The Glass Butterfly

by Louise Marley

  It didn’t work that way, evidently. Even after all this time, the rift between Jack and herself made her heart ache. The pain was layered, like the water swirling in the gray morning light, ephemeral on its surface, but deep and dark and irresistible at its deepest point.

  Be safe, Jack. Kate and Chet would watch over him, surely. They were natural parents, wonderful grandparents, much better at the whole thing than she’d ever been. She’d had no role models, of course—except for Nonna Angela—but that wasn’t much of an excuse.

  She let her head fall back, her tea cooling on the table beside her, and she slept again.

  Doria bent over the ironing board in the kitchen, sweat running down her face and her chest as she labored over one of the maestro’s high-collared shirts. She was still barefoot, despite the signora’s complaints. It was far too hot to wear stockings and shoes. The big black stove, though she kept the fire as low as she could, made the kitchen all but unbearable, but there was no other way to heat the soapstone irons. She swept the iron back and forth over the heavy white linen, and listened to Elvira’s voice rise and fall in its unmusical way, upbraiding her husband for his imagined offenses.

  The iron had grown too cool, and she put it back on the stove to heat while she took up the other one. She was so hot she feared her perspiration would turn the shirt limp before she could finish it. Indeed, the air was so humid she doubted the shirt would keep its shape until she could stow it in Puccini’s wardrobe. She knew what that meant. Elvira would bring it back to her in the morning, demanding she do it all over again.

  She had seen an advertisement in Il Secolo Illustrato for an electric iron, which sounded wonderful, but Elvira would never consent to buying one for Villa Puccini. She was too old-fashioned, and too tight with her lire. The only reason the villa had electricity at all was because the signore insisted on the newest and best of everything—his house, his cars, his boats—even a telephone! Zita refused to touch it, but Doria yearned to be the one to answer its strident call, to pick up the little black cone of the receiver and speak into the scrolled mouthpiece. She knew just what she would say, if she ever had the chance. She would speak very clearly, in her most courteous voice: “Pronto! This is Villa Puccini, and Doria Manfredi is speaking to you.”

  She was not allowed to answer the telephone, though. The signora had decreed that only she or the signore should answer the telephone, and when it was she, she croaked into it like the big black crow she was. “Villa Puccini!” she would shout, as if her voice had to reach over the distance without any assistance. “Who is that?” It was disgraceful. Doria knew she could do it much better.

  She sighed at her own spinning thoughts as she bent over the ironing board. The heat made her heart pound, but there was a mountain of laundry in the big wicker basket, and she feared the worst if she didn’t get it done. She swore to herself, pressing the flat-felled seams until they hissed, that her next half day she would stay away from the house, even if it meant hiding in the woods!

  The dogs lay flat on the flagstone floor near the pantry, their tongues lolling. Elvira wouldn’t like that, either, but Doria wasn’t responsible for what the dogs did. For that, the crow could caw at her husband.

  She was taking a short break, sponging her forehead with cold water at the sink, when she heard someone coming. She hurried back to the ironing board, where she seized up one of the irons to show she was working. The kitchen door opened. To Doria’s relief it was Puccini, carrying one of his big guns, broken in half for safety, with the muzzle pointing downward. He set the gun beside the door and crossed to the sink. He turned the brass tap, and let the water run until it was cold, something Doria never did. “Too damned hot in here,” he said as he filled a glass. “You should iron after dark, when it’s cooler.”

  She shrugged. “The signora—” she began.

  “I know, I know.” He put his head back and drank, emptying the whole glass, it seemed, in one gulp. He put the glass down, and reached into his pocket for a cigarette. “You think she’s mean-tempered,” he said.

  Doria kept her eyes on the shirt, turning it so she could iron the yoke.

