Collected Novels and Plays (38 page)

Enid didn’t know. “Why does that little priest have all those rosaries?” she asked her neighbor.

“Why, to be blessed!” said the woman, Irish like Alice. “Everything you’re wearing or carrying gets blessed by the Holy Father.”

“Oh my goodness!” breathed Enid involuntarily.

At that moment the Pope made his entrance. The crowd knelt, then at a signal rose.

Among the first in line, the Buchanans could scarcely get to their feet before having to kneel again, as instructed, and kiss the Pope’s huge ring. Lily watched her father do this, half-expecting
his
conversion then and there. When her own turn came she grasped the Pope’s fingers, squeezed her eyes tight shut, and aimed for the ring with her lips. Unaccountably, she missed. She felt it graze her chin—too late! Her pursed
mouth had already made contact with the Pope’s dry cool flesh. Mortified, she stood up and faced him, a white old man with glasses.

He spoke. “A little girl going to school?”

Lily just stared.

The Pope repeated his question in a mild automatic voice.

“Oh,” she finally answered, “to school? Yes.” She could see that he knew everything about her. He knew about the ring,
her
ring, burning beneath her glove. Dared she sell it after his blessing? He raised two fingers. Lily steeled herself.

“A special blessing on you and all your dear ones,” the Pope murmured with a look of complicity. The child’s jaw dropped. He hadn’t mentioned what she was
wearing!
Then he moved on to Enid.

A major-domo lost no time in ushering out those whose audiences were over. Below in the Piazza, Enid complained that she hadn’t had a good look at the Pope. “Boopsie Gresham met him,” she recalled, “when he was still a Cardinal. He used to go to East Hampton for weekends. People said he was terribly attractive.”

“Well, we’ve done it and I’m glad,” Larry said, first clearing his throat. “The times we’ve been in Rome and never seen the Pope. You’ll remember today all your life, Lily.”

“I know.” Lily had been feeling the papal blessing at work, much like her mother’s wonder drugs, upon all her sins. Deceits and disobediences, soon she’d be cured of them, incapable of them!

By that afternoon, in fact, her motives had grown so pure that Lily went ahead and sold the ring.

Enid took her first to a fancy jeweler. Lily gaped at diamonds and
emeralds, coveting them not for herself—the Pope had stopped all that—but for her loveliest of mothers. Meanwhile, a polite clerk was expressing regret; they did not buy old gold. A second shop directed them to a dealer in antiquities, right in the Piazza di Spagna.

Inside, a fat old man wheezed. It wasn’t a shop in which you’d have thought to buy anything. It seemed to specialize in the old, the dusty, the unbeautiful. Lily looked around and saw nothing
whole:
a head of veined marble with a nose missing; a shelf of terra-cotta fragments, here a foot, there a face. The old shopkeeper encouraged his clients with a toothless grin. Their own faces expressed both disgust and assurance. They had come to the right
place.

Lily watched her mother produce the ring, watched the dreadful old man’s eyebrows go up and down, once only. “
Beh!
” he said finally. “
Facciamo dieci mille lire
.” Enid turned.

“What he’ll give us comes to about fifteen dollars, sweetie. I really do think that’s too little.” She then told the shopkeeper as much, in a language closer to birdsong than to speech. It wasn’t her ring, but the ring of the little girl, the
figluola
, the
ragazzina
—who all the while listened spellbound to her mother bartering with the terrible old man.

He threw out his hands. He was poor! There was no market for old jewelry. “
Sono vecchio
,” he croaked, “
vecchio, Signora!
” He would be dead, in his grave, before a customer came along for such a ring.

Enid thanked him, wrapped it in Kleenex, and turned to go. They would find another shop, she said cheerfully, seeing Lily’s bewilderment. When the shopkeeper called her back, she winked once slyly, as though she had known he was going to.

Out of pure curiosity—what price did the Signora have in mind?

The Signora pursed her lips. Oh, she hadn’t really thought—forty, fifty thousand lire seemed reasonable. Lily had to hide a giggle; she was learning how in Italy you named a price much higher than you expected to get, but the funny part was to see her mother do it as coolly as any native.

