The Girl in the Glass (23 page)

She snapped the photo. “How about you smile on this next one?” I produced the commanded smile.

“There’s a good one,” the mother said.

“You a student here?” the dad said as his daughter handed my camera back to me.

I am invisible here
, is what first sprang to mind, but I reined it in. “Sort of. I do feel like I am supposed to be learning something while I’m here.” They all laughed. Then they waited for the real answer.

“I work for a company that publishes travel books.” It wasn’t a lie by any stretch of the imagination, but I felt like I was deceiving them nonetheless.

“Oh, how lucky you are,” said the daughter who had taken my picture. “To be able to travel the world like that.”

Guess I had succeeded in deceiving them.

“I actually don’t get to travel that often. Most of our authors don’t need us to come visit them. The Internet makes communicating internationally pretty easy.”

“So you’re publishing a book on Florence, then?” the dad said.

“Considering it.”

“We love coming here,” the mum chimed in.

“My favorite place too,” I said. I hoped the mother wouldn’t ask me how many times I had been. I’d been a hundred times in my mind.

But she didn’t. They said good-bye and I thanked them for taking my picture. The daughter who wanted her picture taken where I had been
standing got what she wanted, and then they headed for the stairs that would take them back to the pavement far below us.

A few minutes later, when I was sure they were many steps ahead of me, I headed down as well.

Sofia had been right about the fresco.

From the floor of the cathedral, the spray of colors and scenery looked beautiful. Up close, the demons that reached for unrepentant souls were the size of swimming pools and clearly overly fond of their work.

Some things you just aren’t meant to see that close.

After I reunited with Sofia, she showed me the Baptistery doors—beautiful—and then I proceeded to try to take the cathedral’s photo from its front side. Again, not easy to do. The massive front of the basilica spills over every camera frame.

Sofia leaned in close. “The bell tower was begun by Giotto in 1334. When he was being considered as its architect, the pope wished to know if he had the credentials to build it. He drew a perfect circle—freehand—and sent it to Rome. A perfect circle. That’s all he sent. He got the commission.”

It was late afternoon when we started to walk back to her flat, but Sofia must have sensed I was getting weary and needed a pick-me-up.

“Let’s get a cappuccino,” she said, and she led me down a few streets to another piazza where an ancient-looking church, plain and monochrome to me after having just seen the Duomo, dominated the view.

“Basilica di San Lorenzo,” Sofia said, nodding toward it. “Very old. Consecrated by Saint Ambrose in 393. Brunelleschi made adaptations in 1423. There was supposed to be a marble facade added, but it never came about. Very pretty and peaceful inside, though.”

We walked toward a café, and she told me to take a seat at one of the tables under an awning and she would be back with the cappuccino.

A few minutes later, she returned with our drinks, and I sipped the frothy concoction, at once smitten with it.

“I will never be able to be content with American coffee again,” I said, not even half-kidding.

She laughed. Then her tone turned thoughtful. “I was in America once. In Maryland. My husband took me along for a business trip.”

A dozen questions swirled about in my head. I didn’t know which one to ask first.

“But your husband wasn’t American, right?”

“British. I met him here, though. He was teaching a business class at the university. I was taking it.”

“Love at first sight?” I asked gently, not sure if she would want to say more.

She smiled the kind of smile you have for events that took you to the crucible but that you survived to tell about. “I don’t know what it was. I was simply drawn to him like a moth to a flame. And I couldn’t shake it. I thought that was love when I was young. But love isn’t like that. Desire is. Can be. But love is not like that. It is not obsessive and fearful. Papa tried to warn me. He could see that Thomas would break my heart. He saw it from the very beginning.”

She paused and sipped from her cup. Her hand shook a little.

“We don’t have to talk about this,” I said.

“It’s all right. It was ages ago. I was young. Only twenty-four.” She looked beyond me to the ancient church she had shown me moments before. “He asked me to marry him inside San Lorenzo.”

I said nothing. A second later she pulled her gaze away to focus on the cup in front of her. “He hadn’t asked my father first. If he had, Papa
would’ve told him no. In a nice way, of course. Because Papa was always gracious to everyone. Even people who didn’t deserve grace. But Thomas and I both knew my father wouldn’t approve, and my mother was already sick with cancer by then. So I convinced myself that I would be doing them both a favor by eloping with Thomas. So that’s what I did. We went to Rome, got married, and I was Mrs. Thomas Burnside when I came back.”

Sofia sighed, not loudly, but with effort, as if she needed extra oxygen to tell me the rest. “Papa wept when we returned. Not in front of Thomas, though. He was as civil as he could be to Thomas, but Thomas knew my father didn’t trust him. They barely talked to each other. I think my mother already knew the cancer would beat her, even though she lived another four years, so her reaction was quiet resignation. It was as if she knew she couldn’t undo what I had done. So what purpose was there in wishing she could? There are things you just can’t wish away, no matter how hard you try.”

I nodded. I knew this to be true too.

“I kept thinking at some point Thomas would want to return to England, not to live there because he told me he loved Italy, but to see his parents and his brothers. To introduce me to them. But he never wanted to go. I think he let me go to Maryland with him that one time to get me to stop asking him when we would go to England. And for a while I did stop.

