Cambridge (3 page)

One night I felt an amazing thing. I became two creatures, one that was my physical self, sliding into and under the lake of sleep, and another that was also me, but a me without the bother of a body, and that rose out of my chest—as if I’d been cracked open at the breastbone to let myself out—and was free to float around as high up as the body-me was down, in the lake of sleep. They were opposites, they had to move in equal measure from each other, so the further I sank into sleep, the further the other me could go up into the air. What was best about it was the feeling of being peeled apart, a moment as rewarding as the one when a scab finally gives way, when the itch stops and the new, naked skin can breathe.

It was a while before I understood that I didn’t have to stay in my bedroom.

First I went up and down the street and looked at the neighbors’ houses and the edge of Hampstead Heath. But I didn’t really want to see that stuff, which was what I saw all the time, although it was fun to look in people’s windows. So I went to Cambridge.

I crossed the Atlantic to Boston Harbor and went upstream along the Charles until I saw the Harvard boathouses. Then I took a right up Massachusetts Avenue, past the flooded frozen Cambridge Common, a temporary skating rink that glistened
in the dark. There was my school, my asphalt playground where I’d skinned my knees on American gravel. There was the snow heaped on corners and curbs. There was our house and our backyard willow with its branches short and stiff from winter. Up the hill was the penny candy store—who cared if the chocolate wasn’t as sweet? I could move quickly with my hovering and encompass the whole of the known city (known to me, that is) in ten minutes. From the swimming pool by the river at Magazine Street where my mother took me in the dog days to the Star Market on the way to Watertown where she dragged me weekly was at least four miles, but I’d get there in a moment with my floating non-body. I wanted the comfort of seeing the wooden houses and their painted shutters and the spread of deciduous trees (in those days there were still elms in North America), even if they were naked in February. I didn’t want brick townhouses, iron railings, yews and cobblestones and equestrian statues.

Every night that I could manage to separate myself, I went home. I called it soul traveling.

It was flying, really.

It was some sort of flying. I hovered above my dream-Cambridge, that was sleeping and frozen below me, and I was happy.

And then, on to Italy.

Everything was new and strange and beautiful. The key to the front door of our villa out on the via Bolognese in the hills above Florence was as big as my arm and looked like a child’s drawing of a key, a schematic, enormous proto-key, which nobody ever used but which was handed over to us in a welcoming ceremony by the farmer who lived across the way in a house a third the size of ours and looked after the property in a feudal arrangement
with the contessa whose villa it was and who was summering elsewhere. In the tradition of Italian contessas she was broke—she must have been to rent out such a house with such a magnificent view and so well situated that it caught any trace of breeze that managed to blow off the Apennines. Instead of doorknobs there were handles you pushed down to open the doors. The windows divided in the center and opened to the outside instead of going up and down. A shutter hidden in the frame clanked down in metal segments, sort of like an alligator. The farmer showed us how to pull it closed while leaving the windows open, catching the air but foiling the sun. The speckled floors were made of marble chips embedded in cement and polished to a shiny finish. Never a rug to get in the way of my sliding down the hall or round and round the dining room, pushing myself along on the dark, high, dusty gnarled furniture that fortified every inch of the walls. Highboys, lowboys, breakfronts, serving tables, linen chests, armoires, extra chairs (eight in addition to the six at the table): That villa had enough furniture for three villas. All of it was carved from black wood, or wood that time had blackened, and all of it was heavy, thick, oily with the touch of hundreds of hands. Walnut, chestnut, ancient fruit trees—these woods felt and smelled different from what I was used to, Scandinavian birch or teak in Cambridge and the cracking oak veneer and dried-out mahogany of the bad, war-torn furniture in the London house.

Once again I had to hop—up into bed. I liked this hop, which landed me in my more-than-double four-poster with curly columns terminating in pinecones that might have been acorns or perhaps the fleurs-de-lis that decorated every aspect of Florentine life from the red leather wallets that smelled of fish (something in the tanning process?) to the waxy, translucent paper bag in which the farmer’s wife delivered our groceries twice a week.

