The Golden Hour - Margaret Wurtele

by The Golden Hour (epub)

  I never understood how she could react like this when things were so horrible and uncertain. “Mother, how can you always be so proper, so stuffy? Don’t you feel anything? Aren’t you even a little mad?”

  “Of course I’m angry, but expressing it is not going to change anything.” Her thin lips tightened into a straight line. “This house has been in my family for four hundred years, and I want to stay here under any circumstances.”

  After dinner we began packing up our clothes, emptying wardrobes and drawers, clearing small decorative boxes off the tops of tables and painted bureaus. This was really going to happen.

  The previous fall, when German reinforcements were first pouring in over the Brenner Pass and it was likely that there would be no escaping a prolonged occupation, my parents had us pack up our most precious belongings: the antique silver tea service, family photographs in their silver frames, Mother’s jewelry, the best linen and finest china. We took the twenty or so boxes to the far end of the attic and built a new brick wall in front of them that would stay in place until the war was over.

  And now we were going to be exiled within the walls of our own home.

  We removed the rest of our personal belongings but left the glittery glass candelabra on the mantelpiece, the leather-bound books on the library shelves, the china tureen and platter displayed on the inlaid wooden sideboard. If we could not be in these rooms, at least our beautiful things could continue to lay claim to the spaces for us. We lugged boxes and suitcases up the stairs and installed ourselves in the tiny makeshift quarters: two small bedrooms, one for my parents, one for me; a hastily arranged parlor; and a small room just big enough for a table and four chairs, where we could take our family meals. We would have to share a bathroom, one that was far simpler and more cramped than the gleaming tiled spaces below, with their porcelain tubs and washbasins, large gilded mirrors, and faucets shaped like the heads of mythological figures.

  On matters that concerned the villa, it was my mother, Natala, whose voice carried the day. Villa Farfalla and its surrounding gardens had been her family’s property since the sixteenth century, a summer retreat from life in the walled city of Lucca, fifteen kilometers to the south.

  Natala had no brothers. As the eldest of three daughters, she had always been in line to inherit the property. Early on, as in many families, her parents, my grandparents, had selected her ideal mate: a third cousin, whose family clustered in the south near Pisa. He was pale, wan, unathletic, and phlegmatic, but of trusted lineage and due to inherit great wealth.

  Natala was always inclined to do the right thing. However, one winter evening in 1922, she attended a large holiday party in Lucca with her parents. This is the part of the story I have always loved best. I picture Mother, eighteen, tall and slim, wearing a long gray satin gown that gleamed as it caught the light. She was dancing with her father, Vittorio, when Enrico Bellini cut in. I could just see Papa doing that, young and handsome, dressed in a dinner jacket, his dark hair combed straight back from his high olive forehead. It was a waltz, and Mother had always said she could immediately feel the strength in his solidly built body, the sureness and grace of his steps as he twirled her around the floor. He was twenty-five, from Turin, bright and well-spoken, and—though his background was unquestionably middle-class—he was a rising star in the local textile industry.

  Over the next weeks and months, Enrico set about conquering my grandfather. He hunted wild turkeys with him, conferred on the marketing of his olive oil and wine. Soon Enrico had made himself indispensable, and when he asked for Mother’s hand, Vittorio could find no reason to refuse.

  Natala and Enrico married the following summer, in June of 1923. It was a country wedding, the reception held in the gardens of Villa Farfalla. All of Lucchesi society was there, helping themselves to antipasti from silver trays decorated with sprigs of lavender. They made a handsome couple, and from that day forward, Enrico Bellini was one of them, the fact that his father was a shopkeeper and his mother’s mother a seamstress all but forgotten.

  My parents moved into a well-appointed small stone house on one of the piazzas in the walled city. Father worked for the best silk manufacturer and rose steadily, rewarded for his keen mind for numbers and his unshakable confidence. Mother gave birth to Giorgio in March of 1925. Even as a mother, they say, she became a talented hostess, a well-liked, always considerate woman of taste and cultivated manners. She played the piano beautifully and volunteered for the opera house and the art museum.

