“Is that surprising?” asked William.
“It wasn’t what you think.” The woman shook her head. “Not that Polly didn’t have business in that way too. But this wasn’t favors; it was something else, only she wouldn’t say what.”
“Do you know where she went?”
“No,” sighed Mary. “But I know it weren’t far. I know ’cause she walked, and once I saw her come back after only an hour or so. She had her cardigan buttoned wrong.”
“That would suggest—”
“Yes, I know, but she said express it wasn’t that. It was more of a highbrow sort of thing, she said. But she’d promised not to say more. I don’t know if it got to do with her death, and it probably don’t. You find all kinds that prowl around here and have odd tastes. Polly wasn’t one to judge.”
“But she said it was something highbrow?”
“Yes. Can’t say what she meant by that.”
“Well, if anything more occurs to you, please let us know,” said William, scribbling his name and Henry’s address, 34 De Vere Gardens, Kensington, on a sheet of paper and handing it to her.
She looked at it doubtfully.
“It’s his lodging,” said William, a bit miffed. “He’s here for a longer duration, and I’m staying with him.”
The woman’s concern appeared to be assuaged, and she addressed Henry again in a supplicating tone. “You’ll say hello to my Tessie when you see her, won’t you? And as I think on it, wait here.” She hurried from the room and returned in a moment with a package wrapped in brown paper. “It’s just a cardigan I made and a jar of one of her favorite jellies. I’d be more than obliged if you could get them to her. Here’s her address.” She extracted a postcard from the pocket of her apron and handed it to Henry, along with the package that she had obviously prepared in advance in the hope she could find someone to mail it for her.
“It would be my pleasure,” said Henry. “Your daughter is fortunate to have such a devoted mother.” He took the package and bowed his head gallantly.
After they left, William looked at his brother with exasperation. “Now what are you going to do with that?” He motioned to the package.
“I’m going to send it to Howells, who will make sure the girl gets it. Howells knows people, you know.”
“Your capacity to lie with aplomb disturbs me.”
Henry bristled. “I don’t lie,” he protested, “I make things up. There’s a great difference between the two. I may not have literally been to Milwaukee, but I have visited the city in my imagination; I may even have created a character who lived there. I shall write the girl a note to be delivered with the package, in which I extol the virtues of her mother. I will get a complete report from Howells’s emissary as to how she is doing. I am not as socially indifferent as you think. I daresay I see people more clearly in their human context than you, who are continually seeking to insert them into a theoretical one.”
“You were helpful,” admitted William grudgingly. “Thank you for accompanying me.”
“You’re welcome,” said Henry, trying not to show that the acknowledgment touched him. He had achieved a modicum of success with his novels, and he had a profile of sorts in society. But William had always treated him dismissively, had viewed his life as frivolous, and had denigrated his writing, if only by failing to read it. These things pained Henry deeply, though he pretended not to care. For more even than social acclaim and fortune, more even than literary immortality, he desired the good opinion of his older brother.
Chapter 13
Not long after Henry and William left Alice’s flat, Sally entered her employer’s bedroom to announce that Mr. and Miss Sargent were downstairs. “They say to tell you as you don’t have to see ’em if you don’t want, as they don’t want to disturb you if you’re resting.”
It was a typical sort of message from the Sargents, who were always extravagantly polite and unassuming. They had a long-standing friendship with the James family and treated Alice with particular reverence because of their instinctive belief that she was a uniquely gifted person. As a result, even today, when Alice had planned to review newspaper clippings of the murders, she was willing to put aside her work and welcome their visit.
“Show them in,” she instructed Sally, “and bring us some tea.”
A tall man and a small woman with a slight limp entered the room. Emily Sargent ran to kiss Alice and Katherine and then immediately began helping arrange the furniture. She had been the victim of a debilitating spinal disease in childhood and had suffered years of pain, but it did not appear to have embittered her or slowed her down in the least. On the contrary, she was the most loving and congenial sort of person, energetically devoted to her friends, but most devoted of all to her brother, whose talent she worshipped. Everyone agreed that John Singer Sargent’s ability to paint as freely as he did and to shrug off any criticism that came his way was because he had his sister to take care of everything and sing his praises all day long.
Emily also had enormous respect for the relationship of Alice and Katherine and was the one person, even above Henry, they allowed to enter the sickroom when Alice had one of her “spells.” “Emily is a creature who makes me temporarily put aside my spiritual skepticism,” Alice liked to say. “I feel sure she is modeled on the angel you see in the background of those paintings, the one who makes sure that the Lord doesn’t trip on his robe. Of course, John is an angel too.”
Indeed, John Sargent, a towering figure who stooped slightly when he walked, as though not wanting to assert his height too aggressively, had a quality of such gentle goodwill about him that even those of his peers who, for reasons of jealousy or aesthetic prejudice, were scornful of his work, found themselves disarmed when they met him. The Jameses spoke of these friends as one would of family members who had been raised in a different part of the world and spoke a different language. The Sargents were not cerebral people and would as soon listen to music or, in John’s case, paint or play the piano, as talk. Not that he was simple—he spoke half a dozen languages without an accent and knew his way around every city in Europe. But his very cosmopolitanism made him a kind of innocent. Alice’s father had traveled far and wide in search of the proper place to educate his children, finally settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the best he could do, but Sargent’s parents had merely traveled, with no destination in mind, and had never settled anywhere. John Sargent had thus been spared the pressure of expectation that the Jameses had suffered. He had started drawing when he was a boy and simply kept on doing it.
While Emily was occupied with pulling the armchair nearer to the bed and arranging the curtains, John sauntered over, embraced Alice, and kissed Katherine’s hand.
“How is your mother?” asked Alice. She knew that their father had died in April, a loss that both Emily and John had handled with equanimity, as had their mother, though she had maintained the convenient social prerogative of a long mourning. Alice sometimes envied her friends for having a father who had effaced himself so completely during his life that his death was a gentle slipping away. Her own father had been a towering presence, and his death three years earlier had been a crushing, incapacitating blow, not just for her, but also for her brothers, who dwelled on it continually and were constantly trying to get over it—without succeeding.
“She’s getting along,” said John mildly.
“She always asks about you and can’t wait to be in a condition to visit,” added Emily.
It was hard for Alice to imagine that Mary Sargent was not in a condition to visit, and assumed that she was simply not in the mood to visit, which was, upon consideration, the same thing.
“Please sit,” said Alice, motioning to the chairs beside her bed.