The Girl in the Glass

by Susan Meissner

  A few minutes later, we stepped out into the rain. As we walked across the Ponte Vecchio, I lingered at the windows of the goldsmiths’ shops. Sofia let me look but told me not to buy there. The jewelry on the bridge is priced for the tourist, she said. And that’s not what I was. She told me she would take me to a few of her favorite stores later to get some things to take home with me.

  By the time we were in sight of the massive Pitti Palace, the rain had stopped, and a weak sun was pushing its way through a bank of clouds. I was glad for the patchy sun to brighten my spirits. Lorenzo’s change of plans had irked me a little.

  Sofia guided me into the expansive garden from the palace courtyard, past a stone amphitheater behind the palace, and up the hill to a fountain of Neptune. I was anxious to see my statue and she knew it. The garden was beautiful and big and hilly, and had it been any other garden, I would have wanted to take my time strolling about its lawns and landscaping. But my goal was the fountain where Andromeda waited for me. We walked down a sweeping hill, past groves and gardens on either side, down the Viottolone—a grand avenue of cypresses—that would lead us to the Isolotto Basin at the bottom of the decline, and my Andromeda.

  “Some of these trees are more than three hundred years old,” Sofia said as we walked.

  I mumbled a comment about that being pretty darn ancient for a tree.

  Her next question came out of nowhere.

  “Are you in love with Lorenzo?”

  I turned to her. “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I’m serious.”

  “What makes you ask?” I half laughed.

  “I saw the way you looked at him this morning. And the way your face changed when he told you he couldn’t have dinner with us tomorrow. I saw that too. I’m not saying it’s bad if you are.”

  “I am not in love with Lorenzo.”

  “Okay,” Sofia said.

  A couple of seconds of silence passed as we walked under the trees.

  “That’s it?” I asked. “Just, ‘Okay’?” Again I laughed, halfheartedly.

  “You said you are not,” she said. “I will believe you.”

  “I am not in love with Lorenzo.”

  “But there is something, yes? Something there. You’re not sure what it is.”

  I was ready to disagree with her, but I felt a tingling sensation up and down my spine convincing me she was partially right.

  “Maybe. Sort of. I don’t know.”

  And she simply nodded, silently inviting me to continue.

  “I’m a little mixed up right now. There’s a man who’s incredibly kind to me, and we get along well. And I like him. Then there’s my mother’s new boyfriend who is this perfect guy, and I so want to meet a guy like that. At least I think I do. I … I don’t know.”

  “Sometimes it’s not about what we know. It’s about what we are willing to trust.” She was looking at the trees and sky above us when she said this, as if searching for a peephole into heaven from which Nora might be looking down on her as Sofia gave me counsel.

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Which one of them would make you the most sad if you had to live your life without him?”

  I had no answer to such a question. “I have no idea.”

  She pulled her gaze away from the treetops. “Deep down, you probably do. But you are afraid to trust your choice. It’s risky. That’s why it’s about what you are willing to trust.”

  I thought about what she had told me about the man she loved, who left her. I chanced the question that rose to my lips.

  “Don’t you have regrets about who you decided to trust?”

  Sofia took a moment before answering. “I don’t regret loving Thomas. Those were the happiest years of my life.”

  I couldn’t help but ask the obvious. “But then he left and handed you the worst years of your life, right?”

  She shuddered. “Yes. They were terrible years.” For a moment Sofia seemed to disappear into a dark corner of her mind. A thin, veil-like shadow fell across her face and a flicker of fear sputtered inside me. I had asked too much.

  But then the veil seemed to lift. She inhaled and closed her eyes, recentering her thoughts, it seemed, on what she had learned to lean on.

  “But the terrible years didn’t make the wonderful years disappear,” she said. “I still have them.” She looked at me and smiled. “They will always be mine. And the wonderful years are worth having.”

  I smiled back at her. “How long did it take for you to figure that out?”

