The Girl in the Glass

by Susan Meissner

  “He’s there.”

  “Oh! And the key to your house?”

  I stared at him, flabbergasted. He wanted the key to the cottage?

  “Your cat,” he said.

  For Pete’s sake. Alex. The cat. I pulled my keys out of my purse and handed them to him. “Yikes. Thanks,” I said.

  As I grabbed hold of the car door to close it, he called my name, and I ducked my head in.

  “Just one more thing. He … You may not be able to convince him to come back with you.”

  I swallowed. “I know.”

  “Try to enjoy Florence, anyway. It’s so beautiful.”

  I probably would have kissed his cheek had he been standing next to me saying good-bye. As it was, I could only nod and give him a thumbs-up.

  I pushed the door shut, waved, and then stepped into the flow of people bound for the skies.

  Nurse told me, that spring morning as we watched Maria ride, that my father was like a fine horse no one had tamed. I thought she meant my father was like a happy, wild horse that no one had yet caught, one that could run free in the countryside with the wind in his mane and never had a rider tugging him this way and that, telling him which way to go.

  “I like wild horses,” I had said. I’d never actually seen a wild horse, but I knew that before a horse had been broken into submission, it was its own master. The unbroken horse was more like a soaring eagle than a beast to carry us here and there. This image of my father running through fields of dewy grass with his arms stretched wide, with no reins, no whip, no crop, made me smile. So I said it again.

  “I like wild horses!”

  And Nurse, who would shield me from the truth for yet a little while longer, told me we’d been outside long enough. It was time for lessons.

  13

  I have flown internationally a few times, and I knew getting to the gate might take a while, but the line through security moved quickly; a gift from the heavens. I arrived breathless at my gate just as coach was boarding. I felt like throwing some confetti in the air. A mere five hours earlier, I had been eating fish tacos at a sidewalk café, expecting to do a load of laundry when I got home, and now I was boarding a plane for Europe.

  It wasn’t until I had my seat belt around my waist that I fully grasped that if I slept at all in the next few hours, I would awaken in Paris; at an airport like this one, with intercom voices I wouldn’t understand and directional signs that would take me by pictures to the second plane I would board—the one that would take me to Florence.

  Florence.

  I pressed my head against the glass of my little window, missing my nonna like I hadn’t missed her since I was a little girl. My dad was finally taking me to Florence, but he wasn’t with me on the plane, and I wasn’t sure he would be on the return flight either. Our days and nights would be shadowed by what he had done.

  When we were airborne and cruising far above the dark land below us, I pulled out my laptop, willing to pay to use the plane’s Wi-Fi so that I could see if my mother or Gabe had a chance to see my e-mail yet.

  My mother had, and her reaction was what I’d expected: shock that my father would leave for Florence ahead of me and force me to travel alone, followed by prognostications of bad weather, cancelled flights, missing luggage, a stolen passport, and food poisoning. She told me to e-mail her when I’d arrived, and I assured her I would. Gabe seemed genuinely disappointed that he’d been out when I needed the ride to LAX that he’d promised. He, too, asked me to e-mail back or text him when I got there.

  I checked the weather in Florence, used my credit card to buy an international data plan for my phone for the next several days—gasping audibly at the price but knowing I had to have it—and sent an e-mail to Lorenzo telling him I was on my way and hoping with all my heart he and Renata weren’t off on a research trip to Portugal or something. I couldn’t imagine making this trip after all this time and not even seeing him. I was about to log out and attempt to sleep when a new e-mail deposited itself into my inbox.

  From Sofia Borelli.

  I hastily opened it. She had sent me two additional chapters, as I had asked. Excited, I opened the documents to have them ready to read before attempting to nap. Then I e-mailed her back and told her my trip to Florence had been bumped up and I was actually on my way there. I asked if she’d be available in the next few days to meet, offering up a tiny prayer that she had at least some free time this week.

