The Girl in the Glass

by Susan Meissner

  I was lost in it for several seconds, in that dreamlike place that your mind takes you when physical sensation is so powerful it is nearly your undoing.

  To Lorenzo, it was probably an enjoyable, throwaway kiss. I was quite sure he liked kissing women. He liked bocce ball. He liked to dance. He liked wowing people with his photography.

  But I had no place in my brain or heart for throwaway kisses. I pulled away.

  “Lorenzo.” I said his name gently.

  “Yes,” he said, kissing my neck.

  “I want … some gelato.”

  He looked at me, eyes sparkling with amusement. “You want … gelato?”

  I knew why he was kissing me. He probably thought he was doing me a huge favor, romancing away my troubles with distracting kisses. But surely he wasn’t in love with me. I was someone he was fond of. I could think of nothing good that could happen from allowing him to continue.

  “You know any good gelato places around here?”

  “You really want gelato? That’s what you want?”

  “I do.”

  He raised my hand to his lips and kissed it like a Victorian gentleman. “Well, then. I know a wonderful place to get gelato.”

  His kiss was still warm on my lips when we headed downstairs, my hand in his, as if I were a child who needed help on the stairs.

  I remember my mother talking about my grandfather once, with tears in her eyes, telling me what a kind nonno he was. I have the vaguest memory of him bending down to kiss my cheek. Or maybe I was bending to kiss his.

  He remarried after my grandmother died, but I have no memory of the woman who was his second wife. She was not liked among the family.

  When Cosimo died, it is said, my mother lost more than her beloved father. She lost the apparatus of her freedom. Not only that, but the matter of my dowry, as well as my future and Virginio’s, was now to be left to my uncle Francesco, who succeeded my grandfather as Grand Duke of Tuscany.

  When my grandfather died, everything was placed in Francesco’s hands.

  He was not like Cosimo. He did not dote on my mother. And he did not like Troilo Orsini.

  21

  Tuesday morning dawned bright and warm. Sofia and I enjoyed breakfast on her balcony while she updated me on the last eight chapters she planned to write to bring her word count up to fifty thousand. She was confident she could have the new chapters done by mid-July. I felt good about the proposed chapters and was fairly sure Beatriz and Geoffrey would be okay with having all the content done by the middle of the summer. The first hurdle to cross in getting Sofia’s book published was taken care of. There would be at least fifty thousand words.

  Next we had to establish that she was who she said she was. Perhaps I would be surprised by her father’s condition when we saw him later that afternoon and he’d be able to easily direct us to older family records. Sofia could only go as far back as the late eighteen hundreds with information she found in her father’s family Bible. There was another one hundred years we needed to cover. If her father couldn’t bridge the gap, I was going to have to start looking on my own.

  And I still had to find a way to somehow let Sofia be Sofia in the pages of her book, ethereal voice and all.

  As we sipped a second cup of coffee, Sofia asked me to describe the statue I hoped to find at the Uffizi that morning. I hadn’t seen my nonna’s painting in almost twenty years. I attempted to describe how I remembered it.

  “The statue has her arm bent in either welcome or request; I’m not sure which. It’s like she’s reaching out to the little girl in the painting who was my grandmother.”

  “The statue has her hand like this?” Sofia raised her arm and bent it slightly at the elbow, turning her palm upward in supplication.

  “Yes.”

  “And is she seated on a rock in water?”

  I couldn’t remember. I closed my eyes to picture it, but all I could see in my memory was the little dancing girl and the statue reaching out to her.

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head. “I don’t think there was water.”

  Sofia nodded. “Maybe there was water, but your nonna’s grandfather chose not to paint it, eh?”

  “Why? You know this statue?”

  “I think I do. But she’s not at the Uffizi.”

  My heart sank a little. Just a little. Sofia still looked quite pleased.

  “She’s not?”

  “No. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, she’s in the Boboli Gardens at the Pitti Palace.”

  Sofia stood, stepped into the flat, and came back out a moment later with a heavy book in her hands. “All the Boboli statues are pictured in this book. She’s in here.” Sofia sat back down and leafed through the book’s colorful pages. She landed on one and spread it out before me, “That’s her, right? Andromeda?”

  My long-ago vision of what the statue looked like wobbled for a moment as I compared it with the photograph now in front of me. The statue, erected in the middle of a fountain, knelt on rocks surrounded by water. The snowy-gray hue of her robe-like dress made her look cold and damp. Her expressionless face was not how I remembered it. But her arm and hand lifted toward heaven was just as I had seen it a thousand times in my head. For the first time since I landed in Florence, I felt unweighted by the troubles I had brought with me. The beckoning statue was right here in Florence just as Nonna said it was. And she had a name: Andromeda.

  I whispered the name.

  “Do you remember the legend?” Sofia asked. I shook my head.

  Sofia ran her finger over Andromeda’s bent knees. “Andromeda’s mother, Queen Cassiopeia, boasted that Andromeda was more beautiful than the daughters of the sea god Nereus. To punish Cassiopeia, and because he was married to one of the daughters of Nereus, Poseidon sent a sea monster to ravage the kingdom’s coastline. Desperate, the king consulted an oracle who told him the attacks would not stop until he sacrificed Andromeda to the sea monster. She was chained to the rock where the sea meets land.” Sofia pointed to the marbled chain around the statue’s ankles.

