Eleven

  “What happened?” asked Merrick’s driver, yanking his sunglasses off, squinting behind him to see. He backed the car.

  “A man was killed,” Merrick said.

  The driver backed the car neatly to the extreme right-hand side of the road, pulled the handbrake, and jumped out.

  For a few moments, the driver and the truck driver had an animated conversation which Merrick could not hear. Merrick did not get out of the car. The truck driver had pulled the body onto the grass at the side of the road. No doubt he was explaining to Merrick’s driver that he could not possibly have stopped, because the man jumped right in front of him.

  “Dio mio,” Merrick’s driver said, coming back, getting into the car. “A suicide. Not an old man, either.” The driver shook his head.

  Merrick said nothing.

  They drove on.

  After ten minutes, the driver said, “A pity you don’t like Amalfi, sir.”

  “Yes. Well—” Merrick was in no mood for talking. His Italian was limited to a basic vocabulary, which however he knew thoroughly and pronounced correctly. Amalfi was where he had had his honeymoon twenty-five years ago. No use mentioning that to an Italian from Messina who was only about thirty himself.

  They stopped at a village Merrick had seen on the map in Palermo and inquired about. The tourist agent had said, “Very pretty, very quiet,” so Merrick intended to try it. He had telephoned from Messina and booked a room and bath. The driver took him to the hotel, and Merrick paid him off, tipping him so well the driver broke into a big smile.

  “Many thanks, sir. May you enjoy your holiday here!” Then he was gone, back to Messina.

  The Hotel Paradiso was very pretty, but not what Merrick wanted. He knew this after two minutes’ inspection of its main hall with its inner court of little fruit trees and a sixteenth-century well, open to the sky. The tiles of the floors were lovely, the view from his window of the Mediterranean as commanding as that from the bridge of a ship, but it was not what he wanted. Nevertheless, Merrick stayed the night, and the next morning hired a car to go on. While he waited in the hotel for the car to arrive, he looked in the small local newspaper for anything about the man who had jumped from the bridge.

  It was a short one-column item on the second page. His name was Dino Bartucci, 32, unemployed mason, with a wife and five children (their names and ages were given, all were under ten); his wife was in poor health, and Bartucci had been extremely depressed and anxious for many months. He had twice said to friends, “If I were dead, the State would at least give my wife and children a small pension.”

  Merrick knew how small that pension must be. There was the extreme, Merrick thought, of human anxiety: poverty, a sick wife, hungry children, and no work. And he found it mysterious that he had correctly anticipated death as soon as he saw the man, but that he had imagined it turned against himself.

  Merrick got into the car with the new driver. At one, they reached Amalfi, and stopped for lunch. The driver went off by himself with the thousand lire Merrick gave him for his meal, and Merrick lunched at a hotel whose dining terrace overlooked the sea. He had been here for lunch or dinner a couple of times with Helena, but he did not dwell on that as he slowly ate the good meal. He found that being in Amalfi did not trouble him. Why should it? The very hotel where he and she had stayed had been destroyed one winter in a landslide caused by heavy rains. They had built it back, of course, and in the former style, Merrick had heard, but he was sure this was not quite true. There would have been a few changes, probably in the direction of enlargement, and they could not have recovered every rock and stone and tree. But if the hotel had remained exactly the same, Merrick would not have gone to it now. He knew that his own memory in twenty-five years must have undergone slow changes, and that reality would be a shock, useless and depressing.

  Merrick lingered over his lunch, then had a leisurely coffee and brandy down on the main plaza. It was nearly five before they went on.

  The next town of any size was Positano. It was the end of the day, and a huge orange sun was just dropping into the sea beyond the purple hump of Capri. Merrick imagined that he heard the sun hiss as it touched the water, but the hiss was the lappings of waves against the rocky cliffs below. Positano, though objectively beautiful set in its curve of mountains—like the banked benches of an amphitheatre whose stage was the flat sea in front—looked no more inviting to Merrick than a half dozen other villages he had seen. Still, he told the driver that he would stay here for the night. The driver was quite surprised, because Merrick had told him they might drive to Naples and even to Rome. Merrick said he would pay him what he would have paid him to go to Rome, and this pleased the driver.

