Not only couldn’t she face another move, but she also couldn’t face the hard work of writing another novel, standing for most of the day at her desk, writing through the pain that shot through her right side. Without the ability to keep writing, she rapidly ran out of courage to carry on. She felt as if she had reached a dead end, unable to live independently and unwilling to be a burden on anyone. In the coming days, she reached out to no one, asked for no help, and told no one how afraid she had become of running out of money.
On the second of January the weather turned sharply cold. It was windy and snowing and even windier the next day. On the sixth it snowed again. During the first two weeks of the year, Constance was likely homebound, sitting by the fire and receiving the occasional afternoon visitor. Princess Olga of Montenegro had asked Edith to introduce her to the American author, and she and Woolson had developed a fondness for each other. Zina Hulton and the Bronsons were still in town, although Edith would leave for London on the seventeenth.34
On the thirteenth of January, Constance braved the weather for a walk through the snow in the public gardens, although her Venetian physician, Dr. Cini, had advised against it. After she came home, she felt ill and went to bed. On the fifteenth, she hired Marie Holas, whom Edith had highly recommended, to help for a few hours a day with her writing and other tasks. Woolson had no fever, only congestion. For the next few days, she was in “very good spirits,” according to Holas, and ate better but moaned periodically, saying “that all her life she could not bear the slightest physical pain.” She also dictated letters, one of which was to her publishers, directing them to send a copy of the newly published Horace Chase to Francis Boott in Cambridge, Massachusetts.35 She always wanted to know what he thought of her works.
Yet she began to doubt whether she would live to receive Boott’s response, a possibility she neither feared nor regretted. In fact, she seemed to welcome it. As soon as she fell ill, Woolson had handed over her money to Holas and asked her to take charge of the household. Quite matter-of-factly, Woolson began to prepare for her death. She wanted to write her will and told Dr. Cini to let her know when her condition worsened so she would have time to do so. She thought it very irresponsible for those who were ill to wait so long that they missed the chance to put their affairs in order. She wanted to provide for Tello and told Holas to have the apartment sealed up after her death until her sister was able to come and retrieve her things. Above all, she made it clear that she was not to be buried in the Protestant Cemetery outside Venice, which she hated. She should only be buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Holas claimed that Woolson even “threatened me in case I did not tell her relatives what her wishes were to let me have no peace after her death.” All of this was said “half joking,” but Woolson was in earnest. She spoke calmly, exhibiting no fear of death.36
On the morning of January 18, she began to think death was nearer. Sharp pains shot through her stomach and bowels, and she had a fever of 39.3° C (nearly 103° F). Laudanum helped some, and when the doctor arrived he allowed her to have some morphine. By evening, Constance was feeling better and sat up in bed to read letters and the newspaper, but then she worsened again, vomiting “very bilious green stuff,” according to Holas. Reports after her death would say she had been suffering from influenza, which was then rampant in Venice. However, her symptoms more likely indicate cholecystitis, or gallbladder inflammation, which could be caused by a blocked gallbladder stone. Other possibilities are bowel obstruction or pancreatitis. All would have been very painful, potentially deadly, and not easily diagnosed at the time. The doctor suspected none of these conditions and, apparently recalling the traditional association of green bile with ill temper, peevishness, and melancholia, asked Woolson “if she had had anything that had troubled her more than usual.” She had recently finished a book and was still not herself, she told him. More than that, “there was not a person under the sun that had more cares & troubles than herself.”37
As Constance lay in bed, doubled over in pain and feeling increasingly weak, all of her feelings of loneliness and self-pity came rushing out. She had a great fear of being ill and all alone in Europe. There was no motherly landlady to care for her, as there had been in Oxford, let alone family she could call on. Jane Carter’s daughter Grace was then her nearest relative in Europe. They had remained close since Jane’s death. Unfortunately, Grace’s sister Mary had inherited her father’s mental illness and broken down after the birth of her children. She was being treated at a sanitarium in Munich, and Grace, who had remained single and devoted to her sister, was staying nearby.38 Not wanting to pull Grace away from Mary, Constance had so far refused to ask for her. Even when Grace grew concerned and offered to come to Venice, Constance declined, telling Holas there was nothing Grace could do.39
As her fever subsided, Woolson spoke little and withdrew into herself. She pushed away the ear trumpet when Holas tried to speak to her. She had grown very weak and repeatedly begged the doctor for more laudanum, but he would only give her a small dose, worried that more would risk killing her. She insisted that she was used to higher doses, but he remained firm. The vomiting had not completely abated, but the accompanying pains had lessened considerably. Beginning on the night of the twenty-first, trained nurses from the Sisters of Charity were employed to stay the night when Holas went home. Woolson would not let the nun on duty stay in the room with her, saying that she liked to have the windows open and didn’t want the woman to be bothered by the chilly air.40 This was a pretext, for however much she liked fresh air, she hated the cold. The real reason was surely that she wanted to be alone.
