The Figures of Beauty (4 page)

Marble was as secure in Anna’s universe as her certainty that she would always live in the hills somewhere in the vicinity of the Carrara quarries. It was impossible to imagine her anywhere else—which didn’t stop her that evening, after our dinner, from sounding as if she’d been away for years, pounding the gritty streets of America, investigating a well-known local story of a young man from the region who’d gone away to get up to no good.

Gianni was handsome as the devil. And clever with a hammer and chisel. He could be a charmer. The ladies went for him. But he had a bad temper and a selfish heart, and he wanted more than he would ever be able to get by carving stone. So he pursued other options. He went to North America as an apprentice in a marble workshop. It was owned by a distant cousin of his mother.

“And then,” Anna said with great drama, “Gianni became Johnny.”

She exaggerated the shift of pronunciation—as if properly to emphasize the evils of postwar emigration. Things went wrong pretty quickly for Johnny. It came as no great surprise to me that there was an icy villainess. She had hair like an angel.

“Did she look like Veronica Lake?” I asked.

“Quite a bit,” answered Anna.

In the story Anna liked to tell there was an old house outside a town near the border where the smugglers met. And there was the connivance of transporting heroin in the skilfully concealed cavities of ornamental statuary. They used an old trick that carvers used to hide breaks in stone.

There was a gun on the kitchen table. There were headlights slashing through the shadows of the drive. This was in the days when sedans were as big as boxcars and still had running boards. There was a body in the trunk.

All this appealed to Anna’s enthusiasm for film noir.

But I made the mistake at the table that evening of saying she wasn’t being reasonable. I’m not sure why I felt it necessary to make this point. Anna seldom was. I must have been in a particularly small and literal frame of mind. But Anna had a habit of passing from fact to conjecture to invention in our conversations without so much as pausing to acknowledge their borders.

“Was Angel the kind of dame a man would kill for?” I asked.

Anna’s English wasn’t good enough for her always to spot sarcasm. “She was,” she said solemnly.

There was something about the certainty in Anna’s voice that provoked me. I told her that she couldn’t really know if there was any truth to what she was saying. She didn’t really know anything about a handsome, young drug smuggler, or even if there had ever been one. It was already a dimming local legend—one that persisted in the collective memory of the marble studios of Pietrabella and the quarries of Carrara largely because there were so few facts about it to forget.

“Look at
David
’s hands,” she repeated softly, and there was something in the quiet of her voice that made me realize that I’d lost whatever argument I thought we were having. So I did what Anna told me to do. I tried to picture
David
’s hands.

“They’re all wrong,” she said. Anna spoke with her customary confidence. “He carved them out of scale. Crazy out of scale. They are not reasonable. Do you see that? But the piece is true.”

So. As you see. Remembering my time in Italy on my behalf need not be an exercise in accuracy. That would run counter to the spirit of the summer I was with your mother. And it is the spirit of that summer that is what I want you to think about every now and then. That’s all.

And that is why I am suggesting that you make no literal use of what Robert Mulberry has advised me to write. The presence of Herkimer, Mulberry, Cannon, and Flatt can’t help but make things sound more Dickensian than they are. Although, here again, you’d have reasons for ignoring my advice. After all, you are the daughter of two orphans—both of whom have beginnings more suited to fiction than biography.

The circumstances of your mother’s survival as a newborn are well known—at least in the Pietrabella region they are. Mine are not known at all—not anywhere. What facts there are reside almost entirely with me—and with what you may remember of what I told you when you came to Cathcart last summer. How much your mother will care to recall is anyone’s guess. This letter will be a chance for me to set a few things straight.

I’m wondering if I will go down to the house to get another drink.

I’m thinking I should.

Invent is what people who know something of their backgrounds do. It is not a privilege of the abandoned. Those of us who know next to nothing about our past are stuck with the comparatively dull task of writing down facts. Such as: Archibald Hughson noticed a cardboard box beside his swimming pool on a June morning in 1948.

