by Mary Malloy
“You would never know from the street.”
“Come upstairs,” Pina said. “I’ll bring your luggage up later in the elevator.” In response to Lizzie’s querying look, Pina said that they had put the elevator in for her Uncle Patrizio many years before. “He just couldn’t handle all the stairs,” she said. She gestured as she spoke to the curving stone staircase beside them that led up to the main floor of the house. There was an identical one on the other side of the door.
There were several pediments along the staircase and each had a Roman statue on it. Male and female, and draped with swirls of fabric, the figures had been captured in motion. Two of them made grand gestures with their arms, as if to point the way to the entrance of the first grand room.
Lizzie had seen black and white photos of the rooms in the house, taken in the late 50s, and the faded color pictures of Tony Tessitore, but they had not prepared her for her first entry to the piano nobile, the main floor of the house. As she stepped into the entry hall she could see through a series of doors the full length of the house, and every surface was covered with color. Paintings, plasterwork, carvings and carpets brought together designs on floors, walls and ceilings that would seem incongruous in another setting. Unlike the simplicity that she had admired in the courtyard, with its plain stone floor and stucco walls, here the patterns were meant to impress, and they did.
“Whoa!” Lizzie said, her neck bent back so she could look at the carved ceiling high above her. The scale of the room had not been captured at all in the photographs. It was not quite twice the height of a room in an American house, but it seemed at least that high.
“If Uncle Patrizio is clear in his head today, he’s the best one to give you a tour,” she said. “If he isn’t, Uncle Cosimo said he would show you around the house when he comes to pick you up later.”
There was a fresco on the wall of the entrance hall that showed the genealogy of the Gonzagas and Lizzie asked Pina if she was on it.
For the first time, Lizzie heard Pina laugh. “No,” she said, “I think that thing is something like two hundred years old.” There was a small framed document on the table in front of it to which she pointed. “Even this one, which brings us into the middle of the twentieth century, doesn’t include the most recent generation.”
Maggie Kelliher’s children were the last full generation on the updated family tree, with just a few grandchildren, including Cosimo Gonzaga, who was the son of Maggie’s son Cosimo, and three children of Maggie’s daughter Margherita. All the other family members had been born after it was made.
“That’s my mother,” Pina said, pointing to the name of Margherita’s daughter Anna.
“So is Justin your first cousin?” Lizzie asked, remembering that he was also a grandchild of Margherita.
“Justin?”
“Giuseppe,” Lizzie corrected. “Giuseppe Carrera.”
Pina laughed again. “Beppe?” she asked, then answered her own question. “Yes, his mother and mine are sisters.”
Lizzie was tempted to tell Pina about Beppe’s adoption of the title of prince, but held her tongue. She didn’t know her well enough to know if she would find it amusing or not. She looked at all the crowns across the top of the fresco, alternating with the mitres of bishops.
“You have an impressive family,” she said.
“Many dukes, cardinals and bishops,” Pina said. “But none of that is worth much now.”
Again Lizzie thought about “Prince Beppe.”
They went quickly through what Lizzie had seen referenced as the “Yellow Salon”—which might better have been called the Gold Room for the amount of gold leaf on the furniture and on the plasterwork that was scrolled in great loops around the framed pictures on the walls. Pina strode so quickly that there was no time for Lizzie to see if she could identify any of the paintings for which Martin had given her a preliminary identification from the old black and white photographs.
From there they went to the “Chinese Salon,” on the back left corner of the house. Again, Pina didn’t pause, so Lizzie had to take in the hand painted wallpaper and the porcelain without being able to look closely at anything. The dining room had the balcony that had charmed Lizzie from the courtyard. It had three large archways that looked down onto the courtyard from the wall opposite the main door.
Beyond the dining room was the library, also called the “Cabinet,” where they found Patrick Gonzaga sitting at a large table with a book.
Pina introduced them in English. “Uncle Patrizio,” she said, “this is Professor Manning from St. Patrick’s College.”
