L'America Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Copyright

  To an Unknown Poet, Dead at 39

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  For Jasper, my valentine

  and always for

  Mark and Livia

  Copyright © 2006 by Martha McPhee

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

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  to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  The author wishes to thank Hofstra University and the John Simon

  Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for their generous support. The author

  also wishes to thank André Bernard, Adrienne Brodeur, Pryde Brown,

  Sarah Chalfant, Heather Clinton, Jenny McPhee, Sara Powers, Andrea

  Schulz, Cullen Stanley, Mark Svenvold, Ana Livia Svenvold McPhee,

  Jasper James Svenvold McPhee, and Donatella Trotti.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  McPhee, Martha.

  L'America/Martha McPhee.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Fiction. 2. Hippies—

  Family relationships—Fiction. 3. Children of the rich—Fiction.

  4. Americans—Europe—Fiction. 5. Aegean Sea Region—Fiction.

  6. Islands—Fiction. I. Title: America. II. Title.

  PS3563.C3888A84 2006

  813'.54—dc22 2005020986

  ISBN 978-0-15-101171-1

  ISBN 978-0-15-603236-0 (pbk.)

  Text set in Columbus MT

  Designed by Linda Lockowitz

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Harvest edition 2007

  K J I H G F E D C B A

  To an Unknown Poet, Dead at 39

  Phil Perelson, 1956–1995

  Love, it seems, when all is said and done,

  kept you (maintained, withheld) indefinite.

  In bits and pieces you offered your Te Deum.

  To disappear was your "natural condition,"

  but what to keep (guard, record) against the infinite,

  when love, it seems, when all is said and done,

  (so utter, complete) so obliterates someone?

  Your "Five Keys to Anonymity," the ball & chain habits?

  In bits and pieces you offered your Te Deum.

  I still say "you," a mistake I see, for the third person

  holds you (faithful, spellbound now) separate—

  love it seems, when all is said and done,

  need not answer back, or get a word in

  edgewise, or feel at all compelled to speculate

  in bits and pieces. You offered your Te Deum,

  and what remains? What space along what margin,

  what wisp in a rented room, what scrap, however delicate?

  Love, it seems, when all is said and done.

  In bits and pieces, you offered your Te Deum.

  —MARK SVENVOLD

  One

  Campanilismo

  Above the party a beautiful young man rises into a cloud. As he looks to the sky, a girl with black hair curled at her ears reaches toward him, as if to pull him back. He is naked, exquisite, revealing the entirety of what is being lost to her. His right hand, enveloped by the faint tracings of a claw (perhaps an eagle's but this is debatable), disappears into the cloud, and only the girl is aware—her upturned face lit by sun. She wears a beige silk gown with a dark brown velvet princess bodice bordered with small pearls, which hugs her full breasts; a pillbox cap snugly rests on the crown of her head. The full gown flutters slightly with her movement, her desperate step toward the sky. Rose tints flush her cheeks and a solemnity haunts her eyes. At the edge of a hill thick with flowering rhododendrons and azaleas, the party carries on around her. Girls in long velvet gowns cluster together like bouquets, coquettish turns to their pretty lips, awaiting the adoration of all the various men, men in velvet pants and elaborate vests brocaded and beaded with pearls and gems. With long curling hair flowing like the capes that drape their backs, they are as handsome and gay as the girls. The colors are rich and deep, burnt sienna and royal peacock blue and gold and golden greens and whites the color of the sky. Couples whisper sweet gossip, though no one yet knows that she is in love with him, except for him. And what is to become of her, of that love, overwhelming and futile? If you look closely, you can see her love fairly palpitating, throbbing under the swell of her breast, all fury and tenderness. The party unfolds at the edge of a town over which looms the bell tower of an imposing church, perched high above one of those cool northern Italian lakes. The party celebrates the flowering rhododendrons and azaleas and the completion of Fiori, the Cellini country house to which these flowering bushes belong. "May they flower for at least a thousand years," Signor Cellini might have said. He is there somewhere among the guests, the father of the lovelorn girl. Time is expansive like that. Fifteen hundred years have elapsed since Augustus ruled the world. A lute player plucks the strings of his instrument, perhaps the bells of the bell tower toll. The beautiful young man touches the cloud in all his glory. A wide ribbon runs diagonally across the girl's chest and on the ribbon in a swirling playful script of gold is the name of the artist who painted this fresco—Benvenuto Cellini.

