29. The Decision
Chapter twenty-nine
The Decision
Alex, The Bellamare Estate the workroom on the second floor becomes a dress workshop and the third collection holds.
The Florentine collector calls personally and asks if there is anything the house needs. There is nothing. He says he will be there at one regardless.
Vittoria is not invited. The absence is its own statement. Vittoria sends nothing.
Banque de Vaudrey & Cie. sends a piece of antique Belgian lace, from the eighteenth-century. The kind that is never sold and only given. The accompanying note is from Maximilian Constantin Vaudrey himself: with the regards and the affection of our house for yours.
Renata holds the lace up to the workroom light and is quiet for a long time. "Yes," she says finally, to no one. She does not say what she will do with it. She knows.
Alex, The Trunk
On day five I am in the storage room on the second floor of the villa looking for a cedar trunk Lorenzo Jr. wants for the dress display. I find a different trunk first. It is in the corner under a sheet. I have not seen it in twenty years. I know what it is before I open it.
Mamma’s wedding dress was in this trunk when she died. Unfinished. She had been working on it for four years, on and off, and it was not for any wedding she had announced. It was just being made. It was, the way Mamma worked, what she was doing while she was thinking.
The dress is still in the trunk, folded the way she folded things, the silk wrapped in tissue she had marked in pencil with directions for whoever would handle it next.
The bodice is finished. The skirt is half-cut.
There are sleeves she did not attach. The construction is.
I sit on the floor and look at it. Her hand.
Her register. The thing she was thinking about when she was not thinking about anything else.
I take the trunk down to the workroom. Lorenzo Jr. is at the cutting table. The trunk goes in front of him. I do not say anything.
He looks at it. He looks at me.
"Yes," he says.
He does not ask permission. He does not explain what he will use. He will use what he uses. The dress on the form will be his. The dress will also be hers. Only the family will know which is which. That is the right shape of it.
Two weeks is not a long time, even for people who are used to making things happen in two weeks. The household does not sleep. Giulia and I share a bedroom at the villa for the duration because if we are not in the same room we are on the phone and that is worse.
She makes me eat. She is forceful about it. "Alex," she says, on day six at three in the afternoon, "you have not eaten today, sit down." I sit down. She puts a plate in front of me.
Max is present without being in the way. He has read the room. His job is to show up and say the words. He has accepted this. He is doing what he does, which is everything the legal calendar requires done, from a desk in the villa’s small library, but he is not doing the wedding.
The wedding has been claimed by his fiancée and his fiancée’s siblings and the women of the atelier, and he is the man this is for, not the man arranging it. He has read his role and is performing it correctly, which is by getting out of the way and bringing me coffee at the right hours.
Alex, His Parents
On day twelve his parents arrive.
They drive up at three in the afternoon in a black car the villa arranged for the airport pickup. Edward gets out first, holds the door for Marina.
He is taller than Max by an inch, in a charcoal suit, with the additional twenty years of being quiet that gives a man a look like he has settled an argument with himself a long time ago.
Marina is in a blue dress that travels well and a small navy coat.
They have been on a plane for eight hours and look like they have not.
Max is in the courtyard with Matteo, who has been instructed to greet his grandparents and is now executing the instruction with the gravity he reserves for documented operations.
Elena is on the terrace with the nanny. I am at the door of the villa. I have been at the door of the villa for ten minutes, which is longer than is strictly necessary, and I know it, and I do not move.
Marina sees me first. She crosses the courtyard at the pace of a woman who has been waiting nine years to do this and is not going to make a meal of it now. She comes up the step. She takes my hands in hers. Then, because hands are not enough, she pulls me into an embrace.
"Alex."
"Marina." My voice does the thing it does when something has gone past the place where I can keep it composed. "Welcome."
She holds me at arm’s length and looks at me. Her eyes are warm and the same shape as Max’s. "It is so good to be here. Max has told us about you for many years. We are very glad."
"He has told me about you for many years too." The line comes out a little wet. "I have been hoping to do this properly for a long time."
"You are doing it properly."
She has a small envelope in her hand. She holds it out to me, almost shyly, as one might offer a thing one has been carrying in one’s pocket since the airport.
"I have something for you. If you want it. If not, no."
Inside is a piece of cream-colored ribbon, hand-embroidered, perhaps eight inches long, the silk worn at the edges as silk wears when it has been kept folded in tissue for a hundred years.
"My grandmother’s wedding," she says. "1924. My mother kept it. I have kept it. I would be honored if Renata could find a place for it in the dress. If she cannot, or if you would rather not, please keep it for nothing. It is not a debt."
The ribbon. The weight of three women who have carried this small piece of silk for a hundred years and waited until there was someone to give it to.
"Marina." My eyes are wet now, properly. "I want it. Of course I want it. Renata will find a place for it. Thank you."
She closes my hand around the envelope and keeps her hand on mine for a moment. "Welcome to the family," she says. "You have been part of it for a long time."
Edward arrives at her shoulder. He is looking at me with an expression I have not seen on a face before, which is the expression of a man who has been told things about a woman for nearly a decade and is now finally seeing her at his son’s wedding villa, and is glad.
He does not extend a hand, exactly. He does what a man in his register does, which is to step forward and embrace me.
"Alessandra."
"Edward. Welcome."
"Thank you for having us."
"Thank you for coming. I am so glad you are here."
He nods. He does not say more.
They go inside. The villa staff take their bags upstairs.
Max embraces his father in the courtyard, brief and firm.
Marina holds Matteo at arm’s length and looks at him for one second longer than custom requires, then says something to him in Italian, which he does not yet speak well but which he understands. He nods. She moves on.
Edward I see again the next morning, alone for thirty seconds in the courtyard before the household is up.
"Alessandra."
"Edward."
"He has been waiting for you. We have been waiting with him. Thank you for coming."
Several things land at once. The first is that Edward Grant, whom I have known for a sum total of about four hours, has just said one sentence to me that locates an absence I have carried for thirty-three years and did not know how to name.
The second is that my eyes are filling up, fully, in the courtyard at six in the morning, and I am not going to stop them.
The third is a thought that arrives uninvited and does not feel like grief, which is: my father is dead. The thought sits.
"Edward."
"Yes."
"I have not been waited for before. Not like this."
He looks at me. He does not look surprised. He does not look as though he is in the business of surprising women in courtyards before breakfast. He nods once.
"You are now."
A breath. The sentence I have been keeping in some inner room for the entirety of this morning comes out without my having decided it would.