“You should always hold your tongue! You’re only the housemaid.”
“I’m not the housemaid here, Mamma! Surely I can speak in your house?”
“Hmmph.” Her mother slapped the mound of dough with an angry hand. “You’d better not lose your job, Doria. You would have no place to go.”
Doria stopped, the pestle poised and dripping crushed basil. “No place to go?”
Signora Manfredi reached for the rolling pin, and began to spin it over the dough. “There is no room here, Doria, you know that. The house is overflowing as it is.”
“It has always overflowed!”
“Sì, sì, sì,” her mother said. “It has always overflowed, and I’m tired of it.”
“That’s hardly my fault!” Doria said with asperity. “I’m not the one with six children!”
Emilia tossed her head. “We take what God sends us, Doria.”
Doria sighed, a little ashamed. “Yes, I know. I’m sorry, Mamma.”
“Well, never mind. In any case, you have a good job, in a good house.”
“You don’t need to tell me that. I love it there. I like taking care of Signor Puccini.”
With deliberation, her mother laid down her rolling pin and folded her arms beneath her pendulous bosom. She fixed her black eyes on her daughter. “You are behaving yourself?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Behaving myself!” Doria clicked her tongue, and ground the pestle into the basil leaves once again, turning and turning it in the mortar until a green paste began to form.
“Answer me!” her mother snapped.
Doria let the pestle fall, its handle dropping into the sticky pesto. She turned, and matched her mother’s posture, arms folded, chin thrust out. “You think I’m sleeping with Signor Puccini? Why not just say so?”
Her mother’s eyes hardened. “Watch your tone with me, Doria Manfredi! It’s a good question. Everyone knows about the signore! ”
“You shouldn’t listen to gossip, Mamma. Not about the maestro, and most certainly not about your daughter!”
“It wasn’t about you,” Emilia admitted, dropping her gaze back to the sheet of ravioli dough. “They say there is someone, but no one said it was you.” She took the dough in her hands, but she looked up under her thick eyebrows at her daughter. “I would defend you. I know you’re a good girl.”
“A good girl!” Doria gave the pestle an irritated twist. “I nursed him, Mamma. When he was so injured in the automobile crash, all those months he couldn’t walk, I did everything for him. The signora wouldn’t do it, I can tell you! She wouldn’t touch a bedpan, or wash him, or do any of the hard things. I was the one to sit up with him when the pain kept him awake.”
“Sì, sì, sì. Everyone knows that, mia figlia.”
“She never thanked me, either.”
“She is the signora, Doria. It’s her house. She doesn’t have to thank you.”
Doria sighed, suddenly weary of it all. She wished, after all, she had simply held her tongue. One day, she prayed, she would learn to stay silent. “The maestro is kind to me.”
“That’s as may be,” Emilia snapped, giving the dough on the floured table a sharp turn. “But he has a taste for young girls.” Her eyes glittered a warning. “You must take care. And keep your mouth closed! You always did talk too much.”
“It’s a family tradition!” Doria responded. Emilia only grunted, but her lips twitched with something like humor.
Still, Doria felt impatient with her mother. She stood for a moment, staring at the rack of ancient cast-iron skillets on the wall, then pulled her apron over her head with both hands. It caught on her hairpins, stinging her scalp the way her mother’s words had stung her spirit. She ripped it free, and threw it at the hook beside the kitchen door. She missed, and the apron fell in a heap of printed cotton on the plain wooden floor.
“Where are you going?” her mother asked. “What about the ravioli?”
Doria didn’t turn back. She heard the thump of the rolling pin as it struck the floury board, stretching, thinning the dough. Her mother’s ravioli were the best in Torre, but she couldn’t bear the thought of them now. “Give my share to someone else,” she said. “I’m not hungry after all.” She slid out through the door, letting it bang behind her. Her mother didn’t call her back. She was probably just as happy, Doria thought, to have one fewer mouth at the table.
