Free The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt Page B

Provençal language in the poetry of Dante. His father had wanted him to become a baseball player and enter the business world, but Peter never moved back to the United States. Instead he became an acolyte of the Anglican priest who presided over the American Church in Florence, and when the priest was reassigned to Venice to establish an English church there, Peter came with him, met Rose, fell in love, and married her.
     
     
    By the time he arrived in Venice, Peter bore little resemblance to the boy from Oak Park, Illinois. He had re-created himself, and he was disarmingly candid about it. “My father never understood why anybody would pick up and move to Italy. Italy of all places. He enjoyed visiting us here, but he could never take my living in Italy seriously. To him it seemed like a nice joke. When our son, Frederick, was born, my father offered to pay for his college tuition, but only on the condition that he go to an American college. He was afraid we were going to make Frederick into an Englishman. He got this notion, no doubt, because of the way I speak and because I married an English girl. However, I’m pleased to say that every bit of Frederick’s education, to date, has been in Venice—he’s a Venetian, not an Englishman. He’ll soon go off to college—but to Oxford, not to America. And as for my living in Italy, it was the best decision I’ve ever made. I luxuriate in this world I’ve invented for myself.”
     
     
    As for Rose, living in Venice came naturally. She was a member of the British aristocracy. For centuries her family had lived in great manor houses and passed along such titles as Baron of Ashford, Lord Bury, and the Earl of Albemarle among the males. Her ancestral line did have its quirky elements: Rose’s great-great-aunt, Alice Keppel, was the publicly acknowledged mistress of Edward VII. Mrs. Keppel’s daughter, Violet Trefusis—“Aunt Violet” to Rose—had become famous as the eccentric and irrepressible lover of Vita Sackville-West. When Rose was a teenager, she visited her aging, expatriated Aunt Violet in Florence. Violet advised her in matters of style and society, contributing significantly to Rose’s worldliness and dramatic poise. Although Rose was entitled to be addressed as “Lady Rose,” her family background seemed a matter of indifference to her. She had settled in Venice in part to get away from it. And because she had lived for most of her childhood at Mount Stewart, a family estate in Northern Ireland, she often replied to questions about her origins by saying simply, “I’m bog Irish.”
     
     
    Rose had been coming to Venice since the age of sixteen, usually in the company of her mother, who bought an old gondolier’s cottage as a retreat for summer vacations. Ezra Pound lived next door in an identical cottage, which he had shared with his mistress, Olga Rudge, since the 1920s.
     
     
    “Pound had just been released from St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane,” Rose recalled, “and by the time I saw him in the early 1960s, he was old and hermitlike. He had taken his famous vow of silence.
     
     
    “We’d see the two of them, Olga and Ezra, quietly strolling in the neighborhood and having coffee at one of the cafés along the Zattere. She was diminutive and very beautiful. He was tall and dignified and always elegantly dressed: a broad-brimmed felt hat, a wool coat, tweed jacket, a flowing tie. His face was craggy, and his eyes were immensely sad. When people stopped to greet them, he would stand patiently, in silence, while Olga made pleasantries. We never saw him speak in public, but at home we could hear him reading his poetry aloud in a strong, rhythmic voice. My mother was a fan of Pound’s, so she rang the doorbell and asked if she might have an audience with him. Olga very politely told her to go away: It was no use, he wouldn’t talk to anyone. We finally realized we’d been hearing recordings of Pound reading his poems.