Tourmaline

by Joanna Scott

  And Harry remembers sneaking from the nursery and making his way to the galley, where a cook put him to work drying pots and then showed him some of the extra treats — hominy grits, cranberry sauce, and malted-milk powder — items so special they were only dispensed upon a passenger’s request. Then the cook gave Harry a spoonful of tangerine sherbet and made him promise to go back to the nursery. Harry says he remembers lying across a soft leather ottoman in an empty salon, though he’s not sure whether this was before or after he left the galley. He remembers watching our mother repack a trunk. He remembers asking for cranberry sauce at breakfast and being laughed at by our parents.

  Our first day on the Mediterranean was unusually stormy, and the ship “rolled like a sick headache,” as Mrs. Fugle described it. But among our family, only Meena the cat suffered the effects. She left little puddles of vomit in corners of the cabin, and Claire scrubbed the floor clean and then hid the dirty towels in a bin by the pool.

  Our mother didn’t let us out of her sight for the last part of the voyage. She ate her meals quickly and paid little attention to the conversations at the table. The Fugles and Murray talked at length about the engineer, speculating about his reasons for suicide. Teresa Fugle noted his obsession with stories of disaster. Walter said he’d seemed well-read. Murray had considered only after the fact that his wife had spent her afternoons in conversation with the engineer, but he decided he’d accomplish nothing by asking her what she really thought of the man.

  The weather cleared, and we approached Genoa at noon on a bright, warm July day. After they’d packed and closed the trunks, our parents took us to a terrace to watch as the port slowly acquired form and detail. Beyond the clutter of masts we saw the black and white of buildings, the dark gaps of windows, the bulge of a cathedral’s dome. The Casparia’s whistle bellowed salutes. A man in a glen-plaid ascot strummed a banjo. Stewards walked dogs along the third-class deck. It seemed as if most of the passengers hadn’t noticed that our voyage was almost over, and my brothers and I, knowing nothing about the engineer’s death, all shared the wordless disappointment that one feels when a party starts to peter out. Shouldn’t there have been fireworks and a band gathered onshore to welcome us, after all the trouble we’d gone through to come here? Murray held me in one arm and carried Meena’s cage with his free hand; Claire held Nat’s hand, and she ordered Patrick to keep hold of Harry.

  The gangway was jarred loose and lowered to the shouting of a dozen men, their commands neatly synchronic, as if joining in song. The sound was a welcome of sorts. But even better was the bagful of streamers Mrs. Fugle gave us. We flung the streamers over the rail and watched them unravel in long ribbons of color that stuck to the hull.

  Once the ship had docked, the passengers began collecting their families and appointing stewards to take charge of their luggage. On a crowded stairwell Harry announced that he had to pee, so we returned to our cabin. Later, as we waited in the crowd funneling onto the gangway, Patrick started to whine that he was thirsty, which reminded me of my own thirst, so I began wailing, the cat began howling in sympathy, Harry yelled at Patrick to shut up, Murray yelled at Harry to shut up, and Claire told Murray to stop acting like a child. The faces of adults in the packed crowd were flushed and drenched with perspiration; one woman swooned; someone yelled for help, and at the front of the crowd the first officer called instructions through a bullhorn.

  Mr. Fugle appeared beside us, his wife nowhere in sight. “It’s not like the Ile de France,” he said. “On the Ile de France you were inspired to live merrily, if only for the moment.”

  “Mr. Fugle, I wanted to say…” Our father hesitated, and Claire peered at him angrily, as if she thought he were going to reveal some humiliating secret about our family. “To ask, rather, if you knew of a decent hotel where we might put up for a day and rest.” Claire rolled her eyes and looked away. Mr. Fugle gasped.

  “You have nothing booked, Murray? You have your whole family here and no place to stay?”

  “I thought…”

  “You didn’t think is the truth of the matter. You’ll have to come along with me, stick close, we’ll need a fleet of taxis with your luggage and the five boys….”

  “Four. We have four boys.”

  “Four then, no matter. Now stay close. Teresa! Where is she? Teresa?”

