That night, the man Dee Moray was waiting for didn’t come, and Pasquale felt somehow responsible, as if his little wish that the man would drown had been upgraded to a prayer and had come true. Dee Moray had retreated to her room at dusk and in the early morning had gotten violently ill again, and could only get out of bed to vomit. When there was nothing left in her stomach, tears rolled from her eyes and her back arched and she sniffed and slumped to the floor. She didn’t want Pasquale to see her retch, and so he sat in the hallway and reached his hand around the corner, through the doorway, to hold her hand. Pasquale could hear his aunt stirring downstairs.
Dee took a long breath. “Tell me a story, Pasquale. What happened when the painter returned to the woman?”
“They marry and have fifty children.”
“Fifty?”
“Maybe six. He become a famous painter and every time he paint a woman, he paint her.”
Dee Moray vomited again, and when she could speak, said, “He’s not coming, is he?” It was odd and intimate, their hands connected, their heads in different rooms. They could talk. They could hold hands. But they couldn’t see each other’s faces.
“He is coming,” Pasquale told her.
She whispered: “How do you know, Pasquale?”
“I know.”
“But how?”
He closed his eyes and concentrated on the English, whispering back around the corner, “Because if you wait for me . . . I crawl on my knees from Rome to see you.”
She squeezed his hand and retched again.
The man didn’t come that day, either. And as much as he wanted to keep Dee Moray for himself, Pasquale began to get angry. What kind of man sent a sick woman to a remote fishing village and then left her there? He thought of going to La Spezia and using a phone to call the Grand Hotel, but he wanted to look this bastard in his cold eye.
“I go to Rome today,” he told her.
“No, Pasquale. It’s okay. I can just go on to Switzerland when I feel better. Maybe he left word for me there.”
“I must go to Rome anyway,” he lied. “I find this Michael Deane and tell him you wait here.”
She stared off for a moment and then smiled. “Thank you, Pasquale.”
He gave precise instructions to Valeria for the care of the American: Let her sleep and don’t make her eat anything she doesn’t want to eat and don’t lecture her about her skimpy nightclothes. If she gets sick, send for Dr. Merlonghi. Then he peeked in on his mother, who lay awake waiting for him.
“I’ll be back tomorrow, Mamma,” he said.
“It will be good for you,” she said, “to have children with such a tall, healthy woman with such breasts.”
He asked Tomasso the Communist to motor him to La Spezia, so he could take a train to Florence, then on to Rome to scream at Michael Deane, this awful man who would abandon an ailing woman this way.
“I should go to Rome with you,” Tomasso said as they cut across a light chop and made their way south. Tomasso’s little outboard motor chugged in the water and whined when it came out as he piloted from the back, squinting along the shoreline while Pasquale crouched in front. “These American movie people, they are pigs.”
Pasquale agreed. “To send a woman off and then forget about her . . .”
“They mock true art,” Tomasso said. “They take the full sorrow of life and make a circus of fat men falling into cream pies. They should leave the Italians alone to make films, but instead their stupidity spreads like a whore’s disease among sailors. Commedia all’italiana! Bah.”
“I like the American Westerns,” Pasquale said. “I like the cowboys.”
“Bah,” Tomasso said again.
Pasquale had been thinking about something else. “Tomasso, Valeria says that no one dies in Porto Vergogna except babies and old people. She says the American won’t die as long as she stays here.”
“Pasquale—”
“No, I know, Tomasso, it’s just old witch talk. But I can’t think of a single person who has died young here.”
Tomasso adjusted his cap as he thought. “How old was your father?”
“Sixty-three,” Pasquale said.
“That’s young to me,” Tomasso said.
They motored toward La Spezia, weaving among the big canning ships in the bay.
“Have you ever played tennis, Tomasso?” Pasquale asked. He knew Tomasso had been held for a while in a prison camp near Milan during the war and had been exposed to many things.