Still, June kept reading the book to herself whenever she had a free moment; she couldn’t help but imagine that it was Sylvie Tanner who was the witness and author of the book, as if she had seen with her own eyes the fierce fighting and wretched wounded in the churches, had toiled to alleviate the suffering without the aid of medicines or clean bandages or food. There was an inscription on the book’s title page, written in a handsome, flowing, old-fashioned hand, To our steadfast daughter. May you be an angel of mercy, and it was Nicholas who once asked June, when he was seven or eight, what a “steadfast” person was, holding the very book in his hands. The blue cloth cover had been long burned away and the binding was crackly and exposed, though the inner pages were intact. Because of its fragile condition she kept it in a large jewelry box on her bureau.
She heard herself tell him what Sylvie had said to her, almost to the word: “Someone who is firm in his person and beliefs, who brings to the world a constant heart.”
“Are you an angel of mercy?”
“I would like to be one,” she told him, realizing that of course he assumed the inscription was meant for her. “We should all try to be.”
He nodded, then gingerly placed the book back in the jewelry box. Sometimes she could tell that he had come in and inspected the book, tiny bits of charred paper left on the bureau top, and though she would have preferred his not handling it, and then taking such an interest in its harrowing, difficult content, she grew to see the activity as a strange kind of intimacy between them, a way to let him peek into her life and past without her having to tell him a thing. Then one day, when he was older, in sixth grade, he came into the kitchen with the book and asked whose it really was-he’d realized the illogic of the English inscription, when her parents had been Korean-and she told him it was a gift from a friend. A woman who had helped her when she was a girl but who died after the war.
“What was her name?”
She told him and though it could mean nothing to him the name seemed to spark his imagination as might a character in a story. “What happened to her?”
“There was an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
“A fire.”
He didn’t say anything to this. Nicholas, always very mindful of her emotions, did not push her on it. They sat in silence for a moment, and then he said, “Is that where you met my father?”
“Where?”
“Solferino.”
She shook her head. “I’ve not been there.”
“Do you know what’s there now?”
“I imagine there’s a small town. I know there’s a church.”
“I bet it’s a special one,” Nicholas said. “You think it’s like in the book we have on the Vatican? Full of fancy stuff, like gold statues and paintings?”
“You mean great treasure and riches? Maybe so.”
“We should go someday,” he said excitedly. “Don’t you think?”
“Yes, we should,” she answered, even if she had always imagined visiting the place by herself.
“Could this be mine?” he asked her hopefully, holding the book.
“I don’t know if I can give it up just yet,” she replied. “Even to you.” But the expression on his face dampened and she quickly offered: “But how about I write something to you in it. How’s that?”
“Okay.”
He quickly ran and retrieved a pen for her and opened the book to the page with the inscription. She was composing her thoughts on what to write when the phone rang; on the other end was a wholesale dealer whose call she had been awaiting. Nicholas waited patiently but when she hung up she had to leave right away to get downtown, to inspect an estate lot and make a compelling bid before any others got there. Nicholas stayed home. When she returned a few hours later (having purchased most all of the estate) he had fallen asleep in front of the television, a half-eaten salami sandwich he had fixed for himself on his lap, and she gently roused and walked him to his bed.
Only many years later, after putting him in a taxi to the airport for his big trip, did she suddenly remember that she had completely forgotten to inscribe the book for him that day. She may not have even looked at it since then. When she got back to the apartment, she went directly to her bedroom and saw that the book was gone from the jewelry box. She searched beneath the bed, in her closet, on the living room shelves, and then in Nicholas’s room, still full of his things, poring through piles of his sketchbooks and records and posters (sure signs, she thought later, that he had planned to come back), but after going through everything and the rest of the apartment she was certain that he had taken it with him.
How could he? At first she was shot through by pangs of confusion, then hurt, wounded as she was by his meager regard for her feelings, by his callous act of taking perhaps the one physical object in her life that had value. Her fury the next day reached a pitch so sharp that she pictured an accident in whatever city he was in, his bus rolling over, his hostel on fire, such that he would desperately try to phone her. But just as quickly a terrible guilt overcame her and she convinced herself that it was his own sentimentality, mixed up with his particular kind of secrecy and larcenous need, that had compelled him, and she came to see it instead as a kind of loving act, as though he’d stolen in and snipped a lock of her hair while she slept. Could it be that this was where her son had gone to hide? Her heart raced with the possibility. Her mind was beginning to fail along with her body, but she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it before. They surely must go to Solferino, too. She imagined Nicholas sitting at an outdoor café, waiting for her. Clines wouldn’t like it, but she would explain to him on the plane that they could only stay briefly in Rome, long enough to rest a few hours before renting a car and driving north.
A car horn wailed behind them, the driver leaning on it an extra few beats in a show of contempt for Clines’s slow driving; he’d been honked at several times already on the trip over from Manhattan. The car behind them came alongside and the driver gave Clines the finger and then cut aggressively in front of him, just grazing their bumper. Clines swerved, losing control for an instant, the steering wheel playing jerkily as the car fishtailed wildly. June was sure they were going to crash. Somehow he steadied it but now he was driving even slower than before and when another car started honking he left the roadway at the next exit, even though it wasn’t theirs. He drove for a few blocks before stopping, saying he needed to check his map, though it was clear he was shaken, his temple damp with perspiration.
June held the side of her head and face; she’d been knocked lightly against the side window of the sedan but in her condition it was as if she’d been struck with a rod, her cheek feeling like a cracked glass. And suddenly a nausea was welling up from her belly, rising and pushing against her lungs, up into her throat.
“Unlock the doors,” she said weakly.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Singer. We’ll be moving on now.”
“Please do it!”
The power locks jumped and she practically leaped out of the car, stumbling a few feet away from the door and falling on one knee in a weedy patch of the shoulder. She vomited very little, just the small mug of roasted barley tea she’d made herself before Clines picked her up, her spit tasting metallic and bilious; she was glad it was dark enough that she couldn’t make out the blood in the grass. She’d begun flushing the toilet at her shop with her eyes closed after she got sick in it, simply to avoid that wash of bright, wild color.