Coalescent

by Stephen Baxter

  "In the place where I stood with Clark, Brutus, fresh from the murder of Caesar, once came to speak to the people. Augustus made sacrificial offerings to Jupiter. Greek monks prayed their way through the Dark Ages. Gibbon was inspired to write his great history. And now here we were, a bunch of ragged-ass GIs. But we'd made our own piece of history already. All I could see was faces, thousands upon thousands of Roman faces turned up toward us.

  "And even then I knew that among those hopeful crowds I would find family..."

  • • •

  I had found Lou in a retirement home just off Seaspray Avenue

  in Palm Beach.

  "What the hell kind of a coat is that?" he asked of my duffel. It was the first thing he said to me. "Where do you think you are, Alaska? Haven't seen a thing like that since the army."

  It had taken me a while to trace him. The address Gina gave me was out of date. She wasn't apologetic. "I haven't seen him for ten years," she said. "And anyhow you don't think of people that age changing address, do you?"

  Evidently Lou was an exception. His old address had been a rented apartment in Palm Beach. There was no forwarding contact, but Dan advised me to try the American Association of Retired Persons, which turned out to be a muscular lobby group. They were reluctant to give me his address, but acted as a third party to put us in touch. In all it took a couple of days before Lou finally called me at my hotel, and invited me over.

  Lou showed me around his rest home. It was like a spacious hotel, every room sunlit, with dozens of white-coated staff and its own immense grounds. You could get permits for golf courses and private beaches. There was a daily program of exercise. As well as old-folk nostalgic social events like wartime picture shows and big-band dances, I saw notices for guest speakers from universities and other learned organizations on such topics as Florida history, coastal flora and fauna, art deco, even the history of Disney.

  When I enthused about all this, Lou slapped me down. He called the place "the departure lounge." He walked me to a dayroom, where rows of citizens sat in elaborate armchairs, propped up before a gigantic, supremely loud wide-screen TV. "They like reality shows," he said. "Like having real live people here in the room with them. We do have a little community here. But every so often one of us just gets plucked out of here, and we all fight over his empty chair. So don't get all nostalgic about being old. You're fine so long as you keep fit, and you don't lose your marbles." He tapped his bare, sun-leathered cranium. "Which is why I walk three miles a day, and swim, and play golf, and do the New York Times crossword every day."

  I was impressed. "You complete the crossword?"

  "Did I say complete?... So you want to talk about your sister."

  I'd told him the story on the phone. I'd brought a copy of the photograph, scanned and cleaned up by Peter McLachlan; Lou had glanced at it but didn't seem much interested. "I want to close the whole business off," I said.

  "Or you're picking a scab," he said warningly. "I never met her, your sister. So if you want to know what she's like—"

  "Just tell me the story," I said. I spread my hands, and tried to imitate his Godfather accent. "Picture the scene. Rome, nineteen forty-four. The liberating army is welcomed by a smiling populace—"

  He laughed, and clapped me on the back. "Shithead. Christ, you are your father's boy; he made the same kind of dumb jokes. All right, I'll tell you the story. And I'll tell you what was told to me by Maria Ludovica."

  "Who?"

  "Your cousin," he said. "Or whatever."

  Maria Ludovica. It was the first time I'd heard the name. It wouldn't be the last.

  We sat in a bright dayroom, and began to talk.

  • • •

  "When we had operations established, and we got the electricity back to the hospitals on the second day, and the phones working on the third, and so forth, I had time to look around a little... I knew the family had roots in Rome. I knew where my grandparents had come from — near the Appian Way — and it wasn't hard to dig out some Casellas in the area. Whatever you say about those fascists, they kept good records."

  So young Sergeant Casella had ventured nervously down the Appian Way, the ancient road that led south out of Rome. In that hot autumn of 1944 the area was crowded with refugees, and everything was shabby, poor, dirty, deprived, despite the liberators' best efforts.

