The Marble Quilt (2 page)

“Ah, how I envy any traveler his first visit to Italy!” Mrs. Warshaw said. “Because for you it will be new—what is for me already faded. Beginning with Airolo, the campanile, as the train comes out the other end of the tunnel …”

Harold's book twitched. He knew all about the campanile.

“Is it splendid?” Irene asked.

“Oh, no.” Mrs. Warshaw shook her head decisively. “Not splendid at all. Quite plain, in fact, especially when you compare it to all those other wonderful Italian towers—in Pisa, in Bologna. I mustn't forget San Gimignano! Yes, compared to the towers of San Gimignano, the campanile of Airolo is utterly without distinction or merit. Still, you will never forget it, because it is the first.”

“Well, we shall look forward to it. Grady, be sure to look out for the tower of … just after the tunnel.”

The curtain didn't budge.

Irene's smile said: “Sons.”

“And where are you traveling, if I might be so bold?”

“To Florence. It's my habit to spend the winter there. You see, when I lost the Captain, I went abroad intending to make a six-months tour of Europe. But then six months turned into a year, and a year into five years, and now it will be eight years in January since I last walked on native soil. Oh, I think of returning to Toronto sometimes, settling in some little nook. And yet there is still so much to see! I have the travel bug, I fear. I wonder if I shall ever go home.” Mrs. Warshaw gazed toward the curtained window. “Ah, beloved Florence!” she exhaled. “How I long once again to take in the view from Bellosguardo.”

“How lovely it must be,” echoed Irene, though in truth she had no idea where Bellosguardo was, and feared repeating the name lest she should mispronounce it.

“Florence is full of treasures,” Mrs. Warshaw continued. “For instance, you must go to the Palazzo della Signoria and look at the Perseus.”

Harold's book twitched again. He knew all about the Perseus.

“Of course we shall go and see them straightaway,” Irene said. “When do they bloom?”

When do they bloom!

It sometimes seemed to Harold that it was Aunt Irene, and not her sons, who needed the tutor. She was ignorant of everything, and yet she never seemed to care when she made an idiot of herself. In Harold's estimation, this was typical of the Pratt branch of the
family. With the exception of dear departed Toby (both of them), no one in that branch of the family possessed the slightest receptivity to what Pater called (and Harold never forgot it) “the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake.” Pratts were anti-Paterian. Not for them Pater's “failure is forming habits.” To them the formation of habits—healthy habits—was the very essence of success. (It was a subject on which Uncle George, God rest his soul, had taken no end of pleasure in lecturing Harold.)

Still, Harold could not hate them. After all, they had made his education possible. At Thanksgiving and Christmas they always had a place for him at their table (albeit crammed in at a corner in a kitchen chair). “Our little scholarship boy,” Aunt Irene called him. “Our little genius, Harold.”

Later, after Uncle George had died, and Toby had died, and Toby the Second as well, Irene had come to him. “Harold, would you like to see Europe?” she'd asked, fixing his collar.

“More than anything, Aunt Irene.”

“Because I'm planning a little tour this fall with the boys—following my brother's itinerary, you know—and I thought, Wouldn't it be marvelous for them to have a tutor, a scholar like yourself, to tell them what was what. What do you think, Harold? Would your mother mind?”

“I think it's a capital idea.”

“Good.”

So here he was.

So far, things hadn't gone well at all.

In Paris, Harold had decided to test the boys' receptivity to art by taking them to the Louvre. But Grady wanted only to ride the métro, and got infuriated when Harold explained that there was no need to take the métro: the museum was only a block from their hotel. Then they were standing in front of the Mona Lisa, Harold lecturing, Grady quivering with rage at having been deprived of the métro, Stephen leaning, inscrutable as ever, against a white wall. Harold spoke eloquently about the painting and, as he spoke, he felt the silent pressure of their boredom. They had their long bodies arranged in attitudes of sculptural indifference, as if to say, we have no truck with any of this. Curse our mother for pulling us out of our lives, and curse our father for dying, and our brother for dying, and curse you. To which Harold wanted to answer: Well, do you think I like it any more than you do? Do you think I enjoy babbling like an idiot, and being ignored? For the truth was, the scrim of their apathy diffused his own sense of wonder. After all, he was seeing this for the first time, too: not a cheap reproduction, but
La Gioconda
. The real thing. How dare they not notice, not care?