  “I know the best hotel here, sir. Shall I take you there?”

  Merrick did not want to come to a decision so soon. “No. Drive through the town first. Please.”

  The road took them above the town, round the semicircle of the amphitheatre. There were no roads in the town proper, only steps and slanting footpaths.

  “What about this?” Merrick said, indicating a hotel on their left. Its wrought-iron sign said Hotel Orlando, flat and black against its white front.

  “Very well.” The driver pulled into the parking area in front of the hotel.

  A bellboy came out.

  It was probably a very ordinary hotel, Merrick thought, but it looked rather expensive, so he supposed it would be clean and the service good. Merrick paid the driver and tipped him.

  Merrick undressed in his room and had a slow, hot bath. Then he put on his dressing-gown and ordered a half bottle of Champagne to be sent to his room. With the cheer of the Champagne, he forced himself to write a postcard to his sister in New York and to his daughter-in-law, both of whom were worried about him. To both he wrote the same thing:

  Having a very enjoyable time, resting as prescribed. Joining the Denises in Munich soon. Hope you are well. Don’t worry. Much love,

  Charles

  His doctors had told him to rest for two hours in bed in the afternoons. Merrick had done this until Palermo, but not since, not for three days. Four months ago his wife Helena and their only son, their only child, Adam, had been killed in a collision on a New Jersey parkway in a car driven by Adam. Merrick had not reacted badly at first, but he had three months later. He had had to stop going to his office at Merrick Weaves, Inc. in White Plains, not really because he felt as bad as the doctors thought he did, but because his going seemed to have no purpose. The textile factory continued to produce just as well without him as with him. His sister Wynne had come to stay in his White Plains house with him for two weeks, but since she had a household of her own, that couldn’t last forever. Her presence in the empty house, wonderful as Wynne was, had really not touched Merrick’s melancholia, anyway, though he had pretended to her that he felt better. He lost weight even though it seemed to him, perhaps because of the effort it took, that he was poking the same amount of food down himself as he always had. He had not realized that he loved Helena so much, that he so needed her simply to exist. The loss of her, plus his son just out of college, just finished his military service, just married, just ready to start living—had been enough to shake his faith in everything he had lived by until then. The virtues of hard work, honesty, respect for one’s fellow man, belief in God, had seemed suddenly thin and abstract. His convictions had become ghostlike, whereas the bodies of his wife and son in the funeral chapel had been as tangible as stone. The emptiness of his home had been real, but not the abstract ideal of manly fortitude. At the same time, Merrick knew that millions of men had been here before, since the beginning of time. There was nothing unusual or original about his feelings. It was what people called “life”—the two deaths in his life, and their aftermath. Finally his doctors had recommended a leisurely trip to Europe, but before endorsing this prescription had made sure that Merrick planned to see friends in London, Paris, Rome and Munich, and that the friends were the kind who would have time to spend with him.
Though his boat went to Genoa, Merrick had abandoned it in Lisbon, its first port, and had taken another boat to Palermo. The Martins in Rome wanted him to stay with them for a week in their large house on the Via Appia Antica. Merrick hoped to make that an overnight stay, on the excuse that the Denises were expecting him in Munich earlier than he had thought. The Denises lived in Zurich and were coming to Munich especially to join him. From Munich, they were to drive down to Venice, then into Yugoslavia and down its coast.

  Dinner was served at eight, Merrick had been told. At seven-thirty, he wandered into the garden behind the terrace where all the tables were set for dinner. The garden was dimly lighted by a few candles in glasses set along the low stone wall and on nearly buried stones in the grass. It was a wild garden, if one could call it a garden at all, but as soon as Merrick saw it, he was entranced. There was a swing chair on the left, half hidden by a low tree, where two people sat, a small table in front of them with drinks on it. There was no one else in the garden. Far behind, black now since the sun had gone down, rose the forms of huge mountains that seemed very close, walling the garden in. The candlelight lit up the faces of the couple in the swing chair like the faces of children around a lighted Hallowe’en pumpkin. Perhaps they were newlyweds, Merrick thought. Something about them suggested it, not their physical closeness because they were not even touching each other, but their quiet happiness and familiarity, their youth.

