14.

IT WASN’T UNTIL MILO AND I were walking across the Valetto footbridge in the dark that the demands of the present came rushing back. My grandmother’s hundredth-birthday party was in ten days, there were festering disputes with the caterers and a guest list of unknown size, and Donata had fallen into a blue funk. Milo itemised these obstacles in his usual meandering, offhanded way as we walked through the Etruscan archway and across the piazza in front of the church. A few feral cats were chasing each other in one of the narrow alleyways.

‘Which house did the Ruffo family live in?’ I asked.

He stopped halfway across the square to get his bearings. After a moment, he pointed to a wrought-iron lamp-post and the tall, narrow house behind it. ‘That one,’ he said. ‘They lived there and Ruffo walked over the bridge to the farmacia every morning. When they forced him out after the war, he and his wife and daughter left for Rome, but they let their teenage son stay behind with an uncle and he helped run the shop and they lived above it. Even after the son grew up to become a pharmacist, they continued to use the house for storage. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still full of bandages and expired cough syrups.’

The house had been empty for decades but I’d never gone inside it as a boy, since it was one of the few deserted houses kept locked. In the pale light of the lamp-post, I imagined its interior, the long hallway and the study, the stone cellar with its brown glass jars lined up against a wall. What proof remained of my mother’s ordeal?

When we came to the pathway above the villa, Milo asked if I needed firewood down at the cottage. Somehow, amid the day’s tumult, I’d forgotten that I could return to the cottage, that all claims against it had been relinquished. It also occurred to me that Susan was arriving in three days to stay for a week, and so I asked Milo if I could borrow his Fiat to pick her up in Rome. I was hoping a two-hour car ride would give me a chance to tell Susan everything that had happened before she visited with the Serafino widows. As we cut through the terraced gardens, Milo explained that the car was indeed available for use but that the lower gears and reverse were something lifted from Dante’s Inferno and that, if it was all the same to me, he would prefer to drive me to fetch my beloved daughter. He clapped me on the shoulder and said he would bring me some firewood. I told him it could wait until tomorrow, that I was going straight to bed.

‘Will you tell them in the morning?’ he asked. ‘If you like, I can ask le signore to meet you in the dining room, which is now in very good shape. I cleaned the fresco with antibiotics and spackled and repainted the north wall for the party, the one with the crack and rising damp.’ Excellent plan, I told him, let’s say ten o’clock, and then I went inside the cottage.

Elisa’s knives and espresso maker and measuring cups in the kitchen brought that morning’s kiss back to me, a distant episode on the early tide of the longest day in history. She’d left some eggs and butter in the refrigerator, and I made myself an omelette before carrying my bags into the bedroom nearest the living room. This had always been my mother’s room, and judging from the vase of wildflowers and the made-up bed, where Elisa had slept. I briefly thought about changing the sheets, but it felt comforting to lie back against the pillows that smelled of her.

I had no desire to read The Italians or check my emails, so I waited in the darkness for sleep to come. My mind drifted toward the gathering of my aunts and grandmother in the morning and I tried to find a toehold, a way to begin. With my history majors, it was sometimes the artefacts of the past that brought history alive for them, the physical proofs, and I always made a point of taking them into the archive to see the ticket stubs and fountain pens and bullet casings that had walk-on roles in major events. I thought about Silvio Ruffo’s pocketknife, now on the nightstand, and how I might begin by setting the knife on the big wooden dining table. But then I was pondering how many things the knife had sliced into during its lifetime and realised the knife was a digression. It wasn’t proof; it was a memento. The only way to begin was with everything I’d seen up north. I would bring up the photos of the cemetery on my laptop, and of the room where Aldo died and where I’d slept. Only then, once the evidence of Aldo’s final years had been laid out, could I move to the story within the story—the concealed room that had been waiting within the walls of my family’s history for almost seventy years.

