Almost Famous Women (14 page)

The morphine is a tidal wave of warmth through her body. She shudders. Her eyes are closed, but she can sense light, a sort of redness seeping in through her lids. She's living now in the interior of her mind, and there is the familiar view of looking up, forty-nine feet up, at the twisting staircase that leads to the blinding light. Tend it; do not look into it.

What do my daughter's eyes look like? she wonders, thinking back to the moment when the screaming child had slid from her body, the child that could have changed everything, if she'd let her, and she had not let her. The first time she held the child she'd let her fingers rest on the baby's soft spot, the place where the skull had not yet closed over the pulsing brain.

There's also the familiar view of looking up from the cylindrical wall of death, the sensation of seeing people but not knowing them as individuals, never catching their eyes.

The audience is looking down, she thinks, or is it my father? I am looking up. I am spinning. I am fast but not empty. I am swimming in the strong currents near the jetties, I am crying with the gulls, bobbing like the buoy on a lobster trap, looking through the fog banks over the churning Bay of Fundy.

Allegra Byron, illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont, 1817.

O
n the first of March, 1821, Allegra Byron entered the Convento di San Giovanni like a small storm, accompanied by nonrelations, overdressed women who handled her with cool affection. It was a clear morning, so we met our charge in the prayer garden, a patch of grass where a few ancient olive trees were waking up to spring. Though lauded by her guardians as an early talker, three-year-old Allegra greeted us with silence.

This, her chaperone said, is your new home.

Allegra looked at our faces, then the grounds and buildings. I don't like it, she said.

I stood with another Capuchin sister, flanking the abbess, who lorded over the garden with a solemn stare. A breeze whipped our brown habits around our knees, exposing our humble shoes. I felt my job was to soften the harsh presence of the abbess. These moments, when a child was left in our care, struck me as pivotal in the child's life.

The convent was not a place of peace; it was a place of noise, an almost holy sanctuary carved out in the heart of Bagnacavallo in
northeast Italy. It was a boarding school, repository for unwanted children, and abbey for Capuchin nuns. The surrounding buildings were a pastiche of gray-, cream-, and flesh-colored bricks and plaster; the streets were irregular and winding and smelled of thick peasant soups. Soon the convent gardens would be tilled and planted with lettuces and herbs that could withstand late frosts.

Vendors set up leather, vegetable, and paper carts underneath our public arches. The Roma curled their dirty fingers around our iron gates—
a little something
,
gaje
, they said to anyone looking—but we were not allowed to help them. I could smell garlic, pungent and a little sweet, burning in the trattorias on my afternoon walks past the Palazzo Gradenigo to the boundary of Porta Pieve, the town gate. At night, from my cold bed, I could hear the syncopated rhythm of horse hooves on via Garibaldi's cobblestone when all else was still.

I'd come to Bagnacavallo the year before Allegra arrived, the month my newborn daughter and husband died from typhus. My milk was still strong, and I wanted to be put to use. I wanted to be occupied, exhausted, sucked dry. I wanted to cut myself off from everything outside of the convent walls.

Say hello, Allegra, her chaperone urged.

The girl's eyes were large chestnut jewels, insouciant below ash-blond curls. Her chin was dimpled, giving her face a strange maturity. Her empire-waist muslin dress, which peeked out beneath her unbuttoned velvet coat, was wrinkled from constant movement. Instead of pleasantries, the girl marched off to shake an olive tree, leaving footprints in what remained of a late snow.

Allegra is prone to fevers and tantrums, the lead chaperone said. She likes to drink warm milk and eat biscuits in the evenings. Her father requests that—

We have biscuits, the abbess said, turning to project her voice toward the girl. The abbess was a formidable woman of sixty-eight with short gray hair she cut herself. She was tall, humorless, and deeply committed to the church.

Amaretti? Allegra asked, the question shaping the bow of her cupid's mouth.

The abbess nodded, but I'd never encountered amaretti in the convent. It was my first notion that the girl was being won over in front of her charges, that she was a prize. This was not the type of place that made cookies or catered to whims. The sisters were thin. Righteous, they ate like sick birds.

I could tell immediately that Allegra was a difficult child, but something in me felt I could reach her. I watched her quietly, the way she pretended to play while eyeing her chaperones' every move. Her anxiety was evident. She moved to clutch at the knees of the lead chaperone.

At the convent I'd nearly found what I was searching for: blankness. I sought exhaustion through labor, a mind quieted by industriousness.

When I arrived in Bagnacavallo, they'd given me the problem children—the ones yellow with malaria or wild with seizures. My first six months, I nursed a countess's discarded son to health, despite his severe cleft palate, which wrenched his lip into his nostril like a drawn curtain. I stroked his thick black hair and rubbed his cheek with my callused thumb, watched his chest rise, his stomach swollen with milk.

Early on, one of the Capuchin sisters gave me a warning. Your
first instinct at the orphanage is to possess a child, she said, to make it love you best.

