The Glass Butterfly

by Louise Marley

  “That’s not—”

  Doria interrupted. “I told you before, Mamma. I am not the signore’s lover. I have not been in his bed, nor he in mine. I am as much a virgin as when I left your house to go to work at Villa Puccini, when I was only fifteen. If you care anything at all for me, you will believe that!”

  Her mother gazed at her for a long moment, and Doria stared back at her. The two of them, Doria thought, were like a pair of hound bitches at that moment, taking each other’s measure, deciding their territory. In the end, Emilia gave a sharp nod, turned about, and went back to the kitchen. Doria closed the door behind her before she collapsed on to one of her brother’s cots and put her head in her hands. She sat there for a long time, trying to think of a way to make things right. Wishing the maestro would come back to Torre.

  When the feeling came, she wasn’t sure of it at first. It was a vague itchy feeling that began in her long toes, as if tiny ants were biting at her feet. It spread up her ankles and into her calves, becoming a tingle that seemed to bloom in her chest. Once, she had touched a frayed cord of one of the electric lamps in the villa, and this same sensation had run through her hand and up her arm, but it had gone no farther. It was like that in a way, a distinctly physical energy, a slender line of fire that made her shiver with surprise. Mostly it reminded her of how she had felt listening to Caruso sing in the maestro’s studio, when the whole of Villa Puccini vibrated with his celestial voice, his high B flat making the glassware shiver and the walls resound—and causing Doria’s breastbone to vibrate in sympathy. Now she pressed her hand to her chest, wondering.

  It lasted for perhaps a minute while she sat there, her breathing quickening, her body trembling before this strangeness. When the feeling subsided she rose slowly to move to the little octagonal mirror that hung over the dilapidated chest of drawers. She peered into its murky depths, and she wondered, Was this her fé, come at last?

  “Not much good,” she muttered to her reflection, “if I don’t know what it means.”

  25

  In quell’azzurro guizzo languente sfuma un ardente scena d’amor.

  In that blue flicker, an ardent love scene vanishes.

  —Rodolfo, La Bohème, Act One

  Tory woke with an odd sensation in her toes that seemed to spread up into her shins, as if her legs had fallen asleep. She was surprised to see that she had slept right through the night for the first time since arriving in Cannon Beach. Johnson lay in what had become his usual position, curled against her, a node of warmth and comfort. She lay still for a moment, wondering at the unusual feeling, but before she could analyze it, it was gone. She turned on her side, and ran her hands over Johnson’s sleek head, pondering the latest installment of her dream.

  Installment was the right word, she thought. There was something sequential about the dreams, as if one led to the next, even though the events were shadowy, the characters made of gossamer, elusive creatures of imagination. If this was her subconscious at work, its message was both subtle and obscure.

  She sighed, and pushed back the covers. Johnson raised his head, ears forward. She patted him. “You’re always ready for the day, aren’t you?”

  For answer, he gave her his doggy smile, and leaped off the bed to race to the front door. “Wait just a minute, my friend,” she called. “I can’t go straight outside like you can!”

  When she was ready, her coat pulled on over a pair of jeans, the two of them emerged from the cottage into a cold gray morning. Johnson bounded off toward the beach the moment she opened the gate. Tory followed more slowly, yawning and pushing her fingers through her hair. The rain of the night before had stopped, but everything was wet, the dirt of the lane, the sand, the long grasses that fringed the beach. A thin fog shrouded everything, so it all looked mystical, a fantasyland of indistinct shapes and shifting mists.

  She and Johnson were halfway to the big rock when she heard the bells chiming their Sunday invitation from the Presbyterian church. The sound seemed amplified by the fog, or perhaps it was that there were no other morning sounds as yet. Tory lifted her head to listen, and thought of Hank. Tall, gentle, charming Hank. Who had been a priest.

