Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (28 page)

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,

And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;

Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,

And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;

Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,

And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,

To the wide world, and all her fading sweets;

But I forbid thee one most heinous crime,

O, carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,

Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen.

Him in thy course untainted do allow,

For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.

Yet do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong,

My love shall in my verse ever live young.

The sonnet being done, we three embrace. I feel the sweet bulge of my mother almost as though she lived, and I smell, even in my dream, my daughter's lovely little-girl-on-the-verge-of-nymphet smell.

All is well, I say to myself in the dream. All is well.

Bright sun. It is morning. The demons of the dark are burned away. Somewhere off in the distance a church bell chimes, echoing and seeming to ricochet amidst the hills. The animals moo and baa, scratch and cluck, cluck and crow. Outside the shed, the day seems bright and warm. The baby squalls, is fed from the milky way of the goat's udder, then burps and smiles his first true smile. For that one moment, watching those baby lips turn upward like the promise of life renewed, it seems impossible to believe that all is not right with our world.

We take off once again through the Asolean hills. Where all was fog and dark last night, there is now a brilliant landscape of rounded hillocks, peasant houses with red tile roofs, olive trees, poplars, cypresses, and vines holding out their arms to dance across the hillsides. Little
torres
dot the gentle bumps of hills, and now and then a ruined medieval citadel, or
rocca
, crowns a precipice. The towns nestle in the valleys and the church bells peal as if they did not proclaim death to the Jews—or indeed to anyone—as if they were as utterly benign as the baby's first smile.

We ride along like Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus in some quattrocento painting, painted with tiny brushes in jewellike pigments ground from semiprecious stones. Down the mountain path we continue till we come at last to a wider path, then to a valley, then to a somewhat flatter road, which follows alongside a pretty river on which barges,
barche fluviali
, and gondolas ply their trade.

“We must steal new clothes,” says Will, realizing we are come to a populated area, “and a gondola—and a goat so the babe may eat.”

“Where shall we go?” I ask, knowing there is nowhere we can go. “Back to Venice? To Padova, Vicenza, Milano? Or else to England—sweet England with her low stone cottages, her half-timbered houses, and her burning green lawns? Shall we away to Warwickshire, there to hide in the hills?”

“Ah, Jessica—would that we could discover the Americas and make a new life with the babe.”

I think of the “Americas” I know—a whole continent consecrated to greed, and given over to the rape of nature and the death of art. If Will knew what had become of this New World, he would be as sad as I, so I am glad I cannot tell him.

“Back toward Venice,” I say, “along this sweet river. And on the way, we'll think of what to do and how to beard the dragon of our fate.” I think to look down at the ring again, but truly I am afraid to do so, for it has such unpredictable, capricious powers. Instead I whisper a psalm, remembered from my childhood:

“I am poured out like water,

and all my bones are out of joint:

My heart is like wax;

it is melted in the midst of my bowels…

Save me from the lion's mouth:

for thou has heard me from the horns of the unicorns…”

Whenever I am most perplexed about my life, I pray, asking that my future be revealed to me although I know not, for the moment, how. Perhaps God is a woman with milky breasts, perhaps a vengeful bearded patriarch, perhaps a dancing satyr, perhaps a maiden in a helmet with a sword in one hand and scales of justice in the other, perhaps a Triton with the waves at his command, perhaps a wood nymph piping through the wild, perhaps a seething fog seeking to become incarnate…Whatever God's form—and I know God takes different forms at different times in our lives—it is the union of our soul with God's that alone makes life bearable. And when we can no longer bear this sublunary turmoil, we fly up then to God's all-encompassing bosom.

I need not tell you how Will stole the boat and the clothes from two drunken gondoliers who were sprawled out on the riverbank in the morning sun, drinking the pale white wine of the Veneto, and sunning themselves in nothing but their open linen. Nor need I tell you how he stole the goat from a farmer whose property lay farther downriver toward Padova. The farmer had so many goats that he probably would not miss one for some time, but to Will and me this she-goat was as precious as if it were a unicorn.

