Though in the month since the dinner party at the Strattons’, Louisa’s temperature toward her had run from tepid to frigid, she still asked for Julia to play the piano for their Christmas party. Besides being the most literary and intellectual of the three sisters (as well as arguably the loveliest), Juila was also the most musical, a fact that Louisa’s request acknowledged. They all attended Christmas services at both Santa Maria Maggiore and St. Peter’s. For the party, Julia changed into her dark green velvet gown, sashed with gold, and an emerald necklace given to her by her father for her sixteenth birthday. She splurged on having a girl, recommended by Mrs. Freeman, to dress her hair, roped with tiny garlands sparkling among the red corkscrews. She felt like a present, ready to be unwrapped, as the Crawfords’ brougham trotted through the winding streets sprinkled with the sugar of a light snow.
When she arrived, one hour late as planned, although she was providing the entertainment, she found thirty or forty guests already gathered in the grand hall of the villa. The place looked splendid, she had to admit, with her brother-in-law’s sculptures of virile naked youths each pooled in its own spotlight of brass-sconced red candles. The enormous crystal chandelier was wreathed with garlands of pine, and cast its soft light on the fifteenth-century murals that Thomas had spent endless hours and much money restoring to their original beauty, though the ravaging of nymphs hardly fit with the gay holiday theme. She wished there were murals at Perkins, but she had to fight with Chev to even get him to hang paintings, given that the residents of the place had no appreciation for them. Louisa’s glory stood in the corner of the hall: a twelve-foot-high fir tree strung with satin ribbons and tiny biscotti, which the guests were encouraged to take down and nibble along with the flutes of prosecco handed out by the tuxedo-clad waiters, handsome young Italian boys all. Most of the guests were grouped around the tree, which was a great novelty since Italians did not celebrate Natale with trees. Thomas had fashioned a shimmering ceramic star for the top, though, and had also sculpted several small but perfect angels for the mantel of the ancient marble fireplace.
After greeting her hosts with apologies for her lateness, Julia made her way to the grand piano opposite the tree and took her seat. It didn’t take long for the spell of the music to overtake her, though she would much rather be playing Bach cantatas or Beethoven concertos than Christmas carols. At least she got to play tunes for dancing after the initial few, but within half an hour, her feet were tapping wildly in her new golden slippers and she wanted to be dancing, not playing!
Thank goodness for the dinner break at last. Julia was surprised they hadn’t served dinner sooner, since the Italians had been fasting for the last twenty-four hours, a ritual that Julia had definitely not observed. Louisa’s cook had prepared the traditional Natale meal called the cenone: spaghetti with anchovies, an assortment of fish, fresh broccoli, fruits and sweets. No meat was allowed. The American she was seated across from looked very familiar, and when he leaned across the table to take her hand and introduce himself, she remembered: Horace Binney Wallace of Philadelphia, whom she’d met years ago at her sister’s country home and who had displeased her by repeatedly remarking on Boston’s backwardness compared to the City of Brotherly Love. She had disagreed with him at the time, being new to her husband’s home, but in retrospect she saw that he had been entirely correct. She probably also hadn’t recalled him at first because he gave no great physical impression: rather slight, with curling ginger hair and a polite but reserved bearing. But as he engaged her in conversation, proving much more interesting than the dinner companions on either side of her, she fell a bit into his eyes, which were a soft doe brown, and his bone structure was really quite fine. He was a lawyer, but taking a year away from his profession to soak up European culture―a common thing, though not that common for one of his age, which she estimated to be about thirty-five, just three years older than she was. What interested her most was that since their last meeting he had published two novels, Stanley and Henry Pulteney, along with several stories, all under different pseudonyms.
“But why so many pseudonyms, not just one?”
“The private man versus the public person,” he said, “much like the public person versus the private woman.”
Julia thought of some of her latest poems about her marriage, desperately disguised as pastoral odes, and found herself blushing in agreement. She had already realized she would probably have to publish as Anonymous to placate Chev.
“Now I must read your books,” she said, and he told her that he would bring them to her if she would favor him with her address.
“But,” he warned her, “they are, for the most part, quite violent and morbid, not necessarily to a lady’s taste. I was a friend to the late Mr. Poe, and we brought much to each other.”
“What a contrast indeed to your demeanor!” Julia said, though she realized that might not have been polite.
“I believe that ideally what art draws from us is not what the world would expect,” he said.
When it was time for the dancing to resume, Julia took Louisa aside and prevailed upon her sister to play so that she could dance. And dance she did, from the polka, which had come crazily into vogue in the last decade largely because the turns allowed women to keep their hoopskirts out of the way, to the new five-step waltz, which she stumbled through.
After the last dance of the evening, when the sherry had been passed, Mr. Wallace lifted his glass and proposed a toast: “To redheads, for it takes nature’s highest efforts to produce a true rosso.”
Julia clinked glasses in full and grateful agreement. A true rosso indeed.
