By now, torches were being lit at the palace gatehouse. What would I do if they wouldn’t let me in here either? I leaned out the window again. “Orazio Gentileschi? Pittore italiano?” This time a guard repeated the name to a porter who went inside.
Somewhere in that wet stone building Father breathed and painted, but he could not see through walls. I could tell the driver to turn around. No one would know. I could go home, back to warmth and people I knew. To Genoa. To apologize to Cesare and Bianca. To take Renata to Florence, to the academy. Look Signor Bandinelli straight in the eye and say, “Pay attention. Train her. Nurture her. She will do great things.” I could give her Michelangelo’s brush.
But that was not what one did. Instead, one muddled through, fretting about what to eat each day, trying not to think of one’s last brushstroke. What color would it be? What brush? What effect?
The porter returned and allowed me to enter and the trunk to be set down in the gatehouse. I picked up my carpetbag and, with a stride that belied my uncertainty, I went inside. A woman led me upstairs, chattering words I didn’t understand, harsh sounds echoing against the bare stone walls of the staircase. Her expression seemed a reprimand for not coming earlier. We passed through room after room until she finally opened a door and he was there.
Orazio Gentileschi, with his shapeless coat draped over his shoulders, coughing and holding his chest. Something between a grunt and a whimper escaped when he saw me. He took a few steps toward me, then stopped.
“You did ask that I come,” I said, my pulse beating in my throat.
“I had given up thinking that you would.”
“I couldn’t come earlier. Palmira wanted to get married. It took me a long time to earn a dowry.”
“You should have asked.”
Our sentences came between awkward pauses. We stood apart from each other. I was still holding my carpetbag. He gestured for me to set it down.
“She married a nobleman. For love. They chose each other. She’ll never lift a brush. She hates painting.”
He looked hurt. “She was a beautiful bride, I imagine.”
“Yes, but beauty isn’t everything. It’s better to have a hunger and appreciation for beauty than to be merely beautiful. In the end, life is richer that way. She may learn that.”
He puffed air out his nostrils. “So, the years have made you wise.”
“They’ve made me realistic, and content. I’m glad she’s happy.”
“And Palmira’s father? Was he at the wedding?”
“No.”
“Pity. It would seem an opportune time for a reconciliation.” Judgment shone in his eyes. “Did you try?”
What business is it of yours, I wanted to say. “It’s not as simple as you think.”
“He didn’t help with the dowry?”
“I didn’t ask him to.”
We looked at each other warily, as if we both recognized that any misstep might unleash fire.
“Can’t I sit down? I’m exhausted.”
He emptied a chair of paint rags and dragged it toward the fireplace. Not a word of thanks for my coming.
“The palace is so empty. Furniture and tapestries, but no people. Just a few servants and caretakers. You live here all the time so . . . alone?”
He closed his eyes, screwed up his face, lifted his chin.
“What’s the matter? Are you in pain?”
“Just hearing Italian again.” He blew his nose on a rumpled handkerchief.
“You said that fellow with the strange name speaks Italian.”
“Inigo Jones. Uomo vanissimo,” he said scornfully. “The expert of all arts. He is everything and everywhere. Clever, with a good sense of design, but mightily full of himself. Flaunts his position as a favorite of the king. So does a Flemish painter. Van Dyck. An ill-mannered and jealous boor lapping up the king’s luxury.”
He stirred the fire roughly, and placed more wood on it.
“So there are people here?”
“The king and queen hold court here in the palace twice a year, for hunting. The queen comes more often to follow the progress of the decoration of her own house.”
“That white building?”
“Yes.”
“What’s her name?”
“Henrietta Maria. Her mother was Marie de’ Medici.”
“You can speak French to her?”
“Five years in that court ought to have taught me something.”
“And English?”
“Some. Badly.”
Now what? What to say next? I couldn’t tell him about Graziela. No stories of dying. Not with how thin he was.
