Four Hundred and Forty Steps to the Sea

by Sara Alexander

  I sat there until white ashes dusted the grate.

  * * *

  I placed the major’s morning coffee upon the ceramic pot holder. He dipped the edge of his paper down and thanked me over the top of it.

  “I will deliver the baskets today,” I said, shunting the sudden recall of last night out of mind, the slammed shut of an open drawer.

  “I saw them on the counters last night when we returned, yes,” he added, absentminded. “Not to worry.”

  I wandered back to them. Each with their envelope pinned to the fabric covers: Rosalia and family, the American who had written Paolino’s note for me, the German sisters up the street who’d held the party where Paolino had crooned to me across a packed room, an extra-large one for the widow who lived in the smallest house beyond them.

  The major poked his head around the door. “Would you mind taking some of your wonderful broth to the lady next to the Germans? Her husband has come down with a terrible influenza, I’ve been told, I’m sure she’d appreciate it.”

  He’d caught me unawares. I didn’t have a moment to draw the curtain over myself.

  “Santina, whatever’s the matter?”

  I shook my head, brushing away his concern.

  He didn’t move. I felt myself curl in, the decaying edges of an autumnal leaf.

  “You’re gray,” he said.

  I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to crumble like that. I didn’t want to feel his arms around me, filling me with the memory of our night, of the safety and freedom of his embrace. I pushed him away. He held my shoulders and met my gaze. I clasped at my vanishing courage, scrambling to hold on as it clawed at the edge of a cliff.

  “There is nothing to say. Nothing you need to hear,” I said flatly.

  “Santina, please. You’re hurting. A great deal. Let me in.”

  “Why?!” The words spat out too hot before I could stop them.

  “Because I care for you!”

  “Let go of me!” I shirked his hold and began unscrewing the coffeepot. A shake of grounds tumbled out in a damp brown heap.

  His hand was on mine. “Santina, please.”

  I snatched my hand away. “Don’t touch me! Don’t jeer at me like that. Don’t pretend concern. Not now. It’s too late for that.”

  “Santina, you’re not making any sense.”

  “Life doesn’t make any sense!” I felt the red-hot steam of fury rise in my abdomen. “And it’s your fault! All of this! Bringing me here! Taking away my dreams! Sending that beautiful child away! Imprisoning us with Adeline, our feelings, our hiding, our lying! And now I’m standing here like a cheap harlot, carrying your child, with a broken engagement! This isn’t the life I wrote for myself. You did this! I allowed you to do this to me and I hate myself for it. And I hate you even more.”

  That’s when my fingers clutched the side of the stove. When the full brunt of my grief burst out. My face was wet with indignation, embarrassment, anger, a fat sopping mess of the person I used to be.

  He didn’t touch me. He watched me disappear into the silent center of my tears.

  He waited.

  “Santina, I had no idea.”

  “You must have had some idea. That is usually what happens when two people make love, no?”

  My sarcasm crackled across the space between us.

  “Come and sit by me.” He pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and another for me.

  “Do I look like I want to sit by you? I’m finished following your lead. I’m done with silencing what I came here to do. I loved your daughter like my own, I’ve cared for your wife, the woman you betrayed for a snatched night with me.”

  “A snatched night? Is that what that was to you?”

  “Yes! A dream! A make-believe that sent me running into Paolino’s arms!”

  “That was your choice, Santina. No one forced anything on you.”

  “You lured me into a betrayal!”

  “Of whom? Adeline? Where is she?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “No. She left a long time ago. And I lost myself inside you.”

  “Don’t speak like a guiltless party in this.”

  “Here is the painful truth. Are you ready to hear this, Santina? I orbited Adeline like a burning sun for years. She was my light, but did she ever let me in? I mean truly let me inside her very essence? Or was I simply captivated by her light? The moment I set eyes on you my whole existence was called into question. You tapped something so deep inside me. Something I’d never wanted to acknowledge before. And we’ve worked here, side by side, feeling the delicate intimacy of pure, complicit love. I felt you in the silences, Santina. I felt your every shift. And I felt you sensing mine too. Adeline is not my twinned soul. And you taught me that. And the lesson scorched. And I hated myself for it. And sometimes I hated you for it. For ripping me open.”

