It was ODD. THE MEMORIES THAT HAD ONCE BEEN SO PRESSING on Jessie’s consciousness had begun to fade. First, it seemed that she was only tired and less interested in the subject of that other life. Then, as she and Margot took the vaporetto back to the hotel, she began, quite simply, to forget. It was as though her mind were a delicate archaeological excavation: Some strange shift in the terrain had opened up a crevasse where one could glimpse something extraordinary about the past. Now another shift had begun to cover over what had been briefly revealed.
“You know I’m not a literary person,” Jessie said to Margot as they took the elevator up to their room. “What do I know from William Shakespeare?”
“You knew quite a bit an hour ago,” said Margot, feeling angry and frustrated. She had, in a short period—dating from exactly when, she couldn’t say—come to feel invested in this cockamamie scheme. What had originally seemed like an absurd delusion now seemed like a wondrous fairy tale. She wanted to shake her mother and say, “Don’t you remember—you’re the Dark Lady of the sonnets, the model for Jessica in The Merchant of Venice!”
Margot had also noted Hal Pearson’s expression as he looked up at her from the Lubavitcher pamphlet. The sense of loss was
palpable in his eyes. She suspected that it was not just the loss of the sonnets that pained him; it was also the loss of someone who had had at her fingertips knowledge of a vanished world and a cherished author.
Anish was also disappointed. He could imagine his report on the aborted expedition to the grant committee: “Site of lost sonnets converted into glatt kosher restaurant; reincarnated Dark Lady suffers amnesia; no manuscript found.”
But Anish was by nature resourceful when it came to burrowing in the mines of academe. If there were to be no sonnets, that didn’t mean they couldn’t dig up something else of interest for the Shakespeare Biannual. Thus, he and Felicity went off to explore the archives in the doge’s palace.
Hal, meanwhile, had decided neither to go with Anish and Felicity nor to return to the hotel with Margot and Jessie. He remained behind, after everyone had gone, and then walked out of the ghetto, without thinking about where he was going. He walked in a kind of daze, taking no note of the time, until he suddenly realized that it was getting late and he turned around and walked back. When he arrived again at the ghetto, it was night, and the tourists had left the area. The glatt kosher restaurant was closed—locked and dark.
But Hal, for some reason, stepped up to the door of the building and knocked loudly. He didn’t expect anyone to answer. He simply wanted to knock on the door that he still believed had once been knocked on by the greatest writer in the English language.
Surprisingly, his knock was answered. The door opened, and an old woman in a black shawl, obviously the caretaker or the concierge for the building when it was not in use, stood before him.
“Excuse me,” he said slowly, sensing that this person was not fluent in English. “I have a friend who lived in this building once, a long time ago. Would you mind if I come in?”
The woman did not seem to mind. She was so old that perhaps the notion of minding anything had fled. She led Hal up the stairs
to the second floor and then into a small alcove that had not been visible to them when they had visited the rest of the building earlier in the day. The room felt more like a cave than a house. It was perhaps the one area that had not undergone renovation.
“You are the caretaker?” asked Hal.
The woman’s head moved slightly under her shawl.
“How long have you lived here?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Sempre.”
“And have you ever”—he wasn’t quite sure what it was he wanted to ask, but he spoke the words that came to mind—“have you ever—found anything?”
She did not seem surprised by the question but went to a drawer and took out a small metal box. She opened it carefully. Inside was a locket. It was very old and very tarnished, but, to Hal, it resembled the locket that Margot had worn the night before. He took it in his hand.
“Aperto,” said the woman, reaching out and pressing the little latch so that the locket opened on its hinge. Inside was inscribed in tiny scroll script the following words: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.”
“Inglese,” said the old woman proudly, “antico.” Then she kissed the locket gently and replaced it in the box.