Chapter Forty-Eight Rory

The ride to Le Sirenuse is short, Ginevra tells me. Ten minutes, not more. The car gently rolls forward, and I gaze out at all the little gates and awnings punctured by more bougainvillea than I knew existed in this world, let alone have ever seen. Ginevra folds her hands in her lap, twists one of her fantastic rings—this one with hulking ruby gemstones—up toward her knuckle, then down again.

“When we get there, we’ll have to climb many steps to the entrance.” She shrugs. “That’s how they do it in Positano. You’ll be okay?” Her eyes flit to my espadrilles.

I nod. Think that the more apt question is, will she be okay with the climb? She’s relatively young, in her late fifties, but she wheezes when she walks. Even though Papa has Alzheimer’s and is older than her, she seems by far his senior. Like any verve she once had evaporated long ago.

Well, now that I understand what happened—what she did—I can sort of understand.

No. I can’t understand. So much is churning in me that I haven’t begun to deconstruct.

“Rory, I need you to permit me something. A favor, I suppose.”

“What?” I ask, hearing my harsh tone but feeling unable to excise it from the next part. “Don’t you think you’ve asked a lot of me already?”

Ginevra’s head jerks back. “That’s fair, but what I meant is… the favor I want to ask… is that I’d like to take over payments for your father’s care. It’s expensive,” she says carefully. “Employing Suzette around-the-clock. And other aides may be needed over time, or even…”

“Even a care facility down the line,” I slowly say. I haven’t wanted to contemplate it, but most Alzheimer’s patients proceed to a stage where they require it.

Ginevra nods. “And now that Max… Well, it’s unlikely Hippoheal will have the funds, so I thought—”

“Oh, wow, Ginevra. I can’t… I don’t know what to say. I mean, that’s wildly generous to—”

“It’s nothing.” Ginevra half smiles. “It’s what I want to do. For Max’s father. For your father. For the man I loved. Nothing will ever make up for what I did. I know that. I’ll have to live with it. But I’d like the burden of his care not to fall on you. It’s nothing to me.” She waves a hand. “The money, I mean. Please let me do this.”

Something lifts off my shoulders that I can’t even say I didn’t know I was holding—because I knew. It was weighing on me, a burden I didn’t want to voice, because what a thing to focus on in the aftermath of Max’s death. But how was I going to pay for Papa’s care? And although I’m proud, I’m not too proud to refuse Ginevra’s help. Because I can even see that her assuming the payments has a strange circularity to it. It feels right.

“Okay. Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much. I can’t—”

“Just because I’m doing this, it doesn’t mean I expect you to forgive me.” The author shifts in her seat, grips the leather door handle as if it’s a stress ball. “This is what I want to do.”

“Okay, then. Still, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

We sit in quiet for a bit. “Does she know now?” I finally ask the author. “Your sister, I mean. Have you told her by now that Max… that—”

“No. Still, not yet. She deserves to find out in person.” Ginevra twists another ring—an emerald. Her hands are studded in colorful rocks, almost geological oddities unto themselves.

“Does Orsola live at Le Sirenuse?” I ask.

“Temporarily. Her villa is undergoing renovations now.”

“Huh. So you’re putting her up at the fanciest place in town.”

So much to make up for. And no matter what Ginevra does, it will never be enough.

“I mean, I know you said your sister doesn’t watch the news, but maybe she’d have heard about… Max around town? I think it was a pretty big thing… locally.”

Ginevra’s eyes flicker with something—derision? But then it passes as quickly as it came. “No, my sister doesn’t care much for current events. Nor do the people she surrounds herself with.”

I process that. I am curious—more than curious, all of a sudden—to meet this woman whom my father loved. He kept a picture of her all this time. This is the woman he wanted Max and me to believe was our mother. If I know Papa, and I do, he must have found her worthy of the title.

She must have been something, Orsola, to make my father fall so hard and fast that he never married.

Suddenly a thought strikes me, and I reach for my phone.

“I don’t…”

Ginevra’s face creases with concern. “What? You are nervous to meet her? My sister? Don’t worry—she will love you. She will be so happy to see you. Regardless of Max…”

“No, it’s not that.” I thumb through my photos, land on the one I just remembered. “This is awkward to say. I hope you won’t be upset.”

“With you? I couldn’t be.”

“Well, when the train stopped in Rome, I wanted to see you. I was angry at you, to be honest. For sending me on this crazy trip. For telling me I was adopted but giving me no more information. And the books were stolen…”

“Max.”

“Yes. I wanted another copy. A lot of things. I figured you might be home.”

“Oh. I boarded the train in the morning.”

“Yes, well.” I breathe in deeply, then show her the picture that I snapped, when I was at her apartment. The photo in the frame that I now understand was of Ginevra and Orsola Efrati, with a vicious permanent marker X over the beautiful one. An X on Orsola’s face.

