Read A Thousand Days in Venice for Free Online Page A

them against the demons, and, finally, how to outlast if not escape those same demons, life can seem more merciful. It’s that long, smooth, false swanning through the course of a life that seems to drive a person, sooner or later, into the wall. I never swanned through anything, but I was always grateful for the chance to keep trying to shine up things. Anyway, by this time, there wasn’t much left to fear. A grim childhood, scattered here and there with the hideous, provided early grief and shame. I kept thinking it must be me who was all wrong, me that was so dreadful, me the cause of the epic agony in my family. No one worked very hard to dissuade me from my thinking. Why couldn’t I live in a house with golden windows where people were happy, where no one had bad dreams or white-hot fear? I wanted to be anywhere where someone wasn’t lashing old pain across my new life, flailing it smart as a leather strap.
    When I understood it was me, myself, who’d have to build the house with the golden windows, I got to work. I salved heartaches, learned to bake bread, raised children, invented a life that felt good. And now I’m choosing to leave that life. I let myself remember my quaking fears when the children were small, the lean periods, myplaying for time with the gods, asking to stay strong and well enough to take care of them, to grow them up a while longer. Isn’t that what single moms do? We fear someone stronger than us will take away our babies. We fear someone will find grievious fault with the job we’re doing, with the choices we’re making. We’re already hard enough on ourselves. And even in our strengths, we’re judged broken. At best, we’re half-good. We fear poverty and solitude.
Lady Madonna, children at her feet
. We fear breast cancer. We fear our children’s fear. We fear the speed at which their childhood passes.
Wait. Wait, please, I think I understand it now. I think I can do it better. Can we just repeat last month? How did you get to be thirteen? How did you get to be twenty? Yes. Yes, of course, you must leave. Yes, I understand. I love you, baby. I love you, Mommy
.
    At first, I talked more often than usual to Lisa and Erich, my children. I would call, and they would ask a million questions I wasn’t certain how to answer, or they would call just to hear if I was okay, if I was having doubts or that sort of thing. After a few weeks we spoke less frequently and with strain. They needed to talk more to each other than to me during this time, having to sort out shock and joy and fear, perhaps. Lisa would call and I would cry and she would just say, “Mom, I love you.”
    Erich came to visit. He took me to dinner at Balaban’s and sat across the table searching my face hard. Satisfied, then, that at leastI looked the same, he sat a long time sipping quietly at his wine. At last he opened with, “I hope you’re not frightened about all this. It will be good for you.” It was a vintage tactic of his to reassure me when it was he who was drop-dead scared of something.
    â€œNo, I’m not frightened,” I said, “and I hope you’re not either.”
    â€œFrightened? No. I just need to readjust my compass. You and home have always been in the same place,” he said.
    â€œAnd they still are. It’s just that now home and I will be in Venice,” I told him.
    I knew the difference between going off to university, knowing that home is a few hundred miles away, and having one’s mother dissolve that home to go and live in Europe. Now home would be six thousand miles away, not accessible on long weekends. And there was also this person called Fernando. It was altogether a less dramatic event for my daughter, she having lived in Boston for several years already, deep in romance, her studies, her work. I wished my children could feel part of this future of mine, but all this wasn’t happening to the three