The Glass Butterfly (14 page)

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Authors: Louise Marley

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BOOK: The Glass Butterfly
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She put the towel down, and turned her face to Iris, hoping she would see the truth in her eyes. “You're asking if I'm a suicide risk,” she said. “It's very kind of you to be concerned, Iris. I appreciate it very much. I promise you, though, I'm not at risk for that. Please don't worry.”
Iris watched her as she spoke, then nodded. “Excellent. Thank you.” She patted the stack of leftover containers with a brisk gesture. “It would be a tragic waste.”
Tory returned to the cottage laden with largesse. There were not only the leftovers, but a CD player Iris swore was going to waste in a back bedroom. “I only have jazz recordings,” she said, “but you'll find what you want to listen to, right? Try the library sale.”
They carried the things into the house as the light waned over the big rock on the beach. Gulls cried their tritone song through the gathering dusk, and Tory, exhausted by the company and the day, dropped the leftovers on the kitchen counter with a sigh.
“I'm going,” Iris said. “I know you're beat.”
Tory nodded. “I am. But it was a lovely day, Iris. Thank you so much.”
Iris set the CD player on the table. “You're welcome. It's good to be with friends.”
Friends. Tory wanted to think that through, to sense how dangerous it might be. The idea of having to leave Cannon Beach because someone might guess her secret made her so tired she could hardly stay on her feet. It was why, every time she went to a pay phone and tried to call someone in authority, terror that the call would be traced or someone might guess where she was made her voice shake. She had tried again, two days before. This time she had called the attorney general's office in Vermont, but the result had been the same—disbelief, doubt, insistence on knowing her name. It had made her feel both helpless and invisible.
The lights in the cottage reflected in windows that were nearly black. She glanced at the clock on the radio, and saw that it was already five o'clock. Eight in Vermont, where Jack would be . . . what? Watching football with Chet, she hoped. Playing video games with Kate's grandkids. Or maybe at a friend's home, some friend who had a big, noisy family like the Garveys, two parents, kids roughhousing in the yard. But not alone, please god. Not alone.
She had a sudden, devastating image of that black revolver pointed at her son's lean belly, and a spasm of fear made her heart clench.
She tried to thrust the image away, to gather herself so she could show Iris to the door. Somehow along the way she found herself sinking onto the sofa by the cold fireplace. She wrapped her arms around herself, saying shakily, “Sorry, Iris. I'm just so tired. And a little drunk, still, I think!”
“You're not drunk,” Iris said firmly. She came into the living room, and sat on the armchair. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. “You relaxed a bit today, and it all caught up with you.”
“I suppose.”
“It's a tradition with me, the refugee dinner. Different people come in different years. Some I know well, some not so much. It's not terribly personal, but it's comforting.”
“It's so kind of you,” Tory said. She couldn't remember how much wine she'd had, but she probably shouldn't have added sugar to the mix. She let her head drop back, and closed her eyes. The room spun a little when she did it.
“Well. No point in having a pretty house and nice things if you don't share them.” Iris drew a breath, and Tory was sure that, now, she was going to rise from the chair, say her good nights, and go. She opened her eyes, anticipating this, but she found that Iris was looking at the family pictures she had bought at the antiques store. “Your folks?” Iris said.
With a quiver of shame at the deceit, Tory nodded. “Parents, grandparents.”
“Looks like a nice family. All gone now, I suppose. Like mine.”
“Yes.” It was probably true, Tory thought. Otherwise, why were their photographs for sale in an antiques store?
Iris didn't seem to notice her reluctance to talk about them. She said, “Mind if I use the bathroom before I go?”
“No, of course not.” Tory closed her eyes again as Iris went through the bedroom and into the bathroom. The door closed, and water ran. Tory thought how strange it was to have someone else in the house, to hear the cozy noises of someone other than herself. She was just marveling at how much of her life she had spent in solitude when Iris returned. She walked with quicker steps now, her shoes scuffing the floor in a nervous rhythm. Tory opened her eyes.
Iris had Nonna Angela's paperweight in her two hands. She held it out. “What's this pretty thing?”
