The Lost Landscape (26 page)

My breath steamed as I walked quickly on University Avenue, and on Park Street, to the foot of Bascom Hill; and up the steep, wind-whipped hill until my legs began to cramp. It seemed urgent to be
in motion
—to appear to have a destination.

Under the gradually lightening sky I would continue past Bascom Hill in the direction of the observatory; my destination was a State Street diner that opened early, but I forestalled arriving there too soon, before the front door was unlocked and the lights on. In these long-ago years a dense gathering of trees, both deciduous and evergreen, bordered the hill; beyond that was slate-dark Lake Mendota. Eventually I would return, down the long hill, passing the State Historical Library and the mammoth Memorial Union, not yet open; if it wasn't too cold or windy, I would walk along the lakefront; I would pause on the terrace, to stare at the lake; here, I was nearly always happy; freed from the confines of my over-heated room and from the rampage of my thoughts; I was both exhilarated and comforted by the lapping waves, and Lake Mendota was often a rough, churning lake; in the twilight of early morning it appeared vast as an inland sea, its farther shore obscured by mist. On such mornings, which were common in Madison, the lake's waves emerged out of an opacity of gunmetal gray like a scrim; there was no horizon, and there was no sky, and it would not have surprised me if when I glanced down at my feet there was no ground.

I was in no danger, I thought. My engagement to be married was like a safety-harness, I could not be swept into the water.

Then there were mornings of stark, eye-aching clarity. A moon, or a remnant of a moon overhead, and isolated mica-bits of light that must be “stars”; tattered clouds blown across the sky like shreds of thought. No sound except the waves of the lake and random cries of those curious nocturnal birds, common in urban areas, unknown in Millersport, called “nighthawks”; nighthawks must have nested beneath the eaves of the Union, or in trees nearby. I liked to feel that, at this hour, alone, anonymous, and unaccursed by gender, I was a nighthawk; a pair of eyes, a skein of brooding thoughts. How beyond mere happiness—or unhappiness—I believed myself. What rang in
my head was Walt Whitman's poem of surpassing strangeness and beauty, “A Clear Midnight”:

In my circuitous route to the State Street diner I would pass the still-darkened university library, which was one of my places of refuge during the day; I would walk along Langdon Street past fraternity houses with their stolid, impressive facades bearing cryptic Greek letters emerging out of the gloom, and invariably there were scattered lights burning in these massive houses—who knew why? It was gratifying somehow to take note of scattered lights in the windows of apartment buildings and two-storey woodframe rented houses on Langdon, Gorham, Henry streets as the early-morning shifted toward 6:00
A.M
.; still darkness, for this was late autumn in a northerly climate, with a wan promise of dawn in the eastern sky. The nighthawk takes comfort in recognizing others, kindred souls, or anyway souls, at a distance: warm-lighted city buses wheezing on Gorham and University bearing a few passengers, and most of them dark-skinned women and men; headlights of vehicles, and (receding red) taillights; occasional pedestrians, alone, swiftly walking and bent against the wind. Among these there had to be some who were morning-insomniacs like me, relieved and grateful for the new day, the new chance, but most were of course workers, custodians, cafeteria staff, attendants at the university hospital, for whom there was no romance to the
hour, nor probably any particular significance; beneath their coats they wore the uniforms of routine.

On Gorham Street sometimes I saw a man walking his dog; a man of indeterminate age, perhaps in his late thirties; I would see him leaving one of the sturdy old Victorian houses partitioned into rentals for graduate students, crossing the wide porch and descending, his dog held to a tight leash; the dog was a springer spaniel, buff-colored, thick-bodied but still youthful; my heart leapt at the sight of the spaniel, which reminded me of a dog out of my past, and behaved in a friendly way toward me even as his frowning master tugged him in another direction. On Gorham often I recognized certain lighted windows; I'd noticed glimpses of a couple behind a ground-floor window with a carelessly drawn blind; from less than ten feet away I could gaze into their kitchen, though not very clearly; I felt a stab of envy for to be awake at such an hour does not seem pathetic if there is another with you—if you are talking and laughing together, preparing breakfast. I wondered who this couple was, were they both students at the university, what were they studying, were they in love, were they married—of course they must be in love, and probably they must be married.

