CHAPTER TWO
He had to wait two weeks – nothing, in the grand scheme of world travel – for the next ship to Italy. He could have taken an earlier departure to Marseilles, but the thought of France made his teeth clench. Paris was Teddy Kent's playground now, not his. Why remind himself that Esmerelda never looked at her adoring Hunchback, that his heroic fixation on her led him only to a pauper's grave?
Victor Hugo. Sentimental trash. But even so.
Naples, then, on the SS Vancouver. Shocking what one paid for a single cabin in first class, but that was no matter.
It could be worse, he told himself. You could be a cripple without money. What then?
No leisure, no travel, no distractions. No books.
Books compensated for the lack of almost everything else. And then ... well, and then there was the Parker House breakfast, palatial and British down to the kippers and the kedgeree, and improved further by the addition of their famous, eponymous rolls, hot and buttery from the oven with honey glistening stickily in their deep central creases.
He would miss this breakfast. But then, was there not always another new small pleasure to replace the one left behind?
His trunks were packed and waiting in his flat in Shrewsbury. He sent for them, and they were delivered to the hotel a few days later. What fortune, he thought, that he had not yet unfolded their contents into the charming cedar closets of the Disappointed House.
Thinking of the House hurt him. It was as if the knife in his gut shifted, withdrew, changed angle, and drove in again, just a millimeter away from the first wound. A distinct pain, but tied to the other.
All those years, he thought, his lips twisting, those long years-in-waiting spent breezing through the world as if it were one big open-air bazaar, pausing only to pick up any little trinket that made him think of her. Anything to please her, anything to make her eyes shine and her lips part; anything he could squirrel away as a reminder of her, hope against hope against hope. The House was a shrine to his decade of patient, wholehearted longing. And for what?
I can't marry you, Dean. I don't love you.
He wandered through the city, paging through books that he didn't want to read, looking through windows at goods he had no intention of buying, dining at this place and that though the food tasted like wet newsprint in his mouth. He walked for miles, forcing his leg to bend and flex and take his weight – the best of the doctors had all agreed on that point, that he was better off moving it than keeping it still. And then, four days before his scheduled departure, he held a shop door open for a woman on her way out to the street, and found himself caught in an unexpected fox-fur embrace.
"Dean Priest!" she said. "Darling, how long have you been in the city? And why ever didn't you call on me first thing?"
Dazed by a bracing, rosemary-sharp drift of her Acqua di Regina perfume, he looked up. "Oh," he said, flushing with surprise. "Mrs. Gardner. How wonderful to see you again."
"Isabella, dear," she said, catching his arm at the elbow. "I insist. Now, don't even think of trying to escape, I won't have it. You must come to the house and have dinner with me; I am entirely on my own this evening. The boys are all away at school, the Symphony Guild has moved their meeting to Friday, and I suppose you heard about Jack."
"I did, yes," Dean said. "I am so sorry for your loss."
"Yes, well," she said. "We had a lovely time, didn't we, as long as it lasted? Now come along, that's a good fellow, here's my car."
She was an imperious, strong-jawed lady in her middle sixties. Dean had seen the portraits – well, the Singer Sargent, anyway, the best of the lot – and even in her youth, she had been more vivid than beautiful: square of face, snapping of eye, vigorous of opinion. They had met on some steamship or other, if he recalled it correctly, perhaps ten years previous – he on one of his directionless intercontinental wanderings, she and her husband bound for Italy to buy more artifacts for their house in the Back Bay. He remembered long, circular arguments about Dante and Milton, about Botticelli, about the Hokusai Manga, sheaves of unframed paintings by unknown hopefuls stacked like old newspapers in her cabin, glittering diamanté luncheons.
She was unlike any rich society lady of a certain age he'd ever met: utterly without self-importance, devoted to her collections, excited by ideas and by art and indifferent to the fashions that she subsequently ended up setting. She had never seemed even to notice his hump or his limp. At the time, he had thought her a beatified, perfected version of what his Great-Aunt Nancy might have been.
He hadn't supposed that she remembered him at all.
The car was a gleaming ivory Mercedes limousine – "only bought this year," she said, rubbing her hands gleefully together; "a shocking beast, is it not? The boys all want it for joyriding, but only Mr. Mackenzie is trusted with the key. Now, you must see the house. You remember that Jack and I were talking about building it, the summer we crossed to Italy with you. The old one had been added onto so many times it was a patchwork, and still it wouldn't hold all of the lovely things we found."
Dean did remember that conversation – feigned reluctance on Jack's part, laughing insistence on Isabella's. "You wanted a palazzo," he said. "Like – what was the place in Venice? The one you loved so much?"
"Clever boy," she said, patting his cheek. "Good memory. The Barbaro, on the Grand Canal. The most lovely place I've ever seen or ever will. And – look! Didn't I get the feel of it right? No canals, of course, but the Fens are right outside."