  He was nineteen years old, born in 1500, the age of the year, and had recently been banished from Florence for a second time for one of his many quarrels, the result of his proud and cocky temper. He had never painted a painting before, much less a fresco, and he never would again. He had sketched, he had practiced with paint and tempera, but his interest was in sculpture, working with bronze and on occasion gold. He thought painting an inferior art. A sculpture, unlike a painting, could be looked at from eight different angles and thus had to be perfect from eight different perspectives. But he had fun with this fresco. He made it for the girl, Valeria Cellini, his cousin and his love, too. It was Cellini family lore (you know the way that families have their myths, the stories that lend them importance and carve their place in history) that she would not have followed him even had he let her. She would not have left behind her family and her town—brave girl, she was the symbol of family loyalty and resilience. Of all the Cellini daughters, twenty generations of them, she was the first and she alone remained untouched by time and change: five hundred years old, perpetually beautiful and young, captured as if in amber while the other daughters of the Cellini line (the nineteen who followed her) had married and vanished into the myths of other families. The action Valeria would have taken, could have taken, didn't take, remains frozen in that one instant of after and before, frozen the way art can freeze something, after love and before all the potential of life. Valeria was fifteen years old.

  Benvenuto danced into town, escaping Florence, to stay with his uncle Cesare Cellini in the town of Città in the foothills of the Alps. He stayed the summer of 1519. He stayed until he became well acquainted with the town and his uncle's friends and family. He stayed until he fell in love, until the shy half smile igniting Valeria's pale rose-tinted face flowered into something more com
plete. He stayed until he grew restless, impatient, bored even by romance. Then he left, traveled north to Switzerland, turned south and went to Rome, the city of his dreams, where a wealthy woman became his patron and where he stayed until he had the courage to return to the city that had exiled him but to which he unequivocally belonged. By then Valeria had faded to an insignificant detail, erased by the fullness and bravado of his biography.

  In Città, though, he stayed long enough for Valeria to be seduced by hope, the depths of hope, its deep recesses and its wells, and to find himself basking in it, too, though they both knew that he was incapable of staying forever (that deceptive word) and that he would never have taken her away with him and that she would never have left. That is what she had loved about him, that from the beginning she knew their time together would not last. That was the draw, the pull, the urgency behind the love—the desire to conquer the impossible. The "if only" at that love's core, the "if only" triumphing to become all. But art trumped and Benvenuto left Città and he left Valeria and he left, as well, the story in the fresco, a token of his gratitude, an ode and a bow to exquisite pain.

  For a long time, 453 years to be exact, the fresco remained in the dining room of Fiori, the villa in the hills above Lago Maggiore, thirty kilometers outside of Città. It presided over parties and dinners and the ordinary family meals of twenty generations of Cellinis (Sunday dinners of polenta and uccellini, tiny birds with bones as delicate and tasty as marrow, shot by the Cellini husbands in the estate's bird arbor) until Giovanni Paolo Cellini and his wife, Elena, at great expense, had the fresco removed and restored and fronted by protective glass and rehung in the more tempered environment of their Città villa. Humidity (the enemy of frescoes everywhere) was eating the lime plaster and corrupting the pigment, slowly devouring the picture, and the Cellinis wanted to save it. They wanted it to last. For twenty generations it had survived. Giovanni Paolo Cellini, a short elderly man (he had his first child at fifty) with a halo of white hair and a missing hand disguised by a stiff black leather glove that endowed him with the aspect of a laborer rather than the banker that he was, would not allow the fresco to die on his watch. Elena, tall, thin, dark-haired, big-eyed, good wife, wouldn't either. Through the centuries the job of the Cellini wives had been to preserve the Cellini family's rituals and customs, and Elena well understood her role. So in the 1970s, when Elena and Giovanni Paolo's son was a teenager, the elaborate process of separating the fresco from the wall (digging out and destroying a good foot of plaster and stucco behind the picture) was undertaken.

  Young Cesare was all but oblivious to this exercise. He was a boy caught up in history, studying Latin and Ancient Greek at the Liceo Classico. He read Aeschylus in the original yet preferred the comedies of Aristophanes because he liked to laugh and make others laugh. His little sister, Laura, had this same love of laughter, but she went even further. A funny little girl with thick curly white-blond hair, the source of which eluded everyone, Laura's ambition was to one day become a clown. Three years younger than Cesare, Laura already knew who she was and what she wanted, and one day she would run away to clown school in Switzerland; but that's later, much later.

  Cesare liked music, could play the piano, was learning Dylan songs on the guitar, and had a passion for the harmonica. He listened to Italian music, too: Lucio Battisti and Lucio Dalla, and on occasion (strictly in private) Claudio Baglioni (but Baglioni was less hip, less cool, too romantic in a sentimental way, singing of "small, big loves"). Always Cesare dreamed of the big roads of America of which Simon and Garfunkel sang. America was his dream, just as Benvenuto had dreamed of Rome—a place where people did what they chose and anyone could become anything. In 1972, Cesare was fourteen years old, old enough to be aware that American boys were being blown to pieces in Vietnam. He watched this war on TV, watched it like a show each night, acutely aware, of course, that it was not a show. Aware that in France, one country to the north and west, the peace talks had been held, aware that Nixon had gone to China to speak with Mao Tse-tung, aware of the historic scale of it. He liked to know, Cesare did. He was a beautiful boy with thick dark hair so black that at times it almost seemed blue.

