The Grey Beginning, page 3
“It’s the right phrase,” I said, laughing. “But my brothers wouldn’t agree with you. Butterfingers Malone, they called me. I guess it was a lucky catch.”
“Will you catch another?” he asked hopefully.
“Sure. Just wait a minute, I’m a little out of breath.”
“Sit on the bench and rest.” He helped me up with an old-fashioned courtesy that matched his clothes. He sat down beside me. “I am Pete,” he said with an air of defiance.
I gave him my hand, and the football. “I’m Kathy. Pete? That’s a good name, but I’d have thought it would be Pietro, for an Italian gentleman.”
“I am only half Italian. The other half is American.”
“Which half?” I asked, smiling.
“My mother.”
I’m not sure how I knew. Maybe it was the way he avoided using a verb—past or present. Maybe it was the way his thick lashes dropped, veiling his eyes.
“And your father?” I asked after a moment. I didn’t use a verb either.
“I lived in America for a year,” he said evasively.
“Was that where you learned to play football?”
“Yes. Where did you learn? I thought girls did not play.”
I told him about Jim and Michael. “They spent all their spare time practicing, from August to December, and when they couldn’t get anybody else, they made me play receiver. I was only too happy to oblige; usually they complained when I tagged along. Luckily for me, neither of them wanted to be a linebacker.”
He had to think about that one. Then his lips parted in a tentative smile. “To tackle you, you mean. That would hurt, yes.”
“Yes.”
“I knew you were American,” the boy said, swinging his legs. “From the way you catched the ball. No Italian girl could do it.”
Feeling it necessary to defend my sex, I said, “Football is an American game. I’ll bet a lot of Italian girls can play soccer.”
His eyes lit up. “I’ll bet. I’ll bet…I had forgot that. It is a good word. Like ‘right on’ and ‘baad, man.’”
Last year’s slang. I didn’t want to ask him outright how long ago he had been in America. There was something wrong about his parents—his mother certainly, perhaps his father too. I thought I was safe when I said, “Your English is very good. You must speak it often.”
But I made a mistake there, too. His lashes again veiled his eyes. “They do not let me talk English. ‘Sempre italiano, Pietro; non parlare inglese.’” He slid down from the bench, the football extended invitingly. “Will you catch it again? Are you rested now?”
I had actually forgotten how I got there and why I was there. I said with a sigh, “Pete, I wish I could. But I have no right to be here. I climbed the wall. I’m trespassing.”
“I thought so,” he said coolly. “It is lucky you came here. They do not let the dog here because it is my place.”
“The dog? What kind of dog?” I asked apprehensively.
He didn’t know the breed, but he measured the dog with his hands. This long—this high—black, all black, with teeth this big…. He was right, it was lucky for me I had not met the dog. I got to my feet.
“Well, I’d better go and make my apologies. I came to see the contessa. Is she at home, do you know?”
“I think yes. If you go there—” He pointed to a gate at the far end of the garden. “It leads to the door of the kitchen. You don’t mind, to go to the door of the kitchen?”
“Not at all,” I said, smiling at the apologetic face looking up at me. “Any door is fine so long as it doesn’t lead to the dog’s run.”
“It is the way I come, so the dog is not there. I would go with you, but I must play for one hour. That is the rule.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “It will be twenty minutes more.”
I reassured him, resisting the urge to give him a hug or call him honey, or any of the other awful things a boy his age would bitterly resent. He was a darling; those odd, old-fashioned manners in a frustrated football player…. I looked back when I reached the gate and saw him standing watching me, the ball cradled in his arms. I smiled and waved before I closed the gate.
Every house, no matter how grand, needs certain humble adjuncts. Garbage is garbage and mops and brooms have to stand somewhere. The path I followed between rows of green sprouts that would one day be peas and carrots, onions and lettuce, led to a paved courtyard with a variety of homely objects scattered around—buckets, rakes, mops, and empty boxes. This wing of the house was humble enough—low-roofed and sprawling, its walls a mosaic of peeling stucco and rough brick. The sun broke through the clouds as I stood there, trying to summon the courage to proceed.
