The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

by Michelle Lovric

  The first photograph was at the Ca’ d’Oro, the palace we had seen on the night of our arrival. By day it seemed to consist mostly of air laced together with slender ribbons of pink and grey stone. We sisters were posed in profile on its monumental first-floor balconies. Then we let our hair down, side-saddle, as it were, so it streamed off the parapets like medieval pennants.

  The city might have been designed as a showcase for long hair, which, we now discovered, never looked so soft as when juxtaposed against marble, nor so liquid as when lolling above jade-green waves.

  The next day we were made to climb the dusty bell tower of San Vidal, an idea that little pleased my sisters. I volunteered to go to the topmost floor, for the joy of the view over the backbone of Dorsoduro – as Signor Bon explained – to the lagoon and its islands. I was to push my hair out of the belfry, and below me was Darcy, feeding her hair from an arched window, and below her Oona and so on until there were seven Venetian-Irish Rapunzels with their hair hanging down one tower in one multicoloured rope.

  Signor Bon ferried us in his own green boat to and from our lodgings at the Danieli, his apparatus nestling among us like an eighth dark sister. He brought us the first prints that evening. I had to concede a quiet admiration for his way of telling stories with our hair. He was a better poet than Tristan, because he understood the feel of things, of the sensations to be gleaned at the conjunctures of stone and water and hair. He was sensitive to the potency of the imagery he created, and he was afire with the possibility of creation. For him, our hair had its own things to declare – and they were nuanced, natural, thought-provoking things – not just something hot and vulgar, staged to strike primal fear or envy, rousing all those passions only to sell something else. And then there was his voice. Even talking of a broken hinge on one of his many monstrous pieces of machinery, Mr Bon’s voice told a story that kept your ear pleasurably inclined towards him.

  The photographer’s mood darkened the next evening, when it was time to execute the first of Tristan’s ‘delicious ideas’. He had hired seven gondolas and fourteen gondoliers, each more handsome than the last. We were stationed in front of the Corte del Duca, where Signor Bon had set up his apparatus. One Swiney sister was made to stand in the steadying embrace of a gondolier at the bow of every gondola, her hair flowing into the next boat, and so on until there was a procession of seven gondolas going down the Grand Canal, all linked by hair. A skull illuminated by a candle burned at every pair of Swiney feet. The photographs were taken at dusk, each of us holding a ceremonial torch to illuminate our faces and the ends of the hair of the sister we followed.

  Signor Bon worked rapidly on two devices, two boys assisting him with the plates. He fired magnesium at us endlessly, until my eyes were afire with stars and dust.

  The technique ‘chiaro di luna’ he explained, required two photographs of each image, one to capture the light of the background and the other for the buildings. He would combine the images in the studio, one bathed in light, the other dark, on pale blue paper.

  The photographer executed his work with his mouth drawn down. This much I already knew from Mr Rainfleury’s comments: Signor Bon loved the aesthetic qualities of our hair, but he did not like us flaunting the sexual allure of it, or hinting at looseness in our characters. He had flinched at the skulls, protesting to Mr Rainfleury. ‘Why must there be death? What is lacking with beauty alone? It is not respect. For love or death, to make them be so . . . intimate.’

  Signor Bon was no happier with Mr Rainfleury’s order that a second set of gondola photographs be taken in the same way, but by daylight, in which each of us cradled our own ‘Miss Swiney’ as we reclined on a velvet banquette. He regarded the dolls with ill-disguised disgust. We were required to point with pleasure at certain buildings, as if showing our dollies the great beauties of Venice, while, of course, surpassing all of them with our own hirsute kind of loveliness. For the occasion, the dolls were dressed in pinafores embroidered with Celtic crosses by the nuns of the Poor Clares Convent in Kenmare.

  ‘Make sure you get the detail,’ urged Mr Rainfleury, by which I guessed a private financial connection with the convent that would not appear in the Swiney Corporation books.

