The Golden Hour (35 page)

“Oh, Mario. I’m so sorry. I—”

“She went on to say that some people—like me—have slowly been returning. But none of our names were on those lists. ‘But we don’t know for sure what happened at Auschwitz, do we?’ I said. And then she said, ‘No, dear. We cannot know for sure, but Auschwitz was liberated in January by the Russians. If they were still alive…’”

I kept my eyes on Mario’s face. It had never seemed so beautiful to me, so raw, so open, so utterly without defense.

“Giovanna, I feel completely gutted,” he said. “So empty. I don’t think I have a family anymore.”

I wanted to move out, to run away with Mario, to begin a new life somewhere, the two of us alone. But he would have none of it. With his parents and brother gone, the whole notion of family became paramount. Since he was living with the marchesa, Villa Falconieri became our refuge once again. We spent long hours sprawled on blankets on the floor, sometimes talking, sometimes simply lying there, in silence, together.

“You’re just being unreasonable,” he protested one afternoon. It was hot; the sound of a tractor grinding through the fields floated up to us through the open window. “You are all your parents have now, and you want to leave them here alone? Leave them childless?”

“If they loved me, they would want to love you.”

“You’ve got to give them time,” Mario said quietly, his hands folded back behind his head, staring at the ceiling. “They’ve been
through a lot, and they hardly know me. I’d probably feel the same way.”

“With your own daughter? No, you wouldn’t, not for a minute. You’re not like that at all.” I sat up. “My father as much as disowned me because of you. He’s just so selfish and narrow-minded.”

Mario shook his head. “He was angry at the time and felt threatened. He had dreams, images of a future that he thought he was losing. I’m sorry, but your parents are both alive and well. Mine are gone forever. You can’t throw that away. You’ve got to be patient, to love them, and they’ll come around eventually. Just give me a chance to change their minds.” He sat up and faced me, began stroking my forearm slowly with a finger.

“I want our children to know their grandparents, to have roots, to have a history. I want them to know who they are, to know where they come from.”

“But my history isn’t yours. They won’t know anything about your family at all.”

“You leave that to me. Don’t worry; I can fill in the blanks. But why turn our backs on the only family they will have?”

Mario was right. I agreed to keep living at home, and he set about making himself indispensable. Mother was easy. She missed Giorgio desperately, and the craving for her own son drew her to Mario like a starving person following the scent of roasting meat.

She clucked over him like a mother hen, soliciting hours of stories of his childhood, of their life in Turin, of his parents and extended family. She listened with rapt attention to every detail, countering with stories of her own, until he knew more of the Bellini lore than I did. She took comfort in Mario’s friendship with Giorgio and grilled him for details about their years together in school, their partisan exploits, and—over and over—those last days
of the war before his death. Mario had endless patience for it all. I think it was as healing for him as it was for her.

Father was a different story altogether, and I vowed to be the one to break through his defenses. His grief, like mine, drew him inward, wrapped him in a brooding silence. He retreated to his study for hours at a time, barricaded behind its heavy oak doors.

The one thing that brought him out of his shell was tennis. I begged him to play with me, and I used our sessions to talk with him. Strolling down to the court, in short breaks, and after the games, I reminisced in depth about that last year or so of the war—from my point of view. I introduced him to the daughter he had not yet known.

He heard stories of dire injury, sickness and recovery at the clinic, cases that I had often nursed firsthand. I told him in graphic detail about Mario’s infected arm, and even confessed to stealing the penicillin. I told him about arranging Mario’s stay at the winemaker’s cottage, the raid on the convent, about our overnight transfer to the tower, and even about Klaus confronting us in the cave.

“And he let you go, just like that?” he asked, wide-eyed. “So maybe it was fortunate that you knew him at the school after all.” He shook his head, nonplussed.

The one thing I never confessed was my suggestion that they mine the Italians’ wine cellars.

Undaunted, Mario used the rest of his time at Villa Falconieri to shadow the marchese on his daily rounds of the estate. He questioned him relentlessly, greedily absorbing the newest innovations in grape cultivation, wine making, and olive oil production. When he was with us, while he was engaged with Mother or me, he kept one eye on Papa, sensitive to the nuances of his moods. He had a pretty good feel for his ups and downs, riding their rhythms until
he intuited just the right moment to make a bid for his attention. He would fall in step with him between the vineyard rows and gently promote the new trellising technique that the marchese was having good luck with.

Mario’s love of food brought with it a discriminating nose. Once, helping Father sample the wine that was aging in oak barrels, he detected a bacterial presence in one of them that saved it just in time from being blended with and contaminating all the others. He brought his lively palate to the blending process too, convincing Papa to try some new proportions to deepen the color and mellow the tannins. Our estate wine, thanks to Mario, took on a memorable character after the war that attracted attention and paid off later in the marketplace.

Father grudgingly acknowledged the utility of everything Mario was doing, but he still stubbornly refused to embrace Mario emotionally in any way.

A full year passed, week after week, month after month, until—like a mighty horse chestnut tree that yields, one chip at a time, to a persistent ax—Father began to wobble.

