The Glass Butterfly

by Louise Marley

  When the overture to Butterfly ended and the first faintly Japanese melodies began, he felt strange, listening as he drove alone through the night. He felt as if there was no one in the world but himself. There were no headlights behind him, no cars passing him. There was only the road unfolding before him, a concrete ribbon running up and down hills, around bends, over bridges, and beneath underpasses.

  And the great thing was, now that he was headed west, the tingling in his skull had eased at last. He knew—he knew—this was the right thing to do.

  22

  Demonio! Taci!

  Demon! Be quiet!

  —Edgar, Edgar, Act One

  A utumn wore on toward winter in Torre with days of pouring rain alternating with days of cool sunshine. All Souls was coming, and after that, Christmas preparations would begin in earnest. The Puccinis had been in Milan for weeks, and when they returned, the maestro declared there would be no guests, no hunting, no distractions. “I must work on Mademoiselle Minnie,” he said. “Everyone is after me to see the score, and I have nothing! ”

  Doria and Zita cast each other a glance as they cleared the table. Elvira, grunting a little as she pushed herself up, said, “Giacomo, you always say that. Everything will be fine.”

  “This time it’s true,” he grumbled. “They’ll say I’m a hack. It’s what they all think.” He rose, too, feeling in his shirt pocket for his Toscano cigar.

  “Well, Giacomo, tonight it is quiet and peaceful. You can work.”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll see. We should have stayed here, and not gone to Milano at all.”

  “Come now,” Elvira said, tossing her napkin onto the table. “We can’t stay in Torre all the time. We would never see anyone!”

  “I like that,” he said. “Too damn many people in Milano, anyway, and they all want something from me.” He stuck the cigar in his teeth, and looked around the room. “Damn it, Elvira, where is my matchbox?”

  Doria was just taking the linen napkins to launder. She glanced at her mistress. “The matchbox is on the signore’s desk,” she said. “In the studio.”

  Elvira waved her hand. “Get it, then, Doria. Don’t make him wait.”

  “No, signora.” Doria hurried into the studio and collected the matchbox from where it sat beside the butterfly paperweight. She carried the box back into the dining room, meeting Puccini halfway. She took a match from the box, struck it, and held it for him as he puffed on his cigar. He blew a cloud of smoke over her head; then, with one of his sudden changes of mood, grinned and winked at her before he walked past her into the studio. Doria, flushing a little under the narrow regard of her mistress, put the matchbox on the table and picked up the napkins. She turned toward the kitchen, but she found Elvira in her way.

  Elvira’s arms were folded beneath the shelf of her bosom, and her cheeks were reddened by the port she had just drunk. Her black eyes glittered in the way Doria had come to know meant trouble for everyone.

  She had taken every care not to anger her mistress since her return, and she couldn’t think what she might have done just now to set her off. She paused, clutching the soiled napkins. “Signora?”

  “Don’t think I don’t notice,” Elvira hissed.

  “Cosa? Notice what?” Doria took a half step back.

  “The way you look at him,” Elvira snapped. She kept her voice low, and Doria knew she didn’t want Puccini to hear. “You flirt with him, batting your eyes like that, doing little favors. I want you to stop it!”

  Doria swallowed, remembering her resolve to keep her temper. She tried to speak mildly. “Signora, I didn’t—” She faltered when Elvira raised one big hand, the fingers spread. Doria took another half step back, away from the threat of a slap.

  How was she supposed to behave in the face of such treatment? She could have drawn Puccini’s attention, but already the sound of the piano reached them, the work resuming, and that was what mattered. It didn’t matter what Elvira thought or did, as long as the maestro could go forward with his opera, and she could stay here, in Villa Puccini, smoothing his path.

  She let her gaze drop to the floor. “I’m just going to help Zita with the dishes.”

  “Very well.” Elvira lowered her hand, and stood aside. As Doria passed her she said, in a harsh whisper, “But you watch yourself, my girl. I know your type.”

  Doria, though it galled her, looked back at Elvira and said, as demurely as she could, “Sì, signora,” and went on into the kitchen.