  He had found a "nest of Casellas," as he put it, an extended family living under the stern eye of a black-wrapped widow who turned out to be a cousin of his father. "It was a small house in a kind of down-at-the-heel suburb. I mean it had been down-at-the-heel even before the damn occupation. And now there were, hell, twenty people living in there, stacked up. Refugees, even a wounded soldier—"

  "All relatives."

  "Yep. And with no place to go. They made me welcome. I was a liberating hero, and family. They made me a vast meal, even though they had so little themselves. Aunt Cara produced this tub of risotto with mushrooms — dense and thick and buttery, though God knows where she got the butter from..." He closed his eyes. "I can taste it to this day. They asked me to help, of course. I couldn't bend the rules, but I did what I could. I had my own salary, my own rations; I diverted some of that.

  "They had some sick kids in there. Two boys and a girl. They were pale, hollow-eyed, coughing... I couldn't tell what was wrong, but it looked bad. They had to wait in line for the civilian docs, and in those days medical supplies were scarcer than anything else, as you can imagine. I tried to get an army medic to come out, but of course he wouldn't."

  "And so you turned to Maria Ludovica?"

  "It was all I could think of."

  By this time Maria Ludovica had come looking for him. In an inverse of the family search Lou had performed, Maria, or others from the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins, had inspected the new invaders of Rome for any family connections, and they had found Lou.

  "Maria was really your cousin?"

  "No. Something farther away than that. Remember it was my grandparents — your, uh, great- great-grandparents, I guess — who left Rome for the States in the first place. Hell, I don't know what you'd call our relationship. But she was a Casella all right. Those gray eyes, you know — you have them," he said, looking at me. "But she had black hair tied up around her head, cheekbones you could have eaten a meal off, and an ass — well, I guess I shouldn't say stuff like that to a kid like you. But she was sexy like you wouldn't believe. No wonder Mussolini couldn't keep his hands off her."

  "Mussolini?"

  "She was never a fascist — that's what she told me, and of course she would say that to an American soldier in nineteen forty-four — but I believed her. It turns out she'd known the Duce since the thirties. She first saw him in October nineteen twenty-two, when he first came to power, and she joined in the March on Rome: four columns, twenty-six thousand strong, closing on the city. The army and the police just stood aside as all those blackshirts marched in. Maria was sort of swept up; where she came from, in Ravenna to the north, it was politic just to go along with it."

  "And she became — what, his mistress?"

  "You might call it that. She met him face to face the first time on Christmas Eve in 'thirty-three, when she was brought to Rome as one of the ninety-three most prolific women in the country."

  "You're kidding."

  "Nope. Ninety-three women in black shawls, mothers of thirteen hundred little Italians, soldiers for fascism."

  I did the math quickly. "Thirteen each?"

  He grinned. "They were heroes. But we've always been a fecund family, George. Our women stay fertile late, too." That was true, I reflected, thinking of Gina. "The heroic mothers were taken on a tour of the city, and they saw the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, where Maria kissed a glass case that contained a bloodstained handkerchief — the Duce had held it to a bullet wound in his nose after he survived an assassination attempt." He winked at me. "But that wasn't all she kissed."

  I spluttered.

&nbs
p; "Come on, kid. I think we need a walk."

  • • •

  And walk we did, at an impressively brisk pace, trotting around town on what I took to be one of his regular three-mile routes.

  Palm Beach is set on a narrow tongue of land between the Atlantic, to the east, and Lake Worth, to the west. The city itself is set out according to a classic American grid layout, a neat tracing no more than four blocks wide from coast to coast. We tramped south down the County Road, peering dutifully at landmarks like the town hall and the Memorial Park fountain, a water feature fringed by swaying palm trees under a powder-blue sky. Then we turned onto Worth Avenue

  , four blocks of overpriced shops: Cartier, Saks, Tiffany, Ungaro's, stocking everything from Armani clothes to antique Russian icons, anything you wanted, nothing with a price tag. One of the shops boasted the world's largest stock of antique Meissen porcelain. Outside the shops limousine engines idled.

