Beautiful Ruins (73)

“It was her time,” Tomasso said as he steered through the dark water.

Pasquale faced forward to keep from having to talk anymore, from having to see his mother’s shrouded body. He felt grateful at the way the salty chop stung his eyes.

In La Spezia, Tomasso got a cart from the wharf watchman. He pushed Pasquale’s mother’s body through the street—like a sack of grain, Pasquale thought shamefully—until they finally arrived at the funeral home, and he made arrangements to have her buried next to his father as soon as a funeral mass could be arranged.

Then he went to see the cross-eyed priest who had presided at his father’s mass and burial. Already overwhelmed with confirmation season, the priest said he couldn’t possibly say a requiem mass until Friday, two days from now. How many people did Pasquale expect at the service? “Not many,” he said. The fishermen would come if he asked them; they would spit-flatten their thin hair, put on black coats, and stand with their serious wives while the priest intoned—Antonia, requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine—and afterward, the serious wives would bring food to the hotel. But the whole thing seemed to Pasquale so predictable, so earthbound and pointless. Of course it was exactly what she would have wanted, and so he made arrangements for the funeral mass, the priest making a notation on a ledger of some kind and looking up through his bifocals. And did Pasquale also want him to say trigesimo, the mass thirty days after the death to give the departed a final nudge into heaven? Fine, Pasquale said.

“Eccellente,” Father Francisco said, and held out his hand. Pasquale took the hand to shake it, but the priest looked at him sternly—or at least one of his eyes did. Ah, Pasquale said, and he reached in his pocket and paid the man. The money disappeared beneath his cassock and the priest gave him a quick blessing.

Pasquale was in a daze as he walked back to the pier where Tomasso’s boat was moored. He climbed back in the grubby wooden shell. Pasquale felt terrible again that he had transported his mother this way. And then he recalled the strangest moment, almost at random: He was probably seven. He woke from an afternoon nap, disoriented about the time, and came downstairs to find his mother crying and his father comforting her. He stood outside their bedroom door and watched this, and for the first time Pasquale understood his parents as beings apart from him—that they had existed before he’d been alive. That’s when his father looked up and said, “Your grandmother has died,” and he assumed it was his mother’s mother; only later did he learn that it was his father’s mother. And yet he had been comforting her. And his mother looked up and said, “She is the lucky one, Pasquale. She’s with God now.” Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love. He put his face in his hands and Tomasso politely turned away as they motored away from La Spezia.

Back at the Adequate View, Valeria was nowhere to be found. Pasquale looked in her room, which was as cleaned and made up as his mother’s had been—as if no one had ever been there. The fishermen hadn’t taken her away; she must have hiked out on the steep trails behind the village. That night, the hotel felt like a crypt to Pasquale. He grabbed a bottle of wine from his parents’ cellar and sat in the empty trattoria. The fishermen all stayed away. Pasquale had always felt confined by his life—by his parents’ fearful lifestyle, by the Hotel Adequate View, by Porto Vergogna, by these things that seemed to hold him in place. Now he was chained only to the fact that he was completely alone.

Pasquale finished the wine and got another bottle. He sat at his table in the trattoria, staring at the photo of Dee Moray and the other woman, as the night bled out and he became drunk and dizzy, and still his aunt didn’t return, and at some point he must have fallen asleep, because he heard a boat and then the voice of God bellowed through his hotel lobby.

“Buon giorno!” God called. “Carlo? Antonia? Where are you?” And Pasquale wanted to weep, because shouldn’t they be with God, his parents? Why was He asking for them, and in English? But finally Pasquale realized he was asleep and he lurched into consciousness, just as God switched back to Italian: “Cosa un ragazzo deve fare per ottenere una bevanda qui intorno?” and Pasquale realized that, of course, it wasn’t God. Alvis Bender was in his hotel lobby first thing this morning, here for his yearly writing vacation, and asking in his sketchy Italian, What’s a fella got to do to get a drink around here?

After the war, Alvis Bender had been lost. He returned to Madison to teach English at Edgewood, a little liberal arts college, but he was sullen and rootless, prone to weeks of drunken depression. He felt none of the passion he’d once had for teaching, for the world of books. The Franciscans who ran the college tired quickly of his heavy drinking and Alvis went back to work for his father. By the early fifties, Bender Chevrolet was the biggest dealership in Wisconsin; Alvis’s father had opened new showrooms in Green Bay and Oshkosh, and was about to open a Pontiac dealership in suburban Chicago. Alvis made the most of his family’s prosperity, behaving in the auto business as he had at his little college and earning the nickname All Night Bender among the dealership secretaries and bookkeepers. The people around Alvis attributed his mood swings to what was euphemistically called “battle fatigue,” but when his father asked Alvis if he was shell-shocked, Alvis said, “I get shelled every day at happy hour, Dad.”

Alvis didn’t think he had battle fatigue—he’d barely seen combat—so much as life fatigue. He supposed it could be some kind of postwar existential funk, but the thing eating him felt smaller than that: he just no longer saw the point of things. He especially couldn’t see the angle in working hard, or in doing the right thing. After all, look where that had got Richards. Meanwhile, he’d survived to come back to Wisconsin and—what? Teach sentence diagramming to morons? Sell Bel Airs to dentists?