I would quickly learn that Aria’s mother was not the only model-mother at the school. Apparently many wealthy Florentine men went to Fashion Week to meet their future wives. The parking lot was full of them on Thursday afternoons when they walked across the yard from the headmaster’s house. “It’s a support group for mixed marriages,” Aria said, rolling her blue eyes. “Mixed meaning Italian husbands, foreign wives. Tomaso’s mother is Canadian.” She nodded at the striking woman walking next to her mother. “She and my mother started the group.”
Every afternoon the mothers of the permanent students gathered together on one side of the parking lot where they spoke in Italian. “They aren’t very friendly,” my mother said to my father at the end of the first week. “They make no effort to welcome new parents.” On the other side of the parking lot were the Filipina nannies and just beyond them, men in dark suits leaning against the wall smoking—professional drivers hired by parents to pick up their children each afternoon. Those first days, waiting for the final bell to ring, my mother stood alone with her back to the parking lot, staring at the olive groves stretching across hills as far as the eye could see.
My school occupied an old villa on the highest hill: white walls, terracotta floors, hallways that opened to the center courtyard with its fountain and garden. In the morning the hallways smelled of coffee, replaced mid-morning by scents of garlic, potatoes, fish, roasted tomatoes. Women in hairnets set tables, stirred pots. Afternoons, the wind shifted, wafting horse manure. Below the school, on the other side of the river, was a stately white stable with a jumping field. The riders, dressed in jodhpurs and hard hats, lifted themselves off saddles as their horses took the jumps.
After school all the model-mothers gathered around Aria’s mom. She drove a red Audi convertible, often arriving with the top down and a silk scarf around her hair. She was tall and thin and always wore gloves, even when the temperature was warm.
“Did you talk to her?” I would ask my mother. I wanted her to be friends with Aria’s mom. I wanted her to stand in that group.
On certain days, Aria’s nanny came to pick her up. She didn’t sit with the Filipina nannies dressed in pastel-colored sweat suits. The BelCastello nanny wore blazers, had smooth blonde hair, lipstick, sunglasses. She told my mother she was a retired physicist from Harvard with a son in medical school. She wanted to travel, so she decided to nanny for the BelCastellos.
“She uses nanny as a verb,” my mother told my father. ‘I nanny for the BelCastellos.’ She invited me to come and see her villa on Viale Mazzini.”
“Why don’t you go?” my father asked.
She lowered her voice. “Am I the nanny’s friend now?”
My father held out his wine glass for a refill. “Nanny me. Besides, her son’s in medical school.”
“So she says.”
Two days later my mother went to the nanny’s villa for lunch. “How was it?” my father asked.
“She had salads sent over from the main kitchen, and we drank wine on her balcony.”
“Sounds nice.”
“She has a maid. The nanny has a maid.” My mother lowered her voice. “Apparently he’s a Gucci, Signor BelCastello.”