  “It’s all right. I understand. Everyone thinks that,” he said. “Her life hasn’t been easy.” The smile had gone out of his voice, and it throbbed slightly, musically. With sympathy for Elvira? Doria didn’t know. He added, with what she thought was an admirable show of loyalty, “Her first husband was a grim man. She had to leave her son with him when she—when we moved to Milano.”

  Doria lifted the shirt, and smoothed the sleeve out along the board. Everyone in Torre knew of the scandal. Elvira had abandoned her first husband and her son to run off to Milan with Giacomo Puccini. No one in society would speak to her for a very long time, and she was cut in the street by everyone she knew. They were poor, also, when they first came to Torre del Lago, and it had been years—not until after the success of La Bohème and Tosca—before they were able to build Villa Puccini.

  And then, of course, there was the affair with Corinna.

  Doria didn’t like to think of it. It bothered her to imagine Puccini in bed with some other woman. Of course she heard Elvira and him together sometimes. She couldn’t help that. Her room was just under theirs, and though she covered her head with her pillow, the thumping of the bed and the squeaking of the springs were unmistakable. But they were a married couple. It was proper for them to enjoy each other, even though they were terribly old. It was the idea that the signore would make such thumps and squeaks with someone else that made Doria feel uneasy.

  Of course the signora had behaved shamefully to Corinna, and in the most public place. The enormous umbrella she had used to strike her rival, in full view of everyone on the street, still rested in the stand beside the back door.

  Doria turned the shirtsleeve to iron the other side. A drop of perspiration slid from her cheek and fell on the linen, and she dabbed at it quickly with the hem of her apron.

  Puccini expelled a wreath of smoke that rose slowly through the hot air. “Doria, you know, sometimes . . .”

  She looked up at him from beneath her eyelashes. He was staring out the window at his garden browning in the relentless sun. “Signore?”

  He took another drag on his cigarette. When he breathed it out, the kitchen filled with the toasty scent of tobacco. Doria inhaled, savoring the taste, liking it because it had been in his lungs, had been exhaled through his lips.

  “Sometimes we make bad decisions, but we have to live with them. You’re young. You don’t know that yet.”

  “I’m nearly twenty-one,” she said.

  At that he turned to look at her. “So young!” he repeated. “Half my age—less, even.” His eyes were liquid and shadowed, like the depths of the lake where the sun seemed never to reach. She liked looking into them, and she was sure his thoughts were deeper than hers, more complex, more knowing. “You should be out in the village, Doria, spending your time with young people, not here with old folks like us.”

  “I don’t want to be out in the village, signore. I like it here.”

  He twinkled at her. “No young man, my little nurse?”

  She tossed her head. “The village boys are boring,” she said crisply. “They talk of nothing but how well they shoot, how much they can drink—how many girls they go to bed with!”

  He laughed aloud. “You always say what you think, don’t you, Doria?”

  She dropped her eyes. “Oh, no, signore. A girl like me doesn’t dare say what she thinks.” She could have said that what she wanted was not to go into the village, but to go to school, to study in Milan, the way the maestro had. She would never speak such a desire aloud. The whole idea was laughable.

  He gazed at her, still smiling. “Sometimes, my little nurse,” he mused, “I wish I were young again. Just like you are! If I had known what I know now, I might do things differently.”

  “But, signore, you—you are—” She couldn’t think of the words. Surely he, who had everything,
who had achieved so much, should not entertain regrets. She looked down at the shirtsleeve, and ironed the same spot again.

  “I,” he said, “am old and tired.”

  It was ridiculous, but how could she say so? It was precisely as Mamma had said. She was only a housemaid. She had no authority to scold the great Puccini, to point out how wrong he was. She could only wash his clothes, run his errands, clean his studio. Admire his music from a reverent distance.

  He ground out his cigarette in one of the ubiquitous ashtrays, nodded to her, and picked up the shotgun. The two dogs, grunting, lifted themselves from the floor, and followed him out of the kitchen. There was a bit of banging and bustling as he racked the gun. A moment later the piano sounded through the hushed, overheated house.