Thus attired as boatmen, rowing a stolen gondola containing a stolen goat and an orphaned baby, we continue down the Brenta toward Padova, then down a smaller river toward Fusina and Venice.

Stately villas dream along the banks. With the weather as warm as it can sometimes be in the Veneto in December, we feel somehow suddenly blessed, lulled into a state of false security, as if this river idyll could last forever.

Will tells me of his plays and poems, swearing he has done nothing of consequence yet—some English history plays, the start of one erotic poem of the sort that university wits like to keep beneath their pillows and refer to in their venery, a few “sugar'd sonnets” for private eyes only—but he swears that if he lives, he will amaze and astound the world. Especially with plays he shall write of Italy and its wonders.

“Do you prefer playing the part, or writing it?” I ask.

“The player can ruin the writing for a time,” allows Will, “but the writer hath the last laugh always. Certes they try to change all you have done. Players are stubborn, cussed beggars…They try with all their might to make the author into a mere shade of himself, a ghost, and when the play begins no one is more despised a creature than the poor author. Ah, someday, Jessica, I shall, by my troth, write a ghost's part and play it myself! For that is all we are good for once the play begins—mere ghosts of intention, stalking misty battlements by night…”

I laugh, thinking of
Hamlet
, which I know is to come, but Will does not—not yet.

“I wish with all my might that you live to write such wonders,” say I.

Dreaming with my baby in the sunny gondola whilst Will rows with a gondolier's twist to his oar, I think of my mother again, of her suicide, and of Antonia, my wise and subtle ten-year-old who goes to Chapin with a knapsack on her back, endures a stepmother who speaks as though her jaws were wired together, and loves her father, as all daughters must—at least at ten—although she knows he is not my friend. If only I could bring my world and Will's together! That he might know Antonia—and I might know his babes as well. Perhaps I could save Hamnet's life were
I
his mother!

Mad—all mad. How can the dead conspire with the living? And yet, in truth, they do so all the time. Even in my own family, the dead kept the living in an iron grip. My grandfather reached icy fingers from beyond the grave, controlling all of us through the mechanism of his dreadful will. It was his will that indirectly caused my mother's suicide, his will that inevitably took Antonia from me, his will that knitted Pip and my ex-husband together as allies, although they mistrusted each other every bit as much as Grisha Krylov and Björn Persson.

Sometimes freedom is just a matter of changing perspective. In another frame of mind, with stronger self-esteem and less of a tendency to sabotage myself, I might take on the battle to win back both my daughter and my inheritance—possibly even win it. It was not that Pip and Antonia's father had any more legal right to the money or to my grandfather's dream of a foundation than I had, it was only that they had busied themselves with sucking up to the trustees and executors, with putting themselves in the drivers' seats while simultaneously discrediting me as a much-divorced, itinerant actress with a lurid psychiatric history. These maneuvers—or perhaps my own sense of powerlessness—had enabled them to take both Antonia and the Bostwicke booty from me. Perhaps, if I ever got back to New York—if New York still existed, that is—I would change all that. Antonia deserved better than a mother who gave up a fight. For her sake as well as mine I ought to have done things differently.

It was certainly something to dream and scheme about while rowing down the Brenta, past Palladian villas whose golden stones and columns are reflected in the ripply mirror of the water—and the more I dreamed and schemed, the more I became convinced that somehow I had to get back to my own time and begin to change the course of my life. But that, of course, was much more easily said than done.

I look at Will, who rows the gondola by now like a true Venetian, and looking at him, my heart breaks. Love this strong can warp the universe. For is there any other force but love that can obliterate time? The longing of a woman for a man—or a man for a woman—can cancel centuries, wipe out eons, cause the universe to arch back upon itself like a glittering snake devouring its own tail.

“Will, I love you with all my heart. Whatever becomes of us—never forget that.”