  On one of their visits to Villa Farfalla the summer after Giorgio celebrated his first birthday, Vittorio was bouncing my brother on his knee. He paled suddenly, they say, pulled out his handkerchief, and began to wipe his brow. Mother, hugely pregnant with me, had just lifted Giorgio to her hip when she watched her father roll off the wrought-iron settee and collapse onto the lawn in a gentle heap.

  After the funeral, my parents began spending every weekend with Grandmother Celeste at Villa Farfalla. She needed the company, and soon—to relieve her of the burden of overseeing the household—Mother began to take over the planning of meals, to see to the repair and mending of upholstery, the replanting of roses in the garden. Papa phased gradually out of the textile business and focused on managing the farming of the orchards and vineyards, the marketing of the oil and wine. By the time Celeste died, in the summer of 1930, when Giorgio was five and I was still three, my mother—at twenty-six—was the uncontested mistress of Villa Farfalla. Since the late thirties, like so many Lucchesi families, they had left the city house behind and moved out here full-time to avoid the hazards of approaching war.

  Now—all tradition and history eclipsed by the reality of war—we were living in five small rooms on an upper floor in the back of our own house. Mother and Papa settled into this new routine with an apathy and resignation that seemed to me to be a disease affecting everyone and everything around me. They nodded politely and greeted the soldiers whenever they encountered them. They kept the radio turned low, and they avoided talking about how the Nazis were running our lives.

  Living upstairs, I could hear from below the clink of silver on our dishes as the soldiers ate their meals, smell the sour odor of cabbage and sausage that Rosa was forced to prepare for them. An acrid cloud of fermented grain hung all through the house, rising from half-drained mugs of beer evaporating on side tables that we could see through the windows as we passed. With the coming of spring, smoke from their huge cigars curled up from the terrace into my open window while I tried to sleep. Below, the murmur of their voices sounded impatient, cold, and unfeeling. Even my dreams became hemmed in and rigid, outlined in gray shadows through which I would hurry, anxious and lost, and awake most mornings feeling disoriented and lonely.

  I slowed down as I reached the top of the narrow stairs. I knew I was late, but I wasn’t sure what Papa wanted, whether he might be angry about something. “Papa, are you here? Tonino said you wanted to see me.”

  Father appeared in the doorway to the parlor. He was slightly taller than I was. Nearly fifty, he was still youthful, his hair only beginning to turn silver at the temples; he had two long, creased dimples at the sides of his mouth, and just above his upper lip a prominent indentation, as if someone had carefully placed a finger in clay and left an imprint there, permanently molded. His brown eyes, like shots of espresso, were powerful and penetrating, and now he looked down his long, straight nose at me.

  “Where have you been? It’s nearly six o’clock. I thought we were going to hit some balls this afternoon.” He wore white slacks and a sweater vest with blue and gold stripes around the V-neck, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the elbow. It was a casual, elegant statement, as if there were no war, as if nothing had changed. Sometimes it seemed wrong to me that we should claim these moments of class-bound leisure in the midst of such upheaval, but getting Papa to play tennis seemed to restore him to his rightful stature. Living in those few rooms, he seemed stooped, weighed down by anxiety, as if his spirit
and life force shrank in proportion to the walls of our confined quarters. He went about the business of overseeing the orchards and vineyards, but his heart was not in it. He showed no interest in progress or hope for the future. Tennis was also one of the ways I could fill Giorgio’s absence and give my father back a measure of the normality he had lost.

  I slipped my hand into the pocket of my skirt, fingering the photograph lightly, guiltily. I had completely forgotten that I had promised to play that morning when I left for the school.

  “Oh, Papa, I’m so sorry!” I could feel my cheeks flush. “I had extra work to do, and I couldn’t get away until now. I’ll just change.”