“I broke into your apartment,” I explain fast, when I make out Ginevra’s dismay. “I’m sorry. I knew how to get in, with the key, the code. You weren’t home, and you weren’t responding to my texts, and I wanted answers. I’m really sorry. I know it’s a huge breach of privacy, but…”

Ginevra’s hand goes to her throat, her eyes still fixed on the picture.

“It’s okay, cara. I understand. I understand quite well why you did what you did.”

“Okay, but…” I gather courage. “But I just realized—I still don’t understand something.”

“What’s that?”

“The X. Why did you put an X over your sister’s face? You were the one who deceived her. Not the other way around. So I don’t get it—what did Orsola do to you to make you deface a photograph with her, and then frame it?”

Ginevra glances up at me, perplexed. “But I didn’t put an X over my sister’s face. You’re mistaken, Rory. I put an X over my own.”

“You…” I study the picture again. “But that makes no sense… that… I don’t understand.…”

“I didn’t put an X over my sister’s face. I put it on my own. I wanted to cancel myself out. I guess my whole life, I’ve felt so guilty and ashamed. I never wanted to let myself off the hook. Forget what I’d done. I suppose, like Ansel, I took a new name, too. Ginevra Efrati became Ginevra Ex. And I wanted it in my study, facing me every day. I didn’t want to let myself live one day forgetting it.”

“But you were beautiful.” I point to the picture—undeniable as it is. “You were the beautiful one!”

“You’re mistaken. Look.” Ginevra points to the girl on the right. “My sister was always the beautiful one. Even my father always said so.”

We both stare at the picture, but it’s clear to me now—Ginevra was indeed beautiful. “Maybe your father said so not because he thought she was more beautiful than you, but because he was trying to convince Orsola of it, and he didn’t think he needed to convince you.” I remember how Papa would always bolster Max, tell him he was brave, pump him up. He didn’t say it to me—but then I didn’t need him to.

“The beautiful sister and the ugly sister…” I say slowly.

“Oh, yes. You told me about it in our interviews. The fairy tale Ansel used to tell you as a child.”

“I think I told you the basic gist, but maybe not the intricacies.” I fumble for them, the words slipping out fast. “In the fairy tale, there’s a duke, and he comes across two sisters. One is beautiful and good, and one is ugly and evil. The duke is in love with the beautiful sister and he tries to be with her. Papa used to invent all these ways the duke got thwarted, which I found hilarious as a child. But the ugly sister is evil and controls the beautiful sister. And in the end, the duke and the sisters all wind up alone. Yes—I remember the ending. The evil sister locks up the beautiful sister in the tower and throws away the key.”

My conversation with Papa on the train flies back at me. The good one was the beautiful one. The evil one ruined it all!

He said something else, too. What was it…?

Ginevra shakes her head. “I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re trying to say, Rory.”

“You were the beautiful sister,” I say slowly. “You were the one my father was in love with.”

“Oh.” Ginevra pales, laughs. “That’s not true. You’re very wrong.”

I stare at the photo as it all coalesces in sickening clarity. I clap my hand over my mouth.

“I asked Papa the other day if the fairy tale was like Swan Lake, and he said it was the opposite of Swan Lake. He got agitated. He kept saying the duke always knew! The duke always knew! I didn’t understand what he meant, but now I do. In Swan Lake—”

“The prince is fooled by the substituted girl,” Ginevra says slowly, her face perplexed.

“Yes,” I say softly. “But Papa was telling me that he wasn’t fooled. He always knew which girl was which. He knew you were the twin who opened the door at the Metropol. Did you ever even see Orsola and my father together?”

“Did I see…?” Ginevra croaks, her eyes rolling back in their sockets. “Did I? It’s so long ago. No. We toured on different days. We were caring for my father.…”

“Orsola must have met my father, too. And when she found out you cared for him… when she saw the love written on your face, she decided to take it from you.”

“No. That’s… no, she couldn’t have done.”

I’m suddenly certain. “She did.”

“Orsola… no, I can’t believe… I wasn’t beautiful!” But I watch it dawn in Ginevra’s eyes, the possibility, however slim, that maybe she was.

“You were.” I reach over and squeeze her limp hand. “You were. The picture is the proof. Even if you didn’t think so, you were gorgeous. And Papa had a picture of you. He called you Sandra, but he wanted Max and me to believe you were our mother. He wouldn’t have done that unless he loved you.”

I study the picture again, and suddenly I have a realization. “And your favorite color is purple! I knew that.” My vision blurs with the young, beautiful girl wearing the violet top, a girl who had a world of possibilities open before her, but never even knew when they all got closed off, one by one. “I should have known it was you.” And the girl on the right—Orsola I now know—is wearing a cheery floral dress. Ginevra is so not a cheery-floral-dress person. Even the items she’s bid upon from Sophia Loren’s collection have some measure of gravitas.