He turned and smiled. “My grandfather founded St. Patrick’s College,” he said. He extended his hand, which Lizzie took, and he invited her to sit at the table with him.
It took some effort to concentrate on her host and not let her eyes wander around the room, where all the treasures she sought were kept, but Lizzie looked into his eyes, dark and filmy and set into deep lids that drooped at the edges. His face was soft and lined and, Lizzie thought, sad.
“My grandfather founded St. Patrick’s College,” he said again, still holding Lizzie’s hand.
She squeezed it. “I know,” she said. “I know about your grandfather.” She pulled her hand away and opened her book bag. “Here is a copy of a small book I wrote about him,” she said, handing him a copy of Patrick Kelliher, Immigrant Industrialist. “I sent you a copy when it came out, but I am happy to give you one in person.”
He leafed through the book and Lizzie took her first opportunity to scan the room. There was the famous alligator, hanging from the ceiling, though this room was clearly not the room in the 1677 picture. The library had a mezzanine, approached by a narrow staircase at one end, and had shelves from floor to ceiling. Some were filled with books, but others clearly had specimens from the old cabinet.
The old man followed where her eyes were going. “This is the Wonder Chamber,” he said.
“The Wunder Kammer,” Lizzie said, repeating the phrase in its original German.
“Exactly,” he said. “You are the first person to know that. No one else calls it that, they call it the ‘library,’ as if that will somehow dissipate its power.” He then said something in Italian and Lizzie looked up to see if Pina would translate, but she just shook her head. Stopping abruptly he looked suspiciously at Lizzie and demanded in Italian that she identify herself.
“I’m Lizzie Manning,” she said. “I teach at St. Patrick’s College.”
“My grandfather founded St. Patrick’s College.”
“I know,” she said. “Paddy-boy Kelliher.” She was instantly sorry that she had used the nickname by which she and Jackie spoke of their college founder, but Patrizio responded positively.
“Paddy-boy,” he said. “My mother sometimes called me that. I’m named after him.”
“Of course,” Lizzie said. “May I call you Patrizio?” she asked, “or would you prefer I be more formal?”
“You may call me Pat,” he said. “That is what Americans call me, it’s what they called me at St. Patrick’s College.”
“Have you been there in recent years?”
“No, not since 1974. I went there just after my mother died, but not since.”
“Your English is still very good.”
He told her that he had grown up speaking it with his mother, but that he didn’t have a chance to speak it very often now, and for several minutes they spoke of Boston and of the college. He had first gone there in 1938 and remembered details of the city and of the campus that were long changed. She eventually turned the conversation to the collection by asking about the alligator on the ceiling.
“He came from America too, you know. He was captured in Florida by an early traveler and brought back to the Mediterranean on a Spanish ship.”
“It must have been a very early traveler indeed,” Lizzie said
, “because I know it was in this collection by 1677.”
“How do you know that?” Patrizio asked.
Lizzie took a copy of the original image out of her book bag and laid it on the table in front of him. It was an excellent reproduction, a high-resolution photograph printed on an expensive matte paper. Lizzie had had five copies made especially to give to members of the Gonzaga family.
“Where did you get this?” Patrizio demanded and then spoke rapidly in Italian.
Pina finally stepped into the conversation. “He wants to know how you have this sketch,” she said. “He says it has been missing for years, that he has been looking for it.”
Lizzie was flustered and embarrassed. She tried to explain, with Pina translating, that the image had been given to the College by his mother in 1959, and that this was a copy of it.
“Tell him that this will be the centerpiece of our exhibit,” Lizzie said.
“What exhibit?” he asked angrily.
“The exhibit at St. Pat’s of your collection,” Lizzie explained, “to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of your grandfather founding the college.”
Patrizio turned to Pina and spoke rapidly for several minutes. He was obviously upset.
