The Sonnet Lover (38 page)

“That’s what the police decided—” I stop when I see the nun’s chin begin to wobble and dig a tissue out of my pocket. She blows her nose loudly and shakes her head as if trying to shake her tears away.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just that I thought the conversations we had were a help to the boy. I could see he was troubled, but if I had thought he was in that much trouble—”

“You mustn’t blame yourself,” I say, laying my hand on her arm. “I don’t think Robin
did
kill himself. I think someone might have pushed him. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. If I had listened…” I stop, startled at how close I am to tears.

The nun’s soft hand steals into mine. “Would you like a cup of tea?” she offers. “I think we both could use one.”

I’m about to say no—I can see by the angle of the sun slanting through the cypresses that it’s growing late, and I’d promised Bruno I’d look for Ginevra’s poems—but then I look down at the nun’s softly crumpled face and realize I can’t possibly run off after dropping such a bombshell.

“Tea would be nice,” I say.

We introduce ourselves on the way down to the gatehouse. “Sister Clarissa,” she says, “of the Anglican Church.” And then, with a sly smile, she adds, “Clarissa Dalloway that was.”

I laugh and then feel instantly ashamed to have regained my humor so soon after telling her about Robin. But Sister Clarissa seems pleased at my reaction.

“Yes, I know. My mother was a fan of Virginia Woolf. I’ve always suspected she married my father so that she could name me after her favorite literary character. If she’d had a suitor named Woolf, I’m certain my name would be Virginia.”

We’ve reached the gatehouse, which contains on one side a little souvenir bookshop. She ushers me into the other side, into a room filled with books. “This is the library,” she says, moving a stack of books off a small deal table by the window and plugging in an electric kettle. “I live upstairs, but I find it’s cozier to have tea down here. And such interesting people come to visit. So you’re a teacher at Hudson College. In English literature?” she asks, offering me a seat.

“Comparative literature,” I answer. “My specialty is the Renaissance sonnet—English and Italian.”

“Ah, the sonnet. ‘What lips my lips have kissed,’” she quotes from Edna St. Vincent Millay, “‘and where, and why, I have forgotten.’”

I’m beginning to learn not to be surprised at Sister Clarissa’s un-orthodox literary interests, but her next statement does startle me.

“Did Robin’s death have anything to do with that boy he loved?”

“You knew about that?” I ask, abashed that even a nun knew that Robin was bisexual while I didn’t.

Sister Clarissa smiles. “He talked and talked about William Shake-speare’s love for the young man and the Dark Lady of the sonnets, and I surmised after a while that Robin himself was in a similar triangle and that it was tearing him apart.”

“He may have been,” I allow. “There’s this girl at the school now who says that Robin was involved with another boy at the villa last year…” I stop, not wanting to give away Orlando’s name, but Sister Clarissa is clearly well informed.

“Orlando, wasn’t it?
My
favorite Woolf character”—I try not to gape. A nun who’s read and admires Woolf’s gender-switching adventurer!—“and the girl…Zoe Demarchis, isn’t it? They were here today.”

“They?”

“Orlando and Zoe. They didn’t come together. Zoe was here first—” The teakettle whistles and Sister Clarissa’s attentions are occupied for several excruciating minutes of tea preparation before she’s ready to continue her story. “Oh, yes, what was I saying?”

“Zoe Demarchis came first…”

“Yes, she came to put flowers on Elizabeth’s grave. She was crying and I wondered if I should go talk to her, but I thought I’d give her a little time to herself. Then Orlando showed up—”

“Did it look like they had planned to meet?” I ask.

“Oh, no, I think not. She looked quite startled to see him, but, now that I think of it, he didn’t look surprised to see her.” Sister Clarissa’s blue eyes narrow, thinking. “No, I’d wager he came to find her. That he knew she’d be here. Zoe always came here last year when she was upset…. Has something happened at the villa?” she asks, training hersharp blue eyes on me. While I’d like to spare her the news of another death, I realize I’m not likely to get anything past her.

“Yes, a woman died last night—an American woman.” And then, feeling that I owe Mara this much, I add, “She was a friend. She fell down a flight of stairs in the garden, but I’m afraid the police might have reason to think that Orlando pushed her.”