  Doria paused, the iron in her hand. He had gone back again. Back to Butterfly. It must be comforting to him, that great aria, the one everyone had been singing before the opera even opened. Un bel dì vedremo . . .

  She pictured the devoted Cio-Cio-San, little Butterfly, kneeling at the doorway of her house, looking down on the bay with Sorrow beside her. “One fine day we will see the smoke on the far horizon . . . the white ship sails into the port . . .” Butterfly, not knowing yet that she had been betrayed, sang her beautiful song of waiting for her beloved, pouring out her longing for him to return to her.

  Doria took the shirt from the ironing board and folded it neatly. Butterfly had dared to dream of something beyond her station, a happiness not granted her by birth. Doria understood perfectly. She and Butterfly were both village girls, born to do as they were told and accept what came their way.

  Doria couldn’t go to school, but she could at least hold on to what she had. She could stay here, in Villa Puccini, where she had a room to herself, enough to eat every day, an ordered house. She could listen to the music coming from the studio every night, and serve the genius who created it. It was a small ambition, surely, a modest wish! Hardly the stuff of grand opera.

  She pulled another shirt, stiff with starch, from the basket, and shook it out on the ironing board. She took up an iron, spat on it to test the heat, and began again, keeping her ears pricked to any sound of fresh trouble from abovestairs.

  Tory woke with perspiration beading her forehead and her neck. A drop had rolled over her cheek to fall on the hood of the sweatshirt, and that had woken her. The sun slanted directly onto her face, and her legs beneath the chenille were hot and itchy.

  She couldn’t remember ever having resumed a dream after being interrupted, but then she couldn’t remember ever dreaming repeatedly about the same people, the same place. The whole thing was so strange, as was the feeling of anxiety that stayed with her even as she got up to return the comforter to the bed and pour out the cold tea. She put the kettle on the stove again, and moved briskly about the cramped kitchen, taking eggs from the fridge, putting bread in the toaster, staying busy until the unwelcome feeling passed.

  As she settled her breakfast on the cracked Formica of the table, it occurred to her that now she understood what her depressed clients had tried to explain, what it felt like to have no feelings of your own. It was what her own mother must have felt, this flatness. This disconnection. It was too bad that she understood it more deeply now, when it was too late to help anyone else. She hoped some other therapist had taken her practice, contacted her clients, claimed her files.

  All except one, of course. That one lay where she had stowed it, hidden in the bottom drawer of the rickety bureau in the bedroom. She hadn’t looked at it. She hadn’t wanted to think about it, but she remembered the look on Ellice’s face, the weight of that cruel black gun, the horror of an innocent man’s death....

  And she had done nothing. Nothing but run away.

  She spread jelly on her toast and took a bite, but her appetite faded at the taste of the food in her mouth. She abandoned the eggs, left the toast uneaten, and went into the bedroom.

  She opened the drawer, and stared down at the file folder. Her conscience flailed beneath the ice that encased her. Someone else could suffer. Some other therapist might be at risk. She had to do something, to take some action—but what?

  There was Jack, and Jack came before anything. Whether he knew it or not.

  She shoved the drawer shut with her foot, and stood for a moment, thinking, then hurried to pull on jeans and a sweater. She took the hammer and screwdriver from the kitchen drawer, and carried them out into the little yard. She knelt beside the gate in the picket fence, and began to pull nails from the broken slats.

  7

  Ho tante cose che ti voglio dire,

  o una sola, ma grande come il mare.

  I’ve so many things I want to say to you,

  or one only, but big as the sea.

  —Mimì, La Bohème, Act Two

  Jack squatted before Tory’s personal filing cabinet and pulled open the top drawer. He had put off this chore for too long. It was past time to face what was in it, deal with the mortgage and the bank and the insurance company, get it all to the lawyer’s office. The lawyer said she would inform everyone, make arrangements for payments and cancellations. Kate had offered to help. He had told her he could manage, but now his heart quailed at the orderly row of folders with their official-looking names. It was all meticulously organized, of course. That was Tory. Everything about her was disciplined: her appearance, her house, her practice—just not her son.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, his elbows on his knees, his forehead on his closed fists. “Jeez, Mom,” he muttered. “I feel like such a shit.”

