The Girl in the Glass

by Susan Meissner

  “What a terrible way to die,” I whispered.

  She cocked her head. “I’ve never thought of them that way. I’ve always thought that was a terrible way to live.”

  I was so appalled by the Prisoners that I hadn’t looked ahead of us as we walked.

  “Marguerite,” Sofia was saying gently.

  I turned and the seventeen-foot statue was before me, white like snow under moonlight and shining with his sinewy legs, tensed arms, a full chest of air, and pulsing veins in his neck. His skin looked warm and soft. His Adam’s apple seemed to bob after a swallow. He was a giant of a man about to slay a giant, with the sling nearly swaying behind his back. I staggered back a step, and Sofia reached to steady me, as I am sure she has done with others a thousand times before.

  “No one was meant to see him this close,” she murmured to me, the way a mother might say to a child, “It’s okay, it was just a dream.”

  She patted my arm. “He was meant to be atop the roof of the cathedral. But the statue was too heavy. You weren’t meant to be this close to him. This is why you stagger. Why everyone does.”

  Sofia took my arm, and slowly we made the circle around the pedestal. I was vaguely aware of other people in the room, some standing in awe, some reading their guidebooks, giving their eyes a momentary rest from the magnificence in front of them. I was also only slightly aware that the statue in front of me, clearly portraying a young man about to kill a giant, hadn’t a stitch of clothes on. I was transfixed by its perfection no matter where I looked. And I shivered as I saw that the statue’s expression seemed to change as my angle of vision changed. Courageous. Then hesitant. Then calculating. Then determined. And then courageous again.

  “Michelangelo was only twenty-six when he took this commission,” Sofia said. “The marble had been sitting in a courtyard for twenty-five years after several ill-inspired attempts to hew something out of it. It’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s facing Rome! How’s that for attitude?”

  I appreciated the comic relief and smiled. “What did you think when you first saw it?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t remember the first time I saw it. Papa brought me here from the time I was little.” She looked up at the statue. “I have always known him.”

  The next question out of my mouth fell away from me without forethought or reason. “Do you hear Nora’s voice in here?”

  “Sometimes it seems like I can hear her saying my name in here. Just that. Just my name. Or maybe it’s the statue itself saying my name. This is the one place where I’m not sure if it’s Nora I hear or something or someone else.”

  “Do … do you hear it right now?”

  She tipped her head, unfazed by my question. “Not today.”

  I knew we would be heading back out onto the street and my grand moment with the statue would be over. I stood as close as I could and looked up at his face, high above me. I opened my mouth, not caring who heard me or what anyone would think.

  “Hello, my name is Meg. I mean, Marguerite. Marguerite. That’s my name.”

  A few people next to me whispered to one another, but I didn’t care.

  I just wanted that statue, if indeed it were even remotely possible that it had a soul, to know my name.

  My mother loved Carnival. In the gallery of my mind, in one of the images I have of her, she is dressed in Carnival regalia, as beautiful as a fairy princess—all glitter and diamonds and feathers. She is showing me her dress in this memory, and I am asking her if I can come with her to the theater where she has staged a play. She is bending down to place an errant, downy feather on my head. Then she kisses me and says, “When you are older, Nora.” And I ask her if I can have a dress just like that one, and she says, “You can have this one. I’ll save it for you.”

  I never saw the dress again. I looked. I asked. But by the time I asked about it, several years had passed since I had last seen it. No one knew which dress it was. She had many beautiful dresses, and they’d been given away or sold. I only wanted that one because she twirled in that dress when I asked her to. She hummed a little tune, and it made me laugh.

  She also loved music. There is a painting of her holding a piece of sheet music that looks very much like the portrait of her in her wedding dress. But there is no little dog in this one. It soothes me to know she loved music and that she staged concerts and plays at her villa and the palace, even though she did not play for me. Music is the language of the soul. Music captures our prayers and hopes and joys—and yes, our sorrows—and gives them voice, just as the paintings and the statues give them dimension.

  Nurse told me my mother was fond of games too.

  Her face was sad when she said this, as if she wished to warn me that some games are too dangerous to be played. I understand now that unlike music and art, games do not give voice and dimension to our dreams and desires. Games exist to make sport of them, for our entertainment. Games produce victors.

  And wherever there is a winner, there is by necessity, the one who lost.

  18

  Sofia and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the Duomo. She encouraged me to climb the stairs to the top to see Florence from the sky above it.

  “You don’t want to come with me?” I asked her as we made our way to the northern exterior of the basilica.

  Sofia shook her head. “The underside of the Duomo is beautifully painted, but Vasari’s fresco of The Last Judgment is too much for me. I know people deserve what they get for the terrible things they do against God and one another, but I do not want to see it.” She leaned her head back and looked at the outside of the dome. “It gives me nightmares. I don’t go that close anymore.”

  She stood in line with me while I waited, sharing with me Brunelleschi’s genius in completing a dome no one believed was possible to build.