It was Aldo’s headstone my grandmother wanted to linger on. I enlarged the image so that it filled my laptop screen and brought it over to her wheelchair. ‘Cyclamens,’ she said softly, pointing to the snow-dusted pot at his graveside. I zoomed in on the inscription to make it easier to read and she said that she hoped for something a little more effusive on her own headstone. She gestured for me to take the laptop over to her daughters, who were bundled against the draughty, cavernous room in thick wool cardigans and shawls, sitting on three different sides of the enormous table. They each took a turn inspecting the headstone, and then we repeated the process for the remaining signposts of Aldo Serafino’s vanished years.

I could sense their satisfaction in seeing concrete details—roadsides he’d walked along, mountains he’d climbed, the room where he’d taken his final breath—but I could also feel their disappointment. It was Iris who said what perhaps they’d all been thinking: ‘He might have been brave to go north, but he was a coward not to return home to his family.’ So I told them what Alessia had shared with me, about Aldo’s head in his hands, about his grief and guilt over burying his partisan friends and his erratic behaviour near the end. I said, ‘He was not the man who left here on horseback in the spring of 1944.’ A heavy silence took hold of the room and I wondered if they would, in time, soften toward his memory. But when I saw my grandmother fold up her reading glasses, it felt as if she were folding up an entire era of her life and putting it away.

After a long while, Violet changed the subject by picking up the thread of the looming birthday party. She reminded her sisters and her mother that the caterers were coming that afternoon to finalise the menu and take a deposit.

‘Will Donata be here?’ Rose asked hopefully.

‘She’s skulking in bed, from what I can tell,’ said Violet. ‘But someone needs to stand up to these truffle hunters before they swindle us. Charging for bruschetta by the piece should land a person in jail, if you ask me.’

I felt the room pulling away from me into the upswing of a discussion about antipasto price gouging. I closed my laptop with a slight snap. ‘Iris told me about my mother and Alessia going missing for three days in 1944.’

In the long pause that followed, I could hear the electric coil heaters ticking and the slouching dog’s breath from under the table.

‘It’s never been a secret,’ Violet said eventually.

‘Then you know what happened to them?’ I asked.

‘They ran off and were found wandering down in the valley,’ Violet said. ‘They were lost.’

‘There were more letters,’ I said, ‘up north. Between Alessia and my mother, more than fifty years of them. I found a mention of something and then we asked Alessia what it meant. She told Elisa and me about everything that happened to her and Hazel for those three days. It was absolutely terrifying, what they both endured. And deeply traumatic.’

My grandmother’s face turned ashen, her hands dropping beside her wheelchair.

Iris asked, ‘Alessia couldn’t be persuaded to come?’

‘No, they’ve given up on the cottage.’

‘Because we called their bluff,’ said Violet, reaching down to rub a sleeping Rocky IV.

‘I don’t think she could face coming back. Not after what happened to her down here,’ I said.

‘There was a war on,’ said Violet, still bent to her dog, her voice half under the table. ‘That’s what happened down here.’

Very quietly, my grandmother said, ‘I always knew it was something terrible.’

‘I suspect we all knew,’ said Rose.

Iris folded her hands on the table and stared into the wood grain. ‘Will you tell us?’ she asked me. ‘Because I think we all need to hear it.’

And so I began to tell the story, not the way I’d heard it in reverse, but the way it happened in life, from beginning to end, from Silvio Ruffo’s black polished shoes stepping onto the chalk marks of the hopscotch game to the two girls standing naked on the chairs to the cellar escape and the chestnut grove. The fear they carried if they told anyone, the particular burdens of that silence. I told them about the escaped British prisoners dead and mutilated in the piazza after the interrogation, and about my mother having to serve the Ruffo family in the restaurant years later, and how it unhinged her. In the middle, I talked about my mother’s depression and secrecy when I was growing up, after my father left her, the way she declared herself a widow and withdrew from the world. But all the while, I said, there were these fiercely intimate and private letters flowing back and forth across the Atlantic, delivered to a shop in the Alps and a post office box in suburban Michigan. It was as if Hazel and Alessia had made a pact and refused to break it. ‘In those letters,’ I said, ‘my mother had room to be herself and it was someone I never knew. Maybe someone none of us knew.’ I looked around the room, watched as the four Serafino widows absorbed the cascade of information and made their own private connections. How would they see my mother differently knowing that she’d kept her own pain, as well as the fate of Aldo Serafino, a secret for so long?

