How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (28 page)

My mother’s friend had shrugged. “You can’t go up against Harvard.” She sighed.

Harvard be damned, I think now. Lacking the scholarly credentials to get into the inner sanctum sanctorum, I’m not as crushed as you might predict. Do I actually have to see the hands? Maybe it’s enough to know they exist. That they inhabit a resting place only one zip code away from me. Perhaps it’s enough to make the connections. To marvel at the coincidence. To acknowledge how plaster can resonate with flesh. To take comfort in the possibility of the “union of two high, poetic lives.” I came close to such a union, I tell myself. Maybe the next.

I lie down on my creaking, unmade bed. The room spins. I’m at sea on my lumpy mattress, crashing against wave after wave, my only anchor, my only consolation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s chamber pot.

But the minute I think this, up seeps the old familiar guilt. Ned’s pity. Lavinia’s charity. What have I done? What am I going to do?

Then something happens that only proves that you need to hold on to your raft, that you should never give up on life. Because when your emotions plummet so low they have nowhere else to go but up, fate can take an unexpected, soaring turn. Not that I can recognize the truth of this maxim right away.

Here’s what happens: The phone rings. I can’t bear any more of anything, I plead. Besides, I am so pinned to my bed of woe by woe, so weighted down with remorse and guilt, I could never lift an arm to reach for the telephone. I manage a few tubercular-sounding coughs to underscore my invalided state and let the machine pick up.

“Abby, Abby!” Gus nearly screams. “I’m just back from
Antiques Roadshow
. Your King’s Arrow is worth forty thousand bucks!”

Like a miracle at Lourdes, I throw off my shackles. In an instant I’m off the bed. In seconds I’m at the phone before Gus hangs up. “I don’t believe it!” I scream.

“It’s true!” Gus screams.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” I scream.

The man upstairs pounds a broomstick on his floor. I lower my voice. “What happened? Tell me everything.”

“Do I have an eye or not?” he fishes.

Far be it for me to split cherubs. “You do indeed!” I agree.

“The expert vetted it. And then a museum curator came up and offered the full estimate price on the spot. I told him I’d consult the owner.”

“Accept the offer. Sell it,” I order. Decisive, businesslike, I revel in the take-charge-of-your-life side of me I’ve never seen before.

“Done.”

“I’ll give you a commission. Only what you deserve.”

“The result is its own reward,” Gus assures. He pauses. “Though I wouldn’t turn down a bottle of bubbly.”

“A
bottle
? I’ll send you a case.”

I waltz a self-congratulatory loop around the living room. I allow myself a few yelping
yippees!
which bring the pounding of the broomstick back. Without any thought, without any waffling, I know exactly what I’m going to do. Forty thousand dollars! Thirty-seven fifty is exactly half of the seventy-five. I’ll have some money left over to purchase new stock for my business. I salute my professional eye. That I first set that eye on a corn sheller instead of the King’s Arrow is something I hardly bat an eyelash at. Who can fault a dealer clever enough to buy the whole lot? Hooray! The solution is so clear it’s astonishing.

But first I dial the University Liquor Store. I ask for the authority on champagne. Expert to expert in our different milieus, we discuss possibilities. We decide on a single vineyard. Vintage. Brut. I supply Gus’s address and the number of my Visa card.

By now it’s seven-thirty, way beyond quitting time. For anyone except Mary Agnes Finch, that is. I reach her on her direct line. I explain about the King’s Arrow, about its forty-thousand-dollar sale.

“Is it in dispute?” she asks. Oh, no, here we go again, her tone implies.

“Not at all,” I assure her. “I want to use the money to buy back Lavinia’s half of the chamber pot.”

“You
what
?” She stops. “I don’t think I heard you right.”

“I want to use the money to buy back Lavinia’s half of the chamber pot,” I repeat.

Though I can tell she’s making a superhuman effort to keep her voice measured, I can still detect an edge of fury. “Don’t be an idiot, Abby.”

“I’m not. I got a windfall. I bought something for fifteen bucks that turns out to be a little more than half of the chamber pot’s worth. It has to be a sign. Manna from heaven.”

“And you want to give this away?”

“It seems the right thing to do.”

“Abby, the chamber pot is lawfully yours.”

