by Mary Malloy
Gianna came home for Christmas, but Pat stayed with his Boston relations and Maggie felt keenly the absence of her grown children. As 1938 turned to 1939, the letters included references to small presents enclosed for Pat, and news of Gianna’s progress as a young woman. On July 21, 1939, Maggie finally wrote the letter that had the information Lizzie sought.
“We have a visitor, one of Pat’s Boston classmates who is traveling in Italy with her mother. Apparently he invited them to stay here for a week, but he never told me and it put me in a bit of an awkward position when they arrived. Accommodating them was no problem, of course, with the children moved out, but I’m sorry I wasn’t prepared to greet them with something more special than our usual dinner fare on their arrival.”
Another letter gave more details about the Kenneys. “Do you know them?” Maggie wrote her brother. “Pat says they are a prominent Irish-Catholic family in Boston and that the father is a friend of Frank’s. I can’t quite tell if he is smitten with the girl, Theresa, because he is so awkward around her. My God, you’d think he hadn’t been speaking English from infancy—sometimes his words come out all broken and accented. Renzo likes her and the mother is nice enough. She is very interested in the family tree in the Entrance Hall—it’s hard to tell which of them, mother or daughter, would most promote a match.”
At the end of the summer, Maggie wrote again to her brother about her son Patrick.
August 28, 1939
Dear Tommy,
Pat is headed back your way and I hope you will once again take him under your wing while he is in Boston. I want this to be a year that he concentrates on his studies, but his mind has certainly taken a romantic turn this summer. First there was that girl Theresa Kenney from Boston, and after she left he fell madly in love with a German girl who came home from school with Gianna. The second candidate for Pat’s affections, Greta Winkler, has the advantage of speaking Italian, which Renzo appreciates, but Germans are not altogether popular in this house right now, with the rise of the Nazis.
I have written you many times of Renzo’s dislike of Mussolini and his Fascist movement, and I’m sorry to tell you that Adino and Cosimo are both interested in the advantages that could come to them by throwing their lots in with the Fascists. They try to convince Renzo and me that Mussolini and the King will prove to be the best allies for anyone in business, and they don’t understand their father’s strong philosophical objections.
The next letter, written in late September, announced the start of the war and the fear that Mussolini would ally Italy to the Nazis. “Switzerland’s neutrality makes it a safe place for Gianna,” Maggie wrote, “and I hope that as things develop, you and Frank will try to convince Pat to stay in Boston during any period of conflict. I appreciate your offer to put us all up for the near future, but Renzo won’t leave Bologna now, and consequently, neither will I.”
Chapter 17
Pina was not entirely comfortable with the idea of Lizzie visiting Patrizio. “I thought he was a problem for you,” she said irritably.
“Maybe in different surroundings, where he is not suspicious of my interest in his collection, he’ll be more willing to talk to me,” Lizzie explained.
“But what do you want to talk about?”
“He’s still the most knowledgeable person about the collection, and I want to get as much information as I can.”
“I’ll call my Uncle Cosimo and see what he thinks,” Pina said.
Lizzie had tried to call him at his office just a few minutes before to leave the names of the workers that Carmine would bring into the house in two days, and she knew that he was not in.
A frustrated Pina snapped her cell phone shut and said, “Okay, I’ll drop you off at the hospital, but I can’t stay and you’ll have to find your own ride back.”
“Thanks,” said Lizzie. “I’ll take a taxi.”
They took the steps down to the garage, which Lizzie had not yet been in. It was part of the old cellar of the house, where Patrizio said they had hidden part of the collection from the Nazis during the war. Pina spoke as little as possible during the twenty-minute drive and Lizzie was unreasonably eager to make her talk by asking questions about various city sites that they passed, all of which were answered tersely.
The hospital of St. Columba of Bobbio was located on a hillside above the city, with a long curved drive lined with olive trees. Pina pulled to a stop in front and informed Lizzie that Patrizio was in a room on the main floor. “You’ll need to check in with the nurses.” The young woman was clearly conflicted between wanting to get away fast and thinking that her presence might be necessary to keep her great-uncle from embarrassing the family. The former impulse was greater though, and she sped away as soon as her passenger was out of the car.
Lizzie stood for a few minutes on the stone steps of the hospital and looked down the valley toward Bologna. Even on a winter day it was a landscape filled with color. The olive trees had dry silvery leaves that rattled together as the breeze passed through them, a sound that, when she closed her eyes, might have come from a stream passing over stones, or a fire crackling in a hearth.
There were dark brown fields of earth waiting for a new crop in the spring, and patches of grass that had turned from green to golden brown. The red tile roofs of houses made a line down the hill and in the distance she could see the towers that rose above the old core of the city.
A receptionist inside the building had seen Lizzie standing on the porch, opened the door and now greeted her in Italian. With her limited knowledge of the language, Lizzie managed to convey her desire to see Patrizio Gonzaga and the woman showed her into the building. She pointed Lizzie to a seat and went off down the hall.
