A New Year's in Old Rome.

Morris, Joe Edd

Van Hampton and his wife, Lillian, sat in the lounge on the top floor of the Eden Hotel, the glittering Eternal City spread before them, its layered history and illumined ancient monuments rising from the amber-pebbled dark. But it was their reflection in the panoramic window, as though double-exposed on the grand scene, he observed. She in the black dress he'd requested, with the slit that parted, fell away from her thigh and bared her leg. He in his tuxedo, red bow tie and cummerbund. Her full blond hair flipped above her shoulders, as she'd always worn it; his gray and thinning. Their hands cupping brandy snifters, as though cradling something fragile. Their brooding melancholy faces. Everything magnified.

He'd recently turned sixty-three and she forty-eight and he was beginning to reflect uncomfortably on age. He was spending more time looking in mirrors, noting with anxious scrutiny the wrinkles beneath his eyes and the slippage of flesh beneath his chin. To stem betraying specks of stubble, he'd begun shaving twice a day. He'd quit thumping his electric shaver head against the side of the sink. The gray residue resembled ashes swirling away when he turned on the tap. He'd had his eyebrows waxed and plucked and brushed with a dash of Grecian Formula. Their snowy whiteness, he'd noticed lately, invaded his face and made it look paler. He'd had his teeth whitened. He laughed at himself, at the contradictions of aging; darkening part of his face while lightening another.

He'd begun observing how men looked when he and his wife passed, ogling her but thinking of him; why he deserved her, was able to keep her. They were all younger men, the lecherous insecure; their heat probing the empty spaces, where to strike first. He knew, in part, he was projecting. He knew the projection was valid. Writers tend to do that, work both sides of the psychological fence. At times, fact and fiction merge.

He ran the numbers. Sixty-three minus twenty-five. That's how old he was when they married. She was twenty-three. Then, fifteen years did not seem much. But fifteen years at thirty-eight did not equal fifteen years at sixty-three. He'd known from the beginning it might come to this, the numbers would catch up with him.

He was famous. Passing bookstores in airports, she'd tug at his elbow, point proudly at a display. On cruises, lying around the pool she'd lean over and, not in a whisper, say to the person reading next to her, "that's my husband's book" and set off a flurry. But people get used to fame, just as they get used to wealth, to glamour, to power. They don't get used to growing old.

He stared out again through the cold glass, through their reflection at the lights of Rome and wondered what she was thinking. She, too, had sensed something wrong. The day he had called a marriage therapist and told her, she'd confessed she'd called one the day before. They had to do something, their marriage seemed dead, she had said. But the doctor he had called could see them first.

His name was Dr. Romano, Alessandro Romano. He was a short, older man, near retirement, seasoned in his profession. He had a dark square face with thinning hair and an overgrown mustache. His eyebrows were thick, long wiry tendrils looping over the tops of wire frame glasses. He was from Italy and spoke with an accent. Lillian Hampton felt comfortable with him, trusting. Van Hampton was guarded, less at ease. He preferred someone younger. This doctor was old enough to be his father, her grandfather.

They sat diagonally to each other in blue leather wingback chairs, a small table between them. Dr. Romano seated himself directly across from them.

"Tell me this," he began, this pronounced to rhyme with geese, "your stories and how you met."

Lillian Hampton went first.

She grew up in the Mississippi Delta. Her mother was still alive, in her sixties. She never really knew her father. He died when she was eight years old. His name was Cavenaugh Duval. He was a big man, she remembered, with a deep voice. She adored him but did not know why, unless for that reason, that he was "big."

"He was a large presence in your childhood," Dr. Romano reframed.

"Yes, he was," she reflected, surprise in her eyes and voice at the broadened, confirming comment. "When he was there. I don't remember seeing much of him. 'How's my girl?' he would say then was off, often before I could answer." As a child she was in beauty pageants, dance and piano recitals. In the audience she saw only her mother's face. Her father's life was the plantation, the land, that other world of dominion and power. Unlike so many Delta planters indebted up to their hairlines, he'd invested wisely leaving her and her mother well off, with a large white-pillared mansion near Tutwiler, Mississippi, and a funded estate on which both could float the rest of their lives.

"I had it good in the Delta," Lillian Hampton said, "everything a young girl growing up could want. My clothes came from the best shops in Greenville and Cleveland and Greenwood. Christmases always meant fine gifts-from Neiman Marcus,

Saks, Bloomingdale's, Tiffany's. Mother and I took trips to New York, dined in nice restaurants and took in the Broadway shows, spent days in museums. Even when he was alive, daddy, preferred to stay on the plantation. 'I'm comfortable in this world,' he'd say."