  A guitar began to play. It seemed to come from below, where the ground fell in dark clumps of bush and tree—though there was nothing down there, no light. The guitar was unaccompanied, yet it had the richness of three instruments playing together. The song glided in an easy, self-confident manner. Its melody line was long and intricate, down to a bass note that seemed to vibrate in Merrick’s blood when the player came to it now and again. He realized it was probably only a popular slow foxtrot, yet now it seemed far better, almost like an aria destined to be famous, from an opera by a great composer. Merrick took a deep breath. There had been such a song in Amalfi when he and Helena had been there. He had never heard the song since, and he and Helena had never taken the trouble to find out its name or to buy a record of it to take back to the States. It had simply been played, on a guitar also, now and then in the evening at their hotel. They had known it would turn up, like a certain bird at sunset, sometimes, and it would not have been fitting to ask its name, to ask a musician to play it for them, because it had its own times of turning up.

  At dinner, Merrick had a table, which might have seated four, to himself, set against a decorative rail of the terrace. Bougainvillaea grew up from below and climbed the rail, so close that a pale purple clump of it could lie on the white tablecloth beside his right hand. Merrick looked around at his fellow diners. There were more young people than old. He saw the newlyweds, still engrossed in each other and talking, at a table in the center of the terrace. In the far corner sat a middle-aged woman with light-brown hair, a very well-dressed woman who looked American, eating by herself. Merrick blinked and stared at her, then at the corner—less than a right angle—made by the terrace and the rail behind her. It was exactly like a certain corner of the terrace in the hotel in Amalfi. There had been bougainvillaea there, too. But the rest of the hotel was not like the hotel in Amalfi, not like it, and yet just enough like it. There had been, for instance, a garden left rather in a state of nature in the Amalfi hotel, like this one. Then Merrick realized he had at last come to the right place.

  “Finished, signor?”

  Merrick’s antipasto plate was taken away, and the smiling Italian waiter, who looked no more than sixteen, held a large tray of fettucini for him to help himself. This was followed by roast veal, a green salad, then a large basket of fruit, from which Merrick chose a pear, then a sweet. Merrick ordered coffee served to him in the garden, and he drank it standing at the garden rail, though there was no one now in the swing seat or in the two deck chairs near it.

  The woman with the light-brown hair and small pendant ear-rings came into the garden, and bent her head to light her cigarette. Her lighter only sparked.

  “Allow me?” said Merrick, coming toward her, pulling his lighter out of his jacket pocket with his free hand.

  “Oh!—I didn’t see anybody there. Thank you.”

  She was not in the least like Helena, though when he had seen her sitting in the corner of the terrace, he had thought she was—like Helena as she might have looked today, if she had sat in the corner of the Amalfi hotel terrace.

  “You’ve just arrived, haven’t you?” said the woman pleasantly. Her blue eyes had little crinkles of lines around them. Her face was suntanned.

  “Yes. You’ve been here a long while?”

  “Five weeks. I come here every year. I paint at the art school. Mostly as a hobby, you know. You must come and see our school. Come before twelve-thirty, because it closes then, then we all go down to have lunch on the beach.”

  Merrick made a little bow. “Thank you. I would like to.” He hesitated, then drifted away.

  The next morning, he passed the art school, which was in an old palace with huge doors that stood open to an inner loggia and court, but he did not go in. He went down and stared at the water and the bathers for a while, bought the New York and the London Times at the newspaper store, and while he was sitting on the low cement parapet above the beach reading them, a small boy came up and asked him if he would like a shine.

