by Mary Cable
Our Ginevra would never have done such an unwise thing. She was capable and full of sense. Lost American tourists were likely to spot her in the streets of Munich and hurry over to ask directions to the opera house or to the Bayerischerhof Hotel; or they might even ask how much to tip a taxi driver and what a bratwurst is made of. Like our mother, Ginevra threw herself into her role of good State Department wife. After less than two years in Munich, her German was fluent, and her two older children attended German schools and were often dressed in pint-size lederhosen or dirndls.
I had told her on the telephone only that I wanted to come for a short visit. The rest of the story was too hard to tell on the phone, and now, driving from the airport in Ginevra’s new BMW, it seemed too hard to tell at all.
“Where’s Osgood?” Ginevra began. “When’s the wedding?”
“There won’t be one.”
“What?!” she exclaimed. “But in one of the last letters Mother wrote to me, she was so full of plans for it.”
“She was always full of my wedding plans. And at the end, I told her it would happen. But now I’m not going to marry him.”
“Oh, Alex! He sounds perfect. Rich, good-looking, Harvard - what more can you want?”
“It’s my decision, after all,” I said. “It’s me he wanted to marry, not Mother. And I just didn’t think he was right for me.”
At a stop light, Ginevra turned and looked at me penetratingly.
“I think you’re a little sad,” she said, and reached out a sympathetic hand. “Is something the matter?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m pregnant.”
The light changed and Ginevra very carefully shifted gears and got the car going again. Then she said, “And Osgood won’t do anything?”
“It’s not his.”
“My God,” she said. After that, I felt that I would have got more concern or sympathetic advice from any passerby in the street. Ginevra said nothing at all for some time. Then she asked why I had come to Munich.
“For an abortion, you must go to Sweden,” she said. “Munich is very Catholic.”
“I don’t want an abortion.”
“Mein Gott, Alex! That leaves adoption. If you’re putting a child up for adoption, there are Americans here who are looking to adopt.”
“That’s what I hoped. Maybe you can help me find out how to go about it.”
“Yes ...” She sounded vague, as if she would prefer to have nothing to do with it. “I’ll ask Rick to look into it discreetly, down at the Consulate. Who is the father?”
“That’s classified information.”
Ginevra made a clicking noise with her tongue, reminding me of our mother. Clicking had been her way of expressing disgust and disbelief.
“Well, I’m sure you’ll have to tell,” she said. “Adoptive parents need to have some idea about heredity.”
“Then I’ll just have to keep the baby.”
“Certainly not!” Ginevra said, bursting with impatience. “You’ll ruin your life and the kid’s, too. Really, Alex, how in the world can you have been so stupid?”
Then she glanced at me again and must have seen how miserable I looked, because she said more gently, “Well, let’s not worry. Rick will think of something. He always does.”
I was well aware that Ginevra and her husband, Richard Watkins, were dedicated toward a lofty goal. This post was Rick’s big chance. He had reached the rank of FS-4, having started only a few years previously as a 7. From now on, everything he and his family did would be closely observed, duly noted on his Efficiency Report, and considered each time he came up for promotion. Between FS-4 and FS-1, the rank of ambassador, many were passed over or selected out. Ginevra had grown up seeing her mother’s constant striving, and her father never quite measuring up to her expectations or to the State Department’s. Rick was going to be different. Together they were going to be an ideal State Department couple. And there was no room in their careful plans for an errant younger sister.
Next day, capable Rick had all but arranged my life. There were many couples among the thousands of military and government Americans in Germany who wanted to adopt and who would not ask a lot of questions. Give him a week or two and he’d set it up.
“Rick is so wonderful,” Ginevra said, relaxing at last. “We can stop worrying and have some fun together. You certainly don’t look pregnant.”
“That’s because I’ve got about seven months to go.” And as soon as I said that I suddenly realized what a long and unhappy time it was going to be. Part of me agreed with my sister that abortion was the best of the terrible choices. But I was still too close to David and my love for him, and I wanted that baby to have a life. I was like a person who, willingly and eagerly, has jumped into rough sea and has then remembered that she can’t swim. Crazy. Inexplicable.
