Party Of The Year

by Inconnu(e)

  “You may call me Alfred,” said Security with a small private smile. “It’s not my name but it’s my handle in this place. Behind my back the staff call me Alfred the Great. They think I don’t know, but there is little goes on in this place I don’t know.”

  • 6 •

  “We are a mélange,” murmured Lorenzo.

  The butler wore a leather apron over his livery. He was polishing a silver and gold coffee urn of gigantic size which had a sea nymph’s face in gold for a spout. The nymph’s arms, gracefully pulled back from the hips, were handles. A great clamshell with gold flutings was the base of the urn, the sea nymph’s fish-scaled body reposing on the clamshell.

  The aged butler looked like a deposed Pope, the face a mixture of taciturn wisdom with deep sadness. With the soft polishing cloth, he caressed the nymph’s face, making love to the object, mouth moving as if framing unspoken endearments.

  They were in the pantry, Cassidy sipping coffee. which Lorenzo had laid before him with such deference it seemed actually to improve the taste. One does not sip coffee lightly that is so elegantly presented, Cassidy was thinking. He was trying to draw Lorenzo out on the subject of Titi.

  “She is a whim of the Contessa,” said Lorenzo, his cloth burnishing the sea nymph’s ears.

  “Where is this whim from?”

  Lorenzo smiled his hooded Florentine smile (looking, Cassidy noted, like one of the paintings of the Doges of Venice—crafty, all-knowing, and benign): “She is a little peasant girl from one of the di Castiglione estates, a little forest creature full of innocence and evil, about equally mixed.”

  Cassidy sipped his coffee. “Is the Contessa always permitted these whims?”

  Taciturnity closed down Lorenzo’s exquisitely lined face. “I think, signor, you should find out some of these things yourself.”

  “I stand rebuked,” said Cassidy.

  “Admonished, sir” the old man corrected him. “You must reach your own conclusions in this household. I don’t wish to . . . lead you astray.” Lorenzo held up the heavy coffee urn, inspecting every crevice, each golden fish scale, eyes aglow.

  “Tell me about the coffee urn,” said Cassidy.

  Lorenzo pursed his lips. A long silence. Finally he said almost brusquely: “It is by Fironi, the di Castiglione’s silversmith in the seventeenth century. In those days each family had its own silversmith.”

  Cassidy probed gently because the old man didn’t like too much curiosity: “The staff seems to have shrunk quite a bit since then. We are a rather small mélange—yourself, Titi, me. Who else?”

  “The two maids are Irish. I picked them myself. The secretary is Miss Cass. English. Neither she nor the maids live in.”

  “No cook?”

  Lorenzo smiled his fine Italian smile: “Like so many people the world over we are looking for a cook. The earth was once agog with cooks. They have all become lawyers. Eventually we shall all starve surrounded by lawyers making out our wills. This is called upward mobility.”

  They both smiled.

  Cassidy was aching to ask questions about the dead Prince, but he didn’t dare. Lorenzo shut him up, with embarrassing finality when he felt like it. He rose from the pantry table.

  “Well, to my duties. To bring the light of civilization to the Contessa’s twelve-year-old mind.”

  “I wish you good fortune, signor,” said Lorenzo, uttering the antique sentiment as unself-consciously as hello. “I think sometimes the Contessa suffers from perhaps too much civilization. One of the great tasks of future educators will be to devise some system, not for putting things into little heads, but taking things out.”

  Lorenzo said this absently. He was using his polishing cloth on a silver cup in the shape of a conch held by a mermaid whose hair was solid gold. Treasures of the di Castiglione family. The Red Wind wouldn’t call them that. Treasures of the Italian People, they’d say, stolen by this American upstart of a wife and smuggled out of Italy. That’s what they’d say. If they knew.

  Cassidy walked down the corridor from the kitchen, past the fifteenth-century Perugia painting of a di Castiglione Cardinal, past the Donatello bronze of David, mounted on its pilaster of red marble (Donatello had done a good many Davids, not all of them in museums), past the door to the Principessa’s bedroom where she lay asleep, past the seigneurial armor in silver edged with gold (which meant it had not been intended for serious fighting), finally to the nursery door.