“He says no one has told him about this, that he will not let anything leave the house,” she translated. As she said it, Pina held her hand up slightly, as if to indicate to Lizzie that she should not be too worried about this alarming news. The two continued back and forth in Italian for several minutes. “I have told him that he knew about this, but has forgotten,” Pina explained. “But I’m going to call Uncle Cosimo and ask him to come over now if he can.” She put a hand on her uncle’s shoulder, which he shrugged off.
A tiny woman came into the room and Pina turned to her. “Graziella is Uncle Patrizio’s housekeeper,” she said first to Lizzie, and then she spoke to the woman in Italian.
Graziella put her arms around Patrizio and with a strength that impressed Lizzie, lifting him out of his chair and into a standing position. She could not have been much more than five feet tall and he was two heads taller than she, but he put himself meekly into her small hands and was positioned onto his walker. As he shuffled from the room, Pina said softly, “Uncle Patrizio will sleep for a while, and when he gets up will probably not remember any of this.”
“I feel awful about this,” Lizzie said. She had stood up when Graziella brought Patrizio to a standing position, but now she sat down again and rested her hands on the table in front of her. She was angry with Cosimo that he hadn’t been more forthcoming with information about his uncle’s condition—she certainly didn’t want to have to face this situation every day that she was here. “How can we do the exhibit if he doesn’t want anything to leave this house?” she said to Pina, the frustration clear in her tone.
“I’ll call Cosimo,” Pina said, pulling a cell phone from her purse. “In the meantime, you should look around at the collection.”
While Pina spoke into her phone in rapid Italian, Lizzie took her first walk around the room. From what she could see from the main level, the open shelves of the mezzanine were entirely filled with books, and despite the large number of things hanging from the ceiling in the Renaissance drawing, today there was only the alligator.
Pina closed her phone and said that Cosimo would join them within the hour. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” she asked.
“I’d love one,” Lizzie said thankfully. “Can I drink it here?”
“Of course,” Pina answered, “I’ll just get it and come back.”
When she had gone, Lizzie began a slow stroll around the room, looking in every case. Most of them had glass doors, though some that contained only books had doors made of a decorative screen and others were just open shelves. Lying in the cases were oddities and wonders in equal numbers. Some things had dried and shriveled until they were no longer recognizable; even if they could be identified, they were mostly just grey lumps that would not be suitable for exhibition. Other things crossed over the wonderful line between “natural” and “artificial” curiosities. There were trees of coral that had been worked into wonderful miniature landscapes, where plants and animals from the sea were transformed into their counterparts on shore. Bits of ancient pottery were sometimes hard to distinguish from samples of minerals, and small dried sea horses lay on a shelf among small bronze figures, dancing, playing instruments and engaged in battle, like some ancient Etruscan toy soldiers. It was as if a child had played with them at one time and organized them into an imaginative world.
Lizzie saw the automaton that Jimmy had identified from one of the photographs. Wrought of silver into a marvelous tabletop model of the solar system, this orrery could roll under its wind-up power down a dining table dispensing salt. There were ancient bottles with unidentifiable animals inside them and Lizzie considered that a few of the bottles exhibited together would capture the essence of this early collection and be visually interesting.
Of dried animals there was no shortage. A few hundred bugs, lizards, fish and birds looked back at her with glass eyes or no eyes, their skin or feathers covered with a layer of dust. While the rest of the house looked quite clean, the shelves in this room had clearly gone a long time without a dusting. She assumed that Patrick would not let anyone touch the things but himself.
Picking up the 1677 image of the “cabinet” that Patrizio had left on the table, Lizzie held it up against each wall of the room. It was clear that if the image represented this collection, it had not been located in this room when the sketch was made. Because of the architecture of the house, with the courtyard in the center, each of the large rooms was much longer than it was wide. The width of the library was reduced even more by the shelves that covered the walls. The furniture was limited to a very long table that ran almost the length of it, surrounded by chairs. On the table were two large globes, one representing the earth and the other the celestial sphere of the sky.
