Perfect Reader (20 page)

15

New Routines

T
HE WINDOWS OF THE
S
POTTED
S
ALAMANDER,
the bakery in town, had been painted in frosty shades of white by local schoolchildren with snowmen and snowflakes, sleighs and secular stars. Two decades ago, Flora had been one of them. The Spotted Salamander was so named in honor of Darwin’s Springtime Salamander Crossing, an event in which roads in town were blocked off to make way for the amphibians’ annual migration to their mating grounds. Though not actually grounds—they mated in pools of water, a fact that Flora and Georgia had, with the silly prurience of youth, found endlessly amusing, conjuring as it did steaming hot tubs and salamanders with towels around the waist. A movement had long been afoot in Darwin to dig little tunnels along the salamanders’ desired route to provide them even safer passage. How the Darwinians cherished the lower members of the animal kingdom.

Flora was becoming a Spotted Salamander regular, having decided she needed new routines for the new year, or at least some semblance of routine, period, and her breakfasts there were not unlike the old Tuesday-night dinners at the unmemorable Ponzu in their neat, formulaic construction—though lonelier—and this time currant scones and overpriced coffees in large saucerless mugs instead of scorched shrimp, cold soda, and plum wine, the college kid behind the counter flirting with her, stamping her free-coffee card extravagantly, winkingly, six times for every one so that every other week hers would be on the house—the cheap perks of monotony. Though today she was not alone.

She had called Cynthia and suggested they meet. Cynthia was the star of her father’s journals—the “gentle and generous” C., C. the “marvel.” Cynthia possessed the poems, had what appeared to be the original manuscript. She had an inscription, a dedication, a claim. She had an interested editor. Cynthia would not disappear, move across the country, or die anytime soon. But Flora was the executor; her father had left her in charge. If he had lived longer, perhaps all that would have changed, but he hadn’t. If mutual adoration was unlikely, perhaps a bland apathy could be achieved, an enduring emotional stalemate arrived at in the place of mutual understanding.

“I was
so
happy that you called, Flora,” Cynthia said, emphasizing the emphatic word
so
to the point that Flora pictured it as she had written it in letters as a child with a long string of
o’s
. “I was so hoping this moment would come, when you would be ready to sit down and talk about your father’s work. I’m so glad it’s here.”

“Yes, me too,” Flora said.

“Do you have a favorite?” Cynthia homed. “My favorite is always changing. I’m always discovering some new miracle in his words.”

“Hmmm, yes,” Flora answered, vagueness her only weapon against Cynthia’s enthusiasms. She admired her scone. “I know what you mean.” But Flora did have a favorite, the one she returned to, trying to make sense of it, the one that stood out from the others as a work not of self-reflection or narcissistic adoration, but of imagination and empathy, that on her first night of reading she’d put aside to think about later, the one poem she felt sure Cynthia would never mention, but which Flora could now recite: the one called “The Wizard.”

“How would you describe his style?” Cynthia asked.

“What a good question,” Flora said, looking deeply into her paper napkin.

“Lyrical, certainly. Scholarly, steeped in the English tradition,” Cynthia offered. The bakery was overheated, but she wore a long knit scarf coiled around her, this one an orgy of magentas—too many days in gardens had chilled her blood.

“Umm,” Flora said. “Yes.”

“But how would you put it?”

“I was surprised by them, I think.”

“Really? I think of them as being so entirely, so fully him.”

“I wasn’t expecting them to be so … so steamy.”

“Oh.” Cynthia smiled more to herself than at Flora. “Some of them are steamy.”

“I guess you never expect to gain access to your father’s erotic mind in that way.”

“No, you don’t,” Cynthia said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Flora watched as Cynthia considered this new perspective, her perspective. The moment didn’t last long.

“But they were also richer than I expected them to be,” Flora went on, the sudden lift, the pleasure in talking about him. “His writing, it’s musical—or, more specifically, it strikes me as choral, with many voices singing different parts. He used to listen to this ancient choral music. I forget the composer and the exact era, but it had forty-seven different parts or something, dozens of singers singing in their own voices, each part small, but the cumulative effect huge, grand. His work reminds me of that. He was so good at voices—literally, at creating different voices. He was a good mimic. There was a famous family story of him reading
The Wind in the Willows
to my mother early in their courtship and doing all the voices.” Flora looked to see how this news was received, but Cynthia, a great nodder, was nodding at almost every word Flora said. What was that, agreement? “When I read the poems, I can see him hearing them, if that makes sense. The writing is more aural than visual. Meant to be engaged with the ear and not the eye.”

“We must host a reading of them!” Cynthia burst out, as though the nods had propelled the words from deep within her.

Flora had shared too much. Stupidly, she’d told Cynthia what she thought. Her brief openness an error. The call had been a bad idea. The thing to do was toss the phone in the trash, to send it off to the landfill with its brother the answering machine.

Cynthia pushed: “I was just so taken with what you were saying, with the rightness of it. It made me want to hear them aloud. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

The point was not to hear other voices reading them, but to hear
his
. Reading the poems to herself, alone in the house, Flora heard his voice. The poems were hers. They made her squirm, they made her mad, but they were
hers
. What would Cynthia do, distribute the manuscript to everyone in town? Perhaps she already had. She’d admitted to sending some pages to the editor. Likely, there were multiple copies afloat. She was handing them out on street corners. “Here, take them, take them,” she’d call out, her head bobbing like a buoy in agreement with herself. “Read these exquisite poems all about me!”

“It might be something to think about, Flora. We could get a group of his friends and colleagues—Ira, and a few others from Darwin’s English Department, and maybe Wood would come down—and they could each read one, perhaps they could each even choose the one they wanted to read. Oh, it would be wonderful.”

