Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel

by James Markert

  “This intrusion enraged the gods of death—Thanatos and his blood-craving sisters, the Keres, all of them agents of the Fates. The Keres looked up through the hole and dripping water and promised violent death to anyone who drank from it. But Thanatos, like his twin brother, Hypnos, had a touch that was gentle. He plugged the hole with the stone that had caused it, assuring Zeus that any death from the water that remained would be nonviolent and brought about during sleep.”

  She lowered her head, closed her eyes again. “And with that, Zeus was satisfied.”

  After

  2019

  The Tuscany Hotel, Gandy, California

  The nurse parked Vittorio Gandy’s wheelchair in the same place every morning—within arm’s reach of the piazza’s central fountain, where Cronus wrestled with memory and forgetfulness, close enough for him to reach over the tiled edge and run his fingers through the water. Close enough to hear the trickle coming from the mouths of the chimeras.

  From there he could see over the southern crenellations to the terraced olive grove, where plump green ovals weighted down limbs. Around him, scattered throughout the piazza—some standing, some in wheelchairs like his own—were dozens of men and women his age, battling as he was to remember the simplest of things: how old they were, what their names were, what they’d just eaten for breakfast—or whether they had eaten at all. The name of the man who’d tied his shoes for him this morning, the one with the bald spot forming on the top of his head. The name of the lovely nurse who had parked him seconds ago.

  “What is your name, dear?” At nearly ninety-eight years old, his voice now rattled like the rest of him. “I know your eyes.”

  The brunette nurse sat on the edge of the fountain and gripped his hand, a hand now covered in liver spots and curled wretchedly with arthritis. “I’m Amy, Grandpa. Amy Gandy. Your granddaughter.”

  “Ah, yes. Amy.” He pretended to recollect but only had a vague impression, although her eyes reminded him deeply of someone.

  She must have sensed his confusion, a daily thing, and pulled a notebook from the side pocket of his wheelchair. She opened the first page for him and pointed to the words. He could still read on most days and assumed she wanted him to do so. “Vittorio Gandy.”

  “That’s you.”

  He looked back down. “Married to Valerie Gandy, now deceased.”

  Now he remembered. “You have her eyes, Amy. My Valerie’s eyes. What’s funny?”

  “Nothing, Grandpa. It’s just that you tell me so every morning, and it never gets old.”

  He looked to the notebook—his journal, as it was called. Everyone in the hotel had one, carried at all times to remind them who they were. “It says she was a violinist.”

  Amy nodded, yes, go on, encouraging him. Vitto read, “She started the hotel’s music therapy program, which she, at the time, called musical medicine.”

  “Yes,” said Amy. “From the stories I was told, she would play the violin for the guests here on the piazza or in their rooms sometimes at night to help some fall asleep or calm down. She was convinced that music could help restore memory. That it could calm and remind and heal.”

  “Yes,” said Vitto, wheezing out a laugh. “She loved her violin. Where is she now?”

  “She passed away ten years ago, Grandpa. She’s buried here, though. In the cemetery. We could go now if you’d like, although we normally wait until after lunch.”

  “Yes.” He nodded, tried hard to remember. “After lunch. Do you work here?”

  “I’m a nurse, yes.”

  “And I’m a patient?”

  “Of sorts.” She lowered her voice and playfully said, “But we don’t call them patients here. You’re all guests.”

  “Guests?”

  “Of the hotel.”

  “Ah, yes. The hotel.”

  “Your father’s hotel.”

  “Yes. Father’s hotel.” He paused. “You’re pretty. You’ve got eyes I’ve seen before.”

  That laugh again. She leaned forward and turned a page in the notebook, where a few pictures had been glued. The same pictures were on the iPad in the wheelchair’s side pocket, but they’d learned that the real photos brought back memories more readily.

  Amy pointed toward the first photo. “That’s you and Valerie at my father’s wedding.”

  “Who’s your father?”

  “William. William Gandy. Your son. And his wife is my mother. Claire.”

  “Yes, William and Claire. What do they do?”

  “They run the hotel. My father, William. Your son. He’s the doctor here.” She pointed across the hotel to a white-haired man walking stooped and holding a clipboard, stopping to chat with an even older woman. “There he is. Your son, William. He’s been the doctor here for decades now. Since the seventies, I believe. Guests come from far and wide to stay here.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because of our success with the elderly,” she said. “With those with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.”

  “Which do I have?”

  “We’re pretty sure you have Alzheimer’s, Grandpa.”

  “Sounds like nasty business.”

  “It is, but we somehow make things work here. As well as they can be worked, I suppose.”

  Vitto looked around, felt around, his fingers prodding in the side pocket, reaching for the iPad. She asked him if he wanted to take a picture, and he said yes.

  “Of what?”

  “Of you,” he said. “Right there next to the fountain. Like a painting.”

  She helped him hold the electronic device, reminded him of what button to press, and then sat back down on the fountain to be photographed. When finished, she showed him the picture he’d taken, and then with the pad of her index finger swiped left and right to show him similar pictures he’d taken in the past days.

  “You started all of this,” she said.

  “All of what?”

