“Not this time!” His voice was rough with smoke and tension. “I think this is the end, Doria. I’m a fifty-year-old has-been with a ruined leg and a career drowning in cosettine!”
“Non è vero!”
He waved a negligent hand, but she could see by the arch of his eyebrow that he was listening. Just so had he listened to her through long wakeful nights after his accident, when he relied on her to talk about anything and everything she could think of, to distract him from his dark thoughts and the pain in his leg. He was like one of her little brothers, in constant need of comfort and reassurance.
She took a step inside the door. “Signore, your operas are not little things at all. They are—” She gestured with her hand, as if she could snatch the word from the air. “Profound!” she finished. And with a touch of asperity, because he already knew how she felt about it, “Especially Madama Butterfly.”
He snorted, not yet mollified. “That’s the one they criticize the most. They say it’s commercial. Cheap. A melodrama!”
“Then they don’t understand the story,” she protested. “Cio-Cio-San’s story!”
“And you do, Doria?” He stretched out his arm to tap his cigarette ash into the cut-glass tray. “My little nurse? You think you understand?”
She tossed her head. “Of course I do! Cio-Cio-San and I have much in common.”
He puffed on the dwindling butt of his cigarette, and smiled at her. “No one has sold you to an American naval officer, Signorina Manfredi!”
She folded her arms, laughing at him. “Not yet, in any case!”
He let his chair settle back to the floor, and ground out the cigarette. “I wish you to be happy, Doria. You should be out with young people in the evenings, not stuck here with all us old people.”
“You’re not old!” she insisted. “And besides, I don’t want to be out in the village. I’m happy here, in your pretty house. Hearing your beautiful music.”
His smile faded, and he stared up at his painted ceiling through a haze of cigarette smoke. “You pay a price, I think, my little nurse.”
She shrugged. “We all pay in some way for what we want.”
At that he laughed, but it was a bitter sound. It grated on her ear, and she flinched, fearful he would wake the signora. “You’re too wise, Doria. We do indeed! Even I!”
She said with sympathy, “Sì, sì. Lo so.”
He grimaced, and straightened his right leg, rubbing at the thigh and groaning. “Doria, let’s have a glass of port. I have no musical ideas tonight, in any case.”
“I will bring you one, maestro.”
She turned back into the dining room to pour a glass. She carried it back to him and set it on the desk, within his reach. “Are you sure you’re well? Does your leg pain you tonight?”
He sighed, and reached across the desk for his box of Toscano cigars. “My leg always pains me, which no one but you seems to care about! Still, I’m well enough,” he said. She took the cigar from him. She clipped the end with the little cutter, then handed it back. He stuck it between his teeth as she scraped a match on the matchbox, and held the flame for him as he drew. When it was glowing, he said, “There’s no need to nurse me now, Doria.”
“I don’t mind.”
“I know.” He squinted at her through the smoke. “You’re a good girl.”
“Grazie.” Doria gave a shallow curtsy, and he chuckled. “Buona notte, signore.”
“Wait.” He took a deep swallow of wine, and set the glass down again on his desk. He propped his left elbow on the piano above the keyboard, and played an idle chord with his right hand. “Are you very tired? Could you sit a while and talk with me, as you used to do?”
Involuntarily, Doria glanced above her head, as if she could see through the sculpted plaster ceiling and into the signora’s bedroom.
Puccini saw, and drew hard on his cigar. “Your mistress is asleep, I promise you.” He pointed to a chair resting beside the card table. There were no guests tonight, and everything was as tidy as she had left it earlier in the day. “Pull that over. Just a moment’s talk, to distract me. Perhaps my reluctant muse will wake.”
Doria hesitated, torn between wanting to do as he asked and fear that Elvira would find her here, and misunderstand. The house had been more or less peaceful for a week, and she hoped it would stay that way.
He gave her his boyish smile, rueful and self-deprecating. “Please,” he said, squinting through the smoke and tugging at his mustache with his free hand. “The opera is a disaster, and I can’t sleep for worrying about it.”
