Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (30 page)

Sometimes, as I ride, I seem to hear flapping wings above me; but looking up I can see nothing, so dense is the fog. I think of Arlecchina and the ring. Dare I even gaze upon it here? Better not, I think. Another thunderstorm like the last one might dispatch us all. The babe would surely perish in the cold—and I myself might not endure it. But I know that in some way Arlecchina is behind all this mayhem and debauchery. She is the witch, the muse, the midwife to our fates. But whether she is trifling with us to no end, or prodding us along toward some glorious destiny, is not yet clear. What fertile seeds will spill out of the gourd of time? What will be revealed?

Riding thus in the fog, I think of my life and my death. “Death, as the psalmist saith, is certain; all shall die.” But if I were to die today, would it be too soon? I have borne Antonia, played some few roles I am proud of—but I have completed neither Antonia's education nor my own. And I have not claimed the legacy that should be mine. Not just the legacy of lucre, but the legacy of art. Nor have I borne a son. The two acts are oddly intertwined, for there exists a curious, disputed codicil to my grandfather's will that states that any son of mine could claim a lion's share of income from the layered trust.

Best not to think of this! But if somehow I could get back to my own time and take the baby with me, I'd have the key to all: the Shakespearean theater with the Bostwicke name and grandfather's disputed booty. Even more, I'd now know what to do with it, for I'd build a theater to perform Will's plays—Will's plays, which do not yet exist!

But what if Will should perish? What if even now Southampton slays him in a fit of pique? Or what if he should drown while sailing home? Or die of plague or fever? And what if the babe and I should perish? Oh, strong magick is needed and needed now—perhaps even stronger magick than Arlecchina herself possesses. The magick of the muse alone will do!

We gallop on. From time to time I outride Shalach, whereupon he frantically gallops behind me, trying to catch up. Each time he almost catches me, he shouts a more desperate promise. “I'll raise the babe as my own grandson!” he shouts on one occasion. And, on another, “I'll permit no harm to come to him!” Thus has my WASP knack of horsemanship saved me even in a Jewish world! Toward Fusina we furiously gallop—where a hired gondola awaits. And thence by choppy sea from Fusina to San Marco, thence toward Cannaregio and home.

The ghetto is as we left it: the teeming
campo
with the poor lining up to pawn or redeem their pledges, the din of the street vendors, the children playing, the water carriers, the old-clothes men, the foreigners from every corner of the globe, the tourists in turbans, coronets, yellow hats, red hats, come into the ghetto to gawk, to pawn their chattel, or to buy a jewel, a painting, or a sweaty old garment (with a jewel or painting sewn into its silk).

The ghetto has not changed, but we have. For we have seen the threat that lurks like a sleeping beast outside its walls. We know that at any moment raving Christians can storm its walls, screaming of plague, bad harvests, ruinous rates of interest—all of which will be blamed upon the Jews.

For this reason, Shalach is determined to circumcise the baby as soon as possible and claim him as a grandson and a Jew. No word passes between us about my adventure with the Christian Englishmen. Whatever his deepest feelings, Shalach is prepared to act as if he forgets my indiscretions. Did they ever occur? Who knows? Such acts of passion have the quality of dreams. The more they move our deepest selves, the more we cancel them to consciousness. Shalach will claim this baby as a Jew—that will be his revenge.

He looks at me and his watery old eyes bear a father's mixed blame and blessing. He cannot hate me, no matter what I've done. He could reveal me as a harlot to the Jews in the
campo
and see me stoned to death by my own people (with the women, no doubt, taking the most perverse delight in my destruction), but he will not do so. Instead, he will claim this baby as his heir.

Oh, dear Will Shakespeare, when he finally came to write his Jewish play, was unerring about Shylock! For all his grumbling and bitterness, he remains the most interesting character in the story—a tragic hero like Lear, a great soul despite his defects. Even at the end, when Portia (that Miss Priss, that WASP debutante) grants him the flesh but not the blood to go with it, and calls in a forgotten law against the alien to do him out of his ducats, our sympathies remain with him. For Shylock, and Jessica (with Antonio a poor third), seem finally the only real characters in the play. To Portia's debutante, Bassanio's fortune hunter, Gratiano's rake, Lorenzo's anti-Semite, only these three appear as complex beings, full of the terror and wonder of life. Against our wills, we leave the theater feeling Shylock's deep humanity. And Jessica's. How did the playwright know to put it there?