  Lou said, "So what do you think? A little different from Manchester?"

  "Too bloody expensive."

  "Yeah, but if you were rich enough your head would work differently. You don't spend to get stuff. You spend as a statement. But it hasn't always been this way. I started to come here in the early sixties. We had a beach house, farther up the coast."

  "We?"

  "Lisa, my wife. Two boys. Already growing up, even then." He didn't mention the wife and kids again; I inferred the usual story, the wife had died, the kids rarely visited. "It was a good place for the summer. But back then it was kind of different." The town had been founded in the nineteenth century as a winter playground for the well heeled. In the twenties had come further development. "It was a winter town. In the summer they used to dismantle the traffic lights! Now, though, it stays open all year. Some say it's the richest town in the Union."

  "So you've done well to end up here," I said.

  "End up. You're not around old people much, are you?"

  "Shit. I—"

  "Ah, forget it. Yes, I did okay. Stock options—" His talk drifted back to the Second World War. He had been a draftee. "I was lucky. Spared the fighting. I already had some business experience, helping my father run his machine shop as a kid. So I got staff positions. Logistics. Requisitions. The work was endless.

  "The invasion of Italy was the biggest bureaucratic exercise in history. We were heroes of paperwork." I grinned dutifully. "But it was good experience. I learned a hell of a lot, about people, business, systems. Stuff you learn in the army you can apply anywhere.

  "I went back home after the war, but my father's business felt too small, with all respect to the old man." Having grown up in New York — he was old enough to remember the Wall Street crash — Lou took some positions in the financial industry. "But I got impatient with being so far from the action. After Italy, moving funds around, buying and selling stocks, watching numbers on a ticker tape — it was all too remote. I'm not a miner or an engineer. But I wanted to work somewhere I could see things being built."

  So, after taking some kind of business degree, he had moved to California to work for none other than North American Aviation in Downey, California.

  "It was North American built Apollo. You know, the moon ship?" I nodded. Evidently he was used to younger people never having heard of the program. "Not all of it," he said. "Just the CSM — the command and service modules, the part that came back to Earth. I did well at North American. I was in the right place at the right time. We believed we could achieve anything, on any scale, if we worked hard enough, with our flow charts and schedules and critical paths. Why not? That was how we won the war, and how we managed Project Apollo. Four hundred thousand people, all across the country, all doing their tiny part — but all controlled from the center, all those resources pouring in, like building a mountain out of grains of sand, a huge mountain you could climb all the way to the moon."

  He was a solid character, intense, engaged, vividly real. In his anecdotes I glimpsed a postwar America growing fast, confident and rich, a time of technological growth and economic expansion — and I liked the idea that a relative of mine had been there at the fall of Rome, and had worked on Apollo. But I wasn't enjoying the encounter. Beside him I felt pale, diminished, uncertain, maybe a bit intimidated. And young.

  We turned off Worth onto Lake Drive South, which ran north along the coast of Lake Worth. Here the road was part of a bicycle trail, and in the low afternoon light there were people cycling, skateboarding, jogging.

  "Here, you can buy me a Popsicle."

  It turned out he meant an ice lolly; we had come to an ice cream stall. I stumped up for two great gaudy confections, so sugary I couldn't finish mine. But we sat on a stone bench and gazed out at the ducks paddling on Lake Worth. The flat western light made his face look like a bronze sculpture, all plains and grooves.

  By 1943 the war was going badly for the Italians. Mussolini was removed and arrested, and an armistice signed. When the Allies landed at Salerno, the Germans found out about the deal. Rome quickly fell to the Nazis.

  "The Order was involved in the resistance, in a quiet way," Lou said. "So Maria Ludovica told me. The Germans tried to call up all the young men for work on factories or farms or mines, or on the defense lines they were building to oppose the Allied advance. And the city was full of escaped POWs. Lots of people to hide. We estimated that at one time, of a city of a million and a half or so, about two hundred thousand were being hidden, in homes, churches, even the Vatican."

