How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (24 page)

He ignores my New Hampshire references. “Did you tell her anything?” he repeats.

And now, reader, here’s where you’ll be most proud of me. Charmed and betrayed. Seduced and abandoned. I nevertheless manage to collect myself. I harden my heart and pervert my brain cells into the dark criminal mind of the blackmailer.

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“Did you write that article yet?”

Another, this time longer, silence ensues. I sense the fog of Hamlet indecision seeping through the wire. Will he settle for the home entertainment center? Will he go for the jackpot? Cap’n Crunch versus Special K? Corn shellers over the King’s Arrow? Ladies and Gentlemen: In this corner lies journalistic integrity. In that corner, domestic tranquillity, however tainted by lies. Place your bets.

I’ve placed my bet.

Ladies and Gentlemen: We have a winner here.

He clears his throat. “Funny you should mention that article. I’ve just decided to trash it. The whole subject—the
Antiques Roadshow,
your Cambridge family, those sappy Brownings, a chamber pot of all the disgusting things—was bound to put my readers to sleep. To think that I slogged through that novel by your friend Bickford Potter. What a piece of junk.”

“Asshole!” I scream. And for the zillionth time that day, I slam down the phone.

I must admit I take to my sofa. I must confess I shed a few tears. For old, generic breaking-up’s sake. You are well rid of him, I tell myself. The signs were all there. His driving. His lying. His sex manual skills. I’m sure he was the kind of kid who drowned kittens, who pulled off the wings of butterflies. Was I so desperate that I could overlook such blatant character flaws? I picture myself in bed with him. What I see is so bad, so pathetic, I have to stuff my pillow over my eyes. I am a fool. I am a motherless girl. I am adrift without a moral compass. I shed a couple more tears. But—
big but—
the article is not coming out, I marvel. I have silenced a member of the press. Wait till I tell Lavinia.

I stop. Maybe I won’t tell Lavinia. Maybe I, Abigail Elizabeth Randolph, the duped, betrayed, abandoned, can work my way to the end of my cycle of misery. I think of the six wives of Henry VIII.
Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived
. I can certainly produce a variation on that rhyme for my own faltering relationships. Yet maybe, like Catherine Parr, wife number six, I could survive and surmount the difficulty of a not-up-to-par, not-up-to-
Parr,
consort. She outlived three husbands, including Henry, and went on to marry the man of her dreams. An inspiration I’ll tuck away for future revisiting.

But for now, enough about me. Enough about men. Enough about me
and
men. A subject worthy of a doctoral thesis in sociology. Or sociopathology. Let’s move on to a smaller, more manageable, less male-o-centric front. I raise my fist in a V for victory. I take a bow. Could it be possible that for once in my whole sibling-free-but-not-free-of-sibling-rivalry life, I am holding the upper hand over Lavinia?

T
hirteen

T
his morning’s the deposition. I didn’t sleep all night. I tossed and turned, caught between the Scylla of the chamber pot and the Charybdis of Ned. Or should it be the other way around?
Mine mine mine,
kept running through my head like the tantrum of a toddler. The chamber pot is mine. As for Ned, he once was mine but I’d sent him away. For all the right reasons. I had no choice. Charm and betray. Did every man I ever met go to J-school? Is it a rule in the XY-chromosomes-training manual to coax what you want from a woman and then leave the dried-out hollow husk the way we girls might learn how to sew on a button and brown a roast? Oops—twenty-first-century correction—the way we girls might study how to be a titan of industry and double-cross your best friend? One thing I am sure of: I no longer want to see Ned again. And yet all night all I could see was Ned. His face. The sculpted edge of his jaw. His cockeyed smile. The little yellow glints in his irises. How his eyebrows rose in astonishment at the beauty of nature, the eloquence of a line of verse. The way the light had singled him out at St. Barnaby’s Chapel haloing him like a saint.

Some saint. I know I am well rid of him. I’m positive I made the right decision when I sent him away. Proved by the silence of these last years. Proved by how well I moved on and had subsequent, however doomed, relationships. Still, if I could not care less, then why is he haunting my sleep?

Stockholm syndrome, I diagnose. I am identifying with my oppressor. Patty Hearst has nothing over me. I feel a sudden chill. Wasn’t Tanya her name when she was a soldier in the Symbionese Liberation Army? A name I dredged up from my subconscious to use for my own purposes? I picture her in fatigues waving that machine gun. I see myself on TV clutching my chamber pot. Will the real Tanya please stand up? Unlike me, Patty Hearst went on to marry, have a family, act in movies, attend charity balls. She survived her legal troubles. This Tanya is just beginning hers.

