The Figures of Beauty (28 page)

A
NGEL WAS A STONE COLD BEAUTY
. She was the kind of dame a man would kill for.

When Anna told the story there was always a gun on the kitchen table. It never did anything. Chekhov notwithstanding. It never went off. But she always included it in her description. It was a reminder that things are bound to go wrong.

The car was from the days when sedans were as big as boxcars. Its headlights were slashing through the shadows of the drive.

It was an old house in the country outside a town near the border. Everything gleamed, the way the nighttime does in black and white movies. This was the world Anna thought Oliver came from. It wasn’t surprising, really. She’d never learned much more about America.

It wouldn’t have been all that difficult—through veterans’ associations and army records—for Anna to have tracked down
the G.I.s who’d made their way up from the ruins of the villa, through the outcropping of rock, to the village of Castello in the aftermath of the massacre. But Anna only ever said that she was saved by the Yanks. And left it at that.

It was difficult to tell whether she viewed it as a good thing or just the best that could have been hoped for under the screwed-up circumstances of Europe in August 1944. “We were all saved,” she said, “by Betty Grable and Lucky Strike and Hollywood.” She shrugged. “What can you do?”

Angel moves to the window. She watches the car coming through the darkness. The light through the venetian blinds makes her smooth fall of hair look almost white. It is parted on her left, and its wave almost covers her right eye.

Good, she thinks. That bastard Johnny’s here.

They move the heroin across the border near Niagara in statues: in the antiques and memorials and ornamental statuary that Angel guides through customs with her fur coats and her great legs and her enthusiasm for fine Italian sculpture that the guards always so enjoy.

She has a killer figure. She has a winning smile. She has a good prep school accent. For a hustler.

The junk is out of Indochina. By way of a lab in Marseilles and the manager of a marble exporter in Italy. That’s where Johnny comes in. He works in a marble workshop on the Canadian side—about sixty miles away. He knocked up some girl there. He delivers every few months.

There isn’t much that can surprise Angel. She’s been around the block once or twice. But the news Johnny brings raises an eyebrow. Her left, to be precise.

She holds the cigarette in a V of elegant fingers. The smoke drifts across her face.

“Say that again,” she says quietly.

“She’s dead,” Johnny repeats.

“I see.”

“I didn’t mean to. The baby was crying. She was shouting. So I smacked her.”

Again, the left eyebrow. Angel is familiar with the way men smack.

Another drift of smoke.

“Okay. So a couple of times. So I smacked her a couple of times. But the thing was she fell. She just tripped over her own fucking feet. She was holding the baby. So she couldn’t, you know, stop herself. She just fell. And she cracked her head against the corner of the bed frame. Right here.”

He points to his right temple, as if with the barrel of a pistol.

“And that was it. Kapow. Just like that.”

“Just like that,” Angel says. She speaks slowly and with more skepticism than she feels.

“Whaddya think? That I wanted to kill her?”

“So you brought her here?”

“What else am I going to do with her? You got fields. You got woods.”

“And the baby?”

“What am I going to do with two kilos of yellow powder, a dead body, and a baby? Call Children’s Aid?”

“So what did you do with the baby?”

“I left it. Lino will take care of the baby. There’s no goddamn problem there. But what I gotta do is disappear. Fast. Can you get me across?”

“I thought you said the old man was sick.”

“He’s not so old. He just looks it. And he’s not that sick. He had a stroke. Not so sick that he won’t hear a baby crying.”

Angel considers all this.

One less border is always a good thing. And anyway, she’d
been thinking recently that the city was one big headache. This hood’s turf. That hood’s turf. She’d get in trouble sooner or later. That was for sure. And that’s why she’d been thinking maybe the future isn’t a big city. Maybe it’s near the border. Maybe it’s between the driveways and the lawns of suburbs and towns. They have families. They have money. They have kids who will want to get high.

She stubs out her cigarette.

Johnny is sitting across from her, bent forward, his head in his hands. He has dark hair, broad shoulders, strong arms.

He isn’t crying. She kind of wishes he was. But the plan that is beginning to take shape is worth the risk. She’s thinking about a small ornamental stone and monument operation on the American side. She’d have to be careful of Johnny, that’s all. He has a selfish streak she’d have to watch.

But she knows how to handle him.

“Come here, you big dope,” she says. And she shimmies to one side of the armchair to give him room.

L
INO
C
AVATORE HAS BEEN LISTENING
to the baby cry for more than an hour. It was late at night when it started. But it was not for him to interfere.

He looks ashen. He looks very tired. He has always looked older than he is. But now his appearance seems to him not to be misleading. He feels old.

