The Truth About Death

by Robert Hellenga

  It’s late when my mother and sister get home—after six o’clock. They’ve had a wonderful time, but Dad blows a gasket, is in a towering rage. I can hear him chewing out my mother in the bedroom. “You know better than to get overtired. I try to be a good husband; I try to do the best I can, and now look at you. You’ve been gone for four hours … You’ve tired yourself out. You know better …” And so on.

  The bedroom door is not locked. Mom is sitting on the bed. Dad is shouting at her, repeating himself. “What were you thinking? … How could you? … I do everything I can … I try to be a good husband, but …”

  “Leave her alone,” I say. “She had a good time. Why do you have to ruin it?”

  Dad gives me a look of contempt. “Get out.”

  “Leave her alone,” I say. “You’re too drunk to know what you’re doing.”

  This is the Oedipal moment. I would kill him if I dared, if I could.

  He’s a big man. Drunk. “Like a raging bull elephant in musth,” as my sister and I sometimes say to each other.

  He slaps me so hard I fall down.

  My mother is crying

  I get up and he slaps me again, backhanded, on the other side of my face.

  I run out of the room.

  And that’s a story I’ve never told to anyone before, but I’ve had to live with it for years. I’ve never been able to forget, or to forgive. But there’s more.

  Later on—Dad asleep in his chair—we do the usual. My sister and her husband, Pete, and their daughter, Megan, are there. Mom reads the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke. We’ve decorated the tree, and there’s a fire in the fireplace. We don’t talk about what happened. Maybe that silence is the greater act of cowardice.

  Megan, age twelve, is the only one who stands up to my father. When she was little he would force her to eat sweet potatoes or candied carrots, which she couldn’t stand, and he’d make a big battle out of it. She’d eat the sweet potatoes or candied carrots or whatever it was and then throw up on the table. Finally he gave up. But he respected her. At least he left her alone.

  Later on, in the middle of the night, I can hear him typing. He’s retired early—too early—in order to spend more time hunting and fishing. He’s turned his wholesale lumber business, which specialized in choice hardwoods—cherry from western Pennsylvania and West Virginia, yellow poplar from Appalachia, yellow birch from Canada, black walnut from Indiana—over to some of his key employees, who have embezzled so much money that the company has fallen into the hands of the receivers, a phrase that my father repeats over and over: “fallen into the hands of the receivers.” He wants to go back into business and repay the creditors, firms he’d done business with over the years. But the credit rating agency won’t give him back his old credit rating, and without his credit rating, he can’t, or won’t, go back into business, and that’s what the letter is about—addressed not to the men who defrauded him, but to the credit rating bureau. He’s been working on it—sending it out, demanding meetings, switching lawyers—for six or seven years, working on it day and night, including Christmas Eve. On Christmas morning we go over the letter again. It’s the same letter every year. It’s a good thing he doesn’t have a computer, because then he wouldn’t have to retype it, and the typing is a kind of therapy for him. He types so hard he ruins two or three Underwood office typewriters a year.

  In any case, we go over the letter as if nothing had happened the night before. I advise him to go easy on the capital letters, and he agrees. He retypes the letter, jabbing at the keys with two thick fingers, a job that takes him about twenty minutes. I look it over again. There are a couple of typos. He retypes it again, and then again. Pretty soon all the nouns and verbs are recapitalized. For emphasis. “Although I am neither RICH nor POWERFUL, nonetheless if you THINK …” Then the adjectives and adverbs. And then every word: “ALTHOUGH I AM NEITHER RICH NOR POWERFUL, NONETHELESS, IF YOU THINK …”

  On Easter evening at the Marchettis’, after most of the relatives, including Nonna Agostina, had gone home, I played a beautiful mahogany guitar that Luca, a professional musician, had got in Paris the year before. I knew a handful of Italian songs and we sang “Bella Ciao” and “Il Cacciatore Gaetano.” It was a twelve-fret classical guitar with a wide neck and short scale, very easy to play. I tuned it down to an open G and played a new version of “Corrina, Corrina”—by an Italian group, TamboGnola—that I’d found by accident on YouTube. The song articulated the kind of melancholy I often experience after a few glasses of wine, and I was moved to open my heart to the Marchettis. I did not, however, tell them that my father had died drunk in the locker room of the Green Arbor Country Club. I just said how moved I was to see four generations together with the grandmother at the head of the table. Four generations.

