The Garden of Letters Read Online Free Page B

Orsina, was not a musician herself, but had fallen in love after hearing him perform.
    He had been invited to play in her native city, a labyrinth on water. A place where in winter, the fog merged with the sea. Orsina’s father knew the feather of every bird and made a living from all things ornithological. He traveled three months a year to places as far away as Africa to collect rare plumage for his hat store, a jewel box known to the city’s most fashionable at the corner of San Marco’s Square. Ostrich, peacock, and yellow and blue parrot, every journey brought home a trunk full of feathers, each one more exotic than the last.
    Orsina couldn’t forget the sight of her mother’s beautiful bed, laid out in feathers. Silky plumes layered in abundance; a feather coat of turquoise, lapis, and green. It was her mother who took her father’s extravagant bounty and transformed them into the beautiful hats that filled the windows of their store. Her narrow, tapered fingers were so delicate and nimble as they sewed dozens of seed pearls, silk corsages, and thin wisps of veil. Orsina learned the styles early from her mother: cloche for the ladies and the English tourists, broad-rimmed for church and weddings, and the flapper headbands with beads and white feathers for those who liked to dance. In her mother’s workroom, there were always tall stacks of fashion magazines her father had sent from Paris so that his wife could be kept abreast of the latest styles. Orsina spent her days leafing through the pages, dreaming beyond the lagoons of her own childhood, to places like France, where there was a different kind of light. Cities where one didn’t float but were beautiful all the same. She imagined them like confectionary sugar, air-spun and light as gauze.
    Orsina had not expected that it would be a concert in I Gesuiti that would cause her to leave Venice. But her life took on another path, when one Friday evening, shortly after her twentieth birthday, her parents closed their shop early and took her to hear a rising young violinist play. It was at that concert that she found herself transported by music and entranced by the musician who played before her.
    She and her parents walked that evening to the church, her father in a dark suit, her mother in a pale lavender dress; a cloche hat the color of plum blossoms framed her face. Orsina had chosen something wholly different; she wore her hair loose and a yellow dress made of the lightest chiffon.
    As they settled into the wooden pews, the sounds within the church seemed to shift. Gone was the somber atmosphere of a Sunday Mass. It was as if the pale gray and celadon marble, with its intricate patterns and lace cut from stone, was electrified. Excitement and anticipation now filled the holy walls. No one glanced at their prayer books. Instead they all craned their neck to see the dashing violinist tuning his strings.
    Soon he stood with his instrument at his side and smiled modestly as the church’s cultural director proudly introduced him as the latest virtuoso from Verona. The audience clapped and Elodie’s father began to play.
    Elodie loved the description her mother often told of hearing those first notes.
    “Like magic,” she said. “I had seen feathers all my life, and his notes seemed like feathers floating in the air. Arabesques of movement that made my head spin.” Her mother always gasped for air after remembering the moment so intensely, as the memory literally took her breath away.
    “When he played a Beethoven Romance the audience was enraptured. Your grandfather tapped me on my leg and told me: ‘You’ll always remember this, the first time you heard genius!’
    “But I already knew I would never forget it. I was completely intoxicated by the music.” Orsina always smiled at this point and took another breath. “And I knew that the man who could create such beauty was the man I wanted to love.”
    At this point, Elodie’s father would laugh and