He knew.

Life resumes in the ghetto—but now, with little Judah to account for. Shalach will brook no questions about the baby's origins, and my maid and all the other womenfolk assume that I have gone away to bear a bastard babe and brought it back into my father's house. They gossip about me behind their hands, say how they always
knew
I hid a pregnancy beneath my stays, but I care not—nor does my father. It is astonishing to see him melted by grandfatherhood, to see him spending hours cooing at the baby, neglecting his counting house. The other merchants whisper and wish him ill.

But since Shalach is relatively rich, and since the commonest people in all ages grovel before money, he is permitted his eccentricities. The poor must conform to laws, but the rich are allowed to be above them. Both within and without the ghetto, human nature is equally inhuman when it comes to gold.

Life goes on. The wet-nurse feeds the baby and it grows. Time slows to a crawl as life revolves around this infant life. Will and Harry seem almost like figures in a dream. Montebello all but fades from memory. California and New York, Antonia and her father and my brother, Pip, again become but memories of another life. The baby holds me captive in his power. He coos to me, gurgles to me, smiles at me, and all of history is held in abeyance as I play my greatest role.

A son! We fall in love with our daughters but we adore our sons. If women have any weakness on this earth, it is that they put their sons before themselves!

Well, then, if I am doomed to stay here as Shylock's daughter, I shall enjoy my son, who, with his radiance, obliterates all other worlds. The winter creeps along and Christmas is almost upon us. I stay indoors, worshipping at the altar of the baby's cradle.

One gray morning I awaken to the shouts of revelers in the
campo
below. I run to the window and look down—and there, milling about the open well, I see dozens of Venetians in their masques and dominoes come to haggle with or taunt the Jews. Real terror grabs my heart, for this baby has become my will to live.

I see one reveler dressed as Pulcinella grab a Jewish boy by one foot and dangle him above the open well as if to drop him in. The boy's mouth gapes wide in silent horror. The screams of all the Jews for the last six thousand years are in that silent O. The boy's mother rushes forward in despair, and in that moment, the reveler puts the boy down as if only a jest were meant. But the Jews coagulating in the square know differently. Christmas time approaches, then carnival; it is a most dangerous time for Jews.

A chill rushes through me. My hands tremble and I begin to sweat. At first I think it is the fear of what I've seen, but as the day wears on, I feel giddier and giddier and my vision dims. I grow weaker with fever and my armpits swell. In my groin there are two tender lumps, and my stomach alternately heaves and cramps violently.

Plague, I think—and then laugh at myself for being melodramatic. Even in twentieth-century Venice I believed I had plague. Impossible. I stagger across the floor to the baby's cradle—and it is there that I collapse.

All health is alike; all illness particular. I shiver; I cannot get warm. My back aches, and all my limbs feel bruised and sore. I cannot look into the light of day, or even at a candle in the room by night. My eyelids droop and yet I cannot sleep. My stomach heaves and a boiling stinking purgatory pushes from my guts. I stagger up and fill the chamber pot beneath my bed, praying that no one sees me, hears me, smells me. Then I stagger back to bed. The soreness in my armpits grows. My fever rises and it does not break. I hear someone say, “Thus are harlots punished,” but I cannot tell who the speaker is.

And then I am away at sea. I lose consciousness and rock in an ocean of feverish dreams. I am five; the benign birds on the ceiling of my room have changed into enormous, bloody-beaked pterodactyls from the Museum of Natural History. They are buzzing about the ceiling, opening and closing their beaks as if they are about to swoop down on me and pluck my eyes out. I scream for my mother and with that scream awaken, not knowing where I will find myself. The writhing columns around my bed alert me: I am still in Shalach's house in Venice, and when I open wide my eyes I see Arlecchina standing before me.

She looks down at me with glittering eyes. She lifts and strokes my icy hand.

“I made a promise to your mother long ago,” she says.