On Henry Street lived the man I would marry, by what concatenation of chance and fate I would never comprehend, in January 1961. Raymond lived on the ground floor of an attractively shabby wood-frame house, in a single-room “flat” with its own private entrance; the room was crowded with books, journals, papers—for Ray was completing his Ph.D. requirements in eighteenth-century English literature, writing a dissertation on Jonathan Swift under the direction of the eminent scholar Ricardo Quintana. In this flat, most evenings we prepared and ate supper together, and afterward worked, or read, side by side on a sofa. The little apartment was furnished, with an air of mismatched gaiety; though in retrospect it sounds cramped
and dreary, in fact it was a place of coziness, privacy, and contemplation. The man I would marry was not, and would never be, afflicted by insomnia.
You would not wish to marry another like yourself: a nighthawk
. My predominant feeling for Ray was a powerful wish to protect him—which was strange, and groundless, for there was no reason to feel this way, Ray was demonstrably capable of protecting himself. He was eight years older than I was, a brilliant and bemused veteran of the English graduate program at Madison; so kindly to me, a naïve first-year student, that, on the first evening we met, while having an impromptu dinner in the Memorial Union overlooking Lake Mendota, he led me patiently and painstakingly through the evolution of the “Great Vowel Shift” in the English language; Ray would later indicate to me which titles were really important, and which not so important, on the daunting list of titles on the department's reading list for master's candidates. Begun in this way, our relationship was never one (it seemed to me) of “equals” precisely; in such respects our marriage was a union of another era, about which I am still hesitant to speak, for it is really not possible to speak of someone whom you have loved, and who has loved you, for many years. I do recall my initial shyness, even after we were engaged; even after we saw each other each evening without fail; I would not have dared to knock on the door of Ray's apartment, or tap lightly at the window as I passed slowly by as if enchanted . . .

Instead, I walked on.

It was not really “early” any longer. Soon, it would be 7:00
A.M
.—at which time normality begins.

At last I headed for the little diner on State Street, which was open now. How warmly lighted it seemed, how welcoming, amid the still-darkened storefronts of State Street at this hour. In this diner I'd become a familiar customer, perhaps, like several others, though we never acknowledged one another or spoke. We were individuals who
wanted to read at breakfast. We brought with us books, papers. We were solitary and silent and yet we were companions of a kind like the figures seated at the counter in Edward Hopper's
Nighthawks
, the most poignant and ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness. Like the red-haired woman in the painting I sat at the counter, since I would not have been allowed a booth unless I shared it with someone else. By this time after so much walking, and suffused with the optimism of the new day, I was ravenous with hunger. For no one is so happy, or so famished, as an insomniac who has survived the night.

And I was in love, and loved. I would not torment myself with the riddle—
How can he love
me?
Is his love predicated upon not precisely knowing
me?

I have yet to solve that riddle.

MID-MORNING, BASCOM HALL. THERE
was “Joyce Carol” among the forty or more graduate students seated in a lecture room in Bascom Hall, in a hallucinatory drowse trying to take notes as the Renaissance scholar Mark Eccles lectured on the Elizabethan-Jacobean (non-Shakespearean) drama, reading from copious notes in a subdued, uninflected voice like that of a hypnotist. Professor Eccles was one of the most renowned of the Harvard-educated English faculty; one of those for whom a literary work exists for the sake of its footnotes, that cover it like barnacles; the more footnotes affixed to a work, the more valuable the work in its providing labor for the earnest scholar, if not exactly illumination. (Yet it was in Eccles's class that I first read the great tragedies of Marlowe, Middleton, and Webster; years later I would recall this soft-spoken man, and others at Madison, with more sympathy reasoning that they, too, had been trained in a particular sort of pedagogy for whom the “liter
ary work” contained little pleasure; they, too, had been captives of the canon.) And afterward walking back to our residence with Marianna who had seemed increasingly distracted lately, complaining of the cold, worrying about a paper she was writing for Eccles, talking compulsively, very different from the young woman I'd met on my first day in Madison, back in September.

