They were, in truth, nice people. But they had their customs, and that was that. They weren’t prudes about sex, they just set certain limits. By now, Frank was quite sure that if he proposed to Giovanna her family would agree instantly. Enthusiastically, in fact.
And . . . he was almost there. In truth, he would have done so already except that the prospect of having the Marcolis as his in-laws was just that little too daunting to accept yet. Especially when they were on the eve—no, not even that, anymore—of undertaking what was probably one of the screwiest stunts Frank had ever heard of. The Marcolis Go to Rome.
A little flurry of shouts broke Frank out of his reverie. The Marcolis were in the middle of hollering orders and advice at each other. Six opinions, not one of which matched. Naturally.
Frank reflected that in the time Giovanna’s father and his cousin Massimo had spent lashing spars together and rigging the thing up, the boatmen, who were standing in the bottoms of their craft, grinning at this display of lubberly ingenuity, could have heaved up all twenty boxes and been on their way. They were both born engineers, that way. Perhaps the two finest examples in the world of the perils of being an autodidact.
Naturally, the boatmen had stopped work to watch the fun. Frank was suitably embarrassed on Messer Marcoli’s behalf, although Antonio himself didn’t seem to notice the grins, nudges, and sly chuckles he was getting from the peanut gallery down on the water. Giovanna just watched with cool disinterest. Frank was getting good at reading her expressions, and this one said Papa will grow bored of this game soon, don’t worry.
That was the other thing that made Frank still hesitate. On most subjects, Giovanna was a levelheaded girl. Well, as levelheaded as a girl just turned eighteen ever gets, anyway. But that was still more levelheaded than Frank himself, half the time, he’d cheerfully admit. The problem was that Giovanna’s good-humored sanity seemed to come to an abrupt halt when it reached that border which she and her beloved father both called The Revolution.
It wasn’t the ideology that bothered Frank. Except for an occasional curlicue or excess here and there—he didn’t think demanding that the church melt down all its gold—the artwork, too?—and distribute it to the poor was really such a great idea—Frank shared most of it himself. Hardly surprising, of course, since the core of the ideology came from the American up-timers in the first place. It was just that . . .
Did they have to be so impractical about everything connected to politics? Look at Mike Stearns, for Pete’s sake. He was probably even more radical than the Marcolis, in lots of ways. But that never stopped him from being as canny and slick as you could ask for. Alas, in the Marcoli lexicon, the word tactics seemed to be a synonym for unthinkable.
“Done!” Marcoli shouted, dumping Frank back into the here-and-now. Marcoli and Massimo had spent some minutes pulling on things and, in the finest tradition of pioneer engineers since the dawn of time, kicking at the spars and lashings to make sure they were secure. Massimo sat on the back leg of the tripod to weigh it down. At a word from Messer Marcoli, one of the boatmen put the hook of the lower block under the sling of a stack of boxes.
“Marius!” Marcoli called, beckoning his handyman to come help pull.
Frank and Ron looked at each other, amused. They’d noticed before that whatever Marcoli’s pretensions to liberty and equality, he invariably stuck Marius rather than one of his own sons or Massimo’s with the worst of the grunt work. Not that Marius wasn’t eminently suited to the lifting and moving of heavy objects. That was just about all he could be relied on for. And at that you had to watch him carefully. It wasn’t just that the poor guy was on the dimwitted side. He also tended to be watching a completely different channel to most everyone else, most of the time.
And, of course, he was strong as an ox.