by Inconnu(e)
It was longer than that by half an hour. Cassidy stood well back in the shadows watching the sidewalk through his fourteen-foot windows. He’d been running through the possibilities. It was physically exhausting and emotionally debilitating.
“I don’t know if I want her here, and she doesn’t want me,” he shouted at no one at all. “This whole situation is fraught with cataclysm for both of us.” Wandering back and forth, his hands behind his back in his deposed Archduke bit, talking to himself like John Barrymore’s Hamlet with much twitching of eyebrows.
The driver had opened the rear door for Lucia, but she was taking the devil’s own time in getting out. Finally she stepped out on the sidewalk, her head drawn into her shoulders like a turtle. She was dressed in black. Black dress. Black shoes. Little round black straw hat with a round upturned rim. Very schoolgirlish, all of it, and very black, a color she detested.
She was clutching a suitcase, and it, too, was black.
We must do some shopping, thought Cassidy. What with?
Lucia was fumbling in her black purse for some money. The driver was shaking his head and saying something. His palm had already been crossed with silver. He had also been coached. He was under no circumstance to leave until she was well off the sidewalk and into the building.
So he waited.
Lucia stood motionless, suitcase clutched to her chest, staring at the brownstone steps as if they were the Himalayas. The driver standing there, car door open, not saying anything. He’d been told not to get into this (whatever this was).
Lucia looked this way and that. Up and down the street—and at her toes.
She has no place else to go, thought Cassidy savagely, and when you come right down to it, neither have I.
She’d grown perceptibly taller, and she had aged five years in one. It tore his heart to see it. Robbed of five years of precious childhood, he was thinking. And how do you get that back? You don’t.
The plain brow was longer, more adult, and sadder, and the chin was firmer. (It had always been pretty firm.) A stubborn child, no doubt about it.
She was moving finally, dragging herself up the brownstone steps, stopping at each one. Interminably.
He heard the outer door open—and then she was inside the building, standing just outside his own front door. The Pan Am limousine drove away. Cassidy kept one eye on the outside steps to be sure she didn’t bolt for it.
She didn’t bolt. Nor did she come in. She did nothing at all for so long Cassidy couldn’t stand it any longer. He threw open the door.
She was standing there, solemn as an owl.
“Am I such a fearsome object you’ll stand on my stoop for all eternity without ringing the bell? Come in! Come in!” Irritation to cover his nervousness.
Lucia looked at him, her black eyes deep with reproach.
Or perhaps that was his imagining.
She came in slowly, dragging each foot, in a way peculiar to teenage girls. She sat on his huge bed because, in Cassidy’s great room, there was nowhere else to sit. Every chair was loaded with students’ papers that needed correcting or books on the middle ages or Cassidy’s trousers that needed pressing.
Lucia said nothing, the black suitcase between her legs.
Cassidy scratched his nose. He walked to the window, hands behind his back, and looked out at the church across the street. Antichurch as he was, he always found comfort in the severe classic facade of that church with its Doric columns, which clashed with everything architectural on the street and, for that very reason, struck joy in Cassidy’s perverse heart. As churches go, it was pretty good—having a little theater in its basement and a gymnasium with showers and locker rooms at its rear. God had been relegated to the front one third of the first floor because God didn’t draw very well in Greenwich Village whereas basketball and theater did. Putting God in his place—behind the actors and the basketball players . . .
This sort of rumination was getting him nowhere. He had best get on with his prepared speech which now sounded to him like the subtitle from a silent film: “It was your mother’s dying wish that you be raised in America by Americans. Your mother didn’t want you wasting your life on your knees.”
Lucia said nothing.
Cassidy plunged on, getting it all out: “You didn’t have to come at all. I made it clear in my note, the choice was yours.”
He was walking back and forth now, passing her, silent on the bed.
“I must say you deliberated at great length. I assume you reached a decision. At any rate, you are here, and there must be an accommodation between us. We cannot live with hostility, we cannot dwell on the past, in one room.”
