The Glass Butterfly

by Louise Marley

  There was nothing left to do. She went back into the kitchen, found a corkscrew in a drawer, nestled incongruously next to a hammer and a rusty screwdriver. She opened one of the bottles of wine and poured a generous glassful, then walked aimlessly into the living room to stand beside the picture window and look out at the ocean.

  She watched the gray waves swirl on the sand, and wondered if this was the moment it would all catch up with her, come roiling to the surface like those waves, to eat away at the ice that encased her. She sipped wine, and stared at the water. She didn’t feel anything, not even relief that she had a home, that she had a few things to comfort her, that no one could find her. She was used to missing Jack, of course. That shard of her broken life rested in its customary place, tucked just out of reach in the tidy closet of her mind.

  No, she felt nothing. Just a touch of surprise that she had pulled it off. Ice Woman.

  She ate baked fish and steamed vegetables for dinner, drank another glass of wine, and went to bed with one of the novels she had bought. The last thing she did before turning out the lamp was to touch the Murano paperweight, and wonder at the impulse that had made her put it in her pocket when she fled.

  4

  Forse come la rondine, migreró verso il mare,

  verso un chiaro paese di sogno, verso il sole!

  Perhaps like the swallow I will migrate toward the sea,

  toward a bright country of dreams, toward the sun!

  —Magda, La Rondine, Act One

  The heat that rolled in from the swampy shore of the lake was the sort to wilt starched collars and turn linen tablecloths as limp as dishrags. It was thick and damp, a weight of late-summer heat that oppressed everyone’s spirits. It made the villa seem cramped and crowded. The signora quarreled with the signore and snapped at the cook. Doria, the maid, dripped perspiration as she stood over her ironing board. Signor Puccini, with an irritated oath, stamped into his gun room, chose a shotgun from the rack, and strode away through the garden. His gun dogs rose from their kennel to follow him, but even they moved languidly, tails drooping in the heat. Doria, seeing, snatched up Puccini’s hat from the hook near the back door and ran after him into the garden.

  “Maestro!” she called, but softly. Elvira Puccini’s second-floor bedroom, with its small balcony and painted shutters, faced the garden, and the window was open to receive the breeze from the lake. “Maestro, the sun—you really must wear your hat!”

  Puccini had already gone out through the scrolled iron gate. He turned back, scowling, but his expression softened when he saw it was Doria trotting after him. He took a few steps back, raising one hand to show he had heard her. His field glasses hung around his neck on a leather cord, and he had put on his tall boots for tramping through the muck of the swamp. He reached across the gate and took the hat in his fine, strong fingers. “Doria,” he said. He shifted his ever-present cigarette to the other side of his mouth. Lines of anger still marked his cheeks, and his full lips pressed tight beneath his brush of mustache. He shook his head, as if with the movement he could shake off his fit of temper. “My little nurse! You’re the only one who stays calm in this weather.”

  “You must take care, maestro,” Doria said. She shook one small finger at him. “My mamma would scold you for not covering your head in this heat.”

  He grinned suddenly, showing strong teeth yellowed by smoke, and she smiled back at him. “I tell you, Doria,” he said, “I am deathly weary of being scolded by women. But since it’s you—” He made a small, ironic bow as he accepted the hat from her hands. “And out of deference to Signora Manfredi, I will certainly wear the hat.”

  Doria nodded, satisfied. He looked much more youthful when he smiled, and that pleased her. She bobbed a hasty curtsy before she picked up her skirt and dashed back into the house, hurrying lest her mistress glance out the window. She paused when she was safely inside, and stood in the music studio to watch through the zinc screen as Puccini shouldered his gun and turned toward the lake, the two shaggy dogs at his heels. The last thing he did before he disappeared from her sight was to tilt his hat at a jaunty angle. Doria chuckled, but her smile faded as she turned to resume her chores. The signore was always kind to her, and appreciated her efforts. The signora was another matter, but the signore didn’t seem to understand.

