What Casanova Told Me by Susan Swan Read Free Book Online Page B

friends—and herself. She had prided herself on avoiding faux intimacies with her students and yet, she thought ruefully, here she was trying to shepherd her dead lover’s daughter through the Mediterranean. Now that Kitty was gone, she felt like just another middle-aged woman with a past receding like an ancient shoreline.
    With a groan, Lee threw herself down on her bed. I will not feel sorry for myself like those sad English women I read about in Anita Brookner novels, she thought. I must choose and know that I chose my circumstances.
    Luce awoke, trembling, from a dream. Already she could barely remember it, but it brought back a memory of waiting for her mother who was working on a dig near the Wye River in Ontario.
    On that long-ago day, Luce had been waiting bravely by herself in the marsh by the old Jesuit ruins. All morning, she’d played in the bulrushes whose roots intertwined into a spongy carpet under the surface of the water, imagining she was one of the Jesuits from medieval France who left behind old axes and gun casings and did not renounce their faith even when the Iroquois scooped out their sizzling flesh with clam shells.
    She had spent hours watching sturgeons flash their yellow bellies and fishermen chug up the river in aluminium out-boards, their lines trailing through clouds of algae, listening in vain for her mother’s voice above the muffled sound of traffic beyond the trestle bridge.
    Now her mother was dead, and in her place she’d left the Polish Pumpkin, who insulted her intelligence with patronizing speeches about her mother’s worries over her retiring nature. As if shyness was a fault. She’s punishing me for being alive when Kitty is dead, Luce thought. Well, she wouldn’t stoop so low as to take out her own grief on someone else.
    She turned on the bedside light and sat up. She longed for her comfortable room at home. Her mother had told her it was easy to feel sad after a cross-Atlantic flight, that jet lag trails in its wake little tendrils of woe, like the start of adepression. And her mother would know. After all, Kitty had spent the last years of her life visiting hot, happy, faraway places, leaving Luce to look after herself at home.
    She thought of their century-old Victorian house in Toronto. It was their first Christmas with Lee and they were celebrating by the fireplace. Lee sat in an armchair eating Belgian chocolates and watching as Luce opened a present from Kitty, the oracle kit with its handsome tasselled pouch. “I know you don’t usually like this sort of thing. But I thought you might find it fun,” her mother had murmured, smiling over Luce’s shoulder at Lee. Luce had thanked Kitty and then angrily taken the kit upstairs. That evening, her mother had followed Luce to her bedroom.
    “I’ve upset you, haven’t I?”
    Luce had turned away so she wouldn’t see the lines of strain on her mother’s face.
You dyke
, she had wanted to shout, though such a word had never rolled off her tongue.
You think you can appease your guilt about having an affair by giving me presents.
    “I know you think I’ve been a bad mother.” She heard Kitty sigh. “And I’m sorry. But Luce, you’re twenty-one. And I shouldn’t have to feel guilty for loving someone.”
    Her mother had sounded so sad and despairing that she had relented and told her she wasn’t upset.
    Packing for her trip with Lee, she had come across the oracle kit again. Half-jokingly, she had put it in her suitcase, secretly hoping it held a magical connection to her mother.
    Sleep wasn’t going to come now. What was she going to do with herself? She found the stack of essays tucked inside her knapsack and turned to one by the Englishman Arthur Symons who had visited Count Waldstein’s castle in Dux one hundred years after Casanova had died. It was just as she hadthought. Symons confirmed that he’d seen the bill for Casanova’s damages to the roof of the Ducal Palace in the Venetian archives. And here,