“All the time!” Francesca snapped her fingers. “And isn’t this something we should address? Now that your father has come back to the Lodge, now that he wants to talk about what really happened that night, don’t we owe it to ourselves to learn? Maybe the nightmares will stop. Maybe we’ll start to heal as a family.” She pressed her palm against the white tablecloth. Her fingers had gotten thinner with illness. She felt like a collection of bones.
“Mama,” Allegra said tentatively, “I wanted to tell you that I found a really wonderful therapist. He’s excellent. I’ve beengoing for a couple of years now and have had great success. I didn’t know how to bring it up. But don’t you think that after everything that happened with Jefferson, after everything that happened in America, you owe it to yourself to look into your mental health?”
Lorelei furrowed her brow. “I know it isn’t something people in your generation usually go for.”
Francesca smarted, realizing that her daughters had discussed her mental health and decided on a solution that had nothing to do with a plane ride across the Atlantic. “Is a therapist going to tell me why my husband faked his own death and disappeared for almost thirty years?”
Allegra sighed. “I don’t think even Dad is going to be able to tell you that.”
Lorelei was quiet for a moment, swirling her pasta around her fork. “Do you think Dad knows where Jack is?”
Francesca’s ears rang. Jack, my darling baby, Jack. She could still picture his smile, clear as day, always mischievous as he cut through the kitchen and stole a piece of cheese or a bit of meat from the countertop. Her emotional life had been ravaged after what she’d been told was Jack’s death. But who had told her that Jack died?Who set that up?Francesca’s thoughts whirred. It was clear people were operating deep within the system, people who’d been manipulated to tell her lies that chased her out of the country.
Was that you, Angelo?She wondered about her brother, a man whose face she hadn’t seen since that fateful July 4th, 1998. Francesca would not go to her grave without understanding more of her story. Her tongue itched to tell her daughters she was not well, that she needed their help to put the final pieces together. But she couldn’t bear the idea that they’d break down into tears and ask her questions and demand that she stay in Italy for immediate surgery. No, she had to take matters into herown hands. She took a massive bite of pasta, indulging in the cream and the parmesan cheese, and closed her eyes. She was still the young, vivacious Francesca who’d first gone to America. The only difference now was that she still had her American citizenship. She could do with that identity what she liked.
Chapter Four
Autumn 1969
It was two weeks after Francesca’s return from her summer of Nantucket love that she moved to Rome and began studying film, her chosen profession, her chosen love. Most of the girls her age were obsessed with becoming actresses or directors’ muses or being center stage on screen, but not Francesca. Like her father before her, Francesca wanted control. She wanted brilliance and fame. People had called her beautiful all her life. She was tired of it.
Francesca lived with two other Tuscan girls who’d come to Rome to study: Rosa and Barbara. The three of them were eighteen years old and equal parts silly and serious. Both Rosa and Barbara were fascinated by Francesca’s summer in Nantucket. They begged her for specifics about her American boyfriend, but Francesca struggled to say more than a few spare details. To her, Benjamin was a bright light in her past, an exhilarating fantasy to which she could never return. It hurt to talk about him.
But three weeks after she moved to Rome, a letter appeared for her in the mail. Rosa and Barbara fetched the mail before Francesca did and, deep into the night, waited up for her to return home so that they could see her expression when she saw the return address: Benjamin Whitmore, the White Oak Lodge, Nantucket Island. When Francesca held the letter in her hands, a wooziness overtook her—probably a combination of too much studying and not enough food—and she collapsed on the sofa. Barbara and Rosa begged her to open it and translate it aloud for them, but Francesca was too frightened to open it at first. It took her three days to remove the letter from the envelope and another day after that to read it.
My darling Francesca,
It’s now early October, and the White Oak Lodge has slowed for the season. No longer are there Hollywood elites having mini tantrums over cocktails on the veranda, or fancy Europeans on horseback, or grand dinners in the dining hall. People mill around as though they’ve forgotten where they’re meant to be going next, as though they’re certain they have an appointment somewhere after this but can’t remember where or what it is. I think the winds of autumn do that to people. They make people feel displaced.
It’s always this way at the White Oak Lodge after the summer ends. But this year is especially gloomy for me because you’ve gone.
