Four Hundred and Forty Steps to the Sea

by Sara Alexander

  “She thinks you despise her.”

  I would have left him to his solitude then. I would have hidden in mine elsewhere in the house. But his words pinned me to the spot.

  “I’m taking my anger out on her. Adeline hurt her and me in the cruelest way she could, and I’m not ready to forgive her. Not by a long shot. Elizabeth’s right—I put everything on hold for Adeline.”

  His expression darkened. “I made the biggest sacrifice for her and it’s been a shocking waste. I’m supposed to feel pity. I’m supposed to understand her suffering. But do you know what, Santina? I feel utterly rejected. And I scream at my daughter because I envy her new love. I envy her freedom. What kind of father does that make me? What kind of man?”

  “The most honest man I’ve ever known.” The words slipped out before I thought them, a fish sliding back into the water from a fisherman’s net. But no fear followed. I stood upon the liberating precipice of truth and decided to jump. I had nothing to lose now. Paolino was right, when someone dies a person does become heightened to their fleeting existence.

  “The man I have loved in silence for twenty years.”

  I was quivering. The powerful admission shook through me.

  I might have fled then. I didn’t.

  He walked over to me.

  In the lunar glow he looked like marble, sculpted at the hand of a master, his face chiseled with a passion I knew he had never let me see, not like this, not till now.

  Our words twisted up into air like the flurried ribbons of smoke from flickering flames. Now there was only the feel of his lips on my neck. They pressed onto my skin like a forgotten song. The powerful sensory return to our silenced past rushed over every fiber of my body. In a breath we were beyond the walls of the villa, beyond the boundaries of memories and thoughts. I let the current of energy score through me, the fierce realization that our bodies were but fiction, the illusion of a shell. And we peeled away the layers, within and without, our clothes at our feet, moon-kissed bare bodies, the door frame pushing against my back.

  The long-ago feel of the major inside me made my breath catch.

  He stopped.

  So did I.

  My legs were around his waist.

  He looked into me.

  His eyes were wet.

  “Let them fall,” I whispered, my hands around his face. And his cries shuddered through him. And so did mine. Then the laughter broke out through the wet and our lips celebrated. Our breath deepened. He pushed farther into me.

  The main door downstairs creaked open. We froze.

  He slipped out of me and leaned over the balustrade.

  “They’re back,” he whispered.

  I grabbed my clothes and dashed down, closing myself in the dark quiet of my room.

  Rest evaded me because my body was on fire. I had awoken from a twenty-year sleep. I watched my clock tick toward twilight, pretending I couldn’t hear the engaged couple make love in the room next to mine.

  * * *

  Breakfast was silent but not sullen. Elizabeth seemed more relaxed than the night before and Eddie surprised the major by proving to be more articulate than he had judged by his appearance. The major even appeared to take some interest in Eddie’s plans to work in the Far East, a place Eddie explained he had been fascinated by since he could remember. Then Elizabeth sliced through the pleasantries.

  “We’re leaving today, Daddy. Eddie and I want to travel south to Sicily. We might cross to Greece or Africa, follow the wind.”

  “Elizabeth, that’s not necessary. Please, stay here as long as you wish.”

  “I hate this house, Daddy. I always will. It’s Mummy’s sanatorium. Only worse. Because it reminds me how you both wanted me gone.”

  I watch him take a deep breath, fighting the bristle rising in his throat and the embarrassment at her blunt delivery in front of the young man he barely knew.

  “Don’t look embarrassed, Eddie darling,” Elizabeth threw his way, “you need to hear this. It’s best out in the open.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Elizabeth,” the major replied, “the poor man is caught in the middle, he has every right to feel uncomfortable.”

  Eddie stood up. “Elizabeth, I’ll head on up. You two hash it out in private, yeah?”

  “Eddie, my love, it’s totally fine,” Elizabeth replied.

  “I’m going to pack,” he replied, and left. His forthright attitude surprised both the major and I. His direct reply reassured the major. Elizabeth may have met her match after all. Perhaps this was a true partnership?