But guard your heart,
mia cara
, she said, her habit the color of light coffee, faded from coarse hand washing. When the children you've suckled are grown, they will forget you. When the children you've taught go home, they will hate you as if you're the one who kept them here.

In the nursery, you could get away with the luxury of affection. But as soon as the children became toddlers, the tone sterilized, as if reticence and decorum were more instructional than compassion.

The nursery walls were a sickly green, and there was, I worried, malice in our Madonna's face. She stood with her hands out and open on a wooden table. Her fingers were too thin; her hair, too gold; her lips, too red.

Hail Mary, full of grace
, I said that evening before dinner, rosary in hand at the Madonna's feet.
Blessed is the fruit of thy womb . . .

You could tell she hadn't enough mercy for all of us. Perhaps it had been siphoned off years ago. Perhaps there wasn't much to begin with.

I did not see Allegra again until bath time, when I left the sleeping infants in the nursery to assist with turndown rituals for the older children. As my milk had dried the month before, I'd been asked to make the transition from the nursery to the boarding facilities.

I manned my station, a tin tub on a wooden floor, the bathwater a little dirty but warm. Allegra was undressed and handed to me. The rims of her eyes were red with fatigue. I set her down next to the bath. She looked at the water, then pressed her feet—still
plump with baby fat—against the tub and shot backward, the skin of her bottom taut against the cold floor.

No! she screamed, smacking her naked heels on the wooden floors.
Lo non voglio un bagno!
Her words echoed off the walls and tall ceiling as if she were calling from the top of the Alps, unholy and alarming sounds.

Allegra fell into a wild tantrum, her nostrils flared, her back arched. Her little body was a wonder, stout and athletic. She threw herself across the floor, kicking the air. No, she screamed. No.

Shh,
mia cara
, I whispered. Shh, Shh.

I brought her to her feet, placed one arm around her chest, kneeled behind her, and tried to contain her. Her arms flailed and one struck me in the nose, sending tears to my eyes. I was afraid she would hurt herself. Her body went slack. The other children watched, wide-eyed.

Ten minutes more and I will call for an exorcism, the sister beside me said.

It's her first night, I said.

Mammina, Mammina, Allegra wailed. Her breathing was jagged. Papa.

She now stood a few feet from the tub, her eyes shut and mouth gasping for air between sobs. She urinated on the floor, watery beads sliding down her solid legs. No, she screamed. No bath!

Shh, shh, I said. If you will bathe like a good girl, I said, taking her hand, we will make a letter for Papa.

She continued to cry but let me move her into the tub. She sat still, like a stone cherub in a fountain, her face a tableau of misery. Her blond curls flattened to her shoulders and neck as I poured a cup of dull water over her head.

I washed her quickly and not without tenderness. I lifted one arm, then the other, enamored with their girth and proportion. As I raised her from the tub and began to towel-dry her hair, she started to wail again. Her cry was sharp and unpleasant, like that of a bleating sheep lost from the herd, and everything in me wanted it to stop.

Take me home, she begged, casting herself forward over my arm. Take me home.

Hush, I said. You must calm down.

Her eyes looked past me. I picked her up off the floor. She kicked and clawed at me and slid down my frame as I repeatedly bent to find a better hold. Darkness was coming in through the windows, and we were losing precious visibility. The convent was too large to light in entirety.

Allegra's young skin was like marzipan, her cheeks scrubbed and shiny like the
frutta martorana
the cafés served at Christmas. I wrapped her tightly in a towel, whisked her down the hallway to the bedchamber.

The bedroom for three- and four-year-old girls—there were six of them—was small, but the ceiling rose to enormous heights, capped off in a Gothic arch, humbling everything beneath it with space and shadow. As soon as Allegra's body went limp with exhaustion, I pulled a nightgown over her head. Her eyes opened once, blank. I ran a comb through her hair and tucked her underneath the sheets, which smelled of lye. The beds were donated from a hospital, undersized wrought-iron frames that sat upon the old floor unevenly.

Try to sleep, I whispered, touching her small back, feeling its heat. I'll see you in the morning.

I had a chill as I made my way back to clean the bath station; the fight with Allegra had dampened my clothes and hair. I crouched to mop the spilled water around the tub. The horsehair packed between the cracks of the wood flooring occasionally came loose, dirtying my rag.

The abbess approached me. I saw her worn shoes first, then looked up to meet her eyes. Sister, she said. You broke protocol this evening putting Allegra to bed.

She was upset, I said. I thought—

There are no favorites here, she said. Consider this a warning.

It had always been my intention at the convent to be nobody, to go unnoticed, to punish myself until I could no longer feel the weight of my dead child in my arms. But the old fight in me stirred, the fight of a peasant's wife who had sewn seeds in the hills of Alfonsine while pregnant, tended my ill husband a day after childbirth. I swallowed the protest and continued drying the floor.