40
KAREL SPECULATED ENDLESSLY, disdainful of the guidebooks we employed, disparaging their accuracy about the dating and provenance of artifacts. “You see, Dummkopf ? They just repeat the old myths and lies handed down from one generation to the next, without checking the facts or analyzing the stylistic evolution. Every human artifact evolves—why we are bound to murder our fathers, according to Freud.” Even at twenty, he had an exacting eye, photographic memory, and a remarkable mind—encyclopedic in scope, with detailed knowledge of stylistic variations I could only dream of fully grasping. When we came upon some exotic carving embedded in San Marco, he would rattle off a dozen examples of similar kind that he had seen in various museum collections or catalogs, and on the basis of stylistic affinity, he’d make a determination as to date and origin. He actually scribbled his revisions into my mother’s Baedeker guide—mother was much impressed. I hung on his every word. He set a scholarly standard I felt I could never hope to attain. All he lacked was patience, patience for the tough slog—attention to details—to decipher Linear B. He knew it; I knew it. It locked us in.
—excerpt from John Alden’s Pankrác Prison diary
Exhausted with walking—my back, her knee—we opted for a gondola, like any two lovers nearing middle age might do, in funds enough to afford it.
“We can’t leave Venice without doing something goofy, like . . . a kiss beneath the Bridge of Sighs.”
She said this in a hopeful humor, yet leery, too, since this, as we both knew, was a running gag in the last chapters of Gardens.
So we huddled together on the padded seats, and the young gondolier gave us a thin blanket to spread across our knees. We agreed to a price and a circuitous route that would allow us to double back along the Grand Canal and so make two passes by Palazzo Barberini, doubling down on our exhausted emotional capital—without either one of us having set foot in the place. The gondolier swung us out into the foggy stillness of the Bacino and we were launched. It was the oddest sensation for me, not having had the pleasure since my trip with my grandmother a quarter century before, to be nearly prone on my back, this time next to my lover, while someone else did the rowing— my rowing days having ended on that godforsaken clearing above the Vam Co Dong River. The accumulated ballast we shifted in tandem brought to mind Matthew Arnold’s old chestnut, “The Future,” echoes of which, I would discover in the following months, had found their way into Essays and Prayers by virtue of polymath Pearce Breckenridge: “Vainly did we fable and dream of that past, though lost to us as the world before our birth, yet alive as the intuited names and places which had first set us adrift upon the river of Time . . . those murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.” Max would laugh at such a gerrymandering of a stogy literary source, but then, he never found out about Pearce Breckenridge. What intrigues me are Arnold’s insights absent any knowledge of genetics or neuroscience, although he should have been tipped off by Darwin. And I still have to knock it into my distracted students’ heads that it is not the Lockean immediacy of experience that best fits us out for the journey, but the voices of our progenitors as they whisper to our inner ear.
I remember beams of amber light seeping from behind the cracked blinds drawn over the Gothic windows of the Barberini, spilling in flashing triplicate upon the waves, as if signaling us to a safer port. The Istrian stone facade and quatrefoil windows—spandrels crowned with circular disks of colored marble carved with beasts of the apostles—was just as Singer Sargent had it in his watercolors—the very same Roman copies of Hellenistic originals that had almost caused my father and Karel to tip over as Karel stood in the gondola for a better look. While the Barberini returned me to the side of my grandmother as she droned on about its history, cagily excising the brief interlude when Isabella Williams had owned it, much less the two weeks she’d spent there with her husband on their honeymoon. My father’s Pankrác diary had revealed her deep ambivalence about her life of squandered love, as it had his.
While to me, she had only seemed to care about the Barberini’s “dreadful state . . . a real mess, they tell me; the foundations are rotten and waterlogged” when it had been the place where she had been most in love, and the scene of another, if brief, love affair, and her son’s love-hate relationship with Karel Hollar.