  And Signor Bon’s expression was positively thunderous when Mr Rainfleury put us Swineys to work in the Sala Orientale at Caffè Florian in San Marco. The room hosted seven exotic painted beauties framed in golden arches. One, a Negress, was scandalously clothed only from the waist down. We Swineys undressed our hair, and draped it from the frames of the paintings and nestled back in it, so all that was visible to Signor Bon’s lens was our faces, the lovely features of the painted harem, and a web of variegated curls. The crowd pressing its noses against the window roared with delight. Signor Bon muttered, ‘Poverine: che insulto!’ I longed to tell him that he was not the only one who regretted that we Swineys had filled that elegant space with our hair, where Mr Goldoni, Lord Byron and Herr Goethe had filled it with their intellects.

  Unlike other photographers and unlike our patrons, Signor Bon always asked permission if he wished to touch our hair, to lift it or drape it. His fingers never lingered, but their movements were agreeably quick and firm. Only his pleasant scent of leather and coffee lingered.

  More gondoliers were hired for scenes in which each sister lassoed her cavalier with her hair, wrapping it round his pale neck and drawing him to her. I tried not to meet the hot toffee eyes of my all-too-willing gondolier, and was again extremely grateful for the absence of Alexander.

  Poor Oona was also required to act out Mr Browning’s poem ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ in which the narrator, currently lodging in a madhouse cell, tells how he ended the girl’s life:

  . . . and all her hair

  In one long yellow string I wound

  Three times her little throat around,

  And strangled her . . .

  People gathered to watch the photography, but were shooed away by the barefoot boys specially hired by Signor Bon. I was sorry whenever the boys succeeded, for I loved to look at the Venetians, particularly the females. The working women adopted a fetching hairstyle: their dark hair was fanned to fullness around their faces before being gently drawn back and fastened in a high topknot. Curls and tendrils were freely allowed to escape. Whether they were young girls lithe as ferrets or squat barrels of grandmothers, the women all dressed the same way. Their skirts were often a dirty cream colour, made to look dirtier by contrast with the grey-white of their stockings underneath. The men looked dashing as matadors in their knee-length dark capes and their felt hats.

  I was fascinated by the Venetian ladies’ ways with their long-fringed shawls. A few wore red, fewer white; black was overwhelmingly chosen. Some of them wrapped their fabric tightly round their torsos in shapely figures of eight. Others draped their shawls loose around their shoulders and let them fall to their knees, with the extravagant fringes undulating like waves in night canals. The women’s hands were always at work on those shawls, sometimes lifting them to cover their heads, other times tucking a stray curl into the hood.

  Catching my eye on one woman’s hands, Signor Bon smiled. ‘Graceful, yes? The shawl is called a “sial” in our dialect.’

  The next morning he brought me one as a gift. ‘Just do not ask me to find one for that horrible doll of yours,’ he muttered.

  I answered, ‘No. I’d rather get her a shroud.’

  The Venetians loved their city – their ferocious affection for it was contagious. Each seagull, it seemed, had its own bit of Venice that it defended with beak and claw.

  I too was forced to defend the place.

  Darcy’s staunch position, asserted every time something beautiful appeared by way of reflections under a mossy bridge or a tumble of geraniums on a balcony, was that Venice was not notably different from Manchester.

  ‘It’s also black inconvenient with the canals all over waiting to be fallen into,’ she observed. ‘Dirty as a dirty girl’s bathwater.’

&nb
sp; Venice did not charm Enda and Berenice, who saw very little beyond Mr Rainfleury’s moustache. Oona pined palely for Tristan. If she might not share Venice with him, she could barely experience the place. Pertilly was dizzied by the dancing light of the water and clung to every balustrade. Ida fell into peals of laughter at the sight of the Basilica of San Marco. ‘That is not a church!’ she cried with glee, ‘that is a fairground tent!’

  ‘No, more of a reliquary,’ I told her. I dragged her in and choked her on the bones of more saints than even Annora would have been able to believe in. The phial of Virgin’s Milk in the crypt made me gladder than ever that Tristan was not with us, as it might have bred untenable ideas in him.