  She found the kitchen peaceful. Old Zita, unwrapping a ball of mozzarella on the wooden counter, whispered that the signora was lying down with a cold compress. That was a relief to them both.

  Elvira Puccini was famous for her temper, not only here in Torre del Lago, but in all the cities the Puccinis visited. The heat made her worse, of course. Indeed, the sweltering temperatures made everyone cross. The best way to manage Signora Puccini, in such a situation, was to stay out of her way. At least today she had vented her ire on her husband and not on her servants. It was something to be grateful for.

  Doria put away the ironing board, then fetched her bucket and rags from the cupboard, taking great care not to bang or drop anything. She dropped an extra dusting cloth into the front pocket of her pinafore apron before she went to clean the studio.

  The maestro’s studio was her favorite room in the house. She liked it even better than the bathroom, though she loved that, too, with its big white bathtub and a thick rug to step on when you climbed out. The bathroom of Villa Puccini had its own plumbing that delivered hot and cold water. It was nothing like being at her mother’s simple house, where a tin tub had to be carted into the kitchen once a week and filled with kettlefuls of water heated on the stove. Here in Villa Puccini, you simply turned the brass taps and waited in delicious idleness for the water to flow in.

  The studio, though, was the place where magic happened. In this room the maestro sat composing into the late hours, sometimes even right through the night. It was lovely, with windows facing the lake and walls covered with paintings of flowers in Florentine urns and lined with shelves full of books in Italian and French. The piano and the desk fitted together, so the composer could sit in his swivel chair, turning back and forth between the keyboard and the desk while he labored over his manuscripts and flicked ash from his cigarettes into a cut-glass ashtray.

  There had been friends with him last night, Father Michelucci, Alfredo Caselli, and the poet Pascoli, drinking and playing cards while the maestro worked. Glasses and empty bottles littered the card table. Doria carried those into the kitchen, and emptied the maestro’s ashtray. She dampened her dust rag, and began wiping up ashes and crumbs of bread and cheese. She cleaned the grate, polished the mosaics of the fireplace, and stretched on tiptoe to dust the inlaid mantelpiece.

  When she turned to the black walnut piano she pulled the special dust cloth from her pocket. With reverence, she wiped down each separate key, thinking of the mystical notes that trickled through the darkness to her little room behind the kitchen. Though she took care not to sound them, it seemed the music vibrated through her fingertips anyway, a sensation both marvelous and faintly disturbing. She lifted the lid of the piano to polish the underside, then closed it, so no new dust would fall on the keyboard. She cleaned the candle sconces set into the carved front, and replaced the old stubs with new, unburned candles. Despite warnings from his doctors about his eyesight, Puccini still preferred to compose by candlelight, complaining that the electric lights—though he had gone to such pains to have his house supplied with them—were too harsh and glaring.

  Doria had clear instructions about the sheets of music paper on the piano and on the desk. She carefully lifted the pile to dust beneath, and set them back in the precise order—indeed, the precise formation—he had left them. When she touched the pages, more music seemed to sing through her fingertips, chords now, and fragments of melody. She paused with her palm hovering over the manuscript. La Fanciulla del West, it said at the top. It was still a thin packet of pages, the opera only half begun, but she heard the music in her mind, the opening chords, the first fragments of the melodies. She couldn’t read the m
usic—a village girl like herself was lucky to be able to read at all—but every note the maestro played imprinted itself on her memory, and if she only had time, she felt sure she could connect the marks on the page with the sounds the maestro played.

  It was a dream come true to work in the same house as the composer of Edgar and Tosca, La Bohème and especially Madama Butterfly, her favorite above all other operas. Sometimes singers came here to Torre to work with Puccini. They rehearsed through the long evenings, trying out the arias, listening to the composer’s comments, arguing, laughing with their big, beautiful voices. Doria loved those nights, and when the opera was Madama Butterfly she knelt beside the window in her little room behind the kitchen, listening as intently as if she had a ticket to sit in one of the great, gilded boxes of La Scala.

