Why do we always feel like idiots when talking to our parents, whatever our age? The phone call from my father had stripped away any maturity that may have accrued during the past few months. Like a child, I stood there trembling in the library of the Villa Clio, surrounded by books, fine paintings, and elegant furniture, while my father talked in that plaintive, rough, generous, confused, uneducated, endearing voice. He could hardly imagine the world I’d fallen into, with its peculiar traditions and resonances, its particular values, most of which could not possibly compute in terms he’d ever understand.
It was not that my valley in Pennsylvania didn’t have its own traditions, resonances, and values. I knew and even admired them, but I felt the contrast now, and it wasn’t merely that I assumed that Capri was more sophisticated than Pennsylvania. It was, perhaps, in its way; but it wasn’t this contrast that I found disquieting. I remained an American-style egalitarian, ready to denounce old Europe’s autocratic, class-ridden tendencies. Yet I understood that the world of Rupert and Vera Grant, with its ironies and cultural depths, dazzled me nonetheless, making it difficult for me to imagine going home.
It amused me to think of Rupert and Vera transported suddenly to Pennsylvania, and forced to understand, sympathize with, and manipulate the elements of that world. Much would have puzzled and appalled them. The humor would have seemed crude, unfunny. The aesthetic values would have passed them by. On the other side, my parents would have found Capri just as alien, a corrupt and jaded island full of snobs and dissipated intellectuals. This was definitely not the Italy my grandparents recalled and sentimentalized.
My father, on the phone, had seemed unreal, remote, enervated. A dead man talking. I felt sorrow and pity for him, as I always had. Never conscious anger. Unlike many sons in history (if Freud and Norman O. Brown were right), I’d never rebelled against him directly, though I’d experienced the usual urges along these lines. The circumstances of my life had simply not afforded them a place to root, and so my rebellion had become oblique.
Hearing echoes of myself in the plastic receiver, I too had sounded strange and unfamiliar—a thin, disembodied voice. A thing I refused to acknowledge as my own. I had tried to become a different person on Capri, more worldly and independent, and to some extent I’d succeeded. But my father had tapped into and elicited an earlier version of myself—a person I wanted to forget: the dutiful son, a placating and innocent and narrowly selfish creature. Growing up, my goal in life had been to raise no hackles and trample no toes. And especially not my mother’s toes or hackles.
The day after my father called, my mother was taken out of the intensive care unit. I was able to phone her in the hospital that next afternoon, and we talked politely, though briefly. (The idea of talking on the phone “long distance” always panicked my parents, with their Depression-era mentality. The idea of talking transatlantic was totally unimaginable, an act of suicidal extravagance.) “Don’t even think of coming home, Alex,” my mother said, hoarsely. “If anything happens to me, there’s nothing you can do anyway. It’s not your concern.”
I never believed these unselfish assertions. They were made only half in earnest, and I could hear a countermanding voice behind them, saying: “If anything happens to me, it’s all your fault. My illness was brought on by your departure, your selfishness, and your thoughtlessness. You’d better get your ass on that airplane, pronto!” Then again, she meant what she said on some level. Her better self struggled with her lesser, although it was an unequal contest.
Yet I sympathized with her situation. On the surface, who wouldn’t? The woman had recently lost a son in the war, and her feelings of guilt—there are always guilt feelings where the dead are concerned—were probably exacerbated by having failed him as a mother. What children most need, a feeling of parental confidence in their ability to succeed in the world, had been withheld from Nicky. And this was largely her doing. She had chosen me over him.
I put down the phone in a confused state, wiping tears away. Whatever the reality behind my mother’s illness, I realized I was not going home. I would attend my mother’s funeral, should one arise. But I was not going home.
“Is everything all right?” Vera asked, entering the library with a pot of tea on a tray only moments after I had hung up. Her timing was eerily precise, as if she’d been hovering outside the door.
“I guess so,” I said, wiping my eyes.
“You were able to speak with your mother?”
I nodded. “She seems okay. Out of intensive care. You can’t tell with her. It’s hard to know.” I decided against giving Vera a detailed medical history of my mother, though I knew it by heart. Everything from the varicose veins to the angina pains and tingling hands. I used to call home from Scranton Prep at lunchtime to get the latest numbers on her blood pressure as though trying to get the score in the World Series.