  Then I logged off the Wi-Fi and settled into my seat to read what Sofia had sent me.

  Florence, when you come to visit her, will not welcome you with showers of greetings. It will not matter to her that you are there, nor will she notice when you leave. She is not one for sentiment, and she does not need you to love her. If no more tourists came, the vendors and café owners and artists on the piazzas would miss the tourists, but Florence would not. She is indifferent to the visitor. What you take from Florence when you leave, you take for yourself; she does not give it to you. That might seem cold to you, but to a Medici, it is not so hard to understand. Your life is what you make of it, not what happens to you. Papa told me this. And he told me that’s what Florence is and her people are.

  It’s not as if the city is uncaring or unfriendly. I had an American man tell me once that people in Florence weren’t friendly to him. They wouldn’t give him directions when he was lost or present him with the check for his meal or offer a table to sit at though he stood for many long minutes just inside the door of a restaurant.

  I told him, as my father told me a very long time ago, that here in Florence it is customary to discover for yourself what it is you think you need. Asking for directions is not discovery. This same man told me, in a rather terse tone, that asking for directions is how you find your way. But I told him gently that asking for directions is how you rob yourself of finding your way yourself. In Florence you do not wait for your check; you request it. And you do not wait to be seated. You decide for yourself where you will sit. It is not that way in America, he said. Florentines are rude and unhelpful. He did not tip me.

  It is all about perspective, isn’t it? It is how you see something that you decide what it is. And in Florence, perspective is celebrated, not reprimanded. Always.

  In the time of the Renaissance, art and science were not separate views on life, but one and the same. Today, science is studied at one college and art at another, but the two disciplines were entwined in the days of old. The great artists insisted on correct proportions, and they were masters of perspective. Perspective is what the heart sees. Nora whispered this to me. Perspective is mathematical and precise, but it is also artistic and unfixed. I think she meant that we see all the time what the great masters of the Renaissance saw; we just don’t know it. When you look at two parallel lines, they seem to converge in the distance, like a long stretch of highway that melts into the sky at the very end of what you are capable of seeing. Your head tells you these lines do not converge, but your eye tells you they do. And because your eyes tell you they do, you can imagine they do. This is what is called the vanishing point. Florence’s Leonardo da Vinci and Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi—you know him as Donatello—were the first to use it. Brunelleschi, the brilliant architect of the Duomo, was a master of linear perspective. Some say he invented it. Wise Brunelleschi merely discovered what God had already set across man’s path to stumble upon. And that is, what we see is not always what is. And what is, we often cannot see until we train our eyes to see it.

  When Papa was teaching me how to paint, he said I must first imagine my drawing as an open window through which to see the painted world beyond. He drew a straight line to represent the horizon and then rays connecting my eye to a point in the distance, the vanishing point. The horizon, he told me, is where the sky meets the ground. I told him the sky never meets the ground. But Papa said, “But you can imagine that it does.”

  In the Uffizi, once the Medici offices but now a gallery of the Medici art collection, there is a p
ainting by da Vinci called The Annunciation. There are many paintings of the Annunciation and the Crucifixion in Florence. So many, I lose count. Christ is coming! Christ is leaving! as if nothing in the middle of His extraordinary life is worth capturing in paint.

  If you look at da Vinci’s The Annunciation and don’t rush past, you will see the vanishing point. And you will see where the horizon meets the ground. On the left side of the painting, an angel holds out a lily. On the right side, the Virgin Mary responds in graceful surprise and awe to the greeting. In between the angel and the Virgin is the horizon, the rest of the world. Da Vinci painted her calm and composed, as if she saw angels every day and had just been told only that the kitchen was fresh out of figs for breakfast.

  The hills in the distance—beyond the tiny coastal city and the boats in the water that everyone in a hurry misses—represent all that is beyond the moment in time when the angel told the Virgin she would bear the Savior of the world. That is the vanishing point. Without it, there would be no sense that this moment is a slice of time.

