Sheila Connolly - Reunion with Death

by Sheila Connolly

  Since the recumbent damsel bore no wounds and hadn’t been whacked on the head (unless I’d missed it), someone declared that she had been poisoned by someone at the table. It also turned out that the baby was really a pillow, and that was part of a grand scheme to usurp something from someone, which apparently someone else thought was worth killing for. I wondered if this had made sense on paper, because it didn’t make much sense to me. The murderer finally revealed himself: he declaimed for several minutes, explaining everything (only partially audibly), and then all the cast, including the dead ones, stood up and bowed to raucous applause from the audience. And a good time was had by all.

  But it wasn’t finished yet. One member of the audience, Rebecca, whom I vaguely recalled was a drama critic in the real world, stood up and gave a blow-by-blow analysis of the performance—tongue in cheek, of course—that had many in the room laughing helplessly, including the dead count, who had rejoined the party.

  The evening wound down until Jean (not Jane) reminded us that we were catching an early train to Florence in the morning and probably needed our rest. That occasioned another toast to the now-tipsy players. Finally we straggled out into the cool night air and Cynthia and I made for our room.

  “That was fun,” Cynthia said. It was too dark to tell if she was being sarcastic, and I was watching the path in front of us.

  “Well, it was something,” I said.

  “Oh, lighten up, Laura—everybody had a good time. Isn’t that what matters? I for one think it’s refreshing to see our gang acting silly. There’s not enough silly going around these days.”

  “If you say so. I think there were a few plot holes.”

  “Of course there were. So what?”

  We arrived at our door. I sighed. “You know, Cyn, I miss having you around to keep me silly. Sometimes I bore myself.”

  “I’ll keep trying. To be fair, I thought the playwrights did a good job of catching the flavor of the era—lots of intrigue, and people pretending to be something they weren’t.”

  “Don’t forget the murders, plural.”

  “Well, that went on too. Why the two, I wonder?”

  “Well, if I understood it, maybe, the baby that didn’t exist was supposed to be the heir to the count’s riches and worldly goods, which means that the pillow stood to inherit a fortune. Wonder how they would have handled that a few months down the line when no baby appeared?”

  “So who killed her? I mean, she was killed, right? She didn’t die of a stroke or heart attack or the vapors?”

  I squinted at Cynthia. “Do the vapors kill? No, don’t answer that. I think somebody fed her belladonna, although from what I’ve heard, the dying part of belladonna poisoning takes more than a minute or two and is a lot messier. You know, vomiting and stuff.”

  “Hard to stage, on short notice. Consider it artistic license: she was poisoned. So who slipped it to her?”

  “Either the count’s son—there was a son there, wasn’t there?—or his faithful servant, or somebody he paid to do it to throw us all off course. Which worked very well.”

  “So who killed the count, outside?”

  “Uhh …” For the life of me I couldn’t come up with an explanation.

  Cynthia laughed at my confusion. “Oh, come on—admit you enjoyed it.”

  “Kind of. It was fun watching the actors enjoy themselves. I didn’t expect it from a few of the people up there.”

  “People can change over time. And fun never gets old. What’s the agenda for tomorrow?”

  “Firenze,” I said, rolling the syllables on my tongue. “I haven’t been there since right after my senior year. I always thought I’d go back, but then life kind of happened.”

  “I know what you mean. I haven’t done half as much traveling—I mean as a tourist, not just for business—as I always thought I would. I was in Florence once too. What I remember is the Duomo, which you could see from everywhere. The Ponte Vecchio and the goldsmiths there. A place that made incredible lasagna …”

  “You don’t remember the museums?” I asked.

  Cynthia smiled. “I remember them as being very large, with lots of art hanging everywhere, most of which was boring. Oh, sure, there were a few high points, but beyond that I was hot and my feet hurt.”

  “Sounds like the Uffizi,” I said. “It’s huge. You kind of have to pace yourself and not try to look at everything. If you don’t, you burn out fast and then you miss the good stuff.”

