The Confessions of Frances Godwin (31 page)

I didn’t go into the house itself—because it was getting late—but I bought an Italian translation of
Romeo and Juliet
in the gift shop.

That evening I was going to read for a while and then cobble together a dinner from some spaghetti and garlic Samantha had arranged on the kitchen table, along with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper, a packet of bread sticks wrapped in cellophane, and a large bottle of red wine. The table was covered with a bright yellow cloth.

But after a second glass of wine, sitting alone in the empty apartment on via Vipacco, my copy of
Romeo e Giulietta
unopened on the kitchen table, I began to fantasize that Paul’s spirit
would
show up in Verona. I didn’t want it to go to Lois’s.

“Oh, Paul Paul Paul,” I said aloud, surprising myself, as I peeled a clove of garlic. “What an adventure this would be if you were here. Not the way you were at the end, but . . .” I didn’t finish the sentence, but I was thinking, remembering Paul at his sixty-third birthday party, before the cancer, when we first talked about returning to Verona. You couldn’t see the top of the harvest table for all the dishes and wine bottles, but I could see Paul presiding at the far end: bawdy, Falstaffian. The whole department was there, and Paul was singing:

No more dams I’ll make for fish

Nor fetch in firing

At requiring;

Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish

’Ban, ’Ban, Cacaliban

Has a new master: get a new man.

Freedom, high-day! high-day, freedom! freedom,

high-day, freedom!

“Oh, Paul Paul Paul,” I said again, as if I were sitting on the edge of his bed again on the day that he died. “You know what I
really
want? I want to set things right again. All this time I’ve blamed you. Maybe Dr. Franklin was right. I should have been more understanding. I see now that there was plenty of room for the books and for the piano. But I’ll have to leave that for someone else. And Jimmy. I killed Jimmy, you know. He had it coming, but I’m sorry anyway. I’m going to confess to Father Viglietti in Rome. He doesn’t know it yet. You remember Father Viglietti, of course you do. He spoke at your memorial service at the college.”

I tried to concentrate on the clove of garlic I was trying to slice with a dull knife. I poured a little olive oil into a saucepan that weighed about two ounces—the sort of saucepan you find in vacation cottages—and turned the gas on.

I tried again to call Stella, but there was no land line in the apartment and I still couldn’t get the new cell phone she’d given me to work. There were too many options, too many buttons. I tried several times, following her written instructions, dialing the code for the U.S. number over and over again, but before I could enter her cell phone number, a voice in Italian would interrupt and explain why this call couldn’t be made. My Italian is pretty good, but I couldn’t understand the explanation.

I had brought with me a CD that Stella had made for Paul and me, a Christmas present, with recordings that she’d transferred from old cassette tapes to GarageBand and from GarageBand to iTunes and from iTunes to the CD. It contained a short version of the story of our life as a family, or at least one version of that story: Stella reading some of her early poems and playing the piano; me playing Chopin and reading my translations; Paul reading Shakespeare sonnets and playing the piano.

I inserted the CD into the slot on the front of my laptop computer and waited, while the computer made grinding noises, for the CD icon to appear on the screen. When it did, I double clicked it, and suddenly Paul’s voice filled the room: “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action.”

I thought about Paul and Lois. “You always were a dark-lady guy, Paul, weren’t you. Couldn’t keep your hands off Lois when I went to Rome that summer. You thought I didn’t know.”

But I managed to stop myself right there. Who was I to talk? Besides, I hadn’t come to Verona to scold Paul.

I added a handful of coarse salt to the pasta water and then a handful of thick spaghetti. There was no scale to weigh the spaghetti and no timer to time it, but I had an inner scale, and an inner timer.

I gave the spaghetti a stir with a wooden spoon. I was on my third glass of wine. Paul was on sonnet 138. I repeated the words along with him. “‘When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her though I know she lies.’ It was a mid-life crisis,” I said. “I was very understanding. I took a certain pleasure, in fact, in being very understanding. And I really was understanding. I wasn’t faking it. That was twenty-five years ago, ancient history. And then one day I come home from school—the last faculty meeting of the year—and you’re dead and Lois is sitting on the bed next to you.

“Ah, the hell with it . . . What am I doing here? Talking to a ghost? Not even a ghost!”

By the end of the evening, and of the bottle of wine, I had no idea.

I woke up with jet lag aggravated by a terrible hangover. I was still disoriented. I was confused and depressed. I’d crossed a line the previous night. Made a fool of myself. At least no one had been there to see me. I didn’t see how I could go back, didn’t see how I could go forward, either, couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted to do in Verona. Or Rome. The prospect of confession to Father Viglietti now seemed like a foolish pipe dream.

I tried to make coffee in the espresso pot, but the espresso pot leaked from the center, where the top screws onto the bottom. The coffee ran down the side. The gas flame sputtered and went out. I turned off the stove. I hadn’t unpacked my suitcase and didn’t intend to. I was going home ASAP.

I tried again to call Stella but got the same calm voice explaining that this call was not possible. I tried calling from different parts of the apartment—from the balcony off the kitchen, from the window in the bedroom, on the north wall. Always the same voice explaining why the call couldn’t be completed. I listened to the explanation, but I still couldn’t understand.

I got some clean clothes out of my big suitcase, something suitable for confronting a
padrona—
a simple sheath dress, gathered at the waist, and a pair of flats. I was trying to get a brush through my tangled hair when the bell rang. I hadn’t cleaned up the mess on the stove. I didn’t care. I wanted my money back. Most of it, anyway. But there was no confrontation. Samantha returned the money, eight bank notes, which were still in her purse. Eight crisp one-hundred-euro notes, each with a picture of a Renaissance palazzo with receding arches. She agreed to help me change my return flight, and apologized about the coffee pot. It was a special pot, she said. You needed only a small amount of water.

