The Marble Quilt Read Free

see Europe?” she’d asked, fixing his collar.
    â€œMore than anything, Aunt Irene.”
    â€œBecause I’m planning a little tour this fall with the boys—following my brother’s itinerary, you know—and I thought, Wouldn’t it be marvelous for them to have a tutor, a scholar like yourself, to tell them what was what. What do you think, Harold? Would your mother mind?”
    â€œI think it’s a capital idea.”
    â€œGood.”
    So here he was.
    So far, things hadn’t gone well at all.
    In Paris, Harold had decided to test the boys’ receptivity to art by taking them to the Louvre. But Grady wanted only to ride the métro, and got infuriated when Harold explained that there was no need to take the métro: the museum was only a block from their hotel. Then they were standing in front of the Mona Lisa, Harold lecturing, Grady quivering with rage at having been deprived of the métro, Stephen leaning, inscrutable as ever, against a white wall. Harold spoke eloquently about the painting and, as he spoke, he felt the silent pressure of their boredom. They had their long bodies arranged in attitudes of sculptural indifference, as if to say, we have no truck with any of this. Curse our mother for pulling us out of our lives, and curse our father for dying, and our brother for dying, and curse you. To which Harold wanted to answer: Well, do you think I like it any more than you do? Do you think I enjoy babbling like an idiot, and being ignored? For the truth was, the scrim of their apathy diffused his own sense of wonder. After all, he was seeing this for the first time, too: not a cheap reproduction, but
La Gioconda
. The real thing. How dare they not notice, not care?
    Yes, Harold decided that morning, they were normal, these boys. They would never warm to art. (As if to prove his point, they now gravitated away from his lecturing, and toward an old man who had set up an easel and paints to copy a minor annunciation—their curiosity piqued by some low circus element in the proceedings: “Gosh, it looks exactly like the original!” an American man standing nearby said to his wife.) Why Aunt Irene had insisted on bringing them to Europe in the first place Harold still couldn’t fathom; what did she think was going to happen, anyway? Did she imagine that upon contact with the sack of Rome, the riches of Venice, some dormant love of beauty would awaken in them, and they would suddenly be transformed into cultured, intellectual boys,the sort upon whom she could rely for flashes of wit at dinner parties, crossword solutions on rainy afternoons? Boys, in other words, like their brother Toby, or their uncle Toby, for that matter, who had kept a portrait of Byron on his desk. Grady, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared less about Byron, while Stephen, so far as Harold could tell, liked only to lean against white walls in his flannel trousers, challenging the marble for beauty. Really, he was too much, Stephen: self-absorbed, smug, arrogant. Harold adored him.
    There was a rapping on the compartment door.
    â€œEntrez,”
announced Mrs. Warshaw.
    The conductor stepped in. Immediately Grady pulled back the curtain, splaying the light. Stephen’s eyes slotted open again.
    â€œPermit me to excuse myself,” the conductor said in tormented French, “but we are approaching the St. Gotthard tunnel. I shall now light the lamps and make certain that the windows and ventilators are properly closed.”
    â€œBien sûr.”
    The conductor was Italian, a handsome, sturdy fellow with a thick black mustache, blue eyes, fine lips. Dark hairs curled under his cuffs, rode down the length of his hands to the ends of his thick fingers.
    Bowing, he stepped to the front of the compartment, where he got down on his knees and fiddled with the ventilator panel. As he knelt he winked manfully at Grady.
    â€œOh, I don’t like tunnels,” Irene said.