The Apprentice Lover Read Free Page B

wanted to see. By the time I boarded the ferry in Amalfi, I could—if I limited myself to occasional phrases—pass myself off as a young, if somewhat laconic, Italian.
    The Capri ferry in 1970 (unlike the current hydrofoil) was a bulky trawler, its straking painted bright Mediterranean blue, with red trim on windows and rails. Each morning it began its journey in the glaucous port city of Salerno, where my father had landed with General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army during the invasion of Italy in 1943. For reasons of his own, he rarely discussed the war, though it had consumed five years of his life. The Battle of Salerno, a famously bloody conflict in which he had been among the first to come ashore, was even less frequently mentioned, although once, on a camping trip in the Poconos long ago, I’d managed to pry loose a fair account of this experience. It was as though he’d been waiting for years to tell someone about Salerno. Oddly enough, he almost never mentioned it again after that. “I don’t remember more than I told you already,” he would say, when prodded, shutting the door to that conversation.
    I had hoped to spend time in Salerno, walking the beach where my father had landed and trying to imagine my way back into his boots. As a child, I often thought of it, and considered him a hero. But some impediment blocked the pursuit now; I found myself averting my eyes from the waterfront as I hurried from the train station to a bus stop. That war was over, with its anguish and euphoria and mixed allegiances. I could not visualize it, except for the endless sentimental films seen mostly on late-night TV. One day I might face that beach in Salerno, but not at this time. I refused to become a tourist in my father’s past, resetting my compass for Capri, whose vivid, light-drenched image beckoned—a war-free zone if one ever existed. (Even my father had no will to revisit Salerno, rejecting an offer that once came from the VFW—a package tour for veterans of the Italian campaign. “Once in Salerno was enough,” he said, with unusual passion, “and I don’t care if the beach is lined with dancing girls. They can have it.”)
    It seemed that, somehow, I shared his disinclination to face Salerno. It might have been painful to stand there, where he had landed and (I assumed) lost so many friends. It would certainly have brought feelings about Nicky to the surface, and I was trying hard to get over them. Iwanted to push the past year out of my head. To forget Nicky, the war in Vietnam, and the turmoil of my last few months at Columbia, when every assignment had seemed irrelevant, an abrasion. I wanted the freedom to read only what I felt compelled to read, and to write what absorbed me. I didn’t want anyone judging me, grading me, wondering if “everything was all right.” Everything was not all right, and I was here in Italy to shift the stage. To begin again, free of that past, discarding old selves.
    Eager to see the Amalfi Drive, I had taken a bus northward along the zigzag road, with its steep western slope to the sea. The pinkish tile roofs of villas were barely visible from the road, although glimpses of their opulence fed my imagination. An elderly man beside me on the bus—a retired postal worker, as I quickly learned—served as de facto guide, explaining that the Mafia liked this coast above all others, and had pumped lots of money into those villas. “You should see their boats,” he said. “The worse the criminal, the bigger the boat.”
    There was barely room for one small vehicle on the road, but the massive blue SITA bus hurtled forward, swaying, the driver blasting his two-tone horn before each hairpin curve to warn oncoming drivers that certain death lay ahead if they didn’t immediately scuttle into any available space. The drop on the left, over sharp amethyst-toothed rocks or steep lemon groves, was brutal, but I