Doria gave a shake of her head, but she brought the chair close to the piano. He said, “Pour a glass for yourself, my little friend. Let’s make the best of this dark and empty evening!”
Of course, Puccini didn’t have to get up at dawn to begin the work of maintaining Villa Puccini, but Doria would never point out such a thing. Soon enough she could rest as much as she needed to, she and Zita. She went back into the dining room, poured herself a small glass of his excellent port, and rejoined him in the studio. He raised his glass to her as she sat down. “Good! I hate to be alone with my miserable thoughts—and this piano refuses to speak to me!”
Doria, rather primly, sipped the port. She sat with her legs crossed at the ankle, the glass held in both hands in her lap. Her eyes cast down, she said, “Maestro, the piano will not speak if you don’t touch the keys.”
He laughed, more merrily now. “You’re a bossy one, aren’t you, Doria? You love to tell your master what to do.”
Her lips twitched, and she looked up at him from beneath her eyelids. “It’s what we do with spoiled boys,” she dared to say.
He guffawed, and a flush of pleasure rose up her chest and throat. It was the same laugh she heard so often when his friends were here, the signori from Milan who came to keep him company on the hot summer nights as he wrestled with his music. She took another sip of port to hide her blush, though it would make her head spin if she drank it too fast.
“My sisters tell me the same thing,” he chortled. He drained his glass, and she took it from him, carrying it into the dining room to refill it. When she brought it back, she found him absently rubbing his leg with the heel of his hand and gazing at the manuscript sheets standing half-filled on the piano. His laughter had faded, and although he took the glass from her, he set it on his desk, and picked up a thick black pencil, marking a note on the staff, then another.
His mood had changed abruptly, as it so often did. It was like the autumn weather, sunny one moment, stormy the next. “You’re going to work now,” she said. “I’ll leave you to it.”
“No, no, not yet,” he said. He put the pencil down, picked up his glass, and took a swallow. His eyes were still on the manuscript. “Sometimes I think if my leg would cease its infernal aching, I could write faster.”
“Did you write faster before your accident, maestro?”
“Only when I was very young. Before—before I was distracted.”
She knew what that meant, but forbore to say so. He meant Elvira, and the scandal that caused so much fury to circle around him, like a chain of thunderstorms, one after the other. His family, his friends, everyone had been shocked when Elvira abandoned her husband and her children to live with Puccini, and she knew they had badgered him endlessly to send her back to her husband and restore his reputation. He hadn’t done it, and Doria thought they must, once, have been very much in love. Why else would they suffer the scathing looks and biting words of society? Why else had they stayed together through the years of poverty? Perhaps Elvira had been different then, more amiable. Perhaps she had been pretty, her voice sweeter, her eyes more tender. Doria took another delicate sip of wine.
These conversations in the dark of night were familiar to her from that first hard year of Puccini’s convalescence, when she had come so eagerly to the beautiful new Villa Puccini to nurse the great composer in his recovery. The pain of his injured leg often roused him in the night. She w
ould fetch whatever he needed, do what she could to make him comfortable, and listen as he talked. She heard him speak of his beloved mother, of his children, of his tumultuous relationship with his publisher, and with his librettists, who seemed to quit on a regular basis. She knew how desperately he feared failure, how much criticism stung him, how he loathed Wagner and adored Verdi and Mozart—all of it. She had learned a great deal about opera by listening to him. And sometimes, deep in the night, he had sung fragments to her—a bit of an aria, a line of recitative, even the melody of a chorus—and she remembered every one of them.
“So now,” he mused, twirling his glass in his left hand, tapping the keyboard with the pencil in his right, “now I have made it worse. Distracted myself so I fear I will never write another note.”
The dour tone of his voice made Doria look up at him. “What do you mean, signore?”
He sighed. “I brought this all on myself,” he said, his voice little more than a scrape in his throat. “I know that now, but at the time—I thought it was only my fancy, my mood.”
“I don’t know what—” Doria began, and then stopped.
