The Puttermesser Papers (19 page)

Rupert gave a paradisal smile. “Isn't that what he had in mind?”

“He was in love! And she was lonely, she was missing connubial love. She'd been happy with Lewes, she wanted to be happy again—”

Puttermesser seized the
Letters
and shook out the pages with a ferocity. “Damn it, Rupert,
listen
!”

A great momentous change is taking place in my life—a sort of miracle in which I could never have believed, and under which I still sit amazed. If it alters your conception of me so thoroughly that you must henceforth regard me as a new person, a stranger to you, I shall not take it hardly, for I myself a little while ago should have said this thing could not be.

I am going to be married to Mr. Cross. . . . He has been a devoted friend for years, much loved and trusted by Mr. Lewes, and now that I am alone, he sees his only longed for happiness in dedicating his life to me. . . . Explanations of these crises, which seem sudden though they are slowly dimly prepared, are impossible. . . . We are going away tomorrow and shall be abroad two or three months.

“And then they went off together. That's how it is,” Puttermesser finished. “A pair of married lovers. You can't
just go and twist it into something else. You want to hear how she'd been feeling?
Here's
how she'd been feeling!” She was as pitiless as a conqueror. It was Rupert she wanted to conquer—Rupert's plan for Johnny Cross. She thumped a fist on the
Letters
and read out furiously, “‘Blessed are the dead who rest from their labors, and have not to dread a barren, useless survival.' That's why she married Johnny Cross!”

Rupert looked meditative; he looked serious. Puttermesser took him in all over again—he was narrow, and blond, and burnished, and small. He was brushed and orderly. The clear blank circles of his eyes needled out their steady black pupils. The pupils made deep fierce periods. They punctuated; they punctured.

“
We
ought to do that,” Rupert said. “Not the going away part. The great momentous change—that part.”

He
was
serious. It wasn't a snicker, it wasn't a crack tossed off. Puttermesser hated banter and flippancy; she had fled Harvey Morgenbluth's party because of banter and flippancy. Rupert was a Southerner—he wasn't infected by the New York patter. “Like a few other people in the world, he is much better than he seems—a man of heart and conscience wearing a mask of flippancy.” That was how George Eliot had once described George Lewes—though not right away. Her first impression was of a miniature fop, gyrating his arms, too talkative, shallow. But Rupert was serious through and through.

“O.K.,” Puttermesser said. “Let's do it.”

She wasn't sure whether she had at just that moment agreed to marry Rupert Rabeeno.

“Let's not forget the honeymoon,” he said.

“O.K.,” she said. “The honeymoon. You do it.”

She watched him do the honeymoon. He did it fastidiously, with a sort of military instinct for the organization of it—slips of paper to mark the pages, volumes set in consecutive order ready to hand, quotations culled on cards. It was curious how well he had prepared himself. Out of the jumble they drew from every night—maps, letters, journals, biographies, memoirs, pamphlets, books and more books!—he was fashioning something clever, something out of the ordinary. A destiny. Rupert went about doing the honeymoon with the same heat of immanence he had blown into “The Death of Socrates.” He read, yelled, sang, beamed. It was all for Johnny Cross, and Johnny Cross was only footnote and anticlimax. He wouldn't let her ride over his theory; she hadn't been able to deflect him. Puttermesser was jealous. Rupert had lavished nothing like this on George Lewes. Yet it really
was
happening again, a second round. Puttermesser was obliged to admit to herself the possibility that Rubert might be on the right track. The honeymoon of Johnny Cross and George Eliot was turning out to be purest mimicry of the honeymoon of George Lewes and George Eliot—the honeymoon that couldn't be called a honeymoon because there had never been a wedding.

Rupert did the wedding first. It was plausible to begin there, at the church at half-past ten in the morning. Lewes's son, two years younger than Johnny, gave George Eliot away. All of Johnny's relatives came—his sisters and their husbands and his cousins and his cousins' children. After
the ceremony the bride and groom went back to the Priory with a pair of solicitors to sign their wills. Then they set out for Dover, to catch the next day's Channel steamer for Calais. In Dover they spend the night at the same hotel George Eliot and George Lewes had stayed at on their journey twenty-five years before. (“When Johnny was still a schoolboy!” Rupert crowed. “The same hotel!”) When they reached Calais Johnny noticed how much younger and healthier George Eliot was looking—it was as if she were being renewed by every familiar mile along the old route. (“It
was
the old route,” Rupert pointed out.) They were heading for Venice. Johnny took them down to Milan through Grenoble and Mount Cenis, exactly the itinerary Lewes had designed for what George Eliot had called their “deep wedded happiness.” A week in Milan, as before, and then Venice.

