The Ancestor Read online

  Dedication

  To my ancestors, whose lives made mine possible. And to Hadrien, for the future.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Family Tree

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Interstitial

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Interstitial

  Twenty-Six

  Interstitial

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Epilogue

  A Note About the Research

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Danielle Trussoni

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Family Tree

  One

  To discover you are the heir to a noble title in the twenty-first century is like winning a fortune in the lottery, the Mega Millions or a Powerball jackpot, only to find your prize will be paid out in francs or liras: suddenly you are rich, but rich in a currency that has no value in the modern world.

  Or so it seemed to me upon learning that I was the last living descendant of the ancient house of Montebianco, a family whose power, from the Middle Ages to the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century, was immense; whose sons—because only sons mattered in those unenlightened times—had fought religious wars and married minor princesses and sired noble children, but whose fortunes (and fertility) had diminished as the modern world rose, leaving me, Bert Monte, a twenty-eight-year-old American woman with few social graces and zero knowledge of European history, the sole blood heir to an ancestral domain in the mountains of northern Italy.

  It all began early one Saturday morning just before Christmas. I was living alone, although Luca’s things were still at the house. He’d been taking clothes to his new apartment slowly, week by week, a pair of jeans here, a T-shirt there, in an effort to keep our lives intertwined. His plan was working: we saw each other often, and had even gone out for dinner and a movie the month before. While we’d been separated for six months, and it had been my idea for him to move out, I found it comforting to have my husband around. We’d been together for nearly ten years, and despite the problems—which were mostly my problems, as we both would agree—it was hard to imagine life without him. My parents were both gone, and I had no brothers or sisters, aunts or uncles or cousins. Luca was the only family I had.

  Until, that is, the letter arrived from Italy. A knock came at the door, and I left off decorating the Christmas tree—a three-foot fir festooned with tinsel and blinking lights—to answer. It was a cold, sunny December morning, the sky so bright that the envelope glinted like a mirror in my hand. I signed my name on an electronic pad, wished the delivery man “happy holidays,” and was back inside before I saw that the envelope was addressed not to me, Bert Monte, but to someone named Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco.

  I sat down at the kitchen table, pushing aside tinsel and glass bulbs, so that I could get a better look. The return address was from Torino, Italia. A parade of bright Italian stamps floated at the top right corner of the glossy envelope. The words “Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco” scrolled across the center. Although everyone called me Bert, my given name was Alberta, so that part made sense.

  I was hesitant to open something that might not belong to me, but Alberta was my name, after all, and the address was my address, and so without further debate, I ripped the envelope open. A sheaf of thick, A4-sized pages fell into my hand. The top page was covered in calligraphy, and in the bottom right corner, gleaming like a first-place medal, shone a golden seal of a castle floating above two mountains. The paper alone was something to behold—heavy bond linen stock, creamy and thick, with an ink signature pressed into the fiber by the nib of a fountain pen. The text was dense and entirely foreign. Turning the pages, I tried to find something I could understand, but aside from the name Montebianco, which appeared about every other line, it was entirely incomprehensible. Holding up the envelope, I said the name out loud, “Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco,” fumbling over the syllables as if I were a child learning to read.

  My first thought was to call Luca. He always knew what to do. Logical, reliable, sane—these were the qualities I loved about him, and the qualities that bound us still, even after all the rough times we’d been through. I’d known Luca most of my life—we had attended the same schools; we had practically grown up together—and he knew me better than anyone. He had grieved with me after the last miscarriage, and he was the one who suggested we go to therapy, volunteering to join me, even when it was clear that I needed it more than he did. Luca had always believed that with a little work and preparation, we could survive anything. But one thing was certain: neither of us could have prepared for a letter like the one from the Estate of the Montebianco family.

  I remember sitting there, in my kitchen, turning the envelope over in my hands. A strange feeling came over me then, clear as a voice in my ear. It was a warning, a premonition of danger. I wonder now, after all that I’ve learned about the Montebianco family, and all that has happened since that snowy December day, what my life would be like had I tossed the envelope into the recycling bin with the junk mail and old newspapers. But I did not throw out the letter, and I did not pay attention to the creeping sense of danger slithering up my spine. I simply slipped the papers back into the envelope, grabbed my jacket, and went out into the cold, bright morning to find Luca.

  My husband owned a bar called the Miltonian, a local hangout on Main Street in the hamlet of Milton, New York, a river town of about two thousand people two hours north of Manhattan. I’d made the drive to Luca’s bar a thousand times at least, marking the way by the rolling hills and apple orchards, the pumpkin patches and cornfields, the nail salons and roadside fruit stands. Milton had not been hit with the great Brooklyn migration that had revitalized Hudson or Kingston or Beacon in recent years. It was small, the population static, which was fine with those of us who grew up there, but difficult for business owners like Luca, who needed city traffic.

