Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel

by James Markert

“Valerie says hello.”

  “I bet she does.”

  “Your dad seems out of sorts. My grandma is like that—can’t remember anything. Maybe we should introduce them—although they’d probably forget five minutes after.”

  John laughed. Vitto didn’t. “Why are you still here?”

  “’Cause you are, Gandy.” He smirked. “We don’t leave soldiers behind.” He shifted his weight on the bed, and the frame groaned. “I don’t think you’re getting much better though. You should try that hypnosis. You see Givens over there?” The dark-haired man was playing solitaire on a board propped across his lap. “He did it, said it helped to bring those memories out. The ones you’ve buried. Kind of like bloodletting in the olden days. Letting out the humors. They’ll get you in what Dr. Cushings calls a twilight state. He talks you through real nice.”

  “He put you up to this?”

  John wouldn’t be derailed. “You’re completely relaxed, half in and half out. Then they try and get you to relive—”

  “I don’t want to relive. I don’t want to remember.”

  John chewed his lip. “Opposite of me. I couldn’t stop remembering.” He pointed to the thin patch of hair at his temple. “That’s why they did this.” John folded his arms, looked around the room, shook his head. “I had the blues something awful, Gandy. Couldn’t stop the crying and the whimpering for nothing. CO called me a sad sack. I vomited on his shoes, and he tossed me in the clink. Let me out a couple days later for a shave and a wash, but as soon as he sent me back out the crying started again.”

  Vitto felt John staring at him, hands like sandpaper on wood when he rubbed them together. Nervous. John wasn’t as cured as he pretended to be. “How about that GI Bill, Gandy? You sign up for the unemployment benefits?” Vitto shook his head. “Twenty dollars a week for us veterans. You should look into it, until you get back on your feet. What’d you do before the war?”

  “I was a painter.”

  “Like houses?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Like pictures, huh? You can make money doing that?”

  Vitto ignored him. The back of his head felt flat as a board, and his hair hurt. Nurse Dolores wheeled a bed into the back corner of the room and parked it against the wall. The man atop it had half his head shaved, and he was drooling. “What’s his defect?”’

  John looked over his shoulder. “Oh, that’s Cheevers. When it gets too bad, that’s what they do.”

  “Do what?”

  “Lobotomy. It’s when—”

  “I know what a lobotomy is, John.”

  John sat straight, smiled proud.

  “What? You just break wind?”

  “You just called me by name, Gandy.” He nodded toward Cheevers. “Maybe that won’t be you after all.”

  * * *

  Vitto grips the table with both hands when the piazza starts shaking, a tremble that lasts three seconds and rattles his plate of tortelloni with porcini before settling.

  “What was that, Mamma?”

  Magdalena looks around the piazza, where dozens are getting up from the kneeling positions they took when the earth started rumbling. Robert, next to his latest statue, looks up at the sky. Juba, a few feet away, looks down at the travertine.

  “That was an earthquake, Vitto. You’ve felt them before.” Magdalena looks up and down and all around but otherwise shows little concern. “Sometimes the earth moves. Or quakes. Especially here in California. But this was little more than a rumble.”

  “Like thunder?”

  “Yes. Like thunder under the ground.” She wrote in her journal and closed it.

  Vitto says, “So when it thunders and lightning flashes, Zeus is up there moving around?”

  Magdalena nods. “Or perhaps some of the other gods.”

  He points to the stones. “What about just now?”

  She smiles to reassure him. “Oh, that was just Hades.”

  * * *

  “You feel that, Gandy?”

  John bit into an apple nearly the size of his fist, and juice squirted onto Vitto’s cheek. He wiped it off. “Feel what?”

  “That earthquake.” John licked juice from his finger. Instead of the bed, he sat in a wooden folding chair. The man had hooked onto Vitto like a tumor. “More like a tremor, though, instead of a full-on earthquake. Bit of earthly indigestion.”

  “I didn’t feel anything.”

  “Woke you up, didn’t it? Must have felt something.”