They soon fell into a pattern: every morning, after they had both had time to write, Mr. Wallace would stroll over from his pensione on the Via Felice, always dapper in his bespoke suits, though he cut an almost boyish figure, and stop to buy her a nosegay of violets from the vendor on her corner. Fresh flowers every day―how he spoiled her! Then after a cup of strong Italian coffee, which they had come to enjoy, they would start out walking, weather permitting. Julia carried her lavender parasol, unfortunately the only one she’d had room to bring with her, and Mr. Wallace wore his felt derby so that they could protect their equally fair complexions from the winter sun, even if it was deceivingly weak. Mr. Wallace joked that they could both freckle and burn in a snowstorm. Julia had visited all the major monuments on her first trip to Rome, and several of them this time as well, but it was never the destination that was important with Mr. Wallace’s arm in hers; it was the company, the intellectual conversation. He was as bright as any man she’d ever met and nearly as sensitive as any woman, a combination that she was surprised so attracted her. Chev, after all, was the epitome of the dashing and masculine ideal.
Their favorite spot was the Forum, situated in a valley between the Palatine and Capitoline Hills, where they wandered in and out of the shells of the temples and the House of the Vestal Virgins, sitting on the pocked pigeon-sprinkled stones beneath the shadows of the columns. On their second visit, Mr. Wallace had told her he had discovered a surprise, fit only for her. He led her to one of the standing curia, or meetinghouses, the lower part of it covered in slabs of marble. Inside, the building was fairly austere except for the beautiful floor: rosettes and cornucopias in red and green against a background of yellow and purple. Julia had never seen anything like it.
“Numidian yellow and phrygian purple,” Mr. Wallace read from his guide, and told her how the original construction on this meetinghouse for the senate had been interrupted when Julius Caesar was assassinated at the Theater of Pompey.
“It’s stunning,” Julia said, “but why is it so special to you?”
“It is the Curia Julia, the meetinghouse of Julia.”
She was touched, almost unbearably so. “I have never been the first Julia.” She told him how her mother had given birth to a baby named Julia, who died at one of whooping cough. Just two weeks later, she herself was born and given again the name Julia.
Mr. Wallace was a student of Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, which recently had become popular. He spoke ardently of the ideas and of the man himself, whom he had visited twice in Paris. Julia was unfamiliar with Comte, save the name, but she soon felt herself drawn to his theories of progressivism, and she in turn shared her thoughts on Hegel and Swedenborg, though Mr. Wallace knew a fair amount about them as well. Even more fulfilling than the philosophy, they could discuss poetry, most specifically hers. Though Theodore Parker and Longfellow were supportive of her work, neither was willing―or perhaps capable―of giving her the grave and direct criticism of Mr. Wallace. He could spend an hour on one stanza, and Julia respected his opinions as well as his taste since he proclaimed his great admiration for the majority of her verse. She even showed him the latest poems, camoflauged plaints of her marital discontent, and he uncovered the very heart of them straightaway. How he could see through her, or perhaps more correctly, into her. She had never encountered a soul like him. And it wasn’t as if they didn’t laugh―oh, they did―and Julia found herself sharing stories about Chev and Laura and life among the enfeebled. Mr. Wallace did not seem to judge her, even when she confessed how she had fibbed about writing odes to Laura as they finished their hike to the top of the Tarpeian Rock overlooking the Forum. As she climbed the steep hill, Julia deliberately lifted her skirts a bit higher than necessary and gave him a flash of her stockinged ankles; they weren’t near as lovely and slender as before her pregnancies, but she knew they were still comely.
Mr. Wallace had read that during the Roman Republic, the rock was used as an execution site. Murderers, perjurers, and runaway slaves were thrown to their deaths, as were those with severe mental and physical disabilities since they were believed to be cursed by the gods.
“Forgive me,” he said, “but the company of a blind-deaf-mute must be quite boring.”
Julia looked down at the sheer hundred-foot drop and thought carefully before she spoke. Laura, she guessed, would have been flung over the cliff. “No, it’s not that Laura is boring. She has the spirit of a bobcat matched with the curious affection of a kitten.” There, she had summed her up so aptly. She must remember this description to tell Chev; surely even he would be pleased at her insight. She went on to tell Mr. Wallace how Laura had despoiled her marriage bed; assaulted her ear; slapped various teachers; and generally wreaked havoc at Perkins with her caprices. She didn’t mention how Laura had embarrassed the great Dr. Howe on the religious front, mostly because she herself viewed his long battle against the Calvinists as slightly absurd.
“But you named your last daughter Laura,” Wallace reminded her. He’d held little Laura himself in recent days, once even rocking her to sleep. The children appreciated his gentleness, his calm.
“When she became too much for even Chev to endure, he sent her home, but then she tried starving herself to death. So the naming of my child was an offering.”
“You were very kind to agree.”
Yes, especially since she’d been afraid that the name itself might jinx her daughter for life, cause her to trip into a spindle or go deaf. But so far, she was a delightfully average―no, above average―child. And in exchange for the name, Chev had moved Laura into a cottage on the grounds on her return, no longer to haunt Julia in the main house.
She told Mr. Wallace about the stench of the Institution’s water closets; the drafts that kept her swaddled in layers even in late spring; the eerie walk through a gauntlet of oncoming blind children, dodging their spidery hands, their arms out, groping like ghouls, meeting the blank green-masked gazes again and again until she thought she would go mad.
