by Nell Stevens
My brother’s voice: ‘We’ve got some great news.’
‘You have?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We’ve decided to get married.’
Somehow, I stammer my way through the rest of the conversation. I tell them both how pleased I am for them, and that I can’t wait to hear all about their plans, and they say thank you and that they just wanted to be sure I heard it from them first, and we all agree that we will talk again soon, and then I hang up.
Afterwards, I know I should feel relieved, and the part of me that believed my parents were dead really is. More than that, though, I should feel pleased that my brother is happy. I stare at Max, who is watching me from across the table.
‘They’re getting married,’ I say. ‘They were just really excited to tell me.’
‘Yeah,’ says Max, ‘I figured as much.’
‘That’s never going to be us, is it?’ I say.
At the next table, the chihuahua has moved on to its second course, and is licking whipped cream from the blonde woman’s fingers.
1862
A Woman Whom Everybody Loves
You were a swift writer, and didn’t generally overthink things, and yet Sylvia’s Lovers took you years. It wasn’t like the anxiety-ridden diplomatic balancing act of writing Charlotte’s biography, but more a kind of lethargy that crept into your life and slowed down your pen. You were tired. You were ill more often than you were healthy. The letters from Mr Norton, on which you had relied in previous years for energy and sustenance, became more and more irregular, with longer and longer periods of silence in between. You wondered often what he was doing, and heard about him from your mutual friends: he was settling in Boston, the Storys said, and had published a little book called Notes of Travel and Study in Italy.
Your own life, too, had moved on. Your girls were adults now, with dramas of their own, which you watched and supervised and counselled them over. In the quiet moments in between your other duties, you sat at your desk and pretended you were looking out to sea. You sent your mind back to Whitby, where your novel was set, and forced it to stay there as, gradually, painfully, your story developed word by word.
You were sitting that way one morning when a letter from America came, and despite yourself, after all the intervening years since you had last seen him, your heart fluttered when you saw who it was from. You set your pen down, and called to Hearn to bring you tea. A letter from Mr Norton was an event, and you wanted to savour it, to be perfectly comfortable, to settle yourself in readiness, as you would into a theatre seat before the curtain rose.
I am sure I may count upon your being glad with me when I tell you that I am very happy. I am engaged to be married to Miss Susan Sedgwick. – I wish that you knew her, for then you would wish me joy, and rejoice with me, with completest satisfaction … . She is a woman whom everybody loves.
For a long while, you sat, not reading the words but looking at their shape on the page. You were holding paper that Mr Norton himself had touched. You lifted it up to your nose and inhaled, searching for some residual trace of him. You fingered the edges of the sheets, and then traced the outline of the words: a woman whom everybody loves.
‘Girls!’ you called out. ‘Girls!’
It was Meta who rushed in, waving her own letter. You saw the American stamps on it and knew that she, too, knew.
‘Mama,’ she said. ‘Mr Norton is getting married!’
And you said, ‘Yes, I know,’ and realized that you were going to cry. Meta went to you and held you as though she was the parent and you the nervous, heartsick little girl. ‘It’s wonderful,’ you said, your face pressed against her chest so that she couldn’t see your eyes. ‘I’m so happy for him.’
‘I know you are, Mama,’ said Meta. ‘Of course you are. We all are.’
It should not have been a surprise. You should have known that in the increasingly long stretches of time between his letters to you, he would be establishing a life for himself in America. He was still young, and it was natural that he would want a wife, a family. After all, hadn’t you wanted a husband? Hadn’t you wanted children? And didn’t you have those things? How could you be surprised that he had chosen the same for himself?
When you replied, you chose your words meticulously. You had never written anything more slowly, or with more care – not even the sections of Sylvia’s Lovers that were finished, or the chapters that were still underway. ‘I am so particularly glad to think of your being married,’ you wrote, ‘almost as if you were my own son.’ You were pleased with this line. It was a clean re-casting of your relationship. It was a term you hoped would put his mind at rest about the impact his news might have had on you. Your interest in his affairs was strictly friendly, so asexual as to be, now, maternal.
