Chapter 1 : Part 5

Spring and Fall
by Nicholas Delbanco

(Page 5 of 7)

One woman at a corner table arrested his gaze briefly; she was regal-seeming, self-contained, and something in the way she held herself seemed in some way familiar. Her hair was gray. Her dress was blue. He made a mental note to try to speak to her later, when the meal was done, but the couple from El Paso were talking about immigration and the bridge to Juérez, the difficulty of border patrols, the Mexican families crossing at night, the RV they had purchased and were keeping in Las Cruces and how America was going to the Democratic dogs. "Don't get me wrong," the man announced, "you-all might just be Democrats and as long as we live in this wonderful country I'll fight for your right to have an opinion. But the opinion's wrong."

Lawrence drank decaffeinated coffee and a final glass of wine. He was, he recognized, exhausted, and excused himself and went on deck but saw nothing in the sky or sea and made his way down to his cabin and shrugged himself out of his clothes. What he dreamed of was a team of horses, cantering then galloping, and he awakened to the thump of his wineglass filled with water falling and breaking into splinters while the engines thrummed. He spent some minutes on his knees, carefully picking the shards from the carpet, then-when he was sure no glass fragments remained-fell asleep once more. This time he did not dream.

"YOU USED TO SING," said Catherine.

"Badly." "Not so badly, Daddy. It was fun, the way we tap-danced." "I have put off childish things," he said. "I'm an old man, sweetheart. Or haven't you noticed?"

"Not really."

"You know," he said, "last December we put on a skit-the architecture faculty puts on a skit every Christmas, lampooning each other, insulting the dean, looking consciously silly in front of the students-and I've always played a part in it and tried to steal the show. Telling jokes about Philip Johnson & Johnson or Frank Lloyd Wrong-stuff like that. Or Meier to Gehry to Graves, being Tinker to Evers to Chance . . ."

She looked at him blankly.

"Forgive me," Lawrence said. "It's a baseball joke, a joke about infielders, famous ones. And Meier and Gehry and Graves-Richard, Frank, and Michael-are the cleanup architects these days. The point is, I sang. I put on my old baseball cap and found a pair of knickers and was standing up there on the stage belting out my tune. From Corbusier to Courvoisier, from Libeskind to Liebfraumilch, from Renzo to Piano, fa la. And suddenly I saw myself the way the students must, an old man being idiotic, and the words just got stuck in my throat."

Catherine reached out her hand to him; he took and pressed and held it.

"There isn't that much music left is what I'm trying to say."

THE FOLLOWING MORNING DAWNED WETLY, and when Lawrence looked out of the porthole he saw that the M.S. Diana had been made fast to a dock. He dressed and went up to the deck. It was, the purser announced, the Bay of Naples they had sheltered in, and not the more open Sorrento, because tenders in Sorrento Harbor have proved unavailable this morning and the captain has decided not to wait until sufficient tenders for off-loading might be found. In the meantime, ladies and gentlemen, said the purser, a bus will take you to the embarkation point for the Isle of Capri, where you will see the sights. In the meantime, ladies and gentlemen, off to your left is Vesuvius and behind us the city of Naples, and we wish you all a very pleasant day.

There was a guide called Ettsio who stood at the base of the gangplank and shepherded those passengers who went ashore to a black and yellow tour bus with a driver he introduced as Giuseppe, my best friend. There was a round of applause. There was a hurtling drive past piers and storage sheds and garbage dumps to a station where they took a ferry to steepcliffed Capri. The island loomed ahead. The sky was gray, with threats of rain, and the man beside him in the ferry said, Hey, if I wanted shitty weather I could stay home in Seattle, it would cost a whole lot less. At the Marina Grande, where they disembarked, Ettsio handed out tickets for a funicular ride to the village of Capri itself. They boarded, turn by turn, then clattered up the hill.

All this took place in a loud press of bodies, a gaggle of tourists of whom he was one. Bowing his head to the sudden hard rain, he remembered a phrase from a song by Noël Coward- a song about a widow on the Piccola Marina, drinking gin and flirting with Italians. Her name, Lawrence found himself remembering, was Mrs. Wentworth-Brewster, and "hot flushes of delight suffused her," or perhaps it had been flashes, hot flashes instead. Ettsio urged everyone to have a coffee, have a glass of wine, have a look please at these beautiful shops.

The tour group unfurled their umbrellas and loitered in the cobbled streets; Lawrence, however, withdrew. He felt ashamed of having joined in, of being cajoled and organized and told to report to the ferry at noon, or he would miss his lunch. What am I doing here, he asked himself, and was jostled by a German who said, Vorsicht! sharply, Careful, as he stepped back from a ditch.

Copyright © 2006 by Nicholas Delbanco

About the Author

Nicholas Delbanco's writing has earned him widespread recognition and many literary honors, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. He served as founding director of the Bennington Writing Workshops and, since 1985, has directed the MFA Writing Program at the University of Michigan, where he also administers the prestigious Hopwood Awards. Nicholas Delbanco makes his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his wife and their two daughters.