Though I would have been shocked to know it, this would be the last time I spoke with Marianna Churchland. Within a day or two she would have moved out of Barnard Hall and departed Madison, returning to North Carolina without a word of farewell to her friends.

Inside the residence Marianna went immediately to the row of mailboxes to look anxiously for mail though it was too early for mail, as she would have known. She was telling me that she had not heard from her fiancé since she'd been back home to visit at Thanksgiving—“We were talking about our wedding. I told him we need to set a date, next summer. I told him—‘I love you so much! I want to have children with you. I want to live long enough to bury you.' I told him—”

(But at this point I was too distracted to listen for Marianna's words seemed uncanny to me, bizarre—
I want to live long enough to bury you
. Marianna's manner, her voice, her gaze were too intense. The remainder of our exchange was lost to me as I found myself in a hurry to get away from my friend.)

Not I but another. The wings of madness beating near.

ON JANUARY 23, 1961,
at the Catholic chapel at Madison, Raymond Smith and I were married, and I vacated my room on the third floor of Barnard Hall to move my spare possessions of mostly winter clothes and books into a surprisingly spacious and airy five-room
apartment on the second floor of a sturdy old Victorian house a mile away on University Avenue.

Though we were married by a Catholic priest, we were not married at the altar but in the sacristy, a sort of storage room at the front of the church; this was a compromise of sorts since Ray was no longer a practicing Catholic, and I had not wanted to upset my parents by being married “outside” the church.

It is true, I had not dared to marry “outside” the church—I had not dared to defy and disappoint my parents who were at this time, however nominally, members of the parish of the Pendleton Good Shepherd Church.

Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue
—as the eloquent La Rochefoucauld once observed.

One sunny morning in May, near the end of the spring term, I was examined for my master's degree in English, in venerable Bascom Hall. It would be my last visit to Bascom Hall. My examiners were, not surprisingly, all men; two were older professors with whom I'd taken seminars, and who had seemed to approve of my work; the third was a younger professor of American literature, perhaps an assistant professor. My heart sank—(yes, it is a cliché: but how appropriately visceral)—when I saw this stern individual staring at me doubtfully as if thinking—
Joyce Carol Smith?
—who'd been
Joyce Carol Oates?
A married woman? A serious scholar? It did seem suspicious, I could not blame him. In the young man's unsmiling eyes I saw my fate.

Yet, two-thirds of the exam seemed to go well. I had followed my husband's advice and memorized sonnets by Shakespeare, Sidney, and Donne which I could analyze and discuss, as he had done three years before in this very room; I could speak knowledgeably of “sources”—“influences.” With feeling, but without an excess of feeling, I could recite the opening of
Paradise Lost
and key passages
in
Lycidas, The Rape of the Lock
, and
The Prelude;
I could discuss the close reasoning of Milton's
Areopagitica;
but the American specialist was unimpressed, biding his time. When it was his turn to interrogate me, he didn't ask about primary works at all. I might have spoken knowledgeably about the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, but I wasn't given an opportunity; as in a courtroom nightmare, I was asked only questions I couldn't answer with confidence about dates of poems, dates of drafts of poems, publications, editions; for instance, how did the 1867
Leaves of Grass
differ from the 1855 edition, and what were the circumstances of the 1871 edition? Some of this I knew, in fact—but I did not know with certainty. (If I were teaching the material, I would simply have looked it up in a reference book.) Through a haze of headache and shame I heard myself murmur apologetically, “I don't know”—“I'm afraid I don't know.” The experience brought back my having been interviewed for a Woodrow Wilson fellowship as an undergraduate at Syracuse, at the insistence of my professors; there, I had been virtually tongue-tied with shyness, feeling intrusively brash at having wished to be considered for a fellowship in which, it was mandated, only one in four recipients could be a woman.