  Not a sound. There should be sounds coming from a nursery, thought Cassidy. Laughter. Chatter. Some kind of outcry.

  Cassidy opened the door. Lucia was gazing at herself in the mirror with hauteur, upstaging tier own image. Titi was on the floor next to her.

  Lucia was wearing a man’s shirt of English poplin which hung down over her little flat behind clear to her knees. She had nothing else on.

  “E troppo grande,” murmured Titi.

  “Mi piace troppo grande,” retorted Lucia.

  “It’s too old for you,” commented Cassidy. “When you’re fifteen is time enough to wear boy’s shirts.”

  He’d caught them unaware, and they didn’t like it. They looked violated, their young bodies drooping like flowers. Both stared at the floor, shrinking from him emotionally to such a degree it left a hole in the air.

  “I thought the shirt would please you, Professor,” said Lucia eyes downcast.

  Meekness, thought Cassidy. I’m being savaged by meekness. Italian girls know all the feminine wiles at birth. “Time for your first lesson, Lucia,” he said.

  “Oh!” cried Lucia, a lament that has run down the ages from 100 generations of schoolchildren.

  Cassidy turned on the Irish charm, bowing from the waist: “Might you be persuaded, Contessa, to slip on a pair of blue jeans.”

  She underplayed him skillfully. “Might I wear the shirt with the jeans?”

  “Well,” said Cassidy. The first of probably many surrenders. “Would you leave us, Titi?”

  “Oh!” A piercing strangulated cry from Lucia. She does that well, thought Cassidy, the actor in him admiring it, the professor in him loathing it.

  “Titi has no education, Professor.” Lucia had turned on him her black eyes full of pleading. “It would be enriching for her to experience your English vocabulary.”

  And what can I say to that, thought Cassidy. Deny my splendid vocabulary to this poor, deprived, peasant girl. I’d be violating at least twelve anti-poverty laws. I’m being diddled up the ass with marshmallows.

  Cassidy walked to the window and stared out stonily. “If you’ll put on the blue jeans, we’ll start.” Not surrendering this time, just sidestepping.

  When he turned around—a good five minutes later (If she disobeys me about the blue jeans, I’m going to paddle her little Contessan ass, he was thinking)—he found her dressed in blue jeans (bare feet to preserve a sliver of rebellion). She was seated cross-legged on the floor, eyes fixed demurely on him. The peasant girl sat next to her, eyes bright with laughter as if they’d shared some secret pantomime joke behind his back. I’m to be a figure of fun, am I? thought Cassidy furiously.

  “Let us begin at the beginning,” snarled Cassidy, “with the assumption you know nothing at all.” A gambit he’d employed with great success at Brandeis University (before they’d discovered the CIA connection and tossed him out.) “This planet, demoiselles . . .” giving them a fierce grimace of a smile, “is roughly four billion years old, an accident of cosmic dust and gravity, wholly unimportant in the mechanics of the universe. The human race has glorified and despoiled this little ball . . .” forming a little ball with his hands, peering down at it hunchbacked like God looking at his creation, a bit of play acting he’d stolen from Bronowski’s TV show which always slayed the girls at Brandeis, “for a million years or—if you lean toward the Leakeys and their discoveries at Olduvai Gorge, perhaps four million years—a blink in the vastness of eternity. I bring it all up because you must never forget two things—the glory of human accomplish
ment and its total irrelevance in the larger cosmic scheme—if the word scheme is not too demeaning for the cosmos. As humans, we are splendid but temporary.”

  Titi’s eyes were beginning to glaze. He had enriched her vocabulary to the point of putting her to sleep. Lucia’s eyes on the other hand were bright with astonishment. Cassidy was deliberately flattering her twelve-year-old ego with college intelligence.

  “I’m endeavoring, Contessa, to arouse your wonder at the modern world and your skepticism in the hereafter. If you are ever to be truly educated, if in this dangerous world you are even to survive, you must not look to God. There is none.”

  “I am a good Catholic,” piped Lucia, eyes gleaming with . . . what? Fear? Anger?

  “So am I,” bellowed Cassidy. “An Irish Catholic—the best or worst kind of Catholic, depending on the point of view. I entreat you, Contessa, banish these medieval superstitions.”

