Chapter 5
Chapter 5
Rome—summer 1950
She’d taken a ship and trains to get to Rome, and during the journey, Elsie’s excitement had grown so much that she thought the reality of Rome and the art school could never measure up to it, but when she arrived at the elegant and winding drive bordered by tall trees and ending at a soft pink villa with a tiled roof and jutting square towers, she realized she was wrong. She hadn’t had enough imagination to envision this. Elsie paused, exhausted and sweating, and dropped her suitcase. It landed on the flagstones with a thud. She flexed her hand, imprinted now with the stitching from its cheap and fraying leather handle, and stared at the American Art Academy in Rome, wondering again at the will she’d manifested to get herself here. Here, she was sure, her life would change again.
She picked up the suitcase and made her way to the large and imposing iron door that stood three times her height, with great pull rings. One side was wide open, and she walked into a foyer with a pink marble floor inset with great white granite medallions, white pillars holding up arched frescoed ceilings, and bustle.
She found the academy office down the expansive hallway, and it was like no office she’d ever seen. Massive red stone desks that looked as if they’d been lifted from some palace, chairs with upholstery that could have suited French kings. Sun slanting through huge windows overlooking a fountain of a veiled woman pouring water from a jug. The place didn’t look quite real. It was about as far away from anything in LA or Zanesville, Ohio, as you could get, and since those were the only places she’d really been, she couldn’t help staring in awe.
“Can I help you, miss?” the woman at the nearest desk asked with an inquiring smile.
Elsie approached. “I’m Elsie Gruner. New intern?”
“Ah.” The woman nodded, took up a pair of heavy black-framed glasses, and turned to a vast wooden card catalog behind her. “Welcome to the American Art Academy, Elsie. I’m Mrs. Brown. Spell your last name?”
Elsie did. Mrs. Brown pulled open a drawer and skimmed through the cards. “Here you are. Fashion design—is that right?”
Elsie nodded.
“You’re in the Villa Augusta, the female dormitory.”
“Are there many other women interns?”
“Only three this summer,” Mrs. Brown told her. “But we’ve only been taking female students since the war, so ... there are two other resident artists. You won’t be lonely.”
Loneliness was the last thing Elsie had thought to worry about. She’d be too busy to be lonely. She’d quit Polly’s on Olive. Chouinard she’d taken leave from, not knowing if she would return, and sent a postcard to her parents saying she was going to Italy for the foreseeable future. Whatever the academy brought her in the next six months, she meant to leverage however she could.
“Rob,” Mrs. Brown called out. A young man with a head of brown curls popped up from behind another wall of card catalogs. “This is Elsie Gruner. Would you please show her to the Augusta? She’s a new intern.” She turned back to Elsie and handed her a manila envelope labeled with Elsie’s name. “Here’s all the information you’ll need.”
Rob sprinted over with a smile and an extended hand. “Rob Phillips.”
She shook his hand and he took her suitcase, nearly wrenching it from her in his enthusiasm.
“Have you seen the gardens yet?” he asked, leading her from the office and back into the massive hallway.
“I only just arrived.”
“You’ll love them. Off to the side there, follow that hall straight out.” He shrugged the direction. “Sometimes they hold classes there. Are you studying archaeology? You’ll dig the Palatine—I was there yesterday. Or you could help out with—”
“Fashion design,” she said.
“Oh. Well, I don’t know anything about that.” A quick grin. “But I can tell you all about the Etruscan origins of early Roman sculpture.”
Elsie grinned back. “I’ll know who to ask if I have any questions about it.”
He jabbered on, but she was too busy looking around to pay much attention as he led her through a back door and onto a loggia with an elaborate cast-iron gate, and then down worn, cracked steps that might have been centuries old, past trees bearing foliage shaped like huge pom-poms and shrubs she didn’t know the names of, and the fragrance of flowers mixed with that of smoke and petrol wafting from the Via Flaminia beyond. Another winding path, also worn and very uneven, led to a low-slung, two-story, whitewashed, tile-roofed building midway down a slight hill.
