The Sonnet Lover

by Carol Goodman

  “I’ve already asked the waiter to bring an extra chair,” Mark says, holding my chair out for me, and then, in a lower voice, “I’d prefer that you stay here.”

  I slide into my seat just as Mara lets out an earsplitting shriek. “Hermès scarf rings!” she cries, holding up a silver-plated ring that I had taken for an ordinary napkin ring. “They go for over a hundred apiece in New York. Now that’s class.”

  “Cyril likes everything done with style,” Bruno says, sitting down next to me.

  “A ridiculous extravagance,” Daisy Wallace says, sliding her napkin out of its silver ring and briskly snapping out its folds before smoothing it over her lap. She herself is wearing a white cotton shift so austere in its simplicity, it might be a nightgown. With her long light hair, she reminds me, tonight, of the sickly Mary in Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s Annunciation. “No wonder this place is falling apart.” I notice, though, that she’s carefully slipped her scarf ring into her evening purse. Since I don’t have a purse, I place my ring to the right of my plate.

  “Careful you don’t lose yours, Rose,” Mara says. “Gene, can you put mine in your jacket pocket?”

  “Do you want me to hold yours for you?” Mark asks as he sits down.

  I see Bruno and Daisy watching us and realize that the offer to carry this silly overpriced bauble in his pocket, where it would surely spoil the line of his suit jacket, has a husbandly aura that these two have picked up on.

  “That’s okay,” I say, holding the ring up. “My name is firmly attached to it.”

  “You’ll find that your initials are inscribed on it as well.” Bruno smiles his Etruscan smile. He seems pleased that I’ve rebuffed Mark’s offer.

  “Signora Brunelli’s work, no doubt,” Mark says. “And look, she’s even gotten the middle initials right. What careful attention to detail. How lucky to have a wife who pays attention to every little thing.”

  Bruno’s smile disappears and I reach for the glass of Prosecco that’s just been poured for me. I’m already exhausted. My God, if we can’t even put our napkins on our laps without sparring, how are we ever going to get through the antipasto, let alone the six courses of a traditional Italian dinner? And I know that Cyril would never present anything less than a banquet. The antipasto itself is a feast, including a half dozen cured meats in the salumi misti, three types of crostini, sundry pickled vegetables, figs, peppers, and olives.

  Fortunately, Cyril is as generous with wine as he is with food. Leo Balthasar, holding up a glass of the local Chianti that comes with the primo piatto—taglierini pasta with black truffles—makes a backhanded toast of sorts to our host. “Cyril Graham certainly has a free hand with the booze. I hear his mother was quite the lush.”

  Daisy Wallace, who is still nursing her glass of Prosecco, tilts her head and looks at Balthasar with the same disdain with which she regarded the fat-marbled salami and wrinkled peppers of the antipasto. “And yet it was Lucy who had the presence of mind in the 1966 flood to rescue the archives of Santa Catalina while Sir Lionel was posing in front of the Biblioteca Nazionale and flirting with the mud angels.”

  “Mud angels?” Mara asks, wrinkling her nose. “Is that some Catholic thing?”

  “Not exactly,” I answer because Daisy is staring at Mara blankly. “That’s what they called the volunteers—many of them women librarians from the States—who came to help save the books that had been damaged in the flood. It was amazing, really. People from all over the world came. The city had no electricity, there was a food shortage, fear of epidemics, tons of mud, oil and sewage choking the streets. The volunteers had to sleep in railway cars, but they stayed anyway, forming human chains to pull books out of the Biblioteca Nazionale, the State Archives, dozens of private collections, museums, galleries, and ecclesiastical archives. It’s estimated that at the Biblioteca Nazionale alone over a million books or manuscripts were damaged.”

  I finish breathlessly and take a gulp of the Chianti, embarrassed to notice that the whole table is staring at me. At least I haven’t confessed my lifelong regret that I was born too late to be a mud angel.

