Death in a Serene City by Edward Sklepowich Read Free Book Online Page B

Lives . If I do anyone who isn’t Venetian, he must have some close relationship to the city, like Browning or Wagner.”
    â€œI like your choice of words. ‘Do’! We Americans living abroad sometimes end up using the most unusual expressions. But you may be tempted yet to ‘do’ me one of these days. I’ve always wanted to have a pied-à-terre here in Venice the way you do.”
    â€œIt’s much more than that. It’s my only home.”
    â€œSo much the better for you.”
    At this point Voyd launched into a monologue on Venice that had Urbino wondering why he even wanted to visit a city he seemed to have so much disdain for. He had little good to say, pointing out that it had been a long time since there had been any real life in the city and lamenting that today it wasn’t much more than a tomb and a vast museum, a cross between an Oriental bazaar and a sideshow.
    â€œThe Philistines are everywhere. A vulgarizing mob has taken hold of this once great city—and they’re not all foreigners either but Venetians themselves. One of these fine days I won’t be surprised at all to have to buy a ticket before I’ll even be able to step out of Santa Lucia.”
    Urbino didn’t feel like rising to Voyd’s bait and defending the city. Instead he changed the topic to Rome. From Rome they soon passed on to Paris and London and eventually to their mutual expatriate existence.
    â€œIt isn’t at all what it used to be,” Voyd said several times.
    Whether he was referring to his own long experience as an expatriate or to the twenties and earlier, Urbino couldn’t decide and didn’t get an immediate opportunity to ask, so expansive and fast-talking was the man.
    Then, just when Urbino had begun to despair of introducing Margaret Quinton into the conversation, Voyd brought the dead woman up himself.
    â€œMy friend Quinton told me last year that she felt in many ways the Bedouin during her years abroad, taking up and pulling down the same old tent in different places. Only the thought of a room back in Schenectady gave her the strength to stay. Schenectady! Can you imagine! She doubted if she’d ever see that room again. She described it down to the wallpaper pattern and windowpanes. I could almost see it myself. She said she was going to make one last try here in Venice this winter, not the most auspicious of places for such things. Well,” he sighed, raising his glass of wine to his thin lips, “we all see how that worked out, don’t we?” He drained the last of the wine and stared at the empty glass.
    â€œPoor, poor Quinton,” he went on after a moment. “I liked to think she had no idea what she was doing, that she must have been in a daze. She had the influenza, there was all that medication, fever, who knows what came over her? The last time I saw her, the day before she—she died, she looked older by a decade than her fifty years. She was sitting up in bed in the same room she threw herself from the next night, and you’ll never guess what she was doing. She had one of my early books propped up on her knees and was copying the whole damn thing out in longhand! She was up to the fifth chapter, Passing into the Picture it was. She said that she was beginning to understand how I had managed to bring it off. She was certainly an unusual woman.” He lifted his empty glass in tribute to her memory, then added, “She was deaf, you know.”
    Urbino had been so taken aback by Voyd’s unsolicited flow about the dead woman that it was a few seconds before he realized that the last comment, unlike the others, expected an answer. Voyd was waiting and seemed amused, as if he had caught Urbino out in being either too much or too little interested in what he had to say about Margaret Quinton.
    â€œNo, I didn’t know.”
    This seemed enough for Voyd who, after exchanging his empty glass for a full