by Colm Toibin
THE AMERICAN consul came with them to break the seal which the authorities had put on her apartment at the time of her death. Tito, who had been her gondolier, waited below for them. Mrs Benedict and her daughter stood in silence as the door into the house of death was unlocked. They seemed to Henry hesitant about stepping in. He stood behind them, trying to believe that her spirit was not in these abandoned rooms, merely her papers, her belongings, her left-overs, her gatherings, for she had been a collector of objects. He felt more sharply now that she had planned it all and foreseen it. In her love of detail, she would have been able to predict the arrival of the consul to break the seal, the boat waiting below, and she would have been able to imagine also the three others waiting to enter her room – her sister Clara Benedict, her niece Clare and her friend Henry James.
This, he thought, was her last novel. They all played their assigned roles. He watched as the American women stood in her bedroom afraid to approach the window to the small balcony from which she had jumped. Constance would have been able to conjure up their stricken faces and would have known, too, that Henry James would have studied the women, observing them with cold sympathy. She would have smiled to herself at his ability to keep his own feelings at a great distance from himself, careful to say nothing. Thus the scene taking place in this room, each breath they took, the very expression on their faces, each word they left said and unsaid, all of it belonged to Constance. It was pictured by her with wry interest during the time when she knew she would die, Henry believed. They were her characters; she had written the script for them. And she knew that Henry would recognize her art in these scenes. His very recognition was part of her dream. No matter where he looked or what he thought, he felt the sharpness of her plans and a sort of sad laughter at how easy it was to manipulate her sister and her niece and how delicious to direct the actions of her friend the novelist who, it seemed, had wished to be free of her.
The Benedicts did not know what to do; they employed Tito to ferry them from one part of the city to another; soon they spoke of him fondly. They sought comfort in Constance’s friends; but when they heard that she had been found alive when she fell, that she had moaned as she lay dying, they were inconsolable. They cried each time they entered her rooms until Henry felt that if Constance could witness this, or if she had included it in her imagined vision, she would regret what she had done. She would never have been so hard.
Her sister and her niece remained helpless in the face of the practical. At first they did not wish to disturb Constance’s papers and seemed happy to leave everything in situ. They appeared not to believe that she was dead; and touching her things, they thought, would be a way of consigning the woman who had possessed them to oblivion.
After several days, when all had been grief and confusion, softened by the ministering of Constance’s circle of friends, with many lunches and dinners and gatherings to distract and console the sister and niece, Henry arranged to meet them at the apartment, to which he had now been given a key. Constance had kept a great deal of paper, half-finished and unpublished work, letters, fragments, notes. He had touched nothing on his early visits to the apartment, but he made a mental map of the terrain. He knew that should there be a battle between him and the Benedicts over what should be kept and what should be destroyed, he would lose the battle. As he waited for them, he determined to avoid even the slightest skirmish.
When he heard their key being turned, he shivered. Their voices seemed like interruptions. This was the first time he had heard an ordinary conversation between them which did not centre on Constance’s suicide and their own shock and sadness. Once they entered the bedroom where they found him standing at the window they became silent and serious.
‘I meant to ask you if your quarters are comfortable,’ Mrs Benedict said.
‘The apartment is pleasant,’ he said, ‘and its atmosphere is appropriately full of the presence of Miss Woolson.’
‘I do not think that I could bear to sleep there,’ Clare said. ‘Nor here indeed.’
‘This apartment is very cold,’ Mrs Benedict said. ‘It is the coldest place.’
She sighed and he felt that at any moment she was going to cry again. Both he and Clare watched her, however, as she seemed to gain strength. There was, he saw now, a toughness in her nature which matched that of her dead sister. In that moment, as she willed herself to speak, she could have been Constance.
‘We must make arrangements,’ she said.‘We have not been able to find a will, it may be buried among her papers. And we must begin to take care of practical matters.’
‘Constance was a writer of significance,’ Henry said, ‘a very singular figure in American letters. Thus her papers must be treated with care. There may be unpublished manuscripts, a story or two that she did not finish or did not send to an editor. I believe these must be carefully preserved.’
‘We should be so glad,’ Mrs Benedict said, ‘if you would look at her papers for us. Neither of us could bear it, I think, or have the concentration it would require. I think this room is the saddest place I have ever been.’
IT WAS ORDERED that fires be lit each morning in Constance’s study and in her bedroom and that they should be maintained by a servant until the early evening. The Benedicts came and went in Tito’s gondola, being kept busy by the American colony, and on each visit Henry had something to show them, an unpublished story, a number of poems, an interesting letter. They agreed that even fragments should be preserved, perhaps carried back to America and looked after in her memory.
He himself wanted merely one memento of her. Having viewed the general collection of her objects with sorrow and indecision, he eventually chose a small painting. It was a scene from the wild untamed American landscape she had loved. When he showed it to her sister and niece, they told him he must have it.
