“No.”
“It’s about a woman named—”
“Rebecca?”
“Oh, so you’ve read it?”
She hadn’t responded, and that had been the end of the conversation.
I did not know why Rebecca Smith felt the need to be there on Christmas morning, 2006. It was a cold, brittle day. My father had hidden my present underneath the tree. The gift was the size of a small piano, and it had been there for two days, draped in a pink bedsheet. Dad told me not to touch anything underneath because the present was radioactive and might implode. I had been counting down the days until the grand reveal. If he was going to divorce my mother, then it was only fair that I should receive a massive, ostentatious gift from him, like some sort of worker’s compensation. I wished I didn’t have to open it in front of Rebecca. She would misinterpret the gift as a gesture of kindness, when really it was an attempt at an apology.
The three of us sat in a triangle by the gingerbread-decorated tree, awkwardly. I was on the floor by the presents, my father was on the couch, and Rebecca was in the chair by the fireplace, arms thin and folded, with an expectant expression on her narrow face. Inwardly, I compared her to my mother, and found that my mother was lacking. Rebecca might have been much older but she had a stately beauty. She was handsome, not pretty.
When my father gave me the go-ahead to open my gift, I tore off the sheet in one large magician swoop. To my surprise, there was nothing there. I saw only a pile of plastic chairs, the kind you find in cafeterias for pint-size kids. Was this a twisted joke? I looked at Dad, close to tears. But he was grinning. He motioned to the floor. I peered under the wilderness of chairs. Underneath the closest one was a small, solitary envelope. I opened it. Inside, I found Emily Dickinson’s face. My father had given me a bookmark.
I started crying in earnest. I would have been inconsolable had Dad not rushed over to me, eyes lit up. He said, Dammit, Samantha, don’t you get it? He tried to explain. This bookmark was a clue that would lead me to my real present. If I followed the hunt correctly, I would find a matching bookmark. If I failed, the present would be lost.
“Courage,” he said. “It requires courage to find it.”
Rebecca was sitting on the chair, ignored and confused, eyes wide like a cod’s. This made me feel pleasantly exclusionary, and I cheered up. I read the text on the bookmark over and over again. Much Madness Is Divinest Sense.
Immediately, I quitted the room in favor of my father’s library, aka the Heights. I knew it was where he kept all of his Emily Dickinson poetry. The Heights was perpetually dark but I used the pale light from the shut window to fish through his lowest bookshelf, which contained all the books he liked the most: Daniel Deronda, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Portrait of a Lady. There—I found it. The Greatest Works of Emily Dickinson. To my surprise, the two hundred and seventeenth page had been dog-eared. On the page, one passage had been highlighted in bright orange:
Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,—
Past the houses, past the headlands,
Into deep eternity!
Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?
I had never read this poem before, but I gleaned its meaning easily enough—or at least the meaning I knew it would have for my father. We had a basement in our home that he referred to as “Deep Eternity.” (I’m heading to Eternity, my father would sometimes say when he went off in search of spare batteries.) I reread the Emily Dickinson poem. Can the sailor understand . . . ?
I darted from the room and ran to the basement, passing a bemused Rebecca and a beaming father. Deep Eternity was a home for all of our dead electronics and broken bikes. There was a chalkboard on the far wall, and today, there was one sentence written on it. It was a bright and cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. George Orwell.
And then, slowly, I realized what my father was doing. He had constructed a treasure hunt for me, built out of literature. The game lasted well into the afternoon. Most of his clues were the opening lines of novels, none of which had ever been meant literally:
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
This last one led me out to the sanitary sewer in the middle of the street. My father had marked it with a giant masking-tape X. Rebecca, bored, had retired to take a nap, so it was just me and Dad—the way it should have been. I picked up the heavy metal lid. Did my father expect me to climb in? Courage, he had said. I would need courage. I descended the small, damp ladder, and there, to my great surprise, was a giant Dean & DeLuca bag, in which my father had hidden a shoebox containing The Wizard of Oz. My Christmas present. It was a wonderfully ornate early edition. Inside, my father had lodged his own Emily Dickinson bookmark. Twins.
It remains, to this day, the finest present my father ever gave me—and finer than that was the pride on his face when I returned to the house, clutching my prize. I devoured The Wizard of Oz that very day, if only because I wanted to be lost somewhere, and a book seemed like a good place. I loved Dorothy more than any protagonist I had ever known. She longed for something so deeply that it came true. (This level of imagination, Dad said, was the greatest and most elusive of life skills.) That day, I fell back in love with my father. His bookmark was my entry into a world—his world—the one that he used to escape life, pain, divorce. Here was my escape too. He was helping me, in his own way.
Recalling Christmas of 2006 made it all the more cruel that seven years later, I would be sitting in my lonely Oxford tower with Dad’s bookmark in my lap—just with no Dad. If I knew my father well, this bookmark was a clue. The clue would lead to another clue, and another clue after that, and then maybe this time I would find the Warnings of Experience. But this game was meant to be played indoors, in a closed system—a backyard, or maybe even a library—not across an entire country. I had no idea where to start. And couldn’t he have explained this all in a letter? I put the bookmark down on my desk, right next to Agnes Grey, and sat back in my seat.