He looks at me and his golden eyes fill with tears.

“Love is not love,” he says, “which alters when it alteration finds. Oh no, it is an ever-fixed mark which looks on tempests and is never shaken.”

I gaze at his strong body, which has given me so much pleasure, his eyes, the windows of his soul, which have given me so much joy—and I am weak with longing. Again, death seems sweet to me compared with parting from this man. To die and be together through all of time seems reasonable and right. But a small insistent voice in my head whispers:
Antonia
,
Antonia
,
Antonia
. Motherhood calls me back to life. I have two children now to ground me—Antonia and little Judah—so death is a luxury I cannot afford.

“I wonder what has become of my father and your patron?” I ask Will.

“The devil take them!” says Will, rowing furiously.

“The devil never takes people exactly when we wish him to,” I say, rocking my little one. But I am also wondering what has become of that unlikely pair.

I can almost see Shalach and Southampton, those two uneasy allies on the road, fleeing Montebello in the storm brought by Arlecchina's ring. But while we hide in the manger from the hailstones, they press on and by now have come to Cittadella. They have taken horse rather than boat toward Venice, linked together by their rage against us and their vow to take revenge on Will, no matter what the cost.

I see them riding over the hillocks, anti-Semite and Jew, neither wearing his proper attire—Southampton is by now a rather bloody and tattered Brighella, and Shalach wears a black hat in defiance of the ghetto's laws. What do they speak of? The conversion of the Jews? The queen of England? The doge of Venice? The establishment of the Venetian ghetto? Men need have nothing in common but an enemy to ride together, haunch to haunch. Nor need they speak to be allies. These two have a common cause: Will's skin. That itself is bond enough.

Will's skin. I look at Will's skin—his scarred chest (nearly flayed of its pound of flesh), his forehead, glistening with sweat—and I am overcome with longing for him. My knees part slightly as if to receive him. His wounds speak to my own. If I leave this lover and go back to my time, what lies in store for me but loneliness? Since I first knew my stubborn craft, my sullen art, at seventeen (when I played Juliet to a Romeo who, alas, turned out to be resolutely gay), I have known that the life of an actress wedded to her art is hardly calculated to bring happiness and joy in love. Some few find it. The rest fling themselves from man to man as if their lives were complex square dances, with changing partners the order of the night.

What awaits me in either New York or Los Angeles is a sort of sexual Sahara. Married men, gay men, narcissistic actors wanting caretakers who act like mommies but look like daughters, studio executives spoiled rotten by the sexual smorgasbord that is Hollywood, captains of industry who require a full-time call girl-decorator-caterer to fly around the world in Lear jets as their schedules demand.

Just thinking of all that, I want this river idyll never to end, for Will and me to stay here in this stolen gondola forever, drifting, but going nowhere. Oh, I know there have been saints who died in religious ecstasy never to return to the world of men, bodhisattvas who renounced the call of the sublunary spheres, shamen who disappeared into the desert forever. But the true calling of the hero or heroine who follows a vision-quest is to descend into the underworld, into the labyrinth, up to the vaulted heavens, out of time, only to bring back a boon for all of humankind—and such a hero would I be. I want to rock in this timeless gondola forever, but I know that is impossible. It is as though Demeter and Persephone have had their roles reversed, and my daughter, my Persephone, calls me back to earth.

But what of Judah, my little lion? Which world does he belong to? That remains to be seen.

A
N ABANDONED VILLA
sleeps along the bank. Its golden stones are rusticated, so as to suggest antiquity, and it has turrets, columns, windows that are glinting rosettes, and windows that are slates of polished gold in the setting sun of the Veneto. It appears strangely still, its garden overgrown with weeds and vines, vines climbing its stones as if to repossess the turrets. Perhaps mad dogs guard its battlements, but we are determined, nonetheless, to stop here—at least for a while—so we tie up our gondola at a half-rotted river dock and step ashore.