  The girl’s black eyes stared back at him frozen. Mutinous?

  Titi’s face meanwhile had sunk into a sullen apathy.

  Cassidy sank, cross-legged to the floor facing Lucia and bent his fierce face to hers. “What do you know,” he whispered, “about Sumer? About Crete? About the Mediterranean civilizations that gave birth to your black eyes and your long Roman nose?”

  “Nothing,” said Lucia defiantly, glaring back at him.

  “What in hell,” bellowed Cassidy, “did they teach you in those four languages?”

  “Manners,” shot out the girl.

  “Banish them,” said Cassidy.

  “I’m to discard my God and my manners?” said Lucia disbelieving.

  “Banish was the word. Not discard. Hang God and your manners in the closet like habilments to be worn when occasion demands. When you are learning, you must put these impediments,” spitting the word out, “aside and open your mind to facts as opposed to superstitions, prejudices, and myths. If you have been taught that God made the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested, forget it. He didn’t. Let us now briefly explore the beginning of civilization as it really happened . . .”

  For an hour he held forth conceding nothing to her twelve years, delivering the same lecture he’d given college students twice her age. The black eyes stared back, smouldering. Cassidy hadn’t the faintest notion whether she even understood. There was nothing writ on the plain withdrawn face except consciousness. She was definitely awake. (Titi wasn’t. She’d fallen asleep, head on her chest.)

  After an hour, Cassidy stopped abruptly. “Quite enough for today,” he barked.

  He rose, tall, emaciated, towering over her like an over-educated crow. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we take up Egypt whose five thousand year death wish has done great damage to civilized thought ever since.” He bowed to Lucia, sulkily, because she gave him no idea how well—or poorly—he had been received.

  He closed the door behind him and leaned against it for support, exhausted as if he’d been playing football, breath whiffling out of him.

  Lorenzo appeared soundlessly, bearing a breakfast tray. “The Principessa would like a word with you, Professor. Follow me if you would be so kind.”

  • 7 •

  The Principessa rested against an extravagance of pillows, four of them, all immense, square, and edged with Belgian lace. Before her was an elaborately carved bed table with mirror in which she was doing her face. Finishing her face, actually, because the face was young and radiant—and youth and radiance were not, Cassidy thought, part of her natural equipment any longer. The Principessa was working now on the upper left eyelid with great care. She’d never have let me watch the earlier, uglier stages, thought Cassidy.

  The two of them, Lorenzo and Cassidy, stood at the foot of the great painted bed (cool green with autumnal brown shadows), Lorenzo holding the heavy, silver, breakfast tray until the Principessa deigned to pay attention. Meanwhile, holding them hostage.

  Lorenzo was used to it. Cassidy wasn’t. He examined the breakfast tray, a work of art. It contained little nourishment—coffee and two rolls with butter and marmalade. But what a profusion of china, silver, and linen: The china and silver was emblazoned with the di Castiglione crest, a crenelated castle with prancing unicorns on each side (facing the camera, as it were). There was an extraordinary amount of silver—separate knives for butter and marmalade, separate spoons for sugar bowl and for stirring the sugar in the coffee, each of quite different design and filigree. The plates were delicate, primarily white and red and gold design at center and were used only for breakfast, never for any other meal. Cassidy felt a twinge of sympathy for revolutionists everywhere.

  The Principessa finished work on her upper left eyelid and snapped the mirror down on her bed table, transforming it into a breakfast table. Without a word, Lorenzo lay the tray on it. On Cassidy she turned a smile of such brilliance that Cassidy thought: Someone made love to her last night.

  “Some coffee, Professor?”

  “Thank you, no,” said Cassidy, dryly.

  “All right, Lorenzo,” said the Principessa dismissing him. No smile.

  I get a smile. He doesn’t. What should I deduce from that? Nothing, thought Cassidy.

  “Sit down, Professor, won’t you.” Indicating a chair by her bedside. She was tucking into her breakfast with good appetite, her white teeth biting into the roll, after slashing it with butter and marmalade, pouring herself coffee, stirring in sugar and cream—and talking. Lorenzo had vanished.

  “I heard your first lesson,” she said crisply.

