L'America

by Martha McPhee

  Cesare liked this woman, liked her energy and her enthusiasm. She was over seventy and had the strength of a hundred mules, mules because she liked to describe herself as "an old threadbare mule going round and round the katydid." Of the phrase he only understood mules. However, her airs were not missed by him. (And the fact of these airs endeared Beth to him all the more completely because Beth had none.) In an Italian he would find this characteristic pretentious and annoying. With Grammy, however, he did not because he could tease her and make fun of her and she would laugh along with him at herself because, of course, she, too, was well aware of the airs. "The airs," she would say, "are so fresh. What a pleasant day." She knew who she was and where she came from: a cowgirl from Montana who was smart enough to make her way east to Vassar, to marry well so that she would be provided for for life. But her roots were her roots; her parents had been uneducated. Everything she knew she learned herself, including her airs.

  Grammy visited Città three times, going to church with Elena, eating daintily, shopping mightily, pretending to be a grande dame from New York with not a financial care in the world. Cesare would take her to the center of Città in the evenings for prosecco and to show her off to his friends, who would gather around her and smile and try out their varying abilities with her language, and somehow she would make them all smile and laugh as she sipped the bubbly wine, flushing from its influence, inviting everyone to visit her in America.

  "Your bedroom is waiting for you in New York," she'd say to Cesare, whom by now she considered her pal. "Of course, it is separate from Beth's. There'll be none of that in my household. Not until you marry her. You'll have to go to Pennsylvania if you relish monkey business." And she lifted her left eyebrow and pierced him with those sharp green eyes and then lifted her lips in a gentle, knowing smile that said, I like you, son. (She called him son.) And then she was gone.

  As for the rest of the people in Beth's family, those at Claire, they were a mishmash. Over the years Cesare got to know them through pictures and through the stories Beth told: he heard about the people who came, the ones who left, the ones who seemed to stay forever. The father took in anyone who needed a place to live, and they could stay as long as they contributed. There was a Russian carpenter named Mash, who erected yurts and teepees in the woods. There was an out-of-work investment banker named Hunter, who helped with finances and kept them flush with champagne and had an exquisite eye for antiques. Sometimes the way Beth paused on Hunter made Cesare jealous, wondering if Beth liked this Hunter more than just a little. "What kind of name is Hunter?" he asked, though he knew well of Hunter Thompson. "Jealousy doesn't become you," Beth responded, and then kissed him. "Besides, I hardly know him. He's only just come to Claire. All I know is that he's rich." Beth's noting that detail struck Cesare as particularly indiscreet: that Hunter's wealth would be the defining attribute, the one thing she'd recall and share, revealed in her that American fascination with any kind of money.

  Beth's current stepmother's name was Sissy Three. (Yes, her last name was like the number; Cesare had checked with Beth several times to make sure he had heard correctly.) She referred to herself as Beth's stepmother, but she wasn't legally married to Jackson. "He'll never marry again," Beth explained. "He would see that as a betrayal of my mother." The man made no sense to Cesare, and thus Cesare became curious, especially because those who spoke of him (Bea in particular) admired him and his Claire, remarked on this visionary with two thousand acres smack in the middle of Snyder County, Amish country with horses and buggies rolling busily across the rippling hills of orchards. Of course, Cesare knew about the Amish. Later, when he finally visited Claire, their presence would make him feel like he had gone back in time, as though he were walking through a Thomas Hardy novel. Seeing them and seeing Claire juxtaposed, he couldn't help but reconsider his notions of the preservation of the past. Who doesn't try to preserve the past in one way or another?

  Grammy claimed she hated Beth's father's haven, but she couldn't stay away. She drove out there often in her long black Lincoln Continental to try and "convert" them to ordinary souls. Them—the members of Claire—they came from everywhere bringing along their talents and knowledge. Sometimes Cesare would have Beth draw a diagram of the people and the place so that he could understand how it all fit together. Mostly Claire was just too weird and he wanted to save Beth from all that. Though another part of him, in truth, wondered, if he ever went there, would he ever leave—an idea that both excited and terrified him from the moment he first heard of Claire as he sat beside Beth on Santa Maria beach, imagining himself a writer. Writing for a living was the one dream that burned in him but that he rarely allowed himself to acknowledge. Even so, he always wrote: journals, letters, letters to editors. He was the rare Italian who filled up every inch of space on his postcards home, describing in explicit detail his adventures. Secretly, he wanted to be a nonfiction writer in the tradition of all those Americans who wrote real stories like novels. His hero was Tom Wolfe—The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; The Right Stuff Perhaps, he thought, he could write a book about Claire.

