‘Constance,’ he whispered, ‘I have come as close as I could, as near as I dared.’
He imagined the choppy sea out at the lagoon, and the nothingness that was there, wide water and the night. He imagined the wind howling out there in the void and the chaos of water, the place where there was no light, no love, and he saw her there, hovering over it, having become its equal. And he knew then to turn, to walk slowly back whence he came, step by guarded step, concentrating, making no mistakes until he reached a place that he could recognize, the palace where he was a guest, his books, his papers, his warm bed. That night he knew that he would leave Venice as soon as he could and go south and not return.
THE WEATHER in Rome was perfect; the very air glowed with lovely colour as his daily strolls began, daringly, to take in the Corso and stretch as far as Saint John Lateran and Villa Borghese where the new grass was knee-deep. Everything was radiant with light and warmth. The city smiled at him and he learned not to scowl in return as more tourists crossed his path and more insistent invitations arrived at his hotel. When he had visited Rome first, he thought, he was in his twenties and free to do as he pleased, make new friends, wander at will, ride out on the Campagna from Porta del Popolo along the old posting road to Florence in the mild midwinter, the country rolling away into slopes chequered with purple and blue and blooming brown. He had become like the eternal city itself: he was dented by history, he had responsibilities and layers of memory, he was watched and examined and in much demand. And now he would have to show himself in public. Just as the streets of the old city were cleaner and better lit, he, too, would put on a brave face, cover up old wounds and erase old scars and appear at the correct time, attempting neither to disappoint those who viewed him nor to give too much of his own secret history away.
The Waldo Storys and the Maud Howe Elliotts, each believing that he had spent his first days in Rome held in the other’s captivity, now set about enticing him gently and firmly into their own particular Roman cage. The Waldo Storys inhabited the large apartment of William Wetmore Story at the Barberini and wished Henry to write a biography of the old half-talented but most serious-minded sculptor; Maud Howe Elliott and her artist husband required nothing more from him than that he would be a regular and unannounced visitor at Palazzo Accoramboni, mingle with their guests, and admire the view from their rooftop terrace as much as they admired it themselves.
Neither party lived in Rome for the pleasure it offered the solitary resident and, since neither party was skilled at imagining pleasure in which they themselves did not regularly indulge, his need for solitude seemed to both an almost scandalous excuse, not to be countenanced. After four or five days he gave in and found himself accepting their hospitality on alternate evenings. In England, he had watched with interest as the heir, on the death of his father, took over the great house, as though its comforts and contents were created for him alone. Now he watched the new generation as they adapted the city to their own uses, young Waldo Story putting in the same hours as his father at the chisel and hammer, meeting even less the public demand, sweetly spoiling even more blocks of pure white marble, and Maud Howe Elliott, the daughter of Julia Ward Howe, following in the steps of her aunt Mrs Luther Terry who had offered hospitality to artists and New Englanders alike two decades earlier at the Odescalchi Palace.
They were neither Romans nor Americans, but their manners were perfect and their habits well formed. They collected old friends and pleasing and distinguished visitors with skill and some kindness, having already collected as much antiquity as would tastefully fit into their palaces. Maud’s husband, John Elliott, was a painter and, like his compatriots, was talented while lacking real ambition and fire. Both he and Waldo Story and their friends were bohemians in their studios, but in the company of their servants they knew how to give orders. In Rome, with a private income, it was more respectable to be a dilettante than in Boston where such things were frowned upon. For them, Henry was not only a fellow New Englander who also spoke Italian and had made his home in Europe, but an artist who had chronicled and given some significance to their peculiar aura, the strange dilemma and drama of their presence in Europe. They liked him too much, he felt, and were in any case not in the business of taking offence, to mind the tone of his novels, the sense of defeat and deceit which poisoned the lives of so many of his American characters in Europe. They had enough reverence for the past to include the 1870s in their area of interest, and since he had known Rome in those years, he could become part of the precious and thinly populated universe to which their parents had introduced them.
Thus he found himself on a warm May evening in the last year of the nineteenth century standing with a jolly group on a flowered terrace on the roof of Palazzo Accoramboni, overlooking St Peter’s Square. They watched the dying rays of the sun and admired the Roman domes and rooftops, and beyond, the Campagna with its aqueducts encircled by the Albine and Sabine hills. He did not need to speak but merely nod in assent as his fellow guests pointed out Castel Sant’Angelo and the dark masses of trees marking the Pincio and Villa Borghese. They spoke in a sort of wonder and excitement. They were mainly young and their light summer clothes played beautifully against the early roses and pansies and lavender which their hosts had trained with such New World enthusiasm to grow in abundance on their terrace. The men could be easily distinguished as fellow Americans by the quality of their moustaches and the innocent and amicable expressions on their faces; the several women could only have come from New England, making this clear, he felt, by their willingness to allow their menfolk the right to speak at length while confining their own talk to short and brisk, intelligent interruptions or slightly disagreeable remarks once the men had finished. This was, he thought to himself, a group in which his sister Alice would have felt most uneasy and uncomfortable, but which all her friends would have adored.
The group in which he stood took in the scene, allowing themselves suddenly to become quiet if they so pleased and treating each other with familiarity. He knew that some of them bore proud American names and therefore had a deep sense of their own status which spread almost naturally to those with whom they were travelling. They did not need to establish their credentials by asking questions of the famous author; they managed to suggest that here on this rooftop in one of the grandest private apartments in the city, they were both modestly equal to anything which might come their way and strangely impervious to it. He was relieved that no one among the company saw fit to enquire if he were close to completing another novel, or if he were doing research for one, or what he thought about George Eliot. They listened to him briefly as he pointed out a local monument, in the same spirit as they listened to each other.
He noticed that his group was being observed by a young man who stood alone at a distance while ostensibly taking in the same scene. Soon, he observed that he himself was, from time to time, being watched by this figure who differed significantly from the young men who stood in the group. He had none of their easy-going manners, their mixture of confidence and tact. His gaze was too sharp, his pose too uncomfortable. He was, Henry noticed, remarkably good-looking, but it was as though his blond and big-boned handsomeness put him on guard and made him self-conscious. The tense aura he had created around himself meant that no one, among the growing numbers who had gathered to watch the sunset, came close to him or spoke to him. Henry concentrated on looking away and joined in the general marvelling over the glory of the dying light. Yet when he turned back the young man was staring at him openly in a way which made him determined to avoid him during the rest of the evening. He looked indeed like someone who would be quite prepared to ask about work in progress and future plans and have strong views on the question of George Eliot, but there was also something strangely soft about the man’s face which worked against the intensity and tactlessness of the gaze and this made Henry feel further a need to keep away from him. The fact that he was an artist went without saying. As Henry descended the stairs from the rooftop to the apartment below, he wished to know nothing more and made sure that he kept his eyes averted from the young man for the rest of the evening. He was much relieved when he later found himself in the street, not having spoken to him.