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MERCUTIO

My father, consulting only himself but himself so completely that it might have seemed to him that he consulted us both, made an appointment for me to meet with him that Monday. He did it through a servant.

“Tell my son to come to speak with me at noon,” he told the footman, knowing that to tell my page Caliban, who can neither speak, nor read, nor write, was a waste of breath. My father wastes nothing, not even breath. “Tell him to go to my private study.”

His study — that was a funny term! My father never studied anything but his accounts in his life. He could read, true, but he only did it to look after his money, to find out how much things were worth, either things he already had or things he wanted to get. Houses, land, monopolies, banking concerns: these were the things my father studied. He could not make out Latin or Greek, and poetry gave him no pleasure at all. Of course it gave no pleasure the fathers of my friends, either, to those lordly men who raised Romeo and Benvolio and Pietro and Lucentio and, worst of all, that insufferable Salvatore. But they pretended it did. Unlike my father, they could recite Ovid or Petrarch aloud if asked to by a lady or the prince, to show how clever they were, how very much better and greater they were than everyone around them, even if my father’s fortune was growing while theirs were dwindling. They could still show everyone the difference between him and them. And so could their sons, my friends. At least that is what we called them: my friends.

So my father lived in terror of being called on to recite Plutarch, although the older he got the less likely it seemed that anything like that would happen, since all Plutarch wrote was sentimental love poetry which I thought was fit only for peasants to slop their hogs with.

I was late to see him that day. I shuffled my feet uncomfortably, to give the impression that I was concerned that I had displeased him and feared his anger.

“I was with Romeo Montague this morning, I told him, standing there before him, although that was not true, I had not been with Romeo, I was with Annalisa, one of the younger whores who lived in the smelly board shacks that threatened every day to slide into the river. To make sure of my privacy I sent my man Caliban on errands in town, to get a new lace for an old doublet, to reset some jewels on the hilt of my dagger, to buy me some wine for an evening alone in my room. I knew he would not blab, since after all he could not talk, but there are other ways besides speech to say things, and my father could bribe anyone for a bit of information, spoken, written, or otherwise. Caliban was loyal enough, that is what I thought then, but I was more worried about my father’s other, more habitual spies, who might see him hanging about, waiting for me, by the river, figure out with their dull little brains that I was nearby with a woman of low reputation and, what was worse, even lower origin, and report their findings.

Poor Annalisa, she was no exalted courtesan, she was a girl from the country. Her priest made her pregnant three years earlier. The child was taken from her and sent God knows where, perhaps a nunnery. Perhaps if if was a girl it was even sent to a brothel to grow up in and call home, learning the trade, but this did not seem to weigh heavily on Annalisa. Her family sent her into the city soon after the birth to make her way as best she could, as she had dishonored them and could certainly not stay any longer in their house or hovel or whatever it may have been. Annalisa liked me because I paid her more than the others did — what need did I have to care about money? — and because I did not seem to have any need or wish to hit her, unlike some of the others she mentioned without calling them by name. I suspected Salvatore.

And I made her laugh. “The hand of time is on the prick of noon,” I told her that day, when the clock at St. Peter’s struck to let me know that I was late and that she had better hurry up with what she was doing with her damp, sweet fingers. She was not used to anything clever and laughed so she could hardly finish, which was hard on me, I can tell you, and I got so desperate I almost took over myself.

But she did finish me, and then I felt more contented, and I laced myself up and ran up from the river and got myself to my father’s so-called study, and there I was. And my father smiled when I told him I was with Romeo Montague. He approved of me fraternizing with the likes of him. It was the only excuse I could have offered that would do away with his irritation at being kept waiting in his luxurious room, full of those hand-copied books he never looked into. The chamber had a low ceiling, because it was only a small private study, but that low ceiling was carved in panels painted like blue sky crossed by the sun’s rays. It was a rich little closet for my father to sit and fume in.

His irritation was no concern to me, I thought, but I did not want to spend any more time listening to him in that overstuffed wealthy room than I had to, and I knew my lie would keep those minutes to a minimum. There were other ways I wanted to enjoy myself that afternoon. Romeo’s cousin Benvolio asked me to come and drink with him, and I wanted to go, if his simpering sister Claudia would not be too nearby.

It was not that I was afraid of any discipline at my father’s hands for whoring around, either. I cannot tell you how little he cared who I stuck my prick into, at least in principal. But he would have been annoyed that I might have been seen with someone like Annalisa, been perceived to be consorting with a lower class of woman than Romeo and Benvolio and their crowd would have condesended to, a woman who was supposed to be there only for the use of common laborers and little better than servants, or at best for guildsman who were bored with their wives. To my father a woman’s beauty increased in direct proportion to her land holdings, or at the very least in proportion to what other men would pay for her.

