The House at the Edge of Night by Catherine Banner Read Free Book Online Page A

else could be done. To a shell-shocked captain in a mud-splattered field hospital, or a gassed infantry officer recovering his sight, he could merely ask about the man’s home, his infancy, his family, and a spark would burn behind the eyes of his patient, a change would come upon him: Hesitantly, words would emerge, the patient’s particular story unfurling by degrees, filling the space between them, a shared light against the dark.
    He did not record these stories. He did not want to remember them. But sometimes no words came from the patient’s mouth, and then he would tell his own stories instead, fanciful stories from his book of tales, stories that had evolved over centuries in the mouths of the poor, calculated to take one far from the gray world: the story of the girl who became a tree, became a bird; the story of the two brothers who met and did not know each other; the story of the tale-telling parrot. Across the whole region, he became known as “the story-collecting doctor of the field hospital in Treviso.”
    Occasionally, he told his patients about the island. Always the tale that burned in his own mind was the account he told himself of surviving this war and getting back to Castellamare. By the time it was over, Castellamare had become the only place he still believed in. Everything else had fallen behind the gray veil the war had interposed.
    —
    HE HAD A GREAT wish to see his foster father. As the war progressed and regressed, subjects had emerged that could no longer be spoken of between them, great gulfs in their experience that threatened to make them enemies. “Perhaps because you are a foundling,” the elderly doctor had written, “you lack the natural patriotic feeling of your comrades, and this war is more difficult for you to bear.”
    “Perhaps because I am a foundling,” wrote Amedeo, “I see its falsities more clearly.”
    He had received no letters from the elderly doctor for more than a year. Now, on the preprinted army postcards he wrote simply, “Love, Amedeo.” The war ended, and still he was detained. There were troops with influenza, villagers with influenza. More variations of that same dying he had witnessed in the trenches: dying of the young and the healthy as well as the old and the weak, with swollen surprised faces and white-filmed eyes. It was 1919 by the time he got free, and he was forty-four years old. Riding the crowded train south to Florence, through villages empty and shuttered, he was seized with a feeling of waste so profound he could taste it, like a rot in his mouth. Still, he would see his foster father, he would return to Castellamare, and life would begin again in some form or another.
    He went directly to his foster father’s house. A sticklike woman opened the door at his knocking, not the housekeeper he remembered. “Esposito?” she said. “The old doctor, you mean? He’s dead. He was carried away last winter. Influenza.”
    His foster father’s real relatives had already descended from Rome and carried off all his things. The woman returned to Amedeo only his bundle of army postcards.
    She allowed him to walk through the rooms of the house. Gone were the snakes in jars, the masks, the whale brushes over the stairs. Only a few wires and squares of discolored wallpaper remained where the exhibits had once been suspended. “We’ve all lost people, you know,” she said, slightly scoldingly, when Amedeo wept.
    —
    IN THIS GREAT DISORDER of mind he returned to Castellamare. It seemed that his previous journey, in the Neapolitan steamer, had taken place in a different life, and the war was the only real thing that he had lived: He had never dwelt with his foster father at the house like a museum, never been licensed as a
medico condotto,
never been apprenticed to the watchmaker or the baker or the printer, never been a foundling, never been born.
    But Castellamare. He had lived that. The memory of Castellamare endured.
    Father Ignazio had written to