“What is it?” Malory puffed after.
“L’Isola Tiberina. The island of the Tiber!” Tibor shouted into Malory’s uncomprehending face. “The best goddamned place to have a child on Earth. Follow me!”
“Ah,” Malory said. And armed with little more knowledge than before, Malory struggled over a stone bridge to the Isola Tiberina following Tibor as he turned right beneath an Art Nouveau awning: Ospedale Fatebenefratelli.
“Buona sera.” A nun nodded at him. “Sua moglie?” Malory was on the verge of stopping and asking which way it was to the maternity ward, when he saw the sign Maternità and turned left.
“Malory!” Tibor shouted at him from the opposite direction. “Forget the signs, this is Italy.” At a slightly slower pace, Malory carried Louiza into one courtyard, full of visitors squatting on plastic benches or stretched out on old newspapers along the wall. They jogged around a makeshift bar of charcoal burner and clothesline holding pages of the day’s L’Osservatore Romano, through another arcade and into a second courtyard that turned back in the direction of the bridge. Malory looked hopefully to the signs on the left-hand staircases, but most of them were either unintelligible or prefixed with pessimistic onco’s and cardio’s.
“I told you,” Tibor said, running for a staircase in a far corner, “no signs! This way.” Malory followed Tibor up a staircase one flight, then two.
“Almost there, Louiza,” he whispered her name, setting his courage to the verge of overheating with the thought that he, Malory, was on the cusp of fatherhood.
“Malory,” Louiza said, “you’ll stay with me, won’t you? You’ll stay?” She had forgotten about the equations, forgotten about the problems. The contractions had focused her mind on this miraculous man who was carrying her — was he really big enough to do that? — carrying her in his arms.
And Malory — Malory didn’t know what the rules were, barely knew where they were, but he pulled Louiza tight, his cheek pressed to hers, her breath hot and wet in his ear. And if it were possible, he felt the Pip in the Kit Bag pull her in even tighter as he floated, yes floated with the long-sought Louiza in his arms down the hallways of the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli.
“Fututi pizda matii!” Tibor shouted for the fifth time that morning. “Eccoci qua! Here we are!” Tibor stopped at a door much like the others. A variety of nurse-like nuns or nun-like nurses kept a steady flow down the slow lanes of the corridors as Malory tried to catch his breath. And with that announcement, Tibor turned the handle and pushed the door wide open.
Breathless as he was, Malory stopped breathing for more than a moment at the radiance that embraced the three of them. Even Louiza raised her face towards the glow that came from inside. The room that opened up to them was at the forward-most point of the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, the prow of the ship. It was a triangular room of sunlight and marble; an altarpiece window on starboard and another on portside made the room seem like it was carving a wake of light through the Tiber towards the Ponte Garibaldi and, in the far distance, the dome of St. Peter’s. And the sun from the windows made it nearly impossible to see the few contents of the room — an armchair, a low table, a pair of beds.
A nun appeared from behind the door.
“We’ve been expecting you, my dear.” An English accent. The sister guided Malory to the bed on the left. She pulled down the covers and smiled. Malory, in his exhaustion, accepted both accent and invitation as he would a pair of scones and a cup of tea. He met the sister’s smile and set Louiza gently on sun-warmed sheets.
“Don’t go,” she whispered through the sweat and the matted hair.
“No one’s going anywhere,” the sister said, easing Louiza’s grip from Malory’s neck. “We’re just going to clean you up and help you into something more comfortable. You’ll want to look your best to greet your new baby, won’t you?”
In the Roman sunlight, filtered only by the umbrella pines outside the window and a bit of curtainy lace, Louiza was as angelic as any of the creatures he had seen dancing in the dust of the organ loft that afternoon back in March. Some might say Louiza needed a serious wash-up after her cross-continental hegira. But to Malory, there was no more best than how she looked.
“Thank you.”
Not Louiza’s voice.
Malory turned. He hadn’t seen anyone else in the room when he’d entered, but now he turned to the new voice, and saw on the other bed a figure intercepting the force of the sun from the far window. The figure, a woman, didn’t so much deflect the current of light from the window as draw it inwards. A long braid wrapped around one shoulder onto her breast, she was a vision in gray — gray hair, gray eyes as if she had captured all the color of the sun, determined to transform herself into the black-and-white heroine of a movie by Fellini. It was a gray that shone like the scales of an enchanted fish, a half-seen mermaid, a transparent stream, the hidden, veinless back of an autumn leaf. The hair was pulled away, back from the cheekbones, as impossibly sculpted and Slavic as any Pietà. At the heavenward end of her left cheekbone, a soft mole led Malory to the woman’s eyes, which waited in serenity for Malory’s full attention. Gray-haired as she was, the woman could not have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five years old.
“Thank you.” The woman smiled at Malory with a softness that pushed the corners of her eyes into Siamese feathers, although it may — Malory thought later — have been only the smoke from a Gitane between her fingers that she handed up to Tibor. Could you really smoke in Italian hospitals, and just before you were due to give birth? But what stopped Malory short was the sound of the woman’s voice. It shared not only the same Eastern European tones as Tibor’s, but also its uncomfortable dissonance. The sound that came to Malory’s right ear was gentle with undertones, he thought, of lavender and ambrosia, though he was only vaguely aware of what ambrosia might be. But at the same time, the “thank you” that came into his left ear was nasal and unsettling, like a sorceress from a Brothers Grimm tale scratched out in Cyrillic.
“You’re welcome,” Malory said. “But thank you for what?”
“For rescuing my husband.”
“Ah,” Malory said, “you are La Principessa.”
“And I am the Count of Monte Cristo!” Another voice entered the room, another accent — American, a male voice. The man belonging to the voice was tall. Red-haired, in a full-bodied lupine way that made him seem twice as tall as Malory, with red hairs protruding from his cuffs and running down onto his knuckles. He was wearing tan khakis, a pink-striped shirt, a blue blazer, and a pair of soft, expensive moccasins that seemed out of place with the white coat draped cavalierly over his shoulders. Malory hoped that this was the standard uniform for obstetricians in Rome.
“Are you Louiza’s—” Malory began to ask, but the nurse jumped in.
“Doctor, I thought the fathers might go down to the cortile for a coffee, while we prepared the ladies.”
“Excellent!” the red-haired American boomed. And the vibrations of the boom had an effect on Malory’s knees and drew him to his feet. “You gents grab a coffee while I check up on your wives.”
“Malory!” Louiza called. He could see that something about the red-haired doctor clearly terrified her. But it was time for Malory to be a man, to be a father, to do the manly thing and let the professionals take charge and he would be back for the birth and the life and Louiza in the five minutes it would take for the nurse to run a washcloth across her pale skin and change her into something more appropriate for new beginnings.