The bathrooms were the best of all.

“The Romans invented plumbing,” said my father, “and it shows.”

The bathrooms were as big as the bedrooms and there were lots of them. They had large windows and spacious bathtubs and skittery white marble floors veined with green streaks in my parents’ bathroom and rosy streaks in mine and blue-gray streaks in the one at Frederika’s end of the hall. The only disturbing thing about them—and it was puzzling more than bothersome—was that the fixtures were oddly placed. A sink popped up at a peculiar angle, off-center between two windows, and a toilet was too far into the middle of the room, acting as if it were an armchair. Probably the bathrooms had been bedrooms once, before the plumbing was put in at the turn of the century, and before bathroom layouts had been routinized.

In England time had been thick and impenetrable. It might as well have been plaster. It was immovable, obdurate, and sheer. It was also repetitive. Every day was as bad or bad in the same way as the previous day. Going to school was like putting an iron block on my head and balancing it for six hours. When I got home in the brief gloomy afternoon, I didn’t know what to do other than flop onto my bed and disappear into a book. Real bedtime was a relief. I could just lie there and hope to take one of my flying trips—except for the toilet worries that constituted a small but unceasing pressure, as if I wore a too-tight collar at night.

In Italy time had an utterly different shape and feel. A day was a long, coherent totality, shining and hot, all of one piece, though the piece was variegated and speckled like the floor.

In part I was transformed by love, because in Italy I fell in love again, this time with a single entity rather than with a city, which, no matter how much I loved it, could never return my
affection. I didn’t do much better the second time. I fell in love with a statue.

He stood in his niche on the wall of Orsanmichele, the old grain market in the center of Florence. Lots of other saints and heroes stood nearby, but he was striking for his straight, upright beauty: Saint George, the patron of England, emblazoned on flags and walls and letterheads there, but never looking like this.

For one thing, no dragon. The dragon was understood. This was a post-slaying portrait. He was holding his triangular shield between his feet, resting a hand across the top, looking out at the passersby with a faraway, tired expression. Because he was an Italian saint, he was wearing a sort of toga and cloak getup rather than the chain mail he wore in England.

His face was dreamy, not only his expression but his features. It was slightly rounded, with a small, delicate chin and little ears tucked in close. A northern Italian face. I could see the fair skin and light eyes even in the stained, pockmarked bronze.

It happened because the statues were placed around the first story of the building instead of up along the roofline as usual. If they’d been up where they were supposed to be, I wouldn’t have gotten a good look at them. These statues were so close they could have been people on the street who’d hopped up to stand on the ledge of rusticated granite that ran in courses along each floor.

I looked up and our eyes met. I blushed. I had to look down at the cobbles right away. Then I looked up and stared. I wanted to drink him. I wanted to breathe his quiet, steady being and smell his smooth, warm metal mouth and cheeks.

An attractive statue, and I was attracted. But there had to be something else—that’s the way love is. Something special, something that made me know.

Later that week we were in the Bargello Museum. We were always in a museum in Italy. And standing on a plinth, no niche, there he was again. This time he was made of marble.

He’s following me! He loves me too! That’s what I thought.

I stood looking at him.

“It’s Saint George,” my mother said. “You know him from England.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. I couldn’t talk. Also, I didn’t like her saying his name, though at the same time I was thrilled to hear it spoken. Saint George, Saint George, I said silently over and over. I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud.

“Donatello,” my father said.

“Donatello what?” I asked.

“Donatello made it,” he said.

I didn’t like this idea.

“This room is full of him. Here’s another good one,” my father said, moving off to the left.

It was nice. It was a young bronze man with a wonderful little hat, naked except for this crazy, jaunty hat, smiling, and with long curly hair.

“That’s David,” my father said. “David and Goliath, remember?”

I remembered.

“Like the huge
David
in the piazza where the best gelato is,” my mother said. “By Michelangelo.”

I was getting a good art education in Italy. I didn’t know that, of course.

We’d left the Bargello and were having gelato in another place, not quite as good as the one near the big
David
, before I dared to ask: “Isn’t Saint George on the outside of a building too?”