Yes, Harold decided that morning, they were normal, these boys. They would never warm to art. (As if to prove his point, they now gravitated away from his lecturing, and toward an old man who had set up an easel and paints to copy a minor annunciation—their curiosity piqued by some low circus element in the proceedings: “Gosh, it looks exactly like the original!” an American man standing nearby said to his wife.) Why Aunt Irene had insisted on bringing them to Europe in the first place Harold still couldn't fathom; what did she think was going to happen, anyway? Did she imagine that upon contact with the sack of Rome, the riches of Venice, some dormant love of beauty would awaken in them, and they would suddenly be transformed into cultured, intellectual boys,
the sort upon whom she could rely for flashes of wit at dinner parties, crossword solutions on rainy afternoons? Boys, in other words, like their brother Toby, or their uncle Toby, for that matter, who had kept a portrait of Byron on his desk. Grady, on the other hand, couldn't have cared less about Byron, while Stephen, so far as Harold could tell, liked only to lean against white walls in his flannel trousers, challenging the marble for beauty. Really, he was too much, Stephen: self-absorbed, smug, arrogant. Harold adored him.

There was a rapping on the compartment door.

“Entrez,”
announced Mrs. Warshaw.

The conductor stepped in. Immediately Grady pulled back the curtain, splaying the light. Stephen's eyes slotted open again.

“Permit me to excuse myself,” the conductor said in tormented French, “but we are approaching the St. Gotthard tunnel. I shall now light the lamps and make certain that the windows and ventilators are properly closed.”

“Bien sûr.”

The conductor was Italian, a handsome, sturdy fellow with a thick black mustache, blue eyes, fine lips. Dark hairs curled under his cuffs, rode down the length of his hands to the ends of his thick fingers.

Bowing, he stepped to the front of the compartment, where he got down on his knees and fiddled with the ventilator panel. As he knelt he winked manfully at Grady.

“Oh, I don't like tunnels,” Irene said. “I get claustrophobic.”

“I hope you don't get seasick!” Mrs. Warshaw laughed. “But never mind. When
you've been through the St. Gotthard as often as I have, you shall sleep right through, as I intend to do.”

“How long is it again?”

“Nine miles!” Grady shouted. “The longest in the—” He winced. He had broken his vow.

“Nine miles! Dear Lord! And it will take half an hour?”

“More or less.”

“Half an hour in the dark!”

“The gas jets will be lit. You needn't worry.”

The conductor, having finished with the ventilators, stood to examine the window latches. In securing the one on the right he pressed a wool-covered leg against Harold's knees.

“Va bene,”
he said next, yanking at the latch for good measure. (It did not give.) Then he turned to face Harold, over whose head the oil lamp protruded; raised his arms into the air to light it, so that his shirt pulled up almost but not quite enough to reveal a glimpse of what was underneath (what
was
underneath?); parted his legs around Harold's knees. Harold had no choice but to stare into the white of that shirt, breathe in its odor of eau de cologne and cigar.

Then the lamp was lit. Glancing down, the conductor smiled.

“Merci, mesdames,”
he concluded merrily. And to Harold:
“Grazie, signore.”

Harold muttered,
“Prego,”
kept his eyes out the window.

The door shut firmly.

“I shall be so happy to have my first glimpse of Milan,” Irene said.

Why French for the women and Italian for him?

They had been traveling forever. They had been traveling for years: Paris, the gaslit platform at the Gare de Lyon, a distant dream; then miles of dull French farmland, flat and blurred; and then the clattery dollhouse architecture of Switzerland, all that grass and those little clusters of chalets with their tilted roofs and knotty shuttered windows, like the window the bird would have flown out on the cuckoo clock … if it had ever worked, if Uncle George had ever bothered to fix it. But he had not.

Really, there was nothing to do but read, so Harold read.