‘I have often thought,’ you went on, ‘that of all the men I ever knew you were not only the one to best appreciate women; but also (what is very probably) the other side of what I have just said, the one to require – along with your masculine friendships – the sympathetic companionship of a good, gracious woman.’ A compliment and the very slightest rebuke, all bound up together. You had been the good, gracious woman whose sympathetic companionship Mr Norton had so needed, and he had appreciated you as no other man had. Now, you understood, you had been replaced. You asked for particulars. You wanted to know how they met, and where, and when, and what she looked like.
Later, a thick envelope arrived from Mr Norton’s sister, Grace, providing all the details you had asked for, and you read it with a greedy, throbbing fascination, savouring every detail of the woman whom everybody loves. You sat at your desk, trying to formulate a reply, and after almost two hours, the page was blank, your pen still hovering uncertainly above it. What was there to be said about this description of Miss Susan, who was charitable and respectable and cheerful and lovely all at once? What could you say? You gave up trying to respond, and felt guilty about it every time your eye rested on Grace’s letter amongst the other papers on your desk.
You could not be low and heartsick for long. Your novel needed an ending, and the news from Mr Norton prompted you to deliver it in a swift blow. The long-lost lover, Charley, returns from sea and begs Sylvia to marry him. She cannot; it is too late; she is married. She swears never to forgive her husband for keeping the truth from her, but neither can she abandon her marriage. And then, only a few months later, she learns that Charley has married an heiress, a babbling, shallow, pretty girl, whom everybody loves. It was, you said, the saddest story you ever wrote.
By the following year, you were ready to publish and you were ready, too, in your own way, to make peace. There were to be separate editions in America and in Britain, and you gave instructions for two different dedications to be printed. In the British version, it was to read, dutifully and understatedly,
This book
Is dedicated to
MY DEAR HUSBAND
By Her
Who Best Knows His Value
The American edition, you instructed, should read,
To all
My Northern Friends
With the truest sympathy of an
English Woman; and in an especial
manner to my dear Friend
Charles Eliot Norton
And to his Wife
Who, though personally unknown to me,
is yet dear to me for his sake.
2016
Tornado
It is Sunday morning, and in Austin, I have a Sunday morning routine. I wander through my neighbourhood to a little Italian cafe, where I meet Natalie, one of the other researchers at the Ransom Center, and a band plays gypsy jazz until noon. We sit out on the terrace in the sunlight, and read the news, and drink coffee, and I take the time to feel relieved that I do not have to give up caffeine, or stay awake for forty hours straight, and that my thesis is so nearly done. The end is truly in sight: I have three chapters, an introduction and the bare unfinished-but-nonetheless-promising bones of a conclusion.
O
n this Sunday morning, though, for possibly the first time since I moved to Austin, it is not sunny. The sky is a thick, mulchy grey, and there is an uneasy stillness in the air as I descend from the treehouse to make my way towards the cafe. Norma’s wind charms are limp and silent. As I pass the front of the house, Norma waves at me through the window. I raise a hand in return, then realize she is gesturing at me to stop. Moments later, she appears at the front door.
‘Where are you going?’ she asks.
‘To see a friend,’ I say.
‘But where?’
I tell her the name of her cafe, ‘Dolce Vita,’ and she shakes her head.
‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘no, you can’t go that far.’
‘Why not?’
‘You didn’t hear?’ she says. ‘There’s a tornado warning. You really shouldn’t be going out at all.’
I retreat to the treehouse, text Natalie, and position myself at the window to watch as the cloudy weather reformulates itself into a fierce storm. It begins to rain so heavily that parts of the roof start to leak. The sound of the water smashing down overhead is thunderous; I can’t even hear the wind chimes that are jangling frantically from the branches below me. It occurs to me that of all the places to be riding out a tornado, a treehouse is one of the least secure. Surely I’d have been safer at Dolce Vita.
