Beautiful Ruins (109)

At first Amedea simply forgets to shop, or to lock the door, then she loses their car, and then she starts forgetting numbers and names and the uses for common things. He comes inside to see her holding the telephone—with no idea whom she meant to call, or, later, how the thing even works. He locks her in for a while, and then they simply stop leaving the house—and the worst is how he feels himself slipping away in her eyes, and he feels lost in the shimmery mist of identity (would he cease to exist when his wife stops knowing him?). Her last year is nearly unbearable. Caring for someone who has no idea who you are is a ripe hell—the weight of responsibility, bathing and feeding and . . . everything, that weight growing as her cognition fades, until she is like a thing he cares for, a heavy thing he pulls through the last uphill part of their life together; and when his children finally talk him into moving her into a nursing facility near their home, Pasquale weeps with sorrow and guilt, but also with relief, and guilt for his relief, sorrow for his guilt, and when the nurse asks what measures they should take to sustain his wife’s life, Pasquale can’t even speak. So it is Bruno, lovely Bruno, who takes his father’s hand and says to the nurse, We are ready to let her go now. And she does, go, Pasquale visiting every day and talking to that blank face until one day a nurse calls the house as Pasquale is preparing for a visit and says that his wife has passed. He is more distraught by this than he imagined he would be, her final absence like a cruel trick, as if, somehow after she died, the old Amedea would be allowed to return; instead, there is only the hole in him. A year passes and Pasquale finally understands his mother’s sorrow after Carlo died—so long has he existed in the perception of his wife and his family that now he feels like nothing. And it is brave Bruno who recognizes in his father his own battles with depression, and he urges the old man to remember the last moment he felt his being without its relation to beloved Amedea, his last moment of individual happiness or longing—and Pasquale answers without hesitation, Dee Moray, and Bruno asks Who?, the son having never heard the story, of course. Pasquale tells his son everything, then, and it is Bruno again who insists that his father go to Hollywood and find out what happened to the woman in the old photograph, and to thank her— Thank me? Debra Bender asks, and in his answer, Pasquale chooses his words carefully, mulling them over for some time, hoping she will understand: I was living in dreams when I met you. And when I met the man you loved, I saw my own weakness in him. Such irony, how could I be a man worthy of your love when I had walked away from my own child? That is why I went back. And it was the best thing I ever did.

She understands: she began teaching as a kind of self-sacrifice, subverting her own desires and ambitions for the ambitions of her students. But then you find there’s actually more joy and that it really does lessen the loneliness, and this is why her last years, running the theater in Idaho, have felt so rich to her. And what she loved about Lydia’s play: that it gets at this idea that true sacrifice is painless.

They linger and talk this way for three more hours after dinner, until she feels weak and they walk back to the hotel. They sleep in separate rooms, neither of them sure yet what this is—if it’s anything, or if such a thing is even possible at this hour of their lives—and in the morning they have coffee and talk about Alvis (Pasquale: He was right that tourists would ruin this place; Dee: He was like this island where I lived for a while). And on the deck in Portovenere they decide to go on a hike, but first they plan the rest of Dee’s three-week vacation: next they’ll go south, to Rome, then to Naples and Calabria, then north again to Venice and Lake Como, as long as her strength holds—before returning at the end to Florence, where Pasquale shows her his big house and introduces her to his children and his grandchildren and his nieces and nephews. Dee is envious at first, but as they keep coming in the door, she is overtaken with joy—there are so many—and she accepts a warm blush of responsibility for all of this, if Pasquale is to be believed, holds a baby and blinks away tears as she watches Pasquale pull a coin from the ear of his grandson (He’s the beautiful one now) and perhaps it’s another day, or maybe two—what business does memory have with time?—before she feels the dark dizziness come and another before she is too weak to rise, another before the sharp tug in her stomach is more than Dilaudid can handle, and then— They finish their breakfast in Portovenere, go back to the hotel, and put on hiking boots. Dee assures Pasquale that she’s up for this, and they take a taxi to the end of the road, crowded now with cars and walkers and the bicycles of tourists. At a turnaround, he helps her out of the cab, pays the driver, and they set off once more on a trail along a vineyard leading into the park, up into the striated foothills that serve as backdrop to the sea-scraped cliffs. They have no idea if the paintings have faded away, or have been spray-painted with graffiti, or if the bunker still exists—or, for that matter, if it ever existed at all—but they are young and the trail is wide and easily traveled. And even if they don’t find what they’re looking for, isn’t it enough to be out walking together in the sunlight?





Acknowledgments



My deepest thanks: to Natasha De Bernardi and Olga Gardner Galvin for help with my brutto Italiano; to Sam Ligon, Jim Lynch, Mary Windishar, Anne Walter, and Dan Butterworth for giving the book reads at various stages; to Anne and Dan for enduring hikes in the Cinque Terre; to Jonathan Burnham, Michael Morrison, and everyone at HarperCollins; and most of all, to my editor, Cal Morgan, and my agent, Warren Frazier, for their generous work, support, and guidance.