The Faces of Angels (15 page)

I pause for breath, and I can feel Kirk staring at me, a sandwich halfway to his mouth. ‘They liked killing things,' I say. ‘Especially in gardens. As a matter of fact, there's a story about it in
The Decameron
.' My voice is gathering speed now, running away like a ball rolling downhill.

‘A young man falls in love with a woman, but she doesn't love him, so he kills himself. Then she dies. And since suicide is a mortal sin, and she was so hard-hearted because she didn't love him, both of them are punished. For eternity. His punishment is to chase her through this beautiful wood, and her punishment is to run away from him. But, every time, he sets his hounds on her and catches her, and kills her and cuts her heart out. Then, as soon as he does, after just a few seconds, she jumps up again, runs off again and he has to chase her again. And they go around and around like that in the beautiful wood, him killing her because she didn't love him, and her being killed because she was so cruel, over and over and over. For ever. Amen.'

‘Jesus.'

I don't look at Billy, but I can sense her eyes on me. I can feel her parted lips and see the bright white line of her teeth just the same way I can see the birds flying into the nets, and the running woman, and the hounds. The man wielding his knife. The shower of feathers landing on the trampled grass. I reach for my wine and it spills, running down the inside of my wrist.

Henry touches my arm. His hand feels hot through the sleeve of my shirt. ‘Mary?' he asks. ‘Are you OK?'

‘Oh, just leave her alone!' Billy stands up suddenly, pieces of grass clinging to her hair and dress. ‘For Christ's sake,' she says, ‘just leave her alone.' Then she turns and stalks up the slope towards the ruins of the coffee house.

‘I'm sorry.' It's a few minutes later when I say this to Henry.

Kirk has followed Billy up the hill, his coat a dark pile, like a skin some animal has shed, lying on the edge of the rug. From where we are sitting we can see them standing by the red plastic tape that's stretched across the entrance of the little rococo coffee house. Billy runs her hand down the ornate crumbling stone, her fingers plucking at clumps of carved grapes and the worn edges of leaves. Then she ducks under the tape and disappears. Kirk follows her.

‘For what?' Henry asks.

I look at him stretched out in the sun, his head resting on his balled-up sweater. He smiles, and I think again that he looks like a curly-haired bear. It's easy to imagine Henry swiping honey from a pot, or plucking ripe fruit from the branch of a tree.

‘I don't know.' The strange fuggy feeling that has enveloped me all afternoon is slipping away, as if a fog inside my head is clearing, and I wonder how crazy, exactly, I sounded. ‘It's an ugly story,' I add. ‘I guess it upset Billy. Anyways, I'm sorry if I ruined the picnic.'

‘Picnic shmicnic,' Henry shrugs. ‘And don't worry about Billy. She's fine. You want my bet?' he asks. ‘In my professional capacity, that is? I'd say Miss Billy's just not too thrilled when anyone else is the centre of attention.' He grins at me. ‘Especially,' he adds, ‘if they're talking about dead birds.'

In the end, it's Henry and I who pack up the picnic.

Billy and Kirk eventually reappear, holding hands like teenagers, and announce they're going to the Porcelain Museum, an expedition it's clear we're not really invited to join, which is no big deal, since neither of us want to go anyway. Henry says he's not interested in soup tureens and china monkeys playing violins, and I've seen them already. So we volunteer to throw the remains of the sandwiches into the bushes, and wrap up Signora Bardino's sticky glasses, and carry the big basket back to the apartment, where I finally get a call from Pierangelo. He'll be back from Rome tomorrow night and he wants to take me out to dinner.

All day, I have been trying not to fantasize about him pretending to be in the Vatican City with the cardinal while in fact hiding in his apartment with some strange woman, probably Monika, who, in my mind, is now a combination of Angelina Jolie and Sophia Loren, so this cheers me up considerably. Or at least enough to agree when Henry suggests we ‘abandon the lovebirds' and go off for an early meal by ourselves.

We dither for a while over where to go, but our minds are finally made up for us because so few places are open on Sunday evening. We eventually find a tiny trattoria over in San Frediano and have to stand in line, our backs smushed into the coat rack as we hover over the jammed-in tables where couples drink wine out of pitchers and devour the Florentine version of the Blue Plate Special, which usually turns out to be tripe.

‘God,' Henry says when we finally sit down, ‘I am starving. You know what,' he adds as the waiter flings two menus in our direction, ‘I really hate picnics.' He raises his eyebrows when I start to laugh.

‘I'm sorry,' he insists, ‘but I do. There's always way too much food, and you never eat it, because it's all stuff like olives. I mean, I like olives, in moderation. But to tell you the truth, I think sandwiches are really overrated.'

‘I don't know.' I am remembering the deli around the corner from our apartment in Philadelphia. ‘I never went for cheese steaks,' I confess. ‘But I have a serious weakness for Ruebens.'

‘Well, that's different! A Rueben isn't a sandwich. It's an institution. With a pickle.' We raise our glasses to this idea as the waiter comes to take our order, which in neither case is tripe. I have pasta, and Henry has a good old-fashioned steak.

The food arrives and we eat for a few minutes in companionable silence. Then Henry says, ‘Tell me about your husband.'

He is cutting his steak as he says this, concentrating on the pink slab of meat, and for a second I stop chewing. In the normal course of things I would probably demur, or change the subject, or maybe even flatly refuse. But Ty has been so on my mind in the last twenty-four hours that I don't.

‘What do you want to know?'

Henry shrugs. ‘I don't know. Whatever you want to tell me. I mean, what was he like?'

