The weather had improved. “We could walk to Fiesole,” Miranda suggested. “We could see the field full of flowers.”
“It’s wet,” Margot said.
“I don’t mind. Besides, we’re both wearing sensible shoes.”
Margot looked down at her feet, as if to make sure.
“I’ve never walked it backward,” Margot said. “I’ve always started in Fiesole.”
“It will be a new experience. Do you think you can find the way?”
“I’m not sure I can find the field full of flowers, but we can’t get too lost.”
Margot didn’t tell Miranda about Francesca. There were some things she wanted to keep to herself. Francesca was dead too, now, but she’d left Margot a life interest in the apartment in Santa Croce. Her brothers had tried unsuccessfully to break the will.
They found the field full of flowers, where Julian Sands kisses Helena Bonham Carter in A Room with a View. The scene was hardly recognizable in winter, except for the little shed in the back of the field. And then they went on to the lane where the carriage scene had been filmed.
“The carriage driver, Lucca Rossi, still drives a cab—a horse cab—in the city, you know,” Margot said. “I met him at a wedding reception in Palazzo Vecchio.”
“He was so handsome. And so dangerous looking.”
“Maybe I’ll introduce you, but he doesn’t speak English. You’d have to work on your Italian, but that might be a good thing.”
Walking the familiar path backward, as if they were walking into the past, Margot felt that she was growing younger with each step, walking backward into childhood innocence, backward into a time before this time, before Francesca, before her father’s death in India, before Sandro, before the flood, before her mother’s death in Chicago, till by the time they got to the outskirts of Fiesole she was a young girl again and her adventure was just beginning. But they met an old couple setting out on their own walk, and Margot realized she had the wrong metaphor.
“Did you see the way they smiled at us?” she said to Miranda. “They thought we were mother and daughter.”
Our Town
Wednesday evening. Woody and Biscotti waited in the lobby of Albergo Porta Rossa for Miranda to come down. The drama club at the American Academy was putting on a performance of Our Town, and the students had persuaded Woody to ask Miranda to come to one of the rehearsals. Woody was afraid she might not show. Margot had told him the whole story—how Miranda had been expecting Zanni to seduce her and then had discovered Beryl Gardiner in Zanni’s hotel room—but had sworn him to secrecy.
He looked up when he heard the elevator door open and took in the tragic expression on Miranda’s face just as it gave way to a wan smile. She was Cookie’s age, the age Cookie would be if she hadn’t been killed, and his heart went out to her. He thought that an affair with a man like Zanni would have been a good experience for her, but he couldn’t help thinking that being passed over by a man like Zanni might be an even better experience. “I appreciate your doing this,” he said. “The students are very excited.”
They left the hotel and walked down Via Porta Rossa toward Piazza Repubblica. “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do tonight,” Miranda said as they passed under the fake triumphal arch and entered the piazza, “and no desire to do it.”
The piazza was brightly lit and they had to pass through a crowd of children waiting to ride a merry-go-round that had been up since Christmas.
“For heaven’s sake, Miranda,” Woody said, “you played Emily when you were in high school. What can go wrong? It’s just a bunch of students. Good students too. That makes it easy— Emily’s from San Francisco; the Stage Manager’s an Italian. George is an Iranian. Mr. Webb’s from Hamburg, and Mrs. Webb is an Italian.”
Miranda thought for a minute. “It’s hard to imagine Grover’s Corners peopled by Italians, Germans, and Middle Easterners. How can they possibly understand Our Town?”
“The same way anybody understands anything,” Woody said. “Isn’t that the purpose of art? To see through others’ eyes?”
“I can never win an argument with you,” she said.
Biscotti tugged on the leash and squatted. They waited for her to pee.
“I wasn’t arguing,” Woody said, stooping to pat the dog’s head; “I was explaining.”
The Drama Club met in a small theater—Teatro le Laudi— on the side of Piazza Savonarola opposite the American Academy. The set had been dressed like a piazza for a different production. On one side there was a bar with a few tables in front. On the other, one of those little shops that sold fruit and vegetables. One of the tables had a Cinzano umbrella that seemed, to Woody, to be too large for the small stage.
