Muse: A Novel (8 page)

A.O. spent his declining years in Venice, holed up in the apartment overlooking his old flame Celine Mannheim’s garden. It was there, in the fall of 1969, that he encountered Ida Perkins again (they’d had a brief affair in London in the late fifties), at a dinner for none other than Homer Stern, who was visiting his cousin. Soon Arnold and Ida were living together, and she was to care for him devotedly for the next twenty years, till he died of emphysema on October 25, 1989, at the age of eighty-four.

Sterling admitted that when he’d first come to Outerbridge in London for advice, Arnold had not been encouraging about the young Princetonian’s forays into verse. “You’ll never make it as a poet, Sterl,” he’d drawled. “Go home and do something useful—like starting a publishing house. We need you.” Crestfallen, then inspired, Sterling had spent a few months skiing and canoodling in Gstaad before wending his way home on the
Queen Mary.
Less than two years later, Impetus Editions, set up in the old farmer’s cottage on his aunt Lobelia Delano’s estate in Hiram’s Corners, New York, a hundred miles north of the city, was a going concern.

“Impotent Editions,” Outerbridge called it when he was annoyed with Sterling, which turned out to be often over
the next forty years. He hadn’t conceived that Sterling, beyond being loyal and well-heeled, might actually have a mind and sensibility of his own. But Impetus soon became anything but a rich man’s plaything. Sterling had been tight with a dollar, he acknowledged, but liberal in his encouragement of writing that he thought mattered and the writers who created it, and over not too many years, his fledgling house had developed from a congeries of Outerbridge acolytes into a small, selective organ of the left-leaning branch of late modernism (as opposed to the by-then-incarcerated Pound’s and the apotheosized Eliot’s rightward-tilting brand) that came to be known as the Movement.

Paul was convinced that no one had done more to ensure the health of what became a vital alternative strain in American literature than Sterling Wainwright in his heyday. After all, Byron Hummock, the showiest of the trendsetting postwar Jewish American writers, had published his first book of stories with Sterling, as had April Owens her now-classic anti-O’Neillian dramas of modern Greek love and politics, and Jorge Metzl his groundbreaking journalism about West Africa. Sterling’s Impetus New Poets also introduced and stayed loyal to most of the second- and third-generation modernists. Only Pound and his disciple Laughlin, with his comparatively staid Nude Erections, as Pound had dubbed it, established a decade earlier not thirty miles east in
Connecticut’s Northwest Corner, could hold a candle to the impetus that Outerbridge and Wainwright together had given to the Movement Moment.

And Sterling had evolved, too. From being a gawky, sex-obsessed, very tall rich young man, he grew into a debonair, eligible, sex-obsessed bachelor-about-town. Yes, he was something of a wastrel, along with his youthful buddy from Cincinnati Johnnie George, heir to the Skoobie Doo peanut butter fortune, who enjoyed nothing more than swanning around with Sterling and a couple of starlets for evenings on the town in New York, ski vacations in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or trouble in Tahiti. One winter Sterling and Georgie had spent two months in the Hole, as they called it, and came away owning the ski resort at the Summit for their pains. The Summit boasted the finest powder Sterling had skied on since his student days in Switzerland, and some mighty attractive women, too. Paul had seen a picture of him making an elegant turn on a slope somewhere, a nimble industrial princeling as handsome as a matinee idol. No wonder dashing, tall, blond, rich Sterling had wowed local cattle heiress and landowner Jeannette Stevens and promptly gotten her pregnant. Jeannette was lovely and forthright in the Western way, but not all that challenging, Sterling admitted, and after giving him a daughter, she had gone back to Wyoming, baby in tow, while Sterling stayed in the East, carousing and reading and picking up writers
in minuscule deals that had added up over time to a list of influence and importance, if not overwhelming salability.

By his fifties, when America was still licking its wounds over its debacle in Southeast Asia and being torn apart by the revolution in values it unleashed, the onetime playboy had evolved, Paul saw, into a literary grandee and guru, a kind of minor saint of the counterculture as the publisher and protector of his most popular author, the iconic Ida Perkins.