He might recover. He might be able to move easily again. The doctors say there is hope at his age. They say this very sadly, though. And after more than three decades in Cathcart, Lino knows English well enough to understand what they mean. They are saying that with strokes like this there’s always hope. Just not much.

When Lino learned his trade in the Morrow studio in Carrara he was thrilled with the process of carving stone. The
sbozzatore
first roughs out the block with his point chisel. This is the beginning. Then the more detailed carvers work the stone,
first with flat and claw chisels, then with an ever-more-fine system of rasps. Then the polishing.

He has a skill. He doesn’t think of it as a gift—even if everyone else does. It’s luck more than anything. It’s just a talent he has.

Lino has the ability to see the one thing that makes a good piece of sculpture good. And a great piece of sculpture great. And to copy that. The size is just a question of mathematics. Copies are Lino’s bread and butter. Michelangelo is a specialty. Lino sees nothing cheap in this.

When he was learning his trade his copying was always faithful, precise, devotional. He is proud of this. And anyway, when Michelangelo was little more than a boy, it was the skill of his copying that first drew attention to his genius. Vasari reports that the young Michelangelo “used to tinge his copies and make them appear black with age by various means, including the use of smoke, so that they could not be told apart from the originals.” As a teenager, Michelangelo carved a Cupid in white marble and then buried it for a time so that it could be convincingly passed off as an antique.

Lino uses the same technique. He buries his marble figures—after knocking off a nose or an arm with a crack of his point chisel. But he adds to Michelangelo’s technique six months of a trick he learned from Julian Morrow.

Lino is not a big man, but he pisses like a horse. For six months his torrents rain down on the earthen courtyard outside his studio on the outskirts of Cathcart. As he pees he looks out at the hydro lines and strawberry fields past his workshop.

Making souvenirs is how he first learned his business. When he was an apprentice in Carrara, his sibyls cradled telephones. His Bacchus was a candelabra. His Davids and his
Pietàs
were sold in railway shops in Florence and Rome and Milan. He did cigarette lighters. He did fountains.

In the marble studios in Carrara where he had apprenticed—and from the time he stepped, in the early spring of 1932, from the last of the trains that had taken him from Halifax to Montreal, to Toronto, to Cathcart—Lino was proud of the tradition of which he was part.

He wore a blue stoneworker’s jacket. It came almost to his knees. His smudged glasses, his impatience with what was often the less than satisfactory efforts of the crew he oversaw on the grounds of Barton House, and his frenetic energy gave him the aspect of a finicky maiden aunt. He wore dust hats made of folded newspaper.

Lino would eventually settle in Cathcart, establishing Cavatore Memorial and Ornamental Stone on an overgrown lot he found at the scruffy end of Locket Street. This was not part of anyone’s original plan. Lino’s goodbyes to his mother and to his brother had not been the farewells of someone who would never return to Italy.

It was Grace Barton’s death that had inspired this unexpected idea. Lino noted how quickly money and resources were marshalled for the memorial. He was impressed by the sedan that had pulled into the gravel driveway where he had established his temporary workshop on the Barton property, and he was impressed with the neatly dressed, efficient young woman from the
Chronicle
offices who stepped from it. No one had prepared for this considerable expense. And yet, there was Argue Barton’s secretary, in a crisp blouse and woollen suit, stepping through the unfinished statuary on the driveway, handing him a manila envelope containing reference photographs of Isabella of Aragon’s tomb and a cheque, signed by Argue Barton, for this sad, additional assignment.

Lino was beginning to see the true affluence of the place where he had ended up—affluent, that is, compared to the place
from which he’d come. And it was while he was working on Grace’s tomb that Lino Cavatore began to ask himself a question he had never previously considered: What if he stayed?

Lino had always seemed to be more sinew than flesh, and well before he was thirty he had a wizened tightness that made him appear much older than he was. It was as if he were passing through time more quickly than other men did—a characteristic that accorded with his serious nature. It isn’t very common to have a stroke in middle age, but when Lino collapsed in the workshop of Cavatore Memorial and Ornamental Stone in 1948, nobody was all that surprised.

His voice had always seemed taut and elderly. The resolute intensity with which Lino had always confronted the turns of his own destiny made him steadily predictable. He would always do good work. He would always provide for those who depended on him. But Julian Morrow had been surprised on that late autumn afternoon in 1932 when, standing at the window of his villa, overlooking his pool and garden, he had opened the carefully addressed envelope and learned that Lino wanted to stay in Cathcart.

