Betsy and the Great World / Betsy's Wedding Page 18

  “Finished?”

  “I’m an architect. And I was lucky enough to be put on a research project. I was sent right back here with some very interesting work laid out. I’m making drawings now of the choir stalls at San Giorgio Maggiore.”

  “Do you…” Betsy broke off, laughing. “Really,” she said, “I was brought up not to ask personal questions. I know I shouldn’t be hurling them at you. It’s just so wonderful…to be out with someone my own age who speaks English. I’m so happy!”

  “So am I,” he answered.

  After getting her trunk through customs, they ordered it sent to the pension and Mr. Regali said, “Why don’t we look around Venice a little before we go home?”

  Because it was near, they went first to the Rialto. The old marble bridge was lined with cheap little shops. The proprietors stood in front haggling over prices with women in black shawls.

  “All the treasures of the Orient used to be spread out here,” Mr. Regali remarked.

  “And Shylock used to come!”

  They took another vaporetto to St. Mark’s Square…the Piazza, Mr. Regali called it. It looked just as it did in all the pictures, except that the colors of the marble buildings were richer and the Grand Canal sparkled as it never did on canvas.

  Tourists were going in and out of the rosy Doge’s Palace and St. Mark’s Cathedral with its orientallooking domes. They were looking up at the clock tower and the golden angel on top of the Campanile. They were lunching at the open-air cafés, and feeding the pigeons that kept circling down in glossy waves.

  “Oh, I wish we’d brought my camera! I want my picture taken feeding the pigeons.”

  “If you really do,” said Mr. Regali, “I’ll take it the next time we come. I believe we’ve passed lunchtime. How about stopping here at Florian’s?”

  They lunched at that famous café, outdoors. Betsy kept looking around at the brilliant busy square.

  “They have music in the evenings.”

  “Oh, that would be too celestial!”

  “You must let me bring you soon.”

  They walked from the Piazza to the Piazzetta, and between two stately columns, topped by St. Theodore and the famous winged Lion of St. Mark, down to the quay. The Grand Canal was full of gondolas, barges, yachts, and ferries. The gondoliers began to call: “Una gondola, Signor! Una barca!”

  Mr. Regali nodded across the water. “See that tower? It’s on the church of San Giorgio Maggiore.”

  “That’s where you’re drawing the choir stalls.”

  “Yes. And the view from the tower is the finest in Venice. Let’s go over; shall we?”

  “Oh, yes!” Betsy said.

  So they took a gondola to San Giorgio Maggiore. The gondolier wore white with a green sash. They swept gently over the water and landed at another domed church. Palladio had built it in the sixteenth century, Mr. Regali said, and going inside he showed her pictures by Tintoretto, and the choir stalls. “Magnificent baroque!”

  They climbed what seemed like a hundred thousand dark steep steps, but when they came out into the sunshine, Venice was spread out below like a map, glistening white, the water dotted with the orange sails of fishing vessels.

  “Oh, oh!” cried Betsy.

  “Ripping, isn’t it?” came a British voice. There was another visitor in the tower. The Englishman of the House of the Yellow Roses lifted a soft hat.

  “Why…how do you do? I did go out after all,” said Betsy.

  “So I see.”

  “We attended to the trunk,” said Mr. Regali.

  Then, forsaking the view, he and Betsy turned and clattered down the stairs. Laughing, they ran as though pursued, down through the vertical darkness and out into the light and back to their gondola.

  “Wasn’t that a horrible moment?” Betsy asked.

  “He’s a horrible person. The idea of his thinking he could take you out all alone on your first day in Venice!”

  Simultaneously they realized that it was just what he himself had done, and they broke into laughter.

  It dawned on Betsy that they had been laughing all day.

  “I laugh with him like I do with Tilda, and Tacy and Tib,” she thought. She felt as though she had known him forever. It seemed completely natural to be wandering around with him, but it came to her now that perhaps it hadn’t been quite proper.

  “I was having so much fun I forgot about everything.”