  His cold honesty was a wind surging through me.

  “I was always Adeline’s bystander. A loyal audience. She bewitched me because I would never understand her. Not fully. The distance was there before her illness. Perhaps it’s the reason I fell in love with her. I knew I would never be able to reach her. Not fully. And so I knew she would never seek to pry into me. She wouldn’t prize me open.”

  Our eyes were wet.

  “Not like you have,” he whispered.

  We used what little resolve remained to not let those tears fall; he wanted me to believe what he said. I refused to let him know how impossible it was to stop loving him.

  “I have to leave,” I replied, dishonoring the burning truth inside me. “I will go to America as planned. You will help me complete the papers. I refuse to keep letting the men around me dictate what I need. Because in the end, they suit themselves! My brother, my father, my fiancé? They’ve all tossed me like seeds in the wind!”

  “And you put me on that list too?”

  “Yes!”

  “Why, Santina? Because I followed my instincts? Because your fire of curiosity, determination, honesty, intelligence is utterly compelling to me? Is that reason to hate me?”

  “I hate you for trapping my desires into your little world while making me believe you were preparing me to leave! It’s insidious. At least Paolino just rejected me, straight down the line, you’re worse. Marco was right, you just made me believe what you were doing was righteous, heartfelt. I should have listened to him.”

  “To him? Where is he now?”

  “You have no right to talk about my family!”

  “And you have no right to tell me that I am a hypocrite. My God, Santina, why do you stand there so blind now? You chose your life with Paolino. He has hurt you. And I abhor him for that. But I will not stand here and let the woman I love rail against me with no recourse. Because I look at you now, raging, your face wet with pure venom for me, and I can’t make those feelings go away, and I won’t try because I will offer you only my truth: I am, and will always be, in love with you!”

  He fought his tears now. I watched him force his breath to deepen. I watched him refuse to shirk the painful truth of what he needed to express. “Every aspect of you. I’m not in love with a picture, nor a promise, nor a future, because we know there can never be one. But for all my efforts to silence it, I am still utterly lost to my love for you. That is for me to bear. And you cannot insist I have no right to say it.”

  Our quickened breaths filled the little room.

  “And we return to ownership!” I called back. “Again! Listen to yourself.” I tried not to let his expression power through me, tried not to acknowledge the unbridled love I saw. I clutched my argument. “Paolino has abandoned our promise, and you step in! In the heat of my pain, you swing in with declarations! You should feel shame!”

  “I don’t, Santina.”

  His voice, all of a sudden calm; a summer storm tore through and left a glassy sea. He looked at me, still, strong. “I feel no shame for being lost in my love for you. I’ve clung onto the days this summer, knowing that you would wa
lk out of here soon enough. I sent Elizabeth away sooner than I had planned in order to let you begin your own life away from here too. To spare myself the agony of waiting. To spare you the weight of my feelings. It is killing me.” He looked into me. “Should I feel shame for loving you?”

  “It’s all words.”

  “You know that is far from the truth. I clung on to our studies, wading through those declarations of love because I couldn’t do it myself. I didn’t want to push in. I didn’t want to spit it out like this, like I am now. It’s clumsy. It’s messy. I can see that. Any fool could. But it’s true. Look me in the eye, Santina. Right now. See all of me. See every fiber of my being before you. And tell me that you don’t believe that I love you.”

  The wintry light from outside slit in.

  His eyes were bright with truth. “I’m laying myself bare.”

  I took him in.

  “Can you do the same, Santina?”

  I was translucent, weakened by my tears. “Look at me! I’m crumbling.”

  “Because you’re allowing your terror and love and anger to shake through you? Is that crumbling? It’s strength. You’re standing here feeling what you feel, you’re not holding back, you’re not staying neat, you’re not keeping up the perfected act of Santina. Is that weak?”