It was only after I’d told them everything I learned up north that I recounted my visit to a nursing home on the outskirts of Rome. I put the pearl-handled pocketknife onto the table and then I picked it up again and clenched it in my hand. Up until now, they’d been too overwhelmed or stricken to cry, but somehow the sight of the pocketknife made them all weep. My aunts produced cotton handkerchiefs from cardigan pockets and beneath shawls. My grandmother pressed a crumpled tissue to one eye then the other.

‘Hazel knew about Aldo,’ my grandmother said flatly, as if it suddenly made sense to her. ‘For all those years.’

‘She punished us for what we let happen to her,’ said Violet. This came as statement of fact, without defensiveness or blame, and her voice was gentler than I’d ever heard it.

‘We were in charge that day,’ said Iris, looking directly at Violet.

Violet glanced over at the empty fireplace and then briefly at her sister’s face. ‘I was the oldest,’ she said gravely. ‘It was my idea to go up to Mother’s bedroom.’

‘If anyone is going to burn themselves at the stake,’ said my grandmother, ‘I’ll be at the front of the queue. If I hadn’t gone to Florence that day things would be different … If your father hadn’t left us, things would be different. If the Germans hadn’t come through the Brenner Pass, things would be different … But that’s not life. In life, things are never different.’

Rose, who hadn’t spoken in over an hour, said, ‘I’m going to take a walk in the garden with Chester and pray for Hazel’s memory. May she rest with God in eternal peace.’

She crossed the room with her dog in tow, toward the bruised daylight pressing against the windowpanes. When she opened the front door, a wintry breeze blew in, smelling of damp limestone, and it seemed to rouse us all back to the present. My grandmother rang the little bell she kept in a leather sleeve on her wheelchair armrest, and Nina came in to wheel her back to her apartment. ‘I need to rest before the caterers arrive,’ she said. As she backed away from the table, I told her that Susan would be arriving in a few days, that she was coming for the big celebration. ‘Marvellous,’ she said without emotion, and then it was Iris, Violet and me sitting under the fresco that Milo had swabbed with antibiotics to kill off decades of bacteria.

Over at the cottage, I cleaned, made up the other bedroom for Susan, and gathered up Elisa’s kitchenware. I carefully packed two small boxes, one for the glass measuring cups, each encased in bubble wrap, and one for everything else. In the evening, Milo brought me some firewood and I heard that the meeting with the caterers had not gone well, that Donata refused to attend and that the restaurant owners would not accept a personal cheque, only a cash deposit, because they said the trust between the two families had been eroded. ‘Like it was a crumbling hillside,’ Milo said, as he detailed his mad dash to the bank before it closed to withdraw the caterers’ blood money from the Serafino household account.

As a distraction, I worked on my lecture. I wanted to conclude my talk with the idea that although Italy had more than two and a half thousand towns that were abandoned or barely populated, there had been a handful of comebacks. In Bussana Vecchia, for example, hippies and artists had reclaimed the town starting in the late 1960s after it had been abandoned for more than a century following a massive earthquake. They moved into the vacant houses, filled in potholes, repaired roofs, and even found a way to restore electricity. Today, you could walk among the grottoes where artists sold handmade jewellery, paper and leather goods. There was even a pay-what-you-want coffee shop run by a Dutch sculptor, and a tiny, improbable jazz and blues club set inside a stone cellar.

