How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (14 page)

“Of course I suggested that very thing to Amelia. ‘We have other young people coming,’ I explained.” She paused. “Chauncey, you will be shocked to hear her reply.”

“I’ll try to withstand it, my dear. Do tell.”

“That the grandchild. Or great-grandchild. I don’t know the sex either. But the fact is that he or she never studied Latin. Not even a term.”

“What a disgrace. An entirely sorry state of affairs. Latin is the basis of all knowledge.”

“Amelia explained that she or he is learning Spanish, or was it Portuguese? Very useful in our multicultural society, she added. All well and good, I told her, but a person needs a foundation in the classics. One can’t build on anything without due respect for the roots of the past.” She turned to Ned. “Don’t you think so?” she asked.

He nodded. “The roots of the past are very important.”

Professor Thayer poured the sherry into the thimble-sized stemmed glasses. His hands trembled. Some liquid spilled over onto the tray. I saw Ned start to lean forward to help him, then think the better of it. We are of the same mind, I concluded, my first instinct to reach out to help, my second not to let Professor Thayer know I noticed any infirmity.

Our same mind was underscored even more by our shared relief—and debt to the grand or great, the him or her—not to have to risk certain humiliation in a game of Latin anagrams.

Was our relief so apparent? Perhaps so, because Mrs. Thayer then nodded at us. “I’m sure the two of you studied Latin,” she declared.

“Four years,” confessed Ned.
“Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est.”

“Two,” I added.
“Amo, amas, amat.”
I paused. I gathered steam.
“Agricolae poetae sunt,”
I recited. I couldn’t help myself.

She clapped. “See, I knew you were both properly educated.”

“What a pity we can’t play. It’s not quite the same with just four,” her husband said.

“What a pity,” Ned echoed.

“Next time,” Professor Thayer consoled. He poured more sherry into an already-overflowing glass. This welcome diversion cascaded onto the tray, over the table’s edge, onto Professor’s Thayer’s tweed knee, and onto the Heriz carpet at his feet.

I brought the tray into the kitchen. Mrs. Thayer pulled out a roll of paper towels. “Oh, men.” She sighed. A word of exasperation stated with such affection it made us both smile.

A soup tureen of pale blue china sat in the middle of the kitchen table. Painted on it were pairs of cupids dancing, jumping, cavorting over fields of wildflowers. Birds and butterflies filled a brilliant sky. Picturesque ruins crumbled artistically next to waterfalls. “How beautiful!” I exclaimed.

“Isn’t it? Chauncey and I got it on our honeymoon. In Italy.” She stopped. Her eyes filmed with far-off memories. “To this day, more than sixty years, every time I serve a lobster bisque, I’m reminded of those magical weeks.” She ran her fingers over the tureen’s cover, rested them on its handle, a knobbed red apple attached to a sleek purple plum. She patted a cupid. “Chauncey is so fond of Ned.”

“Driving Professor Thayer is the best job he’s ever had. Ned adores him.”

“And Ned seems so fond of you.”

“You think so?”

“I can always tell.”

Back in the library, Professor Thayer was asleep in his chair. His chin bobbed on his chest. The sound of gentle snores mixed with the clang of dishes and glasses being cleared.

“It’s time for us to go,” Ned said. “Stay there, Mrs. Thayer. We’ll let ourselves out.”

At the door, we turned to wave.

Mrs. Thayer didn’t see us. She was sitting next to her husband. Her hand was on his knee. She leaned toward him. She whispered something. Then planted a kiss on a cheek that, I was certain, seemed as smooth to her as that of a young man, her young man, her bridegroom, in Italy more than sixty years ago.

E
ight

I
’m still in bed when the buzzer rings. I stick my head under the pillow. “Go away,” I yell. “I am retreating from the world.” Not that anyone can hear me. The buzzer keeps screeching like those car alarms that bring old ladies into the street wearing fuzzy slippers and waving rolling pins. Is it stuck? Now that I shall never leave my apartment, now that I shall never leave my bed, am I to be tormented by a jammed and insistent buzzer that will turn me into one more crazy hermit in a city full of them? Who could it be? I wonder. And the second I think this, I pounce on you-know-who. And dismiss that thought.