What you said plays over and over again in my head: that we’re still young, that we have our entire lives ahead of us, that our lives will be rife with stories that we can’t yet know—and it’s all the better if we move ahead and let them flourish. But I’ll tell you the truth—my love for you is grander and more profound than it ever will be for another woman. I’m gratefulthat I was able to spend a slice of time with you before you charge off into the incredible future that awaits you. I hope one day we can meet again, and that I can see one of the films, plays, or art pieces you put together. I can’t fathom how great you’ll be, while I live on here, manning the White Oak Lodge like my father and grandfather and great-grandfather before me. It’s my destiny, and I know it’s my destiny, just as you know yours is to be someone admirable, someone great, like your own father.
I hope you’ll write to me. Winters on Nantucket Island are long, arduous, and grueling. If I could have a pocket of Italian sunshine every now and again, I’d be so very pleased.
All my love to you forever,
Benjamin Whitmore
Francesca stopped reading, set the letter on her desk, and burst into tears. She could picture Benjamin on the veranda of the White Oak Lodge, perhaps bundled up in a traditional American flannel, his pen driving neatly across the page. She could feel the cracks of his broken heart deepening, just as hers had since she’d left him. It felt tremendously unfair that Benjamin was trapped at the White Oak Lodge forever, ready to take on whatever the Whitmore family line was supposed to pass on to him. For the first time, Francesca wondered if Benjamin could instead pass on the Lodge to his younger brother, Ronald—and come to Italy instead? Sure, the Lodge was gorgeous, and she knew how much Benjamin adored it. But what if they could build a reality that had nothing to do with Italy or America and everything to do with whatever they wanted to do in the moment they thought of it?Carpe diem, as they say, she thought.
She wrote Benjamin back right away, telling him how much she missed him, explaining to him the difficult realities of herstudies in Rome, her ideas for films, and her friendship with her new roommates. She wanted to bring him deeper into her world, so much so that he’d need to leave his family behind, because he loved her so desperately.
Throughout that autumn, Francesca studied, wrote brief student scripts, met friends, and partied sparingly, always hurrying home to find new letters from Benjamin, to which she responded immediately. Rosa and Barbara called him their American roommate, as if his presence lived in the apartment with them. Francesca eventually recounted everything he told her in every letter, especially the most romantic bits, which Rosa and Barbara swooned over. They’d dated a few guys here and there, Italian men who seemed to always rush home to their mothers when they needed something. They regarded Benjamin as an adult, interesting, and altogether American—like a cowboy in a western film.
Of course, Francesca knew that Benjamin was no cowboy, but she let her friends think whatever they wanted to about him. She liked that they talked about him so often. She liked that he felt so close.
Christmas came, and Francesca returned to Tuscany for the holidays, making sure to write Benjamin with her parents’ address so that they could continue their correspondence. He wrote her three Christmassy letters and included a photograph of himself and his brother, Ronald, in front of a snowy White Oak Lodge. Francesca pressed the picture to her heart and tried to imagine herself in the photograph. She visualized a world in which she could have both her film studies and her life with Benjamin in America.
But when Francesca returned to Rome for her second semester, no new letter came at first. She’d come to expect a letter each week, usually on Mondays or Tuesdays. But a week passed, and then another, and there was nothing. Francescacould see empathetic panic in Rosa’s and Barbara’s eyes. They knew Benjamin hadn’t written. They knew Francesca was dissolving at the edges, searching for his letter in the mailbox and between the bills they received. Francesca didn’t bring it up. She threw herself into her studies, attending lectures and film screenings, and discussing high-concept filmmaking topics with her professors, all of whom worshipped her father and therefore were on their best behavior toward her.
A letter didn’t arrive till mid-February. There it sat on the kitchen counter, waiting for her after a difficult seminar. She could feel Rosa’s and Barbara’s eyes on her as she plucked the letter from the counter and went to her room, where she sat on her bed and stared out the window. It was rainy and cold, the cobblestones glossy with a strange light. A voice inside her whispered for her to throw away the letter, to get rid of it before it poisoned the rest of her life.You’re too reliant on him, she told herself.You were supposed to come to Rome and become someone special. You weren’t supposed to be yet another young woman, hung up on a man.But that night, she tossed and turned and eventually tore the letter open. She read it under the weak light of her lamp.
My darling Francesca,
Happy New Year. Things are difficult here. I’m thinking of you and love you with my whole heart. Please know that I’ll write you with an explanation soon.
Yours, Benjamin