  They reached Haystack Rock, and Tory strolled around it while Johnson sniffed at the tide pools, his flag of a tail waving gently. The bells faded away, and she supposed the service had begun. Did Hank go to Mass, she wondered? There was no Catholic church in this town, but she had seen a sign for one a short distance away. It would be nice, she mused, as she and the dog headed back up the beach, to go to Mass. To hear the ritual prayers, to kneel with the congregation, to listen to the music. She thought of the communion wafer being offered in Hank’s long fingers, and something strange and oddly familiar shivered in her belly.

  It had been a long, long time since she had felt anything like that. It seemed incongruous that now, when everything in her life was a desert, she should meet someone like Hank, who made her feel—well, made her feel something.

  She glanced up, and realized that the sun was well up above the fog. She hurried Johnson back up the beach and in through the gate. She was due at the flower shop soon. It would be busy today, only two days from Christmas Eve.

  As she was making her coffee, she thought about Christmas. Nonna Angela had always taken her to Midnight Mass, and she had continued the tradition, attending at Our Lady of the Forests, where Father Wilburton led a contemplative service that always appealed to her. Jack had stopped going with her a long time ago, but she had kept on, feeling centered by the ritual, comforted by the words of promise. She often imagined that Nonna Angela was with her at those times, a gentle and loving presence.

  Perhaps she—

  The thought, whatever it might have been, died unborn. With her hands still on the coffeepot, she remembered, in a rush, the rest of the dream.

  November and December in Torre were unusually cold that year. The sun shone without warmth, and the shallows at the edge of Lake Massaciuccoli crackled with ice crystals. Puccini had removed himself to Rome, and everyone in Torre knew why.

  Old Zita came to Emilia Manfredi’s house one chilly evening when her work was done. She had brought biscotti she had baked that day, and she sat with Emilia and Doria drinking coffee as she listed her complaints about her mistress. When she reached the end, she exclaimed, “She’s as mad as one of those loons that nest on the island!”

  “Yes, everyone says so,” Emilia said. Doria listened in resigned silence. It seemed pointless to talk about it, yet talk they did. “They say half the village heard them arguing,” Emilia went on. “Did you know that?”

  Zita sucked her breath in, a disgusted hiss. “I could have guessed. I thought her ugly voice would break the crystal in the dining room.”

  Emilia leaned forward eagerly. “We’re too far away to hear. What did they say?”

  “The usual things,” Zita replied. Emilia poured more coffee into Zita’s cup, and Zita stirred a lump of sugar into it. “Mostly about him neglecting her.” She took a sip of coffee, then said with a shake of her frizzy hair, “What that woman needs is a good fucking. I could tell her she’s not going to get it from him that way, but she would never listen!”

  Doria looked away, her cheeks burning.

  “And so,” Zita said triumphantly, setting her cup down with a bang, “he can’t work this way, he says, so off he runs to Roma. He claims this new opera is the reason!”

  “La Fanciulla del West,” Doria murmured, but Zita didn’t hear her, and her mamma was intent on the details of the Puccinis’ argument.

  “He left me alone with a madwoman! No one will come to work there now. Not even her children will come to see her. Even Tonio found someplace else to celebrate Christmas.”

  Doria crumbled a biscuit in her fingers. Emilia said, “Do you know, Zita, she told Giorgio the butcher that Doria is pregnant. Then she told that little tart Nuncia, at the café, that Doria seduced her husband, took him into her bedroom late at night when she was supposed to be ir
oning. She called my Doria a whore and a slut, right there in the café where anyone could hear, and now Doria won’t go out of the house because people whisper behind her back!”

  Zita put her wrinkled hand over Doria’s smooth one. “Doria mia, you mustn’t mind what people say.” She patted her hand, over and over. “Or what they think,” she finished.

  Doria’s eyes stung, but there would be no more tears. She had wept them all.

  When the first gossip and taunts reached her, she had cried over every hurt, every insult. It was much worse than she had ever expected, a constant barrage of rumors and whispers and slights. She couldn’t go to the café or to the market. She even stopped going to church. Foolishly, Doria had thought Elvira’s attacks would stop once she left Villa Puccini. If anything, they had worsened. The viciousness of them shocked her. She had no way to fight them. She had no way to prove herself, and now she felt emptied by the struggle, like a sponge wrung out and left to dry on a shelf.