As much as it was his age, it was Archie’s proper, old-fashioned manner—and his loose grey flannels, short-sleeved
dress shirt, balding head, and rimless spectacles—that made him look more like a grandfather than a soon-to-be new parent. He hurried across the poolside flagstones.

The urgency in his voice was unmistakable. His wife came running.

“Oh my shattered nerves,” she said when she saw what the box contained.

Somewhere there must be a police file that indicates that the complainant walked up through his garden early on that June morning and reported sensing an unusual quiet by his swimming pool. He quickened his step as a result. The gentleman reported that he noticed the cardboard box the moment he stepped through the gate at the top of the stone steps.

And Archibald Hughson might have remained an auxiliary detail in a manila folder stored in a crammed metal filing cabinet in a police station. Even in those simpler days, finding a baby did not bestow advantage when it came to adopting it. Authorities and agencies stepped in then, as now.

“Well, I’m not sure, really,” Archie said to one of the three policemen who responded to his phone call. “The birds were silent for one thing. They’re usually quite boisterous at this time of year.”

The burly cops stood, amazed, looking down at the contents of the box, as practically useless as wise men.

“The blue jays can make a terrible to-do,” added Winifred Hughson.

But in this case the Hughsons’ stature in the community overcame what red tape there was—in part because the couple felt obligated to overcome it. Winifred and Archie suspected that the swimming pool had not been randomly selected by whoever had carried me there in the middle of the night. The pool was not an obvious place to find nor a particularly easy
place to get to. And this, they felt, established some connection between the owners of the pool and the baby left beside it. In the blink of an eye—bureaucratically speaking—they became my parents.

Archie was a high school geography teacher. He and his wife lived in a pleasant, tree-lined neighbourhood. Cathcart, in those days, was neither small enough to look like a town nor big enough to feel like a city. All the same, Archie liked to preserve a few verbal souvenirs of his youth. He had grown up in the country.

That morning, so he used to say, was a break-your-back-hot, strawberry summer morning. The sky was so still it was almost white. The cicadas were already buzzing despite the early hour. If you didn’t know better you’d think it was the air that was vibrating. And the sun, just coming above the Hughsons’ next-door neighbour’s roof, was turning the pool’s surrounding red maples the same filigree that he recalled seeing on the windbreak during his summers working as a picker on the strawberry flats out near Cayuga.

It was unusually quiet. But the cardboard box was not still—so Archie could see as he approached it.

“Oh, you were a kicker,” Mrs. Hughson always said to me at this point in the story. Her pride in this fact could have been no more evident had she carried me for nine months.

The carton had been placed with a precision that Archie found inexplicable. It was sitting in a shaft of sunlight, at the spot where his gaze always fell when he first came through the gate. It was the spot where everyone’s gaze fell. Somehow, the box had been left in the night exactly where it was most likely to be seen immediately in the morning. It was right beside the statue.

It may have been the splashing water of the fountain that
made the half-naked figure at the deep end of the pool the centre of everything. Or it may have been the graceful beauty of her form. Either her bent arm was carved with particular skill or the crook of her elbow just happened to catch the sun at the perfect angle in the early morning. It was hard to know.

There was an ocean of sky and there were continents of trees surrounding the pool, but the centre of that world was always that statue. There was the play of light on the surface of the green water. There was the movement of that reflected light on the facade of the old stone bathing pavilion at the shallow end. And there were a dozen other smaller marble statues around the water and in the hedgerow. But it was always the bending female at the deep end that people first saw. And it was there, on the marble flagstone, beside the figure pouring her water jug, that Archie spotted the cardboard box.

Aylmer. Grade A. Archie always said
tamatas
.

And that—the weather, the time of day, and the brand of canned tomatoes—are all I know for certain of my origins. This was an ignorance your mother found perverse.