Sterling, as Paul didn’t need reminding, had known Ida his whole life; she was his cousin, after all. Doris Appleton, the much younger half-sister of his grandmother Ida Appleton Wainwright (the Appletons hailed originally from Salem, Massachusetts, and claimed two or three witches in their lineage), had married George Peabody (“Pebo”) Perkins, a stiff, Episcopalian Proper Bostonian if there ever was one, as a mere girl of eighteen in 1919; Ida’s father was a hopelessly ineffectual banker who lost everything in the Crash and turned into a nasty drunk. As if that weren’t enough, Pebo’s brother Thomas Handyside Perkins, known as Handy, married a cousin of Sterling’s mother, Lavinia Furness, so they were doubly if not exactly closely related. So Sterling and Ida were glancingly aware of each other from family gatherings throughout their childhoods, though she barely acknowledged her younger cousin’s existence.

It had been at the Wainwright family’s elaborate “camp”
at Otter Creek on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 1943, the summer Sterling turned sixteen, that he’d first come alive to his older cousin’s beauty. And Ida had been equally smitten with Sterling, a golf club–wielding Adonis who’d already begun turning heads, as he would all his life—Paul had heard the stories.

Sterling’s infatuation with Ida, then, was not only genteelly quasi-incestuous, but had the sanctified aura of first love about it. But it wasn’t simply carnal, though her flowing red locks, creamy skin, and callipygian figure were as remarkable as her aquiline profile, which today graces our 52-cent stamp. To see the cousins together was to feel you were on a movie set—except that they were so natural and unaffected, there wasn’t the faintest whiff of commerce about them.

And young Ida had turned out to be a poet as well—and a supremely gifted one. No wonder Sterling, who already had the literary bug himself, fell book, line, and sinker for his beauteous lyre-strumming playmate, who at eighteen had just published her notorious first collection. Even crusty Arnold, himself more than a little dazzled by the poetic
Wundermädchen,
had dubbed her, on reading
Virgin Again
that same fateful summer, “the Sappho of Our Times.”

The Sappho of Our Times was not a Sapphist, however—far from it. Her fling with her young cousin hadn’t lasted
long, Sterling admitted, but Paul knew it was only the first in a string of passionate liaisons destined to become the stuff of literary myth. Ida’s liaisons became as legendary as Edna St. Vincent Millay’s, but where Vincent had been blowzily self-advertising in her controversy-courting life and work, the young Ida was aristocratically private—ice to the outer world, a furnace within. Only H.D. and Marianne Moore approached Ida in ethereal remoteness, so dazzlingly
raffinée
next to the louche effusions of her own contemporary, the sloppy Muriel Rukeyser. No, Ida’s style—cool, fragmentary, and mysterious—was entirely her own, and lent her more than a whiff of erotic glamour. “No wonder they thought she was one of the girls,” Sterling joshed, downing his third single malt of the evening.

Sterling ran into the now-infamous and if anything more striking Ida in New York in the fall of 1948, and before long he was head over heels again, the way he’d been at sixteen—enough to allow him to recover at least temporarily from A.O.’s dismissal of his work and start writing again. “
Il Catullo americano
” an Italian critic had named him in his later years, the American Catullus, a moniker he wore with pride, though he could never quite muster the engorged animus that had made the Roman immortal. Sterling’s love poems were generically idealizing, maybe even a little saccharine. Basically, Paul thought, he was too nice.

Not the stuff of greatness, alas. But Ida had responded. Tall, dreamy Cousin Sterling, his adolescent peachiness seasoned by a few years of romantic training, his remaining baby fat absorbed into leanness, caught her fancy again, and over that Christmas holiday they had their second torrid entanglement.

