Styx & Stone (5 page)

“Bernie,” I said, shaking him by the elbow, “thump once for yes, twice for no.”

“Huh?”

“I was asking about Miss Jaspers,” I said.

“Hildy is a freethinking girl,” he pronounced. “Her reputation is well established here in the department. She’s quite emancipated, if you know what I mean. And attractive, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I had.”

“The speculation runs thick about whom she’s bedded. And every last one of the professors and graduate fellows saw her perform in that play.”

“Including yourself?”

“I said every last one, didn’t I?”

“You don’t like her, do you?”

Sanger shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that. There’s a bite to our repartee, an edge on our acquaintance, but we enjoy the exchanges.”

“Some might call it flirting. Do any of those rumors include my father?”

Bernie stiffened, then stumbled over an inadequate reply. I reminded him that my father was a healthy man, in good condition for his sixty-three years, and currently unattached.

“Have you heard any such rumors about Hildy Jaspers and my father?” I repeated.

“You know how nasty people can be,” he said. “Just because he took pity on her and helped her with some Latin. But I don’t believe it. I know what kind of man your father is, and he’s not so frivolous.”

The last thing I wanted to do was picture my father pitching woo to Hildy Jaspers, or anyone for that matter, but I wanted to understand his relationships within the department. It’s hard to reconcile Eros with one’s parents, especially if the object of desire is as potent as Hildy Jaspers. I shook the thoughts from my head.

“What about this Ercolano?” I asked. “Did people talk about him and Miss Jaspers?”

“Of course,” said Sanger. “Ruggero, poor guy. I liked him, and he did well with the ladies. He was quite handsome.”

“Terrible way to go,” I said, thinking of Ercolano’s last bath. “How do you suppose Chalmers happened to discover him after midnight?”

Sanger shrugged, then looked at me askance. “You sure ask a lot of questions.”

“I’m a curious gal,” I said.

“Well, if you’re curious about Hildy, you might ask that man out there,” and he pointed through the glass in the door. A thin man in his fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair cropped close to his scalp, was stooping to drink from the water fountain. Dressed in a dark-brown suit and tie, he appeared solemn and severe, hardly the type I’d picture with the spirited Miss Jaspers.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Gualtieri Bruchner. Visiting professor from Padua. There’s been some talk that he’s the latest partner in Hildy’s hedonistic pursuits.”

“Think he’ll talk to me?”

“He’s an odd one. Reserved and formal, with the personality of a sardine: tight and oily.”

“And he’s Miss Jaspers’s playmate?” I asked.

Again Sanger shrugged. He didn’t understand it any better than I. “That’s what some people say.”

I excused myself from the lounge and approached the gray figure, whose rigid face, I discovered, was indeed handsome in an intense, severe way. I introduced myself, and he offered his hand almost as an afterthought.

“I am sorry to hear about your father, Miss Stone.” His accent was stiff, though not especially heavy. “I do not know him well as I have only been in New York since June. But I hear only good said of him.”

I doubted that; my father’s temperament was contentious and antagonized many, myself first on the list. Some loved him, some hated him, and unanimity was not likely. “Thank you,” I said. “Have you had the chance to work with him at all?”

“No. I work on modern topics, you see, and our intellectual paths do not cross often. However, I lunched with him last Friday. It was by chance, really; we met at the Faculty Club dining hall.”

“What did you talk about? Since your intellectual paths don’t cross often, I would imagine you’d have trouble making small talk.”

Bruchner seemed taken aback. “Not at all. Although we specialize in different periods, we are not Welfs and Ghibellines. We share an interest in Letters. Your father told me about a book he was completing, and I discussed a paper I delivered recently at a conference on Marinetti and Futurism.”

“Was that the one at the Harrisburg Sheraton?”

Bruchner looked confused.

“Sorry,” I laughed. “I was mistaken. Do go on.”

