The pilgrims went to Vatican City the next morning and as they approached St. Peter’s across the vast brick plaza ringed by colonnades, several thousand tourists were massed on the steps, waiting to enter and view the wonders within, all of them snapping pictures of each other snapping pictures of St. Peter’s. At the periphery of the vast mob, tour groups stumbled along like convicts, each of them following a dapper gentleman holding up a metal shepherd’s crook with a totem tied to it—a yellow flower, a stuffed lion, a plastic cardinal—as a beacon in the ocean of humanity. A group of Japanese went by like a herd of penguins, headphones clamped to their heads, listening via radio to their group leader, a tall Japanese lady in a kimono, jabbering away into a silver microphone, telling them what they were seeing. Margie could only imagine what they saw here—an enormous pagan temple where guilty Westerners (like her) came to tremble in the presence of the Three-Headed Divinity, one Head of which had been hung up on a pole and left to die and then, magically, had risen in the air on golden wings, accompanied by other avian creatures.
Carl clutched at her arm as they neared what seemed to be the end of the line to get into the basilica—which was still far in the distance—but it wasn’t exactly a line: other groups leapfrogged past and still other groups pushed ahead of them. A group of elderly dark-skinned people in strange colorful cloaks stood by, dazed, tired, swaying. Were they beggars? Pigeons scurried around them as if waiting for them to collapse. The bells of St. Peter’s began to clang and some car alarms started whooping, triggered by the bells. An ambulance raced by, screaming, and four buses passed, their engines grinding.
“I can’t do this,” Carl whispered to her and turned away. Claustrophobia had hit him in a couple of churches and he felt waves of unbearable anxiety looking at St. Peter’s. He walked away and she walked with him. “You can go in if you like. I’ll wait out here… .” He waved toward the street.
“Don’t be silly. We’re here together.”
She was glad not to go in. She felt guilty about Paolo but even guiltier about buying an apartment without asking Carl, though it was her money, given to her by Norbert. But still—her motive was to have a place to go to escape from him. She was tingling with guilt. She had been brought up to feel that something horrible would happen to her if she set foot in a holy place when she was in a state of sin. Which she was.
Carl waved her away. Told her to go into St. Peter’s—silly to come halfway around the world and not see it—but she took his arm and led him out of the plaza. “We’ll come back,” she said. “You’ll see. We’ll come back when it’s less crowded. I think maybe we should buy an apartment here.”
“Why in the world would we ever do that?”
“We can’t afford a getaway. We may not be able to afford to stay at home.”
The words “romantic getaway” sounded a little silly, hanging in the air. But wasn’t it worth it? What price do you put on love? A half million dollars for a sweet little two-bedroom apartment with white walls and wooden shutters, looking out on a narrow street in the heart of Rome, in an 1845 building with excellent water pressure—an apartment listed for $600,000 that Maria had obtained through her friends for an enormous discount. She wanted to take him there right now. “I have a surprise for you,” she’d say, and they’d take a taxi to Via Maggio and up the stairs and there they’d be—“Our love nest, Carl!” she’d say—and maybe they’d do it right then and there. Drop their clothes on the floor and hop into bed and take the long climb up the stairway to heaven and boom and then lie curved against each other.
A man in a bearskin hat was selling tickets to a guided tour aboard a van that drove through the Vatican Gardens and Carl thought he could tolerate that fairly well so off they went on a narrow brick-paved alley along an ancient stone wall and around the corner of a palatial mansion where the van stopped. The driver got up out of his seat and motioned to his belly and groaned—international sign language for nausea—and off he went and did not come back. Fifteen minutes, by Carl’s watch. The six other passengers seemed content to bide their time but Carl was feeling claustrophobic and had to evacuate so she went with him. They stood beside the bus for a few minutes and then he suggested they walk around and have a look. They stepped over a low brick wall and into a grove of bamboo and found a path that led them through a dense thicket that opened onto a bare patch of dirt where an old man was turning over the soil with a shovel. He wore a white shirt and white pants and he wore a white beanie.
“Good morning,” said Carl. The old man, startled, turned and said, “Good morning.”
“Looks like you’re going to put in some vegetables.”
The old man looked down and said, “It is our hope to put in a few rows of corn. The sweet kind that one boils and then eats with salt and butter. We call it mais di grande dolcezza.”
“Sweet corn?”
The old man nodded. “We have received gifts of two packs of seeds from the good people of Dubuque, Iowa.”
Carl shook his head. “Not to tell you what to do, but Iowa corn is for hogs, it’s not for people. You’d bust your incisors on that stuff. You want the Anoka Super Sweet from Minnesota. That’s the one worth the eating.”
“Minnesota—,” said the old man. “It gets cold there, doesn’t it?”
“You need cold weather for corn. Everything needs to have a dormant period to rest up. Your soil in the south is all exhausted. Sweet corn, potatoes, apples, onions—it’s all better in the north.”
“Where would I get this Anoka Super Sweet?”
“I’ll send you some soon as we get home.”
So the old man wrote an address down on a scrap of brown paper. And just then four men in blue suits strolled up and took hold of Carl and Margie—gently, smiling, nice as could be—and led them back up the path to the van.
Father Wilmer came out of St. Peter’s early. He had seen a man on a high ladder replacing a lightbulb and had to leave. “Like Earl Magendanz that time,” said Carl. “Yes, like Earl.” And Father told them the story.