Karel smoked, but my mother forbade me. As soon as our gondola was under way down the Grand Canal, Karel shared his cigarette with me. Mother and Wilfred, his so very handsome father (his wife had returned to Vienna for a wedding), hired their own gondola, which lingered so far astern that we lost sight of it for an entire hour! As we passed the Barberini, Karel pointed out the porphyry columns on the water entrance, convinced they were from a Greek temple in Smyrna. But it was the pair of sculpted griffins, vaguely lionlike, with one raised front paw and curlicue of a tail, perched on the balcony railings that threw him into paroxysms of scholarly effusiveness. “Surely they were liberated from the temple of Apollo on Delos—one remains in the museum there, but it must have originally come from Alexandria by way of Antioch. How else to explain the mongrel mixture of late Hellenistic and Assyrian influences?” As we hovered in the reflected lights of the Barberini, I could just make out the sound of a piano from the flame-lit interior, a Chopin nocturne—so familiar that I was quite taken out of myself. “Oh,” says Karel “that must be Robert Williams, the nephew of the old lady who owns the palazzo.” The week before, when I had first visited the Barberini with Karel’s parents, Bobby and his mother, Amaryllis, were not there, delayed for medical reasons, so we were told.
Ancient Isabella, draped in silks and satins and dripping jewelry, held court amidst a crowd of European and American intellectuals—in such a stupor that she didn’t even recognize me. When I got back to the Gritti and reported in to Mother, she listened intently to all I had to tell, especially about how Wilfred Hollar had held forth on the floor of the piano nobile about how little Czechoslovakia, “the child of your Woodrow Wilson,” so he put it to Isabella, was determined to stand up to Herr Hitler and so champion the antifascist cause in every way possible. And yet Mother still resisted my entreaties to join us at the next soiree scheduled for the following week.
“There are just some things you would find hard to understand at this point in your life—trust me, we are not welcome there with those people. I hear the old witch surrounds herself with sycophant Jews and their nouveau hangers-on.” Only when I tried to convince her otherwise, when I told her about Wilfred’s brave comments to resist both Stalin and Hitler, did she come around, if just a bit, and she finally revealed how she and my father had spent two weeks at the Barberini in the summer of 1910. At first hesitatingly and then with more candor, lying in her bed in the Gritti, she described how she’d been dazzled by the splendid drawing rooms of the Barberini, the frescoes and tessellated floors, and how the honeymoon couple had spent a wonderful evening with Singer Sargent, a distant cousin of the Williamses, on the balcony of the Barberini discussing international affairs, the state of Europe and America, artistic controversies at the Paris Salon. “Your father dazzled Sargent with descriptions of his many advances in heart surgery at Harvard Medical School. Sargent, with his BeauxArts training in anatomy, hung on his every word.” It seems Sargent talked about his longing to return to America—Boston would be his choice—wondering out loud to the young couple visiting Venice for the first time if he’d spent too much time in Europe—“too many damn days painting frivolous portraits of British toffs; perhaps if I’d been a landscape painter back in New York, I might have more respect among my countrymen.” My father, it seems, was very taken by their conversation. According to my mother, he was a very fine draftsman and was known in medical circles for his extraordinary illustrations of surgical techniques in the professional journals. Relating these memories to me, my mother had suddenly laughed as gaily as a newlywed, wiping at her tears. “What if your father had decided to become an artist and Mr. Sargent had returned to America to paint his own country? Then Europe would not have wasted them both.”
As we drifted past the Barberini on our first run down the Grand Canal, I shivered at the thought of my father writing those words in his Pankrác cell, surely a despairing nod at his own wasted life.
I gripped Laura’s hand tighter and she turned to me. I felt her examining my profile, lingering pensively. What did she see now that she had heard about Vietnam? A callous cold-blooded killer, a warmonger, a fool?
“Funny,” she said, “but of all our fucked lives, you, the practical, diligent one, turned out to be the real romantic.”
We were passed by other gondolas floating out of the mist, disturbed only by the slow churn of a No. 1 vaporetto and by the distant sounds of newscasts from television sets, the excited reporters giving freedom’s updates from various cities in Eastern Europe. Then silence.
