Chapter One:
The Arrival

Mara followed the sound of the doorbell up out of Gwendolyn’s world, across her darkened living room and out into the foyer where she pushed open the heavy front door, expecting only a brief distraction. In the hot, white glare of the early morning sun, Aidan stood before her. Aidan had been dead for seven years.

“Aidan,” she whispered. He looked so young, so strong, so sure. “Aidan.”

“His son,” said the apparition. “You wrote a novel about my father, and I’ve come to revenge him.” Then he extended his hand.

Stunned, compulsively polite, Mara took the outstretched hand into her own, unprepared for the shock of the touch. Same skin. She pulled her hand away, feeling faint.

“May I come in?” he asked, stepping with authority into the darkened room. “Oh! You look quite pale. I’ve frightened you. I’m so sorry.” She heard genuine apology in his voice. His familiar voice. “It was a terrible thing for me to say . . . about the revenge, I mean . . . I meant it as a joke to cover my nervousness. Stupid of me.”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.” She sat down abruptly on the small table next to the door. Sat, looking up at him as he swiftly took possession of the room with his eyes. He was tall, a little taller than his father. He stood with his feet slightly apart. Tense. Alert. The resemblance to Aidan was more striking in the dimness than in the light. He turned and looked at her.

She was suddenly self-conscious, aware of her near-nakedness. She was wearing a thick, white bathrobe and nothing else. Her hair was still damp from her morning shower. She had not put on any makeup. His eyes were approving. They made another circuit of the room, taking in the heavy, overly carved furniture, the tiled floor, the half-closed wooden shutters.

“The apartment is exactly as you described it.”

“Yes.”

He looked at her again, concern informing his expression. “Can I get you something? Water? Sit here.” And he took her arm gently, bringing her into the room as if she were the guest. She sat again, where he indicated, sinking into the worn, velvet couch.

“I would like some coffee,” she replied. “It’s just made, on the stove.”

He turned without hesitation in the direction of the kitchen. In a moment she heard him moving about . . . a rattling of dishes. An old sound. Comforting. From childhood? No. She concentrated on her breathing. He returned with two cups of coffee, black and sweet and strong.

“I should have liked to bring cappuccino,” he said, “but there was no milk.”

He sat down on the tapestried footstool. Near her knee. Now it was he who looked up to her—and she could see the shyness in him.

“Why are you . . . why were you nervous?” she asked.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t see me.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“I tried all the usual routes: your publisher, your agent, phone books. Your pen name hid you well. There was no way I could trace you through a family name. Then, when every attempt had failed and I had given up, the idea, the answer, arrived, came to me, as in a dream, although I was wide awake at the time. I suddenly knew you could only be here.”

“And how did you know where here was?”

“I followed your descriptions in the novel. The gargoyle on the corner house all but winked at me. The letter box—”

“So you are here.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you come?”

“To know you. And through you, to know him.”

“Impossible.”

“Which?”

“Both.”

He put his cup down on the Turkish carpet. She put hers on the Chinese table with the carved sea monsters curling up the legs.

“What may I call you?” he asked.

“You may call me by my pen name, Bess, if it feels natural to you,” she said. “Or you may call me by my given name, which is Marina. Or you may call me Mara.” As your father did, she thought.

“So many names . . . I will call you Mara. It’s a beautiful name, and it’s the most like Mira, your name in the novel.”

“The novel is fiction. I am not in the novel.”

“Aren’t you? Then how did I find you?”

She chose not to reply. Instead she rose and went to the window. With a strong, practiced gesture she pushed open the shutters, enjoying the familiar shock of the sun as it bounced off the canal and shot across the room, bringing the movement of shimmering light into every corner.

She turned to face him where he sat, squinting in the sudden glare.

“What is your name?”

It was his turn to be shocked. Now we’re even, she thought.

“You don’t know it?”

“He never said it.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Why not?”

“I have a name in the novel.”

“You are not in the novel. The novel is a fabrication.”

“But why did he never mention me? Was I so unimportant?”

“On the contrary. He would not speak your name to me. You were sacred.” She was watching him closely as he absorbed the import of her words. “And I was profane.”

He looked stricken. “What a terrible thing for him to think! How wrong of him to say it.”