Mailman? UPS? Someone soliciting for Common Cause despite the no solicitation signs stuck all over the downstairs hall? These rarely deter the kids putting themselves through college by selling magazine subscriptions to
Auto Digest,
though never
Art & Antiques
. Or the earnest souls collecting for disease of the month, terrorizing you into handing over five dollars lest tumors map your body and rot your skin. I touch my still-stinging face—rot has afflicted me already. Maybe it’s Clyde, who left behind in his ticketed car another doctoral thesis’s worth of apologies.

I shall never answer my door, I decide. The minute I take this stance, the buzzing stops. What a sense of power I feel, the power of semipositive thinking. Too bad I can’t vanquish thoughts the way I can vanquish annoying visitors.

But I’ve spoken too soon, for now there’s pounding at my door. Ceaseless, unrelenting pounding. Followed by the voice. “Abby, open up. I know you’re in there. I’ve already been at Objects of Desire. I know you’ve gone home. Open up. I am going to keep knocking until you let me in.”

It’s Lavinia.

“Go away,” I call again. But my heart’s not in it. I recognize a hopeless case when I see it, and Lavinia’s stubbornness and persistence are as immutable as the Berlin Wall—more, if you consider they tore the wall down.

I force myself out of bed. My legs are weak; maybe my calf muscles have already started to atrophy. I pull on sweatpants over my plain white 100 percent cotton serviceable underpants. I’ve tucked away my Victoria’s Secret silk bikinis along with my hopes in the back of my bureau drawer. I have seen my bleak future. No sex. Bodily fluids as dry as my shriveled, shrinking skin.

I open the door.

“My God, what’s happened to your face?” Lavinia shouts.

“Hello to you, too.”

“Stress,” she diagnoses.

“Actually some allergic reaction to a face cream,” I say. I do not admit rubbing toothpaste all over my delicate brow.

“No wonder you’re hiding out.” She walks inside. Flings a jacket I have hung over the back of a chair onto the floor, pushes away a pair of jeans, and sits down. “Just so you know, some lady who lives in the building, on her way back from the market, let me in. You should have a rule. It’s hideously unsafe.”

“If we had a rule, you wouldn’t be here now,” I reasonably point out.

She brushes this off. “I need to talk to you.”

“Is conversation between us permitted?” I ask. “Considering our lawyers.” Since my
Bleak House
legal problems, I’ve been watching even more
Law & Order
.

“We’re friends.”

Were,
I start to amend, then slam my mouth shut.

“Besides, we’re not jurors blabbing to the press.” She looks around my living room.

I view my own four walls through her two eyes.

She doesn’t say, What a dump, but I can read it on her face.

I touch my own face. “I’ve been feeling so under the weather I haven’t got around to cleaning this up.”

“With all this stuff, I can’t imagine you’d have room for anything more.”

Does she mean room to fit a chamber pot? Does she mean room for our mothers’ antiques, ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of which she arranged to have crated and moved to her Concord house? “I’m sorting it out. Some of the stuff is going to my booth,” I lie.

She studies my sofa, draped with my none-too-clean, all-too-practical underwear. “I’m getting married again,” she announces.

I do a double take. She has stated this in the same way she’d say she was going to the store to pick up a jar of pickles. “Oh,” I remark, neutral as Switzerland. I feel a sadness for what, in a normal friendship, would have been the scenario to follow such news: the jumping up and down. The flinging of arms. The examining of the ring. The pulling out of photographs. The who, what, and where asked and answered with mounting excitement verging on gushiness.

“Yes. And I want to start this marriage with a clean slate.”

“Which has what to do with me?”

“Everything. The chamber pot, for example.” She smooths her skirt. She points to my
OUT OF IRAQ
T. “Aren’t you a little too old to be wearing that?”

“I feel strongly about the war.”

“You’re not a college student anymore.”

“Does that make me less of an involved citizen?” I stare at her. At her neat red suit and diamond studs and red-leather-trimmed pocketbook. “Omigod!” I exclaim. “Is your husband-to-be a
Republican
?”

To her credit, she has the good grace to blush. “Political affiliations are private,” she snorts. “Besides, my forthcoming marriage is not the purpose of this visit.”

“Explain to me again what the purpose is.”

“To resolve the issue of this chamber pot.”

“I assume your heavy-hitting Snodgrass X, Y, and Z law firm was in charge of this particular assault.” I pat my T-shirt. “These weapons of mass destruction on a civilian population unable to defend itself.”