My head pounds. I swallow two aspirin. If I’m suffering from Stockholm syndrome, however, there’s a cure. I’m identifying with an oppressor I could avoid if I’d only give up the chamber pot. Yet here’s the rub: in this case the cure is worse than the disease because I can’t surrender my casus belli, this source of misery. Why? Because it’s also the source of my salvation, my antiques credentials, and the foundation I can build my business on. Besides, it’s mine. And so few things seem to be mine these days; I’ve lost so much.

Usually I try not to dwell on my losses. Not that I’m some Pollyanna who can always separate the gold from the dross, as you already know. As you also already know, I do have a tendency to whine about those who done me wrong as well as my own failings, not to mention the flaws inherent in an imperfect society. But I’m making a huge effort to improve my character. If character is destiny, then I’m determined to whip mine into better shape.

Nevertheless, dwelling on my losses this particular morning is just the fuel I need to feed my anger for the deposition. I’m coaching myself to get mad at the other team so that I can walk away victorious, hoisting a ceramic trophy that once contained the metabolic waste of a famous poetess. Let’s face it, sometimes aren’t life’s ironies just too much?

I’m coaching myself because—frankly—I think Mary Agnes is falling a little behind in her training exercises. I showed up two days ago on the dot of three for my prep session. By the time she called me into her office it was four-fifteen. I’d read two issues of
People,
one
New Yorker,
then half a
Wall Street Journal
(someone had swiped the stock listings; not that I wanted them). I was about to ask for the bodice ripper paperback splayed open on the receptionist’s desk when the buzzer sounded. This prompted the same receptionist with terrible taste in literature to announce in a hoity-toity all-rise-for-the-king voice, “Attorney Finch will see you now.” I was tempted to tell her I’d seen Attorney Finch in Snoopy pajamas; I was tempted to add that I too was a high-powered, overly booked professional. There are other lawyers in the Greater Boston area, I wanted to point out. Other lawyers who don’t make important clients wait. But I didn’t. “Thank you so much.” I bowed and scraped. I made my sheepish way to Mary Agnes’s office, living proof that the meek do not inherit the earth.

Once I was inside the heavy paneled doors, it was pretty clear to me that the needs of Abigail Elizabeth Randolph—both legal and emotional—were not marked top priority on Mary Agnes Finch’s daily planner. Piles of paper littered her previously pristine desk. Five phone lines blinked with pulsing red lights. In the corner a fax machine was grinding out enough paper to provide Christo and Jeanne-Claude sufficient material to wrap Faneuil Hall. Secretaries and associates rushed in and out carrying blue-backed documents. Mary Agnes’s hair was askew; coffee stained her lapel. She looked at me as if she didn’t know who the hell I was.

“Abby,” I supplied. “Here for deposition coaching.” I clicked my heels together. I added a smart salute.

She didn’t smile.

“I thought you’d forgotten about me. I ran out of things to read and nearly filched the Harlequin romance from your receptionist.”

No amused appreciation turned up the corners of her lips. She didn’t apologize for keeping me waiting. She didn’t invite me to sit down.

I sat down. Someone knocked on the door, then opened it an inch. “Ginsburg and O’Connor are waiting in the conference room,” informed a disembodied voice.

“Ruth Bader? Sandra Day?” I asked.

She barely shook her head. The old Mary Agnes would have marveled over the coincidence. The Mary Agnes I-knew-when would have managed a chuckle at the least. “This won’t take long,” she said.

She must have noticed my disappointed body language because her face softened. “We’re in the middle of a really big case,” she explained.

I nodded. I waited for her to add—à la Clyde—Not that yours isn’t.

She didn’t.

She got right down to business. She recited from memory, rolling through the words the way you’d deliver the Pledge of Allegiance or the Preamble to the Constitution. We hold these truths to be self-evident: “This should be a civilized procedure. No need for anyone to get angry. No need for you to be anxious. The purpose of a deposition is to discover information so that lawyers can evaluate your case. Discourse should be cordial. No one will attack anybody else. You’ll be interviewed by the opposing attorney. I have the power to object. You’ll be under oath. Be honest. Just answer the questions. If you don’t know the answer, just say you don’t. Don’t volunteer any information. Don’t speculate. Don’t fill in. Don’t guess. Give short answers. You can pause before the answers to think. Make sure you listen to the questions. If you don’t understand, you can ask for clarification. If I object, don’t speak unless I give you the go-ahead. If you feel confused or uncomfortable, you can always request a break. Watch out for tricky questions asked in a friendly style or buried in a series of seemingly innocuous inquiries.”

