It was early morning, the only time of day in July when I found it really comfortable to sit outside with a book. The sun sat like a red boulder on the eastern horizon, a warning that a hot day lay ahead. The sea was streaked with violet, still relatively cool. I leaned back on my cane chair under the lemon tree where Grant sat in the late afternoon. Like him, I wore a floppy straw hat, a castoff that Vera had given me.
I was reading Love’s Body, the volume of provocative aphorisms arranged and recast by Norman O. Brown, the neo-Freudian guru-philosopher from Santa Cruz. Toni Bonano had lent it to me over lunch in the piazzetta the day before. Skeptical at first, I read it slowly, finding Toni’s judgment sound. It was an exhilarating book, knitting a vast array of learning into a challenging, and provocative, pattern. I reread the opening lines: “Freud’s myth of the rebellion of the sons against the father in the primal, prehistoric horde is not a historical explanation of origins, but a supra-historical archetype; eternally recurrent; a myth; an old, old story.”
My own story preoccupied me now, but it was not so old. My situation had, in the past few weeks, changed dramatically. I had come to the island alone, uncertain, and full of turmoil that I could not quite manage. Despite having lived away from home for several years, I remained naive. (“A virgin,” as Vera said, “in all but body.”) Now three women—Holly, Marisa, and Toni—occupied my thoughts in various ways. And there was Patrice, who continued to pine after me, sighing wistfully in my presence (though his affair with Giovanni had helped relieve the intensity of that situation).
Toni and I had met several times, yet I still didn’t know where the relationship was going. She mentioned, during our picnic on Mount Solaro, that she’d been “seeing” someone “at home,” meaning New York City. His name was Jason, and he was an architecture student at Yale. (A badly herniated disk had kept him out of the army, she explained.) Her parents, for one reason or another, were not so keen on Jason. (Dominick considered him a snob.) Toni herself was undecided. “You have to trust your instincts,” I said, enjoying the aura of generosity and good sense created by such a statement. I was simultaneously relieved to hear that she had a boyfriend and reassured that it was not an irrevocable commitment. We were, for the moment, “just friends,” but I wondered if this might change, knowing that friendships between men and women often deepened into something more intimate.
The situation with Marisa was more complicated. She had become more difficult than ever, sitting silently through meals, avoiding me in the garden or, more unnervingly, confronting me about my fickleness. “I am sad when thinking of you, Alessandro,” she said, leaning into the window of my cottage one afternoon, her elbows on the sill. “You are so selfish all the time, thinking of only yourself.”
She was right, though I refused to think of myself in those terms, and was always shocked when any notes were sounded not already in my tonal self-assessment. I had certain ideas about myself that were inviolable. I was nice. I was a good person. I meant well. At the very least, I did no harm. Yet somehow I had to reconcile Marisa’s comment, which must have sprung from genuine feelings.
I pushed her from my mind, however. Holly remained the focus of my fantasies, the object I coveted, the one whose company I sought. I was hobbled by desire in her presence, transformed into a halting nincompoop. Needless to say, I envied Grant’s access to her, and was angered by her attentions to him. What she saw in him, as a sexual partner, baffled me. He was an old and wrinkled man. There could surely be no gratification there? I understood that he provided a kind of mentorship for her as a writer, and when I realized that he was reading her manuscript one afternoon—I saw it on his desk, the margins full of comments and suggestions—I was, if anything, relieved. This made sense. But I still didn’t understand the sexual angle, and Holly was not the sort of person with whom one could discuss such things.
One night, after everyone had gone to bed, I heard a splash in the pool while sitting in my cottage. Curiosity got the better of me, and I crouched behind a manicured privet hedge to spy on whomever. It was Holly swimming by herself. She floated on her belly in the water, doing what we used to call a dead man’s float. I strained to get a better view of her, and my breath caught when I realized that she was naked. Her ass was lovely, white against the tanned lower back and sleek upper thighs. Her legs seemed impossibly long. When she flipped onto her back, her small breasts were white as well, poking through the water. Her blond hair fanned out around her head. I could see a tantalizing wedge of pubic hair.
I wanted her desperately, but my desire felt hopeless until the night of the dinner with Vidal and Greene, when Holly had seemed to revise her opinion of me. I was now a person to pity, someone to add to her collection of interesting types. Not a sexual partner, perhaps, but a person worthy of her attention. Whereas I had barely attracted her notice before, she now asked me questions, wondering what courses I had taken at Columbia, how I felt about the antiwar activities there, and what part I had played in them. (My SDS membership had clearly impressed her, though I neglected to say how inactive a member I had been.) She told me excitedly that she had once participated in a march on the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, and had almost been arrested. Her boyfriend at the time, a Rhodes Scholar from Connecticut whom she called Granger (presumably his first name), had actually spent a night in custody for kicking a bobby in the groin. (“Granger was a pacifist” she added, incongruously.)
