Elton smiled at me and pressed my fingers weakly with nicotine-stained fingers. “You run on, Vic. I’ll be okay here. Thanks for-you know, God bless, all that.”
He produced a grubby green card from an inner pocket, so I knew they wouldn’t put him straight out on the street. I caught a cab back to my office and put Elton-not out of my mind, but to the bottom of it. I was exhausted from travel, but I’d been away too long to give myself decompression time before returning to work.
I’d been in Italy, with Morrell, where we’d rented a cottage in Umbria, in the hill country, near my mother’s childhood home. Morrell had finally recovered from the bullets that almost killed him in the Khyber Pass two years earlier. He wanted to test his legs, see if he was ready for journalism’s front lines-he was aching to return to Afghanistan-despite the death of some three hundred journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan since we began our endless war.
My needs were even more personal: I’d grown up speaking Italian with my mother, but I’d never visited her home. I wanted to meet relatives, I wanted to listen to music where Gabriella had learned it, see paintings in their Umbrian and Tuscan light, drink Torgiano in the hills where the grapes grew.
Morrell and I visited the remnants of Gabriella’s family, elderly Catholic cousins who exclaimed how much like Gabriella I looked but who wouldn’t talk about the years she’d had to live in hiding with her father, an Italian Jew. They claimed not to remember my grandfather, who had been denounced and sent to Auschwitz the day after someone smuggled Gabriella to the coast and a Cuba-bound freighter.
No one knew what had become of Gabriella’s younger brother, Moselio. Gabriella herself hadn’t heard from him since he joined the partisans in 1943, and I hadn’t been optimistic. My mother’s been dead a long time, but I still miss her. I was hoping for too much from her Pitigliano family.
Morrell and I toured the Siena Opera House, where Gabriella had performed her only professional singing role, Iphigenia, in Jommelli’s opera, thanks to which I have the most insane middle name in Chicago. We even met a frail diva, now almost ninety, who remembered Gabriella from their student days together in the conservatory. “Una voce com’una campana dorata.” A voice like a golden bell, as I knew: Gabriella used to fill our five-room bungalow in South Chicago to the bursting point when she sang.
When she arrived in Chicago, a poor, clueless immigrant, Gabriella answered an advertisement for a singer in a Milwaukee Avenue bar, where the backroom boys tried to take off her clothes while she sang “Non mi dir, bell’idol mio.”
My dad had rescued her from that, my dad wandering in for a beer in the middle of a scorching July afternoon and pulling her away from the groping hands of the bar manager. My father had been a Chicago cop, a kind and gentle man who adored my mother from that day forward.
Looking at the Baroque cupids holding up a plaster banner in the Siena Opera, I felt the gulf between the stage and the music, where Gabriella began her life, and the bungalow in the middle of the steel mills where she ended it. How could my father and I have ever been enough to make up for all that Italy’s racial laws forced her to renounce?
That part of the trip had been difficult, but when we left Siena, and Pitigliano, Morrell and I spent a pleasant two months together. It became clear to us both, though, that this trip marked the farewell tour of our affair. We had thought when we planned this vacation that it would deepen our relationship. Since we worked at unusual jobs that kept us from home for long stretches, we’d never spent concentrated time together. As the time came for Morrell to catch his train to Rome and the direct flight to Islamabad, we both realized we were ready to say good-bye.
I flew home from Milan a few days later, sad, wondering what it was that had kept Morrell and me from a deeper, tighter bond. Was I too messy or Morrell too compulsively tidy? Maybe I was too prickly, as some of my friends suggested, for anyone to get close to me. Or maybe, ultimately, each of us reserved our deepest commitments for work. Morrell’s career as a journalist covering international human-rights issues looked so much more glamorous than my own, so much more deserving of a deep commitment. After all, I spend my time looking at frauds and sleazy con artists.
That thought depressed me, too, as I left Elton at the hospital and rode a cab back to my office. When the cab reached the rehabbed warehouse I share with my sculpting friend, I had to remind myself again that I was back in America-this time, over the issue of tips, which are never as big in Europe as they need to be here. I took a breath and typed in the code on the keypad at the door. Elton’s crisis was over, my vacation was over.
I unlocked my inner-office door. Amy Blount, a young history Ph.D. who’s done research projects for me in the past, had organized my documents so rigorously that they just about saluted when I opened the door. The trouble was, there were too damned many of them. My whole worktable was covered with neatly labeled papers, while my desk held a stack of the most urgent papers.
While I was away, I only went to an Internet café twice a week to check for messages. Amy held down the fort for me, handling small projects and responding to routine inquiries. We spoke only when something came up that she couldn’t handle.
Right before I came home, Amy suddenly found an academic position; she’d been looking for three years. She had to leave for Buffalo in a hurry to start the summer term. She’d organized my papers, and left a pot of crimson gerbera daisies, a little wilted from their time alone but a gallant splash of color in my cavernous space.
This afternoon, I poured water into the daisies and pretended to be interested in the mountain range of files on my big, long worktable. Unfortunately, on top of the highest peak stood my credit-card bills. Pay within ten days to avoid loss of credit rating, a kidney, or any hope of filling your car again.
I looked at the AmEx bill out of the corner of my eye, as if that would make it smaller. The dying U.S. dollar meant I definitely should not have cheered myself with those Lario boots the day before I left Milan. Or that Antonella Mason acrylic Morrell and I found on a side trip to Treviso.
I made a face and forced myself to start digging. Fast turnaround on my own past-due invoices had to be my first priority. I put in a call to a temporary agency to find someone to help, and started returning the stack of my most crucial phone calls: those from clients with real money to spend.
A little before five, I had to stop. My body thought it was midnight, and I was starting to forget who I was talking to, or what language I was speaking, in the middle of complicated sentences.
I was putting a few files in my briefcase-the pessimist says the case is half full, the optimist that she’ll read them over supper-when the outer bell rang. I have a surveillance camera at the door so that I don’t have to run down the hall every time the UPS man is delivering a ton of steel to my lease-mate. I looked at the image on my computer screen.
It’s not a sophisticated system, but I thought I recognized the young woman I’d seen at the hospital earlier today with Elton. Elton! I’d completely forgotten him. My stomach tightened. Had she come to deliver bad news in person? I pushed the lock release and moved hurriedly down the hall to greet her.
When I asked about Elton, she took my hand reassuringly. “No, no. He seems to be okay. I talked to him for a bit this afternoon. He’s a vet, Vietnam, so he can be moved to the VA. He’ll get better care there.”
I thanked her for coming around in person to tell me, assuming Elton had given her my office address.