An Italian Wife (15 page)

There are fields at the farm. Endless fields of hay stacked in neat bundles and clover everywhere. The grass smells sweet. Martha presses her face right into it, feels the wet dirt and the soft grass, pushes her face into it and breathes deeply.

FROM THE BENCH
where Martha waits she always sees the same woman walking through the park. At first, Martha thought she was old with her white, wild hair and her blotchy face. But now she realizes that the woman is probably no more than fifty. Her eyes are the blue of the autumn sky in Vermont—deep and clear.

“Winston Churchill is the father of my child,” the woman tells anyone who will listen. “He's the father of my daughter, Poppy. I only want what's mine.”

Martha brings the woman an apple.

“I'm waiting for him to come out,” the woman says, polishing the apple on her thin cotton skirt. “Then I'll say, remember me? Remember the weekend we spent in the cottage by the sea? Well, we have a daughter. I'll say, I only want what's mine.”

Later, Martha sees the apple, shiny but uneaten, lying under a tree.

DIANA HAS PREPARED
a light supper. Cold slices of leftover lamb. A salad. But she tells Nigel she won't be joining them. Some nights it is more than she can manage to make her way downstairs to the dining room.

“Do you think Winston Churchill would have an illegitimate child?” Martha asks Nigel. She is cutting her meat into tiny pieces.

“I don't know,” Nigel says, baffled and embarrassed.

“He's half-American, you know,” she says.

“Of course I know that,” Nigel says. “He's our prime minister.”

She leans wickedly close to him. Her eyes are green with flecks of gold, like a precious stone of some kind. “Did you know his mother invented the Manhattan?” she asks him.

Nigel frowns. “The Manhattan?” he repeats.

“Oh,” she says, grabbing his hands. “It's the most wonderful cocktail. I'll make us some! That's what I'll do!”

“I don't know,” he says.

“Just wait,” she says, closing her eyes, still holding on to his hands. “You'll love a Manhattan.” She opens her eyes. “We won't tell Diana.”

“No,” Nigel says.

“It will be our secret,” Martha says. She winks at him. Such a fun-loving girl, a happy-go-lucky girl. He sees why his son married her. He still doesn't understand why Robin didn't tell them, why he didn't bring her home himself. But he sees Robin loving her. That much is clear.

NIGEL SUPPOSES H
E
SPENDS
too much time drunk. It isn't the drunkenness of his youth, when he and his friends would spend hours at the pubs, drinking and boisterous, singing, loud. This is a somnambulant drunkenness. It makes everything fuzzy and soft. It makes everything pleasant. It slows his thinking and reactions; he knows that. But it's worth it for the gentle humming it brings deep in his brain.

He watches the girl leave and wonders in his drunkenness if tonight she will bring home the Manhattans, like she promised. It is morning. It is May. He is drunk. The girl walks with her bouncy American steps down the gray London streets.

MARTHA SITS
ON
THE BENCH
and eats some bread and cheese. She waits.

“Winston Churchill is the father of my daughter,” the woman says loudly. “I only want what is mine.”

WEEKS PASS
. Nigel waits. But the girl does not bring him secret cocktails.

She is in Vermont. It is fall. The air carries a chill that gets into your bones. Martha sleeps under four blankets, sinking into the feather bed. Her mother reads her Robert Louis Stevenson,
A Child's Garden of Verses.
She closes her eyes and her mother's voice lulls her to sleep.

Since they got word about Robin, Diana has not let Nigel touch her. But tonight he feels her hand slide down his pajama bottoms. She takes him, soft and small, into her hand and works and works but he cannot grow hard. There is an ache where his leg used to be, a deep ache. He thinks he might cry from what he has lost and the pain it brings him now, even after all this time. Diana pumps and pumps his poor soft thing. When she gives up, he makes his way on his one good leg to the front room and sits in his pajamas and drinks another glass of sherry.