“Don’t. You cannot speak for him.”

“You did.”

“Did I?”

“Didn’t you?”

“I didn’t.” What she didn’t know was why they were sparring.

“But you used his real name. You called him Aidan.”

“I liked his name. He was dead. What did it matter?”

“It mattered to me!”

There was a painful silence. Both were aware of the sudden, hot intimacy that had arisen between them in the few short minutes since their meeting. Both were bewildered.

He changed his tone. “Look . . . Mira . . . Mara . . . someone sent your novel to me five years ago when I was still reeling with the loss of him. It made a tremendous impression on me, as I’m sure you can understand. I don’t know who sent it. I always thought, given the content, that it must have been you. Maybe I was wrong.”

She looked as if she might interrupt him, but he raised a gentle hand. He had come a long way to say this. “I have always believed that the story was real—thinly disguised, as they say, but true. After all, he did leave us—mother and me—and he did come here, and he did die here. According to the belated and woefully incomplete reports that we received from the Italian authorities, he died in the garden of this apartment.” A solemn expression crossed his face like a shadow. “Anyhow, when I read your book I felt that I had been given a gift—shocking, perhaps, but a gift of a glimmer of a glimpse of his last months—however distorted.”

“You are mistaken—”

“I felt as if I began to understand him a little . . . why he left . . . why he never came back . . . the story must be real.”

“It’s fiction.”

“It feels real . . .”

“It’s good fiction.”

“And you’re here. In the very apartment.”

“And he is not!”

As if slapped by her words, he bent his head and hunched his shoulders. He looked small and defeated, there on the footstool. Bruised.

From where she stood, Mara watched the reflected light as it played on the nape of his neck. She felt a horrible surge of pleasurable feeling deep inside herself. She looked away abruptly, out of the window, across the canal now brimming with the early tide. She needed to look anywhere but at the neat line of black, curly hair that cut across the dark, smooth skin of his curving neck. She wanted to kiss him exactly there. She knew how his skin would feel, warm against her lips, how he would taste of soap and salty sweat, how he would respond to her touch and, smiling, take her into his arms, there, on the velvet couch.

“Please,” he implored her, “please, help me to know him. I loved him. He left so suddenly and so completely.” And she felt the grief come straight up through her body like the winds of San Michele—fast and cold and full of force.

“No . . . no, Aidan, no.” And a black fissure of sorrow opened beneath her, where there had been floor a moment before.

“My name is James,” he said, as his arms went around her, catching her as she began to fall, supporting her, lifting her, carrying her to the couch.

He held her closely while she cried, her body shaken by seven years of grief that had suddenly welled up within, surfacing in spasms of lung-deep sobs that threatened to tear apart her chest and throat. Time dissolved.

She didn’t know how long she wept, how long they were locked together in sadness—his, as well as hers, she knew—for his face, too, was tearstained when at last he relaxed his protective embrace. They were quiet together for a while.

As he drew slightly away, a grimace of pain crossed his face, and she realized he had been kneeling next to the couch throughout the ordeal. Feeling embarrassed, and grateful, she reached over and touched his face. The face of James, not Aidan.

“Perhaps you were right to be nervous,” she said.

A stripy-gray, one-eyed tomcat catapulted from a ceiling beam and thudded onto her chest.

“Wally!” exclaimed James. “Wally?”

“Yes.”

“I thought he was a literary device.”

“No. He’s a cat.” She smiled.

“His aim is excellent.”

“Also, his appetite.” Mara struggled to rise from the depths of the sofa, holding the cat close and warm against her breasts. “You should leave me now,” she said to the boy who had held her like a man.

“Will you be all right?”

“I’ll be fine. I need to rest and to write. That’s all.”

“The work.”

“Yes. The work.” The cat began to squirm and purr in anticipation of its breakfast.

James stood shaking his head slowly from side to side. “It’s hard to take it all in,” he said, “meeting you and fighting with you . . . why were we fighting? And then the sadness . . .”

“Will you be all right?”

“I’ll be . . . fine . . . too.” She could tell fine was a word he seldom used. “If you tell me that you will see me again?”

She heard the anxiety in his voice. She had not been important to anyone for a long time. It was disquieting.