I was reluctant to ask Laura if she harbored any feelings of loss or even nostalgia for the Barberini’s storied past during Isabella Williams’s tenure—for fear of bringing up the palazzo’s many cameo appearances in Gardens. The sound of the lapping water and the stars overhead reminded me of that night at Elysium when Max had gotten us invited to Hermitage, when I had my first good look at the Sargent watercolors of Venice, and the shock of Amaryllis’s nudes of my grandmother—and Suzanne’s unmatronly embrace—when Max and I hung out on the boathouse dock by the lake, wondering which of those millions of stars to make our own.
Around a bend, the shadowy outline of Palazzo Pisani appeared ahead, where Max had spent a summer helping with his mother’s master class. Aka Chef Boyardee, he had sent me erotic missives as he came under the spell of Venice past, especially the golden years, when Isabella and Bernard Berenson held sway at the Barberini, collecting old masters for Palazzo Fenway in a time of relative peace before the First World War turned the world into a quagmire of death and destruction. . . as if only now, in the passing moments—the splash of our gondolier’s oar, water sprinkled on the steaming embers—was the stinking thing finally burning itself out.
“So what do you think,” she asked, “did Max write himself into our lives, or we into his?”
She said this only partly tongue in cheek: Some part of her always believed she had been in control, if not of the outcome exactly, then certainly of the scenes along the way, where she reigned like an erotic goddess: “Do you suppose teenage boys will seek me out in the good bits, the sexy bits . . . when I’m a dried-up fossil, and beat off to my pages?”
“Once upon a time, in a golden age of peace, when the likes of Whistler and James and Sargent ruled the roost, to be remembered with the immortals.”
“But Max was of his time.” “And us in the dust.”
“Speak for yourself, old man.”
She squeezed my hand as if to say, Well, we, the living, don’t you think, still have some benefits. I thought of the aching, ecstatic beauty of her face when she climaxed on top of me in the mornings, and so found myself well pleased with our gondolier, the way he indulged the glide between strokes, as if to encourage the currents to have their way, as Max had that night on the boathouse dock when he’d cast his broken staff into the lake and shattered our looking-glass stars . . . and any last hopes, after the shooting of Charlie Springfield, and the slow fuses lit around the dinner table at Hermitage, that life might just let us get on with it.
I could feel Laura looking up at those same stars, surely trying to anticipate the meeting with her mother and her godfather—her new stepfather, now putative father, which the Pankrác diary threw, if anything, into even graver doubt. Worse, between the love letters and now the diary, there was enough evidence asserting Philby’s claim over my father’s that the best we could manage were the feints of a snake charmer.
“I think I’d almost prefer just to take my mother’s word for it,” she finally said to me. As usual, she could read my mind before I could. “For the sake of us, if you know what I mean.”
“Mum’s the word,” I offered, attempting to get us off the hook on that most delicate subject. “Besides, I’ve got a few bones of my own to pick with Charles if that meeting in Cambridge with Ventris and Nigel Bennett really happened.”
“What meeting?”
“My father wrote about it in his diary.” “That Linear B stuff is way over my head.”
“My father spent two days in England before flying on to Berlin. Ventris and Bennett were the two greatest experts in the field—Ventris had just made the breakthrough in the decipherment of Linear B, after generations of failure. Why would my father have included a description of that meeting in the diary? Was it for us, his family, or for the Soviets, to throw them off the track, or something else?”
“Maybe it was to protect Hollar, to substantiate their meeting in East Berlin.”
“Just old colleagues getting together to discuss the latest news in the field.”
“Something like that. Your Karel Hollar comes off pretty well in the diary.”
“A supercilious young man dedicated to the Communist cause, who, if Nestor was right, worked for British SIS, as well as the KGB. But a double agent for whom? Or more to the point: Who brought them together in East Berlin? How did my father know Hollar was alive, much less his circumstances?”