  Vitto grunted, watched the sunlight shift out the window. Suddenly, he craved it on his face, the back of his neck.

  “Only lasted a few seconds. Just long enough for Dolores to panic and spill her coffee on Littlefield’s sheets over there.” Another loud bite of the apple. He offered it to Vitto, who declined. “You know some say the big one is gonna come. Big honker of an earthquake, bigger than the big San Francisco quake back in ’06. It’ll make California an island, some say.”

  “You ever get tired of talking?”

  “You need to eat,” said John. “Bet you’ve lost twenty pounds in here. I can see your cheekbones. They’ve got a system for fattening you up after you’ve convalesced.” John leaned in, juice from the apple clinging to his lips, his face stubbled with flecks of light-brown hair. “You believe in the power of the mind, Gandy?” Vitto didn’t answer, so John went on. “Barrel of sunshine or a barrel of stones. You already know which one I picked. The one that don’t sink.”

  “You still cry at night, John. No such thing as cured. Not with what we got.”

  “You can lay in that bed as long as you want to, Gandy. Or you can drown in it all the same.”

  The next morning Vitto got out of bed and with John’s help took two slow, aching laps around the room. He ate vegetable soup for lunch and wondered if Val would come by. Dr. Cushings said they were pulling back on how much they’d let him sleep now. Day by day his strength would return. He still screamed out at night but wasn’t as restless. The doctor had mentioned insulin shock therapy and again brought up chemical hypnosis.

  Vitto refused, even when Dr. Cushings said that nothing stays buried forever.

  “Sure it does,” Vitto told him, “when you bury it down deep enough. What’s the saying—time heals all wounds?”

  “Time can be a tenuous dancing partner, Mr. Gandy. And memory the devil. Sometimes the wounds we can’t see leave the worst scars, unless they’re tended to.”

  “Well, unless you can give me a Band-Aid I can swallow, we’ll just have to wait and see.”

  Dr. Cushings patted his shoulder. “You speak like you’re contemplating leaving, Mr. Gandy.”

  “I see sunlight out that window, Doctor. I’ll fill my barrel with it and see what happens. And I miss my wife.”

  “You’ll give us a couple more days to fatten you up?”

  “A couple.” He nodded across the room at Cheevers, who was drooling. “I’m not going to end up like him.”

  Dr. Cushings grinned, condescending. “Very well, Mr. Gandy. Just know that a patient is never—”

  A door clicked open, and they all turned.

  Valerie hurried in with William in her arms. “Vitto, your father is missing. He took his suitcase and left during the night.”

  Five

  John drove his Model A sedan; it had room for two in the back, while Vitto’s truck didn’t.

  The top of John’s head nearly hit the car’s ceiling and his big hands made the steering wheel look like a black Cheerio. After a minute of contemplation in the hospital’s parking lot, Valerie had gotten in with them, making sure she and William were alone in the back. Despite her urgency, when it came to her husband, she’d kept her distance.

  In the passenger seat, Vitto looked over his shoulder, caught William staring. He said to Valerie, “Don’t worry. John is good people.” And then he remembered that she probably knew John better than he did.

  She hugged William on her lap like the wind might blow him away. “You mind rolling the windows up? It�
�s cold.”

  John said, “Sure thing, Valerie.”

  Vitto watched John, unsure about him using his wife’s first name, but let it go. Anyway, he was cold too; he still wore his hospital gown and skivvies. Fortunately, John had grabbed both of their suitcases during their hasty retreat from the hospital, Dr. Cushings following on their heels and warning it wasn’t a good idea to leave.

  “Mr. Gandy, you’re far from convalesced.”

  Vitto changed in the car—a pair of beige pants and a white button-up he didn’t remember packing, along with a pair of brown-and-white oxfords he didn’t remember buying.

  “They were on sale,” said Valerie. “Got them for only three twenty-five.” She stared out the window, jaw clenched. Maybe she was used to being in control, and now things seemed completely out of it. Or maybe she’d planned on driving herself and now here she was in an unfamiliar car, at the mercy of two soldiers with what Dr. Cushings called severe combat exhaustion.