  She laughed lightly. “I actually didn’t have to figure it out. Nora had been whispering it to me all along. I had just stopped listening.”

  I suddenly hungered to know where Nora had imparted such lofty wisdom, nearly paternal in its beauty. Which statue, which painting, had whispered this to her?

  “Where did she tell you this?”

  “Everywhere.”

  Sofia stopped then and grasped my arm. “It was worth it, Meg. It was worth the risk.”

  Sofia said nothing else and we kept walking. I was glad to again be alone with my thoughts. And the reality that Sofia seemed to think lay before me.

  Devon, a man I hardly knew, had already chosen my mother over me. How could I even think of him as part of my dilemma? He surely had to be a representation to me of some kind of security that was missing from my life. Gabe, my office confidant, was a kindred soul at the sweetest friendship level; I liked him. But affection for him felt almost obligatory, as if I must feel a romantic attraction toward him because he was single and I was single and we got along so well. Lorenzo. Lorenzo pulled at some deep part of me that even Miles hadn’t been able to rouse. The way I felt when I was near him was new and striking and powerful. But Lorenzo couldn’t possibly feel the same way about me. He was a product of his intensely romantic culture, one that captivated me and led my foolish heart to believe something that was not meant just for me. Loving him would crush me. In almost the same way as loving my father had left me broken.

  But Sofia hadn’t asked me which one I felt most attracted to. She asked which one of them, if he were completely absent from my life, would leave me the most devastated.

  I pushed the question away. I didn’t want to think about it anymore. It was too complicated. Or too simple. Either way, I wasn’t ready to ponder what Sofia said I’d already subconsciously decided.

  We were at the end of the cypress lane, and before us was the oval basin and Giambologna’s Oceanus fountain. Even before I could clearly make out the other figures in the water, I could see Andromeda’s outstretched arms and Perseus, her rescuer rising from the sea on Pegasus, determined to set her free.

  There were a number of people sitting on benches arranged all around the oval, looking at maps, taking pictures, and posing with the statuary in the background. I wanted to shoo them all away. It took effort not to. I wanted to be alone with the statue that was all mine.

  “Well?” Sofia asked softly. “Is she the one?”

  “Yes.”

  We neared the fountain’s edge, and I positioned myself to gaze at Andromeda, many feet away from me, from the vantage point where my great-great-grandfather would have painted her.

  Sofia took a few steps back from me, gifting me with the chance to experience finding the statue on more intimate terms.

  Andromeda seemed too far away, sitting there in the water, in her weathered-marbled pose. The expression on her face was unfamiliar to me and too hard to distinguish. Water weeds had sprouted up on the rocks she was chained to, and two ducks perched at her feet like irreverent bystanders. One of them pecked at a feather on its back. Bird droppings had slid down her face, and her knees were yellow-green with furred patches of moss. The outstretched hand that was lifted toward heaven was missing two fingers. More bird droppings littered the other hand that she held across her breast in hopeful anticipation of rescue.

  A wave of disappointment crept over me.

  My great-great-grandfather
had painted her far differently. He had endowed his Andromeda with such elegance and beauty that it was easy to believe Perseus would battle a monster no one else had been able to kill—just to rescue her. And my great-great-grandfather’s perspective had placed the statue not yards away in a watered prison, but close to the form of my young grandmother who held her own hand toward Andromeda’s in a mirrored pose.

  He had reimagined Andromeda as beautiful and still hopeful. I turned toward Sofia.

  “She’s not how I pictured her.” Disappointment tugged heavily at my words. “She looks so beaten down.”

  Sofia nodded sympathetically. “The elements are hard on outdoor statuary. There are other statues of Andromeda. And paintings too. I can show you those.”

  “But this is the one that mattered to me.” I raised my camera, but then lowered it. I suddenly didn’t want a picture of the way the statue really looked. I did not want to remember her this way, my beloved, beckoning Andromeda. As if in sympathy for me, the sun edged behind a lingering cloud. I turned away from the statue. “I like the one I see in my memory so much better.”