The sudden pain of premonition, piercing her chest from breastbone to spine, took Tory's breath away. Her voice faltered. “It's—a paperweight. My grandmother's. She was a war bride, and she brought it from Italy.”
Iris cradled it in her palms. The gold butterfly in the sea-green glass caught the light as her thin fingers traced the silhouette. “Not the grandmother in that photograph,” she said. “That woman's not Italian.” She wasn't asking. It was a statement, and it felt to Tory like an accusation. That was the trouble with lies, as she had often advised her clients. It was hard to keep them straight.
She said shakily, “No, she was—my other grandmother.”
Iris set the paperweight on the table with care. “It's probably fragile, as old as it is,” she said. “It reminds me of something, but I don't know what.”
“Oh. Does it?”
“It seems familiar.” Iris shrugged. “Strange, isn't it?” She thrust herself up from her chair, and was at the door in seconds, buttoning her jacket around her, pulling her cap down over her forehead. “Thanks for coming today, Paulette,” she said. “I'm going to check in on you tomorrow, if that's okay.”
Tory said faintly, “Sure.”
Iris lifted a hand in farewell, and was out the door a moment later. Tory sat where she was, staring at the paperweight, for long moments before she finally rose and went to bed.
12
Chi son? Sono un poeta.
Che cosa faccio? Scrivo. E come vivo? Vivo!
 
Who am I? I'm a poet.
What do I do? I write. And how do I live? I live!
 
—Rodolfo,
La Bohème,
Act One
D
oria set the breakfast things ready for the morning, then turned out the lights in the kitchen. She stepped outside for a breath of fresh air, and paused to enjoy the light of a full white moon shining on the garden, glistening on the glossy leaves of the Judas tree and gleaming on the wrought iron and glass of the bow window. The crisp air of October was refreshing after the wilting heat of August and the humidity of September. Soon the Puccinis would be off to their apartment on Via Verdi in Milan, and she and Zita would be alone in a peaceful house, with nothing to do but begin preparations for Christmas. Zita, who was from Siena, would assemble the traditional seventeen ingredients for her famous panforte, and pretend to smack Doria's hand as she snitched hazelnuts and candied apricots from the mixing bowl. She would haggle with the butcher over prices for turkey and leg of lamb. Doria would scour Villa Puccini from top to bottom, and there would be no one about to make it dirty again until the
signori
returned.
She took off her apron as she went back inside. Before going to bed, she took a last glance into the dining room to see that everything was ready for the morning. She noticed the glow of candlelight coming from the studio, but she heard no conversation and no music.
She peeked in. The electric lights were off, but the candles burned merrily in their brass sconces on the piano. The room was in shadow except for bars of moonlight reflecting from the lake onto the carpet.
Puccini was in his chair before the piano, but not touching the keys. He had just lighted a fresh cigarette, and blew a ring of smoke, tipping his head back to watch it rise and break against the sculpted moldings. When he dropped his chin, he saw Doria, and saluted her with two fingers to his forehead. “Not in bed, my little nurse?”
“I was just going, signore. I thought perhaps you had forgotten the candles—it was so quiet in here.”
“Sì,”
he said heavily. “Too cursed quiet.” He tipped his chair back, and stared up at the ceiling again. “The music won't come.”
“It will. You always say that, yet in the end, it comes.”
“Not this time!” His voice was rough with smoke and tension. “I think this is the end, Doria. I'm a fifty-year-old has-been with a ruined leg and a career drowning in
cosettine!
”
“Non è vero!”
He waved a negligent hand, but she could see by the arch of his eyebrow that he was listening. Just so had he listened to her through long wakeful nights after his accident, when he relied on her to talk about anything and everything she could think of, to distract him from his dark thoughts and the pain in his leg. He was like one of her little brothers, in constant need of comfort and reassurance.
She took a step inside the door. “Signore, your operas are not little things at all. They are—” She gestured with her hand, as if she could snatch the word from the air. “Profound!” she finished. And with a touch of asperity, because he already knew how she felt about it, “Especially
Madama Butterfly
.”
