No pedestrian Mrs. for me, though. I would be Signora Marco Paretti, wife of the well-known, well-respected architect. I would live in Fiesole, the hilltop town north of Florence, in a house my husband had designed especially for us and our children.
All this and more comprised my future. For now, though, we had just this one night together in our secret hideaway, and then we’d have to say goodbye.
As soon as I stepped into the room, I saw that Marco had been there earlier. Freesias were arranged in the vase which, previously, had held daisies. Rose petals lay scattered over the bed. A bottle of Chianti and two glasses stood on the small table under the window.
“Tonight we make memories which will carry us through the coming weeks,” Marco whispered, content for the moment to hold my hands and look into my eyes.
I started to cry, the beauty of the moment, of his love for me, colliding horribly with the desolation filling my soul. He pulled me close. I realized then that he was crying, too. Great, silent, helpless shudders racked his body.
We clung to each other blindly, and the heat of desire fed on our emotions and burned away everything but the need to fuse our bodies, our hearts, our minds, to give to each other everything we were, everything we had.
We held back nothing. We simply loved each other, deeply, intimately. I heard myself moan and beg in ways that, before, would have left me too embarrassed ever to face him again.
But not that night. That night, I was shameless in my greed. Nothing lay beyond the pale for either of us. Touching, tasting, scrutinizing inch by inch, using words never uttered in polite society—such were the means by which we stitched together the love that had to be strong enough to survive separation.
Not that I share such intimate details with my granddaughter, of course. They belong to Marco and me.
Too soon, first light filtered through the open window. We dressed, fumbling with our clothes as if we could delay the inevitable. But there was no postponing time. A nearby church sounded five o’clock. In four hours, the taxi would come to take my aunt, my cousin and me to the train station. By the next afternoon, I would be in England; a week from then, in America, with over three thousand miles separating me from him.
At the door, I turned for one last glimpse of our hideaway. At the crushed rose petals and the tangle of sheets on the bed. At the half-empty bottle of Chianti. At the freesias perfuming the room with their scent. I knew then that I would never again smell roses or freesias, never again taste the red wine of Tuscany, and not be assailed by the poignant sadness of that moment.
When I returned to our pensione, Genevieve snuck down to let me in. “You’re cutting it fine,” she scolded. “Momma’s up already. You’re lucky she didn’t knock on our door to make sure we’re awake.” Then, seeing that I’d been crying, she hugged me and said, “Don’t mind me, Anna. You’re back now, and she’s none the wiser. Come and wash your face with cold water, or she’ll wonder why your eyes are so red.”
Her kindness started my tears flowing again. “It nearly killed me to leave him, Genevieve.”
“Don’t dwell on that,” she said briskly. “Instead concentrate on when you’ll see him again.”
“Months from now,” I wailed, stumbling over our luggage.
In fact, I saw him just a few hours later, at the railroad station. I was about to board our train when I felt a hand at my elbow. “ Posso aiutarla, signorina? May I help you?”
For a moment, I closed my eyes, afraid I was hallucinating. But the warmth in his voice, in his touch, were all too real and left me trembling. “Thank you,” I stammered. “Grazie.”
“Prego.” Marco squeezed my arm in secret intimacy, smiled into my eyes, and in a low voice added, “ Ti amo, la mia bella. Hurry back. I don’t want to be apart from you a day longer than necessary.”
“Thank you, young man. We can manage quite well,” my aunt declared, regarding him suspiciously from the top step into the train.
“Si, signora. Buon viaggio.”
“What was that about?” she sniffed, when we’d found our seats.
“He wished us a safe journey, that’s all,” Genevieve replied for me, because I couldn’t speak. I was too busy pressing my nose to the window and watching him fade into the distance as the train pulled out of the station.
Aunt Patricia hoisted her bosom into place. “Foreigners! I don’t trust them one iota. You girls might be sorry to leave Europe behind, but I can’t wait to set foot on American soil again.”
The grand tour had come to an end, and so had my idyll. As the train thundered north through Switzerland and into France, rumblings of war brought me back to a reality unlike anything I’d experienced before. Suddenly Marco’s political leanings, which he’d hinted at in passing and then casually, as if they were of no great consequence, assumed a frightening dimension.
I recalled that he and his father were outspoken critics of Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist dictator and that sometimes, on those evenings when he wasn’t with me, Marco attended partisan rallies. I might have been shielded from much of the news, but even I recognized that although the sun shone on Florence and turned the River Arno into a swath of blue silk flowing smoothly under the city’s bridges, a dark underbelly existed beneath the ancient calm of the Uffizi and Pitti Palace.
“Well, no need to make yourself sick over that,” Genevieve told me, as the boat train approached Southampton. “If you must find something to keep you awake at night, worry about Hitler.”
But optimist though she was, Genevieve couldn’t help noticing the subdued atmosphere aboard the Queen Mary any more than I could. The luxury remained intact, but the laughter flowed less freely, and the young men who’d previously flirted with us on the dance floor now assumed a more solemn bearing.
“It’s not very promising over there,” they said, referring to the way events were shaping up in Germany. “They’ll be up to their necks in it before much longer.”
Over there. Synonymous with Europe and war, the term was on everyone’s lips, echoing along the Promenade Deck and infiltrating such exclusive retreats as the Verandah Grill. She tried to hide it, but Genevieve wasn’t immune to its aura of foreboding. “Not that we have anything to worry about,” she insisted when the Statue of Liberty rose up against the skyline and the tugs towed our ship to its berth in New York harbor. “Regardless of what happens over there, America won’t be involved.”
But Italy might be, I thought fearfully.
My parents were waiting at the dock. “We’re so relieved to have you home,” my mother cried, enveloping me in a hug that squeezed the breath from my lungs. “Your father and I have been frantic these past few days. We were so afraid you’d be stranded in England.”
“That wouldn’t have happened,” Aunt Patricia said. “I kept our passports and tickets on my person at all times.”
“But you must have heard,” my father told us gravely. “This was likely the Queen Mary’ s final run as a commercial passenger ship. On September first, just a day after you set sail from Southampton, Germany invaded Poland. On the third, Great Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand declared war on Germany.”
The news had reached us, but we hadn’t wanted to believe it. Unutterably dismayed, I asked, “How long before it’s over?”
He shook his head. “Who’s to say? It could be months—or years. It all depends on that madman, Hitler, and how soon they’re able to put a stop to him over there.”