In the letter—one it took Lino days to compose, revise, write, and rewrite—he told Morrow of his decision. He could see opportunity in a place that would always need bank foyers and bathroom counters and cemetery monuments but that had no local access to stone or the skills needed to work it. The deep sadness that was buried in Lino’s decision—the sadness of his not returning to the green valleys and blue sky of the hills in which he had grown up—was not something he acknowledged.

The truth was Lino was a lonely man, but his loneliness was not something he ever regarded as anything other than an unchangeable fact. Like the weather in the quarries, it was just
the way it was. Loneliness was something he expressed in his exacting standards and impatience with incompetence.

He didn’t care much for where he’d ended up. Everything was ugly. Except for the strawberries in June and the tomatoes in the early fall, the food was awful. But loneliness here was the same as loneliness there. He had the same useless desires. He had the same burning dreams.

Morrow was irritated by the letter at first. Lino’s was a rare talent, and Morrow was unhappy about losing it. But it did not take him long to reconsider. His own practical self-interest helped him to see when the self-interest of others could be used to advantage.

Morrow knew Lino’s to be the determined logic of emigration—and no logic was more compelling. There was money in Cathcart. It was as simple as that. Lino Cavatore had a mother and a crippled brother to support.

Morrow answered promptly. He wrote to say he understood. About seeing opportunity. At a reasonable but by no means overly generous rate of interest, he made available the funds needed to purchase the Locket Street property and the faded frame cottage at its edge. And, of course, Morrow International would supply (at a deferred but mutually advantageous price) whatever stone the new business would require.

But the baby is still crying in the night. And this has gone on for more than an hour.

So Lino Cavatore makes his way, very slowly and with great difficulty, from the little frame house at the edge of the workshop’s property. In the dark, he finds his way through panels of marble lined up like trays in the yard. The bigger blocks are like iceboxes. He is on his way to the apartment above the workshop where, over the years, the apprentices he brings out from Italy have stayed.

Gianni’s car is gone. This is odd. At this hour.

He unlocks the studio. With only one arm that works properly this takes a few minutes. Twice, he drops the keys.

The wide-planked floors, deep sills, and high, raftered ceilings of the studio look as if they have been carved from a cliff of marble. The rough wooden shelves are white. The maquettes are white. The armatures are white. The calipers and files and claw chisels are white. Only the workbench has had the marble dust swept off.

It was the worst luck.

Not the stroke. That was bad luck enough. But it was the worst luck that of all the apprentices he has had over the years, it was this one—this handsome one, this useless one—who was there when Lino Cavatore was taken to the hospital and then, five weeks later, returned to the workshop and his home.

He couldn’t speak. He could not move very well. And this one, the handsome one, the useless one, was up to no good, somehow. Lino could see that. He had been planning to send him home. He didn’t trust him.

And then the girl moved into the rooms above the workshop.

And then there was the baby.

He’s seen such things before—a girl so young and strong she could hide it almost until her time. He hadn’t noticed himself for a long time.

But what are they thinking? Lino collapses for a moment in his chair, beside the stove where he heats the abrasives he uses on stone. He is amazed at how tired he is. He feels like he wants to sleep.

They are keeping the baby a secret. From her parents, he guesses. They are living in a hiding place.

They are children, he thinks. They are playing house.

The stairs to the apartment above the studio are steep and narrow and very difficult. It takes him forever.

He knows immediately that something is wrong. The baby is on the bed. Even before he sees the blood on the floor he knows something is wrong. He stands there, unmoving, for almost a minute.

His mind is still good. He sees things clearly. He knows what he is going to do.

He senses how much movement is still possible. He can feel it inside him. He knows his left arm is useless, but the right is not so bad. He shuffles stiffly and slowly. But he does shuffle. If he finds something he can carry with one hand it could work. There is a pail.

He moves slowly in the darkness. He finds the blanket in the dresser. The wool is soft, the colour of dusty rose. It was sent to him by an aunt a few years after he first moved to Cathcart—long before it became clear, even to his female relatives, that he had no interest in finding a wife.

He finds a cardboard box. Aylmer. Grade A.

He flattens the cardboard with his feet. Then he squeezes it as firmly as he can under his elbow. He tucks the baby boy into the blanket and then curls it, as if he were seated, into the pail.

The streets are empty. There are crickets in the hedges he passes and in the dewy, carefully tended lawns.

When, almost two hours later, he makes his way back down through the garden from the pool, he does not return to Cavatore Memorial and Ornamental Stone. He turns right, not left, at the corner of Hillside Avenue. He isn’t sure why. He is too tired to think. He wants to sleep so badly he thinks he might be dreaming. He still has the pail. And he continues up, along the switchback trails, stones slipping underfoot, slowly, so slowly, up.