  “Unfortunately many of the flooded churches in the Arno valley were neglected,” Daisy continues. “Lucy Graham personally supervised the evacuation of manuscripts from Santa Catalina, a small convent in the Valdarno, about an hour southeast of the city. She felt it was her duty because the convent was once located here on the grounds of La Civetta, but not everyone would have acted so conscientiously. She let the nuns stay in the old convent here on the grounds until the convent in the Valdarno was habitable again. She organized training sessions at the biblioteca in cleaning and restoring books for the nuns and her own household staff. They used this building to dry the folio leaves on laundry lines strung over the lemon trees.” Daisy lifts her eyes to the ceiling with the fervor of a saint ascending to heaven and we all follow her glance up to the rafters, where dark shapes flutter in the shadows, and I can almost imagine that the ghosts of those old manuscript pages still linger in the cavernous space. “Even now,” Daisy says, “the books in Lucy’s archives smell like lemons.”

  “It would have been even nobler if Lucy had returned the archives after she’d restored the books,” Bruno says.

  “Oh, but the convent library was so damaged in the flood. For a long time it was closed for restoration.”

  “Ah, chiuso per restauro,” Leo Balthasar says. “Practically my only Italian phrase. I learned it trying to film a miniseries on location here a couple of years ago.”

  Gene tries to ask Balthasar what miniseries—clearly he is dying to change the subject from convents to movies—but Daisy goes on as if it’s a brief she’s prepared to deliver in court.

  “Well,” Daisy says, “the convent is open now, but the nuns there are devoted to wool production and tapestry weaving. They’re far too busy to care for such an important collection. I’m sure it’s better off here at La Civetta, especially now that it will belong to the college.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Mara says. “What could possibly be that interesting about some nuns’ writing from the dark ages?”

  It’s practically the same sentiment I expressed to Daisy Wallace back in New York, but when I hear it voiced by Mara, I’m ashamed at my previous dismissal of the library of Santa Catalina. “Actually,” I say, “it’s surprising how varied the works are. The nuns wrote plays, diaries, histories…A seventeenth-century nun by the name of Arcangela Tarabotti wrote a moving and eloquent condemnation of fathers who immured their unwilling daughters in convents just to avoid paying their dowries so they could add to their own wealth.”

  “Oh, how awful,” Mara says, a hand to her chest, her voice raspy as if something was constricting her breathing. “I didn’t realize those girls were put in the convents against their will.”

  “Not all,” Daisy says. “Some had a calling.” And then, turning to me, “I see you’ve revised your valuation of the archives. Have you found something of interest?”

  “I only just arrived today; I haven’t had a chance to look in the archives. I confess, though, that the fact that Ginevra de Laura spent the last years of her life at Santa Catalina has piqued my interest in those records.”

  “Ah, our Dark Lady,” Leo Balthasar says. “I’d forgotten that she ended up in a convent.”

  “Really, though,” I say, “Professor Brunelli’s the expert on Ginevra de Laura.”

  “Bah, hardly an expert, so little is known about her. Barbagianni’s heirs destroyed all the letters and poems they could get their hands on when he died and they kicked Ginevra out of the villa. Legend has it that she went to the Convent of Santa Catalina wearing a shift lent to her by a serving woman and that she sewed some of the pages of her poems into the cloth.”

  “A woman who was having an affair with a married man went to live in a nunnery?” Mara asks. “Wasn’t that unusual?”

  “Mara would have had her burned at the stake,” Gene comments to Leo Balthasar in an all-too-audi
ble aside.

  “The Renaissance convent was the last refuge for women who didn’t wish to remarry or who were no longer considered desirable on the marriage market,” Bruno replies, ignoring Gene and addressing his comment directly to Mara, perhaps, I think, to distract her from her husband’s boorish behavior. The second-course wine is poured while Bruno talks—a Brunello di Montalcino—known sometimes as the king of Tuscan wines. When I raise the glass to my lips I can smell the oak from the cask it’s been aged in. “It’s possible that Ginevra de Laura brought her collected poetry with her to the convent—or even wrote in her remaining years—and that it survived in the convent’s archives. Unfortunately, the library’s catalog was lost in the flood and no inventory has been made since then, when the collection was brought here. Cyril began cataloging the material two decades ago, but then complained that one of the student researchers he hired stole a rare manuscript. He’s been very cautious about who he lets have access to the archives since then. Naturally that has slowed up the cataloging process.”