  I parked on Main Street, in front of the Miltonian. My husband’s bar was a short, squat brick saloon with a neon beer sign in the window. Inside stretched a long, polished nineteenth-century bar, an antique pool table with gryphon claws gripping the hardwood, a jukebox full of old jazz standards, and a series of low-hanging Depression glass light fixtures that cast a soupy glow everywhere.

  I went inside and sat on my favorite barstool. Bob, my soon-to-be ex-father-in-law, had just finished eating lunch. He slipped into his coat and gave me a quick smile. “He’s in the back.”

  “Thanks, Bob,” I said, giving him a kiss on the cheek on his way out. Luca’s mother had died when Luca was in fifth grade, leaving him and his father to fend for themselves. Bob felt Luca’s disappointment about the state of our marriage as much as Luca did, and I loved him for it.

  “Hey,” Luca said, returning from the backroom with an armful of bottles—Hudson Baby Bourbon, Catskill Curio
us Gin, and others I couldn’t name.

  He was surprised to see me there; I hadn’t been to the bar since our separation.

  “Want some lunch?” He hadn’t shaved in a while, and a thin blond scruff covered his chin and cheeks, giving him a disheveled look I’d always found sexy.

  “A drink,” I said, sliding the envelope onto the bar. “Gin and tonic, extra lime.”

  In the past, I wouldn’t have had to tell him. Luca knew what I liked to drink and usually had it ready before I could order. But lately, this man I had known most of my life looked at me as though I had become a different person and all the things I used to like—black coffee, and long walks by the river, and suspense novels, and a strong gin and tonic with extra lime—might change as easily as my mood.

  As he mixed my drink, I spread the pages out on the bar, smoothing down the edges, trying (and failing) to understand a word or two of Italian. They looked like official documents to me—at least the top one did, with its large golden seal and colorful calligraphy.

  “Are you back in school?” Luca asked, placing the gin and tonic and a bowl of peanuts on the bar.

  I had been working toward a degree in early childhood education, and had even completed two semesters of a program at Marist, but everything had unraveled when I lost another baby, this one five months along, older than the others, developed enough that we knew he’d been a little boy. I couldn’t bear to read about the physical milestones during the first year of a child’s life or the development of language in toddlers when it was becoming more and more clear that I would never have a child of my own. So far, no one, not even Luca, knew how to help me get over that.

  “It’s not for school,” I said, meeting his eyes. He poured a pint of IPA for himself, which was unusual: Luca didn’t drink at work. He had realized I needed company and broke with habit to join me. I tipped my glass at him—cheers—and drank the gin down. It felt good, the slow, sure rush of alcohol, the inevitable flood of blood to my brain.

  “What is it, then?” Luca asked, looking down at the documents spread over the bar.

  “I’m not exactly sure,” I said, taking another long sip of my drink. “It came to the house today.”

  “Looks like Italian.” He picked up the envelope and read the flowery Italian names aloud, each one like blossoms on a branch: “Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco. Who the hell is that?”

  I shrugged. “I know as much as you do.”

  He looked at the return address. “Torino?”

  Something surfaced in my mind, a memory rising from an obscure depth. “Didn’t our grandparents come from Turin?”

  “They were farther north,” Luca said. “Up in the Alps.”

  Our grandparents had been born in the same small village in northern Italy. They had immigrated to New York City after the Second World War, lived in a tight community in Little Italy, and then moved to Milton in the fifties, drawn by backyards and good public schools. Luca and I had grown up in the shadows of this migration—the elaborate Sunday lunches that went on all afternoon, the Catholic school education, the way we looked as though we were part of the same clan. Our heritage was northern Italian, our skin washed pale as a snowdrift, our hair white-blond, and our eyes watered down to the lightest shade of blue. Our ancestry held fast in our genes like the clasp of a fob to a chain, even as our grandparents, then our parents, became Americans.

  Despite my shared heritage with Luca, our families had not been close. In fact, I always felt that they had disliked each other, especially the older generation, although I had nothing concrete to back this feeling up. Luca’s paternal grandmother, Nonna Sophia, had never been particularly warm to me, not even at our wedding. When Luca and I took her to church on Sundays, as we used to do before the separation, she never sat near me on the pew, but between her son and grandson, as if I might rub off on her.

  “How is Nonna doing, anyway?” I asked, fingering the documents on the bar. Nonna had been born in Italy, and it struck me that she might help me understand the letter.

  “Eighty-six and healthy as a horse,” he said, taking a handful of peanuts.

  “That woman will outlive all of us,” I said, feeling both admiration and dread.

  “She hasn’t been doing very well since the move, actually,” he said. “My dad says her mood is worse than ever.”

  Bob and Luca had moved Nonna to a condo at the Monastery, a retirement community on the river, earlier in the year. It had been a big production. Nonna hadn’t wanted to leave her house, but Bob had insisted.