He snorted, not yet mollified. “That's the one they criticize the most. They say it's commercial. Cheap. A melodrama!”
“Then they don't understand the story,” she protested. “Cio-Cio-San's story!”
“And you do, Doria?” He stretched out his arm to tap his cigarette ash into the cut-glass tray. “My little nurse? You think you understand?”
She tossed her head. “Of course I do! Cio-Cio-San and I have much in common.”
He puffed on the dwindling butt of his cigarette, and smiled at her. “No one has sold you to an American naval officer, Signorina Manfredi!”
She folded her arms, laughing at him. “Not yet, in any case!”
He let his chair settle back to the floor, and ground out the cigarette. “I wish you to be happy, Doria. You should be out with young people in the evenings, not stuck here with all us old people.”
“You're not old!” she insisted. “And besides, I don't want to be out in the village. I'm happy here, in your pretty house. Hearing your beautiful music.”
His smile faded, and he stared up at his painted ceiling through a haze of cigarette smoke. “You pay a price, I think, my little nurse.”
She shrugged. “We all pay in some way for what we want.”
At that he laughed, but it was a bitter sound. It grated on her ear, and she flinched, fearful he would wake the
signora
. “You're too wise, Doria. We do indeed! Even I!”
She said with sympathy,
“Sì, sì. Lo so.”
He grimaced, and straightened his right leg, rubbing at the thigh and groaning. “Doria, let's have a glass of port. I have no musical ideas tonight, in any case.”
“I will bring you one, maestro.”
She turned back into the dining room to pour a glass. She carried it back to him and set it on the desk, within his reach. “Are you sure you're well? Does your leg pain you tonight?”
He sighed, and reached across the desk for his box of Toscano cigars. “My leg always pains me, which no one but you seems to care about! Still, I'm well enough,” he said. She took the cigar from him. She clipped the end with the little cutter, then handed it back. He stuck it between his teeth as she scraped a match on the matchbox, and held the flame for him as he drew. When it was glowing, he said, “There's no need to nurse me now, Doria.”
“I don't mind.”
“I know.” He squinted at her through the smoke. “You're a good girl.”
“Grazie.”
Doria gave a shallow curtsy, and he chuckled.
“Buona notte, signore.”
“Wait.” He took a deep swallow of wine, and set the glass down again on his desk. He propped his left elbow on the piano above the keyboard, and played an idle chord with his right hand. “Are you very tired? Could you sit a while and talk with me, as you used to do?”
Involuntarily, Doria glanced above her head, as if she could see through the sculpted plaster ceiling and into the
signora
's bedroom.
Puccini saw, and drew hard on his cigar. “Your mistress is asleep, I promise you.” He pointed to a chair resting beside the card table. There were no guests tonight, and everything was as tidy as she had left it earlier in the day. “Pull that over. Just a moment's talk, to distract me. Perhaps my reluctant muse will wake.”
Doria hesitated, torn between wanting to do as he asked and fear that Elvira would find her here, and misunderstand. The house had been more or less peaceful for a week, and she hoped it would stay that way.
He gave her his boyish smile, rueful and self-deprecating. “Please,” he said, squinting through the smoke and tugging at his mustache with his free hand. “The opera is a disaster, and I can't sleep for worrying about it.”
Doria gave a shake of her head, but she brought the chair close to the piano. He said, “Pour a glass for yourself, my little friend. Let's make the best of this dark and empty evening!”
Of course, Puccini didn't have to get up at dawn to begin the work of maintaining Villa Puccini, but Doria would never point out such a thing. Soon enough she could rest as much as she needed to, she and Zita. She went back into the dining room, poured herself a small glass of his excellent port, and rejoined him in the studio. He raised his glass to her as she sat down. “Good! I hate to be alone with my miserable thoughts—and this piano refuses to speak to me!”
Doria, rather primly, sipped the port. She sat with her legs crossed at the ankle, the glass held in both hands in her lap. Her eyes cast down, she said, “Maestro, the piano will not speak if you don't touch the keys.”
He laughed, more merrily now. “You're a bossy one, aren't you, Doria? You love to tell your master what to do.”