Silence in the high-ceilinged room with its tier after tier of books. Outside on Thirteenth Street a huge furniture van was blocking the thoroughfare, causing a traffic jam clear to Seventh Avenue. Someone was always moving out or moving in on Thirteenth. It was a restless street full of students, sitar players, poets who sniffed cocaine, and revolutionaries who smoked cigarettes. Splendid neighborhood for a growing girl. They were more interested in ideas than rape on Thirteenth Street.
Cassidy filled the silence watching a bearded man in an ankle-length greatcoat going through Spumi’s garbage, which contained delicacies not known in ordinary garbage pails.
Life would come as a shock wherever she lived. The palazzo, the Windletop, the convent. She’d scarcely been out of doors alone in her whole life.
He faced her, sternly. She looked in agony.
“If you hate it here, you can always return to the convent. Few things in life are irrevocable.”
“Where is the bathroom?” whispered Lucia in real distress.
Cassidy pointed. Lucia scuttled in and closed the door.
Cassidy sighed and collapsed on top of the bed, eyes on the ceiling. He was as winded as if he’d run a race. It wasn’t much but it was a milestone of sorts.
Once they had gone to the bathroom, marked out the territory with the smell of their urine . . .
Excerpted from The Legend of the di Castigliones, Annotated
As we know, Nicki’s was a long incarceration, made so by Clothilde’s haggling over each lira of ransom. (1) Clothilde didn’t think her brother was worth $7,500,000, which she thought might more properly go to the Church as a down payment for life everlasting for herself. (2)
During six weeks of haggling Nicki was held captive in a shabby house on the outskirts of Rome where he was subjected to a daily going over at the hands of Pieta Lavalla, a beautiful, rabidly Maoist revolutionary we later knew as Titi.
Now comes the most wonderful part of all. What Titi (as we are accustomed to calling her) didn’t know, what Nicki didn’t even himself suspect, was that Nicki was an advanced masochist in search of an ideology. Far from being revolted by Maoism (3), he was enchanted and radicalized by it. Within two weeks Titi and Nicki were co-conspirators (4), conspiring against the other kidnappers whom Titi seriously (and quite rightly) distrusted. They were also lovers, Titi whipping Nicki savagely with both her tongue and her whips simultaneously—an exercise both found deeply fulfilling.
Titi was no fool. She suspected that her fellow kidnapper Gianini Gennaro was more interested in the loot than in revolution, and she was quite right. Actually Gennaro was a Mafia hoodlum who had infiltrated the Red Wind at the order of his Mafia boss Vittorio Pietroangeli. The idea was to give the kidnapping an aura of revolution, get the money, and make off with it, probably killing Titi on the way.
Titi turned the tables on them. Titi and Gennaro were dispatched to pick up the money, and Titi maneuvered things so that they brought Nicki along. In chains, but nevertheless it was two against one. Somewhere along the line, Nicki was unloosed and, as we know, he was a jujitsu expert and in superb physical condition. He overpowered Gennaro, and Titi finished him off with her knife.
Titi and Nicki dressed Gennaro’s corpse in Nicki’s fancy clothes, after which Titi slashed Gennaro’s face to ribbons so that neither Elsa nor anyone el
se would recognize it. When Elsa arrived with the cash—alone, as had been ordered—Titi took it from her at gun point and vanished. The police found Elsa in hysterics—conceivably the only time this self-possessed woman lost control—embracing the bloody body of what she thought was her husband.
Where was Nicki during all this? In the bushes, engaged in his favorite pastime: watching.
• 38 •
Cassidy entered her in St. Theresa’s, which was in walking distance. He detested parochial schools, but after a long wrestle with his conscience, he decided St. Theresa’s was safer than the public school. Whether it was better to be raped by street hoodlums than by Christ, ah, that was the question. Cassidy decided he could parry the clericalism by a strong dose of derision administered in the home. That is, of course, if a sensible dialogue ever began between them. So far it hadn’t.