“After we’d been married for two years, I wanted a baby, but Thomas said no. We couldn’t afford one yet. We were living on the other side of the Arno, and I was still working for my father, though he spent much of his time caring for my mother. I would stop in and see them every Monday and Friday afternoon. Thomas and I were renting a flat, and he didn’t want to even talk about having children until we could buy our own place. In the country. So I started saving every lire I could get my hands on. I would take on extra tours, and I saved all my tips, thinking that if I could put away a small deposit, we could buy a little place and finally start a family.

“We had been married four years when he said he had to make a business trip to Paris. He was gone for a month. When he got back, he told me he had really gone to England and that he had something to tell me. I thought he had a surprise for me. I thought he had bought a little house for us in England, and though I was sad to think of leaving Florence, I knew this meant we could finally have a baby. At last I would have a child, and I could be to that child what my parents had been to me. I would bring the baby to Florence for a visit, and maybe the baby would give my mother a reason to fight the cancer and she would get better. A baby would change everything.

“I thought of all of these things in just a handful of seconds. I was still thinking of them when he said he needed to tell me something he should’ve told me when he first met me. He looked troubled, and I put my hand out to caress his face, and he … he pulled away from my touch.”

Sofia paused to gather some inner strength, and I used the quiet moment to seek some for myself to be able to hear what she was going to say. I knew it couldn’t be good.

“He told me he was already married when he met me four years ago. That he had left his wife and infant son because he thought she had been cheating on him. And he took a teaching post here to get away from her and married me so that he could stay in Italy.” Twin bubbles of silvery tears peeked out of Sofia’s eyes, and she fingered them away. “But apparently she hadn’t cheated on him. She had somehow finally been able to convince him, and he realized he still loved her and that he wanted to be a father to the child he already had.

“So he left me. And went back to England alone.”

I felt hot tears at my own eyes, and I daubed them away with a napkin. “I’m so sorry that happened to you, Sofia.”

She shook her head. “I was sorry too. Sorry enough to want to throw
myself off Giotto’s bell tower. I knew I could probably have taken Thomas to court for having lied to me about his marriage. But I didn’t have the wits about me to be livid enough to do that; I was too full of anguish. I went back to my parents’ house, and Papa drew me into his arms and into the home I had grown up in. My mother was nearly gone by then, and when she understood what had happened to me, I think that was the thing that sent her skipping toward heaven, far away from this terrible planet. She died a week later.”

By this time I was wiping my nose with my napkin and searching my purse for a clean Kleenex to replace it.

Sofia reached across the table and squeezed my other hand. “It was a long time ago, Marguerite.”

I thought of my own losses that seemed tiny compared to hers, and I shook my head. “How … how did you recover from all of that?”

She smiled, patted my hand, and then sat back in her chair. “It took a while. Took a long while. But I had my papa to travel the road of grief with. It’s not as scary when you have someone who walks it with you. He would remind me, at my darkest moments, that I had the blood of the Medici running in my veins. I was strong. I was resilient. I was able to stand under the crushing weight of this double sorrow. I told him one day that I just wanted to close my eyes and never wake up again. And he went into my old bedroom, found that five-hundred-lire coin, and pressed it into my palm. ‘That is not your way,’ he said to me. ‘That is not your way.’ ”

She paused and drank the last of her cappuccino.

“Was … was there ever anyone else?” I asked. “I mean, did you ever think of getting married again?”

“No. I never met anyone who could love me the way my papa loved my mama, and that’s what I wanted. Love like that. The other isn’t really love. If the Medici know anything about love, it is that there is no substitute for
the real. I have no regrets, Marguerite. My papa and I found happiness after our sorrows. Until he became ill a couple years ago, we had a lovely home together in the flat. I wish sometimes that I’d had a child, just one. I am the last. There are no more Medici after me, at least none that can hear what my father and I can hear.”

I thought of what Geoffrey had said to me when I first told him about Sofia’s claim. “But aren’t there others out there who can trace their lineage back to the Medici? I mean, it was a big family, and they were always marrying their children into royal families of other nations, right? Aren’t there little Medicis running around the royal houses of England and Spain and France?”

Sofia laughed. It was good to hear her laugh.

“Sure there are. But no one seems to consider that it matters. The family name is dead to them. What does it matter who you are if you don’t care that’s who you are?”

She stood. “Let’s stop by the market and get some veal for supper. I will show you how to make
Vitello alla Fiorentina.”

I stood too, crumpled the napkin I had been crying into, and shoved it into my pocket.

During those long years of my youth, as I tried to comprehend what happened the summer my mother died, I went to Nurse for answers and advice. She knew all the answers to my questions, and she had more advice for me than anyone—not because she was amazingly wise, but because no one else was interested in giving me counsel.

When people whispered of my mother’s death, the name Troilo Orsini often appeared in the same breath. The more I began to understand the way of men with women, the more I understood Troilo was my mother’s undoing. He was my father’s cousin and was a very handsome man. I remember him in snatches of memory. Tall, muscular, and with laughing eyes the color of polished wood. Nurse told me that my father and Troilo were born the same year, but my father grew in girth as he aged, and Troilo grew only more beautiful. Troilo came to Florence after my parents were married—long before I was born—to impress my grandfather, win his favor, and improve his financial prospects. Many people came to Florence to impress Cosimo de’ Medici. And since he was family, Troilo was welcomed.