“Charles Fairburn?” she asked.
“Charles had to have been part of it; he and Nigel Bennett were always close. As a kid, for my birthday, Charles always gave me signed copies of Bennett’s books on Minoan civilization.”
“Would your father have made up stuff, in the diary, to save himself ?” “Wouldn’t you?”
She let out an uneasy laugh, as if we’d been over this before, which we had. She gestured extravagantly to the walls of a palazzo we were passing, “Once there were frescoes on the walls by Palma Vecchio and Titian. Gone, too. Isn’t it all so sad?”
“Sad,” I echoed, sensing that this non sequitur, begotten of the mists, had been part of a conversation—a life not mine.
She continued along the same line: “I sometimes feel as if I’ve been living inside a cocoon of half-truths and lies so long that I can no longer tell the difference.” I was hopeful she was speaking of her mother, her family—that near-moribund clan. “Christ, it was scary, freaky how well Max got on with my parents by indulging all their subterfuges as his own. Like cats, they licked up after one another.” I felt her shiver, as if the thought brought on a rising tide of anxieties. “The most amazing thing about my mother is how guileless she is, how unconscious she is of her secret deceptions. And there’s no margin for guilt in her because she’s always managed it so effortlessly—bending the world to her wishes; she’s so dazzling, so convinced of the righteousness of her cause—if people could only see it through her eyes. She believes in herself absolutely: a true believer. It’s what made her such a great dancer, the fearlessness that comes from a total absence of doubt. Much less guilt for the roadkill left in her wake.”
I graciously held back my catty rejoinder, because it no longer mattered.
“If you believe the papers, the Times’ obituary, that’s how people felt about Kim Philby, too, after everything—not a shred of self-doubt—world-class.”
“Listen, she was my Circe, too . . . swans into swine.” On that score, Max must be given the last word.
And like ingrained muscle memory, she felt again the tug of her mother’s hand, the creak of the old rickety stairs to the entrance of the ballet studio, the firm, exacting motion of her mother’s fingers as she wrapped and rewrapped the shiny pink ribbons around her ankles, a discreet knot tucked beneath the top loop. It was like a ritual blessing, a laying on of hands. There, repeated endlessly in the mirror, in every studio from Lincoln Center to the Mariinsky: mother goddess and graven image—upper back arched and elegant, blond hair in a tight chignon so that every feature and emotion showed to telling effect, feet formed in glowing arches, as if to stamp herself indelibly onto her daughter’s soul. “You must understand, dearest, the steps come from the grandest tradition in Europe: Petipa and Pavlova, the Kirov and Bolshoi and Vaganova Academy, and Diaghilev, Nijinsky, and, oh, the Ballets Russes—an art of purest grace and revolutionary ardor that connects us with the distilled genius of Russian civilization. Let me show you again, and this time, dear, get it fucking right. And don’t worry about the other girls; they don’t have the talent you do. Talent trumps all. They’ll be happier, anyway, as waitresses and adornments for rich bankers.” She knew her mother was capable of murder, if not of the body, certainly the soul.
The gondola turned in an easy arc and glided into a side canal. Dark stone walls teetered above us, as if we’d slipped into a narrow grave with just a crack of starlight.
She sighed. “I was wondering if my mother will try to charm the pants off you, or scare you off . . . or worse.”
Her hand gripped mine. Shadows hid her face. Then her voice echoed like an offstage voice in an opera.
“Do you ever worry about being the person you were . . . meant to be?”
“Like in Plato, in the Meno.” “How’s that?”
“In Plato’s Meno, true knowledge—or knowledge—of yourself, you see—was understood as remembering ideas from a previous existence.”
“I knew”—she laughed—“I could count on you.” “Dependable me.”
“So, then it does matter . . . if she admits the truth.” “Not as long as we have each other.”
We drifted in silence.
“That’s why Max wanted to return to Venice, that it might save us.