It even amused the shopkeeper. He clapped his hands and laughed a fine dry laugh. He made the gesture of wiping his eyes, then begged her pardon. “
Scusi, Signora
” but he couldn’t help it, it was to laugh, that a ring so small should sell itself for a price so big. However—he held up two fingers, like the Pope—seeing that the ring belonged to the Signorina, he would make a special price—fifteen
thousand!

“Take it, take it!” Lily wanted to say, chilled by the old man’s smile and fear lest the sale never be completed. But Enid had already picked up the ring, pleasantly shaking her head. “Special prices are as bad as Special Audiences,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.

What then did the Signora want! Money?—impossible! The shopkeeper’s rolling eyes took in silk, fur, fine leather, a ruby-and-pearl brooch. A sweep of his arm showed how poor, by contrast, his own treasures were. On the floor near the counter Lily saw a cardboard box full of fragments, marble, clay, some still caked with dirt, fingers and things broken from old statues. How funny! What would anyone want with them? Then, recalling her father’s missing
finger, she decently averted her eyes from the box.

“Sweetie, he’s offering you twenty thousand. I think that’s fair, don’t you?” Lily looked up. The old man was holding out two big bills, pink and gold, one clean, the other filthy—standing for that half of the price he would pay only under pressure. The ring had already disappeared.

“
Va bene, Signorina?
”

Lily nodded.

“Take the money, sweetie. What do you say to the nice man?”

“
Grazie
…
?
”

“
Grazie a Lei, Signorina!
” the shopkeeper returned, wheezing and bowing. They had reached the door when he called them back. “
Un momento!
” He lifted from a cabinet, with reverent flutterings of his hand, an intaglio mounted in pale gold, blood-red as he held it to the light. It showed the profile of a fattish young man. “
Bello, eh?
”

They considered it briefly, out of politeness, then, thanking him once more, left the shop.

“He must have thought we were either blind or cuckoo,” said Enid. “I don’t call something
bello
when it’s cracked clean through. Without that silver band it would have fallen apart!”

Lily led her mother across the Piazza, made her promise to wait at the corner, and started down a street towards a shop she remembered. That morning, waking, it had come to her, what to buy with the money. It was the perfect thing.

It was still the perfect thing twenty minutes later when, back at the Eden, flushed and happy, Lily found a cleared surface on which to set it down. The box was three feet long, and heavy. “I simply cannot bear this excitement!” said Enid, bug-eyed.

“Then open it!” cried Lily.

“Don’t you want to wait till Daddy’s awake from his siesta?”

“No, it’s for you!”

“For me?” Enid had been about to take off her hat, but stopped. “Oh, my goodness!”

“So open it!”

It seemed to Lily that her mother took an exaggerated time to undo the string, the shiny white paper, finally to lift the lid, beginning to coo as she folded aside layer after layer of tissue. At the end, however, she stepped back, as genuinely surprised as Lily could have hoped.

“Why, Lily! Of all the …
oh!
”

Not trusting herself to say more, Enid lifted it from the box and stood it upright facing the window. The late sun did wonders for the figure, richened the whites and pinks, the powder blues, woke all kinds of sparklings within the glass jewel of the crown. Though not the largest, it had been to Lily’s mind the loveliest Virgin in the shop. She’d chosen it from a rainbow thicket of plaster images. Significantly, no knives protruded from its breast.
All
that
, its soft forgiving smile conveyed, was over and done with.

“Mummy, Mummy, didn’t you guess? Where will you put it? In your bedroom?”

Enid found her tongue. “I can’t decide now, sweetie, I’ll have to think ….”

Maybe in time they could build a chapel around it!

The little girl easily imagined, in her mother’s heart, the sweet relief of having brought to light something that had been overlooked or hidden for so many years. Often all you needed was a
way
of doing this. And she had thought of it, she alone! Also, the Virgin was
whole
, not cracked across or chipped. Lily remembered her father’s lecture in the restaurant. I’m developing taste, she thought radiantly, I’m learning the
value of things!

Enid meanwhile had removed her hat. “Tell me,” she begged, “how you ever dreamed up such an original present.”

Original? “But I
know!
” said Lily. “You never told me, but I found out. Couldn’t I be a Catholic, too? I already have a little medal at home, that Alice gave me …. I wanted to be like you, that’s all—it’s the truth, Mummy!”

For at the mention of Alice an indecipherable look had crossed her mother’s face. Then the explanations began. From that moment on, Lily’s happiness in her deed shrank and soured.