  When my father first showed me The Annunciation, he showed me the place in the painting where this moment in time and the rest of eternity collide. I was seven. And I stood there for many long minutes transfixed by the unseen dot on the canvas that held my gaze. Then Nora called to me, rewarding me for finding the place where the painting began and ended. She told me a secret that I share with you now.

  The Virgin’s slender hand, the one not raised in astonishment at the angel’s words, rests on an open page of Scripture. The verses are in shades of red and black ink, like patterned stripes on wallpaper. The letters seem to be neither Latin nor Hebrew, nor any alphabet we might recognize. But the canvas whispered to me that the Virgin was reading from the book of Isaiah.

  “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

  The stripes. The red and black rows.

  I began to cry when I heard this because I knew then the Virgin had to know what lay ahead. What lay ahead was written under her own fingers, and she was reading it. And I also knew why the angel carried a lily. It was the kind I had seen at a funeral procession, a flower that spoke of love and loss.

  My father leaned down and asked me what was the matter, and I told him the painting had whispered to me what the Virgin was reading.

  Papa always knew when to say absolutely nothing. He just put his arm over my shoulders and waited. After a while Nora’s whispering ceased, and the painting was quiet again.

  Now that day we were there was my father’s day off, but a lady at the Uffizi knew he was a guide, and she sent a couple over to him because they had a question about the painting.

  When they came close to us, Papa stood and I wiped my eyes. The couple looked down at me, eyebrows arched, thinking perhaps I had just been scolded for running in the museum. They asked Papa if another artist had begun The Annunciation and da Vinci just finished it, because that is what they had heard. Papa told them yes, it’s believed da Vinci’s mentor, Verrocchio, began the painting and instructed da Vinci to complete it as part of his training. They said, “Oh.” And they glanced at the painting and walked away.

  They did not see the vanishing point. They did not see where the horizon meets the ground, where a moment in time meets the rest of eternity. If they had stayed longer than five seconds, my father might’ve told them to look for it. He might’ve even told them, by the way, that da Vinci’s contribution to another painting, the Baptism of Christ, was so magnificent, it was rumored that this very same Verrocchio threatened to stop painting.

  When they were gone, I asked Papa why they walked away so quickly. He said it happens all the time and not to let it bother me.

  But it did bother me. And he kissed my head and said, “That’s because of who you are.”

  Da Vinci once said, “Perspective is the rein and rudder of painting.” That sad couple walked away, oblivious that the painting wished to take them somewhere.

  You don’t have to be a Medici to understand a painting is never just about who painted it. It’s also what you see when you look at it.

  When I take people to visit the Basilica di San Lorenzo, I sense within me, still, after all these years, a tug of melancholy. The basilica is the burial place of most of the Medici family.

  It is older than the Medici family itself. Historians say it was consecrated in the fourth century after Christ, but it has been rebuilt many times. History tends to be hard on the church. The one we see today is mostly the work of Brunelleschi in the fifteenth century.

  The Medici Chapels at the Sagrestia Nuova, the New Sacristy, are showcased by Michelangelo’s tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici—watched over by the statues Night and Day—and the tomb of his brother, Lorenzo the Magnificent—graced with Dusk and Dawn. People ask me why Dawn and Night are female and Dusk and Day are male. Their genders were assigned to them based on Italian nouns, but there is more to it than that. I will tell you in a moment what Nora told me.

  Giuliano de’ Medici was brutally assassinated in 1478 in front of parishioners celebrating the Mass at the Duomo. Right there in the cathedral, by murderers masquerading as comrades. The Pazzi Rebellion was designed to send both Medici brothers, bloody and dead, to their Maker. Whenever there is a family in power, there is always another family that wants to take its place. Lorenzo, who was very fond of his brother, narrowly escaped.