  A storm had begun to build during dinner, with flickers of lightning off to the east. Just as Zita and Doria finished their kitchen chores, rain began to patter against the windows, and the rising wind shook the shutters. Zita said, “This will be a bad one.” Far in the distance they heard a soft roll of thunder, like a bass drum just beginning to tune.

  “I hope it doesn’t disturb the maestro,” Doria said. Puccini had been hard at work for the hour since dinner, and she knew he would go on long past midnight. She smiled at Zita. “Mademoiselle Minnie must be behaving herself tonight!”

  “Hah!” Zita exclaimed. “I should think she’d do as she’s told.”

  Doria laughed at that, and stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the clean kitchen with satisfaction. “You’re off to bed?” she asked Zita.

  “Sì, and you should be, too.”

  “Soon. There’s just the table linens to iron, so they’ll be ready for the morning.”

  “Do them tomorrow, Doria mia! Go to your bed! And besides—” Zita paused, glancing upward, where they could hear the creak of Elvira’s heavy footsteps. “Besides, didn’t she tell you not to iron at night?”

  A crash of dissonance on the piano made them both startle, and they heard a curse from the studio. Doria said, with a shrug, “She did, Zita. But if there are no table linens, she won’t like that, either. I’ll just do enough for the breakfast table.”

  “Well—” The music started again, a fragmented and halting progression of chords beneath a melody in octaves. Zita scowled. “Well, see you’re very quiet. And hurry!”

  “I will. It shouldn’t take long.”

  With the irons heating on the stove, Doria gingerly set up the board, careful not to bump anything or make any noise. She had turned off the lights in the kitchen, and she meant to work with just the light from the pantry. She thought, as she spread the tablecloth over the board, that this would be a pleasant chore under normal circumstances. She liked seeing the hot iron smooth the wrinkles in the linen, and she liked the scent of soap that rose from the cloth under the heat. It was routine, but it was made delightful by the music wafting from the studio. The intermittent, nearly inaudible beat of the thunder was, she thought, a little like gunfire, of which there was evidently so much in La Fanciulla del West. Perhaps it would be an inspiration!

  She forgot, as she listened to the rich sounds of the piano, to be quiet. She had begun to recognize the melodies of this opera, and it seemed the maestro was growing confident. Doria paused, the iron held above the tablecloth, listening as he played all the way through a scene, the different voices coming through, picked out in different registers, the flowing harmonies so like his usual work and yet—somehow, in a way she wasn’t educated enough to understand—different, more subtle, more continuous. The iron went cold in her hand as she stood there, rapt, and she reached to put it back on the stove, to pick up the other one.

  She was distracted, and it was dark in the kitchen. As she reached across the ironing board with the iron in her hand, still following the melody unfolding at the piano, she lost her grip on the heavy iron. She tried to grasp it as it fell to the floor, but she was too late, and it burned her fingers as it slid through them. The iron clattered on the floor, and Doria thrust her burned fingers into her mouth with a gasp of pain.

  From the studio, the maestro called, “What was that?”

  Doria, her heart in her mouth and her fingers stinging, hastened toward the studio to explain to him. She cast a wary glance
up the staircase, then dashed through the dining room. Puccini was standing now, his hair disarrayed from running his hands through it, a cigarette dangling from his lips. “I’m sorry—” Doria began, just as he said, “Are you all right?” He reached out to take her reddened hand with an exclamation.

  “How dare you!” Elvira shrieked from the doorway to the studio.

  Doria and Puccini both jumped, and the cigarette fell from the maestro’s lips to the carpeted floor. He swore, and bent to snatch it up, and Doria whirled to face Elvira, holding her burned fingers with the other hand.

  “Right here under my nose?” Elvira shrilled.

  “Elvira—” Puccini began, but she cut him off with a gesture worthy of any diva standing center stage at La Scala.

  Her voice was as sharp and cutting as the edge of a saw. “I know what’s going on here!”