  “Now you tell me. I don’t know how many museums I can take tomorrow. I may just find a table out of the sun and a cool drink, and sit and watch the world go by.”

  It sounded like a nice idea, but I thought I owed it to the former me to visit old friends—Botticelli, Bronzino, Michelangelo—and see if they still meant anything to me. “Dibs on the first shower.”

  And so we settled in for the night, with a busy day ahead of us.

  Chapter 6

  I awoke before Cynthia again the next morning and lay there fuming at myself. Why couldn’t my body take advantage of this rare opportunity to sleep late? And if I couldn’t sleep, what was I supposed to do with my time? Read? It seemed wrong to travel all the way to Italy to read a book that I could read at home. If I practiced yoga this would be a good time to do that, but I’d never taken it up. A stroll around the grounds? Maybe. There were parts I hadn’t seen, like a swimming pool someone had mentioned. I could go study an olive tree or a grapevine up close. There was said to be a church dedicated to a local martyr—St. Cresci, was it?—at the top of the hill beyond; he’d achieved his status when somebody cut his head off.

  Mostly I wished there was a way to get a cup of coffee without disrupting the staff’s preparations for our breakfast. At least today the time for breakfast had been moved up to seven thirty so we could all shuttle to the nearest train station and catch an early train to Florence, where we had a marathon day ahead of us. I was glad we didn’t have to drive into the city, at least on behalf of the drivers.

  All right, I was looking forward to it, and Cynthia’s scoffing the night before had made me see that. Sure, I’d done the museum thing in my distant academic youth, but I was looking forward to seeing some things again, with forty years’ worth of experience and wisdom to temper my views. What I wasn’t looking forward to was wading through crowds of tourists, and June was prime time for them. But as I remembered it, one could escape the masses by taking small side streets—the ones with no museums or historic monuments lurking on every corner. Florence oozed history in every alleyway, so peace and calm were hard to find.

  The queue at the coffeepots wasn’t as long today since people had figured out that there was plenty to go around, and they arrived at different times. Nor did the servers mind if we showed up early, bless them. No croissants, though. People were a bit more subdued today, as though saving their strength to tackle the city. Or absorbing as much caffeine as possible in a short time.

  The weather looked unpromising, spitting rain, but I chose to believe that it would be better in Florence, which lay … somewhere. Inland, I was pretty sure. Maybe south? After breakfast we caravanned to the train station, where Jane and Jean handed out individual tickets. We filed onto a train car and grabbed seats, taking up most of a train car and no doubt terrifying the local population (well, not the teenagers, who regarded us mainly as an impediment to plugging in their cell phones and music players). We emerged into the San Lorenzo station in Florence after a fairly short ride and huddled together like a flock of sheep, getting our bearings, until Jean and Jane gathered us up and marched us toward an exit. Then we survived crossing several streets while dodging cars and buses and trooped to our first stop, the monastery of San Marco. The rain had almost, sort of stopped, which was a good omen.

  This stop was the one I had most looked forward to, since the one time I had visited Florence, long, long ago, San Marco had been closed for renovations, so I had never experienced the Fra Angelico frescos firsthand. As somebody in the group m
uttered as we roamed through the monastic hallways, it was like viewing every religious holiday card you’d ever seen, all in one place. I happily admitted that a lot of the images looked familiar, but that was fine with me. What I hadn’t realized was that each monk’s cell had its own small fresco, either by the hand of the master or overseen by him. I wondered if there had been any competition among novices for the “best” pictures—and then I wondered which one I would have schemed for. It was a pleasant way to pass the time, and luckily the place was not too crowded early in the day. It was beginning to fill with groups of students by the time we were ready to leave.