  “Then that’s the one you hang on to, Marguerite. That’s the one you keep.”

  We turned around and began to walk out of the cypress alley back toward the palace. Sofia shared with me the storied details of the Pitti Palace and the Medicis who had lived there, a kind distraction from the disappointment still swirling inside me.

  Clouds were again gathering overhead, and a breeze began to pick up. We were still a few minutes’ walk from the palace’s front doors.

  We quickened our steps.

  Finally the palace was in front of us, but it looked plain and homely to me, void of outside decoration, just cube after cube of enormous wheat-colored stone, three stories high.

  As we prepared to go in, Sofia told me there was much to see inside, especially in the more than twenty-eight rooms in the Palatine Gallery. But she told me there was a painting she wanted to show me first that hung in the corner between one salon and another.

  The opulence inside was staggering, and I kept my eyes trained ahead as we made our way to the left wing of the first floor. We were headed for the farthest corner, bypassing salon after salon of canvas-filled rooms.

  We arrived at an alcove of sorts where several statues dominated the visual landscape. At the corner where two walls came together, three paintings hung in a seemingly forgotten place.

  The one in the middle, not much bigger than the spread of my outstretched arms, drew me in. I knew in an instant the young girl who stared back at me from within the paint strokes was Nora Orsini.

  The girl looked to be twelve or thirteen. Her brown hair was pulled away from her face, revealing deep brown eyes that bore into mine. Her caramel-hued dress was cut tight across her bodice, sucking her into it, it seemed. A pearl necklace circled her neck. Her closed mouth was slightly upturned in the makings of a subtle smile. She held two paintbrushes in her hand.

  “Nora painted?”

  Sofia smiled. “She did. This was her self-portrait. It’s not signed. No one else attributes it to her. But I know she painted it. She whispers that she did. It’s the only painting of hers there is.”

  “Why is it here in the corner like this?”

  “Everyone thinks it was painted by a nameless art student in the late fifteen hundreds. It is still a valuable painting based on its age, but the curators here don’t know who painted it. How could they know? She didn’t sign it.”

  Up to that moment, every work of art I had seen in Florence had been created by a man. I uttered something of this notion as I stood there staring at Nora’s image.

  “All the great Renaissance painters were men,” Sofia said, “but that does not mean that Renaissance women could not paint or didn’t have the aptitude for it. Some had it, but they were not encouraged to pursue it as anything but parlor entertainments. They appreciated beauty in the arts just as much as the men did. They knew the arts’ ability to redeem, just like the men did. They probably needed that loveliness more than the men did.”

  Sofia took a step toward the painting so that her body touched the velvet rope that kept spectators at a safe distance. She was as close to the painting as she could legally get.

  “If you can imagine your life is peaceful and good, that your father and mother care for each other, and you are as sure of their affection for each other as their unchanging love for you, then you can paint yourself like this. You can paint what you believe. If you can imagine it, you can paint it.”

  I started to ask her what she meant, but before I could, she continued.

  “And if you could escape to that painted place in your dreams, the time when life had been wonderful, because the truth is, your father murdered your mother and did not care if he ever saw you again, then of course you would.”

  “I guess you would.”

  “The first time I saw this painting, I was unable to walk away from it; it pulled me so. I asked my papa why. He said he wanted me to discover for myself why Nora Orsini’s portrait tugged at me. Papa told me to close my eyes and listen; just like I had you close yours in the chapel. To shut everything else out and listen, inviting her, by my silence, to speak. You see, Marguerite? She painted herself happy. She created a place in her mind where she could have her wonderful years. No one could take them from her.”

  At that moment I had a sudden influx of memories of my parents and me when we were still whole; those magical years before the divorce, before my perception of family had been swept away from me. Before the miscarriage, before my dad met Allison, there had been wonderful years. I was a child; I saw the wonderful, more than the terrible. A child’s vision is geared to see the wonderful.