For the third time that evening, I found myself dwelling on Rebecca Smith. It surprised me to learn that my father had chosen her to witness the signing of his will since a year and a half after Rebecca became my tutor, my father politely asked her to leave. He had never told me why. It bothered me to think that they secretly kept in touch. Couldn’t he have asked a lawyer to be a witness? Or my mother? It was a stupid choice on his part. Rebecca had died only months after my father did. The papers said that it was a boating accident, off the coast of Scotland. To this day, her remains were lying at the bottom of the sea, along with all the gold rings she kept around her middle finger, and along with everything my father had ever told her. Down with her, I suppose, went my first clue.
CHAPTER 5
The weeks passed and as my preoccupation with Agnes Grey and my bookmark grew, I developed an equally pressing concern. As it got colder, all I seemed to be doing was growing stupider. Every tutorial I suffered with Orville invariably turned into a verbal lynching. Our syllabus implied that I was studying critical theory and the masterpieces of the Western canon. What I was actually learning was the agony of speechlessness, and the exhaustion of contemplating my own idiocy.
“But what does it mean?” Orville would ask. He liked to sit in his chair—the stuffed, lumpy, cancerous piece of orange leather by the fireplace—and ask me the same question over and over again, until my temples throbbed and the only thing left in this world was his sick grin and meterstick. The sick grin, I imagined, was a construction of my too-easily-terrified imagination; the meterstick was something Orville kept in his right hand so that he could thwack the coffee table for additional punctuation.
This particular morning, we
were having an impromptu pop quiz on “An Essay on Criticism.” Orville had handed me the text the moment I arrived. Now, twenty minutes later, here I was, sweating dramatically.
“You’re still not telling me anything, Samantha,” he said pleasantly. I had a volume called English Masterpieces in my lap, which I had come to know as Hell: Volume I. In it was everything that I hated: “The Rape of the Lock,” “The Wasteland,” blurry pictures of Wordsworth, and four thousand and seventy two footnotes.
Orville asked, “What is ‘An Essay on Criticism’ about?”
I said, “Criticism.”
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“That depends. Was I right?”
Orville’s gaze was steady. His shirt was fitted, and through his sleeves, his biceps appeared to be flexing and unflexing on their own. It was fascinating and disgusting at the same time. My palms were damp and leaving perspiration marks on the book’s pages. I imagine I had the sweaty sheen of a woman in labor.
He said, “Let’s try again. What is this essay about?”
“It talks about the role of poetry and critics.”
Thwack.
I jumped. The meterstick made an empty, twiggy sound against the wooden table. He appeared at ease, as though he had been slashing unruly furniture his entire life.
“An essay does not talk,” he said. “Tell me something less juvenile.”
I said, “It’s about poetry in the modern era.”
“Tell me something less vague.”
“Modern era meaning post-Reformation.”
“Tell me something less incorrect.”
I blinked. Orville’s jaw was twitching. In all the lessons I had had with my father, I had never felt so powerless. Had I had any backbone myself, I might have—
Thwack.
I jumped back to attention. “Sorry.”
Finally, Orville put the meterstick down. “Oh, for God’s sake, Samantha, if you keep apologizing, I am going to have to lower your marks.”
He reached for his tea. There was a worn, tortured look to his face when he concentrated, and I was disgusted to find myself attracted to it. Intelligence carried a handsome degree of authority.
Orville leaned back in his chair, in a gesture I recognized. I knew what was coming next: his favorite question, and my least. Sure enough, he motioned toward “An Essay on Criticism” and asked, “Does this piece of writing strike you as reliable?”
I restrained a desire to hit something. Teachers had been asking that question for years and it made me batty. Questioning the reliability of a narrator was an attempt to prove that every novel written—every verb, every comma—existed solely for the sake of subversion. There was no such thing as face value; there were only authorial biases and self-constructed identities.
Orville looked pleased. I was beginning to believe that he enjoyed nothing more than watching me froth at the mouth and implode.
I answered, “Yes, it is reliable.”
“Wrong,” he said. “How can it be reliable? The essay deliberately exemplifies that which it admonishes. Pope offers specific advice for writers and then ignores each of his own instructions.”
“Sure.”
“He deplores the use of metaphors, and then proceeds to liken ‘expression’ to an unchanging sun, ‘false eloquence’ to a prismatic glass, and words to leaves. Alexander Pope,” he concluded, “is a fool.”
“I—”
“I’m not finished,” he said. “Crucially, it is Pope who engineers this contradiction. He is a master masked as a fool masked as a master. Do you see? Alexander Pope,” he concluded, “is a genius.”
“Make up your mind.”
“No, you must make up your mind,” he said. “Pope’s essay demands that the reader be the final critic. He is teaching you that the best student will question his opinion.”
I waited for the thwack, but it didn’t come. The bubble of silence was disarming, as though an orchestra had missed its cue. We waited, lingering in the swollen pause.
I cleared my throat. “May I speak?”
He looked kind—almost. “Please.”
“Pope is just pretending to solicit another’s opinion. Anyone as young or as cocky as a twenty-three-year-old genius is only feigning modesty.”
