The Glass Butterfly

by Louise Marley

  Iris laughed. “Like he belongs?”

  Tory pressed a hand to her chest. The sudden, premonitory pain pierced her through. It took her breath away. She whispered, “Yes. He looks like he belongs,” and the pain subsided.

  “Well, then,” Iris said brusquely. “More of a cat person myself. But you’d better keep him. Company for you.”

  Company. Yes. And something else, something Tory knew very well but couldn’t guess at yet. Her heart thudded at the thought, that familiar sense that something was coming. She said through a dry throat, “Thanks. Thanks very much, Iris. Do you know if there’s a vet in town?”

  15

  Oggi il mio nome è Dolore.

  Today my name is Sorrow.

  —Butterfly, Madama Butterfly, Act Two

  Doria stood, hands on hips, and looked around at the spotless kitchen. Old Zita had gone to her bed an hour before, but Doria had stayed on, scrubbing, polishing, tidying. The brass-and-steel espresso maker was filled and ready for the morning, and the table laid for breakfast. She was tired now, and she would have to be up early to begin it all again, but there was still the basket of ironing waiting for her. She put a stick of wood in the stove, and fetched the two irons from the pantry to begin to warm while she set up the ironing board.

  Beyond the screened window the night looked thick and dark. Autumn often brought clouds and rain to Torre, gloomy days, murky nights, sometimes thunderstorms and great flashes of lightning that lit the clouds from within as if God had set them afire.

  Doria set the basket of ironing on the table and went to fill the sprinkler at the sink. She yawned, wishing she could go to sleep. At least, if she had to iron, she could listen to the desultory sounds of the piano from the studio. Puccini was working on Fanciulla again.

  She sprinkled water over a linen tablecloth, smoothed it over the ironing board, and picked up the first iron. Just as she was testing its heat with her finger, she heard his whisper.

  “Doria!”

  She turned from the ironing board, and found Puccini standing beside the sink. His cigarette hung from his lower lip, and he gestured with the glass of port in his hand, making the dark wine slosh over the rim. “You’re still up,” he said, grinning. “Good! I hate being alone when Mademoiselle Minnie is behaving badly!”

  “Signore.” She crossed to the towel rack, took the oldest one there, and bent to wipe up the spilled wine. “Your Mademoiselle Minnie will not behave if you drink so much.”

  “No, no, Doria mia! It’s the other way around! I drink because she will not behave!”

  Doria tutted as she folded the towel and replaced it. “You should go to bed. It’s late.”

  “No, no,” he said. “These are the best hours. These are the hours the music comes to me!” The slur in his voice told her he had drunk more this evening than usual. He took a step, stumbling as his weight shifted to his bad leg. She put out her hand to steady him, and he chuckled. “Grazie. You’re very nice to an old man.” Then, with a louder laugh, “An old drunken man!”

  “You’re not old, signore.” She stood back, and shook her finger at him. “You are, however, quite drunk.”

  At this he guffawed, then clapped his hand over his mouth like a guilty boy. “Shhh,” he whispered loudly. “You’ll wake my policeman.”

  Doria pursed her lips to quell her smile, and said as sternly as she could, “You shouldn’t speak so of your wife.”

  “No?” He leaned back against the sink, puffing on his cigarette, filling the kitchen with its toasty scent. “No, perhaps I shouldn’t.” Another laugh. “But I will! She dogs my every step, just like one of the carabinieri in their striped pants and silly hats!” He took another drink of port, and said in an undertone, “Have you seen her hats? Mamma mia, what contrivances! They lurk at the top of the wardrobe, hulking there in the shadows like—like monsters waiting to leap at me! I swear to almighty God they give me nightmares!”

  Doria giggled before she could stop herself. Elvira’s hats were the talk of the village. They seemed to grow larger and more elaborate every year, with great swaths of netting and massive collections of silk flowers. It was, Doria thought, a thing rich women did as they aged, compensating for lost youth with fancier dresses and bigger hats, the most expensive gloves and the softest shoes.

  “Women,” Puccini said with bitter humor, “have ruined my life.”