  “Elizabeth, I’ve always wanted what’s best. But if you marry someone none of us know, I can’t tell where it will find you.”

  “So let it be, Daddy. You stopped protecting me the moment you watched me leave for school. That’s the hard truth. You gave control over to others that day.”

  He wiped his mouth with a napkin. It enforced his silence a little longer, which I presumed was the intent. Then he straightened.

  “Look after yourself. I will cease to bail you out of predicaments, sending you money, like I have till now, anytime you take it upon yourself to go somewhere with someone or other with no mind whatsoever to the consequences. You are impetuous and careless.”

  “I don’t want your money. Never have. And I don’t want to be summoned back here either.”

  The major didn’t rise to the bait. “I’m not going to tell you what to do, Elizabeth. But I’m going to remind you that you are an intelligent, brave, powerful young woman. It breaks me to see you throw all that away.”

  Elizabeth turned toward the sea. His reaction caught her off guard.

  This wasn’t the father of a few days ago.

  “But don’t come running back here expecting me to rescue you. You walk out and start your life with Eddie, then it is on your shoulders. You hate this place so very much? Then let’s not call it your home any longer.”

  “Again the ultimatums,” she sneered.

  He stood. “Call it what you will. One day you might accept that I’ve only ever wanted you to be happy.”

  She rose to meet his stare. “Peculiar way of showing it.”

  She left her final word hanging like a hovering arrow.

  The major saw me. His eyes bowed a little.

  The couple said their goodbyes. The major shook Eddie’s hand. Elizabeth held her hand out for her father to shake. It broke my heart. She came over to me and squeezed me tight. “None of this is your fault, Santina, nor mine,” she whispered in my ear. “Mother could have taken her life at any time, tell me you know that?” She pulled away and looked at me. “I will write to you, yes? I will tell you every juicy detail.” Her face widened into a beaming smile. Her eyes blinked away hidden tears. Eddie followed her out.

  The major pressed the door till it clicked shut. He turned to face me.

  “I didn’t sleep a wink,” he said.

  “Me neither.”

  His words wrapped around me like tentacles. In that moment Paolino was right. If his feelings for me were as profound as mine, he wouldn’t be at sea. He would be running into my arms. He would be unfolding his heart to me. There was nothing to hold us back any longer. Yet he stood, motionless.

  “These walls have absorbed so much sorrow,” he began. “Elizabeth is right. It is a prison. You and I have been trapped inside it too.”

  “Can’t we be free now? I decided to be honest with you last night before I could think. And I’m glad. I love you, Henry. And you have broken my heart for too long. I let you do that. Because I preferred to stay close to you than live a life without you.” I knew my honesty would challenge him, but at last my own feelings surmounted his.

  His expression withered. “I seem to have hurt the people I feel the most for.”

  “This is the time to look me in the eye and tell me you don’t feel the same way.”

  He looked at me square. His eyes filled with tears he refused to let fall.

  “I’m not prepared to ruin what we have,
Santina.”

  “What do we have?”

  I watched him snatch a breath to speak but the words caught. I stepped forward.

  “Look at me, Santina,” he blurted out. “I have never been so terrified in my life: I may never see my daughter again. The woman I thought I once loved threw herself away from everything I provided for her. Maddalena is here and I feel the twist of the knife of how much we gave up.”

  His breaths became tighter, lighter, inhaling away the tears rattling the ends of his words. “Fact: I have ruined the lives of the three women I cared most for. And I’m not going to hurt any of them anymore.”

  I longed to hold him.

  He shook his head as I moved toward him.

  “No, Santina. I won’t do this. I won’t hurt you anymore. I’m so sorry. I’m so dreadfully sorry.”

  We held each other. Our chests beating against one another’s tear-streaked shoulders.

  Someone rang the bell. I wiped my tears with the back of my hand.

  The major darted inside. He abhorred how this period of mourning had made our home an invitation like never before.

  I pushed back the catch and opened the door.