Below in the yard, Norma appears in a bright pink mackintosh. I relax. She is coming to fetch me. She’s going to let me wait out the storm in her house. But instead of moving towards the treehouse, she heads to the chicken coop and begins to move the birds inside, scooping them up one by one and carrying them under her arm. On seeing this I am certain: if the chicken coop is not strong enough to protect the chickens, the treehouse is not strong enough to protect me. I pack a plastic bag with my computer and a few library books, and then I make a run for it. I hurtle out of the door, down the wooden staircase and towards the shelter of Norma’s back porch.
‘Ah, yes,’ she says, when she returns with the last chicken. ‘I was just about to fetch you.’
I suppress a grumpy comment about her priorities, and follow her, dripping, down to the basement, where the chickens are clucking disconcertedly, pecking at the floor and shuffling between boxes of junk. Their clawed feet scrape along the concrete.
‘How long do you think we’ll be down here for?’ I ask, but Norma just shrugs and says, ‘Until the Lord’s done ragin’.’
I sit on a box of old magazines, with my laptop on my knees, and work on my conclusion. Rome, I write, was exceptional. If anyone wondered, ‘Why Rome?’ at the beginning of my thesis, I am certain that, by the end, I’ve answered the question. There was nowhere else like it in the nineteenth century, no comparable meeting point where ideas and inspiration could move so freely between people of different nationalities, genders and sexualities. When Elizabeth Gaskell wrote that it was the ‘tip-top point’ of her life, it was because, in those three months she spent in Rome, she was free to communicate, to express herself as an artist and to receive ideas from others in a way that was impossible anywhere else.
I do not, in my thesis, write about love. I let it sit below the surface, as it did in the lives of my subjects, a heartbeat.
Hours later, water has begun to seep through the ceiling on the far side of the space. I point this out to Norma, who nods and says, ‘Just so long as it’s water coming down, and not the house going up, we’re all right.’ Just then, the pain in my right side that began in LA returns, a twisting, wrenching sharpness, and I have to bend over my knees and take deep breaths to stop myself from yelling. I pant through it, waiting for it to pass, and trying to distract myself by reading and re-reading the words I’ve just written. Norma notices me crouching and staring, bemused, at my computer screen, and says, ‘You’ll make yourself crazy, tapping away at that damn machine all day. You should look at something else for a change.’ I’m about to gasp a reply when, as suddenly as the pain came on, it subsides.
I feel as though I have woken up. I am disoriented. The chickens have settled, huddled together near my feet; in the corner of the room, water is still dripping from the ceiling, amassing in a black puddle. I turn to my computer. I look at thesis.docx, and discover that I have finished. I have reached the end. It brings me up short.
When Gaskell dreamed of America, did it look like Rome, as is given in A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard’s The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell (1997), or like home, as in Jane Whitehill’s Letters of Mrs. Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton (1932)? This divergence of readings of the same word is symptomatic of the link between the three places evoked here and in Gaskell’s other writing: Rome was home, and America, defined by her relationship with Charles Eliot Norton, was therefore like both Rome, and home. Rome was where Gaskell was free to encounter new art, and other artists, to forge her own relationships and to tell her own stories. It was a city through which she saw new worlds.
Norma scatters grain on the floor at her feet, and the chickens strut towards her, clucking. The cursor blinks after the final word, ‘worlds’, on my screen. Below it, the word-count is bulging; I’ve reached the limit. There’s still a strange feeling in my side where the pain was, a dull echo, but for now, all I can think is that I’m finished. The Americans Mrs Gaskell met in Rome have been researched, their works and ideas recorded. My own American, who is back in Boston, has been visited, kissed and given up. It is time for me to go home.
1878
William’s Party
Mr William Wetmore Story decided to throw a party. It had been years since he’d last done so, since his apartment at the Palazzo Barberini had been noisy with the voices of guests, and with music, and with laughter. He had been back to America over the summer, accompanied by his son Waldo, to give a series of lectures on the subject ‘What is the Use of Art?’. He had toured town halls, artists’ institutes, small cities, had met Americans of every description – educated, uneducated, rich, poor, curious, incurious – and all of them had seemed foreign to him, citizens of a country that was no longer his own. He did not recognize America, with its railways and factories and strange smells. Even the voices seemed different, the accents more distinctive. Waldo was even more lost than he, staring bemusedly at the place that was, purportedly, his homeland. He was twenty-three years old and had never lived there. Father and son were both strangers in America.