“I’m sure,” said my mother.

“Oh.” My father started rummaging through the guidebook. “You’re right. That one is a copy. They moved the original into the Bargello.”

“
David
is a copy too,” my mother observed, wiping chocolate off the baby’s chin.

“Is that fair?” I asked. “Is it fair to have copies? Are copies okay?”

“You mean the Michelangelo,” my father said to my mother. “The bronze
David
in the Bargello, the Donatello—”

“Yes,” my mother said. “What do you mean by
fair
?” she asked me.

“If it’s bronze,” my father said, “you can make another cast and it isn’t a copy, exactly. It’s considered an original. But you can’t do that with marble.”

“He comes both ways,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say
it
or to say his name again.

Back to the guidebook. “ ‘The Saint George in the niche of Orsanmichele is a copy made when the statues were moved into the National Museum—’ ”

“There’s another one?” I was astonished. Maybe he was everywhere, in every museum and on every building in Florence.

“The National Museum
is
the Bargello,” said my father.

“Are you sure?” asked my mother.

“There are too many names,” I said. “Is it called Orsanmichele or the grain market? Is it the Bargello or the National Museum?” Even though I’d been wondering about this point, I didn’t really give a hoot about the answer. The question was a way of diverting attention from my interest in Saint George.

“Everything here is so old it’s been different things in different centuries,” my mother said. “The Bargello used to be a kind of city hall, now it’s a museum. You see?”

“It used to be police headquarters,” my father said.

“Probably for the Fascists,” my mother said.

I suppose we made an appealing group, dark-haired and dark-eyed, my mother elegant in brown linen, the baby still feathered in soft curls, my father with his penetrating, often terrifying gaze, all bent over our bowls of pastel gelato, trying to eat it before it regressed to cream and eggs and fruit in the heat of noon. Daily my father intoned, “ ‘Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun,’ ” because daily we were out there too, doing our rounds in the museums and piazzas and palaces. We were clearly tourists; only foreigners were so silly as to not go home for a decent
pranzo
and a nap. But we were not obviously American ones. French, a diplomat? Maybe a Greek businessman and family. But surely not Philadelphia Jews, scholarship kids (my mother beat out my father to win the citywide competition for full tuition at Penn), with the kind of luck that comes to high intelligence, the mentors who make sure you get to where you should have been all along: on the Harvard faculty, at the lunch table in the Society of Fellows (aping Oxford and the real, fake Cambridge), or under the red-and-white awning of a
gelateria
in Florence on a Guggenheim and a Fulbright too, in the prime of life, in the middle of the century, in full sun.

But in fact my mother’s canny disguises hadn’t fooled the cannier Italians, alert for centuries to poseurs, interlopers, forgers, spies,
stranieri
. So what if she’d forked over plenty of American dollars for her caramel suede Ferragamos and convinced my father to trade his chunky Brooks Brothers tie-ups for some sleek black slip-ons? She’d replaced my beloved red Keds with rubber-soled, ankle-strapped gladiatorial leather sandals from the open-air market near Santa Maria Novella. Shoes tell all, was her belief, and she wasn’t wrong. Leather- and fashion-conscious Florentines looked first at the feet, then at the face. And though there was a momentary confusion, requiring a second look at the
whole ensemble, no waiter ever failed to address us in English. The people who couldn’t figure out that we were Americans were the other American tourists.

Frederika (not with us on this day) was a complicating factor in identifying us. She certainly wasn’t Italian: too tall, too beige, with her hair in a bun and her thick-framed glasses and her homemade, batik-print clothing and ergonomic shoes. A Swedish hippie is what she was, before there were any hippies. After I fell in love with Saint George, I became aware of the clichés of romance, and wondered if Frederika were to undo her bun, chuck her glasses, and put on a low-cut dress, she would turn into Sophia Loren. When she came to live with us in Cambridge, she did many of those things, but she turned into a tall, brown-haired, nearsighted Swedish girl, which wasn’t much of a transformation.