“I will see you again. Tomorrow. At two? After I’ve written and had my lunch.”

“Here?”

“Not here.”

“Where, then? The Piazza San Marco? Florian’s?”

It was a startling idea. She had not been to San Marco in months, to Florian’s in years. But Florian’s . . .

“All right. It will be quiet at two. They all sleep.”

“Who?”

“The Venetians.”

“Will the waiters be awake?”

“Barely—and the sun will be full on us. You don’t mind the sun?”

“I’m on my vacation. It will be wonderful to sit in the sun.” She wondered if she should ask him about himself—what work he did, how long he planned to be in Venice—but she was too exhausted from the sudden excavation of her emotions to dig in unknown places. There would be time enough tomorrow to unearth what was worthwhile in this man.

She walked him to the door. He turned once more to look at her, then reached out tentatively to stroke the cat.

“It’s all right. He’s quite tame.” James smiled a little as he gently made friends with the animal.

“Until tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.” And he was gone. Back into the glare.

Mara stood staring at the closed front door as she often stared at the closed front cover of a book. What new world was there to be discovered?

She held the cat away from her body for a moment, at arm’s length, and looked into his one, hungry eye. He made a slight twist of objection and she put him down.

“I can tell I’m in a very precarious state right now, Wally,” she said, as he, unconcerned, jauntily led her off into the kitchen. “Everything has been shaken loose in the shock of . . . him . . . and in the earthquake of grief he let loose. Have you ever seen me cry, Wally? Maybe not. I don’t think you would understand it anyway. Crying is a human experience. Not for tomcats. Not for me, either, for years. I think I was drying up inside. No wonder the work hasn’t been good lately. Dry. Until this boy—this man, James . . . his son—arrives . . . James—a saint’s name . . . I got that right. He’s about the age I had put him . . . young . . . twenty-five or –six . . .”

She put down the dish for the cat, and he immediately lost what little interest he had been taking in their conversation. She stood looking at him for a while, letting her emotions catch up with her. When they did, she went down: her knees on the cold tiles next to the cat. She was doubled up, as if in physical pain—but it was not physical. She felt a deep, sick revulsion that had not overtaken her in years, and she had almost forgotten its existence—but, of course, it was what lay behind her solitude: this horrible reaction to other people, to the communion of souls, hers and another’s. What had she done? You let him touch you . . . only to hold me . . . you’re disgusting . . .

She let the wrenching self-loathing take her, run its course through her psyche, and, already on her knees, leave her body beaten, as if from the inside out. Then she very slowly stood up again, steadying herself on the kitchen table, breathing evenly as Aidan had taught her. Aidan had known about pain. There, she thought, it’s passed. I will be all right now. I will be allowed to live in this world for yet a while.

She wrapped the robe more tightly around herself and stepped out into the small back garden to rest. It was still cool here, still fresh where the garden walls made morning shadows. She sat in the bright corner, legs apart, letting the sun warm the inside of her thighs.

“Aidan,” she said. She waited a long time—until she felt the deepness of the shadows, the richness of the light. “Aidan, we have to talk.” A slight breeze disturbed the flowers. “Aidan, I never thought I could feel . . . well . . . those feelings for any other man. I thought they belonged to you and to you alone. I’ve never even looked for anyone else. You know I’ve been lonely. Did you send him to me? Your son? With your look and your manner all about him? I don’t know what you want me to do.” But the breeze had died. There was no answer in the air.

What an unexpected woman, thought James, as the heavy front door swung shut behind him. He, too, felt stunned. He looked up and down the empty fondamenta, seeking direction. He found himself smoldering in the full sun of a mid-August morning with no idea where to go. He wandered back the way he had come, thinking he could get a map and some hotel information at the train station. He had, on arrival, come directly to her.

