Hill Towns (17 page)

Joe says he remembers mostly how dim and hot it was; the lights and air-conditioning were not working, whether from simple defect or
sciopero
no one knew. And he remembers that Ada Forrest wept, and he found that strange.

Sam said what he remembered mostly was his own first wedding, in the tiny living room of a justice of the peace in Elkton, Maryland, that smelled of cat urine and throbbed with recorded wedding music and the sobs of his cheerleader bride, who missed her mama and daddy.

HILL TOWNS / 135

“And,” he said, “I thought how much I’d like to paint that magistrate, with the cigarette hanging out of his mouth and the Hush Puppies sticking out under his robe. I think I’d call it SPQR.”

Maria remembers the surprising liberality of the Italian civil ceremony, with its emphasis on honoring each other, and the unexpected tenderness of the charge to honor each child of their union according to its own talents and identity.

“I remember,” Colin said, “that I’ve never had to pee so badly in my life. I thought I was going to have to run down to the Forum and do it behind a column.”

“I remember thinking how wonderful it would be to remember being married in Rome,” Yolanda Whitney said. “It would be the one thing you could never lose to the community property laws. Not, of course, that you darling children will ever have to worry about that.”

And she smiled her television smile at the new Mr. and Mrs. Gerard.

Afterward, while we milled about in the portico of the Conservatori, waiting while Joe and Ada Forrest snapped pictures of the newlyweds, Sam and Yolanda and I strolled again down toward the parapet that overlooked imperial Rome. He linked his arms with ours and we walked aim-lessly, sapped with heat. He stopped and gestured toward a great carved door, closed now, that led into one of the museum rooms.

“There’s a bronze tablet in there, a very small one, that says, simply, BRIT. It’s the first time in the history of the world, as far as anyone knows, that the word for ‘England’

or ‘English’ was written down.”

I felt the tears I did not shed for Maria and Colin gather in my eyes and spill over my bottom lashes onto my cheeks.

I looked away from Sam and Yolanda.

136 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

He saw, though.

“I know,” he said. “It just takes the top of your head off for some reason, doesn’t it?”

“It doesn’t mine,” Yolanda Whitney said. “I can’t stand the bloody sanctimonious English.”

Ada told us that night at dinner, making a little joke of it, that Yolanda’s only marriage, failed scarcely a year after the ceremony, had been to an English anchorman of great charm and even greater fecklessness. He had abruptly decided to move back to England and live with his mum in her rambling old house in Padstow and write a book on terns. He had never understood why Yolanda had refused to go with him.

“How many people have asked you if you’ve left no tern unstoned?” Joe asked Yolanda when Ada told the story. He was obviously pleased with the pun. I thought it was funny too.

“You’re the four hundred and twenty-seventh,” Yolanda said.

Sam gave the wedding dinner for Colin and Maria at a small trattoria just off the Piazza della Rotonda. We sat at a long table set with pink linen and vases of great salmon daisies and lit with white candles in flickering hurricanes, under a canopy directly on one of the narrow streets that lead into the piazza, separated from the clamoring stream of foot traffic only by a line of small trees in pots. It was the first time, really, that Joe and I had been out in the midst of Rome, swallowed up in its jostling, hooting, honking throngs. It had been crowded up on the Campidoglio, but we had been above the maw of the city there, and later, in the hectic blur of the Piazza Venezia, Sam had miraculously hailed a taxi before

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there was time for the teeming clot of people and motor scooters and automobiles to close in around me. Now, though, I was awash in Rome, drowning in it. I sat with my back to the narrow street, but every prickling inch of my neck and shoulders and back was aware that, perhaps three feet behind me, a torrent of alien humanity poured by. It was all I could do to keep from constantly swiveling my head from side to side to see what was coming, to keep from bolting out of my chair and dashing inside the dark low-ceilinged confines of the restaurant as a wild animal might into a cave.

There were bottles of red and white wine already on the table, and I gulped mine down and refilled the glass before anyone else had even tasted theirs. Desolately, I wondered, feeling the alcohol’s comforting hot track down into my stomach, if I was going to have to get drunk again in order to be able to sit at this table and celebrate the union of Maria and Colin. On my left, Joe turned to look at me, smiling a little, but I read the warning clearly in his eyes: Don’t do that again, Cat, for God’s sake; enough is enough. He turned back to Ada Forrest. Over the gagging fear, hurt and embarrassment flamed. I knew everyone else had read his eyes too.