Her lips twitched, and she looked up at him from beneath her eyelids. “It's what we do with spoiled boys,” she dared to say.
He guffawed, and a flush of pleasure rose up her chest and throat. It was the same laugh she heard so often when his friends were here, the
signori
from Milan who came to keep him company on the hot summer nights as he wrestled with his music. She took another sip of port to hide her blush, though it would make her head spin if she drank it too fast.
“My sisters tell me the same thing,” he chortled. He drained his glass, and she took it from him, carrying it into the dining room to refill it. When she brought it back, she found him absently rubbing his leg with the heel of his hand and gazing at the manuscript sheets standing half-filled on the piano. His laughter had faded, and although he took the glass from her, he set it on his desk, and picked up a thick black pencil, marking a note on the staff, then another.
His mood had changed abruptly, as it so often did. It was like the autumn weather, sunny one moment, stormy the next. “You're going to work now,” she said. “I'll leave you to it.”
“No, no, not yet,” he said. He put the pencil down, picked up his glass, and took a swallow. His eyes were still on the manuscript. “Sometimes I think if my leg would cease its infernal aching, I could write faster.”
“Did you write faster before your accident, maestro?”
“Only when I was very young. Before—before I was distracted.”
She knew what that meant, but forbore to say so. He meant Elvira, and the scandal that caused so much fury to circle around him, like a chain of thunderstorms, one after the other. His family, his friends, everyone had been shocked when Elvira abandoned her husband and her children to live with Puccini, and she knew they had badgered him endlessly to send her back to her husband and restore his reputation. He hadn't done it, and Doria thought they must, once, have been very much in love. Why else would they suffer the scathing looks and biting words of society? Why else had they stayed together through the years of poverty? Perhaps Elvira had been different then, more amiable. Perhaps she had been pretty, her voice sweeter, her eyes more tender. Doria took another delicate sip of wine.
These conversations in the dark of night were familiar to her from that first hard year of Puccini's convalescence, when she had come so eagerly to the beautiful new Villa Puccini to nurse the great composer in his recovery. The pain of his injured leg often roused him in the night. She would fetch whatever he needed, do what she could to make him comfortable, and listen as he talked. She heard him speak of his beloved mother, of his children, of his tumultuous relationship with his publisher, and with his librettists, who seemed to quit on a regular basis. She knew how desperately he feared failure, how much criticism stung him, how he loathed Wagner and adored Verdi and Mozart—all of it. She had learned a great deal about opera by listening to him. And sometimes, deep in the night, he had sung fragments to her—a bit of an aria, a line of recitative, even the melody of a chorus—and she remembered every one of them.
“So now,” he mused, twirling his glass in his left hand, tapping the keyboard with the pencil in his right, “now I have made it worse. Distracted myself so I fear I will never write another note.”
The dour tone of his voice made Doria look up at him. “What do you mean, signore?”
He sighed. “I brought this all on myself,” he said, his voice little more than a scrape in his throat. “I know that now, but at the time—I thought it was only my fancy, my mood.”
“I don't know what—” Doria began, and then stopped.
“No. No, I never told you. I thought you would not believe me. Elvira didn't.” She held her breath, wondering what made him so gloomy.
The sky beyond the windows darkened suddenly, clouds folding over the moon, obscuring the stars. The night seemed to close around the studio. The only light came from the candles on the piano, flickering unsteadily over Puccini's cheeks. He was in need of a shave. His mustache drooped, a little overlong, and the shadows deepened the lines in his face.
“Premonition,” he muttered.
“Cosa?”
He glanced up, one eyebrow raised, then down into the luminous darkness of the wine in his glass. The pencil was now motionless in his fingers. “I had a premonition. I've tried to convince myself I imagined it, that the medicines and the pain altered my memory of that night, but I know now it's not true.”
“You've never told me this,” Doria murmured.
“No.” He emptied his glass again. She rose, and brought him the bottle, setting it next to the manuscript on the piano. His cigar had gone out. He dropped it in the ashtray, then groped in his pocket for a cigarette. When it was lit, he slumped in his chair.

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