“Ah,” said Franco. “Ha, ha.”
“Ah,” said the woman. She reached under the wig, scratched enthusiastically at her scalp with a finger, and readjusted the black mat on her head.
A shiver traveled down Gideon’s back. Something bad was coming; you could feel it hovering in the air, waiting for its chance. He was sorry now that he’d told Phil about his father.
“It’s Vincenzo, the great Vincenzo, who is your mother’s son,” Franco cried. “Not you. What do you think of that? Isn’t that funny? To be not your own mother’s son?” He tried a laugh, but his muscles were too rigid to bring it off. He sounded, in fact, a little crazy. His fists, loosely curled on the table until now, were clenched, so that the extensor tendons on the back of each hand stood out like drinking straws.
Phil gawked at him. His mouth opened and closed twice before he could get even a few garbled words out. “Vinc... what...? How can...? I don’t ...I don’t...” He threw a perplexed, apprehensive look at Gideon, who was as clueless as he was.
Franco got to his feet again, more unsteadily this time, propping himself on the table with his fists and bathing them in a wash of alcohol and tobacco fumes. “Now I’m going to tell you a very interesting story,” he said, raking them with his eyes.
At which point Gideon, to his surprise and embarrassment, burst into a brief but noisy snort of close-mouthed laughter, managing to more or less snuff it out after a couple of honks. They stared at him, even the woman. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”
But there was no way he could explain, especially in Italian, that when Franco had leaned over them and peered so intensely at them, an image of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, the famous old Tenniel illustration, had jumped into his mind with amazing clarity. In his memory, the parallel was almost exact. There was Franco, the Mad Hatter himself, running the show according to rules that nobody understood, with the docile, dopey Dormouse—the woman with her shabby wig, in this case—slipping in and out of awareness beside him. Phil was the March Hare, who, if he wasn’t nuts before, seemed well on his way now. That left Gideon as Alice, the observer from outside who didn’t quite belong and couldn’t quite comprehend what was going on or where it was headed. A perfect fit all around.
Franco’s story fit too: a bizarre, jumbled tale of switched babies, bamboozled rich uncles, and confused identities straight out of a Victorian potboiler. Gideon’s Italian was just barely up to the job of following him, and even then, only because an increasingly incredulous Phil interrupted after almost every sentence with a befuddled
This was the upshot, as near to it as Gideon could make out:
In 1960 or thereabouts, Domenico de Grazia, whose wife was barren, had arranged with Franco and his wife Emma—
“My mother,” Phil had put in hopefully.
“Wait and see,” Franco said.
—had arranged with Franco and his wife Emma that Emma, through a process of artificial insemination, should secretly bear Domenico’s child, the object being to provide him with a genetically suitable heir. The process was successfully accomplished and Franco and Emma were secluded here in Gignese for several months, awaiting the baby’s birth. Emma wasn’t good at being pregnant—sick every morning—and complaining from morning till night, so much so that Franco couldn’t take it anymore and went home to Caprera after a while, until the baby was born, leaving Caterina, the live-in housekeeper, to deal with Emma’s moods. But finally it was over, and it was the old doctor—Lazzero? Luzzatto?—who delivered it, a baby boy that met Domenico’s requirements: a son and heir.
“Vincenzo?” Phil exclaimed dazedly. “You’re talking about Vincenzo?”
“Of course, Vincenzo, what do you think?”
“So Vincenzo and I are brothers—half-brothers? We have the same mother? Wait a minute, we’re the same age, how could—are you telling me we’re
“Stop interrupting,” Franco said. “Do you want to know or not?”
“Sorry,” Phil said meekly.
“All right, then.” Franco looked at Gideon and gestured at his empty glass.
This time Gideon wasn’t as anxious to leave and managed to signal the barman from where he sat. Franco watched hungrily as his second double brandy was carried out to him and set down, then quickly drank half of it and licked the residue from his lips.
“I can’t help wondering what happened to all those towels,” the woman mumbled. “Where could they have gone to? After so many years. It was so strange.”
Franco glanced at her, wiped his mouth with his fingers, and continued.
After the birth, Emma moped about until Franco, with Domenico’s assistance, persuaded her to adopt a child of her own, which Domenico “purchased” for her from a young neighbor girl she’d become friends with, an unmarried teenager, who was unable to care for her newly delivered baby.
Franco looked at Phil, his eyebrows lifted, waiting for him to speak.
Phil cleared his throat. “And that... that baby, that’s me? The one that was bought?”
“Yes, yes, that’s right,” Franco said meanly, “the one that was bought, that’s you. Five hundred dollars, American, was the price.”
Gideon had his doubts about Franco’s reliability and his intentions, but Phil seemed not to. “So you’re really not my father.”
“You’re finally catching on?”
“And my—and Emma Ungaretti isn’t really my mother.”
Franco nodded.