“I’m sorry,” I said, embarrassed. “I wanted . . . I thought . . . It’s the anniversary of my husband’s death. Next Tuesday. I need to be home. In case his spirit returns to say good-bye.”

“I should have explained about the coffee pot,” Samantha said. “I was in such a hurry yesterday afternoon.”

“I’ll clean up the stove,” I said. “But maybe we should call the airline first.”

Samantha started to wipe off the stove. “We need some coffee. Let me show you.” She proceeded to demonstrate, using a little plastic cup to measure a small amount of water. Then she dipped her finger in a tiny jar of olive oil and rubbed the tip around the threads of the coffee pot. “You have to do this to get a proper seal,” she explained.

She put the pot on a small burner with the lid up. We waited for the coffee, staring at the inside of the pot.

“You have to keep the lid up,” Samantha said, “or it won’t make the
crema.
And that’s the whole point of this pot.”

I knew because Paul had a pot like this that I was not allowed to touch. I didn’t want to spoil it for her.

We waited. “It takes a while,” Samantha said.

Finally a sheen of coffee wrapped itself around the stem and then suddenly the pot whooshed and Samantha turned off the burner. The coffee continued to bubble up through a special valve, or filter, and then Samantha poured two small cups with blue stripes under the rim, just like the ones we used at home. The surface of the coffee was covered with a rich crema. We sat down at the kitchen table.

“You know,” Samantha said, “your husband’s spirit is free to wander over the whole universe. I’m sure he’ll find you right here in Verona.”

“Do you think so?”

“Of course.”

But then he could have found me in Galesburg .
.
.

The coffee was delicious. The best I’d ever tasted. Better than the coffee in the big machines in the bars.

Samantha, I learned, was from Bologna. We discussed Bologna. And after a while I realized that we were speaking in Italian, and that Samantha was calling me Francesca instead of Frances.

Samantha loved Bologna and had never wanted to live anywhere else, but she’d fallen in love with a Veronese.

“
Amore
,” I said, shaking my head. “
Odi et amo
.
Catullus 85. ‘I hate and I love. How can I do both? I don’t know, but I feel it, and it’s a bitch.’ I’ve just finished a translation of Catullus,” I said. “I wanted to come back to his hometown. Maybe go out to Sirmio, the family place on Lake Garda.”

“Sirmione,” Samantha said, giving it its Italian name. “We could go together, but I couldn’t do it this afternoon. I’ve got the play again tonight.”

“It’s a different kind of love,” I said. “Not very romantic. Catullus and Lesbia weren’t Romeo and Juliet.”

She laughed. “The love impulse is irresistible,” she said, “unstable. But so is the impulse to love one person with your whole heart. Have you been to the Casa di Giulietta?”

I looked her in the eye: “Fake fake fake,” I said. “The balcony was added later to look like the balcony in the George Cukor film. But you know that.”

“Yes, it’s fake,” she said, “but it’s become real. A real shrine. People come here when they’re in trouble, in pain. Like your shrine of Canterbury. Or Santiago di Compostella. They even write letters.”

“ ‘Dear Juliet’ letters?”

Samantha nodded. “There was a Russian woman who stayed three weeks in this apartment. She became the Russian Juliet. When we get a certain number of letters from Russia, we put them in a packet and send them to her in Moscow. She answers them in Russian and sends them back to us, and then we send them back to the people who wrote them.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. But it turned out that Samantha was one of a dozen volunteers—all young woman—who answered the letters. Five thousand letters a year.

“Like Ann Landers.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry. It’s just that romantic love is nothing but trouble. It’s all based on frustration. In the Middle Ages it was regarded as a disease. And there was only one sure cure.”

“What was that?”

“Let the lovers live together for a while.”

Samantha laughed. “Francesca,” she said, “you’re just like a window. I can see right through you. Tell me the truth, was that your experience? I mean really?” She touched me—a light touch on the wrist with her fingertips, and then a firm hand clasp on my forearm—and it had been such a long time since anyone had touched me that I broke down and started to cry, and by the time I was done crying, I’d told her about the end of Paul’s life and about Lois and about Stella and Jimmy and Tommy (but not about the murder).

“What would
you
say to Paul?” I asked her. “I mean,
you
as Juliet?”

She looked into her empty espresso cup. “If I were Juliet,” she said, and after a long pause she put her hand over her heart and started to speak. I didn’t recognize the words in Italian:
La mia generosità è davvero sconfinata come il mare
.

“It’s from the balcony scene,” she explained. “Just before the nurse starts calling Giulietta to come in.”

And then I put two and two together.

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite.

“That’s what Juliet would say to Paul?”

“No. That’s what she would tell you to say to Paul’s spirit when he shows up. You don’t need to be afraid. He’s not going to scold you.”

“What if he goes to say good-bye to Lois instead?”

“That’s a risk you’ll have to take.”

She gave me a cell phone to use—she had three—and said I probably needed an Italian SIM card for my phone to work in Italy. I wouldn’t be able to call the United States with her cell phone, but I’d be able to receive calls from the U.S., and I could make calls in Italy. I dialed her number. Her phone rang. The two of us stood in the kitchen and talked to each other on our cell phones.

“What about Juliet?” I asked. “What would you say to
her
? If
you
were Juliet?”

Samantha laughed again. “If I were Juliet, what would I say to Juliet? I’d say, ‘Don’t do what I did.’”