She was so different from what he had imagined. In the book she had made herself Botticelli beautiful, but she was not. There was no translucent skin or red-gold hair. She was tall and dark like himself. Her hair was cut just above her shoulders, feminine, but not flowing. He felt familiar with her body, having held it so close to himself while she cried. She was not thin. Not overweight, but full and soft. Titian. She had intelligent eyes, set into an even-featured face. Enigmatic. Self-possessed. He had the impression of an inner strength in spite of her faintness at the sight of him, and the bout of uncontrolled weeping. Allowance had to be made for the shock, of course. He had surprised himself when, after carefully trimming his newly grown beard, he had stepped back from the mirror to gather the effect. It was uncanny the way he had come to resemble his father. He had always copied his father’s walk and stance, first as a small boy consciously imitating his dad, then, as he grew into his own ways, unconsciously, and then again consciously, after his last analysis had brought these habits to his attention. For this adventure he had chosen to dress as his father had—excellent fabrics wrought by Aidan’s tailor. The effect was daunting. Had he accomplished this transformation because he wanted to shock her? Perhaps.

And she looked much younger than he had anticipated. In the novel she was thirty-two. If he were to add the seven intervening years—but even now she seemed no older than thirty, or at the most thirty-five. Was that possible? Was she so much younger than his mother? It was disquieting.

A small, yellowish flower on a rubbery stalk caught his attention where it pushed up between the paving stones of the fondamenta. He smiled in recognition and bent to pick it, then stopped, deciding to let it live . . . the grandson of the grandson of the flower that grew here in his father’s time. His father’s time. His father’s place. His father’s woman.

Suddenly exhausted, he decided to hurry back to the station and collect his bags and find a place of his own. He had never been in Venice before. It was a place that had haunted his imagination since adolescence. To him it had been a magical place, a fictional place . . . created by this woman . . . Bess . . . Mira . . . Marina . . . Mara . . . her.

How had he known what to do? It seemed to James that when he had first stepped across her threshold, a foreign power had taken possession of him. Words had been given to him. He felt that he had uttered profound truths. He felt he had done great deeds. He had caught her up and held her in her sorrow with a maturity beyond his experience. He could still feel the wetness of her tears on his rumpled shirtfront. Or were they his own tears, or his own sweat? In reality it had all been mundane, he knew. In the unfamiliar kitchen he had simply poured the coffee and added the crumbly brown sugar. He had said what had to be said, done what had to be done—but it had felt heroic.

And he had felt, just for a moment, a flash of desire such as his father might have felt. Not when he held her, as might be expected—her body warm beneath the robe of soft, white toweling—but when she had opened the shutters and stood with the sun behind her. Then. He had wanted her then. In the darkness . . . with the light . . .

The world surrounding him now, though busy and bright in appearance, felt paltry . . . unsubstantial. The beads worn by a passing woman were red, but not red enough. The sky was unclouded blue, but not blue enough. Richness seemed confined in the apartment with Mara. Would she bring it with her tomorrow to San Marco? Would she come at all? Or, perhaps, once she recovered from the confusion of his unexpected arrival, might she not change her mind? Retreat? Refuse to see him? Leave Venice? No. She would not leave Venice. He had hunted her down and trapped her, here, in her burrow. Did she know she had been captured? He would see her again. He must see her again.

He looked around now, actually seeing the city for the first time. The buildings were standing in the water. How absurd, he thought.

But the most absurd thing of all was that she was real.

Chapter Two:
Piazza San Marco

James awoke abruptly. He had heard a thud close by, but in the darkness of the night he could not see who or what had made the sound. Frightened, he strained to make out familiar shapes in the unfamiliar room. Thin shards of light slipped through the cracks in the wooden shutters, and he realized that it might no longer be the night at all. He relaxed a little, then heard another unidentifiable thump. He tensed again and began to climb slowly out of the bed. Just before his feet touched the floor he saw the stranger standing at the foot of his bed. His heart dropped.

“Who are you? What do you want?” he challenged in a frightened voice.

The intruder did not respond or move. It was, after a terrorized moment, the figure’s inhuman stillness that caused James to realize he was staring at a lifeless, life-sized male portrait on a museum poster. He had much admired the poster on the previous evening when he had first entered this otherwise unadorned hotel room. It represented a detail, much enlarged, from La Sacra Conversazione by Piero della Francesca. Perhaps it had been pinned up by a previous guest. Feeling a little foolish, he breathed a sigh of relief. He heard another thump and a muffled voice, but he thought now that the sound was somewhere outside and below the window.

