The man’s joints were quiet. The way he stared, thoughtful under a white shock of hair, unexpectedly called to mind Barbara’s mentor Nettie.
“I’m angry,” the mother said. “I’m still angry.”
The movies got it wrong, she thought. What happened to foreigners in Italy wasn’t a mere hotting-up of the love life. It was crazier than that, a roiling makeover, the ingredients chopped and cooked into another kind of pasta altogether. The movies got it wrong, the mythology got it right: everybody turned into something else.
“I think,” she said, “I’m the one who needs to get out of the house.”
When Cesare nodded, she wasn’t watching. She only heard the scraping, his hard-to-shave neck against the confining collar.
She had alternatives to working at DiPio’s clinic. A number of alternatives, in fact, including a couple that Barbara and Jay had rejected as soon as they’d left the meeting with Roebuck. The family could’ve moved, for instance, taking a place more under American protection. NATO housed most of its people at a base in Aversa, an old mozzarella town north and inland, not far from the old Borbon playground at Caserta. According to Cesare, according to Silky, the base was a transplanted California suburb. San Fernando Mediterraneo. The Lulucitas could’ve transferred to one of those ranch-style prefabs, walking distance from a PX with ten movie screens. Or they could’ve moved down into the Consulate compound. The Attaché herself kept some sort of executive apartment in one of the attached palazzi, with a gun-toting doorman and steel-shuttered windows. Telecommunications hookups linked the houses with both land bases and carriers, the Sixth Fleet, and the nuclear presence beyond the Suez was just fifty minutes away. Down in the Consulate or out at Aversa, the family could’ve holed up like Crusader princes in Castel dell’Ovo. The new monsters imitating the old monsters.
But they’d all gotten enough of that with the late Lieutenant-Major. Nor did the parents waste time with Aurora’s loose talk about “the Grand Tour.” The in-law suggested that the family jaunt all over the NATO-lands. They could take in Hamlet at the Stratford-on-Avon; they could visit the grave of Jim Morrison. “Quite the spree,” so the grandmother put it. And all the family would need to do in return was make the occasional stop for Public Relations. A hospital here, an orphanage there.
Aurora, however, surprised Barbara with the restraint she showed about raising the possibility. The old playgirl never suggested the Capitals-of-Europe business directly to the kids, she wasn’t so nefarious as that, and so the daughter-in-law had kept her head as well. She’d dismissed the grandmother’s proposal out of hand, but she’d been polite about it. Besides, Barb figured the children wouldn’t have wanted to leave town. Hadn’t they asked to stay? Hadn’t JJ announced that here, he and his brothers and sisters had found fresh ground for the spirit, an inner Nea Polis?
Barbara, on the other hand, couldn’t get unstuck. That’s what she’d intended to talk about with the fallen priest, today, before the old man had let her know just how fallen he was. So ten minutes after Cesare left the apartment Barb found herself ranting again. She upbraided the old man in the sort of fury that, a few short days before, would’ve been reserved for the Jaybird and her marriage.
“You’re a wolf in priest’s clothing!” she cried. “This is just another oily Latin-lover thing, another…”
The empty room had an echo; that stopped her. She’d been railing at the blue-bordered map of Naples, open on the family table. What had triggered her outburst, the mother realized, was that she couldn’t find DiPio’s clinic on the map.
She tugged at an armpit and turned to the door. Her bodyguard was across the piazza at the gelateria, but once she caught up with the overgrown boy, he assured her he knew “the asylum.” In half an hour Barb was down in DiPio’s office, and in another half an hour the place began to feel like just the change she’d been seeking.
Though a stopgap measure with Byzantine funding, the clinic meant business. The disaster had left behind a considerable spectrum of situational disorders. Even as the goatee’d medico finger-walked Barbara through the building directory, it sounded as if she’d stumbled on a transatlantic annex to the Samaritan Center. Here was a counselor who handled phobias, there a pair did group work on socialization, and a third specialized in dissociative episodes. Barbara saw post-traumatic stress, family-of-origin issues, and dual diagnoses. The tune was so familiar that she could sing the harmony right there across DiPio’s desk. Between what she’d learned over the winter and what he needed this summer, Barb had no trouble arranging another of those jobs-in-quotes. She didn’t have to mention reimbursement from the Consulate either, not with her husband already at work in the kitchen. For the next four or five days, until one of the doctors called Mrs. Lulucita into his office for a chat, she arrived at the clinic each morning at ten, with Jay and the boys.
Chris and JJ, though, never hung around the downtown studio for long. The boys were good for a chore or two, and if DiPio could think of some drug or other supply that didn’t need to be rushed back to the clinic ASAP the two teenagers were glad to handle the pickup. But for the few days that Barbara played at having a Master’s in Social Work, or the Italian equivalent, John Junior and Chris didn’t linger at the old palazzo much past the time Mama was assigned a client. As soon as DiPio had someone for her, JJ would throw the camera bag over his shoulder. He’d hook the canvas pouch to his belt as well, an extra precaution against scippatori, and the later some staff member would let Barbara know which of the security team had gone off with the boys. She and the Jaybird wouldn’t lay eyes on their two filmmakers again till dinner.
This was as she’d expected, really. She counted herself lucky just to get the brothers to stop calling DiPio’s place a “booby hatch.” She knew better than to take them seriously, too, when the teens suggested that the patients’ psychosis might “rub off.”
“That’s always the danger,” Chris said, “when you’re exposed to another culture. Like, it rubs off” The boy kept a remarkably straight face. “Next thing you know, JJ and me will go out and be crazy.”
“Hey,” said the older brother, “why go out?”
Wise guys. Barb had to admit, though, that the clinic hardly conveyed a sense of order. DiPio’s palazzo, like many in the centro storico, was a multi-generation treehouse. Five stories of unmatched heights, with porches in different places, teetered around a small courtyard that, at the time when some baron had tacked on the first of the upper floors, had served as the stable. Apartments burrowed from one converted space to another, from a Borbon widening to a Fascist subdivision. There were rooms that could only be reached by first stepping out onto a balcony. The doctor himself had made changes, setting up therapy-cubicles in a couple of street-floor parlors. When Cesare spoke about the place, he fell back on antique vocabulary: a veritable Bedlam.
So far as husband and wife were concerned, actually, Bedlam felt like a healthy work environment. Around the clinic Barb and Jay encountered fewer hot buttons, fewer issues that came back to sex. They might’ve been a couple of expats going partners on a B&B. The Jaybird never gave the least indication of hurt feelings, for instance, about having his wife outrank him. She was playing doctor, around DiPio’s studio, whereas Jay’s position might’ve been chief cook and bottle-washer.