  I suddenly remembered this myth from high-school lit class and reruns on Saturday afternoons of Clash of the Titans. “Great parents she had,” I mumbled.

  Sofia smoothed the page. “They didn’t know what else to do. Sometimes you just don’t.”

  “Sometimes you do and just don’t want to do it.”

  “True. But help can come from another way.” She turned the page and pointed to a second statue of a man rising out of the water on a winged horse. “See? This is Perseus returning from having killed Medusa. He rescues Andromeda and kills the sea monster. He saves her. They fall in love and marry. Everything works out in the end. Most of the time it does.” She paused a moment before going on. “These weren’t here when Nora was here. They were moved here after she left Florence. I think she would have liked this statue too, just like you do.”

  “Well, that’s her.” I looked up. “When can we go see her?”

  “I don’t have tickets for the Pitti Palace for today. I have them for Sunday. But if you want me to change them, I will.”

  I leaned back in my chair to contemplate. Part of me wanted to grab my shoes and camera and run across the first bridge that would take me across the Arno to the Pitti Palace. Part of me wanted to hold off seeing the statue until the end of my trip so that it would be one of the last things I saw. Seeing it would either be climactic or the exact opposite.

  “I’m not sure what I want.”

  “It is important to you, this statue?”

  When she said this, I knew it was not so much the statue itself that mattered to me. It was an echo of the life I knew when Nonna was alive. The life that felt good and right and safe and that had been taken from me.

  “Kind of silly, I suppose, but yes.”

  “I don’t think it’s silly at all. We will do whatever you want. You don’t have to decide now.”

  I have always been the kind of girl who didn’t want Christmas to come too soon. I
wanted to enjoy the anticipation of what was to come. The days before Christmas were always more enjoyable and magical than the day itself. And I never cared for the day after Christmas. I still don’t. “Let’s keep the Sunday tickets,” I said.

  She nodded, apparently neither pleased nor displeased with my decision, perhaps because it really was just mine to make.

  “Then shall we make our way to the Uffizi? I have so much to show you.”

  There is something to be said for the ancient motto “Everything in moderation.” I’d never been exposed to so much artistic genius in such a short two hours’ time as I saw in the Uffizi. I was mentally and spiritually unprepared for it.

  Walking its halls was like walking through a corner of the Creator’s mind.

  Canvas after canvas, statue after statue; there was too much for my eyes to take in, and I was quickly fatigued by beauty. But it was exhilarating to see so many works by Italian greats whose last names everyone knows.

  Nonna loved Botticelli’s Primavera the way I loved the painting of her and Andromeda. The Primavera print she had hanging in her house seemed immense when I was a child. Perhaps it was. She told me the frame and mat cost twenty times more than the print itself. But she hadn’t cared. By the time she was in her midthirties, well before I was born, she was convinced it would be years before she could get back to Florence to see the original again, if at all. The Primavera was like her portal home for years. When she promised me the trip to Florence for my high-school graduation, she was gifting herself as much as me. She hadn’t been back since her twenties.

  “See all the faces?” Nonna said to me once, when I was looking at her Primavera, trying to figure it out. “Every emotion is here. Life is hard, but spring always comes. Sometimes she is late, but she comes.”

  So when Sofia ushered me into the gallery where the Primavera hung, as if it had been waiting for me, I had to swallow a dozen emotions.

  “The Primavera was commissioned as a wedding gift to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, who married in 1482,” Sofia said to me, either unaware of my emotional state or endeavoring to distract me from it. “In the Second World War, it was moved to Montegufoni Castle to protect it from the bombing. It is the most studied of Botticelli’s work. You read it from right to left, like a story. See? Zephyrus, the wind of dying winter, takes Chloris and marries her, transforming her into a goddess. Now she is Spring, and she is tossing roses onto the ground. And she is looking at you. As is the caped woman in the center. And the three Graces? They do not see Cupid pointing his arrow at them. Some say Botticelli painted it as companion to Pallas and the Centaur. They say Mercury on the end there is looking out of his painting and into the scene where Pallas, in the other painting, triumphs with love over lust. See?”

  “And what do you say?” I asked her, as my eyes swept over the canvas.

  “There’s five hundred species of plant life painted there. Nora and I think this painting just wants to be outside.”

  After two hours of unimaginable artistry and Sofia’s colorful commentary, I was ready to take a little break from sightseeing to go visit her father. I was eager to see what he could tell us, and I needed to reenergize my ability to appreciate beauty.

  We bought sandwiches from a food vendor in a little mercato and then walked to a bus stop. Sofia told me she had found little use for a car and hadn’t owned or driven one in more than twenty years.

  It was nine kilometers to the casa di riposo, the care home where Angelo Borelli had been living the last couple of years. Getting there involved two buses and forty minutes of travel and transfer time. Sofia was quiet as we traveled out of the older part of the city and across the river into the newer section. I imagined that seeing her father every Tuesday was something she looked forward to—and dreaded—at least a little. I was okay with the silence between us as we traveled since I had my own inner thoughts to wrestle with.

