The Girl in the Glass (11 page)

He was too good to be true. “I suppose you’re right,” I managed to murmur.

He took a drink from his mug and set it down. “So. Does this mean we are okay?”

I knew he meant was I okay with him dating my mother, but the question startled me nonetheless.

“You don’t need my permission.”

“But I want it anyway.”

“I don’t want you to hurt her. She was hurt once before.”

He nodded slowly. “I know she was … And we are a long way off from anything other than just dating,” he continued. “If it should get serious, we promise you’ll be the first to know. Okay?”

We sat there quietly for a few moments, letting the aura of our understanding settle in around us. At some point he must have decided we could move on.

“Your mother says you might be headed to Florence this summer?”

Florence
.

“Yes.”

“With your dad?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. So when you go, there’s a little restaurant in the Piazza della Signoria that makes the best porcini mushroom ravioli in the world. Honestly. The best. Porcini mushrooms are tangy sweet and as soft as marshmallows. You will love them. The restaurant is in the same piazza where the copy of the
David
statue is. But promise me you won’t settle for that one. It’s just a copy. When you get there, make sure you get tickets to the
Accademia and see the real statue. It’s simply the work of a genius. You have to see it.”

He didn’t say “if.” He said “when.” No one else had ever talked of my promised trip to Florence that way. Not even my dad. The muscles in my chest tightened.

I looked across the table at the man dating my mother, and a smile involuntarily spread across my face. I felt it lift.

Devon smiled back at me, the gentle hook of his crooked smile softening the lines around his jaw.

I hadn’t been even the tiniest bit jealous of my mother in I don’t know how long. But in that moment, what I felt inside me was not attraction to her new boyfriend but an odd envy that she had found one so wonderful.

My mother longed for Florence whenever she was away from it. She told Nurse the Orsini castle in Bracciano hadn’t the beauty of Florence and its lifeless corridors bored her. But I don’t think it was boredom that made my mother dislike any place that wasn’t Florence. It was loneliness. And Rome, though majestic in its own way, could not woo her either. Only Florence charmed her.

When my father came to Florence to see my mother, he would always ask her to join him in Rome, but apparently he did not insist. Nurse thought he asked because he wanted to be heard asking. Sometimes my mother visited him at his family home in Bracciano or in Pisa or at one of the Medici villas in the country. But she hardly ever went to Rome to see him. Two years after their wedding, during a summer when my father had joined her at the Medici palace, my mother found herself with child but miscarried within the same month. Nurse said my mother barely had a moment to consider that she would be a mother before the tiny life was taken from her.

9

Our reason for meeting clearly met, I told Devon I needed to get back to the office to finish something I’d left undone. Devon stood when I stood, reached for my hand to clasp it in thanks for meeting with him, and offered to walk me to my car.

No need, I told him. No need, no need. I said he should enjoy the rest of his coffee.

Five minutes later I slid easily into a parking place in front of the darkened building. I fumbled for my office key, grateful I couldn’t see any lighted desk lamps inside. I punched in the alarm code, locked the door behind me, and headed for my office.

I tossed my purse onto the desk and sank into my chair.

This ugly feeling inside me was ridiculous.

Devon was dating my mother. He liked my mother. Liked her in that way men like women. She deserved a guy like him. Of course she deserved a guy like him.

I grabbed my computer mouse, and my computer screen sprang to life. I clicked into a search engine for bargain flights out of LA. Dad would want to leave out of LA. I couldn’t type the words fast enough. Los Angeles to Florence. LAX to FLR. From where I was now to somewhere far away.

The results came up quickly. Dad and I could leave on a Monday in late May. There were two seats left at a great price, leaving at three in the afternoon. And arriving the next afternoon. A connection in Paris. And then we’d be there.

In a month or so, I could be in Florence.

I couldn’t possibly wait until June.

I e-mailed the suggested itinerary to my dad. And then I texted him.

“Hey, Dad. Just wanted you to know there are two tickets to Florence at a nice price for the end of May. Just sent you the itinerary. Thoughts?”

I pressed Send and waited for ten minutes.

There wasn’t a sound in the place except for my own inhaling and exhaling. My phone was silent. And the room around me was silent too.

With less speed this time, I reached for my mouse to open my e-mail inbox. Maybe Lorenzo had responded back to me in the three hours since I had last checked. I chortled cynically at my own childish anticipation and checked anyway.

A handful of messages dropped into the inbox. Nothing from Lorenzo.

But the last one snatched my breath for a second. In the
From
line was a name that made me sit up in my chair: Sofia Borelli. I clicked the message:

Dear Miss Pomeroy,

My dear neighbor Lorenzo tells me you would like to see more of my manuscript! I cannot tell you how thrilled and amazed I am. I know this does not mean you will publish my book, but I am so honored that you wish to see more. I asked Lorenzo if this was a good sign, that you wish to see more, and he said it was.

I have other chapters. Fifteen or twenty, I think. They are not in any kind of order. I write them as the stories come to mind; the ones my father told me and the ones Nora has whispered to me. I am afraid I am not very skilled at putting things in order. I trust that will not spoil the reading for you. I have never written a book before, although I have always wanted to. And my parents always told me I had a gift for writing. It runs in the Medici family, you know.