  A bronzed man stood before me, hair slicked back, a crisp white shirt with long lapels taut across his chest, tapered in at the waist where it met pale blue tailored trousers. A heavy gold chain was reflected in the gleaming toes of his loafers. Two men stood either side of him, a foot or so away from the door, a questionable triptych.

  “I know it’s been a while, Santina, but I hoped for a warmer welcome than this.”

  Only then did the voice of my little brother slam me into reality. My mouth was dry. I may have been trembling, but I couldn’t feel much below the stone dropping to the pit of my stomach.

  He leaned in and kissed me on either cheek. Then he stepped inside and signaled to his cronies to wait where they were. He walked to the center of the terrace like he owned it.

  “Well, still the same, no? You keep this place like an oasis.” He turned to me where I stood, still gawping at him by the door. “I heard what happened. Came to pay my respects.”

  I fought for words, but they prickled the side of my mouth like thorns. “Where on God’s earth have you been? Have you any idea what you put me through?”

  “Some. A lot actually. I kept a close eye. From a safe distance. I knew you’d be furious.”

  “I am speechless with fury. Have you any idea, any at all, what you’ve put me through?”

  My tears weren’t dry from my conversation with the major and this disorientating nakedness made me fear I would not control my emotions with my brother as much as I would have liked. He nodded with a polite smile. He reminded me of a priest who listens with an impartial ear, inviting confession and absolving with grace. Quite a skill, considering he was the blatant wrongdoer.

  “You have every right to be, I suppose,” he replied, his voice so smooth and distracted it made my fury sink even deeper. “Even if I was the one who made sure that sorry sack of shit of a father never bothered you again. Even if I was the one who made sure you weren’t a widow at age twenty-three. You have any idea the danger I put myself in to save you that? I didn’t want to kill Paolino any more than you wanted to live as a widow. I had to hide myself for a long time, Santina, because I protected you and your lover boy. Because I didn’t want to do what I was told.”

  His words boxed my ears.

  He gave a raspy sighed laugh. “Times have changed. I got my revenge on those pigs in the end. And enough years have passed—I ought to take credit where credit’s due, no? In the end, we all like a pat on the back.”

  I stormed across to the far end of the terrace, where he’d reached the table and taken himself a seat.

  “The gall you have, coming in here like this!” I panted.

  “I thought I’d do business the proper way.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Englishman is planning on selling. And I’m planning on buying.”

  My feet rooted to the tiles, but I felt like shaking him.

  “I’d like to speak with the Signore. Tell him I’m here.”

  “I’ll do nothing of the sort.”

  He looked up at me. His eyes were flint. “Oh I think you will.”

  My head was spinning.

  “Good afternoon, Signore,” I heard the major call out behind me. “What a surprise to see you here.”

  Marco stood up and shook the major’s hand.

  “I came to pay my respects.”

  “Thank you.”

  The major didn’t offer Marco a seat.

  “I won’t take your time, Signor Major, but I wanted to leave my card. Anything you need, anything at all, you just call. I have a lot of”—his hand fiddled with the air for the right word—“business in this area now, and I’m always happy to help. It’s been a long time I know. I hope you don’t mind me just turning up like this.”

  The major shot me a look.

  Paolino’s words thudded in my mind. His story seemed less of a fabrication than I’d assumed. The man before me was not my brother. The transformation was so complete that if it weren’t for the voice I would never have believed it to be the same man. His dancing eyes were hard. There was a flinty edge to his movements and speech, a sense that his body was poised for attack at a breath’s notice; we were in a tiny cage with a hungry lion.

  “Santina—I will call for you again in the next few days,” he said, prowling toward the door. “We have a lifetime to rediscover. I’m happy I’m finally able to come back home.” His smile was crooked. It sent a shiver down my spine. He turned toward the door. When we reached it, he spun back to me.

  “I’ve behaved like an ass. I know that. But I’m a different man now, Santina.”

  “I can be sure of that,” I replied, my voice a shiver.

  “I can make this up to you more than you will believe. You’re in shock. I am too. I’m just hiding it well. Comes with years of practice.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know whether to hug you or punch you.”