  And then the truth came out with a bang: No one could stand the grandmother, Signora Marchetti’s mother. Signora Marchetti had one brother and two sisters, and they moved Nonna Agostina around from house to house. But she kept her old casa near Palazzo Strozzi, even though she went back to it only once a year. She was tight with money. She was always changing her will to punish her children, usually the son or daughter she was living with. Everyone hated her. Even the grandchildren.

  I was floored. It was like discovering that there’s no Santa Claus—or no Easter Bunny. It was worse than that. It was like discovering … I didn’t know what it was like discovering. I still don’t.

  * * *

  Rosella—the woman I was in love with—was going to take the bus from Cortina d’Ampezzo, where she’d been skiing with her friend and his children, to Venice and then an express train to Florence. I drank a coffee in the station bar, checked the schedule, and then waited for her on a bench at the end of track 6. We’d met at a party in Hyde Park (Chicago, not London) to which I’d been invited because I spoke Italian, which turned out not to be necessary. “We’ll speak Italian when you come to Italy,” she’d said. “But in the United States we’ll speak English.” Her mother was from the Orkney Islands and her father was Italian, and she spoke English fluently, but with a pronounced Scottish accent. She didn’t say “wee” and “bonny,” but she rolled her r’s and collapsed her words into as few syllables as possible, and the first time we made love she’d said, “Whun ye feel it coomin, luv, tock it oot,” because she’d suddenly remembered that she’d forgotten to take her birth control pill. I took it out, spilled my seed on the bed, and she’d laughed and drawn me down to her. She’d tasted sweet and salty.

  She’d come to Chicago for a conference on fresco restoration. I’d taken some time off and went to a couple of her lectures at the Art Institute, and one at the Newberry Library, and I showed her the main sights, including some of the exhibits I’d worked on at the Museum of Science and Industry: “The History of Computers,” “Life Tech,” “Blue Planet, Red Planet.” She’d spent time in California and New York, but it was her first time in Chicago, and she expected to find an old bluesman on every street corner, but she had to settle for Roy Book Binder at the Old Town School, and Cephas & Wiggins at Buddy Guy’s, and all the time I was thinking that what we were doing was having a little adventure, una piccola avventura. But by the time I dropped her off at O’Hare—she was on her way to New York—she had become the person in whose eyes I wanted to shine, and I gave her a Galilean-style telescope kit I’d created for the Galileo exhibit out of a cardboard mailing tube and a pair of lenses. It was two feet long, but we managed to squeeze it into her suitcase at the last minute.

  She wasn’t married, and neither was I, but she was somebody’s mistress and lived in a house on this somebody’s estate on the side of Mount Ceceri, above Fiesole. “It’s one of those complicated European affairs,” she said. “You Americans, you Middle-of-the-Westerners, wouldn’t understand.” She laughed. I was standing with her in the check-in line at the United terminal.

  “I understand all right,” I said. “You’ve got yourself a sugar daddy in Fiesole, and he cheats on his
wife and now you’re cheating on him.”

  “Sugarrr daddy,” she growled. “That’s exactly what I told you: you don’t understand a thing.”

  Sitting by the tracks in the station in Florence, I could close my eyes and still hear her laughter over the sound of the trains. Love made the world bigger, louder, more surprising, brought what was blurry into sharp focus. But what about my parents? What had happened? What had gone wrong? Would things have been better if my mother had allowed my father to drink in the house? That was one theory, Pete’s theory. It made a certain amount of sense, but it was an interpretation I didn’t want to pursue. Going back even further I could remember the first time I heard them quarreling. Adults didn’t quarrel in Green Arbor, Michigan. Not when I was growing up, and that’s why it made such an impression on me. I woke up in the night. My mother wasn’t saying anything, but my father was shouting something about the new mantel over the fireplace in the living room. “Goddamn it,” he shouted, “if you didn’t want it that way you should have said so.” I couldn’t hear my mother, and I never figured out what the problem was with the mantel.