  We followed Mr. Fugle down the gangplank, followed his muttering voice when we lost him for a moment in the crowd, found him again standing miraculously beside Mrs. Fugle — miraculously, I say, because Mrs. Fugle had apparently lost twenty or so pounds in a matter of minutes and had dyed her hair black, powdered her face white, and shrunk in height a couple of inches.

  Mrs. Fugle was, in fact, Mrs. Fugle’s sister, Ida, who, Mr. Fugle explained, lived half of each year in Florence and was perfectly fluent in Italian. She would keep us from becoming gypsies, he said. They conferred for a moment, then Ida instructed us to take a taxi to the Hôtel Luxembourg, where the Fugles had already reserved a suite; we’d rendezvous in the courtyard, she said. Mr. Fugle secured two more taxis. He’d wait for the luggage and bring it along directly.

  We left the Fugles just as Teresa arrived and embraced her sister. We crammed ourselves into a taxi with corduroy seats ripped at the seams, broken floorboards, and a driver who smelled like broiled flounder, and as we rode up the steep narrow streets of the old port, I whimpered because I was hot, Patrick whined because he was thirsty, and Murray remarked at all the stone monsters lounging above doorways, “Will you look at that!”

  After nearly half an hour the taxi pulled up onto the sidewalk in front of the arched brick entrance of the Luxembourg, an elegant hotel near the Piazzale Resasco. When Murray reached for his wallet, the driver gestured behind him and said something about the signore. Claire and Murray understood him to mean that Mr. Fugle had generously paid our fare. They gathered us and Meena and the few small sacks we were carrying and headed into the hotel. A fountain graced by a bronze Pan gurgled in the courtyard, and Murray threw in a penny. Then we all had to throw pennies, including Claire. A maid swept the cobblestones, and the swish of her straw broom sounded like the wind onboard the Casparia. The broom, the fountain, the fragrance of orange blossoms, the blue patch of sky overhead, the warmth, the stillness, the uncertainty of the future, the certain fact of our safe ocean voyage — everything combined to lull us into calm. I stopped crying, Patrick stopped complaining, Meena curled up in her cage and fell asleep. We sat on the edge of the fountain’s basin and waited for the Fugles and our luggage to arrive. We waited serenely for ten minutes, until a concierge approached and in perfect English asked if he could be of assistance. Murray went into the hotel to arrange for a room. Claire sat with her face turned up to catch a beam of sunlight. Patrick quietly counted to twenty in the Italian he had learned from the sitters in the ship’s nursery.

  Murray appeared, key in hand, and we continued to wait. Thirty minutes turned into an hour. I chased my brothers around the fountain. Murray went to see if the hotel had another courtyard. As each minute passed Claire’s features grew tighter. Murray returned, shaking his head as if to shake away the irritating buzz of a fly. Claire coughed, and just as she was about to tell Murray to go back to the harbor to look for the Fugles, they heard the crunch of gravel beneath car wheels. Doors opened and slammed. Voices rose in argument. An engine revved, stalled, and revved again.

  The Fugles had arrived, along with one canvas suitcase. The rest of their luggage, and ours, was in another taxi — a taxi that was supposed to follow the Fugles to the Luxembourg, a taxi with a black-eyed, bearded driver who turned off on a side street somewhere back in the centro storico and disappeared without so much as a parting honk.

  Ida scolded Walter for not paying better attention during the drive. A bellhop fetched the concierge. The concierge and the Fugles’ taxi driver conversed solemnly, while Ida turned her rage upon Teresa. Walter started arguing with Murray, calling him inept and irresponsible. Claire asked the concierge,
“Does this mean our belongings have been stolen?” and the concierge, forgetting himself for a moment, started rattling in Italian, then bowed slightly and apologized “for the inconvenience.”

  The police would be called, the concierge promised, and hopefully the thief and our luggage would be found. Until then he trusted that we would enjoy our stay at the Hôtel Luxembourg. The other adults followed the concierge to the manager’s office. No bellhop came to help us, so Claire led my brothers and me up to our fourth-floor room. We had a spitting contest on the balcony while our mother leaned back against pillows wrapped in colorful lace and dozed.

