locked up with her court dresses in the trunk with the lost key. We said goodbye and went out, but the porter was waiting for us to make sure we hadn’t gotten anything and we walked back home through the terrible traffic and the dark streets.
Tibi was there when we got back and he had dinner with us and then late that night when I was reading someone knocked on my bedroom door and it was Tibi. He seemed to have gone out because he had his coat on over his shoulders like a cloak the way the Romans do. He also had on his plush hat and his tight pants and his plush shoes with gold buckles and he looked like a messenger. I think he felt like a messenger too because he was very excited and spoke to me in a whisper. He said it was all arranged. The old Princess had a painting that she wanted to sell in the United States and he had convinced her that I could smuggle it in. It was a small painting, a Pinturicchio, not much bigger than a shirt. All I had to do was to look like a schoolboy and no one would search my bags. He had given the old woman all of his money as security and he said some other people had bought in and I wondered if he meant my mother, but I didn’t think this was possible. When I delivered the painting in New York I would be paid five hundred dollars. He would drive me down to Naples on Saturday morning. There was a little airline that carried passengers and freight between Naples and Madrid and I could take this and catch a plane for New York in Madrid and pick up my five hundred dollars on Monday morning. Then he went away. It was after midnight, but I got out of bed and packed my suitcase. I wouldn’t be leaving for a week but I was on my way.
I remember the morning I left, Saturday, that is. I got up around seven and had some coffee and looked into my suitcase again. Later I heard the maid taking in my mother’s breakfast tray. There was nothing to do but wait for Tibi and I went out onto the balcony to watch for him in the street. I knew he would have to park the car in the piazzale and cross the street in front of the palace. Saturday in Rome is like any other day and the street was crowded with traffic and there were crowds on the sidewalk?Romans and pilgrims and members of religious orders and tourists with cameras. It was a nice day and while it is not my place to say that Rome is the most beautiful city in the world I have often thought that, with its flat-topped pines and the buildings all the colors of ripening, folded in among the hills like bone and paper, and those big round clouds that in Nantucket would mean a thunderstorm before supper but that mean nothing in Rome, only that the sky will turn purple and fill up with stars and all the lighthearted people make it a lively place to be; and at least a thousand travelers before me, at least a thousand must have said that the light and the air are like wine, those yellow wines from the costelli that you drink in the fall. Then in the crowd I noticed someone wearing the brown habit that they wear at the Sant’ Angelo School and then I saw it was my homeroom teacher, Father Antonini. He was looking for our address. The bell rang and the maid answered it and I heard the priest ask for my mother. Then the maid went down to my mother’s room and I heard my mother go out to the vestibule and say, “Oh, Father Antonini, how nice to see you.”
“Peter has been sick?” he asked.
“What made you think so?”
“He hasn’t been in school for six weeks.”
“Yes,” she said, but you could tell that all of her heart wasn’t in the lie. It was very upsetting to hear my mother telling this lie; upsetting because I could see that she didn’t care about me or whether or not I got an education or anything, that all she wanted was that I should get Tibi’s old picture across the border so that he would have some money. “Yes. He’s been very sick.”
“Could I see him?”
“Oh, no. I’ve sent him home to the States.”
I left the balcony then and went down the salone to the hall and down the hall to my room and waited for her there. “You’d better go down and wait for Tibi,” she said, “Kiss me goodbye and go. Quickly. Quickly. I hate scenes.” If she hated scenes I wondered then why she always made such painful scenes but this was the way we had parted ever since I could remember and I got my suitcase and went out and waited for Tibi in the courtyard.
It was half past nine or later before he showed up and even before he spoke I could tell what he was going to say. He was too tired to drive me to Naples. He had the Pinturicchio wrapped in brown paper and twine and I opened my suitcase and put it in with my shirts. I didn’t say goodbye to him?I made up my mind then that I was never going to speak to him again?and I started for the station.
I have been to Naples many times but that day I felt very strange. The first thing when I went into the railroad station I thought I was being followed by the porter from the Palazzo Tavola-Calda. I looked around twice but this stranger bent his face over a newspaper and I couldn’t be sure but I felt so strange anyhow that it seemed I might have imagined him. Then when I was standing in line at the ticket window someone touched me on the shoulder and I had that awful feeling that my father had come back to give me help. It was an old man who wanted a match and I lighted his cigarette but I could still feel the warmth of the touch on my shoulder and that memory that we would all be happy together again and help one another and then the feeling that I would never get all the loving I needed, no, never.
I got into the train and watched the other passengers hurrying along the platform and this time I saw the porter. There was no mistake. I had only seen him once but I could remember his face and I guessed he was looking for me. He didn’t seem to see me and went on down to the third class compartments and I wondered then if this was the Big World, if this was really what it was like?women throwing themselves away over halfwits like Tibi and purloined paintings and pursuers. I wasn’t worried about the porter but I was worried about the idea that life was this much of a contest.
But I am not a boy in Rome but a grown man in the old prison and river town of Ossining, swatting hornets on this autumn afternoon with a rolled-up newspaper. I can see the Hudson River from my window. A dead rat floats downstream and two men in a sinking rowboat come up against the tide. One of them is rowing desperately with a boat seat and I wonder have they escaped from prison or have they just been fishing for perch and why should I exchange this scene for the dark streets around the Pantheon? Why, never having received from my parents anything but affection and understanding, should I invent a grotesque old man, a foreign grave, and a foolish mother? What is the incurable loneliness that makes me want to pose as a fatherless child in a cold wind