  “The pictures. Every guest here has one of those. Some use their phones. Some still use old-fashioned cameras. They take pictures to capture memories, Grandpa. Do you remember the paintings you used to do? Of the guests here? To help them remember?”

  He nodded slowly but didn’t really. Vaguely, perhaps.

  “You called it painting the real,” she said. “At least that’s how Dad tells it. So that’s what we do with our cameras.”

  Vitto nodded, grinned, stared into the fountain, at the water as it rippled. “We used to drink from this fountain.”

  She chuckled, patted his hand. “No one used to drink from the fountain, Grandpa.”

  “It was like medicine.”

  “As the story goes,” she agreed. “But those were only stories.”

  Vitto watched the water, the shimmer blurring and distorting the blue and yellow tiles below it. “It worked for a time . . . the water. But then it didn’t. Over time it didn’t. It became just . . . water.”

  “That’s why so many come here still,” she said. “They say there’s something in the water. Something about the ocean. The Alzheimer’s, it can’t be fixed, but there’s something about this place that makes it, well, manageable. The senses are somehow stimulated by all of this art and music and . . . the Renaissance.”

  “Rebirth.”

  “Yes. That’s what you always said this hotel would be for the guests. A rebirth.”

  “They used to come here to live.”

  “And they do still.”

  “There was something in the water. There were miracles in the water.”

  “No miracles,” she said, patting his hand again. “Just us. Humans doing for others.”

  “Yes, doing for others.”

  “And it was all started by you. And Grandma. And the stories of Great-Grandpa Robert and Magdalena.”

  Magdalena. That name. He knew it . . . but couldn’t quite grasp it.

  He didn’t say anything more for several minutes. Then, “Valerie, can you take me for a ride?”

  “It’s Amy.
”

  “What’s funny? Why are you always laughing at me?”

  “Because we have to. We have to laugh.”

  “And why is that?”

  “We’d go crazy if we didn’t.”

  “Humor is the universal language,” he said. The elevated words seemed to shock her. “Just something someone once said to me. Can you take me for a ride?”

  She unlocked the brakes on the wheelchair and pushed him around the fountain, and as they circled, he named all the colors of the doors, the slight variances in shade as one wing angled into another until all the colors of the color wheel were represented. “You never cease to amaze me, Grandpa.”

  “How so?”

  “Every day you tell me the names of each and every color, of each and every door.”

  “Yes, color. Always color.”

  They were both silent for a bit as she pushed and the wind whispered words that could have been song. The wheels went thump-thump over the travertine. “Stop there, please.” He pointed toward the large piece of marble on the northwestern side of the piazza, not far from the bar. “Tell me about this.”

  “It was your father’s last masterpiece.”

  Vitto ran his hands over the surface, the engraving of so many names—hundreds and hundreds of names—all etched under his fingertips.

  “The guests,” she told him. “After they leave here, their names are carved into the stone.”

  “You mean die,” he said. “Pass away. Not leave.”

  She didn’t argue with him, although it had become legend by now that Magdalena’s body had never been found, and days after Sir Robert Gandy’s body had been buried at sea, they’d found his coffin floating empty. And no one ever heard from Juba again.

  She pointed to his father’s name, carved by Robert half a century ago, and then the name of Juba. Vitto’s fingers found Cowboy Cane next. Johnny Two-Times and his wife, Beverly. A woman named Elenore Eaves. Landry Tuffant’s name was there too. The reporter, who had come on as an employee of the hotel soon after Robert’s passing, had continued to write a daily column in the Gandy Gazette and started a hotel newspaper, the Tuscany Tribune, in the early 1950s.

  Vitto pointed next to the bar, so she rolled him there. A man he recognized vaguely was cleaning glasses behind the bar and nodded to him with respect. “Mr. Gandy. How are you this fine morning?”

  Vitto sat confused. “I’d be better with some wine in one of those glasses.”

  The bartender smiled. “How about orange juice?”

  “How about orange juice that bubbles?”

  The man laughed. “So the usual.”

  “The usual, Juba.” He knew it wasn’t Juba, but the way the bartender laughed and then shared a glance with Amy made him think that this, too, was a daily occurrence. He pointed to the wall behind the bar, the place between the shelves where the old clock hung. “The clock on the wall is broken.”

  “Since the spring of ’46, Mr. Gandy.” The man handed Vitto his spiked orange juice and the nurse rolled him onward, around the outskirts of the piazza, following the blue mosaic tiles. They passed a cluster of men and women painting, a young woman playing piano, and a gathering of people fumbling through some kind of craft with bright yarn. Vitto could still see the colors so vividly it hurt his eyes.

  She rolled him through the front arches to see the statue of Cupid, to the poppy field spotted in brilliant orange and red, past vineyards and olives trees that now thrived again.

  Vitto sipped his orange juice. The wind tousled his thin hair. “Beautiful, Valerie.”

  The woman pushing his wheelchair laughed and patted his shoulder. “Isn’t it, though, Grandpa?” So that’s who she was. He had a granddaughter. “They say Gandy gets more rain than any other place in California.”