  Or, rather, let her thoughts drift through the clutter of impressions — the bearded satyrs and fat-cheeked gargoyles decorating the buildings of Genoa, the delicate green-tipped fingers of the Luxembourg’s Pan, the bodies surrounding her on the gangway of the Casparia, the annoyed expression on Mr. Fugle’s face at the harbor, Teresa’s impatient smile. The engineer.

  The mysterious, doomed engineer from Ohio. When Claire thought of him now she felt something she wouldn’t have wanted to describe to anyone. The engineer had taken the most desperate measure possible to escape his private agonies. That he had spared Nat was cause for a strange, uncomfortable gratitude. Claire wouldn’t have called it gratitude. She wouldn’t have admitted to feeling anything but sympathy for the unhappy engineer and his family.

  Sympathy — and relief. Her four boys were alive. Amazingly, we were alive, safe, healthy, attentive to the world, full of hope, easily pleased. The Murdoch family had survived an ocean voyage, and we would survive the theft of our luggage. Who knows but that it was a necessary loss? In order to leave home behind, we had to lose what we’d brought along with us.

  Still, Claire decided that we should postpone our journey and wait in Genoa while the police searched for the thief. In the meantime we’d shop and replace what we’d lost. We were already living off borrowed money. Now Murray would have to wire his mother in New York and beg for more. Convey his desperation in a telegram and wait at the Luxembourg for the reply, which would come eventually, though he’d have to suffer the wait while our grandmother borrowed the money from her brothers.

  Such suffering, here at the top of the Luxembourg! The breeze blew through the balcony doors. The hills were the color of new leaves on a sugar maple. Claire could smell the ripe lemons in the garden.

  She must have fallen asleep, for when she woke Murray was sitting on the chair in front of the dressing table, his face hidden in his hands. Claire heard Patrick talking to the rest of us out on the balcony. The only other sound was the chatter of a parakeet in a cage on the balcony next door.

  “Any success, Murray?”

  “We’re lucky we didn’t lose a thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds and pearls like the Fugles did. Though if we’re talking relative value, the Fugles lost a couple of shoelaces, and we’ve lost almost everything.”

  “Do you want to go home?”

  “Yes. No.” He rose from his chair and stood with his hands in his pockets, idly watching us through the open doorway. “I don’t know. What a mess I’ve gotten us into. If I’d used the money as intended, I’d have my own office by now. Maybe a client or two — on the condition that I cut my commission by fifty percent. Why do I sacrifice every possibility of profit to incentive? You understand why I needed a break, don’t you, Claire? A man who’s going nowhere benefits from a change in routine. Some time away to give him perspective.”

  Of course she understood. We couldn’t give up now. We lingered in Genoa. Mornings we’d stroll with the Fugles along Via Garibaldi, led by Ida Fugle, who took it upon herself to distract us all from the loss of our belongings. We dragged our open hands along the cold stone facades of palazzi as Ida told us the history of the local families. We crowded into a funicular and rode above houses built on streets so steep that they had doors cut into their roofs. We climbed up La Lanterna, the ancient lighthouse of Genoa. We shopped for clothes along Via del Campo. Murray treated himself and Walter Fugle to cigars from the Hobby Pipe at Via XII Ottobre and treated us all to marrons glacés. We ate licorice that stained our tongues black. Murray gave Patrick a taste of wine at a bar. We threw the last of our pennies to Pan in the fountain at the Luxembourg. One day in a gentle rain we sifted through the decade-old rubble in an area where new construction hadn’t yet replaced a building destroyed in the war. Harry found a leather watchband. Patrick found the frayed end of a rope.

  It took five days for our grandmother to wire us enough money to give Claire and Murray both the means and confidence to continue our trip to Elba. The Fugles gave up hope of recovering their luggage and left for Florence on the fourth day. We were content to stay on in Genoa. We were cast as royalty by the smiling, whispering staff of the Hôtel Luxembourg, who made it their goal to convince all the Murdoch boys to try the gianchetti they served as an appetizer at lunch. Gianchetti are tiny newborn fish steamed and coated with olive oil and lemon, and they stare up at you from the plate with the passiveness that comes with condemnation. My brothers and I would wrap handfuls of gianchetti in bits of newspaper and hide the wads in our pockets. We’d nod vigorously when the waiters gathered to ask in English, “You like?”