He remained at her desk from morning until darkness fell. Each time the Benedicts left the apartment he went to the window and watched them as they stepped into the gondola, observing their growing animation, and then he returned to her desk and found papers he had saved and brought some of them to the fire in the bedroom and others to the fire in the study. He consigned them to the flames and stood looking at them as they burned. And when they were ash, he made sure that they could not be noticed among the embers.
He did not want the strange, cryptic and bitter notes from his sister Alice to Miss Woolson to be part of some cache of papers that would be open to others to read. He did not even wish to read them all himself. As he went through the papers and spotted his sister’s handwriting, he put the letter aside, coldly and methodically, making sure that it lay under other papers and could not be seen by the Benedicts should they chance to arrive unexpectedly. He also found some letters of his own, and as soon as he saw the handwriting, he put them aside. He had no interest in rereading them. He wished them destroyed. He could find no diary and no will.
Among her papers, however, he found a recent letter from her doctor discussing her various illnesses and her melancholy. He read until he found his own name. He placed the letter carefully into the pile to be burned without reading any further. All of her literary manuscripts including drafts, he put aside for the Benedicts to take home.
MOST EVENINGS he dined with the Benedicts, making sure always that someone else was present so that the conversation could range over more general matters, not confined to the reason for their presence in Venice. He preferred the party to be large, thus making it more difficult for them to discuss with him once more the task he was performing and the arrangements they were making. Slowly, it became clear that they were tiring of Venice; the empty days, the rainy weather, the greyness of the light and the monotony of the company began to make them feel that they should prepare to depart. Also, he noted that their presence, as each day passed, was of less interest to Constance’s friends and the wider colony whose sympathy had, at the beginning, been intense, but whose invitations grew less insistent now that the Benedicts had be
en a month in Venice.
On these evenings, he liked to rise early from the table, it being understood by all that he was involved in onerous work and thus was not confined by the normal rules. The Benedicts put Tito at his disposal if the distance to his lodgings was too great. Although the lower floors of Casa Biondetti contained some Americans, including Lily Norton, he was surprised at how easy it was to reach his quarters on the top floor without having to see them. Each evening, he found a fire lit and one lamp by his bed and another on a table close to an easy chair. The rooms were not opulent, but in this light they were rich in their colouring, and because the apartment was neither on the scale of a palace nor the quarters inhabited by servants, and because the landlord, who had been fond of Miss Woolson, made every effort, Henry found his room comforting and welcoming. The high soft bed offered him at first a deep and dreamless sleep from which he woke each morning refreshed and ready for the day’s work.
He looked forward to the night. He longed to return to his quarters at Casa Biondetti not because he was tired, or bored by the company, but because the rooms themselves offered him a glow of warmth which lasted through the night.
Tito was always waiting. Like anyone who had worked for Constance, he loved her and wished to look after her sister and niece. He remained respectful and silent as he ferried Henry to his quarters, but he made clear, since he had not met him before, and since Henry was not a member of the family, that Henry’s position was almost that of an outsider. Henry knew that should he want the most accurate account of Constance’s state of mind during the last months of her life, Tito was most likely to possess such knowledge. As he became acquainted with Tito, however,he understood how unlikely he was ever to part with it.
Only once in Henry’s presence did Tito speak of her. One night, as they waited for her daughter, Mrs Benedict asked Henry to compliment Tito on his dexterity, especially on corners and small canals. When Henry translated her remarks, Tito bowed solemnly to her and then said that Miss Woolson had sought him out not for the dexterity she had mentioned, which all the gondoliers had, but because he knew the lagoon, the open water, and could navigate safely there. Miss Woolson always preferred to move out from the city, out into the lagoon, he said. Many Americans, he said, love the Grand Canal and want to travel up and down it all day. But not Miss Woolson. She liked the Grand Canal because it led out to the lonely open water, where you would meet no one. Even in the winter, she had loved it, he said. Even in the bad weather. As far out as you could go. She had her favourite places there, he said.
Henry wanted to ask him if she had taken such journeys right until the end, but he knew from the way that Tito had finished his speech that no more information would be forthcoming unless Mrs Benedict were to ask a question. Once Henry had translated for her, however, she smiled at the gondolier distractedly, and asked Henry what he thought her daughter might be doing to keep them waiting so long.
AFTER A WHILE he began to wake in the night; the worried thoughts which came disturbed him, and in the morning there remained a residue of the night’s unease. After a time, however, his waking was merely an interlude in his sleeping, another aspect of the night’s deep rest rather than a disturbance; he felt no fear, and no worried thoughts came into his mind, but rather a sense of abiding warmth. In this period, he did not feel Constance’s presence at all. He felt instead a nameless and numinous presence. As time passed, the glow on entering these rooms, and when he woke in the night, took on a more particular intensity. He found himself all day looking forward to this, and wondering if, when he left here and returned to London, such ease and sweet goodwill could follow him.
