I began to prepare for my departure, dismantling my life as if it were a tent I’d briefly pitched. It seemed necessary to divest myself of things: I gave up my apartment, sold off most of my furnishings, took boxes of clothing – ancient things, things I had owned since high school, that still had the smell in them of my life then – to the Goodwill. The ticket I bought was a one-year open return: it had the sound of a different order of travel, an open return, something that airlines, travel agents, slipped in amidst their usual fares to allow for those whose lives were unfixed, who might suffer catastrophe or a change of heart or find waiting for them at their destination the thing that put going back out of the question.
It was surprising how little my possessions – what was really mine, what had meaning, wasn’t just the detritus of being alive – actually amounted to when I gathered them up. There were Rita’s letters; there was a book I’d had as a child, The Guiding Light, that told the story of the Bible in pictures. I remembered how I had gone through the house after my father’s death collecting his belongings and had come up with only a few trinkets, a watch, a razor, his old wedding band, which I’d worn for a few weeks like a piece of string tied to my finger to remind me of some important errand, then removed. In the end, his things had come to no more than what fit in the old Crown Royal bag I kept them in now, that bulged it like so much ash or dust. I came from a line, it seemed, that did not hold on to things, that had no heirlooms to pass on, no signet rings, that didn’t think itself a weighty enough presence in the world to leave some record of its having passed through. I thought of the gifts I’d brought with me from Italy, a jack-knife, a Lives of the Saints, my grandfather’s war medals, things that I might have passed on to a daughter or son along with their stories but all scattered now, lost like memories I could not quite recall. It wasn’t so much that these things hadn’t mattered to me as that my life had not seemed receptable enough to hold them, to keep them from slipping away from me.
I had a coin that I’d got a few years before from an old man in Mersea, a pre-war one lire, the exact duplicate, down to a flaw on one side from the minting, of one I’d been given as a child by a friend of my mother’s and had lost. The coin seemed now the symbol of everything that had vanished from my life, in every respect the same as the first except in the important one of being the actual physical thing, what had passed from hand to hand, what could have proved the reality of a certain moment or person or place. It hardly seemed possible sometimes that a life could go on at all with only such phantoms of phantoms to lend it credence, with almost nothing that could ever be nailed down for certain. Yet that was what matters always came down to, to faulty recreations of things that had themselves perhaps only been tokens, that hadn’t been adequate even in their first moment of meaning to take in the fullness of the world that they’d strained to represent. I set the coin aside now to bring with me, a shibboleth; perhaps something would accrue on it that would make it cease to be simply a copy of a lost original.
I brought a few boxes of belongings to Elena’s for storage. Her apartment seemed even emptier than usual, with the damp, cavernous feel that our house on the farm used to take on in summer, the sense of not being quite lived in. She and I hadn’t talked much about my trip: I had tried to put it as a spur-of-the-moment thing that Rita and I had arranged when Rita had phoned: but she seemed to have understood that there was more to it than I would say, and that made any casual reference to it awkward.
“I’m not sure what you guys hope to accomplish there,” she said.
“I don’t know. I was born there. It’s normal to want to go back. Maybe things are different for you.”
“You mean because I’m adopted. Because you think my parents left me in a trash can or something so why would I want to know about that.”
“That’s not what I said. I just meant –”
“Forget it.”
She was feeling abandoned, had that angry, restless energy she took on when she couldn’t admit she was hurt. Getting close to her when she was like this was like scratching at an irritation, not knowing if you would soothe or inflame it.
“You’ve never talked about your parents,” I said. “Your real ones, I mean.”
“You’ve never asked.”
“So I’m asking.”
She gave a half-laugh.
“Here we go. True confessions.”
“We don’t have to do this,” I said.
“No. Fine. It’s not as if it’s some deep, dark secret. They didn’t molest me or anything like that.”
“So you knew them, then.”
“I was with them till I was five. I guess my dad was a bit of a drunk and he smashed me around a couple of times. End of story.”
“And they took you away.”
“Yeah, well, you know how they did things back then. Very quiet. I doubt my folks ever even knew what hit them. Then they moved away and I never heard from them again.”
“And you’ve never tried to find them?”
“Why bother? They probably feel bad enough as it is. And then I’m sure they’d be really pleased to find out their daughter’s a lesbian. It would be just one more set of people I’d have to lie to.”
“Maybe they wouldn’t care about that.”
“Wouldn’t your family?”
She was getting an edge in her voice from having revealed too much. There was a hard look in her eyes that in a different person, one less wilful, might have been a prelude to tears.
“I ought to get going,” I said.
“Sure. Send me a postcard.”
She saw me to the door. There was a mat there where a pair of Rita’s winter boots had sat since her departure.
“Are you still seeing Suzanne?” I said.
“I suppose. Not really. It’s pretty casual.”
“Oh.”
She laughed.
“I guess you thought lesbians mated for life.”
“Something like that.”
We stood awkwardly a moment but then both in the same instant reached out for a sort of hug.
“Hope you find what you’re looking for,” she said.
I hadn’t told my family yet about my going. When I was a child, a return was always a matter of a certain ritualized formality like a funeral: those returning would sit in wait in their kitchens or rec rooms the night before their departure and all evening long people would come to them like petitioners with their envelopes or little packages to be carried back to their relations. It had always struck me how little joy there had seemed to be in these events, as if a return were a matter of grave risk or threat or as if it were a sort of judgement against those who remained behind, a source of quiet humiliation. Once I had gone with my father to see off his cousin Alfredo: he had brought a small package with him wrapped in brown paper and string to be passed on to his mother, but he hadn’t been able to look Zi’Alfredo in the eye as he’d handed the parcel over to him. It was probably merely some token, a shawl or a piece of cloth that my Aunt Teresa had picked out; but my father had carried it as if all his shame, his own failure, inability, to return was somehow enclosed within it.
It was less than a week before my departure when I called Aunt Teresa.
“I’m going away,” I said. “To Italy. I thought you should know.”
I could never tell with my aunt from what set of mind she would respond to me out of the competing ones that seemed to play in her head. She could be smug or gruff, could put on an informed, cynical tone that appeared to come from her church group or revert to an old-world atavism and incomprehension as if a gap of centuries divided us. Or sometimes she responded with perfect, lucid understanding.
“It won’t be easy for you,” she said. “People remember things.”
“I know that.”
“Go to your Aunt Caterina, outside the town there. She always had a lot of respect for your mother.”
There were only a few days to wait. All that remained in my apartment were a backpack and duffel bag full of clothes, a mattress, a kitchen table and chair. I spent my days reading novels and drinking coffee in cafés like an exile living a spare but leisured life in some foreign city, awaiting the revolution or coup that would send me home.
It only occurred to me at the last moment that I had to make arrangements for my car. I took it in to a used-car dealer just up the road from my apartment who looked it up and down, impressed with the bulk of it. It was only eight years old but already had the look of an antique, of a car you drove only for show.
“Pretty hard to move a car like that these days,” the dealer said.
“It was my father’s. He hardly drove it.”
He offered eight hundred dollars. By the time the paperwork was done, someone had already parked the car on the lot amidst the rest. A sign in the windshield read SINGLE OWNER, as if my own brief tenure of it had been erased.
Two days later, possessing little more than I had arrived with twenty years before, I got into an airport cab and started back.