  Later, after our game, he put his arm around my shoulder. “Your smile does my heart good. Where would I be without you, piccola?”

  Once dinner was over, I was finally able to shut the door of my room. At least I still had this small measure of privacy. I reached into the top drawer of my dresser and slipped the photograph out from under a pile of silk camisoles. Seeing it there both thrilled and terrified me. What if Klaus had come back and discovered it missing? But still, here in my hand, in my own room, was this fragile token of his most inner and personal life. Here was Mathilde, the woman he loved, left behind in Germany with what must be their newborn son. Did she miss him terribly? Did he miss her? He must be lonely so far away from home. But how odd it was, I thought, to find myself attracted to one of the cruel aggressors who had plunged our lives into such chaos. I lay back, closed my eyes, and let my imagination float on the sounds of boisterous laughter, the rising verses of a German drinking song coming from the terrace just under my open window.

  Chapter Three

  It was May and the nights were getting shorter, but when a rooster crowed around four o’clock, it seemed as if only a couple of hours had passed. I sat up in bed, remembering the photograph. It was still dark, the sky just beginning to fade. I frantically searched among the bedclothes and found it, to my dismay, creased and slightly rumpled where I must have turned over on it during the night. I have to get to school before Klaus does. I dressed quickly, tiptoed down the back stairs to the kitchen, grabbed a piece of yesterday’s bread, and hurried out into the chill of the early morning. An orange glow was burning on the eastern horizon. Swallows darted in and around the tops of the dark cypress trees that stood sharply outlined against the sky.

  By the time I reached Santa Maria, the sun had come up. The courtyard was deserted, the morning stillness broken only by the song of a warbler trilling from the top of a horse chestnut tree that shaded the north side. I stepped onto the wooden loggia and made my way to Klaus’s office. Hardly breathing, I peeked in to make sure no one was there. The envelope was still on the typewriter, just where I had left it. I took the rumpled photograph from my pocket and was just smoothing it on the desk when I heard footsteps outside the door. I was leaning over to slide it quickly into the envelope when a shadow blocked the light from the doorway. I froze.

  “Giovanna? Why do you come here so early? Why are you in my office?”

  I kept my eyes down, not daring to face him. The photograph was still in my hand. I broke out in a cold sweat, and the bottom of my stomach dropped. I steadied myself, then slowly looked up at Klaus. “I…I was just going to tidy your desk.” I paused a moment. “I found this picture. Is this your wife? Your baby?”

  Klaus moved slowly, his neck stiff and his face immobile, and took the photograph. He stared down at it, traced its new creases with his finger, beginning at Mathilde’s head, down her back, across her lap to the tightly wrapped blanket that held the baby. “This happens to be my wife, and, yes, it is my child, my son.” He looked at me without smiling.

  The heat from his body began to penetrate the morning chill. I stepped to the side of the desk. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb your things. Honestly, I just…think they are both so beautiful.”

  “Ja, well, of course they are beautiful.” He sounded sarcastic now, anger seeping out between the words. “I have never seen my son, and this is the one photograph I have. Now look at it, will you?” He thrust it out and made me look at it again. “Look at it, Giovanna. You ruined it.”

  “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have touched the letter. I feel terrible; really I do.”

  “Well, you should.” He set the photograph back on the desk and smoothed it heavily with his hand. “You have no business here at all. Just go—right now.” I thought I heard a tremor in his voice, as if he wanted to cry. He sat down. Slapping both his hands hard against the top of the desk, he lifted a file, opened it, and bent over the papers inside with full concentration. I took that opportunity to turn and run out of the office.

