It was enough for him to sit at an outdoor cafe under a great awning and study the plasterwork on a wall as it moved out of shadow, the ochre colour suddenly becoming vivid and brilliant in sunlight, his own spirit seeming to brighten as well at the idea that something as simple as this could empty his mind of the shadow of Venice which continued to hover over him. It was easier to be old here, he thought; no colour was simple, nothing was fresh, even the sunlight itself seemed to fall and linger in ways which had been honoured by time.
In Venice, he had avoided the streets between the Frari and the Salute, keeping as much as he could to the other side of the Grand Canal, in case he should happen on the street where Constance had fallen to her death. On one of the nights before he fled the city, he had believed himself close to the Rialto Bridge as he made his way confidently back to Palazzo Barbaro without considering the danger he was in. He realized later that he should have simply turned back and retraced his steps and then found his way comfortably to the bridge. Instead, each turn he made led either to a blind alley or an opening onto the water or, more ominously, to a turning to the right which could only take him closer to that dreadful street which he had hoped that he would never again have to stand in. He felt that here in the silence of the night he was being led along, as though someone were guiding him and he was too weakened by guilt not to follow. He had loved this Venice which shut early and became still and empty; he had often enjoyed being the lone walker, the one who might easily take a wrong turning, allowing luck and instinct as much as skill or knowledge to guide him, but now he knew that not only was he lost but that he had come close to the site of her death. He stood still. Ahead was a blind alley which he had already tried, which seemed to lead to the water but did not. To his right was a long narrow street. He could only turn back, and as he did he felt an urge to speak to her out loud, with a sense that her spirit, so restless and independent and courageous, would inhabit these streets for as long as time lasted. She did not settle for an easy life, he thought, and now, whatever part of her remained was as yet uneasy and uprooted.
‘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.