Drawing Conclusions - Donna Leon [24]
As if encouraged by the name of the bar, Niccolini began to walk towards it. Brunetti fell into step beside him, assuming that his invitation had been accepted. By silent assent, they chose a table outside, one without an umbrella so they could better enjoy the remnants of the autumnal sun left to them. There was a menu on the table, but neither of them bothered with it. When the waiter came, Brunetti asked for a glass of white wine and two tramezzini: he didn’t care which. Niccolini said he’d take the same.
In the first months after Brunetti’s mother had fallen complete victim to the Alzheimer’s that was to lead to her death, she had stayed in the old people’s home a bit further along Barberia delle Tole, but Brunetti, no matter how much he wanted Niccolini to talk about his mother, was not willing to try to win his fellow feeling and goodwill by offering up his own mother’s suffering as a way to encourage him to speak.
They waited in silence, strangely relaxed in each other’s company. ‘Did you come to see her very often?’ Brunetti finally asked.
‘Until a year ago, I did,’ Niccolini said. ‘But then my wife had twins, and so my mother started to come out to see us.’
‘In Vicenza?’
‘Lerino, really; it’s where they were from originally, my parents. She’d come out on the train and I’d pick her up.’ The waiter came with the glasses of wine. Brunetti picked his up and took a sip, then another. Niccolini ignored his and continued speaking. ‘We have another child, a daughter. She’s six.’
Brunetti thought of the joy his mother had taken in her grandchildren and said, ‘She must have been happy with that.’
Niccolini smiled for the first time since they met, and grew younger. ‘Yes. She was.’ The waiter came and put the sandwiches in front of them.
‘It’s strange,’ Niccolini said, picking up his glass but ignoring the sandwiches. ‘She spent her whole life with children, first as a teacher and then with me and my sister, and then with other children when she went back to teaching when we both were in school.’ He sipped at his wine, then picked up a sandwich and studied it. He set it back on the plate.
Brunetti took a bite of his first sandwich, then asked, ‘What was strange, Dottore?’
‘That when she retired, she stopped working with children.’
‘What did she do, instead?’ Brunetti asked.
Niccolini studied Brunetti’s face before he asked, speaking very slowly, as if searching through his vocabulary for the right words, ‘Why do you want to know all of this?’
Brunetti took another sip of wine. ‘I’m interested in women of my mother’s generation.’ Then, with a glance in Niccolini’s direction, before he could object, Brunetti added, ‘Well, close in age to her generation.’ He set his glass on the table and continued. ‘My mother didn’t work: she stayed home and took care of us, but once, years ago, she told me she would have loved to have been a teacher. But there was no money in her family, so she went to work when she was fourteen. As a servant.’ Brunetti said it boldly, in defiance of all those years when he had denied this simple truth, wishing that his parents had been other than they were, richer than they were, more cultured than they were. ‘So I’m always interested in those women who got to do what my mother wanted to do. What they made of the chance.’
As if now convinced of the legitimacy of Brunetti’s interest, Niccolini went on. ‘She began to work with old people. Well, older people. In fact,’ he said, pointing with his chin, ‘she started down there.’ Anyone in Venice would know he meant the old people’s home, the casa di cura, only a hundred metres away.
‘Started how?’ Brunetti asked. ‘Doing what?’
‘Visiting. Listening to them. Bringing them out here into the campo when the weather was good.’ This, too,