The Mountain Cage (39 page)

They stopped by one shop window. Behind the panes, two terra cotta marionettes danced. The male marionette took the hand of the female puppet and bowed. A dark-haired young woman was manipulating the strings; she caught Miriam’s eye and smiled.

Evening had come. People were sitting at outdoor tables and wandering inside restaurants while others laughingly disappeared into alleys. Alan stopped at a display of lace outside one shop, fingered the delicate work of one shawl, then draped it over Miriam’s shoulders.

She shook her head. “It’s beautiful, but it’ll cost too much.”

A slender blonde woman had come out of the shop.
“Quanta?”
Alan asked. She answered him in Italian, he murmured something else, and Miriam saw their hands touch for a moment.

“It’s a gift,” Alan said as he took Miriam’s arm again. Before she could speak, he had led her toward a small table outside one of the restaurants.

The waiter brought them glasses of a sparkling wine, and then a white wine with an unfamiliar label. Miriam let Alan order the food. They nibbled at mushroom tarts, bean soup with pasta, and calamari. The wine was making Miriam lightheaded. She laughed as Alan spoke of the early days of their marriage, of the years in their cramped apartment and first house before they had moved into the one he had built for them. Memories were spilling out of her, too—Jason’s valedictorian’s speech to his high school class, Joelle’s home run for the girls’ Softball team during the state championship game, the morning during their trip to Cancun when they had sent the kids down to the beach, locked the door, and made love until lunchtime.

Their waiter brought them a concoction of chocolate, cream cheese, and cake for dessert. Alan stirred his coffee. “I used to tell you then,” he said, “that we’d look back on those years with some fondness, even the rough times.”

“Yeah.” Miriam leaned toward him. “Funny—I don’t even remember how panicky I got when I was trying to get a job and couldn’t find one. You remember, after Joelle was in nursery school. Took me three months, and we had to keep holding off the bill collectors, and all I really remember now is how ecstatic I was when Freedom Mutual hired me.”

“I kept looking forward,” Alan said. “That’s what kept me going—that and you. I think I could handle things now if things were right between us. I could face anything then.”

Her head was clearing. She suddenly wondered where Vera was. Vera had wanted to leave them alone, to settle things between them, to have a romantic evening on this little island. Why? What did Vera want with them? Why had she gone to all this trouble for a friend she had not seen for years until today?

Alan got up. He was quickly at her side, helping her out of her chair. She did not see if he had left any money for the waiter as he led her along the street. The shops were closing; women were carrying displays of lace, glass, and marionettes inside and locking the doors. The tables outside the restaurants had been abandoned.

Along the canal where Alan had been waiting for her, gondolas were gliding silently toward the open water. Her hand rose to her neck and she realized that she must have left the lace shawl at their table. “We’d better go back. I forgot that beautiful shawl.”

“It was a gift, Miri.”

“Just because you didn’t have to pay for it—”

“You can’t take anything away from here. They won’t let you.”

“Are we going to Vera’s house?” Miriam asked. He did not reply. “Does she live here, on this island? How did you get here, anyway?”

“Miri,” he whispered, “I need you. Don’t leave me,” and let go of her arm. She reached for him and clutched air. She spun around; he had disappeared.

“Alan!” she cried out. “Alan!” She hurried along the canal, not seeing him anywhere in the darkness, then ran toward the square. “Alan! Alan!” She kept calling his name until tears filled her eyes.

Lights were going on in the houses around the square. She looked up at the nearest windows and saw people gazing down at her. The square looked smaller, the buildings around it shabbier. The flagpole, painted red, was still there; the fountain had disappeared.

Two men were coming toward her, one in a dark blue uniform, the other in a striped shirt and loose dark pants.
“Signora,”
the man in the striped shirt said.

“Mio sposo,”
she said frantically.
“Signor
Loewe.” She did not know enough Italian to make herself understood. “Help me, please.
Per favore
. My husband—” She paused. “Where am I?”