  At the University of Michigan I majored in philosophy. I read Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper and specialized in the philosophy of science, which is how I wound up in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry as an exhibit developer. On Tuesday I was going to ask the director of the Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence if I could borrow Galileo’s telescope for the Galileo exhibit at the MSI. It was out of the question, I’d told my boss. The famous telescope that Galileo used for his observations for Sidereus Nuncius was going to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. But there was a second telescope, a smaller prototype that we were aiming at. It had a magnification of 14x, as opposed to 20x, and a focal length of 1330 mm with a 26 mm aperture.

  I was thinking about this second telescope—comparing it in my mind to the telescope kit I’d put together for the exhibit—when Rosella came up behind me and put her arms around me. “Sorpreso?”

  “Stupito,” I said. Stupified. I really was amazed. Amazed to be taken by surprise like that and to hear Italian coming out of her mouth.

  We backed up a little, looked each other up and down, and stepped into each other’s embrace. The train, which had backed into the station, was already pulling out, on its way to Rome. We walked to the new parking lot and I hoisted her big suitcase into the trunk of her smallish Alfa Romeo.

  “Is this a Spider?” I asked. It was the only kind of Alfa Romeo I could name.

  “A Brera,” she said. “It’s small, but not too small. I couldn’t fit this suitcase into a Spider. Would you like to drive it?”

  I declined automatically. I’d never driven in Italy and had no desire to. But then all of a sudden it hit me: I could buy a car like this. I could buy two of them. I could buy anything I wanted. Now that my father was dead, I was rich.

  “Momento,” I said. “Maybe I will drive.”

  I hadn’t been to bed with a woman since Rosella’s two-week stay in Chicago the previous October, and I didn’t want to disturb the prospect of bliss by telling her about my father’s death. In my mind what had started as a piccola avventura with a predictable trajectory had turned into the real thing. Even before she left Chicago. But what was the “real thing”? And how would it turn out? On the one hand, I wanted to deromanticize it. We were both adults, after all. This wasn’t a teenage infatuation. On the other hand … But you can’t think about these things when you’re driving in Italy. Rosella guided me through a complex maze of streets in which you have to go south in order to go north, east in order to go west, until we were finally on the familiar bus route up to Fiesole, then through the piazza in Fiesole and onward, up Mount Ceceri, and then down a narrow wooded lane that was like a tunnel, green as dark as midnight, till we came to a big wooden door in a stone wall. It was thrilling. Rosella got out, opened the door. I drove through, and she closed the door and got back into the car. It was like a fairy tale, and the house—her house, provided for her by her sugar daddy—was like a glass palace. Like the Philip Johnson glass house in New Canaan, Connecticut.

  “I’m the one who suggested the glass,” she said. “So now he says I have to live here. I used to live closer to the villa.” Farther along a road that disappeared into the darkness.

  “Well, you’re pretty isolated,” I said.

  “We can pull the drapes,” she said. “If you’re self-conscious.”

  Maybe I was self-conscious, but I didn’t say so.

  “Let’s go to bed right away,” she said, once we got into the house. “Then we can enjoy our dinner later. Besides, it’s chilly in here. That will give it a chance to warm up.” She adjusted the thermostat. “We can talk later. You can tell me all about Galileo. His tomb’s in Santa Croce, you know.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m going to see if we can borrow it for the MSI exhibit.”

  “The tomb?” She laughed. In the bedroom she unpinned her hair in front of a mirror and then combed it out. Hurry up and wait. But I didn’t mind. I studied an etching on the wall signed Rembrandt f. 1646—a young couple making love.

  “Is this real?” I asked. “I mean really a Rembrandt?”

  “Yes, but it’s not mine. It comes with the house.”