In the meantime, until decent conversation sprang up, Cassidy took her to St. Theresa’s by six different routes, varying them each day, as if she were still the object of kidnapping. “There is no point in tempting a rapist six times a week,” he said to her. “Once a week is enough.”
He taught her the safe ways to travel alone on a street, keeping well toward the gutter, where a nimble girl can dart out between the cars, well away from the doorways where she could be trapped and pulled into hallways. To the Kung Fu he had already taught her, he added some chops he had learned in the CIA which were lethal—not least to himself.
“I’m a rapist leaping from behind,” Cassidy would shout, and she would knee him in the balls and knuckle him in the kidneys with such diligence he couldn’t speak above a whisper for half an hour.
It broke down barriers slowly. In a way.
There was no avoiding Sophy. She would drop unasked into a chair at the Spumi when Cassidy and Lucia were having their supper. Cassidy would grunt. Lucia would eat. Nobody would say anything. When the silence became unbearable, Sophy’s earnest, stupid, deplorable face would blurt out some earnest, stupid, deplorable observation.
“You’d better get custody or there’ll be trouble.”
“There’s never any custody trouble when no one wants the child,” said Cassidy. “No one wants an heiress when the money’s gone.”
Lucia ate stonily. That night as she was undressing behind her screen—she had her own little niche with a camp bed behind that screen—Lucia blurted out: “You don’t want me either. You’re only doing it because Mama asked you to.”
“You’re not believing that, Mavourneen?” said Cassidy and softly aimed it at the black screen behind which was Lucia.
“I do indeed!” Very fierce whisper.
“You’re all I have,” said Cassidy.
He had no idea how that went down behind the black screen because Lucia said no more, and presently he could hear her soft breathing, which meant she was asleep. She fell asleep moments after her head hit the pillow. In that respect, she was still a child.
When she was safely deep in slumber, Cassidy pulled out his notebook and went to work on The Legend whose existence she didn’t suspect. And whose eyes was the Legend for then? Only hers. When, Cassidy hadn’t decided. At first he thought, maybe twenty-one. Then he pushed it up to twenty-five, and lately he had been thinking she should be at least thirty before she found out the whole terrible story . . .
Excerpted from The Legend of the di Castigliones, Annotated
Because of the power and prestige of the family, the corpse was laid away in the di Castiglione mausoleum in the hills of Tuscany without anything so demeaning as fingerprints being taken. Elsa was kept in ignorance throughout the funeral (easier to pass as grieving widow if one thought one was indeed one, Nicki had decided). Nicki, who had been hiding out in the 233 room palazzo with Titi, made his appearance at 3 A.M. in her bedroom.
“A milestone in the theater of the absurd,” the Principessa had whispered on her deathbed.
Nicki was in black leather from head to toe, dressing up for the role of terrorist with the exquisite care he gave always to costume. “My dearest one,” he said rapturously, kissing the Principessa. “You must forgive me.” Smothering her all the time with kisses, for wasn’t she, after all, his darling mama? “Look what I have brought home to you?”
Presenting Titi to her, as if she were a rare jewel for his Mama’s delectation. “I have fallen in love at last! Isn’t that remarkable? Aren’t you pleased, my dearest?”
The Principessa only half awake in a tumult of joy and astonishment.
“I don’t recall what she wore, but mostly she was garbed only in her own sullenness which she wrapped around her like an ideological contraceptive.” A mistress of the barbed phrase even in her last extremity.
The beginning of despair, said the Principessa.
She was undisturbed by Nicki embracing Titi but appalled by his embracing Maoism, not because she was Right Wing (she had no politics at all and considered politics demeaning, a topic for the lower orders) but because she knew it was fatal for Nicki.
“For what is terror but theater,” he would say with his shining eyes.
“It isn’t, Nicki! It’s not theater at all,” she would cry. “What you are engaged in, Nicki, is murder.”
“A murderer! Me! These people have never been alive, my dearest one. How can you murder someone who has never been alive?”