Where was he? In Venice. In Venice to find Mira . . . Mara. And he had. And he would see her again today at two. James leapt out of bed at the thought. He had no idea how long he had slept or what time it might be now. What if he had missed the appointment? On his dash to the window he slammed his hip into the corner of the massive dresser, causing himself a considerable amount of pain. He then managed to pinch his finger on the unfamiliar hardware of the shutters. James was always at war with the material world—dropping wineglasses, burning himself on teapots, tripping over steps. His chronic awkwardness was an eccentricity he had accepted about himself long ago, deciding he was not really meant to be in this world at all—that he had been dropped down, unsuspecting and unprepared, onto the wrong planet. He was supposed to be in a world that was more ethereal, where spirit and mind prevailed, not lumpy, unimaginative, ungiving, hard-edged matter. He particularly suffered when traveling—when objects about him were unknown, and pathways untried. Yet he marveled at the adventures available to him in this bruising world, and was determined to make the most of his stay, however long, however hurtful, in the haunts of mankind.

The clumsy shutters, once successfully maneuvered, admitted a day as sun-sodden as the one before it. He leaned out and, rather tentatively, looked down. In so doing he discovered the source of the thumping noises. A colorfully cursing boatman was working his vegetable barge around a tight corner of the narrow canal directly outside the window. James reached for his watch and was relieved to see that it was still early morning. He took another breath and went back to bed. There he closed his eyes, composed himself, and decided to begin the day again.

First, he listened to the sound of the boat. Yes. It did sound as though it was inside the hotel room. He listened to the other sounds of the morning—a child’s shout, a bird’s call—then he slowly opened his eyes to the morning, admiring the poster at the end of the bed. The young man in the picture was beautiful. Was he an angel? There was a curve of wing over his left shoulder. With close-set, intelligent eyes he looked boldly back at James. He seemed to be saying, “Welcome to Venice.”

His own eyes took in the rest of the room. It was a comfortable, if somewhat cramped space: wooden furniture, uncarved; straight-beamed ceilings; a terrazzo floor rolling and buckling across the room. He noticed the extra blocks of wood placed under the legs of the furniture to level out their surfaces, and the angled planing of the doors to adapt them to the out-of-kilter doorjambs. This was an amusing city. He knew that it was slowly sinking into the lagoon, but it hadn’t occurred to him that it would be sinking unevenly, twisting rooms into funhouse shapes and turning floors into roller-coaster surfaces. He would have to be especially careful. He took the time to note the placement of the dresser, chairs, and table, hoping thereby to minimize the possibility of future collisions.

He lay reviewing the recent events of his life.

Who are you? What do you want? Those had been the questions his father had asked of himself upon his arrival in Venice seven years before—according to Mara. Now James had inherited the questions, and his arrival marked the culmination of a long journey in his father’s footsteps. First, the unfruitful trip to Beirut; then Texas with its mixed messages; then New York, to the office, where his father’s name was still carried on the letterhead, but not in the minds of the current staff—except Helga, who had run the place in his father’s time, but wouldn’t talk to James about anything personal. After New York, the flight to Milan, the train to Venice, and the walk to Mara’s apartment. Her doorway marked the end of one phase of his quest and the beginning of another, one that would take him chapter by chapter through Venice: first the apartment, then San Marco, Santa Margherita, the Rialto, a walk along the Zattere, Torcello, San Michele, San Rocco, the old museum in the Fondaco dei Turchi, and, finally—if they both survived—back to the apartment and garden. He was sure by the end of the itinerary he would know his father, Mara, and, with luck, himself in new and unimaginable ways. Somewhere under her confusion and annoyance he hoped that she would be flattered to have her novel treated as a holy pilgrimage.

So far he had been fortunate. Before arriving he had entertained a number of fantasies about what his first encounter with his father’s last and, by all accounts, loveliest, mistress would be like. He had imagined her outraged at the invasion of her privacy, slamming the door in his face. He had pictured her properly married to a brawny gondolier. One who would beat him up on sight, while their pack of surly half-Venetian children looked on in delight. He had feared that she might be dead. Or crazy. Well, she wasn’t raging, married, crazy, or dead. What was she? Who was she? He wondered. He had wondered about her for years. He had loved her from a great distance. He had been drawn to her across the waters. James had hopes for Mara and himself that depended on an initial acceptance, one of the other. Having had the good luck to step into her good graces, he wanted to remain there.

