Hill Towns (43 page)

“Ada, you wouldn’t believe how uninteresting it all was,”

I said. “I promise, there’s just not anything to tell. Maybe, later, when we run completely out of things to HILL TOWNS / 359

talk about and are all glaring at each other. Right now I’d much rather hear what you all did last night and this morning. Did you eat dinner somewhere wonderful? Have you been into Siena yet? Where are Colin and Maria?”

“In reverse order,” Sam said, still looking at me intently,

“Colin and Maria are in their room, finishing up last night’s fight. Or maybe starting on a fresh one. Or, if we’re extremely blessed, screwing and making it all up. You should know soon; they’re right next to you. If there’s silence, you can assume there has not been a cessation of hostilities. If, on the other hand, you hear a screech like the beginning of a Sioux scalping party—”

“Sam,” Ada said mildly. He grinned.

“OK. Yes, we did eat somewhere nice last night, but not as nice as we’re going to tonight. We’ve saved the best for you. It’ll be your victory dinner. Maybe another kind of celebration, too. And yes, Ada and Joe and Maria went into Siena this morning, to shop. I worked on the portrait’s background. Colin, I believe, meditated in his room.”

“What did you buy?” I said to Joe. “Is Siena wonderful? I can’t wait to see it.”

“It really is,” he said. “Very dark and severe, very…what?

Medieval. They never did get around to acknowledging the Renaissance. I saved most of the good stuff for you. Ada and Maria used me shamelessly as a beast of burden, staggering up all those steep old streets under loads of chattel—”

“Most of which was yours,” Ada said. “Cat, you simply will not believe what this man of yours bought.”

“What?” I looked from her to Joe. She began to laugh.

“Well, aside from a complete set of tableware—”

360 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“Dishes?” I said, looking at Joe. Would he really have bought dishes without me present?

“If you don’t like them, I’ll take them back,” he said. “But they’re really beautiful. Kind of blue and yellow and white, very rough, very…natural. Ada says it’s one of the oldest Siennese patterns. I thought they’d look great in the kitchen.”

“I can’t wait to see them,” I said, smiling tentatively. My kitchen at home on the Mountain is green and cream and terra-cotta.

“But wait, that’s not all.” Ada giggled. “He bought a holy-water font!”

“A what?”

“A little white ceramic wall font, for a private home, you know. Yellow and blue glaze with delicate scroll-work. It’s really very pretty. But a holy-water font! Joe! He seems so…”

“…very Anglican,” I said, beginning to laugh too. “So very like Mr. Chips. I know. I can just see it, the Rector of Justin, with his own holy-water font. We’ll have to hide it in a little niche when people come, like a priest’s hole.”

Joe looked at us, Ada and me, sitting in the sunlight, laughing, and began to laugh himself. In a moment we were all near hysterics. We laughed a long time.

“I thought it was, you know, to hold keys and stuff,” he said, and we were off again, helplessly. This time we did not stop until the young waiter, smiling at our foolishness, brought the champagne.

We drank a lot of it that afternoon, three bottles, and had more wine with our lunch. We laughed some more, and talked of very little that mattered, and lingered there beside the pool until the light began to slant low through the trees and the little breeze stiffened into HILL TOWNS / 361

a small cool wind. Finally Ada stretched and made as if to get up.

“I believe I’ll go up,” she said. “I’m really pretty tired. You three stay.”

I looked at her. I had never heard Ada admit tiredness.

But her voice was fragile, and she did indeed look tired, somehow slackened, emptied out. I wondered if she was coming down with Joe’s cold, just briefly, and then put the thought away.

“Please go on,” I said. “We’ve all but worn you to a shred this trip. Take a long nap.”

Sam glanced up at her. There was the look again, long, unreadable.

“Do,” he said. “You’ve earned it.”

“You coming?”

“In a minute. I won’t disturb you, though,” he said. “I’m going to do a little more on the portrait. Let’s meet in the bar about six-thirty. Maybe I’ll have a surprise for everybody.”

“What?” I said.

“Well, now,” he said, looking at me with his big copper head cocked. The hat rode low on his nose once more. “It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you, would it?”

