Authors: Dan Simmons
Near
him
. He’d taken her melancholic presence for granted while it was there for so many months. Only when she left Oxford, in something like exasperation if not outright anger, did he notice her by her absence.
Fenimore could be cast in fiction as an amusing eccentric, made more amusing by her hearing problem that she would not acknowledge and which made real conversation all the more difficult, especially in a salon or crowded public place. But James knew that she was no more eccentric than he. Almost certainly less so. At least Fenimore, as far as he knew, was holding no secret at the core of her being.
He had realized the previous year, just as Fenimore was leaving for Switzerland and then Italy again while showing more asperity toward him than ever before, not only that she’d moved to Oxford for all that time to be near him to offer her support during the last months of his sister’s life but that, with Alice now gone, perhaps she had expected more attention from James.
They’d often agreed to meet in European cities and even English towns, rigorously staying in separate hotels, but meeting for walks and dinners together and tours of art galleries or the occasional concert, which Fenimore enjoyed in spite of her hearing problem. Could she possibly have expected more than this?
Could it be possible that she was in love with him?
James had assiduously avoided being seen with her when mutual friends were about. They met in out-of-the-way towns, dined in hotels and restaurants which were nice enough but in which James was close to certain he’d never find any of his friends. He was not ashamed of or embarrassed by her, per se, since Constance Fenimore Woolson was one of the more interesting and sophisticated American writers he knew in Europe. He was, he acknowledged now, simply terrified that a third party would think what sister Alice had, on more than one occasion, written flippantly to William or someone else in his family—“Oh, Harry. He’s off flirting with Fenimore Woolson on the Continent.”
He allowed his dying sister to make such jokes. Having anyone else he knew do so, even—especially—his brother William, would devastate him.
But he had lived with Fenimore in Bellosguardo, lived with her after a fashion and by her terms, comfortable in their strangely similar and formal fellow-bachelors-devoted-to-their-work way, and those weeks had changed him somehow. Mostly, it had made Henry James realize how terribly, terribly lonely he was.
A year ago, in May of 1892, just a month after his forty-ninth birthday, James had visited Fenimore while she was packing to leave Oxford and then gone straight home to write a passage in his unfolding story “The Wheel of Time”. In his story, the 49-year-old main character Maurice Glanvil had, in his twenties, rejected the plain-looking but secretly charming lady friend Fanny Knocker, only to meet her again on the Continent decades later. Maurice’s wife had died, leaving him with few memories of actual love and a rather plain-looking daughter.
When 49-year-old Maurice meets Fanny again, now the widowed Mrs. Tregent, he sees to his astonishment that she has grown into that rare sort of beauty which reaches its apex only in middle age. And she has had a son—a strikingly handsome and dashing son just a little bit older than Maurice’s rather plain and ordinary daughter.
In the story, Fanny’s son repeats Maurice’s earlier betrayal of young Fanny Knocker by rejecting his daughter’s hopes of marriage despite both his and Mrs. Tregent’s efforts to make the match. Maurice’s daughter was simply too plain for the handsome youth.
But the real shock of the story occurs when Maurice learns that he—Maurice—had been the secret passion in Fanny Knocker Tregent’s life for all these years. A love undeclared. Unrealized. But central to her life.
That day in May a year ago, after visiting the strangely irritated and rapidly departing Fenimore, James had gone straight home and written this scene where Maurice is meditating on this unknown passion, a discovery that makes “his pleasure almost as great as his wonder”.
She had striven, she had accepted, she had conformed; but she had thought of him every day of her life. She had taken up duties and performed them, she had banished every weakness and practiced every virtue; but the still hidden flame had never been quenched. His image had interposed, his reality had remained, and she had never denied herself the sweetness of hoping that she would see him again and that she would know him. She had never raised a little finger for it, but fortune had answered her prayer. Women were capable of these mysteries of sentiment, these intensities of fidelity, and there were moments in which Maurice Glanvil’s heart beat strangely before a vision really so sublime. He seemed to understand now by what miracle Fanny Knocker had been beautified—the miracle of heroic docilities and accepted pangs and vanquished egotisms. It had never come in a night, but it had come by living for others. She was living for others still; it was impossible for him to see anything else at last than that she was living for him. The time of passion was over, but the time of service was long.