“I brought you olives and artichokes.” I dug into my carpetbag for the jars, happy to have something for him that he’d like. “I saved them for you from Palmira’s wedding supper.” He pried open the wax seal on the olives with a palette knife and ate one, then two more.
“Do you have any bread?” I asked.
“Yes. Awful stuff.”
I brought out the wine and olive oil. He drew over a chair for himself, and watched my every move, curious, it seemed, about what was in my carpetbag. He poured the wine and we huddled by the fire and ate artichokes on the moistened bread. He closed his eyes when he chewed, to concentrate on the taste.
“Too many years I have lived here. And in France. Too many.”
“Yes. I know.” I felt the warming path of the wine in my body while the fire thawed me from the outside. I held my hands up to the flames and let out a slow, deep breath to try to relax from days of cold.
“And for what? For hard-hearted courtiers swarming here twice a year?” he continued. “Men of duplicity who eat the king’s meat and then plot against him? They wear quilted doublets here, but not for warmth in this frozen land. They’re to ward off poignards.” He made a gesture with his bread in his hand, and an artichoke fell off. He picked it up and ate it. “For a scheming, supercilious queen?”
I didn’t expect such bitterness. “For all time, Father.”
“No, Artemisia. Most of the world’s people will eat their bread while watching whippings, hangings, burnings, spectacles of any kind”—he drummed his fingers on the wooden arm of the chair at every word—“and not care a whit that there are painters in the world quietly working, for all time.”
“But you wrote that the court was friendly to you, and would be to me.”
“To get you to come.”
“You mean you lied to me?” I felt my back become rigid.
With a disdainful wave of his hand he disregarded my question. Was this another betrayal? Would there be no work for me here? If I reacted, we’d surely get off to a bad start.
“They tolerate me because I can bring them a little visual drama instead of their stiff, boring portraits.” He took a draught of wine, stretching out his neck to savor it. “Artemisia, there’s none of la dolce vita here.” He balled up his fist and brought it to his heart. “No conscious, appreciative enjoyment of fine things. Their gentility is self-serving and manipulative. They don’t care about art. They care about hunting and horses and ships.”
“But we care. Every painting gives us joy.”
He looked up from his wine as if the thought startled him. “You’re doing . . . well?”
“It varies. I have a clerk now who acts as my agent. He sold my first Judith.”
“Finally someone smart enough to recognize your genius. Who bought it?”
“Prince Gennaro of San Martino.”
“Lucky for him that fools before him passed it up.”
“I still have to explain again and again that I charge the Roman way, a set price. They think I operate the Neapolitan way, asking thirty scudi and then settling on four.” It was an odd thing to say, but I was tense. We didn’t trust each other. And I didn’t trust myself.
“I’ve been working for a patrician from Sicily, Don Antonio Ruffo, and for the Count of Monterrey. But only portraits for him. Nobody wants invenzione. All they want is ideal femininit
y. I haven’t done any heroic women since I came to Naples. Time bled the torture out of me.”
His eyes flashed resentment that I’d said that word, that I’d reminded him so soon after arriving. I only meant . . . I didn’t know what I meant. I just said it.
“Still angry?” His voice turned icy.
“No. I’ve stopped painting violent Judiths. I guess that shows I’m not angry, except when mean-spirited people in Rome brought it up in front of Palmira when she was younger. But that was only feeble, short-lived anger at them, not at you or him.”
“I thought that finding a husband for you made up for it anyway. Considering your reputation—”
“My reputation. If reputation was on your mind, why didn’t you look into the reputation of the man you were paying to take me?”
“He was Giovanni’s brother.”
I squeezed the arm of the chair. “Giovanni’s brother had a string of lovers before and after I married him. That’s why I didn’t reconcile, if you must know. And that’s why he was willing to marry someone sight unseen. He had to go out of Florence to find a wife ignorant of his reputation.” I kept control of my voice, but only by a hair. “He married me for the dowry, which he used to rent a room to entertain his women. A closed box of a man, incapable of real love. Oh yes, Father, a careful choice you made.”