They were greeted by about thirty students, cast and crew, who fussed over the dog, and over Miranda, and by Polly Winston, the English teacher who was directing the play. Woody was fond of Polly, who had a clear hierarchy of needs that included adjourning faculty meetings after one hour and opening a bottle of Prosecco in the staff lounge on Fridays at four. She’d surprised everyone at Epiphany by coming to school dressed as the befana and handing out candy to everyone. She was wearing jeans and a white shirt and was smoking a cigarette. She was about Miranda’s age and seemed perfectly confident as she and Miranda exchanged air kisses. Woody was a little nervous. He wanted the visit to go well.
What Miranda did, after a brief introduction, was ask the students, who were standing on the piazza stage, to form groups of three and brainstorm about what daily life would have been like in a small New Hampshire town, and to compare it with daily life in their own hometowns. But the students had already done that. What they wanted to know, one of the girls said, was how to kiss.
Woody, who was sitting in the front row next to Polly Winston, looked around. “I’ll bet some of you could give lessons in kissing,” Miranda said. Everyone laughed. “There’s only one kiss, isn’t there? In the wedding?”
“End of Act Two,” Polly said. She leaned toward Woody and whispered: “I’d kiss Nasser myself—he’s playing George—but I don’t want him to fall in love with me.”
“Well, then,” Miranda said, “let’s do it. George? Emily? Maybe everyone else could sit in the front rows.”
Nasser, an Iranian, was swarthy. That was the only word for him. Emily, from California, was small and fragile.
“What you want to know,” Miranda said, “is the difference between real kissing and stage kissing, right?”
“And movie kissing,” someone said.
“It can be scary,” Miranda went on. “But it doesn’t have to be. You’ve got to get to know each other when you start blocking the scene, but I assume you’ve already done that.” Some laughter. “Now in stage kissing, your lips don’t actually have to touch, okay? The guy—usually it’s the guy—will have his back to the audience, so the audience won’t see that your lips aren’t touching. A kiss is stage business, like crossing stage left and sitting down on a chair. It’s part of the blocking.”
The students were skeptical. “What about movie kissing?” Nasser asked. “When Agnese Nano kisses Jacques Perrin in Cinema Paradiso, you can see that their lips are touching.”
“And not just their lips,” someone said. More laughter.
“One thing at a time,” Miranda said.
Emily spoke up: “Polly—Ms. Winston—says that she wants the audience to see the kiss. If George has got his back to the audience, he might just be licking my cheek. What’s the point?”
“All right,” Miranda said. “I just said your lips don’t have to touch, but there’s no law against kissing on stage. It’s just . . .”
“Are you going to kiss Zanni in the movie? Will your lips touch?”
“Let me tell you something,” Miranda said. “Screen acting is just posing for the camera. It’s all cut and paste. You don’t have to act at all. There’s no give and take, no buildup, no rhythm. There’s no consistent arc. You do the same shot over and over and over,” she said, “and then it’
s cut together later; all the reality is edited out. It’s mind-numbing. There’s no rapport with the audience, with real people. When you’re on the stage, the audience is there with you, in the same moment, sharing the same space.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s start over. Again. If you want a real kiss, and you want everyone to see the kiss, then just take it easy, open your mouths a little and join your lips together and press, but not too hard. The main thing is you need to communicate. The kissers have to trust each other. If you’re afraid that the other kisser’s going to stick his tongue in your mouth, then it’s impossible to act natural.”
The students wanted a demonstration.
“George,” Miranda said, “come over here.” She crooked a finger and beckoned.
“What about Emily?” George asked.
“I’ll be Emily,” she said. “Has somebody got a script I can borrow?”
Polly stood up and handed her a script.
“Come on, Nasser. George. You don’t mind if I call you George?”
Nasser said he didn’t mind.
Miranda looked at the script. “Well,” she said, “we might as well do the whole thing. Let’s see, I’m Emily, so I’ll need to be stage left. We’re going to need the Stage Manager and we’re going to need Mrs. Soames. I think that’s it.” She looked again. “No, we need Mr. Webb too. All right, everybody, hit your marks. Or I guess I should say, ‘Take your places.’”
