Italian Hours

By Elizabeth Cowley Tyler

Italian Hours features three short, interconnected novellas. Tricks of the Heart, set in Rome, explores the impact of the recent papal conclave on a group of Romans and expats. Holiness of the Heart’s Affections finds a woman returning to Florence after the death of the estranged love of her life to process that loss. To Cease Upon the Midnight Hour charts the journey of a pianist who is trying to outrun the progress of a motor neuron disease in order to give his last concert at La Fenice in Venice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503555174

Elizabeth Cowley Tyler

Elizabeth Cowley Tyler lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Elmira College and a Master of Arts in French from Middlebury College. She has lived and studied in London and Paris and has traveled extensively in France, Italy, England, Germany, and Russia. Prior published works includes a series of mystery novels: The Madeleine Murders, Murder at the Maison de Balzac, and Murder at Les Halles, featuring Inspector Henri Corbet of the Paris Police. Her literary novels include Pro Patri Mori, a Great War novel, Dark Angel, In Search of Chopin, a biographical novel. Hôtel Chopin, Tavistock Square, Vanishing Point, Italian Hours and Violet Hours are her most recent works.

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Copyright © 2015 by Elizabeth Cowley Tyler.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

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Rev. date: 07/31/2020

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CONTENTS

PART I

Rome

Tricks of the Heart

PART II

Florence

Holiness of the Heart’s Affections

PART III

Venice

To Cease Upon the Midnight Hour

In Loving Memory of Mary

PART I

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"My charm is a trick of the heart."

Dick Diver

Tender is the Night

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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ROME

TRICKS OF THE HEART

In London she’s Isabel, but in Rome, she’s Isabella. Her last name, Angeletti, remains the same in either place. Returning to Rome now after all these years seems very strange, yet very familiar. Her father, Vittorio Angeletti, will celebrate his seventieth birthday on Sunday. She has come to attend the party, but has refused his invitation to stay with him in his lovely apartment, and only reluctantly agreed to let him put her up in the elegant Hotel Hassler at the top of the Spanish Steps with grand views of Rome and the Vatican.

Approaching the Spanish Steps now, stopping at the bottom before climbing the grand staircase to her hotel, it seems only yesterday when this part of Rome was the whole world to her, when her parents were happy together, through living in different cities, when she would visit her father in Rome in the Spring and Fall and stay in the apartment he still has around the corner.

With her mother dead now for over a year, she no longer fears being put in the middle of what became their war with each other, and when she returns to London, she’ll have no mother who will demand an accounting of the visit with her ex-husband.

After the rupture of the marriage, during the visits he made to England over the years for his research on Keats, her father would make it a point to see Isabel at least once for tea or dinner. He, unlike her mother, had always had the good grace not to inquire about her mother’s activities, indeed not to mention her at all. The relief was such that after his visits, Isabel always wondered why she didn’t simply build a completely separate relationship with him which would include the visits to Rome she had so enjoyed in the past.

However, way had a way of leading on to way, and it was just easier not to even tempt herself with visits of that sort, just to close the door on the possibility, and see him when he was in London. The fact that she’s a Woolf scholar grounded her research essentially in England and a bit in the South of France. She simply found it more convenient to hide behind an academic’s hectic life, at least until her own black curtain dropped shortly after her mother’s death. No sight, no sound, no being attached to the earth, but rather floating on a cloud of horror and dread of what it might mean to be no more.

If she can lift the dark curtain just a little to have another look at the X-ray and CAT scan the doctor has just shown her, maybe she can grasp the meaning of the dark spot on her left lung. It will have to come out, there may be others under it or elsewhere in the other lung, not capable of being seen by the X-ray or the CAT scan. The doctor’s words sound as though they’ve traveled down a very long tunnel to reach Isabel’s ears. She will be cut, sliced open to remove pieces of the offending lung. The dark curtain wants to come back down, but she struggles to hold it up, to remember how she enjoyed smoking all those years ago –- strong cigarettes, Gauloise, when in Paris and, when she could get them, in London.

She lifts the black curtain another few inches to let herself hear again the doctor’s words, we may be able to get it all, and it may not come back. May. That word now so far away from the flower-filled glorious month of her birth forty-two years ago.

That is the sword of Damocles she brings with her to Rome, a sword which hangs over her head, threatening to sever it if she lowers it just enough for it to get purchase on her long, swan-like neck. The happy splashing of the Barberini fountain bubbles forth from dead center of the long, narrow stone boat resting at the bottom of the Spanish Steps, the very sound that kept Keats company during his last days in the little room on the second floor at Number 26, no stranger to death watches.