“Which mother?” I croak, my throat dry from fever, my mouth full of cotton wool.

“The one who lost the will to live in Venice, the one whose suicide brought you back again and yet again, the one whose death you have been fighting all these years.”

“What promise?”

“To protect you from all harm—your children, too. Jessica: the baby boy is yours. I give him to you in whatever time. Time does not exist. It is a fiction we invent to please ourselves. Just as life is. Just as death. We can move through time at will, but most of us do not know this. You of all people understand that the dead are not powerless. There is no death, but only a change of worlds.”

“By what magick will you send me home?”

“Your own, Jessica, your own.”

And she is gone. My fever grows like a monstrous red creature filling the room, a silken tent of red through which the noon sun shines, a glowing coal imbedded in my forehead.

Del Banco's doctor brother is sent to minister to me with leeches and bleeding bowls, potions and poultices, powders, salves. A rabbi is sent; another doctor. Suddenly all the faces in the room around me wear long-nosed chalky masks—as in a play of plague. I remember an errant line from my Shakespearean research some weeks (or is it centuries?) past: “The cause of plagues is sin, if you look to it well; and the cause of sin are plays; therefore the cause of plagues are plays.” Good God, I think, I am really dying! Is this how it happens—like a pantomime, or a masquerade, or a bad play with shoddy, tattered, rented costumes? You keep expecting a reprieve, and then you die with half your work undone? Inexorable as childbirth or a baby's cry, death stalks the chamber where I lie.

I drift, I drift. A day passes, a night. Masked figures come and go in my darkened chamber. They take my blood, swaddle my forehead with rags soaked in bitter herbs, apply leeches, apply poultices, give me potions to drink. The little suckers of the leeches sing to me; they sing to me of death. Sometimes I swim (nay, struggle) into consciousness raving (in English) that I need sulfa drugs or antibiotics—whereupon the beak-nosed watchers think me mad, or entering the last delirium of death.

“Hear how she speaks in a barbaric tongue!” whispers one chalk-faced wraith.

“The dead are not powerless!” I cry in English.

Behind their masks they cluck with pity and with condescension. “
La morte viene subito
…” they say.

How many hours or days I drift I cannot tell. My great four-postered bed becomes a boat, rocking in a stormy sea. My mother is clinging to its side, her eyes hollow from the grave, her flesh in tatters around her cheekbones.

“Do as I say, not as I do,” she whispers.

“What?” I croak.

“I release you from my death,” she says, and then she floats away.

Pip appears, a little boy with gray shorts and a blue blazer that says
BUCKLEY SCHOOL
.

“I always worshipped you,” he says. “I wanted what was yours—especially love. I got the money, but they all loved you. And so I still had less…I've never had enough.” He cries like a baby and floats away, shaking his fists at the waves. And then Antonia appears wearing her green school knapsack on her back. She unzips it and extracts for me a little bag of gummy bears such as I have sent her when she was sick.

“Take them, Mummy, they will make you well!” I pop a gummy bear upon my tongue, then reach out my arms to hug my darling girl, but she too churns away on that boiling sea that takes all my relatives: mother, brother, all.

“Am I really dying?” I ask myself. I cannot die; too much remains undone. The whole first half of my life, I understood nothing; everything was wasted on me. Now that I have finally become someone on whom nothing is lost, shall I have to pay with my life? I suddenly want so terribly
not
to die. I who have worn my life so carelessly till now, who have courted suicide with one eye open, want nothing more than life.

Dear God, be with me now. Dear God, give me a little time to change my life. And then, out of the depths of some memory I did not know I possessed, these lines come to me:

Beauty is but a flower,

Which wrinkles will devour:

Brightness falls from the air,

Queens have died young and fair,

Dust hath closed Helen's eye.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord have mercy on us!

Two courtiers approach my bed.

“Hush, Will,” says one. “Don't be a frightened puppy.” I recognize Southampton's voice, and the tone in which he speaks to Will tells all: Will has submitted to him for the sake of a thousand ducats—that disputed debt canceled by the deaths of Bassanio and Gratiano. I wonder if Will knows this or if the earl still holds the debt over his head like a sword of Damocles.