Bella Tuscany

by Frances Mayes

  I remember my collections so vividly that I think I should be able to go to my closet and take down a box, spend this rainy afternoon playing with the blond Dutch girl paper doll, with her flowered pinafore and wooden shoes, the Polish twins with their black rick-rack skirts, their ribbons and aprons.

  Collecting, like writing, is an aide-memoire. An ancient relative bored me wildly with her souvenir silver spoons. “Now, this one I got on a vacation to the Smokies in 1950. . . .” But memory can make you live twice. As words fall onto paper, I can again marry the cat to the dog.

  Memory, the graduation pearls unstrung, rolling out of reach on the church floor, the choir screeching “Jerusalem.”

  Memory, they all rise, young again, able to see without looking. They're clamoring for the wishbone, asking what's for dessert. Close the box, close the album, hang the old lace curtain in the south window where it catches the soft billowing breeze, a breeze for a spirit to ride.

  As an adult, I have few collections. I started to buy old bells once, but forgot them after a while. I have a number of Mexican ex-votos painted on tin and have accumulated many antique carved or clay hands and feet, and dolls' arms and legs, a collection I never planned and didn't even notice until someone remarked that there were quite a few body parts around my house. My collection must be expanding to other body parts because at the Arezzo market, I've also bought three bisque saints' heads, two bald, one with a golden wig and painted glass eyes. When I find early studio photographs of Italians, I buy them. I'm filling one wall of my study with these portraits, for many of whom I've invented life stories. My real passion at the Arezzo market was never planned, either, but springs from an old source.

  I go not only for the chance to find furniture for the many bare spots at Bramasole and to discover treasures, but to see the people, to stop for gelato, to wander invisibly at this immense market, which retains the atmosphere of a medieval fair. At 1 P.M., the dealers cover their tables with tarps or newspaper and go off to lunch, or they simply set up lawn chairs and a table, complete with tablecloth, right there for family and friends, and bring out cut-up roast chickens, containers of pasta, and loaves of bread. People jam the bars, ordering little sandwiches, slices of pizza, or, in the upscale gastronomia, sausage and asparagus torte.

  Gilded church candlesticks, olive oil jars, stone cherubs—out of all this, what draws me to the vendors of old linens? “This time,” I tell Ed, “I'm not even going to stop. We'll look at iron gates, marble sinks from crumbled monasteries, and crested family silver. I certainly don't need any more pillowcases or . . .”

  At first, I succeed. With so much to look at, I can become saturated. Ed is glancing at andirons and a mirror. I spot some painted tin ex-votos. He likes looking at the hand-wrought iron tools, locks, and keys, but after two hours, he gets this set half-smile on his face.

  He has an effective way of speeding me along in department stores at home. Other men sit in the comfortable chairs put there for waiting men, but Ed stands, and when I linger at the blouse rack, fingering the silk and examining the buttons, he begins to talk aloud to a mannequin. He gestures and smiles, walks around her. “Love that suit,” he marvels. “You look fabulous.” People stare, the sales staff looks nervous.

  Here, he wanders off for coffee or a paper. He comes back to find me sorting through white piles of linen. I can't tell whether he looks astonished or distressed. I wonder if he thinks to himself, Oh no, an hour in the rag pile.

  In a heap marked 5,000 lire, I turn up a stash of fine hand towels embroidered .

  At home in California and here in Italy, slowly I have amassed a collection of old damask, linen, and cotton house linens, some with monograms, some not. “Why would you want someone else's initials?” a friend asked me as she shook out her napkin at dinner. “I find that a bit creepy.”

  “These are my friend Kate's grandmother Beck's napkins,” I answer, aware that nothing has been explained. When Kate had to empty her mother's house, she passed on a stash of linens to me. She wasn't interested in ironing them. They are enormous, with scrolled in the center, the hump of thread as thick as a child's little finger. “I have a thing for old linens.” Understatement. Spirals and history spinning out from that flip remark.

