Roman Fever

More reserved than her energetic friend, Grace’s beauty as a girl was matched by her “sweetness” and “quiet ways” (759). Following her illness in Rome as a young woman, she abruptly left for Florence and married Horace Ansley. As she and Alida talk, the reader learns that she had been in love with Delphin Slade, then Alida’s fiancé. They had sex, and he is the father of her daughter, seemingly her only child, Barbara.

Wharton’s narrative priorities make Grace a cipher in “Roman Fever,” and she often seems to be the more staid of the pair. She suggests, for example, that they might play bridge at the Embassy when church bells announce that it is five o’clock. Similarly, through much of the conversation, she occupies her hands with knitting. Grace is depicted as nearly “expressionless” although the movement of her hands—sometimes she knits, other times she lets the work fall to her lap—indicates inner agitation (755).

For all her apparent prudence, however, Grace was willing to risk all for love, agreeing to meet her friend’s fiancé and sharing an experience of passion with him. She acknowledges doing so, even knowing how much Alida loved him. Alida is the aggressor for most of the story, deliberately inflicting a wound on her friend by revealing that she wrote the letter, but Grace is no victim. She reveals that she answered the letter, that the two met, and that she gave birth to Delphin’s daughter. Alida dubs her a “monster” for this, but in the aftermath of the story’s “wreckage of passion,” it might be better to call both women monsters (755).

Barbara, Babs for short, is the “brilliant” daughter of Grace and Horace Ansley (753). As the last line of the story makes clear, however, Horace is not Barbara’s biological father. She was conceived during a tryst at the Colosseum between her mother and Delphin Slade. It has long baffled Alida how Grace and Horace “had managed to produce anything so dynamic” as Babs—and the answer one learns at the end of the story is that they didn’t (755).

Much attention is paid to Barbara’s vivacity. Although both Alida and Grace agree that she is, like Jenny, an “angel,” it is only Barbara who has “rainbow wings” (755). To have such wings means that one is meant not to be a ministering angel, like Jenny, but instead, a celestial creature, destined for a glorious future. In all the representations of her, Barbara shimmers.

When the mystery of her parentage is resolved, however, new questions about the relationship between parents and children emerge. Perhaps Barbara brilliant because she is the result of a moment of passion and love. In daring to meet Delphin, Grace revealed a side of herself that finds further expression in her daughter, who is less beautiful than her mother but more spirited. Barbara is the more dynamic of the daughters, the one Alida seems to prefer, possibly indicating that Grace and Delphin were destined for one another.

As with Barbara, Jenny receives only the most fleeting direct introduction in “Roman Fever.” The two are leaving as the story begins. Where Babs jokingly uses figurative language, calling the mothers “young things” who will spend their time “knitting,” Jenny prefers literal language, replying with a laugh that they will not be “actually knitting” (749). The interchange is brief, yet it conveys key differences in their characters.

The daughter of Alida and Delphin Slade, Jenny is “extremely pretty,” kind, and caring (753). There is no doubt, her mother notes with some disappointment, that Jenny is an “angel” (755). This reference recalls subtly a prevalent 19th-century ideal of the perfect woman as the “angel in the house,” devoting herself to the nurture of others, an old-fashioned ideal by the early years of the 20th century. Consistent with this characterization, Alida observes that were she an invalid, her daughter would be an ideal caregiver, ready with medicine and other attention. At the same time, however, Jenny makes youth and beauty seem oddly “safe,” even a little “boring” (753). Grace Ansley similarly admits that Jenny lacks “vividness” (753). Sadly, for Jenny, this is one judgment on which Alida and Grace agree.

Delphin Slade is a corporate attorney. That he was extremely successful in his career is one of the few facts that readers learn about the man whom both Grace and Alida loved in their youth and might well both love after his death. He fathered two children with Alida, Jenny and an unnamed son who died in childhood, and one with Grace, Barbara.

What makes him attractive to the woman, so much so that both are willing to transgress social conventions and inflict emotional (and physical) damage on a friend, is never specified. That he is willing to betray Alida, to whom he is engaged, by having an affair with Grace allows the reader to speculate about his inclinations. One of Wharton’s most famous novels, The Age of Innocence (1920), tells the story of a man who marries the woman to whom he is engaged even though he no longer loves her. Perhaps “Roman Fever” returns to that dilemma, approaching it from a different angle, as Grace admits that the letter Alida wrote her in Delphin’s name is the only one she ever received from him.