He bathed and shaved and put on the last of the shirts she’d bought him, which was still in its clear plastic package. Everything else of his stunk. They had been traveling without a thought of doing wash and so he gathered their dirty clothes up into a canvas drawstring sack he found in the closet, rooting through her luggage and pulling out what was unfolded or dirty. Her things smelled only marginally better than his, the odor more of dampness and spoilage than body smells. Someone could easily argue that all of him had spoiled, even as his physique remained remarkably sound, that a special scan of his abstract being would show an unsettling result, revealing a soul neither bountiful nor spare but used up, right down to nothing. Of course Dora would not have said so about him, but he couldn’t help wondering during the long, silent hours in the car whether he had been fooling her and himself, whether she would have eventually seen him for what he was, agreed with June that he was a man who wanted to hide himself away forever. He wasn’t useless (as a gravedigger, a janitor, a driver, a nurse, now a laundry maid), but by any weighing of the present evidence-what one might have banked via family or friendship or love or self-purpose, not even counting the mistakes or transgressions or outright crimes-he was not a worthy man. It was as plain as his thirst. His heart felt smashed every time he pictured Dora, but if he was honest it soon revived with what he had to believe was a rush of liberty, if liberty degraded, this feeling that he was released once again from the onus of having to hope or dream.
And yet here he was, dressing for an errand that he could hardly pretend had not partly become his own. He was increasingly curious about Nicholas, too, wondering about the bloodlines that he and June had given him; about its expression in his physical appearance, and then in his undeniably slippery character; what his voice sounded like; and then simply wanting to lay eyes on the young man, take in the shape of him astride the world. He wished he could bump into him and know him and trail him unannounced, peer at him as he sat at a café or on a bus. Maybe this was what comprised fatherhood, at least for somebody like him: a sorry kind of surveillance. He knew he was a thousand light-years from being a respectable adult, his only contact that was even remotely paternal being his sometime counsel at Smitty’s of the slumming suburban kids, muttering they ought to switch to beer before they drove back home on the Palisades Parkway. He certainly couldn’t bear any connection now, any relationship, the prospect of learning too much about Nicholas only trumped by the frightening idea that he’d have to explain himself, too, go over his background and his history and his bond to June, which would, if Nicholas pushed it, open up every other damn thing. But as he shuffled quietly across the expansive space of the suite to leave, he stopped by the bedroom and the sight of her stilled body, looking desiccated and abandoned in the gauzy raft of the canopied bed, made him think he couldn’t deny her this one last thing, however it might disturb him.
At the residenza office on the ground floor he held up the bag of their dirty clothes and tried to communicate to the woman at the desk that he wanted to wash them someplace. She kept talking and motioning and then began pulling the bag away from him and it was only when Bruno appeared that it was sorted out; it had been so long since Hector had stayed in anything but a fleabag hotel that he’d forgotten that such a thing as laundry service was possible. He gave over the bag and had Bruno make sure she knew to leave it outside their door, as the signora was sleeping. Outside they made their plan. Hector had briefly mentioned to Bruno earlier that they were looking for someone and now he showed him the old school photograph and said he was likely working in an antiques shop.
“There are many numerous establishments of antiquities here in Siena, signore,” he replied. “But I have cognizance of the very best ones, and we shall be advised to start at these.”
He explained that it would be better to go by foot today. They were heading to Il Campo, the large main square, where the most prominent shops were, several of them in the piazza itself and on the street immediately ringing it. This was where they would run the horse race tomorrow.
“Excuse me if this is offensive to you, but may I inquire who is this fellow you are looking for?”
“He’s her son.”
“I see,” he said, openly searching Hector’s face. “This is dolorous. Is the situation due to an estrangement?”
“I suppose so.”
“You are a good friend, then,” Bruno said.
“No, not a good friend.”
Bruno nodded curiously. He had a funny way of speaking and was forthright, but he still had a sense of when to keep quiet. He was just about the age Nicholas was now, and Hector decided he was lucky to have him along, so he could get at least some practice dealing with a younger fellow. All along he had assumed that June would be the one dealing with Nicholas, and that if he did anything at all, he’d do as she had asked him, perhaps physically compel him in some way. But now he wasn’t sure what he’d do, and he was glad for Bruno’s presence, to run interference, maybe even to talk for him if necessary.
On the way to the main square they passed smaller squares and side streets completely taken over by the contrade. It was as if circus gangs and their families had overrun the town. They were making preparations for tomorrow’s race, making banners and decorating large chariots for the prerace procession. The banners, patterned with medieval-looking crests and designs, festooned the doorways, the motifs rhymed in the smocks and costumes of the mostly young people milling around the long tables on which older women were setting out bread baskets and plates of salami and pitchers of water and wine. Small dogs and children, also dressed in contrada colors, scampered after one another across the cobblestones. Tourists stood to the side, pointing and taking pictures. Some assemblages spontaneously broke into song, rehearsing traditional anthems that sounded like stadium chants crossed with folk ballads, the reports of which would prompt a competing chorus across the way, drawing out yet another chorus, echoes of the bellowed music rounding through the stone-walled city.
Hector thought back to certain summer days in Ilion, though those would too often end not in shared song but shouts and strife: a scene of mostly company families picnicking at the river park, the men playing baseball with a keg of beer stationed by first base, the mothers cheering hotly between gulps of their shandies and lemonades, all of it peppy and happily competitive until some red-faced lout (sometimes Jackie Brennan) would shriek about a rough slide or inside pitch; there’d be taunts and shoves, and unsettled scores would rear up and ignite a scuffle or two, until at some point everybody quit going altogether, staying at home and drinking on their own porches and giving familial grief to one another. If he had grown up here instead of in Ilion, would he look forward to sitting cheek by jowl each year with his lifelong neighbors? Would he be drinking in celebration, crooning with them until his chest ached? Serve as an estimable brother, or husband? Maybe even a father? Or would he be just as unsociable as now, maybe more so with the standing expectation that he join in? Surely there were malcontents and miscreants here like anywhere else, and yet to look upon the gatherings he could believe what Bruno was telling him, that near every last able-bodied person took part, at least marginally, that a “communal tide,” as the young man put it, swept up all, even the flotsam like Hector, who would never hold high any colors.