Hill Towns (44 page)

“Well, you probably did me out of a drink, so why don’t you buy me one on the terrace?” I said. “Joe’ll be down in a little. I feel like bourbon, I think.”

“You can take the girl out of the South, but you can’t—blah, blah, blah,” Sam said. “Find us a seat. I’ll ask the manager to see if he can scare us up a waiter.”

“OK. Oh…wait. I want to ask him something myself,” I said, and went with him up to the little window.

The green-eyed man nodded to us. His jaw was even bluer now, in the twilight.

“Signora?”

“I wanted to ask you about the falcon,” I said. “I took the wrong path this afternoon and blundered into his cage. Is he yours? Do you ever let him out? He’s a beautiful thing.”

“He is a she,” the man said, and smiled. It changed his face into something else entirely, an approachable face. “She is a peregrine, a fairly young one. She is a 368 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

hunting falcon. I trained her myself. She belongs to the owner, but he is very old now and lives in Florence and does not often come here. So I have taken her over. Her name is Guinevere. She is the third Guinevere since I have been here; there have always been falcons at the Falconi: hence our name, you see. This was a hunting lodge in the last century, and they hunted the peregrines here. She is a good hunter, but she has not got a very good temper.”

He held up his arm so that the cuff of his jacket fell away, and I saw a line of small, round white scars there, like a flight of distant birds.

“She
pecked
you?” I said incredulously. I thought of that cruel beak.

“No, these are from her feet. We do not call the feet of the raptors claws. With her feet she impales and grasps her prey; the foot is very strong. Only then does she eat them. It is my fault. I flew her once without my arm guard. She had not tried to impale me before. She is very smart. She knew I was without the guard.”

“When do you hunt her?” Sam said. His blue eyes were intent, and there was a half-smile on his mouth. I knew he was taken with the idea of the falcon. I thought, not for the first time, that he had a falcon’s face himself.

“Oh, I do not hunt her when there are people about,” the manager said. “She is unstable, and I cannot be responsible.

And then she frightens people. She has a very, what do you say—eerie call. It sounds quite inhuman out over the valley.

High and thin and ghostly:
We-chew! We-chew! We-chew
!

Not like a bird at all. I hunt her very early in the mornings, before there is anyone about.”

“What does she take?” Sam said.

HILL TOWNS / 369

“Oh, rodents, big insects. Other birds. A rabbit, sometimes.”

I thought of it, the bird, very high up, a shadow flying silently on the old red hills, and then the cry, and the swoop, and the thin squeal of the victim, impaled. I shivered.

“It sounds very medieval,” I said. “I can just see her, out there over that old valley and that old town. It must be as if time had stopped in the Middle Ages.”

“Just so,” the manager said. “They have hunted falcons in Siena since there was a city. I feel very much its oldness when I hunt her.”

“What do you feed her?” I asked.

“Nothing. She must stay lean for the hunt, a little hungry.”

I felt again the swell of pity I had felt when I first found the beautiful captive bird.

“Does she ever try to get away…just not come back?” I said.

“Oh, no. She does not know about flying free. She has never flown unless it was to return to the arm. For her it is a part of flight, like the patterns.”

“Patterns?”

“They make patterns out over the hills and gullies. It seems to be a natural thing for a falcon; in the wild they will do it.

They divide up their range in patterns and fly them, looking down. I think it makes things clearer and simpler for them.”

“By God, I’d like to see that,” Sam said.

“I wish I could invite you to join us one morning, but I dare not,” the manager said. “I cannot tell what she would do. I cannot take the responsibility.”

“I quite understand,” Sam said. We walked away, he looking off into the distance where the last sun glinted 370 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

off the towers of Siena. I knew he was with the falcon in his head, up there in the thin blue air, riding the thermals in her ancient patterns. It made me want to hug him suddenly, as I would a child. I wanted to give him the gift of the falcon’s flight.

We went out onto the terrace beyond the lounge, nodding to the Alabama Dekes, who lifted their glasses to us as we passed. They began to sing once more after we had gone.

Joe and Colin and Maria were there, at a big table at one end. The other tables were vacant.

“Did you see the tableful of Full Clevelands?” Joe said, grinning, as we slid into our seats. He was drinking bourbon.

