Liquid Desires

by Edward Sklepowich

  But before Occhipinti would allow himself to rise to the bait, he stared at Barbara and, putting as much urgency as he could into his reedy voice, said, “‘Let who lied be left lie!’”

  But hadn’t Occhipinti come to La Muta precisely not to let things lie? Urbino asked himself. It didn’t quite make sense. And who was the birdlike man referring to? Flavia Brollo, her mother, Regina, or possibly even Alvise? The puzzled look on the Contessa’s face seemed to indicate that she was just as uncertain as Urbino was himself.

  4

  Not until much later that night, after Occhipinti had left and Eugene had gone up to his room, were Urbino and the Contessa able to talk alone together in the salotto verde. The Contessa had agreed to a glass of Remy Martin and was sitting once again on the Brustolon sofa, peering down into the wide glass.

  “What possible relationship could there have been between that actress Lennox and Flavia Brollo?” she asked with a touch of petulance, raising her gray eyes to Urbino’s face. “I know what kind of reputation she has,” she added.

  What Urbino knew she was really asking, however, was what connection there might have been between Lennox and Flavia Brollo’s descent on her garden party.

  “And then there’s what the old nurse said about Flavia’s mother,” the Contessa went on. “Lago di Garda was where Alvise spent his time with Silvestro while I was in England looking at mazes. Perhaps this Regina Brollo was accustomed to spending her summers there the way other Venetians are. It’s something you’ll have to look into, too. You will tell me the truth, won’t you? Whatever it is?”

  “Whatever you hear from me will always be the truth.”

  “I hope you won’t be tempted to break your promise. I could never forgive you—or, even more, myself for putting you in that position.”

  The Contessa’s face clouded and for a moment Urbino thought she was about to cry.

  “I’m so absolutely blue, caro! When I force myself not to think of Alvise and me, I start thinking of poor Flavia.”

  The Contessa fell silent for several minutes. Urbino didn’t interrupt her reverie. She was obviously trying to come to terms with a great many painful things. He had no doubt, however, that the Contessa’s moral strength, coupled with her intelligence and feeling heart, wouldn’t let her down. They were the very things that would help her get through this crisis—along with his own efforts and support, of course.

  “Flavia was a victim, one way or the other, wasn’t she, even if she wasn’t murdered?” the Contessa said, looking directly at Urbino. “Either she was teeming with lies—or she was let down horribly by Alvise, and now me.”

  The Contessa considered her own culpability for several silent moments. Once again Urbino said nothing, but waited for her to work things through as much as she could at this point.

  “If Alvise was her father,” she eventually went on, “then Alvise and I have failed her. And if she made it all up, for whatever inscrutable reason, what does it say about her? About her life? Her relationship with her real father? I know you’ve thought of all these things, too, Urbino, and I beg you: Don’t be so concerned about my feelings that you try to spare me any pain.”

  What the Contessa was saying and what her frightened eyes implored seemed so opposed that Urbino, for the rest of that night until he finally escaped into sleep, couldn’t even begin to sort it out.

  5

  It was the next afternoon. The Sant’Anna Cemetery, on the gently rolling hills below the walls of Asolo, at first seemed empty of anyone living except two attendants raking the gravel paths on the lowest terrace. But then Urbino saw Madge Lennox. The tall, androgynous woman was standing at the grave of Eleonora Duse, the actress who had rivaled Sarah Bernhardt at the turn of the century. The grave, on one of the highest tiers, was set off by low bushes and cypress trees.

  Urbino often came here to the Sant’Anna Cemetery. One of his interests—or his “eccentricities,” as the Contessa preferred to call them—was visiting cemeteries, something he had shared with Evangeline. In this, as in other things, he admitted to being something of a sentimentalist. Wherever he was, if he had time he would seek out the main cemetery and wander among the graves, read the inscriptions, and chat with the caretakers. What was morbid to the Contessa, who despised any memento mori, consoled him. He took pleasure from seeing the graves that hadn’t been forgotten, the fresh jars of flowers, the recently tended flowerbeds, the notes left for the weather to obliterate. He tried not to concentrate on the greater number of neglected plots.

