The Golden Hour (30 page)

“I’m sorry, but all our decent things are still hidden away,” Mother said, busying herself realigning flatware and refolding napkins. “Rosa’s done her best, but we’ll just have to use our imaginations, won’t we?” She gave a little conspiratorial chuckle and smiled at the group, taking her place at the foot of the table. “Now, Giorgio, my darling, you sit here by me.” She patted the place to her right. “That’s all I’ll say about the seating. The rest of you sit wherever you like.”

Mario avoided looking at me and quickly placed himself to my father’s left and beside Giorgio, leaving me to sit opposite them. He turned to my brother and clapped a hand on his back. “I’ve thought about all of you constantly for the last few months. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through.”

“We’ve missed you, Moses. How’s your arm? It looks okay to me.” Giorgio grinned and shot me a quick look across the table.

“Thanks to your sister it’s fine. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for her—and the miracle of penicillin.”

Mother sent an inquisitive look my way.

“So what’s happening up the river?” Mario shifted in his chair as he deftly changed the subject. “How much longer is it going to take to rout the enemy?”

“Oh, man.” Giorgio shook his head. “It’s been a damn nightmare up there. We’ve been up in the mountains for a few months. The army’s supplied by mules, for Christ’s sake. There’s no hot food for anyone, and the rains have made it not only uncomfortable but impossible to see—like looking through a fogged lens all day long. People are sick; they get hit—the wounded have to be carried down by litter. Morale stinks, and the Allies have suffered so many casualties, it’s ridiculous.”

Father pressed him. “You said they’re going to send in some white reinforcements to shore up the buffalo units.”

Giorgio winced and gave his head a little shake. “All I said was that they are expanding, bringing in more troops, moving things
around. Some of the buffalo units are moving down to the coast, some new ones up here. That’s all. There’s a big spring offensive likely beginning in the next couple of weeks. That’s all I can tell you right now.”

“So what do you partisans do then, if you’re not part of the army?” Mother asked.

Giorgio eyed Father. “We’re operating to a large extent from the other side of the line, Mama, infiltrating the enemy. We know the area. We speak the language. We can move about more easily than they can, undetected. So we keep watch, send messages, harass the enemy.” He looked at Mario next to him and winked. “Hell, if it weren’t for us, I hate to think what—”

“But you don’t actually fight,” said Mother, twisting her napkin tight and weaving it through her bent knuckles.

“Did I say that?” He continued to look at Mario. “It’s all become much more organized, really, along military lines since you were with us: brigades down to companies, platoons, and squads. We’re trained and supplied—some of us even have uniforms. We’re fighting right alongside the Allies. Remember Bacon? Big beefy guy with long hair?”

Mario nodded. “The one from Umbria?”

“Yeah, that’s the guy. Took a grenade in the gut the other day. Worst thing I’ve ever seen.” Giorgio took a long, noisy draft of wine, set his empty glass down, then stared at the table for a long moment. “So—you haven’t heard from Patch?”

Mario shrugged. “I was hoping you’d have something to tell us on that score. Last we heard, you thought maybe he was doing some labor, maybe somewhere nearby. Right, Giovanna?”

I stared at my brother, hoping to divert him, but he refused to look at me. “Yeah, well, who knows, huh? There was a district concentration camp in Bagna di Lucca not too far up the river until the end of January—maybe a hundred Jews or more. They moved ’em all, shipped them to Florence on the train, then off to God
knows where. You gotta get real here, Moses. Gotta get real. These guys don’t fool around.”

Mario looked as if he’d been kicked in the gut. He folded his arms over his stomach, biting his lower lip but staying silent. I wanted to run over and hold him in my arms.

“Well.” Mother was chipper now. “I don’t know who Patch is, but I’m sure he’ll be just fine. Right, dear?”

At that, Giorgio stood up and began pacing back and forth, as if he were walking barefoot on hot pavement.

“Now, son, relax. Sit down.” Father leaned back in his chair, ever the benevolent head of family. “You’re making me nervous. This is a celebration, after all—so just simmer down, will you?” He thought for a moment, then turned slowly to his left. “So, Mario, what are your plans once this war is over? Do you want to go into the banking business? Follow in your father’s footsteps?”

Mario shifted in his chair. “No, sir, I don’t think that I do. Of course, first I’ll need to go back to Turin, to find my parents, find out what’s happened to them.” His hands were working under the table, clasping and unclasping, wringing together. “I’ve got to complete my university degree. But I’m not so keen, at this point, on urban life. I’m more inclined to get into the land, to see what more I can do with our summer property—olive oil, grapes, maybe wine.”

