neck with his arms. The shopkeepers came out slowly to see if there was trouble and the motorcyclist appeared in the piazza, his engine backfiring irregularly. Everyone laughed at the old man, but after having seen the dead policeman, I fully understood his anxiety.
Natasha turned back. “An American tourist was killed near Salerno today,” Natasha said. “My father told me.”
“Terrorists?” I asked.
“Who knows,” she said. “But it is always good for Americans to be careful. Please explain it to your friend.”
“How do I explain it?”
“Tell her that Italy is complicated,” Natasha said, and as she said it I saw Jordan Elliott watching us from an alleyway.
At first, I turned away from him, since I had never seen him outside in public. When I turned back around as I led Ledare down the stairs that led into the piazza on the back side of the Capitoline hill, he had vanished from sight. In Rome, nothing was more invisible than a priest or a nun. Every day you could run across geeselike flocks of them from all the nations of the world.
I wondered if it was a bout of pure homesickness
that had brought him out into the sunlight of Rome. As we walked toward the theater of Marcellus, we crossed a busy street lined with buildings from the fascist period. Then I spotted Jordan with his back to us sitting on top of a bench-sized marble fragment of a broken column. To run ahead of us the way he did, I realized that my friend knew the streets of Rome and all its shortcuts much better than I had imagined. Perhaps he just wanted to see what Ledare looked like after all these years. Circumstance had stolen Jordan’s youth away from him, and perhaps he had an uncontrollable desire to watch some of those lost years from a distance.
He kept twenty-five yards ahead of us, never looking back, as I maintained my role of tour guide and pointed out the sites of historical note as we passed through the main street of the Jewish Ghetto. I stole glances at Jordan and led Ledare through the maze of lightless streets. It was a perfect place to stage an assassination, or arrange an affair, but you had to know the streets by heart.
With Jordan in the lead, our path took us by the Tortoise Fountain with its handsome boys helping turtles crawl up to a higher fountain. I watched as he walked past the outside tables of the Vecchia Roma restaurant, spoke to a waiter, then disappeared inside.
“Let’s have lunch outside,” I suggested. “Here in the sunlight.”
“Is this the most beautiful restaurant in the world or what?” Ledare said as she took her seat. I saw that I had exhausted her in the walk. Rome exhausts the human eye quickly and too much beauty too quickly offered is wasted. After ordering us a bottle of acqua minerale, I excused myself and went to try to find out where Jordan had gone. He was waiting for me in a stall in the men’s room. He began speaking to me as soon as I entered.
“These were left in the confessional at Sant’ Anselmo,” he said, sliding a manila envelope beneath the stall. I opened the envelope and took out a series of blown-up photographs showing me entering the confessional and Jordan emerging from it.
“You look good,” I said.
“I look so much older,” he replied. “Trappists are never photographed. I was shocked by my appearance.”
“I saw the private eye when I left the church,” I said. “He was the same guy that Martha Fox hired to follow me and Leah around Rome.”
“I was glad to see you look even older than I do,” Jordan teased.
“You’re a monk,” I said, speaking toward his voice. “You don’t get up with kids in the middle of the night, don’t worry about bills to be paid, or where the next buck is coming from. And you guys’ve discovered the true fountain of youth, the real secret of staying perpetually young.”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t have anything at all to do with women,” I said.
“So women age you?” Jordan said and I could feel his smile behind the closed door.
“No, women kill you from the inside out. It’s the liquor you drink in order to live with women that ages you.”
“My abbot has moved me to another monastery, Jack,” Jordan said. “He won’t let me tell even you where it is.”
“He’s right,” I said. “I let you down. I brought the outside world to you.”
“Mike Hess wrote me a letter saying he wants to meet with me. He mentioned the movie. I called my mother as soon as I got the letter and told her to be extra careful.”
“Does your father know you’re alive, Jordan?” I asked. “Has Celestine ever let on to him?”
“She knows my father would turn me in to the authorities,” Jordan said. “His whole life’s been a one-way street. He can’t change.”
“These photos,” I said, looking at them again. “It’s me and my confessor whom I’ve never seen. You don’t look much like the Jordan Elliott we grew up with.”
“I’ve got to disappear for a while, Jack. Even from you,” the priest said.
“I understand,” I said. “I’ll miss you, Jordan. Don’t make it too long.”
“That Ledare. Still a looker, isn’t she?” Jordan said. “I’d do anything to spend a couple of days talking to her.”
“Maybe someday,” I said.
“It can’t be, Jack,” Jordan Elliott said. “I’ll always be dead for people like Ledare.”
“There’s got to be a statute of limitations on all this,” I said.
“Perhaps,” the priest said as I readied myself to leave. “But there is no such statute for murder.”
