Four Hundred and Forty Steps to the Sea

by Sara Alexander

  Along the terrace stood several tables, which Paolino used in his mountainside restaurant up the hill. They stretched underneath the vine canopy thickened with two decades of care. Upon the tablecloths lay vast trays of seafood antipasti, steamed squid with potatoes and parsley, risotto with wild asparagus zinging with fresh lemon, vases of raw vegetables, feathered tips of fennel, fresh endive. Paolino’s signature cured meats took the center, ribbons of salty prosciutto, salami, and bresaola, cured in-house and sliced thin as rice paper. There were terrines of fresh anchovies drowning in green olive oil and local chili, enamel pots of shells; clams, mussels, and sea urchins, steaming with garlic-and-parsley-infused broth, deepened with his homemade white wine. I caught the major take in the feast. He looked over at me. The blue of his eyes turned cobalt.

  He turned and headed up the stairwell toward the upper floors.

  Once most of the guests appeared to be filling our terrace and filing out into the garden, I took a moment to follow him. I couldn’t trust that the major’s acceptance of the crowd invading his very private space would leave him any more equipped to deal with the challenge of this day.

  A familiar rumble of voices reached me like a distant thunderstorm.

  Adeline’s bedroom door was ajar.

  I heard Elizabeth’s rasp. “What have you ever known about family?”

  “I made sure you were both in the place that would help you the most. Your mother was too sick to understand, but you? Years of money and time poured into giving you the life and education you deserve, and you throw it back at me at every chance. Enough, Elizabeth. It’s time to be a young woman, not this whining child!”

  “My mother just threw herself from this balcony—I can whine like a child if I wish!”

  His gaze slid away. He caught me in the shadows beyond the door.

  “Can you talk sense into this?” he called to me.

  “Don’t talk about me like I’m not even inside the room. That’s sociopathic.”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “You hide away in here and outside everyone thinks you’re a saint. Sending soup and food to a few neighbors does not make you a hero!”

  I stepped inside. Our breaths filled the room.

  I’d made the bed but left Adeline’s paintings hung about the space. I’d cleared her collection of glasses, mopped up the paint dripping on the decorative tiles, the blue and yellow designs gleaming in the suffused light from the afternoon shafts streaming in through the shutters.

  “It’s time to join the others,” he said, his voice soft.

  “I won’t go,” she answered.

  His eyes searched mine.

  “Elizabeth,” I began, “come down for a little while? Eat a little something?”

  She turned in silence, walked away from us, across the room, and flung open the shuttered doors. She stepped out into the afternoon sun. When she leaned against the ledge of the terrace, she looked just like her mother. A shiver crawled down my spine.

  “Why must it be like this, Elizabeth?” the major asked. “This is our chance to make things better.”

  “Don’t tell me how to feel,” she replied without turning back.

  “If you had listened to me, we wouldn’t be standing here like this now.” His whisper was icy.

  She flung round to him, her face crimson with fury. “You put that sick woman before me a long time ago! She needed a hospital, not sea views. Whose fantasy were you in? Rescuing all these women? My mother, Santina, me? It’s like some kind of warped harem. You’re a control freak.”

  “Keep your voice down, for heaven’s sake!”

  “You banished me from my own home, from Santina—my real mother. Tell that to the guests downstairs. Tell them how you imprisoned your wife, kept her from the doctors she needed. If you don’t, I will!”

  He turned away and began to walk out of the room.

  It fanned her fire.

  “Have you any idea how that felt?!” she yelled back to him, her voice chasing him as he left the room, as he descended the stone steps two at a time. She wouldn’t let up. The faster he moved the louder she shouted.

  “Have you any idea how it’s felt all these years, people telling me how kind my father is, how he’s done this and that for them, sent them soup when they were ill, for fuck’s sake?”

  We reached the drawing room beside the entrance to the terrace. Their sharp voices rippled out to the party, transmitting waves of hush.

  “If you expect me to be around these people now and agree that you are in fact God, you have another thing coming!”

  “If you’d just got in the cab from the airport, Elizabeth. If you’d just come straight home in the car I’d sent you, Santina would never have had to leave the house! If for once in your life, you’d done what I asked.”