  "And the Order—"

  "They have a big complex there, big and old and deep. Not that I ever saw it." I wondered, Deep? "Yes, the Order did their share. And it was not without risk. Family, huh — I guess we should be proud."

  "Air raids began, even though Rome was supposed to be an open city, aiming at railway lines but hitting civilians in such customary friendly-fire targets as hospitals. The gas and electricity went altogether," said Lou. "They cut up the benches and trees in the parks for wood. The Order started selling meals, hundreds a day, at a lira a head. But then the citizens started to hear the heavy guns."

  "Maria Ludovica came out to the Lungotevere to watch the Germans go. Armed to the teeth but dejected, bedraggled. Everybody was silent. Makes you think," he said. "A Roman crowd, surrounded by all those ancient monuments, once again seeing the retreat of an occupying army."

  "And then you arrived."

  "Yep. I walked in after the tanks that came up the Porta San Giovanni. In the evening everybody lit a little candle in the window. It was, you know, magical." And he told me how, on June 5, 1944, the day before D-Day, he had climbed the steps of Michelangelo's cordonata with General Clark. "Not that the Romans were grateful," he said with a grin around his Popsicle stick.

  He leaned closer. "Maria never told me all of it, about Mussolini. Far too delicate for that. But I figured it out. He was kind of a brisk lover. He'd just nail you, right there on the floor of his office. He wouldn't even take his shoes or trousers off. And when he was done he'd just send you right out of the room and get back to work."

  "What a charmer."

  "But he was Mussolini. Knew a lot of guys in the army who had similar habits, mind you..."

  I half listened. I was trying to put this together, trying to figure out how old this Maria Ludovica must be. Say she was about twenty during the 1922 march. That would put her in her thirties when she'd become a "prolific woman," and in her forties during the war. Was it really credible that a forty-year-old mother of so many children would be the selection of Mussolini, who had, I supposed, the whole of Italy outside the convents to choose from? And could such a woman really have been the sex goddess glimpsed by the callow young Sergeant Casella in 1944? Was Lou somehow conflating the memories of more than one woman? — but his stories seemed detailed and sharp.

  "You know, Mussolini was going to build a giant statue of Hercules, as tall as a Saturn Five rocket, with the face of Mussolini and its right hand raised in a fascist salute. All they made was a head and a foot."
He laughed. "Credere! Obbedire! Combattere! What an asshole. But still, if he made a pass at you, you didn't turn him away. I'm pretty sure that by letting the Duce poke her, Maria Ludovica earned a lot of protection for the Order in those years."

  "What was Maria's connection to the Order? Did she start it?"

  "Hell, no. Boy, don't you know any of the family history?"

  I frowned. "The story of the Roman girl—"

  "Roman British, yes. Regina."

  "Just a legend. Has to be. The records don't go back that far."

  He sucked on his Popsicle. "If you say so. Anyhow, for sure the Order was a lot older than Maria Ludovica."

  "And when you found the Casellas you turned to Maria."

  "She, the Order, knew about the Casellas. The Order itself was based not far away. But they hadn't known about the sickness. When I got in touch, they came — Maria, and three other women. Medically trained, apparently. They wore these simple white robes. I remember cradling one of the boys while they crowded around with their stethoscopes and such. They were all three about the same age. And all similar, all like Maria, like sisters. And the family eyes, smoky gray. It was strange looking from one face to the other. They kind of blurred together, until you couldn't be sure who was who."

  "And they helped the children."

  "They were short of resources, like everybody else. They treated one boy. He recovered. The other boy died. They took the little girl away."

  "What?"

  He turned to me. "They took her away. Into the Order."

  "But they brought her back to her parents."

  "No." He seemed puzzled by that. "They just took her in, and that was that."