The building was unlike any other that Lizzie had seen in Italy. There was a courtyard, but it was enclosed in glass and accessed by hallways that ran around each side. The rooms were designed to look at the outside view rather than the interior one. A sign on the wall just inside the door acknowledged the patronage of Margaret and Lorenzo Gonzaga in memory of Patrick Malachi Kelleher in 1915, with a list of subsequent donors that included two different generations of Cosimo Gonzagas. It explained how Cosimo was able to make the arrangements for Patrizio so quickly.
The purposeful click of high-heeled shoes on the stone floor brought Lizzie’s attention to the tall well-dressed woman who walked toward her. Behind her, the receptionist walked more quietly in her sensible footwear.
“I understand you want to see Mr. Patrizio Gonzaga,” the woman said in English. “Can I ask what this is about?”
Lizzie took out one of her business cards and explained her project. “If Mr. Gonzaga is well enough to speak to me, he can answer some questions about the family collection. He has been the principal caretaker of it since after the war.”
“Does Mr. Cosimo Gonzaga know that you’re here?”
“No,” Lizzie answered, “though he is the person who has engaged me to work on this project. I’m sure he would approve of my talking to his uncle,” she added, though in fact she had no confidence it was true.
The woman proved to be the hospital administrator and she asked a passing nurse if Patrizio was awake. Hearing that he was, she asked the nurse to escort Lizzie to his room.
The old man was sitting up in his bed watching television and the nurse took the remote control and turned it off without asking his permission. Lizzie resented the action, both the casual insensitivity of it and the fact that introducing herself by once again interrupting his routine seemed a bad way to start the visit.
He seemed happy to see her, however, and asked her, first in Italian, who she was and what she wanted. When he sensed her confusion he immediately asked the same questions in English.
“I’m Lizzie Manning,” she said, pulling a chair up to the side of his bed and sitting. “I teach at St. Patrick’s College in Boston.”
“My gr
andfather founded that college,” Patrizio said. “And I went there.”
“I know,” Lizzie said. “I’m very interested in your grandfather, I have written a book about him. She pulled another copy of Patrick Kelliher, Immigrant Industrialist out of her bag and gave it to him.
“I know this book,” Patrizio said. “I’ve seen it before.”
“I sent you a copy when it was published.”
“Am I at St. Columba of Bobbio Hospital?” he asked.
“You are. And I see from a plaque at the door that it was dedicated to the memory of your grandfather by your parents.”
He nodded. “My mother chose the name. Her father was Irish and St. Columba was an Irish saint who came to Italy in the sixth century and established a mission church at Bobbio.” He put his hand up to feel the stubble on his chin. “Why am I here?” he asked. “Did I get hurt?”
“I don’t know why you’re here.”
“Why are you here?”
“Since I wrote that book about your grandfather I’ve become interested in your family. Do you mind if we talk about them?”
“I think that would be nice,” the old man said with a sad sincerity that embarrassed Lizzie.
She turned her face away and made the excuse of taking her computer from her bag. “I have some pictures that your mother gave to the college library in 1959,” she said. “I thought you might like to see them.”
As each image came up on the screen, Patrizio gave a little sound of recognition and delight. The earliest pictures of his childhood were greeted with laughter as he pointed out the short pants and little cap that he wore. “And look at Adino and Cosimo, trying to look so grown up.”
“How much older were they?”
“Adino was seven years older than I, but Cosimo only three.”
“He was a senior when you first went to St. Pat’s,” Lizzie said. “I have a picture from the yearbook in 1939.” She showed him the picture of “The Bologna Boys” that Jackie had scanned for her.
“That’s me,” Patrizio said, pointing to his picture. “And that’s Cosimo, Archie, and …” He paused as he tapped his finger on the last face. “Oh I’m sorry, I can’t remember his name.”
“It’s listed here under the picture,” Lizzie said gently. “Guglielmo Gustalla.”
“Guli!” he said. “That’s right, we called him Guli.”
The nurse came in to check Patrizio’s vital signs and asked Lizzie how the visit was going. After answering, Lizzie moved to the window to give them some privacy. She wanted to ask him about the collection, but was worried that she might say the wrong thing and set him off into some sort of rage. She also didn’t know what sort of response he might have if she just continued on with the family photographs. Would it remain a safe and comfortable topic when they got to the war years and all the painful memories associated with it?
When the rolling table on which her computer sat was pushed back in front of Patrizio, she sat down next to him and asked him about Archie.
“Arcangelo,” he answered. “Arcangelo Cussetti. Even though he had been in and out of my house his whole life, I only really got to know him at St. Pat’s. My mother had tutored him in English and arranged for him to get a scholarship and travel to Boston with me.” He turned to look at Lizzie and smiled. “I was a lazy boy,” he said. “Never a hard worker.” He closed his eyes and put two fingertips above his nose and tapped softly, as if to help him bring up images of the past. “But Archie, he was something special. He worked hard, and he was so smart.” He opened his eyes again. “And he had nothing. His family was poor, his mother did our washing, washed our sheets, our underwear.”