  Then on to the Bargello, which housed a lot of sculptures by Big Names like Michelangelo. It was nice because the place wasn’t too huge—which I knew the next stop, the Uffizi, was. In the Bargello one could enjoy the artworks up close and personal: no Plexiglas or velvet ropes, and the guards didn’t appear terribly concerned that we were breathing on their precious marbles and bronzes. And breathe on them we could have, but we were appropriately respectful, as befit Wellesley Women. It was intriguing to learn that on one famous Michelangelo tondo the man himself had finished the face of the Virgin, leaving the surface so creamy that I wanted to reach out and touch it, while only roughing out the rest. That kind of detail never showed up in textbooks on art history. You had to be standing in front of it, at eye level, to grasp the nuances. When I’d been here all those years ago, had I done no more than run through the museum and tick off the Important Works on my checklist, without taking the time to really look at them? How sad for the earlier me.

  I’ve always had a sneaking fondness for looking at famous works from unlikely angles (irreverently wondering, what did they do for underwear?). No, I was not searching for whatever hid behind the fig leaf (not that there were many fig leaves in the Renaissance, those came later), but I thought seeing a piece of sculpture from an unusual direction conveyed a lot about the artist. My brilliant observations: most sculptures with feet had a long middle toe, and the sandals they wore would have been useless on a long march; most of the armor depicted would have impeded engaging in a battle of any sort, or even movement. And I still loved the flowered hat on Donatello’s David, which, the guidebook reminded me, the artist had modeled upon an antique sculpture of the emperor Hadrian’s pubescent male lover. Another note said that this had been the first free-standing bronze sculpture of the Renaissance. If that was true, then Donatello had done a damn fine job of it. Whatever the inspiration, the statue was a delight, and I spent quite a few minutes admiring the lovely young man from all sides, even taking note of a discovery made since my long-ago art historical days: David had tasteful golden highlights in his hair. Very nice.

  Emerging from the relative cool and quiet of the Bargello, we were dismissed to find food and entertain ourselves until our scheduled tour of the Uffizi a couple of hours later. I looked at a pair of the nearest women, Christine and Rebecca, both of whom I’d known slightly in college. We’d spoken now and then at reunions on campus, and I said, “Food?”

  They nodded vigorously, and then Rebecca, with a wicked gleam in her eye, replied, “Gelato.”

  I grinned at her: a sister under the skin. The heck with art—we were hungry.

  It was rapidly becoming clear that if you drop forty women of a certain age into one of the great cities of the world, they will shop—after they’ve found a bathroom. And they will eat, no matter how hard they might diet at home.

  The three of us found a small hole-in-the-wall lunch place with no other Americans in it and ate salami sandwiches and scarfed down bottled water. Then we set off on a gelato quest, led in theory by Rebecca, who had fond memories of an incredible gelateria somewhere in the small streets to the east of the Duomo. Finding it proved to be a challenge. Let it be said that having a purpose, whether it is tracking down Michelangelo’s David or the perfect gelato, is a good thing, because often it takes you places you might not otherwise go (if you don’t get run down by a moped on the street). On the other hand, if you and your companions are directionally challenged, you may see the same place more than once as you wander through the twisting streets. Even asking for directions in our broken Italian didn’t help, and we kept finding ourselves going in circles when we tried to follow what we thought were the directions we’d been given. But in the end we found a magnificent gelateria called Vivoli, which lived up to its reputation. We spent an appropriate amount of time deciding how much to ask for and which flavors, then sat on a bench across the street from it and concentrated on the gelato. It was worth the hunt. And then it was time to go find our museum-bound group once again. At least now we knew the way.

  Touring the Uffizi is like jumping into the ocean. You know there’s a lot there, but you also know you’re never going to see most of it—you’re only dipping a toe in. It is vast, but you can’t just hug the shore. There are incredible artworks clustered there, if you can find them. And if you can even focus your eyes after the first fifty or so rooms. The only moment that really stood out for me was finding an empty seat facing both The Birth of Venus and Primavera by Botticelli, and claiming it until the crowds of tourists parted long enough that I could actually see the paintings. I was glad I had waited. The famous Venus was a bit wispy, but Primavera was a babe to be reckoned with. I decided I liked Primavera better.