  "Why am I the Roman Empire and not just Italy?" he asked again as they lay together in the summer grass.

  "Italy would be too obvious and I prefer the idea of Rome because you're Caesar, emperor of my country." She held her eyes to the clouds and let her right hand drift the length of her to indicate the borders of her country. Sunlight coming through the trees dappled her skin with golden spots as the wind rustled the leaves. Caesar Not Exactly, he thought, imagining the three words as a name. He was an ordinary Italian man at twenty-seven, living with his parents who were desperate for him to finish the Bocconi so that someday he could take over his father's position at the bank, taking the baton and leading the family forward in a journey that started five hundred years ago. But then came Beth like a revelation. Cesare loved how large she could make him, as if through her there really could be more to who he was. He was in love. She was in love. Possibility seemed infinite. "As emperor I command you to stay," he said, and began to kiss the length of her.

  Cesare's English was perfect, better than Beth's Italian. He had studied in London during high school summers, had had an English governess at one point, had read many English novels. The slight hint of an English accent hid behind his words, hard is and strange pronunciations—shedules, tom-ah-toe, and the like. He was lit by hidden dreams and unending enthusiasm for anything and everything. He loved to cook with Beth, teaching her about why certain pasta shapes went with certain sauces, which pastas held which sauces best. For example, farfalle worked well with smoked salmon because the little flakes of fish caught in the butterfly wings. Cheese never went with fish. (This was at a time when many Americans were still unsophisticated about pasta, when it was most often referred to as noodles.) The names of the various pasta shapes alone was enough to ignite her imagination: twins, weeds, snails, little ears, priest stranglers. She wanted him to teach her to make a dish with each shape. He taught her to revere and thus eat with the seasons: onions in the spring, asparagus in early summer, then mushrooms (hunted in the woods at Fiori). She taught him all about chocolate and chocolate desserts; she taught him the bit she knew about Indian food. Together they made elaborate meals for his family and for their friends, who feasted together in the Fiori gardens. Cooking and entertaining, Beth was in her element—confident and generous and gregarious. She brought people together with the food, fitting as many as she could around the table, sparking conversations on any topic, making certain everyone felt comfortable. Even his parents acquiesced to her authority (though they only pretended to enjoy her Indian dinner). Together Cesare and Beth played. He taught her to windsurf and to compete in ski races and to vacation like an Italian—long months at Santa Maria beach waiting for the wind. He introduced her to Wolfe, who, in truth, she did not much care for, preferring fiction. She didn't tell him this, but he noticed her leaving the books he recommended half read. He cared not a bit for shoes and the
Bocconi and exams, though on occasion Beth would try to help him care, encouraging him to study, accompanying him to Milan for the exams so that his parents would leave him alone and so that she would endear herself to them. She tried to fit in. She tried to adapt to the traditions of his life in Città—the pattern of the days and weeks and years. She learned to buy the daily bread at noon, learned to eat a big meal in the middle of the day, learned to drink her aperitif in the town center at dusk, making conversation with his friends even if they (initially) were suspicious of her. Sometimes he wondered how long she would be able to keep this up.

  Città with all its Bianchis, Macchis, Ghiringhellis, and Cellinis was his world, a world that few ever left permanently. Cittadini and Cittadotti crossed the nearby Swiss border to deposit money (all the money they had made on socks and shoes) in Credit Suisse banks, buy cigarettes and chocolate, and fill up their cars with gasoline, but they always hightailed it back to the beauty (and certainty) of their prosperous little town. From the top floor of Cesare's family's villa, which loomed above the town, you could see the snowcapped peaks of the Alps. What he wanted, deep down, was to be able to wander away from here, free to be a writer, a cook, a farmer (God forbid), and at the same time never to leave—to take his place in Città as master of Fiori, raising children with Beth. Indeed, he had never been to Rome.

