These Tangled Vines(5)

When the Italian officer stamped my passport and waved me through, I wheeled my carry-on suitcase past the baggage carousel, keeping my eye out for a driver holding up a sign with my name on it, but there was no such person at arrivals. My heart sank because I didn’t have the mental or emotional stamina to determine how to get from Florence to Montepulciano in the darkness when I didn’t even speak the language.

With a sigh, I dug into my purse for my phone and searched for Ms. Moretti’s email, hoping she had provided a number to call. All I remembered was that she’d told me I would be staying at Anton Clark’s place of business, a winery that included an inn on the premises, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember the name of the winery.

I was scrolling through the messages in my inbox when someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“Scusa . Ms. Bell?”

I swung around to find myself facing a weathered-looking fortysomething Italian man in loose-fitting jeans and a plaid shirt.

“Yes,” I replied. “Are you Marco?”

“Sì! ” He held up the sheet of paper with my name on it. “I am your driver. Welcome to Italy.”

“Thank you.”

He reached for my suitcase and picked it up. “Here, we say grazie , and I will say prego . You’re welcome.”

“Thank you for my first lesson in Italian,” I replied good-naturedly, hurrying to keep up with him. “Or I should say grazie .”

He smiled broadly. “Very good. Molto bene .”

I followed him out of the terminal to a black Mercedes sedan parked at the curb. He opened the back door for me, and I climbed onto the leather seat, wondering if Marco would consider it rude if I were to lie down and fall asleep as soon as he hit the gas.

Without missing a beat, Marco shut the trunk, got into the driver’s seat, and started up the engine. “How was your flight?” he asked, glancing at me in the rearview mirror.

“Long. I’ll be glad to get to a warm bed.”

“I understand. The drive will take about an hour and a half. Rest if you like.”

“I might do that.” I turned to look out the window. “It’s too bad it’s dark outside. I was hoping to see something of Florence.”

“It’s a beautiful city,” he replied, “but overrun with tourists.”

We drove through brightly lit streets beside an ultramodern tram that had also left from the airport. Marco pointed to the right. “Look over there. You will see the Duomo.”

“What’s the Duomo?” I asked.

“The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. The dome is lit up. Do you see?”

Sitting forward, I identified the historic cityscape in the distance. “Oh yes, there it is. It’s beautiful. I’ll have to google it. Maybe I’ll get a chance to visit while I’m here.”

“You can climb up the tower,” he said, “but the lineups . . . very long. Book in advance.”

“Thank you for the tip. I mean grazie ,” I said with a smile.

Before long, we merged onto a freeway, and Marco accelerated to a fast clip. I rested my forehead against the window, hoping to finally drift off, when Marco spoke softly. “I see resemblance.”

Again, our eyes met in the small space of the rearview mirror. “I beg your pardon?”

“You look like him,” Marco said with a touch of melancholy. “Like your father.”

I sat up a little straighter. “You knew him?” I’d assumed Marco was just an anonymous airport limo driver.

“Sì . I was Mr. Clark’s driver for six years.”

I froze for a second or two, my ears still ringing from all the noisy takeoffs and landings. Or maybe it was something else, a sudden awareness that the father who was a stranger to me—a man I thought of in the way one might think about a stone statue—had lived a full life with close friends who knew him intimately. People who worked for him, people who cared for him.

Of course, rationally, I knew that he must have had friends. Thanks to Ms. Moretti’s email, I knew for a fact that he was survived by a wife and two children. It was surprising how quickly I devoured the information in her email, even though I had never wanted to know anything about him before. All my life, I had preferred to think of my biological father as not quite human. A one-dimensional villain, if you will. Not a person I would ever wish to know or care about.

Perhaps the reason I didn’t want to know anything was because I feared it might lead to a desire to meet him. Then I would have to travel a great distance to satisfy my curiosity, and I couldn’t do that to Dad. It would have felt terribly disloyal.

“Did you enjoy working for him?” I asked Marco, finally removing the chains from my curiosity. I was in Italy for one week only. I might as well surrender to it.

Marco laughed. “I don’t think anyone enjoyed working for your father. He was . . . how do you say in English? Oppressore? Tiranno? ”

“A tyrant?” I offered.

“Sì! Tyrant!”

I sat back, feeling strangely relieved to hear that. If he was, in fact, a horrible person, that might soften my regrets in the future. I might be grateful I’d never met him. “Really.”

Marco laughed again. “But we loved him. We would have done anything for him. I don’t know why.”