Bella Tuscany (19 page)

Monograms in my family were not limited to cloth. Baby rattles, silver cups, shoehorns, dresser silver, and the backs of flatware were subjected to this mania. The urge to monogram always seems mysterious to me, and never more mysterious than when I was ten and found my baby dresses. I loved to plunder, as my mother called it. “Plunder and strew! Plunder and strew! You strew faster than I can pick up.” Her language was, otherwise, not archaic. I was looking in the hall chest at my father's high school report cards, the deed to the house, a beaded purse with a slippery silver mirror inside, which my mother carried when she was in her belle-hood and did the Charleston, back when a pink feather boa hung in her closet. I was searching for secrets. My hands riffled through the bolts of material that might someday be made into skirts or bathrobes, through the stored-away plastic bags holding my mother's cashmere sweaters, washed and hidden in cedar to protect them from moths. Then I pulled out a flattened stack of blue batiste infant gowns and held one up. There, over where the heart would have been, I saw the monogram:
.

A child had died? A secret child? I ran to my mother's room.

She was propped in her canopied bed, reading a fashion magazine. “Oh, those were yours, if you had been a boy. M for Uncle Mark, F for Franklin, Big Daddy's name.” Her father, the puffy-cheeked man in the photograph, with her pouting in white flounces on his knee, died when I was three. I would have been a Mark and Franklin, not Frances, not Elizabeth. And the inevitable deduction: They had Mark in mind, not me.

“Why did you have them monogrammed before you knew?”

“I don't remember. We thought you would be a boy.” Her hair is caught in silver clamps to set the waves. I could almost see this brat. His ears stick out and he has scabs on his stupid bony knees. He looks out with my blue eyes.

Little wheels of logic spin. “Where are the dresses with FEM?”

“There aren't any.”

It didn't take long for me to figure that, after two girls, they desperately wanted a boy and that the monogramming was an act of superstition and determination, an attempt to bend the will of fate. Years later, my mother told me that my father disappeared and “went on a tear” for two days when I was born. Odd, my father was wild about me, and when he said, “All my boys are girls,” I never picked up any tone of regret.

And is it odd, too, that when I think to myself about a sheet or shirt that is monogrammed, I think of it as a
mark
?

My mother monogrammed
on the batiste dress of one of my dolls. Amy, a name I loved from
Little Women,
though the name I secretly desired for myself was Renée. That was the one time I ever saw Mother at needlework. Usually, we took a hatbox full of my father's handkerchiefs and shirts, or pillowcases and my mother's silk slips, to Alice's, a woman who lived in a narrow house with a chinaberry tree out front. I climbed around in the tree, where once I saw a swarm of bees, or sat in the porch swing with her dog, Chap, who had swollen ticks on his ears. Sometimes I waited at Alice's table eating saltines and watching my mother and Alice, who was tall and angular, with enormous hands that looked as though they should be kneading great piles of dough—how did she manage to thread the thinnest of needles? She had bright pink gums that came far down to short teeth. She was brown and lived in “colored town.” That she and my mother were friends may not have occurred to either of them. They gossiped and drank coffee, which Alice made in a blue and white speckled tin pot.

My mother pushed out her bottom lip when she concentrated. They carefully cut around printed initials, pinned tissue paper patterns to cloth, and ironed the indigo script indelibly onto the shirt pocket or sheet, leaving behind the outlined initials and the smell of scorched paper. Mother would then leave the imprinted linens for Alice. The preferred thread was silky white, limp figure-eight loops held together in the center with a gold and black label. A few weeks later, Alice walked the mile to our house and she and Mother would spread Alice's handwork across the bed, remarking on how nicely everything came out.

 

The June market in Arezzo is even larger than the ones in April and May. I find the torso of a saint, lost from the whole carved wood body. I find a gold-leaf wooden cross and a beautiful studio portrait of a young woman, circa 1910. She is poised on the edge of a chair but radiates an inner calm. Several women gather around a stand hung with filmy lace and linen curtains. The woman in charge has starched and ironed for days. She has a heap of my favorite square pillowcases edged in handmade lace and secured by mother-of-pearl buttons on the back. I have these yard-square pillows in all the bedrooms—such pretty substitutes for headboards we don't have, and comfortable for reading, too. Most are too busy with lace inserts to bother with monograms but here's
in white swirls. At home in California, I have a handkerchief-linen pillowcase with the same initials. It belonged to my friend Josephine's aunt, who lived in a splendid house in Palm Beach. Josephine gave me, too, Aunt Regina's pale, pale pink linen sheets with labyrinthine cutwork above and below her initials. Josephine had them for fifty years, her aunt for thirty or forty; they are perfect. Why do monogrammed things last, while others are discarded? I have brought the sheets to Italy because in summer heat, nothing is as cool as linen sheets. At the market, I have acquired several more. I also love the heavy white sheets edged in webs of white crochet, and the plain, uneven cotton ones, heavy as a sail. When washed and hung outside to dry, they do not need ironing, just a smoothing with my own flat hand as I fold them.

Sleeping on linen or the dense cotton spoils me. Occasionally, I'll find a bedspread, white cotton, of course, with the raised matelassé design and swags of handwork along the edge. They're short for contemporary beds but I bought one anyway and let my pillowcases show. I fall asleep thinking of the ancient villas and farms in the deep country where these sheets were used for birth, death, love, and ordinary exhausted sleep after a day of digging fields. They have been washed in stone troughs, flapped in spring winds, and have been hurriedly brought in when rain started across the hills. The ornate
or
were worked by firelight for a bride. Perhaps some were “too good” and were saved (for what?) in the
armadio
shelves with aromatic bay leaves and lavender to keep them fragrant.

All the linen stands at the market have rolls of lace, petticoats, christening dresses, blouses, and nightgowns. I'm not tempted. Once in France I found a long-sleeved gown, buttoned to the neck for modesty or warmth, embroidered in red with my daughter Ashley's initials. That
is
a bit weird, to wear someone else's gown, a French someone with your own monogram. She thanked me but somehow the gown ended up in the trunk with other vintage linens. Maybe the family mania has trailed out in her generation, or has taken another turn. Her art projects have involved damask napkins with her writing on them, and drifting rooms made of gauze with poems painted on the hanging panels.

My sister located a place in Florence that still does hand monogramming. They have a book of styles, some plain, some as ornate as a Baroque ceiling. She took them a pile of linen napkins for her new daughter-in-law and three months later they arrived in Atlanta. At markets, I have been accumulating for my daughter beautiful linen towels with circles for monograms woven into the design. My daughter, who does not yet own an iron. I hope she likes them.

 

When they are almost dry—slightly damp but warm from the sun—I take the six hand towels I bought at the market off the line. Just as I thought, they have come out of the wash white as salt. I hold the monogram to the sun,
. These hand-hemmed linen towels, I notice, have a tab for hanging on a hook. I've never seen that before. Last summer when I travelled to the south of Italy, I saw the grave of one Assunta Primavera in the cemetery near Tricarico. Fresh yellow gladiolus and pink plastic flowers adorned her stone, along with her photo taken in middle age. Rather than an ethereal someone about to be assumed into heaven in spring, as her name suggested to me, she looked hearty and present. She pulled her black hair into a loose bun and her face was lighted by a wide smile. She looked like someone who could take the head off a chicken, no problem, or assist in birthing a breached baby. It seemed impossible that she could be lying under the stone. Surely she was off in some kitchen, the flavorful scent of her
tortellini in brodo
floating up the stairwell.