“It—it was a wonderful dinner, sir. This is all sort of too much—”
He waved his hand, as though dispersing a cloud of unpleasant smoke. “Of course, dear, of course. You don’t need to make a decision right away. I don’t imagine you could really start as a matriculating student anywhere until the spring term; but if you’d like to sit in on classes at GW…”
I told him I’d think about it. He gestured toward the door of his study.
“Angelica still feels very close to you, Sweeney,” he said. His gaze softened and his hand held mine for a long moment. “My daughter has always had wonderful judgment in her choice of friends. Nearly always,” he corrected himself. His eyes took on a keen look; I knew he was thinking of Oliver. “Now, you scamper up there and take a nice long bath, help yourself to any books you see, and tomorrow morning you sleep as late as you please. I get up early but don’t you worry about that. I think your flight is at two in the afternoon? The driver should be here by noon, to make sure you get there in plenty of time. Here, now I’ll see you to the steps—”
He placed his hand on my back and steered me out the door. At the foot of the stairs he smiled down at me.
“It will all work out for the best, Sweeney,” he said softly. “It always does.”
Impulsively I leaned up to kiss his cheek. “Good night, Mr. di Rienzi. And thank you again—”
“Good night, dear. Sweet dreams.”
The guest bathroom was small. A huge claw-footed tub took up most of the space, but after my four days of exile it seemed like a royal bath at Pompeii. A willow basket held seashell soaps from France, and muslin sachets of dried lavender and chamomile, and there were blue-and-white striped cotton towels thick and soft enough that I could have spread them on the floor and slept there. I almost wept at all this homey luxury, but instead I clambered into the steaming tub and stayed there for an hour. When I got out my fingers were puckered and pink as boiled shrimp. I felt thoroughly serene, calmer than I had been in weeks. Everything suddenly seemed manageable again. I had a new life waiting for me, new friends, a new school. Though of course GW wasn’t the Divine, and there would never be anyone like Angelica or Oliver.
I went back to my room, and found the covers turned down, a white plate with two foil-wrapped Perugina chocolates on the night table beside a carafe of water and a glass. To the pile of Vogues and New Yorkers a few books had been added: The Thirty-nine Steps, Anne of Windy Poplars, Margaret Mead’s Blackberry Winter. But I was much too tired to read. I ate the chocolates, drank a glass of water, and fell into dreamless untroubled sleep.
The next morning I slept until nearly nine o’clock. After showering and changing I went downstairs. There was a note on the kitchen table saying that Mr. di Rienzi had unexpected business to attend to and probably would not be back before my departure. He wished me well and told me that someone from George Washington University would be contacting me soon, and left the number for Mercury Skyline Livery, in the unlikely event that my car didn’t show by noon. There was coffee set up in the coffeemaker, cream and milk in the fridge, and a basket of pastries and fresh fruit.
I ate and went back upstairs. I lay on the bed in the guest room, thinking about my dinner the night before, and flipped through the stack of magazines. There was a recent issue of Paris Vogue addressed to Angelica, and the copy of Blackberry Winter had her name in it, written in that familiar swooping hand with peacock blue ink. I looked around the guest room for other signs of her presence but found none. Only that watercolor of a Mediterranean scene, which she must have brought back from some long-ago visit to the Aegean.
At last I gathered my things and went to wait for the car. As I walked slowly down the hallway I stopped in front of a closed door and tested the knob. I was curious to see Angelica’s room, just for one moment. But the door was locked. So was the next one, and the next, and the one after that. All the doors were locked. When I got downstairs I put my knapsack by the front door and walked very quietly down the hall, calling out softly for Mr. di Rienzi. There was no answer. When I reached his study, it was locked. Everything, locked. I returned to the front door, and waited with a mixture of melancholy and resignation and relief for the car that would bear me from Storm King.
I did not hear from Angelica. No letters, no phone calls; nothing save a small package that arrived a few days before Christmas, posted to my parents’ house in Armonk. The box was neatly wrapped in brown paper, and covered with brightly colored airmail stamps and the word FIRENZE stamped in red ink. When I opened it, there was another box inside, and inside that a nest of Italian newspapers and shredded bits of wrapping. I dug my fingers into the nest and withdrew something round and pocked with myriad tiny raised bumps, trailing an electrical cord.
It was a sea urchin. Like the one Angelica had on her desk at the Divine, its swollen sides striated in shades of pale rose and lavender and white. A sea urchin lamp, actually—it had been fitted with a tiny Christmas-tree bulb. It glowed a wonderfully soft, twilit purple, like a globe representing some lost and secret place. There was a little card with it, of marbled paper, and Angelica’s swirling peacock blue handwriting.
For my darling Sweeney,
A Gift from the Sea—
With all my love,
iii
Lost Bells
FOUR YEARS LATER I graduated from college with a respectable grade point average and a bachelor’s degree in sociocultural anthropology. As if by magic, the week before my graduation I received a letter from Luciano di Rienzi. It was written on the same rich paper and with the same royal blue ink as his earlier missive, and in the same controlled yet flamboyant hand. Inside he congratulated me on my matriculation, and hoped that I would not think it presumptuous that he had contacted an old friend of his at the National Museum of Natural History, Dr. Robert Dvorkin, and informed him of my interest in native studies. Dr. Dvorkin had agreed to set up an interview with me at my earliest convenience. Mr. di Rienzi wished me well in all my endeavors and remained, with warm regards, Luciano di Rienzi. There was no mention of Angelica.
My job at the museum consisted of cataloging all the photographs in the Larkin Archives, a collection of fifty thousand photographic images dating from the late 1800s to the present. Pictures of Native Americans, of every tribe imaginable, recorded in every shade of sepia and ocher and grey and black and white, and every kind of image: old silver nitrate negs, Polaroids, daguerreotypes, official government photos, Brownie snapshots, Kodak slides, Hasselblad 8x11s, even a strip of Imax film taken from one of the space shuttles.
Actually, there were 63,492 photos, but no one knew that until I had finished logging every one. That took three years. I was very lucky to have a job in my discipline, any job. If I’d been an archaeologist, I might have fared better. As it was, I was an armchair anthropologist, as distant from the objects of my study as James Frazer had been from his. Destined (doomed, I secretly believed) to a lifetime career at the museum.
Over the years we acquired other photographic collections, all of which needed to be archived. I had no advanced degree, and no money to go to graduate school, and indeed no burning desire to do so. But Dr. Dvorkin was exceptionally kind to me, almost a surrogate uncle. I was certain that he was a Benandante, but I never dared to ask. If I had, I’m sure he would not have given me an answer.