The Wonder Chamber Read online

  “Signora Gonzaga,” he corrected, turning to his daughter, “she never used the title of Principessa.” He rolled his eyes at Lizzie. “Always with the princesses, my Rose.”

  Lizzie smiled at him. “I know,” she said, handing the old man her coat. “Rose and I have had this conversation many times.”

  “Italians don’t want royalty,” he continued. “It’s bad enough there are the politicians, the mafia, the pope. We don’t need another hand in our pockets.”

  “Well you can tell us the whole story,” Rose said, putting her arm around her father and giving him a kiss on the side of the head.

  She pointed out chairs to Lizzie and Martin and began to pour wine as her father explained the various cured Bolognese meats and cheeses.

  “Most people know us only for baloney,” he said, “but there are such great foods from Bologna.”

  “I can’t wait to go there,” Lizzie said, happily sampling each piece that was passed her way.

  “Where will you stay?” Tony asked her.

  “At the Gonzaga family house.”

  “The palazzo,” Rose said enthusiastically.

  “The house on Galvani Plaza?” her father asked, ignoring his daughter’s commentary.

  Lizzie answered that she thought that was the address.

  “I was there often in my youth,” Tony said wistfully. “My father worked for the Gonzagas in their linen factory and when I was a small child I worked in the house.”

  Martin asked him what sort of jobs he had done and Tony answered that when he was eight or nine he had held the reigns of horses when vendors came to the door.

  “There were still some old guys that used horses then. And after the Second World War there wasn’t much gas for cars and they brought them back.” He laughed as he thought about it. “Then I went inside and played in the courtyard until the next visitor arrived.” He saw the look on Martin’s face and turned to him. “Don’t worry, this was not any kind of exploitation of child labor. The Signora got us into her house so that she could school us, and she always had seven or eight children of Gonzaga workers there.” He explained that she had taught him to read and to speak English, and had used the famous collection in the house to teach about art and science.

  “I have just started to read about the collection,” Lizzie said. “That’s my reason for going there.”

  “I have some pictures,” Tony said, “if you’d like to see them.”

  “I’d love it,” she answered enthusiastically.

  During the short time he was out of the room, Lizzie told Rose how much she liked her father, and what a great help it was to her to talk to him.

  “Just wait,” Rose said. “I told you I think you should write a book about the Princess Gonzaga, and Pop can give you a ton of information.”

  “I thought he said she never used that title.”

  Rose shrugged and laughed. “That doesn’t mean I can’t.”

  “You are nothing if not persistent,” Lizzie said with a smile.

  Tony returned with a leather album. On the cover his name was tooled in a fancy script. “This was a gift from the Signora,” he said. “She gave one to each of us when we left for America.” He opened the book and showed the first pictures, which Maggie Kelliher Gonzaga had placed in the volume. “These are my parents,” he said, placing his fingertips lightly on a photo. “Signora Gonzaga had a photographer take this so that I would have it to remember them when I was far from home, and here is a picture of my family and our house.”

  He pointed to a picture of himself with his sponsor. “This was taken in the courtyard of the Palazzo Gonzaga,” he said. “This is me with the Signora.”

  Lizzie took the album and looked closely at the face of Maggie Kelliher Gonzaga. It was obviously the same woman she had seen in the engagement photo in the New York Times from many years earlier, but the expression was quite different. She had a slight smile and her hand rested affectionately on the shoulder of the young man beside her.

  “Where was her husband at this time?” Lizzie asked.

  “He was dead by then,” Tony answered. “He died at the beginning of the war and this is after.” He took the book back. “So much happened to her in the war. Her husband gone, her son killed, her daughter executed, and still she was such a kind and steady person. She never turned anyone away who needed help and her house was crowded with people all through the war and long after.”

  “You told me she was some kind of Resistance fighter,” Rose said.

  Tony nodded. “She never made any kind of political declaration. It would have been too dangerous for her, but it was known that she supported the Resistance. Her daughter Gianna was executed by the Nazis for spreading partisan propaganda, and her son Pat and son-in-law Archie Cussetti spent much of the war in hiding.”

  “Her daughter was executed?” Martin said softly. “How terrible that must have been for her.”

  “It was a horrifying day,” Tony said, his voice becoming less steady as he talked. “I was only a kid then, but I remember coming out of the house when I heard a truck drive up to the front door. I saw them throw Gianna’s body onto the pavement of the plaza. She was almost unrecognizable, she had been beaten so badly.”

  There was silence in the room for a time, which Rose finally broke.

  “But these awful things are not what Lizzie and Martin came to talk about,” she said, putting a hand on her father’s arm. “Show some pictures of the collection.”

  Tony seemed relieved to change the subject and turned over several leaves in his album. “Ah, the famous collection,” he said. “I took several pictures of it many years later. These are in color.”

  Lizzie peered down at the images. Most of them had faded over the forty or so years that they had been pasted in the album. She could not see details well but she recognized an alligator mounted along one wall. “I might like to come look at these again if that’s okay,” she said.