For four years, Nicki and Titi hid in the upper reaches of the Rome palazzo during which they carried out many of the bombings and kidnappings of the Red Wind from the last place the police would think of looking. Nicki was back in his childhood haunt, playing a grown-up version of the acting games he had played as a child.
Through it all, the Principessa raged in private and was silent in public, following the coda that leads all others in the upper reaches of aristocracy the world over. If you have a skeleton in the cupboard, keep it there, if possible, for centuries. There is nothing more cleansing than a couple of centuries.
• 39 •
Lucia had dreams, so terrible they woke her up in a fit of screaming, and left her shaken and sobbing.
“Mavourneen,” said Cassidy on one of these occasions, and tried to comfort her, him in his worn red dressing gown.
She pushed him away with revulsion, as if it were all his doing, and he never tried again. He could put up with much from Lucia—and he did—but revulsion was more than he could bear. The truth of it is, said Cassidy to himself, is that she’s overwhelmed by self-loathing for killing her mother and her father—and it’s not her mother and probably not her father. So what do I do? Make her fatherless and motherless—rob her even of her parents?
It was almost enough to drive him to the priests—but not quite.
She had her own key and came and went as she pleased now, always alone. “There must be some nice girls at the school,” Cassidy said to her. “Why don’t you bring a friend home?”
“I had a friend; I killed her,” said Lucia fiercely.
“She wasn’t your friend,” said Cassidy—after a moment because he didn’t know how to deal with this.
“I know,” said Lucia, the voice throbbing with passion. “She hated me! All that time, she must have hated me!”
It was too much for a thirteen-year-old to deal with, duplicity of that scale. She burst forth with a terrible question: “Why did Mama put up with it? Why?”
Excerpted from The Legend of the di Castigliones, Annotated
The Principessa had permitted Titi to be with Nicki as a sort of advanced toy that a child of his immensely overcivilized temperament demanded. In that sense she was an aristocrat to her fingertips: one dealt with the unspeakable by not speaking. The aristocracy has its own simplicities, some of them so painfully obvious as to be—to the rest of us—invisible.
She drew the line at Titi as nursemaid: “No, Nicki, it is out of the question. I have gone along with this masquerade beyond the call of love or reason—but Titi as nursemaid to Lucia is just not on.”
“My dearest one,” he had said—he wa
s on his knees, pleading with his shining smile and Italian passion, “you are signing my death warrant.”
The Mafia, said Nicki—a flat lie—had wised up to the fact that Gennaro had not run off with the money. (1) They were looking for Pieta Lavalla and if they found her, they would also find him, Nicki, and they’d both be dead. Pieta needed a disguise and they also needed a change of scene. In short, New York. (2) Nicki would come along as butler, a role he played with more passionate attention to detail than any butler ever did. (1)
The Principessa eventually started hiring tutors to counter any radical poisons Titi might be pouring into her daughter’s ears.
The Principessa’s last words to me were: “Clothilde will bury her in a nunnery where she’ll die of despair. Promise me you’ll get her out of there, Cassidy.” I promised.
• 40 •
Something enormous was going on behind Lucia’s black eyes and Cassidy had no idea what it was. Communication between them slowed to a dead stop. Cassidy peppered her with questions about school, the cooking, the shopping, her clothes. In reply, she would say: “It’s okay.” “That’s okay.” Or simply: “Okay.”
When clearly nothing was okay.
“It’s not even a word—okay,” he would say to the heavens in which he didn’t believe.
Cassidy’s job at the New School was exceedingly part-time. His specialty—medieval literature, as it pertained to modern life—was needed only when sufficient students asked for it, and that wasn’t often. There were long intervals when money came in from nowhere. It took careful money management, and here Lucia stepped in uninvited.
“We cannot afford restaurants,” she said flatly one day.
“There’s no kitchen here worthy of the name,” said Cassidy.
“I’ll manage,” she said stubbornly. And she did. The cooking was fairly awful, but her shopping was a miracle of resourcefulness.