He was pleased, though, that I kept company with the sons of the great families. He thought it took some effort on my part; he didn’t know how welcome my money and I were. The fathers of the boys I caroused around town with were still wealthy in name and blood but, with the times, they were gradually becoming poorer in everything else: land, cash. But they weren’t fools. They saw the value in a young man like me, a young man with a ready, full purse, someone who would smile and loan a few chinks of gold to one of their boys to help forgive a gambling debt — all in good fun, of course, we were all boys together, we are all understood each other, didn’t we? Wasn’t I good natured? A young man to pay the tavern bill without complaining or even seeming to notice, wasn’t I easy going, wasn’t I funny, wasn’t that just like witty Mercutio?

So. My father would have me buy their company with my money, and they knew it, and their fathers would have them buy mine with their names, but that they did not seem to be aware of, and I am sure they believed that they were doing me a much larger favor than I was doing them.

To be fair, Romeo Montague seemed to feel differently. He often took care of his own bill after everyone else had left the table as though they had forgotten there was such a thing as payment due for wine imbibed, even though is noble father was in the same mess as theirs. They were all desperate for money, really, except for rich old Capulet, who had no son for me to make traounble with. Only Capulet had no need at all of a rich ally. But young Romeo seemed to keep me company without holding out his hand for cash. I called him young in my mind, although he was only a little less than two years younger than me. But he felt young, as young as that pretty little Pietro. Salvatore, the great bully, never seemed young, not even when we were schoolboys.

So now, in his study, my father smiled to think I was with Romeo Montague, son of Lord Montague, who was related by blood, not just marriage, to not only the prince but to the doge of Venice and the bishop of Veneto. I could almost hear him saying to himself, Very good, kinsman to the prince and then some, well done, boy.

He looked down at his ledgers as he closed them. He put his papers on the locked cash box on his writing desk. Rosewood, that desk was. It cost as much as some small estates at Lake Garda.

“I believe,” he said, “that the anniversary of your birth will soon be upon us.”

He always talked that way — not “your birthday” but “the anniversary of your birth” as though it was some kind of long-standing business appointment.

“Yes, Father,” I answered. On the thirteenth of July I would be eighteen. I was born on a Friday the thirteenth, and we never spoke of that. And my mother died that day, of me, I was told, and we never spoke of that, either. That marked the death of one of greatest efforts. My mother was the youngest of the four sisters of the prince, a Scaligeri, and she had the smallest dowry of all of them to give to a husband, but my father Cosimo Rabisi did not mind that. Not when she could give him a son that was a near relation to the prince, and there I was, standing in front of my father. The prince did not mind keeping her dowry, either, a little country house with a vineyard outside the city walls. That was the deal my father the up-and-coming merchant dealt him. Instead the prince gave Cosimo the monopoly on the trade in cloth-of-gold and cloth-of-silver within the city. Cosimo didn’t mind that. No, neither of them minded anything.

But when my mother died, so did part of the connection, despite my existence. I was not an exemplary relation to the prince. And with her death there would be no more. So it was star-crossed, that day that I was born.

M father was thinking of that, I think. I thought of her sometimes, too. My mother. Wandering the halls of this great house like a phantom. I thought of how it must have hurt her, to leave me here. I would have liked to tell her that I was well. I wished it had not been childbed fever she died of. I wish she had not died of me.

I put her out of my mind. I did not even like to think of her when I was standing in the same room with my father. It dirtied her name to be so near him. Especially during the conversation that we were about to have — afterward I was glad she had not been there, even as a floating thought in my brain, which was hot and steweing from the weather and the glare of the sun outside.

“Yes,” my father said, reminding himself of what we were talking about. He stared at his cash box and that seemed to bring him back to this room and me.

“I have arranged,” he said, “for a celebration. An entertainment for that night.”

I was taken aback. “Have you, sir?”

“Yes.”He smiled and I did not like the look of it at all. It was a narrow smile, but something about it . . . dripped. Yes, it dripped something.

“Well, thank you, sir.” I was puzzled. “May I ask, sir, what kind of celebration? What will be required of me? Sir?”

I envisioned some awful display in front of the prince and my father’s financial associates as I was called on to show off my education and business sense with impressive, learned conversation.

The smile widened, changing to something between a smirk and a grin. I tossed through my mind for the word for it and found it: leer. My father leered.