Ginevra kept trying to be kind and nice, but her true feelings showed.
“Oh, dear, Alex!” she said more than once. “You haven’t managed well!” And managing was what Foreign Service women usually did so splendidly.
The third time she said it, we were in the breakfast room of her large, comfortable house in a Munich suburb, and she was spoon-feeding her youngest child. All her children were good-looking, healthy, and rather cowed. The baby’s small receptive mouth opened wide for a spoonful of applesauce, then closed while Ginevra deftly scraped the spoon all around it, to remove all messy traces; then back to the dish; dip, feed, scrape. The baby became part of this machinelike procedure - receiving, swallowing. An automatic baby.
Everything else in Ginevra’s household was as skillfully processed. An all-purpose servant set the table and after each meal washed the dishes. Ginevra cooked. In the evening, the servant converted into a nursemaid and put the children to bed. Then Ginevra turned from hausfrau to wife and comrade, asking Rick intelligent questions about the Bavarian elections, and showing familiarity with parties and candidates.
“We are invited to cocktails with the Engelhardts tomorrow,” she said to me, “and we’d love to have you come with us. The only thing is, the conversation will be in German and most likely the subject will be autobahn maintenance, because the Engelhardts are in the paving business. Will that interest you?”
“Well, not very much, thank you, Ginevra.”
“Then perhaps you’d stay with the children. I owe Renate an evening off.”
Once Ginevra and Rick had recovered from the shock and nuisance I had caused them, they seemed to enjoy helping me make decisions. The baby would be born in April, and I would need to find a pleasant, impersonal place to stay until then. Ginevra thought Salzburg might be a good idea - not too far from Munich and its good doctors. But I exasperated her by selecting Venice. I had childhood memories of a visit there. A pigeon had stood on my head in Piazza San Marco. I had loved the shop windows, twinkling with jewelry - amber, garnet, crystal. And the soothing sound of lapping water was everywhere you went.
“Venice will be damp, cold, rainy, and smelly,” Ginevra objected. “And it’s overnight from Munich. You’ll wind up having the baby on the train.”
“I’ll come back here a month early,” I said. “And I’ll stay at some little pension near the hospital. You don’t have to know I’m here.”
“Suit yourself, then,” she said. And added, “Just as you usually do.”
Suit yourself as you usually do. I thought, I would be likely to say the same thing to David. We are not unlike. We suit ourselves, even when what we do is destructive. The difference is, I harm myself, but David goes free.
By the following week, Rick had selected parents for my baby, and it had been arranged for them to stand by in April to pick it up as soon as it had been born. Now I had one more job to do. Oz knew I was visiting my sister; now I had to write to him, breaking our engagement. I told him that I had felt for some time that it wouldn’t work; that since my mother’s death I had been depressed and needed to spend time in Europe, traveling and maybe studying, but living on my own. I asked hi
m not to look for me, and I said that he should get on with his own life and forget me, because I was really not the right person for him. A couple of weeks later, an answer came. It was short and reserved, simply asking me to get in touch with him anytime I changed my mind.
In the years since that time, I have strictly avoided thinking about the winter I spent in Venice and the birth of the baby. Now, even if I try, I cannot remember it very well. Loneliness was the worst of it. I had stuck to my decision not to tell David - or at least not until much later - and it was not a tale for casual friends. Had my mother been alive, I would have gone to great lengths to prevent her from knowing; and Ginevra was no use at all. I had never liked secrets, because they seemed like burdens. And now I had a lifelong burden.
Venice suited my mood, because its story seemed to match my own. Once filled with energy and passion, now it seemed to look sadly back at the past and uncertainly at the future. I found a small pensione and settled down with a satchelful of paperbacks from an English-language bookshop in Munich. My room overlooked a back canal, so that I could hear, day and night, the lapping-water sounds that I remembered, and they still had the effect of making me feel soothed and tranquil.