  He stared down the valley, at the robust vineyards. “Must be something in the water.” He had her stop outside a stone building that looked familiar to him. She said it was the building where the olives were made into oil. He smiled, raised his arm. “There’s a loft up there.”

  “Yes, that’s where they store the blankets and willow baskets for the olive harvest.”

  Vitto smiled. “That’s not all that happened up there.” He didn’t elaborate, but she laughed again. He didn’t want to tell the stranger pushing him about such things, so he said simply, “I met my wife up there. When we were kids.”

  “Did you know your wife was my grandmother?”

  “She is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she? I think the two of you should meet then.”

  “She’s gone, Grandpa. She died.”

  The wave of sadness began to dissipate almost as soon as it struck. “When did she die?”

  “Years ago.”

  “Oh, yes, yes. That’s right. We should visit her today. I’d like to invite her to lunch. She plays the violin, you know. I’ll have her play for you.”

  The wind picked up as they approached the cliffs, and the woman behind him had to exert herself to get him up the paved incline. He braced his hands on the armrests and leaned back. “Have you ever been on a roller coaster?”

  “I have,” said the woman. “I hear that you and Grandma once got stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel.”

  “Yes, yes, we did.” He didn’t remember completely, but something brought about a smile. He pointed toward the cliff, where it narrowed out to a triangular outcropping that resembled the one in Athens, the crumbled temple of Poseidon. A chinking sound echoed, the sound of hammer and chisel and stone. There was a woman out there, with long gray hair that flowed like a ripped flag might. “Who is that?”

  “Your daughter, Grandpa. My aunt.”

  “You sure?”

  “Quite sure,” said the woman behind him, now leaning and speaking directly into his ear as she pushed. “You and Grandma had her in 1947.”

  “Why do you know so much about me?”

  “Her name is Violeta.”

  “Violeta,” he said. “Yes. Violeta. William was six or seven when she was born.”

  “And all that hair,” said the woman. “Do you remember? She was born with all that orange hair. With eyes green as olives.”

  Vitto smiled. “Like Magdalena.”

  “That’s what everyone said. Her hair is gray now, but it was once the color of fresh paint.”

  The hammering grew louder. “What is she doing?”

  “Working on another statue.”

  “She’s an artist, huh?”

  “Not just an artist, Grandpa, but the artist. She has sculptures and paintings all over the world. In museums and castles. In private homes and estates. The great Violeta Gandy.”

  “What’s she doing?” Whatever the statue was, it appeared to be nearly finished and included several figures, three of them nude women.

  The series of sculpted figures were all mounted on a grand marble slab, facing out over the cliff to the vastness of the ocean beyond. “She’s calling this her masterpiece.” She pointed. “The three who are holding hands and dancing—those are the three Graces. Or some call them the three Charites.”

  “Daughters of Zeus,” he said, his mind becoming clearer the closer he got to the cliff, to the sound and mist of the crashing water. “Goddesses of beauty and charm and creativity. Good cheer and joyfulness.”

  “And friends to the nine Muses.”

  “Yes, the Muses.” She pointed to the right, down along the cliff’s edge, where the land eventually dipped lower toward the tennis courts. Ten more statues overlooked the ocean. “She finished those last year. The Muses . . . and Apollo.”

  She parked his wheelchair next to the statue the woman with the long gray hair was chiseling. The dancing figures of the Graces cast shadows across his face and torso, leaving his legs warmed by the sun. Next to them was another grouping, the one now in progress, of a man and woman intertwined lovingly, their figures holding hands and spiraling up from waves that reached for them. Vitto somehow knew them to be his parents, Robe
rt and Magdalena.

  The creators.

  The woman with the long gray hair poked her head out from behind Robert Gandy’s marble arm. “Daddy.”

  He looked over his shoulder for affirmation. Who is this woman? Who are you?

  She carefully placed her hammer and chisel on the ground. “I’m Violeta. Your daughter.”

  “Yes. Violeta. Of course.” Her gray hair held a hint of gold, and he could see it as fire even still, just as he had when she was born. The wind blew ocean mist, and along with it came memories. “You paint too. Some say better than I?”

  “Some say,” she laughed. “But I disagree.”

  More memories struck him. “Father Embry—after Father died, Father Embry told me about that creek out there. The Lethe. That wasn’t the first time it changed direction. It did it three times before that.”

  “And four times since,” she added. “There is always a quake before the river changes direction, yet it doesn’t always change when there’s a quake. We know that now. It’s like sand in an hourglass. When one end runs out, it flips back.”

  “So it didn’t only happen when the guests arrived.” What the hotel now commonly referred to as the hotel’s rebirth. “The water in that fountain. It once restored memory.”

  Violeta nodded. “So the story goes.”

  “Then the clock stopped. The water . . . It slowly . . .” He lost his train of thought.

  Violeta helped him. “It slowly became just that . . . water.” She opened her arms to the hotel behind him. “But look what sprang forth, Daddy.”

  “Yes,” he said, craning his neck to look over his shoulder at the hotel. After a moment he focused again toward the cliff, toward the ocean. He smiled, broad and wide. “Barrel of sunshine or a barrel of stones, Gandy.”