Like he always said, because it never changes, you can find some part of you that never changes—the better part, that which age and bad choices can’t fuck up. He hated getting older, you know, like he always said: ‘But my narrator is a young man; he can’t age. He’ll lose his edge if he gets old.’”
Hearing her perfect imitation of Max’s voice was so uncanny, I had to laugh.
“So he wrote a novel, about you, about Venice, about himself as an ageless young lover.”
I hoped I wasn’t being a gracious loser.
The gondola swung into a series of tight turns, as if sucked by a riptide, through a maze of tiny canals. Gesticulating, low-voiced, Piranessian figures hurried over bridges and disappeared. It was like drifting on wings of antique silence. Then around a final turn, the ornate arch of the Bridge of Sighs appeared at the end of a high passage of rusticated stonework, a palace and prison on either side.
She said with sympathy, “Thank you for doing this for me.” “Aye-aye, captain.”
The great ivory span loomed before us. Somewhere down the piazza, music played.
“Shall we do this thing?” she said, turning her luminous face to mine, a moment later engulfed in shadow.
I felt her lips on mine and I put my arms around her. Somehow it felt more like a stage kiss, as if her heart wasn’t really in it. Who could blame her for being preoccupied: a repeat performance with a new leading man and Lady Macbeth lurking in the wings.
“My home Port,” I whispered in her ear, half in jest. She stiffened and fell silent.
I felt the gondolier lean into his oar and we surged forward and into the clear moonlit night, gliding, surrounded by the murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.
My mother’s gondola, which she was sharing with Karel’s father, never reappeared that evening. Karel and I were left parentless at the gondola landing by the Gritti. I was in near panic but Karel offered an insouciant smile—“My father, the great liberal chameleon!”—put his arm around my shoulder, and led me to Palazzo Barberini, where a party was in full swing.
Old Isabella, tottering on her last legs, sniffed the air upon our entrance and retired without even shaking my hand (I believe she was dead within the year). Bobby’s mother, Amaryllis, was indeed there, just released from a Bern sanatorium. I was shocked by her ravaged features, as I hadn’t seen her in almost a decade. Once considered the most radical American painter in Parisian artistic circles—rumored mistress of half a dozen artists, she was so drunk that she could barely stand up as we were making the rounds of the guests. Then she confused me with my father—they’d first met at Palazzo Barberini in 1910, when Amaryllis was studying in Paris—as if she didn’t even remember he’d been killed in the war. Her raven black hair had streaks of gray and was in disarray; her eyes were dull and dark-ringed, her face waxy pale and slack at the jaw—hardly the ravishing beauty of my early childhood, when she had been the life of Hermitage, hosting party after party, summer after summer, when her artist friends from New York came up to perform, to dance, to pose and paint, and drink the night away. Amaryllis’s aggressive, boisterous incoherence was a terrific embarrassment, especially for Bobby, who sat at the piano, playing show tunes while we were introduced to the gathering. The guests were all Europeans of a fast arty set in various states of inebriation. Someone put a record on the Victrola of Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, and the crowd began dancing, releasing Bobby from his piano duties.
Bobby and I shook hands, as if nothing had happened our sixth-form year at Winsted, but he moved quickly to rejoin his friends from Cambridge. Karel and I stationed ourselves in a corner of the piano nobile to watch this cavorting crowd beneath the twinkling chandeliers of Murano glass, the walls soaring with frescoes filled with rather plump angels and roly-poly cherubs. I noticed Bobby hanging around a tall, gangly Englishmen at least five years older, face of a mortician, an art historian from Cambridge, someone had told me, who was introduced to me only as Anthony, as if the first name alone was all that was required. This Anthony seemed more intent on the pictures than on the dancing, and on Bobby rather than on the gorgeous females circling like cats in heat, all in various states of dishabille. Among the dancers was the most beautiful woman I had ever laid eyes on, tall and graceful, with long reddish blond hair and flashing blue eyes, who drew the gaze of every man in the vicinity. “Suzanne Portman,” Karel told me as he handed me champagne. “They say she will be the next Pavlova.” Many years later in the hospital ward in Guilford, we would meet again. It was days before we remembered where we’d first laid eyes on each other. Not until our first kiss, when she finally came up for air:
“The Barberini . . .” “The dancer,” I replied, and again I found her lips.