  It was a year, 1972, like any year, filled with history. Ezra Pound died in Italy two days after his eighty-seventh birthday. Marianne Moore died, too, and the poet John Berryman jumped to his death off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minnesota. So it goes and so it went and Cesare went with it. He watched the war protests on television, saw protestors gassed at American universities. Watergate began to unfold and Cesare began to ponder the consequences: one nightly drama replaced another. Being the boy that he was, fresh into adolescence, he had a girl-friend (named Francesca) and together they wondered mightily what would become of Pioneer 10 and the relics of human civilization it carried on its million-year journey into space, wondered if it would all be found and interpreted and how? (A million years from now, ten years from now, twenty, thirty, forty—where would they be? He would not be a banker like his father and his father's father and his father's father's father. Of this one fact he was certain.) Somewhere in the deepest part of him, he wanted to be a part of the bigness of all that was America—big musicians and big poets and big plans and big trips and big presidents and big protests and big failures and big wars and big dreams. Possibility, that was all.

  He was a boy, a fourteen-year-old boy, when the fresco was removed, one year younger than Valeria when she was captured for eternity. But at fourteen he was unaware of her, only half aware of his mother, who ran around the house and the city nervously making the arrangements for the fresco. Nervous because she had a nervous energy that fueled her and that seemed to reveal that she knew there was not enough time. Long ago she had given up her passion for Russian literature and her fantasies of taking trips to Moscow and St. Petersburg, of riding in a horse-drawn sleigh in the bitter cold, wrapped to the nose in furs, of being surrounded by people capable of speaking half-a-dozen languages fluently, especially the children she would someday have. She spoke five languages herself: Italian, French, Spanish, German, and English. For a while she had studied Russian, but then she married Giovanni Paolo, a man who spoke no language other than Italian and who had never traveled (and never would) beyond the perimeter of northern and central Italy. He was a good ten years older than she, and though she had known him since she was young (her father was a lawyer for the Cellini bank), in the beginning he had felt like a stranger, if kind, and their marriage had felt like an arrangement that was intended to please her parents more, perhaps, than herself. In this new life, her ambitions had become decidedly less complex and her faith decidedly more profound.

  Of her boy, of course, she was aware, more of his physical side (his skill at sports—soccer, skiing, tennis) than of his interior world (America, history, literature). She was acutely aware of his physical beauty. He was much more attractive than either she or her husband or their funny little Laura, though Elena could see herself in him: he had her height and Roman nose, long and distinguished. She was aware of Francesca, daughter of one of Cittàs richest and most prominent citizens, who had a thriving business manufacturing socks and whose accounts were at the Cellini bank; she was aware that Cesare and Francesca had a tight love. They went skiing together at Francesca's house in Cortina. They went sailing together from Francesca's house on the Costa Smeralda in Sardegna. The two would grow up together, falling in love at fourteen and staying together until they were twenty-two—eight years during which Francesca transformed from girl to woman, with her almond hair and her perfectly round face and her soft green eyes, and learned to expect nothing and everything.

  Francesca's mother, Signora Marconi, younger than Elena by a good fifteen years, draped herself effortlessly in all her money, lots of gold and fine clothes, Como silk and Tornabuoni leather. She would invite Elena to their various villas, and Elena, in turn, would invite her to her own villas and involve her (she was named Caterina but was known as Cat, pronounced with a ver
y hard C) with the elaborate process of restoring the fresco. Elena invited Cat to see the fresco in situ, before removal. She invited her to the restorer's studio in Milan. She invited her to the Città villa to elicit Cat's opinion about where the fresco should hang once restored. Elena lacked Cat's easy confidence and that is why Elena loved to be with her—as if Cat's confidence could somehow rub off. "Here," Cat said emphatically. "The fresco should hang right here." She was in the living room of the Cellini's Città villa. Cat was deeply tanned from an Easter trip to Sardegna. Smaller paintings hung on the wall Cat referred to, but it was a vast wall that would not swallow the fresco. And Cat was there when the fresco (restored) was hung in its new spot. Reaching her long and slender and tanned finger (bejeweled with one enormous diamond sunk in a thick band of yellow gold) toward Valeria's face, she drew a circle, targeting Valeria's expression. What she loved best about the painting, Cat said, was that pain. "It must be felt. Must. At least once, for some reason."

  Elena watched the beautiful hand encompassing the pain that Elena had always felt in the figure of the girl but had never articulated—a ripping ecstasy tearing across the face, familiar to Elena from paintings of religious trials, from Anna Karenina's travails. Seeing Cat describe the pain, contouring it with the confidence of experience, Elena had the urge to ask private questions, to talk like free young girls, when all was whimsy and potential. She did not, of course, because it would have been impolite. Such subjects were not discussed, and she was a good Catholic woman. But the pain, the heartbreak, it flourished in the privacy of her mind, Cat as the heroine with some lover, someone other than her small balding husband, emperor of socks—a ferocious kiss followed by tender bites on the back of a pale reclining neck, tender bites sending shivers of desire throughout her. Briefly this image cut across Elena's mind before she dismissed it and all such foolishness with an embarrassed prayer to Saint Jude.