  “No, no, signore, surely not!”

  “Sì, sì, sì, signorina, absolutely true!” He took his cigarette from his mouth to drain his glass, then stuck it back between his teeth, sucking on it so the tip glowed fiercely. “Women—my sisters, my wife, my mistresses—they steal my soul! They want to tell me what to do, where to go, whom to see—whom not to see. Their endless chattering drowns out the music in my head!”

  Doria thought he had a good point. He needed to concentrate, of course, and they distracted him. His sister Ramelde came to Torre to harangue him for his offenses. His sister Iginia, the nun, wrote him scolding letters. His lover Corinna had even threatened a lawsuit! Of course, some of the fault must be laid at his own doorstep. He could have settled on one woman, and avoided the scandals and the arguments and the—

  Puccini dropped his cigarette in the sink, and it hissed for a second or two before it went out. She saw the gleam of his teeth beneath his black mustache as he smiled. “Doria! Come into the studio with me,” he said. “Listen to what I’m working on. You have a good ear! Maybe you can tell me what’s wrong.”

  Doria’s breath caught, and she gasped, “No, no, maestro! I know nothing about music!”

  He put out his hand to catch her wrist, and tugged her roughly toward the door. He meant to be playful, she knew, but his grip hurt, and she couldn’t pull away from him. “Just un momento, Doria mia,” he said, with laughter in his voice. “Just let me play you a little of Mademoiselle Minnie—talk to you about it—”

  She trotted after him because she had little choice, but she protested at every step. “Maestro, your friends will be here tomorrow, Pascoli and Caselli. Play it for them! Ask them your questions!”

  He paid no attention. “I hear you singing around the kitchen, and when you’re cleaning upstairs,” he said cheerfully. “You understand my music, Doria, I can tell you do! It touches you. It moves you!” As they passed through the dining room, he snatched up the port bottle from the sideboard. “Elvira doesn’t understand anything about my work—except, naturally, for how much money it brings in.” He released her when they reached the studio. He banged the bottle down on his desk, where he could reach it from the piano. He snagged an extra chair, then flung himself onto the piano stool. “Sit, my little friend, sit! You will help me with this beast of an opera!”

  Reluctantly, Doria settled herself on the chair. It was ridiculous, of course. She knew nothing of how an opera should be composed, nor how to criticize its faults. Anything she knew she had learned in the long nights of the maestro’s illness, when he talked on and on about arias and recitatives, staging and orchestration. All she knew about Fanciulla was that Puccini had been agonizing over it, that it was due in New York far too soon, and that he was terrified of a huge failure after the grand success of Butterfly.

  She watched him turn the pages of the handwritten score, splotched here and there with cross outs and insertions and scribbled notes, and her heart throbbed with a mixture of pity and admiration. He was, despite his fifty years of life, like one of her brothers, all bravado and bluster one day, all doubts and despair the next. She wondered Elvira could not see that all her badgering only made things worse for him, only drove him farther away from her. The two of them were like petulant children, tormenting each other in some twisted game no one but they could understand, subjecting everyone around them to their tantrums and tumult.

  Puccini played a few bars of a melody, and turned to her, his eyes pleading. “There!” he said. “You see? It’s not working.”

  “No, signore,” she protested. “It’s beautiful. I don’t know
what to say, because I—truly, I don’t even know the story of this opera. Of your Mademoiselle Minnie.”

  He spun on his stool to face her. He had picked up his thick pencil, and he held it ready in his hand, as if she were going to tell him just what to do and he would write it out. He said, “It’s a terrible story, and Minnie is the ugliest name any of my heroines has ever had.”

  She gave a wry little shrug. “But she’s American. Perhaps in America, it’s considered a beautiful name.”

  He fumbled in his pocket for a fresh cigarette. “Not even an American could love that name! But I’m stuck with it, as I’m stuck with this play. I wish I had chosen the other play, but I’ve gone too far to stop now. It’s due in New York! There’s no time to start again.”

