And then her thoughts turned to the crazy rage Duccio must be in. Big meetings all morning, lots of screaming. He would be violently possessed, angrily pitching ashtrays against walls, screaming in eight different languages at the top of his lungs, hurling explosive epithets at whichever unlucky person happened to be nearest, deranged at the news that his most expensive trophy, all six hundred and ninety-seven feet of her, was lying belly-up at the bottom of the sea.
It was that strange time of day at the four-hundred-year-old palazzo when the fading light of dusk fooled the eye. It often spooked Six and Sara, who frequently giggled and swore to their mother that a stone statue had just moved his arm or waved his sword, for a fleeting second coming alive. As Claire opened the heavy palazzo door, she looked down the long, tunnel-like corridor, darkened by shimmering afternoon shadows. She entered the house quietly, hoping she would have time to climb the stairs to see the children before having to calm Duccio's wrath. She tilted her head in surprise. It occurred to her that Duccio must have added to his ever-expanding art collection in her absence. In the darkness she could just make out an unfamiliar marble statue holding an offering in its arms. She wondered why no one had thought to turn the lights on. Not even a spotlight on the statue, as Duccio usually arranged to light his newest prize treasures. With its broad shoulders and long, shapeless legs, she wondered if this was the valuable Greek kouros that Duccio had been trying to outbid Onassis for. She was momentarily stunned when, from her perspective fifty feet down the vaulted entry, which had always reminded her of a tomb, the Greek statue breathed. But that was the spell this hall held over everyone's imagination, Claire told herself as she turned on one of the entranceway torchères. She moved forward only a few steps before she froze. In the light, she could clearly see that the statue was Tutti, and the lifeless bundle in his arms her son.
Claire shrieked. As she ran down the hall in the slow-motion gait of a person trapped in a nightmare, there was time for her to imagine a thousand explanations: Six had fallen off his horse and sprained his ankle; he had just fallen asleep and Tutti was carrying him up to bed; they were all playing a game of swinging statues and Six was “it.” But the other side of her brain had only to see the unnatural angle at which Six's neck and head hung from his shoulders. His eyes rolled back in his head. His boy-child's curled fingers were more rigid than limp. Her ears were deaf to her own screams. She fell to her knees in what she thought was silence as Tutti handed Claire the body of her dead son.
Chapter Fourteen
Into the Tunnel
Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form: Then have I reason to be fond of grief.
—Shakespeare
King John
Six's baseball cap still hung from the rump of the onyx centaur guarding the entry hall of Palazzo Duccio, as if he might grab it in his hurry to run out and play. No one had the courage or heart to remove it, least of all Lorenza, who passed it, crossing her heart and dabbing her eyes with her black cotton gloves, each time she answered the doorbell. The festive chimes rang out almost incessantly, and in this somber house on the morning after death, whoever was the nearest—butler, chambermaid, or cook—bustled to the door to stop the sound. Lorenza knew that Tutti had been ordered to kill the bell's gay melody and replace it with a more respectful toll. Duccio had also instructed the help to wear crepe-soled shoes to keep a silence in the house and to hang black bunting from all the balconies. Even the dogs and cats had been ordered into mourning; they, along with the canaries in Duccio's library, wore crepe bows around their necks. Lorenza wondered if this elaborate display of grief could hide what had really happened in the house.
An accident, they were saying. A terrible freak accident, so unfortunate and doubly tragic coming on the heels of the Andrea Doria disaster. The Neapolitan banker was unembarrassed to weep real tears, saying that God had blessed Duccio with so much and was now extracting payment. The bishop shook his head and knew out loud that Six was certainly at peace in heaven. Though the boy was not a Catholic, last rites had been administered by the Vatican's secretary of the treasury, Archbishop D'Agostini, who happened to be in the house at the time. Surely he was with the angels now, this child as beautiful as a seraphim. What a misfortune that the child was as reckless as he was golden, falling to death from the top of the marble balcony, balancing like a circus ropewalker on the narrow ledge until something distracted him. He had slipped and then toppled off, breaking his neck either when he hit the staircase railing or when he finally landed on the marble floor.
