Sisters of Glass
Authors: Stephanie Hemphill
Also by Stephanie Hemphill
Your Own, Sylvia
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2012 by Stephanie Hemphill
Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Anna and Elena Balbusso
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Visit us on the Web!
randomhouse.com/teens
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
randomhouse.com/teachers
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89701-6
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
For my little sister, Kate
Contents
My Insolence Starves My Family
Full of Feathers, Short of Hair
The Question I Am Not Supposed to Ask
You Can Have That Bumbling Bembo
What to Do About My Father’s Will
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 1487, the real Maria Barovier, daughter of Angelo Barovier, received permission from the Doge to build a little furnace on Murano for the firing of enamels. She was one of the few women glassmakers of the time and the first known to be granted permission to build her own furnace. This small historical detail inspired me to write this book.
SECOND DAUGHTER
I feel Giovanna’s fire
as Mother prepares me for suitors,
polishes me
while Giovanna polishes glass.
Though I am the younger daughter
and rightfully should
not
marry
into Venetian nobility,
my father declared
the day I was born,
the week he invented cristallo,
that I was his
baby of good fortune,
and good fortune would be mine.
I would marry a senator.
Yet like tides washed into shore
by winds one never sees,
we all prayed
he would change his mind.
We were thus raised
to follow tradition.
Giovanna shoots me
only a sideways glance
as I lace into my new green dress.
I want to scream,
“I will trade positions,”
that I desire to polish glass
and stoke the fires
and see the creation of crystal,
like I was permitted to do
when I was a little girl.
But I promised Father
on his deathbed that I would
honor his first and greatest wish for me.
I just did not know I would
lose my sister even before
I lose my Murano.
MY FATHER, ANGELO BAROVIER
The Barovier family furnace
has molded glass on Murano
for nearly two hundred years, since 1291,
when the Venetian government
required that all furnaces move
to my island home.
The Council of Ten claimed
that it was to prevent fires.
But containing all glassmakers
on Murano also allowed Venice to regulate
her most profitable industry
and to prevent leakage of trade secrets
beyond Venetian shores.
My father spent his entire life
on Murano, never once sailing
into the ocean, not even to Venice.
Father said, “Ships are for cargo,
what need have I of them?”
Besides, he sailed
the vast ocean of his mind,
so indeed, he traveled everywhere.
Father studied to be the scholar
of his family and was to attend
the University of Padua.
My uncle Giova says
he never saw one so eager
to see the world, that my father
packed his bags for university
two weeks in advance.
But fire overtook
one of the two Barovier fornicas
like a thunderstorm.
My father lost his father,
his mother, three of his brothers,
and his only sister
to the torrent of flames.
Father unfolded his clothes.
He and his one remaining brother, Giova,
found work at neighboring furnaces
until they saved enough ducats
to purchase materials for their own.
I always wondered why
my father did not fear
the furnace and the flame,
the hot molten cullet.
He said, “Dearest Maria,
does a general fear a battle
after he loses men on the field?
No. He studies what went wrong,
resolves it, and fights better the next time.
Otherwise, the loss of his soldiers was in vain.”
Not one day
did my father miss work,
even holy days
he created his batches
sundown to dawn.
Angelo Barovier carried
the deaths in his family
on his shoulders
like a mule never relieved
of his load.
I am named Maria
after his sister, who died.
My father died
when I was ten.
Mother wore clothes of mourning
for five years,
until she determined
it was time
to begin grooming me
to be bartered away
from my home.
THE GLASS VESSEL
In some prominent glassmakers’ homes
girls do not work with glass at all,
but my father raised us
to be a family of industry,
all of his children schooled
to understand the art
and business of the Baroviers.
Like first mates to the captain,
we all learned
to prepare ingredients,
to stoke the thousand-degree furnace
with beech and alder wood,
to make his frit,
to polish glass,
and even to blow it.
Giovanna and I
have never been permitted
to blow a punty,
but we understand
how it works.
A well-run vessel,
we naturally settled
into our rightful crew positions.
Father steered and guided the ship.
He remained inventor.
I became his assistant,
lagged after him like a dog,
bobbled carefully
the ingredients for his batch.
My brother Paolo
has blown glass for the Doge,
a master gaffer
my father never saw rivaled.
My eldest brother, Marino,
like my uncle Giova,
dove into business affairs
as though he had been handling
the wicked waves of supply and demand
for a thousand years.
Giovanna and Mother,
both experts at beautification,
polish glass so that our wares
sparkle finer than crown jewels,
so we deliver the premier glass on Murano.
Always servants, hired hands,
workers from other guilds
swabbed decks of the Barovier ship,
for the workload was too great
to bear just us six.
For seven years our two furnaces
alone produced cristallo,
the secret recipe for colorless glass
hidden in the bow of our ship.
But Paolo and Marino
believe that because
Father was stubborn
as a wheel stuck in mud,
our secret escaped.
Father refused to outsource work,
he rather brought laborers into
the Barovier fornicas,
and one must have spied
when Father and I prepared a batch.
Within two weeks
all the major furnaces on Murano
produced cristallo.
We no longer
sat first in church.
Paolo unsheathed his sword
to slay everyone
who worked in our kiln.
Father disarmed him.
“You cannot kill
all the innocent
to avenge the guilty one.”
But after his recipe dispersed,
my father lost
the jaunt to his step
and seemed always
to press a hand over his heart.
A year later
we buried my father at sea.
Clutching a clear cristallo cross,
he departed Murano
for the first time,
never to return.
TALENT
A graceless gosling,
I stumble through most things.
Like a baby just learning to walk,
I try to step forward
on my own but usually
fall down bottom-heavy.
Giovanna excels without even trying,
as though she emerged
from the womb a golden child—
fair, gentle, kindhearted, feminine,
and she sings sweeter, and with better tone,
than the finest instrument.
Her voice could praise the Doge,
her singing make God weep.
As she polishes glass
or if gloom fogs the day,
Vanna will step to the window
and sing to lift those who labor
with melody and cheer.
People cease working
and listen. Some deliberately
route past our palazzo
to hear her music.
My voice sounds old
and witchy as crackling flames.
One day Vanna sang
little rippling scales
out the window, and the light
on her hair and cheeks
made her look like a saint.
I grabbed paper and quill
from my father’s old work desk
and drew Giovanna in her radiance,
sketched how she made us all feel
when we heard her voice.