Sterling made it sound as if he’d spent a lifetime mourning those few weeks—though he’d gone on to have a rich and varied sex life of his own. He’d acquired another wife, and a son and namesake, after a series of relationships, including a long-standing, emotionally wrenching one with Bree Davis, who worked as an editor for many years at Impetus. Bree was a live wire, sensible and huskily beautiful, a kind of literary Ava Gardner, but Sterling’s mother had put her foot down. He’d had one free shot; his next consort was not going to be a nobody, too. So Bree got the
boot, though the
on dit
was that they’d never totally called it quits, and Sterling married Maxine Schwalbe, the self-effacing, no-nonsense, seriously wealthy daughter of the founder of Mac Labs. Sterling, who was more than a foot taller than his wife, was, Paul was aware, the less wealthy partner of the two, though Wainwright’s own investments, as his protégée Bettina Braun had told Paul, brought him $10,000 a day back in the early eighties, when money was still money.

You would never have known that slight, brunette Maxine was rich, except that her effortless manners and careful democratic consideration for everyone gave her away. She didn’t need to throw her not-so-considerable weight around; she needed not to. And she was loved for her selfless self, her warmth and generosity, by all who knew her, according to Bettina. Everyone but Sterling, that is. Their alliance was highly satisfactory for him, for in Maxine he finally had a good-natured mate who could create and manage a domestic establishment that catered to his every need and wish—if not desire. Desire belonged elsewhere, outside the suffocating family circle. And no doubt Maxine understood this, though she never made reference to it; that would have meant disturbing the almost courtly decorum that regulated their lives. So Maxine held firm but gentle sway in Hiram’s Corners with young Sterling III,
while Sterling toggled back and forth between the farm and the Impetus office he’d opened in New York in the sixties, where it was easier for him to sweet-talk wayward authors, and indulge his penchant for beautiful young things.

That was decades ago now, and a lot of water had flowed under all their bridges. Maxine had died far too young, in her late fifties, and Sterling had up and married Bree soon after. Ida was walled up in Venice with the ghost of A.O. and her showboat Italian husband. In the old days, she’d made a cross-country tour every year or two, organized by the Impetus staff, who were understandably desperate to maintain her franchise. She’d appear like royalty, magnificent in frayed velvet, silvering hair flying wild in her face, before ecstatic audiences of all ages, and then, as long as Maxine was alive at least, would drop down for a week or two of R&R at the Wainwrights’ farm in Hiram’s Corners, north of the city. She and Sterling had been kissing cousins, after all, and she was his best-selling author. Though their lives had long since diverged, their literary and personal ties endured. They were like family—no, they
were
family. It had been ages, though, since Ida, claiming the excuse of age, had been to America.

“The Goddess,” Sterling called her more than once in the course of his evenings with Paul, with more than a hint of envy. “She barely deigns to notice us mere mortals
anymore,” he complained, drawing contemplatively on his amber-colored meerschaum, its bowl sculpted into a grinning satyr’s head.

To which Paul had gently retorted, “Isn’t she just the same as always—only older?”

“Maybe so,” Sterling muttered, chewing on the stem of his pipe, then withdrawing inward, his mind already on something else, or lingering on how his and his cousin’s lives had developed and diverged, tendrils from the same plant that had wound around different branches, different banisters—undeniably separate, yet still connected, still somehow one.

Paul had come upon a framed picture of them all together in Hiram’s Corners on a bookshelf in Sterling’s apartment, a color snapshot from the late eighties, its greens and blues leached out now. Ida, uncharacteristically wearing jeans and a straw hat, is seated between Sterling and Maxine, looking up at the photographer—most likely Sterling’s daughter, Ida, her namesake. Ida P is wearing a determinedly happy smile, possibly a little careworn around the eyes. Putting a brave face on things? It was hard to tell from one photograph, one small yet precious bit of evidence, one mere tessera in the great mosaic that might fit in so many places. Who could say what those looks, those hands, those clothes, that weather truly signified? But there it was, a piece of the
gone world that existed where we tread today. One sunny moment, moving inexorably toward sepia. Incredible, really, so far and yet so near: the divine Ida Perkins in Hiram’s Corners, New York, holding hands with Sterling and Maxine Wainwright, smiling into the sun.