  “Take the album,” Tony said. “You can copy any of the pictures you like and get it back to me when it is convenient.”

  Conversation during dinner turned to more conventional topics, though Tony frequently mentioned Maggie Kelliher Gonzaga and Lizzie found that she wanted to know more about her. The frightened teenager in the newspaper photo was clearly not the whole story.

  Chapter 3

  The Kelliher family had been generous to St. Patrick’s College since its founding, not just with money but by buying books for the library and works of art for the small museum on campus. When Maggie Kelliher married Lorenzo Gonzaga he had given several pieces from his family collection to the college, including a small but magnificent portrait of the Madonna by Guido Reni, and a marble angel carved by Niccolo dell’Arca, artists who had worked in Bologna in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These works were in the campus chapel, but Lizzie had already secured permission to move them to the museum for her exhibit.

  Maggie Kelliher had purchased several seventeenth-century books for the campus library that dealt with the Gonzaga collection or others like it in Italy during the Renaissance. Lizzie had a study carrel in the library and she was assembling books for this project so that she could work efficiently with them, and with archival material from the Kelliher and Gonzaga families. When she had written her short biography of Paddy Kelliher a few years earlier, she had surveyed all these collections and she knew there were folders of material related to the Gonzagas that she had not thought pertinent at the time. Now she asked Jackie to bring her all the files related to the Gonzaga family or their collection.

  “You won’t have room here,” Jackie said, standing at the edge of the carrel. “I have a cartful of material and I think it would be best to spread it out on one of the library tables and see what we have; then you can make a plan for the order in which you want to look at it.”

  “I also have an elect
ronic list of what is currently in the collection that is in Italian, and I’ll need some help going through that.”

  “Is Father O’Toole giving you money for any assistants on this?” Jackie asked.

  “I can hire two student assistants, first for January short-term projects, and then I’m taking the spring term off to work on the exhibit and catalog, and I can keep them through May if they work out. I also have to take on a junior named Justin Carrera as an assistant. I’ve never met him but he’s the great-grandson of Maggie Kelliher Gonzaga.”

  “The Principessa…”

  “Stop saying that!” Lizzie interrupted before Jackie could get out the whole title and name. “Rose’s dad, Tony, who knew her, said she never used that title.”

  “I know,” Jackie said. “I just like the way it sounds when I say it.”

  “You’re as bad as Rose,” Lizzie complained. “You both love that title, though for different reasons. I have decided to think of her as Maggie. Tony showed me a picture of her last night and I really liked the look of her, very kind and friendly, though she lived a hellish life during the war.”

  “There are more pictures,” Jackie responded, reaching for a folder from the cart and putting it on the table as Lizzie sat down.

  “Tony knew Maggie from the time he was a kid. She sent him to St. Pat’s to go to college.”

  She picked up a folder with the title “Gonzaga Family: 1 of 8.” Inside were wedding photos of Maggie and Lorenzo Gonzaga and of a growing family; they could be laid out on the table in a chronological order just by the number of children included in the picture.

  “I must say this wedding picture makes her look a lot happier than that picture you showed me from the New York Times,” Jackie said.

  “It certainly does,” Lizzie said. “Let that be a lesson to us not to judge too hastily from small evidence.”

  “I’m happy to see they wrote the names on the backs of the pictures. You can’t imagine how many old photos we have in this library of people who will never be identified.”

  They put the wedding pictures at the top left corner of the table.

  “These were taken here,” Lizzie said, pointing out the stone porch on which the couple stood with their families. “That’s the Kelliher house in Brookline. I was there a couple of weeks ago to talk about the exhibit with Jim Kelliher.”

  “And these are clearly in the courtyard of an Italian house,” Jackie said, placing three pictures of the Gonzagas with two little girls on the table. “Eleonora and Margherita, it says on the back.”

  “And here they are back in Boston, in the yard of the Kelliher house with those girls and a new baby.”

  “Adino,” Jackie said, reading off the back of the picture. “Do you think he was born here?”

  “Does it give a date?”

  “October 17, 1914.

  “Hmm. Paddy-boy died in June 1914. Maybe they came across for his funeral and stayed if she was pregnant.”

  Jackie was thoughtful. “That was the start of the First World War. When exactly did Paddy-boy die?”

  Lizzie opened her computer file on Kelliher and found his death date, June 8, 1914, while Jackie looked online for the starting date of the war.

  “‘The Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28, 1914,’” she read to Lizzie. “If I were a mom with a new baby and two little girls, I would not want to take them back into a war zone. Maybe they just stayed here to sit it out. I think the Austro-Hungarians brought their fight into Northern Italy soon after things got started.”

  Lizzie took more pictures out of the folder. “Well, they were certainly back home by 1918. Here’s a picture in the courtyard of the house with four children.” She held the picture up to catch the light. “She looks really happy here. Maggie looks really happy. I’m sorry I ever let that first picture I saw of her affect me so much.”

  “And here is one with five children,” Jackie said, reading from the back of the photo. “Eleonora, Margherita, Adino, Cosimo and Patrick.”