Doria trod angrily through her mother’s tiny garden, where fennel and parsley drooped in the sun. She stepped down the single stone step directly into the dirt lane. The heat was so thick she felt as if she couldn’t breathe. It was her half day, and she had meant to spend the afternoon with her family, to return to Villa Puccini after the Puccinis had finished supper, when the signora had retired upstairs and the signore retreated to his studio. Now Doria didn’t know where to pass the afternoon. It was too hot to sit in the piazza. She had no money for a café, because she had just handed over all her wages to her mother. Her room behind the kitchen at Villa Puccini would be nearly hot enough to boil Mamma’s ravioli.
As she walked, picking the sweat-dampened fabric of her dress away from her skin, she thought longingly of the cool fragrance of the maestro’s beloved garden. He had ordered it planted with sweet bay and privet, and the heart-shaped leaves of a Judas tree shaded a small wooden bench. Perhaps, if she were very quiet, she could sit there for an hour. She had a book in her pocket, one the maestro had given her. An hour’s solitude, reading in the shade, would soothe her temper and cool her hot skin.
Hopeful, she turned toward the lake, where Villa Puccini rose in modest splendor above the lakeshore. She loved the house, she was sure, even more than the maestro did, and he loved it very well indeed.
She had been a young girl when the renovations of the old watchtower began. Everyone in Torre del Lago had been thrilled to have Italy’s most famous composer come build his house in their village. Step by step, they had torn the old building apart and rebuilt it, painted it, plumbed it, even connected it to the marvels of electricity and the telephone. Doria was thrilled to be the one allowed to care for Puccini’s “golden tower,” as he called it, with its yellow stucco and scrolled iron entryway, its neat shutters and clean, elegant lines. The artist Nomellini came to paint the walls of Puccini’s studio, and everyone in Torre heard about how the dampness that pervaded everything around Lake Massaciuccoli crept into the new villa and ruined his work. He had to return to reconstruct his pictures on tapestries of canvas.
Villa Puccini made Doria’s own home, where six children crowded into two bedrooms, seem little more than a noisome hut perched along a dirt lane.
When she reached the gate of the villa, there was no one about. The house was so quiet she could hear the lap of the water below the road. The signora’s painted shutters above the little balcony were closed against the sun. No sound came from the kitchen, nor did Puccini’s brown-and-white dogs come romping out to meet her as they always did if he was home. No doubt he had taken his big motorboat out to the little island where he went to fish or hunt or just find some peace. The dogs, the rough-coated spinone, loved going out in the boat, hanging over the bow with their long tongues dangling and their ears flattened by the wind.
Doria kicked off her shoes and stripped off her black cotton stockings before she settled herself on the bench. It was blissfully cool in the shade, and she wriggled her toes in the patchy grass as she pulled the book from her pocket. She turned the pages carefully, silently, and read.
It was called Il Fuoco—The Flame. She didn’t truly like it. It was the sort of thing Puccini read. He liked this writer because he also wrote plays, and the maestro was forever seeking out plays he could turn into operas. This one, though, would never work. Even Doria, with her paltry education, could see that. There was a great deal of sex in it, which made her squirm. Despite her mother’s dour warnings, Doria knew nothing of sex beyond what she had read in novels. Still, she me
ant to read Il Fuoco all the way through so she could talk about it with Puccini, if he should ask.
She was lucky to be able to read, to have learned so easily from Father Michelucci. Most of the girls in Torre, and the boys, too, for that matter, could barely write their names. Despite this bright new century and nearly new country, many Italians had no schooling at all.
For a happy hour she relaxed beneath the Judas tree. In this relentless heat, she doubted anyone beside Puccini would be out of doors. If he wasn’t in his boat, he might have tramped up into the hills in search of a breeze. He often did that, his gun slung over his arm and the dogs panting happily at his heels. She hoped he had remembered his hat.
She sighed beneath a gentle wave of drowsiness. Bees buzzed in the roses twining through the wrought-iron fence, and an occasional lazy bird twitter punctuated the sweet silence of the afternoon. Doria’s eyes drooped, and the book sagged in her hands. She gave in to the moment, and lay back on the bench, her knees up, her skirts arranged so they covered her modestly but allowed a bit of air to caress her hot calves. With a feeling of pure self-indulgence, she drowsed through the warm afternoon as if she were a lady of privilege.