“Earl loved ladders even though he was seventy-five years old—”
“I know, I know,” said Carl. “I was there.”
“So anyway, he went up to change the little spotlight over the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was forty feet in the air and required him to stand on the very top of the ladder on his tiptoes, and we begged him not to, on account of his recent fainting spells, but up the ladder he goes with me behind him—so if he fell, both of us would break our necks, I guess—and he got to the top and was swaying slightly as he reached way up to unscrew the old bulb. And that was when the bird flew in and around the sanctuary and flapped around Earl who waved at him with a damp rag and the ladder swayed and the men steadying it down below hung on for dear life—”
“I was one of those men,” said Carl.
“Anyway, I said, ‘You okay?’ and Earl says, ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ And then he noticed the stranger in the big black overcoat walk in and kneel down in front of the Blessed Virgin Mary and burst into tears and cry out that he had fallen as low as a man could fall, meanwhile the bird is flying figure eights around Earl who is looking down at the man and up at the socket and I have hold of his legs and I am perspiring so hard the sweat is running down in my eyes and I have to let go of him and wipe my eyes and the ladder is swaying—”
“Actually it was pretty steady,” said Carl.
“And now Earl is starting to sing,’ Pack up all my care and woe, here I go, singing low, bye bye blackbird,’ and two guys climb up past me and grab Earl—”
“That was me and Roger,” said Carl.
“And Earl is saying, ‘I’m okay, get your hands off me’ and in the struggle he falls thirty feet from the ladder—”
“Ten feet,” said Carl, “and I had hold of his wrist and that broke the fall. Also broke the wrist.”
“And he lands on the big black overcoat guy, knocking him out cold—and when they went to loosen his clothing, they found dozens of billfolds in the lining of his coat. The sheriff came and the thief turned out to be a former child actor who played Timmy on Friendly Neighbors on WLT and he’d gone through the Chatterbox at noon and picked pockets, including yours.”
“That is true,” said Carl.
“Anyway, in St. Peter’s, I was looking around at the beautiful art and marble and I walked into the ladder. I heard someone yell and looked up and he was almost directly above me, and I thought he was going to jump on my back, and I hightailed it out of there.”
Daryl took pictures of St. Peter’s and when the pilgrims reunited in a café that afternoon, Carl looked at them on the camera—the long nave, the great marble canopy over the altar, the celestial light filtering down from the dome, the crowds of carved angels, apostles, bishops, saints. “Nice,” he said, and looked over at Margie. “What are you reading?”
“Just a letter about Rome,” she said.
Dear Lille Bror,
The Germans are gone up the Tiber Valley so there is nothing to do in Rome but catch a nap and read Stars and Stripes and admire the girls who are, of course, all beautiful in their clean white dresses. But I have Miss Gennaro, so I don’t look at them too hard. She is beautiful too and quiet, brown eyes, honest, even-tempered, nothing silly or flirtatious about her and now that we are lovers I am a man on a mountaintop and everything is clear to me and I know more than generals or reporters or the Pope himself and am about to make great pronunciamentos. I suppose this will not last long.
I have lost my Jeep and suppose I should tell the Brigadier about it before he reports me but I think there is time. He has attached himself to OSS now and may not even notice I’m gone. The owner of the café is bringing me eggs and bread and a piece of meat for breakfast and I reach into my pocket for money and he waves it away. “Grazia, grazia, grazia.” My feeling exactly. The eggs are delicious. I will eat breakfast and then go back to my lady and collect her and go underground. Don’t worry about me, I am in love and nothing bad can happen to a man in love, he is impermeable. I will stay out of trouble and trouble will stay out of me.
Oh my God I am so happy. And the coffee is good too and the sun is shining. I will dump this khaki which has earned me this good breakfast and I will become a Person Unknown and make my way through life accepting whatever compensations are offered and also whatever hard knocks. Think of me, little brother, as a great lover striding through a great city, and if any of the old gang asks about me, tell them I am thankful for their thoughts and think of home with due reverence, especially the beautiful snow and the glittering trees after an ice storm, which I have described to my serene and lovely Miss Gennaro. The love for life, my brother! Let it never be extinguished. And if they try to send you to the Front to wade through the mud and suffer for their blunders, the heroic thing is to refuse. This war will be forgotten but love will endure and poetry and stories and the sound I hear right now which is a boy playing with hesitation a love song on a piano. How beautiful! To hear his cautious notes, like a man walking out onto a newly frozen lake, testing his footing, and now I hear trucks approaching, and I must say goodbye. I’ll give the letter to the breakfast man to mail, and wish you well, and as they say here, “Pazienza!” Patience. And tolerance and skepticism and frankness! I am O.K. Whatever happens, I will not be gone for long. I have extra cigarettes and soap and chocolates and whiskey.
We may hide out in the Apennines and live in the forest for a while in a little stone cabin, and surface when the coast is clear. Love is subversive, always. I hear a band approaching, the appalling strains of Sousa, the thump of the drums. I am eating my eggs with one hand, writing with the other. Hurry, hurry.
Good-bye. Good luck. Ciao. Buon fortuna. Whatever happens, know that I was never so happy as I am this very instant.
Love from your brother,
Gussie