He got up then, stretched, and went to the window. The boat was gone. He could hear the water lapping against the side of the building. It was time to shower and dress and explore the city for a while before meeting Mara.

When he was ready to go, he looked briefly at the map which the clerk at the tourist office had given him. James had an uncanny sense of direction. Once having visited a city, however briefly, he could return to it years later and still make his way around it, occasionally bumping into it, perhaps, but never getting lost. Friends who knew of this strange talent had predicted that Venice would defeat him, but one glance at the map reassured him. The two major sections of the small city fit together like lovers, the Grand Canal marking the curve of their cuddled bodies. The third, La Giudecca, lay unhappily off to the side, and James knew it was unlikely he would stray so far on the short, intense mission he had planned for himself.

He quickly memorized the major points along the Grand Canal and the position of the Piazza San Marco to all the rest. Piece of cake. He left the map on the dresser and went out to add dimension to this newfound terrain.

Mara awoke determined to put an end to the startling, new, unsought relationship with the man, James. Yesterday had turned into an unproductive day after the emotionally depleting morning. And it had been followed by a restless night.

She wished she hadn’t set an appointment to meet him. She wasn’t ready. She hadn’t had time to sift through her reactions, the assortment of thoughts and feelings that his sudden appearance had aroused and revived. She shuddered at the remembrance of the self-hating episode on the kitchen floor. Her knees still ached. Perhaps she should let James do the hating. He must hate me, she thought, though he doesn’t show it.

Still, agreeing to meet him was the civilized choice. He was, after all, Aidan’s son. And he had come a long way to find her. Mara admitted to a mild degree of curiosity. Curiosity befit a writer, she assured herself. But there was more to it than that—dangerously more, she knew. She had felt desire. Or desire, as the more romantic novelists would put it. It had marred the self-image that she had held up for herself and followed for so many years. The image of a woman destined to love only one man in a lifetime—waiting for him to arrive, caring for him when he did, mourning him when he died, remembering him in the art of the day and the dreams of the night until she rejoined him in death. There was no place for another, for James, in her life.

Wrenched as she was, she would go to the meeting with James and, once there, she would bring matters to a close. First she would answer a few appropriate questions about his father. She had been uncommonly abrupt with him in that regard. She was chilled by the ice of her own defensiveness, but he had arrived so shockingly, and with such grandiose expectations, that abruptness on her part was, in the light of a new day, forgivable, she felt. Maybe.

Before all else, she must write. She must make something valuable of her morning. Yesterday her mind had wandered far from her current story, and she had, instead, retrod on weary thought-feet the memories of the time with Aidan . . . returned again to the novel that had been produced in its wake. The Name of the Son, it was called. A good title, she thought, though the novel itself she judged with less charity. She considered it unsuccessful in spite of the good reviews and respectable sales. Publishing the novel had been an attempt to heal the wounds of that brief, intense love affair. She had gathered up her memories, spun them out into threads of meaning and woven them into a novel bandage. The healing, too, had been incomplete. Every time she thought about him, she hurt.

After the final edit, she had never read the book again.

And now, the son. With a name. James. What did it mean? she wondered, and she climbed out of bed to go and look it up. James: the supplanter. How like Aidan to have so named his child.

And then, quite suddenly, with the book of names still held open in her hands, she felt a small, internal quake. She was unblocked. She had been at a virtual standstill in her current work for weeks—to be honest with herself, for months—and now, as if a curtain had been torn asunder, she could see the characters come to life again in the stage set of her mind. She knew what they feared and how they would fare. Perhaps this James-son-of-Aidan would have some small acceptable place in her life after all.

Oh, but what would she do with another dying man?