  For all the briefness of the glimpses I’d been allowed of it, I alone among the Swineys had formed a hot love of Venice inside me by the end of our first week. I was greedy for it, and woke before dawn, stealing away from the Danieli. Some mornings, Alexander met me at pre-assigned places. We had precious minutes murmuring our lovely nonsense together in quiet alleys – not so much streets as mere fissures in the marble – or we stood close together on bridges to gaze at towers whose leprous feet paddled in the green water and whose bony spires disappeared into opalescent skies.

  ‘How could you ever leave it?’ I asked, hoping he would reply, ‘Because Elisabetta is here.’

  But he just smiled and held the rationed finger of my hand more tightly.

  In Venice, we started again. We were learning to touch, just a few fingers at a time and our shoulders aligned or my hand tucked up under his arm. We hovered around one another’s faces with our lips. We would, by mutual but silent agreement, eke out more of this churning, uncertain time before we took to anything more than these Venetian almost-kisses. At the Antico Panada, Florian, the Orientale, we kept on at not kissing, devotedly. We always left separately. When he left first, I nursed the dregs of his coffee, sipping them till the last grains embittered my tongue.

  He still had not told me where he lived or if he saw his wife, so I needed something to withhold too. By a carefully casual question to Signor Bon, I found out where Elisabetta Sardou dwelled – a tall and pretty palazzo on the Corte de la Vida near San Samuele. I had found many reasons to walk down the street that passed through it, and once I caught sight of a woman I believed to be Elisabetta herself, a small robust figure with strong features and a taste for bright colours. She wore that expression of magisterial discontent that only married women are allowed to show on their faces.

  I did not ask Alexander for confirmation as that would have necessitated a confession of my shameful spying.

  Even when he could not meet me, I still rose before dawn to see more of the city. I loved the chimneys that looked like ice-cream papers rolled for a scoop, the wooden buckets clustering around the sculpted well-heads in each square, the loose-lipped onion girls, the diminutive stone kings at the entrance to the Doges’ Palace, the way each gull interviewed the water with the shadow of its wings before deciding to slide its yellow feet into it. And how magical in the mist were those marriage-breaking snores emitted by steam ferries on the Grand Canal in the last shreds of the night.

  And the colours: the scalding pinks, the skin-warm terracottas, the angelica greens – at first I could understand them only as the opposite of the colours I had grown up with. Harristown colours – I remembered them all in sepia, even the forty Irish shades of green were tinged with muddiness. Now they appeared in my mind’s eye as if someone had spilled coffee on a dimming watercolour and then wept over the damage for a long time.

  I used the traghetti, standing up in the gondolas like a Venetian. I loved to be afloat the little golden fists of waves shaking hands with one another while knees of blue and elbows of vivid emerald poked up between them. And how different it felt to have the water coming up beneath instead of constantly falling on top of me as in Ireland. When no one was looking, I could not refrain from wriggling my shoulders luxuriously in the unaccustomed sun.

  The morning after the doll photographs Signor Bon passed me at the San Tomà traghetto. He turned his green boat in a graceful arc, raising a serpent ridge of water in his wake. He beckoned me over, smiling frankly.

  ‘It is very early, Miss Manticory! I suspect you of coming out to drown your doll, perhaps.’

  ‘And I suppose,’ I smiled, ‘you have a perfectly rational reason for being out so early, some errand, perhaps?’

  ‘You have caught me, Miss Manticory. I confess to wanting to see the sunrise from the water before I bury my head under the black velvet. Would you care to join me?’

  Signor Bon seated me in front of him so that my view was unimpeded. He rowed, as he explained, ‘alla Veneziana’, standing behind me, stooping rhythmically over a pair of oars. On the back of my neck, I felt the warm air disturbed by his efforts.

  It was worth all Darcy’s anger, all Mr Rainfleury’s clucking and even worth keeping a secret from Alexander, the hour I was late for breakfast, the hour I spent as the sun rose above the city being rowed by the photographer around the back canals of Venice, dipping under trailing vines, being enveloped in the sudden shadows of bell towers, following the sugar-scented bakers’ boats. The ferry stops snapped their crisp striped awnings at us. I watched the women throwing ropes into the water to teach their young children to swim. I listened to the happy chatter of the bead-stringers of Castello sorting the treasures in the wide wooden trugs on their laps.