I consider this for a second, then pour myself some more wine. The truth is, I don't know how to answer. I had known Ty for so long by the time we got married, since our senior year at Penn, that I can't remember when I last thought about ‘what he was like'. He just ‘was.' Which, I suppose, means I took him for granted. ‘He was a teacher,' I say finally. ‘And a good person. Some people thought he was virtually a saint.'

Henry glances at me. ‘Saints don't exist.'

I smile. ‘What about angels?'

‘
Oy Vey!
Mary, I'm Jewish, the jury's out.' Henry waves his fork in the air. ‘How about we settle for human beings?' he asks, and for some reason we both find this funny. Our laughter mingles with the cloud of conversation that fills the little room. Then I tell Henry about Ty.

I tell him about the Warren family, who were nice, philanthropic Philadelphia Quakers, and about how we met, unremarkably, in a seminar on ‘William Faulkner and the Genesis of the American Novel' in the fall of our senior year. I tell him how Ty asked me out, picking me from the hundreds of other girls he could have chosen, which to this day puzzles me, because he didn't know me at the time, and now I think the truth is, he never knew me. Not that it seemed to matter to him. Ty claimed he loved me. From the very beginning. Sometimes he'd sing a little song that went, ‘No, honestly, you know you belong to me.' And eventually it became true because Ty decided it was.

‘Sometimes,' I find myself saying, ‘I felt as if I was standing outside the whole thing, watching a movie about two people, one of whom bore a passing resemblance to me. I think I was sleepwalking, for the better part of a decade. Which is kind of scary. But I did it.'

Henry does not watch me too closely while I say all this. He eats, and nods, orders more wine and smiles occasionally. And I understand now why he probably has an awful lot of clients who pay him enough so he can afford to take three months off to learn bad jokes about Brunelleschi's dome. In the end, I even tell him about my parents and Mamaw.

‘Your great-aunt sounds like she was just that,' he says, when I finally stop to attend to my pasta. ‘Great.'

‘Yeah,' I say. ‘She was.' And then without really intending to, I explain how Mamaw died, and how afterwards it really did feel as if Ty might be the only person in the world.

I describe how she called, and her voice had a new huskiness underneath it, and a cough that wouldn't quit. I thought it was a cold, but Mamaw said, ‘I have to talk to you, honey. I have bad news.'

As I tell it, the house in Pennsylvania swims up like something in a dream. Leaves collect on the lawn, drift against the maple tree, and skitter like birds across the frozen grass while I hold the car door open and Ty helps Mamaw into the back seat. He adjusts a pillow under her feet, tucks a blanket over her knees because, even though we have put her parka and lined jeans on, she's cold now all the time. The engine turns over, roaring in the chilly air, and Ty reaches out and squeezes my hand. His wide, tanned fingers close over mine, and both of us try not to look, not to intrude as Mamaw presses her face to the glass of the car window so she can keep looking and looking, so she can hold on to the white clapboard and ugly black shutters until the last possible moment, until we round the corner by the gas station and the house her daddy left her slips out of sight, lost amid the bare branches and scraggly untrimmed hedges of November.

There are poinsettias at her funeral because it's Christmas. And gold-coloured chrysanthemums, which Mamaw loved but I still think are ugly. Ty's parents drive up from Philadelphia, meaning well, but are too sleek and smooth-edged for Mamaw's avocado carpet and the smell of cigarette smoke. His mother asks and asks if there is anything she can do, but it is Ty who shakes hands and talks. He is the one who listens to people cry, who pays the caterers and thanks the priest. And it is Ty who drives back up with me one Sunday in January to pack woollen blankets in plastic bags and mothballs, and pour anti-freeze down the drains, and check that the storm windows are locked.

And it is Ty who, a week after that, picks a dog out of the city pound to make me feel better. He brings it home on a red leash and we call it Leo, and when it gets hit by a car one afternoon the next summer both of us cry. Then, one rainy day in December when Mamaw has been dead for almost exactly two years, Ty comes home early and tells me that someone has dropped out of a teaching exchange programme sponsored by his school. It's a comparative study, teaching in other religious education systems, and they've offered him the space. Italy. Six months in a school in Florence. There's an apartment and everything, and he can take a spouse.

Rain pours down the window above my desk making wormy shadows crawl across the piles of paper stacked on the sill. ‘Marry me,' Ty says. It is not the first time he's asked, but now he gets down on one knee. He produces a diamond ring in a velvet box. ‘Come on, Mary,' he says. ‘Marry me and come to Florence.'

When I stop talking, my half-eaten pasta is cold and the waiter is glaring at us because he wants us to order dessert. Henry is mopping bread around the edge of his empty plate, his brow furrowed as if this is very important work.

‘So what happened?' he asks. ‘I mean with the two of you?'

I shrug, surprised I've said all this. ‘I fell in love with someone else.'

‘So, you got divorced.' It wasn't a question, but I shake my head.

‘No. He died.'

Henry doesn't look up. ‘I'm sorry,' he says. ‘That must have been awful.'

‘Yeah.'

He swallows his bread, and the waiter pounces on our plates. Do we want crème caramel? Tiramisù? A pear with Gorgonzola? We both ask instead for coffee.

‘I did too,' Henry says suddenly. ‘Fall in love with someone else, I mean. She didn't love me, but it didn't particularly matter. I couldn't go back to my wife afterwards. Not 'cause she threw me out. I mean, she wanted me to come back, said she still loved me. But I couldn't. It just wasn't possible.'