“He told me hoodlums had vandalized your brother’s gravestone on Wednesday night,” he said. His voice was a drone of dull tones, and I wondered how his students stayed awake. “The incident left him disturbed. His hands were shaking.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t have a stroke.”

Bruchner stared into my eyes. “Although I tried to understand his rage, I could not; I have no children, you see.”

Now it was my turn to stare at him. “Thank you for the kind words,” I said. “I guess it’s been a bad week all around.”

“How do you mean?”

Was he kidding, or are academics truly as befuddled as people say? “Ruggero Ercolano,” I prompted.

“Oh, yes, of course. Horrible, horrible.”

I returned to the lounge where I’d left Bernie Sanger. We pulled a couple of chairs up to one of the tables and sat down. We weren’t quite ready to cozy up together on the sofa across the room.

“What did you think?” he asked.

“Didn’t I see him in a Charles Addams cartoon?”

“Pretty spooky. It’s not that he’s mean-spirited, he’s just as cold as ice.”

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t want to sound ignorant, but he said something I didn’t understand. Something about Welfs and Bellinis. What’s that?”

Bernie Sanger chuckled as only pompous intellectuals do. “Professor Bruchner meant Guelphs and Ghibellines,” he said. “The Germanic influence must have been too much for him up there near the Austrian border. That’s why he said ‘Welf.’ He also says ‘vine’ for wine.” Bernie had a good belly laugh over that one.

“All right, then,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over his cackle. “I’ll bite. What are Guelphs and Ghibellines?”

Bernie swallowed the last of his laughter and explained: “The Guelphs and the Ghibellines were opposing political factions in late-medieval Italy. The Guelphs, named for a noble family in Germany: Welf, or Welfen in the plural, supported a political alliance between the pope and rulers from the line of the Welf family. In a nutshell, the Ghibellines were antipapalists and loyal to another Germanic line.”

“Rather obscure reference, isn’t it?”

“Not in Italian history,” he said. “The struggle for political supremacy in medieval Italy was pervasive. Years ago your father wrote a very interesting article on the subject. I could let you have a copy if you’d like.”

“No, thank you,” I said, sorry I’d ever asked. “One more question, though. Hildy Jaspers said she hoped my father would become chairman, but he always hated the idea of administration. Had he changed his mind recently?”

Bernie shook his head. “No, there’s been some scheming recently, by Ruggero in particular. Ercolano was pushing your father to stand for chairman; Chalmers’s term is up at the end of the semester. But your father never agreed to be a candidate.”

The door opened and a stocky young man, dressed in a plaid shirt and black trousers with slicked-down black hair, entered. He nodded a polite hello to Bernie and me, then crossed the room, plopped himself down on the sofa, and opened a book.

“Ciao, Bernie,” a voice called out from just behind me. A second young man had entered the room without my noticing and now stood above me. I looked up and started. He was a strikingly beautiful creature, like a Botticelli angel. Soft green eyes, gentle olive complexion, wavy brown hair, casual and loose, as if he’d just piloted a sailboat across a windy lake. He stood there, easy, engaging, instantly likeable, and smiled sweetly at me.

Now it was Bernie’s turn to rouse me from my dream. I blushed crimson, unsure how long I’d been staring at the young man.

“Ellie Stone, this is Luigi Lucchesi,” said Bernie, embarrassed for me if his obvious discomfort meant what I thought it did.

“How do you do,” I said, holding out a hand. Luigi took it and pressed just enough to unsettle me further. Even his grip was beautiful.

“Please call me Gigi,” he said. “Everyone does.”

“Really?” I asked. “Gigi? Like Leslie Caron?”

Bernie chuckled. “Not exactly. It’s just short for Luigi. Still, rather a silly name for a grown man.”

Gigi smiled at the affront, seemingly taking no offense at all. Then he asked if I was Professor Stone’s daughter.

“Yes. Are you a student of his?”

“Oh, no. I’m a visiting lecturer.”