Across from me, between Maria and Yolanda, Sam studied me for a moment and then said, “Change places with me, Cat. You can’t see the Pantheon from where you are, and that’s the major reason anybody comes to Rome—or should be.”

He got up, shouting to his friend, the waiter Fredo, to bring more wine and some bread. I got out of my seat and moved around the table on legs that threatened to collapse under me. I had put on a white linen shirtwaist in deference to the sacramental nature of the occasion, forgetting that Maria and Colin were being married in a 138 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

civil ceremony, and it was wet now with the sharp sweat of fear and the thick night, and drying on my body in corruga-tions. The hair at my nape and forehead was soaked too. I steadied myself against the table and dropped into Sam’s chair and murmured, “Thank you.” Somehow I could not look into his copper hawk’s face.

He laid his hand on the top of my head for a moment and then went around and sat in my abandoned chair. With the wall at my back, solid stone nearly a foot’s thickness and perhaps centuries old, the fear shrank back into its kennel and I took a long shuddering breath and let it out and looked around me.

“Now,” I whispered. “Now.”

And as if in obedience, Rome turned slowly and ponderously, as upon some ancient fulcrum, and settled into place, and the enchantment began.

I will never forget the few hours we sat there in that
caffè
off the Piazza della Rotonda. As bad as the fear had been a few minutes before, and despite everything that came after, that meal has still about it the patina of a perfect thing. The bulk of the Pantheon against the clear green evening sky darkened as full night fell, and the floodlights came on and cast it up for us like the very seat of all the gods that it was.

From where I sat I could see only the portico, with its powerful, perfectly proportioned columns and the frieze with the shallow triangle above it; seen above the line of potted trees, it seemed to grow out of a small forest. It was, indeed, very beautiful, profoundly compelling. Was it because it was simply so very old, had stood so long, had seen so much?

No, there was more…. Real power poured out of it into the night, into the old square. The crowd there, families and drug dealers and prostitutes and pimps and the very young and the very old and the strong and the dying and HILL TOWNS / 139

lovers and pickpockets and tourists from Kansas and Khat-mandu and Romans from all neighborhoods, milled and shouted and quarreled and ate and drank and laughed, and each one was touched by the power of Hadrian’s great temple to all the gods of his world.

I took another deep breath and closed my eyes. When I opened them Sam was looking at me across the table.

“You OK?”

I smiled and made a circle with my thumb and forefinger: OK. He grinned. Behind me, Fredo, with a platter of anti-pasti, snorted and then began to laugh aloud, and the waiters following him with plates of pasta and more wine did too.

Soon we were all laughing. I did not know what was so funny, but it seemed a lovely thing to do, to sit on a side street in Rome under the benison of the glorious living Pantheon and laugh with joy.

We ate enormously and drank a great deal of wine. Sam and Joe made toasts, and we drank some more. And ate some more. It was the first time I had ever had the wonderful, huge, meaty
porcini
mushrooms, both delicate and as substantial as steaks, simply brushed with oil and roasted. I could have eaten them forever. All the waiters and the owner knew Sam, and everyone came to clap him on the back and to congratulate Maria and Colin, and the owner sent compli-mentary house grappa when, finally, the meal was over. We lingered on, sipping its sweet, thick fire. I did not want to leave the candlelit table and plunge back into the river of people outside the
caffè
; now, far after midnight, it had swollen to an ocean. No one else seemed to want to leave either.

I looked around the table. In the flickering light of the guttering candles, we all looked…Roman. Leaning forward across the table, his fierce face uplit by candle 140 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

light, Sam might have been a Barberini. Maria, entwined with Colin and kissing him, dewed with sweat and grappa, could be a Roman girl of any time, celebrating her green young body on a summer night. Ada, still and somehow fe-line and secret in her beautiful silk, and Yolanda Whitney, once again dissolved with wine, might have been creatures of Fellini.

“We knew her when she was just a little Irish girl from South Boston on a scholarship tour of Rome,” Sam had said.