  When we stepped off the second bus at a little after one thirty in the afternoon, Sofia’s demeanor brightened, as if she had used the last half hour to bolster herself for the visit.

  “It’s just down the street and around the corner,” she said as the bus pulled away. I saw that we were on a fairly quiet street on the outskirts of downtown. Buildings rose up on either side with retail shops on the ground floor and apartments above, none higher than four stories. There were trees on the avenue and patches of flower beds here and there.

  “My father knew he was becoming … He was getting ill,” Sofia said as we headed down Via Torcicoda. “He picked out this place himself. He wanted to pick it. And he wanted to move in before he really needed to. He knew there would come a time when he would forget this is what he wanted.”

  I said I was sorry. I didn’t know what else to say.

  She smiled. “My father has always been such a kind man. Even now, when he has forgotten so much, he has not forgotten that he is a kind man.”

  We turned a corner.

  “It is not a terrible place, but it is not home.” She stopped. “Here we are.”

  We now stood in front of a beige building with wood-trim windows—all of them with closed blinds. The front door was heavy oak, graced on either side by squat urns of red scraggly geraniums. At least they were real.

  Sofia stepped inside, and I followed her onto a tiled entry that smelled faintly of burned toast and pine.

  “He will be in the common room. They always dress him in street clothes and bring him down to the common room when I come. He asked them to do that. Back when he remembered that’s what he wanted.”

  She said something in Italian to a black-haired woman sitting behind a reception desk. The woman said something back and waved to me. I waved back.

  Sofia signed our names to a register, and we proceeded down the hall, past a woman in a wheelchair who said something angrily to me as I passed her, to a set of arched and opened double doors. We went inside. Armchairs and sofas in different shades of rust and russet vinyl were placed about the room. A large television stood in one corner of the room, broadcasting a soccer match watched by three men in bathrobes. Several round tables with half-finished puzzles on their tops were in another corner. A woman in a red housecoat stood at a large picture window, watching birds in a tree that shaded a small courtyard. In another corner, a man wearing khaki slacks and a powder-blue cardigan sat straight-backed in an armchair. One hand rested on each knee.

  I knew without Sofia saying a word that this man was her father.

  We began to walk toward him. He watched us approach with no hint of recognition. Sofia greeted him cheerfully in Italian and bent to kiss him.

  His eyes were wide as she stepped back from him. Surprise was etched in every wrinkle on his face. He blinked several times, and his left hand began to rub his knee as if there were a spill there.

  Sofia knelt to look at him at eye level. I don’t know what she whispered to him, but after a moment, the surprised look was replaced by one of calm. “Sofia …” he whispered.

  She laughed, leaned forward, and kissed him again.

  He said something and she laughed again.

  I felt like an intruder. I backed a few steps away and sat in an armchair identical to his a few feet away.

  Sofia spoke to her father for a few moments before turning toward me and motioning me to come.

  When I reached them, Sofia introduced me. I heard her say my name, and I extended my hand. But her father did not do likewise. Instead, he rattled off something and patted the chair next to him.

  I turned to Sofia. “What did he say?”

  She looked troubled. “He … he’d like you to sit next to him.”

  “Um. Okay.” I took the chair next to Angelo Borelli and crossed my feet at the ankles, assuming as casual a pose as I could, but I felt anything but relaxed.

  Angelo turned to me and said something and laughed lightly. I eked out a complementary laugh and turned to Sofia. “Sofia, I don’t know what he’s saying.”

  She chewed on h
er lower lip before answering. “You remind him of my mother.”

  “I do?”

  She sighed. “He … he thinks—for the moment at least—that you are.”

  “What?”

  “He thinks you’re my mother.” She sighed a little.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Before she could answer, Angelo leaned closer to me. His eyes were watery with age and illness. He said something else and nodded toward Sofia.

  “I don’t know what to do here,” I said to Sofia.

  “I don’t either.” Sofia looked troubled. “Maybe I should come back alone later this week.”

  My first thought was that sounded pretty good to me, but we hadn’t even asked him about the family ancestry. Beatriz and Geoffrey were expecting an update.

  “Do you think you could ask him about the family records?” I asked.

  She hesitated a moment. “I will tell him again who you are, and then I’ll ask him. I’ll tell him you’re helping me write the book.”

  Sofia knelt down and said a long sentence in Italian. Angelo listened, and his expression grew more pensive as she talked.

  He said something to her and she stood up.

  I looked from him to her. “What did he say?”

  “He asked me to go find him a cup of coffee.”

  “That’s all he said?”

  Sofia nodded and then turned to me. “Will you stay with him while I get him one? Maybe if he has what he wants, he will be able to give us what we want.”

  I said I would, but I knew I would be counting the seconds she’d be gone.

  As soon as Sofia was out of the room, Angelo turned to me. He began to speak, in the kindest of voices, sounding so much like Nonna. He patted my arm with one hand and touched his chest with the other. Whatever he was saying, it was something he thought he was sharing with a wife he loved. He asked me a question and waited for my answer. He asked it again, and his eyes were begging for me to say yes.