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By Root 8921 0

’Alba was running around the hall in an apron, giving orders to a dozen maids that Moses had never seen before. The place was upside down. Doors were thrown open onto bat-smelling parlors and Giacomo took the bed pillows out of the broken windows in the winter garden where palm trees and rose bushes were being unloaded from trucks. There was no place to sit down and they had sandwiches and drinks in the hall where the Scaddonville Symphony Orchestra (eight ladies) undressed the harp of its cracked mackintosh and tuned their instruments. Then the glee of the old upside-down palace on the eve of a party reminded Moses of West Farm, as if this house, like the other, lay deep in their consciousness—even in the dreams of the fly-by-night maids, who exhumed and burnished the old rooms as if they were improving their wisdom. Bats were found in the big basement kitchens and two of the maids came screaming up the stairs with dish towels over their heads but this small incident discouraged no one and only seemed to heighten the antic atmosphere, for who, these days, was rich enough to have bats in their kitchen? The big chests in the cellar were filled with beef and wine and flowers and all the fountains played in the gardens and water poured out of the green-mouthed lions in the plunge and a thousand lights or more burned in the house and the driveway was beaded with lights like a country fair and lights burned here and there in the garden, forlorn and unshaded like the lights in rooming-house hallways and with all the doors and windows open at ten or eleven and the night air suddenly cold and a thin moon in the sky over the broadest lawns Moses was reminded of some wartime place, some poignance of furlough and leave-takings, headlines and good-by dances in beery ports like Norfolk and San Francisco where the dark ships waited in the roads for the lovers in their beds and none of it might ever happen again.

And who were Mamma and Papa Confettiere? They were the Belamontes, Luigi and Paula, the last of the haut monde of the prezzo unico botteghe. She was the daughter of a Calabrian farmer and Luigi was spawned in the back of a Roman barbershop that smelled of violets and old hair, but at the age of eighteen he had saved enough money to stock a prezzo unico store. He was the Woolworth, he was the Kress, he was the J. P. Scaddon of Italy and had made himself into a millionaire with villas in the south and castles in the north by the time that he was thirty. He had retired in his fifties and for the last twenty years had motored around Italy with his wife in a Daimler, throwing hard candies out of the windows of their car to the children in the street.

They left Rome after Easter (the date was announced in the newspapers and the radio) so that a crowd would have gathered outside the gates of their house for the first free candy of the season. They drove north toward Civitavecchia, scattering candy to the left and the right—a hundred pounds here, three hundred pounds there—circumventing Civitavecchia and all the larger cities on their route for they had once nearly been torn limb from limb by a crowd of twenty thousand children in Milan and had also caused serious riots in Turin and Leghorn. Piedmont and Lombardy saw them and southward they traveled through Portomaggiore, Lugo, Imola, Cervia, Cesena, Rimini and Pesaro, tossing out handfuls of lemon drops, peppermints, licorice sticks, anise and horehound drops, sugar plums and cherry suckers along streets that, as they climbed Monte Sant’Angelo and came down into Manfredonia, had begun to be covered with fallen leaves. Ostia was shut when they passed there and shut were the hotels of Lido di Roma, where they scattered the last of their store to the children of fishermen and caretakers, turning northward and home again under the fine skies of a Roman winter.

Moses took a suitcase to work in the morning and rented a suit of tails at lunch. He walked up from the station to the hall in a late summer dusk when the air already smelled of autumn. Then he could see Clear Haven in the early dark with every one of its windows lighted for Mamma and Papa Confettiere. It was a cheerful sight and, letting himself in at the terrace doors, he was cheered to see how the place had been restored, how shining and quiet it was. A maid who came down the hall with some silver on a tray walked stealthily and, other than the sound of the fountain in the winter garden and the hum of water rising in some pipes within the walls, the house was still.