  “How did you manage to do that?” Himself dismayed.

  The Principessa flipped a lever next to her on a box-like device. Immediately the voices of the two girls filled the room chattering Italian.

  “Sometimes they talk French,” said the Principessa. “It amuses Lucia to teach Titi all her languages.” She snapped the device off. “A nursery device, Professor.” All the while chewing on her roll, sipping coffee, glancing at him out of her heavily made eyelashes (if they were her own). Terribly busy, she was, for a woman in bed. “One puts these things in the nursery to listen for coughs and bad dreams when they’re tiny and one keeps them there . . . for other reasons. I do hope you’ll forgive me.”

  “I’m not sure I will, Principessa,” said Cassidy harshly. In his CIA days he’d eavesdropped shamelessly. He found it unforgiveable in others. “I cannot instruct your daughter if the walls have ears.”

  “The walls won’t have ears for very long,” she said, amused. “I have no intention of listening to all your lessons, Professor, fascinating as they undoubtedly are.” (Laughing at me, the bitch! thought Cassidy.)

  “It just occurred to me . . .” Now she was crooning, caressing him with her magnificent eyes, softening him up “ . . . that just possibly, Professor, your superb lecture was a trifle advanced for my daughter. She’s only twelve.”

  “The greatest age of all,” cried Cassidy, becoming very mellifluous and Irish. “Our advanced aptitude tests have shown, Madame, that the age of twelve is the magic time when more can be imparted than at any other year of life.” A lie from beginning to end. Cassidy was making it up as he went along. “There is in the twelve-year-old—on the very brink of puberty—the receptiveness of innocence without the grievous self-interest of sexuality that so shrivels the learning process later.”

  The Principessa munched her roll thoughtfully. “Innocence,” she murmured, “is something no one has ever accused Lucia of. She was born wise as a serpent.”

  She leaned back into her pillow, eyes closed, the face beautiful and ageless like a death mask of a Pharaoh. Cassidy felt abandoned. After a moment she opened her eyes and fixed on him a blue, transparent, and infinitely seductive gaze: “I must explain to you—and it will come as a surprise—that I am not your employer. You are in the employ of the trustees of the di Castiglione fortune. I hired you as I hired all the others at their insistence, but they pay your salary and their wishes must be heeded.”

  She smiled a weary smile: “They are ter
rified of Lucia being kidnapped, not because they are fond of the child but because it would cost a great deal of money to get her back,” the Principessa bit her lip pensively. “They’d pay billions to get her back. If I were kidnapped, they wouldn’t pay a single lira.”

  Now why did she say that, wondered Cassidy. Bid for sympathy? Not likely from so self-possessed a woman. She was, he decided, giving him information. He arched an eyebrow, signifying nothing much except that he was listening.

  “There may be no God, Professor,” she said dryly, “but there are trustees. They wouldn’t like you teaching anything remotely subversive to my daughter.”

  “My purpose, Madame, is not to subvert her but to teach her self-reliance. If she looks to God for protection in these most troubled times, she’ll be eaten alive by wolves.”

  “I doubt they’d look at it quite that way.”

  “Madame,” said Cassidy scowling, “if you’d remove that listening device, they’d have no way of knowing what I teach your daughter.”

  “Oh, Professor,” making a face at him. “I’m not their source of information. I don’t know how they find out what’s going on in the nursery. Perhaps an old hand at intelligence like yourself could tell me.”

  • 8 •

  In the perpetual gloom of the Spumi, Cassidy counted out the money, $180 in $20 bills, on the dark mahogany surface of the bar. Henry rang it up and lay a dollar and eight cents change down. He poured Cassidy another Wild Turkey. “On the house,” he said, disconsolate. Henry had never understood the curious American custom of giving away drinks. For Alison he poured another glass of white wine. For himself, a little Old Kentucky.

  Cassidy held up the Wild Turkey to the multicolored chandelier. “To your continuing prosperity, Hugh,” he said, and drank the bourbon in a single gulp. First time in three years he’d paid the whole bar bill.

  “Have the fettucine,” he suggested. “Henry’s old lady makes it. My treat.”

  “No,” said Alison, bent over the menu. “I’ll put you on the expense account.”