Much to my discomfort, Vietnam became a subject of debate at the Villa Clio, especially with Vera and Holly, who prodded me with questions about the war, as though I must be an expert because my brother had been killed there. Grant, who continued to maintain that the war was a necessary evil—though he’d never known war at firsthand—sat stony-faced throughout our discussions or made sharp, ironic statements calculated to put us in our place.
Grant startled me that morning in the garden, approaching from behind while I was deep in Love’s Body. I shuddered and looked up.
“It’s bad luck about your brother,” he said, squatting next to me. “I lost a brother in North Africa.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Nigel was an officer, under Monty. Rommel got him—anti-artillery fire.”
I expressed sympathy but still felt embarrassed, having been caught under his special tree in one of his straw hats.
“It’s a shitty thing to happen,” he said.
That understatement would, two months ago, have enraged me; by now, I simply took his manner for granted. It was a tone upon which an empire had been constructed. No obstacle was too large, no defeat too numbing. Everything—even disaster—was taken for granted, viewed as part of a larger scheme that spelled eventual success. It was the same approach that had put Grant, after many setbacks, somewhere near the top of the heap of writers from his generation.
“What was his name, your brother?” Grant asked.
“Nick,” I said.
“You were close?”
“Fairly,” I said, not wishing to lay out the complications of our relationship.
“Bad luck,” he repeated.
“War seems to increase the amount of bad luck people have,” I said, unable to conceal some irritation. “Bad luck” seemed dismissive, although I understood that it played differently to British ears. On the other hand, I liked the fact that Grant was being friendly with me, aggressively so. He was showing genuine sympathy: a feature I had not found in abundance at the Villa Clio.
“You’re doing a good job, Lorenzo,” he said, his tone like that of a platoon leader singling out a particular soldier. “Just thought you might want to know that.”
“Thanks.”
“You don’t intrude,” he added. “One doesn’t like intrusions.”
“Thanks,” I repeated.
“The last boy, Edgar—from Twickenham—he was no good at the typewriter. Made a lot of mistakes. Your copy is clean. No mistakes, grammar, and so forth.”
I had actually hoped for more, but accepted this bantamweight and garbled praise without comment. Despite my complaints, there were many reasons to be grateful to Rupert Grant. He had broadened my scope, dropping books and suggestions into my lap. His work in “correcting” my drafts of the Suetonius had proved useful. My prose had become noticeably swifter, cleaner, and more sure-footed. The one thing that still languished was my poetry.
“Were you close to your brother?” I asked.
“Not so much,” he said. “One hardly got to know one’s family in those days. Sent to prep school in Sussex, far too early. Seven years old. Nigel went to a school in Hampshire.”
From Vera, I had learned something of Rupert’s family and childhood. His mother, from an English family who owned a large country house near Carlisle, had died when he was four, of liver cancer. His father, who never remarried, had been a successful lawyer in Edinburgh. That Grant retained a trace of Scots in his accent was a tribute to his fierce stubbornness: Scottish children sent to English public schools were not supposed to hang on to their burr. His first wife, whom he met in London during the war, had been the daughter of an English baronet. “Rupert was always climbing in those days,” Vera said. Apparently it took exile on Capri—and the safety net of Vera’s family fortune—to put him at ease, socially. “Even so,” she said, “he doesn’t really get around much. His life is really his work, as you’ve seen. It’s a bit of a bore, for me. I should have married a lad.” By this, I believe, she meant that she should have married someone who liked to go to parties.
Grant stood now, gradually unfolding upward, his knees cracking. “Bloody old knees,” he said. He folded his arms and cleared his throat, suggesting that he had something further to say. His facial muscles twitched. As I knew, he often prefaced significant remarks with a slight reshuffling of the throat’s mucous layers. The twitching meant that what he had to say was important but difficult. I helped him by shutting the book on my lap and saying nothing. That silence provided enough draft so that his words could be sucked out.
“I rather thought you should know that I’ve asked Marisa to leave.”
“What?”
“Marisa will leave us. She hasn’t worked out terribly well, her research. She’s a lazy girl, as you will have noticed.”
“She tries.”
“Tries what? Her assignment was to find material on Capri. I sent her to the Cerio archives. But for what? She’s done nothing. Spends most of her time by the pool. It’s distracting for everyone.”
“This is my fault,” I said.
“Actually, Lorenzo, it has nothing to do with you.”
“It does,” I said. “We have made love.”
Grant smiled. “Oh, dear,” he said, feigning shock. “I assumed it was just fucking.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“That doesn’t surprise me. You’re a young man, and you’re an American. The combination is lethal.”