The shorter walls of the room were dominated by a large double door at one end, which was currently closed, and the staircase up to the mezzanine on the other. There was a small window there built into the wall of the stairs, and Lizzie climbed up to look out. Below her trucks were unloading in the street behind the house.
When Pina returned, Lizzie was examining the globe of the earth and wondering if she could have it in her exhibit. She sighed at the thought. Would she be able to have any of this? Had Patrizio not responded as he had, she would be making a list right now of marvelous things to go to Boston.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t know more about Patrick’s condition before I started all this,” she said to Pina.
“Why? What difference does it make? He just doesn’t remember things.”
“I’m not talking about his short term memory,” Lizzie said. “I meant that he lives with these things and cares about them and will be deprived of some of them at a time when he is otherwise confused. If they are the familiar things in his life, it might even hurt him.” What if he died while his collection was on the other side of the Atlantic? she thought. “Oh God,” she prayed silently, “please don’t let that happen.”
Pina gave Lizzie a cup of coffee. It was a tiny cup, very strong and bitter, which Lizzie sipped slowly.
The image of the old collection was still on the table and Pina picked it up. “Is this really what all this looked like three hundred years ago?”
“I’m not sure,” Lizzie explained. She told her about the Cospi image and the similarities between the two. “It’s possible that the artist laid down a template and then drew the individual collections onto it. But certain identifiable things are still here, obviously.” She pointed up. “Our friend the alligator and the sarcophagus.” As she said it she realized that she had not seen the sarcophagus in the room.
“I hope so, anyway,” she said. “Is the Egyptian mummy case still in the house?”
&
nbsp; “It’s in the ballroom,” Pina said, leading Lizzie to the closed doors at the far end of the room. “For some reason, it started to really upset Uncle Patrizio, so my Uncle Cosimo moved it into the ballroom, where he never goes.”
She pushed open one door and they stepped into a dark room. Some light filtered in from the courtyard windows, which had shutters that leaked light along the edges and between the lattices. A dim light showed up the stairs at the far end, where the second staircase from the courtyard emerged into this room.
Pina found a switch and turned on the nearest of three gigantic chandeliers. The room was filled with furniture covered with sheets or other covers to keep the voluminous dust from ruining upholstery.
“No balls or parties anymore,” Pina explained, “so this has mostly just become a dumping ground for the overflow from the house.” She turned on the other two chandeliers. Each of the great lamps was made of pale ivory-colored blown glass that twisted like snakes up and around the glass plates that had originally held candles. Decades before they had been replaced with candle-shaped bulbs, and many of those were now burned out. For good measure, Pina also opened one of the floor-to-ceiling shutters onto the courtyard, releasing a cloud of dust. She swore in Italian, a word that Lizzie had often heard Jackie use.
The stream of light that burst in from the courtyard turned the ghosts around the room into chairs and tables, whose forms could now be seen beneath their coverings. The shape of the sarcophagus was unmistakable under an incongruous linen tablecloth patterned with green vines and yellow flowers. It lay on its back against the wall opposite the courtyard window and as Lizzie walked over to it, Pina joined her.
“I assume you have seen it before,” Lizzie said.
“Once,” Pina said. “I was just a little girl and it was still in the library. I put my hand on it and Uncle Patrizio screamed at me not to touch it and I never did again.”
They pulled back one end to reveal the face, carved and painted on the lid of the sarcophagus. The eyes were large, with big black pupils against the bright whites of the eyes. A black line surrounded each eye and fine eyebrows were painted above them. The face was beautifully carved; all the features but the eyes and eyebrows were left unpainted and the wood was of a color that could represent the skin of an Egyptian, light brown with a golden undertone. Across the forehead and tucked behind the ears a wig of tiny braids was carved to cover the head. The protective wings of Isis came down around the face and three lotus blossoms hung like a crown, painted in gold, green and red over the dark black plaits of the hair.