“Stop it, Abby. You’re becoming tiresome.” She sighs her long-suffering Lavinia sigh. “My lawyers, in fact, would not wish me to be here talking to you.”

“You mean consorting with the enemy?”

She ignores this. “They feel my case is the superior one. That my mother wanted me to have the chamber pot, herein stated same, and as such it rightly belongs to me. But even given the probable positive outcome of my case, I am, as you know, not a selfish person.”

“Always thinking of others. Generous to a fault. Awash in the milk of human kindness.”

All irony is lost on her, maybe because she keeps talking like a lawyer. “And, as a result, to avoid litigation insofar as I can focus on my upcoming marriage, this
happy
event—
very happy event
—I’ve decided to go against counsel’s advice and offer to sell the chamber pot and split the proceeds with you.” She looks at me with a self-congratulatory tilt of the chin.

Am I supposed to melt at her feet into a puddle of gratitude?

She waves her fingers in the direction of my underwear-upholstered sofa, my clutter of bric-a-brac and flea-market finds, my pizza boxes and Chinese food cartons waiting to be put out in the trash, my mottled lumpy face in desperate need of an ace dermatologist, my T-shirt and sweatpants begging for a fashion make over. “It seems to me you could certainly use the money,” she adds, noblesse oblige winning out over
Let them eat cake
.

My spine, put through its character-building paces, gratifyingly stiffens. “The chamber pot was meant for me. It was my mother’s. I’ll never part with it.” I pause. “Besides, you didn’t want it until I took it onto
Antiques Roadshow
. It was
my
mother’s,” I repeat. “You rejected it. I kept it. Too bad.”

“Well, then let me point something else out. How would you like your mother’s—and my mother’s—life together broadcast all over the Boston tabloids?”

“Believe me, no newspaper would be interested in the domestic arrangements of two mousy academic wives.”

“You wanna bet? When there’s a chamber pot that once belonged to Elizabeth Barrett Browning involved? When you stick yourself and it up on one of PBS’s most popular programs, broadcast on channels across the fifty-two states? With reruns shown more than twice a week, dare I calculate. Almost every time I turn on the TV—which isn’t often, as I prefer to use my few free moments to read—there you are with your eyes popping out and your mouth agape. ‘You’re kidding,’ you scream.” She shakes her head. “Don’t be naïve, Abby. You asked for it. Boy, the media can’t wait to shove the knife into us Brattle Street Harvard types. The whole story of our lives will be right out there for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to read. Your grocer. Your dentist.”

“Not to mention your new fiancé.” I was going to say Republican fiancé but I didn’t have the hard evidence. I paused. “Lavinia, it isn’t as though our story hasn’t been told before. It isn’t as though your brother didn’t publish his book.”

“Which was a
novel
. Not a piece of mass-market yellow journalism.”

“You were upset at the time.”

“I got over it.” She waits. “Unlike you.”

I don’t defend myself.

But she defends Ned. “The book didn’t get the recognition it deserved. It sold zilch copies. Due not to Ned but to the bad marketing of his publisher. I’d rather keep our story in the family than let the newspapers make hay of our private affairs.”

“Nothing changes my mind. You didn’t want it. Finder’s keepers.”

She gets up in a huff. “I would have hoped you’d be reasonable. But why would I have thought that, as you’ve never been reasonable in your whole life.”

“Not reasonable like you,” I say sweetly. “Not so unselfish as you, either.”

She turns toward the door. Some of the upholstery in the chair must have ripped as feathers and bits of cotton batting dot the seat of her red skirt. I smile.

“I don’t know why you’re smiling, Abigail. You’ve made a stupid mistake.” She sticks out her jaw like a toddler incubating a tantrum. “I’ll see you in court.”

I keep smiling. “I bet you’ve always wanted to say those words.”

She puts her hand on the doorknob. “Next will come the depositions.” She opens the door. She turns to me. “I assume Ned will be subpoenaed to testify.”

Ned. Ned. I’ve delayed this part long enough. I’m not surprised you’re getting restless. I pour myself a glass of wine even though, as Uncle Bick would have said, the sun hasn’t passed over the yardarm yet. I get back into bed, where I promptly dribble wine on the pillowcase to join the Rorschach blots of pepperoni pizza and Buddha’s Delight. I take another, more careful sip.