Geoffrey voiced a keen desire to see something that I didn’t quite catch, and Beth said she couldn’t wait to see Michelangelo’s
David
. Victoria, shifting her cutlery to precisely align it with the edge of the table, chirped, “I plan to do a day trip to San Gimignano while we’re in Florence. They have a medieval torture museum there, and medieval torture is sort of a hobby of mine.”
Napkins rushed to mouths all around the table. I thought I must have heard her wrong, but if I had, apparently so had everyone else. Geoffrey spluttered, “Oh, nonono! Don’t prack . . . read. Y’know.” Or something like that.
Victoria smiled. “Oh, of course. I didn’t mean I
practice
medieval torture. Oh dear, no. Poor Geoffrey! I’d never . . . no, what I mean is, I operate a book store at home, and I sort of specialize in medieval histories—early England, knights, Celtic stuff, Norman stuff, you know. I’ve always been fascinated by the horrid things they thought of to do to each other. Such short, painful lives they had.”
Lettie cleared her throat rather self-consciously. “I’mrward to our gondola ride tomorrow night; something I’ve always wanted to do. So romantic! Too bad Ollie isn’t here.”
“Maybe you’ll run into a sexy gondolier tomorrow,” I said. “I won’t tell Ollie.” Everyone laughed—everyone except Meg.
Meg just sniffed, pinching even further her already pinched-in nose. “Well I, for one, am going to register a complaint with Pellegrino Tours about this bait-and-switch job they’ve pulled. They’re not going to get away with it.”
“What do you mean, bait-and-switch?”
“I mean Venice. Is this Venice? The brochure promised two nights in Venice, and they’ve stuck us in this god-awful . . . whatever it’s called. It’s certainly not Venice. Do you see any gondolas? Canals? Where are the canals? Look out the window. Is that water or asphalt out there?”
“The brochure said our hotel would be in Mestre,” Victoria said. “To get to Venice proper we have to take a boat. Tessa said we’d go over in the morning right after breakfast.”
“She said hotels along the canals cost the earth. This is an economical alternative.” Lettie dumped Parmesan onto her pasta.
“I wasn’t aware we were taking a cut-rate tour,” Meg sniffed. “For what we’re paying, they should have put us on the Grand Canal.”
“All gondolas are black, and all gondoliers are men.” Tessa, using a microphone at her little jump seat in the front of the bus, told us a little about the history of gondolas and the canals as Achille drove us down twilit streets to the dock where we would catch the vaporetto to St. Mark’s Plaza and reassemble for our gondola ride. This would be our third vaporetto ride of the day. Our group had done a morning tour of St. Mark’s Basilica and the Doge’s Palace. The Byzantine domes and mosaics, reminiscent of old Constantinople, jammed in with Romanesque arches and Renaissance frescoes had overwhelmed me. I felt like I stood at the crossroads of civilization. Victoria Reese-Burton had to be dragged out of the dungeons and across the Bridge of Sighs, in the opposite direction from that forced upon the poor condemned prisoners who gave the bridge its name.
Lettie, Beth, and I had shopped up and down the narrow alleys and passages all afternoon. I confess that I am not much of a shopper. Lettie and Beth seemed to have a lovely time examining hundreds of carnival masks and tons of glass. Whatever could you do with a carnival mask if you got one, I wondered? But I kept that thought to myself as Beth and Lettie were having so much fun. The glassware, in my opinion, came in two varieties: ugly, and way too expensive. I bought a couple of paperweights for gifts and tagged along, soaking up the atmosphere of this unique, sinking city.
Tessa told us that the gondola business was strictly controlled as was the building of the boats themselves. They’re built slightly asymmetrical so they will travel straight when steered from the right side only. “If you want to be a gondolier,” she said, “you need to be the son of a gondolier. You can’t just set up your own business.”
She led us along the Grand Canal to the row of four gondolas we had hired. Meg, Beth, Amy, Lettie, and I climbed into the first one, which ended up being the last to leave the mooring. Amy stumbled toward a seat and fell across Meg in the process. Meg waved her hand as if fending off bad breath and muttered, “You’re still hung over from last night. If you throw up, Amy, please do it over the side.”
Amy tented her left hand over her right middle finger so only Lettie and I saw the gesture. Shifting several times to find a comfortable place to sit without unbalancing the boat, Amy called across to Tessa. “Can I go with you?” Tessa and our musicians, a singer and an accordionist (we had paid extra for them), had a gondola to themselves. Amy climbed out, giving our boat an unnecessarily vigorous push with her foot as she left.
