no matter what you did. I thought somehow it could be healed.
And bowing his head, Tonio seated himself as so often in the past at the head of the table. It was not even a moment before he realized what he had done, and his eyes rose immediately to confront his brother.
His heart quickened its pace. He studied this smile, this affable radiance. The snow-white wig made Carlo’s skin seem all the more dark and the beauty of the high-placed eyebrows was all the more marked as he sat gazing at Tonio with neither rancor nor censure.
“We are at odds with each other,” Carlo said. And now his smile melted slowly to a calmer, less deliberate expression. “No matter how we pretend we are not, we are at odds, and almost a month has passed and we cannot even break bread together.”
Tonio nodded, the tears standing in his eyes. “And it is uncanny,” Carlo went on, “this resemblance between us.”
Tonio wondered if a man could feel love when the other gave the silent expression of it. Could Carlo see it in his eyes? And for the first time, he realized, sitting here, very still and unable to speak even the simplest words, that he wanted so to rely upon his brother. Rely upon you, trust in you, seek your help, and yet that is beyond possibility. At odds. He wanted to leave this room now, and he feared his brother’s reckless and strange eloquence.
“Handsome little brother,” Carlo whispered. “French clothes,” he observed, his large dark eyes flickering almost innocently. “And such fine bones, from your mother, I think, and her voice, too, that lovely lovely soprano.”
Tonio’s eyes shifted deliberately away. This was excruciating. But if we do not talk now, the agony will only grow greater.
“When she was a girl,” Carlo said, “and she sang in the chapel, she moved us to tears, did she ever tell you that? Ah, the tributes she received, the gondoliers loved her.”
Slowly Tonio looked back to him.
“She was a very siren,” Carlo said. “Has no one ever told you?”
“No,” Tonio answered uneasily. And he felt his brother observe how he shifted in his chair, and how he looked away again hastily.
“And beautiful she was, too, more beautiful even than she is now….” Carlo dropped his voice to a whisper.
“Signore, best not to speak so of her!” Tonio had said it before he meant to.
“Why, what will happen”—Carlo’s voice remained calm—“if I speak so of her?”
Tonio looked at him. His smile was changing, lengthening coldly. There are few things under God more terrible in a human expression than such a smile, Tonio was thinking.
But behind it lay that misery, that agitation, that rage which had found its greatest eloquence in the roar behind closed doors. So the smile wasn’t really cold. It was merely desperate and fragile.
Tonio whispered suddenly, “This is not my doing!”
“Yield to me then!” Carlo answered.
So it had come to this.
This moment he had dreaded day in and day out. He would have risen to go, but his brother’s hand had come down on his own, and it seemed he was almost pinioned to the table. He felt the sweat break out under his clothes, and the room seemed abysmally cold to him suddenly. He was staring at the candle flames, perhaps letting them burn his eyes, and he knew there was nothing he could have done to prevent this.
“Have you no hunger to hear my side of it?” Carlo whispered. “Children are curious. Have you no natural curiosity?” His face was swelling with anger, and yet that smile held and the voice died away on the last syllables as if fearful of its own volume.
“Signore, your quarrel is not with me. Do not appeal to me.”
“Oh, little brother, you astonish me. You are never cowed, are you? I think there is iron in you as there was in him, and the sharp edges of impatience that there are in her. But you will listen to me.”
“Signore, you are mistaken. I will not listen to you! You must make your case to those who are appointed to govern us both, our estate, our decisions.”
And feeling an overpowering revulsion for his brother, Tonio drew his hand away from Carlo’s.
But the face was magnetizing him. It was as if it were more youthful than it should have been, and filled with impetuosity and misery. It was challenging Tonio, it was imploring Tonio, and there was nothing of that “iron” in it, to use his