Chapter 32
MY DAYS BEGAN TO TAKE Shape. Each morning, after Paul left for the tender, I lay around for at least a half hour, contemplating my existence.
Eventually, I bathed, but since I never had anywhere to be, I usually took a book into the bath with me and read until the water grew cold and my flesh was covered in goose pimples.
Then I dressed and wandered over to the piazza, where the waiter at Café Gargiulo began delivering my cappuccino and cornetto without being asked.
It was a lovely routine, if not a little dull, so I found that by Friday, I was actually looking forward to my first CAWS function.
Mary Lou picked me up at exactly half past eleven. She drove a mint-green Chevy Caprice, which was such a roomy sedan that, to this day, I have no idea how she navigated it through La Maddalena’s narrow streets.
We drove out of town on the Via Ammiraglio Carlo Mirabello, and she pointed out the Mariscuola La Maddalena, which was the school run by the Italian navy that Tom had told us about on our first day in town.
“They show movies in the auditorium on weekends,” said Mary Lou.
“But of course they’re in Italian, which doesn’t do most of us much good. ”
“Do you speak at all?” I asked.
Mary Lou scrunched up her nose. “I’ve tried, but I’m useless. You don’t, right?”
“No.”
“I hear your husband is quite good.”
“Paul’s grandmother on his father’s side was Sicilian. She lived with them when he was growing up.”
“That’s a nice cheat,” said Mary Lou, and I agreed that it was.
The commodore lived in a neighborhood called Moneta, on the eastern side of the island. “If you stay on this road,” Mary Lou said as she hung a left onto a smaller side road, “you’ll get to a little bridge that will take you to Caprera.”
“And what’s that again?”
“Another island. A little bigger than La Maddalena. Most of it’s a nature reserve.”
“Like with hiking trails?”
“I guess?” she said as she rooted around in her purse for something. “I don’t really go in for that sort of thing.”
By that sort of thing, I think Mary Lou meant the outdoors.
She had found what she was looking for. A pack of Virginia Slims. “Do you smoke?” she asked, offering me one.
I was a social smoker, never one to buy a pack myself but always happy to bum a cigarette off someone at a party.
It was tempting to do so now, but Paul hated it when I smoked, and I felt certain he’d have feelings about me lighting up in front of the CO’s wife. I shook my head and said, “No, thanks.”
Mary Lou took her hands off the wheel long enough to light her cigarette, then used the cigarette to gesture in the direction of Caprera. “Garibaldi’s house is out there.”
I knew nothing about Giuseppe Garibaldi except that the Sardinian revolutionary’s portrait hung in more than half the shops and restaurants I’d been to.
He gets the credit for Risorgimento, or unifying Italy, in the mid-1800s, which sounds like it was a pretty bloody undertaking.
But the reason the Maddalenini loved him was that, after he’d helped install Victor Emmanuel II as king of Italy, he retired to Caprera, where he established a small farm and lived out the remainder of his days.
It would be years before I read his biography, but in only a week on the island, I had already come to understand that “the Hero,” as he was referred to by the Maddalenini, was their pride and joy.
“You can tour the house,” said Mary Lou, “but I’d save it for when you have out-of-town company. You don’t want to do it more than once.”
I made a mental note.
“There are some pretty beaches out there, too. And a Club Med.”
I looked over at her, confused. “I thought the Club Med was on the other side of Santo Stefano?”
Mary Lou blew a thin stream of smoke out the window. “There are two.”
“Wow.”
“I know. Seems like overkill. Though it does mean we get some pretty good celebrity sightings.”
“Anyone I’d know?”
She took an exceptionally long drag on her cigarette, which gave me the impression that she was intentionally holding out on me. “How about Robert Redford?”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not,” she said with a wan smile.
“Oh my God, I loved The Way We Were. He was so handsome in it.”
“Well, from what I hear, he’s every bit as handsome in person.”
We had arrived at a fork in the road, and Mary Lou veered onto a dirt path—barely wide enough for one car, let alone two.
As we bumped over the rutted road under a canopy of pine trees, we passed a number of villas, mostly hidden from view thanks to an outcropping of concrete walls and bougainvillea.
I couldn’t see the water, but I smelled the salt in the air and knew that I was likely looking at the backsides of a bunch of waterfront homes.
“This is gorgeous,” I said as we passed a particularly lavish spread.
Mary Lou shrugged. “Moneta’s popular with Europeans on holiday, and Americans like us. It’s because of the views. And the beach. But the Italians prefer to live closer to town.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“All of the schoolchildren walk home for lunch. There’s not time to get all the way out here and back before the bell rings.” She abruptly changed the subject. “So, this luncheon—it’s for Frank Jordan’s wife, Susan.”
“Who’s Frank Jordan?”
“He runs the Navy Support Office.”
I tried to remember what, if anything, Paul had told me about the Jordans, but I was drawing a blank.
“Susan and Frank aren’t leaving for a few more weeks, but Janine and I wanted to get this in ahead of the change of command ceremony. Just us girls, you know?”
I assumed Janine was the commodore’s wife, but I wasn’t going to ask. Instead, I said, “Is she going to care that I’m crashing her party?”
“Janine? God, no,” said Mary Lou. “Women are always coming and going on this island. If we waited until we got to know everyone before we started issuing invitations, none of us would ever get out of the house.”