Orville raised an eyebrow.
I continued, “He wrote this poem for the one purpose of showing how much smarter he was than everyone else. You said it yourself. He engineered it. He’s a pompous ass masked as a modest man masked as a pompous ass.”
I wanted a meterstick, too, just so I could hit something for the hell of it. Instead, I swallowed and tried to maintain eye contact with Orville. There was another silence, longer this time. For a moment, we sat staring at each other, so deliberately frozen that we could have been posing for a hidden portraitist.
“Tell me,” Orville said, smiling, “why does a twenty-three-year-old protégé, as you say, elicit such a violent reaction from you?”
“I’m not being violent.”
“Look down.”
I did. I had the first page of “An Essay on Criticism” clenched in between my thumb and forefingers. It was crumpled in my grip and the page had wilted, like the damaged wing of a dove. I took the book off my lap and gingerly placed it on the table.
“I don’t like Alexander Pope,” I explained.
“Some say that hate is only unachieved love.”
“Whoever said that obviously never hated anyone before.”
I caught his eyes then and, as usual, looked away. His jaw was strong and square, like it had been forged out of steel.
I thought the conversation might be over, but he said, “There must be one author who arouses your less aggressive passions.”
Passion. There was that word again. I sat back in my chair, trying to think of authors I halfway liked. But Orville’s face had induced a temporary amnesia, and every author I knew promptly evaporated from my mind. The only name I could think of was Julius Caesar.
I said, finally: “Frederick Douglass.”
Orville’s eyebrow curved upward again—slowly, this time, with expert precision. “Frederick Douglass, the former American slave and abolitionist?”
“Yes.”
“Any reason?”
Yes, I had a reason. No, I did not want to share.
I said, “I find him . . . poignant.”
Orville leaned forward to scribble something on a sheet of paper. He was so large that his limbs seemed to spill out of the mouth of the chair; his knees buckled, his pant legs hiked upward, his elbows jutted over the armrests. The image made me wonder what a young man was doing in such an old chair, and why, out of all the careers James Orville III could have chosen—espionage, torture, psychological warfare—he had picked a profession that cooped him up in a fourteenth-century literary prison, with books as his companions and quivering students as his lunch.
“Very well, Samantha,” he said, finishing a quick note to himself. He stood up and, after a brief search through a nearby shelf, pulled down a book. In a moment, he handed it to me. “As you wish. Frederick Douglass. Let’s begin.”
“Now?”
“I expect you can discuss him very well, if you are so passionate about him.”
I blinked. Wasn’t the tutorial over? Besides, I had lied. Frederick Douglass was not my favorite author. He was my father’s. Dad always said that Douglass’s Narrative was one of the two finest pieces of literature he could recall. The other was Anne of Green Gables, which he said grasped shockingly real-world themes. (Like the narrator, Dad had always been terribly concerned with whether or not Anne should be spelled with an e. Tricky things, names, aren’t they? he had once said to me.)
“Tell me why you like this book, Samantha,” Orville said, smiling.
I gave a grunt and picked up Narrative. I flipped to the scene my father found most interesting. It was the moment in which Frederick Douglass described a brutal slave master, Mr. Gore. I put my thumb on the page and handed the open b
ook to Orville. At the end of a long and gory account of their dealings, this is what Douglass had to say:
. . . and thus the guilty perpetrator of one of the bloodiest and most foul murders goes un-whipped of justice, and uncensured by the community in which he lives. Mr. Gore lived in St. Michael’s, Talbot county, Maryland, when I left there; and if he is still alive, he probably lives there now. . . .
Orville read the passage and looked up, unimpressed.
I explained: “Douglass is telling the truth. Not spiritual truth, or metaphorical truth. Literal truth. Douglass is not so subtly asking his readers to hunt down this man and kill him. He might as well have given us Mr. Gore’s street address, apartment number, and morning schedule.”
I could almost feel my father’s ghost erupting in the corner of the room, egging me on. Yes, yes, he would say, that’s very good! Yet Orville had a frown on his face. He interlaced his hands on his lap.
“Do you think that Douglass is a reliable narrator?” he asked.
Something twitched in my face. I wondered if Orville knew he slowly was driving me to apoplexy.
I said, “Now may not be the right time, sir, but I really hate that question.”
He ignored me. “Answer it.”
“No, I mean, I really hate it.”
“Answer.”
“Yes,” I said. “Frederick Douglass is reliable. If you can’t trust a diary, how can you trust any author who has ever lived?”
“You can’t,” Orville answered. He handed me the book. “Which is why the life of an author should not inform the evaluation of a book. We must treat this text as any other work of fiction. Turn to page seventy-one.”
“No.”
“Pardon?”
“Sorry.”
I cracked open the book. Page seventy-one. I looked down. In my old copy back home, this was the scene on top of which I had doodled a dragon.
“Tell me what’s happening,” Orville said.
I glanced at the page. “Frederick Douglass is fighting his master.”
“He’s not just fighting his master,” Orville said. “He is engaging in one of the most epic battles in any slave narrative. The fight lasts for a full two hours, or didn’t you notice?”
The Madwoman Upstairs Page 7