“I’m not as stupid as you imagine.”
“I don’t imagine anything. You have done a good job for me. You are pleasant company, for the most part. And you don’t intrude.”
“Glad to be of service,” I said, amazed that sleeping with one of his concubines did not count as an intrusion.
“Don’t upset yourself over this, Lorenzo. Really, there is no point. I’ve made up my mind. But given your attachment to the girl, I thought you should hear it from me.”
“Kind of you,” I said.
Perhaps to comfort me, he said, with a biblical intonation, “This, too, shall pass.”
I thought for a moment, then asked: “So when will she be going?”
“She and I have yet to discuss the details.”
His lack of generosity toward Marisa upset me, and I was tempted to make a bold gesture and resign, believing that her precipitous loss of stature in Grant’s eyes was closely related to her affair with me. I was also annoyed by his self-centeredness, his conviction that everyone was at his disposal.
“I’m not shoving her out the door,” he added, seeing that I was upset.
“Marisa cares about you,” I said.
He frowned. “She is a young and silly girl. You mustn’t be sentimental, especially when it comes to girls.”
“She likes it here.”
“There’s nothing for her on Capri,” he said. “You don’t know anything about her, Lorenzo. Her life is in Naples.” He saw my eyes cloud over and grabbed my wrist. “You needn’t worry. She will dazzle them in years to come. I recognize her abilities: she’s quite clever in her way. This whole thing is my fault, not yours. I made the initial mistake by hiring her. I hadn’t thought out the consequences.”
With that, he left me alone under the tree, upset and uncertain. I had a terrible feeling about Marisa, and was not so sure about myself. Closing my eyes, I found myself thinking about Pennsylvania, juxtaposing Grant with my father. On the surface, the differences between them were beyond calculation. Grant was thoroughly cosmopolitan and seemed to have read every author since Homer. He had been to Oxford, and he knew everybody who was anybody from Auden to Alec Guinness and Noel Coward. He had been awarded the Queen’s Medal for poetry, and (like any self-respecting bard) had refused the job of Poet Laureate. His name had recently been floated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, but his conservative politics reduced the chances of his actually getting the award. My father, by contrast, had no formal education. He read nothing except the sports pages of the Wilkes-Barre Record. Beyond a small circle of builders in Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties, he knew few people. Yet my conversations with Grant and my father bore an eerie resemblance. In both cases, I felt that bridging the gap between them and me required a huge effort.
It was more difficult to think of my mother in relation to Vera. I didn’t see the volatility in Vera that was my mother’s stock-in-trade. Nor did she suffer from the insecurity that dogged my mother: an Achilles’ heel inherited from her own mother, an immigrant from southern Italy who never adjusted to life in the New World, where the assumptions of peasant village life never quite applied. Yet Vera could, like my mother, be intrusive. She had prodded me about Toni Bonano, suggesting that we were ideally matched. “Don’t make the mistake of reaching only for what you can’t have,” she said. “It’s like in cooking. What’s available—fresh and local—is always best.” She claimed that Toni’s mother adored me, and that Bonano himself found me extremely likable. “What’s wrong with Toni?” Vera kept asking, as if anything were wrong with her.
It was obvious she thought I was queer, and that Patrice was my secret passion. “He’s awfully dear,” she would say, “but I shouldn’t have thought him your type.” She had nevertheless welcomed him to the Villa Clio with open arms, as if he were my boyfriend. It had recently infuriated me when she suggested I bring Patrice “as my date” to a party at the Bismarcks. “Eddie will understand,” she said, slyly.
My mother never played games with me in the Vera manner. She preferred overt conflict, and would pit me against my brother or my father, often successfully. She appeared most contented when everyone swirled around her, snapping and bitching at each other. The faster we all spun, the calmer she became, as in the paradox of the wheel. Only Nicky seemed regularly disposed to shove a wrench into the spokes, bringing the whole display to a shrieking halt.
I rarely talked about my family in front of Grant, but once—prompted by Vera—I complained in his presence about my mother. “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother,” he said.
Slowly, I began to rethink Grant’s witticism. Perhaps I was blaming my mother when the situation was more intricate that it appeared? My father had chosen to marry my mother for reasons of his own. He liked to appear the good guy, the gentleman; however, like everyone else in the world, he bore angers and resentments. He needed someone to carry these bad feelings for him, and my mother had proved an able vessel. She swarmed with grudges that might properly have been his, and was easily offended by his potential enemies. Even her eating seemed to keep him slim. (“Have another scoop of that ice cream,” he would say, though the doctors had warned them both that her dietary habits could easily lead to an early death.) Her precarious health apparently balanced the scales in such a way that my father himself never missed a day of work in three decades due to illness.
