by Jane Langton
At Mrs. Wellesley’s firm request, Sam always called his mother-in-law by her first name. Ursula too was supposed to call her grandmother Dorothea, but she never did. She never called her anything.
“The word grandmother is so old-fashioned,” explained Mrs. Wellesley. But it wasn’t really a matter of language, it was simply that she couldn’t bear to be thought of as an old lady. Certainly not as una nonna, an Italian grandmother. If Ursula were to call her Grandma, people might think she was no longer a young and vibrant woman.
Dorothea didn’t tell herself this in so many words. To Sam her lack of an honest connection with her own brain was the whole trouble. The most boring thing about his exquisitely boring mother-in-law was her everlasting unconscious untruthfulness.
Could it have been Dorothea who had entered his study and committed this vile atrocity? After all, she was even more of an iconoclast than he was himself. She might very well have thought it a cleansing act to destroy this remnant of barbarous superstition. Sam cursed his mother-in-law under his breath, wondering how a woman of such extreme respectability could be so violent.
He knocked on her door and confronted her just as she was picking up her alligator bag to go out. “Dorothea,” he said sternly, “have you been in my study?”
She looked at him slyly. There was a slight pause, and then she said, “Of course not. How could I? The door is locked.”
He jumped at the truth. “You have a key, don’t you? You have a key to that room.”
“Well, of course I don’t have a key. How can you accuse me of such a thing, your own mother-in-law?”
“Because somebody opened that door.” Sam was so angry he didn’t care what he said. “How do I know it wasn’t you?”
It was no use. Dorothea Wellesley had an ace in the hole, and it was better than the ace of clubs, the ace of diamonds, the ace of hearts, or the ace of spaces. It trumped every other card in the deck. It was the ace of gold. She simply had a fit.
Sam had seen her fits before. The scene—Dorothea Wellesley having a fit—was familiar and deadly dull. He watched as she threw herself on her bed and gasped between sobs, “How can you say a thing like that to me, me, the mother of your own dead wife, whom you drove into the grave?”
Frustrated, Sam waited. At last he said loudly over the noisy gulping floods of tears, “Well, have there been any strangers in the house? Could someone else have broken in?”
The tears stopped at once. His mother-in-law sat up, sniffling, and said craftily, “Yes. A plumber. There was a plumber here, fixing the sink.”
“Which sink?”
“The kitchen sink. It was plugged up.”
Oh, of course, thought Sam, it would be a plumber. There was always a plumber. “You called him? What company was it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t pay much attention. He was in the phone book.”
Without a word Sam turned away to find the Pagine Gialle and brought it back into her room. He stood over her, flipping the pages, and asked a clever question. “What did you look under? How did you find the list of plumbers in the phone book?”
He had played his ace. Dorothea Wellesley knew little Italian, although she had been married to an Italian and had lived here for years. Sam knew she could never have found a plumber under the word Idraulici.
But his ace, as usual, was only the ace of spades. Hers was the usual stupefying ace of gold. Flopping back on the sofa, she began to howl.
CHAPTER 29
Homer Kelly sat in the Rare Book Room on the ground floor of the Marciana, where precious books could be examined by serious scholars. He had been given the freedom of this room with the benevolent permission of his friend Samuele Bell, although serious purpose had he none.
It was like a vacation in the South Seas. The overhead lights were the tropical sun, the librarians grass-skirted dancers, the books themselves a feast of roast pig and pineapple. Utterly vanished was the New England landscape that Homer cherished in Concord, the woods and fields of Henry Thoreau, the cold skies that had dropped such transcendental eloquence on the head of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
All that was far away and—could it be?—a little pinched and dry, compared to the wreathed and garlanded riches of the Italian Renaissance. Homer could almost taste the humanist greed of Cardinal Bessarion as he called for the manufacture of yet another codex in Latin or Greek, another Aristotle or Saint Jerome.