Colin and Maria sat side by side, bright social smiles painted on their faces. So they had not patched up their quarrel yet.

They sipped wine and did not look at each other.

“Sure did. They were just fixing to drag Cat off to their tent when I stepped in and saved her,” Sam said. “What is it with the bourbon? Cat said she wanted it, too; y’all on some kind of psychic wave length?”

“They say it happens to people who’ve been married a long time,” Maria said brightly, and then flushed. I could not imagine why and felt only a sort of fatigue. I did not want to spend any more time trying to decipher nuances and minister to frazzled brides.

“They put a move on you, Cat?” Joe said with amusement.

“Good ol’ home boys, they are. Introduced themselves, and tried to give me the grip, and invited me to join them later in what I gather will be a kind of Siennese nooky search.

After dinner, of course. Kept asking me where a guy was supposed to get any in a town that didn’t have any places to park. They’re going across Italy in an RV, I believe. Their leader told me it had leopard

HILL TOWNS / 371

print upholstery and a big mattress in back. See what you missed?”

“Be still, my heart,” I said.

“Christ,” Colin said virtuously. “The proverbial ugly Americans. You all can castrate me if I turn out like that in twenty years.”

Maria looked at him levelly and Joe and Sam laughed. He looked so young and scrubbed and handsome in his blazer and lightweight gray flannels, one leg cut to accommodate his cast. So totally American. It took only a small leap of imagination to clothe him in years and pounds and disappointments. He would look, I thought, not unlike the Alabama Dekes, if he had bad luck.

The waiter brought a bottle of bourbon and ice, and Sam poured drinks for himself and Joe and me. We clinked glasses and tipped our tumblers to Colin and Maria’s stemmed ones, and Sam said, “To beginnings and endings.”

“What’s beginning?” I said. “What’s ending?”

“I don’t know about the beginnings,” he said. “I kind of thought you did. After driving over here by yourself, I mean.

A whole new Cat, maybe. But the ending is the ending of the painting. I decided this afternoon it was finished. No more slaving over a hot easel, Cat. I thought I might unveil it for you all before we went to dinner.”

“Sam!” I exclaimed. “Is it really? I thought you said—”

“Yeah, but I looked at it once more and realized it really was done. I’ll just spoil it if I try to push it further. You game, or would you rather not?”

I was silent. Suddenly I did not want to see the painting.

I did not want the days of sitting for him to be over. I was not ready to give them up. To give him up.

372 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“Let’s see it, by all means,” Joe said. Maria and Colin chimed in. Sam rose and went inside to get the painting. We all sat still, looking at one another.

“Do you realize this is a historic moment?” Maria said.

“The unveiling of a new Sam Forrest painting, the centerpiece of the world’s next great one-man show? And to think that it’s you, Cat; imagine showing it to your children and grandchildren.”

“Shit, Maria,” Colin said in a low voice, and I saw her remember about Lacey and flinch. I reached over and patted her knee.

“She’ll know,” I said. “She’ll know as well as anyone else.

And I fully expect to have grandchildren, all of whom will be mortally embarrassed that their grandmother is grinning off the wall in some museum or collection.”

“How does it feel?” she said. “It must be a strange feeling, to know that people all over the world will be looking at you forever.”

“I don’t guess I’ve really thought about that,” I said slowly.

“It doesn’t feel any way at all; the famous part of it isn’t real to me. I think it’s Sam who’ll be the talk of the international arty set, not me. Nobody knows the name of people in portraits; they know them by the artist.”

“Yeah,” Colin said. “Like the Mona Lisa.”

Joe said nothing and poured another drink.

“Is this bothering you?” I said.

“No. I’m honored that he chose you. It feels funny, thought. I just thought about all the people who’ll see it and maybe wonder who you are, or were, and if you had a husband or a boyfriend. I’m going to be Mr. Catherine Gaillard.”

“Don’t be an ass,” I said. “He’s not going to title it ‘Portrait of Catherine Gaillard.’ Artists never do.”

HILL TOWNS / 373

“What would he call it, then?”

“I don’t know. ‘Woman in White Dress,’ maybe, or ‘Bored Woman Beside Window.’ Ask him.”

“I will,” Joe said.

He drank off his bourbon and poured another, and I held my glass out. My head was beginning to buzz pleasantly.