Orpheus: having led Eurydice up from the Underworld, he turned to make sure she hadn't tired behind him. He turned even though he had been warned in no uncertain terms not to turn; that turning was the one forbidden thing. And what happened? Exactly what Orpheus should have expected to happen. As if his eyes themselves shot out rays of plague, Eurydice shrank back into the vapors and died a second death, fell back down the dark well. This story of Orpheus and Eurydice Harold had read a hundred times, maybe even five hundred times, and still it frustrated him; still he hoped each time that Orpheus would catch on for once, and not look back. Yet he always looked back. And why? Had love turned Orpheus's head? Harold doubted it. Perhaps the exigencies of story, then: for really, if the episode had ended with the happy couple emerging safely into the dewy morning light, something in every reader would have been left slavering for the expected payoff.

Of course there were other possible explanations. For instance: perhaps Orpheus had found it impossible not to give in to a certain self-destructive impulse; that inability, upon
being told “Don't cross that line,” not to cross it.

Only God has the power to turn back time
.

Or perhaps Orpheus, at the last minute, had changed his mind; decided he didn't want Eurydice back after all. This was a radical interpretation, albeit one to which later events in Orpheus's life lent credence.

Harold remembered something—
Huck Finn
, he thought—you must never look over your shoulder at the moon.

Something made him put his book down. Stephen had woken up. He was rubbing his left eye with the ball of his fist. No, he did not look like his brother, did not look like any Pratt, for that matter. (Mrs. Warshaw was correct about this, though little else.) According to Harold's mother, this was because Aunt Irene, after years of not being able to conceive, had taken him in as a foundling, only wouldn't you know it? The very day the baby arrived she found out she was pregnant. “It's always like that,” his mother had said. “Women who take in foundlings always get pregnant the day the foundling arrives.”

Nine months later Toby was born—Toby the Second—that marvelous boy who rivaled his adopted brother for athletic skills, outstripped him in book smarts, but was handsome, too, Pratt handsome, with pale skin and small ears. Toby had been a star pupil, whereas Irene had had to plead with the headmaster to keep Stephen from being held back a grade. Not that the boys disliked each other: instead, so far as Harold could tell, they simply made a point of ignoring each other. (And how was this possible? How was it possible for anyone to ignore either of them?)

“Be kind to your aunt Irene,” his mother had told him at the station in St. Louis.
“She's known too much death.”

And now she sat opposite him, here on the train, and he could see from her eyes that it was true: she had known too much death.

Harold flipped ahead a few pages.

Throughout this time Orpheus had shrunk from loving any woman, either because of his unhappy experience, or because he had pledged himself not to do so. In spite of this there were many who were fired with a desire to marry the poet, many were indignant to find themselves repulsed. However, Orpheus preferred to center his affection on boys of tender years, and to enjoy the brief spring and early flowering of their youth: he was the first to introduce this custom among the people of Thrace.

Boys of tender years, like Stephen, who, as Harold glanced up, shifted again, opened his eyes, and stared at his cousin malevolently.

And the train rumbled, and Mrs. Warshaw's aigrette fluttered before the Colosseum, and the cracked glass that covered Trajan's Column rattled.

They were starting to climb at a steeper gradient. They were nearing the tunnel at last.

From the
Hartford Evening Post
, November 4, 1878: Letter Six, “Crossing from the Tyrol into Ticino,” by Tobias R. Pratt:

As we began the climb over the great mountain of San Gottardo our
mulattiere
, a most affable and friendly fellow within whose Germanic accent one could detect echoes of the imminent South, explained that even as we made our way through the pass, at that very moment men were laboring under our feet to
dig a vast railway tunnel that upon completion will be the longest in the world. This tunnel will make Italy an easier destination for those of us who wish always to be idling in her beneficent breezes … and yet how far the Palazzo della Signoria seemed to us that morning, as we rose higher and higher into snowy regions! It was difficult to believe that on the other side the lovely music of the Italian voice and the taste of a rich red wine awaited us; still this faith gave us the strength to persevere through what we knew would be three days of hard travel.