“HOLD!”
Crassus stepped down onto the gravel, and though he was dressed in nothing more authoritative than his house tunic, his voice brought the stunned quiet that follows the thunderclap. The familia froze, including Tertulla and Publius. Then, more gently, he spoke above the clamor of the disobedient fountain. “May not a father greet his son?”
Publius pressed his forehead against that of his mother, kissed her cheek and walked to stand before the paterfamilias. He was several inches taller than his father, but in force of presence they were equals.
“Father.”
“You look well.”
Publius smiled. “I am fit.”
“You are unwounded?”
“No harm that won’t heal.” Tertulla approached to stand two paces behind Publius, but no closer. She would not enter that sacred space between a Roman father and his warrior son. The men stood facing each other, almost at attention. Not even a cough escaped the rest of the familia.
“Did our letters reach you?”
“Forgive me for not writing. Gaul is a reluctant mistress, and Caesar is an unrelenting conqueror.”
An awkward silence, to none but dominus, domina and myself.
Crassus looked down, recovered himself and again met his son’s eyes. “You have acquitted yourself well in Aquitania.”
“I had hoped I would arrive before the general’s letters. I wanted to be the first to relate my adventures to you.”
“I shall pry every detail from you at dinner.”
“We will bore Mother.”
Crassus' hands twitched at his sides. “That is extremely doubtful.” For several moments, their eyes did what formality forbade: they embraced each other in silence, the old, crafty grey holding the young, impetuous blue. Tightly, tenderly.
“You look well,” Crassus said at last, then smiled at the redundancy. Publius grinned, and the spell of formality was broken.
“My son,” dominus said hoarsely, reaching for Publius and gripping him with a strength that belied his sixty years. They held each other close, unmoving, Crassus substituting the pressure of his grasp for what he could not voice: ‘I was sick with worry for your safety’-‘I prayed for you twice each day’-‘When letters came from Gaul, your mother and I would only open them at the temple of Bellona after making sacrifice; one time I vomited at the foot of the altar and had to give the appalled priest a thousand sesterces for his trouble.’
We watched in silence, many of us crying openly now. Publius cradled his father’s greying head against his shoulder. Dominus squeezed his eyes shut, but could not stop what nature and love demanded. They stood as statues, and we, barely breathing, completed the courtyard tableau.
Chapter XIII
56 — 55 BCE Winter, Rome
Year of the consulship of
Cn. Cornelius Lentulus Marcellinus and L. Marcius Philippus
It was past the sixth hour of the night. The family had retired over an hour ago. Publius’ homecoming meal had been simple enough: bacon-wrapped chicken, steamed mullet and flat bread. By comparison, the feast to mark the celebration of his return to Rome was a Herculean task: 200 guests including senior senators, both optimates and populares, entertainments and a menu which must be provisioned and prepared in only five days, on the third day before the Ides of Ianuarius, between the festivals of the Agonalia and the Carmentalia. None of the preparation could be started until now, not even the invitations, for fear of spoiling the surprise of Publius’ return.
I sat on a stool at one of the two long work tables in the kitchen, oil lamps casting slats of shadow and light through the pile of wax tablets on my left, one for each runner. Our six house scribes had their own work-in the morning I would have Curio send men throughout the city to wait while the invitations were printed by copyists-for-hire so that the scrolls could be delivered by mid-afternoon. Before me blurred a list Nicoteles had handed to me when I sent the bleary-eyed cook to bed. Nicoteles was talented, but I missed our old cook, Atticus, who had died at the venerable age of 59.
I perused Nicoteles’ inventory of items not already in store which would be required for the celebration’s menu, and it was not funny in the least:
500 dormice
6 boars
10 lambs
300 wheels of bread
10 gallons of garum (in addition to the three gallons of the fish sauce we always kept on hand)
5 large amphorae of honey
5 more of olive oil
3 baskets of almonds and 8 of fresh figs
All that and a veritable field of salad greens and vegetables.
Enough! I could look upon the interminable list no longer. Taking the weights from the scroll I watched it curl upon itself like the capital of an Ionic column turned on its head. The short lines of the missing items, in itself a poem of excess, gulled my reluctant attention back to the rash and idiotic blunder I had committed only hours before in a moment of irretrievable optimism.
After the servants had been fed, I had summoned Hanno to my tablinum. There I had instructed him, before he retired to the servants’ quarters, to deliver two scraps of parchment to the medical clinic at the front of the estate where Livia made her bed. The same bed where her mother, Sabina, had slept before her. He scooped them off my table with his customary technique of interlocking the remaining fingers of both hands to hold them securely. Then off he loped, may Hermes pluck the feather from his one good heel! I had changed my mind the moment he disappeared, but the hour would not allow me to call for him in a voice much louder than a whisper. He was gone, and with him, the middle ground above despair and below elation which I had so carefully constructed, then inhabited ever since Livia’s return to Rome.
They were little poems, gods defend me! Insignificant scraps of nothing that would destroy the modicum of harmony I had gingerly pieced together after years of misgiving, awkwardness and distance. Yes, I had kissed her on the massage table, but two months had passed since that impulsive moment, and curse my ignorance and innocence, I was more flustered and unsure now than ever I was before. I did not know how to approach her without feeling ridiculous, and having a hundred household duties as excuses, I had employed virtually every single one to avoid her.
Her rejection of me was imminent, of this I was certain. She would come to me with sad, green eyes, take my hand (this time in sympathy, not in fear), and tell me how much my friendship meant to her. Playing the scene in my head made me want to regurgitate.
Who is the greatest poetess of love, beguiling hearts down through the centuries? Sappho, as any schoolboy knows. Any schoolboy, it would seem, could teach me more of this art of the interplay between the sexes than I have gleaned from my paltry experience. (Not that I would take the advice of a pimpled coagulation of base impulses.) All that I know of love came from Livia herself, but that was twenty years ago; we were barely more than children when Eros kindled the fire in our eyes. Here, I might as well share with you how I tightened the noose around my own unworthy neck. I sent her this:
The sweet apple blushes on the end of the bough,
At the very end of the bough which gatherers missed.
Nay, missed not, but could not reach.
If only I had tempered my ardor and left it at that, Livia might have taken the sentiment as a genteel compliment and nothing more. At that moment, alone with my wine and my misery, I was convinced that life was a string of “if only’s” leading from one self-inflicted bungle to the next, until at some point, that phrase became one’s final utterance, and one expired with regret on one’s lips.