Waking the Moon

“That’s me,” I said. He took my bag and I followed him to the waiting car, a navy blue Oldsmobile with MERCURY SKYLINE LIVERY stenciled on the side. I was a little disappointed but mostly relieved it wasn’t a limousine.

“Do you work for Mr. di Rienzi?” I asked after we had left the parking lot.

“Nope. He just hired me for tonight, and to take you back in the morning. Mind if I listen to the news?”

I shook my head. He clicked on the radio, and that was all the conversation we had. We drove north on the interstate. After an hour we pulled off Route 684 and crossed the Bear Mountain Bridge. Forty-five minutes later we arrived at Storm King.

I was expecting something grand, after the plane tickets and mysterious letter and the liveried car, something along the lines of the Orphic Lodge.

Instead, the di Rienzis’ house was at the end of a cul-de-sac in a small woodsy development, high up on the Palisades overlooking the Hudson. STORM KING ESTATES, said a wrought-iron sign, but there was nothing quite so dramatic as an estate anywhere in sight. The other houses were pleasantly suburban, set amidst plenty of trees now bare and stark against the backdrop of browning lawns and neatly raked piles of leaves. The di Rienzis’ house stood apart from all of these, on a small rise planted with huge old rhododendrons and mountain laurels and a slender, pampered-looking Japanese maple. Behind the trees and shrubs rose a sprawling Queen Anne Victorian, a real dowager dating to the turn of the century, with grey weathered shingles and a wide porch sweeping around it on all sides. It was certainly the oldest house on the street, and it commanded a marvelous view of the river and Storm King Mountain and even the George Washington Bridge, glittering like a string of glass beads in the distance. But it was a surprisingly comforting-looking house, nothing grand or intimidating about it at all, until Angelica’s father appeared at the door.

“You must be Sweeney.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, shaking his hand. It was the first time I had ever called anyone sir in my life. “You are—it was very, very kind of you to send me the tickets to come here.”

He smiled. “Well, I am very, very happy that you came. Please, come inside.”

I was shocked to see how old he was. Older than my parents, older even than my grandparents. Had Angelica ever mentioned that to me? But there was nothing frail about him—he was over six feet tall, big-boned and broad-shouldered, with an exaggerated, almost military, bearing, and his hand, while bony and blue-veined, was so strong my fingers cracked in his grasp. I protested when he bent to take my knapsack, but he ignored me and went inside, waving offhandedly to the Oldsmobile as it drove off.

“Did you have a pleasant flight? I wasn’t certain if you would have time to eat, so I have dinner ready for you.” I followed him down the hallway, too nervous to say anything but Yes sir over and over, like a new recruit. “At any rate airplane food is appalling, isn’t it? Let’s take this upstairs to your room, so that you can wash up if you’d like.”

He had a beautiful sonorous voice, with just the slightest Mediterranean warmth to it, and such extravagantly pronounced diction that he sounded like an exotic bird that has been trained to speak. I followed him upstairs, and then down a long hallway, where a number of photographs of Angelica hung in expensive, heavy frames. Angelica as an infant, innocent and self-contained as an egg; Angelica in a white dress for First Communion; Angelica graduating from elementary school, high school; Angelica at summer camp. Camp! I could as easily imagine her at camp as distributing alms to the poor in Calcutta; but there she was, tanned and squinting into the sun in her khaki shorts and white short-sleeved shirt with WENAHKEE OWLS embroidered on it. Between the photos were doors, all of them shut tight. I tried to guess which hid Angelica’s room.

“This is the guest room, here—you don’t have your own bath but it’s only a few steps down the hall. And there’s plenty of hot water.”

My room was large and cozy, the walls papered with a pattern of ivy squills and the floor covered with bright rag rugs. There was a large canopied spindle bed piled high with a feather comforter in a green duvet, and a small night table, where a vase of chrysanthemums and marigolds dropped petals onto a stack of magazines. On the wall hung a watercolor of gold hills and blue water and feluccas sailing in the distance.

