For the REST OF THE FLIGHT HAL READ TEACHING APPROACHES to As You Like It, while Margot read McCullough’s biography of John Adams. Jessie dozed, worked on a sweater she was knitting for Jeffrey, and thumbed through a copy of Gourmet magazine. When they finally touched ground at Marco Polo Airport, she had been sleeping deeply for some time and woke with a start. “Where am I?”
“Venice,” said Hal.
“Home,” said Jessie. She had turned chalk white and was shaking slightly.
“Mom, are you feeling well?” asked Margot, concerned. Her mother rarely was sick or displayed nerves.
“I feel so … strange,” she said.
“No need to be nervous,” said Hal, taking her hand.
“It feels … like stage fright,” continued Jessie. “Not that I’ve ever been on stage, but he used to describe it. Your heart starts thumping and suddenly you don’t remember what you’re supposed to do.”
“You don’t have to do anything, Mom,” Margot reassured her. “Just relax and enjoy yourself.”
“No, no,” said Jessie irritably. “I have something I have to do.”
She paused as if trying to recollect what. “There were other loves, you know,” she murmured. “Will was a great love, but there were others.”
“Sure, Mom,” laughed Margot, “we all know, thanks to Uncle Sid, that you were a ‘hot tomato’ like me.”
“No need to think about that right now,” said Hal more seriously. He assumed she was thinking of Milt. After all, wasn’t this trip, an excavation of earlier love, a kind of imaginative usurpation of that later relationship? He could understand if she were suddenly feeling guilty. “Just take a few deep breaths and clear your mind,” he counseled.
Jessie didn’t respond, but made her way out of the plane into the airport, leaning on Hal’s arm, her lips pressed together. She didn’t speak until they had claimed their luggage and walked outside to catch the motoscafi that would take them across the lagoon, up the Grand Canal, to their hotel. As the boat approached the bank, she lifted her head to the sky. “That smell,” she said.
Margot sniffed. “It smells rather vile.”
“It was worse in the summer,” murmured Jessie. “Rotting garbage.” She waved her hand in disgust.
The boat let them off at the foot of the hotel, where they climbed up the stone steps, through a discreet entrance, and into the lobby, a magnificent room with gold damask wallpaper, blue velvet curtains, and a polished red and beige marble floor. The room was decorated in antique furniture and hung with tapestries and old paintings. A harpsichord stood in the corner near the reception desk.
“Wow!” exclaimed Hal. He had been to Venice before, but had stayed in a modest if quaint bed-and-breakfast.
“Stunning!” breathed Margot.
“Vanitas vanitatum,” murmured Jessie.
“What?” said Margot.
“It’s Latin. It’s what Will used to say whenever he saw how some of them lived. I can’t remember what it means.”
“‘The hollowness of vanity,’” translated Hal.
“Yes.” Jessie took this up. “It’s the idea that everything passes—even the rich and powerful ones die,” she said wistfully, “which makes you wonder what the fuss is all about.”
“‘Dust to stop a bunghole.’” Hal nodded. “Food for worms.”
“Enough already!” said Margot. “Would you stop being morbid and let me enjoy this place!”
But Jessie wasn’t listening. She had paused near the center of the room and was gazing around with a look of recognition on her face.
“What is it, Mom?” asked Margot.
“I’ve been here before.”
“You remember the room?”
“Yes. I was here with Poppa when I was thirteen. We came to see the Popish ambassador to work out the negotiations about the new trade routes. I sat over there in the corner and played checkers with the doge’s son. I remember: He was stupid but a nice boy. I let him win.”
Margot laughed. “That sounds like you, I’ll admit,” she said, for the first time appearing to enter into the spirit of her mother’s story. Then she took Jessie’s arm and pointed to the elevator. “Why don’t we go to our room and get settled? You can lie down.”
“I don’t want to lie down,” said Jessie testily.
“It was just a suggestion,” said Margot in a conciliatory tone. “You don’t have to lie down if you don’t want to.”