Venice! “What stillness! What beauty!” George Eliot whispered. (Rupert, reading from George Eliot's journal, was whispering too.) “Looking out from the high window of our hotel on the Grand Canal, I felt that it was a pity to go to bed. Venice was more beautiful than romances had feigned. And that was the impression that remained and even deepened during our stay of eight days.” But that was long ago, with Lewes. Their room was dizzily distant above the glistering water. In the afternoons the two Georges meandered through the basilica of San Marco, thinking it resplendent but barbaric. In the Scuola di San Rocco they were transfixed by the homely Mary of Tintoretto's “Annunciation.” They bought lace and glass and jewelry, and floated around the lagoon in a gondola decked out with
colored lanterns. Under the Rialto bridge the gondoliers rested their poles and warbled their lungs out, to bring up an echo out of the waves. (“
O sole mio
,” Rupert sang. “Now watch-a-John-nee,” he sang.) Johnny Cross and George Eliot reached Venice a month after their wedding. It was fragrant early June. Sunlight and speckled cream palaces with ancient cracks running down their walls, and darkling shadows under the bridges—they intended to linger for an indefinite stretch of summer.

Instead they quit Venice in the second week.

“Panic,” said Rupert. “The honeymoon's secret shock. Its mystery, its enigma.”

“All right,” Puttermesser said. “Get it over with. You don't have to milk it.”

V. THE HONEYMOON

T
HEY TOOK A HOTEL
directly on the Grand Canal and had all their meals brought to their room. Much of George Eliot's new wardrobe had come with them in trunks. She was cunningly and handsomely dressed, the elderly erupting collarbones covered by the lightest of wraps, the youthful waist disclosed. Lewes's death had left her ailing and frail; now she was marvelously restored. She was robust, she was tireless. She marched Johnny out to churches and galleries, and lectured him on architecture, painting, sculpture, history. He followed her ardently. He was proud of her, he was proud of himself. It was achieved. It was all exactly as it had been with Lewes. They stood before the same ugly Tintoretto Madonna and circled the gaudy bowels of San Marco. The June heat thickened; it began to feel tropical, though inside the old stone churches it was cool enough.

But there was something amiss with the air; the air was strange, and bad; there was something amiss with the drains. The view (though not so high up) from the windows of the Hôtel de l'Europe was just what it had been for that earlier pair, the two Georges—the Grand Canal knife-bright in the morning, blood-streaked at sundown, glowering at dusk. The canal below was itself no better than a drain. The air that rose from it was a sick cloud, a pustule of spew, a
fume. The air was very bad. Their open windows gulped it in, especially at night when there was a flicker of wind. At night the stillness, the beauty: a pity to go to bed. Day after day they searched out gonging campaniles, out-of-the-way chapels, glazed portraits of holy babes and saints and bishops and doges, and when the heat ebbed slightly they rode round and round in gondolas, dazed by the blinding white cheeks of the palazzi. The beauty, the beauty!

In the evenings they settled in for supper at the snug oval table in their room. The napery was always blue, though the cloth, sweetened by some herbal soap, was changed daily, and a bowl of flowers, cut every afternoon, was set down on it to obscure the drifting smells of the canal. When the porter came to remove the trays—they ate simply, bread and fish and tea—Johnny and George Eliot were already sunk back into the
Inferno
. They had returned to Dante because it was clear that Johnny needed to brush up on his Italian now more than ever. Again she was lavishly attentive, especially to the difficulties of the syntax. She saw a kind of phrenological sturdiness in the coronal arch as his head lowered to the discipline of the page, a dolichocephalic head belonging to a long-boned six-footer. She was glad that he was as different in appearance from Lewes as could be—nothing about him was a reminder. Lewes had been little and vivacious—occasionally too quick—and brilliant and versatile. Johnny wasn't quick, but he was worldly enough; he was a banker who could tell when a man was bluffing. “Thou dost not know,” she teased him once, “anything of verbs in Hiphil or Hophal or the history of metaphysics or the position of Kepler in
science, but thou knowest best things of another sort, such as belong to the manly heart—secrets of lovingness and rectitude.”