I knocked on the door. My hand was still lifted when the door was flung open by a stout gray-haired woman wearing an apron. Finding my knuckles six inches from her nose unnerved her for a moment; then her alarmed expression turned to a broad, amused grin. My halting apologies only increased her amusement. She replied, but of course I didn’t understand a word; I only noticed that her accent sounded softer and more musical than that of the man at the gate.
I produced my memorized sentence. “La contessa Morandini—io desidererei vederla.” Then I presented my card.
Heaven only knows what I had had in mind when I ordered those cards. They were five years old if they were a day, the product of some long-forgotten adolescent whimsy. I had found the dusty, dog-eared packet a few days before I left for Italy and had put it in my purse. I suppose I had some vague idea that a calling card would increase my aura of respectability. When you call upon a countess—an elderly, European countess—a countess who has never so much as acknowledged the fact of your existence—every little bit helps.
Naturally I had anticipated handing the card to the proper servant at the front door. If I had not been so rattled I’d have revised my plan; for a trespasser who has climbed over a wall to present a visiting card to the cook was nothing less than ludicrous.
The cook wasn’t amused. She was flabbergasted. She finally took the card, holding it by the edge as if it might explode any second, and gestured at me to come in.
The kitchen was big and low-ceilinged, with a floor of red tile. The world’s fussiest housekeeper (my mother) couldn’t have found fault with it—spotlessly clean, filled with delectable odors from the pots bubbling on the stove. Yet it had an indefinable air of desolation, perhaps because there were only two people occupying a space designed for many times that number. A young girl, slim and black-haired, stood at the sink scrubbing vegetables. She stared at me over her shoulder, her eyes wide with curiosity. The cook turned my card over and over in her fingers; this was a situation she had never encountered, and she didn’t know the proper procedure. Finally she shrugged and indicated one of the chairs at a long wooden table. I shook my head, smiling. Again she shrugged, studied the card, and plodded out of the room.
The minutes stretched on. I wished I had had the sense to sit down. I felt like a fool standing there, my hands primly clasped, my feet primly together. The girl at the sink kept glancing at me and giggling. She’d have been the scullery maid in the days when houses like this had dozens of servants. Instead of a uniform she wore a tight skirt that hugged her rounded bottom and a knit blouse that was even tighter. I smiled at her and said, “Buon giorno,” and her giggles expanded into a high-pitched laugh.
On the back of the card I had written, “I must see you. It is about your grandson.” Eloquent it was not, but it was brief and to the point. By the time the cook returned, I rather hoped she would open the back door and show me out. Instead she beckoned me to follow her.
My heels clicked on bare boards and then were muffled by carpeting before they clicked again, more sharply, on marble. That was all I remembered afterward—the sound of my footsteps, like drumbeats tapping. I could not have described the rooms or corridors or furniture; my heart was pounding and my stomach wasn’t too steady either. I expected the cook would hand me over to a butler or footman or parlormaid, but she led me across the marble floor—acres of it—to a door, and threw it open.
I walked into a blaze of sunlight. It filled the room, with its gilded woodwork and white walls, like champagne in a crystal glass. I was too nervous to take in the details then; I saw only the woman seated at a desk near the French doors. She did not rise.
The mental picture I had formed shattered like a window hit by a stone. It isn’t easy to guess people’s ages these days, but I would have sworn she wasn’t a day over forty. That most unflatteringly truthful of spotlights, the sun, fell full on her face. It was exquisitely made-up, but it takes more than makeup to hide the lines carved by years of living. There were no lines visible on her smooth forehead. Her hair was a marvelous shade of silvery copper and her eyes were gray—not silvery bright like Bart’s, but darker, tarnished, like old mirrors.
I’m sure I looked as gauche and uncomfortable as I felt. Her lips curled slightly and she said, “You don’t speak Italian, I suppose.”