I have never forgotten how she looked that evening, a beacon of light even in star-encrusted Venice. I had been too shy to ask her to dance.
Later, Karel and I, now joined by a sheepish Bobby, clutching glasses of bubbly, escaped the crowd on the dance floor and went out onto the balcony. Karel and Bobby soon became quite chummy but shared little except enthusiasm for Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. I was worried about what had happened to my mother, inspecting every passing gondola in hopes she might turn up. But soon, after Karel plied me with a second or third glass of champagne, we got into a rapt conversation about the well-traveled griffins that bracketed the balustrade of the balcony. We speculated on the griffins while fingering the worn carving, the mane and nubby wings, as if they were domestic pugs purring at our indulgence. I was at the height of my fervor for Homer’s Odyssey, as was Karel, after a summer with Nigel Bennett’s team at Knossos, when we turned up yet more Linear B tablets; unfired, they were friable as autumn leaves and left us mad with curiosity about what tales they might tell, as did stray bits of spolia discovered in far-flung corners of Venice. For two weeks, we had been like terriers sniffing the air for prey.
As we stood at the balcony railing, Karel put his arm around my shoulder and launched into more shoptalk, as if to further exclude Bobby. I remember how he pointed toward the Salute, or beyond the Salute to the wide Adriatic—southward, to Greece and the islands from which we’d just sailed, telling me in a slurred voice how our future lay there. “Homer, the world of Homer and the Greek Bronze Age, which the great Schliemann revealed to the world, beckons us! Think of the stories yet to be told of the golden age of heroes, when Crete and Mycenae and Pylos were at their height. Crete—perhaps the kingdom of Atlantis, the blessed isles—maybe Homer’s Phaeacia, where ideas of justice and equality were first born to human civilization. As Marx had it, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ Imagine, my American friend, the fame, the crown of laurels to the man who reveals that lost world of our common humanity.”
With a raised glass to mine, Karel, sensing something of the family history between us, gave my cousin Bobby a significant look, as if to signal that our senior partnership was the only one that really mattered. And so we three young men toasted the future, as Karel continued to laugh off my anxious scrutiny of the passing gondolas.
Our glassed tipped skyward, we watched as Amaryllis Williams stumbled through the French doors, Gaulois in one hand, whiskey in the other, and fell all over Bobby, slobbering kisses on her son.
“What do you think of that splendid Singer Sargent portrait of Isabella in the Grande Salle, boys? Such shitty bourgeois garbage should be dumped, don’t you think? Only Picasso and Matisse matter now.” And she turned to me as she clung to Bobby for balance. “And where’s that witch of Winsted mother of yours? I’ve finally remembered whose viperous offspring you are. I wonder, Did she misplace her broomstick, or just hide it up her ass?”
Bobby turned red and tried to quiet her down, but to no avail. “Your mother was quite the swimmer in her day, sneaking over to Hermitage to pose for me. But it wasn’t enough—never enough; maybe that was my problem, if the carping critics are right: didn’t have the balls, not like a man who can sire true art.” Amaryllis came over to me and tried to kiss me, humping my leg, slobbering on my face as she ground out her cigarette on my shoulder. Her breath stank. “So what if I couldn’t fuck her like a stallion and sire a specimen like you—a real man, a real son.”
She threw her glass into the Grand Canal and gestured wildly, as if to that distant chorus of admirers or critics, as if to make her case; and as she did, she stumbled forward, pushed me away, and sent herself tumbling backward, over the balustrade. She sank like a rock and was a deadweight when I managed to latch onto a leg near the muddy bottom. Then she grabbed me with a death grip around my neck, as if to keep me under.