  For five hundred years his family had been bankers in this town. And for five hundred years his family, the Cellini family, had produced at least one son and a daughter or two. The firstborn sons were always named after the grandfathers, which allowed them two alternating names, Cesare and Giovanni Paolo (one Roman name, one Catholic, anchoring them quite squarely in the secular/religious duality of their country). For the names of the daughters they were allowed to choose anything: Valeria, Federica, Livia, Claudia, Isabella, Caterina, Laura. Beth thought of the women as the precious jewels of the Cellini line, the Cellini's gift to the world. The Cellini women were not bound to a single destiny. Cesare's sister, Laura, could do almost anything she wanted with her life except be a clown (which was, as it happened, what she wanted to do most with her life).

  With Cesare's help, she ran away to clown school in Bern, Switzerland, when she was eighteen. He was twenty-one. He organized admissions to the school and train fares and an apartment rental. "My face is a funny one," she told him, looking him in the eye. "My face is absurd. When I smile, I can make people laugh. I like the way that makes me feel." He told her not to be ridiculous, but even as he said the words he couldn't help but agree. Her broad, puffy cheeks, her bright round eyes that seemed to jump forth with her animated smiles, her tight curly blond hair, her button nose, she had used them all to make him laugh many times. So, because he loved her, he took on her escape as if it were his own, awed by her determination and passion, curious to see how far she would get and whom she would become. He had visions of her tromping across the world, leaving happiness in her wake. A small part of him wished he had been born female because he believed he would have been allowed the freedom to make himself.

  Alas, however, her parents learned the news and Signor Cellini, throwing all banking obligations aside, tore off to Bern to save his daughter from clowns and from all that clowns implied. (He gave the silent treatment to Cesare, knowing he had facilitated Laura's plan. Elena only asked, "But why?") Giovanni Paolo found his daughter wearing a clown costume—red and white polka dots and a big red nose—in a class that taught the art of laughter. The grotesque animation of her laughing face destroyed her beauty. Her luscious curly blond hair, a bob above her ears, had been dyed green. He simply held her, tightly and with everything he had, hard tears forming in his eyes. And that was that.

  Bea had long since forgiven Beth for falling in love in Páros. "When I realized how serious this was," she said, there was nothing she could feel but happiness and a hope that someday this relationship would mean that Beth would live permanently in Città. Years later, after Bea had abandoned Italy for New York, she admitted that she had been stupid to hope that Beth would have come to live in Città. "It would have been wrong for you and would have destroyed you. Cesare, dreamer that he was, would never have been capable of being anything but a spoiled boy from that town." In the end, after knowing him longer, Bea did not like Cesare. She saw that he was entitled in the way that rich boys from Città were: arrogant and unaware of their privilege. Sure, they had secret notions, but for all their confidence and all their resources, they couldn't break away. But that was later. For now, in Beth's second year of living in Italy with Bea's family, Bea hoped. She hoped along with Beth's grandmother, who helped fund this year because she was determined that Beth lead a "normal" life far from her father's ideas of "joyful" communal living in which talent was liberated from the pesky details of everyday life.

  "Hogwash," Grammy would say to Beth. "Someone has to wash the dishes." But Claire did work as far as Beth could tell. If you liked to cook you cooked, if you liked to farm you farmed, if you liked to sew you sewed, if you liked children you taught, etc. It was a thriving farm that fed itself, taught itself, paid for itself—a think tank of sorts, too, from which some quite clever ideas were emerging about the use of alternative fuels. Indeed, by the year 2017 many cars would be using hydrogen and Jackson's role in this transformation would be acknowledged. And though Beth would be sixteen years dead, her daughter Valeria would witness the fruits of this dream, invited with her grandfather to Washington to celebrate the milestone and his contributions, his sheer persistence and determination in spreading the word, putting a face on the idea. Now, however, Beth was alive: she was twenty-one years old, lying in the grass at Fiori with the summer against her skin and a future looming beautifully in front of her. Cesare lay by her side, pondering the idea of a year in America, which he liked very much but only cautiously so because he knew his parents would not approve, that they would want him to finish university first, and even then they would find the year an extravagance and a waste. "Tell me what I would do," Cesare said. He wanted to hear the flood of her ideas for him, how easily they came from her lips like all those soap bubbles blown by a child.