  In the parking lot, after they’d decided Robert had more than likely run away to the abandoned hotel, the panic level had gone down, but only somewhat. The man was still far from capable of taking care of himself, regardless of his familiarity with the place. There were numerous ways he could get hurt there all alone, especially in the dark where electricity no longer hummed. Not to mention the cliffs and the rocks and ocean below.

  No, he wouldn’t! Vitto glanced back at Valerie’s face and knew she’d had the same thought. Robert wouldn’t be the first to jump—or fall—from those cliffs.

  Valerie said she’d never seen Robert as agitated as he’d been after last night’s tremor—the newspapers were now calling it a minor earthquake—pacing through the darkness of their home like a moth trapped in lamplight.

  Vitto decided he could listen to Valerie talk all day. Her voice had always seemed like music incarnate—like sound from the angels, he’d once told her when they were both thirteen. He glanced back, then faced forward again; remnants of purple bruising still showed around her neck from where his hands had clutched it. That memory he’d have to bury, deep in the ground.

  He closed his eyes, wished it gone. He’d once promised his mother he’d never put his hands on a woman for any reason. That was when he was seven, after he had watched a drunken guest at the hotel hit his wife across the face. The memory of the smack and then her scream as she collided with the wall had been etched so vividly that Vitto had been unable to sleep, both the violence and the rage from that man wreaking havoc with his mind. So Magdalena had sat him down on the edge of the fountain, lovingly taken his hands in her own, and told him to bury it.

  “Bury what?”

  “The memory. That’s what I do with all of mine, Vitto.”

  “All of your what, Mamma?”

  “The bad ones. I bury them deep down so they never come up.”

  She’d said it like she’d never been more serious about anything, and then a few seconds later she’d appeared confused, like she didn’t remember why she was sitting on the fountain with her son. She’d gotten out her journal and scribbled a few lines before closing it, smiling at him again, pretending all was right with her world.

  “And promise me, Vitto. You’ll never strike or harm a woman.”

  And so he’d promised.

  The man who hit his wife had been kicked out of the hotel, forcefully removed by Robert’s own hand and warned to never come back. And Vitto had taken his mother’s advice quite literally, writing the memory down on a piece of paper, placing it inside a small tin can that still smelled of tomato sauce, and burying it the field next to the vineyards, where he’d gone on to bury every bad memory, every argument he’d ever had with Valerie, all the way up until the war.

  When Vitto opened his eyes they were already halfway to the hotel, and he wondered if he’d dozed off. He still felt hinky from the drugs they’d been feeding him the past two weeks. With the windows up, the whipping wind got sucked into the noise of a rumbling engine in need of a tune-up and tires that felt uneven. John pushed the car as fast as it would go—through dips and turns on the highway and then through the trees and houses of Gandy, which rested as a small, nose-shaped outcropping of the coastline just north of San Diego. The once-famous hotel Robert had built with Cotton Gandy’s fortune perched right on the tip of the nose. A narrow, curving river severed the hotel’s property from the rest of Gandy, and butterflies swirled in Vitto’s empty stomach as they neared the one-lane wooden bridge that connected it all.

  Valerie could have made the trip on her own, he knew, but Vitto understood that her stealing him from the hospital had been a cry for help. Strength can only bend so far before it breaks, and hers was waning. She’d been going it alone for too long now, starting back as far as her childhood, when her parents had brought her for an extended stay at the hotel and then left her behind, with a note for Juba to continue her lessons and look after her. He’d done just that without hesitation, treating her as if she were his own, but the abandonment had still taken its toll.

  I’m home now, Vitto thought, willing her to somehow get the message. Your husband is home, and it’s time I started fulfilling again my end of the bargain—war damaged or not.

  Six years ago they’d insisted on getting married in the place they’d first met as kids, right there on the recently closed hotel’s piazza with the tall, sculptured fountain trickling in the background and the sun setting over the crenellated stone walls. They’d made promises to each other. The “for better, for worse” one stuck like a splinter in his mind now because things couldn’t get much worse. So as they neared the hotel, he bottled those swirling butterflies, leaned over to finish tying his oxfords, and steeled himself like he would just before battle.