Lorenza turned her back on Duccio and his men, afraid to meet their eyes. She rushed upstairs to hold Signóra Duccio's bloodless hand. She'd been very surprised to see that her refined lady mourned her child with the same naked grief as the simple people from her village. She had wailed with the same banshee voice, thrashing feverishly around on the floor, flagellating her body with her arms like the bent black-shawled peasant women wailing their dead off to heaven. But now her lady sat staring out a window in Six's room upstairs. The signóra was in a pill-induced stupor, the remedy prescribed by Duccio's doctor to quiet the animal howl emanating from deep inside her. Lorenza's tears flowed freely as she knelt by Claire's side. Signóra's normally translucent skin had turned paler than porcelain. The bones in her face protruded as sharp as knives, cutting through the sunken hollows of her cheeks. Her mouth continued to quiver as it opened and shut like an unlatched window in a storm. Each time Lorenza expected a glass-shattering scream to come out of the wide-open mouth, but each time only an anguished whisper escaped Claire's trembling lips. Rocking in the yellow and gold armchair in which she had read Six his stories, tears streaming down her cheeks, Claire's fingers gripped his soccer jersey, twisting it around and around her wrist, making it impossible for anyone to take it away from her. His smells still filled the jersey, and the sweet perspiration of the young athletic boy permeated his uniform; she could conjure him up just by holding his shirt to her face. Lorenza laid her hands lightly over Claire's and rocked with her. She decided that the next time the doctor came in with his needles and jelly-bean bags of pills she'd keep him away. She'd stand guard until Violet and Harrison arrived to protect her. She'd already covered Sara with a blanket, as the child had billeted herself on Six's bed and just lay there as if she had died, too. It worried her even more than Claire's very human unraveling, the kind she had seen too often as a child during the war, that Sara had gone rigid and frozen.
When the child had heard Lorenza's screams the day before, she'd come flying out of her room. When she saw her brother's body lying at the bottom of the stairs, a thick hedge of kneeling men around him, she urged him to get up and tried to shake him awake.
“Don't tease me, Six,” she'd cried. “This isn't a game. Get up, get up!” And for the first time in his Me, Six didn't wink back and jump up gaily from one of his practical jokes. When Duccio ordered her out, she'd fought him with her small angry fists until two men dragged her away, her shoes leaving lines of black scuff marks on the floor as she flailed the air with her arms.
“Too bad it was the golden one and not the ugly little Puritan who fell from the balcony.” Duccio's cruel words were in Italian, but Sara understood. She should have been the one who died. She was supposed to have been Six's protector. She had promised her mother. And Grand-mère Ophelia. She had let them all down. Six was gone, it was her fault, and there was nothing more to say.
Lorenza had watched, horrified, as the child stiffened and turned icy-eyed, as if her feelings were being carried away by Tutti along with her brother's body down the long, darkening hall. One of the dark men in gray suits tucked Sara under his arm like one of her mute Madame Alexander dolls and carted her up the stairs to her room. The little girl, poverina ragazza, hadn't uttered a word since.
Lorenza thanked all her special saints—M
aria, Teresa, and Santa Lucia—when Violet finally arrived with the morning. Now she wouldn't be the only one standing sentry, protecting Sara and Claire from only she knew what. The proper lady in the quiet suit could organize the commotion taking place downstairs, throwing out the florists who wove insincere garlands around the small coffin and sending the publicity hounds packing. Lorenza took Violet's hat and apologized repeatedly for her own disheveled appearance. She had lost her apron and her bun had come undone sometime during the long night, which she had spent kneeling on the floor, holding hands with Claire and rubbing a comforting arm on Sara's shoulder. She hadn't allowed herself to doze off for a second, all the while keeping her watchful eyes on the door. Now Lorenza heaved her first sigh of relief in hours and let her aching shoulders fall. Relief had come in the shape of a diminutive lady with a brooch that matched the piercing color of her eyes.