  “Then what? Mummy wouldn’t be suicidal?”

  “That’s no way to talk about your mother!”

  “My mother is standing right here!” She flung a manic arm out toward me. I clocked the German sisters take note of the erupting argument. Beyond them, several other neighbors drew to stillness, engaged in acute listening.

  “See what you’ve put her through!”

  “Don’t speak for Santina—she has a brain too, you know!”

  “Elizabeth, please,” I interjected, “there’s no need.”

  “To what? Say what you won’t? I will. Because I don’t play his games. I’m not a victim.”

  “When will you realize I’m your father, not a monster?”

  “You stopped being my father when you sent me away!”

  The metallic clang of the bell cut through the terrace.

  The guests looked toward the door.

  I felt an intense awareness of the sound of my shoes across the tiles and was glad when the voices rose once again—the swell of argument had been forced to ebb.

  I opened the door.

  Rosalia’s smile cut through the years we’d been apart. I don’t remember too much of those next few minutes, it was a sigh of tears and laughter and hands wrapped around friends who, since her move to America, hadn’t embraced for two decades. Her hair had started to whiten a little, but her skin was lustrous as ever and her grin spread over her face like a sunbeam. She kissed my cheeks. She held my face. I cried again.

  “I wanted to come here even before going to my sisters!” She squeezed me into her.

  She pulled away from me to take a deep look. “Santina, my tesoro. We are old, are we not?” She giggled then, and in the sound was the dance of her youth.

  Off my expression, her face fell.

  “There was no way I could get the message to you, Rosalia,” I began, my voice wavering, “it’s Adeline.”

  “She’s gone?”

  I nodded.

  “When?”

  “Two days ago. We’re having the wake now.”

  “Santina, I’m so sorry. I will come back tomorrow.”

  The major eased the door open behind me. “Everything alright, Santina?”

  It was one of those snatched moments I wished I’d been able to grasp between my fingers and squeeze to stillness before it unraveled before me.

  Maddalena stepped out from behind her mother.

  My breath caught.

  Her face was alight with fresh air, bronzed cheekbones. There was an alarming alertness about her. I noticed her one hand trace the rose brick around our door, not an absentminded gesture, rather stitching herself into our space with a sensuous luminosity.

  “Piacere, sono Maddalena,” she said, her voice woody, melodic, void of embarrassment even though you could hear she had studied the phrase well and that Italian was not her first language. Her hand slipped into mine.

  “Mamma has told me all about you—that’s where my Italian ends, I’m sorry—you don’t mind, do you?” Her grin reminded me of Rosalia’s. “You are more gorgeous than she said! This whole place is entirely magical. It’s like I’ve stepped into a painting!”

  Her blue e
yes darted around our wooden doorway, alight with wonder.

  “Maddalena darling,” Rosalia began, “we’ve come at a bad time. Sorry, Signore.” Rosalia’s eyes flicked to the major. I thought I saw her blush a little.

  “It’s very nice to see you again, Rosalia”—he stretched out his hand to her daughter—“and you, Maddalena. My name is Henry.”

  His voice didn’t waver. Nor his hand. But I was certain that our glistening eyes were born from the electricity skating our skin, not from grief for Adeline.

  “You’re, like, from England?” Maddalena asked.

  “Most definitely, yes. Please, won’t you come on in? Half the town is here. You’re most welcome.”

  Rosalia looked between us and Maddalena.

  “I would love nothing more than for you to join us, my friend,” I said.

  They stepped inside.

  I watched as waves of memory trickled over, as we waded through the town of people, familiar faces that had aged and slackened with time and stories. She held my hand as we walked through the terrace, tentative steps. On her other side, her daughter: I sensed her run her hand through the shaggy mop of thick black waves frolicking over her face.

  Paolino walked over to us.

  “Dio mio—I’m seeing things! L’americana! You back home for good? No one leaves Positano forever!”

  He took her hand and gave her two kisses. She looked over at me.

  “Paolino made all this for the major,” I said.