She woke to the damp scrape of a pink tongue against her cheek and a blast of hot dog breath. With a start, she sat up, crying, “Buoso, stop!” Her protests did nothing to prevent the dog from slathering her with affection. She tried to push him away at the same time that she struggled to pull her skirts down to her ankles. Bica, the bitch, galloped up the path behind Buoso, and the two dogs quarreled, forcing their heads into Doria’s lap as she groped beneath the bench for her shoes and stockings. She dropped one shoe, and Bica grabbed it in her teeth and shook it fiercely, as she might an unlucky mole that crawled into her path.
“Buoso, Bica, down!” Puccini called as he paused to latch the gate.
Doria leaped to her feet, laughing. She had stockings in one hand, a shoe in the other. The hounds had knocked her book to the ground, and she bent hastily to pick it up and brush bits of grass and dirt from its cover. Clutching her possessions in front of her, she tried to regain her dignity by bobbing a swift curtsy.
“That’s a good way to stay cool,” the maestro said, nodding toward her bare feet.
Doria tried to twitch her skirt so it would cover her toes, but her dress was too short for that. Her feet embarrassed her. They were like bird feet, with long, narrow toes and high arches. Worse, they were dirty now, smudged with dust and grass stains. She sidled away, hoping to escape to her room to set herself to rights.
“You’re reading Il Fuoco!” the maestro said cheerfully. He was wearing his broad-brimmed hat, but he was in shirtsleeves, and he had dropped his braces so he could wear his shirt loose outside his trousers. Now he took off the hat, and slapped dust from it against his knee. He had a bag with a couple of fat birds in it, and he looked happy, dark hair falling across his sunburned brow, a rime of dust on his thick mustache. Why, she wondered, had such a man married Elvira? The signora was old and sour in comparison with her husband’s boyish charm. Even at the great age of fifty, Giacomo Puccini was a handsome man.
Doria took another sidelong step toward the kitchen door. “I’m halfway through,” she said. “I mean—” She held it up. “I mean the book.”
He said, “I didn’t like it all that much. His plays are better.”
Doria said, “I think they must be, signore. This book, it’s all about sex and not about—” She closed her mouth abruptly, and ducked her head. Her mother was right. She should learn to keep silent about things she knew nothing about.
He said, “You’re quite right, Doria! Sex isn’t the least bit interesting unless the characters are interesting.”
In fact, it was just what she had been thinking, and his agreement gave her a little glow of pleasure. She took another step, her head down, watching the impression her bare feet made in the grass, little claw marks like those of a hen scratching for ants. The dogs pressed close to her, nuzzling her legs, asking for tidbits. She slipped them treats from time to time, when Elvira wasn’t looking, and she saw by Puccini’s grin that he knew that. He couldn’t know, of course, how she nestled with them sometimes on the grass. They were her only source of physical affection, and she adored both of them, despite their antics.
She patted the dogs, and muttered, “Go on with you, now. I don’t have anything!”
Puccini fell into step beside her, and at that moment, with a talent for timing only Elvira Puccini seemed to possess, the shutters of the second-floor bedroom window flew open, clacking against the outside of the house, and the lady’s head appeared.
“Doria!” she shouted. “You haven’t touched the ironing!”
Doria lifted her head. “Signora.” Sudden anxiety made her voice rise, and it sounded plaintive. “Signora Puccini, it’s my half day.”
“Your half day?” Elvira exclaimed. “And you spend it gallivanting in the garden?”
Puccini said, “Elvira, let her be. She can spend her half day as she likes.”
Doria drew a small, dismayed breath. Surely he must know by now that any argument could set off one of Elvira’s tantrums. Even at this distance she could see the signora’s face darken, her eyes contracting like those of an ill-tempered crow. Doria tried to hurry around the side of the house, toward the kitchen door, but it turned out that, too, was a mistake.
“Where are your shoes? Your stockings?”
Elvira sounded like a crow, too. She screeched and cawed and quarreled, and once she got started, nothing would stop her. Doria stopped where she was, and held up her single shoe and the wad of her stockings. “Here they are, signora.”