“Me. Always me to blame.” He stood up and walked away. “Just what I was afraid of,” he muttered. “I shouldn’t have written you.”
“Do I still need to tell you how I might have been chosen by a man who loved me if I had not been exposed in Rome?”
“It was necessary.”
“Necessary that everything else come first? Your friendship with a bastard? Your sickly need for him?” Words I’d said to myself a thousand times and promised I wouldn’t say to him came gushing out. I leaned forward in the chair. “So necessary you couldn’t stop yourself from inviting him to Genoa?”
“How many years does a man have to live in penitence? For twenty years you’ve treated me like a leper.” He was pacing now.
“And for twenty years, you never acknowledged that you betrayed me. Never said you’re sorry. You want forgiveness but you’re unwilling to say you’re sorry.”
“There’ll come a time, either here or hereafter, when you’ll say that things just happened, not that I made them happen.” His fingers pounded his chest at the “I.” “You expect too much of me. Nothing less than what I did would have stopped Agostino. I know him, Artemisia.”
For an instant, I had the sense that he actually believed what he said. Still, I plunged ahead, my nails digging into my palms. “You send me a self-pitying letter asking that I come and forgive you. Can’t you see how selfish that was? Can’t you, for once, look at my life from my perspective? No family blood runs in your veins. I’ll tell you what runs in your veins. Orazio Gentileschi, first, last, and always.”
His trembling hands grasped the back of his chair. “If you felt so bitter, you shouldn’t have come. Do you think an old man wants to be slapped down again by hearing everything he ever did wrong? God will judge me, Artemisia, on my day of dying. Not you.”
I stood up. “But I can say—”
“No!” he bellowed and waved me away. “Leave me alone. Get out.”
I was dumbfounded. He wouldn’t even look at me. “Get out.” He took a few steps toward me as if he would push me.
I couldn’t move.
“Eh, porca miseria.” He grabbed his doublet and left.
28
Artemisia
Get out. Where? I stood alone in his room, shaking. After traveling for a month, get out. After dismantling my life again, get out. The ingrate. I shouldn’t have come.
I walked around the room in circles. I wasn’t going to get out. I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t make anyone understand me even if I left. Let him spend the night somewhere else. Getting me to come here under false pretenses and then shoving me away. He’d become an embittered old man.
I gulped down some wine and flopped into the chair by the fire, feeling torn and drained. Only one thing Father had said made sense—that Agostino would have continued using me unless Father exposed him in court. Probably true. One dreary month of travel to learn that.
I ate an olive and looked around. The room was cluttered. A waistcoat and breeches hung on an easel. Books, plates of half-eaten food, jars of brushes, his worn copy of Ripa’s Iconologia, small sketches on scraps of paper all lay haphazardly on a long worktable. Between a pair of oil lamps there was a stack of large drawings. I was curious but too tired to get up and take a look. I tipped my head back against the tall chair and closed my eyes.
After a while I heard a noise. Maybe he was standing outside the door waiting for me to apologize. I opened it and walked through a few other rooms. Empty. And cold. I went back into his room and put more wood on the fire.
My curiosity was too much for me. On a portfolio cover he had written, “Allegory of Peace and the Arts Under the English Crown.” I looked at the whole stack of drawings. They were muses and allegorical figures holding their various symbols taken from the Iconologia—book, helmet, sphere, flute, palm frond, sheaf of wheat, laurel wreath, cornucopia. He still had a fine sense for composition and form. It looked like a huge project. I wondered how far along he was on it.
I picked up a small parchment page of profile and three-quarter sketches. To think that this late in life he was still studying how to do faces. I was moved by the humility in that. Like me still struggling to do feet. On the back of it was a letter, full of ink blotches and scratch-outs, addressed to il granduca Ferdinando.