  I do not mention my mother, that I still have in my trunk her monogrammed sheets I slept on as a child. I remember clearly my white spool bed, the sensation of slipping into chilly, fine cotton sheets, with the scalloped pink edge, and right in the center, my mother's curvaceous initials, , delicate as bird bones. For her room, she had blue sheets with blue monograms, and every other week, white with blue monograms. I have some of those, too, worn to a softness but still good. When she has a house, I intend to give them to my daughter. Dozens of plain towels, sheets, napkins, and pillowcases have passed through my household without a trace, but the hand towels my mother had monogrammed before my marriage are still in service, though the initial K is gone now from my name. When she gave them to me, I was shocked to see my own initials changed: . I traced the new initial with my finger; K, the letter still carried forward on unused silver napkin rings, silver shot cups, a bread tray, a pepper grinder.

  Monograms in my family were not limited to cloth. Baby rattles, silver cups, shoehorns, dresser silver, and the backs of flatware were subjected to this mania. The urge to monogram always seems mysterious to me, and never more mysterious than when I was ten and found my baby dresses. I loved to plunder, as my mother called it. “Plunder and strew! Plunder and strew! You strew faster than I can pick up.” Her language was, otherwise, not archaic. I was looking in the hall chest at my father's high school report cards, the deed to the house, a beaded purse with a slippery silver mirror inside, which my mother carried when she was in her belle-hood and did the Charleston, back when a pink feather boa hung in her closet. I was searching for secrets. My hands riffled through the bolts of material that might someday be made into skirts or bathrobes, through the stored-away plastic bags holding my mother's cashmere sweaters, washed and hidden in cedar to protect them from moths. Then I pulled out a flattened stack of blue batiste infant gowns and held one up. There, over where the heart would have been, I saw the monogram: .

  A child had died? A secret child? I ran to my mother's room.

  She was propped in her canopied bed, reading a fashion magazine. “Oh, those were yours, if you had been a boy. M for Uncle Mark, F for Franklin, Big Daddy's name.” Her father, the puffy-cheeked man in the photograph, with her pouting in white flounces on his knee, died when I was three. I would have been a Mark and Franklin, not Frances, not Elizabeth. And the inevitable deduction: They had Mark in mind, not me.

  “Why did you have them monogrammed before you knew?”

  “I don't remember. We thought you would be a boy.” Her hair is caught in silver clamps to set the waves. I could almost see this brat. His ears stick out and he has scabs on his stupid bony knees. He looks out with my blue eyes.

  Little wheels of logic spin. “Where are the dresses with FEM?”

  “There aren't any.”

  It didn't take long for me to figure that, after two girls, they desperately wanted a boy and that the monogramming was an act of superstition and determination, an attempt to bend the will of fate. Years later, my mother told me that my father disappeared and “went on a tear” for two days when I was born. Odd, my father was wild about me, and when he said, “All my boys are girls,” I never picked up any tone of regret.

  And is it odd, too, that when I think to myself about a sheet or shirt that is monogrammed, I think of it as a mark?

  My mother monogrammed on the batiste dress of one of my dolls. Amy, a name I loved from Little Women, though the name I secretly desired for myself was Renée. That was the one time I ever saw Mother at needlework. Usually, we took a hatbox full of my father's handkerchiefs and shirts, or pillowcases and my mother's silk slips, to Alice's, a woman who lived in a narrow house with a chinaberry tree out front. I climbed around in the tree, where onc
e I saw a swarm of bees, or sat in the porch swing with her dog, Chap, who had swollen ticks on his ears. Sometimes I waited at Alice's table eating saltines and watching my mother and Alice, who was tall and angular, with enormous hands that looked as though they should be kneading great piles of dough—how did she manage to thread the thinnest of needles? She had bright pink gums that came far down to short teeth. She was brown and lived in “colored town.” That she and my mother were friends may not have occurred to either of them. They gossiped and drank coffee, which Alice made in a blue and white speckled tin pot.