Well, it was heaven. Whenever Homer’s eyes began to close and he drooped over a beautiful vellum page, he could walk outside to the arcade to watch people threading their way on wooden planks across the pond that was the Piazzetta. Or he could gaze at the staggering view of the lagoon, with San Giorgio Maggiore emerging from the sea like a temple in a dream, and there below the Molo the massed gondolas and the lumbering vaporetti.
This morning he saw a wedding gondola spread with a golden cloth, the bride’s dress foaming out of the fairy vessel like a flower.
“The embarkation for Cythera,” murmured Homer, going back indoors, enchanted, unconscious of Sam Bell’s wistful dream about a pink-sailed cockleshell that would bear him away to a Cytherean bower with the missing procurator of San Marco, Lucia Constanza.
“Cosa?” said the librarian.
“Niente. Mi scusi,” whispered Homer, going back to his place at the table.
Today he was bowed over a volume containing the first five books of the Bible. Was it in Hebrew? There were three columns, each in a different hand, all of them hard to decipher.
When Sam touched his shoulder, Homer looked up blindly and said, “I don’t understand this at all. Is it Hebrew?”
Sam glanced at the open page and murmured, “The Pentateuch. It’s in three languages, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. It’s the first five books of the Bible, bound backward like a Hebrew Torah. Deuteronomy comes first, Genesis last.” Sam grasped Homer’s coat sleeve and hissed in his ear, “Listen to me, Homer. Can you put this aside for now?”
Homer came to his senses and saw his friend’s face clearly. At once he pushed back his chair and whispered, “What’s the matter? “Together they went outside and walked along the arcade in a flood of French teenagers. “Allons y!” cried the tour guide, holding aloft her umbrella and waving her charges out onto a path of planks leading to San Marco. Some of them merely stepped down into the water, shrieking with laughter.
The tide was ebbing. The next high water was ten hours away. Homer was starving. “What about lunch?” he said. “But, good God, not here.”
“No, of course not here,” said Sam, and they swept past the little tables of Florian’s, where last week Homer had paid six dollars for a cup of cappuccino.
There’s a good place across the Rialto Bridge,” said Sam. “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
To Homer Kelly, Dottor Samuele Bell was half an enigma. He understood the Bell part all right, the American part, but the Italian part was beyond his grasp. It was clear that Sam was contemptuous of fools. Was that an Italian quality? If so, there was nothing wrong with it. Someone had once told Homer that Italians were a melancholy race—jolly on the surface but gloomy within. Like most generalizations it was probably a lot of bull.
Together they walked quickly to the Rialto Bridge. Halfway up the long staircase Sam stopped to rest, and they leaned over the stone railing and looked down. Below them on the Grand Canal there was a traffic jam. A grubby working boat with a hydraulic lift was crowding a neatly painted craft heading for the Hotel Gritti with a delectable freight of shellfish and fruit. There were cries of Attenzione! A crate of grapes tipped into the water. The man at the tiller shouted obscenities, Vaffanculo! Porca puttana! and a fishing boat loaded with mussels swerved away in a wide arc.
They turned away from the spectacle and kept on climbing. At the crest of the bridge Homer wondered if he himself had two sides like Sam. It was true that his famous cheerfulness was sometimes only a skim over misery, but usually a healthy optimism prevailed.
“Whoops!” Homer
apologized for cannoning into an American girl who had stopped cold in front of him to look at a guidebook, and then he hurried after Sam past the fruit and vegetable stands in the narrow street below the bridge. Beyond the blackberries and grapes he could smell the rich aroma of the fish market, and catch a glimpse of men scooping ice over heaps of calamari and eels, and hear the hoarse cry of Gamberetti! Cozze! Scampi!
“Sam, wait for me!” shouted Homer, but he was wedged against a counter of glass baubles from the island of Murano. Nobody was buying glass goldfish. Homer was amused to see the young proprietor talking loudly into a cell phone.
“Hey, look at that kid!” shouted Homer, trying to catch up with Sam. “Those little phones are everywhere.”