On the day Susan was due to fly into Rome, I spent the morning working on my laptop at the kitchen counter, and I’d just typed Italy has always believed in her resurrections—in politics, religion and history, when I heard a knock on the door and found Iris standing on the stone porch. The November sunshine had returned and she was dressed as if for a late-autumn picnic, wearing an olive gabardine coat and a pair of sturdy walking shoes. She said she’d taken a stroll first thing and hoped she wasn’t disturbing my work. I invited her in for some tea.

‘It’s been years since I’ve been inside the cottage,’ she said, taking off her coat. ‘May I look around?’

‘Of course.’

She went to survey the rooms while I waited for the water to boil. A few minutes later, she sat down at the kitchen counter and told me that I’d kept the place sparse.

‘It’s only been a few days since I was allowed to re-enter,’ I reminded her.

‘All the same,’ she said, ‘it needs some decoration. The villa attic is full of things that might brighten it up.’

The villa attic was, in fact, the final resting place for a century of forgotten furniture, clothing, paintings, rugs, toys and memorabilia. The one time I’d been up there with Milo, searching for Christmas decorations, we’d come upon a nest of baby mice inside a wooden chest of blankets.

‘I like it bare,’ I said. ‘Helps me think.’ What I thought, but didn’t say, was that it also preserved my mother’s spartan presence in the cottage. I poured us some tea and added the splash of milk and one sugar she liked. She stirred her tea and idled the conversation for a few minutes between sips, how she was looking forward to seeing Susan again and hearing all about Oxford, how Donata’s depression couldn’t have come at a worse time. Then, across the rim of her teacup, she said, ‘I miss her, you know. Your mother.’

‘Me, too,’ I said, though it was more complicated than that.

‘I always wanted to be a better friend to her, but she was hard to get close to. She was very private, a bit withdrawn. Riservata. We went for walks when she visited. But we didn’t see her for years after she first left for America with Jerry.’

‘Why didn’t anyone ever come to visit us in Michigan?’

‘We weren’t invited, for one thing,’ she said.

I remembered phone calls from Italy twice a year, a procession of birthday and Christmas cards, a few airmail letters. When they all got word of my father’s suicide, there were tender letters from my grandmother and Iris sent me a handwritten copy of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. I remembered she’d written it out in English and Italian, on two different sides of the same piece of parchment paper. I wondered, all these years later, what she’d meant the poem to signify, but I also remembered the line, It was evening all afternoon, because it somehow captured the mood in our house after my father left, the sense that we lived in a state of permanent twilight.

‘How did she sound in those letters to Alessia?’ Iris asked.

I recalled that in one letter, dated in the late 1950s, she’d written the phrase You are my only blood to Alessia. Even now, I wanted to shield my aunts and my grandmother from the devotion my mother had reserved for Alessia. So I said, ‘She could write things to Alessia that she could never say to the rest of us.’

‘She was always so distant.’ She took another sip of tea, swallowed it contemplatively. ‘I suppose it started that afternoon Violet and I went up to Mother’s bedroom to try on her clothes and jewellery. We could have done more to protect her.’

‘You were teenagers,’ I said.

Iris turned the rings on her left hand, lining up the centre stones in a way that reminded me of someone entering the combination to a safe. She said, ‘I was talking to Rinaldo on the telephone about our situation.’

I watched the steam rising from my cup, trying not to react. ‘Which situation is that?’

‘That your mother’s kidnapper is still alive and living free as a bird in a Roman nursing home.’

The word kidnapper suggested this had become another manila folder on Iris’s living room floor, and I felt myself flush at the thought of her telling Rinaldo about my mother’s ordeal. I said nothing, but it came to me that now Rinaldo Fumigalli knew that Silvio Ruffo was still alive, but Elisa and her mother did not. By telling the Serafino widows everything I knew, I’d unearthed a pocket of history and couldn’t control where or how it was shared.

‘Sadly,’ Iris said, ‘as Rinaldo reminded me, there is a statute of limitations for a crime such as this.’

