The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales by Elizabeth Spencer

the echo of his own steps in familiar streets and looking at towering shapes of stone. The night seemed to be moving along secretly, but fast; the earth, bearing all burdens lightly, spinning, and racing ahead—just as a Florentine had said, so it did. The silent towers tilted toward the dawn.
He saw his father the next morning. “It is all right,” said Signor Naccarelli. “I have talked a long time with the signora. We will go today as yesterday to the office of the parroco.”
“But Papà!” Fabrizio spread all ten fingers wide and shook his hands violently before him. “You had me sick with worry. My heart almost stopped. Yesterday I was like a crazy person. I have never spent such a day.”
“Yes, well. I am sorry. The signorina is a bit older than I thought. Not much, but—Did you know?”
“Of course I knew. I told you so. Long ago. Did you forget it?”
“Perhaps I did. Never mind. And you, my son. You are twentyone years, vero?”
“Papà!” Here Fabrizio all but left the earth itself. “I am twenty-three! The sun has cooked your brain. I should be the one to act like this.”
“All right, all right. I was mistaken. But my instinct was right.” He tapped his brow. “It is always better to discuss everything in great detail. I felt that we were going too quickly. You cannot be too careful in these things. But my son—” He caught the boy’s shoulder. “Remember to say nothing to the Americans. Do you want them to think we are crazy?”
“You are innamorato of the signora. I understand it all.”
    14
    At the wedding Margaret Johnson sat quietly while a dream unfolded before her. She watched closely and missed nothing.
She saw Clara emerge like a fresh flower out of the antique smell of candle smoke, incense and damp stone, and advance in white Venetian lace with so deep a look shadowing out the hollow of her cheek, she might have stood double for a Botticelli. As for Fabrizio, he who had such a gift for appearing did not fail them. His beauty was outshone only by his outrageous pride in himself; he saw to it that everybody saw him well. Like an angel appearing in a painting, he seemed to face outward to say, This is what I look like, see? But his innocence protected him like magic.
Clara lifted her veil like a good girl exactly when she had been told to. Fabrizio looked at her and love sprang up in his face. The priest went on intoning, and since it was twelve o’clock all the bells from over the river and nearby began to ring at slightly different intervals—the deep-throated ones and the sweet ones, muffled and clear—one could hear them all.
The Signora Naccarelli had come into her own that day. She obviously believed that she had had difficulties to overcome in bringing about this union, but having gotten the proper heavenly parties well informed, she had brought everything into line. Her bosom had sometimes been known to heave and her eye to dim, but that day she was serene. She wore flowers and an enormous medallion of her dead mother outlined in pearls. That unlikely specimen, a middle-class Neapolitan, she now seemed both peasant and goddess. Her hair had never been more smoothly bound, and natural color touched her large cheeks. Before the wedding, the wicked Giuseppe had seen her and run into her arms. Smiling perpetually at no one, it was as though she had created them all.
Signor Naccarelli had escorted Margaret Johnson to her place and sat beside her. He kept his arms tightly folded across his chest, and his face wore an odd, unreadable expression, mouth somewhat pursed, his high, cold Florentine nose drawn toughly across the bridge. Perhaps his collar was too tight.
Yes, Margaret Johnson saw everything, even the only person to cry, Giuseppe’s wife, who had chosen to put her sophisticated selfinto a girlish, English-type summer frock of pale blue with a broad white collar.
I will not be needed anymore, thought Margaret Johnson with something like a sigh, for before her eyes the