The Master (32 page)

In that turning of his head from the Salute to Palazzo Dario, his eye was caught each time by the gloomy Gothic windows of Casa Semitecolo and this was when Venice ceased to be spectacle for
him, when it abandoned its guise as vast pageant and became real and hard and filled with horror. It was from the second story of this building, five years earlier, that Constance Fenimore Woolson
had flung herself onto the pavement.

HE HAD FIRST met her early in 1880 in Florence when he was writing
The Portrait of a Lady
. He was thirty-seven; she was forty. She had had a letter of introduction from Minny
Temple’s sister Henrietta. While she had read everything he had written, he had read nothing by her. He had met many American women travelling in Europe with letters of introduction to him.
Such letters, if gathered together, he thought, would produce a hefty volume, but they would not be as tedious as many of their bearers, who included a number of lady novelists who wished that they
had written
Daisy Miller
and were anxious to tell him that they were on the point of doing something quite as good.

Constance’s deafness in one ear interested him as much as it seemed to irritate her. It pointed to something he might otherwise not have noticed so quickly. She possessed an extraordinary
amount of reserve and self-sufficiency and seemed anxious neither to please him nor impress him. She lived, to a degree which he believed unusual, in her own mind. He was not surprised, as he
showed her the sights, that she wished to avoid tourists, but he was fascinated by her lack of interest in Anglo-American society in Florence and her refusal to be introduced to his friends and
associates in the higher echelons of Florentine society. She needed her evenings to herself, she said flatly; she could not happily absorb the company of so many people, no matter how rich and
important they were.

He was unable to tell whether her responses to churches and frescoes and paintings were truly original. Nonetheless, the freshness of her intelligence, her likes and dislikes, and her ability to
be puzzled and confused, made him interested in accompanying her through the city in the mornings. Two years later, when she read
The Portrait of a Lady
, she noticed, she intimated to him
softly, his skill at displaying an American woman full of openness and curiosity and ideas of her own in Italy for the first time being quietly but firmly directed by a connoisseur, a man of
slender means who had studied beauty. He had used that sense of her, attached it, as it were, to his other prior claimants, and written it sometimes on the very same day that he wandered in the
city with his new American friend. So that Isabel Archer saw what Constance Fenimore Woolson saw and may indeed have felt what she felt, if only he could have fully divined what Constance felt.

She teased him about the tameness of his background; his being a native of the James family caused her much amusement, as did Newport and Boston and his European wanderings. She, the grand-niece
of James Fenimore Cooper, had access to an America he would never know. Both in Ohio and Florida, she told him, she had been on familiar terms with the wilderness. And just in case, she smiled at
him menacingly, he thought that she was a roughneck, she should point out that, while he was the first of his family to set foot in Italy, her great-uncle had lived in Florence and written a book
about it.

Added to her background was her strange and busy independence. She saw him in the mornings, but in the afternoons she walked in the hills above Florence for hours, and at night she wrote and
read. Each day, when they met, she had a new perspective on the city, a new experience to recount, and a fresh eye with which to view what he had arranged for her to see.

He did not mention her in letters to his parents or his sister Alice or brother William. In those years, they were all too ready to respond to the slightest hint of an amorous adventure which
might lead him to marriage. He knew that every line of his letters was carefully analysed in case some clue might be offered about where his heart lay. For his relatives in Boston, hungry for news,
his heart remained as hard as he could make it.

Constance and Henry met when their paths crossed in Rome and then in Paris. They corresponded over the next few years and read each other’s work. Sometimes, he was preoccupied with his own
writing or with other correspondents, but often when he had written her a letter he discovered that his old enjoyment of her company had been stirred again; he found himself writing another letter
to her before he received a reply. He feared that she was confused by this sudden interest after a long silence and he knew that she was wary. She had become his most intelligent reader and, after
he had extracted a promise that she would destroy his letters, a most trusted and sharp-witted confidante. And when she came to London, as she did when they had known one another for more than
three years, she became his steadfast and self-contained and secret best friend.

Neither of them spoke about their private lives, their hidden selves. He spoke to her about his work and his family and she made observations which were personal in that they belonged to a very
particular mind; they seemed like confidences no matter how general or vague the subject. She did not talk about her work to him, but he learned by implication and accident that the completion of
each of her books brought with it a nervous collapse of which she lived in dread. The winters were not kind to her; dark days and low temperatures made her depressed so that there were times when
she could not get out of bed, could not see him or anybody else, could not work, and could, as far as he could discover, see no hope, although she was desperate for him not to know the scale and
depth of her suffering. She, who had been ready for his friendship and company, could be silent and withdrawn. He had never met anyone who shared to such a degree this readiness and its very
opposite. He knew that he could trust her, that he could remain close to her while becoming distant, if he needed. She had a way of abruptly leaving his side as though she feared he was about to
dismiss her and could not tolerate the pain and the humiliation of that. Nothing she did with him was simple; he was amazed and often concerned that he did not fully know her, could not fathom if
these brisk gestures at parting were aspects of her vulnerability or her need to be alone, or her fear, or all of these things.

O
NE EVENING
in London in February 1884, Henry went with Mrs Kemble to see the Italian actor Salvini in
Othello
. It was a fashionable evening and
a fashionable production and there were people there who were richer than Mrs Kemble and her escort, with titles and also beauty, neither of which Mrs Kemble nor her escort possessed, but there was
no couple more fashionable in the audience, more noticed and observed, than the great actress accompanied by the author of
The Portrait of a Lady
.