“All you will have to do is enjoy yourself, and encourage your friends to do the same,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” I would not give him the satisfaction of showing too much curiosity, and he would not wait for me to show it. He was in a hurry, he had no extra time for me, if I did not need ot be upbraided for something or other.

“I have contracted,” he said, “with Madam Bartolomea for the use of her establishment exclusively on the evening of July the thirteenth. There will be a banquet, wine, servers in costume on the theme of the Orient, the Orient which has been so good to you, my son . . .” he might have caught my look there, he might not. The Orient and its rich trade got him his money and his house and my mother, now gone, and, of course, me. And he liked to think that what was got for him, was got for me, too. “And then,” he said, “in the spirit of the evening, of course, there will be entertainment.”

I raised my eyebrows, pretending to be naive. “Entertainment, father? What kind of entertainment at Madam Bartolomea’s? That is a place for women, sir, there is nothing but women within those walls. Thank you for the gesture, sir, but wouldn’t my friends be entertained with something more manly? A tournament, or something like it? Something to do with sports . . .”

“They’ll get their sport, young man.” He laughed uncomfortably, throwing his head back a little too much to be believable. “There is no more manly pursuit than the sport they will be playing!”

“Sir?” I still pretended not to understand. I do not know why. I certainly extracted a perverse kind of pleasure from it, but I also wanted, needed, to feel that I was fooling him. “Sir, really, I will say it again, I am sure it is an establishment for women, for women only.”

His sharp look meant to sting and my fooling hour was over. “No more so than your riverbank,” he shot, cold and quick, and I was brought up short, without even a “Yes, sir,” to answer him. So he was irritated. He did know my movements, even if I had deceived him about that particular morning, and he brought them out of his secret cache of information when it served him. He had simply put it aside earlier because he had something more important to him at hand.Well. What was done was done, what he knew, he knew. I could not change it now.

I swallowed, though not from shame. I had no call to feel any shame before him.

“I’m sure we will all be very grateful to you for your generosity,” I said.

“I’m sure you will.” His smile was completely gone, there were only his hard, thin lips. “You will be at Madam’s at dinnertime on the thirteenth. I have sent a man to give the invitation at the houses of the young gentlemen.” And then I understood. Oh, yes, what a good fellow, old Rabisi, my idiot friends would say. What an understanding, good-humored old merchant! Lucky Mercutio! His father buying him a night at an expensive whorehouse for his birthday. The table, the wine, the pageant, the women! The women, the most expensive in the whole north of Italy, who knew the most tricks with their hands and tongues, never mind their other, even better parts. Good-natured old Rabisi. He knows how to show a man a good time!

I grasped even then and even in my disgust with him that my father was no fool, that he was the farthest thing in God’s universe from a fool. For the fathers of the noble scum I roamed the city with would die someday, maybe some of them someday very soon. And then who would buy the cloth-of-gold and deal out the monopolies and crave a friend to come to in times of financial need? Who would hold the favors to be awarded for loaning services rendered then? That very noble scum, of course. Salvatore and Romeo and Benvolio and Lucentio and even pretty Pietro. And to them, my father would be a right-thinking senior man, the one who thought the same was as they did, who cared for their comfort and fun, who bought them and Mercutio a night of debauchery with all the trimmings at the best brothel north of Rome. How amusing.

Eight to twelve hours at Madam Bartolomea’s. Each girl, a hundred pieces of gold, either florins or ducats, for the whole evening. Plus the food. I was sure it would be fit for a royal wedding, to impress my friends, and their fathers and anyone else they would tell about it. And the wine, and the fee for the Madam herself, and the rental fee for the rooms. I knew she charged extra for that. I did not know if my father would get the servants direct or pay Madam’s mark-up for them. No doubt he had negotiated a deal based on volume of trade. He often sent business associates there with his compliments, if they had netted him more than the usual level of money. But Madam was shrewd too. She would not, I was sure, let herself be taken advantage of. And way it was cut, it would cost Cosimo a fortune, at least as much as the net worth of the entire dowry of Benvolio’s sister Claudia.

I nodded. I laughed, and he shot his sharp look at me again, because my laughter made him uncomfortable.

“I’ll be there, sir,” I said. “With pleasure.”He gave me no answer and I followed with, “Do I have leave to go, sir? I have some business with Romeo’s cousing Benvolio. Father?”

“Mmm?” He had already nodded and finished with me.

“Not the Orient.”

He did not look at me and he at least appeared not to care what theme my party took. “As you wish.”