The American Lady(82)

And if not? Marie saw no reason why they should live here forever, however big the palazzo was. There were other houses in Genoa.



Marie dawdled awhile rather than venture into the breakfast room and endure Patrizia’s frosty glances. She had learned that the countess usually went out into the garden by ten o’clock. Marie decided to go down into the kitchen and ask the cook for a few slices of bread with a jar of honey and a glass of milk. She would have a quick breakfast at the kitchen table while the maid chopped herbs or jointed a hare or cleaned mussels at the table next to her. Marie probably could have asked to be served a late breakfast in the salon, but she didn’t much care where she ate. Heaven knows she had wasted enough time with fine linen and tableware when she was staying with Ruth in New York. Here in her new home she wanted to use her time for what really mattered: her work.

It was nonetheless nearly eleven o’clock by the time Marie finally sat down at her workbench. In front of her lay the flat, square glass picture that she had begun a few days earlier, the last in a series of four depicting the elements. Earth, water, and air were already propped up on the windowsill, glowing in the November sunlight. Marie looked at the picture of air with a critical eye. Perhaps she should have used fewer shades of blue, and put in a shard or two of transparent glass here and there? There had been days on Monte Verità when the sky really had been one vast unbroken expanse of blue. But wasn’t there more to air than just the sky? Wasn’t wind a part of it too? Sweet tender breezes and fierce cold gusts alike? She should have thought of that before. It was too late to change it now, Marie thought irritably as she picked up the last of the four.

Glass was the hardest taskmaster of any material an artist could work with. It made no difference whether the work was glassblowing, glass painting, or another technique. An artist only ever had one chance to get it right, and even the smallest lapse meant starting all over again. Any slip would be visible forever after. That was precisely what had always drawn Marie to the work, though.

She looked at the element of fire and concentrated. She had chosen the image of a tree in the fall, its leaves glowing with bright autumnal colors on branches spread all the way across the picture. A little more crimson here. And perhaps just a touch of ocher, but no more than that. The picture already blazed with all the colors of a crackling log fire. The tree of life, she thought, and smiled. It was time to breathe life into the image now.

A deep, warm happiness spread inside her. How had she survived these past few months without her work?

Once she had put the pieces of red and ocher glass into place, she struck a match. But instead of lighting the glassworker’s lamp as she used to whenever she sat down at her bench, she held the match tip to a soldering torch.

From glassblower to glass artist! Sometimes Marie couldn’t quite believe that she had dared try out all these new techniques. But as she wound a length of wire around the edges of a leaf-shaped piece of glass and then soldered the ends together, she felt as though she had never done anything else.

It had all started on Monte Verità, during a visit to the glassmaker Katharina. After much idle talk, they had finally managed to seek her out. As soon as Marie and Pandora had opened the door of the modest-looking wood cabin, they found themselves in a wonderland of glass, where thousands of sparkling shards and mirrors glittered among artworks made with an array of materials ranging from feathers and silver wire to shells and pearls. And Katharina von Oy was the queen of this wonderland, cloaked like a sorceress in a silk garment in all the colors of the rainbow. When she heard that Marie worked with glass too, she was delighted to discuss the various techniques she used. Some of them were quite new to Marie—such as the way she combined glass with shells and pearls. Suddenly she was almost ashamed to think that it had never even occurred to her to combine glass with other materials. Glass and silver, glass and stone, glass and . . . the possibilities were endless. Some of the pieces fascinated her so much that she came back to them again and again, gazing, running her fingers over them. There were others that she felt didn’t really work, such as the glass snake that wound its way around a carved wooden apple. The contrast between the rough wood and the sensuous glowing red snake was too great, Marie decided.

Nor had she cared for Katharina’s painted glass pieces, at least at first. The figures were too flat and clumsy and the landscapes too one-dimensional, but she didn’t say so, of course, since she didn’t want to be rude. And she did like the way the pictures glowed when she held them up to the light so that Katharina’s simple designs shone with a life of their own.