Chapter 30 The Centenary

The factory turned a hundred years old in the spring, and Venice decided, with the quiet stubbornness that had kept the city alive for a thousand, that it would celebrate. The idea came from Beppe, which surprised everyone, because Beppe was a man who had never once in his life suggested a celebration of anything. He announced it at breakfast, in the middle of a sentence about the quality of the year's first aventurine, and the room went quiet, and then Sofia laughed, and then the whole yard was talking at once. "A hundred years," Beppe said, when the noise had settled. "Your grandfather's grandfather lit the first furnace in this yard when the city was still arguing about whether Venice would survive the century. We have been making glass here for a hundred years, through war and flood and fire, and I have been here for almost half of it, and I am not going to die without seeing the factory given its due." He looked around the room, at the apprentices and the masters and the young people who had come to learn, and his walnut face softened. "We will show the city what we have built. All of it. The old furnace and the new one, the ruby and the school. And we will finish the chandelier." Isabella looked at Marco across the table, and she understood that the plan had been growing in Beppe's mind for a long time, and that the rescued fragment had given it a shape. The chandelier would be made again—not a copy of the one that had burned, but a completion of it, the seven arms of the lagoon ruby with the old arm, the one pulled from the canal, set in the place of honor at the center. It would hang in the yard for the celebration, in the open air, and the whole of the city would see the color that had survived the fire. They had two months to make it, and they made it the way the factory made everything in that spring—together, in a hurry, and with the whole of their hearts. The apprentices worked beside the masters, and the masters worked beside the apprentices, and the schoolhouse furnace burned day and night, and the yard took on the sound of a shipyard, the ring of hammers and the long, patient hiss of cooling glass. Isabella found herself doing something she had never done before: teaching with her hands on other people's tools, correcting a gather here, steadying a blow there, passing on the breath and the patience that Emilio had passed to Marco and Marco had passed to her. Sofia made the first arm alone, and it was the best thing she had ever made, and Isabella stood back and let her set it on the rack with the others and did not say a word, because there was nothing to say that the glass did not say for both of them. Gianni came every day, from his new room above the schoolhouse, and he sat at the edge of the yard and watched, and he did not offer advice unless it was asked, and he was asked often, because there was no one alive who knew the old techniques the way he knew them, and the apprentices had begun to call him Nonno, and he had stopped correcting them. One evening, with the last of the light going red over the lagoon, Isabella went down to the hidden workshop alone and opened the drawer where the letters now lived. She had read them all, and she had cried over some of them and laughed over others, and the one she had read a hundred times lay on top, the last letter Emilio had ever written, the one that ended with the door never having been locked. She sat in the light of the old furnace and thought about the two old men who had written to each other in secret for years, who had carried the same shame and the same love and had never once found the courage to say it to each other's faces. She thought about the courage it must have taken for Gianni to come home at last, and she understood that the kingdom was not a place or a family but a door, and that everyone who had ever loved it had spent their whole lives finding the courage to walk through it. Beppe lit the first torch of the celebration himself, on the evening of the festival, with the whole of the island gathered in the yard. He carried it from the old furnace to the new one, the way Marco had carried it the night the school was born, and the two fires burned together against the dusk, and the crowd went quiet. Then he set the torch down and looked at the chandelier, hanging from the oak beam that had been raised for it, catching the last of the light, the seven arms of red glass with the old arm at the center, and he said, "Emilio," and nothing else. Isabella stood beside Marco, and the tears came, and she did not care. The light fell through the arms in red rivers, the way it had fallen in the hidden workshop, the way it had fallen in the great hall of the foundation, and she thought of every piece of the story that had brought her to this yard—the key and the letter and the sealed room, the fire and the flood and the rebuilding, the school and the furnace and the old man who had come home at last. It had all been leading here, not to an ending, but to a beginning, the way every piece of glass is a beginning of the next one. The celebration lasted until the small hours, and the city came, and the critics came, and the old woman who had wept in front of the first chandelier came and stood in front of this one and did not weep, only smiled, because she had lived long enough to see a promise kept twice. The foundation sent a letter that would have made her grandfather weep—an offer to sponsor the school for ten years, and a request for a commission from Berlin, and a museum in Kyoto that had asked for the story of the laguna ruby to be told in glass. The mayor came, and the apprentices served wine, and Beppe danced, which no one had ever seen him do, and Gianni stood at the edge of the crowd with his hands clasped behind his back, and Isabella went to him and stood beside him and said, "You're home." "Yes," he said. "I believe I am." Later, when the crowd had thinned and the lanterns had burned low, Isabella and Marco stood under the chandelier with the yard finally quiet around them, and the two furnaces burning, and the stars coming out over the lagoon. "We did it," she said. "We did it," he agreed. "And tomorrow we begin again. There is a commission from Berlin, and a museum in Kyoto waiting for the story, and three new apprentices who will be ready for the furnace by summer, and a daughter's name to argue about, and a hundred years of work behind us and a hundred in front." She laughed, and the laugh was bright and full of the life she had built, and she took his hand and looked up at the chandelier, at the old arm at the center of the new ones, at the color that had survived fire and water and time. "To the next hundred," she said. "To the next hundred," he said. "And to the people who will make it." The furnaces burned on through the night, and the chandelier held the light, and the kingdom of glass stood at the edge of the water, patient and alive, waiting for the morning.