“You do not know, Signora?” the man in uniform said.

Miriam struggled to control herself. “Vera Langella,” she said. “She’s the woman who brought me here. Where does she live?”

The uniformed man shook his head and thrust out his hands. “I do not know the name.”

A joke. It was all a cruel joke. Vera had thought it up and talked Alan into playing along. All the tender words had been only another bitter jest. Maybe these men were in on it, too, and if they weren’t, they might assume she was demented if she went on and on about her husband and her friend. She would not go along with this horrible joke any longer.

“How do I get back to Venice?” she asked.

The man in uniform pointed in the direction of the landing. “The
vaporetto
,” he replied.

She hurried down the slope. Vera’s boat had vanished. Out on the water, she could see the lighted decks of an approaching
vaporetto
.

The boat took her to another island. She looked at her watch, which was running again, telling her that it was only seven o’clock. She consulted her schedule, questioned the people waiting on the landing with her, and found out that she was on the island of Murano and that the number 5 would get her back to Venice itself. That water bus took her to an unfamiliar landing. An older woman who spoke English pointed her in the direction of the Grand Canal.

She walked there and caught a
vaporetto
to the landing near the hotel. The boat traffic was as heavy as it had been during the day, and it seemed that flotillas of gondoliers were ferrying passengers along the Grand Canal. People were still roaming the streets, loading up on souvenirs, or finishing coffee and wine at outside tables.

As she came into the lobby, the desk clerk looked up, and then a man in a dark suit was bearing down on her from the left. “Mrs. Loewe.” He bent forward from the waist, then took her hand. “They came for your husband.”

Miriam tensed. “Who?”

“They took him, the ambulance. He is in
l’ospedale
, the hospital. He was in the lobby, and then he fell—” Miriam hung on to him tightly. “He came to the desk. I heard him say this word, something like ‘Miri,’ and then he fell.”

The hotel manager walked her down to the docks. A powerboat was there, one much like the boat Vera and she had been in that afternoon. The hospital looked like a Renaissance
palazzo
from the outside. Inside, stretchers were lined against the walls and white-jacketed men, nurses, and nuns moved swiftly through the corridors. As she followed the orderly who had met her at the entrance, Miriam heard the sound of electronic beeps and then a voice over the public address system summoning a physician.

A console beeped next to Alan; an intravenous needle was in his arm and wires ran from his body to the console. A man, apparently asleep, lay on a bed next to Alan’s; he was also hooked up to a console. The other two beds were empty; a small marble statue of the Virgin Mary stood at the other end of the room. She lifted a hand to her mouth.

“
Signora
Loewe.” A man in a physician’s white coat came toward her. “It will be all right.” He squinted at her through wire-rimmed glasses; he seemed young, maybe still in his twenties, with light brown hair and a closely trimmed beard. “Your husband was lucky. He was brought here immediately. It is a myocardial—” He paused. “A heart attack, but he will recover.”

She leaned over her husband and touched his hand. Alan opened his eyes. “Miri.”

“You’ll be all right. The doctor just said so.”

“Went to the lobby. I don’t know why, I was thinking—” His throat moved as he swallowed. “I was thinking about you. Thought of going over to the
vaporetto
landing, to meet you, tell you I was sorry—I was dreaming about you. We were walking around in—I think it was some kind of village. Wanted to stay there, and knew I couldn’t. I needed you, I was trying to hang on—”

“It’s all right.” She moved her hand gently over his. “I can’t lose you, Alan. I love you.”

His mouth curved up; he was smiling, as he had on the island. “You won’t.” He closed his eyes.

She found the young doctor out in the hallway. He introduced himself as Dr. Palmieri and led her to an alcove with two chairs, a sofa, and a crucifix hanging on the wall. He explained that her husband could be flown home in a week to ten days, that it could have been worse, that if he had been alone in his room instead of in the hotel lobby among people when he collapsed, where help could quickly be summoned for him, he might not have survived.