  My father had confessed to me on Poppy-Seed Day that he felt like he had failed me as a father in my growing-up years, but the truth was, I never felt he had. Even after the divorce, I wanted him to be my Perseus. What I needed now was a new kind of rescuer. I wasn’t a little girl anymore. Little girls in distress are rescued by their fathers. Grown girls in distress want to be rescued by someone else.

  I wanted a prince to show up, not my dad.

  I pulled out my camera, made sure the flash was off, and took a picture of the canvas in front of us. This would be the picture I took home from today. Not a shot of a decaying statue.

  Nora Orsini wanted to imagine that a different life could be hers.

  So she did.

  She looked at herself in a mirror and painted the girl she wanted to see.

  I remember lying in my bed in the suffocating heat and calling for my mother. Nurse told me she couldn’t come; she was in heaven with the angels. I told Nurse to go fetch her for me.

  And Nurse said heaven is not a place with a door.

  “I want her,” I said.

  “She is with the angels,” said Nurse.

  For a while I hated every angel in every painting and statue and tapestry, for they had my mother and were keeping her from me. I wouldn’t look at them, and I said terrible things under my breath when I passed them.

  And then I began to fear them. Would they hurt my mother because I hated them? I wasn’t sure. After a while my hatred was exhausting; it sapped me of breath and strength and sleep.

  In my weariness I began to be drawn to the angels for solace. They had my mother. If I could be close to them, I could be close to her.

  And then I began to cherish them. I wandered the halls and gazed up at them in their paintings and in stone, in reverent devotion like a lovesick maiden.

  And then I began to listen to them.

  26

  Sofia was up before me the next morning, tapping away at her laptop. Later we would see the Medici Chapels and the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, but we had planned a quiet morning working on Sofia’s book before stepping out. I had her other finished chapters to read and send to Beatriz, and she wanted to spend the morning hours writing.

  I knew at some point that day, Renata would be talking t
o Emilio. Emilio had not called Sofia to find out what the heck was going on; she would have said something if he had. As I sat reading her chapter on Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici—finally a Medici with merit—I decided to pave the way for a later conversation about Emilio. I was pretty sure there would be one. She was going to have to know at some point that we had contacted him, especially if he was the one to help us authenticate Sofia’s ancestry.

  When she got up from her laptop to refill her coffee cup, I asked her as casually as I could if she had any other family on her father’s side besides Emilio. Cousins, perhaps?

  “No. Emilio never married.” She set the carafe back in the coffee maker.

  I hurriedly dashed out another question. “Does Emilio ever come to Florence?”

  She nodded slowly. “Sometimes. He prefers Rome.”

  “But I suppose with the building to co-manage, he has to come sometimes.”

  A tiny frown crossed her face. She was trying to figure out where I was going with this conversation. “I already told you he won’t help me with this.” She nodded toward the pages I was reading.

  “What if we just ask him?” I kept my tone light and casual.

  She shook her head. “I know you mean well, Meg. But I do not trust Emilio. My father does not trust him. I know they are brothers and he should not feel that way. But he does. Emilio only cares about money. He would love to sell this building right out from under my father and me. Nothing matters to him but getting what he wants. I do not trust him.”

  Cold apprehension poked at me. I didn’t know what to say next, and since I said nothing, Sofia walked back to her laptop and sat down.

  I waited a few minutes and then announced I was going to take a little walk to stretch my legs and that I wouldn’t be long.

  I sauntered out of the flat and then dashed across the landing to Renata and Lorenzo’s door. I had to tell her we needed to nix the call with Emilio for now. I would find some other way to get what we needed.

  But there was no answer at the door. I didn’t have Renata’s cell phone number, but I knew I had Lorenzo’s. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and texted him to tell Renata to text me as soon as possible. It was urgent.