‘The man is also ninety-six,’ I said. ‘That’s another limitation.’

‘Yes, he’s surely near the end,’ she said, tracing a C with one fingertip along the edge of the teacup handle. ‘Better if we handle this informally. As a family.’

‘You sound like a mafioso.’

‘They don’t have a monopoly on ironing out the wrinkles in family laundry.’

‘Like I told you all the other morning, I plan to go back to the nursing home to confront him.’

‘What, so he can drift off in the middle of another chess game?’ She drained her teacup, set it onto the china saucer with a clink. ‘What if instead of you returning to the nursing home, we invite him here?’

‘What, just invite him over for dinner?’

‘No, no,’ she said, ‘to the birthday party.’

‘For starters, it looks like he can barely make it down a hallway.’

‘We can get him a wheelchair if we have to. I have thought it through: we issue a special invitation to the whole family, handwritten by Ida, and tell the Ruffos that so many of the old families are coming back to Valetto for a reunion, that it will be their chance to see the place where their patriarch was born one last time. We must make it clear that Silvio Ruffo has been invited as a special guest by the centenarian herself.’ Her eyes were ablaze. This had been ticking over in her mind for days. While I’d been rubbing the pearl-handled knife in my pocket, she’d been polishing this hypothetical chestnut in her mind.

I said, ‘Then what?’

‘I would take another cup of tea by the way.’

I was glad to have an excuse to turn away from her. I took the kettle from the stovetop to fill it in the sink while she talked.

‘We confront him. Together, as a family,’ she said.

‘During the birthday party? With all those people around?’ I put the kettle back on the stove.

‘It could happen after the birthday celebration. Maybe we invite him into the study or the billiard room, where we are all assembled. We confront him with his family and lay out the evidence of his wrongdoings. Since it’s Ida’s celebration, she should be the one to decide how it will take place, but it needs to be a strategic and communal ambush. In sociology, we call it a degradation ceremony. Garfinkel came up with the term in 1956, if I’m not mistaken, and he said moral indignation and shame are the two primary ingredients. We shall have plenty of both.’

I watched the blue gas flame below the kettle and wondered if this scheme had been imagined in the clear light of day. Iris had thought out the logistics and the conceptual framing of what would take place, but I couldn’t help thinking of Rose’s story of finding a dead husband’s shoes drying in Iris’s oven. Stalling for time, I said, ‘It sounds messy,’ though in truth it was considerably more thought-out than my idea of returning alone to the nursing home.

When I turned to face my aunt, she said, ‘You know, we never decided as a family to keep those three days she went missing a secret. And I don’t think your mother woke up one day determined to never tell us what happened to our father. Life chips away at us.’

She sounded wise and reflective, but I wasn’t sure I could trust it. I thought about a professor emeritus at my college returning for a faculty meeting one semester, the way he delivered a touching monologue about the end of history. It wasn’t until after he’d left the meeting that the department chair, another old-timer, revealed that the professor had attended the meeting by mistake but that he didn’t have the heart to tell him. Two decades earlier, the man had retired from anthropology, not history.

I poured the boiling water into the teapot of fresh leaves and we waited for it to steep.

‘For most of my life,’ Iris said, ‘I’ve carried this guilt and shame. I knew something terrible had happened to Hazel but I didn’t know exactly what. No matter what you say, I was partly to blame and old enough to know better. I’d just like a chance to be there when we all look into his eyes. Will you please let me have that?’

‘What about the others?’ I asked.

‘They all agree this is the right way to make peace with the past. Even Violet.’

‘You’ve all discussed it?’

‘You’re not the only one who can call a meeting of the Serafino widows.’

She reached into her purse and produced an envelope with my grandmother’s spidery, hooped cursive, made out to Silvio Ruffo e famiglia. When I didn’t take the envelope from her, she propped it against the pepper grinder on the counter. I turned back to watch the steam rising from the teapot spout, letting the idea take form.