Violet was anguished to see the tragic little scene that she discovered in Claire's private apartment. Her own broken heart and exhaustion from traveling fourteen hours were forgotten when she saw her daughter rocking stone-eyed in Six's chair, but the picture that sucked the air out of her lungs was of her granddaughter guarding a ghost. Sara had curled herself around the imprint Six's sleeping body had made on the bed linens only two mornings ago, so that the child looked as if she were sleeping next to her brother, her arm thrown protectively over the hollow left by his young boy's body.
Violet swung into grim action. There would be time for her own tears later. The best way to help her daughter was to be the person she'd always been: the one who dealt with the necessary details. A casual observer would have mistaken her efficient reserve for lack of feeling; in reality Violet was conducting herself in the only way she knew, burying the ache in her own heart to allow everyone else their sorrow. Grief for Violet had always been a luxury, a private indulgence she could allow herself only when everyone else had been consoled. She asked Lorenza for Claire's agenda, the phone numbers of her closest friends, a washcloth for her daughter's face, and instructed the anxious woman to try to coax some soup or juice into Sara's tightly clenched mouth.
She blinked away the mist from her own eyes as Claire dug her fingers into her arm to tell her with a weak smile what bright thing Six had said only two days ago. Violet purposely distanced herself from this pitiful little scene in Six's bedroom. Three generations of women swallowed up in sorrow. She knew that as always they would be left to their own devices to comfort each other out of tragedy. What the lioness in her felt intuitively was the need to show strength and gather them close together; otherwise Duccio and Ophelia would mark them as vulnerable prey.
The watchful den mother took a moment to lick her cub's wounds. Taking Claire's peaked face between her palms, she listened as Claire begged her to explain why Six was gone. She rubbed her daughter's shoulders as Claire wondered aloud what God could have been thinking. Had he been away from his desk? They'd taken the wrong boy. Violet clasped their hands together, making a double church steeple with their fingers as Claire fretted that Six wouldn't know anyone else in heaven. Who would look after him or show him the way? She wouldn't want him to get in the wrong line with the lost souls.
“Sara, my first baby Sara, why weren't you watching out for your brother? Why did you let him down? Why?”
Violet leaped to Sara's defense and held her grandchild in her arms. All the warmth had left her body. “Hush, Sara, don't listen. Your mother's very upset. An accident isn't anybody's fault.”
Then Claire turned the blame upon herself. “Why wasn't I at home?” She let her face fall into her hands. It was all her fault. She'd been making love to Harrison while Six tumbled off the railing. “Harrison. Harrison.”
Violet patted Sara's hair and tiptoed into Claire's room, a few feet away, where she apprehensively telephoned Charlotte Hall to inquire what time their plane was due to arrive. She was surprised to hear Ophelia's clipped, businesslike tones informing her that Six's burial site and stone were being prepared for interment in the family plot in Tuxedo Park and they would hold the funeral when her grandson arrived home next week. She hoped that the Duccios wouldn't allow Six's Roman memorial service to take on the flavor of one of their over-the-top dinner affairs. She and Harrison would appreciate it if Claire would remember that out of her own neglect she had lost William Henry Harrison VI, the heir to one of America's oldest and most important families, and perhaps out of respect for the rest of the Harrisons, who stood united, she could try to conduct herself with a modicum of good taste.
Violet was flabbergasted, her dark intuitions proving true. It was obvious that, in the moment when Claire was the most defenseless, Ophelia would strike. Like well-bred vultures, Ophelia and her lawyers were already circling over the carcass of Claire's life. Ophelia would seize the death of her grandson, the light of Claire's life, as an opportunity to renew her custody suit for Sara, the child whom she considered her own. With a shudder, Violet realized she'd have to put the steel back in Claire's spine if she didn't want to lose her daughter, too. But why wasn't Harrison helping? She'd long suspected there were deep feelings between the two of them. Where was he now?