She continued. At fifteen she made her debut in the Greenville Junior Cotillion and her mother gave her a Corvette convertible, Chinese red with bright silver chrome, the car her father would have given her had he been alive. She became a debutante her freshman year at Ole Miss. Because her father had been one of the largest landowners in the Delta and had, at one time, been on the board of the all-powerful Delta Council, her sophomore year she was selected Lady of the Realm to the Memphis Cotton Carnival Court and two years later the ultimate crown, Maid of Cotton.

"If the Mississippi Delta was a foreign country with royalty, and many thought it was, she was its princess." This came not from Dr. Romano but her husband.

She flinched when he said it.

Dr. Romano quickly, but gently, interceded: "In those days you needed no introduction. Your name, Duval, preceded you. Everyone knew your father. Everyone, perhaps but you."

She sat transfixed, her body facing the therapist but her head turned toward her husband, her eyes a mixed teary glare of surprise and hurt and anger, all of it welling up to explode.

With a shrug and open palms, Van Hampton gestured inadequately with apology. His mouth opened to speak but Dr. Romano cut him off.

"And how did your father die?" he asked her.

"Heart attack," she said with a shaken voice, her head turning slowly, as a turret after firing, from her husband back to Dr. Romano

"And you were away when this happened?" Dr. Romano enquired.

"No. I was at home. But he died in the field."

Dr. Romano looked down at his tablet then raised his eyes slowly back to her.

"Your mother never remarried?" he pressed.

"No."

Dr. Romano rolled his finger, a gesture for her to pick up the story. Maintaining her erect posture, her hands finger-locked in her lap, Lillian Hampton breathed deeply and resumed. "I was floundering. I didn't know what to do with my life. I got a degree in art at Ole Miss then went on for a master of fine arts. That's when I took a creative writing class." She cast a sideward glance at her husband in the chair beside her. "Under Van."

There was a moment of silence.

Van Hampton observed his wife's face, that stage he'd watched over the years, the different actors, moods that swept across it, the curtains that rose and fell with sudden intentionality. He'd seen before the calculating pause, the restrained calmness. He knew, too, when she'd said all she would say.

She opened her mouth as if she might say more then closed it and leaned back in her chair, legs crossed, one hand primly atop the other on her knee.

"Very well," Dr. Romano said and nodded at her husband.

"I grew up in the Mississippi hills, not the Delta," Van Hampton began, an opening that drew a sharp look from his wife, so he dropped the next few lines, about his humble origins he'd crafted while she was talking. "My father was a watchmaker. He and my mother owned a jewelry story. He fixed watches and she sold merchandise-gems and glassware and fine china." He'd been listening to this cut-to-the-chase doctor and decided responding in kind might gain him points, forge an alliance. "Screwdrivers and legs brought them together."

Dr. Romano's brows jumped above his glasses and his eyes expanded. "Interesting combination."

Van Hampton continued. Before his parents met, a local drug store had let his father set up a repair bench. "Word got around about his tiny screwdrivers. My mother was young and just out of college. One day she brought him her violin case. A screw to the lid had come out." He describes the scene with his hands. "She'd been told he was the only person within miles who might have a screwdriver to fit it, and he did. Several weeks later she was back. This time it was a loose screw in her glasses' temple and she knew he'd have just the right screwdriver. She must have thought he could fix anything because months later, months, mind you," he leans forward for emphasis, "she married him."

He paused and glanced at his wife but she gave no indication of support or affirmation. You're on your own, her look said. "My mother had a gap in her front teeth and a scar down the side of her nose, but it was her legs my father said, that caught his eye. If she hadn't had the most beautiful, shapely legs he'd ever seen, he might never have looked twice. 'You can always tell how well a woman's going to age,' he said one day when we were fishing. I asked how and he said, 'By looking at her legs. If they are thin at the ankles and tapered, she'll take good care of herself.' I remember my mother was tall and she did have long tapered legs. She always dressed with style. 'Tell your mother how beautiful she looks today,' my father was always saying to me before we left the house for church."

Van Hampton stopped. There was a lengthy pause, as if the next line hung in a balance and he was unsure which way to tilt. Then: "My parents were killed when I was ten years old. That night was ..." He paused again. He looked at Lillian, who'd heard the story and might tell it for him but, again, there was nothing helpful in her face. "I continued on through school and after graduation from high school--"

Dr. Romano stopped him. "Return to that night, your parents ... Everything about that night you can recall is important. You were in fourth, fifth grade, no?"

