The Glass Butterfly (6 page)

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Authors: Louise Marley

Tags: #Romance

BOOK: The Glass Butterfly
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Doria took another sidelong step toward the kitchen door. “I'm halfway through,” she said. “I mean—” She held it up. “I mean the book.”
He said, “I didn't like it all that much. His plays are better.”
Doria said, “I think they must be, signore. This book, it's all about sex and not about—” She closed her mouth abruptly, and ducked her head. Her mother was right. She should learn to keep silent about things she knew nothing about.
He said, “You're quite right, Doria! Sex isn't the least bit interesting unless the characters are interesting.”
In fact, it was just what she had been thinking, and his agreement gave her a little glow of pleasure. She took another step, her head down, watching the impression her bare feet made in the grass, little claw marks like those of a hen scratching for ants. The dogs pressed close to her, nuzzling her legs, asking for tidbits. She slipped them treats from time to time, when Elvira wasn't looking, and she saw by Puccini's grin that he knew that. He couldn't know, of course, how she nestled with them sometimes on the grass. They were her only source of physical affection, and she adored both of them, despite their antics.
She patted the dogs, and muttered, “Go on with you, now. I don't have anything!”
Puccini fell into step beside her, and at that moment, with a talent for timing only Elvira Puccini seemed to possess, the shutters of the second-floor bedroom window flew open, clacking against the outside of the house, and the lady's head appeared.
“Doria!” she shouted. “You haven't touched the ironing!”
Doria lifted her head. “Signora.” Sudden anxiety made her voice rise, and it sounded plaintive. “Signora Puccini, it's my half day.”
“Your half day?” Elvira exclaimed. “And you spend it gallivanting in the garden?”
Puccini said, “Elvira, let her be. She can spend her half day as she likes.”
Doria drew a small, dismayed breath. Surely he must know by now that any argument could set off one of Elvira's tantrums. Even at this distance she could see the
signora
's face darken, her eyes contracting like those of an ill-tempered crow. Doria tried to hurry around the side of the house, toward the kitchen door, but it turned out that, too, was a mistake.
“Where are your shoes? Your
stockings?
”
Elvira sounded like a crow, too. She screeched and cawed and quarreled, and once she got started, nothing would stop her. Doria stopped where she was, and held up her single shoe and the wad of her stockings. “Here they are, signora.”
Puccini laughed, and Doria thought he was trying to lighten his wife's mood. “Look, Elvira, Bica has the other shoe! I think she's trying to kill it.”
Elvira said, “I won't have anyone in my house running around barefoot like a common village slut!”
“I—I was just reading in the garden—”
“What are you doing with my husband?”
Doria turned to the maestro, hoping he would explain, but Puccini had evidently comprehended what was about to happen after all. He slipped quietly in through the iron-and-glass bow window that connected the garden to the house, and disappeared. Even the two dogs abandoned her, trotting after their master. Doria felt a flush of resentment burn in her cheeks. She stared at her long toes, afraid to show her angry face. “Nothing, signora,” she said. “I wasn't doing anything. I was asleep on the bench when the
signore
came home.”
“Hah!” Elvira said, and slammed the window shut with a bang.
 
“Hah!”
Tory jerked awake. It was still dark, and cold. Only the faint ghost light of the sea found its way through her open bedroom door to shimmer on the mirror above the bureau and sparkle faintly on the gold butterfly in the paperweight. She lay a moment, rubbing her eyes, trying to orient herself. She put her hand to her chest, and found her skin hot, her nightgown damp with perspiration.
There had been new people in this dream: a mother, and a man who seemed vaguely familiar. Thinking of him made her uneasy for some reason she couldn't identify. It seemed if she could just concentrate long enough, remember what she had dreamed, she might know who he was, or at least who he represented in her psyche.
But then, the dream would evaporate soon enough, as dreams did. Sometimes her clients had felt their dreams were significant, that they held clues to their waking lives. Tory, though she listened and encouraged the lines of thought they created, had never been convinced. For her, a cigar was always just a cigar. Or so she had thought.
She threw back her blankets and put her feet on the cold floor. So different from the warm, patchy grass in the world of her dream. She was cold here, even in the daytime. Perhaps her dreams were just her suppressed longing for a warm, sunny climate.
She had found a long zippered sweatshirt on the remainder table at a little shop on the main street of the town, and decided it would work as a bathrobe. She pulled it on, and zipped it, letting the hood hang down her back. She put on a pair of thick socks, and padded out to the kitchen to fill the teakettle. The stove clock read four
A.M.
Too early to go for a walk, too early to eat breakfast. Too late to try to go back to sleep.
She turned on the radio—early music, Hildegard of Bingen, she thought—and carried her teacup into the living room. It was becoming a habit, she feared, waking on East Coast time and sitting in the armchair watching the tide creep up the beach. Solitude was becoming a habit, too. She tried to think when she had last spoken with anyone other than the clerk at the market, which was hardly conversation, or the station attendant who pumped gas for the Beetle.
It was time, she told herself, to do something different. Idleness didn't suit her. She needed to go out, to find something to do. She would have suggested that to a client who found herself spending too much time alone.
She carried the bedspread out to the living room and settled into the armchair, the blanket pulled up to her shoulders, to watch the light grow over the beach and the ocean. The big black rock—Haystack Rock, they called it—emerged gradually from the gloom as the darkness of the sky lightened to gray, then to a dusky blue, with streaks of pink and lavender on the horizon. The rock hulked above the shallow waves, a sentinel guarding the coastline.
Watching dawn break over the water, so far from her home, made Tory long for her son. She wondered if he was all right, if he was back at school, if he was sad, or frightened, or . . . She thrust the thoughts away. In her dreams of that hot place she felt things—sadness, anger, even joy. Maybe that was the point of having the dreams. In real life, at least in
her
real life, feelings were pointless. She had done what she had to do. She closed her eyes, and let the cold sea air chill her mind and her heart, banish the treacherous stirrings of longing.
Her life had been ruled by taking care of Jack. She had ended her marriage to protect him, moved him away to a tiny place where no one knew them or knew their story. Nothing else mattered, even when he barely spoke to her, when she knew he longed to be part of some other family. This separation should be easier, surely, because their relationship was already fractured.
It didn't work that way, evidently. Even after all this time, the rift between Jack and herself made her heart ache. The pain was layered, like the water swirling in the gray morning light, ephemeral on its surface, but deep and dark and irresistible at its deepest point.
Be safe, Jack.
Kate and Chet would watch over him, surely. They were natural parents, wonderful grandparents, much better at the whole thing than she'd ever been. She'd had no role models, of course—except for Nonna Angela—but that wasn't much of an excuse.
She let her head fall back, her tea cooling on the table beside her, and she slept again.
 