  John removed his right hand from the steering wheel to wipe tears from his cheeks.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I miss your father already.”

  “You don’t even know him.”

  “I’ve known him half a dozen times.”

  Valerie mumbled from the backseat, “At least he gets you talking.”

  “Talking,” said William.

  Vitto felt like John had already wedged himself in as part of the family. “Don’t you have a family of your own?” he snapped, then wished he could take back the words.

  John started crying harder now, clenched that steering wheel like his life depended on it.

  Vitto pointed. “Turn here.” Then he said, “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Gandy.”

  Vitto glanced over his shoulder again, found his wife and son staring at him like he was some kind of monster, and then turned his face back into the sunlight just as the car’s tires roll-thumped over the boards of the rickety one-lane bridge, plunging him into the present and the past in one confused heartbeat. The river they were crossing was really a glorified creek, a wide stream that trickled instead of flowed, with barely enough force to move a stick during the dry months or float one of Mr. Carney’s wooden toy ships during the wet ones. Today the water was halfway up the bank, moving just swiftly enough for them to hear the gurgle now that Valerie had rolled her window down, poking her face into the wind like she used to do when they were little.

  By now both he and John had tears running down their cheeks, and Vitto did his best to hide them from his family in the backseat.

  John whispered, “What’s wrong, Gandy?”

  Vitto wiped his cheeks dry, the tears gone as readily as they’d arrived.

  On the other side of the bridge—fifteen paces across, according to Mr. Carney, the architect who’d built it decades ago, even before the first stone was placed—was a tall sign that read, “Welcome to the Tuscany Hotel.” And below it: “Since 1887. Where you put your worries and past behind so your creativity can thrive.”

  Robert always spoke those words to guests upon their arrival, no matter how many times they’d been there. Ninety percent of those guests had been creators of some sort—musicians, singers, magicians, scientist
s, architects, novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, famous actors from Tinseltown, and visual artists working every different medium. The rest of them had just wanted to experience the magic of it all. Now only ghosts remained—and the lone security man Robert had insisted on paying. Robert Gandy had stayed until the hotel closed—for a few years even after the staff had up and gone, strolling the courtyards and piazza alone as if waiting for a final rush of people to come trundling over that bridge for one more last call.

  On the opposite side of the bridge was a life-sized marble sculpture of two beautiful women, their legs intertwined as if battling for supremacy on a single pedestal. One of them faced in the direction of those arriving; the other looked the other way. They had been carved by Robert at the hotel’s conception more than five decades earlier. Now weeds and vines coiled around their legs and waists, climbing upward and branching toward marble arms frozen in motion.

  At the end of the bridge, John slowed to take in the statue—transfixed by it as so many had been. Vitto and Valerie had seen it so much as children that they’d wondered if the statue held true powers instead of mythical ones.

  William now beside her on the seat, Valerie leaned forward behind John. “The woman facing this way is Lethe, the Greek goddess of forgetfulness. Robert’s idea for the hotel was that the guests would leave all painful memories behind while they were here, leave behind the worries of the day so they could relax and create. Which is why the hotel was always full of artists and the like. Vitto’s mother—”

  “Val.”

  She stopped cold, leaned back.

  Vitto added, “That stream we just rode over—my father named it the River Lethe for the same reason. In Greek mythology, the waters of the River Lethe caused forgetfulness.”

  “Is he from Greece?” asked John. “Your father?”

  “He’s from Alabama. Turn right.”

  Eyes and mood again perked to the surroundings, Valerie continued her explanation. “When the guests left the hotel they’d see the other woman in the statue. Mnemosyne is the Greek goddess of memory.” Vitto felt her stare, so he didn’t face her while she added, “She’s often portrayed with red hair like fire. Seeing her upon departure was believed to restore your memory so that you could return to the outside world.”