I am taking the liberty to transmit to Your Highness this small example of my painting in order for you to determine if I am able to merit employment in your service for the little that remains of my life, if this weak talent of mine might be sufficient to fulfill my ardent desire to return to my beloved homeland, submitting myself to Your Very Serene Highness, to whom with devoted affection I make a reverent bow from England.
If he had actually sent it, and this was only a draft, he had apparently received no answer. He’d probably yearned to come home for a long time, yet was afraid to leave secure work. I understood that. It sprang from the same source as my own ache at being uprooted. His exaggerated self-abasement saddened me. To practically beg for a commission from a boy duke after a lifetime of painting for cardinals and queens. A knot swelled in my throat. He’d suffered humiliations too.
His cassapanca was open and clothes lay in disarray. A sick shock pierced me. His undergarments were all in shreds.
On a window ledge was his carved wooden memento box, the other one of the pair I had always kept with me. I went to the door and listened a moment but didn’t hear anything, so I opened the box. My letters from Florence were on top, brittle and faded. I read them again—Palmira’s birth, Cosimo’s first acceptance of my work, my admission to the academy. The last one pricked my conscience. I’d barely thanked him for writing to Buonarroti, yet that had started my acceptance in Florence.
Underneath the letters were a few Roman coins, cold to my touch, probably kept in the hope of returning, and my mother’s wedding ring. The large ruby I remembered had been removed. I didn’t like to think what that meant. A child’s drawing was folded to fit the box exactly and show the face of a woman. On the back was written, Amore mio, Artemisia drew this portrait of me for you on her tenth birthday. See that she is happily married, as we are. Prudenzia. How Mother would have grieved if she had witnessed the scene just past.
The pity of his life, his last thirty years without her, more than a decade outside his homeland, his communication always limited by language. How long has it been since anyone touched him, other than a slap on the back, a touch that would convince him that his heart was still alive? I marveled at the courage of his loneliness. Would I be able to command it when I was alone at his age? If, for his time in France, Agostino had been with him, I could not begrudge him that.
&nbs
p; I set my father’s things back in his memento box the way I had found them, loosened my bodice laces, and finished the wine in my glass. I could not shake the humiliation and longing of his letter to Ferdinando, yet I’d written letters nearly as desperate. Both of our lives seemed to consist of piercing humiliations, some victories, and brief moments of sweetness. We both ought to count ourselves fortunate if, in the end, the sweet and the sour were of equal weight.
Coming here meant nothing if I had made him wish I hadn’t. The journey I’d made was easy compared to what lay ahead—to complete the gesture, not just to come here but to enact the full measure of compassion, bigger than offering a blanket, as formidable to me as Christ touching the leper, Graziela touching the dying man. It was frightening, not because of what might happen, but because, if I were fiercely honest with myself, I would distrust my sincerity.
I put on my night shift, lay down on his bed and pulled his blanket over me. Maybe he’d come back tomorrow morning, ashamed, as I was.
No sounds in the neighboring rooms roused me until late in the morning. I stirred up the few embers to ignite a fire, and stood close to it. I was famished. I ate more artichokes and olives and the rest of the bread while standing there. I poured water from a pitcher into a washing bowl and dipped my hands in to wash my face. It was so cold I cried out at the shock. I managed to tie up my hair, dirty from weeks of travel.
I looked out the window. The rain had stopped. The sky was what I imagined English people took for blue. On the other side of an enclosed meadow stood the Queen’s House where the carriage had taken me first. From here I could see its classical lines, its fine sense of balance. It had a balustrade for viewing the countryside from the roof, and a loggia on the first story. There was nothing to do but walk across the meadow and see if he was there. I dug into my carpetbag to find Michelangelo’s brush and tucked it in the inside pocket of my short cape. I found the stairway and a door. The long wet grasses soaked my shoes. I lifted my skirt to try to keep it clean and dry.