Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel

by James Markert

  “So you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Mamma . . . that she’s dead?”

  Robert looked at him like he had three eyes. “Of course. She’s buried here at the hotel—out past the poppy field. But thank you for poking an old bruise.”

  “It’s just that . . . Valerie, every day she would have to remind you . . .”

  Robert’s chisel bit off another small chunk. “A lot has happened since your hibernation yesterday. Water. Electric. We have a telephone line working.” He wiped the stone, revealing what could have been the initial pocks of a beard, or perhaps the hair of a woman. “The other evening when the earthquake hit.”

  “It was hardly an earthquake.”

  “Tremor, whatever it was, I had a brief burst of lucidity directly after. I made some phone calls. Packed my suitcases and a few other things I thought we’d need.” He nodded toward Valerie. “Like her violin. And then I sneaked out of the house. That fountain . . . was running when I arrived.”

  “How?”

  Robert shrugged. “Maybe it was Charles. He was my first phone call. You remember Charles; he used to do maintenance. Or maybe it was something else?”

  “Like what?” Vitto was incredulous.

  “You’re not the only one to have telling dreams, son.” Robert held up his hand, craned his head toward the south wing. “Ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus.” That in all things God may be glorified. The pocket watch he pulled from his pants showed a couple of minutes past noon. “Sext, Vitto. Shh. Listen. I heard them singing Lauds in the wee hours of the morning.”

  The faint baritone sound of the Benedictine monks chanting carried over the hillside olive grove. From the top terrace the monastery was visible down in the valley, a collection of modest stone buildings for modest men. A church with a tall steeple, stained-glass windows, and a colorful ceiling fresco painted by Vitto in his teens marked it with beauty. The smaller buildings looked like brown paint dots from the height of the olive grove.

  Valerie had stopped playing her violin. With William by her side, she stood facing the chanting from the valley.

  Robert pointed toward the kitchen. “Your friend, he cries a lot, by the way. He asked to try the ovens. I said be my guest.” He grinned, gripped his son’s arms. “Our first guest, Vitto.”

  “Our first . . . What are you talking about?”

  “Your friend John. He stayed in one of the Caravaggio rooms. The one with the replica of Judith Beheading Holofernes. Vitto, I’m opening the hotel again.”

  “You’re what . . . how? And with what money?”

  “Ah.” He waved it away as if to say Vitto knew nothing and money mattered little.

  “Father, this place closed down from lack of funds, plus a lack of guests near the end. Art is beautiful, but it is not currency. It is not food. The Depression hit hard. And just two days ago you were—”

  Robert’s glare stopped him. “You don’t know why we closed down, Vitto, so don’t pretend to.”

  “It was Mamma’s death then.”

  Robert pointed with his chisel. “You do that, you know? Rationalize. You’ve always needed to hold something to know it exists. To give concrete reason to things, a hardness”—he knuckled the marble beside him—“when those things just might prefer to be air.” He pretended to snatch something from the air in front of his face. “Unseen.”

  “Really? So who is it you’re getting ready to sculpt?”

  Robert ignored him, focused back on the marble slab.

  Vitto wondered if the water Robert had consumed from that fountain yesterday had done more than restore his mind and memory. Perhaps it had rattled some of the remaining good screws loose.

  “Don’t always ask why or how or what, Vitto.” Robert chiseled another sliver from the marble. “Not all questions have answers, nor should they. And not all medicine comes in a bottle.”

  “So that’s what this is? This hotel, the water in that fountain—suddenly medicine?”

  “Nothing is as sudden as it seems, Vitto. We are made of mostly water, are we not? Water is life. And to me art is food!”

  “You’ve gone mad. This isn’t real.”

  He laughed. “Perhaps you should look in a mirror, son.” He lifted an eyebrow, eyed Vitto’s wrinkled clothes and unshaven face. “Or perhaps not. But you’ve been here only one night and you’re already more engaged with life than you were those first two horrible weeks after your return.”

  “How would you know? You didn’t even know who I was. Your shoes were on the wrong feet every morning.”