The Vogels and the Hostetters had elected not to do the gondolas, but had ridden the vaporetto over with the rest of us. They left us and wandered off to “do their own thing.” We pushed off the mooring to the strains of “Santa Lucia” and passed under the Bridge of Sighs to “Back to Sorrento.” That song took me back to my childhood—to my grandmother’s old Victrola and the 78-rpm record she had of that same song. I had sat on her living room floor and played it over and over. At seven, I had thought it the most romantic song in the world. It still was.
Oddly, many windows of regular homes were on eye level as our boat maneuvered through Venice’s narrow passages. Windows and curtains, open to the night air, gave us an uncomfortably voyeuristic glimpse of their dinner hour. We glided past one window where a woman adjusted a table setting, and a man in a dinner jacket slipped up behind her and kissed her neck. The song at that moment was the Godfather theme, “Speak Softly, Love,” or something like that. The pain of it hit me in the stomach as real as a fist. At that moment, I would have given anything for a kiss or just a snuggle from Chet. Damn him.
Down one dark passage, I heard a crash like a metal can falling over. Lettie and I both jumped. “Probably a rat in a trash can or something,” I said. “I’ll bet there are a lot of water rats and other . . .”
“If you don’t mind, I prefer to believe it was a cat.” Lettie said with finality. Subject closed.
Meg allowed as how it was probably Shirley Hostetter chasing Crystal through the alley, “And being her normal clumsy self. For a nurse, she’s the most uncoordinated woman I ever met. It’s a wonder she doesn’t kill more patients than she does.”
“Kill patients? You can’t be serious!” Beth gulped.
“She generally manages to pump about a quart of air bubbles in ‘em just changing an IV drip.” That was not a specific accusation—it was more like a general bitchy comment, and we all ignored it.
As we rounded our last corner and swerved back into the Grand Canal, there was a flash and a scuffle from the sidewalk near Harry’s Bar. Paparazzi? Why us?
Achille was waiting for us at the ramp to the vaporetto. I would have expected him to meet us at the bus on the other side, but I saw his face light up when he spotted Beth Hines. “Oh ho!” I nudged Lettie.
“Well, well.” Lettie whispered. “ttle summer romance might be just the thing.” Lettie had talked to me at some length about poor Beth’s marital nightmare. Harvey Hines had walked out on her a couple of years ago under circumstances not that different from my own recent ordeal—that is, out of the blue and because of another woman. But Harvey hadn’t given any hint of trouble until he already had his things packed, the bank account cleaned out, and the woman waiting in the car. At least I had found out about Sweet Young Stephie in time to get a lawyer and a generous settlement. I glanced back in time to catch the glow on Beth’s face. It looked to me like she was not surprised Achille was there.
“Does Achille speak English?” I asked Lettie.
“He has a thick accent, but his English is good.”
Beth rushed up behind us, pushing me in the back. “I hope they have a restroom on this boat, I’ve been looking for one for two hours.”
“What difference does it make if you find a bathroom or not? Isn’t that what you wear a diaper for?” Meg’s tone of voice was the same buzz-saw screech she had used on Lettie last night.
Achille turned away. Beth spun around and ran back down the ramp. Lettie ran after her. I started to follow, but then thought better of it. Lettie was the right one to offer the help Beth needed, and I’d have been in the way.
“I hate you, Meg. I really hate you!” Amy snapped as she raced past.
Meg sniffed and drew her sweater around her shoulders. “Incontinence is nothing to be ashamed of. I see it all the time. If you work in a hospital, you get used to it.” She looked around as if for validation, but found only scowls.
As she plunged onto the deck, Amy grabbed my arm like she needed me to keep her from jumping Meg with fists and flying feet. “Let’s find a seat as far away from her as possible,” she pleaded. We grabbed a couple of vacant plastic chairs in the passenger cabin next to Tessa, who was thumbing through a
Bride
magazine. I noticed it was in English. “Talk to me,” Amy said to Tessa. “Talk to me about your wedding and get my mind off that bitch.”