The following afternoon, Thursday, when her parents carried the Virgin back to the shop, Lily was blushing for her babyishness. Fortunately they seemed to understand this. At least the matter was never brought up again. When they took her to spend the refunded money, neither her father nor her mother made a single suggestion. All by herself Lily chose what she wanted, a stunning leather purse with a shoulder strap and ornamental brass clasp, a Roman scarf, and the most
exquisite doll—a Spanish Seèorita wearing a mantilla of real lace. By then, of course, everything had changed. Lily had even begun to rehearse a conversation with Francis, years hence. “Yes, I sold the ring,” she would say, crossing her legs in some wonderful way she’d have learned, “I sold the
ring, but only after the Pope had blessed it.” She practiced the remark aloud, with different inflections, getting it to
sound very clever and wise.

The three Buchanans had decided Wednesday before dinner that the Virgin was to be returned—“even if they won’t give back the money,” said Larry. In the course of a long adult hour—she supposed it was adult because they allowed her a splash of Campari with water and ice—Lily quite forgot why she had picked out the statue, the real reason, not just what she’d told her mother. The room was too thick with other revelations.
Listening, awed, to “what we believe,” to “what
our
faith says about Mary,” and “our Episcopalian attitude towards confession,” Lily forgot Alice. She even forgot that she’d heard it all before in Sunday School, till they reminded her. She peered down unsuspected vistas. Her mother had been right to leave the Catholic Church. Confession
was
a private matter. And here were Lily’s own parents sharing the secret
substance of their lives with her, as if at last finding her worthy.

“We think you’re one of the most attractive people we know,” said Enid. “We like being with you.”

“We have a real companionship, don’t we?” Larry cracked his knuckles. “We can talk things over with you—”

“—in a friendly, natural way—”

“Not like most parents. Love’s an investment, Lily, which your mother and I feel has been repaid, in your case, a thousand percent.”

Lily’s head was reeling. The Virgin gazed sweetly from the table, forgiving them all. But Lily found that she cared not very much for Jesus’ mother, and immeasurably for her own. Nothing made of plaster was adequate to patch up a real difference between people. The Virgin’s blue robe, aglitter with the hilts of no knives, didn’t keep Lily from hearing the rip of canvas, her own breathing, her mother’s hurt voice afterwards.

She had no choice. It was dreadful, only the exact truth would help.

“Mummy,” she said hours later into Enid’s ear, when she came to tuck her in, “I was the one who did that to your portrait.” There! Lily fell back on her pillow, weak with the effort it had cost her.

She’d had two glasses of white wine at Ranieri’s, a place full of atmosphere. She’d kissed her father goodnight, screaming as he pinched a fold of innocent fat through her seersucker pajamas—“Goodnight, my little oyster!”—and giggling at his admonition not to dream of the Pope. Then to bed, waiting, listening, their talk muffled by the thin wall. “Alice … church … fuss
…” her mother murmured. “Rot … God’s name … money …” he replied. Lily tried to hear more, but the room had begun to hum, to quiver like a compartment in a train hurrying you towards a place you’d never seen. A light widened on the wall, then narrowed and went out with a click. Her mother had entered, closed the door behind her, maybe knowing all along what had to happen.

The words uttered, Lily’s responsibility came to an end. She fell back on the pillow. Whatever followed wouldn’t be
her
doing. In a dull curiosity she watched Enid sink to her knees beside the bed. “Oh sweetie!” she cried, and made a soft crooning noise, while over the child’s skin sleepiness crept, strange, slow, a tide of honey. It turned out that her mother did know, had known from the very day.

“I know, I’ve known from the day it happened,” she breathed, stroking Lily’s forehead and cheek. “I found out, I couldn’t help it—Michèle had seen you leaving the Cottage ….”

“Then you lied,” murmured Lily wearily, unable to cope with the tenderness in her mother’s voice, speaking
her
words of a few hours before. She felt part of herself tremble, break into tears, but the rest of her, from some vast distance, watched, caught in that paralyzing sweetness.

“Yes, I lied. Baby, don’t cry! Nobody else knows! Michèle didn’t suspect—don’t! I’m crying too!” she laughed, her voice high and squeaky with love. “Think of your old lady’s predicament!
She
didn’t want to say anything about it until
you
did!”