  She knew the story of Butterfly by heart, though she had never been to the opera. Even the poorest of inhabitants of the village knew all of Maestro Puccini’s operas. People hummed the tunes in the streets, and paused to listen outside Villa Puccini when the composer was playing through a score. The butcher sang arias from behind his counter. The priest and the doctor huddled over cups of espresso or glasses of vin santo, disputing the merits of Bohème and Manon and Butterfly.

  Of course, Madama Butterfly was the greatest of all the maestro’s works. Doria would never understand why there was any argument about that, nor why it had not been instantly hailed as a masterwork. Not only was the music glorious—she could sing all the way through Un bel dì herself, though she only did it in private, when no one could hear—but the story was irresistible. Beautiful Cio-Cio-San, little Butterfly, thought the naval officer from America really loved her, had truly married her, saved her from her life as a geisha. Poor Butterfly, who named her little son Sorrow for the heartache that was to come. Even thinking about Butterfly kneeling above the bay, watching for her beloved’s ship to return, brought tears to Doria’s eyes. Then, when he did come, he brought his American wife, and wanted to take Sorrow home to raise in America! It was too cruel.

  Sometimes, when Elvira Puccini had one of her bad days, Doria thought of Cio-Cio-San. Butterfly’s story reminded her how dreadful things could really be for a powerless girl. She was no more than a few heartbeats away from being as helpless as Cio-Cio-San, destined for a life of drudgery and too many children. She blinked, and shook off the thought. It didn’t have to be the same with her as it was with her mother! And she had the Puccinis to thank for that, even the signora with her uncertain disposition!

  Doria finished with the piano and moved around to the desk. She dusted the surface, under the blotter, around the bronze base of the lamp. She wiped ashes from everything, including some that had spilled onto the wooden floor. She placed a fresh packet of cigarettes near the clean ashtray. She dropped the cloth into her bucket, and stood back to admire her handiwork.

  Only one thing looked out of place. The maestro treasured it, because his beloved mother had given it to him after the premiere of Madama Butterfly. Doria loved it, too, because the older Signora Puccini had always been kind to her. When Doria was nursing the maestro after his car accident, his mother sometimes brought her little things—a book, an embroidered handkerchief, a box of chocolates at Christmas. Doria had seen Puccini caress the little paperweight with his fingers. She expected it made him feel connected to his mother. He had grieved so terribly when she died.

  The paperweight was from the island of Murano. It was a delicate green, with a cunning little gold butterfly somehow set deep inside the crystal. It usually rested on the stack of music pages, to keep them from blowing about when the window was open, but it had somehow been moved to the edge of the desk, where it rested in a precarious position. Perhaps he had been holding it, toying with it. She leaned forward, and set it into its proper place. It was enchantingly cool and smooth, and she imagined she could sense the sweetness of Albina Puccini through her lingering fingertips.

  “Doria!” The screech came from the kitchen. Guiltily, the girl pulled her hand away from the paperweight, bent to seize her bucket, and hurried out of the studio.

  Elvira was opening drawers, cupboards, even the icebox, slamming each shut when she didn’t find what she wanted. Doria said hastily, “I’m here, signora. Do you need something?”

  “I can’t find my locket, the one Giacomo gave me!” Elvira straightened, spinning in a whirl of full skirts. The white gauze of her summer-weight frock was so sheer Doria could see the shape of her plump legs in their white stockings. Her own dress was plain brown cotton, made from remnants her mother bought in the market at Viareggio.

  “Did you take it from my dressing table?” Elvira demanded.

  Doria, with a start, lifted her gaze to the signora’s face. Her natural temper flared, making her cheeks burn. “No, signora!” she said. “No, of course I didn’t!” Veramente—did she expect to find her locket in the icebox? She was mad. Pazza.

  “I told you to dust the bedroom, not to rearrange my things!” Elvira’s dark eyes, her only good feature except for her abundant black hair, narrowed.

  “I didn’t! I mean, I did dust, but I didn’t touch—”

  “Cretina! How could you dust if you didn’t touch?”