  We shopped our way through the hordes of street vendors selling everything from knockoff suitcases to tomato seeds, back to the train station, collecting souvenir scarves and hats and postcards we’d never send, and then we gathered ourselves together inside the station, where jazz wafted from invisible speakers—or maybe from live musicians in a corner somewhere. We boarded our train without losing anyone. We were surfeited and sated by great art and bargains. All in all, a good day.

  Dinner that evening was a somewhat subdued affair. We were, of course, all tired to some degree from trekking from one end of Florence to the other, plus the novelty of the trip had worn off and we were settling into our own rhythms. Happily the groupings kept shifting, so it was possible to spend time talking to people I didn’t know well. Cynthia rambled off to one end of the room and sat down at the long table there; I found a smaller table and sat and was quickly joined by two people I hadn’t spent any time with yet, Denise and Sharon, and then a couple more. We broke the ice by sharing our happy discoveries from the day and then speculating about what was to come.

  “I’m glad tomorrow will be quieter,” Denise said. “I think we’re touring some local workshops, which should be fun.”

  “More shopping?” I said. “Florence wasn’t enough? Oh, did anyone make it to the goldsmiths?” I felt a bit wistful: I’d been looking forward to seeing their wares, on the venerable Ponte Vecchio, even though I knew they were well beyond my budget.

  “Hey,” Sharon protested, “all my family demanded that I bring them souvenirs—some even gave me specific orders. But I admit that once I got to the Ponte Vecchio, I had to indulge myself. See?” She reached under her collar and pulled out a lovely pendant on a gossamer gold chain, and I had to sit hard on my jealousy.

  “What about the rest of you?” I countered. “What single thing would you like to take back to remind you of this trip and what you’ve seen?” I looked at my companions. “Don’t be shy.”

  The other women tossed out suggestions and balked at the idea of “only one thing.” We weren’t even halfway through the trip; who knew what other wonders we would see and want to remember? And, of course, would spending money on souvenirs help us do that?

  “We don’t have to decide right now, do we?” Denise said. “There’s plenty of time. I’m looking forward to a little downtime tomorrow afternoon. We have to pace ourselves, because there’s lots more coming.”

  “Don’t forget the lecture at four, when we get back,” I reminded them.

  “Oh. Right.” Denise was suddenly very busy cutting up her pasta.

  Again, I sensed a curious hesitation. A couple of people at the table exchan
ged glances; others carefully avoided looking at anyone else. This was odd. “Did any of you take a course from Professor Gilbert?” I asked.

  “One, my freshman year,” Sharon admitted. “Distribution requirements, remember? Besides, he was hot. Although that’s not the term we would have used then. Cute? Dishy?”

  “You don’t remember him, Laura?” Denise asked. “He must have been in his thirties then, which was young for a professor. Tall, good-looking. And he had charm, however you define that.”

  “What was his specialty?”

  “Renaissance poetry, if I recall—it’s been a while. I think the course I took was on Dante. Wonder if he’ll be giving the same lecture? After all, this is Dante country, isn’t it?”

  “My freshman roommate took a course from him, second semester,” Connie muttered. “He might have been a hunk, but he could be scathing with his criticism. She never took another humanities class after he ripped apart her term paper in front of the whole class.”

  “I heard stories …” Sharon began. “No, I won’t go there. There were lots of stories floating around back in those days, and not all of them were true. It should be interesting to see him again. He must be, what, seventy-something by now?”

  “Wonder if he’s an old or a young seventy-something?” Denise asked.

  “Wonder if he’s got a wife, and if she’ll come along to keep an eye on him,” Sharon retorted, her eyes gleaming.

  “A much younger wife?” Denise said, raising an eyebrow.