Doria bent over the ironing board in the kitchen, sweat running down her face and her chest as she labored over one of the maestro's high-collared shirts. She was still barefoot, despite the
signora
's complaints. It was far too hot to wear stockings and shoes. The big black stove, though she kept the fire as low as she could, made the kitchen all but unbearable, but there was no other way to heat the soapstone irons. She swept the iron back and forth over the heavy white linen, and listened to Elvira's voice rise and fall in its unmusical way, upbraiding her husband for his imagined offenses.
The iron had grown too cool, and she put it back on the stove to heat while she took up the other one. She was so hot she feared her perspiration would turn the shirt limp before she could finish it. Indeed, the air was so humid she doubted the shirt would keep its shape until she could stow it in Puccini's wardrobe. She knew what that meant. Elvira would bring it back to her in the morning, demanding she do it all over again.
She had seen an advertisement in
Il Secolo Illustrato
for an electric iron, which sounded wonderful, but Elvira would never consent to buying one for Villa Puccini. She was too old-fashioned, and too tight with her
lire
. The only reason the villa had electricity at all was because the
signore
insisted on the newest and best of everything—his house, his cars, his boats—even a telephone! Zita refused to touch it, but Doria yearned to be the one to answer its strident call, to pick up the little black cone of the receiver and speak into the scrolled mouthpiece. She knew just what she would say, if she ever had the chance. She would speak very clearly, in her most courteous voice: “
Pronto!
This is Villa Puccini, and Doria Manfredi is speaking to you.”
She was not allowed to answer the telephone, though. The
signora
had decreed that only she or the
signore
should answer the telephone, and when it was she, she croaked into it like the big black crow she was. “Villa Puccini!” she would shout, as if her voice had to reach over the distance without any assistance. “Who is that?” It was disgraceful. Doria knew she could do it much better.
She sighed at her own spinning thoughts as she bent over the ironing board. The heat made her heart pound, but there was a mountain of laundry in the big wicker basket, and she feared the worst if she didn't get it done. She swore to herself, pressing the flat-felled seams until they hissed, that her next half day she would stay away from the house, even if it meant hiding in the woods!
The dogs lay flat on the flagstone floor near the pantry, their tongues lolling. Elvira wouldn't like that, either, but Doria wasn't responsible for what the dogs did. For that, the crow could caw at her husband.
She was taking a short break, sponging her forehead with cold water at the sink, when she heard someone coming. She hurried back to the ironing board, where she seized up one of the irons to show she was working. The kitchen door opened. To Doria's relief it was Puccini, carrying one of his big guns, broken in half for safety, with the muzzle pointing downward. He set the gun beside the door and crossed to the sink. He turned the brass tap, and let the water run until it was cold, something Doria never did. “Too damned hot in here,” he said as he filled a glass. “You should iron after dark, when it's cooler.”
She shrugged. “The
signora
—” she began.
“I know, I know.” He put his head back and drank, emptying the whole glass, it seemed, in one gulp. He put the glass down, and reached into his pocket for a cigarette. “You think she's mean-tempered,” he said.
Doria kept her eyes on the shirt, turning it so she could iron the yoke.
“It's all right. I understand. Everyone thinks that,” he said. “Her life hasn't been easy.” The smile had gone out of his voice, and it throbbed slightly, musically. With sympathy for Elvira? Doria didn't know. He added, with what she thought was an admirable show of loyalty, “Her first husband was a grim man. She had to leave her son with him when she—when we moved to Milano.”
Doria lifted the shirt, and smoothed the sleeve out along the board. Everyone in Torre knew of the scandal. Elvira had abandoned her first husband and her son to run off to Milan with Giacomo Puccini. No one in society would speak to her for a very long time, and she was cut in the street by everyone she knew. They were poor, also, when they first came to Torre del Lago, and it had been years—not until after the success of
La Bohème
and
Tosca
—before they were able to build Villa Puccini.
And then, of course, there was the affair with Corinna.
Doria didn't like to think of it. It bothered her to imagine Puccini in bed with some other woman. Of course she heard Elvira and him together sometimes. She couldn't help that. Her room was just under theirs, and though she covered her head with her pillow, the thumping of the bed and the squeaking of the springs were unmistakable. But they were a married couple. It was proper for them to enjoy each other, even though they were terribly old. It was the idea that the
signore
would make such thumps and squeaks with someone else that made Doria feel uneasy.

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