  She had even forgotten how she looked. She hadn’t so much as glanced in her pocket mirror. Taking it out now, she tucked her hair beneath the red and green cap, buttoned her red jacket, and smoothed the skirts of her pale green cotton dress.

  “If I’d known we were going to stay all day, I’d have worn a hat, at least.”

  “I like you the way you are,” said Mr. Regali. “Do you know,” he added thoughtfully, “there’s a full moon. This might be a good night to go over to St. Mark’s Square.”

  “And it might not,” said Betsy, and laughed, and he laughed, too. He knew she had realized belatedly that they had been together for a very long time.

  Reaching the pension, Betsy went straight to her room. She rested and bathed and changed into a white dress. At dinner she talked animatedly to her fellow Americans. (The Englishman ignored her.) And in the evening she took pains to join the college girls in the garden. Mr. Regali walked past them once or twice.

  She went to her room early, for her trunk had arrived. She unpacked, and settled her desk, and got out her photographs and Goethe’s cup and Tacy’s doll, and put the American flag over her mirror. She wrote her home letter and told the story of the day, not forgetting the embarrassing situation on the tower at San Giorgio Maggiore.

  “Mr. Regali is a perfect dear,” she was writing when she heard a knock. She opened the door to find one of the maids with an enormous armful of pink roses.

  “Oh, thank you! Grazie!” Betsy cried. But she knew from whom they came. She put them in her water pitcher, for none of the vases in the room would hold them. They filled the entire room with fragrance.

  Standing before the mirror in her pink summer kimono, brushing her hair, Betsy’s expression grew thoughtful. She opened a drawer in which she had arranged her toilet articles and began to hunt for something she had not used for a long time.

  A short time later, chuckling, she went back to her letter and added a postscript.

  “I just put my hair up on curlers,” she wrote, “for the first time in Europe. You’ve heard about emotion coming in waves???”

  17

  Forgetting Again

  IN EXACTLY FIVE DAYS Mr. Regali told Betsy that he loved her. And after that he told her every day in Italian, French, and English.

  “When I saw you standing in the railway station,” he said, “with all those bags, I fell in love. I didn’t admit it, though. I said to myself, ‘Oh, I hope she will be stupid!’ But in the gondola I could see that you weren’t. I knew I was a goner.”

  “It’s perfectly ridiculous,” Betsy replied with a joyful sensation spreading through her body. “You only imagine it!”

  “I wish I did. I didn’t want to fall in love. Why couldn’t you have stayed in Oberammergau?”

  Until this revelation he had continued to be only an extremely kind friend.

  “He’s my guardian angel,” Betsy wrote home.

  He explained the monetary system and helped her change her money. He pointed out the American Express Company, and Thomas Cook’s, and the English Church. He bought her a map of Venice and checked the steamboat stations and the ferries.

  “But getting around Venice on foot is complicated,” he said. “I’d better show you in person.”

  There were no streets except canals. Walking, you went up and down bridges, and along tiny alleys, spanned by clotheslines full of washing, and across picturesque courts where people were always hanging out the windows in vigorous conversation. They shouted; they gesticulated.

  “What’s the matter with them anyway?” Betsy asked
.

  Mr. Regali laughed. “Oh, they’re just saying it’s a beautiful day!”

  You dodged around old houses, time-stained to mellow hues. You went through lanes with vines climbing over the walls and hints of gardens behind. With Mr. Regali, Betsy explored every tantalizing nook.

  And always in the end they came out on the Grand Canal. The palaces lifted their airy arches, balconies, and columns above water that changed color all the time. It was oftenest a vivid blue, but it could be sapphire blue and lilac blue. It could be grass green and emerald green and bottle green. It could be iridescent, enameled, pearly, silky.

  “I don’t see how you put up with me!” cried Betsy. “All my raving and ranting! I know I bore you, but I just can’t help it.”

  “You don’t bore me.”

  He took pictures of her feeding the pigeons. They bought a paper bag full of corn, and the pigeons perched on her shoulders, her arms, her fingers! The Harvard man passed by and yelled something scoffing.

  “I know it’s a touristy trick, but I don’t care,” Betsy said.