  “Of course it is. You don’t deserve to see it.”

  He took a breath. I watched his fingers trace the locks off his face.

  That’s when I let go, lying back onto the crisscrossing currents of my feelings, letting the watery emotions toss me downstream. I allowed the resounding truth to float to the surface: before me stood the man I had fallen into at first glance, in the gloomy London light of Mr. Benn’s parlor. The person who loved me to the core. The person who fascinated me and lured me and grew me in every sense.

  The only man I would ever love.

  “There’s nothing to keep me here now,” I said, instead of the declaration burning in my chest, instead of falling into him with abandon.

  He sat down.

  “And our child? Where will you go?”

  “To America. As planned.”

  “I won’t stop you.”

  “You can’t stop me.”

  “It will break me.”

  “You tell me to feel vulnerable! You tell me there is courage in that! So why don’t you find your courage too?”

  “I’m being brutally honest with you.”

  Another burning silence. Hanging. Unbroken.

  I tried so hard to let the touch of his hand in mine feel real. But all I remember was the fast-vanishing sun, the night swallowing the light, the sound of my footsteps echoing up the stairs and across my room. The torturous darkness engulfed my twisting thoughts; I was staring at a blank page, yearning for an ending.

  1976

  Chapter 27

  The summer sun was brutal: houses expanded and creaked, plaster blistering, waves of scorch lifting up from the pavement. The Positano tourists were undeterred, rather lured in deeper, charmed by the snaking heat. More homes mushroomed around us, etching further toward the mountains that loomed above. In town, the fishermen’s modest homes were festooned with window boxes, fresh coats of paint in dainty shades of flora and sea hues, pale emerald, pistachio, watery teal, aquamarine, celeste, their windows adorned with theatrical displays of bay life, where once worn kitchen tables stood. Instead of a hearth surrounded by barely fed children, there were now glass buoys hooked to whitewashed walls, rooms perfumed with lemon; soaps, potpourri, wardrobe sachets of dried herbs. Decorative bottles of limoncello clustered the counters of the growing number of shops, never to be drunk, rather to stand like trophies for friends back home; proof of a visit, Positano corked for posterity.

  Across low ceilings, displays of lace and linen danced, wafting in artful curves, stone boutiques filled with playful phantoms. Our bay was a celebration of all things beautiful, and the tourists worshipped their finds and told their friends. Boats arrived daily, heaving with hot bodies eager to take a little piece away with them, snap-shooting our cove in their little black boxes, sipping our dolce vita from large glasses ruby orange with aperitifs.

  Over the past twenty years we’d witnessed my town’s blossoming. The change whirring around us papered over the cracks left by my secret pregnancy. My hushed confinement that took me to Naples and the best hospital the major could find. My baby slipped out of me in the dead of night after a day and a half of laboring. I lost too much blood. A nurse later told me death and I skated seduction.

  My girl was perfection and sorrow. I held her long enough to feed her once, an act the medical staff were loath to allow me, but I would not be stopped. I felt those tiny lips search my breast, and, as she swallowed, my tears raced down my wet face. They eased her out of my arms when she fell into her first sleep. My heart was ripped. I couldn’t speak. I may not have ever left that sludge if it wasn’t for the fact that my best friend had agreed to be her mother. Despite the nurse’s insistence otherwise, Rosalia came to say goodbye with her, in the hours before their ship set sail the following day.

  My friend handed me my baby and sat down on the bed beside me.

  Tears broke through and my hands wove around her warm little body. Apologies tumbled out, breaking me in two.

  Rosalia held me.

  Her tears fell next to mine.

  “I love you with all of me, Maddalena,” I murmured, burning inside. “I always will. And your new mother is the best one I can give you.”

  Rosalia’s body shook with mine. I felt her hands clasp around me.

  Maddalena squirmed.

  I looked down at my shirt. Milk had begun to wet the front of it.