  “Oh, some part of me was paying attention,” said Robert. “Perhaps locked in a cruel cage, but I was in there.”

  “And you’re healed now? Suddenly let free from your cage? The Alzheimer’s disease or whatever is magically gone, just like that? Memory restored?”

  “More or less. At least for the moment.”

  “This makes no sense.” Vitto pointed. “You make no sense.”

  “I thought you’d be thrilled.”

  “Of course, I am . . . but . . .”

  “Your friend John calls it a miracle.”

  “John cries all night. He pretends to be a barrel of sunshine, but deep down he’s no different from me.”

  Robert looked across the piazza toward Valerie, who’d begun playing again—probably to mask their argument—a made-up song in accompaniment with the monks’ voices. “It’s good to hear her play again. She didn’t play when you were gone. The passion oozed from her by the day.”

  Vitto pursed his lips, fought the urge to go to her.

  “She’s still frightened of you, Vitto. Give it time.” He pulled from his pocket a folded paper. “Read. That went out in this morning’s newspaper—and not just the Gazette. I made some long-distance calls, got it in the Union and the Times and the Examiner. Expensive, but worth it.”

  It was a notice about the opening of the hotel. Specifically, it invited the elderly and those afflicted with memory loss. Vitto crumbled it, tossed it to the ground. “You cannot promise healing . . . memory restored. You don’t know. This is not right. Who drinks from a piazza fountain?”

  “What’s not right is to keep this to ourselves.”

  “This? This what?”

  “Who is Bed-Check Charlie?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You screamed it out in your sleep last night. Bed-Check Charlie. Your mind is covering things up, Vitto. You’ve buried too much.”

  It was true. He had. Robert had never approved of his son burying those silly little tin boxes of nightmares and bad memories in the field, based on advice from the folds of Magdalena’s mind. And Robert had never been comfortable discussing his wife’s mental quirks—because how could his muse possibly be flawed?

  “I craved my mind back, Vitto—my memories. But you fear yours. And you have to get past that. You can be hurt by what you remember, but you can also be healed. And the healing will not happen until you allow those memories back out, just as the army doctor said. Who is Bed-Check Charlie?”

  Vitto turned on him. “In January of ’45, the Eighth was ordered to Rheims. Then we raced more than a hundred miles across France through snow and ice to Pont-á-Mousson, to help stop the Nazis’ drive for Strasbourg. We were assigned the call sign Tornado. In Rheims, we saw our first enemy plane. I wet myself as it neared. Is that what you want to hear?”

  “Yes, go on.”

  “He didn’t open fire. It was only reconnaissance. But he came back. Every evening at dusk, this lone plane flew above us. We named it Bed-Check Charlie! Why are you smiling?”

  “How did that feel?”

  “What?” But he knew, and it had felt good.

  “Letting go,” said Robert. “Allowing that memory freedom. It’s already working on you too. Yes, Valerie gave you wine last night. But it wasn’t only wine.”

  “No. She didn’t.”

  “John whimpered all night. He drank too.”

  “You had no right
to bring that horror back. John spent weeks burying those memories.”

  “He drank on his own accord. And Vitto, memories can’t be buried. Not forever.”

  Vitto turned, didn’t know where to go. Back to the army hospital seemed the safest place. Where they could poke and prod and dig; he could admit that once, during the war, the sights and sounds and colors had been so strikingly real that he’d attempted to bury himself in a ditch, shoveling dirt in upon him like a man buried alive until Coopus had pulled him out.

  Robert touched his shoulder. Vitto flinched. “I drank again this morning, Vitto. The water’s effect doesn’t last. It really is like medicine—we need regular doses. Daily doses.”

  Vitto shook his head. He’d been tricked into consuming it last night, but never again.

  “Vitto, look at me.” He turned. Robert now held a wooden model boat in his hands—a Viking ship three feet long from bow to stern, one of Mr. Carney’s maritime replicas. Tiny wooden shields lined the sides, a sturdy red-and-cream-striped mast soared above it, and a tall-necked dragon head adorned the bow.