“No—I’m sorry….”
“Then I must speak English, much as I dislike doing so. You wrote to me, not once but several times. You might have assumed, when you received no reply, that I had not the desire nor the intention of communicating with you.”
I started to answer. She cut me off with a quick movement of her hand. “I did not suppose you would have the effrontery to appear in person. If you came here hoping for money, you will be disappointed. I don’t intend to give you a penny. Have I made myself clear?”
“Very clear.”
“Good.” She turned and touched a bell sitting on the desk. “No more need be said. Good-bye, Miss”—she glanced at the card she was holding—“Miss Malone.”
My father used to say, “Us Malones take no lip from nobody.” My father is six foot three. I’m ten inches shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, but so far as my father was concerned, size had nothing to do with it. I said, slowly and deliberately, “Not Miss Malone. Mrs. Morandini. I was your grandson’s wife, Contessa.”
She leaned back in her chair, fingertips together, face calm. There was no way of telling what effect, if any, my speech had had. Before I could elaborate, the door opened, in response to her ring. It was not the cook, but another woman, heavyset and swarthy, with a perceptible mustache and dead black hair. She glanced quickly, avidly, at me and then looked away.
The contessa spoke to her in Italian. She bowed her head respectfully and went out, giving me another of those quick, unsmiling stares. For some reason I had the impression that the contessa had changed her mind—that the order she had given the servant was not the one she had originally intended to give.
She said nothing to me. I didn’t speak either. It was up to her to respond to my challenge. Indignation still boiled in me. I wanted to do something rude—delicately, aristocratically rude, to match her rotten manners. So I sat down, without being invited to do so, on a love seat covered in yellow brocade. It was horribly uncomfortable.
I think the gesture amused her. One arched eyebrow lifted just a trifle. I stared defiantly back at her and we sat like a pair of waxen images until the servant returned.
Pete was with her. I’d not have known him. His thin face was a sullen mask. When he saw me, his eyes lit up and the corners of his mouth quirked, the way Bart’s did when he was trying not to smile.
The contessa didn’t miss much. “I wondered how you had got in,” she said conversationally. “I imagine, however, that you two have not been formally introduced. This is il conte Pietro Francesco Morandini. My grandson. My only grandson.”
Chapter
2
THE WEARY CONTEMPT IN HER VOICE WAS NOT DIRECTED at me. Her meaning was as plain as if she had spoken the words aloud: This weakling, this half-barbarian, this insignificant thing is all I have. And he isn’t much, is he?
She was cruel, but not sadistic. She let the boy go, dismissing him with a flick of her fingers. Another, deliberately more gracious gesture, sent the servant out of the room after him.
“Well?” she said.
I stood up. “You needn’t worry. You’ll never see me or hear from me again. I’m glad I came, if only to find out what kind of family I have the pleasure of not belonging to. I don’t know why you are lying to me, and I don’t care. I married Bart—Bartolommeo Morandini—and we were together for six months before he was killed in a car accident. He told me his grandmother was the Contessa Morandini. And,” I added, “you have a photograph of him on your desk. There. That’s my husband. I don’t think much of your manners, or your morals, or your methods of raising children, but thank God none of those things are my concern. Good-bye.”
“Wait.” I was almost at the door when that one word cut the air like a whip. “I am beginning to believe you,” she went on.
“Thanks so much.”
“You do not wear a wedding ring.”
“I put it in…in with Bart.”
“Were you married in the Church?”
“In the…No. In a registry office in New Hampshire.”
The wry twist of her lips dismissed this as unsuitable, almost illegal. “But you are Catholic?”
It was a reasonable guess, given the good old Irish name of Malone. It was also an impertinent question, by my standards. I said stiffly, “I was raised in the Church.”
She studied me thoughtfully. Then she said, “Bartolommeo’s mother was my sister-in-law. My husband’s sister.”