  I never once saw Alexander, no matter how hard I looked.

  By a mutual understanding, Signor Bon and I did not talk, but at times the pleasure was so great that it needed to be shared. Then I could not refrain from twisting round so that our eyes met. When I did so, he nodded with a solemn smile like a benign priest who has made a convert of an unlikely sinner.

  I loved Venice so much that I probably should have confessed to idolatry at the moonlight-white church of San Tomà, where the priest was said by Mr Rainfleury to speak English, and indeed did so, richly and baroquely. His penances were far lighter than those the priests at St Teresa’s in Dublin had thought to give us – and he did not need to hold my hair through the grate like Father Maglinn in Harristown.

  I did not tell him, I am on fire for a married man of this town, and I pass tranced hours in desirous memories of him, and bitter minutes of knowing I may not have him for my own. This is the cost I knowingly pay for loving Alexander Sardou, and I had not realised that it would be beyond even my Swiney-fattened means. Meanwhile I take morning boat trips with another man, who may well be married. I am so wanton these days that I have neglected even to ask him. His intelligence and kindness come free of cost, and so I do not value them properly. Even that is a sin in itself.

  Instead, I excavated an older sin, a Harristown sin: I confessed to the Venetian priest that once, on a bridge in Ireland, a man had touched me.

  He asked, ‘And did you allow it because you loved him? Or was it for sensuality alone? Or was he an evildoer who wished to hurt you, my poor child? And did this foul thing against your will? If so then he is damned to Hell without my intervention, and your own innocence is unstained.’

  He added, ‘And anyone who tells you otherwise is the one who carries the stain.’

  Outside, in Campo San Tomà, I looked straight up at the sun, dazzled by my new freedom. And in that moment I wished I might never, ever go back to Ireland.

  I even wondered if I should now confess for Darcy, that she had quite possibly murdered our father. I trusted this priest. Would he express the right outrage and comfort me for my loss, and tell me how to set my feelings in order about those crossed spoons over the secret grave in Harristown that my mind kept ever green and tended?

  I was still thinking about it the next day when Signor Bon announced that he had discharged his commission in its entirety. Darcy ordered our trunks brought up to our rooms.

  Signor Bon took me for one last dawn boat trip around Venice. This time my mood was tragic. The photographer told me, as if he guessed how it
hurt me to be leaving, ‘Let the tears out, Miss Manticory. If you rinse your eyes, you shall see more clearly.’

  In front of him, I was not ashamed to weep, though it felt wrong that he did not know all my reasons for not wanting to depart.

  Two days later we were aboard the train at Santa Lucia Station, with Alexander staring up at me from the platform, getting smaller and smaller.

  We travelled back to Dublin first class, stopping in Paris for new gowns and hats, as if born to shopping in glass arcades and dining on cœurs de filet Rachel among the better types of American and English travellers behind the impeccable lace curtains at Voisin’s in the rue Saint-Honoré or drinking tea among the crushed-strawberry upholstery, carpets and tapestries of the Ritz in the Place Vendôme.

  Signor Bon’s photographs earned us a fee per random dozen – this was the rate agreed with Mr Rainfleury, who had learned the hard way from the dolls that it was better not to let us know when the public chose its favourites. The pictures went to press immediately and were in the Venetian shops in days. Every tourist wanted to take a piece of Venice away with them, despite the tax on photographs – charged by the pound of weight – and now they also took a piece of Swiney Godiva. Signor Bon reported wonderful earnings, especially after Mr Rainfleury set up a discreet mail-order business for Continental gentlemen collectors.

  But a problem emerged. With fulsome apologies, Signor Bon revealed that a new convulsion of fiscal law meant that he could not send the money out of Italy. It was safely deposited in the Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia, which, Signor Bon reported, sternly refused to be so unpatriotic as to empty its coffers of Italian currency and send it in the direction of Dublin.

  Back in Pembroke Street, Darcy fulminated, ‘I knew he would rob us, the slimy Italian! Too mean to give us a fright! I’ll make him scratch where he doesn’t itch.’