He had written that scene—published that story—all while smugly and secretly (even to himself) knowing that he was writing about Constance Fenimore Woolson’s long unstated passion for
him
. He hadn’t fully admitted the power of that connection even to himself last year, but he saw it now.
And he also saw, with his gorge rising in horror, that he might have been writing that passage about
himself
. About his unacknowledged, never recognized need—not for love, not for passion, never for desire, but still basic and compelling
need
—for Fenimore to be in his life, to be in his life to relieve his terrible burden of loneliness, to encompass him with her almost masculine understanding and yet persistently feminine presence.
Dear God
, thought Henry James on this Saturday morning a week before his fiftieth birthday,
I have to get out of here, away from here
.
He would go to Boston to leave Alice’s ashes in the marble urn on her grave where Miss Loring had set to rest the majority of Alice’s cremated remains. Then he would go home. Home to England.
One thing was now certain: with Sherlock Holmes gone from his life, the question Holmes had raised as to whether he was real or a fictional character—thus making Henry James an adjunct fictional character if he were merely being used in a work of fiction as Holmes’s Dr. Watson–like assistant made to marvel at Holmes’s powers of deduction—was moot. With Holmes gone, doing whatever he was doing wherever he was doing it, Henry James had returned to being just a living, breathing human being. Albeit a powerfully gifted and talented one.
* * *
There was a rapid knock at his door, James said “Enter” without thinking, and Clara Hay fairly danced into the room.
“You must see this, Harry, you simply must!” she cried, as giddy as a girl. She caught his left hand in both of hers and all but lifted him bodily up and out of his chair.
She led the amazed author to the door. “No need for your coat, Harry. It’s as warm as a summer’s day outside. And it’s only a few steps. You simply
must
see this! It’s too wonderful to miss.”
“See what?” managed James as they hurried down the broad central staircase toward where Benson held the front door open for them.
“The Flying Vernettis!”
* * *
The crowd had gathered on the green grass of Lafayette Square Park and were looking up at what Clara reminded him was the Camerons’ huge house. James saw Lizzie Cameron near the front of the crowd (but not her husband, Don, of course—he would be at work), shading her eyes with her hand so that she could see better. James noticed other high-society neighbors, mostly matrons, of the Hays’ and Adamses’ and Camerons’ neighborhood gathered near the east side of the park while more common folk, including some street workers still with their brooms, stood back a bit. Some of the society women—James saw young Helen Hay—were using opera glasses the better to see.
But everyone was looking upward. Clara pointed. James shielded his own eyes and tried to find what they were all gawking at.
There. Along the highest roofline of the huge, steeply roofed house, a man and a boy were walking with exaggerated high steps, crossing the dangerous distance between one cluster of chimney pots and another. The man had a sort of quiver strapped to his back and from that vessel rose various brushes and strangely apportioned brooms.
“Chimney sweeps?” said James, astonished that Clara had dragged him out into the hot sunlight for mere chimney sweeps.
“Watch!” cried Clara Hay.
James saw that there might be some tension in watching the man and boy move carefully along that high, narrow roof beam, since they were almost sixty feet up and the Camerons’ roof was far too steep to stop their fall if either one slipped.
Suddenly James and the crowd gasped as the boy did a forward cartwheel on the narrow ridge and the man, letting the quiver dangle by its strap so the brushes would not fall, did a handstand behind the boy, his hands on the slippery slate slabs on either side of the apex.
The two were odd-looking creatures. Both man and boy—he might have been eleven or twelve, no older—were rail thin and dressed in black sweeps’ clothing that seemed several sizes too small for each of them. That was a deliberate effect, James noticed, since the socks and shirts protruding from the cuffs were red-and-black striped for the skinny man and green-and-black striped for the boy.