  Urbino approached Madge Lennox. The seventy-year-old actress was wearing a cerise scarf that concealed her hair, a broad-brimmed hat, and billowing crimson-colored pants and top. She was looking down at the gravestone. There was something almost marmoreal about her stiff pose—even her pale, taut face—that made her seem very much at home among all the marble of the cemetery. But then her head suddenly snapped up and she stared through her large sunglasses at Urbino.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you, Miss Lennox, but your maid at Villa Pippa said that you might be here. I’m Urbino Macintyre. We met at the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini’s garden party.” The actress nodded in recognition. Urbino walked the rest of the distance to join her by Eleonora Duse’s grave. “I come here often, too. She has a splendid spot.”

  “She does, doesn’t she?” Madge Lennox agreed in her low, exquisitely controlled voice.

  She adjusted her hat—different from the one she had worn to the Contessa’s party—and smiled at Urbino. Once again, as he had been last week, he was struck by the almost sexless, ageless beauty of her white, high-cheekboned face. Everything about her seemed studied and restrained, something that Urbino found both appealing and yet strangely disconcerting. She reminded him of someone, and it troubled him that he couldn’t remember who, for he vaguely sensed that the association wasn’t entirely pleasant.

  Madge Lennox bent down to rearrange a jar of small yellow flowers. “Perhaps you can help me decide,” she said without looking up yet somehow making him feel bathed in her approval. “Do you think Eleonora’s spot is more like a secluded balcony or a small stage?”

  “Either comparison would suit the final resting place of an actress, don’t you think? And a balcony can also be a stage, of course. Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Well answered! And Eleonora played Juliet many times, on one memorable occasion in Verona itself. She was one of the few actresses who’s ever played the role when she was the right age for it.” She straightened up and laughed. “I played her when I had just turned thirty. But you’re here to ask me about Flavia Brollo, aren’t you? Signor Occhipinti must have told you that he saw us together. By the way, please call me Madge, especially since I want to call you Urbino.” She gave the “U” of his name the correct Italian sound. “Such an unusual name for an American.”

  When Urbino didn’t satisfy her implied question, she smiled, revealing even, remarkably white teeth and very few lines for someone her age.

  “Yes, I knew Flavia, but I didn’t think it was my place to tell the Contessa that I did.”

  Madge Lennox’s surface was so fine and polished, and she seemed so complacent, that Urbino felt the need to shock her.

  “It’s possible that Flavia was murdered, you know.”

  “But that’s preposterous!” She appeared more angry than shocked. “The paper said nothing about murder. Is that what the police think?”

  “They’re looking into all possibilities, of course. They’ll know more after the autopsy.”

  “But you’re already convinced, aren’t you? Or trying to make me believe you are.”

  Lennox took off her sunglasses and put them in her pants pocket. Her eyes were dark and bold, and they searched his face.

  Urbino sensed that Lennox was trying to absorb the idea that Flavia might have been murdered. A conflict—or a good semblance of one—was evident in the actress’s high-cheek-boned face.

  “Murder,” she said in her soft voice. “It doesn’t s
eem possible. But wouldn’t this best be left to the police if they share your—your suspicion? That’s all it is, isn’t it? A suspicion? At any rate, I doubt if I can be of any help.”

  She wasn’t reluctant to give him information, however. As they walked from the cemetery and up the hill in the direction of town, she told him how Flavia used to drop by the villa from time to time and would sometimes spend the night. Lennox had a room set aside for her for whenever she stayed.

  “Flavia liked to get away from all the commotion of Venice—the things that you and I talked about at the Contessa’s party. I would leave her to herself. I never bothered her. We understood each other. She said she felt safe and secure here in Asolo.”

  “Safe and secure,” Urbino repeated. “Was she afraid of something?”

  “I’m sure it was just a manner of speaking.”

  “Where did you meet her?”