He looked awfully young to be a lecturer, but Bernie would have surely contradicted him if he hadn’t been who he said he was.

“What’s your field of study?”

“I specialize in history of science and art. This semester I’m teaching a course on Galileo’s poetry.”

“Galileo wrote poetry?” I asked. Again I had mortified Bernie. But Gigi didn’t seem to mind.

“Some,” he said. “But he’s better known for other things.”

As he spoke, I noticed his Italian accent was a dignified collection of precise vowels and guttural—not rolling—
R
s, what the Italians call
erre moscia
, or soft
R
. My father had described the phenomenon like this: “If you come from a wealthy family, it’s a sign of class or affectation, depending on your political persuasion. If you come from a poor family, it’s a speech defect, like a lisp.” This was the first time I’d actually heard it. I was bowled over.

Gigi took his leave, his smiling eyes lingering on mine as he turned slowly toward the exit. Then he disappeared into the corridor, and I exhaled for the first time since I’d laid eyes on him.

“I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that Hildy Jaspers plays in his sandbox,” said Bernie. “Not Professor Bruchner’s.”

My heart took a tumble.

“They seem very cozy with each other, but they try to keep everything on the QT.”

I returned to Saint Vincent’s at seven o’clock for visiting hours. My father’s condition hadn’t changed, and there was nothing for me to do but sit by the bed and watch the rise and fall of the respirator’s bellows. The steady pumping of the apparatus was not new to me. I had seen it once before, at the Westchester hospital where my brother Elijah’s body lay awaiting transportation to the funeral home after the accident. An old woman was tethered to the machine, which inflated her weak lungs with oxygen and sucked the CO2 back out. The vision remains eerily clear in my mind, and I associate it with Elijah’s corpse. At times his face blurs into hers: gaunt eyes and loose, colorless skin; a trickle of saliva escaping from the corner of her mouth; and thin gray hair, too weak to stick together, falling like dried grass on the foam pillow of a hospital gurney.

My mind drifted inexorably to thoughts of my older brother, his offbeat sense of humor, uncommon intelligence, and charm. A gangly kid, Elijah grew into a restless adolescent, rebellious in the often-strange world of Greenwich Village. There was the flirtation with a smoky crowd of beatniks on Bleecker Street and the time he ran off with a group of out-of-town toughs on motorcycles. He lived his adolescence as if it had been a challenge to my father’s authority and cultural legacy.

In the meantime, Dad and I were enjoying a special affinity, as special as it ever got between us, grounded in the iconography of American childhood: sports. I loved the Yankees and the football Giants, perhaps to win his approval or just to be close to him by sharing his zeal. My father didn’t seem to mind that I was a girl in love with boys’ games; he just liked having an enthusiastic protégée.

My idols were called DiMaggio, Berra, Vic Raschi, Hank Bauer. For a time in the late forties, my favorite Yankee was Snuffy Stirnweiss. I liked the name. My father indulged me for a while, but when Snuffy was traded to the Browns and later to the Indians, he disparaged him as a middling player, whose only good years had come during the war when the best players were overseas. By the time Mickey Mantle came to epitomize Yankee pride and glory, I was too old and rational. Baseball is a childhood obsession; adolescence brings other fixations, and the spell of the game dissipates.

Ours was not a religious family, so Yankee Stadium was my temple. I preferred the upper deck in the infield while my father, more reflective and attuned to the history of the
House That Ruth Built
, liked the bleachers in dead center, where he could contemplate the monuments at any time. So while I enjoyed rare moments in my father’s company, Elijah had always remained his favorite, and that despite his lack of direction and my father’s constant disappointment. Whether it was my sex or my sins that he couldn’t accept, I can’t say. There was nothing I could do to warm his frozen affection for any length of time.

A nurse nudged my shoulder, rousing me from my thoughts, and told me it was time to go. Before leaving, I looked again at the harness of tubing affixed to his face, and I realized he hadn’t moved since I’d arrived.