At eight she comes. She hands me a plate.
“Smell,” she says.
I inhale deeply and make an appreciative noise.
“Biscuit with jam. Blackberry.”
I eat with what I hope is gusto, smacking my lips. “Delicious.” Why spoil it for her? Let her believe I’m only deaf and dumb and blind.
“Little bird,” she writes. “I’ll fatten you up. Like me.”
It’s true she is quite plump; whenever I help her on or off the horse, I grab a quick squeeze of whatever softness I can find. She must sample while she’s cooking.
Over the next two weeks, she brings me something nearly every night, which I force myself to swallow. She steals for me; I eat for her and pray she won’t get caught. How can I tell her it’s all for nothing, all a show just for her?
This time it’s meat pudding, apparently.
“Like?” she asks.
I nod vigorously and force down another gelatinous spoonful.
She stops feeding me. “Your face bad liar. Hate it.”
I am so tired of pretending, of eating all this food. “Can’t taste it.”
“Not enough kidney?”
“No, I can’t taste anything. No taste, no smell.” She would have found out sooner or later.
“Impossible.”
“Everything about me is impossible.”
“Serious?”
“The fever.”
“Cook says no seasoning. If you―”
“Doctor’s orders.”
Finally she says, “I can make you taste.”
“Only God.”
“We’ll see,” she writes. She walks out and takes the pudding.
She doesn’t come the next night as she promised, but the night after. I am almost asleep when she creeps in and sits down on the narrow bed beside me.
“Open,” she says and drops tiny flakes onto my tongue. I wait, and then I feel it: a warmth that is different from heat, that is actually coming from my tongue, and then a sharp stinging. My whole mouth burns. Is this tasting?
“You taste it!”
“Yes,” I write after a moment. It’s too much to comprehend. “What?” I finally manage.
“Red pepper.”
“You eat,” I tell her, and her laughter jolts the bed.
“Too strong. Only you need strong.”
“Just touch it on my tongue,” I beg her, and she reaches one finger into my mouth. I hold it there, sucking. I can’t help myself. And then it is her mouth on mine, and I am coating her tongue with pepper.
After what feels like hours, we return to ourselves. My heart has taken captive my whole body, and each thud shakes me with fear, with delight.
“Tomorrow,” she writes. “Surprise.”
All I can do is nod. I can’t imagine what could be more surprising than what has transpired tonight, inside and out.
All day I can hardly breathe. I go up to the main house early and tell Jeannette I’m ill. It’s true. I do feel ill. Light-headed, my heart still struggling. I lie on my bed and relive the kisses again and again until she comes.
I am expecting her mouth on mine, but it is metal she holds to my lips. A liquid burning, different from the pepper, suffusing my chest, coursing down into my stomach. I try to sit up but I am dizzy. She tries to force me to drink more, but I stop her.
“What?”
“Whiskey,” she says. “Blood of the Irish.”
I have tasted wine, a few sips, at table when Doctor and Julia have hosted fancy dress parties, but it was nothing like this. It had no taste for me. Actually, this whiskey doesn’t exactly have a taste, I don’t think, but more of a feeling. And what a feeling. I allow her to give me more, and we pass the flask between us. I giggle and make my whole menagerie of noises for her. Is this what it’s like to be Irish?
“Tell me about Tewksbury.” I have been waiting for the right moment to ask her because I know it’s a sore subject.
“Can’t tell you. You’re too soft,” she writes, and I feel both the pride and the dismissal in her touch.
“In my life, nothing surprising. What did you do there?”
“Cooked. Played in the deadhouse.” The children’s only playroom was where the corpses―and apparently there were many―were prepared for burial.
“All terrible?”
“Not all,” she says.
She asks if she can try on my dresses, though I know none of them will fit, not even close. Nevertheless, I am excited to help her out of her corset. It is far inferior to mine, with stays of wood instead of whalebone. And I am even more shocked at the fact that she wears only one petticoat and that her crinoline is made of scratchy horsehair. She must have gotten it second- or thirdhand because horsehair went out of fashion over ten years ago. She gives up on the dresses and tries on my bonnets instead. I imagine her standing before me in just her shimmy, my white straw bonnet framing her ringlets, the lilac velvet ties hanging between her heavy breasts.