Chapter Eight
From watching my own daughter, I had learned that motherlessness caused one of the great thirsts of the human condition. Leah could not look at a woman without sizing her up as a wife for me and a mother for her. She never gave up hope that I would one day bring home that special woman who would give a sense of harmony to our unbalanced lives. When I introduced Ledare to Leah, I spotted the exact moment when Leah made the silent selection of my old friend as the leading candidate to take over the running of our household. Leah made a bad habit out of hero-worshiping any woman I brought home to dinner, but Ledare had the added attraction of being one of those mythical creations who populated those tales I told her about my childhood.
“I never thought I’d get to meet Ledare Ansley in my life. You were the homecoming queen at Waterford High School, the president of the National Honor Society, and the head cheerleader.”
“How on earth do you know all that?” asked Ledare.
“The yearbook is a sacred text to Leah,” I answered as we settled in the kitchen and I began to prepare the evening meal.
“My mother edited the yearbook,” Leah said. “She wrote to you that she’d never forget the good times you both shared in Mr. Moseley’s economics class. It was fifth period. You told each other a million secrets. That’s what she wrote.”
“Ah, the shallow years,” Ledare said, smiling. “How I adored them.”
“You went with my father to the house on St. Michael’s Island,” Leah said. “That’s the night you broke up with Daddy and made out with Capers Middleton in Daddy’s car.”
“Not my best career move,” said Ledare.
“I’ve always thought Capers must be very nice,” Leah said. “My mama dated him in college and you married him. He’s very handsome.”
“It was like growing up with a movie star,” I said as I lit the stove and started the water for the pasta, salting it and turning the heat on high. Leah rushed out of the room and returned with that well-thumbed copy of her mother’s yearbook. She flipped through it expertly and turned to the picture of the cheerleaders.
“My mama was very cute, wasn’t she?” Leah asked.
“She was just precious, darling,” Ledare said. “You’ve got your mother’s eyes, her pretty hair, and her smile.”
“Did you have a favorite cheer?” Leah asked. “Daddy claims he does not remember a single one of them.”
“He never taught you the ‘Waterford High Fight Song’?” Ledare said in mock surprise. “Now that’s just dereliction of duty.”
“I didn’t even know there was a fight song,” said Leah.
“Look at your mother. Here in this picture. On top of the human pyramid,” Ledare said, pointing to the nine-girl squad stacked precariously at half court. “Once we got out of the pyramid, the student body knew the fight song was coming.”
“What a lousy song,” I said. “I challenge you to think of a lower form of music than fight songs in the American South.”
“Quiet, Jack. You’re not part of this,” Ledare said. “Stand beside me, Leah. Now, lift up your arms, just like this. That gets the student body off their feet. Now we’re going to spin three times and face the flag of Waterford High.”
Ledare spun and Leah followed her example clumsily, but watching every movement.
“Now we lift our pompons in the air and shake them steadily as the marching band plays our fight song. Shake ’em, honey.”
Both of them stood in the middle of the kitchen shaking imaginary pompons as I rolled fresh pasta through a pasta machine until the dough held a bright, lineny shine. Then I began cu
tting it into long strips as Ledare and I sang a song I had left far behind me years ago.
“Fight on, fight on, brave Dolphins,
Fight for our lovely town.
We’ll strive to beat each team we meet,
Not one will keep us down.
Strive on, strive on, brave Dolphins,
Seize for our school this day.
When victory comes, we’ll hear those drums
On fields where our teams play.”
“It’s still the worst song ever written,” I said.
“Your father always lacked real school spirit,” Ledare explained. “But your mother more than made up for it.”
“Even then,” I said as I opened a bottle of Barolo and let the wine breathe, “my burning honesty caused me to stand out among my feckless peers.”
“Is that true?” Leah asked.
“It’s all hindsight,” Ledare said. “Your father was just as ridiculous a teenager as all the rest of us.”
“Did you go to my mama’s funeral?” Leah asked suddenly.
Ledare answered, “I sure did. Saddest thing I ever saw, sugar.”
“Everybody really loved Mama, didn’t they?”
“We adored that girl,” said Ledare.
“I’m dropping the pasta,” I said. “Get ready to eat like kings and queens.”
“Anytime Daddy wants to change the subject, he drops the pasta,” Leah explained.
I could smell the red wine imparting some of its silken character to the aromas rising out of the skillet, where it blended and bound the congruent personalities of the tomato and garlic with the happy green smile of basil.
After we finished the pasta, I assembled a large army of greens and arranged them deftly until they took on a disheveled order. The olive oil was extra-virgin and recently pressed in Lucca and the vinegar was balsamic, black from its careful aging in rimmed barrels, and soon the smells of the kitchen coalesced to make me dizzy as I kissed the two women in my life and poured the wine to toast the health of the three of us.
“Let me taste the wine, Daddy,” Leah said.
“Just a sip. Italian authorities get suspicious when little girls die of cirrhosis of the liver.”