“When she was Annie Laurie O’Reilly.” And below the television persona I could see, now, the round little Irish face and snub, sweet nose. But over that…oh, yes, definitely Fellini. Exalted by the night and the wine, I thought, Isn’t that fitting? How good of Rome, to take us all in and make us hers….

Only Joe and Colin did not look Roman. Even in the shadow of the Pantheon, even in the light of the candles and kissed with the shine of olive oil, they looked immutably American. Colin looked like an overdressed young expense account traveler who suddenly found himself entwined with a ripe Latin girl, and Joe looked, simply, bored.

How could he? I thought, and remembered it was the face Joe wore when he felt profoundly uncomfortable and out of place, and I had seldom seen it because I could count the times he had felt that way in my presence on the fingers of one hand.

“Should we be getting back?” I said. “We’re going to have to get a taxi, and it’s awfully late.”

That broke the spine of the evening. Colin and Maria, who were staying in a small hotel nearby, hugged everyone and drifted away, their bodies so closely fitted together they seemed glued, all of a piece. They called their goodbyes back to us and melted into

HILL TOWNS / 141

the body of the crowd that showed no sign of abating. Sam and Ada went into the kitchen to thank the owner, and Joe and I stood awkwardly on the pavement with Yolanda Whitney, waiting for them. Yolanda had said she would walk to the Hassler, where she was staying, but it was clear to me that she was in no shape to walk anywhere. She lurched and giggled and held on to Joe, and when Sam and Ada came back, Sam and Joe flanked her and took both arms, and we made our way over to the Via del Corso. With the same legerdemain he had displayed earlier in the Piazza Venezia, Sam held up his hand and a taxi cut out of the clamorous pack and veered over to the curb, and he put Joe and me and Yolanda into it.

“Drop her off and take it back to the Hilton,” he said. “If we can’t get another one we’ll just walk. Maybe we’ll stop in a neighborhood bar and finish getting drunk.”

He leered grandly, and Ada grimaced, but she took his arm and squeezed it. I thought, curiously, that in the hours I had been with them I had never before seen her touch him, or him her.

I looked back, as we shot out into the traffic, and saw that they stood close together, his head bent far down to hers, as she said something into his ear.

“Sweet nothings,” Yolanda said in a strange, strangled voice, and I saw she was looking back at them too.

When we got to the Hassler she was so boneless and disoriented that Joe had to walk her to her room. I waited in the back of the cab for what seemed an interminable length of time, smiling stiffly every time the driver caught my eye in his mirror, irrationally afraid he would grow tired of waiting and simply dump me on the pavement and roar away. Well, maybe we could get a room at the Hassler for the night. But he would proba

142 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

bly stay, after all. The meter was running; the fare would be astronomical.

It was almost half an hour later that Joe finally came out of the front door, and I was so relieved to see him that it was not until he got into the cab and slammed the door that I noticed he was literally smeared with lipstick, as if he had been drinking blood, and his fair hair hung in his eyes. There was lipstick on the collar of his silk shirt, too.

“Good Lord, Joe,” I said, and stopped.

“Don’t ask,” he said, making a face of deep disgust. “I’ll tell you later, but just don’t ask right now. I thought that woman was going to rape me in the hall outside her room.

Christ, how absolutely and appallingly
sloppy
.”

He was silent, except for curt directions to the driver, who did not seem ever to have heard of Monte Mario or the Cavalieri Hilton Hotel, but in the dark I could sense that some interior motor in him had started up.

For the first time in my entire life I said to Joe, when he turned to me in bed that night, “Sweetie, I have got the mother of all headaches.”

And I did.

W
E MET SAM THE NEXT MORNING IN THE PIAZZA Navona, to start the Sam Forrest Special and Particular Walking Tour of Rome. It was not yet eight, and the great oval square was pearled with soft light. The
caffés
and market stalls were just opening, and only a few people were about: children playing some sort of game with a ball and a stick around the looming Bernini fountain in the center, old men drinking cappuccino at outdoor tables, a handful of people in business clothes coming out of the old houses around the piazza, two or three handsomely dressed women walking dogs. It was quiet except for the liquid purl of the fountain. No automobile or bus traffic marred the cobbled piazza, though the low roar of Rome’s morning rush hour was escalating all around us.