  The Medici fortunes dwindled under the rule of Lorenzo the Magnificent, just one of the reasons he is not my favorite ancestor. He was most certainly unfaithful to his wife, though when she died of tuberculosis, he wrote of his great sorrow. Still, Lorenzo funded the school that Michelangelo attended as a young apprentice and was patron to Botticelli, whose work I love. And Lorenzo was a poet, though an odd one. He would write lovely poems of devotion to God and then dreadful parodies that my parents would not let me read. Here is a bit of the poem of his I like best:

  I saw my Lady by a purling brook

  With laughing maidens, where green branches twined;

  O never since that primal, passionate look

  Have I beheld her face so soft and kind

  (Sonnet 1)

  It is most likely my favorite because it was my papa’s favorite. He would recite the whole piece to my mother while she washed dishes, and he would pretend the sink was the brook and I was the laughing maiden. I had to be told what a purling brook was, because I thought, of course, it was pearling brook, and I asked my papa how the oysters got there since oysters are only in the sea. Then he told me purling is a way of describing a brook that twirls and twists, like a dance. The tiny loops along the edge of lacy braid are its purling. Knitters know what purling is. That image seemed prettier to me than a pearl and sweeter than an oyster. A pearl is a lovely thing, but an oyster is not. Sometimes pretty things got lost in oyster-stink. A lacy braid never does.

  The statue known as Night, my tour people are always quick to note, is supposed to be sleeping, but she looks like she is having anguished nightmares. Day does not appear to be enjoying the blessings of another day on earth either. They are both in postures that, were you to attempt to mimic them, would have you quickly experiencing muscle spasms and other little agonies.

  Turn your eye to Dusk and Dawn, and you will see that Dawn, beautiful in feminine form, wears the face of grief. Dusk, with his relaxed, partially finished face, sits cross-legged with his chin dipped to his chest, as if there is nothing he can do to change what the next day will bring.

  Despite their muscular anatomy and marbled austerity, the four faces appear robbed of peace and strength.

  In the agony of my grief at the loss of my mother and my marriage, Nora whispered to me that Night and Dawn, as female, reveal our guaranteed mortality. They are life-givers only during the time their bodies
can create and sustain life. Resigned Day and Dusk know they cannot change that fact. But, Nora told me, do not forget that the day that ends at nightfall is given back to you on the morrow. You get it back. And you keep getting it back, so it is up to you to decide what you will do with it.

  The bong of the aircraft’s intercom pulled me from a strange place of sleep. We were about to land at Charles de Gaulle where I would have two hours to convince myself it was not the middle of the night but two thirty in the afternoon. I forced myself to eat a roast beef sandwich during the layover, even though what I really wanted was a bowl of Cheerios. I found the gate for my connecting Air France flight, pulled out my laptop, and checked my e-mail again, relieved to see a response from Lorenzo. He had written his answer in a hurry on his phone, but he told me he and Renata were in town, he was thrilled that I was coming, and he wanted me to call when I got there. He included his cell phone number. There was no new e-mail from Sofia. I put my laptop away and let my head fall forward to rest. Twenty minutes later when my flight began to board, a young Indian woman with a scarlet drop on her forehead woke me and gestured that our flight was boarding. I thanked her and made my way onto the plane. Just two more hours and I’d be there.

  I gave in to another nap on the flight from Paris to Florence. It seemed I had no sooner buckled myself into my seat than I was being told we were beginning our descent into Florence. I didn’t have a window seat this time, and I couldn’t see much. But the day was turning amber as we made our approach, and I itched to see more.

  The line through customs seemed to take far too long. As I waited, I tried texting my dad that I had arrived, but the message failed. Then I even tried calling him, but I got a voice message that the person I was trying to reach was unavailable. Finally I was on my way to baggage claim. Big-city airports differ only in the choice of tile on the floor, names of the coffee shops inside the terminal, and the language of the relaxed-voice announcer over the loudspeakers. I sped toward baggage claim, eager to meet up with my father and get outside.