“How could it be lawful if I lied to Lavinia?” I wince at the killed
Globe
article. At my adultery-in-the-Old-Man-of-the-Mountain-Room threats. “I didn’t tell her the
Globe
story on the chamber pot had been canceled. Because she assumed it was going to be published, she gave in.”

“You didn’t lie. Nobody questioned you about that putative article.”

“But I withheld information, I committed the sin of omission,” I confess.

“Can’t you just recite a few Hail Marys?”

“An agnostic? Quaker? Unitarian? We went to college together, not parochial school.”

“Oh, Abby, legally your sin of omission is irrelevant.”

“How about spiritually? Emotionally? Personally? Ethically?” Romantically, I’m tempted to include. I change my mind. Romance is what’s
really
irrelevant.

I hear noise in the background. Doors slamming. Bells ringing.
Miss Finch,
a voice hollers out. “Hold my calls,” Mary Agnes tells someone. “
All
of them.”

Mary Agnes sighs. “What is it you want me to do?”

“I want you to call up Lavinia.” I hesitate. “And Ned,” I add. “And tell them I plan to write out a check to guarantee I have full and sole title to the chamber pot.”

“Excuse me? You already own the chamber pot.”

“Technically, maybe,” I concede. “But I don’t feel it in my bones.”

“And it’s worth thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars to you to feel it in your bones?”

I hold up my left hand. “Yes,” I testify. “It will banish all my guilt.”

“Guilt for what? Taking what is yours? Lavinia gave it to you. She didn’t want it. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. In this case, ten-tenths. Don’t be a fool, Abby,” Mary Agnes says. She stops. Her tone is gentler, the kind of tone she must use with recalcitrant clients, the old, the muddled, the dumb, those suffering from Alzheimer’s, the people you’d talk down from the ledge of a roof. “Look, Abby, I realize I gave you short shrift during the deposition. I apologize—”

I think of Clyde. I cut her off. “No matter.”

“Yes, it does matter. I was distracted by another case, which is no excuse…”

“I’m well aware my chamber pot is small potatoes.”

“True enough. But let me remind you that Lavinia deserves nothing from you. All those red stickers she pasted over your mother’s belongings. If I brought an appraiser in to tally up the value of the load she carted away compared with yours, including the seventy-five thousand, I can guarantee you there would be an enormous disparity. I’m sure the antiques she took, she
stole,
are worth many hundreds of thousands. In fact, if you ever wanted to sue…”

“Never. I’d never go through this again. Nothing is worth this agony.”

“The truth is she stole from you.”

“But she said her mother wanted her to have those things.”

“She lied.”

The words shock me; the short declarative sentence feels like the come-to-your-senses slap lovers in movies give women on the verge of hysteria. “But—but—” I stammer.

“Look. You’ve got something worth forty thousand dollars. You own a chamber pot worth seventy-five. You have legal fees. Taxes on the sale of the King’s Arrow alone will add up to almost forty percent. Even with a friends-and-family reduction, my bill will be substantial. Lavinia doesn’t need the money. Ned doesn’t want it. What’s the issue here?” She pauses. “Except for your masochism.”

“Wait a minute.”

“
You
wait a minute. I’ve known you since freshman year, Abby. You’re too scrupulous.”

Not too scrupulous to jump into bed with a man I had few feelings for, a situation my lawyer, for current purposes, really doesn’t need to know anything about. “I wouldn’t go so far as—”

“I would. You’re a wimp. Remember when you passed up free tickets for that U-2 concert you were dying to attend because you’d made some tentative coffee study date with a nerd? Who in the end didn’t even show up? And remember that other time when you confessed to colluding in the trashing of the quad because you thought you might have dropped a candy wrapper on the just-seeded lawn? And it turned out that townies had practically bulldozed the grass?”

“Enough. Enough. I was eighteen. Well, twenty at the most.”

“You haven’t changed in—what?—thirteen years. As your lawyer, I advise strongly against this folly.”

“As my lawyer, don’t you have to do what your client wants?”

Mary Agnes huffs. I wonder if I’m the most challenging client she’s ever had. I wonder if she’ll start writing law articles about me. I wonder if my case will be assigned to first-year property law students in the lecture halls of Langdell.

“I don’t believe my client
knows
what she wants. Take a few days to think this over and call me back.”

“I won’t change my mind.”