“It’s wonderful,” I said. “This is so kind, Mr. di Rienzi—”

“Not at all, not at all.” He waved me away, setting my knapsack on the floor. “Now you’ll probably want to freshen up. When you’re comfortable, come downstairs. We’ll have dinner on the porch—I think it’s still warm enough for that, don’t you?”

On the porch it was barely warm enough, but Mr. di Rienzi got me one of Angelica’s cable-knit sweaters and draped it over my shoulders. It smelled so strongly of her perfume that I felt dizzy; but it helped keep off the lingering chill.

The veranda overlooked a long wooded hillside that sloped down to the Hudson. Over the white wooden railings I could glimpse the tops of trees, a few still brushed with scarlet and brown, and the river itself, dark and shimmering faintly beneath the stars. On the far shore glowed the lights of Beacon and, a few miles north, Poughkeepsie. Two symmetrical rows of red lights showed where a barge was being towed toward the locks upstate.

“Will you have some wine, Sweeney?”

It was odd to have an adult call me Sweeney rather than Katherine or Kate. But then Mr. di Rienzi only knew of me through his daughter, and Angelica wouldn’t have called me anything else.

“Yes, please.” I had changed into a white cotton shirt and chinos, faded but clean. At first I was afraid this would seem too casual, but now in the friendly darkness, the brisk air softened by the faint smell of Angelica’s perfume rising from her sweater, it all seemed just right. “Thank you very much.”

We drank a bottle of chardonnay, and ate warm crusty bread and fried potatoes drizzled with golden olive oil and fresh rosemary, and chicken and arugula brightened with pimiento. Mr. di Rienzi did not grill me about what had happened at school. When I asked after Angelica, he said that she was visiting her cousins in Florence, at the University there. He would join her for the Christmas holidays, but she would probably remain even after he returned to New York, to begin classes in the spring term.

“It is so beautiful there in the spring, it would be a shame for her to have gone all that way and then miss it. But already I miss her so terribly, it is painful for me to talk of her. I hope you understand.”

He stared at me with huge eyes pale and luminous as Angelica’s own. There was a faint flicker in them, a gentle threat that might almost have been amusement; but I knew better.

“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”

So we spoke of other things. He gently but insistently drew me out to talk about my family, where my father had gone to school, how my parents had met, how many older siblings I had and what their careers were. We finished the bottle of wine, toasting the slow dark coursing of the Hudson with our last glass. For dessert he brought out a little orange-enameled tin of biscotti wrapped in colored tissue, and showed me how to twist the discarded papers and loose them above a candle flame, so that they danced and spun and finally flared into ash. He would not let me help with the dishes—

“No, leave them. I have my own ways of taking care of them; it gives me some-thing to do in my retirement. Now, I think it is getting too cold out here for you. Let’s go inside to my study. Will you join me for a Sambuca?”

I was very impressed by all of this. In my family we did not eat outside or have wine at meals. We never ate after seven in the evening, and we certainly never had cordials after dinner. It was the first time I had Sambuca, and the sweet licorice taste reminded me of drinking Pernod with Oliver. Mr. di Rienzi served it in a tiny glass, like a lily blown of crystal, igniting it for an instant to send blue flame rippling across the surface.

“Very nice,” he said. “It takes the chill off the liqueur, and dissipates some of the volatile spirits. So you will not have a headache in the morning.” We were in his study, a small book-lined room. He smiled, motioning for me to sit in an enormous chair upholstered in slippery oxblood leather. “Now then—

“I understand that there were some very unfortunate things that happened to you, and to some of my daughter’s other friends at school this semester. Now, I don’t want to hear any more about it—it was quite unpleasant, hearing about it once from Angelica—so you don’t need to tell me or try to explain. I certainly do not blame you for any of it, Sweeney,” he went on in a gentler tone. “It is very, very common for young people to find themselves in—difficult circumstances—especially, perhaps, young people from