The warmth of the whiskey spreads, and I take off my dress too. Kate unhooks my corset, and then my petticoats and crinoline are dragged to the floor until I stand shivering in just my chemise and pantalettes. Her mouth is on mine, and I slowly lift the linen over her silken thighs and slip my hand into her drawers. Ah there, a garden of curls. My finger slides in. Her finger slides in. I see flashes of light behind my eyelids. Salty, sweet, sour, bitter: I can taste everything.
Chapter 20
Julia, 1851
How different Rome seemed, seven years after Julia’s honeymoon visit. It certainly wasn’t that the ancient city had become more modern, even with the country up in arms over the recent liberalization of Pope Pius IX. No, it was that the first time she had come to Rome a blooming bride and had left it a burdened mother. Still, if somebody had told her back then that she’d be overjoyed to return sans husband, and with only two of her brood of four, she wouldn’t have believed them. But now that Louisa had settled here with her husband, the sculptor Thomas Crawford, Julia was provided entree into the Roman-American intellectual and social circles, most necessary since she was not a known quantity in Europe. She had high hopes this stay would change all that, perhaps even elevating her to the status of the late Margaret Fuller, that paragon of female achievement who had famously flowered in Rome in the decade before.
Julia set up house in an apartment on the Via Capo le Case a mile from Villa Negroni, where Louisa and Thomas lived. It was not the most fashionable or prestigious of addresses, but it was in the hub of the artistic scene, which flourished in Rome. As soon as she found a grand piano and had it delivered, Julia felt she was home. The piano was the kind of detail that Chev would have deemed a ridiculous extravagance, so thank heaven she had retained a trickle of income from her brother Samuel’s trust, though her family had unwisely bargained away the majority of her interests over the years, giving her husband almost total control. She hired a young Italian nurse for the children, a lovely girl who also spoke a bit of English. What a pleasure to be able to hire youthful and attractive help, which she had had to give up on entirely at Perkins due to her husband’s shocking willingness to cross the lines of respectability with the servants. Amiability was fine, preferred even, but outright conviviality with the help? Absolutely not, a point that had been hammered home to her when she’d heard the last nubile housemaid actually call him “Chev”! She now made sure that only women either over the age of thirty-five or in possession of some gravely unattractive feature were installed in key household positions, even if that meant a loss of efficiency and vitality. She’d employed a new assistant for Cook, a pock-faced young widow, before she left, as the old one had gone down with the cholera. Chev still insisted on doing his phrenological exams of any potential staff, which most of them took for a lice check. Luckily, he had found nothing untoward on the widow’s graying head, though Julia knew that he well might fire her as soon as she was gone, as he often did, rationalizing the shrinking or ascendance of some bump or another rather than e
ver admitting he’d been just plain wrong. Of course there was nothing Julia could do about the teachers he chose for the Institution. He seemed to use good judgment there, however, favoring the somber over the well-endowed, cognizant as he always was of getting the best for his blinds, even if they were not a treat for his own eyes. It wasn’t that she actually considered her husband capable of having an affair; she knew he was far too high-minded and self-righteous for that, especially with a female so far beneath him. Look at how long it had taken him to choose a wife, so exacting were his standards, though at this point they both realized that in some respects he had chosen admirably but not well.
For her cook here, she’d hired a wonderful old nonna, who came in for a few hours a day and left them prepared with feasts. Ah, the joys of garlic! Julia could never get enough, probably because Chev loathed it and never allowed Cook to use it at home, though he gave her free rein with more moderate spices, unlike the tasteless meals he had prepared for the students. Julia couldn’t understand how he’d come to the conclusion that a bit of salt or pepper might cause an uprising. Julia was perhaps one of the only Boston elite who greeted the recent influx of Italian immigrants with anticipation, in hopes that the otherwise derelict South End might soon be awash with little trattorias, not that Chev would probably ever take her there.