  “She doesn’t like it there?”

  “Not really. It’s hard to get used to a new environment.” Something in his voice told me he was talking more about himself than his grandmother. “She misses her old life, but she’ll be okay. She’s resilient.”

  He met my eyes, and I knew that he was waiting for me to discuss his move back home. He wanted to let everything bad that had happened between us slide away. He wanted to start over.

  “I’m working on things,” I said, an edge creeping into my voice that I hadn’t meant to be there. “You know that.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, giving me a sweet smile. “But it might be easier with a little help, don’t you think?”

  I pushed the papers toward Luca to shift his attention to the problem at hand. “Do you think Nonna would take a look at these for me? Maybe she can tell me what this is all about?”

  “She might,” Luca said, glancing again at the papers. He seemed as intrigued as I was about them. “Why don’t you stop by the Monastery and see what she says?”

  I bit my lip, wondering if I would regret bringing Nonna into the situation. Things were hard enough between Luca and me without getting his whole family involved. Maybe it was time I solved my own problems, especially now that we were living apart.

  “Do you think she’ll be able to understand this?” I asked, but I knew perfectly well that she would understand all of it. The older generation had spoken Italian all the time. My grandparents had been dead for years, but I still remembered the melody of their voices when they spoke their native language.

  “I’ll give her a call,” he said. “Let her know you’re coming.”

  Two

  The Monastery retirement community sat high on a riverbank, an immense brick structure with copper drainpipes, dark windows, and a moss-covered slate roof. Built in the mid-nineteenth century, it had housed Catholic priests until the eighties, when a developer cut it into twenty-two independent living condos, some with river views, others giving onto the woods.

  I parked near the entrance and then sat in my car, a wave of anxiety running through me. Nonna was a formidable woman, and I was a little afraid of her, especially because I hadn’t seen her since I’d asked Luca to move out. She hadn’t been crazy about me before—she had always seemed to look down on my family—but now she would have a real reason to hate me.

  Bracing myself, I tucked the envelope under my arm and walked up to the reception desk, where a bearded nursing assistant took my name and then led me to Nonna’s apartment.

  “There’s someone to see you, Sophia,” he said. He showed me into the room before slipping back into the hallway, leaving me alone with Luca’s tiny, fierce grandmother.

  When the battle to relocate Nonna had begun, Bob argued that Nonna would be more comfortable at the Monastery, that it wasn’t as antiseptic or medicalized as the other retirement homes, and it was true: Nonna’s apartment was warm and comfortable, with art on the walls and books piled everywhere. There was a small kitchen, a private bathroom, and a stunning view of the river, its snowy banks blanketed by a thick gray mist. A Christmas tree blinked in the corner, a few presents tucked underneath, and I remembered, suddenly, that it was nearly Christmas. I should have brought a gift. It would have cast this whole thing in a better light.

  “Nonna,” I said. She didn’t seem to hear or see me, so I took another step closer. “Is this a good time?”

  Non
na, small and frail, a jet-black wig perched on her head like a nest, sat on a sectional sofa near the window, a magnifying glass in one hand, a paperback in the other.

  She turned the glass in my direction, and a single blue eye expanded under the thick lens, as hard and bright as a blown-glass marble. “Come, sit down,” she said. Her English was heavily accented, her voice clear and direct, forceful, not at all the voice one would expect from an eighty-six-year-old woman.

  I sat across from Nonna on a wobbly recliner. Up close, her skin was mottled with moles and freckles. A few hairs grew from her chin and ears, and her hands were dappled with liver spots. She looked me over, skeptical, and I wondered if she’d forgotten me.

  “It’s Bert,” I said, feeling my cheeks go warm. “Luca’s wife.”

  “I know who you are, child,” she said, glancing back to the door, looking for her grandson. “Is Luca here, too?”

  “He’s working,” I said. “He told me to tell you he’ll be here Sunday, with Bob, to take you to church.”

  “Oh,” she said. She focused on me with a strange intensity, as if trying to understand why I had come without Luca. “So remind me: Who do you belong to?”

  The older generation always asked who your parents and grandparents were, as if you were nothing more than a weak reflection of an ancestral original.

  “My parents were Giuliano and Barb. I’m the grandchild of Giovanni and Marta Monte.”

  “Giovanni’s granddaughter,” she said darkly, her brows settling into a furrow. “Of course, I see the resemblance. You look just like your grandfather when he was young. Around the eyes. Attractive, your grandfather. Nessus dubbio a riguardo.”

  I barely remembered my grandfather. He had died when I was five years old, and only fragments of him remained with me: the smell of his cigarettes, the glimmer in his blue eyes as he laughed, the shiny leather shoes he wore, the tassels flopping. I was about to ask what other similarities she found between us when Nonna pulled herself up off the couch and walked to the kitchen.