  “Father Michelucci spoke to Signora Puccini,” Emilia said. “He might as well have saved his breath. She has never forgiven him for that shameful wedding.”

  “But that wasn’t the priest’s fault! That was Puccini!”

  “As you said,” Emilia whispered, and she touched her palm to her forehead, her eyes rolling. “Pazza.”

  “Hah,” Zita said sourly. “The great Puccini! He ran away like a little boy afraid of a spanking. Ran away without a thought for poor little Doria!”

  At this, Doria roused herself. “Oh, no, Zita. Non è vero! He wrote to me.”

  Zita blinked, startled. Emilia said sharply, “What good is a letter, Doria? Did he send money? Did he promise your job back?”

  Doria sighed. “No, Mamma. You know he didn’t.”

  She felt Zita’s gaze on her sharpen. “What did he say, Doria? In his letter?”

  Doria lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “He said he was sorry about me leaving Villa Puccini. He said—”

  “He said,” Emilia pronounced with bitter clarity, “that his damned opera would never be written if he stayed here, and that he knew Doria would understand!” She pounded her fist on the table, and the coffee cups rattled in their saucers. “Why should Doria understand? That’s not her job! All my girl wants is to do her work and to be left alone by his witch of a wife!”

  “Lo so, lo so,” Zita said, shaking her frizzy head. “Doria is a good girl. He should have done more for her.”

  “But I do understand,” Doria said, in a voice so slight both older women leaned closer to try to hear.

  “What?” Emilia demanded. “You understand what?”

  “I understand the maestro needs to work on Fanciulla. In New York, they’re asking for it, and he’s having such trouble over it. When the signora distracts him—”

  “Distracts him!” Emilia exclaimed. “What about what she’s doing to you? To us? Do you know, Zita,” she said, raising her eyebrows dramatically, “that my son threatened to kill Puccini for seducing his sister?”

  “Very proper,” Zita said, “that an older brother should defend his sister’s honor.”

  “The only thing that stopped him,” Emilia proclaimed loudly, “was Doria convincing him. Telling her brother there is no reason for him to go to prison over something that didn’t happen!”

  Zita crossed herself. “Grazie al cielo,” she said fervently.

  Doria slumped in her chair. That had been a terrible day, with her uncles in a rage and her brother storming around the house and threatening to buy a gun—where he would have found one, she didn’t know, unless he went to Villa Puccini and took one of the signore’s shotguns. She had sworn on their father’s grave that she was not the signore’s mistress, and finally Rodolfo had calmed down.

  “Better Rodolfo should shoot Elvira than the signore,” Emilia said.

  Zita said darkly, “Puccini should never have married her.”

  “There were the children,” Emilia reminded her. Zita nodded, and took a biscuit from the plate. It was a circular argument, back to the same old thing.

  Doria pushed away from the table. “I’m going to lie down,” she said.

  Her mother said, “Doria, you never come out of your room anymore! You can’t spend your life in there.”

  Zita tried to catch Doria’s hand, but Doria gently freed herself. “Thank you for coming, Zita,” she said. “You won’t forget to feed the dogs?”

  “No, no, of course I won’t. Don’t worry. It will all pass, Doria mia, you’ll see.”

  “Sì. It will pass. I’m sure you’re right.” Doria tried to smile at Zita, at her mamma, and walked on heavy feet to her room. She shut the door, and lay down on the bed to stare at the ceiling.

  She had lied to Zita. The truth was that she was quite sure Zita was wrong. Her fé, vibrating in her toes, made her certain. She had felt it when the letter came, and she felt it when she heard the murmurs behind her as she walked down the lane into the village.

  She could no longer live in Torre. Elvira, with her money and her power and her position, would drive her from her home with lies and gossip. Despite hours on her knees at the shrine of the Virgin, she was going to lose this battle.

  Like Butterfly, kneeling on the hill above the harbor, she waited in vain for her hero to rescue her. She was alone.