As the chill of October set in, Julia ordered firewood for the short Roman winter, which was delivered by donkey. She wrote by the fire in the mornings while the nurse kept the children at bay, and if there were no social engagements, again by candlelight when the babies were tucked into the letto matrimoniale, or marriage bed, as all full-sized beds were called. Little Laura was just a year and a half, but she’d weaned her already, far younger than she’d weaned any of the others. She’d kept Florence at her breast until she was past two to keep Chev out of her bed, dangerously fertile as they both appeared to be. The poems were coming along, but they lacked a theme, save marital discontent, which had to be finessed with nearly impenetrable metaphors and aphorisms, much like the eight poems that had recently been published in a well-received anthology. And to think she wasn’t paid a red cent for any of them, only given one free copy―one! She was hoping that the Eternal City would soon provide her with greater inspiration, even of a religious sort. To that end, she had acquired, through a recommendation, the services of a well-known rabbi to continue the study of Hebrew she had taken up long ago, before the children. He came twice a week to the apartment, clad in the long black robes required of all the Italian Jews, and always left well before dusk to be back behind the ghetto walls by six.
And here she had lots of exciting new friends. Why, just upstairs from her lived an artist and a composer, Edward and Augusta Freeman. Julia and Augusta would go on long walks together, without the children, often ending up at one of the cafés that ringed the Piazza del Popolo or the Trevi Fountain. With Mr. Freeman, they toured the house where Keats had lived and died in the shadow of the Spanish Steps. And on Sundays, she and Louisa attended services at the Aracoeli and then took long afternoon drives in the Campagna.
The pope had been forced to flee to Naples, but the fat, old fellow was back, and Julia soon found that it was considered unwise to speak against him among the Italians, and even found herself glanced at sidewise when she brought up the issue at the American dinner parties. It was difficult because she was, after all, the wife of the man who had helped bring about the Greek Revolution and had been named a Chevalier, a fact she became fond of mentioning, though it had never brought her much pride in the States. But here in Italy it gave her, through marriage, a frisson of international intrigue and even cachet. She had never been one for political caution, but she didn’t want to offend any of her hosts and ruin even one day of her glorious sojourn.
Through Thomas Crawford, she had also befriended the Strattons, whose reputation rested largely on their celebrated friendship with the late Margaret Fuller. It was the perfect social mechanism for Julia to exploit, and so she was delighted when they invited her to a ball, more of a soiree actually, though they called it a ball on their beautifully engraved invitation. Her first opportunity to wear one of the two gowns she’d packed carefully in the steamer trunk! Of course, she didn’t have any of her good dresses made in Boston, where the scene was still fairly provincial in terms of fashion. Instead, she scrimped and saved for her trips into New York to visit her favorite salon there, or if she were desperate, even sent a list to Annie of things she needed, which her sister would bring on her next trip: a blue silk sash, perhaps, and slippers to match, or a white rabbit muff to match the collar of her winter coat. At Perkins, she had finally given in to sometimes wearing plain washable muslin dresses, the type worn by the students and teachers that she would never have dreamed would touch her skin, but she had to admit they were good for when one of the babies spit up on her before she could hand the child off to a nurse. In Boston, there were infrequent occasions to showcase herself, and for the few grand events that presented themselves annually, Chev usually found some reason not to go and to try to prevent her from going. This past year, it had been headaches, terrible raging headaches, that he’d used to keep her at home by his side, though he proved the most irritable patient imaginable. How she wished he’d let Jeannette nurse him or even Laura, though Laura had nursed poor Sarah Wight nearly to death.