In March, he announced that he would replant one of the vineyards to merlot so he would be able to make more of what he called “Mario’s blend.”

In April, he rewired a third of his trellises to train the vines farther up and out, to get more of the afternoon sun. “Leonardo’s improvement,” he called it.

In early May, Mother planned a dinner to mark the one-year anniversary of Giorgio’s death. Father agreed that—as his son’s good friend—it was only right that Mario should be there.

Then, miracle of miracles, after the anniversary had passed, we all sensed it: Father’s spirit began to lift—ever so slightly. Though it was no more obvious than the whisper of a breeze stirring the drooping branches of an old olive tree, to us it felt as momentous as the advance of a major front.

Mario pounced. The door to Papa’s study stood open just a crack one day in early June of 1946. So Mario knocked—not tentatively, but brightly—on the deeply grooved wood of its wide border, holding the knob with the other hand to prevent the door from swinging open.

“Yes? Who is it?” came the voice from within.

Mario pushed through and closed the door behind him. When they emerged an hour later, Father was not smiling, but there was in his eyes an unmistakable sheen. He stood straight and proud, as if to insist that he had ceded no real ground.

“Natala,” he said. “We have a wedding to plan. I think it should take place before the harvest, in August. Yes, most certainly in August.”

I
lay there in my old room, emerging from hazy half dreams. Another spring this was, almost fifty years later. That day my father finally consented…the memory of it sent a warm flush over my body. I felt it penetrate my limbs and spread slowly. What a feeling it had been, after so many months of hopeless intransigence, to hear that word
wedding
escape—however grudgingly—from Father’s lips.

I sat up carefully, reorienting myself. It was dark in the house. I must have slept, off and on, through dinner and into the night. Papa was dying now. Drawn by the sound of his breathing, I stepped into my parents’ bedroom. The chair stood empty. Mother must have gone to bed. I sat down and leaned back into it, staring at my father, who was inert, unconscious, drained of life force.

The years of the war, those difficult, stress-filled years, seemed so close, so real. But as I looked at Father lying there, I couldn’t conjure up the feelings of resentment and anger that had led me to reject him and leave home in such righteous rage. He had mellowed, softened in the intervening decades. He and Mario had built
a relationship based on mutual respect and, yes, even love. Though we had purchased property nearby and established our own
fattoria,
we consulted with Father on farming methods, marketing our wine and olive oil together in a family consortium. Now our sons were fully integrated into the enterprise.

Oh, Giorgio, how much you have missed, and how much we have all missed you
. I wonder how things would have been different had he survived the war. Had Mario taken his place, become the son that Father lost? Perhaps, but I also think that the barriers separating my father and my husband—of blood, of religion, of past resentments—allowed each to function with an integrity and independence that made our collaboration work. I’m not so sure that father and son would have fared so well. That is a challenge Mario and our sons now struggle with every day.

As for Klaus’s role—and mine—in Giorgio’s death, I never told my parents about it, but I finally confessed to Mario one day when I couldn’t carry the burden alone anymore. We had been married for a couple of years by then. I tearfully reconstructed the picnic with Klaus and, shaking, reuttered the tipsy words I had whispered in his ear. I reminded him that Klaus was upset when I broke off our liaison.

I was truly shocked by how lightly Mario took it in. “Oh, Lord,” he said, waving a hand dismissively, “I’m sure the Nazis mined wine cellars all over Europe. You couldn’t possibly be responsible, my Giovannina.” He put his arms around me, stroking the back of my neck as he loved to do. “There are so many ways Giorgio could have died and didn’t—and me too, for that matter. It was just a roll of the dice. Life is like that.”

Mario arrived the next morning, bringing our sons, Carlo and Angelo, their wives, and our five grandchildren with him. The children ran about the garden playing, while their parents took
turns by Papa’s bed. Mother and I rarely left his side. As the sun was beginning to set, a grenadine glow filling the window of the bedroom, Rosa passed the word. “It won’t be long now,” she said. “He is nearly gone.” We were all with him, less than an hour later, when he released his last breath and drew no other.
Giorgio, into your arms at last…

The church was full, the pews tightly populated with family and friends, representatives of the best families of the Lucchese community. Mario was a pallbearer and gave the Old Testament reading; Carlo’s oldest son read from First Corinthians.

At the reception afterward at Villa Farfalla, the marchesa was elegant as always, in a broad-brimmed navy hat, leaning on her cane. She and Leonardo had been great and intimate friends of Mario’s and mine ever since the war. Her husband was gone now too, having collapsed with a heart attack three years before. “The service was perfect—just as Enrico would have wanted it. Don’t you think, dear?” She paused and looked around. “I suppose you and Mario will be moving here into Villa Farfalla, now that he is gone.”

It was true. Father had wanted it that way, and Mother agreed. She would stay on with us, living in an apartment we planned to renovate in the back, much nicer than the one the three of us occupied during the war. We were interrupted by my two granddaughters, chasing our beloved dachshund Brunhilde in and among the press of guests, brushing by us on the run. The marchesa shook her head, smiling, looking after them. “I’ve always thought it so funny, Giovanna, that you have a German dog.”