I am sending you two more chapters. Do you want more? I hope it is acceptable that I send them to you directly. Lorenzo thought you would not mind.

He also thought I should tell you a little more about myself. I am fifty-six. I have been a tour guide here in Florence since I was nineteen. I am fluent in English. I decided to write the memoir in English because Lorenzo told me it was a good idea.

I live across the hall from Lorenzo and Renata. They are wonderful neighbors and have been very good to me.

Thank you for wanting to see more of my manuscript. I hope very much that you like it. Lorenzo thought perhaps you would like my contact information to speak with me, so I have included it at the top of the attached pages. Lorenzo helped me place it there. It is on every page.

Yours very sincerely,

Sofia Borelli

The awkwardness of the last hour, the frenzied desire to hear back from my dad on those tickets, and the tomb-like silence of the office at night faded as I guided the mouse over the little paper clip icon that held Sofia’s attached files. I opened the first one and began to read.

My home in Florence has been in the family since the days of Anna de’ Medici’s twilight years. My father has a younger brother, Emilio, who lives in Rome. I do not see him very often.

The flat is lovely with wood floors, creamy plaster walls, and arched doorways. There are three bedrooms and a lovely kitchen with a tiny balcony where I can grow basil and tomatoes most of the year. The flat, and four others like it, sits above a leather boutique
very close to the Piazza degli Antinori. The only time I did not live here was when I was married and I lived on the other side of the Arno. But that was a long time ago; so long, it sometimes seems to have been someone else’s life that I observed.

My mother, Natalia, worked for the owner of the leather shop below us. Leather goods are very popular in Florence and have been since tanners at Via delle Conce provided the leather for the manuscript covers at the Santa Croce monastery in the thirteenth century. The boutique where my mother worked sold beautiful, expensive things, but my mother smelled like a horse at the end of a workday. The three of us would laugh about it: how she could work in a boutique that sold such fine things and yet she would climb the stairs in her high heels after the boutique closed for the day, sounding like a clopping horse and smelling like one. She died when I was just twenty-eight. She had a weak heart, which is why, my father told me, they had no other children after me. She died the same year my marriage ended and the man I loved went back to England without me. When she passed away, my father and I suddenly had this terrible thing in common; it was a blessing and it was a curse. We both lost the loves of our hearts in the sweltering, unforgiving heat of summer; me, twice the loss.

The only cool place to be in August in Florence is inside one of its many churches. And that is where we went, he and I, to beseech heaven for comfort.

My favorite place of solace in those days was the Church of Santa Trinita, just one block from the river. Nora often went to Mass at this church with her mother. When I walk its floor, I am mindful that her feet also brushed the stones more than four hundred years before.

As the heat of that awful summer pressed me to my knees beneath the painting of Saint Francis renouncing all worldly joys, Nora assured me my shattered heart would not be my undoing. I felt her very breath on my neck, as I bent my head in prayer, reminding me that Medici women are resilient. I had only to look backward to see that the Medici passion for beauty stemmed from their passion for life.

Were it not for Nora’s whispers reminding me of this day after day after day, I surely would have disappeared into my grief. Grief is a river like the Arno, the depths of its dark bed you cannot see. To swim in it is to tire in it and sink in it and be lost forever in it.

My father, Angelo Borelli III, is an accomplished artist. The walls of our flat are covered with his canvases. He loves trees; there is always a tree in his paintings.

There have always been many talented artists in Florence, from the daybreak of its existence. To this day, countless artists line the piazzas with their creations, selling them to tourists for a handful of euros. Florence has always been a magnet for those who itch to paint, to sculpt, to bestow beauty on a world in need of it.

The concentration of such genius during the Italian Renaissance is staggering. The greatest works of art since ancient times were left to us during the three hundred years of Medici rule. Such talent was absent during the Dark Ages, and its zenith seems to have come and gone in Florence, in the span of three centuries.

A French author who went by the name Stendhal visited Florence in 1817 and was so awestruck at the immense beauty of Florence’s art that he suffered heart palpitations and feared he would faint dead away. He was not the first to feel this way, but the first, perhaps, to
write of it. Stendahl Syndrome, sometimes called Florence Syndrome, became a byword, and two centuries later, scientists are still curious to know if what Stendahl wrote is true. They ponder his claims with studies and projects. Is the vastness of what the Renaissance artists left to Florence too great for the human soul to fully grasp? Is it truly like a crippling encounter with the Divine?

Doubters call it a psychosomatic illness, this racing heart, dizziness, and confusion in people who’ve beheld such astonishing artistic achievement, and yet I see it on my tours all the time. The staff at Santa Maria Nuova hospital is accustomed to treating woozy and disoriented tourists after they’ve seen the
David
. He takes your breath away. Literally. And
David
is just one of thousands of artistic treasures to woo you, though he is the most spectacular. They are everywhere. To have one’s breath stolen at every turn is what makes a person swoon. It’s that simple.