  Even the name of New York made Doria lightheaded with wonder and envy. She had never been to Milan, to the great La Scala. She could not even dream of going to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, America. She sighed a little, and spoke gently, as she would have spoken to the very youngest and most spoiled of all her brothers. “Tell me the story, maestro. Something must have appealed to you, when you chose it.”

  “Oh, yes.” He held the cigarette in his teeth while he struck the match. He drew a lungful of smoke, and blew it out in a big ring. “For one thing, the villain smokes cigars!” He laughed. “And they all shoot guns! Two of my favorite things.”

  “Who is the villain? And why do they shoot guns?”

  He squinted at her through the viscous yellow cloud of smoke. “The villain is a sceriffo, in the far west of America—California. They all carry guns there, I think.”

  “What is a sceriffo? And who is this Minnie?”

  “A sceriffo is a sort of policeman. And Minnie is a young woman who keeps an inn,” he said. He took the cigarette from his mouth and examined the glowing tip of it thoughtfully. “She keeps the inn, and all the men who come to drink there love her. She teaches them the Bible—”

  “The Bible!”

  “Yes, she’s very virtuous.” He winked at her. “But she carries a gun, too, right here!” He pointed one finger down the front of his shirt. “The sceriffo is furious because she won’t marry him, and then a bandit comes to town, and she falls in love with him.”

  Doria smiled, imagining a girl with a gun and a Bible falling in love with a bandit. “And so,” she said, “the sceriffo tries to arrest the bandit, and she pleads for the life of her lover.”

  “Esatto!” Puccini laughed again.

  “Maestro, it seems a very good story for an opera.”

  He gave a negligent shrug. “I suppose. In this scene, Minnie plays a card game to try to save her lover.” His laughter died, and he turned back to the piano. “It’s not working.” He played a few notes. “I want the singers—the sceriffo, and the virtuous Minnie—to sing recitative, back and forth, back and forth, as they play their cards—but there has to be tension, or it’s just—it’s just silly. Already there is so much in this opera that’s silly. All the time they’re playing the game, the bandit is hiding upstairs, wounded by the sceriffo’s gun.”

  “So many guns,” Doria marveled.

  “Oh, yes, many guns. I think Americans go around shooting each other all the time.” He played the notes again, shaking his head, puffing gouts of smoke into the dimness of the room. “This could be a good scene, though, the bandit bleeding in the attic while the sheriff and Minnie play cards. . . .”

  “Poor Minnie! She must be so worried!” Doria put both hands over her heart.

  Puccini glanced over his shoulder at her. “I suppose she is.” He eyed her. “Is that what you do when you’re worried, Doria? Put your hands there, so?”

  Embarrassed, Doria dropped her hands. “I don’t know, signore. I suppose if I’m worried—if I’m afraid—my heart beats hard, and perhaps I put my hands there—” She did it again, one hand pressed to her chest, the other covering it.

  “Yes,” he said. “Your heart beats hard, because you’re afraid—you’re afraid he will die, and you’re afraid you will lose—” He began a slow, repetitive bass with his left hand, and with his right he seemed to conduct, as if he could hear the orchestra in his mind. He chuckled, and said, “She cheats, you know,” but he kept on playing. “She cheats the sceriffo at cards, and all the while her lover is bleeding . . . and the blood runs down through the boards and drips onto the hands of the cardplayers. . . .”

  Doria held her breath, afraid of distracting him. The corners of the room lay in deep shadow. The last embers of the fire glowed from the hearth, but there was no other light except for the candles in their sconces. The candle flames flickered, their shifting light shadowing the deepening creases in Puccini’s face, making him look even older than he was. He needed rest, she thought. He looked exhausted.

  Suddenly, Puccini exclaimed, “Ah ha!” She jumped, but he laughed. “Very good, Doria mia, very good indeed! You see, I knew you understood!”

  “But, maestro . . . I don’t understand at all! I didn’t say anything.”

  “You did, my dear, you did! There will be an ostinato, a beat in the orchestra, like Mademoiselle Minnie’s heart beating with fear . . . with anxiety . . .” He scribbled something, and then reached for the port to fill his glass. Ruby drops scattered here and there on the desk, on the floor, on the lower keys of the piano.

