hadn’t poured a cup for herself, but now she did, adding neither cream not honey. Sweetener and whitener, the airline would have called them. The coffee had been scalding hot; even cooled with cream and honey, it pushed Lindsey to his limit. Ester took hers black. Pot to cup to lips. She squeezed her large eyes shut as she took a generous mouthful.
She swallowed.
“No more Mars. No more Alpha Centauri. I told him a thousand times, Alpha Centauri isn’t another galaxy. It’s our closest neighboring star. I studied astronomy as a girl, did you know that?”
Lindsey shook his head.
“I studied astronomy. Astronomy and history. I was going to be an astronomer or an historian, I hadn’t made up my mind. But there wasn’t much chance for me to do either of those in Italy. Maybe a schoolteacher, and teach history to schoolchildren. But then along came my handsome American and swept me off my feet. It was a scandal, my marrying Cletus, can you understand that?”
Lindsey could. He knew what it was like to be part of an interracial couple. He knew what it was like to be dumped, even though Marvia had said she still loved him. “It’s the race thing, isn’t it?” he’d asked, and she’d admitted that, Yes, it was, and that had been that and now she was married to a man she could walk down the street with, without drawing stares.
“I think I can understand,” Lindsey said.
“Pardon me, Mr. Lindsey, if I doubt that. I don’t think you know who the Lazarinis are.”
He held his coffee cup, taking microscopic sips from its edge. The cup was translucently thin, white china with a broad deckled maroon stripe and a gold rim. He’d seen this pattern before, paid out insurance benefits to a San Francisco homeowner whose beloved Wedgewood had been turned to a pile of worthless fragments by the Loma Prieta earthquake.
“Cletus was my good friend,” Lindsey said. A little diplomatic exaggeration couldn’t hurt. “But he was a private man, wasn’t he?”
Ester Berry said, “He was a private man.” her smile was as rueful as it was faint.
“So, ah, we talked about our work, mainly. We were roommates, you know.”
“Yes.”
“And about nothing. Television. Football. Restaurants.”
“Women?”
Lindsey blushed. “Not really.”
“Do not be ashamed. We women talk about men. We do it all the times, all our lives. Little girls talk about their brothers and their fathers. Big girls talk about their boyfriends. Grown women talk about their husbands. Mothers talk about their sons.”
Lindsey didn’t have an answer.
“Widows,” Ester said. She drank more coffee, then put her cup down carefully on the shining saucer. It clattered just once. “Widows,” she said again. “Now I will learn what widows say about men.”
Outside the apartment windows—they were behind Ester, covered with transparent, floor-length draperies—Lindsey could see another apartment building across the street. It was identical to this one, and from the architecture he would date them to the late 1920s. From his place on the couch he couldn’t see the sky over New York, but the daylight was fading outside.
If walls could talk, he quoted to himself, and windows tell what they have seen.… Who the hell had said that?
Ester Lazarini Berry started to stand up, then sat down again, running her fingers along her cheekbones and then clasping them in her lap.
“My mother used to say that we were the first Jews in Rome. We were there before the Christians. We were there before Joshua ben Joseph was born. Do you know that, Mr. Lindsey? Do you believe me?”
Lindsey was startled. The woman was vehement. Or maybe just nervous. Who could blame her for being nervous? “I don’t really know. I didn’t know you were, ah, I didn’t know you were Jewish, Mrs. Berry. I didn’t even know there were Jewish people in, ah, Jewish people in Italy. I mean, it’s such a Catholic country.”
Ester Berry asked, “Are you Catholic, Mr. Lindsey?”
Lindsey shook his head, then said, “No, I’m—” He didn’t want to say that he was nothing. He’d been raised without religion, with a careful, politically correct omission of ethnicity. Sometimes he wished he could be a Cherokee or a Jehovah’s Witness or a member of the International Flat Earth Society. Anything that would give him a sense of who he was. “No,” he repeated, “I’m not Catholic.”
“You were never in a Jewish house of mourning? We don’t sit shiva, not the way we should. But we cover the mirrors, the pictures. And how can we stay home? The dog has to go out, does he understand the Law? And the baby, she has to take the dog, and her aunt has to protect the baby. Even in this neighborhood.”
She sighed, brought herself back on track. “They think that Italy is their country, the Christians. Even the ones who hate their church. But there were Hebrews in Rome in Caesar’s day. Did you know that? There were free Hebrew traders and there were Jewish slaves in Caesar’s own household. There were Hebrew prayers at Caesar’s funeral, did you know that? No, I didn’t think so. The Lazarinis trace their blood to those times. My first ancestor came to Rome from Athens with trade goods and gifts. Do you believe that?”
Lindsey didn’t know what to say, so he kept his mouth shut.
“He settled in Rome and studied silversmithing. That became his trade, he was tired of traveling and he wanted to settle down. He found a nice Jewish girl and married her and there have been Lazarinis in Rome for 2,000 years. More.”
Lindsey heard the sound of a key in the heavy front door of the apartment, and the sounds of Ester Lazarini Berry’s sister Zaffira and Ester’s daughter Anna Maria and the little dog Ezio Pinza arriving from their walk.
Lindsey swiveled on the couch to watch Zaffira and Anna Maria and the dog. They had a few snowflakes on them, and the woman brushed the girl, then the girl brushed the dog, before they came down the hall.
Behind himself, Lindsey could hear Ester’s voice. She must have had too much momentum to stop. She got out another few sentences.
“There were Jews in the Roman Senate, did you know that? Two thousand years ago. And there were Jewish soldiers, officers, generals, yes, in King Umberto’s army in the first World War. Commanders. Medal winners. They were Lazarinis.”
The older woman and the girl came into the living room. They had left their coats in the front hallway. Even Ezio Pinza had left his doggie sweater in the hallway and stood in his short, glossy, black and gold coat, hiding behind Anna Maria’s feet, peering around her at Lindsey. His eyes were black and shiny. He looked like an intelligent dog.
Anna Maria stood beside her mother’s chair. Ester put her arms around the girl and said, “Mr. Lindsey, this is my daughter. Anna Maria Berry. Cletus is her father.”
She hadn’t got used to referring to her husband in past tense. That wasn’t surprising, he’d only been dead since yesterday. And the police hadn’t released his body to the widow for burial. Sure, they’d need an autopsy, they’d need a coroner’s report. What was the cause of death? Oh, this little bullet hole in his forehead, yes, that’s
