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The Inheritance
Chapter One
May 1945
Chapter One
May 1945
I didn't cry when the mail-carrier handed me the telegram. I hadn't seen or heard from my husband Roger since his last leave, two months before. It was a surprise, to be sure, but the place in my heart that once belonged to Roger had been cold and empty for a long time.
I didn't bother to change out of my clothes from the factory where I worked and set the telegram down on a table in the hall. I thought back on my life with Roger and I simply couldn't gather the heartfelt tears of a widow.
I was born in 1922 in California. I went out with Roger in high school. He was a wonderful boy back then--handsome, athletic, and charming. We married in 1941, the week after Pearl Harbor and the day before he enlisted. He returned on leave a few times, but each time our relationship seemed a little worse. He had changed, or maybe I had. Our relationship had become perfunctory; there was no love, no affection in our actions. But like the other women in my generation, I knew my place and I knew the alternatives. So I stayed.
When I laid down for bed that night, in a bed that had barely ever seen Roger, the empty space next to me seemed to go on forever. And then something strange happened. For the first time since I first married Roger, I felt so empty and alone that the pain was physical. And I wept.
Two Weeks Later
As I climbed out of the car, I knew I was out of my mind. "She needs something to take her mind off the grief," said my mother. She and my Aunts, Angela, Maria, and Marta decided I should return to the family villa outside of Florence, Italy. "After all, the war is over, it's completely safe!" And so I took the voyage across and found the villa.
The place was a wreck! The columns that held up the balcony and roof were broken; the windows were shuttered or broken open; the door was hanging off its hinges. Whoever was responsible for the upkeep of the yard had failed miserably. Instead of grass there was dirt; the trees were dead and dried up.
I glanced at my watch as the rain began to fall. The guide and 'caretaker' of the villa was late. My mother had warned me that in the "old country", people had a flexible relationship with time. I thought of returning to the car, but the nauseating scent of the leather seats told me I should stay in the rain.
Finally, a pair of headlights appeared down the road, and after a few minutes a car pulled up into the driveway. The driver's door opened and someone stepped out. And suddenly, I was happy to be standing outside a trashed villa in the pouring rain...
To be continued!