His character was solid, well-tried, he was steady and affectionate. It hurt her that she was so old, though
he
never thought of it. In Venice, despite all their happiness, she was consumed by it. Nothing could make her young again for Johnny: she knew it whenever she combed through the gray in her hair, or held the mirror to her eyes, with their bruised fleshiness run wild in the caverns beneath. Johnny was already well into balding, but the hair around his ears was dark and bunched with curls. His beard was frizzy. Behind it (his lovely mouth lost in the frizz) there perspired a striving boy with a nervous look. She noticed the look and understood. It was five weeks—almost six—since the wedding. They went to their beds every night as friends—he was her noble companion, her squire, her loyal pupil. How hard he tried! But he faltered over the Dante; she pointed with her finger, and he corrected himself. He was beginning to languish a little. The more she bloomed, the sounder she grew, the more he drooped. They had not yet lain as husband and wife.

It was exercise he was missing. He was, after all, a man of the outdoors, he played tennis and soccer and rowed and swam. Venice, all that water, and no rowing—it was only the sunburned gondoliers and their indolent poles, it was only the dreamy floating, it was churches and galleries and pictures and history. Endless, endless history. Endless art. Endless beauty. He wanted some clean air, he wanted something strenuous.

(“Pretty strenuous,” Rupert intervened, “to keep on walking every minute in Lewes's shoes!”)

He needed, he said, a swim. The Grand Canal was a cesspool; it was right at their doorstep, just under their windows, but you couldn't swim in the canal. The Lido wasn't far. They ought to get over to the Lido, the other side of it, where there was a good sandy beach. On the other side of the Lido they sat sedately on a bench, among ladies and their parasols, and watched the line of tidal waves. Johnny said he longed for a sea bath. The bath houses were nearby, and he had brought along his swimming costume. He would dash into the sea, have a decent splash, loosen up his limbs, and dash out again; it wouldn't occupy more than a quarter of an hour. She thought the weather wasn't suitable for such a venture: see, she said, raising the pedagogic finger that had so often guided him through the
Inferno
, you can feel the wind. I'm dying for a bathe, he said, it's the middle of June and hot as Hades. “Though the temperature is agreeable,” she argued pleasantly, in that even, courteous contralto cherished by Lewes, and now cherished again by Johnny, “it has not the sort of heat that makes a plunge in cold water”—here she struggled to uncover a just simile—“as good as a drink to the thirsty.”

They went back to their hotel. Johnny ordered an elaborate supper of lamb and tomatoes and pudding. The sommelier followed behind the porter with two small ruby bottles. She drank a glassful. Johnny drank several. He seemed roused, alert. She caught the thirst in his eye, and knew it was a shy celebration. The time had come. Over the last days she had observed his inwardness, his
delicacy, his brooding. He had stood despondently before the very shapes and pictures that Lewes had looked on years before with so much brio and worshipful wit. Johnny was distracted. She was not surprised when, after the porter returned to clear the table, Johnny wiped his fingers with his blue napkin and declined to take up the Dante. She thought to tempt him with Comte—a diversion—but he turned away. She was discreet. The diffidence between them was natural. Until a month ago he had been a bachelor, doubtless no more celibate than any other handsome young fellow. But unlike herself—she had gone to bed with George Lewes for twenty-five years—he was new to the dignified rituals of conjugal intimacy. She made out some fresh tentativeness in him, a drawing away. It was restraint, it was mindfulness: he was whipping down animal nature until she was ready to give him a signal. She was a little frightened that he put the responsibility on her; but also excited. She, who was accustomed to leaning on a husband!

She retired into her dressing closet, a mirrored nook set apart, and chose a nightgown she had never worn before. She shut the door so that he would not see her too soon, and let down her hair. The nightgown feathered her bony shoulders with masses of concealing lace. In the looking glass it all at once struck her that, with her pleasant figure and loosened hair, she had the sweetness of a bride of twenty-two: she did not feel old at all.