It was not a ghost, not anything unsettled and haunting, but rather it was a figure hovering gently, the shadow movements of his mother’s protecting aura coming to him now in the night, pure and exquisite in its female tenderness, gentle and enclosing, cajoling him back to sleep in those rooms which had so recently been inhabited by his friend, whose death still filled him with guilt and whose sad, impassive spirit looked on at his determination each day, as he sat at her desk quietly setting aside letters from her doctor and from Alice’s friend Miss Loring and, when the coast was clear, putting them into the fire.
AFTER MUCH negotiation with the American consul about their relative’s estate, and much fussing and prevarication, the Benedicts oversaw the packing of her papers and the wrapping of her paintings and mementoes which they placed in the consul’s care until legal matters were sorted out to his satisfaction. The month of April had been rainy and chilly and both of the women had caught colds and been confined to quarters. By the time they emerged again Venice had changed; the days were longer and the wind had died down and many of their acquaintances had also, for one reason or another, left the city. Thus their farewell dinner was desultory and badly attended with Henry eager to stand up from the table before nine, as usual, and shake their hands, and kiss them if they should need kissing, and look into their eyes, promising that, as he still had a key to her apartment at Casa Semitecolo, he would oversee the final clearing out of her effects and the return of the key to the landlord.
In the morning when the Benedicts had left the city Henry discovered that they had made no arrangements to dispose of Constance’s clothes. They must have known, he realized, that her wardrobe and dressing tables were full because they had searched for her will there. He wondered if they had discussed the matter, or if it had evoked too much sadness for them to deal with, and then, at the end, they were too embarrassed to mention it. In any case, they had, it seemed, left him to deal with Constance’s wardrobe and personal effects. He waited for several days in case one of their Venetian friends made contact to arrange the removal of the clothes. As no one did, he became certain that the Benedicts had taken advantage of his support and had fled leaving wardrobes full of dresses and cupboards full of shoes, underclothes and other items, that appeared not to have been disturbed.
He wanted no further discussions about Constance’s estate, and therefore did not wish to contact any of her friends who would, he knew, quickly spread the news that her clothes had been left in the apartment, thus offering the freedom to visit and snoop as they pleased, asking for the key at will, and invading the privacy he had guarded for her in the time after her death. When he had pictured her planning each scene in which he and her relatives took part, this aspect of her demise was far from his mind. The throwing away, or giving away, of her clothes had not been, he was sure, part of her dream afterlife. While he had felt her deep displeasure as he burned the letters, now he felt a dull sadness and the grim weight of her absence as he contemplated the clearing-out of her wardrobe.
He confided in no one except Tito who, he felt, would be willing, under his supervision, to transport what was left of his friend’s worldly goods. Tito, he believed, would know what to do with them. But when Henry showed him the mass of clothes in the wardrobe and the shoes and then the underclothes, Tito merely shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. He repeated these gestures when Henry suggested that perhaps one of the convents might be interested in old clothes. Not the clothes of the dead, Tito told him, no one will want the clothes of the dead.
For one moment, Henry wished he had handed the key to the landlord and left the city, but he knew that it would not have been long before he received letters about the clothes, asking what should be done with them, not only from the landlord himself, but from members of the colony.
Tito, in the meantime, stood in what had been Constance’s bedroom watching him fiercely.
‘What can we do with them?’ Henry asked him.
His shrug this time was almost contemptuous. Henry held his gaze and sternly insisted that the clothes would have to be moved.
‘We cannot leave them here,’ he said.
Tito did not reply. Henry knew that his boat was waiting, he knew that together they would have to carry these clothes and place them in the gondola.
‘Can you burn them?’ Henry asked.
> Tito shook his head. He was intensely studying the wardrobe, as though he were guarding its contents. Henry felt that if he made to empty the wardrobe, Tito would rush at him to prevent his interfering with his mistress’s clothes. He sighed and kept his eyes down, hoping that the impasse at which they had arrived would cause Tito to speak or make a suggestion. As the silence between them lingered, Henry opened the windows and went to the balcony and looked at the building across the way and the ground onto which Constance had fallen.
On turning and catching Tito’s eye, he saw that Tito wanted to say something. He gestured to him in encouragement. All of this, Tito said, should have been taken to America. Henry nodded in agreement and then said that it was too late now.
Tito shrugged again.
Henry opened one of the cupboard drawers and then another. Tito, when he turned, was watching him with an interest bordering on alarm. Henry stood and faced him.
Did he know, he asked him, the place in the lagoon to which he had ferried her regularly? The one he had told Henry about? Where there was nothing?
Tito nodded. He waited for Henry to speak again, but Henry merely gazed at him as he considered what had just been said. Tito seemed worried. Several times he made as though to speak, but sighed instead. Finally, as though someone were in the next room, he pointed surreptitiously to the clothes and then in the direction of the door and then in the direction of the far lagoon. They could, he silently asserted, take the clothes there and bury them in the water. Henry nodded in agreement, but still neither of them moved until Tito lifted his right hand and stretched out the fingers.