“No. No, I never told you. I thought you would not believe me. Elvira didn’t.” She held her breath, wondering what made him so gloomy.
The sky beyond the windows darkened suddenly, clouds folding over the moon, obscuring the stars. The night seemed to close around the studio. The only light came from the candles on the piano, flickering unsteadily over Puccini’s cheeks. He was in need of a shave. His mustache drooped, a little overlong, and the shadows deepened the lines in his face.
“Premonition,” he muttered.
“Cosa?”
He glanced up, one eyebrow raised, then down into the luminous darkness of the wine in his glass. The pencil was now motionless in his fingers. “I had a premonition. I’ve tried to convince myself I imagined it, that the medicines and the pain altered my memory of that night, but I know now it’s not true.”
“You’ve never told me this,” Doria murmured.
“No.” He emptied his glass again. She rose, and brought him the bottle, setting it next to the manuscript on the piano. His cigar had gone out. He dropped it in the ashtray, then groped in his pocket for a cigarette. When it was lit, he slumped in his chair.
“The night of the accident—it was so dark, you know, foggy, wet—it wasn’t as if we had to go. Elvira wanted to—well, that doesn’t matter. It wasn’t her fault. I was the one who wanted to come to Torre, to get out of Lucca for a while. Everyone in Lucca was angry at me, my sisters, our friends—everyone.” He uncorked the bottle, and refilled his glass to the brim. “We were just dressing for the trip, and the chauffeur was bringing the car around.”
His voice turned to gravel, low and grinding and ominous. Doria’s arms prickled.
“I remember glancing out the window as I was putting on my coat, and noticing how dim the headlights of the car were through the fog. I felt—” He glanced up at her, unsmiling. “This is like one of my operas, I know. But I felt this overwhelming sense of dread. Of something awful about to happen.”
“The fé,” she whispered.
“Perhaps.” He puffed fiercely on his cigarette, and held the smoke in his lungs for a long time before he released it in a cloud. “How different things might have been, if I had listened to my own heart. But I was so arrogant, so sure of myself . . . and now I have a wife who is never happy, a constantly aching leg, and my muse has abandoned me. I’m a wreck.”
“You’re not a wreck, signore,” Doria said gently. She stood, and put her chair back beside the card table. “You are tired, and your leg hurts. You’re a little drunk, and you’re worried about the opera.”
He flicked the manuscript with a dismissive finger. “Mademoiselle Minnie!” he said with a derisive snort. It was what he called the principal character in Fanciulla, especially when it was all going badly. “I hate her!”
“In the morning you will love her again.”
He set his glass unsteadily on the desk, nearly knocking it to the floor. He took a last drag on his cigarette, and dropped it in the ashtray. Doria reached past him to grind it out, then blew out the candles, cupping them with her hand to keep the wax from splattering the piano. She handed him his cane, and offered him her elbow. “Let me help you to the stairs,” she murmured.
There was a sob in his voice. “Grazie,” he said. He took the cane in one hand, and her arm with the other. “Grazie tanto, Doria mia. I’m sorry to be such bad company.”
She clicked her tongue as a mother might, though she was thirty years younger than he was. She led him toward the stairs, and as she guided him up, he leaned heavily on her shoulder, his steps uncertain in the dark. “Elvira thinks I should not be alone with you.”
“After all this time, that whole year I nursed you?”
“You know how she is,” he said, with a theatrical sigh. “My policeman. She watches everything I do, every step I take.”
A creak from inside the bedroom he shared with his wife made her shiver.
Noticing, he patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Doria mia. She scolds and shouts, but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just noise, because she’s so unhappy.”
“Yes, signore,” Doria said.
“You should feel sorry for her.”
“Yes,” Doria said again. “Good night, now, signore.”
She stood back, waiting until he was safely inside the bedroom, the door closed, before she went back down the stairs. It was nearly one, she saw from the hall clock. She would have to be up again in only five hours to begin preparations for breakfast.