The students positioned themselves on the stage, Miranda and Mr. Webb stage left, George and the Stage Manager stage right. Mrs. Soames found an extra folding chair and sat downstage right, in front of the Italian fruit and vegetable stand.
“Can someone give us the ‘Wedding March’?”
Polly ta-tummed the opening of Lohengrin. George stood next to the Stage Manager. Miranda started down the aisle with Mr. Webb. They stopped in front of the Stage Manager, and George stood next to them while the Stage Manager performed the ceremony. Mrs. Soames started jabbering.
George produced the ring and put it on Miranda’s finger. The moment had arrived. They turned to face each other. Miranda, who was slightly taller than George, looked him in the eye. “Put your arms around me,” Miranda said. Woody saw George stiffen. Miranda stopped and put her hands on George’s shoulders: “I’m remembering my first kiss,” she said. “And I want you to do the same—your first kiss on the lips, and then all the other kisses.” Everyone’s eyes were on them. Woody could see George soften, could almost feel his lips meeting Miranda’s as Miranda pulled him toward her. Woody was remembering his first kiss, Carolyn Draper, on the steps of the high school gym after a dance, their lips colliding rather than meeting, and then the Stage Manager was launching into his cynical remarks about marriage.
“That’s all there is to it,” Miranda said, taking George’s hand and turning to the audience.
Polly Winston thanked Miranda for what she’d said about stage acting. Miranda sat down in the front row, and they watched as the students ran through the last act—Emily’s return to Grover’s Corners to relive her twelfth birthday.
At first Woody was distracted by the Italian stage set. The vegetable stand and the white tables in front of the bar and the big Cinzano umbrella pointed his imagination in one direction, and it was hard to point it back at Grover’s Corners. Biscotti had gone to sleep at his feet. He was tired too. But then he was imagining that the dead were speaking to Cookie, not Emily, in the little cemetery in St. Clair, trying to dissuade her from going back—that it was Cookie, not Emily, who was reluctant to let go of her earthly life, Cookie who had to learn that the living don’t understand. It was true. Woody didn’t understand.
The students wanted a critique. Miranda said she couldn’t find anything wrong. “It’s better than I remembered,” she said. “I saw it at the Goodman Theater in Chicago when I was in high school, with Tony Mockus as the Stage Manager and Harriet Hall as Emily, and then I saw it again at the Lyceum in New York with Spalding Gray and Eric Stoltz and Penelope Ann Miller, so I know what I’m talking about. You guys are doing a great job, wholehearted, that’s the main thing, and not sentimental. I’d forgotten how hard-edged the ending is.” And then she went on to offer some suggestions to Emily on how to find the rhythm inherent in her lines by saying them over and over with the emphasis in different places, and to George, who was having trouble flinging himself down on Emily’s grave. “You’ve got to figure out your objective in this scene,” she said. “Do you want to join her? to protect her? to bring her back?” George tried flinging himself down several times with different objectives in mind.
“I think I want to protect her,” he said.
“There you go,” Miranda said.
Woody chatted with Polly while Miranda signed some autographs.
On the way back to the hotel, Miranda asked Woody Emily’s question: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?” And Woody gave the Stage Manager’s answer: “No.”
“What about Margot?”
Woody laughed. “What about Margot? She’s no different from anyone else.”
“I wish I could go back to the opening night when we did Our Town in high school,” Miranda said. “Emily wants her mother to see her. ‘Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me.’ But my mother did see me. I could feel her eyes on me. ‘Just look at me one minute as though you really saw me, Mama.’ She did see me. She always really saw me. She saw me when I was playing on the swings in East Lake Park, or just reading in the public library—she worked at the reference desk. She saw me when I was Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, and when I was Juliet in the junior play and when I played Emily in my senior year. She saw me on the platform at the station when I left for Smith and when I got off the train the first time, at Christmas.
“What about you?” she said.
“Me?”
“You. If you could live over just one day, what would it be?”
“I don’t want to go back. I’m like the dead. I already know what will happen. Cookie will be killed in the bombing . . .”
“But if you didn’t know . . .”
“I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand not knowing. It would be too painful.”