  “But of course you’ve had access to them all along,” Gene says. “You’ve had plenty of opportunity to find the Dark Lady poems. I bet it would be pretty tempting if you found them to sell them to a private dealer. After all, we all know how low paying this job is.” Gene chuckles and pours himself another glass of the Brunello. The rest of the table is silent. Only Mara seems oblivious to how insulting Gene’s last comment was. Perhaps she’s just learned how to tune him out.

  “No scholar worthy of the name would trade in the black market,” Bruno says in a tightly controlled voice.

  “Really? Not even if it got his son a part in a Hollywood movie? Hey, I know what it’s like to have a kid with the acting bug. Who wants to see him waiting tables for ten years—”

  “What exactly are you implying—?” Bruno begins to ask, but Mara interrupts, suddenly announcing to the whole table, “Our son, Ned, is going to Cornell in the fall. He’s going into the premed program.”

  Another silence descends on the table, but this time, thankfully, it’s filled by the rising notes of a lute and a lowering of the lights throughout the limonaia. The waiters, who are now bringing out plates of cheese, are also extinguishing the candles at each table. “Oooh, what’s happening now?” Mara asks the waiter when he comes to our table.

  “Una sorpresa,” he replies. A surprise.

  “A student performance,” Gene informs the table. “The miracle will be if they don’t all fall over each other. I’d better have a last check backstage.”

  “That’s a good idea.” Mark pushes his chair away from the table and stands. “Cyril said something about ‘pyrotechnics,’ so I’d better go make sure the students aren’t going to burn down the villa.”

  I look up at Mark, trying to catch his eye before he goes to see whether he’s as shocked by Gene’s behavior as I am—and whether his real reason for going is to privately reprimand him—but a sudden flash of light from the open windows throws him into shadow. I turn toward the garden in time to see a waterfall of sparks drift down from each of the arched windows, its fall accompanied by a rising murmur from the crowd. When I look back, Gene and Mark are gone.

  I had thought the Capulet ball was the main entertainment for the evening, but I see now that the dancers have formed two groups on either side of the teatrino, as though they were spectators watching a performance prepared for their entertainment. It’s a clever play-withina-play frame—one worthy of Shakespeare himself. A chorus of oohs and aahs draws my attention back to the windows. Another waterfall of light descends, but this time the tiny sparks seem to settle on the privet hedges and marble statues on the green stage of the teatrino, where they swell into glowing globes. Each globe tumbles for a moment, vibrating to a chord of a distant melody, and then, as if at a signal, they begin to dance. Some of the guests behind our table stand up and move toward the windows for a better view, thereby blocking ours. I hear Daisy Wallace hiss a command to sit down, but no one pays her any mind.

  “Let’s move closer,” Bruno whispers in my ear. “Orlando’s in this.”

  I hesitate, but then curiosity gets the better of me and I get up to follow him through the crowded, darkened room. The only lights are the dancing globes, which, I see, have multiplied and become iridescent with color—indigos and violets, the same colors the sky had been just before dusk, as if the hues of twilight have effervesced into airy bubbles. When we get close enough I can see that the bubbles are, in fact, paper lanterns and that each one is held aloft by a figure in a black body stocking and blackface. Although seeing the dancers peels away a layer of illusion, it doesn’t ruin the effect. It feels, rather, as if the shadows in the garden have come to life, grown muscle and sinew, for this one purpose: to make light dance. When the light from the lanterns passes over their costumes I see they’re not entirely black but of the same iridescent violet and indigo as the globes. Translucent wings flutter and billow at the dancers’ backs. They’re fireflies, I think, or dark fairies.

  “It’s the second act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, isn’t it?” I whisper to Bruno.

  “Yes, this is Oberon’s train,” he says, the purple light from the lanterns catching the curve of his smile, “and here comes Titania’s retinue.”