I made such a snap judgment that the beautiful girl in the picture wasn’t Ginevra. I figured it couldn’t be her—the seeming sinister machinations of the train trip; the fact that, now, aged and having suffered for many years, Ginevra is not conventionally beautiful. The X over her face. Why, after all, would a person deface a photo of herself—cancel herself out?

Now I understand. It’s something that only a person with deep reservoirs of pain and self-hatred could do.

Ginevra is still shaking her head, her face ghostly white.

“Yes.” I’m breathless, my heart still yammering at my chest. “Your sister must have manipulated you. In the most horrific way. To give up your own baby. To forsake the man you loved. To believe you were responsible for your father’s death. To provide for her all her life, making you believe you owed her. You didn’t steal your sister’s life. She stole yours.”

“No, it’s not possible, it’s just not—”

“She maintained the contact with my father.” I feel frenzied to piece this together, but also achingly sad at the story we’re unraveling.

“Yes. Orsola told me from the beginning that it felt like a dagger in her soul to even imagine us together. That she couldn’t withstand our staying in contact. So I didn’t. At the beginning, he called me. Sent me letters. But I hung up on him every time. I ripped up his letters. It was about Max, I figured, or trying to convince me to fix things with Orsola. And Orsola said that even though it was painful for her, she would prefer to keep up the contact. Ansel would send her photos, mementos, and she’d pass them to me, too. I helped out, gave money sometimes, but always through Orsola. In the end, the letters stopped, and so did the phone calls.”

We stare at each other, stricken. “Papa wanted to be with you. He tried. Calling you, letters, but Orsola must have been spinning her tale. He couldn’t visit,” I puzzle out. “He didn’t have any money, and he was trying for citizenship. He wouldn’t have been able to leave the US after having immigrated so recently. Plus, he had Max.”

Ginevra shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. All this time, I assumed he despised me, or at best, pitied me.…”

“He didn’t. He must have loved you.” I’m now as sure of it as I am of anything. “I wonder why he didn’t visit you later, though. Why he didn’t try to get you to see the truth. In person. Once he could. Maybe Orsola did something. Thwarted him somehow.”

Ginevra bites her lip. “I spoke to Ansel only twice after I left the Soviet Union. I remember the last time clearly. Max was six. Ansel had adopted you a couple of years prior. There was a problem with a wire I’d sent. We needed to coordinate on the phone, and so I didn’t tell Orsola, I just called him. And on that phone call, Ansel told me something I never understood. He said, We have one thing in common, you and I. We both constructed our own prisons.”

I gasp.

Ginevra looks at me, eyes misting up. “I can’t believe… he loved me. If you’re right… if… he really must have loved me, didn’t he?”

“He really must have.” I hold her hand, feel it tremble.

“He went to America,” she murmurs, staring straight ahead now, dazed. “He always wanted to go to America.”

“Yes. What does that—”

“Orsola—when she told me their plans, she kept saying Anatoly was going to come to Italy to be with her. It rubbed me in some way. Odd. Because—”

“Because Papa always wanted to go to America. Yes. Ever since he got a copy of the Declaration of Independence in that pavilion exhibition.”

Ginevra nods. “America was in his heart. Not to say he wouldn’t have gone to Italy for”—she chokes over the word—“love. But it struck me as strange, that’s all, how Orsola was so adamant about his plans. I guess I didn’t question it. I suppose I’ve never really questioned much of anything my sister has said. Oh!” Her face sparks with something, then she grimaces.

“What?” I ask.

The car grinds to a halt. “When I was pregnant, pretty far along, I spoke to Anatoly on the phone. That was the first of our two calls. He’d just arrived in America, and he tried to tell me he loved me, that I should come join him with the baby. I scoffed. I thought that of course he was only saying those things because he wanted to make sure I was going to give him the baby. And I told him the baby was going to be his, not to worry about that, and never to contact me again. Then I slammed down the phone. Dio mio.” She presses a hand over her mouth, eyes wide. “He wrote me all those letters.… He called me so many more times. I ripped up every letter. I hung up on every call.”

I glance over at the author’s tormented face and am certain I mirror it with my own. “Papa didn’t just say he loved you because of Max. He must have said it because it was true.”

Suddenly the driver turns. “We’ve arrived. Le Sirenuse.”

There is nothing I want more than fresh air right now. The atmosphere in this car is thick, surely stifling us both.

Still, I say, “It’s probably not the time right now, to see your sister, don’t you think?”

Ginevra removes her hand from mine. Her lips set tightly together. “On the contrary, Rory. I think now is the very perfect time.”