The strangeness was enhanced by the fact that the grown chimney sweep had orange hair spiked up into a column, rather like a Mohawk Indian’s vertical queue, while the boy’s spiky hair, stabbing out in all directions, had been dyed a bright, Kendal green. The man’s face had been painted white—a skull—and the eyes were lost to sight in black paint. The boy’s face was painted all white save for the narrowest strip of red on his thin lips. The effect—at least for James—was disturbing.
Suddenly the almost emaciated-looking boy took the quiver of brushes from the scarecrow man and crouched low as the skull-man leaned forward over the boy, tumbling in a perfect somersault along the three-inch-wide ridgeline, and then immediately got to his feet and bent over as the boy jumped up onto his back.
The crowd let out a gasp and low moan and some in the front stepped into those behind them, as if seeking to get out of range for when the man and boy fell.
James felt a sense of unreality fall over him like a cloak as he watched the red-and-black-striped man—his long, white fingers looking truly skeletal—remove the covers to the triple-chimney at the end of the ridgeline. Fingers moving in a blur, working together, orange-haired-man and green-haired-boy used a loose bit of rope to tie those coverings tight at the base of the chimney.
Then the skeletal man—his black shoes looked almost like ballet slippers—leaped straight into the air until his legs were far apart, the shoe-slippers on opposite sides of the four-foot-wide triple chimney.
The crowd gasped again, like a single organism, James thought (he had gasped as well, although not out loud), when the boy simply threw himself into the air sixty feet above the ground, his arms ahead of him like a diver leaping from a cliff into the sea. But there was no water below the boy, only a six-story drop to hard soil, grass, and stone walks.
The tall sweep with orange hair caught the boy in mid-air and held him, the boy’s terribly thin arms still stretched straight forward, his legs rigid behind him, until suddenly the scarecrow adult swung the skinny lad until his arms and head were pointing straight down into the narrow chimney aperture. It was only then that James noticed that the adult sweep and boy sweep were attached at the waist with two strangely knotted ropes, rather like two Alpine climbers roped together on the Matterhorn.
The skull-faced tall sweep let the boy’s torso and legs slide between his long, stick-white fingers until all of the boy save for his lower legs and feet had disappeared down the impossibly narrow chimney. The grown sweep let go of the boy’s ankles and the crowd moaned in unison again until they saw that the skull-faced adult sweep now had both ropes in his hands. The man began lowering the rope, first letting it slide through one hand, then through the other, and all the while he was leaning further back from the vertical on the narrow chimney pot ridge, letting the boy’s slight weight balance him as he continued backward until it seemed impossible that he might ever pull himself upright again.
James turned away.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” asked Clara Hay. “Exhilarating!”
“Extraordinary,” managed James, not wanting to hurt his hostess’s feelings. Those few seconds of watching had given him a sense of vertigo followed by nausea.
What an insane species we are
, was his only coherent thought.
“They call themselves the Flying Vernettis,” continued Clara, obviously not noticing James’s sudden paleness. “Father and son, Lizzie Cameron thinks. They have been doing their chimney-cleaning this week for only a few of the finest houses, for the finest families, and Lizzie has been impatient all week for them to get to her house.”
“Extraordinary,” James said again, not turning his gaze back to the spectacle as the crowd gasped and groaned again at some new impossibility.
“Lizzie says that they’re ever so efficient,” continued Clara, speaking to James but looking back the other way. “They close every room off before clearing and cleaning the chimneys—and heaven knows some of these older houses need such a clean sweep—and she says they lay newspaper across everything in the closed-off rooms before the actual dusting.”
“Extraordinary,” said James. He focused his gaze on the White House across the street to the south. “I believe I shall take a brief walk,” he continued. “I shall see you later this afternoon or evening, Clara.”
Clara did not respond. Her hands clasped tightly together as if in prayer, her mouth open, she was totally absorbed in whatever death-defying absurdities were occurring high above her on Lizzie Cameron’s rooftop.