  "We'd be in New York," she said. "You could do anything there." The possibility, an ever-expanding universe. "You could study at Columbia's business school, get a job on Wall Street. Your father must have connections." She paused, thought deeply. He could see the answer occurring to her. "Or better yet, you could study American literature, write for a newspaper. You're a brilliant writer." He thought of all the letters he had written to her, the stacks she had at home, neatly preserved in a box, of how she would tell him this, that she loved being away from him, in part, simply so she could receive those letters with their detailed reports of Città, the people, the intricacies of his love for her. "Write more," she often wrote to him, and the knowledge that she liked his letters made him work harder on the next.

  It was life at Claire that Cesare liked to imagine. What talent of his could he really offer? Certainly not banking. During Servizio Civile, his job had been to work with paraplegics and spastics and other severely handicapped teenagers. They adored him simply because he was not afraid to tease them, not afraid to carry them about with him with all their complicated equipment, wheelchairs and breathing tubes, and to entertain them with his friends. He had liked that job; it had given him a sense of purpose.

  "You could go to Claire if you wanted," Beth said. "You could help out as a nurse, the way you help with the invalids."

  "Be reasonable, Bet," he said, and he laughed imagining himself as a nurse. He explained that a career as a nurse would humiliate his family, that there was very little he could do that would not humiliate his family, and as he watched her bright eyes he realized how little she allowed herself to understand even though she tried. "It's already been decided for me," he said.

  "But you can change that," she said. And with her will, pure American will, the will of a new country that believed irrefutably that the best was still to come, she persisted. He lov
ed all sports. He could farm. Farming was another career that would humiliate Cesare's family, but he did not tell her that. He did not tell her, either, that the gift of having his life decided for him had made him lazy.

  During the first weeks of their romance in Città, once they had found each other again after Greece, every time Cesare saw Beth she became light and impatient as if every nerve had wings, so apparent was her infatuation that it was as if she were made of air. Now in the grass at Fiori, he wondered if she would ever leave America permanently for him, or he Italy for her? He wondered if somehow they could merge in their children, create a magical combination of stability and freedom. He was romantic that way. Cesare had been in love a few times, but when he met Beth it seemed to him he had been wrong before and that he had never actually been in love at all. She was a prism, always refracting a new light. His other girlfriends knew the path they had to walk and walked it with elegance and style in their fine Italian clothes, believing in the good alliance of the Cellini bank and Macchi socks. Beth wore jeans and jack Purcells and got fashion wrong when she tried on Bea's hand-me-downs.

  "Come see for yourself if the great experiment of America works," she was always saying to him in her persistent way.

  "Oh, Bet, I would like to," he said.

  "Would?" she said. He was, as were all Italians, good at using the conditional tense. The list of things they would like to do was much longer than the list of things they actually did. "Vorrei, vorrei, vorrei," she said, daring, bold, unafraid to draw attention to herself. It was way past midnight and they were eating watermelon with friends at a farmer's stand by the side of the road—long picnic tables beneath bright lights and plenty of other people both old and young, slurping up the fruit, spitting out the seeds. She loved the innocence of all these people gathered over the jolly slices of watermelon so late at night. Cesare had been doing it since he was a child, part of that pattern of his days and years. Classes, siesta, work, study, a stroll before dinner down the arcaded Corso Roma in the center of town greeting his friends—friends he had known since childhood. His parents and their parents had played as children, too. On weekends Cesare and his friends played, enjoying big picnics and soccer, windsurfing on the lake. For a week in the winter they took a Settimana Bianca, skiing in the Dolomites, a month in the summer at the beach. The Cellinis spent the month of September in Marmi on the island of Elba in a humble beach shack. (For all their money they were not extravagant.) How Beth loved these patterns; she was fascinated by the notion of knowing—day in, day out; year in, year out—what to expect from a day, a life, for five hundred years, like threading time, stitching up all these lives. Beth saw it clearly, this life in perpetuity, and had a great respect for such continuity.