One day earlier in Tuxedo Park, Harrison had shifted his jaw into the stiff diplomatic expression he wore for his most difficult negotiations. He adjusted the four-in-hand knot of his English silk rep tie, lying against the precise fit of his formal chalk-striped suit. Ending his marriage to an increasingly embittered Ophelia rated right up there with persuading Emperor Hirohito to deny his birthright as the Sun God. He had left his travel bags at the Waldorf Towers and driven out to Tuxedo Park to deliver the news in person.
He didn't expect histrionics from Ophelia, whose sense of superiority was sustained by never stooping to middle-class emotions. They had lived like a divorced couple for years anyway. She had only to give her legal consent on a piece of paper that Tom had already drawn up. The whole thing would be very civilized. No announcements of divorce in absentia over hash at “21,” in full view of every gossipmonger in town. His code of honor dictated that he conduct this distasteful business himself, in private. He was tired from his long flight, but, more important, he realized that he was truly exhausted from sleepless years spent shuttling between Europe's capitals on presidential whims and missions. Claire was right. Now was the time for him to find some peace and harmony in his life. Most of all, he was bone-tired of the domestic lie he lived. Now all that would change with a few flourishes of Ophelia's boarding-school penmanship from her pearl-handled pen.
Her voice was polite, but anger flashed in her eyes. Even the coolly independent Ophelia was affronted that Harrison had been gone for five wordless months. And now here he was, walking in the door with that damn diplomat look on his face. She looked past him, hoping to see Sara and Six dancing around a mountain of traveling trunks. He never showed up at Charlotte Hall anymore unless he was with the children.
“I came early to have a word with you.” A leaden civility edged his voice.
Little alarm bells rang inside Ophelia's head. If he was going to tell her he wouldn't be escorting her to the Slocums’ ball in Newport next weekend, she was definitely not going to let him off the hook. There were appearances to keep up.
“You could have at least telegrammed that you were coming.” She glanced crisply at her wristwatch, as if he were two hours late instead of two days early. “You look like you haven't slept properly for a week. Don't tell me you just washed up from the Andrea Doria. Terrible about that leaky boat. Boots Hollingsworth was on the bloody vessel. Broke her arm. Well, where are Sara and Six? Are the children still arriving on Wednesday?” She was at his heels as he walked into the drawing room.
“You know I prefer to stay out of those arrangements. You should consult Claire about the matter of the children's schedules.” He politely gestured for her to sit down in her favorite chair, the Queen Anne that had belonged to her mother.
The heavy hoods of Ophelia's lids blinked while her eyes remained in trigge
r focus. “I shall not have a conversation about that woman in my house.”
“That woman, as you call Claire, is very dear to me.”
Ophelia was startled: Harrison was behaving too badly for words. She tsked-tsked her disapproval and quietly told him to remember his manners in her house. There was only a trace of irritation in her unexcitable facade. She would express her disdain for Claire, but she wouldn't be drawn into an argument about the international tart.
“You know, I've asked the lawyers if they can't do something about her using our good name as if it belonged to her. Sandwiching ‘Harrison’ between ‘Claire’ and ‘Duccio’ is totally unacceptable. It's as if we put our family's seal of approval on that little upstart and her troll of a husband. Why, over at Perkins and Williams the other day—”
“Have the decency to drop the lawsuit, Ophelia. I'm afraid she'll never return if you keep on hounding her. She could prevent you from seeing the children.”
“She cannot break the agreement. I have Sara and Six August and Christmas, and as soon as one of those silly aunts dies and she plants one of her tangoing feet back on American soil, I'll have her hauled into court.” Ophelia was still aghast that her former daughter-in-law had entertained Evita Perón during her Italian visit even giving a well-publicized dinner dance for the Argentinean call girl turned politician. She'd been furious that Sara and Six had been photographed with the bleached blond dictatoress. How she'd been able to live that down at Bailey's was a testament to her self-control and breeding.
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