He paused again and said, almost with regret. “But my mother saw his talent; she knew he was a genius. She didn’t mean to make me feel ashamed that I had so much, the money, the position, and did so little with it, but it was impossible not to feel that she compared me to him and he was the more impressive.”
“Is it possible that he worked to impress your mother, to win her favor?”
Patrizio hushed her with a wave of his hand. “Don’t speak of Archie that way,” he said, not angrily, but with an edge of irritation in his voice. “If I made you think that by what I said, then I am sorry. Archie Cussetti was a faithful friend to me, the most honest man I ever knew. He did shame me, by taking his small gifts and making the most of them, but he never did it to make me look bad. He simply was the better man.”
In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Lizzie brought up the photograph of the balcony scene from “Romeo and Juliet” on her computer screen.
“I believe this is you and Archie, as Romeo and Tybalt,” she said. “Or maybe one of you is Mercutio.”
“Ah that day.” He touched the picture on the screen. “I was Mercutio, so that I could give that wonderful speech about Queen Mab, but I made a hash out of it. I was never the actor my mother hoped for, but Gianna was a Juliet to make you weep, and Archie was her Romeo.”
“Did they fall in love during the play?”
“Maybe Gianna did, but Archie was already very far gone.” He told the story of Gianna’s schooling in Switzerland while he was away at St. Pat’s, which Lizzie had just read about the evening before in Maggie’s letter.
“Gianna was a crazy girl when she left for that school, but even in the first year she became very sophisticated. We were all home for the summer in 1939, just a few months before the war started, and Archie and I had become very good friends. He and I were smoking in the courtyard, hiding behind one of the columns so my mother wouldn’t see us, and Gianna came down the stairs wearing a white dress.” He closed his eyes and Lizzie could tell that he was picturing the moment.
“Archie stepped out from the shadow and just stared at her. I had never known him to be speechless, but he was then. He had opinions on everything and always something to say, but he saw Gianna, standing on the staircase in a white dress, and he practically fell to his knees.”
“But she didn’t fall in love with him right then?”
“Not so quickly,” Patrick answered. “It’s funny but he first fell in love with the way she looked in that particular dress, on that staircase, on that summer day in 1939. He began to follow her though, to be able to meet her accidentally on the street, or to help her into the house when she was carrying packages. And Gianna couldn’t help but notice.”
Lizzie scrolled through other pictures of Archie. “Was he handsome?” she asked.
“Not particularly. He had such a nose on him.” Patrizio put his hand about a foot in front of his face and laughed. “At St. Pat’s they called him ‘the Roman,’ because he had such a big nose. But Gianna didn’t care about looks, and good thing, since Archie wasn’t really handsome.”
“He looks good natured,” Lizzie said, bringing up another picture.
“He was, before the war. After, everything was different.”
“When did Gianna fall in love with him?” Lizzie asked, not wanting to deal yet with Gianna’s tragic death, and steering the conversation back in time.
“My sister hadn’t ever been in love when she met him, though she had been much pursued, especially that year that we came back from Boston, and by men that many considered to be better than Archie—richer or with a better pedigree. But once the two of them started to talk, they never stopped, not until the day she died.”
Patrick’s voice grew hoarse. “They talked about art and politics and music and food; they read books together and talked about them in great detail. They went to movies and discussed minute points for longer than the time it took for the movie to run, and they loved plays. They traveled around Europe after they married in January 1942—even with the war on, there were places that continued to produce plays to try and maintain some semblance of normalcy, and Gianna and Archie sought out every opportunity to see plays in multiple languages. Then they would argue a
bout translations and nuances of meaning. They didn’t fight, but they disputed points, debated for hours, and loved the process of it, the intellectual nature of the discourse, the wonderful complementary nature of their brains.”
Lizzie asked him what his parents had thought of Gianna’s relationship with Archie. “Were they hoping she would marry one of those other ‘more suitable’ men?”
“My father might have, but when he died so unexpectedly, and with the war looming, my mother agreed to let them marry. Gianna was only nineteen, but the two were inseparable and mother had a great fondness for Archie. She had taught him English as a boy and supported him at St. Pat’s—though he never returned after that summer. First he said he was going to go to Spain to fight the Fascists there, and then he fell in love with Gianna, and couldn’t be separated from her.”
“Your mother didn’t mind his humble roots?”
“My mother was an American and never had any of the pretensions of the Italian aristocracy. Even though her father had made a big deal out of her marriage to my father, my parents distanced themselves from any connections to the old titles, and she was very angry that my brothers supported the king. No one in Italy was happier to see the end of the Italian nobility in 1946 than my mother.”
Lizzie was unsure which way to navigate the conversation and backtracked again. “Did you have a girlfriend that summer that Gianna and Archie fell in love?”