———
Early the next morning we left Venice-Mestre and Achille drove us to Florence. The ride took us south through the beautiful regions of Emilia-Romana and Tuscany—past medieval walled towns with watchtowers on hilltops, broad fields of sunflowers and wheat, olive groves and tall feathery cypress trees. The warm sun flowed through the big window beside me, and I dozed off with my ear in the crack between the seats. The size of our group, happily, allowed us to sit either with someone or alone. There were plenty of extra seats. Behind me, Elaine and Walter chatted softly, and somehow, their words became a part of my dream. Like banners towed by advertising planes along the beach, I watched their words drift back and forth. Elaine’s soft voice floated across from right to left, and Walter’s mellow replies bounced back like a shuttlecock in a lazy game of badminton—in my half-dream I saw Elaine’s words wave by, printed forward and Walter’s return, printed backward. The motor hummed, and the tires whined.
“It was from Beth that I heard about this trip. She and her boss were talking about it when I was at their office for a meeting,” Elaine said.
“What sort of business is it?” Walter’s voice bounced back.
“He’s an attorney. Beth is his secretary . . . girl Friday, sort of. I was there because of some litigation my office got mixed up in . . . a strip mall we wanted to demolish.”
“Did you win?”
“It hasn’t been completely settled yet. But anyway, Beth said Greg—that’s the lawyer—had offered to pay for her to take this vacation.”
“Nice boss. Do you suppose he’s paying for Amy’s and Meg’s trips, too?” Walter asked.
“I doubt it. That would be a bit much, don’t you think? Besides, Amy was the one who started the ball rolling when she ran into Tessa at some convention, so I imagine she just told Beth, and Beth probably mentioned it to her boss and . . .”
Walter raised his tone to a falsetto in a Beth imitation. “And I do so wish I could go to Italy with my sister, but I just can’t afford . . .”
“Maybe something like that.”
“I think there are several people in this group who’d be glad to send Meg home and give her a refund. Maybe we could take up a collection.”
“What a piece of work she is.”
The bus veered off the A1 motorway at the little Tuscan town of Scarperia. Tessa announced that we would have an hour and a half to “see the town, visit the fourteenth century Vicar’s Palace, or shop. Scarperia has been known for its excellent knives since the fifteen hundreds, and it’s been an important stopping place for travelers since Etruscan times.”
My ears pricked up at the word “Etruscan,” but I nearly missed it in the squeal of delight from Victoria following the word “knives.” Lettie and Beth headed out toward a small row of shops, and I traipsed around to the Vicar’s Palace. We reunited for a gelato break on a broad plaza near the Palace. Kicking off my shoes at a plaza-side table, I closed my eyes, tilted my face to the sun, and let the bright zippy gelato made with those huge lemons from the Amalfi coast trickle down my throat. “I’m having one of those moments, girls,” I said. “Don’t anybody say a word.”
Beth decided to forego the gelato and head back to the bus. She left clutching a smallish bag, apparently a purchase, tightly to her chest.
“Did you enjoy having a seat to yourself this morning?” Lettie asked.
“Oh, yes. And I learned a few things, too.”
“Like what?” Lettie used her tongue to trap a down-cone stream of melting gelato.
“Like Walter and Elaine aren’t married.”
“How did you discover that?”
“I heard them talking. They were saying things like, ‘I first heard about this trip from Beth.’ Now, if they were married, wouldn’t they both already know how they heard about the trip? And Elaine said something about some legal problem—a lawsuit she was involved in at work—something a husband would already know about.”
“Huh.” Lettie snorted. “That sounds like they don’t even know each other that well.”
We all converged on the bus at the same time and jammed ourselves up at the door like kindergarteners in a bathroom line. Lettie accidentally swiped Meg’s purse with her gelato cone while rummaging through her own purse. Since she already had a paper napkin in her other hand, Lettie tried to wipe her mistake off the purse strap, but Meg wasn’t having it. She twisted abruptly, tearing the purse from Lettie’s grip with a curt, “I’ll clean it myself,” then pushed me aside in her haste to board.
Beth’s purchase kept us from leaving immediately. All of us, including Achille, had to admire and pass around the knife—the “Coltello d’Amore.” It had a carbon steel blade about eight inches long that was engraved with hearts and scrolls. The polished black buffalo horn handle, with inlaid silver and ivory, curved gracefully to fit the hand. If a knife can ever be said to be beautiful, that one surely was. The workmanship was splendid.
“I hate to tell you how much I paid for this,” Beth said in a tone that hinted she really wanted us to ask. “But I’ve been stressing for a month about what to get my boss and his fiancée for a wedding present. Talk about a guy who has everything. And she has everything, too.”