While the weather continued fine, I wandered through the mazey streets, visited all the museums and dozens of churches, and took canal rides on the vaporetto. Several times I spent the day at the Lido, walking on the wide brown beach and wading in the Adriatic, still warm from summer. In November, I walked the rainy Venetian streets, in my maternity raincoat, under a streaming umbrella. I didn’t care how cold the rain was, but I grew apprehensive when the Piazza San Marco began to flood, and people had to walk across it on makeshift bridges made of hastily laid-down planks. The cafes closed because their doors could not be opened without admitting a flood. That, too, suited my state of mind. Disaster by rain; rain in a beautiful place. In this weather, the vaporetto was crowded and plunged up and down on the restless Grand Canal. When the backwash rose and fell against the peach-colored palaces, one saw their ungainly foundations: precarious piles of brick, festooned with weeds.
It seemed that I must be the one lonely person in Venice. All the other foreigners, mostly Japanese or German, moved about in packs. Agile Japanese gentlemen risked soaking their neat trouser cuffs as they leaped over puddles to take pictures. German honeymoon couples crowded the bead shops, taking hours to select a glass necklace or two. On a rainy day I bought a necklace of blue glass, priced lower than when I had noticed it before on a sunny day, sparkling in the window. The beads were the blue of a Tiepolo sky, with flecks and bubbles here and there, suggesting wispy clouds. I took it “home”-that is, to my pensione room, and hung it on the lampshade, so that it would sparkle when the light was on. With methods like these, I got through the winter.
The pensione had other guests who, like me, were staying for weeks or months. As the days grew shorter and our rooms chillier, we tended to gather in the little salone before dinner, pulling our chairs close to a minute coal fire. Gradually, the others revealed themselves, or rather, small glimpses of themselves. One elderly lady from Ohio was thinking of becoming a glassblower. She went every day to a factory where she had persuaded them to give her lessons. A mother and daughter from Sweden had come to Italy to escape the stern Baltic winter, and in chilly December they were still going over to the Lido, where they actually put on their bathing suits and swam, while Italians watched dumbfounded. A plain-faced woman of about forty (“old maid” immediately came to my mind) was “just traveling”; and a married couple were on a sabbatical from a Michigan college.
As my pregnancy became obvious, I aroused the curiosity of all of them. My story was intricate: my husband was an officer in the Sixth Fleet, based in Naples. At present he was on Special Duty, the nature of which was a secret, even from me. And I had decided to come to Venice while I was waiting for him and for our baby. Why Venice? Well, I intended, someday, to get a degree in Art History, and my favorite painters were Titian and his contemporaries.
“Aren’t you lonesome, all by yourself?” the glass- blower asked me.
“No, I like being alone,” I said. “I prefer it.” That was to discourage them from trying to be nice to me.
One day, the Signora who owned the pensione came to me with glad news: there was another Navy wife arriving, a nice friend for me. Perhaps our husbands already knew each other. I immediately developed flu and did not leave my room until the Navy wife had left. I didn’t think I could handle any more lies.
After several months had passed, I began to realize that something strange was happening to my emotions. I no longer had crying fits or felt terribly sorry for myself. In fact, I did not feel much of anything. And I thought of David only a few times a day instead of all the time. Physically I felt fine. Dr. Simoni, my obstetrician, said I was indeed fine, but warned against desserts. To that I paid no attention, and when the sun was out I used to sit at the Cafe Florio at an outdoor table, drinking a cappuccino and lingering over a whipped cream dolce of some kind.
One day in December, I bought a Christmas card with a picture of the Nativity and a “Buon Natale” message. Then I sat at my table debating what to say, finally writing “and Happy New Year, Alex.” It was for Oz. I thought about adding “I’ll be back in the spring,” but I decided against getting anyone’s hopes up - his or mine - and in the end, I didn’t send the card at all. Some part of me would have liked to feel something for Oz. Here was a man who had loved me and asked me to marry him, and I was grateful to him for that. He was not the Prince I had hoped for, but he had put himself in that role. It occurred to me that life is a lot like play-acting. You don’t write the lines or direct the action, and you have to play your part with the actors that are there. It never occurred to me - then - that there might be another play I could be in.
