“It was North American built Apollo. You know, the moon ship?” I nodded. Evidently he was used to younger people never having heard of the program. “Not all of it,” he said. “Just the CSM — the command and service modules, the part that came back to Earth. I did well at North American. I was in the right place at the right time. We believed we could achieve anything, on any scale, if we worked hard enough, with our flow charts and schedules and critical paths. Why not? That was how we won the war, and how we managed Project Apollo. Four hundred thousand people, all across the country, all doing their tiny part — but all controlled from the center, all those resources pouring in, like building a mountain out of grains of sand, a huge mountain you could climb all the way to the moon.”
He was a solid character, intense, engaged, vividly real. In his anecdotes I glimpsed a postwar America growing fast, confident and rich, a time of technological growth and economic expansion — and I liked the idea that a relative of mine had been there at the fall of Rome, and had worked on Apollo. But I wasn’t enjoying the encounter. Beside him I felt pale, diminished, uncertain, maybe a bit intimidated. And young.
We turned off Worth onto Lake Drive South, which ran north along the coast of Lake Worth. Here the road was part of a bicycle trail, and in the low afternoon light there were people cycling, skateboarding, jogging.
“Here, you can buy me a Popsicle.”
It turned out he meant an ice lolly; we had come to an ice cream stall. I stumped up for two great gaudy confections, so sugary I couldn’t finish mine. But we sat on a stone bench and gazed out at the ducks paddling on Lake Worth. The flat western light made his face look like a bronze sculpture, all plains and grooves.
By 1943 the war was going badly for the Italians. Mussolini was removed and arrested, and an armistice signed. When the Allies landed at Salerno, the Germans found out about the deal. Rome quickly fell to the Nazis.
“The Order was involved in the resistance, in a quiet way,” Lou said. “So Maria Ludovica told me. The Germans tried to call up all the young men for work on factories or farms or mines, or on the defense lines they were building to oppose the Allied advance. And the city was full of escaped POWs. Lots of people to hide. We estimated that at one time, of a city of a million and a half or so, about two hundred thousand were being hidden, in homes, churches, even the Vatican.”
“And the Order—”
“They have a big complex there, big and old and deep. Not that I ever saw it.” I wondered, Deep? “Yes, the Order did their share. And it was not without risk. Family, huh — I guess we should be proud.”
Air raids began, even though Rome was supposed to be an open city, aiming at railway lines but hitting civilians in such customary friendly-fire targets as hospitals. “The gas and electricity went altogether,” said Lou. “They cut up the benches and trees in the parks for wood. The Order started selling meals, hundreds a day, at a lira a head.
“But then the citizens started to hear the heavy guns.
“Maria Ludovica came out to the Lungotevere to watch the Germans go. Armed to the teeth but dejected, bedraggled. Everybody was silent. Makes you think,” he said. “A Roman crowd, surrounded by all those ancient monuments, once again seeing the retreat of an occupying army.”
“And then you arrived.”
“Yep. I walked in after the tanks that came up the Porta San Giovanni. In the evening everybody lit a little candle in the window. It was, you know, magical.” And he told me how, on June 5, 1944, the day before D-Day, he had climbed the steps of Michelangelo’s cordonata with General Clark. “Not that the Romans were grateful,” he said with a grin around his Popsicle stick.
He leaned closer. “Maria never told me all of it, about Mussolini. Far too delicate for that. But I figured it out. He was kind of a brisk lover. He’d just nail you, right there on the floor of his office. He wouldn’t even take his shoes or trousers off. And when he was done he’d just send you right out of the room and get back to work.”
“What a charmer.”
“But he was Mussolini. Knew a lot of guys in the army who had similar habits, mind you …”
I half listened. I was trying to put this together, trying to figure out how old this Maria Ludovica must be. Say she was about twenty during the 1922 march. That would put her in her thirties when she’d become a “prolific woman,” and in her forties during the war. Was it really credible that a forty-year-old mother of so many children would be the selection of Mussolini, who had, I supposed, the whole of Italy outside the convents to choose from? And could such a woman really have been the sex goddess glimpsed by the callow young Sergeant Casella in 1944? Was Lou somehow conflating the memories of more than one woman? — but his stories seemed detailed and sharp.
“You know, Mussolini was going to build a giant statue of Hercules, as tall as a Saturn Five rocket, with the face of Mussolini and its right hand raised in a fascist salute. All they made was a head and a foot.”
He laughed. “ Credere! Obbedire! Combattere! What an asshole. But still, if he made a pass at you, you didn’t turn him away. I’m pretty sure that by letting the Duce poke her, Maria Ludovica earned a lot of protection for the Order in those years.”
“What was Maria’s connection to the Order? Did she start it?”
“Hell, no. Boy, don’t you know any of the family history?”
I frowned. “The story of the Roman girl—”
“Roman British, yes. Regina.”
“Just a legend. Has to be. The records don’t go back that far.”
He sucked on his Popsicle. “If you say so. Anyhow, for sure the Order was a lot older than Maria Ludovica.”
“And when you found the Casellas you turned to Maria.”
“She, the Order, knew about the Casellas. The Order itself was based not far away. But they hadn’t known about the sickness. When I got in touch, they came — Maria, and three other women. Medically trained, apparently. They wore these simple white robes. I remember cradling one of the boys while they crowded around with their stethoscopes and such. They were all three about the same age. And all similar, all like Maria, like sisters. And the family eyes, smoky gray. It was strange looking from one face to the other. They kind of blurred together, until you couldn’t be sure who was who.”
“And they helped the children.”
“They were short of resources, like everybody else. They treated one boy. He recovered. The other boy died. They took the little girl away.”
“What?”
He turned to me. “They took her away. Into the Order.”
“But they brought her back to her parents.”
“No.” He seemed puzzled by that. “They just took her in, and that was that.”
“And the parents didn’t mind? These people they’d never seen before, relatives or not, just turn up and take their kid away—”
“Hey.” He put a broad, heavy hand on my arm. “You’re raising your voice … You’re thinking about your sister.”
“There does seem an obvious parallel. Gina said you brokered that deal, too.”
“I wouldn’t put it like that. Your sister wasn’t sick. But she was in need — your whole family was. Your parents just couldn’t afford the two of you. They put out feelers in the family for help—” I could imagine how my father would have felt about that. “It got to me, by a roundabout route. And I thought of the Order.”
“How could any parent give up a child to a bunch of strangers?”
Lou’s gaze slid away from mine. “You don’t get it. The Order aren’t strangers. They’re family.” Again that heavy hand on my arm. “I knew I could trust them, and so did the Casellas in Rome, and so did your parents.”