That was when I realized that my increasing queasiness was not caused solely by emotional factors. Change of water, change of air, the milk at breakfast, maybe…I must have turned a shade greener, for she said quickly, “You had better sit down.”
I had to fumble for the chair. “I’m sorry,” I said, swallowing. “I don’t feel very…Your nephew. Then why did he tell me—”
“He often used the Morandini name. It was not his own, of course. His father was a commoner—a Milanese physician. He was incapable of understanding a child like Bartolommeo. The boy came to me after his mother died. I raised him.”
There was no sign of softening in her face or voice when she said that. I wondered why, if she had served as his foster mother, Bart had not claimed to be her son instead of her grandson. Her statement—which, oddly, it never occurred to me to doubt—raised a number of other questions, but I was in no condition to wonder about them. I felt horribly sick. I stood up, hoping I could get outside the house before I threw up.
“Thank you, I’m sorry to have bothered you. Good-bye.”
All at once she was beside me, holding me with hard, cold hands that did not so much support as confine me. “Wait,” she said again. “Wait. A civil ceremony, but…Is it possible? Did you come here because…. Tell me the truth. Are you enceinte?”
I could claim the question dealt my reeling brain the final blow that toppled it over into catatonia. But the answer did not require profound thought or elaborate explanations. It required one single, two-letter word. I didn’t say it. Something had awakened in the contessa’s gray eyes, like an image dimly seen in a dusty mirror. But that wasn’t why I let her believe a lie. To respond to that shadowy awakening as I did was not kindness, it was wanton cruelty. If I were superstitious…. But I’m not.
Ten minutes later I was lying in a bed the size of a football field in a room the size of a grand ballroom. I was wearing one of the contessa’s silk nightgowns, and she was holding my head while I was thoroughly and disgustingly sick.
II
Some kinds of illness are romantic—consumption, for example. All the best tragic heroines have consumption. Some ailments have at least the dignity of being deadly. Others are regarded as essentially comic. People always make jokes about seasickness. If I had sprained my ankle or been attacked by the dog; if I had been carried, pale and limp, to that elegant bedchamber—it would have been a fitting episode in one of the romance novels that are all the rage. Even if I had really suffered from what is loosely called morning sickness, as the contessa believed, my “interesting condition” would have glamorized the unpleasant effects. There was nothing glamorous, or romantic, or dignified about my affliction. I had been warned about it, and I knew what it was, and it wasn’t one bit funny. I forgot about minor matters like dignity and good manners; I just wanted them to leave me alone so I could die in peace.
They finally did, after making me swallow some revolting stuff that looked and tasted like chalk, and may have been. I didn’t die, but I fell asleep; and when I woke I felt much better.
The room wasn’t quite as large as a ballroom, but it was big—about four times the size of the Malone living room. Heavy forest-green draperies shrouded the windows, and hangings of the same gloomy shade enclosed the head of the bed. A single lamp burned by the bed. Otherwise the room was as dark as midnight, but a thin finger of light stretching across the floor suggested that I had not slept very long.
For a while I lay still, enjoying the simple pleasure of not feeling sick. Then the full enormity of what I had done struck me. I owed my present position, swathed in silk and occupying what appeared to be the best bedroom in the house, to a lie. The contessa had not played Good Samaritan because I was ill. I had seen enough of her to feel sure she’d have pushed me ruthlessly out the door if she had not misinterpreted the cause of my illness. There was no excuse for what I had done—or rather, had refrained from doing. Even Sister Ursula’s boundless charity could not excuse this.
I groaned. “Oh, God,” I said aloud.
The dagger-slim streak of light widened. It came, not from the window, as I had supposed, but from the door. A voice said timidly, “Are you going to die?”
It was the first indication I had had that anybody was interested in me, sans embryo. I knew the voice. “Come in,” I croaked.
He slid in like an eel, closed the door, and trotted to the bed. “I listened,” he whispered. “They sent me to my room, but I listened. Did you throw out?”
