Mary inched her bag forward. " Is that theuh?"
"The pope? Of course."
Homer was desperate for a bed, a chair, a stretch-out on the floor. He peered past Mrs. Wellesley's livid watercolors at the room beyond the hall. It was a pleasant-looking chamber with cozy chairs and a sofa and delightful puffy pillows. There was a charming sideboard with splendid-looking bottles. Homer recognized one from afar, Old Fence Rail.
He groaned aloud. Mary stepped on his foot, and Homer said, "Ouch," just as the door burst open and Samuele Bell came hurrying in, gasping, shouting a glad greeting.
"I'm sorry to be late. I wanted to be here to welcome you."
Immediately another door opened and the little girl reappeared and ran to her father. He hoisted her with one arm and reached out with the other to shake hands.
"Now, Ursula," said her grandmother severely, "remember your manners."
But the atmosphere was warmer by a dozen degrees. "Sit down, sit down," cried Sam.
Mary and Homer sank into the cozy chairs. Mrs. Wellesley lowered herself daintily into a straight one. Sam plumped himself down on the sofa, bounced his daughter on his knee, and asked urgent questions about their flight from Boston and their state of weariness. Then he set Ursula down and stood up. "You must be perishing for a drink. Speak your poison." He looked around, laughing. "I hope that's right. It's what my father used to say. Something for you, Dorothea?"
"Oh, dear, nothing for me, Sam. Well, perhaps just a smidgen of whiskey."
Homer accepted his Old Fence Rail and laughed with relief, because now at last they had finished their journey. They were at home in this foreign land. He looked around the room, recognizing with pleasure a fellow scholar's quarters. The round table in the middle was littered with books. In the bookcase between the windows other books stood upright, leaned sideways, and lay flat. On the top of the bookcase a bust of Dante looked down at them severely. On the walls, instead of Mrs. Wellesley's frenzied watercolors, there were framed maps of the city of Venice. Originals, decided Homer, and very old. The sailing vessels had high poops, and the puffed cheeks of the four winds blew east, west, north, and south.
Mary jumped up to look at another picture on the wall beside her chair, a green-faced Madonna on a gold background. "Isn't this something pretty wonderful?"
"It's a Paolo Veneziano," said Sam. "There's a bigger one in the Accademia."
"Oh, Sam," said Mrs. Wellesley. "I wish you'd take it down. It's a thoroughly unsuitable subject for a household with a growing child." She tittered. "Worse than pornography, in my opinion."
"Dorothea, you need a drink." Her son-in-law filled her glass. He filled one for Mary too, and she laughed and thanked him, remembering how much she had enjoyed Doctor Bell's way of speaking English with a slight accent when he had been a visiting lecturer in Cambridge. She tried a toast in Italian, probably all wrong. "Al suo salute!"
Sam seemed pleased. Mary watched as he pulled the tab on a soft-drink can for his daughter. Then, without making a drink for himself, he sat down again on the sofa and wrapped an arm around the little girl. "Mary and Homer," he said with mock formality, squeezing the child against him, "meet my daughter Ursula. Ursula dear, these two gigantic people are Mr. and Mrs. Kelly from the United States."
Ursula's stony little face opened up. She was beaming.
In the Treasury of the Basilica of Saint Mark there are many reliquaries. One contains spines from the Crown of Thorns.
*6*
On the day after the curator of rare books in the Biblioteca Marciana, Dottor Samuele Bell, came into the office of Lucia Costanza and made his outrageous request to examine a number of sacred relicsand an equally outrageous proposal of marriage (it was only a joke, of course)Lucia descended the stairs from her office and crossed the piazza to consult Father Urbano.
At the east end of the thronged square the Basilica of Saint Mark loomed out of a gray fog like a dream of oriental splendor. In the mist the brilliant colors of the mosaics and the marble columns seemed a little washed out, as though every tourist snapshot had stolen here a blush of rose, there a glitter of gold. On the balustrade above the central portal the bronze horses pawed at the mist, two with the left hoof, two with the right.
There were small pools of water here and there in the square, and a slender stream had seeped into the north aisle of the basilica. Wasn't it early in the year? Lucia splashed through it with her rubber-soled shoes and met Father Urbano in the sacristy.
He was a small round bald-headed priest. When he had been the parish priest of a little village in Umbria he had resembled tne Franciscan monks of old, because the shape of his baldness was just like a tonsure.