“He was so private about them. Do you think he’d really want that?”

“I think so. Don’t you? Something to consider—a precursor to publication. Whet the public appetite! A wonderful idea,” Cynthia said, as if Flora had come up with it.

“Maybe at some point. But not now, I don’t think.” A precursor to publication? How many different ways would she have to say no to this woman? Her indefatigability was irritating. Her hopefulness refused crushing.

“What’s the story with Paul?” Cynthia asked, a tactical change of subject. “How was New Year’s Eve? Is it love?”

That seemed so like Cynthia, making a good thing seem less so by introducing the one thing it was definitely not.

“No, it’s not love,” Flora said. “Less than love, more than lust.”

“What a wonderful title for a country song.” Cynthia repeated Flora’s words back to her in a smoky twang.

That was annoying, too. Just as Flora succeeded in disliking her, Cynthia insisted on making herself likable. “A possible profession. Maybe I’ll look into that—country music,” Flora said.

“You’re not interested in going back to the magazine?”

“I just sort of ended up there. I was interested in houses, in rooms, in the way things looked. Working with words was the only way to make my parents not think it too frivolous.”

“Don’t you think your father wanted you to do what you wanted, no matter what?”

“I mean, they wouldn’t be wrong. It is frivolous. My father cared about books, my mother cared about justice. They wanted me to care about something beyond rooms.”

“Oh, I don’t know. What’s so bad about frivolous? Anyway, I’m not sure it is. What could be more important to our daily lives than rooms? Think of Virginia Woolf’s great book on women writers-no small emphasis put on rooms there. And caring about the way things look or sound—paintings, gardens, furniture, sentences—it’s all aesthetics when you get down to it. Prettiness is an oft-slighted virtue, but why?”

“Did you ever want to be something else? A painter, or an artist of some sort?”

“Oh, you mean like your father’s wanting to be a poet? Your father was always a poet—that’s what he naturally was, and what he should have been in the world all along. I’m just grateful he found out before it was too late.” A silence as Cynthia looked away. Flora felt like an exhausted mother with her newborn, or how she imagined that felt—the constant anxiety that this strange creature before her was going to dissolve into hysterics. “But no, for me, not at all. No hidden easels in my house. No works on paper tucked away in a drawer. You know, so many academics, so many of my colleagues, have this defensive posture toward their work—apologetic, almost hostile to their own research—in response, I suppose, to all the malicious maxims of the ‘Those who can’t, teach’ variety. It’s such a derisive profession—the derision directed both inside and out. But I never felt that particular worry. I’ve always believed that the interpretive and analytical arts are just that—arts—and every bit as rich as the generative ones. At root, it’s all about seeing differently, about looking at the world in a new way, finding something no one else has quite struck upon before—noticing.”

A man who used to notice—
the Hardy poem Ira read.

“The poems, my father’s poems,” Flora said. She wanted to make Cynthia see her way of looking. “They’re so personal. If there was a reading, or some other public forum, they could make everyone close to him feel … exposed. I don’t know, maybe it would be different or easier if they were paintings. Something other than poems.”

“But what about poor Madame X, who had her reputation ruined by Sargent’s famous painting? It’s not only the written word that can expose or impugn. Artists often make people un comfortable, but is that the worst thing in the world?”

“Not for the artist.”

Cynthia laughed. “Your father and I had conversations of this sort all the time, about the responsibility of the artist, and that of the audience. I’d never known anyone to have such a strong sense of the role of the reader, or viewer. For him, observing was not at all a passive act. He felt one could read rightly only if one read selflessly, he saw true reading as a selfless act. He hated the book clubification of American culture—even if it meant more people reading. The ‘What in your own life does this remind you of?’ approach to books appalled him. ‘Method reading,’ he called it. But then, you know all this from
Reader as Understander.”

It didn’t seem the moment to mention she’d never read his famous book. It was Flora’s turn to turn the talk. “How was it, again, you two got to know each other?”

Cynthia smiled warmly, her eyes squinting as if she could watch the memory play out before her. “Through Turner and Hardy, really. They were our matchmakers, for which I’ll be eternally grateful. We’d known each other for years, in passing, as one does on a small campus, and liked and respected each other. But it was when your father was organizing the biannual Hardy at Darwin conference and he wanted someone to lecture on Turner, Hardy’s favorite artist, and I was already at work on the book. So he called on me. Our research had brought us to the same place at more or less the same time—looking at the English landscape in the nineteenth century—but we came at it from different angles. ‘Different fields, same farm,’ we used to say. We immediately had so much to talk about. We could talk for hours. I’d never felt I had so much to say and so much I wanted to hear from anyone ever before in my life. In our early conversations, I always left thinking, Oh, but we’ve only just begun!”

There was the royal
we
, the editorial
we
, and, here, the exclusive
we
, suggesting Cynthia and her father were one, not two, a collective, two hearts that beat as one, one is the loneliest number. Had Flora ever had that kind of bond with anyone? Since Georgia? But it was false, such unity a fantasy, wasn’t it? Once Cynthia was off on the tales of their incomparable we-dom, she could not be stopped.
Relish
, that was the word. She didn’t seem to notice much, but she
relished
things. In her, Lewis Dempsey had found a rare thing to his breed—their breed—someone who loved life, who was good at it. She did not have to live in opposition to her moods, or in spite of them; no, her temperament allowed, abetted, encouraged life. She was hungry for it. As Flora listened to the stories of truly startling like-mindedness, and learned, through Cynthia, of this new, other father, she comforted herself by imagining she was pulling ever so gently on the two separate ends of Cynthia’s long magenta scarf.