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

strongest maternal forces in the world were taking her daughter to themselves. I have stepped out of the picture forever, she thought, and as if to bear her out, as the ceremony ended and everyone started moving toward the church door, no one noticed Margaret Johnson at all. They were waiting to form the wedding cortege, which would wind over the river and up the hill to the restaurant and the long luncheon.
She did not mind not being noticed. She had done her job, and she knew it. She had played, single-handed and unadvised, a tricky game in a foreign country, and she had managed to realize from it the dearest wish of her heart. Signora Naccarelli was passing—one had to pause until the suction of that lady in motion had faded. Then Mrs. Johnson moved through the atrium and out to the colonnaded porch, where, standing aside from the others, she could observe Clara stepping into a car, her white skirts dazzling in the sun. Clara saw her mother: they waved to each other. Fabrizio was made to wave, as well. Over everybody’s head a bronze fountain in the piazza jetted water into the sunlight, and nearby a group of tourists had stopped to look.
Clara and Fabrizio were driving off. So it had really happened! It was done. Mrs. Johnson found her vision blotted out. The reason was simply that Signor Naccarelli, that old devil, had come between her and whatever she was looking at; now he was smiling at her. The money again. There it was, forever returning, the dull moment of exchange.
Who was fooling whom, she longed to say, but did not. Or rather, since we both had our little game to play, which of us came off better? Let’s tell the truth at last, you and I.
It was a great pity, Signor Naccarelli was saying, that Signor Johnson could not have been here to see so beautiful a wedding. Mrs. Johnson agreed.
Though no one knew it but her, Signor Johnson at that very moment was winging his way to Rome. She had cut things rather fine; it made her shudder to realize how close a schedule she had had to work with. Tomorrow she would rise early to catch the train to Rome, to wait at the airport for Noel to land, but wait alone this time, and, no matter what he might think or say, triumphant.
He was going to think and say a lot, Noel Johnson was, and she knew she had to brace herself. He was going to go on believing for the rest of his life, for instance, that she had bought this marriage, the way American heiresses used to engage obliging titled gentlemen as husbands. No use telling him that sort of thing was out of date. Was money ever out of date? he would want to know.
But Margaret Johnson was going to weather the storm with Noel, or so at any rate she had the audacity to believe. Hadn’t he in some mysterious way already, at what point she did not know, separated his own life from that of his daughter’s? A defective thing must go. She had seen him act upon this principle too many times not to feel that in some fundamental, unconscious way he would, long ago, have broken this link. Why had he done so? Why, indeed? Why are we all and what are we really doing? Who was to say when he , in turn, had irritated the selfish, greedy nature of things and been kicked on the head in all the joyousness of his playful ways? No, it would be pride alone that was going to make him angry: she had gone behind his back. At least so she believed.
Though weary of complexities and more than ready to take a long rest from them all, Mrs. Johnson was prepared on the strength of her belief to make one more gamble yet, namely, that however Noel might rage, no honeymoon was going to be interrupted, that Signor Naccarelli was not going to be searched out and told the truth, and that the officials of the great Roman church could sleep peacefully in rich apartments or poor damp cells, undisturbed by Noel Johnson. He would grow quiet at last, and in the quiet, even Margaret Johnson had not yet dared to imagine what sort of life, what degree of delight in it, they