CHAPTER XXVIII
For someone so old, born and raised in a distant world, Honora’s familiarity with the photographs of the monuments of Rome made at one level her entry into the city a sort of homecoming. A large, brown picture of Hadrian’s Tomb had hung in her bedroom when she was a child. Waiting for sleep, suffering and recovering from illnesses, its drum-shaped form and rampant angel had taken a solid place in her reveries. In the back hall there had been a picture of the Bridge of Angels and two large photographs of the Imperial Forum had been handed backward, room to room, until they ended up in the cook’s quarters. Thus, some of Rome was very familiar. But what did one do in Rome? One saw the Pope. Honora asked at the American Express Office how this could be arranged. They were very helpful, respecting her age, and sent her on to a priest at the American college. The priest was courteous and interested. An audience could be arranged. She would receive her invitation within twenty-four hours of the appointment. She was to wear dark clothes and a hat and if she wanted to have some medals blessed he could recommend a shop—he gave her an address—where there was a fine assortment of religious medals sold at a 20 percent discount.
He explained, tactfully, that while the Holy Father spoke English, he spoke the language more fluently than he understood it and that should he forget to bless her medals, she could consider them blessed by his presence. Honora was, of course, opposed to the use of medals but she had plenty of friends who would value a blessed medal and she bought a stock. Returning one evening to her pensione she was handed a card from the Vatican, announcing her audience for ten the next morning. She rose early and dressed. She took a taxi to the Vatican, where a man in immaculate evening dress asked for her name and her card. He pronounced her name “Whamshang.” He asked her please to remove her gloves. His English was thickly accented and she did not understand. It took some explaining to make clear to her that one did not wear gloves in the presence of the Holy Father. He took her up a flight of stairs. She had to stop twice to rest her legs and get her wind. They waited in an anteroom for half an hour. It was after eleven when a second equerry opened some double doors and ushered her into an enormous salone, where she saw the Holy Father standing by his throne. She kissed his ring and sat in a chair that was proffered by a second equerry. He held, she noticed, a salver in his hands in which there were several checks. It had not crossed her mind that she would be expected to make a contribution to the Church during her audience and she put a few lire onto the salver. She was not shy but she felt herself to be in the presence of holiness, the essence of a magnificently organized power, and she regarded the Pope with genuine awe.
“How many children have you, Madame?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t have any children,” she said, speaking loudly.
“Where is your home?”
“I come from St. Botolphs,” she said. “It’s a little village. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it.”
“San Bartolomeo?” The Holy Father asked with interest.
“No,” she said, “Botolphs.”
“San Bartolomeo di Farno,” the Pope said, “di Savigliano, Bartolomeo il Apostolo, II Lepero, Bartolomeo Capitanio, Bartolomeo degli Amidei.”
“Botolphs,” she repeated, halfheartedly. Then suddenly she asked, “Have you ever seen the Eastern United States in the autumn, Holy Father?” He smiled and seemed interested but he said nothing. “Oh, it’s a glorious sight,” she exclaimed. “I don’t suppose there’s anything else like it in the world. It’s like a harvest of gold and yellow. Of course the leaves are worthless and I’ve gotten so old and lame that I have to pay someone to rake and burn them for me but my they are beautiful and they give such an impression of wealth—oh, I don’t mean anything mercenary—but everywhere you look you see golden trees, gold everywhere.”
“I would like to bless your family,” the Pope said.
“Thank you.”
She bowed her head. He spoke the blessing in Latin and when she felt sure that it was ended she loudly said Amen. The interview ended, an equerry took her down and she passed the Swiss Guards and returned to the colonnade.
Melissa and Honora didn’t meet. Melissa lived on the Aventine with her son and a donna di servizio and worked on a sound stage near the Piazza del Popolo, dubbing Italian spectacles into English. She was the voice of Mary Magdalen, she was Delilah, she was the favorite of Hercules; but she had the Roman Blues. These are no more virulent than the New York Blues or the Paris Blues but they have a complexion of their own and like any other form of emotional nausea they can, when they are in force, make such commonplace sights as a dead mouse in a trap seem apocalyptic. If homesickness was involved, it was not, for Melissa, a clear string of images evoking the pathos, the sweetness and the vigor of American life. She did not long to canoe on the Delaware once more or to hear, once more, harmonica music on the dusky banks of the Susquehanna. Walking down the Corso her blues were the blues of not being able to understand the simplest remark and the chagrin of being swindled. It was the Campidolio on a rainy day, with a guide trailing her around and around the statue of Marcus Aurelius, complaining about the season and the business. It was a winter rain so cold that she felt for the host of naked gods and heroes on the rooftops without even a fig leaf to protect them from the wet. It was the damps of the Forum, the chill in the seventeenth-century stairwells and the forlorn kitchens of Rome with their butcher’s marble, their fly-specked walls and their stained pictures of the Holy Virgin hung above a leaky gas ring. It was autumn in a European city with war forever in the air; it was the withering of those clumps of flowers that grow in the highest orifices of Aurelian’s Wall, those clusters of hay and grass that sprout up between the very toes of the saints and angels who stand around the domes of Roman churches. It was that room on the Capitoline where the Roman portrait busts are stacked up; but instead of feeling some essence or shade of Imperial power she was reminded of that branch of her family that had gone north to Wisconsin to raise wheat. There seemed to be Aunt Barbara and Uncle Spencer and cousins Alice, Homer, Randall and James. They had the same clear features, the same thick hair, the same look of thoughtfulness, fortitude and worry. Their royal wives were helpmates—and they sat in their marble thrones as if the pies were in the oven and they were waiting for their men to return from the fields. She tried to walk through the streets looking alert and hurried—caught up in the tragedy of modern European history—as most of the people on the street seemed to be, but the sweetness of her smile made it clear that she was not a Roman. She walked in the Borghese Gardens feeling the weight of habit a woman her age or any other age carries from one country to another: habits of eating, drinking, dress, rest, anxiety, hope and, in her case, the fear of death. The light in the gardens seemed to illuminate the bulkiness of her equipment, as if the whole scene, and the distant hills, had been set up for someone who traveled with less. She walked by the moss-choked fountains and the leaves were falling among the marble heroes; heroes with aviator’s caps, heroes with beards, heroes with laurels and ascots and cutaways and heroes whose marble faces time and weather had singled out capriciously for disfigurement. Troubled and uneasy, she walked and walked, taking some pleasure in that tranquillity that falls with the shade from great trees onto the shoulders of man. She watched an owl fly out of a ruin. At a turning in the path she smelled marigolds. The garden was full of lovers, very sweet with one another and candid about their pleasures, and she watched a couple kissing by a fountain. Then suddenly the man sat down on a bench and took a pebble out of his shoe. Whatever the significance of this was, Melissa realized that she wanted to get out of Rome and she took a train to the islands that night.