  “The woman has three hands.”

  “He forgot to erase one when he changed the position. But look at the smile on her face.”

  It was a lovely smile, a wonderful smile, like the smile on the face of a young woman I’d been watching over and over on the YouTube video—a slide-guitar version of “Corrina, Corrina.”

  I watched Rosella’s shadow moving on the wall as she took her clothes off. When she turned toward me and smiled a smile that spread through her whole body, I could see tiny creases under her eyes. She was irresistible. But over her shoulder, in the mirror, I could see something moving outside the bedroom window, something at the edge of the darkness. The drapes had not been pulled. I turned to look. It was an enormous white pig coming closer, walking stiff-legged. The pig came right up to the glass wall and pressed its nose up against it. For a moment I thought I was coming unstrung, but Rosella put her hand on my back, as if to steady me.

  “It’s Elena,” she said. “She’s supposed to be penned in up at the villa, but sometimes she gets loose. She’s attracted to the light. They have quite a few animals.”

  “They?”

  “The family.”

  “She’s huge.”

  “Over two hundred and fifty kilos. Do you want me to chase her away?”

  “No, no,” I said. “It’s all right.”

  “She’ll wander off when I turn out the light.”

  After we made love, Rosella cooked spaghetti with garlic and oil, the simplest meal in the world and one of the most satisfying. No salad—the shops had been closed on Easter Monday evening. There was nothing else to eat in the house except some crackers and a bowl of apples, big green apples past their prime. We each ate an apple using knives and forks.

  After supper we went outside and looked at the night sky through the crude cardboard telescope I’d given Rosella. No sign of Elena. The moon was full, but because of the small field of vision inherent in the design, you could see only half of it at a time.

  “Before Galileo,” I said, “astronomers thought that the sky had been completely explored. Everything—all the planets, all the fixed stars—had been cataloged. There was nothing more to discover. Who would have thought that by sticking two eyeglass lenses into the ends of a tube …”

  “They had eyeglasses?”

  “Eyeglasses were invented in the late Middle Ages,” I said. “That’s what you’ve got in this tube, more or less. Sixteen dollars for a pair of lenses, thirty-five dollars for the whole kit.”

  We looked at the North Star and at Vega, which was rising in the northeast, and at Jupiter, though the telescope wasn’t powerful enough to pick out its moons, and then we went back inside and watched—on a computer—a slideshow of Rosella�
��s restoration work between the Gothic ribs at the top of the apse of Santa Croce—the Cappella Maggiore. We looked at hands and feet and robes and faces that had been cleaned and the tips of an angel’s wings, the feathers newly restored to their original luster.

  “I love this job,” she said. “You’ve got to be an artisan, working with your hands without leaving a mark. And you’ve got to be an artist, using your imagination, and you’ve got to be a scientist too, a chemist. And you’ve got to be an historian, hanging on to things that are passing away, to preserve the old visual culture. Now we’re in a new visual culture. It’s impoverished in some ways, but rich in others. The problem is that people don’t know how to understand the symbols, how to read them critically. You’ll have to come up on the scaffolding with me. Then you’ll understand.”

  Scaffolding? The top of a Gothic cathedral? I was picturing Juliette Binoche in The English Patient, hoisted up to the top of a church so she can examine the frescoes. No, thanks. But I didn’t want Rosella to know that I was afraid of heights. I wasn’t cripplingly acrophobic, but I never stood close to the floor-to-ceiling windows in a high-rise, and I never took the glass elevators in Water Tower Place.

  “You’ll have to wear a hard hat,” she said, too interested in the slideshow to notice my lack of enthusiasm, interested in the frescoes not so much as works of art but as things, physical objects, subject to decay in a way that a poem or a piece of music is not. “When they’re covered on the outside,” she said, “with an accumulation of dirt and grime and candle smoke, you can clean them. When they’re threatened from the inside by corrosive salts erupting from within the very stones of the cathedral, you can dissolve the salts. But when they’re gone, like half the Giotto frescos in the Peruzzi Chapel, they’re gone forever.”