“But you wouldn’t know, so it wouldn’t be painful.”
Woody just shook his head. “And that my wife was going to divorce me and join a convent. Who would have imagined such a thing?”
“But you’d know that you were going to meet Margot, wouldn’t you? You’d have that to look forward to. And me!” She laughed. “You’d know you were going to meet me.”
Woody laughed too. “How would I know?”
“But if you picked just the right day. That’s all I’m asking. One day. The most important day in your life.”
Woody stopped and thought for a minute. They were in Piazza San Pier Maggiore, outside the convent. The dog started pulling toward Via Verdi.
“Say something, Woody.”
“I see you,” he said, thinking of what she’d said about her mother. She laughed and took his arm. “I see right through you!” he said, and she laughed again.
They turned down Via Albizzi, but Biscotti kept straining toward Via Verdi. “This reminds me of one of the hunting scenes in Anna Karenina,” Woody said. “Levin wants to go in one direction, but the dog, Laska, knows where the game is. Levin keeps going one way, and the dog keeps trying to get him to go in a different direction.”
Woody jerked on the leash, and Miranda said, “Maybe Biscotti knows where the game is!”
“You want to go to Margot’s? I thought you had a six a.m. call.”
She looked at her watch. “It’s only ten.”
“All right,” Woody said. “I’ll walk you home later.”
“You don’t need to do that,” she said.
“But I’ll do it anyway.”
They turned around and started down Via Verdi. Biscotti jumped up and down and pulled harder and harder. When they came
to the piazza, Woody let her off the leash and she immediately ran to the statue of Dante and raised a leg, though she usually squatted to pee.
“Did you teach her to do that?” Miranda asked.
Woody laughed. “She always waters old Dante.” Biscotti headed for the apartment. The shutters were closed but Woody could see that the lights were on in the living room. Margot greeted them in her bathrobe. “How did it go?”
“Beautifully,” Woody said. “And now we need a drink.”
Margot got out a bottle of Vin Santo and some cookies. Biscotti watched hopefully.
“Maybe I’ll go up to Fiesole this weekend and walk to Settignano all by myself,” Miranda said, once they were seated at the kitchen table. She dipped a cookie in the Vin Santo.
“You must be desperate,” Woody said.
“Or maybe I’ll go to the Bargello. Margot’s been trying to get me to go there ever since I got here.”
“Good idea,” Margot said. “The Bargello.”
“Maybe I won’t do anything.”
“Take the weekend off,” Margot said. “You’ve been working hard.”
“Maybe I’ll go to the Paperback Exchange and get a detective novel.”
“I’ve got a stack of them,” Margot said. “You could borrow one. Nero Wolfe. Travis McGee.”
“Maybe I’ll keep on reading Anna Karenina.”
“Where are you now?” Woody asked.
“Levin’s brother’s just died, and Kitty’s pregnant.”
“If you start now,” Woody said, “and read right straight through, you should get to the hunting scene by this weekend.”
“You still haven’t picked the day you’d like to go back to.” Miranda rehearsed their earlier conversation for Margot, who’d never seen Our Town.
“I think I’ll stay right where I am,” Woody said, reaching down to scratch Biscotti behind the ears. “At least for tonight.”
Auction
There’s a day in every shoot when everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and this was it. It was Esther’s fifty-fifth birthday, March 22. They’d had a long day yesterday, and everyone was tired. A roll of film had been left in the developer overnight in the lab in Rome, and now they’d have to reshoot the exterior shots for the scene in which the novice who discovers the Aretino volume flees the convent and meets Margot in the piazza; Miranda, who’d been demanding some script changes in the auction scene at Sotheby’s, had given her copy of the shooting script to Margot, and Margot had been hostile when Esther called her in the morning to see if she could get someone to unlock the gate to the Giardino dei Semplici on the opposite side of Via Capponi, where they were going to park the camera truck, which was now blocking the street; the Italian second assistant director had called in sick; one of the PAs was complaining that her stomach hurt and that she wanted to go back to the convent; the stills photographer was an hour late. Esther called his manager from the porter’s lodge at Sotheby’s, and the manager said that the photographer had had to be somewhere else, so Esther fired him.