But enough of this dark fear, for dark can bring good as well as bad as it did many years ago when his shadow covered her, his arms reached out for her, the fountain splashed and spat behind them. The spicy scent from his face and hair drew her towards him when he leaned down to meet her, to fold her in his arms, and she fell into him swooning, Daddy.

Yes, Bella, he said as he lifted her into his arms, turned sideways, and she saw the pulsating Barberini fountain from his great height, its splash more insistent as it sang to enchant the multitude gathered at Piazza di Spagna that early morning in June when Isabella was five years old and the love of Vittorio Angeletti’s life.

To stand there and listen to this delightful music forever, to never let go of the love and safety of that time, would that she could. Isabella sighs, grasps the handle of her small suitcase to begin the slow climb up the curved staircase to her hotel.

She has often gone by the Hotel Hassler on prior visits but has never stayed there. The young man at the desk greets her, tells her she has one of the best suites in the house, and she decides to believe him. Indeed, the rooms are lovely, grand and spacious with a palatial bedroom featuring a king-sized bed, blue and cream brocade bedspread and draperies, a mahogany desk with inlaid trim. The long windows overlook the Spanish Steps, but are high enough above them that Isabella has no fear that tourists will be gawking into her living quarters. However, she will lack no opportunity, in the event she should she wish it, to gawk at them.

She has taken her father’s invitation to stay at the Hotel Hassler, to be an eyewitness to history, with views of the Vatican from some of the rooms and certainly from the terrace, views needed to see the black smoke from the papal conclave which begins tomorrow, smoke which will rise twice a day until it comes out white to indicate Habemus Papum, we have a Pope.

Though a thoroughly lapsed Catholic, Isabella must admit to an certain excitement at being witness to this kind of history, albeit of a church which has fallen far from grace in world opinion. Indeed, it doesn’t seem at all to be the church in which she was raised at the insistence of her father, over her mother’s strong objections, objections put aside during Isabella’s childhood because her mother wanted her marriage to work. To this day, Isabella acknowledges the power of the indoctrination of the church, though she did lapse profoundly in her teenage years, crushed under all of the dogma, doctrine and the angry fracture of her parents’ marriage.

Still, she considers herself an aesthetic Catholic, loves the incense, the robes, the Latin mass (still done in some churches in Europe, but less so in England). No sooner does she visit Paris, Rome, Florence or Venice than she manages to attend a Latin mass, immerses herself in the beauty of the ritual and even takes communion without benefit of prior confession. If there is any truth to the dogma and doctrine the church teaches about being pure to receive communion, the necessity of going to confession, Isabella will certainly burn in hell for her sin of omission.

The resignation of Pope Benedict, pleading ill health, has shocked the world, and raised much curiosity as to the real reason for his abdication. Hard to believe that the sexual, moral and financial scandals of the last decades haven’t taken their toll on a very, reserved and traditional Pope, who is said to prefer smelling the roses in his garden while the house burns down and rumors fly about as to many scandals in the wings.

After unpacking her suitcase and hanging up the wardrobe she has brought with her for the week’s stay, Isabella takes a bottle of sparkling water from the mini bar and pours the contents into a waiting glass. A long swig of the bubbly liquid refreshes. She moves to the long window to gawk now at the tourists who can’t gawk back at her. There are so many of them, all climbing, laughing and progressing towards the top of the Steps where they will encounter the church of Trinità dei Monti. As they parade by, she is struck by the fact that none of them seems the least bit interesting, just a flock of multi-colored, bird-like creatures, all in motion towards an apparent shared goal.

She is about to close the draperies over the tall window in preparation for a well-deserved nap when she notices a short, rather stocky man climbing slowly up the Spanish Steps. He puts one foot after the other on the Steps, as though performing a slow march, one, two, one, two. His skin is sallow, waxy, almost yellow, he’s not Italian, perhaps Spanish or Mexican? He’s so close to Isabella’s window that, in spite of its height above him, she is privy to a closeup of his beefy, yellow face. How very unpleasant the face is, not unlike those of the omnipresent street Arabs she sees haunting the Steps now as they never did when she was here with her father.

***

Roberto Bonito glances up at one of the windows where there appears a shadow of a person who may be looking down on him. Odd how tall those windows are in that grand hotel at the top of the Steps. He knows he will never be able to stay in a place like that. Well, at least not now, but maybe if –- he won’t think about it. Later. He’ll see whether Geraldine Smythe has kept her word and registered for a suite at the Hassler to watch the papal activity.

He’s taking a well-deserved break from work at his souvenir stand at the