“Just consider it,” Mary Agnes orders. “Go over everything. It’s a no-brainer as far as I and anyone else on the planet is concerned.”

“Two days,” I say, “and then you promise you’ll do what I want?”

“Two days,” Mary Agnes warns.

I sit back in my chair. I tuck my legs under my knees. Really, I think. Am I the last man (woman?) standing? Am I the single holdout in the jury room? Just like the Eureka! recognition of a treasure in a bunch of trash, a person can instinctively know the right thing to do in the middle of an imperfect and morally challenged universe. Wimp? Masochist? Is it so wrong to see both sides of the question? Unlike Lavinia, who was always so sure of her own point of view, who owned a monopoly on the truth. “I’m the boss of you,” Lavinia used to lord over me as a kid. “Do everything the way I want.”

“Don’t act like such a bully,” I’d venture, cowering under her instructions of what to wear, what movie to see, what teacher to choose, what game to play, why I deserved to be
it
.

“If you didn’t have me to tell you what to do, you wouldn’t be able to make up your mind,” she’d reply.

Now I scroll through my career as Lavinia’s subnumerary. Our blood sisterhood, her best-friend betrayals, the unflattering dress she picked for me for her first wedding, her red stickers dotted like measles all over our mothers’ furniture. The way she threw my own clothes off my own chair. As if even those jeans and shirts weren’t mine. As if her singular (self-appointed) superiority granted her the prior claim.

The phone rings. “And by the way. I forgot to tell you,” Mary Agnes begins with no preliminaries, “I heard from Ned. He faxed me an instrument of release and assignment—assignment to
you
—giving up his right to ownership. He apologized for his sister. Said she could be quite the bitch. Bitch,” she repeats. She pauses to let the word sink in. “Got to go. Just want you to stir that into the making-the-sensible-decision pot. The only decision.
Two days
.” And before I can answer, she hangs up.

I look around my apartment. At the clothes still strewn on the chairs, dishes stacked in the sink, the clutter of antiques and junk, everything I ever owned waiting to be sorted into piles of
to stay
or
to go
. I remember when Lavinia and I cleaned out our mothers’ apartment. How reluctant I was to remove all trace of my mother, to strip the apartment to its bare walls, its bare floor. And how eagerly Lavinia went to work to dismantle it.
Let’s face it, you are a bit scattered, Abby. If it were up to you, we’d never get this done,
she’d sneered. But people exist in their objects; they inhabit the walls of their rooms. Old things bear traces of lives lived; possessions provoke cherished memories. That was Grandpa’s watch, a son might say. I remember when he wore it, the way it dangled just so from that chain. I picture my mother holding the chamber pot, admiring the drawing of Flush, treasuring the history contained in its discolored porcelain. I see her hands setting out pâté and cornichons on the very plates I now keep on my shelf.
You haven’t changed in—what?—thirteen years,
Mary Agnes said to me.

I stand up. I straighten the legs of my jeans. It’s about time. I’ll start with the chamber pot that Lavinia didn’t want, the chamber pot that is lawfully mine. The more I tell myself this, the more I believe it. Maybe I’ll be a convert to the healing power of the mantra yet.
It’s mine
.
It’s mine,
I chant. After all, was withholding the
Globe
information a federal crime? Especially since I would have told the truth if Jim Snodgrass had asked. Especially compared to Lavinia. Lavinia had lied. She has always lied. How could I have been so dumb? How could I have thought to throw my King’s Arrow earnings away? How could I have been such a wimp? Such a masochist? I stop. No more.
Former
wimp.
Ex
-masochist. I don’t need any Lourdes water to declare I’ve been cured.

I grab the vacuum. The broom. The mop and the pail. For two hours I clean. I fill four plastic garbage bags with ragged college clothes and threadbare sweaters. I plump pillows. Put away dishes. Sponge down counters. Change the sheets. Organize my files and my jewelry trays. I wash the windows with ammonia: I polish them till the glass shines like fine Waterford. I stick things in boxes to take to my booth, other cartons I designate for Goodwill.
To go
.
To stay
. I wish you could sort people that easily; I wish you could decide who’s to go, who’s to stay, that fast.

When the apartment looks like new, the new me calls Mary Agnes at home. “I’ve decided you’re right.” I announce in my firmest, most decisive voice.