From behind the closed door of the girl's room he hears that song.

Missed the Saturday dance . . . Heard they crowded the floor . . .

THEN, WHEN HE
has finally given up hope that Martha will come to him, she slips into his study. Nigel does not want her to see him like this. He has on only his boxer shorts and his shirt. His artificial leg leans against one wall like a sentry. The stump where his leg used to be is bright red and covered with fresh sores.

But he cannot get up and hide it from her. She is here and is holding a pitcher of amber liquid with ice and cherries in it. In her other hand, she has two cocktail glasses.

“Try to get some bourbon in this town,” she says, laughing. She tries not to look at his stump.

She pours them each a drink, then hands him one. When they clink glasses, she says, “To Winston Churchill!”

“To Winston Churchill,” Nigel says. The drink is delicious, sweet but sharp. “Very good,” he says.

“What happened to you?” she asks, glancing at it.

“War,” he says. “The last one.”

She is a good drinker, this girl. A party girl, Nigel thinks after she refills their glasses.

“Where did you meet him?” Nigel asks her.

“At a dance,” she says. “He was in uniform. So handsome,” she says, her eyes and her voice both fading. But then she turns bright again. “Like his father.”

Nigel has that foggy pleasure in his brain. The girl is muted somehow. The sound of her voice distant.

She moves toward him, reaches out a tentative hand.

He sits perfectly still.

She runs her fingers across the stump lightly. “So smooth,” she says, surprised. “Like a baby.”

Her fingers linger there.

Nigel thinks of his son. Robin knew this girl intimately, privately. She holds some key to him that Nigel would never have had if she had not appeared in April on their doorstep. He knows that his wife wants her gone, but how can they let her leave and take the last bits of Robin from them?

“Where do you go every morning?” Nigel asks her. The bourbon has numbed his tongue. It burns in his gut.

“I'm waiting to talk to Winston Churchill,” she says.

Her mother holds her on her lap while she kneads the bread. She tells her how you know the dough is ready. She has Martha press her little finger into the wet dough. Se
e how it springs back? her mother says. Martha watches as the small dent her finger left disappears, and the dough is once again smooth and whole.

“If we could only get enough flour,” Martha tells them at dinner one night, “I would bake the most delicious bread. It's all in the kneading, you know.”

It is almost June and still the air is damp and chilly. Nigel longs for the sunshine. He longs to throw open the windows and smell the warmth of it. Instead, the cold air smells, still, of war.

Nigel wants to please the girl. “Really?” he says, although he doesn't care about any of it—bread or apples. “It's in the kneading, is it?”

Diana is frowning. She concentrates on dissecting the fish on the platter. She slices it and reveals its spine. She lifts the bone from it whole.

“Lovely,” Nigel says. It is lovely too, he thinks. The shape of it. The sturdiness. Long ago he loved the sciences, biology most of all. He refills his wineglass, splashing some on the tablecloth. It is white, thank heavens. White wine with fish.

Diana holds a serving of the fish toward Martha, who lifts her plate to receive it.

“You weren't married to him,” Diana says, her gray eyes leveled at the girl. “Did you think I wouldn't check? Did you think I would simply believe you?”

Martha looks up, surprised, her fork held in midair.

“Robin,” Diana says, and Nigel is certain he has not heard his wife say their son's name since they got word last winter, It sounds strangled in her throat. “You were not his wife.”

Martha puts a bite of fish into her mouth and chews slowly. “No,” she admits. “Not the way you mean.”

Diana laughs. “The way I mean? There is only one sort of wife. The other . . .” She lets her voice trail off.

The girl continues to eat her dinner. The overcooked green beans, the dry fish.

Nigel watches her, this girl who is not his daughter-in-law after all but instead was what? His son's lover? Whore? He presses his fingertips into his temples, trying to clear the fog in his head.

“You have to leave,” Diana is saying. “You have to get out of our house. Go back to America. Or not. I don't care where you go. But you must leave here.”