"Astonishing," Dean said, and meant it. "Exactly like a Venetian palazzo, only –"
"Shiny and new," she said. "No centuries of patina. But give it time!"
The house was four stories, built around a central courtyard garden that took his breath with its lushness. "Glassed in at the top," Isabella said. "Of course they wouldn't, would they, in Venice. But one must make some allowances for Boston winters."
"How can you bear ever to leave it?" Dean asked, fingering a glossy leaf of the potted lemon tree nearest him. She smiled.
"If Jack were still here, I probably never would," she said. "But –" She broke off, shrugging. "Even a beautiful place is just a place. Come now, we must see the Titian before the light goes. And my Japanese woodcuts – seventeenth century, so lively and detailed, they could walk off the page. And oh – the painted leather panels! Jack and I collected them for years, from a dozen different places. France, Italy, the Netherlands. Enough to paper a whole room; I call it the Veronese Room because of the mural on the ceiling. That ceiling was built two years ago in Milan, expressly to house that painting; I had the whole thing brought over and installed. An extraordinary piece; sometimes when I am in the house alone, I lie down on the floor in that room and look at it for hours."
Her old fingers plucked at his sleeve; her eyes were bright and knowing and determined. "Come now, dear," she said, "you look peaked and melancholy, like summer has stolen something from you, and when I feel that way, I simply must look at art. It is art that saves us, you know."
Dean stole a last longing glance at the garden, smiled, and allowed himself to be led away.
At least, he thought, there is an elevator.
"It would take days to see it all," he said finally, after three hours. "Everywhere the eye turns, it is dazzled."
"Very like Europe in that regard, is it not?" She hooked her arm through his. "And now, dinner. Veal, I believe."
It was indeed veal, though before it came there were courses of tomato aspic and stuffed cucumbers and tiny roasted quail. "I am fond of game birds," Isabella said. "I once saved our entire traveling party from a meal of garlic and offal in Morocco, by explaining that we were Americans, and that Americans like to eat partridges on Wednesdays." She twinkled at him from over her wine glass. "And my tutors said I would never find a use for Spanish, more fools they. How are your languages, Dean?"
"French and Italian," he said, "enough to get by. Less German – I never took to it, somehow. Some rudimentary Chinese and Japanese – speaking only; I struggle with the written language." He laughed. "It would have been the garlic and offal for me, I'm afraid; I have no Spanish at all."
"I wish I was getting on that ship with you," she said, suddenly pensive. "I have another trip planned for next spring – I didn't show you the wing on the third floor where I intend to put my chapel. There are rumors that I might acquire a very fine French Gothic stained glass window from the eleventh century that used to hang in a cathedral north of Paris. But the weather will be finer in May, and I have friends set to travel with me then."
"Is it so hard to wait for May?"
"It is hard to watch any ship sailing away," Isabella said. "Who knows what awaits on the other side of the ocean?"
They had lemon ices for dessert, and coffee in the Italian style, thick as sludge in the tiny round cups.
"I mean to leave it to the city when I die, you know," she said. "The house, the art. Everything. The boys will do quite well without it, and I won't have my life's work parceled out and sold off at auction." She savored her espresso. "I shall write a codicil to the bequest; nothing can be moved or sold or added, once I've breathed my last. And anything I don't want the public to see before I go, I shall consign to the flames."
"A legacy," Dean said, understanding. "Proof you were here."
"I will be remembered as I choose to be," said Isabella, fiercely. "Not as just another rich woman in a famous man's painting."
"Or the heroine of a novel?" teased Dean. This was intimate territory; he would never have had the courage to mention it without the second glass of wine. Isabella eyed him narrowly.
"Cheeky," she said, but without heat. "But yes. Frank Crawford may have tried to capture me in those pages, but he did not succeed. And he knows he did not – otherwise, why would he have killed off my character?"
"There are a thousand ways to die," said Dean, barely realizing that he spoke aloud. Isabella said nothing for a long moment.
"No," she said finally. Her eyes were faraway but not, he thought, sad, not exactly. "No, there aren't. There's only one. And it hasn't happened to either one of us yet."
It was nearly midnight when he kissed her cheek and bade her farewell in the cool stone entry of her fascinating new-old house. She smiled at him and slipped an envelope into his hand.
"An introduction, of sorts," she said. "Go to Venice. Stay with the Curtises, in the Barbaro villa."
"I couldn't possibly impose on you or your friends."
"Imposition, nothing," she said. "Quite the contrary. It will soothe me to think of you in those lovely rooms, sunning the darkness from your soul."
Dean stared at her.
"It is so obvious, then," he said, "that I am in despair?"
"That you are lonely," corrected Isabella, "and tempted to succumb to solitude rather than fight it any longer." She squeezed his hand. "Keep fighting," she said. "And mind that you send me letters. I may be an old woman, but I still enjoy occasional correspondence with handsome young men."