"Fourth."

Dr. Romano said, "Then continue ... there ... that night." "My mother's friend," he said, grimacing his displeasure at the request, "Miss Edwina, was keeping me while my father and mother went to a Christmas party. I remember it was raining. Miss Edwina and I were in the living room in front of the fireplace. I was sprawled on the floor entertaining myself with a coloring book. Miss Edwina couldn't find any crayons so she chewed the end of matches and I dipped those into saucers of color she'd mixed from my mother's makeup."

He stopped.

Dr. Romano rolled his hand for him to continue.

Van Hampton picked up the thread and told how he and Miss Edwina sat there in the quiet listening to the rain splash against the windows then suddenly the sound against the windows changed and Miss Edwina said it was sleeting. "Not long after, I went to my room upstairs and turned out the light. Later I remember the phone ringing. Miss Edwina came and held me ... that's all I remember."

"Most can recall the last image of their parents when they were alive," Dr. Romano gently injected. "What images do you remember?"

Immediately, he pondered the reason for the question. More than any other, it stirred his emotions. His hands gripped the arms of the large wingback and he began fidgeting. He looked at the ceiling and swallowed air. I dare not break down in front of her, that thought rallying some composure. He glanced at his wife again then looked at the doctor. "My last memory of my dad is vague. He had on his hat, the felt one he always wore. He was holding the front door open for my mother. Perhaps I remember so little of him because I was watching her. She was wearing the black and white polka-dotted dress she often wore to church and black high heels. I remember telling her she looked pretty. The last I saw were her legs as they vanished through the door into the night."

There was a long uneasy silence in the room, one, it seemed, Dr. Romano would not rescue. Then: "Your last visual memory of your mother was her beauty, how she dressed, her legs."

He nodded.

"At some point in your adult life, you met your wife," Dr. Romano said, glancing at Lillian Hampton.

"Yes, we met, then--" He halted. "Well, she told you that." "And she had long, beautiful legs." Dr. Romano tilted his head slightly toward Lillian who smiled for the first time, a faint shy thank you nod. He looked down at the pad where he'd been scribbling notes, his eyes moving over the sheet like someone counting in their head then he looked up. "You were in your late thirties at that time. There was another marriage before that, yes?"

"No!" Van Hampton exclaimed.

"Aaah," Dr. Romano breathed in. "You were waiting."

"Yes."

"For the right one."

"Yes."

"And she was ... let me see ..." Dr. Romano's eyes returned to his note pad. "Twenty-three years old."

Both nodded in agreement.

"Aaah!" Dr. Romano exclaimed, another exaggerated sigh, his eyes widening, lighting up again. "You were already published." "Yes," Van Hampton replied.

"One novel? More than one?" Dr. Romano asked.

"More than one."

"I see. So the difference in your ages, this was no problem for you," Dr. Romano said, his focus still on Van Hampton.

"No, it was not a problem," Van Hampton responded, "not then."

"Not then because your name was well known, you were famous," Dr. Romano observed. "You counted on fame. You thought she needed fame. You thought it replaced something in her youth. You knew you would grow old but she'd never leave fame. You thought your marriage could coast on fame; it was the glue, no?"

He opened his mouth to respond but Lillian Hampton, as if to rescue him or both of them, for she had been implicated, swung her eyes onto Dr. Romano. "But I think we've really just drifted, Dr. Romano," she said, sharply, addressing him by his name for the first time. "My involvement in DAR--I'm the national president, you know--has kept me away a lot. His writing is a factor. We have a cabin on the lake. He goes there for weeks on end, then on the road for book events. Our children are in college." She looked at her husband and he nodded agreement.

Dr. Romano nodded with them. "Yes, yes. This is true. You have drifted. But more importantly, you were drifting before you married. There is more to this than drift. Early on, several themes in your relationship--fame, prominence, beauty, age--like the colliding broken pieces of a kaleidoscope, possessed the potential to kill your marriage."

"Maybe we just need to rediscover each other," Van Hampton said, absently, as though he did not hear the comment. "Recapture our first moments." He thought of their honeymoon at The Peabody in Memphis, where they slept on silk sheets and made love with the clopping sounds of horses pulling carriages along the streets just below their window, the wind billowing the curtains with the night smells of the city.