“At least see your room and freshen up,” said Hal gently. “I’ll tell Anish that we’re here and you can meet us downstairs in the bar in half an hour—if you feel up to it.”
Jessie seemed agreeable to that, and now followed Margot to the elevator without protest.
Once in the room, she changed into her best dress, a blue crepe that she had last worn at Milt’s funeral. She told Margot to change too. “Wear the black one,” she ordered with surprising vehemence.
It was a little black dress that Margot had bought at Loehmann’s a few years ago and that Jessie had insisted she pack. It was nothing
special—it had cost $39.99 on the clearance rack. But it had always been one of Jessie’s favorites and, truth be told, cheap clothes generally looked as good, if not better, on Margot as expensive ones.
Margot put on the dress. It had a scooped neck and empire waistline, and it draped in simple folds around her body. “Why do you like this dress so much, Mom?” she asked.
“Because it looks good on you—and he would like it.” (Margot did not bother to ask who he was).
Jessie had taken out her jewelry case as she spoke, and now handed Margot a locket.
“It’s beautiful,” exclaimed Margot. “Where did you get it?”
“At the jewelry store in Haddonfield. It was on sale.” (Jessie could never resist boasting about a good buy.) “It opens, you see.” She pointed to the groove on the side of the locket, and Margot pressed the latch so that the two halves sprung apart on the little hinge. “You can put pictures inside,” explained Jessie, “maybe of Stephanie and Jeffrey. Or your own children, if you have any. A lock of hair is nice, too.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Mom.”
“Or you can have something written inside. That’s what he did. He gave me one like it once—put in a line from one of his poems.” She paused, gazing at her daughter, who had fastened the locket around her neck, then added an uncharacteristically philosophical aside: “Probably things reappear all the time, only we don’t recognize them. We’re too caught up in what’s going on at the moment to feel the past right there in the present.” She grew silent, then resumed her more usual, straightforward tone. “Anyway, I think you look beautiful. Just like I did when he took me on the canal the first time and kissed me.”
“Mother!”
Still, Margot had to admit that she felt good wearing the dress and the locket. The room itself was a jewel box—with its gold-leaf wallpaper, antique desk, and canopied bed, its velvet curtains
swagged along the casement windows. They were overlooking the canal and could see the magnificent façade of a church across the way.
“The Church of Salute,” said Jessie, gazing out at the edifice. “Very grand.”
When they went down to the bar, where the group had congregated for a late-night snack, everyone turned to look at Margot.
“The locket is a gift from my mother,” she said, embarrassed. “She bought it because it reminds her of one she said he gave her.” Margot’s voice had only a trace of mockery in it; she could feel herself falling under the spell of Jessie’s fantasy.
Hal stared silently, but Anish was quick to express admiration. “You look like a Gritti princess, or at least a Franco Zeffirelli Juliet. All you need is your devoted Romeo, a role that I slavishly beg to occupy.”
Margot laughed and gave a regal bow of her head.
Anish proceeded to introduce himself and his colleague, Felicity Gardencourt, a very thin, pale woman who looked as though she had spent too much time eating tuna fish sandwiches in library carrels. Felicity was the product of a New England family, straight out of a Hawthorne novel, for whom sublimation was as much a part of the family inheritance as the pewter cutlery and the drafty, large-shingled house on Cape Cod where the Gardencourts congregated each August for uncomfortable family gatherings. Like Anish, Felicity was an assistant professor at Yale, respected for her excellent monographs on the Italian Renaissance, though not for her teaching style, which tended to be short on the kind of animation required to keep undergraduates awake. In the words of the Yale Student Course Review Guide: “This woman needs to get a life.”
Nonetheless, as a Renaissance historian with a thorough grasp of the minutiae of her field, she could certainly be useful in tracking down a lost manuscript from that era.
Hal immediately began interrogating Felicity on specific historical
points. Jessie had said she was thirteen at the time she visited the palace with her father to meet the Vatican ambassador, which would have put her visit at around 1588 or ’89—since she first met Will, she said, when she was seventeen, in 1593. Did Professor Gardencourt know what the palace was being used for in 1588?
