simple, as advertised, with straw mattresses for sleeping, but there was good reading light and a nice fire. While Chink and Ernest rested before dinner, I went exploring, thinking I might find a kitchen and a basin to soak my poor feet. But every corridor looked like every other. I tried to follow voices, but there were none. Finally, I took a chance on a long, dark passageway only to find that I’d stumbled on the monks’ private quarters. Several doors opened all at once, shaved head after shaved head popping out like moles. I was horrified, and returned to the room where I collapsed and spat out my story. The boys just laughed, of course, and then Ernest told me he thought I’d likely been the first woman to tread these halls in a thousand years! He promptly put it in a letter to Gertrude and Alice:
The next morning we headed out for Aosta feeling more ready to tackle the rest of the pass-or so I thought until my right oxford split open at the seam.
“Serves you right, Miss Vanity,” Ernest barked. Frankly, he wasn’t in much better shape. He was still nauseated from the altitude, and it took everything he had to go the remaining leg of the journey. Only Chink was still in good form. He took a knife and cut open my other shoe for me, and this was the way we hobbled into Aosta the next day, stepping out of a snow-throttled pass into full-on spring, pale green hills with glorious vineyards to every side. I joked in a letter home to Ruth that the boys all but had to carry me into town, but the truth was I’d surprised myself with my stamina. It hadn’t been pretty by any stretch, but I’d shown more endurance than I thought was even possible. If it hadn’t been for those terrible shoes, I might have run the last hundred yards to Aosta.
FIFTEEN
On the train to Milan, I slept like the dead and woke to hear Ernest and Chink talking about Benito Mussolini. The new fascist leader was in town, and Ernest wanted to try to use his press card to arrange an interview. He thought Mussolini was the biggest bluff in Europe just then and was dying to meet him. Meanwhile, Chink had to get back to his post, and so he left us there with kisses and promises that we’d meet again soon.
Ernest was happy to be in Milan again. After we found me new shoes, our first stop was the gorgeous and imposing stone mansion in the Via Manzoni that had been converted into the Red Cross hospital where Ernest and Chink had both recovered. We stood at the gates and looked up at the balconies and terraces, the striped awnings and wicker furniture and fat potted palms.
“It looks like a fine hotel,” I said to Ernest.
“It was good living, all right. Too bad we had to get shot to get inside.”
“I’m sorry I can’t really know what it was like for you.”
“I’m glad you’re here to hold my hand for it just the same.”
“That I can do,” I said, and reached for him. We walked to the Duomo next and then to Biffi’s at the Galleria where we drank sparkling wine floating with fresh strawberries, and although Ernest didn’t often speak about his time at the front, talking and being with Chink had primed the pump, and he was full of it now. Stepping into Milan had completed the process. The whole trip had become a time machine, and he was back.
“It’s funny,” he said, “but sometimes what I remember most about the night I was shot is the mosquitoes. They got in your ears and into the corners of your eyes and you couldn’t sleep for them. Not that we were sleeping much anyway. Then the sky went up in flames. I was blasted right off my feet. We all were. I couldn’t feel anything at first, and then there was just a pressure in my chest like I couldn’t breathe and a jangling in my head.”
“Do you really want to say all this?” I asked gently. “You don’t need to.”
“I guess I do,” he said, and then fell quiet for a few minutes. “My hearing was all off, but someone was yelling for help. Somehow I got over there, and lifted him up and carried him to the command post. I don’t even know how. I hardly remember that part, just feeling my legs going to pieces under me. I heard the machine gun afterward, as if it had nothing to do with me. I went on running and put the bastard down and then I was down, too. Then nothing. I don’t know what else.”
“Then the field hospital,” I said. “And the train to Milan.”
“Yes,” he said. “Every time that train stopped, flies streamed through the open windows and covered my bloody bandages. I was two days on that train.”
I nodded. It wasn’t years behind him at all, but right there in his face and in his eyes, the way he’d come to Milan like a broken doll. Not a hero, but a boy who might never truly recover from what he’d felt and seen. It gave me a sharp kind of sadness to think that no matter how much I loved him and tried to put him back together again, he might stay broken forever.
“You must be thinking about Agnes today,” I said after a while.
“Only a little.” He covered my hand with his. “I’m glad we can do this together.”
“Me too.” I knew he was telling me the truth, but I also knew that if it were possible, he would have preferred to have me and Agnes both there-his past and his present, each of us loving him without question-and the strawberries, too. The wine and the sunshine and the warm stones under our feet. He wanted everything there was to have, and more than that.
I slept and read at our hotel the next afternoon while Ernest arranged for an interview with Mussolini. He’d recently been elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies, and this fascinated Ernest. The man seemed to be a mass of contradictions. He was strongly nationalistic, and wanted to bring Italy back to its former glory by reaching into its Roman past. He seemed genuinely invested in the plight of the working class and of women, all of which he’d laid out in
“Are you nervous?” I asked as he was organizing his notebooks and preparing to leave.
“Of what? He’s just a big bully, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know. Some say he’s a monster.”
“Maybe, but monsters don’t always look that way. They have clean fingernails and use a knife and fork and speak the King’s English.”
I buttoned his coat and brushed the fabric over his shoulders with my hands.
“You’re fussing, wife. Take a nap, and don’t worry.”
He was gone for two hours, and when he came back to the hotel to type up his notes, he seemed all too pleased to tell me he’d been right. “The man’s up to here with bluff,” he said, gesturing to his neck, “and nothing on top.”
“Was he wearing his black shirt?” I asked, very much relieved.
“He was, they all were.” He sat down at the desk and put fresh paper in his Corona. “He’s bigger than you’d guess, too, with a wide brown face and very pretty hands. A woman’s hands, really.”
“I wouldn’t write that if I were you.”
He laughed and began to type rapid fire in his usual way, his fingers stabbing quickly with very little breaking or breathing. “I’ll tell you what else,” he said without looking up, “there was a beautiful wolfhound pup with him in the room.”
“So the fascist monster is a dog lover.”
“Maybe he planned to eat it later,” he said, grinning.
“You’re terrible.”
“Yes,” he said, his index fingers poised for another violent attack on his machine. “That was a fine dog.”
The next day we boarded a bus to Schio, where Ernest wanted to show me the mill and the wisteria and every part of the town that had managed to stay so fine in his memory, no matter what else had happened around it. But on the way, the sky dimmed and grew gray. It began to rain and didn’t stop. When we finally arrived at the town, Ernest seemed surprised. “It’s so much smaller,” he said.
“Maybe it’s shrunk in the rain,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, but quickly realizing that it wasn’t going to be possible. For the whole visit, Ernest wrestled with memory. Everything had changed and grown dingy in the four years since he’d last been here. The wool factory-closed down during the war-spewed black muck into the swimming hole where Ernest and Chink had bathed on so many hot afternoons. We walked up and down the winding streets in the rain, but everything looked dull and lonely, the shopwindows full of cheap dishes and