With the detachment of a spectator rather than a player, I told myself that this was the worst year of my life, and things could only get better. I was surprised by my calm. The passion I had felt so totally seemed more like a storm that one reads about in the newspaper. A hundred thousand people swept away in Bangladesh: we have to turn aside because we can’t undertake to feel agony a hundred thousand times. In a similar manner, I had turned aside from my own storm and its devastations.
When my baby grew bigger and stirred about vigorously, as if he (I always imagined “he”) were not only alive but developing a personality, I thought about keeping him, but in those days, this would have been a fairly rash step. I tried to imagine myself as an unwed mother (“single parent” had not yet entered the national vocabulary). Maybe, I thought, I could become the private secretary of a big executive, and make enough money to support my child and myself. But “what would people say” was a terror I couldn’t get beyond. Furthermore, although I was ashamed to admit it to myself because it seemed unfemale, I was afraid I wouldn’t be much of a success as a mother. I observed Venetian mothers, responding totally and unstintingly to every whim of the little creatures in their arms, and I didn’t think I could do it. Not all alone.
Being alone wasn’t all bad, and my fellow boarders weren’t bad either, but I did find myself longing for a real friend. And I found one in a history professor on sabbatical. Culver Turner was his name, and I somehow picked him up in the Doges’ Palace. We made an unlikely couple - I pregnant, and he gay, both unmistakably so. But he liked a listener, and I loved to hear him talk from his vast knowledge of Venice in the Decadent Period. Together we went to obscure palaces and while we wandered through their icy rooms he would regale me, as if reminiscing, with bits of eighteenth-century gossip; about Count so-and-so and the half-dozen dwarves who were his constant companions; or about the all-night revels the Count used to give for masked guests. Culver made me see history. He could eliminate the postcard stands and the silken ropes protecting the chair seats, and bring in lighted candelabra, violins, murmuring voices, the clink of glasses, and the slap of cards. I responded to Culver’s invocations and he was deligh
ted. But in January his sabbatical was over and he had to return to his university.
“You’ll have to rejoin the twentieth century,” I remarked.
“Yes, but you don’t have to. Go to the library and read about something. Something in the Renaissance. The eighteenth century is rather downbeat, and you need cheering up. I recommend Caterina Cornaro.”
“Who was she?”
“Find out,” he said. “You’ll like her.”
After Culver left, I walked over to the library where he had been doing research and asked if I could work there. It was housed in an elegant old palazzo, unusually well heated, and I thought I would enjoy both the elegance and the heat.
A pleasant man at a reception desk read aloud from a pamphlet: “Our readers must have three letters of recommendation from recognized authorities. These are submitted to a committee. The applicant must also prove that the information he seeks can be found in no other library. Applications will receive a reply within six months.”
I explained that I was staying in Venice temporarily and had no time to fulfill any of these requirements. He looked at my swollen front and asked when I would like to start.
“How about today?” I asked.
“Va benissimo, Signora,” he said. “I will give you now a temporary card, good for three months. Please be at home.”
I was amazed to discover how much I liked being there. Day after day, until the ninth month, I sat reading and note-taking at an enormous carved table. Gilt cherubs scampered across the ceiling, and were my only company except for an occasional pale scholar hunched over books in a far corner of the room. For the most part, the only sound I heard was of myself turning pages. Sometimes a heavy rain would pelt down into the flagged courtyard outside the window where I sat, and its intensity and the sudden darkening of the light seemed to suit my situation and my mood. To be away from people, dwelling inside my head, and surrounded by the trappings of other centuries and other mentalities seemed precisely what I needed. Another language, too, pleased me. I remembered some Italian from my childhood, and I also found someone to give me lessons twice a week.