  Rosalia noticed. “You can feed her, Santina,” she murmured.

  “You don’t mind? Just one last time?” I whispered, tears choking my voice.

  She shook her head, her face streamed by tracks of joy and sadness.

  I opened my gown. Maddalena jerked her head, flailed a little, then attached. I felt myself flow into her. I couldn’t speak anymore. All my love and promise and apologies wove out of my body, wordless. There was no part of me that wished to rip this child from my best friend, I could think of no better life to give the babe I once thought would be an orphan cloistered with the nuns till childless parents took her in. When I had revealed my pregnancy to Rosalia, and she explained that Pasquale had decided that their lives would be in America, my decision to give my child to her took little thought. She always believed my child to be Paolino’s. I never told her otherwise; that was my and the major’s secret burden—not hers. Letting anyone else in now would seem like a betrayal more brutal than the first.

  After Maddalena slipped into a milky slumber, Rosalia let me swaddle her one last time. I kissed the softness of her forehead, smooth with downy fuzz. I smelled her and committed that afternoon in May 1960 to every fiber of my memory, locked inside my body. The nurse eased her out of my arms and placed her in Rosalia’s. She turned back to look at me from the doorway.

  “I love you, Rosalia,” I sobbed. “Allow yourself happiness. That’s how we’ll all be free.”

  She couldn’t reply. Her smile creased over a fresh fall of tears. We might have stayed that way, crying and laughing across the white room, if the nurse hadn’t closed the door.

  * * *

  Twenty years later, on the afternoon of August 2nd, as the sun dipped toward the sea, Adeline’s coffin sunk into the earth. Our neighborhood showed up to pay their respects. All the women and men the major had expressed care toward, never in person, but through the steady delivery of our garden harvests; jars of preserve in the autumn, dried beans and fruits in the winter, and a share of the first of the overwintering cabbages, Romanescos, and kale. They arrived to put a face to the man who came to them in woven tales, pictures shared and morphed from house to house; the British hermit who was ever so kind and ever so invisible. A gentleman to be sure, a floating island offshore, shrouded in myth. I watched them look at him, reading the l
ines of grief, the stoic stance. I watched them waiting for the wailing, which, of course, would never come. I saw them study his daughter, Elizabeth, with her unpredictable energy, that left me feeling like I stood beside a horse desperate to be released from the stable, always liable to rear. Her red hair fell in heavy waves, a choppy sea, copper and brass catching the light. Her eyes were bright, like her parents’, but there was a darting quality to them, as if she calculated the space and people around her at great speed. Gone was that tiny girl who would spend hours on the quietest of tasks, lost in the loose momentum of never-ending play. Now her tempo was cranked toward an insatiable restlessness, which she would always attribute to her great hurry to leave Positano.

  She hated returning, of that we were all made clear.

  I watched her look down at the wooden box. The grief I read made my heart ache. This was a young girl refusing to mourn the mother she never had. Her eyes raised as the priest said his final prayer. That’s when the first cusp of tears glassed over. She didn’t try to stop them. She didn’t try to smile. She just looked at me. And for a moment we were back in the garden. She was beside me at the sink. Kneeling on a chair at the table peeling artichokes. Splashing in an enamel bowl of water.

  I had never stopped missing her.

  The crowd wove through the cemetery, filling the tiny walkways with a river of black, a peck of crows picking through the sorry mess of it all. Paolino insisted he host the wake and though the major resisted the idea of a public celebration of his wife, he relented, because not thanking the neighbors for showing their affection was rude, and despite having his home swarming with people he never wanted to entertain, any alternative was out of the question.

  I received the flow of people, and the major hired several local girls to make sure everyone was handed drinks. It was a spectacular sight to see the villa so full of life, instigated by the sharp loss of it. I knew the major viewed it as some absurd celebration of Adeline’s disappearance rather than a celebration of her life. But Paolino had been most insistent; he was thrilled to pay back the major for his many years of business, and refused the exchange of any money.