  The cathedral preceded the dome, of course. Arnolfo di Cambio designed the basilica, but the design for the cupola itself—the architectural term for the dome—was the subject of endless arguments. Arnolfo envisioned a cupola over the massive cathedral, but he could not come up with a way to execute the dome; there didn’t seem to be a way to build it with scaffolding. And there certainly was no way it could be built without it.

  A competition was arranged in 1418 so that masters all over Italy could propose a solution. Filippo Brunelleschi proposed raising a dome that wouldn’t need a centring, the wooden structure that arches are built upon and is removed upon completion. No one believed he could pull it off. Brunelleschi proposed that whoever could make an egg stand upright on a slab of marble should win the competition. No one could do it. Brunelleschi took the egg, brought it down on the marble hard enough to make the shell on the underside come up inside itself, distributing the weight between inside shell and outside shell. That was his proposal. A double cupola—an outside shell and an inside shell—indistinguishable unless you looked at the dome outside and then ran into the cathedral and compared what you saw. The exterior would appear bigger than its interior.

  Sofia said when Vasari wrote of how beautiful the Duomo was, he began with a list of its mathematical measurements.

  When the line I was in entered the building, Sofia waved good-bye to me and told me she would meet me outside by the Baptistery doors. There were people ahead of me and behind me, but I felt alone as I began to climb the 463 stairs that would take me to the top.

  There was no one I could comment to about the seemingly endless steps or the breathless exertion it took to burst out onto the top.

  As I stood looking over all of Florence, I felt invisible. I took some pictures, amazed by my view but unable to share that amazement with anyone. I saw a man and wife and their teenage daughters laughing and taking photos. They were British, or Australian, perhaps. And I was envious of what they were experiencing together. My father should have been standing there with me.

  A young couple, obviously in love, walked past me, cuddling each other as if it were a frigid forty degrees up there instead of a balmy seve
nty-something. My gaze fell again on the girls. One of them noticed me staring.

  It took me a moment to look away.

  She smiled at me. “Would you like me to take your picture for you?”

  Her kind offer surprised me and I hesitated.

  “Do you speak English?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do. Thanks. That’s very kind of you.”

  I handed her my camera.

  “Right, then,” she said, holding the camera up. Her family assembled around her to wait for her to take the shot.

  “That’s a great view, right there,” the other sister said. “Take mine next, Gemma.”

  She snapped the photo. “How about you smile on this next one?” I produced the commanded smile.

  “There’s a good one,” the mother said.

  “You a student here?” the dad said as his daughter handed my camera back to me.

  I am invisible here, is what first sprang to mind, but I reined it in. “Sort of. I do feel like I am supposed to be learning something while I’m here.” They all laughed. Then they waited for the real answer.

  “I work for a company that publishes travel books.” It wasn’t a lie by any stretch of the imagination, but I felt like I was deceiving them nonetheless.

  “Oh, how lucky you are,” said the daughter who had taken my picture. “To be able to travel the world like that.”

  Guess I had succeeded in deceiving them.

  “I actually don’t get to travel that often. Most of our authors don’t need us to come visit them. The Internet makes communicating internationally pretty easy.”

  “So you’re publishing a book on Florence, then?” the dad said.

  “Considering it.”

  “We love coming here,” the mum chimed in.

  “My favorite place too,” I said. I hoped the mother wouldn’t ask me how many times I had been. I’d been a hundred times in my mind.

  But she didn’t. They said good-bye and I thanked them for taking my picture. The daughter who wanted her picture taken where I had been standing got what she wanted, and then they headed for the stairs that would take them back to the pavement far below us.

  A few minutes later, when I was sure they were many steps ahead of me, I headed down as well.

  Sofia had been right about the fresco.

  From the floor of the cathedral, the spray of colors and scenery looked beautiful. Up close, the demons that reached for unrepentant souls were the size of swimming pools and clearly overly fond of their work.

  Some things you just aren’t meant to see that close.

  After I reunited with Sofia, she showed me the Baptistery doors—beautiful—and then I proceeded to try to take the cathedral’s photo from its front side. Again, not easy to do. The massive front of the basilica spills over every camera frame.

  Sofia leaned in close. “The bell tower was begun by Giotto in 1334. When he was being considered as its architect, the pope wished to know if he had the credentials to build it. He drew a perfect circle—freehand—and sent it to Rome. A perfect circle. That’s all he sent. He got the commission.”

  It was late afternoon when we started to walk back to her flat, but Sofia must have sensed I was getting weary and needed a pick-me-up.

  “Let’s get a cappuccino,” she said, and she led me down a few streets to another piazza where an ancient-looking church, plain and monochrome to me after having just seen the Duomo, dominated the view.

  “Basilica di San Lorenzo,” Sofia said, nodding toward it. “Very old. Consecrated by Saint Ambrose in 393. Brunelleschi made adaptations in 1423. There was supposed to be a marble facade added, but it never came about. Very pretty and peaceful inside, though.”

  We walked toward a café, and she told me to take a seat at one of the tables under an awning and she would be back with the cappuccino.