  Doria judged that silence was the best answer to this. She stood still, her jaw set, her bucket hanging from her hand, and waited for the storm to pass.

  Elvira strode across the kitchen, her leather heels clicking on the flagstones, until she stood so close to Doria that the scent of her perfume and the odor of her perspiration made the girl’s nose twitch. “I know what you’re up to,” Elvira hissed.

  Doria said, mystified, “Cosa?”

  “Oh, yes. Don’t think I don’t notice how you look at my husband! It won’t do you any good, I can promise you, my girl. If you keep it up, I’ll have you out on the street, subito!”

  She was gone before Doria grasped her meaning, and when she did, her hands shook so with fury she almost dropped the bucket of wash water. Look at him? Look at the maestro? The idea that she might even consider him as a possibility—a romantic possibility for herself, a peasant girl from Torre del Lago—was so preposterous she could hardly believe the signora had said it.

  She had only just pulled herself together enough to empty the bucket out the back door and hang her wet rags on the clothesline in the back garden when she heard her name once again, shrieked this time from Elvira’s window. “Doria!”

  She ran for the stairs.

  “Doria!”

  Tory startled awake. She found herself sitting straight up in bed, her pillow thrust aside, the chenille bedspread sliding to the floor. She blinked in the darkness, surprised by the damp coolness of the air inside the cottage. Ocean air. Not lake. Autumn-cool, not July-hot. What had she—

  As she shook off the last shreds of sleep, she realized it had been a dream. It was only a dream, one of those vague, shadowy processions of unlikely events and unfamiliar people. She put a hand to her forehead, and found her hair damp from the heat of that place she had imagined. How strange that her dream should seem real enough to make her perspire!

  She sat on the edge of the bed, fighting her disorientation. When she got to her feet, the chill air brought goose bumps to her thighs. She picked up the bedspread to pull around herself, careful not to knock over the paperweight on her bedside table.

  She was already in the kitchen, digging in the lowest cupboard for a teakettle, when she remembered. She stopped, one arm reaching past her new cookware. She was crouched on the linoleum floor, gazing at the darkness beyond the windows.

  The paperweight. It had been in her dream. How odd that was, after all these years. She had grown up with that object. When her Nonna Angela moved in with them, the small Tory had watched her unpack, fascinated by the strange objects that came from the old cardboard valise. The paperweight had been the very last, the most precious, wrapped in layers of tissue paper. Nonna Angela had smiled, and rubbed it with her fingers to clear away any dust before she set it on
a shelf where it would be out of the reach of a curious child. Why should such a thing show up in a dream?

  Symbolic, she told herself. Something of home and family, all lost to her now.

  She found the teakettle, straightened, and went to the sink to fill it. As it heated, she turned on her new radio, and twirled the dial until she found the classical station. The signal was strong and clear in the uncluttered night air. With a cup of tea steaming gently in her hand, she went to the little living room. She opened the curtains before she sat in the armchair, tucking her bare feet up beneath the bedspread. She gazed out at the glimmer of light on the waves below the beach. The rain had stopped, but clouds still obscured the stars. No other lights showed along the dirt lane. She felt more alone, more isolated, than she ever had in her life, even more than when her grandmother died. At least then she had her parents, inadequate though they were.

  She listened to the ending movement of a Brahms string quartet, sipping tea, trying to let the dream fade from her mind. It was interesting that it still bothered her, though she had been awake for the better part of an hour. It was only a dream, after all, and not a particularly unpleasant one.

  What had actually happened to her, in real life, in the clear light of an October day, was the stuff of nightmare. Why wasn’t she dreaming of Ellice’s furious face, the cold shock of a knife blade slicing her skin, the bruising flight into the woods, the Escalade smashed at the bottom of the gully? Or dreaming something even worse, the thing she most dreaded—Ellice with Jack in the sights of her gun?

  Instead, her first dream since her real-life nightmare had been a complete fiction, about people she didn’t know, a place she had never seen, objects that meant nothing to her.