But though Edward had not communicated with him, Charles had, or had at least tried to. More than a week had now passed since David had last seen him, and Charles’s notes to him had, over the days, become beseeching, unable to quite disguise their author’s desperation, a desperation David remembered from his own latter letters to Edward. But the day before, an enormous arrangement of blue hyacinths had been delivered, the card—“My dearest David, Miss Holson told me you were feeling poorly, which I am deeply sorry to hear. I know you are in excellent care, but if you should need or desire anything at all, you need only say so and I shall be at your service immediately. In the meantime, I send you my good wishes, along with my devotion”—expressing what David interpreted as a palpable relief that his silence was not due to lack of interest after all, only illness. He looked at the flowers, and at Charles’s card, and realized that he had once again forgotten his very existence, that all it had taken was the reappearance of Edward in his life for everything else in it to dim or become inconsequential.
Mostly, though, he contemplated leaving—or not even that, but contemplated whether he could even contemplate leaving. His fear of the West and what might happen there to him, to them, was inarguable and, he felt, justified. But what of his fear of leaving his grandfather, of leaving Washington Square? Was that not also what stopped him? He knew Edward was correct: For as long as he remained in New York, he would always be his grandfather’s, his family’s, his city’s, his country’s. That too was inarguable.
What was not was whether he even desired another life, a different life. He had always thought he had. When he was on his Grand Tour, he had in fact tried to experiment with being someone else. One day in the Uffizi, he had stopped in the hallway to gaze down the Vasari Corridor, its symmetry that discomfited in its inhuman perfection, when a young man, dark and slender, had stepped beside him.
“It is unreal, is it not?” he had asked David, after the two of them had stood in silence for a moment, and David turned to look at him.
His name was Morgan, and he was from London, on his own Grand Tour, the son of a barrister, a few months from returning home to, he said, “Nothing. Or nothing interesting, at any rate. A position at my father’s firm—he insists—and, eventually, I suppose, marriage to some girl my mother will find for me. She insists.”
They had spent the afternoon together, walking through the streets, stopping for coffee and pastry. Up to this point in David’s trip, he had spoken to almost no one but the various friends of his grandfather’s who greeted him and hosted him at each stop, and talking with another man his age was like slipping back into water and recognizing its silk on his skin, remembering how comfortable it could be.
“Have you a girl at home for you?” Morgan asked him as they walked through the Piazza Santa Croce, and David, smiling, said he hadn’t.
“Just a moment,” said Morgan, peering at him. “Where in America did you say you were from, exactly?”
“I didn’t,” he said, smiling again, knowing what would follow. “And I’m not. I’m from New York.”
At this, Morgan’s eyes widened. “Then you are a Free Stater!” he exclaimed. “I’ve heard so much about your country! You must tell me everything,” and the conversation turned to the Free States: their now mostly cordial relations with America, in which they maintained their own laws of marriage and religion but adopted for themselves the Union’s laws of taxation and democracy; their support, financial and military, of the Union in the War of Rebellion; Maine, which was mostly sympathetic to them, and where Free Staters’ safety was more or less assured; the Colonies and the West, where they would be in varying degrees of peril; how the Colonies had lost their war but seceded anyway, sinking further into poverty and degradation by the year, even as their debt to and therefore resentment toward the Free States burned hotter and brighter; the Free States’ ongoing struggle to be recognized as its own, distinct nation by other countries, a recognition denied them by everyone besides the kingdoms of Tonga and of Hawaii. Morgan had studied modern history at university and asked scores of questions, and in answering them, David was made aware both of his love for his nation and of how dearly he missed it, a sensation made more acute after he and Morgan had repaired to Morgan’s dingy room in his ill-maintained pensione. As David walked back to his host’s house late that evening, he was reminded, as he often had been on this trip, how fortunate he was to live in a country where he would never have to hide behind a door, waiting for someone to tell him that it was safe for him to leave without being seen, where he might stroll arm in arm across a city square with his beloved （should there ever be one）， the way he saw male-and-female couples （but no other variants） do in squares across the Continent, where he might one day marry a man he loved. He lived in a country in which every man and woman could be free and could live with dignity.
But the other aspect of that day that had been memorable was that in it, David had not been David Bingham; he had been Nathaniel Frear, a name hastily patched together from his grandfather’s and mother’s, a son of a doctor, taking his year in Europe before he would return to New York to attend law school. He had invented a half-dozen brothers and sisters, a modest and cheerful house in an unfashionable but homey part of town, a life lived comfortably but not excessively. When Morgan had told him about a great residence of his former classmate’s that was to have hot running water in all its water closets, David did not reveal that the house on Washington Square already had hot-water plumbing, and that he had only to nudge a faucet handle to one side for a clear stream to at once gurgle forth. Instead, he marveled with Morgan at the classmate’s good fortune, the innovations of modern life. He would not deny his country—to do so seemed a form of treason—but he did deny his own biography, and there was something about doing so that made him giddy, even light-headed, so much so that when he finally entered his host’s home—a grand palazzo owned by his grandfather’s old college chum, a Free States expatriate, and his wife, a frowning, clomping contessa whom the man had obviously married for her title—his grandfather’s friend had looked him over and smirked.
“A good day, then?” he’d drawled, seeing David’s dreamy, unfocused expression, and David, who had spent his week in Florence leaving the house early in the morning and returning late at night, so as not to suffer his grandfather’s friend’s hands, which seemed always to be finding ways to float over his body, birds of prey that would one day dive and grab onto something, only smiled and said it had been.
He did not think often of this incident, but now he did, trying and failing to remember how he had felt in the moment of invention, and realizing that whatever ecstasy he had experienced was partly attributable to his being aware of the flimsiness of his deception. At any moment, he could have declared his actual self, and even Morgan would have known his name. It was a performance known only to him, but beneath the performance was something true, something meaningful: his grandfather, his wealth, his name. Were he to move to the West, his name would stand only for vice, if it stood for anything. In the Free States and in the North, to be a Bingham was to be respected and even revered. But in the West, to be a Bingham was to be an abomination, a perversion, a threat. It was not that he could change his name in California but, rather, that he would have to, because to be who he was would be too perilous.