Free Hill Towns by Anne Rivers Siddons Page A

was immense and real. The life he led with Ada Forrest was exactly, he said over and over in the magazines and newspapers, the sort of life an artist should lead. Neither of them asked anything of the other or minded what the other did. And what they, together and separately, did was as famous as his paintings. Sam Forrest. Sam Forrest with this young graduate assistant and his bovine child from Newark, New Jersey?
    “Did you win the wedding in a Top Forty contest?” Hays Bennett said.
    “Actually, Hays, he’s family,” Colin said. His smile was creamy with satisfaction.
    “Family. I see,” Hays said. “Your mother’s or your father’s?”
    “Well…Maria’s, really. He’s her uncle or something. By marriage. He’s married to her mother’s cousin, I believe.
    The family who still live in Florence.”

    HILL TOWNS / 61
    “Naples, Colin,” Maria said in her smoky voice. She smiled at him indulgently. “The Mezzogiorno. It’s not at all the same thing.”
    “Well, wherever,” Colin said. “Isn’t that something? Even I didn’t know, and then she hands me this letter from him….”
    We all looked at Maria. She dropped her eyes.
    “It sounds like bragging,” she muttered.
    “So, anyway, you’re all invited,” Colin crowed. “And right now, before God and man and this assemblage, Maria and I want to issue a formal invitation to Joe and Cat to come with us and be our attendants and drive with us through Tuscany. Go on our honeymoon with us. Is that tacky, or what? How about it, Joe? Show us the Italy of literature. Be our cicerone.”
    The group fell silent. Joe did not speak. I felt Hays’s eyes on me.
    “Let’s do it,” I said, my heart bucking like a wild thing under my silk shirt. “Let’s just…do it!”
    “Ah, God, I’d love to, but we couldn’t,” Joe said. “Cat couldn’t….”
    “Oh, yes,” Corinne Parker said. “Cat could.”
    “Could you?” Joe looked at me. Everything that was unsaid, had always been unsaid, shimmered in the air between us. I could not read his eyes. They were, still, the eyes of the stranger who had spoken earlier.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Then,” Joe said, smiling, “we will. And on your head be it.”

4
    E VEN BEFORE WE LEFT—WEEKS BEFORE, IN FACT—THE
    world on the Mountain turned strange. Everything seemed too bright and vivid; I felt, as I went about making preparations for the trip, that the air around me was perpetually lit by unseen strobe lights.
    “Do you feel like we’re making a movie about getting ready to go to Italy?” I said to Joe.
    “Nope,” he said. “I feel like we’re already there. Nothing has felt this real in a long time as this trip.”
    He had been listening to Italian language cassettes for several weeks, and studying guidebooks, and reading prodi-giously about the cities we would be visiting. Books on the hill towns of Tuscany, on Etruscan history and art, on food and customs and architecture littered his study and the big room over-looking the Steep in which we practically lived.
    He was already fluent in the idiomatic Italian of the cassettes and peppered his conversation with phrases he liked.
    62

    HILL TOWNS / 63
    “ Buon giorno, Catti. Ho fame. Quando che colazione? Fac-ciamoci un bicchiere. Dove sono i gabinetto ?”
    “Good morning,” I would reply. “Breakfast is never unless you feel like cooking it. And it’s about twelve hours too early for a drink. And you damn well know where the toilet is.
    Joe, do you realize that virtually everything you’ve learned so far has to do with eating and drinking or the elimination of same?”
    “I have my priorities,” he said. “OK, how about spogliati ?”
    “If it’s not about food or shit, I’m game,” I said.
    “It means, take off your clothes,” he said, leering.
    “They do that in Italy?” I said, peeling my nightgown off slowly to the rhythm of an imaginary bump and grind.
    “Why else do you think they close the shops from noon to four? Ah, Cat,