"Discovery, not rediscovery," Dr. Romano redefined the comment. "A discover}' of something within, something new, something neither of you has touched or has touched you."

Both slid to the edge of their chairs. "What?" they asked eagerly.

"This I cannot tell you," Dr. Romano said. "If I told you, it would blunt, perhaps obliterate, the impact of discovery. And that, the impact, is as important as the discovery itself." He looked seriously at each of them when he said it, then to their perplexed faces and with the same serious attitude said, "Every marriage has its defining moment, its strategic point. Yours will come to you." Slowly, he raised a finger, as if to draw their thoughts to it. "You are bound by history, by something that has no energy; but something that, paradoxically, has kept you going, kept the kaleidoscope turning. You need to put DAR," he looked at her, "and writing" then him, "aside and get away, to a place where you know no one. Just the two of you. No distractions."

They looked blankly at each other then back at their therapist.

"And you have a place in mind, doctor?" she said with a thin ironic smile.

"Yes, yes. I am prejudiced, of course, but Italy, Italy in winter, ah ... no one else is there." His face was animated as he spoke, "You will have it to yourselves. Rome is best, particularly at the New Year." He rolled his hands as though gesturing over a potion and his eyes narrowed to a serious gleam. "People looking for passion go where it is hot. They take cruises, go to the tropics, lie on the beaches. But for what you need, ah, choose antiquity and the cold," he said, still rolling his hands then leaned closer to them, his accent more affected, thicker. "The cold does that to the skin, the eyes, brings out the colors of need."

That was the first session. The next was scheduled upon their return.

Sitting in the Eden Hotel lounge, his wife beside him, old Rome scattered in the night before them, Van Hampton reflected on Dr. Romano's assignment. They'd done what he had asked. They'd gone to Italy in winter. They'd been there two weeks and nothing had changed. Dr. Romano had mentioned a discovery. But nothing stood out. No fire had fallen from heaven. No magic from the antiquity and the cold he'd raved about and they were down to the last evening. Van Hampton had wanted it to be one of gaiety and fun, of romance.

They'd gone first to a teahouse beside the Spanish Steps, opposite the house where Keats had lived. But it had "reservation only" and was booked past midnight. The owner, who was British, had said it would be difficult finding a "decent" restaurant on New Year's Eve. She had made a few phone calls and found one. It was across the Tiber, a twenty-minute taxi ride away. The restaurant was modern, upscale. He had felt energized. She had seemed downcast.

"I was hoping for something quainter, with a tradition," she had said, once they'd been seated. "I feel this is not even Rome. I might as well be in a restaurant in Manhattan." She had paused a moment. "Or even Memphis." She had not been looking at him but out the long window beside them, across the river at the city of Caesars and Popes, of empire.

He had thought before responding, aware of the pitfalls her sharp words had carved into the moment. He had thought about other choices he'd made. For her. For them. For things she didn't even know he had to be sorry about. "I'm sorry," he had said.

"Well ... Oh, thank you," she had said to the waiter who brought their wine.

The food had been good. They had eaten heartily with no discussion and drank a heavy red wine. After dinner, near the Castle San Angelo they had strolled back across the Tiber to a quaint bistro where a pianist with an electric guitar accompanist was playing those old Italian songs that evoke love and romance, sadness at their swift passing. It will never be like this again, an inner voice said to him. Tomorrow, they would fly home. For the first time in years--he could not count them--they had danced.

Old Rome is not large and she had wanted to walk. They had strolled through the Piazza Navonna, past massive flowing fountains whose spray misted their faces; fountains that had not stopped for decades, centuries. Past the Pantheon, that had been there as long, to the Via Del Corso where they strolled by chic expensive shops reminiscent of Manhattan and Fifth Avenue. At the Via Del Condotti they had turned right and soon were back at the Spanish Steps where the evening had begun. They had climbed the Steps and strolled down the Via Sistina then cut back along the perimeter of the Villa Borghese. They had been looking for the Via Veneto, because a movie had been filmed there.

"How far are we from the Via Veneto," he had stopped and asked a doorman at a hotel.

"Che?"

"The Via Veneto. How far?" he had tried again.

"Dov'e la Via Veneto," she had interrupted.

"Ah," the doorman had said and smiled then looked back up the narrow street. "Vada diritto," he thrust his arm forward militarily. "Due strada, giri a sinistra," he pointed left with the same intense formality. "E destra."

"What did he say?" he had asked.

"We missed it," she had remarked.

He had looked again at the sign, Eden Hotel, over the doorman's head and commented, "Why don't we duck in here? Maybe they have a bar."