  My mother pushed out her bottom lip when she concentrated. They carefully cut around printed initials, pinned tissue paper patterns to cloth, and ironed the indigo script indelibly onto the shirt pocket or sheet, leaving behind the outlined initials and the smell of scorched paper. Mother would then leave the imprinted linens for Alice. The preferred thread was silky white, limp figure-eight loops held together in the center with a gold and black label. A few weeks later, Alice walked the mile to our house and she and Mother would spread Alice's handwork across the bed, remarking on how nicely everything came out.

  The June market in Arezzo is even larger than the ones in April and May. I find the torso of a saint, lost from the whole carved wood body. I find a gold-leaf wooden cross and a beautiful studio portrait of a young woman, circa 1910. She is poised on the edge of a chair but radiates an inner calm. Several women gather around a stand hung with filmy lace and linen curtains. The woman in charge has starched and ironed for days. She has a heap of my favorite square pillowcases edged in handmade lace and secured by mother-of-pearl buttons on the back. I have these yard-square pillows in all the bedrooms—such pretty substitutes for headboards we don't have, and comfortable for reading, too. Most are too busy with lace inserts to bother with monograms but here's in white swirls. At home in California, I have a handkerchief-linen pillowcase with the same initials. It belonged to my friend Josephine's aunt, who lived in a splendid house in Palm Beach. Josephine gave me, too, Aunt Regina's pale, pale pink linen sheets with labyrinthine cutwork above and below her initials. Josephine had them for fifty years, her aunt for thirty or forty; they are perfect. Why do monogrammed things last, while others are discarded? I have brought the sheets to Italy because in summer heat, nothing is as cool as linen sheets. At the market, I have acquired several more. I also love the heavy white sheets edged in webs of white crochet, and the plain, uneven cotton ones, heavy as a sail. When washed and hung outside to dry, they do not need ironing, just a smoothing with my own flat hand as I fold them.

  Sleeping on linen or the dense cotton spoils me. Occasionally, I'll find a bedspread, white cotton, of course, with the raised matelassé design and swags of handwork along the edge. They're short for contemporary beds but I bought one anyway and let my pillowcases show. I fall asleep thinking of the ancient villas and farms in the deep country where these sheets were used for birth, death, love, and ordinary exhausted sleep after a day of digging fields. They have been washed in stone troughs, flapped in spring winds, and have been hurriedly brought in when rain started across the hills. The ornate or were worked by firelight for a bride. Perhaps some were “too good” and were saved (for what?) in the armadio shelves with aromatic bay leaves and lavender to keep them fragrant.

  All the linen stands at the market have rolls of lace, petticoats, christening dresses, blouses, and nightgowns. I'm not tempted. Once in France I found a long-sleeved gown, buttoned to the neck for modesty or warmth, embroidered in red with my daughter Ashley's initials. That is a bit weird, to wear someone else's gown, a French someone with your own monogram. She thanked me but somehow the gown ended up in the trunk with other vintage linens. Maybe the family mania has trailed out in her generation, or has taken another turn. Her art projects have involved damask napkins with her writing on them, and drifting rooms made of gauze with poems painted on the hanging panels.

  My sister located a place in Florence that still does hand monogramming. They have a book of styles, some plain, some as ornate as a Baroque ceiling. She took them a pile of linen napkins for her new daughter-in-law and three months later they arrived in Atlanta. At markets, I have been accumulating for my daughter beautiful linen towels with circles for monograms woven into the design. My daughter, who does not yet own an iron. I hope she likes them.

  When they are almost dry—slightly damp but warm from the sun—I take the six hand towels I bought at the market off the line. Just as I thought, they have come out of the wash white as salt. I hold the monogram to the sun, . These hand-hemmed linen towels, I notice, have a tab for hanging on a hook. I've never seen that before. Last summer when I travelled to the south of Italy, I saw the grave of one Assunta Primavera in the cemetery near Tricarico. Fresh yellow gladiolus and pink plastic flowers adorned her stone, along with her photo taken in middle age. Rather than an ethereal someone about to be assumed into heaven in spring, as her name suggested to me, she looked hearty and present. She pulled her black hair into a loose bun and her face was lighted by a wide smile. She looked like someone who could take the head off a chicken, no problem, or assist in birthing a breached baby. It seemed impossible that she could be lying under the stone. Surely she was off in some kitchen, the flavorful scent of her tortellini in brodo floating up the stairwell.

