Bluebeard (39 page)

After Dan and Fred were killed, and before the United States got into the war, Marilee was the toast of Rome. She had a wonderful time shopping and dancing, dancing, dancing, with the count, who enjoyed hearing her talk, and was always the perfect gentleman. Her wish was his command, and he never threatened her physically, and never demanded that she do this or that until one night, when he told her that Mussolini himself had ordered him to marry her!

“He had many enemies,” said Marilee, “and they had been telling Mussolini that he was a homosexual and a British spy. Mussolini certainly knew he loved men and boys, but didn’t even suspect that a man that silly could have the nerve or wit to be a spy.”

When Mussolini ordered his Minister of Culture to prove that he wasn’t a homosexual by wedding Marilee, he also handed him a document for Marilee to sign. It was designed to placate old aristocrats to whom the idea of an American floozy’s inheriting ancient estates would have been intolerable. It set forth that, in the case of the count’s death, Marilee would have his property for life, but without the right to sell it or leave it to anyone else. Upon her death, it was to go to the count’s nearest male relative, who, as I have said, turned out to be an automobile dealer in Milan.

The next day, the Japanese in a surprise attack sank a major fraction of the United States warships at Pearl Harbor, leaving this still pacifistic, antimilitaristic country no choice but to declare war on not only Japan, but on Japan’s allies, Germany and Italy, as well.

But even before Pearl Harbor, Marilee told the only man ever to propose marriage to her, and a rich nobleman at that, that no, she would not marry him. She thanked him for happiness such as she had never known before. She said that his proposal and the accompanying document had awakened her from what could only be a dream, and that it was time for her to return to the United States, where she could try to deal with who and what she really was, even though she didn’t have a home there.

But then, all excited the next morning about going home, Marilee found the spiritual climate of Rome, although the real Sun was shining brightly and the real clouds were somewhere else, to be as dark and chilling as, and this is how she described it to me in Florence, “rain and sleet at midnight.”

Marilee listened to the news about Pearl Harbor on the radio that morning. One item was about the approximately seven thousand American citizens living in Italy. The American Embassy, which was still operating, still technically at peace with Italy, announced that it was making plans to provide transportation back to the United States for as many as possible, as soon as possible. The Italian government responded that it would do all within its power to facilitate their departure, but that there was surely no reason for a mass exodus, since Italy
and the United States
had
close bonds of both blood and history which should not be broken in order to satisfy the demands of Jews and Communists and the decaying British Empire.

Marilee’s personal maid came in with the quotidian announcement that some sort of workman wanted to talk to her about the possibility of old, leaking gas pipes in her bedroom, and he wore coveralls and had a toolbox. He tapped the walls and sniffed, and murmured to himself in Italian. And then, when the two of them were surely alone, he began, still facing the wall, to speak softly in middle-western American English.

He said that he was from the War Department of the United States, which is what the Department of Defense used to be called. We had no separate spy organization back then. He said that he had no idea how she felt down deep about democracy or fascism, but that it was his duty to ask her, for the good of their country, to remain in Italy and to continue to curry the favor of Mussolini’s government.

By her own account, Marilee then thought about democracy and fascism for the first time in her life. She decided that democracy sounded better.

“Why should I stay here and do that?” she asked.

“Sooner or later, you might hear something we would be very interested in knowing,” he said. “Sooner or later, or even possibly never, your country might have some use to make of you.”

She said to him that the whole world suddenly seemed to be going crazy.

He commented that there was nothing sudden about it, that it had belonged in a prison or a lunatic asylum for quite some time.

As an example of what she saw as sudden craziness, she told him about Mussolini’s ordering his minister of culture to marry her.

He replied, according to Marilee: “If you have one atom of love for America in your heart, you will marry him.”

Thus did a coal miner’s daughter become the Con-tessa Portomaggiore.

     
M
ARILEE DID NOT
learn until the war was nearly over that her husband was a British agent. She, too, thought him a weakling and a fool, but forgave him that since they lived so well and he was so nice to her. “He had the most amusing and kind and flattering things to say to me. He really enjoyed my company. We both loved to dance and dance.”

So there was another woman in my life with a mania for dancing, who would do it with anybody as long as they did it well.

“You never danced with Dan Gregory,” I said.

“He wouldn’t,” she said, “and you wouldn’t either.”

“I couldn’t,” I said. “I never had.”

“Anybody who wants to can,” she said.

She said that the news that her husband was a British spy made almost no impression on her. “He had all these uniforms for different occasions, and I never cared
what any of them were supposed to mean. They were covered with emblems which I never bothered to decode. I never asked him: “Bruno, what did you get this medal for? What does the eagle on your sleeve mean? What are those two crosses on your collar points?” So when he told me that he was a British spy, that was just more of the junk jewelry of warfare. It had almost nothing to do with me or him.”

She said that after he was shot she expected to feel a terrible emptiness, but did not. And then she understood that her real companion and mate for life was the Italian people. “They spoke to me so lovingly wherever I went, Rabo, and I loved them in return, and did not give a damn about what junk jewelry they wore!”

“I’m
home
, Rabo,” she said. “I never would have got here if it hadn’t been for the craziness of Dan Gregory. Thanks to loose screws in the head of an Armenian from Moscow, I’m home, I’m home.”

“Now tell me what
you’ve
been doing with all these years,” she said.

“For some reason I find myself dismayingly uninteresting,” I said.

“Oh, come, come, come,” she said. “You lost an eye, you married, you reproduced twice, and you say you’ve taken up painting again. How could a life be more eventful?”

I thought to myself that there had been events, but very few, certainly, since our Saint Patrick’s Day love-
making so long ago, which had made me proud and happy. I had old soldier’s anecdotes I had told my drinking buddies in the Cedar Tavern, so I told her those. She had had a life. I had accumulated anecdotes. She was home. Home was somewhere I never thought I’d be.

Old Soldier’s Anecdote Number One: “While Paris was being liberated,” I said, “I went to find Pablo Picasso, Dan Gregory’s idea of Satan—to make sure he was O.K.,” I said.

“He opened his door a crack, with a chain across it inside, and said he was busy and did not wish to be disturbed. You could still hear guns going off only a couple of blocks away. Then he shut and locked the door again.”

Marilee laughed and said, “Maybe he knew all the terrible things our lord and master used to say about him.” She said that if she had known I was still alive, she would have saved a picture in an Italian magazine which only she and I could fully appreciate. It showed a collage Picasso had made by cutting up a poster advertising American cigarettes. He had reassembled pieces of the poster, which originally showed three cowboys smoking around a campfire at night, to form a cat.

Of all the art experts on Earth, only Marilee and I, most likely, could identify the painter of the mutilated poster as Dan Gregory.

How is that for trivia?