Puccini laughed, and Doria thought he was trying to lighten his wife’s mood. “Look, Elvira, Bica has the other shoe! I think she’s trying to kill it.”
Elvira said, “I won’t have anyone in my house running around barefoot like a common village slut!”
“I—I was just reading in the garden—”
“What are you doing with my husband?”
Doria turned to the maestro, hoping he would explain, but Puccini had evidently comprehended what was about to happen after all. He slipped quietly in through the iron-and-glass bow window that connected the garden to the house, and disappeared. Even the two dogs abandoned her, trotting after their master. Doria felt a flush of resentment burn in her cheeks. She stared at her long toes, afraid to show her angry face. “Nothing, signora,” she said. “I wasn’t doing anything. I was asleep on the bench when the signore came home.”
“Hah!” Elvira said, and slammed the window shut with a bang.
“Hah!”
Tory jerked awake. It was still dark, and cold. Only the faint ghost light of the sea found its way through her open bedroom door to shimmer on the mirror above the bureau and sparkle faintly on the gold butterfly in the paperweight. She lay a moment, rubbing her eyes, trying to orient herself. She put her hand to her chest, and found her skin hot, her nightgown damp with perspiration.
There had been new people in this dream: a mother, and a man who seemed vaguely familiar. Thinking of him made her uneasy for some reason she couldn’t identify. It seemed if she could just concentrate long enough, remember what she had dreamed, she might know who he was, or at least who he represented in her psyche.
But then, the dream would evaporate soon enough, as dreams did. Sometimes her clients had felt their dreams were significant, that they held clues to their waking lives. Tory, though she listened and encouraged the lines of thought they created, had never been convinced. For her, a cigar was always just a cigar. Or so she had thought.
She threw back her blankets and put her feet on the cold floor. So different from the warm, patchy grass in the world of her dream. She was cold here, even in the daytime. Perhaps her dreams were just her suppressed longing for a warm, sunny climate.
She had found a long zippered sweatshirt on the remainder table at a little shop on the main street of the town, and decided it would work
as a bathrobe. She pulled it on, and zipped it, letting the hood hang down her back. She put on a pair of thick socks, and padded out to the kitchen to fill the teakettle. The stove clock read four A.M. Too early to go for a walk, too early to eat breakfast. Too late to try to go back to sleep.
She turned on the radio—early music, Hildegard of Bingen, she thought—and carried her teacup into the living room. It was becoming a habit, she feared, waking on East Coast time and sitting in the armchair watching the tide creep up the beach. Solitude was becoming a habit, too. She tried to think when she had last spoken with anyone other than the clerk at the market, which was hardly conversation, or the station attendant who pumped gas for the Beetle.
It was time, she told herself, to do something different. Idleness didn’t suit her. She needed to go out, to find something to do. She would have suggested that to a client who found herself spending too much time alone.
She carried the bedspread out to the living room and settled into the armchair, the blanket pulled up to her shoulders, to watch the light grow over the beach and the ocean. The big black rock—Haystack Rock, they called it—emerged gradually from the gloom as the darkness of the sky lightened to gray, then to a dusky blue, with streaks of pink and lavender on the horizon. The rock hulked above the shallow waves, a sentinel guarding the coastline.
Watching dawn break over the water, so far from her home, made Tory long for her son. She wondered if he was all right, if he was back at school, if he was sad, or frightened, or . . . She thrust the thoughts away. In her dreams of that hot place she felt things—sadness, anger, even joy. Maybe that was the point of having the dreams. In real life, at least in her real life, feelings were pointless. She had done what she had to do. She closed her eyes, and let the cold sea air chill her mind and her heart, banish the treacherous stirrings of longing.
Her life had been ruled by taking care of Jack. She had ended her marriage to protect him, moved him away to a tiny place where no one knew them or knew their story. Nothing else mattered, even when he barely spoke to her, when she knew he longed to be part of some other family. This separation should be easier, surely, because their relationship was already fractured.
The Glass Butterfly Page 6