  I ducked out the back door and into the play yard, where I leaned against the wall, breathing fast, my heart beating wildly. What was I thinking of, actually stealing from a Nazi soldier? He could easily have arrested me or had me sent to a prison camp. I paced up and down the yard, sat on one of the small swing seats, held the chains loosely in my trembling hands, and began to rock gently back and forth. Only I couldn’t hold on to the fear. I slipped back into my old fantasies of Klaus, and now they were even more exciting, heightened by this new intimacy and tinged with danger. He was a man, a man far from home, a husband and a father. It was at times like this that I longed for Giorgio. I could tell him anything, now that we had passed the point of childhood squabbles. If he were here, I could let him in on this strange new adventure, this attraction to Klaus that I knew I had no business pursuing.

  I hadn’t seen Giorgio since November 25, the last day that the recruits born in 1925 had to turn themselves in to sign up to fight for Mussolini’s Fascist army. Around noon that day German officers came to the villa and told my parents and me the news of the soldier’s disappearance.

  “We know nothing,” Papa had said, genuinely mystified. “He left this morning to get his assignment, and we haven’t seen him since.”

  That night I was sitting in the living room listening to the news on the radio, when the front door swung quietly open. Giorgio appeared in the doorway. I leaped up and ran to him.

  He put a finger to his lips. “Where are Mama and Papa?” he whispered.

  “They know you deserted.” I threw my arms around him. His jacket was rough and cold and smelled of wood smoke. I saw fierce determination on his face despite his disheveled appearance. A shank of straight dark hair hung down his high forehead.

  “I just came to say good-bye and pick up a few things,” he said. “There’s no changing my mind.”

  I knew he had almost as much to fear from our father as he did from the Germans. Papa was deeply ashamed of Giorgio’s disappearance. Mother had sat silently at dinner, worried about her only son, while Father had vented his anger. Words like “yellow-bellied” and “disgrace to the family” had settled over the table. I wasn’t sure exactly what I thought about it. I knew Giorgio was driven by principle, by his resentment of the Germans to be sure, but I also knew him well enough to know that he would hate open combat and the heat of battle. Italian soldiers were hiding out all over Tuscany at that point. They were finding refuge in the woods, in caves, and living off the generosity of peasants and farmers.

  “I think you’re doing the right thing. But where will you go?”

  “I’ll be all right. Just don’t worry about me. Where’s Papa?” he said again.

  “I’m right here.” Father was standing in the doorway, his face clouded with anger. “Where in the hell have you been? Do you know you are putting every one of us in danger by running away?”

  “Father, I’m not going to do the Nazis’ bidding. I’m going to disappear, and you can’t stop me.”

  “I don’t care who’s in command. You’re in the Italian army, and you’re trained to fight. Damn it, you’re going to fight like a man. And I can tell you, when this war is over, you’ll be rewarded for it.”

  He grabbed Giorgio’s wool army jacket and yanked it downward, ripping it off his shoulder. “And if
you’re going to be so damn gutless, you don’t deserve to wear this uniform. You can freeze to death, for all I care.” He threw the jacket on the floor.

  Giorgio stood there, struck dumb. His shoulders were rigid, his fists clenched, but he turned his back and stared at the floor.

  Come on, say something. Defend yourself.

  Father stalked out of the room.

  “He’s wrong,” I told my brother. “He’s living in the past. You’ve got to go, do what you can to help the partisans.”

  “Giorgio.” Mother appeared in Papa’s place. “I’m just so worried about your safety. Why don’t you let us hide you somewhere here, at Tonino’s, or in one of the sheds? Your father wouldn’t have to know.”

  “Mother, my safety is not the point. There is work to be done. There’s a war going on, and I have to take part in it. I’m not running away from my duty. I’m not! It’s just that I don’t want to work for the Germans.”

  Mother and I left him there alone, pacing back and forth like a caged animal. We searched the house and put together a bundle of warm clothes, some fresh bread and cheese. As we worked, I saw myself falling into Mother’s pattern of acceptance and quiet support. I didn’t want to be like her. I wanted to resist, to carve out a role for myself, to use my own energy and ingenuity to push back against this foreign encroachment.

  Mother kissed him gently. “Be safe, darling. Please don’t take any unnecessary chances.”