  The dark-winged dancers have paused, listening to the faraway call of trumpets. Then they hold their globes above the ground, illuminating what appear to be crouching statues. When the light touches them, the figures, dressed in lighter suits of pearly pink and lavender, stretch and rise, unfurling elaborate sparkling wings. I take advantage of the lull in the dance to say to Bruno, “I don’t know what came over Gene. I mean, he’s an ass, but even for him that display was pretty bad.”

  “It doesn’t matter. As you say, the man is an ass—and I think he is annoyed that Orlando got this part instead of his son, Ned—there he is now.” Bruno points toward the center of the teatrino, where a statue poised on a marble plinth is suddenly lit up by a floodlight. It might be a statue of Eros or the young Dionysus, but then it comes to life, vaulting off the plinth into the middle of the dance, scattering the fairies like dewdrops.

  “Orlando is playing Puck?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s good,” I say as the boy dances in a circle made up of the dark and light fairies, the lanterns now placed at their feet a ring of ghostly footlights. “You must be very proud of him.”

  Bruno doesn’t reply at first and I’m afraid that my praise has come out sounding stinting. I don’t mean it to. Orlando’s dance is beautiful, heartbreakingly so. He would, in this part of the play, be telling of the quarrel between Oberon and Titania, a petty fight over the prize of a changeling boy, but his dance seems to evoke some deeper rift, as if some fundamental element of nature had been ripped asunder by the warring king and queen of fairies.

  “He’s been working himself to the bone,” Bruno finally says, “trying to get this part right. You see, it was Robin’s part last year and Orlando feels as if it’s some sort of memorial to him. Dio, I almost forgot”—Bruno slaps his hand against his forehead—“I was supposed to take pictures. My camera’s back at the table. I’ll be right back.”

  Of course, I think turning back to watch the performance as Bruno goes, the grief in this dance is not for Titania and Oberon, but for the original Puck—Robin Weiss. I should have known it was originally Robin’s part. Robin would have made the perfect Puck; even his name echoes one of Puck’s aliases: Robin Goodfellow. When Orlando has finished his dance, he sinks to the ground, wrapping his arms around his knees in exactly the same pose he’d assumed that night in the park after Robin’s death. I’m relieved when the actors playing Titania and Oberon appear and enact their quarrel. “The parts will be spoken in the final performance,” Bruno, who’s returned to my side, whispers in my ear, “but the director wanted this wordless prologue to precede the play.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I say as Titania and her retinue leave the stage, their lights slowly dyi
ng as they fade into the teatrino’s green stage wings. Oberon’s dark fairies remain, but curl into tight balls around their lanterns, extinguishing the lights one by one. Only Oberon and Puck remain at the center of the stage, lit by a single lantern. Oberon performs a slow stately dance around Puck, telling him, I remember from the play, of how he saw Cupid shoot an arrow at the young virgin queen and miss, the bolt falling on a “western flower,” turning it from milk white to “purple with love’s wound.” Oberon points toward the limonaia to send Puck on his quest for this love potion—the touch of which will make any man or woman love the next creature that he or she sees—and Orlando springs to life, runs uphill, and then grabs a rope held by another fairy, and suddenly he is airborne, swinging over our heads into the limonaia. The crowd gasps at the stunning leap, but I am painfully reminded of the moment when Orlando rushed from the balcony after Robin’s death. I don’t have time to ruminate on the memory, though. I hear a rustling sound above my head. Again I think of the manuscript pages that had once been strung to dry in the limonaia, and when I look up I see they’re raining down on us. Only it’s not paper, but a shower of purple and white petals, Shakespeare’s love-in-idleness, settling over hair and eyelashes and shoulders. Everybody is clapping and laughing in the downpour, the fairies taking their bows in a final explosion of purple fireworks and then scampering offstage while the Capulet actors resume their dancing and the waiters light the table candles and serve Vin Santo and almond cookies. Bruno plucks a petal from my hair and touches it first to his eyelid and then to mine, and I can feel the echo of that velvet touch in every atom of my flesh.

  I open my mouth to speak, but the voice I hear isn’t my own.