Father looked at him thoughtfully. “Giorgio tells me you have an older brother. What’s he up to?”

At that moment, Rosa entered the room carrying a cake aloft like a torch through the darkness, ablaze with candles. Mother started to sing in her high, quavering soprano, but before any of us could join in, Rosa lurched, tripping over some unseen hole in the tile floor. The cake slid off its platter and hit the floor, cushioning the maid’s extended hands with a greasy sucking sound.

She let out a low moan, then sat up, dazed, rubbing her pastry-smeared hands on her uniform. Tears ran down her cheeks. “Oh,
Dio
. I’m so sorry—I don’t know what happened; I just lost my balance, I guess. I—”

I ran to her. “Rosa, Rosa, are you all right?” I grabbed her elbow and helped her to her feet.

She looked at everyone standing around her, then shyly at my brother, who had obviously not yet paid her a visit. “Oh, Giorgio, I’m afraid I’ve ruined your birthday.”

“Don’t be silly.” He put his arms around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “The dinner was so good we don’t need cake at all. And, Rosa, I can never thank you enough for all the supplies you’ve sent our way. I don’t know how we would have survived without your faithful deliveries.”

“What’s all this about deliveries?” Father was pretending this was the first he’d heard of it. “How much of the insurgency have I been supplying, anyway? No wonder food’s been a little scarce around here.”

“Papa!” I couldn’t believe he’d said that, that he was baiting Giorgio, regressing to his old stand. “What are you talking about? They are the heroes of this war. They’ve been the key to the Allies’ progress around here, right?”

“I don’t remember your asking our permission to supply the partisans, Giovanna.”

“But I couldn’t. I couldn’t risk Giorgio’s safety.” I knew I was repeating myself. “What would you have done, Papa, if you’d known where they were a few months ago?”

“That isn’t the point. You had no right to keep such important information from your parents, no matter what the consequences were.”

My blood was coursing through my veins like a burst dam, pounding in my ears.

I tried to control my voice. “We have a guest, Father. This is Giorgio’s birthday. He’s home. Can’t we please talk about this later?”

He drew himself up. “Rosa, go clean yourself up. We’ll take coffee upstairs. And, Giovanna, I think you should stay right here. I’m sure Mario can find his way back to wherever he’s living by himself.” He looked at Mario. “Am I right, young man?”

“Of course. I should go.” Mario held out his hand. “Thank you for dinner. It’s been a pleasure to meet you”—he shook Father’s hand, then extended it to Mother—“to meet you both. I look forward to seeing you again once this war is behind us.” Not a word to me. He clapped Giorgio on the back. “Ciao, Hermes. Godspeed.”

Father put a hand at the small of Mario’s back, guiding him toward the door. I watched him go, without a glance my way.

We gathered upstairs in our tight little salon, the four of us. The claustrophobic space once again exuded a kind of balm, as if there weren’t enough room anymore for the hostile energy, for the settling of old scores. Mother, always the mediator, the carrier of the family torch, pulled Giorgio onto the small sofa next to her. She took his hand in hers and began stroking his arm. “Now,
bambino
, let’s hear no more about the fighting. Let’s try to forget this war while you are home. It will soon be over. That’s what everyone says.”

Father, still standing, shook a couple of cigarettes up from his pack and offered one to Giorgio. He pulled another out with his lips, struck a match, and lit Giorgio’s, then his own. He sat down heavily in the armchair and took a deep drag, expelling the smoke with a breath of resignation. “It’s tough, son—tough to keep everything going around here. There aren’t any men around. Not enough people to prune, to tie the vines. I don’t know who’s going to plant the fields when the time comes. I’m sick of this I can tell you that.”

Giorgio leaned over Mother to nudge a long ash into their joint ashtray. “It won’t be long, Papa. From everything I hear it’ll be
only a matter of weeks. They’re on the run now, and the Allies have plenty of reinforcements coming in. Since January, four divisions of German forces have already been withdrawn from the country. Those left are tired—maybe a couple of dozen German divisions, maybe five Italian, a few pro-Fascist squadrons privately financed by the Borghese family.”

Giorgio leaned forward, gesturing with his hands, eager to show Father all he knew. He explained how, in the east, they would move north to Ferrara and on toward Venice. “And our group, they’ll keep pushing up the river, sending what’s left there back away from the coast, best we can.” He ground out his cigarette, took a couple of loud slurps of coffee. “I’m going to stick with it. I’ve got to do that. And I’ll likely get drawn farther from home. So don’t expect me back for a while. You probably won’t hear from me either—until it’s over, once and for all.”

Father leaned back and nodded soberly. “Despite what I said tonight, son, I admire what you’re doing. I really do. It’s a nasty business.”

