Death in the Palazzo by Edward Sklepowich Page B

counsel, but had many nightmares. Some of them were of my brother Amerigo with the face of the boy with makeup.
    Almost ten years passed. No one had forgotten what had happened in the Caravaggio Room. No—but the mind and the heart can become dulled and deadened with time. Even the face of a departed loved one dims over the years and the memory needs to be refreshed by looking at a photograph. This was the situation with my mother and most of our family and friends, but not with me and not, as I eventually came to realize, with my father.
    My own uneasiness about the Caravaggio Room remained as keen as ever. There was not a time I passed its door—not locked, but always closed—that I did not think of Nonna Teresa, Flora, and my brother. I could feel the boy smiling at me behind the door.
    My father’s response was different, as befitted a man of his mature years and unusual sensibility. He was troubled as much—if not more—by his fear, and what it meant to him as a religious man, as he was by the room itself. In his youth there had been some expectation that he would enter a monastery. He was always a model of saintly, though never overly pious or self-righteous, behavior.
    God, he had been taught, did not manifest His love or justice in heathenish fashion. Nor should a believer put any faith in the power of objects, except those blessed by Mother Church, like the miraculous body of Santa Lucia near the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini or the icon of the Virgin and Child at the Salute. In other words, my father’s faith was at war with his cold fear of the room in which his mother and his grandniece had died.
    He consulted a friend who was a priest attached to the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints at the Vatican. This priest examined the room several months after Flora’s death, said some prayers, burned incense, and assured my father that he need have no fear of the room.
    Despite the priest’s visit and my father’s fervent attempt to follow the revealed truths of the Church, the Caravaggio Room remained in limbo for almost ten years. It was cleaned seasonally and used for storage, but no one ever slept there again until May of 1938.
    My mother’s way of dealing with difficulties was often to pretend they didn’t exist. With the world around us so confused and becoming more so, thanks to Hitler and our own Mussolini, my mother decided to forget all troubles and have a big gala at the Ca’ da Capo.
    My father was less than enthusiastic. He feared that my mother was inviting so many guests that the Caravaggio Room would probably have to be used.
    â€œWhat are you afraid of, Amerigo?” my mother said. “Father Olivieri blessed the room years ago, not that such a thing was necessary. It’s ignorant superstition, and this is 1938. We’re all modern and informed— and we trust in God.”
    My father could disagree with neither the advanced date nor with what were surely my mother’s far from artless comments on God and superstition. He said no more about the upcoming gala, although I detected in him an increasing uneasiness as the day drew near.
    I was twenty-five and had finished my studies at Bologna with no great success and no prospects for the future. Everything seemed bleak around me—my immediate world and the larger world outside.
    There were two guests coming to my mother’s gala who, I hoped, would be able to lift my spirits. One was Luigi Vasco, a chum from my days at Bologna. He was a few years older and had successfully completed his medical studies. The other was my third cousin on my father’s side, the beautiful Renata Bellini, a widow of only twenty-five. Despite all the warnings of my mother, I was hopelessly in love with her. It made no difference to me that she had an eight-year-old daughter and a questionable reputation since the death of her husband—along with her father, Signor Zeno—two years before in a