When they reached Rome, he felt a surging joy to be home, to be surrounded once again by people he loved, who understood him, amongst whom he had lived for thirty years. So, he began to plan a party. That autumn he would celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his arrival in the city. He would gather his old friends together again. Robert Browning was back in Italy for the first time in seventeen years; he had left when his wife died, and William had seen him in London sometimes, but never, since then, in Rome. Mr Gibson was dead now. Mr Powers was dead. Mr Hawthorne, too. Miss Hosmer was still there, more eccentric than ever, though Miss Stebbins had run off to America with Miss Cushman, and Miss Cushman had died of pneumonia. Miss Hosmer was less sprightly, more reserved, and had turned her attention away from art and towards mechanical invention: she was working on a perpetual motion machine and had patented several designs. She had collected another member to what William had taken to calling her ‘Harem (scarem)’ of lady sculptors, a Miss Edmonia Lewis, who worked at her marble harder than anyone.
He had been sour, bad company to his artist friends in recent years. He had watched them applaud each other and become famous, had read profiles of them in journals, and couldn’t help feeling embittered. It was true that his talents, too, had been recognized, but it felt as though the attention he received was too little, too late, considering the years he had worked, the contribution he had made. It did not please him the way he had thought it would, the way it seemed to please those around him. He had written all those books of poetry. He had created all those statues, which clustered in his studio like a theatre audience awaiting curtain-up. And yet all people wanted to see or ta
lk about was his Cleopatra, because that was the statue Hawthorne had described in The Marble Faun. Was it really true that his greatest claim to fame would be his role in that blasted novel? Was he, William Story, to be remembered more for Hawthorne’s work than his own? He had been irritable and resentful, even to Robert; he had published a snide poem in the Atlantic, complaining of ill-treatment by his critics and peers, venting his disillusionment.
Fame seemed, when out of reach, how sweet and grand!
How worthless, now I grasp it in my hand!
Give me the old enthusiasms back,
Give me the ardent longings that I lack, –
The glorious dreams that fooled me in my youth,
The sweet mirage that lured me on its track, –
And take away the bitter, barren truth.
What matters now the lauding of your lips,
What matters now the laurel wreath you plait
For these bald brows, for these gray hairs? It slips
Over my eyes and helps to hide my tears.
I am too old for joys – almost for fears.
Now, restored in the Palazzo Barberini after his American tour, he saw that it had been wrong of him. His friends had always looked to him for fun, for gaiety, for the continuity of dear old Rome the way they had always known it. He should not, now, let them down. It was not their fault that he was miserable. It was not their fault that they were praised more warmly than he was by the press, that they were happier. He would throw a party, and everyone would come, and he would be at the centre of everything again.
The courtyard of the Palazzo Barberini was glowing; lamps lined the driveway and encircled the fountain. On each stone step that led to the Storys’ apartment was a candle, flickering, illuminating separate spheres of ancient stone on the way up. Inside, William’s daughter, Edith, was sitting near the door, bouncing her baby on her knee, ready to greet guests. William himself roamed uneasily from room to room, checking everything was in order, the piano tuned, the wine ready, his most wellloved statues correctly positioned to receive the best light, until Emelyn snapped at him to sit down and let her worry about it. He went then to the window, and watched the first carriage arrive; young friends of Waldo emerged, their faces golden in the lamplight, laughing and excited as they crossed the courtyard to the staircase. Moments later he heard them enter the apartment, Edith’s welcome, Waldo’s greeting, the noises of general cheer, of a party beginning. More carriages were drawing up; there was a line of them at the gates, and in the parlour somebody began to play the piano. He felt something lift from his chest, a kind of giddiness beginning in his groin, his stomach, and he began to beam.