Martha continues to eat. She says between bites, “I met him at a dance. So handsome. So British.” This makes her laugh. “He came by my flat the next morning and asked if I'd like to take a ride with him. He said he would be going off to fight soon. He was trying to get a lot of living in. Just in case, he said. I don't think I was away from him again, until he left. I came here because I didn't know where else to go. Who else had loved him? Who else had known him, really?”

Nigel's heart goes out to the girl. He says, “Surely you would have been his wife. . . .” When he sees the hurt look on her face, he corrects himself. “His legal wife, if he'd come back. We'd be sitting here, the four of us, with fresh-baked bread and lots of butter.”

Martha smiles at him, gratefully, he thinks.

“We don't know any such thing,” Diana says. “He never once mentioned you to us. Why would he? Young men who go off to war need to have pleasures that make them feel alive. They need to have relations with a woman. It makes them feel invincible. If he had come home, he would be here without you. Without your bread. We would never know you even existed.”

“You're wrong,” Martha says, her face set with determination.

ALL SHE HAS
is one green valise, a small square thing. He watches from his window as she walks away from him, down the street, the suitcase bumping against her. There is a light rain falling. The air carries a chill unusual in early June.

Nigel imagines opening a window and calling for her to come back. We'll drink Manhattans, he'll say. He can almost hear her footsteps on the stairs and see her bright face in this dim room. The bourbon on her breath, the cool touch of her fingers. Shakily, Nigel pours himself a sherry and lifts it to his lips. It is ten o'clock in the morning. His day stretches before him, endless, cold, lonely.

WHEN DIANA GOES
into Robin's room, where the girl had the nerve to stay all those months, she finds the record still on the phonograph. Carefully, she lifts it like it is a precious thing and smashes it against the sharp edge of the nightstand. It cracks easily. She lifts it again and again, each time bringing it down with as much force as she can muster, until it is nothing. Nothing but shards. A useless broken thing.

MARTHA SITS O
N
THE BENCH,
shivering slightly in her trench coat. Her valise is at her feet. She has no idea what she will do next. There is nowhere for her to go. She thinks of Robin, his face with the chiseled good looks of a movie star. His voice, so clipped and British; she used to mimic it to entertain him. She thinks of how he touched her there, and there; his lips on hers, so hungry and fierce; all the ways he entered her, his hands on her waist, his body over hers, under hers, behind hers. She cannot imagine that body cold, without life. She cannot imagine those lips silenced, empty.

Martha watches as the big black car comes to a stop across the street.

She hears footsteps running and a voice: “Winston Churchill, you are the father of my baby!”

Martha gets to her feet, leaves the valise behind, and walks quietly toward the car. Its doors fly open and men in dark suits and dark hats and faces cast dark with worry, emerge.

Winston Churchill gets out last. Martha is right in front of him.

“Mr. Churchill,” she says.

He looks up. His face is soft with a round nose and big jowls. His eyes narrow, seeking some recognition of her.

“Mr. Churchill,” she says again.

Behind her the woman screams, “I only want what is mine!”

Martha looks into Winston Churchill's face and tries to say what is in her heart. How she loved a man who went to war and will not come home. How she seeks comfort any way she can. How she needs refuge from the things in the world that are killing young men like hers.

Without thinking about what she is doing, she goes to Winston Churchill and hugs him. Startled, he takes her into his arms. He murmurs something that she cannot understand. All she can do is smell the wet wool of his coat, his strong aftershave, and oddly the crisp smell of apples and bread baking. One of the other men comes between them, but not before Mr. Churchill has patted her back and offered some words of kindness.

Then she pushes away from him and is left standing as he disappears with all the men in black suits and hats into the building.

Martha does not move. She lifts her face to the rain. It is gray here. The bombers are on their way. Martha opens her arms, the arms that have held great men, and finally weeps.

La Vigilia