We all got up, then, and went back up the path to the villa, and up the curving staircase to our rooms. Joe’s and mine was on one end of the top floor and looked straight out across the valley to Siena on its hill below us. In the late sun it seemed to float on radiant air, a mirage, a vision.

“This is beautiful,” I said. “I think this is my favorite place so far.”

The room was large, carved out of heavy white plaster like a peasant barn, plain, but washed with air and light. There were no curtains, only shutters, and the rich 362 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

smells of the garden floated in to us. The bathroom, though, was luxurious, all warm bronze marble and chrome, with piles of thick white towels and a whirlpool. Its window, too, looked out over the valley and the town beyond. Pots of geraniums sat about, and cakes of rosy, transparent glycerine bath soaps. All of a sudden I wanted a long hot bath more than anything I could think of.

When I came out of the bathroom, wrapped in one of the great towels, Joe was lying on his back on one side of the bed, looking at me. His face was serious.

“Are you sure you’re OK?” he said. “It’s just what I most wanted not to happen, you to be left alone to get yourself over here. She’s a damned menace, Yolanda is. I’m angry as hell at her. I know there’s more to it than you’re saying—”

“I’m perfectly all right,” I said. “It was good for me. Can’t you tell?”

“I guess I can’t. I’m not sure you can, either. Christ, Cat, you’ve only been off by yourself once since we got married—I mean when Corinne wasn’t monitoring you—in Venice, and look what happened. It nearly destroyed you.”

I sat down on the other side of the bed and looked across at him. “It wasn’t Venice or being alone that nearly destroyed me,” I said carefully. It seemed very important that he understand what I was saying. “It was the
fear
of those things that did the damage. Joe. The
fear
of being alone, the
fear
of being lost, the
fear
of those things…there was nothing dangerous but my own fear. There never has been. And Joe…that’s gone. The fear’s gone.”

He looked at me for a long time. He did not speak. His eyes did, though.

HILL TOWNS / 363

How can we live without your fear? they said.

However we must, I said back to him with mine. Because I will not live with it again.

Presently, and still without speaking, he reached over and squeezed my hand and turned over and went to sleep. I lay for a long time looking at his back, at the line of his ribs under the brown skin, at the double cowlick at the crown of his head.

I wish you had not kissed her, I thought. Maybe I have no right to wish that, but I do. Or at least, I wish I had not seen it. I don’t know how much it changes things.

In a little while I, too, fell into a light sleep, but it did not last long, and it did not seem to relax me. When I awoke, all at once and fully alert, I was still humming all over with the odd, fine vibration that had ridden with me from Florence. It was not anger, though that was still there, far down below, the cold anger at Yolanda. And it was not all the exultation of the vanquishing of the fear. It felt like something else entirely, a breath-held thing, a kind of waiting.

It felt like champagne in my veins.

I tried to lie still but could not, and I did not want to wake Joe yet. I got up and dressed quietly, pulling out the white linen that Sam had favored when I sat for him. I had had it laundered and ironed in Florence, and some unknown hands had ironed it to crisp, silky perfection. It felt wonderful against my body. I slipped into sandals and tiptoed to the door, closed it softly behind me, and went downstairs.

I turned into the lounge, toward the bar, but I did not see any of us there. While we napped it had been colonized by a group of American men, and they were sitting and standing around the piano, singing loudly while one 364 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

of them pounded on it. There could be no doubt at all that they were American. They were around Joe’s and Sam’s age, I thought, perhaps just a bit younger, and most of them wore what Joe and his peers on the Mountain call a “full Cleveland”: white belts and white buck oxfords, plaid pants, polo shirts in pastel colors. It was not a compliment when Joe said it.

There were seven or eight of them, and they were all sunburnt across their cheeks and noses. They were Southerners; their accents were thick and slow, slightly slurred now by what I assumed to be quite a lot of bourbon. Two empty amber bottles and one half-full one stood on the round table they had staked out, and most held half-full glasses in their hands. They were just bawling out the last lines of “Go Alabama, Crimson Tide,” when I came down, and they finished it as I stood in the doorway, yelling in unison, “
Roll,
Tide
!” This was followed by a series of yipping yelps and a long, eerie cry I thought might be the Alabama version of a Rebel yell. We had one on the Mountain, but it was rarely used except at football games and fraternity parties, and in any case it did not sound like this. One or two of them beat on the piano with the flat of their hands. The piano player struck up “Dixie,” and they joined in. I turned to go, but one of them saw me.