  “In the cemetery. Don’t look so surprised, Urbino,” she said, taking obvious pleasure in slowly drawing out the syllables of his name. “We met there, didn’t we? Flavia had a devotion to Duse, you see. She was standing by the grave very much the way you found me. We talked for a while, then I invited her up to La Pippa for a drink. She came back the next week and we eventually became more friendly. It was in early June.”

  They passed a small Franciscan church and continued on toward the main road. Cicadas creaked from the adjacent grass and vineyards. In the distance, villas looked like jewels in the velvet green of the surrounding hills.

  “Flavia was like a ‘melodious apparition,’” Madge Lennox went on. “That’s from the inscription on Duse’s house in town. It suited Flavia with that face of hers and those melancholy green eyes! Those eyes always showed so much—or so very little,” she added, making Urbino think of the blank look in Flavia’s eyes at the Contessa’s garden party. “I called her ‘Principessa Flavia’ after the character Madeleine Carroll played in The Prisoner of Zenda back in the thirties. She might have made a good film actress. She said she had been in some minor theatrical productions.”

  Urbino and Madge Lennox reached the main road and turned up the hill toward town. The road was flanked by villas and smaller private residences.

  “Did Flavia tell you why she was in Asolo?”

  “All she would say at first was that she was here to visit Eleonora’s grave, but it didn’t take me long to realize that she was interested in the Contessa. What did she look like? Did I think she was attractive? What kind of woman was she? What was Villa La Muta like? Did I know anything about the Contessa’s husband? I’m afraid I couldn’t give her much information about anything. I hardly knew the Contessa and what little I knew I learned from Signor Occhipinti, my maid, or people from town who don’t mind gossiping with a straniera.”

  Urbino remembered that at the Contessa’s garden party Madge Lennox had broached the topic of Alvise with him. Could she have been hoping for information she could pass on to her occasional houseguest?

  A Dalmatian behind the fence of one of the villas started barking loudly as they passed. Madge Lennox said a few soothing words in Italian and the animal settled down. Urbino was reminded of how the Contessa’s Doberman, Catullus, had behaved with Flavia.

  As if in response to Urbino’s unspoken thought, Madge Lennox said, “Flavia and I shared a way with dogs. She used to go down to the gates of the Contessa’s villa and talk with her dog. She said they became good friends.”

  “Didn’t you find Flavia’s interest in the Contessa unusual?” Urbino asked as they walked along the fence of the villa, followed docilely now by the Dalmatian.

  “Of course I did, even more so when I saw some of the things in her scrapbook.”

  Madge Lennox’s white face was a mask that showed neither embarrassment nor uneasiness.

  “She kept a scrapbook?”

  “Yes, since she was just a girl. I think she held on to it for sentimental reasons, the way one does with these things. She asked me to add my autograph to some others. It seemed a typical scrapbook. Programs and tickets, newspaper clippings, photographs, and several pages of autographs. There were a lot of clippings from the Venice newspaper about the Contessa and her husband, some of them with photographs, and one of Signor Occhipinti. I found those clippings a bit strange but didn’t give them much thought. Anyway, almost at the same time that I knew Flavia had this—this fantasy about the Conte being her father, the Contessa knew it, too,” Lennox went on quickly in her low voice. “Flavia told me the morning of the garden party. She begged me to take her with me but I refused. When I saw her go up to the Contessa, I knew what she must be saying. And later at La Pippa she told me.”

  The sorrow that seemed to touch Madge Lennox’s face momentarily confused Urbino. It was the appropriate response, albeit somewhat belated in their discussion of Flavia, but Urbino couldn’t help wondering how authentic and heartfelt it actually was.

  With this thought came the realization of whom Madge Lennox reminded him. Urbino was carried back to his hours as a fifteen-year-old wheeling a retired actress around the Garden District at the request of his parish priest. He had been enchanted by her stories and warmed by her gratitude. For him she had been a magical presence, one of the charismatic older women of his life, but he had always wondered how much he could believe or trust a person so much of whose life had been artifice. Lennox was about the age of the actress, but Urbino was almost a quarter century older than he had been then. But it didn’t matter. He felt the same as he had during that unending summer in New Orleans.

