“William went to lunch at the home of his wealthy friends Daniel Sargent Curtis and Ariana Randolph Wormeley Curtis at the Palazzo Barbaro–in one of two adjacent palaces that shared this name, one medieval and one baroque, fronting the wide, watery, S-shaped thoroughfare of the Grand Canal.  The Curtises’ staggering Venetian rental, which they would purchase outright in 1885, featured ‘colossal dimensions’ and a highly encrusted ‘grand style’ that impressed even the jaded William.  In cultivating such splendors, William had transformed his life into Harry’s.  Maybe William now wanted to be Harry even more than, historically, trailing his more confident big brother around London or the Newport art studio, Harry had wanted to be William.

“At the Curtises’, William had lunch with a hanger-on cousin of the family, the twenty-six-year-old painter John Singer Sargent.  Sargent and his cousin Ralph Wormeley Curtis, his studio protégé, were scouring the city for picturesque Venetian genre scenes–Sargent had been coloring up canvasses of Venetian women glassworkers and bead stringers.  But in 1882, the year of William’s visit, Sargent also daubed a portrait of William’s hostess, Ariana Curtis, that showed, against a sea of Spanish black, a formidable, strong-cheeked matron.  Wearing pearls, a lace collar, and a lace cap to contrast with all her black, the Sargentized Ariana Curtis observed the world with languid, half-lidded eyes–a taste of the expatriate splendor that William had to ‘fall back upon’ during those rainy evenings away from his wife.”

(c) Paul Fisher 2008 – All Rights Reserved

“Bob, barely flustered, only ratcheted up his invective, brining Henry Senior into the fray as a guardian of minimum civility.  Eventually, he would be drowned out by William as well as the other three never-silent sons.  Dinner knives swiped dangerously in gesticulating hands.

“Mary James, ‘bright as well as motherly,’ took the shy Edward under her wing, laughed reassuringly, and said, ‘Don’t be disturbed, Edward; they won’t stab each other.  This is usual when the boys come home.’  Alice quietly enjoyed this rough and tumble, ‘smiling, close to the combatants.’  But at least at this stage she didn’t join in these high-spirited contests.  Girls were supposed to remain decorous and not raise knives–or voices, for that matter.”

(c) Paul Fisher 2008 – All Rights Reserved

“With others, Harry strained to bring to life an old rusty pump in the stable yard.  As he worked doggedly to draw water, he got crowded into an awkward position, ‘jammed into an acute angle between two high fences.’  Then something tore.  In a spasm of agony, Harry did himself what he later called a ‘horrid even if an obscure hurt.’  Because Harry remained cryptic in his later memoirs, describing this mishap as an embarassing and ‘extraordinarily intimate,’ biographers speculated for a long time that Harry’s injury was genital.  Historical sources, however, confirm only a back problem . . .

“This ‘hurt’ strangely mimicked Henry Senior’s earlier leg injury.  Both accidents occurred during fires in stables, both struck in adolescence, and both severed the men, father and son, from the ease of ‘normal’ lives.  Harry’s accident, anyway, marked him as disabled in some way.  The ‘hurt’ amounted to a gash he’d carry not only through the Civil War but also on into his adulthood.”

(c) Paul Fisher 2008 – All Rights Reserved

“Paradoxically, William’s love of irony could partly be traced back to Dickens–himself a product of this restless London scene.  But now the boy’s sarcasm also sprang from his own displacement, from his and his siblings’ unfolding experience of what Harry would later call ‘hotel children’–children of transience and transit.  Their father had his own business; he went to Chelsea to refresh his acquaintance with the irascible [Thomas] Carlyle (whom he cleverly pronounced to be ‘the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease’).  But the children–between glorious cab rides–embarked now on their new career of exploring ‘the great bleak parlours of the hotels.’”

(c) Paul Fisher 2008 – All Rights Reserved