  A few minutes later, she returned with our drinks, and I sipped the frothy concoction, at once smitten with it.

  “I will never be able to be content with American coffee again,” I said, not even half-kidding.

  She laughed. Then her tone turned thoughtful. “I was in America once. In Maryland. My husband took me along for a business trip.”

  A dozen questions swirled about in my head. I didn’t know which one to ask first.

  “But your husband wasn’t American, right?”

  “British. I met him here, though. He was teaching a business class at the university. I was taking it.”

  “Love at first sight?” I asked gently, not sure if she would want to say more.

  She smiled the kind of smile you have for events that took you to the crucible but that you survived to tell about. “I don’t know what it was. I was simply drawn to him like a moth to a flame. And I couldn’t shake it. I thought that was love when I was young. But love isn’t like that. Desire is. Can be. But love is not like that. It is not obsessive and fearful. Papa tried to warn me. He could see that Thomas would break my heart. He saw it from the very beginning.”

  She paused and sipped from her cup. Her hand shook a little.

  “We don’t have to talk about this,” I said.

  “It’s all right. It was ages ago. I was young. Only twenty-four.” She looked beyond me to the ancient church she had shown me moments before. “He asked me to marry him inside San Lorenzo.”

  I said nothing. A second later she pulled her gaze away to focus on the cup in front of her. “He hadn’t asked my father first. If he had, Papa would’ve told him no. In a nice way, of course. Because Papa was always gracious to everyone. Even people who didn’t deserve grace. But Thomas and I both knew my father wouldn’t approve, and my mother was already sick with cancer by then. So I convinced myself that I would be doing them both a favor by eloping with Thomas. So that’s what I did. We went to Rome, got married, and I was Mrs. Thomas Burnside when I came back.”

  Sofia sighed, not loudly, but with effort, as if she needed extra oxygen to tell me the rest. “Papa wept when we returned. Not in front of Thomas, though. He was as civil as he could be to Thomas, but Thomas knew my father didn’t trust him. They barely talked to each other. I think my mother already knew the cancer would beat her, even though she lived another four years, so her reaction was quiet resignation. It was as if she knew she couldn’t undo what I had done. So what purpose was there in wishing she could? There are things you just can’t wish away, no matter how hard you try.”

  I nodded. I knew this to be true too.

  “I kept thinking at some point Thomas would want to return to England, not to live there because he told me he loved Italy, but to see his parents and his brothers. To introduce me to them. But he never wanted to go. I think he let me go to Maryland with him that one time to get me to stop asking him when we would go to England. And for a while I did stop.

  “After we’d been married for two years, I wanted a baby, but Thomas said no. We couldn’t afford one yet. We were living on the other side of the Arno, and I was still working for my father, though he spent much of his time caring for my mother. I would stop in and see them every Monday and Friday afternoon. Thomas and I were renting a flat, and he didn’t want to even talk about having children until we could buy our own place. In the country. So I started saving every lire I could get my hands on. I would take on extra tours, and I saved all my tips, thinking that if I could put away a small deposit, we could buy a little place and finally start a family.

  “We had been married four years when he said he had to make a business trip to Paris. He was gone for a month. When he got back, he told me he had really gone to England and that he had something to tell me. I thought he had a surprise for me. I thought he had bought a little house for us in England, and though I was sad to think of leaving Florence, I knew this meant we could finally have a baby. At last I would have a child, and I could be to that child what my parents had been to me. I would bring the baby to Florence for a visit, and maybe the baby would give my mother a reason to fight the cancer and she would get better. A baby would
change everything.

  “I thought of all of these things in just a handful of seconds. I was still thinking of them when he said he needed to tell me something he should’ve told me when he first met me. He looked troubled, and I put my hand out to caress his face, and he … he pulled away from my touch.”

  Sofia paused to gather some inner strength, and I used the quiet moment to seek some for myself to be able to hear what she was going to say. I knew it couldn’t be good.

  “He told me he was already married when he met me four years ago. That he had left his wife and infant son because he thought she had been cheating on him. And he took a teaching post here to get away from her and married me so that he could stay in Italy.” Twin bubbles of silvery tears peeked out of Sofia’s eyes, and she fingered them away. “But apparently she hadn’t cheated on him. She had somehow finally been able to convince him, and he realized he still loved her and that he wanted to be a father to the child he already had.

  “So he left me. And went back to England alone.”

  I felt hot tears at my own eyes, and I daubed them away with a napkin. “I’m so sorry that happened to you, Sofia.”

  She shook her head. “I was sorry too. Sorry enough to want to throw myself off Giotto’s bell tower. I knew I could probably have taken Thomas to court for having lied to me about his marriage. But I didn’t have the wits about me to be livid enough to do that; I was too full of anguish. I went back to my parents’ house, and Papa drew me into his arms and into the home I had grown up in. My mother was nearly gone by then, and when she understood what had happened to me, I think that was the thing that sent her skipping toward heaven, far away from this terrible planet. She died a week later.”

  By this time I was wiping my nose with my napkin and searching my purse for a clean Kleenex to replace it.