  As she unlocked the shop and she and Johnson went in, Tory reflected that though she had never put her faith in interpreting dreams, she had always trusted the subconscious for guidance in healing trauma and restoring balance. She had to think there was meaning in this succession of dreams. It could be a stress response, but it felt like much more. It felt as if, on some level she couldn’t access during her waking life, she was working something out. Were the characters in the dreams archetypal, representing her own conflicting feelings?

  Or perhaps being alone so much was making her imagination work overtime.

  She stroked Johnson’s head. He had already flopped onto his rug with the ease of one who knows his role. “Do you dream?” she asked him as he smiled up at her. “Do you dream of whoever you started out with? Do you have nightmares about getting lost?” He beat his tail against the floor, then rested his chin on his paws. She patted him again, then straightened, found her apron and tied it on, and began getting the shop ready for the day.

  Business was brisk, as she had expected. Tory and Zoe hardly had a chance to talk before a steady stream of customers began to flow through the shop. Zoe stayed behind the counter, busy with poinsettia arrangements and holiday centerpieces. Tory helped customers choose gifts, wrapped them, and hurried to restock shelves when they started to look bare.

  “Mom will be here tomorrow,” Zoe said, in a brief lull when they were the only ones in the store. Johnson, from his blanket beside the counter, lifted his head as if this news interested him. “About time, too! I don’t know what we would have done without you, Paulette.” She bent to tug gently at Johnson’s ears. “Or you, either, Johnson me lad.”

  Tory cleared the counter of ends of clipped ribbon and slivers of bright wrapping paper, sweeping them into the wastepaper basket. “It worked out for all of us,” she said.

  “Whew! That’s the last one for today.” Zoe set a fresh arrangement, a gay display of white roses and red carnations and thick candy canes, into the refrigerated cabinet to wait for pickup. “It’s a good thing. My fingertips are practically raw.”

  “That’s beautiful, Zoe,” Tory said. “You’re wonderful at this.”

  “Thanks.” Zoe stepped into the back, and returned a few moments later with two steaming cups of tea. “I think we need this. There’ll be another rush toward closing.”

  “Thank you,” Tory said fervently. “I do need it.”

  Zoe hopped up on the counter and sat swinging her yellow cowboy boots. She eyed Tory over the rim of her cup. “So-oooo,” she said, with a scarlet-lipped grin. She had pinned a sprig of holly amid the black spikes of her hair, and she wore red-and-green-striped tights. “Are you go
ing to tell me about Dr. Darling, or will I have to hear it from that bitch Shirley?”

  Startled, Tory laughed, and Zoe pointed a red fingernail at her. “There, now!” she said. “I knew you’d be gorgeous if I could get you to smile.”

  “Zoe! I’ve been smiling at customers all day!”

  “Not the same,” Zoe said breezily. “Not the same at all. So tell me. How was your date?”

  Tory leaned against the counter, her teacup cradled in her hands. “We didn’t have a date.”

  “You had dinner, I know that.”

  “You weren’t kidding about small town gossip, I guess.”

  “Nope. I grew up with it, and trust me, it’s better than CNN.”

  “Zoe, you’re an original.”

  “That’s the idea.” Zoe pushed her spikes up with her fingers. “So you’re not going to tell me?”

  “There’s nothing really to tell. We did have dinner.”

  “And wine?”

  Tory laughed again, and sipped her tea. “I always have wine,” she said.

  “That’s my girl!” The bell over the door tinkled, and Zoe slid off the counter, her florist’s apron fluttering. “Back to the salt mines. Why do we say that, I wonder?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned to greet the new customers coming in from the fog. The mist had persisted all day, wreathing the Christmas lights up and down the street in shifting silver haloes.

  Tory drank the rest of her tea, then took Johnson’s leash from the coat hook and clipped it on. She led him through the back room, where jumbled cartons and boxes crowded together with a vacuum cleaner, a big plastic garbage can for flower clippings, and other flotsam and jetsam. In the alley behind the shop she let Johnson sniff for a few minutes while she tipped her face up and let mist collect on her eyelashes.