During these days of decreasing symptoms but increasing weakness, Woolson, it seems, had given up on living. She gave Holas the addresses for Clara and Sam in Cleveland and instructed that they should only be cabled in the event of her death, as they would not be able to cross the ocean in time. She apparently never mentioned James or even Dr. Baldwin, who could have easily come up from Florence. However, with Baldwin’s recent loss of money in the bank failures, she may have worried about troubling him and pulling him away from his family.41 As she lay alone in silence, she felt as if she had no claim on anyone. If she was going to die, she would do it as she felt she had lived—on her own.
Woolson also talked more about making a will. Lady Layard had visited her on January 18 and told Constance that all she had to do was write her will in her own hand and sign it. No witnesses were required under Italian law. Yet she felt the need for something more official, which would hold up under American law. She told Holas that when she was ready to make her will, she would have her call the American consul. She had a sample for Holas to use as a model, for she would have to take dictation. But in the coming days, Constance never asked for the consul. In fact, no will was ever found. This more than anything suggests that she did not expect or plan to die imminently. On the evening of the twenty-second, she told Holas to wire Grace to come. She did not say why. She may have wanted Grace’s help to settle her affairs. The telegram read, “Am worse. Come. Grand Hotel near my house.”42
On the morning of the twenty-third, Woolson was feeling better and drank some milk. The vomiting had ceased, and she had no fever, but she was very weak. She felt she could not sleep without “something strong” and warned, “If I sleep today, I shall be quite well tomorrow, but if I don’t sleep, I shall be dead.” (During her February 1892 illness, she had told Baldwin much the same.) Dr. Cini gave her a small dose of laudanum, which allowed her to sleep a little during the day. In the evening, she was highly anxious and irritable, according to Holas, snapping at her if things were not immediately brought. During the doctor’s last visit that evening, she requested “an injection of morphia, which he decidedly refused to do, for he said, she was so weak, she could not bear it, & never awake again. She would die in her sleep, & he would be responsible for her death.” Woolson also requested chloral hydrate, another potent sedative, but he would only give her another, less harmf
ul dose of laudanum.43
Laudanum was not strong enough to provide the temporary oblivion Woolson needed to make it until morning. Like morphine it contains opium but only one-tenth as much. At that time, both highly addictive drugs were taken for just about any ailment imaginable. If the drugs are used regularly, the body quickly needs more to achieve the same effects. A fatal overdose was a very real possibility with both drugs, and many people committed suicide by overdosing on one or the other. Woolson may have obliquely hoped never to wake up, but preparations for her death were not yet complete. She expected a protracted and possibly quite painful illness. The fact that she needed ever-greater dosages of laudanum to help her sleep may also indicate that she had become acclimated to it through frequent use. Moreover, as a soporific, laudanum and morphine were only partially effective. They induced sleep but were not so good at keeping one asleep. Users often awoke more restless and became “moody, sullen, mercurial of spirits and even suicidal.” Alice James, as she was dosed with morphine during her final illness, called it a “treacherous fiend,” because it prevented sleep and caused “hideous nervous distress.” She wrote that “K[atharine] and I touched bottom more nearly than ever before.” Woolson was getting there as well. What happened after she went to bed on the twenty-third cannot be entirely blamed on opiate consumption, but her reliance on it to sleep and its ineffectiveness that night probably contributed to her death.44