  “I can count on you for the truth, that’s for sure. It’s why I’m back. To own up to some sorry business you needn’t have been hooked up in. I screwed up. This is my penance. I don’t waste time with church.” His eyes widened into a wounded expression, as if it was up to me to absolve him of his unforgivable behavior, disappearance, blatant lack of respect by turning up like this. It was such an excruciating tendency of all the men I’d been closest to: to irritate the life out of me, push me to my edge, watch me explode, then do their best to make me feel like I’m the one committing cruel victimization for which I must offer an unquestionable apology.

  He lifted my hands and kissed them with unhurried lips. Then he raised them to his forehead, bowing toward me like I was a queen.

  “Please let me make this up to you. At least explain.”

  I pulled my hands away.

  “I’ll call again soon, alright? I can’t say when, but soon.”

  His men straightened to attention. They walked away.

  I clicked the door shut. That metallic shunt signaled I was done waiting; for Marco’s explanation, for Paolino’s next maneuver, for the major’s declaration of love that might never come. The thoughts smudged like the powder-pink and purple strata of the sunset, and beyond, a sublime clarity, pure like the glassy equilibrium of the water beneath it.

  It was my time now to set sail.

  Chapter 31

  In 1977, Rome’s Trastevere quarter was a political furnace. At first it made me feel alive, filled with a youthful verve I don’t think I’d ever allowed myself to experience before. The students huddled around tables sipping wine and spouting manifesto against the fascist pull of the city at that time. I took a job that the major offered to arrange for me through a friend who owned a tiny bookstore on Via Moro, which sold a number of English texts much to the delight of eager American and British customers living and studying in the city for their slice of dolce v
ita. In the first few months there I reveled in the quiet order of my days around books, with simple meals in between cooked in the room in which I lived above the store. I hadn’t said my goodbyes to either Paolino or Marco. My memory of leaving the villa was a watercolor wash. Each day I added more liquid in my mind so that the images bled into an anonymous brown; the expression that struck through the major’s eyes, the way we both fought to keep our tears at bay, the way our hands managed to not grasp for one another’s. I arrived in Rome a woman in her forties. Alone.

  One evening as I strolled home to this medieval quarter, across Ponte Sisto, the bridge that arched over the Tiber, my eyes caught a familiar shadow outside my building. I shook off the dread beating through my limbs. There was no way my brother could be in the area stalking my every move. But the feeling trailed me through the next month. When the memory filtered my dreams, and I gasped awake in the dead of night, I realized that my fleeing Positano to a city only several hours north was a meager grasp at freedom. I needed to leave the life carved out by the men who surrounded me once and for all. So, as August slipped toward September, I boarded a boat for England.

  The world I’d left as a nineteen-year-old had disappeared. London was emerging from its psychedelic verve, and I couldn’t be sure I longed to be a part of it. It was no surprise then when a day out to the southern coast turned into a permanent stay. I visited Broadstairs in the southeastern county of Kent as an antidote to the city. I needed a little fresh air to think through my plans, how I would best use the severance pay I’d first refused from the major but which he insisted I accept.

  When I arrived in the town, there was something familiar about the cobbled street warrens winding around the squat cottages that echoed Positano. The curve of the sandy bay at the bottom of the hill enclosed pale blue water, resplendent in the summer sun that greeted me. A wooden pier stretched out into the sea where visitors inhaled fried fish and fat chips, seagulls cawed, children shrieked, and the small town hummed with a modest celebration that appealed to my need for space from city life and what I’d left behind. I found affordable lodging in a room within a house, which faced the promenade. It was on the top floor of the Georgian terrace, its narrow front garden slanting downhill toward a view of the beach, lined with a squat hedge and dotted with rosebushes, colorful blooms fragrant in the salty seaweed breeze. Inside was a bed, a small table with two chairs, a two-ring gas stove, and shared use of the bathroom with the other, mostly holiday, visitors who came to stay and took breakfast downstairs in the landlady’s dining room. The walls were lined with a pale pink wallpaper, net curtains hung in the windows that opened up toward the coast. For the first time in years, I felt at home.