  The sorrow on Lennox’s face—true or feigned—faded as she greeted a carabinieri officer swaggering out of the door of the local headquarters, but it was soon back in place. She went on with her story as they continued up the hill in the heat.

  “We were together one more time before she died. Wednesday morning here in Asolo, then later on the train to Venice.” This was the day before Urbino and the Contessa had met Flavia at Florian’s. “She seemed more excited and nervous than usual. She kept talking about that murdered girl in Venice. You don’t think that man who murdered the girl could have—? But no, of course not. He was in custody before Flavia died. Anyway, Flavia knew the girl and wasn’t able to get her out of her mind. She seemed to become more obsessed about things after the girl was murdered. It was frightening to see her in the grip of something that wasn’t quite in her control. That last time I saw her she kept saying over and over again, ‘I’ll make the Contessa believe me. I will!’ We both took the train to Venice an hour later. She went on and on about the poor girl and the Contessa all the way. I said good-bye to her at the train station and continued on to Milan. I never saw her after that.”

  “Did she ever talk about her family?”

  Madge Lennox looked at Urbino without breaking her stride. There was a slight hesitation in her eyes as if she were considering something—or perhaps trying to give him the impression she was. He sensed that she was not just uncertain but even a little afraid, but once again he wondered how much he could trust his own judgment about the behavior of someone whose life was based on artifice.

  “Rarely. When she did, she would refer to ‘my mother and Lorenzo’—never her mother and father. ‘Lorenzo il Magnifico,’ she used to say scornfully. Sometimes when she would see an older man, she’d say, ‘He’s just like Lorenzo!’ or ‘There goes another Magnifico!’” She looked at Urbino as if assessing his response to what she was telling him. “She said it the first time she saw Signor Occhipinti walking his dog past the villa. It seemed so inappropriate for the little man that I laughed. She had only good things to say about her mother, though. She idealized her.”

  “Did she ever mention someone named Violetta Volpi? Or Violetta Grespi?”

  “No, but the name is somehow familiar.”

  “It was mentioned in Flavia’s obituary.”

  Madge Lennox nodded slowly.

  They had reached a small café with tables set up outside. The road turned up to the right, where it
passed the Villa Cipriani Hotel before entering the walls of the town. Just inside the walls was Eleonora Duse’s house with the inscription to the melodiosa apparizione that Madge Lennox had mentioned.

  “I think I’ll only go this far today,” the actress said, stopping. She looked a little weary and perspiration beaded her forehead. “Why don’t we rest and have a drink?”

  They sat at one of the outdoor tables and ordered Proseccos.

  “Did Flavia ever say anything that might indicate she was afraid of someone? Someone who might have meant her harm?”

  “Someone who might have murdered her, according to your theory? I’m sorry, Urbino, but I can’t believe that Flavia was murdered. An accident, yes—even suicide. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to harm a hair on her head.” The steady look Madge Lennox gave Urbino didn’t convince him that she was telling the complete truth. Once again he detected a slight uneasiness as she raised the glass to her lips and took a sip. “She was acting strangely last week, but who would have thought—?” She shook her head. “I think you should just give your energies to putting the Contessa’s mind at ease about her husband. Murder strikes me as so—so preposterous.”

  And frightening, Urbino added silently for her.

  Madge Lennox stood up, slipping her sunglasses back on now that their talk was over. It was as if she had wanted Urbino to see her eyes and judge how little she had to hide. Over Urbino’s protests she dropped several lira notes on the table.

  “Please give my regards to the Contessa and thank her again for a perfectly wonderful afternoon last week.”

  Urbino watched Madge Lennox walk back down the hill. She had told him quite a few things about Flavia, but could he believe them all? And why did he have the impression that she hadn’t told him everything that she could have? Maybe it was the residue of his experience with the actress he had wheeled around the Garden District so many years ago. The woman had ended up complaining to the priest that Urbino with all his questions had intruded on her, even though she had basked in his attention and encouraged him. To this day he wasn’t sure whether he had misread the actress, been intentionally misled by her, or been lied to, for some obscure reason, by the priest himself.