“He must see a cardiologist when he is home,” Dr. Palmieri said. “It may be he needs more treatment, but I can assure you—”

“Thank you,” Miriam murmured.
“Grazie.”

“I am much relieved myself,” the physician said softly. “Only two weeks ago, I was called to tend to another tourist, an American like yourself. That was not so good an outcome. She had cancer—it had spread to her lymph nodes and internal organs. Her husband said she had been afflicted for almost four years. They were traveling on what he called their farewell tour, because they knew—” He looked away for a moment. “She was a strong woman. She would not admit her illness. She said that I had better put her together because she had not been to see the Peggy Guggenheim collection here yet. She was gone that same day. So I am glad this will not also be the case with your husband,
Signora
.”

Miriam bowed her head. “So am I.” She would not lose Alan. Nothing else seemed to matter at the moment.

“
Signora
Langella.” Miriam realized that she had expected to hear her friend’s name. “
Signora
Vera Langella. That was what the American woman was called. She was fighting, but when she was finally gone—” Dr. Palmieri let out his breath. “She seemed at peace.”

On the day before they were scheduled to fly home, Miriam took the
vaporetto
to San Michele, the cemetery island she had seen from Vera’s boat. Vera had not been buried here; Dr. Palmieri had told her that Vera’s husband had taken her body back to the States. But somehow she felt that her friend was here, that she might remain here for a while.

Miriam walked among the tombstones. Other tourists had come, to gather by the graves of Pound and Diaghilev and Stravinsky and the other artists buried here. She stood and listened to the lapping water as she whispered a thank-you and a farewell to her friend.

Afterword to “Isles”:

“You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it, and finally a soft sense of possession grows up and your visit becomes a perpetual love affair.” So Henry James wrote of Venice, although there are those who find that city disagreeable. I was told by one frequent traveler that people either adore Venice or hate it; there is nothing in between. When I first came to Venice, I fell in love with the place.

So many writers have written about Venice that their collected works could form a good-sized library; to write anything set in Venice is to know that one is exploring territory already heavily traveled by many of literature’s most accomplished masters. That should have been enough to scare me off, but one of my long-held ambitions as a writer has been to write about this fragile and beautiful city, and “Isles” was a story that seemed to demand Venice as its setting.

“Isles” was written during a time when, for various reasons, I was deeply depressed and almost incapable of functioning normally. Reaching the end of this story and seeing some hope for the two people at its center brought me some solace as well.

THE SUMMER’S DUST

Andrew was hiding. He sat on the roof, his back to the gabled windows. He had been there for only a few minutes and knew he would be found; that was the point.

He heard a door open below. “Andrew?” The door snapped shut. His mother was on the porch; her feet thumped against the wood. “Andrew?” She would go back inside and find that he was still near the house; tracing the signal, she would locate him. He glanced at his left wrist. The small blue stone of the Bond winked at him. The silver bracelet was a tattletale chain; it would give him away.

He looked down at the gutter edging the roof. The porch’s front steps creaked, and his mother’s blonde head emerged. A warm breeze feathered her hair as she glided along the path leading down the hill. From the roof, Andrew could see the nearby houses. At the foot of the hill, two kobolds tended the rose garden that nestled near a low stone house. The owner of the house had lived in the south for years, but her small android servants still clipped the hedges and trimmed the lawn. Each kobold was one meter tall, and human in appearance. On pleasant evenings, he had seen the little people lay a linen tablecloth over the table in the garden and set out the silverware, taking their positions behind the chairs. They would wait silently, small hands crossed over their chests, until it was night, when they would clear the table once more. A troll stood by the hedge; this creature was half a meter taller than the kobolds. The troll’s misshapen body was bent forward slightly; its long arms hung to the ground, fingertips touching grass. At night, the troll would guard the house. The being’s ugly bearded face and scowl were a warning to anyone who approached; the small silver patch on its forehead revealed the cybernetic link that enabled it to summon aid.