  “He’s only ignorant,” Mr. Regali assured her. “He doesn’t know how important these birds are. They’re direct descendants of carrier pigeons that helped us win a victory over the Greeks five or six centuries ago.”

  They peeked in at St. Mark’s Church, dim and glittering. St. Mark was buried here, Mr. Regali said. His body had reached Venice after many strange adventures which were told in mosaics over the entrance door. They went up to the galleries to see them, and on a balcony overlooking the Square stood four bronze horses.

  “The only horses in Venice!” he announced. They were trophies from Constantinople. Napoleon had taken them off to Paris, but after his downfall they had been returned. Betsy had her picture snapped beside them.

  They went next door to the rosy Doge’s Palace. Its stones were red and white, but the effect was pink. Going inside, they climbed the Giants’ Staircase and wandered through lofty halls which were carved and gilded, with gigantic paintings by Tintoretto, Titian, and Veronese covering the walls and even the ceilings.

  They walked through the Palace to a bridge which led to an ancient prison next door.

  “Recognize this?”

  “The Bridge of Sighs! But, oh dear, I don’t feel like sighing!”

  “Neither do I. There isn’t a sigh in me. I think Florian’s would be more suitable for us.”

  So they went back to the Square and drank coffee and ate casata di Siciliano, a delicious concoction with chopped fruit and nuts and layers of chocolate in it. They talked about the Wilsons, who were having a fine studious time in Greece, and about Betsy’s travel plans, and—of course—her family.

  “All those letters that were waiting for you. Were they from your family?”

  “Not all of them.”

  His expressive eyes grew thoughtful.

  New sets of tourists were feeding the pigeons now, and going in and out of the Palace and the Cathedral, and shopping in the arcades of other marble buildings around the Square.

  “I just adore this place,” said Betsy.

  “Then when are we coming in the evening?”

  “Oh…sometime!” She wasn’t sure it would be proper to go out with him alone at night. And she was trying to be very discreet.

  Partly because her Italian Self-Taught proved to be inadequate, and partly because study took time which might otherwise be indiscreetly spent, Betsy had started Italian lessons. One of the aunts, the one who spoke English, was her teacher.

  Mr. Regali spent her lesson hours in his rooms, a few houses away. He had been climbing around Venice gathering data, he said. Now he was working on his drafting board, transcribing notes.

  “The sort of notes an architect takes…with pencil, scales, and caliper.”

  Betsy alternated walks with him and sight-seeing trips with her fellow Americans…to the Accademia to look at masterpieces or to Murano to see the glass works. If she went out with him in the morning, she was careful not to do so in the afternoon. But every evening they walked down to the nearby Giudecca Canal to see the sunset.

  Sunsets in Venice were twice as beautiful as ordinary sunsets because they were doubled. All the splendor of the sky—the flaming crimson, violet, and gold—was spread on the water too. And all the tender after-colors, the pastels, the fading silvers were repeated.

  Battleships, merchant vessels, yachts, and gondolas were moored on the Giudecca. Artists were sketching on every bridge and barge.

  “They’ll be putting us into their pictures,” Betsy said.

  “Let’s fool them Sunday night and go to the Piazza.”

  Betsy hesitated. “I’m not sure we should go out at night unchaperoned. In America, of course, I’d think nothing of it. But in Italy…”

  “You’re an American.”

  “Yes, but your aunts…”

  “We’ll ask them,” he said, and when they returned to the pension they hunted up the Signorinas Regali.

  Betsy had straightened them out now, although they looked much alike. All were small, and submerged in black garments, and had their nephew’s thickly lashed dark eyes. They consulted each other on everything, like chattering birds.

  Signorina Eleanora was a little shorter than her sisters but she was more forceful. Signorina Beatrice was a little taller but she had a quicker sense of humor. Signorina Angela, Betsy’s Italian teacher, had the softest heart.

  “We’ll ask Aunt Angela,” Mr. Regali said as they walked back to the House of the Yellow Roses. But they found all three in the little family parlor.

  The aunts, whose home was full of Americans from one year’s end to the next, understood American ways. They made no objection to Mr. Regali’s plan.