  Doria stared at Puccini, openmouthed. She hadn’t understood more than one word in four of what he had just told her. Surely nothing she had said . . . she couldn’t have . . . No. It was only that he figured out what was wrong on his own, even in his port-infused state. She shook her head, bemused by the vagaries of living with an artist. A fleeting wisp of pity for his wife clouded her mind. It could not be easy.

  He sketched in a chord, and then another and another. Quietly, so as not to disturb his concentration, she rose, and pushed her chair back to its place beside the card table. She started through the dark dining room toward the kitchen as he began playing the new chords, filling them in with his left hand while he picked out the melody in his right. It would work, of course. He would change it, and change it again, but she could hear that the idea was there. He would mold it and polish it and turn it upside down and right side up again until it was just right. She had heard him do exactly that with Butterfly, the music growing, maturing, flowering over the months he labored over it.

  The stove had gone cold. She would have to build up the fire to warm the irons again. She bent to pick up another stick of wood.

  “Doria! What are you doing?”

  Doria turned just in time to see Elvira burst from the stairwell in a whirl of long dressing gown and loosened black hair flying about her face. She looked for all the world like a strega, a witch from a child’s fairy tale.

  Doria put her finger to her lips. “Signora, the maestro is working!”

  “Of course he’s working!” Elvira put her hands on her hips and braced her big bare feet far apart as if ready for battle. “I heard you in there with him! What were you up to?”

  Doria answered without thinking. “He asked me to help him.”

  “Help him! Do you think I’m a fool?”

  “No, of course not, signora, and I did try to tell him I know nothing of—”

  Elvira’s thick brows were drawn so hard together they looked as if they must hurt. “Don’t be ridiculous!” she snapped. “How could you help Giacomo, you of all people? You, an illiterate village girl!”

  Doria sucked in her breath. Her temper flared at the insult, and she spoke more loudly than she intended. “I am not illiterate! I read as well as you do!”

  “Don’t talk back to me!” Elvira shouted.

  They both realized, in the same moment, that the music in the studio had stopped. Together, they turned guiltily toward the door, expecting Puccini to come in, to remonstrate, to object to the noise.

  He didn’t appear.

  Now the two women stared at each other. Elvira’s eyes glittered, and Doria wished she had held her tongue
. It never helped to argue with the signora. As they gazed at each other, the front door closed with a bang, leaving the house enveloped in a tense silence, broken only by the scratching and whimpering of the hounds at the back door.

  Elvira hissed, “Those bloody dogs!”

  Doria, cautiously, as if to move too quickly might set Elvira off again, slid the stick of wood she was holding into the stove. She closed the lid with a soft click. “I was just ironing the linens for the morning,” she said. She pointed at the tablecloth as evidence of her industry. “The signore came in, and he asked me—that is, I told him I couldn’t, but he—”

  When Elvira didn’t answer immediately, Doria looked up. Her mistress was leaning against the counter, one hand on her chest, the other buried in the unbrushed mass of her hair. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were trembling. Softly, Doria said, “Signora?”

  Elvira made a small, choked sound. Her eyelids fluttered open, and Doria saw that they shone with tears. Instinctively, Doria started across the kitchen. She supposed she meant to comfort her mistress, perhaps to touch her arm or take her hand, small gestures she would offer to any unhappy person. Elvira, however, threw up her hand, and Doria stopped where she was.

  “You can’t know how terrible it is,” Elvira said, her voice rough as gravel, “to have no one you can talk to. No one to share your burdens.”

  Doria twisted her fingers in her apron. Her lips parted, but no words came. What could she, a housemaid, say to her mistress? What words of counsel could she serve up?

  Elvira barked a mirthless laugh. “You see? I can’t talk to Giacomo—I can’t talk to my servants—I am completely alone.” She pushed at her hair with both hands now, and the tears in her eyes slipped over her cheeks. Another sob escaped her, an ugly sound, as if she were doing her best to hold it back.