“I know,” said Sam, looking back. “Everybody wants to—what do you call it?—show off with a telefonino.” He was trying to lead the way into a broad intersection, but it was almost impossible to squeeze through crowds of tourists buying carnival masks like suns and moons and funny hats with checkers and stripes.
Homer shuffled after him, looking at the greedy smiling faces of his American compatriots, wondering if callow cheerfulness was a general American trait. If so, then he was ashamed for his fellow citizens and ashamed for himself. In the face of the troubles of the world, surely cheerfulness was an infantile attitude.
But in the crowded interior of the Cantina do Spade cheerfulness prevailed. Sam and Homer settled down at a small table and Homer looked eagerly at the menu.
Sam was not interested in food. He began talking quickly, leaning forward across the table, his face a mask of misery, and at once Homer was confronted with the enigmatically Italian part of Samuele Bell. He listened with horrified sympathy as Sam told him about the smashed reliquary.
“All I want is to get the relic back,” said Sam. “The broken crystal can be repaired. I know a craftsman who can do it. But I can’t just whittle another piece of wood to replace the relic that the Scuola has been so proud of for the last five hundred years.”
Homer tried to focus his attention on Sam’s problem, but he couldn’t help looking around and taking pleasure in his surroundings. Dreamily he said, “Byron is supposed to have liked this place.”
Sam said despairingly, “Think of the impossibility of finding a few chips of wood in this labyrinth of a city. Probably they’ve been thrown in the trash already, or dropped into a canal.”
Homer tried to sound hopeful. “What if somebody stole them as miracle-working pieces of the True Cross? Is there a marketplace for relics? A dealer in miracles? Hey, you’re not eating your lunch. Drink up your wine.”
Sam smiled. “Sorry, Homer.” He stirred the pasta on his plate. “And there’s another thing.”
Homer wound fettuccine around his fork and said, “Another thing?”
“Dottoressa Costanza is still missing and the polizia aren’t getting anywhere. The carabinieri haven’t found her either.”
“Dottoressa Costanza? Oh, you mean that woman who killed her husband? The one who ran away with a priceless work of art?”
Sam’s fork clattered to the floor. “She didn’t kill her husband. That’s a lie.”
“Well, okay.” Homer looked at Sam apologetically and blundered on. “I read in the paper that the murder weapon was covered with her fingerprints. And she obviously packed up in a hurry because her suitcases were missing and half her clothes were scattered all over the floor. And—you’ll admit, Sam, that this is pretty damning—she took all her savings out of the bank on the day before his death. And, look here, why would she run away if she didn’t do it?”
Sam stared sullenly at his plate. “I don’t know, I just know she didn’t.” He looked up fiercely at Homer. “And she didn’t take that little seventeenth-century bronze piece either.”
“What makes you think that?”
Sam thumped his fist on the table. “It was that bastard Bernardi, her so-called assistant. When she disappeared, he saw his chance.”
“Oh, yes, I remember.” Homer laughed. “You told me about him. He’s a charter member of your two societies. Both a bore and a bastard, right, Sam? Well, bully for him.”
CHAPTER 30
“Signora!” The proprietor of the tabacchi on the corner of Salizada del Pignater was hailing her, leaning out of his shop door. Outside the bar the men of the neighborhood were gathered in a convivial cluster, drinking and smoking. In the bakery the window was full of fancy flat cakes for Saint Martin’s Day—Saint Martin and his horse were covered with gumdrops.
Mary stopped, and said, “Si?”
“Le vostre folo sono pronte.”
“Bene! Grazie, signore.”
Mary paid for her fat packets of prints and dropped them in her canvas bag. She didn’t have time to look at them now. She was on her way to the vaporetto stop on the Riva to meet Richard Visconti. They were planning to spend the day in Murano. After watching a demonstration of glassblowing in the morning, they would look for a place to have lunch. This time she would insist on paying for her own meal.
Of course when the time came, Richard wouldn’t hear of such a thing. And then to her embarrassment he bought her a pair of handblown earrings in one of the shops. Most of the things on sale were large and hideous glass objects, but the earrings were lovely twisted bobbles of blown glass. She put them on at once.