When a telegram from Grace arrived saying that she was on her way to Venice, Constance responded to the news simply, “Well, well.” Before Holas left for the night, she later remembered, the patient “asked me to change her position in the bed, to turn her & put her head on the other side, & so I did, with the help of the servants—I arranged her blankets, her pillows & cushions; she wished the door, windows, shutters, & curtains very well closed so that the slightest ray of light could not pass through—Then as I took the trumpet to speak to her she said ‘I am so comfortable please let me alone.’ ” When Holas left, a twenty-two-year-old nun, Suor Alfonsa, was stationed outside the bedroom door.45
Woolson managed to sleep, but not for long. At midnight she woke. Without the diagnosis of a fatal illness and freely administered morphine that had made Alice James’s passing bearable, she might have thought about facing an untold period of pain and sleeplessness before her time finally came. While we cannot know what she thought, we do know that she reached for the small, silver-plated bell with her initials that sat beside her bed and rang it. Suor Alfonsa immediately appeared, and Constance asked her to bring a light, perhaps with which to read, and a cup of milk.46
When Suor Alfonsa returned, Constance sent her away again. She wanted a certain pink china cup for her milk, she said, and would only drink from that one. The cup was either far away or required washing, giving Constance time to rise from her bed and make her way to the window. She pulled the curtains aside, unfastened the shutters, and opened the window. Moments later, she was falling three stories to the pavement below.47
16
Aftershocks
WHEN THE nurse reentered the room and found Constance’s bed empty and the window open, she looked out to see a white heap in the narrow street. Frantically, she called out to the servants. Angelo, still groggy from sleep, rushed down the stairs. At the same moment, the doorbell rang. Three men walking in the Calle del Bastion had come upon what they thought was a pile of snow against the wall below Constance’s window. Upon closer inspection, they discovered the crumpled body of a woman in a white nightdress. When they picked her up, she moaned and trembled at their touch. They heard her say something which they thought was the Italian word for “cold” (freddo). They rang the bell at the nearest door, which Angelo answered. “Give me my mistress,” he told them, and carried her up the three flights of stairs to her room. He laid Woolson, still breathing but unconscious, on her bed. The closest doctor was found. Her condition was hopeless, he determined. Dr. Cini soon arrived and examined her, discovering fractures of the thighbone and spine. There was nothing to be done. She lived about an hour. When Grace arrived the next morning, she was devastated by the news. Dr. Cini tried to comfort her, saying that “he was sure the shock to the head & spine had been instantaneously so great that she felt nothing really afterwards.”1
Grace and Marie Holas dressed Constance in the white dress she had wanted to be buried in. Grace telegraphed Clara and Sam and made all of the necessary preparations for the consul to seal the apartment until Clara could arrive. She also arranged for Constance’s burial at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, a short service was performed in the house for the servants, whose devotion to their mistress Grace found touching. That evening, she left with the body for Rome.2
Awaiting her were John and Clara Hay, who had been in Italy and read of Constance’s death in a newspaper. They wired the consul in Venice, offering their assistance. When they learned that Grace Carter had taken charge, they put themselves at her service. Hay took care of the arrangements at the cemetery, selecting the site of Constance’s grave with Dr. Robert Nevin, rector of the American Protestant Church in Rome. They were able to secure a spot on the hill near Shelley’s grave and next to that of the sculptor William Wetmore Story’s wife. “I am sure it would have been a solace to her sensitive soul when living to have known she was to repose forever in such a place and in such company,” Hay wrote to Sam. Hay procured a large cross of camellias, hyacinths, freesia, and white primroses to represent the Mather family. On the day of the funeral, January 31, “The weather was exquisitely beautiful,” Hay wrote, “a real Roman day, with sunshine as bright and sky as blue as summer and yet with a lingered