“Why won’t they just give up?” Mother played with the fabric of her skirt. “If it’s inevitable, they should get it over with.”

Papa and Giorgio laughed. “That’s why you’re not a German commander, Mother. God help us—don’t we wish.”

Father lit another cigarette. “Say, Giorgio, do you remember the Spinola boy—a couple of years ahead of you in school?”

“He was from the coast, right? Genoa, maybe?”

“He’s been fighting in Marshal Graziani’s Ligurian Army. I knew his father from the textile business, and ran into him recently. He was scouting out opportunities in the area once the war winds down, says he wants to set his son up in business in Lucca.”

“Good guy,” said Giorgio. “I’m talking about the son. Hell of a soccer player. Smart too.”

“He was asking about the family, about Giovanna. We got to thinking maybe we should introduce them. What do you think,
piccola
?”
He smiled. “It’s about time you started thinking about the rest of your life.”

I had been listening quietly to all this, invisible until now. Everyone turned to look at me. I stared back at Giorgio, unblinking, unbelieving.

“Oh, I don’t know, Papa,” he said. “I expect she’ll find someone on her own. No hurry.”

“Well, it can’t hurt,” said Mother. “You’d like to meet a nice young man, wouldn’t you, dear?”

“No, I don’t think so.” I stood up and turned to leave the room. “And certainly not one who’s been fighting for the devil.”

G
iorgio had to leave the morning after his birthday. Mother and Rosa packed a couple of kilos of flour, some beans, fresh-baked bread, even some honey and oil gleaned from our own diminishing larder. But there was hope in the air, a sense that the war was almost over, and we were proud of Giorgio. Even Mother. She was solemn but bright as she set about straightening his collar and tugging on the cuffs of his shirt. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him on both cheeks. She called him her “little bear” and warned him to be careful, to stay away from the fighting whenever he could. He kissed her tenderly, nodded, and promised, yes, yes, he would be careful. Of course he would be safe. He hugged Father too, who slapped him on the back and told him again that he was doing the right thing.

As for me, Giorgio had come to my room that morning after spending the night on a stained, dusty sofa in the downstairs salon. He had bathed for at least the third time since he had been home. His clothes were clean, his shirt ironed, and he smelled of Rosa’s lavender water as he sat down next to me on my narrow little bed.

“Mario’s a good man, Giovanna. Don’t ever doubt that. Just take Father with a grain of salt. Whatever he says, let it go. It will pass.”

“What do you think he’ll say when he finds out about us?”

Giorgio shrugged. He gathered the loose hair at the back of my neck in his hand and tugged on it as he used to do when we were kids. “I don’t know. But this is your life, Vanna. Remember that—your life, not Papa’s.”

I found Mario that afternoon sitting up against the wall in the tower room, engrossed in a book by Giovanni Morelli, a fourteenth-century Florentine, about the Tuscan tradition of landownership. It was one he had borrowed from the marchese’s library, along with a pile of others on rural life.

I giggled when I saw the cover. “It looks like you’re already planning our rotation of crops. How did you think it went last night?”

“I liked your father,” he said. “He’s strong, he’s ambitious, and he’s a no-nonsense type. He’s someone I think I could learn to love.” He looked quickly away. “But I wasn’t sure he felt so good about me.”

“He seemed to like you well enough,” I said. “But that’s because he had no idea we are lovers.”

“Do you think that would make a big difference?”

I looked at him for a long moment in silence. “I don’t know. But I think you’re right—that you are not what he has in mind for me.”

“Why? Does he have someone else in mind?”

I told him about the Spinola boy, about Papa’s friend and their plan to introduce us. “I’m scared, Mario. I’m really afraid that my future is all tied up with his position in society, that he has ambitions that have nothing to do with my happiness. Papa can be pretty tenacious, pretty obstinate.”

Mario reached out and ran his hand along my cheek. “Don’t
worry,
amore
. Let’s not waste any time being afraid when there’s no reason to. As soon as the war’s over, we’ll break the news—and then we’ll work on a relationship. You just leave it to me.”

I smiled. “You know, Mother’s family was far richer than my father’s, of much higher social standing. And when Papa met Mama at a dance and fell in love with her right on the spot, he set about winning her father over with a vengeance. The story goes that he went hunting and fishing with my grandfather and brought some of his business know-how to bear on Nonno’s agricultural interests. They became friends, and Nonno eventually consented to the marriage.”

“You see? I can do that too.” Mario smiled and stroked the side of my face. “All it will take is a little time once we can concentrate on other things again. I’ll make myself indispensable. I promise.”