  Doria said, “Oh, no, signora, it’s not—” but she never finished her protest. Elvira took one long step to reach her, and backhanded her across her face. Doria fell, her elbow scraping the carpet, her head banging against the wall behind her.

  Puccini shouted, “No!” and seized Elvira’s wrist before she could strike Doria again.

  Doria pushed herself up on her hands, her burned fingers blazing with fresh pain. Elvira was screeching something, and Puccini’s voice thundered fury. He dragged his wife out of the studio and up the stairs, shouting at her all the way. The house itself seemed to shudder with the force of their argument.

  Zita, in her dressing gown, appeared in the doorway. She bent to help Doria up, and together they scrambled out of the studio, through the dining room, and into the kitchen.

  Doria whispered, “I burned my hand! I burned it on the iron, and the signore—he tried to look at it, that’s all, and he—then she came down and she—”

  “Lo so, lo so,” Zita muttered. “Never mind. Never mind now.” With an arm encircling Doria’s waist, she led her to the sink. She uncovered the butter dish and smeared a generous dollop of yellow butter over the burns. “There, there. This will feel better soon.”

  From upstairs they could hear Puccini berating his wife, Elvira answering with nerve-grating cries. Zita drew Doria into her own bedroom to wrap the burned fingers in a clean handkerchief. They waited there together, huddled on Zita’s bed, until the voices above them reached a crescendo and then, abruptly, ceased. They heard the slam of a door, footsteps on the stairs, and Elvira weeping noisily.

  When the house was quiet, Doria crept back to her own room. She wriggled out of her clothes as best she could with one hand, and got into bed. She lay there, her fingers throbbing. She wished the music would resume, but the only sounds were those of the wind and rain and the occasional clap of thunder, echoed by the quick beat of her own heart.

  The next morning, an enormous bank of storm clouds hid the rising sun. Lightning glinted behind it, making the wall of cloud glow like an enormous curtain lit by footlights. Thunder still rattled and rumbled across the sky. Not gunfire now, Doria thought irrelevantly, as she dressed and drew a brush through her hair with her sore hand. It was more like cannon, great thumps and bumps that made the windows creak.

  Ignoring the theatrics in the heavens, Doria and Zita began their morning chores, creeping about the kitchen and the dining room like mice fearful of waking the cat. Zita set the bread to rise, and Doria laid the table for breakfast, careful to do everything just the way Elvira liked it. She carried the dogs’ food out to them, and dashed back to the house just as the rain began. Raindrops, fat and cold, spattered the zinc screens. One flash of lightning seemed to be right over Villa Puccini, and the following roll of thunder shook the windows. A moment later, the electricity went out, leaving the house in shadow.

  Doria hurried to lay a fire in the studio, and to light the oil lamps kept for such contingencies. She was just on her way to the kitchen to refill the saltcellar when she heard the uneven, limping tread of Puccini on the staircase. She stopped where she was, watching him descend.

  He was dressed in his hunting coat and tall boots. He tramped to the gun rack without speaking, and seized one of his long shotguns. He tucked it under his arm, and pulled his wide-brimmed hat from its peg. He nodded to Doria. “No breakfast for me this morning. Tell Zita, will you? I’m going out to the island.”

  “Not in this weather, signore!” she exclaimed without thinking.

  He scowled. “It’s the weather in this house that’s unbearable. Better a good clean rainstorm.” He tramped out through the front door, leaving Doria staring after him.

  Zita came to stand beside her, and together they watched Puccini walk through the rain to the boat dock. They heard the roar of the engine in his motorboat just as a fresh onslaught of lightning and thunder exploded over Lake Massaciuccoli. The house shook with it, and the dogs, left behind in their kennel, began to howl. The floor above creaked with Elvira’s footsteps moving this way and that. Doria moved to the kitchen cupboard for the box of table salt, but her burned hand hurt so she could hardly twist the top off the saltcellar.

  She heard Elvira’s heavy step on the staircase. She put the saltcellar aside, and stood with her hands twisted in her apron. Zita was on the point of coming through the doorway into the kitchen, but she fell back to allow her mistress to precede her.