  My hand towels could not have been hers, but her strong face immediately came to me when I saw the initials. And so it is with all these linens. I like to open the lid of my cassone, take out a stack, and imagine the dazzling aunt's Palm Beach cocktail parties, jazz on the record player, the champagne, the tiny napkins passed around, the trays of canapés—what did they eat at fancy soireés in the twenties?—the Atlantic Ocean waves spuming over the breakwater. I imagine Assunta's stone house, the walnut sleigh bed where the young husband lay naked, wanting his back rubbed, and later where the old husband snored while she lay awake, wondering if her son would return from the front in Russia, if unweaned lamb would be good for the festa, if the cold had killed her fava beans. AP, embroidered by her mother, given on her name day.

  I imagine, too, the white nightgowns I did not buy at the market but looked at with amazement. They were as big as tents, all three of them monogrammed with suitably huge letters: . A mound of flesh slept in those. had to roll out of bed, her pink feet cold on the tiles, twins screaming at once in the night, this swift white messenger flying through the dark hall to comfort them.

  The monogram is territorial. This is indubitably mine, it says. Under that, the monogram is a fixative of memory. The silver cup always goes back to the moment of the baby's christening. The dozen linen napkins for the bride usher in all the Thanksgiving dinners gathering in the future even now toward her table.

  Ubi sunt is carved on ancient stones, short for that most haunting of questions, Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt, Where are those who lived before us? Naming is deeply instinctive, a motion against the swallowing up by time of everything that exists. At eighteen, about to go to college, I was given a large supply of green bath towels, hand towels, and washcloths, all duly monogrammed. Green was not a color I liked, but those towels went off to college with me, lasted for years, and, even now, two live in the trunk of my car. Decades later, thanks to Aunt Emmy's graduation gift, I wipe off the car seat where Coca-Cola has spilled, my hand around the balled-up initials of a very distant college freshman who dried her hair with this. A fleeting touch of wet hair, no, a spilled drink.

  Carolyn, Assunta, Mary, Flavia, Donatella, Altrude, Frankye, Luisa, Barbara, Kate, Almeda, Dorothea, Anne, Rena, Robin, Nancy, Susan, Giusi, Patrizia—we're all having dinner at my house.

  Breathing Art

  ACROSS THE PIAZZA, THREE BOYS BOUNCE A SOC-cer ball against the side wall of the Orvieto cathedral. The sun strikes the great, gilded facade of that stupendous, dazzling, arrogant building. I'm just basking in the reflected light, sipping a mid-afternoon cappuccino. This month we're free to roam. Primo restored the fallen wall and even improved it with two s
tone pillars for plants. He and his men “repointed” the stone walls of the cantina, too, closing all the crevices where dust and mice might come in. The planned projects start in July.

  Although Cortona is only an hour away, Orvieto seems far. My California sense of distance mysteriously expands here. Sixty or eighty miles usually seem like nothing, but within each kilometer in Tuscany and beyond, something to discover, study, eat, or drink is a potential distraction from the goal. California, at 160,000 square miles, is somehow smaller than Tuscany at 9,000 square miles.

  Inside the cathedral, I've already seen the stop-in-your-tracks Signorelli fresco of judgement day—when skeletons just raised from the dead are caught by the artist as they are about to, and just as they have, melded back into their restored bodies—bodies at their prime of health. I was happy—the reality of seeing what cannot be seen, and also the activation of the phrase, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting: Something known, hoped for, or disbelieved—but unimagined really—suddenly given full verisimilitude.

  I looked up until my neck hurt. When I turned away to explore the rest of the cathedral, I passed a woman praying. Her market basket propped beside her was stuffed with vegetables. She'd slipped out of her shoes and was cooling her feet on the tiles. A little girl nearby braided her friend's hair. Their dolls sat upright on a bench. A young priest idly turned the pages of a magazine at a table laden with Catholic family publications.

  They are knowing that splendid place through their pores, knowing so intimately and thoroughly that they do not have to know at all.