  “Ha!” Lizzie said enthusiastically, “I knew she would have to get an Irish name in there eventually. I’m surprised they didn’t name the first son after her father, especially since he must have been born soon after Paddy’s death.”

  “Some families have a strict naming order. I’ll bet Eleonora was his mother’s name, and Margherita is the Italian version of Maggie’s own name. Adino might have been the name of Lorenzo’s father.”

  “Patrick is still alive,” Lizzie told Jackie. “I expect to meet him when I get to Bologna.”

  “He was born in 1921, so he’s getting up there,” Jackie said, picking up another picture. “And here is the last child, Giuseppina, born in 1923.”

  Lizzie took the photo from her. “This must be the one they called Gianna. Rose’s dad said she was executed by the Nazis for being in the Resistance.” She shuddered as the image came to mind of the broken body of the young woman being tossed onto the pavement in front of her mother’s house. “It is so strange to look at this happy family here and think of all the tragedies that beset them over the next twenty years,” she said. “Two of them died in the war.”

  They went quickly through the rest of the family photos, showing the six Gonzaga children at different ages and in different rooms of the house. In several of them Lizzie had glimpses of paintings, sculptures, and even cabinets filled with shells, small statues, china, and other antiques and oddities.

  “I wonder how much of what we see here is still in the collection,” she said.

  Jackie took another large folder from the cart. “This one is labeled Gonzaga Collection.” She handed it to Lizzie. “I’m sorry that there is no index for any of this. To my knowledge, no one has ever even looked at it.”

  Lizzie thought that maybe one of her student assistants could make a start at it. “And if it turns out to be really useful, we could probably get some money from the Kellihers to pay for it.”

  As Jackie turned to go back to work, Lizzie asked her how the college got this archive. “Did Maggie send it to her family, and they donated it? Or did she send it directly herself?”

  “I’ll check,” Jackie said. “It might have been from one of her children too.”

  Lizzie went to a new table to spread out the various pages from the file on the Gonzaga collection. There were several dozen photographs in the file—pictures of rooms, of cases of objects, and of individual pieces, from Roman statues and inscribed stones to animals that had been preserved by drying or stuffing; from cameos to an Egyptian sarcophagus. There was also a typed list, mostly in Italian, with several handwritten emendations in English. On the last page of the list was a note that said, “Though the origins of this collection are probably even older, my husband Lorenzo Gonzaga believed it was founded in 1659, inspired by collections in Bologna made by Ulisse Aldrovandi and Ferdinando Cospi.” The gift was made in 1959, on the 300th anniversary of the collection.

  Lizzie took the page to show to Jackie; she had to seek her friend out in the stacks of the library.

  “Here’s something cool,” she said when she found her. “This material on the collection was given to the college by Maggie in 1959, and there’s a note to that effect.”

  “I know,” Jackie said, “We must have discovered that simultaneously—that’s when she sent the photographs too. And I found something else in the catalog that I think you might like to see.” She was standing on a stepping stool to reach an archival box on the top shelf of the stacks. “This is a file of her letters to her family.”

  Lizzie stepped forward to take the box as Jackie climbed back down. “I doubt there will be much here that’s relevant to my current project, but now I’m intrigued enough by her to want to know her better.” She cradled the box under her arm and gave the loose paper she carried to Jackie. “Thanks,” she said, “for finding this.”

  “You
have your work cut out for you, Lizzie,” Jackie said.

  “Yeah, but it has started to take shape here today. I have appointments this afternoon with potential student assistants and if I get some good help I can start assigning some of this organizational stuff to them.”

  It took a great deal of willpower for Lizzie to resist opening the box of letters first thing, but she left it unopened on the table and returned to an email she had received the day before from Cosimo Gonzaga, who was to be her liaison in Italy. He had, like most of the Gonzaga children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, lived in Boston for a time and attended St. Patrick’s College. His English was perfect and he attached a file that contained “the most current list of the collection” that he could locate. “You must feel free to borrow anything from the cabinet, and when you come to the house can choose other things not on this list.” The Gonzaga family was, he wrote, “very eager to support the centennial celebration of the college which was founded by my great-grandfather.” He added that he was glad she had agreed to take on his nephew as an assistant, as he thought the experience would be very good for him.

  She opened the attachment and saw that it was the same document that was already on the table in front of her, but a much worse copy. Maggie had clearly sent the original to the college, with her own notes on it. The document sent by Cosimo Gonzaga was a scan of a carbon copy that had been made when the original was typed. Lizzie silently thanked Maggie for having sent the better copy, and Jackie for having found it. The fact that the most recent catalog of the collection was more than fifty years old was discouraging, but this would at least give her a chance to make a preliminary list for her exhibit, and then she could see what was in the house when she got to Bologna.

  Chapter 4

  Justin Carrera was nowhere to be seen when Lizzie arrived at her office promptly at two o’clock, but seven other students were waiting to see her about the possibility of working on the exhibit. The pay was more generous than the usual work-study job, but the hours exceeded what the College allowed for a full-time student, and consequently several people who would have been good candidates were not eligible.