Felicity seemed well versed in the subject. “Doge Andrea Gritti built this palace for himself in 1525 and continued on as doge until 1534,” she explained. “After that, the building was used for a variety of diplomatic purposes, including the housing of the Vatican ambassadors, frequent visitors to the region.”
Hal and Margot looked at each other. “Would there ever be occasion for a Jew to meet with the Vatican ambassador?” asked Hal.
Felicity responded without a pause. “The Vatican negotiated with the doge and the Venetian trade council on a variety of matters. Since the Venetians relied on trade with the Ottoman Empire, who in turn used the Jews as intermediaries, the Vatican was obliged to deal with them as well.”
“So you’re saying that Levantine Jews occupied a role of importance in Venice?” asked Hal.
“Yes,” replied Felicity. “Of course, the debacle involving Joseph Nasi set things back a bit, but that happened earlier than the period you’re referring to.”
“Nasi,” said Jessie. “Poppa said he was a meshuggener.”
“Meshuggener?” queried Felicity. Yiddish terms had apparently not penetrated her library carrel.
“It’s Yiddish for a crazy person,” elucidated Hal.
“I don’t know that that quite captures the nuance of the word,” protested Margot in a sudden renewed desire to place Hal in the wrong.
“It’s the gist,” intervened Jessie.
Felicity nodded in apparent agreement and proceeded to elaborate: “Joseph Nasi was a member of the wealthy Mendes banking family of Lisbon and Antwerp—a Marrano who ingratiated himself
with Suleiman the Magnificent and his son and heir, Selim, rulers of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-sixteenth century. He was briefly named ruler of the island of Naxos and hoped to become king of Cyprus. His attempt to drive the Venetians from Cyprus failed, however, when the Turks were defeated at Lepanto, after which there was a backlash against the Jews in Venice. Talmuds were burned and Jewish movement in the city was closely monitored for several years afterward.”
Everyone in the group had begun to shift restlessly. Felicity’s tendency to deliver long expositions in a relative monotone, with no sense that her audience was falling asleep, was notorious at Yale. Some of her more inventive students had taken to imagining her in black leather holding a whip. But mental imagery could go only so far, and most ended up with their heads on their desks.
Fortunately, Jessie intervened again. “When we first came here, Poppa had a time cleaning up the mess that man Nasi made. Not that I remember; I was still a baby.” She paused. “Kit said Nasi was the subject of his play.”
“The Jew of Malta,” clarified Hal for the company.
“Thank God Poppa and his cousin came along to set a good example and make things right with the doge.”
“His cousin?”
“Daniel Rodrigues, a nice man but also a wheeler-dealer. Used to bring me gold bangles from the Orient. Said I shouldn’t say where I got them.”
Felicity took this up. “Daniel Rodrigues was another wealthy Marrano, but one who maintained good relations between the Venetian state and the Ottoman Empire. He eventually opened up trade routes to the East, convincing the trade councils of the feasibility of ignoring and, in some cases, countermanding Vatican law.”
“Yes,” said Jessie, “he and Poppa did all that.”
“And your father’s name was?” prompted Hal.
“Avram Rodrigues. But she wouldn’t know about him.” Jessie nodded toward Felicity. “He didn’t like to put himself forward.
He used to say, ‘Let Daniel get the covet, make the appearances. Me, I’m content to stay in the background.’”
Felicity took out a pad and began taking notes. “It’s something to look into,” she observed. “Other family members may well have been involved in some of Rodrigues’s trade negotiations; there may be no record of such involvement, but it would be interesting to search the annals for possible references.”
“Well, I think that’s enough background for now,” said Hal. He had noted that Jessie had begun to look tired. “We all need to be fresh for our adventure tomorrow. Let’s get an early start and agree to meet for breakfast at seven. As for you”—he looked at Jessie affectionately—“you need to get a good night’s sleep. I’m counting on your daughter”—he glanced quickly at Margot and then, just as quickly, looked away—“to see to that.”