I straighten up. “Like what?”

“A classic example is ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ If you answer yes, you still admit to the beating.”

“Oh, my God!” I exclaimed. My hands tightened into fists.

“Don’t worry. You’ll spot those balls coming from left field. You’ll avoid the land mines. I have every faith in your intelligence.”

“At least somebody has.”

“We
were
in college together,” she stated.

“Well, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“When this is over, I hope you’ll work on your self-esteem issues, Abby.” She shuffled some papers. She scribbled a note on a Post-it and stuck it on the blinking telephone. I tried to read the note upside down, to see if it had something to do with my case.
Habeas corpus,
I made out. Did that apply to a chamber pot?

There was more pounding on the door. A man wearing a janitor’s uniform rolled in a trolley filled with document boxes and what I recognized as the litigation cases Sam Waterston used to lug around. “Great, Tony. Stick them over in the corner,” Mary Agnes directed. She cleared her throat. “As for your deposition,” she began, even before Tony had left the room.

What about client-attorney privacy? What about client-attorney privilege? I wanted to ask. But she was talking too fast for me to point out Tony unloading boxes in the corner, a breach of confidentiality even if he did have a Walkman on.

She continued. “As we already discussed, to save money on the stenographer and for everyone’s convenience, Jim and I have agreed to depose all of you at the same time, here in my conference room. I understand there might be tensions, but you and the opposing parties are all intelligent adults, well-behaved adults…” She looked at her watch.

“I wouldn’t be so sure.”

She stood up.

“Shouldn’t we role-play a few questions? Don’t I need a rehearsal?”

“
Law & Order
again?” She pushed her hair off her forehead. “This isn’t a criminal situation.”

“From
your
point of view…”

She sighed. She opened a drawer. She took out a pamphlet. She handed it to me. “Here’s something we made up for our clients about to be deposed. Take it home. Study it.” She came around from behind her desk. She put a hand on my elbow. She led me toward the class-dismissed door. “Any other questions?”

“Yes.”

She cocked her chin.

“What do I wear?”

What I’m wearing for the deposition is what Lavinia would wear. Or as close to her taste as my limited bud get and closet full of left-over-from-college vintage bargains and Army/Navy store camouflage would permit. I pull on a pair of black pants. I find the black blazer I bought for my mother’s memorial service, still wrapped in its dry cleaner’s plastic shroud. Under the bathroom light, the blacks don’t match. I put on the white blouse I ironed last night with the iron I borrowed from my neighbor across the hall. I unbutton one button more than usual. For fashion’s sake, not for Ned’s, let me point out. I take so much care with my makeup I could be Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel—if only the results were so good. I blot my lips. I gulp some coffee. My stomach turns at the prospect of cereal, even of dry toast. My stomach turns at the prospect of the day ahead.

“Looking good, girl!” exclaims a kid I pass on my way to the T stop. The bounce this puts in my step lasts until, inside the train, another kid offers me a seat. “Here, ma’am,” he says, jumping up like a jack-in-the-box.
Ma’am!
Do I seem that rickety? I offer the seat, in turn, to a gray-haired woman in sneakers, a backpack slung on her osteoporosis-curved shoulder. She declines. I sink down in despair. Squeezed hip to hip with two supersized women hugging Burger King bags.

For the umpteenth time I open the pamphlet on depositions Mary Agnes handed me. I’ve got the classic student’s panic of being unprepared, a state of terror no amount of cramming seems to dispel. I’ve practically memorized each page. Not hard since, truth be told, the book is written to the level of a ninth grader. Actually even lower, I decide, more Dick and Jane than
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
. I look through the fingerprinted window into the black subway tunnel. Are you there, God? I want to cry. It’s me, Abigail. Instead, I lower my eyes to my homework.
See Dick answer a question
.
See Jane keep her mouth shut
. There’s nothing new here that Mary Agnes didn’t include in her recitation. I study the big print accompanied by line drawings of men and women in suits carrying briefcases. I clutch my floppy hobo-style shoulder bag. Someone I know must own a briefcase I could have borrowed.