The next two weeks seemed to fly. Giorgio’s visit had eased the tension at home considerably, so that both my parents seemed able once again to concentrate on matters that did not concern the war. Papa spent time bent over his farm accounts, plotting improvements and planning how he would manage the spring planting with a much-reduced workforce.

Mother oversaw preparations for Holy Week. It had always been a time for cleaning house, an end of the penitential season in which cleansing the soul manifested itself in an all-out assault on the accumulated dust, grease, and wear of the winter months. That last year of the war it was a mammoth undertaking. Mother and Rosa worked their way systematically through the house, beginning with the decimated
piano nobile
, penetrating every room and eliminating every trace of the careless, slovenly herd of farm animals who had turned our villa into a stable for almost a year. From the walls to the red-tiled floors to the upholstery and the furniture, they washed and scraped, sewed and sanded every single
surface. Then they moved upstairs, where every nook and cranny of the ornate bedsteads and wardrobes were dusted and oiled, the windows cleaned to a sparkle, and the bathroom fixtures restored to family use.

Mother longed to knock down the temporary attic wall and unpack the silver, the good dishes, and family heirlooms, but she was superstitious and decided that it would be bad luck to jump the gun until victory was finally declared.

As for me, I kept to my accustomed routine. In the mornings I worked at the clinic. As the conflict was no longer in our backyard, there were fewer emergencies or crisis cases. We had a number of escaped prisoners of war who had been there for some weeks, even months, who had had serious injuries that were still in the process of healing.

Violetta and Frederick were lovers by then, and I think she worried about the impropriety of her living on the property. I’m sure the marchesa knew, but she never let on until the war was over and the relationship came out in the open. I loved him too and was all for it. Had I thought about it at all, I might have been less enthusiastic. I should have guessed he would carry her off to England.

Each day I delivered lunch to the tower, where I spent the afternoon with Mario. We deliberately ignored the doubt gnawing at both of us and basked in possibilities—of a future that was ours to invent.

I can picture us now lying side by side on the floor, staring at the ceiling. He reaches over and gently ruffles my hair, twirling a lock slowly and steadily around his finger. Then we turn toward each other and stare into each other’s eyes for a long time before one of us asks a question, maybe me.

“What is the worst thing you ever did in school, something that got you in trouble?”

He stares back at me, thinking. Then a little smile tugs gently at the corner of his mouth—the right side, always the right side. “You won’t believe this one.”

“Of course I will,” I say, smiling.

“You promise you’ll still love me?”

“I can’t be sure of that,” I tease. “But surely I won’t if you refuse to answer the question.”

“You know it was a military academy, right?”

“Of course.”

“Well, when I was about fourteen, my friend Marco and I got it into our heads to take one of the guns, just to see if we could do it. We stalked the man who oversaw our target practices until we had figured out the codes to the locks on the cabinets. Then one night Marco and I hid in the cloakroom after school. We opened the cabinet, took out one of the guns, and—under cover of darkness—sneaked it home to my parents’ apartment. We took the whole thing apart, oiled it, put it back together, just as we had been trained to do, and hid it under my bed. We just had to try it, so early the next morning before school, Marco came over. We opened the window a crack and waited for a chance victim. There was a squirrel perched on the eaves of the building across the street, eating a nut.”

I was covering my eyes at this point. “I don’t think I want to hear the rest.”

“What were we thinking? It was Marco, I’m happy to say, who knelt down, took careful aim, and fired. He missed the squirrel, but the bullet was low. It shattered the window of the top-floor apartment, ricocheted off a lead mirror frame on the wall, and then fell onto a valuable porcelain urn on the sideboard, breaking it into pieces. The worst of it is that these people were friends of my parents. They had to reimburse them for the full value of the urn, and Marco and I had to work it off.”

“What about school?”

“We had weeks of detention, and we were never allowed to participate in target practice or use the guns again.” He smiled. “Not perfect for military students, but…” He wrinkled his brow, and a look of sadness passed over his face. “Then all hell broke loose.”

I reached out and pulled him on top of me. “Those days are over, Mario. It won’t be long now until life goes back the way it was before. This madness will pass, and we can lead our lives the way we want to. I just know it.”

It was Papa who brought things to a head. Easter Sunday dawned bright and cloudless. The three of us went to mass together, and I emerged from church rosy and cheerful, inhaling the intoxicating perfume of peach trees in full bloom as we took our time walking home and admired the perfect spring day. The table downstairs was set for the holiday dinner, and just before sitting down, Father offered us each a glass of chilled prosecco. “Here’s to you, my dear, and to you,
piccola,
” he said as he raised his glass and clinked with each of us in turn.
“Salute
.
Buona Pasqua.”