  Robert handed the boat to Vitto; its hull looked wet, recently floated. He nodded toward Valerie across the piazza. “She was skeptical, too, until she saw for herself. I believe you know what to do with this.”

  Eight

  By the time he reached the creek, the Viking ship was an anchor in his hands.

  He’d lost so much strength over the past two weeks, the three-hundred-yard walk to the front of the property had exhausted him. The hills of his childhood had suddenly become mountains.

  Halfway to the creek he’d rested on the base of a tall statue, a replica of Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus. He’d once told Valerie that someday he’d have a full beard like Hercules did in the statue, with the muscles to go along with it. She’d laughed. “Do you expect to get those muscles from wielding a paintbrush?” He’d grinned, only slightly hurt—they often needled each other—but then she’d quickly added, “If the hotel is ever overrun by this Cacus giant—”

  “He breathes fire,” he told her.

  “Okay, this fire-breathing giant Cacus, then I’ll know who to call for help.”

  These were memories he held dear; the ones from the war could rot where they hid. Remnants of her flirtatious giggle fueled him to the next statue, a replica of one in the Medici Chapels. He paused briefly there before moving on toward the creek. The gurgle of moving water gave him strength to plow on, hugging the wooden ship like one might hold an infant.

  The water was high for November, flowing swiftly after recent rains, a mere foot or two below the bank. Often after dry summer months their boats used to get caught on exposed rocks and in little eddies, the flow a murmured trickle instead of a proper current. The best time to float Mr. Carney’s ships—thirty-seven of them, if he remembered correctly, all stored in two rooms above the hotel’s entrance, the Roman bireme being his favorite—was during the first three months of the year, when Gandy experienced the most rainfall. That’s when the Lethe River swelled, and the boats floated faster than he could run alongside as they sped down the valley toward the monastery and the small lake behind it.

  Vitto dropped to the grass beside the creek, muddying his knees, watching the water flow. He heard footsteps, looked over his shoulder. John emerged up the hillside—first his head of shiny, wheat-colored hair and then the massive rest of him—breathing like a man who’d spent three weeks in a bed. They both needed to gain strength.

  “Valerie said I should come with you. That you’d tell me about the river.”

  “It’s not a river. It’s a creek.”

  John plopped beside him, the weight of his knees displacing grass and mud. “I brought bread.” He tore a hunk and offered it to Vitto.

  It was still warm and tasted of honey. Vitto chewed, watched the water.

  John handed him another hunk, sat back on his ankles, and pulled a bottle of wine from his pocket. Vitto hesitated. John promised him it was only wine, so they took turns drinking from it and plucking from the bread loaf.

  “Do you know any Greek or Roman mythology?”

  “No.”

  “There were five rivers in the underworld. In Hades.”

  “Hell?”

  “Sure. If that helps. One of them was named Lethe. The river of forgetfulness, oblivion. The murmuring sounds would induce drowsiness.”

  “I am feeling tired, Gandy.”

  “When the souls of the dead moved to the afterlife, they drank from the River Lethe to forget their past, in order to be reincarnated.”

  “I don’t think I believe in that.”

  Vitto chewed, watched John. “I don’t either. It’s a story, a myth. My father was enthralled by the ancients. He wanted this hotel to be a place where guests could come and forget their humdrum lives. To work on their talents free from daily burdens. Some said the River Lethe bordered Elysium.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  The way John chewed reminded Vitto of a cow with cud. “Elysium. Paradise.”

  “Heaven.”

  “Yes. The final resting place of the virtuous, where heroes were sent to live blissful, immortal lives. The ancient Greeks believed that after death, souls crossed over to Hades and were given a choice to drink from the Lethe, whose water caused forgetfulness. A chance to leave behind any painful memories. Then they were returned to earth, reborn, with a chance to do better.”

  “I don’t think I believe in that either.”

  Vitto ignored him. “Or they could drink from the fountain of Mnemosyne.”