James had never felt better in his life. Venice, he was discovering, was entrancing—everywhere a delight to the eye, a prod to the imagination. He had meandered the morning away amid the ancient architecture, thinking of Tintoretto and Othello and Shylock and Casanova and his father. He had, in his mind’s eye, restored the city as he walked, bolstering sagging foundations and repairing crumbling balconies; he had applied plasters and caulked cracks in the peeling facades of ancient palazzos; and he had replaced tiny bits of glass to glittering mosaics. Deciding to rest from his labors, he stopped for lunch in a canalside restaurant, arcaded with ripening grape vines, where, in the mottled sunlight, he had watched people walk by and float by and chug by throughout the meal. This was a place worth coming back to, for an extended stay—perhaps on his honeymoon. If Mara was the woman he thought she might be, if she could accomplish what he hoped she might accomplish, a honeymoon might someday even be possible.

As he made his crooked way through Cannaregio, he was surprised by the crowds. The place was full-bodied, rich in activity. People pushed through the alleyways and crammed the campos. The idyll that Mara had written had given him the impression that she and his father wandered here virtually alone, with an occasional assist from a picturesque gondolier. By her account there had been tourists in the Piazza San Marco and at the Rialto Bridge, but even in those places the people were only a backdrop, and they seldom amassed anywhere else. For the lovers in The Name of the Son, Venice had been a secluded haunt. The unexpected glimpse into the private parts of his father’s world had, in the discomfort of late adolescence, made him sick. Now, with a collection of romantic, if failed, adventures behind him, James found himself more forgiving.

James stepped in and out of the countless old churches along his way. The ones situated near the canals offered him a vision of living stained glass as the sunlight reflected from the gently rippling water through the beautiful windows colored with biblical tales. Saints are people the light shines through, he had once heard a minister say, aware of his own opacity.

His plan was to get to Florian’s a few minutes before the scheduled meeting so that he could watch Mara as she approached across the piazza. He wanted to know if she walked now as she had written she walked then. From his cursory glance at the map he had determined which was the most predictable direction for her entry. At one-thirty he emerged from the dark, narrow lanes of the Mercerie, out from under the great arch of the clock tower, into the sun-washed piazza, where he was caught off guard by magnificence.

Mara’s description of the square had been a good one. She had caught the grandeur: marble, mosaic, towers, and domes. But architecture had outdone literature—for this place, this gesture of man to walk across the waters in stone, was astounding.

He dropped appreciatively into a chair at the café and gawked.

At a quarter to two by the clock in the tower, Mara entered the piazza from the far colonnade. She had decided to come early, so that she could watch James as he approached the café. She wondered if he would today remind her, in such a poignant way, of his father. She remembered the first time she had seen Aidan. She had been sitting, sketching, at one of Florian’s tilting tables. He had caught her attention, out of the corner of her eye, because of the unusualness of his appearance: American clothes and American walk, but a foreign countenance . . . not Jewish . . . Was he Turkish? Armenian? As it turned out, he was an advanced state of Arab—brilliant, gentle, but with a rough, sandy surface to him. After circling Florian’s indecisively for several minutes, he had finally positioned himself at a nearby table and ordered a Coke (for which, she had decided, he could be forgiven because of the oppressive heat). She had drawn him unawares while he took in the facade of the Basilica. While he had gazed at the great church, his face responsive to the splendor, his expression awed, curious, intense, Mara had gazed at him. And she had fallen in love with him. And fallen. And fallen. Until he, himself, had been felled. He had not been right for her, not with his sophistication, his experience. He had not been especially good to her, though they had had their good times, especially in bed. She sighed. You can’t choose who you love. She still had that first sketch of him somewhere. She should have dug it out and given it to James. It was an artifact that she would not mind turning over to him. She was prepared to offer him so little else.

But James was already in place, looking very much like the sketch himself: lost. She decided there was nothing to be lost by beginning with a pleasantry.

“Buon giorno, James.”

She had startled him. Inwardly, she flinched. She could almost never do anything gracefully with men. Would their meeting, however brief, be another battle of nerves? She hoped not. The experience of yesterday’s encounter had convinced her that her nerves were not sturdy enough for skirmishing.

The Christ of the Butterflies

Contents

Chapter One:
The Arrival

Chapter Two:
Piazza San Marco

The Christ of the Butterflies

Contents

Chapter One: The Arrival

Chapter Two: Piazza San Marco

Chapter One:
The Arrival

Chapter Two:
Piazza San Marco