  He had been thirteen when he’d started spending all his time with his friend Colton’s family, the Garveys. There was hardly anything left of his own family. His crazy grandmother had finally died, and his grandfather, too. His great-grandmother, the Italian one from some little village in Tuscany, had been gone long before he was born. If he had ever met his father’s parents, he couldn’t remember them. He thought he remembered his father, but he had been just a toddler, and he knew it was possible he had created that memory.

  The Garvey family seemed perfect to him. They had three kids, a dog, a rambling, messy house, and two parents. There were pictures of relatives stuck here and there, grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. Colton’s dad liked to throw a football and watch sitcoms. Colton’s mother worked in her garden all the time and never, to Jack’s knowledge, vacuumed her house or folded laundry. They didn’t listen to music, they didn’t go to church, and they didn’t have regular meals or bedtimes or—it seemed to Jack—any rules at all.

  Jack had really liked that dog. He remembered a time when his mother had come to pick him up, and the dog had rushed up to her in a flurry of muddy paws and unwashed, shaggy coat. She had drawn back from it, pulled her coat hem away from it as if it might have fleas.

  In fact, she always seemed edgy when she came to that house where he had so much fun, where there was a father and boys to roughhouse with, where no one asked him to pick up after himself, where they ate pizza from the freezer and chili from cans. He had said something snotty to his mom in the car on the way home that day. Tory had glanced at him, and her eyes reddened, but she didn’t say a word. When they got home, she asked him to put everything he was wearing into the washer.

  Colton’s family fell apart when Jack and he were both sixteen. The Garveys moved away, taking the dog with them. By then Jack had fallen into the habit of excluding Tory from his life. He didn’t tell her about his baseball games or class projects. She went to Parents Night right up until he graduated from high school, but they never talked about his teachers or his class work. She tried to help him with his college applications, but he took them into his room to work on, bringing them out only when he needed a signature. She tried to explain once, when he was a junior, about his father, but he told her he didn’t want to talk about it. She subsided into her customary silence, and that was the end of it.

  He never told her that he already knew all about his father. He and
Colton had looked him up on the Internet, something Tory wouldn’t think of because she didn’t use a computer. It had been ridiculously easy, because he and his father had the same name.

  Colton had been impressed that his friend’s father had gone to jail, as if somehow that made Jack tougher, cooler. Jack hadn’t felt any tougher, though. Going to jail for embezzlement was lame and embarrassing, and dying in a car crash two weeks after he got out was just stupid. Jack made Colton swear not to tell anyone.

  Jack had thought his mother must be relieved when he went off to school in Boston, but now he wondered. He lifted his face from his hands and looked around her office. There were pictures of him everywhere, a snapshot, two school portraits, a copy of his prom picture with—God, he couldn’t even remember the girl’s name. He had only dated her twice. As soon as she started calling his cell phone, he lost interest.

  On the filing cabinet, in front of where he now crouched, his senior picture looked out from a braided leather frame. He had posed against a maple brilliant with fall colors, head to one side, a cocky grin on his face. “Arrogant bastard,” he told his image.

  A memory surfaced, suddenly, of a kid in his English lit class. He hadn’t thought of that guy in years. They were discussing some nineteenth-century novel with a protagonist who was an orphan, and the kid had said that losing a parent made you grow up overnight. He wished he could talk to that guy now. He’d been right.

  Jack blew out a breath, and started stacking the folders on the floor beside the cabinet. The phone on the desk rang, but he had stopped picking up, because most of the calls began, “Hi. I was one of Tory’s clients, and I’m just wondering . . .”