The story from which I’d come was likely very ordinary and very sad. Those were details enough for me. But not for Anna. She believed in fate. That’s why she believed in a devil named Johnny and a dame with hair like an angel. At least, that’s what she said. Their story was true, so far as she was concerned. Like
David
’s hands.

“America,” she said, “is what everybody dreamed. In those days.”

The more I said I didn’t want to know the story of my origins, the more Anna decided she knew what it was. She took pleasure in her attempts at an American accent when she told it.

Angel moved to the window. She watched the car coming in the darkness. The light through the venetian blinds made
her hair look as white as her skin. Its smooth gleam was parted on her left, and its wave covered her right eye.

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

Your mother thought a love story should have a dramatic beginning.

The Hughsons named me Oliver. They were readers of Dickens. Obviously. It was less predictable that your mother was too. Being Italian and being a fan of so English a writer were not characteristics I’d imagined coexisting until I met Anna. But I was not very worldly. I’d never met anyone like your mother.

It was a discovery I made the first morning I woke up in her rented farmhouse in the hills outside of Pietrabella. This was early in the summer of 1968. Your mother was twenty-four. I was twenty.

There were a few well-thumbed paperbacks under the ashtray beside her mattress on the floor. The one on top was a good deal thicker than the Dashiell Hammett below it. She reached across me. I wasn’t sure if she wanted to read a few pages of
Bleak House
or if she was going to kiss me. Neither, as it turned out. She clapped a hand over my mouth and shook her head solemnly in a way that conveyed my need for toothpaste. She was always direct about things.

She didn’t want the book, either. She wanted to retrieve a half-smoked joint from the ashtray before making coffee—although your mother never used the word “joint.” She favoured a mixture of blond Lebanese hashish and black French tobacco. I’m sure she still does. And she favoured the Briticism, which, with her Italian accent, was further exoticized to “spleef.”

Your mother had little patience for the niceties that I was brought up to believe were good manners. And etiquette was something in which I had placed a great deal of stock when I was young. Being an adopted child was sufficiently strange in Cathcart in the 1950s, and even at a young age I could see that strangeness was no advantage. As a boy, I instinctively cast what weight I could against my circumstances by being extremely respectful of convention.

This was something that your mother saw as a challenge. She took it upon herself to educate me in quite a few things that summer. Drumming out my middle-class instinct for small talk was one of them.

I came by it honestly enough—Winifred and Archie Hughson commented on the humidity, and the quality of August peaches, and the milkman’s friendly nature as avidly as they spoke of anything. But the first time I engaged in conversational pleasantry with Anna, she cut me off. “Talk to me about something I do not already know,” she said. From that day on, whenever I said something that she took to be meaningless chatter she made fun of me with her replies.

“That’s what I told to Michelangelo when I met him on the path coming up from the town,” Anna might answer. “This is exactly what I said.” Her English became elaborately, preciously polite. “Lovely day. Isn’t it?”

I’d learned that it was usually good, and always easier, to go along with what Anna wanted to do. So I followed her lead. “And what was Michelangelo doing on the road?” I asked.

“He was on his way to the convent to do some work for the abbess. There is a carved figure in her fountain that needs repair.”

But the thing to know about Anna is that her stories had a wider intention than just making fun of me. She believed in
the presence of great art more literally than anyone I’ve ever known. Beauty was a spirit that she took to be as real as the wind. It was her religion, really. The sculptures of Bernini, Brancusi, and Michelangelo—her big three—were not artifacts for her.

She was stubborn on this point. When she was still in school she was suspended for two days. She had refused to acknowledge to the sisters that her answer to a question about Michelangelo was frivolous.

When did the greatest of Renaissance sculptors live?

“Now,” she said.

In her way, Anna was always meeting Michelangelo on the path.

I’d reply, “And is his nose as bent as people say?”

Anna nodded gravely. “Michelangelo’s nose is very bent.”

“And how was he?”

“Michelangelo was in a very bad mood. He was cheated by a marble agent. And he does not think the abbess appreciates his assistance.”