For the ball, Julia chose the pale yellow Indian silk gown and accompanied Thomas and Louisa to the Strattons’ villa near the Colosseum. What she would give to live in such splendor! The courtyard boasted a fountain with a ubiquitous centaur entangled with a nymph, from whose mouth gushed the clear water. Ancient cypresses dotted the grounds in clumps, their dark green heads bent together as if in gossip. The dinner was properly served by waiters, all Italian, and grazie, grazie, prego, prego trilled round the long table, set for twenty. Julia was seated between an Italian writer and an Umbrian count. Though they both spoke some English, Julia endeavored to practice her Italian―she had studied the language from the age of fourteen with Mozart’s former librettist―and they were predictably charmed by the results, correcting her mistakes gently with the tap of a finger upon her hand. She enjoyed the slight physical contact as much as the conversation, but only the count she found attractive, though his hairline had reached the middle of his shiny skull. How thick and dark Chev’s hair still was, even the widow’s peak still intact. What bourgeois folly that she was thinking of her husband when these two men of the world were hanging on her every word, however mangled. And then the question was asked that she had come to dread: What was Laura Bridgman like? She couldn’t believe that people on this side of the Atlantic were still so fascinated by the girl. At first, she had tried merely shaking her head in mock sorrow and saying that Laura’s star was in decline, without specifying the who or what or why of it. But she soon found that was not enough. “Why hasn’t she come on a European tour?” they’d pepper her. They all wanted to welcome this prodigy, to see her in the flesh and be amazed by her knowledge. So at this point Julia had resorted to, well, lies.
“Cara mia Laura,” she had started calling her, her hand on her heart. She described how she transcribed the latest poetry into Laura’s hand, how she guided her horse down the beach at dusk; how she and the girl took turns braiding each other’s hair while exchanging views on philosophy. “Siamo come sorelli,” she told the gentlemen―we are like sisters.
“And so you have written poems to celebrate her?” asked the writer, and Julia was caught off guard.
“Of course,” she said quickly, though in truth she had written poems on every conceivable subject, from roses to heartbreak to grand cosmologies, but never about the miracle that she lived with, day in and day out. In her quietest moments, she was willing to concede that perhaps Laura actually was a miracle, and as such, more than Julia could understand or put into words. But she knew that both her husband and his pupil would draw inordinate pleasure from having her immortalized by the lady of the house, and she could not bring
herself to give them this much pleasure. As it was, nearly every poet, major and minor, had written about Laura already. What she would add, if she were truthful, would be a description of the strange way she cocked her head as if listening to conversations, the too-sharp scratch of her nails―deliberate, Julia was certain―on the palm, the way her fingers would linger on Chev’s long after the words had run dry. Julia knew the world did not want to read these things about its peculiar darling, and so she refrained. But now she was lying through her teeth, and she saw Louisa glaring at her from across the table. Louisa knew very well that no such verses existed, but then again, Louisa was a prig and always had been, so Julia would not worry about her sister’s opinion, as long as she kept it to herself.
“Why don’t you recite one of your Laura poems?” Louisa asked loudly, raising her wineglass.
“Hear, hear!” said the writer and the count at once, and suddenly Julia held the rapt attention of the entire table.
She placed her knife down dramatically across the plate of osso buco. “The poems, two of them, will be prominent in my next collection. Please forgive me that I have not yet committed them to memory.”
There were murmurs of sad assent, but the silence was buttonholed by Louisa: “We all await these grandi poesi sulla cara Laura.”
Julia couldn’t believe her sister was being so nasty. As the oldest, Julia was not used to being challenged by Louisa, of all people, but perhaps her sister felt that she somehow reigned in their current circle. Well, she’d see about that. And yet Julia surprised herself that she actually felt guilty regarding her little lies about her intimacies with Laura, and pledged to buy the girl a scarf or a hat, perhaps, with many textures to give her fingers the greatest joy. Gloves, she knew, would not please Laura, but remind her of the punishments she had endured years ago, which Sarah had confided to Julia. That must have been awful, and here again she felt a twinge of communion with Laura because she herself had spent many nights with her hands between her legs, in the full knowledge that her husband slept in the next room and could well answer her desires. But somehow this perverseness―his presence so close and her ability to control it―made the quest for fulfillment more urgent and the release more gratifying.
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