Mrs Kemble was imperious with him, and he complimented her regularly on her wit, and listened to her with admiring attention, having seen her first on the stage when he was a mere youth. She
knew that everyone around them wished to hear what she was saying and thus she alternated between a raised voice and a whisper. She nodded to some people and spoke briefly to others, but she
stopped for nobody. Instead she proceeded through the throng to their box, making it clear from the manner of her gaze that no one was free to join them.

In the moments before the lights were dimmed, Henry saw Constance Fenimore Woolson take her seat. It was typical of her not to mention to him, although he had seen her a few days earlier, that
she planned to come to the theatre. In the time that she had been in London, they had never once ventured into this world together. Her sortie into fashionable London life, when no one else was
alone, took him aback. Constance looked worn and preoccupied, not like a distinguished bestselling novelist from an old American family who had travelled the world. Viewed from his box, she could
have been a lady’s companion or a governess. He did not know if she had seen him.

As he watched the tale of jealousy and treachery unfold on the stage, more intimate versions of the same matters came to him sharply. He could easily pretend that he had not seen her. But if she
had seen him – and she generally, he felt, missed nothing – and if she had even the slightest intimation that he had sought to ignore her, he knew how deeply wounded she would be, and
how private and hidden the hurt would remain, and how skilled she would be at silently nursing it over the London winter.

At the interval, he excused himself to Mrs Kemble and made his way through the crowd, finding Constance in her seat checking the text of
Othello
. In that one instant as he stood above her
and she glanced up, he saw that she did not know what to do, and when he spoke, he realized that she could not hear him. He smiled and signalled to her to follow him. He knew, as they made their
way towards the box, that Mrs Kemble was directing a hostile gaze at him and his companion.

As he introduced her, Constance seemed even more forlorn than when he had seen her taking her seat. What he caught now, as she tried to speak to Mrs Kemble, was what he caught before the play
began – a loneliness and melancholy which seemed to outweigh the other qualities she was at pains to emphasize. Mrs Kemble, on the other hand, had never suffered from loneliness, and, as soon
as she saw that Henry planned to invite his friend into their box, she turned rudely away from them, staring at a point in the far distance with the help of her glasses.

H
E CONTINUED
to meet Constance over the next two years as she lived outside London and to correspond with her. He watched her, especially after his
sister Alice had arrived in England, going to great lengths not to be a burden, not to depend on him for anything, and to make regular mention of her plans for travel and work, her famous
independence. He was not allowed to pity her, nor was he allowed to know her fully, except as a set of passionate contradictions underlined by two essential truths: she was immensely clever and she
was lonely.

Her hearing deteriorated and when he spoke, she had to study his face and watch his lips so that she could follow what he was saying. Her face took on a worried gravity, and this became intense
if he ever mentioned plans, where he might go soon, when he might travel. In these years, he most often planned to go to Italy. He would look forward to the time when he had finished a book or a
group of stories and he would be free. These plans were so much a part of his existence that he forgot them, changed them, remade them without consultation or hesitation. Slowly, he became aware
that when he told her of his intentions, she went home and brooded about them. A few times, he noticed her surprise and mild irritation when she discovered that he had changed his mind and not
discussed the change with her. He came to understand that his presence was powerful for her, and that everything he said and wrote was contemplated by her at length in private. To her he was a
mystery, even more so than she was to him, but she put more thought and energy, he believed, into solving the mystery, or at least attempting to divine its properties, than he ever did.

When she began to arrange to leave England and return to Florence, he convinced her that she should know some people there, friends of his, and enter into society, however limited, in the city.
She smiled and shook her head.

‘I have seen enough Americans in America,’ she said, ‘and enough English in England, and I do not believe that the Italians will take much interest in me. No, I would rather
work than take tea, would rather walk in the hills than dress in the evening.’

‘There are two charming and very serious people I should like you to meet,’ he said, ‘people who do not themselves enter very freely into society. I do not wish you to live at
the mercy of the entire Anglo-American colony.’

‘In that case,’ she said, ‘I long for nothing more than to meet your friends.’

In writing to ask his friends to administer some social comfort to Miss Woolson on her return to Florence, Henry was taking a risk he had not taken before, having introduced her to no one in
England. He understood that his old friend Francis Boott and his daughter Lizzie had brought a private income and the best of Boston reserve and refinement to Bellosguardo above Florence. In their
tastes and habits they were simple people. Had they been less simple, he believed, the father’s talent as a composer and the daughter’s as a painter might have lifted them to great
heights. They lacked the steel of ambition and dedication and they replaced it with exquisite taste and select hospitality. He knew that they would warm to an American novelist with the manners and
pedigree Constance possessed.

The chance that they would not like each other was small. Lizzie, now aged forty, had recently married a bohemian painter, Frank Duveneck, and thus Francis Boott, who had been devoted to his
daughter, would have time and energy to dedicate to a new friend. The real risk he incurred in introducing Constance to the Bootts was that they would like each other more than they liked him, that
they would, as evening settled over Bellosguardo, discuss his case, and come to conclusions about him that would require further discussion, until he became one of the subjects which bound them
together.

He did not flatter himself. He knew how careful Constance would be at first, how reticent and cautious, and he knew how much old Francis Boott would like conversation with a new friend to be
general, confining himself if he could to rare old coins and old damask and long-forgotten Italian composers. Nonetheless, he knew that Lizzie Boott, whom he had first met in Newport twenty-five
years earlier, had longed for him to marry and had conveyed her wishes to him and to his sister Alice, with whom she regularly corresponded, as her father corresponded with William. Once Constance
had arrived in Florence, Henry realized, and been sent into their care, the Bootts would know what no one else knew: how much he had seen of Constance and how significant a presence she was for
him; and they would wonder at how strange it was, considering their closeness to Henry and his family, that no one had mentioned this previously. It was not impossible that they might wish to
discuss this with Constance.