He looked at her and then said quietly, “Bellissima,” and with a simple gesture took her hand.
It would have been ungrateful to pull it away. And besides—Mary didn’t say this to herself, but it was true—she liked his warm clasp, and the sense of something velvety and gentle in the air around them, moving with them as they walked back to the vaporetto stop.
When they disembarked on the Riva degli Schiavoni, she murmured good-bye and walked quickly away, feeling his gaze upon her back. As soon as she turned into the narrow Calle del Dose, she pulled off the earrings and dropped them in her bag.
Homer greeted her with a complaint. “Where were you? You’ve been gone all day.”
“I went to Murano,” said Mary. “You know, the place where they blow glass. You take a vaporetto, and there you are. It was terribly interesting, Homer. Oh, and look.” She rummaged in her bag and brought out her packets of prints. “I haven’t looked at them yet.”
She was disappointed. They weren’t very good. “It’s my cheap camera. It must have a really bad lens.”
“They look all right to me,” said Homer, riffling through one of the packets. He stopped and plucked out a picture. “Who’s this?”
“Who do you mean?” Mary looked at it and winced. She had forgotten the picture she had taken of Richard last week in front of a pretty bridge in San Polo. “Oh, I don’t know. I strike up conversations with locals all the time.”
“This one seems to be carrying your jacket.” Homer gave her a questioning look. “And isn’t that your bag?”
“Well, of course. He was holding them for me. You know, while I took his picture.”
Homer looked at her gravely. “Ah, I see.”
Later, running through the pictures again by herself, trying to label them on the back, she couldn’t remember what half of them were. Shuffling through them quickly, she mixed up the first batch with the fifth, and the fourth with the second. When she came upon Richard’s picture again, she looked at it for a long time, feeling a quickening of her pulse. She had always been impervious to the handsomeness of film stars, but Richard’s face was something else again. Oh, those little crinkles at the corners of his eyes.
For the first time Mary felt a twinge of shame. She was aware that her feeling for Richard Visconti was beginning to rage out of control. Removing his photograph from the rest, she slipped it between a couple of heavy sweaters in the bottom drawer of her dresser.
Then she spread out the other pictures on the bed and made a selection. The rejected ones she put away, along with the negatives. Afterward she couldn’t find them. She remembered exactly where Richard’s picture was because she kept
taking it out and putting it back, but she couldn’t remember where to find the fuzzy picture of a shop window somewhere in San Polo or a miscellaneous bridge that might be anywhere or a random palace somewhere along the Grand Canal.
Her pictures were not sharp and the colors were poor, but Ursula liked them. She leaned against Mary and beamed at the glossy photograph of pigeons eating from her hand in Piazza San Marco.
Her grandmother flipped through them quickly, looking for the picture of herself. “It isn’t here,” she said, disappointed.
“Oh, there are more.” Mary went to look for her second-best collection. Again she couldn’t find it. She couldn’t find the negatives. Where the hell were they? “I’m sorry, Dorothea,” she said, coming back empty-handed. “I’ll take another right now if you like.”
Mrs. Wellesley went off to arrange her hair, and Mary showed Ursula an out-of-focus shot of a church blanketed in white marble statuary. “Do you know which one this is? I’ve got them all mixed up.” Ursula shook her head. “Oh, well, I’ll ask your father. He’ll know right away.”
CHAPTER 31
Next day Homer told Mary in confidence about Sam’s ghastly trouble—the theft of a couple of relics and the smashing of the borrowed reliquary. “The poor man doesn’t know what to do. He’s beside himself.”
“Well, no wonder. How terrible! Who could have done such a thing?”
“Who knows? Somebody must have a key.” Homer sank his voice to a whisper. “Sam suspects his mother-in-law. She’s Savonarola in reverse.”
“You mean—?”
“Instead of burning vanities like fancy clothes and jewelry, she’d like to burn the Bible.”
“I see.” Mary laughed. “Look, why don’t we take him out to dinner? I’ll bring along my pictures, and he can tell me which is which.”