What sweet relief to be unthrottled by the ruff of philanthropy, the ill-fitting mantle of forced humanistic feeling! And so with Mr. Wallace, in his accepting and perfectly simpatico company, Julia felt the most comfortable since she was a girl with her beloved tutor Cogswell, who had applauded her high spirits and strong opinions, which the rest of society might not have gallantly received. “A truly independent thinker,” he’d praised her, not, she knew, what her father or her husband wished her to be. But now she had been granted this unexpected gift of Horace Binney Wallace, who, she had begun to feel, had given her back her true self.
Julia was more surprised than alarmed when, after six straight weeks of daily friendship, Mr. Wallace didn’t show up one morning. It was raining—that must be it—and on ill-weathered days they had to stay inside, in Julia’s small parlor, their talk constrained by the presence of the nurse and children nearby. But the next day was sunny, and still he didn’t come, and so she sent a letter to his residence. By the fifth day, she was considering going there herself, though she feared she’d get lost among the tiny winding streets, as she always did when she was alone.
It did not help her mood that an irate letter had arrived from Chev, a long tirade demanding her return and mentioning Mr. Wallace not once, but several times. He seemed to think himself the butt of a scandal, a possible cuckold. Perhaps the recent success of Mr. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter had inflamed him; though Chev didn’t read novels, he doubtless knew about the passion-blind Hester Prynne since the book had sold over twenty-five hundred copies in its first ten days. Did he wish to brand his own wife with a scarlet A upon her return? Julia was incensed; no line of propriety had technically been crossed. Louisa had intimated, however, that something untoward had happened, or was happening, though Julia assured her that the couple had never even passed an unchaperoned dinner together, only eating out a few times in the company of others. But when Louisa and Thomas had shared a supper with them at Antonio’s, Louisa appeared scandalized that Julia had ordered—had said out loud!―spaghetti puttanesca, the so-called sauce of puttane, or whores. The heavily garlicked and pepper-laden dish was Julia’s favorite. Afterward, Louisa had chastised her for not only that, but for her “too intimate” rapport with Mr. Wallace.
Julia knew better than to allude even obliquely to her sisters her feelings for her new friend, though she had confided in letters to Sarah a bit about her romantic longings, not only because she trusted her, but because she was thousands of miles away. Julia missed Sarah’s sensible but pleasant company, but at least they were both freed from beneath the Chevalier’s iron fist. Sarah had written her a couple of quite peculiar letters, however, that seemed to hint at some unmentionable discord with Mr. Bond. That would be such a pity, Julia thought, since she had secretly matched them in the first place, one of her greatest social triumphs. When Sarah had told her before she left that Laura had thought the minister was courting her, Julia had first laughed out loud and then felt instantly sorry. Was it possible that there was someone out there in the wide world for Laura Bridgman, perhaps some other gravely injured or God-slighted creature? She would keep an eye out, she told herself sternly. Of course, she’d realized long ago that Laura was, in some strange way, in love with Chev, but she was sure now, though she had not always been so, that it was an unsexed devotion, more that of a daughter for a mercurial and ambivalent father than that of a woman for a man. Still, such longing must be very painful for her, even now. Julia remembered how close the two had been at the time of her courtship and early marriage, and she was not proud of how she had done everything in her considerable power to drive a wedge between them. Though letters flew back and forth across the oceans between Sarah and Laura, Julia was confident her friend would never mention anything to the girl. And even if she did, Laura would have no real understanding of what it meant to actually be in love, or of what was at stake.
The oddest thing—Laura had written to Julia that she had recovered her sense of taste. Julia was sure this wasn’t possible, but in her reply said only that she was glad for the girl.
Obviously, it was Louisa who’d written to Chev, or, clever gossip that she was, probably to her dear friend Sumner, who would of course go straight to Chev. And that was the other thing that prickled her: her husband had Sumner, with his peculiar and annoying attachment, to stroke his monstrous ego. He was the perfect mate in that regard.
Shortly before she left, Julia had discovered, quite by accident when she was looking in Chev’s desk for a new pot of ink, a cache of letters from Sumner tied with a red silk ribbon. Since when did her husband buy ribbon? She’d untied the packet and skimmed each letter quickly, mostly for unfavorable references to herself, of which there were many. But aside from expected insults and the tittle-tattle of politics and yawning social reform, she was more than a bit unnerved by the fulsomeness of the endearments, by the sheer number of times Charlie spoke of longing to touch her husband’s face, his hands, any part of him, it seemed. And at the bottom of the last page of nearly every missive, in bold capitals, the words BURN THIS, a request that her husband had obviously not obliged. Why did he keep the letters, over ten years of them? She considered confronting Chev about what she’d found, but really, what was there to say that would make any sense? It was all too confusing for her to even formulate a plan, and she didn’t understand the heat of her own reaction. After all, most people, Julia included, wrote letters full of affection to their dearest friends. What did Chev’s letters to Charlie say? She decided she preferred not to know, even if that had been at all possible.
What Is Visible: A Novel Page 19