  “It’s so wonderful to be home. It breaks my heart that this is all because of Adeline. I’m so, so sorry, Santina.”

  Her hand tightened around mine.

  That’s when Elizabeth scuffed out onto the terrace.

  Her eyes were red. She looked poised for another fight.

  I wondered how I might entice her away before it erupted again.

  “This man, Signori! Take a look at this man right here!” She lifted an angry arm toward her father. “That’s the man who kept my mother locked up in her own home!”

  I watched as the neighbors checked each other for explanations. Elizabeth’s feet seemed unsteady. She looked like she’d been drinking.

  “Elizabeth, please, let’s not do this. Not like this. Not here,” the major said, walking across the garden toward her, taking her by the elbow and leading her inside.

  “Don’t touch me! Get your hands off me! This is all you! This is all your fault!”

  She was kicking back against him now. Flailing. I walked toward them. She didn’t notice me right away. I took her head in my hands. I forced her to look at me. That’s when she cracked into her tears. That’s when she softened and I could lead her back inside and up to my room.

  We eased onto the bed.

  I watched her run through the memories of the past few days. The way she’d refused to get into the taxi her father had arranged for her at Naples, the way she’d arrived without advising us ahead of time. The way she hadn’t reached the villa even when dinner had been and gone. The way I’d waited for her, wrung with worry while her father was in Amalfi on a business errand.

  We sat in the silence and relived me choosing to leave the house to find her, or at least enquire what the abandoned taxi driver had gleaned from her, any possible details about her plans? I’d listened to him explain that she would be arriving later at some point, most likely by bus. I’d found her after dark, sipping drinks in the piazza by the Chiesa Nuova with some new friends. I’d hurried her home because I knew leaving Adeline was never advisable, even if she’d had a good month.

  We returned to find her body.

  A pool of blood drenched the dusty earth beneath her head.

  Forgiveness was a distant light in the sea’s morning mist.

  “I’m bloody exhausted.” Elizabeth exhaled, dropping her head onto her hands.

  She reached for my hand. Strong fingers wrapped around mine.

  “You’re my mother,” she whispered as her tears fought their way out.

  I wrapped my arm around her, welcoming her shudders into my shoulder. Her tears deepened. When she pulled away for breath, I took her face in my hands, wiped her cheeks. “I love you, Elizabeth.”

  A sad smile.

  A voice at the door drew us out of our watery cocoon.

  “Is the bathroom this way?”

  We looked up. Maddalena stepped in.

  “Oh gosh, I’m so sorry—only I’m, like, crazy desperate and downstairs there’s already someone using one. I took a wander. Mamma’s going to kill me when she finds out.”

  I watched the two women find one another, a faint blue snap of electricity between them, knotting across the space. I tried to believe it was just the language, a familiar sound in an unfamiliar time, an anchor for Elizabeth’s torment. But this was not a connection based on language alone. Elizabeth jumped up and led Maddalena along the corridor. I listened to their voices echo across the marble.

  Chapter 28

  I left the bedroom, catching the two girls in the bathroom at the far end of the corridor, slim birches against the gray marble walls. Maddalena looked up and saw me. Her face lit up. For a disconcerting breath, time was a concertina, wheezing out the years, folding back into our snatched solitude, guilty feedings in the moonlight, the feel of her tiny lips against my breast. I inhaled another breath to hide my tears, which she mistook for those of a bereaved, which of course they were; for my brief glimpse of motherhood rather than for the English woman who had tumbled to her death. Elizabeth bubbled something to Maddalena, and she drew her eyes away from me, immune to the gravity of the situation around her and the heartache of the older woman at the end of the corridor. Maddalena was a tonic for Elizabeth.

  I wished she might have been the same for me.

  In the lower terrace, Paolino made sure everyone was overfed and glasses topped up. I watched his wife, Martha, cross the terrace and reach him, wrapping her thin white arm around his widening waist. She was willowy, flowing blond locks lifting on what little breeze wafted up from the sea. Not long after he had terminated our engagement she had sailed into our bay, met the grocer who would become the wealthiest impresario this side of the mountains, and fallen in love. He was dazzled by her elegant otherworldliness, her Canadian fascination with Italy, and, I suspect, his ability to have triumphed over the advances of the other Positanese, or North Americans for that matter. They married three months later. She loved to retell the story at every chance, and the tourists melted between the lines, hoping they too might join the host of travelers who come to visit and never leave. The sea washes them in like shells, precious jewels from beyond our horizon, revered by locals.