Vera sat beside me on the leather sofa beneath a large painting by Peter Duncan-Jones: a version of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, only this nude was all man, and very well hung, the penis replicated in various colors and sizes. She put the tray on a marble coffee table, then set to work in her matronly English fashion: pouring the tea through a strainer into china cups, adding milk and sugar, stirring with a Lilliputian spoon. She put a chocolate biscuit in the saucer beside the cup, having noticed that I liked them.
“Here you are, darling,” she said.
I balanced the saucer gingerly on my lap.
“You must be terribly worried,” she said.
“I don’t think she’s going to die or anything like that,” I replied. “She wants to frighten me, and to make me feel guilty.”
“My mother is a bore, too,” Vera said. “Only I’ve ceased to listen. One simply turns down the volume at a certain point.”
There was a long pause, during which I gathered myself together. Vera was surprisingly good at dealing with these situations: cool and terribly practical in her approach to problems. The stiff, blue winds of British empiricism blew through the Villa Clio, despite its soft Mediterranean setting.
“How are the children adjusting?” I asked, moving the subject to more comfortable ground. “I’m enjoying their company.”
“What a good liar you are,” she said. “No matter—I appreciate the gesture.”
I shifted nervously, having been caught out. “I like young people,” I said.
She put a hand on my knee. “Nigel, as you know, fancies himself a poet. I was rather wondering if you might take him under your wing a bit.”
“Of course,” I said.
“That would be marvelous, thanks. You might read his poems and comment. Take him for a long walk. Play tennis. That sort of thing. He’d rather Rupert stepped forward, but that’s not possible. Rupert has never really liked children.” She lit a cigarette. “Are you writing poems?”
“Not so much,” I said. “A few lines here and there. Nothing seems to stick.”
“It’s a difficult game. What I like about cooking is that you never get kitchen block. You can always slice and dice.”
“You’ve been neglecting my education,” I said. “I was learning a lot from you at one point.”
“Let’s have at it,” she said. “I’m doing a cacciucco for dinner.”
I’d never heard of this, and told her.
“A Tuscan soup,” she explained, “filled with monkfish, dogfish, langoustines, shrimp, mussels. Quite easy, really, and it will dazzle them back in Transylvania.”
I agreed, though even locating monkfish and dogfish in Pennsylvania would pose a challenge.
It occurred to me that I might help with Nicola, too. But Vera shook her head.
“She thinks you’re a git,” she said, in a low voice.
“And what’s a git?”
“You know, someone who doesn’t really know what he’s about. A bit of a chump.”
“Nicola barely knows me.”
“Quite true. I told her you were just very American.”
I felt queasy inside. Did everyone on this island see through me? Was I really so ridiculous?
“Poor little girl,” Vera continued. “She met this dashing, older chap from Cambridge last summer, at the Marina Piccola. A Trinity man. Rugby blue and so forth. He invited her to May Ball or some such thing, then deflowered her.”
“How do you know this?”
“Nicola suppresses nothing. Her letters are riveting.”
“I’ll bet.”
“We don’t mind,” she said. “It’s nice to know what’s going on. As a parent, one can feel helpless.”
“As a child, too,” I said.
“But that’s how it’s supposed to work. A parent is—in theory—in charge. I have never felt any sense of control over either of my children. It’s a bore, really.”
“You’d admire my mother.”
“A commanding presence?”
“General Patton in drag.”
“I can’t wait to meet her,” Vera said, lighting a cigarette. “You know, I’m actually quite worried about Marisa. Something has gone terribly wrong.”
“She has been fired,” I said. “This probably annoys the hell out of her.”
“Not true, I suspect. The actual job—if that’s what one calls it—means nothing to her. And we haven’t exactly run her out the house. Rupert made it clear that she’s welcome to stay until she has sorted things out.” She blew smoke away from me. “Perhaps you could help in some way.”
“Me?”
“It’s obvious that you’ve got a connection.” She lifted one insinuating eyebrow.
“For God’s sake, I slept with her once!”
“You must be awfully good in bed.”
“I’m pathetic. I swear.”
“I believe that,” Vera said, putting out the cigarette, though it was barely smoked—a sign of anxiety. “I have this eerie feeling about her. She was walking in the garden last night. I saw her from the window and went down. I tried to talk to her, but she didn’t even hear me. Then she started chattering, but it wasn’t to me. It wasn’t to anyone I could see. A bloody ghost or something.”
I sighed, guessing she was right. All was not well in the world of Marisa Lauro, and I’d not helped her in the least.