  Merrick looked at him and smiled with amusement. “A shine? For these shoes?” Merrick was wearing dark-blue espadrilles.

  The boy was grinning, too. His pale-blue trousers were dirty and had a patch on one knee. “I can ask, can’t I?”

  “And you haven’t any equipment,” Merrick said. “Where’s your polish?”

  “Here,” the boy said, slapping a pocket that obviously contained nothing. “Fifty lire. Cheap.”

  Merrick laughed. “I’ll buy you an ice-cream cone. Here—” He pulled his change out of his pocket. “Here’s fifty lire.” Merrick got up as if motivated by some force not his own. “Let’s get an icecream cone.”

  They went to the gelateria on the beach front, the boy skipping in circles about Merrick as if Merrick were some captive he was throwing invisible ropes around. Merrick bought him a double chocolate cone. It put a wide border of sticky brown around the boy’s mouth.

  “Where are you from in America? . . . Why are you here? . . . How long are you staying? . . . Have you got a car? . . . Have you got a boat? . . . Have you got a wife? . . . Have you got a big house in America? . . . How old are you?”

  Merrick answered all his questions honestly, without restraint, smiling, even to the “No” that he said when the boy asked if he had a wife.

  The boy accompanied him to the post office, where he had to post an airmail letter to Merrick Weaves, then walked on up the road with him toward his hotel. Merrick was charmed by his naturalness, his utter lack of inhibition—the boy paused by the roadside to urinate, not even stepping behind a tree—and he almost invited the boy into the hotel. He could have ordered iced lemonade and cake as a treat. But Merrick thought it was probably not the thing to do. He wished he could be as free as the child. The boy made Merrick think of a small puppy with the miraculous ability to talk.

  That evening Merrick was more than ever delighted with the Hotel Orlando. The guitar played the wonderful song again. Merrick was so lost in his dreams of Helena, he scarcely heard the few remarks of the waiter, and only replied by gestures. He had coffee at the table.

  “Good evening! We’re playing bridge in the lounge tonight, and I wonder if you’d like to join us? Just myself and Mr. and Mrs. Gifford. Have you met them?” It was the woman with the light-brown hair again.

  Merrick looked at her as though she were a thousand miles away instead of right by his table. Her voice had even sounded faint, and now, suddenly, he could not even remember what she had said. At last, he got to his feet. “Good evening, I—”

  “You’re not sick??
??

  “No.”

  “Good. So many people do get sick here at first.” She smiled.

  “I did go by the art school, but I didn’t go in,” Merrick said, thinking she had said something about the school.

  “Oh. Well, any time for that. What about bridge?”

  Merrick suddenly saw the suicide on the bridge, all over again, and again pulled his hand down his face. “No, thank you. I don’t like it,” he said gently.

  The woman’s face looked surprised. “All right. Never mind. Sorry.” With a faint smile she was gone.

  The next day, Merrick did not leave the hotel until afternoon. The small boy was on the beach front again, standing and chatting with a young couple who looked English, but when he saw Merrick, he detached himself with a wave of his hand to the couple, and came running.

  “Hello! How are you today? . . . What have you been doing? . . . Why weren’t you here this morning? . . . How much did your shirt cost? . . . Were you born in America?”

  They walked along the beach, picking up interesting pebbles and fragments of colored tiles, worn smooth by the water. The boy chatted with some fishermen who were sitting on the sand mending long, rust-colored nets. The fishermen called him Seppe or Guiseppe, and laughed and winked at Merrick as they talked with him. Merrick could understand little of what they said, because it was all in dialect. Seppe was barefoot and thin, but in his eyes and his laughing mouth, Merrick saw the vitality of a people that poverty could never crush. Merrick thought of the suicide Bartucci’s children, knew the same vitality would be in them, though perhaps not now the laughter. He decided to send the widow some money. He remembered the name of the town to the south where she lived. He could send a money order, anonymously. This thought made him feel happy.

  “Seppe,” he said as they walked on past the net-menders. “Would you like to have dinner with me in my hotel tonight?”