  I watched her regale one of the neighbors with choice anecdotes. I’d heard them all before, and maybe they had too, but she had the innate ability to spin a yarn as if afresh, the subtle twist of a sentence here, a flick of punctuation, an embellishment when the listener least expected it. I had wondered over the years how they communicated with her dexterous use of English compared to her jagged Italian, and vice versa. I had a memory of Paolino boasting that when in love language pales into insignificance. Of course their bond was born upon little more than carnal attraction, which, for Paolino at least, perhaps was indeed enough. And she seemed delighted with her Italian lover, however portly he had grown, however much he seemed to enjoy the attention of other young admirers.

  I joined the girls filling the guests’ glasses, for a moment enjoying my ability to melt into the background, under a protective layer of invisibility. From here, I was afforded the freedom to observe everyone else, and by now, they knew better than to pry. I watched them offer the major sage advice, condolences. I saw them uncomfortable with the lack of emotional displays until the major asked for everyone’s attention.

  A surprised hush descended.

  He cleared his throat and straightened. The hair at his temples had begun to whiten but otherwise remained a fiery red, and his eyes had not lost the vigor of his youth. His skin was lighter perhaps, his
freckles unchanged. There was no resignation to age but rather a softening toward it, a lengthening. Adeline’s death was a violent loss, but I know, for him at least, it was also a release. She was free from the torment of her decaying health at last. She found her escape as she always wished it.

  “Before you all leave our villa, I want to take this moment to thank each and every one of you for being here today,” he began, the faint whisper of a crack in his voice floating away as quickly as it surfaced, a tuft of cloud in a taintless sky. “Adeline was a very troubled soul. We came here and found the respite we so desperately needed. Her years here were happy ones. And that is what I will remember.”

  There were murmurs from the English speakers in the crowd. He then began an angular translation in Italian, which elicited a hearty applause from the Positanese. Rosalia caught my eye from the far side of the garden, where she stood beside the German sisters. A lifetime apart eclipsed the space.

  The guests took their cue to leave, which was not common, but the major’s farewell speech seemed to elicit the desired intent. In town it was more customary for the bereaved houses to stay full till the moon began its acquiescence to dawn. The major stood by the door and shook everyone’s hands. Martha whisked over to me. “Thank you so much for letting Paolino do all this for you! I can’t tell you how happy he was!”

  “Our pleasure, of course,” I replied.

  She squeezed my hand. The gesture caught me somewhat off guard. “I really am so very sorry,” she cooed, the gentle lilt of her voice the perfect accompaniment to the wisps of hair licking her face below her languid blue-green eyes. She still had the grace of youth, a childlike wonder about her, as if she too still couldn’t quite believe the way her life had unraveled.

  “You go, tesoro,” Paolino called out, “I’ll stay and clear this all away for Santina and Signore.”

  The major’s name and mine coupled in a sentence. Perhaps he’d said it a thousand times, but I’d never heard it. It unsettled me.

  “I’ll collect my offspring—once I find him!” She laughed, pulling off her wide straw hat and fanning it over her face. I watched her scan the garden. After a search, she found a group huddled around Elizabeth and Maddalena, holding court in the shade of a lemon tree. Maddalena had hooked their attentions. Her gestures were hapless, free, and her eyes were bright at the center of whatever story she was describing. The small herd of youths burst into laughter. I noticed Paolino’s son throw her a sideways grin. He was the picture of his father with his swagger and feckless energy. I don’t think there were many young girls on our hill who hadn’t been attracted to his back-footed charm. His mother reached the group and I watched them stiffen a little. I saw her turn back toward me. Maddalena left the crowd and spoke with her mother. Rosalia reached me upon the terrace, where I was managing to keep up the work of clearing the table.