“Oh, no, I can’t believe that! He’s a little wild, perhaps, but I can’t believe him capable of that. No, dear,” she says, patting my hand, “you must have that part wrong. But, yes, Orlando
was
very upset. Maybe he saw someone else push this woman.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want you to think I was eavesdropping, but just like today when I overheard you, I happened to be doing a little bit of weeding near Elizabeth’s grave—I like to keep it nice because it’s where the tourists head first—”

“Yes, and what did you hear?”

“Orlando was saying that he had to find out where the poems were—the ones Robin had found last year—and that no one would be safe until he did.”

“Did it sound as if he were threatening Zoe?”

“I think he was warning her. He kept saying that if she knew something, she should tell him.”

“And did she?”

“No. She said—and this I heard quite distinctly—that he was the last person she would tell the whereabouts of the poems.”

“And what did Orlando say to that?”

“Oh, dear, this
is
going to sound like a threat, although I didn’t think of it as one at the time. I just thought the boy was angry, and of course I didn’t know about poor Robin.”

“Sister Clarissa,” I say, grasping the nun’s soft, plump hand. “Please tell me exactly what he said.”

“He said that if she didn’t tell him where the poems were, she would be in danger—that she was making the same mistake that Robin had made.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE

I
CATCH THE BUS OUTSIDE THE CEMETERY, BUT WHEN
I
GET TO THE
P
IAZZA DELLA
Libertà I learn I’ve just missed the bus that goes up the hill and because of the
festa
there won’t be another one for an hour. I remember, though, that when I was a student I sometimes hiked up the hill with a couple of girls from Cornell who claimed it was the best way to burn off all the pasta we were eating. They set a brisk pace that got us up to the villa in under thirty minutes. Surely I can make it in forty and still beat the bus and hopefully reach Zoe before anything happens to her.

The difference between nineteen and thirty-nine, though, proves to be more than ten minutes. Although I walk a lot in New York, it’s all on flat terrain. I’m winded in the first ten minutes and after fifteen the backs of my thighs feel like someone’s holding a match to them. Every time I look up, the brick wall that borders the road seems to curve into infinity as if I’ve entered some Dantesque punishment in which professors who don’t listen carefully enough to their students are doomed to tread in an ever-looping circle, their backsides licked by the flames of hell.

When Zoe said to me on the bus this morning that she and Orlando had made up last night, I should have wondered what had prompted the sudden reconciliation. She had also said that Robin told her
everything.
From what Sister Clarissa told me, it’s clear that Zoe must know something about where the poems are—or at least that Orlando thinks she does. Sister Clarissa also said that Zoe had left upset and crying and that Orlando had tried to follow her, but then he had stopped at the gate and stayed behind while she boarded the bus. I had asked whether, by any chance, there had been a policeman near the bus, and she hadn’t remembered. It seems, though, the most likely explanation of why Orlando hadn’t followed her. He could easily have waited, though, and taken the next bus.

By the time I make it to the gates of La Civetta, I’ve worked myself into a lather of sweat and anxiety. The hollow eyes of the owls carved into the iron gates stare at me accusingly. When I press the buzzer and shout my name into the metal grate, I half expect to be denied entrance, but the gates swing slowly open onto the
viale.

I don’t go down the
viale,
though, but turn instead into the narrow path that leads to the little villa where the students are housed, the original Convent of Santa Catalina before Lorenzo Barbagianni resettled the nuns in the Valdarno. In one chronicle I read, the nun claimed that the move was prompted by the sisters’ desire to expand the wool production of the convent, but it occurs to me now that Barbagianni was punishing the order for the testimony of one of its nuns in Ginevra’s lawsuit against him. As I approach the heavy wooden doors I think of Ginevra running here, scared and bleeding, seeking refuge. But when the door swings open, instead of a black-robed nun, a gaggle of teenage girls in navel-baring shorts and skimpy T-shirts spills out into the stone-paved courtyard.

“Excuse me,” I say raising my voice to catch their attention. “Do any of you know which room is Zoe Demarchis’s?”