“It’s hardly a villa. It was a stable once,” Rob said as they approached. “But don’t worry, they’ve done away with the stalls.”
He took her to the door, but then stood back. “I’m not allowed inside. Only women, you know. They’re not very strict about us mixing, except for the residence halls.”
“I see. Thanks for showing me the way.” Elsie eyed the heavy shutters on the windows, dark green and closed against the hot afternoon.
“You’re welcome. Hope I see you around!” He set down her suitcase and was off, whistling as he climbed the path back up the hill.
This would be home for the next six months. Elsie swallowed a mix of excitement and nerves. She was already in love with the place—how could anything bad happen where a pot of splashy red carnations beckoned so welcomingly at the door?
The lever pulled easily in her hand—unlocked—and the door opened to reveal a narrow foyer of cracked black-and-white tile, and a painted table that held a pair of soiled gardening gloves and a filthy clay ashtray. It was quiet.
Elsie ventured into the great room. A kitchen was off to one side, and stairs on the other. The room opened onto a loggia at the far side, overlooking the downslope of the hill and a grove of palms, a park below and the spread of Rome beyond that, and all she could think was, How could Elsie Gruner live in a place like this? She was nobody, a farm girl from Ohio, and this was Rome . She turned away, overwhelmed at how out of place she felt, but then she caught sight of the books, notebooks, sketchbooks, pencils, paints—the evidence of art everywhere—and felt immediately comforted. This she knew. If she concentrated on art, she would find her way.
“Hello?” Elsie ventured.
There was no answer.
She set down the suitcase carefully, gripped by the impulse to be as silent as the building, and glimpsed the kitchen, which was a mess: pots and pans helter-skelter, something spilled and burned on the stove, a half-drunk bottle of red wine beside the sink.
“Who are you?”
The voice startled Elsie and she cracked her shoulder on the doorframe as she jerked around to see a woman who looked to be her age padding barefoot toward her. The woman was stunning, with wide-spaced catlike eyes, a wide mouth, long, waving chestnut-colored hair. She wore loose trousers and a blouse without a bra, and Elsie immediately felt like a tired frump in her polka-dot dress, wrinkled from traveling. Not only that, but she was tongue tied.
“Well? Who are you?”
“Elsie Gruner. I’m an intern.”
“In what?”
“Fashion design.”
“With that name?” The woman laughed. “Oh God, no. You can’t possibly be serious.”
Elsie didn’t like feeling at a disadvantage. She felt trapped against the kitchen doorway, and this woman was odd and disconcerting. “It’s my name,” she said stiffly, stepping into the space the other woman had claimed. “I suppose yours is much better.”
“Julia Keane,” said the woman.
Yes, of course it was better. Of course she had an appealing name. Of course it matched this woman, who seemed to have inhaled elegance. A name was just a name, wasn’t it? Until Elsie realized as she stood in the hot summer air of a Roman villa that it was one more thing that marked her as a farmer’s daughter from smack in the middle of Zanesville, Ohio, in way she’d never considered before.
Elsie managed, “Are you studying fashion design too?”
Julia smiled and shook her head. “Archaeology. Don’t worry. We’re not competing.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Oh yes, you were.” Julia’s smile broadened. She had a vague accent, very slight, one Elsie could not place. “But that’s okay. I know just the room to put you in. Then we’ll have some wine and I’ll tell you all the things to avoid here this summer and all the best things to do. But I’m not going to call you Elsie. That’s the name of that Borden cow, and you’re no cow. Besides, you’re going to be famous one day, and Elsie just won’t do, will it?”
“No,” Elsie agreed softly. “It won’t.”
Julia smiled. “You smell good too. What is that?”
This time, the smell wasn’t pig shit. “L’Air du Temps.”
“It’s nice. I like it. Come with me.”