There was a knot of anxiety in the pit of my stomach, though.

I wished I had asked Sam not to bring the portrait down. I should have seen it for the first time alone with him.

I drank off the bourbon.

Sam came back with an oblong wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. Ada was not with him.

“Where’s Ada?” Joe said.

“Ada has taken one of her sleeping pills and gone to bed,”

Sam said. “She asked me to give you all her regrets. She’ll be out like a light until morning. She was already snoring when I went back up.”

“What’s the matter?” Joe said, and there was concern in his voice. I did not like hearing it. “She isn’t sick, is she?”

I knew without knowing how that he was thinking of his cold, and I dropped my eyes to the glass in my hand. The anger nipped at me, far down.

“Nah, she does this occasionally, after she’s been going on all burners for a while,” Sam said. “It’s like getting a facial or something, I think. Part of her personal care routine. Her way of dieting. She’ll be raring to go in the morning.”

“We’ll miss her tonight,” I said, and Sam grinned at me.

I knew he knew I did not mean it. I wondered what else he knew about Ada on this trip, and if he cared. He gave no indication of either.

“Well, then, here we go,” he said, and fumbled with the string around the painting.

374 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“Ta-
da
!” Maria sang out.

Suddenly I wanted to get up and run.

Sam propped the painting up on the chair that Ada would have taken and folded his arms and looked at us.

“Behold Cat,” he said.

There was a silence, and then two gasps. Then silence again. I lifted my hand to my mouth and found that my lips were parted; only then did I realize that one of the gasps had been mine. I still do not know whose was the other. Maria’s, probably.

It was me, no doubt about that. In meticulous brush-strokes overlaid by bold slashes of impasto, my own face, drowned in a diffused white light that you knew somehow was the hot light of afternoon. My own face, head thrown back, eyes shut, mouth open, neck corded with some force that suffused it with pink; he had caught the way I blush from my breasts up to perfection. Just my head and shoulders…naked shoulders, sheened as if with sweat, with only a suggestion of wrinkled white linen around them. Just my head, with the hair at my nape and temples dewed like the rest of my flesh, sheened with light and sweat.

Just my head and face, in such a sensual and explicit ecstasy that even as I recognized its genesis, Bernini’s Saint Teresa, in the church in Rome, I felt the force of it in my groin, in the pit of my stomach. I looked like the Bernini, there was no doubt of that; his eye had been true.

It also looked like me and no one else, me at the precise moment of climax, me in the act of love. Me, as no one in the world had ever before seen me, except Joe Gaillard.

I could not get my breath. I could not move my eyes from it.

HILL TOWNS / 375

“That’s the dress you’re wearing tonight, isn’t it?” Maria said presently, in a high, silly voice.

Colin cleared his throat. “It’s a fine piece of work, Sam,”

he said judiciously. “Very powerful. Not at all derivative. It transcends style and school. Not really Cat, of course, but very evocative….” His voice trailed off. He looked down at his hands.

I raised my eyes to Sam’s face. He was smiling faintly and looking at me inquiringly. I did not think he saw anything at all amiss with the painting. He was merely waiting to see what I thought.

I looked over at Joe. His face was still and very pale. He did not move his eyes from the painting.

“It’s modeled on a Bernini statue that we saw in Rome the afternoon you didn’t come with us,” I said chattily to Joe.

“The day you and Colin had the footrace, remember? I wish you’d seen it; it’s a remarkable likeness. Sam thought so at the time. Ada did too; I remember that she agreed…. It’s called
Saint Teresa in Ecstasy
.”

I stopped. Finally he moved his eyes to me. They were flat and dark.

“Maybe he can call this one ‘Cat in Heat,’” Joe said, and got up and walked away toward the lounge.

I got up and ran after him, my legs rubbery and trembling.

I stopped him with my hand on his arm. He turned and looked at me. I will never forget that look. There seemed nothing in it but a vast, cold distaste. He pulled his arm away, but he stood without moving.

“It’s a thing he does, Joe,” I said. “You know he painted Verna Cardigan as Brünhilde. I know when he first saw me in Rome, he thought of the Saint Teresa…. Please don’t do this. Please don’t spoil things. It’s…you
know
there wasn’t anything—”