Except to order their brandies, neither had spoken since the maitre d' had seated them. Others at nearby tables engaged in animated conversation but they sat quietly, looking at the city, its nocturnal contrasts of light and shadow, at the tops of buildings moon-whitened in the dark.

He broke the silence. "What was your favorite?" He did not turn and look at her but kept his eyes on the city.

"My goodness," she reacted, slightly flinching at the question. "There was so much. Pompeii, Sorrento, the Amalfi Drive, Positano."

"No," he gestured toward the window, his index finger pointing from his hand holding the snifter, "in the city, in Rome."

She thought a moment, her eyes roving the amber lights, the floodlit shrines. She arched a finger and pointed. "There," she said uncertainly. "I think I see it ... there."

"What?" He leaned forward peering with her. "Where?"

"The darkened dome among that clutter of buildings. The Pantheon, I think. Yes. The Pantheon." She looked at him. "And you?"

"Why the Pantheon?" He was still leaning forward, still straining to see.

"Why not the Pantheon?" she asked, then pressed, "You didn't answer my question."

"It was so dreary and decrepit, gloomy-looking," he responded caustically. "I thought you would have picked something more stately, polished, like the Emmanuel Second Monument there in the distance. Now, there's something deserving of floodlights. That's my pick."

She shifted her posture, returned her gaze to the panoramic view. "And why that, since the question has become fair game?" she challenged.

"It represents consolidation, synergy, the new Italy," he said smugly, twirling his drink. "The Pantheon represents decay."

"Say what you will," she flipped a hand. "It's one of the oldest structures in Rome, maybe in the Western world." She gave him a reprimanding frown. "And it's not decaying. It's in near perfect condition from the time it was built by Hadrian. It has endured with grace."

For the first time since they'd been seated, he looked at her. "Didn't you see where they had patched it on one side? With concrete blocks, of all things."

"No, I didn't see that," she replied. "Those are not things I notice."

He was not going to argue with her. "I still like the Emmanuel second best," and cast his eyes back to the gleaming peristyled monument, a micro-acropolis outshining all else, and her beautiful reflection superimposed upon it, her black velvet heels and long crossed lovely legs she recrossed as she shifted again in her chair.

Quiet moments slipped by, the only sounds murmurs from nearby tables, muted noise from the kitchen.

"Scusi, Signora. Signore." The waiter was bending over them holding two small platters. He was an older man, perhaps in his sixties, with salt-and-pepper hair, bushy mustache and eyebrows. The face reminded Van Hampton of someone he'd seen but could not place.

"What's this?" she asked.

"The saucers. They are for you," he said, placing one in front of each.

"But we ordered nothing else," Van Hampton declared.

"No, signore. They are to break. The New Year, it is almost here." He pulled up his white sleeve and pointed to his watch.

"I don't understand," she said perplexed.

"At midnight you break something--plate, glass, cup. An old Italian custom. Break the bad things of the past year. Welcome the good of the New Year. There," he pointed toward a door. "You can walk onto the patio and, at stroke of midnight, throw them onto the street below. Everyone do it." He spread his arm expansively outward to show them. In the small lounge others, too, were receiving saucers, some plates and glasses.

"But it's good china," she remarked as she reluctantly accepted the saucer.

The waiter shrugged.

"Que sera sera," Van Hampton said, after the waiter left. "They must all think that way, these crazy Italians."

"They're not all crazy," she disagreed, eying him over her snifter as she took a sip. "They've preserved some good things."

Van Hampton checked his watch. "Will you join me?" he asked, pointing toward the outside door.

She shook her head. "I'll watch you."

He excused himself from the table and followed a small exodus onto the adjoining outdoor patio. He looked back and motioned her to follow but she remained seated, smiling faintly, as a mother to a small child off to have some fun.

Counting down with everyone on the patio, at the appropriate second he sailed his plate, toward the darkened dome of the Pantheon, and watched it disappear into the shadows below and listened to the collective crash all around him, the sound of a crystal moon shattering over the city. I am ending my oldest day, he thought as he turned and looked back through the unreflected clarity of the window, at his wife amid the soft orange yellow decor, the dusty saffron color of Rome, vanilla lights turned down low and tuxedoed waiters standing at attention as though sentinels. She was smiling, clutching her plate to her breast, her crossed legs protruding through her skirt and the thought, substantial as the midnight breeze, suddenly hit and drew a smile from him in a place deep inside he'd not known was there.