She wondered, as she trudged wearily through the kitchen and into her own bedroom, at what Puccini had said. She tried to find it in her heart to feel sorry for Elvira, for his sake if for no other reason, but sympathy eluded her. Perhaps, she thought, as she stripped off her clothes and fell into her bed, she was just too tired.
13
Chi c’è là fuori nel giardino? Una donna!
Who is out there in the garden? A woman!
—Suzuki, Madama Butterfly, Act Three
Chet Bingham drove Jack home after the Thanksgiving dinner was over. Kate had insisted on picking him up that morning rather than letting him drive the Escalade. Jack was pretty sure they had been afraid he wouldn’t show, and they might have been right. The whole day felt hollow, despite the crowd around the Binghams’ table and the good food, music, and friendly conversation. In years past, Tory and Jack had always gone to the Binghams’ for dessert. Jack liked the tradition. He had also liked the quiet dinner he and his mother had enjoyed at home.
He’d never said that, though. It was as if, by not telling her, he was retaining control somehow. It didn’t make sense, and he had figured that out when he went away to school. It wasn’t that she tried to control him unnecessarily—not really—he had seen how the parents of other guys, mothers in particular, called and e-mailed and generally hovered over every detail of their lives. It wasn’t Tory who was controlling—it was Jack who couldn’t bear to be controlled. It was one of the many things he meant to tell her, if—no, when—he got the chance.
Although it was hard to admit it, he was glad Chet was with him as he approached the dark house. Ever since the deputy’s visit, he had been uneasy around the place, especially at night. Now the house bulked before him, its blank windows and oppressive silence daunting. “Can I give you some coffee?” he asked Chet.
The older man nodded, and climbed out of the driver’s seat. “That would be great, Jack. I’d be relieved to have a moment away from the thundering herds,” he said.
Jack knew he didn’t really mean it. Chet, stout and graying and cheerful, adored his children and his grandchildren. It was obvious to everyone who knew him, however he might bluster sometimes and complain about the noise in his house.
They walked side by side up to the front porch, and Jack unlocked the front door. He opened it and switched on the lights. The mail from the day be
fore—the mail from the whole week, in truth—still lay waiting on the hall table. Chet raised an eyebrow at the pile. “Yeah,” Jack said. “I need to go through that.”
“Tell Kate if you need help,” Chet said. “She’s good with that sort of thing.”
“I know.” Jack glanced at the stack of mail, then away. He went to the mailbox every day, pulled out the envelopes and circulars. He flipped through everything to see if there was anything that might be from Tory, some hint of where she was, before he added it all to the pile.
“There might be bills in there,” Chet said.
“Yeah. I’ll check it tomorrow.” Jack gave Chet a rueful look as he led the way into the kitchen. He glanced around, and felt a rush of self-consciousness. It wasn’t just the neglected mail. The kitchen—in fact, the whole house—was significantly less tidy than when Tory was here. Bread crumbs and smears of butter marred the granite countertop, and dirty glasses and plates sat in the sink, waiting to be put into the dishwasher. He pulled out the coffeemaker, saying, “Sorry about the mess.”
Chet laughed. “Did you see our house, with all the monsters tearing through it?”
“Yeah. But there’s only me here.”
“I know, son. I’m sorry about that.” Chet pulled one of the tall stools up to the island and sat on it with a little grunt, adjusting his belt as he did so. “Listen, Jack—I’ve been hoping to have a moment with you.”
Jack was spooning coffee grounds into the filter. He glanced across at Chet, and saw that the older man was staring down at his folded hands. His round cheeks, so often creased in a ready grin, drooped. Jack braced himself. “Go ahead.”
“It’s just—well, Kate and I are worried about you.”
“I’m doing okay.”
Chet looked up, and gave Jack an approving nod. “Yes, you are. You’ve been doing great with all this.”
Jack pushed the button on the coffeemaker, and it began to bubble. “The thing is—” he began, but Chet rushed on. A slight flush stained his round cheeks, and Jack was sure he had prepared his statement, and wanted to make certain he got it out.
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