Chapter 59
WE FOUND A TAXI at the ferry terminal. On the drive, Paul told me about Nixon’s impeachment hearings, which were getting underway in Washington.
The grand jury had turned over all its evidence to the House Judiciary Committee, and the special prosecutor was appealing to the Supreme Court to force Nixon to surrender dozens of tapes of Oval Office conversations pertaining to the Watergate break-in and its messy aftermath.
“Do you think he’s going to actually get impeached?” I asked.
“I hope not,” said Paul.
“Wait, really?”
“You know Nixon’s the whole reason we’re here?”
“What, like in La Maddalena?”
“Not just La Madd. The whole Med. He’s been a huge proponent of building up the Sixth Fleet.”
“Why?” I asked.
“To keep us safe,” said Paul, like it was obvious.
“Safe from who?”
“Whom.”
“You knew what I meant.”
“Safe from the Soviets, of course.”
“Are we worried they’re going to invade Italy or something?”
He shrugged. “You know what they say.”
I gave him a blank stare.
“Communism never sleeps.”
This argument, that we had to fight the spread of communism, wasn’t new.
We’d used it to justify our actions in Korea and Cuba and Vietnam.
And while I agreed that living in a democracy was the way to go, I was starting to question the idea that the U.S.
military could be everywhere all at once.
“We’re just one country,” I said to Paul.
“Yeah, but we’re the greatest country in the world.”
I wasn’t going to argue this. But if I had, I might have told him that this was the type of bravado that had gotten my brother killed.
“I still think that we should hold the president of the United States to a high standard. If you lie or you cheat or you convince your goons to break into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters, you should get impeached. ”
Paul’s expression soured. “Let’s watch it, okay?”
“Watch what?” I asked, genuinely confused.
“There’s no evidence he had anything to do with the break-in.”
“Well, if he’d release the tapes—”
“He’s still my commander-in-chief, Eileen.”
The reprimand surprised me. “Sorry,” I said, although I didn’t know what I was apologizing for.
Vice President Agnew had already resigned, and while it would be another two months before Nixon turned over the tapes that would effectively end his presidency, most Americans already agreed he was guilty of obstruction of justice.
Until a few minutes earlier, I’d assumed Paul was one of them.
But I was learning that my husband was a company man.
We pulled up to the house as the sun was pushing against the horizon, which cast the whitewashed exterior in a warm orange glow. “This is it?” Paul asked, and I pointed to the unit on the right, then turned to the driver and tried to explain that I wanted him to wait for us.
“Torneremo tra cinque minuti,” promised Paul.
The house was exactly as I remembered it, but now I was seeing it through Paul’s eyes, and all I could see was peeling paint, broken roof tiles, and weeds.
Had the hairline crack in the foundation been there before?
What about the rusted railing? It was important, I felt, to project confidence, so I didn’t let on that I was second-guessing my decision.
Instead, I pointed out the apricot tree and told him how I wanted to learn to make jam, which I realized, even as I was saying the words aloud, was patently ridiculous.
“Does anyone live here now?” Paul asked as I led him up the steps and onto the small porch, where I hoped we might be able to peek in the windows.
“Nope,” I said, but knocked anyway.
There was no answer, so we pressed our faces against the tempered glass, trying to get a look inside.
There wasn’t much to see. The windows on the front of the house were shuttered with heavy green persiane, which I would, of course, come to appreciate on hot afternoons in the middle of summer but didn’t yet know how to operate.
“Come this way,” I said, and Paul followed me down the steps and along the side of the house to the back garden, which—mercifully—was every bit as beautiful as I remembered. I did a little spin in the center of the patio. “Isn’t this perfect?”
Paul ran a hand over the top of his head, an overwhelmed sort of gesture. “Yeah, it is.”
“There’s a cat here somewhere,” I said, and started to make increasingly elaborate kissy sounds, but Miele didn’t reveal himself. While I looked for him in the fig tree and behind the granite boulders, Paul got a look at one of the bedrooms through the sliding glass door.
“Okay, this isn’t bad,” he said in a voice loud enough for me to hear, and I breathed out a sigh of relief.