tang of winter in the air.” Some of Woolson’s friends were able to attend the “simple, but profoundly impressive” service: Richard Greenough, Henry Codman Potter (bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York and brother of Mrs. Launt Thompson, Constance’s old friend from Florence), the artist Elihu Vedder and his wife, and “two strange, English ladies—one of whom came and begged a flower from the wreaths” to send to Eleanor Poynter. Henry James, who had received word of Woolson’s death from Clara and dropped everything to prepare for his departure to Italy, was finally too ill and grief-stricken to attend. He asked Hay to save twenty flowers for him. Two days later, Hay returned to her grave to find a wreath bearing the name of Edmund Clarence Stedman.3
The news of Woolson’s death spread quickly throughout the United States. Newspapers ran short statements without mention of the cause of death. The Venetian papers, however, ran longer stories based on interviews, reporting her death as a suicide. One concluded, “[S]he lived alone and was referred to as a strange and eccentric woman.” The Venetian reports might not have reached the English-speaking world were it not for the Vienna correspondent of the London Standard, who wrote, “It is reported from Venice that the American authoress and novelist, Constance Fenimore Woolson, killed herself yesterday by leaping from the window of the house there in which she had been living for the last seven months. Death ensued almost immediately. She had been ill with influenza for only four days, but long before that attack she had shown signs of eccentricity.” This paragraph ran in London on the twenty-seventh and was picked up immediately, almost verbatim, by papers all over the United States, many of them running the news on the front page. Some paraphrased it, altering the ending to read, “A seven months attack of influenza left symptoms of insanity.”4
Woolson’s family refused to believe she had jumped. Grace’s telegram to Sam, which he released to the papers, read: “AUNT CONSTANCE HAD INFLUENZA NIGHT NURSE LEFT HER FOR SOMETHING NEEDED IN SUDDEN DELIRIUM FELL FROM WINDOW TO STREET PICKED UP IMMEDIATELY LIVED SHORT TIME UNCONSCIOUS WITH NO APPARENT PAIN FACE LOOKED VERY PEACEFUL NO WILL FOUND.” Grace’s letter of the twenty-seventh elaborated: “What her fancy had been, a sudden desire for air, & the dizzyness of weakness after the effort of getting from the bed—There is no way of saying.” As horrible as was the image of her falling three stories to
her death, the peaceful expression on her face was the family’s greatest solace, convincing them that she had not died violently by her own hand.5
Marie Holas seemed to agree with Grace’s interpretation. She explained to Sam, “Nothing gave ever to suppose that she had such a sad purpose in her mind, nor can I think she had it, as she sent for Miss Carter, & was going to make her will, that same day.” She made a persuasive case. Constance had been so intent on making a will that she had threatened to haunt Dr. Cini if he did not give her ample warning of her imminent decline. Dr. Cini’s interpretation of her death, however, was different. He was certain she had taken her own life and that she was trying to get him to do the job for her by demanding chloral hydrate and morphine. (If he had believed that at the time, then why she was left with only a young nurse stationed outside of her room that night is a mystery.) He blamed Dr. Baldwin for not having warned him of her “queer state of mind” when they met earlier that winter.6 However, neither Holas nor Dr. Cini would have wanted to feel responsible for her death, so their accounts may be biased. Woolson’s death may have been a suicide, but likely not as calculated as the doctor believed.
In her final days, she was in a state very much like that described by Kay Redfield Jamison in her study of suicide: “In short, when people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace.”7 Constance’s earlier bouts with depression and suicidal thoughts, her rationalization of suicide in her letter to Francis Boott and in the margins of her book of Epictetus’s teachings, as well as her state of mind in her final months leave little doubt that she had thought of taking her own life.
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