  We fed the gianchetti to Meena, and over the course of the week she grew strong, regal, fierce. She took to sitting on the rail of the balcony and staring at the parakeet that was owned by a widow who lived year-round in the Luxembourg. The parakeet would twitter — in panic at first, then weakly, helplessly — and Meena’s tail would snap back and forth to the rhythm.

  Bells rang through the dusk. Swallows fished in the sky for insects. Nat said we were in Fairyland. Harry said we were never going home.

  Shortly after dawn on the morning of our fifth day at the Luxembourg we were woken by a scream. Or Murray and Claire and Harry woke; the rest of us managed to sleep as the widow on the balcony next to ours screamed, doors banged, and a maid called from the courtyard below.

  Murray and Claire had been sleeping in their usual fashion, back to back, Claire’s new silk nightgown bunched up around her waist, Murray in boxers, their rumps touching, one of Claire’s legs sandwiched between Murray’s shins. When Murray woke he clamped his legs together so Claire had to yank hers free, a movement which, as he’d later explain to Claire, reminded him of her angry, abrupt movements during early labor, and in the blurry haze of sleepiness he forgot where he was and thought that Claire was getting ready again to give birth. How many times had she been through it? How many boys did they have? Four? Or five? He remembered that someone had told him he had five sons. But the someone was a liar — Murray remembered that much. Who was screaming? What was wrong?

  Claire had bolted out of bed by then. Murray stumbled after Claire, pulling on pajama pants. Harry followed Murray, dragging a blanket along with him. They gathered out on the balcony and found the old widow on the balcony next to theirs screaming something about a gatto, a gatto cattivo, weeping, shuddering, clutching the sides of the parakeet’s cage. Inside, the little green bird lay on its side, button eyes without the flicker of life, legs twisted together like pieces of wire.

  Cattivo, Claire heard, a word she mistook to be the Italian word for cat, and with her mistake succeeded in understanding the woman’s accusation. Gatto cattivo. Cat something. Something cat. The parakeet was dead — that’s what had made the old woman distraught, a dead bird, nothing more — and our cat, black-masked, velvet-pawed Meena, was the assassin. Or mere onlooker, perhaps, since the door to the birdcage remained closed. Or a medusa, which was the widow’s explanation, Claire would understand later from the concierge, Meena having murdered Cerabella with her gaze, simply sitting on the partition and staring had driven the little bird into such a state of inarticulate panic that it had what the concierge called in English “an eruption of the heart.”

  Nothing more than a parakeet with heart failure on a balcony in Genoa with a view of the rose gardens edging the cimitero di Staglieno and the Ligurian hills beyo
nd. Nothing more than two trunks stolen by a Genoese thief. Nothing more than a few polite conversations with a stranger on an ocean liner. Nothing more than the first two weeks away from home.

  OUR FATHER HAD BEEN TRYING TO FIND a suitable job ever since he’d come home from the war. In ten years he’d talked his way into eight different firms — advertising, investment, and real estate — and then somehow managed to talk his way out, leaving behind him a history that his colleagues politely called mixed. Finally he decided to open his own consulting firm. His mother loaned him money. But before he’d even rented office space he felt he needed a break from work to consider his options, and he convinced his mother to let him use the money for a trip abroad. He assured her that he would secure a good job upon his return in the fall.

  When our grandmother wired the extra money to Murray in Genoa, she warned him that this was it — he’d get no more. But it was enough to let us continue our journey. We left the hotel for the train station on a warm July morning when the clouds were still pink with dawn. We were going to Florence, though in the taxi Murray suggested that we get off the train in Pisa and from Pisa take a bus to Piombino and there catch the ferry to Elba.

  “We’re going to Florence,” Claire said.

  “Why not directly to Elba?” repeated Murray.

  They argued in the taxi, though Murray knew that Claire would not change her mind. Of course we’d go to Florence, as planned, and Murray would travel alone to Elba to find us a suitable place to stay for the month.

  “Wish I didn’t have to go alone,” Murray murmured.

  “The whole point…” Claire was in the backseat with me on her lap. She let her voice drift off, leaving the obvious point implied — that Murray had chosen to take us to an island known to the rest of the world only as a place of exile.