  Elvira looked as if she had aged ten years in a single night. The flesh beneath her eyes was baggy and dark. She wore a shirtwaist and a long plaid skirt with a thick woolen shawl around her shoulders. She bulked in the kitchen doorway like a massive ship in a tiny harbor, turning this way and that as she fixed her two servants with a baleful gaze. “I know what you all say about me,” she said hoarsely. “You say I’m crazy. That I throw fits.”

  “No, no, signora,” Zita began, but Elvira cut her off with a gesture.

  “The signore is out?” she said in a colorless tone.

  “Sì, signora,” Doria whispered. “He went to the island. He took his gun.”

  “Good. Doria, get your things. I want you gone before he comes back.”

  Doria stiffened. “What? Why?”

  “I’ve had enough of your tricks.”

  “That’s not fair!” Doria cried. “I didn’t—”

  “Giacomo doesn’t see it, but I do! I want you out of my house!”

  Doria couldn’t think of the right words, the diplomatic ones, the calming ones. She could only blurt, “Signora, if you will just listen to reason!”

  “Reason?” Elvira hissed. “How dare you?”

  “I didn’t mean—I only want to—”

  “You think I will keep a servant who speaks to me this way?”

  “I only mean—if you would only think—”

  Elvira said hoarsely, “You! You, the village slut who can’t stay away from my husband.”

  Fear and anger mingled in Doria’s heart. She protested, “It’s not true! I’ve told you over and over, it’s not true!”

  “I have my pride! I know who I am and what I deserve!” Elvira pressed her hand, with its long, thick fingers, to her breast. She didn’t appear to notice that her corset was twisted askew. The shelf of her bosom was tipped sideways, making her look even more like a ship listing to one side. “I will not have a little viper like you slithering around my feet, Doria Manfredi!”

  “You have to let me explain—”

  “Oh, yes, yes. You love to talk, don’t you, Doria? You love to talk to my husband! You do your ironing late at night, so you can be near Giacomo, though I’ve ordered you not to do that! I hear you, late at night, talking, talking on and on. You give him no peace.”

  “I give him no peace?” Doria spread her hands, desperate to find her way through the maze of argument. “It is not I who—”

  Elvira snapped, “Don’t you dare!”

  Zita tried again to intervene. “Signora,” she began, but Elvira said, “Quiet! I’m not talking to you!” A peal of thunder rattled the second-floor shutters, and the rain intensified, hammering the roof, spattering the windows. “Go
now, Doria. Fetch your things.” When Doria didn’t move at first, Elvira took a threatening step toward her. “Do I have to throw you out myself?”

  Doria, shocked and defeated, backed away from Elvira toward her bedroom. She fumbled with the doorknob once, twice, before she could turn it and go in. Once inside she stood staring at her few possessions, her brushes, her prayer book, her extra dress, her only coat. She couldn’t think how to collect them, what to do with them. She couldn’t believe, even now, that Elvira meant it, that after all the times she had lost her temper and railed about this or that imagined offense, her mistress had really turned her out of the house. Doria kept thinking Elvira would call her back, change her mind.

  Puccini could not have known what his wife meant to do. Surely, he could not have known. If he had, would he have fled, taken his gun and gone out in his boat? She couldn’t believe it. She wouldn’t.

  Zita came into Doria’s room when Elvira’s heavy footsteps had clumped out into the studio. Elvira sometimes stood beside the mosaic fireplace, one hand caressing the inlaid mantelpiece as she gazed out over the lake, watching for her husband to return. Doria had always felt sorry, seeing her like that, her big feet splayed on the pretty carpet, her thick shoulders tense with impatience and longing. How terrible it must be to love someone so much that it drove away reason and dignity! How sad to be a woman to be avoided, a woman famed for her bad temper and jealous rages!

  But now, sitting on her narrow bed and staring up at Old Zita’s wrinkled, sorrowing face, Doria had no room in her heart for pity. Elvira Puccini had thrown her out, after her years of service, dismissed her on a baseless suspicion. “Zita, where will I go? What will I do?”