  John nodded toward the double-sided statue beside the bridge. “The goddess of memory.”

  “Very good, John.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Gandy.” He tore off another hunk of bread. “I’m not an imbecile.”

  “And those who chose to remember were sent to Elysium, where they could live out their lives in eternal happiness.”

  “So where’s that leave us?”

  Vitto drank wine and chewed bread. “Are we dead, John?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Then a decision is not yet needed, is it?”

  John shrugged, dipped his fingers into the creek water, and then wiped them dry on his pants. Vitto was enjoying a moment of silence, listening to the water, when John said, “What were the other four?”

  “What other four?”

  “You said there were five rivers in Hades. What were the other four?”

  “Do you ever stop talking?”

  “That’s why my parents said I was still single. My daddy said it was hard enough for a woman to overlook this nose I got, so why did I always have to open my mouth.”

  “He said that?” John nodded, teary eyed. “Where are your parents, John?”

  “They’re dead, Gandy. Tuberculosis got ’em both before I went overseas.”

  “I’m sorry.” He raised the wine bottle. “To your parents, then.”

  John drank next, wiped his mouth. “Daddy said I was a sissy ’cause I always preferred to be in the kitchen with my mom instead of throwing a baseball around the yard.” He wiped his wet cheeks. “Said I cried too much too. So I went off to war to show I was tough enough.”

  “And?”

  “I wasn’t.” He drank from the bottle, a long gulp, swallowed like a snake would. “Robert said I could be the new hotel chef. He tried my bread and liked it. I’m writing out a full menu.”

  “There’s not going to be a hotel, John.”

  “That’s ’cause you still think like a barrel of stones, Gandy.”

  Vitto chewed the bread. “Styx was the river of hatred. Acheron was the river of sorrow and pain. Cocytus, the river of lamentation. And Phlegathon was the river of fire.”

  John nodded, let out a brief chuckle that made Vitto ask what was funny. “Just that me and you must have had a good dose of all five rivers then. Hades must just be another name for war.”

  Vitto couldn’t deny it. “They’re all here at the hotel, thos
e rivers.” He nodded toward the creek at their feet. “This one’s the Lethe. The other four rivers I just mentioned are represented by those blue mosaic walkways leading out from the fountain. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Why?”

  Vitto swallowed wine, shook his head.

  John went from solemn to smiling in a snap. “You know, Gandy—what you just said about the people that drink from the Lethe to forget? They’d have to do it all over when they died again, right? That would get kind of frustrating, that constant cycle.” Vitto shrugged, wondered if a point was coming. John gave it. “It’s not too different than what Robert was dealing with. That Alzheimer’s, you know? Each day like an endless loop.” He tipped the wine bottle back and then wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Barrel of sunshine, Gandy. Or a barrel of stones.”

  Vitto looked across the creek, ears peeled to the sound of an approaching automobile. The rumble grew louder, and then a black Chrysler New Yorker pulled up over the ridge and stopped in front of the bridge. The vehicle idled and coughed, hesitating like it had a mind of its own and didn’t want to cross over.

  “Who’s that?” asked John.

  Vitto stood, wiped the back of his britches. “How should I know?”

  Whoever sat in the driver’s seat must have gained some sudden courage, because he or she gunned it over the bridge and continued on toward the Tuscany Hotel like there was no turning back. In the passenger’s seat sat an elderly woman who stared at them as they passed, and then she raised her right hand, the middle finger extended.

  “You see that, Gandy?” Vitto nodded in disbelief. John laughed. “What did that gesture mean back in ancient times?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  The car rumbled down the hill, briefly out of view, and then showed itself again in the distance, scooting along the serpentine, tree-lined road toward the hotel.

  All was silent for a moment as the new arrival disappeared over the horizon. “The quiet hurts, Gandy,” said John. “It ushers bad memories up. You asked why I talk all the time. Well, that’s it. The quiet hurts.” He nodded toward the Viking ship resting in the grass. “You gonna float that thing or not?”