“The best room, of course,” one of the girls answers, rolling her eyes at her friends, “because she was here in the fall and has seniority.”

“And she
had
to have a single because of her asthma and food allergies—like a roommate might slip peanuts into her mouth at night.”

Poor Zoe, I think, she’s obviously not popular with the other students—at least not with the girls. “I see,” I say with a level, humorless stare meant to discourage any more criticism. “And what would be the room number?”

“Oh, it doesn’t have a number, but you can’t miss it. It’s at the end of the hall on the second floor. The one with the picture of a woman with a face like a cocker spaniel.” The rest of the girls double over in spasms of laughter that crease their bare, taut midriffs, and then they practically run from the courtyard, shrieking that they hear the bus coming.

Whatever would the nuns of Santa Catalina make of them? I wonder as I enter the cool stone foyer and pass the old refectory, which is now used as the student dining room. What would they have made of the strains of Coldplay that drift down the worn stone steps where once the nuns would have chanted hymns as they made their way to chapel? Or the torn-out magazine pictures of bare-chested boys on the doors of what were once convent cells? Teen idols vying with the ceramic saints that remain from the period in the 1960s when the nuns of Santa Catalina were housed here after their convent in the Valdarno was flooded.

No wonder Zoe had complained about being stuck on this stuffy hall. It’s hot and airless and smells yeasty—a brew of overactive hormones, greasy snack foods, and Noxema. I easily identify Zoe’s door by the postcard of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who does, I have to admit as I raise my hand to knock on Zoe’s door, bear a certain doggy resemblance to some kind of spaniel. When I knock, though, no one answers. I try again, knocking harder in case she’s asleep—or worse—until the door next to hers opens and a girl in sweatpants and rumpled T-shirt appears rubbing her eyes.

“She’s not here,” the girl tells me in a groggy but pleasant voice. “She got called down to the main villa while she was getting ready for tonight’s dress rehearsal. She looked pretty upset.”

“Do you know who asked to see her?”

“The message said President Abrams wanted to see her in the archive room. Zoe said she was afraid that something was missing and that she was going to get blamed for it. Which wouldn’t be fair”—the girl stops to yawn—“because, Zoe said, all that stuff went missing last year.”

“Okay, thanks, sorry I woke you up,” I say, heading down the stairs and outside as fast as I can. The
viale
stretches in front of me impossibly long. I wonder whether the trip felt this long to Ginevra de Laura when she ran it in the opposite direction. I tell myself that there’s no need to run, that Zoe’s safe as long as she’s with Mark, but I’m unable to dismiss the sense of urgency that’s taken hold of me—a sense that I’m figuring everything out a step too late. I should have questioned Zoe more about the documents Robin sorted through last year and not taken her word when she said they didn’t find anything in the archives and that Robin never told her where he found the poems. Clearly Orlando thinks she knows something, and now so does Mark.

When I reach the villa I go straight into the library and start up the spiral staircase, but a sound from below brings me back down into the library. It’s a plaintive, half-strangled weeping, as if someone were trying very hard not to cry but couldn’t stop himself. The sound is coming from the club chair in the shadowy corner where I found Cyril last night, but when I get close enough I see it’s not Cyril; it’s Gene. He’s got Cyril’s silver decanter of absinthe, though, and one of Leo Balthasar’s Cuban cigars.

“Gene,” I say, “I’m so sorry about Mara.” He looks up so that the light from the
pomerino
falls on his face, and I’m shocked at the damage grief has done there. Although I never shared his infatuated students’ regard for Gene’s looks (he always seemed a little
too
pretty to me), I’d recognized in an abstract way that he was a handsome man—toothy and blond, tan even in winter—but now his face looks like a piece of paper that’s been crumpled, his eyes bloodshot and puffy, and his nose as pink as a rabbit’s. He holds up a silver tumbler full of cloudy liquid. I think he is going to make a toast to Mara, but instead he makes one to me. “Here’s to kindhearted Rose. You were the only one of the faculty who gave Mara the time of day.” He swallows the entire glass in one gulp. “Oh,
ex-scuthe
my bad manners,” he slurs. “You don’t have a drink. Here, let me pour you one. This stuff will knock the socks off you.”