“Whooo
eeee
!” he shouted. “Wait up, here! Who is this muffin come puttin’ her head in our door?”

The song broke off and they all turned to grin at me. One of them began “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi,” and they all took it up, advancing toward me as they sang. I took a step to flee, but one of them caught me by the upper arm, and in an instant they had surrounded me.

I stood there, face flaming, half laughing, half angry, as they serenaded me. I could smell the gusts of bour HILL TOWNS / 365

bon. I was not afraid, but I felt crowded and cornered and embarrassed. They were so grossly out of context here that they were almost obscene. But they were in high good humor, and I knew they meant me no harm. I let them finish the song and then said, smiling, “I’m very flattered, but I have to go now. My husband is waiting for me.”

They set up another chorus of yips at my accent.

“Could tell by lookin’ at her she was a Dixie belle, couldn’t y’all?” bawled the one holding me by the arm. “What’s yo’

name, sweetheart? Where y’all from?”

The accent was exaggerated theatrically. I had to laugh.

They were so like the fraternity boys at Trinity on house-party weekends, rowdy and ridiculous, even ill-mannered, but essentially sweet, somehow very young, even with their paunches and thinning hair and the fine lines around their eyes.

“I’m Cat Gaillard from Montview, Tennessee, and I really do have to go now,” I said. “Please go on with your singing.”

There were more howls of glee, more slappings of the piano. One of them said, “We are the 1964 pledge class of Delta Kappa Epsilon, University of Alabama, at your service, Miz Cat Gaillard, honey. Part of it, anyhow. We had a suite at the Deke house together for four of the best years of our lives. Our esteemed president here, Mr. Reggie Haynes, Es-quire, of Talladega and now Birmingham, won him a trip to Italy sellin’ Ford automobiles and asked us all to join him for a little
re
union, just us Dekes, no ladies allowed. I ’spec we’d make an exception for you, though!”

“
Deke! Deke! Deke
!” they bayed. I tried to tug my arm away, but my captor did not let go. Then he did, looking over my shoulder.

366 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Sam Forrest stood behind me, very close, looking mildly at them. He wore the blue blazer and wrinkled seersucker slacks and a white T-shirt stained with the faded stigmata of red wine, sandals and no socks, and the filthy plantation hat.

It shaded his eyes, but I caught a glint of flame blue from the shadows, and the gold earring flashed in the gloom. The ponytail exploded from under the hat like a burst of Brillo.

I felt a spurt of laughter start up in my chest. He must have looked like something escaped from an itinerant Italian circus, towering there in the dim lounge.

He reached out and gently unhooked my arm from the grasp of the Full Cleveland Deke, who let it go in silence.

“Y’all will perhaps excuse the lady,” he said in a slow, soft drawl that sounded not at all like his normal voice. It was flat and polite in the extreme, and somehow had murder in it.

“Sure,” muttered my captor, stepping back a little. “No offense. We just heard the accent and it reminded us of home.

Pretty lady, one of us in a strange country, you know. No offense.”

“None taken.” I smiled at him, wanting suddenly to ease his embarrassment, assuage his humiliation before his group.

They were all quiet.

“Sam, this is the 1964 Deke pledge class from ’Bama. You might know some of them.”

“You go to ’Bama too?” one of them said tentatively. “You in a lodge there?”

“I was way before your time,” Sam said affably. “Well. You guys go on with your party. My wife and I are due somewhere.”

He turned me with his hand on my shoulder and walked me out into the lobby. Behind me I heard sub HILL TOWNS / 367

dued mutterings, and then, in a moment, the piano started up again, and they began to sing. I heard the clink of glass on glass and knew the remaining bourbon was making the rounds.

“You really are a
stronzo
,” I said, half laughing, half scowling up at him. “‘My wife and I are due somewhere,’

indeed. What did you think they were going to do, sing me to death? That was no match.”

“I’m not real fond of my countrymen in groups,” he said cheerfully. “They get loud and grabby and so goddamned down home it makes me think I’m back in the Phi Delt party room, throwing up after a football game on some little gal’s new suede shoes. I went to considerable trouble to get away from that. Now they’re importing it.”