  “Americans think nothing of such things!” Aunt Beatrice tossed it off.

  “You must bring her home early,” Aunt Eleanora warned, looking at her nephew.

  “Marco is a good boy,” said Aunt Angela lovingly.

  It was agreed that they might go. But as it happened Betsy did not, after all, have her first glimpse of St. Mark’s Square by night with Mr. Regali. He received a telegram from a group of professors under whose direction he was doing his research. They were visiting at Padua and they wished him to come on Sunday for a conference.

  Betsy was surprised at how much she missed him. She went to the English Church in the morning, and after dinner she went to the Frari and looked at Titian’s tomb. At supper Miss Cook and Mrs. Warren asked her if she wouldn’t like to go over to St. Mark’s Square; they had heard it was delightful in the evening. Betsy accepted, and then she had a miserably guilty feeling.

  “Why under the sun should I feel guilty?” she asked. “Mr. Regali didn’t invent Venice.”

  But while she was putting on her hat in her room, she heard a whistle from the garden.

  “For, I adore,

  I adore you, Giannina mia…”

  It was their signal, formally adopted several days before. He had heard her humming the song and had been charmed with the Italian phrases. She went to the window and there he stood, looking hot, rumpled, and triumphant.

  “Ecco!” he cried. “I had to run out on a whole flock of bigwigs, but here I am! And there’s going to be a band concert.”

  “Oh, Mr. Regali!” Betsy faltered. “I’m so sorry! Miss Cook and Mrs. Warren asked me to go with them, and I didn’t know you were coming back…”

  The joy went out of his face. He didn’t speak.

  “I’m so terribly sorry!” Betsy repeated. She was. She wanted to cry.

  He said something in Italian; it sounded despairing. And he pushed his fingers through his hair. But then he looked up with his shining Italian smile.

  “My fault!” he said. “But will you promise not to look at a thing?”

  “Not a thing,” answered Betsy tremulously.

  “And not to listen to the music?”

  “I won’t listen.”

  “And tomorrow,” he said, “you’ll go
out with me on a bat?” Like Tilda, he had picked up Betsy’s favorite word. “And no talk about hurrying home to write letters or study Italian!”

  “But I have a lesson in the morning,” Betsy reminded him, laughing.

  “Bene! You may take it. But I’ll be waiting for you when it’s over.” And he picked a rose and threw it through the window, and Betsy went slowly out to meet Miss Cook and Mrs. Warren. They were nice; they were very full of fun. But Betsy wished they had never started traveling.

  At St. Mark’s Square she tried not to look or listen, although on a platform in the center a band played rousingly. Everything was brightly lighted, and there were crowds of people promenading across the marble pavements, strolling in the arcades, and eating and drinking at little tables. It seemed as though the rest of Venice must be entirely deserted, and no one anywhere sleeping.

  The Grand Canal doubled all the lights and the beauty and the fascination. It was full of gondolas, some of them strung with lanterns, and their occupants were singing and strumming guitars.

  “Oh, dear!” mourned Betsy while she ate ices with the jolly middle-aged ladies. “It would have been so nice to see it with him!”

  The following morning she put on her prettiest dress, white, with a tiered skirt, green buttons down the front, and a flat green bow at the collar. She wore the green bracelets she had bought at Gibraltar, and her jade ring, and her slanting black hat with the green leaves and the rose.

  Mr. Regali was waiting when her lesson was over, and they took a steamboat to the Lido.

  The large island contained a city of hotels and bathhouses. Smartly dressed crowds strolled its walks, while vendors of flowers and fruits called their wares. The beaches were scattered with bathers, and children were digging in the sand.

  Betsy and Mr. Regali sat down on a bench and looked out at orange sails floating on the water. It was here he told her that he had fallen in love.

  She was astonished, delighted, and half-unbelieving. How could even a romantic Italian fall in love in five days! But with the sun flooding down on the Lido, she wanted to believe him, even though she realized that she didn’t know—now that he had ceased to be a friend—how she felt about him. He relieved her by not asking for an answer.