My mother’s letters arrived every week on Thursday or Friday, scribbled on blue U.S. airgrams, invariably folded in such a haphazard way that I could never open them without destroying some of the text. They began sweetly enough, but would soon degenerate into barely concealed accusations and complaints. She was “unwell” most of the time, alluding to her swollen feet, painful knees, breathlessness, high blood pressure, ringing ears, and palpitations. Nobody in the family took her problems seriously, though the doctors had warned her she might not have long to live. She herself (rather disingenuously) dismissed their concerns, saying that doctors had been predicting her demise for as long as she could remember. “If I live till you return from Italy,” she wrote in early July, “I promise to bake your favorite cake: lemon poppyseed.”
Apart from the fact that lemon poppyseed was actually her favorite cake, not mine, I disliked the veiled threat. If she were to die before I returned, I would feel guilty for the rest of my life. I might never recover from the sense of having killed my own mother. “The doctors say there is nothing I can do,” she wrote. “I should probably try to lose a few pounds.” A few pounds didn’t begin to describe it. She needed to lose sixty or seventy pounds, and still she would seem obese to most people. What puzzled me was that one never saw her gorge herself, although she ate substantial meals (and her preferred foods were hugely high in fat) and nibbled constantly. She had been through the usual diets: the various high protein regimens, the grapefruit diet, the avocado diet, and so forth. They never worked because she ate whatever she pleased in addition to the special diet foods and supplements. To say that she ate between meals was misleading. She never wasn’t eating. Her hand reached perpetually for something: nuts and candies, bits and pieces. She seemed to consume the world around her.
I addressed letters to my father and mother, aware that he might never read them. But I needed his presence in the greeting as a buffer, a way of making sure that my letters were not directly aimed at her. And I kept my revelations general. Often, I simply described various scenic spots on Capri and told of my excursions. I mentioned Patrice, in passing. I referred to Father Aurelio and mentioned that I had been to mass as well as confession. I talked about Vera’s cooking, taking care to avoid over-praising her results. (That would only have been taken as criticism of my mother’s cooking.) I wrote about Grant’s obsessive writing habits and described his study in detail. Never once did I mention either Holly or Marisa; that would have made no sense, and only worried them. My first visits to the Bonano villa in Anacapri were elaborately chronicled, with close attention to the decor; again, I made no mention of their daughter.
Nor did I refer to Nicky in my letters home. Each of us in the family was grieving, but it seemed we could not help each other. We had failed Nicky in our separate ways, and there was no chance of repairing this now. Death was so frighteningly absolute, a high stony wall between the living and the dead that could not be crossed.
Nicky’s funeral had been bizarrely impersonal, with that closed casket draped in a flag. The local VFW had sent a contingent of motley veterans to the cemetery, each of whom came to salute a war hero on that snowy morning in December, making assumptions about Nicky’s attitude toward the war that I knew were false. As I knew from his letters, he did not think of himself as a hero, fighting for something called “freedom.” He often derided LBJ and the bureaucratic elite around him who had sent young Americans to intervene in a civil war they never themselves understood. “One thing they don’t seem to get,” Nicky wrote, “was that the Chinese and the Vietnamese fucking hate each other.” He also said, “the only dominoes falling around here are in the American barracks, where a bunch of bored guys got nothing better to do.”
The priest at the funeral—a young fool recently attached to the parish—was annoyed by having to perform another ceremony so near to Christmas. His words of eulogy were generic, and he teetered on the brink of emotion only once, referring to the “great personal sacrifice that the Massolini family has made for freedom.” I tried hard to suppress a grin, recalling Nicky’s words in one letter: “Nobody in Nam thinks we’re saving the world from anything. We know the truth, which is that powers above us and behind us push and pull. We’re piss-ant pawns, moved about on this green jungle of a board. Looking for checkmate. So what if a few of us are lost in the game? It’s only a fucking game.”
One Sunday afternoon in late June, Grant and I took a walk together after lunch. On the way home, we stopped at the cimitero acattolico, where non-Catholic citizens of Capri, mostly foreigners, were buried. (“I shall lie here myself,” he said, “and look forward to the day.”) Among the many headstones that caught our attention was that bearing the sacred name of Norman Douglas, the novelist and natural historian who had lived most of his adult life on the island. Douglas had been a notorious pedophile, a sybarite who relished any form of sensual pleasure. He had also been a meticulous student of the region, and had devoted himself to the ecology of Capri, urging its preservation and planting countless trees over many decades. On a dark slab of verde serpentino marble that marked his grave were the words of Horace: Omnes eodem cogimur. We are all driven to the same place.
Thinking of Nicky, I had taken comfort in those words. A cold comfort, perhaps, but something that would sustain me in the days ahead, when I’d need every resource I could muster.