by Liza Wieland
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For Judy Whichard
On the twenty-fifth [of June, 1937], they took the ferry from Dover to Calais and drove to Paris through Beauvais. Elizabeth’s journal breaks off at this point, and the three women’s specific activities for the first three weeks in Paris are unknown.
BRETT C. MILLIER, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It
Elizabeth dreams of babies, that they are connected to her body, but not to her flesh. They are attached to her clothing by buttons and zippers and snaps and something like cockleburs that will later be invented and called Velcro. Double-sided tape, staples (not through the flesh), and large paper clips. Babies ride in her pockets. Two of them, very still, rest on top of her hair, under her hat. In the dream, she worries not so much that they will hurt her or be hurt, but that they are thirsty. Maybe she should be concerned about their mothers, but she isn’t. She wonders if they could all have the same mother. She doesn’t even think about their fathers, though she is, in the peculiar atmosphere of dreams, aware that she is thinking about them. She tries to look at their faces, but they squirm and twist away. All the babies are dressed or swaddled in bright colors, electrifying patterns, a yellow Star of David over their wildly beating hearts. There will be no hiding these babies, and Elizabeth is vaguely worried about this. But not for their safety, only that she will have to explain her voracious baby love, this immodesty of babies, this glut, this selfishness. Why do you have so many? someone will surely ask. What she thinks but will not say is, Because I can. Because no one will have suspected this of me.
And so after she wakes in the morning, after breakfast, Elizabeth says to Clara, Yes. Yes, I will help you smuggle these children out of Dieppe and south to Paris. And she decides she won’t say or think anything more about Ernst vom Rath and his Polish lover or Sigrid and her marriage of convenience. She won’t be afraid of what comes next, and she’ll try to stop rushing here and there like a sandpiper and settle down somewhere and finish a book of poems.
And she decides, too, that she will never tell Sigrid or Louise or Margaret. She will leave it completely out of her letters to Miss Moore, to Frani Blough, to everyone. If the story of her life is ever written, this episode will not appear, although she suspects some clever sleuth will uncover it, but not for years after she’s dead, a half century or maybe longer, after everyone else is dead, too.
Except for these babies, who will have grown up perhaps knowing that two women saved them. Or maybe just one woman: Clara. They will tell their own children: the Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun singlehandedly brought us from the north of France to a convent in Paris, thus saving our lives.
The crises of our lives do not come, I think, accurately dated; they crop up unexpected and out of turn and somehow or other arrange themselves according to a calendar we cannot control.
ELIZABETH BISHOP, “Dimensions for a Novel”
GEOGRAPHY I
1930
If you can remember a dream and write it down quickly, without translating, you’ve got the poem. You’ve got the landscapes and populations: alder and aspen and poplar and birch. A lake, a wood, the sea. Pheasants and reindeer. A moose. A lark, a gull, rainbow trout, mackerel. A horned owl. The silly somnambulist brook babbling all night. An old woman and a child. An old man covered with glittering fish scales.
An all-night bus ride over precipitous hills, a heeling sailboat, its mast a slash against the sky, trains tunneling blindly through sycamore and willow, a fire raging in the village, terrible thirst.
See? The dreams are poems. And the way to bring on the dreaming is to eat cheese before bed. The worst cheese you can get your hands on, limburger or blue. Cheese with a long, irregular history.
This was a crazy notion to bring to college, but you have to bring something, don’t you? You have to bring a certain kind of habit, or a story, or, because this is Vassar in 1930, a family name. Some girls bring the story of a mysterious past, a deep wound, a lost love, a dead brother. Other girls bring Rockefeller, Kennedy, Roosevelt. They bring smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey and promiscuity (there’s a kind of habit), which some girls wear like—write it!—a habit. This is a wonderful notion, the nun and the prostitute together at last, as they probably secretly wish they could have been all along. Elizabeth laughs about it privately, nervously, alone in her head.
Her roommate, Margaret Miller, has brought a gorgeous alto and a talent for painting. She’s brought New York, which she calls The City, as if there were only that one, ever and always. And cigarettes, a bottle of gin stashed at the back of her wardrobe, a silver flask engraved with her mother’s initials. Margaret has brought a new idea of horizon, not a vista but an angle, not a river but a tunnel, a park and not a field. She will paint angles and tunnels and parks until (write it!) disaster makes this impossible, and then she will curate exhibitions of paintings and write piercing, gemlike essays about the beauty of madwomen in nineteenth-century art.
The cheese, meanwhile, occupies a low bookshelf. Most nights, Elizabeth carves a small slice and eats it with bread brought from the dining hall.
And sure enough, the dreams arrive—though that seems the wrong word for dreams, but really it isn’t. They arrive like passengers out of the air or off the sea, having crossed a vast expanse of some other element. Elizabeth’s father, eighteen years dead. In her dreams, he’s driving a large green car. Her mother, at a high window of the state hospital in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, signaling for something Elizabeth can’t understand, her expression fierce and threatening. A teacher she loves disappearing into a maze of school corridors.
A Dutch bricklayer setting fire to the Reichstag. A two-year-old boy dressed in a brown shirt, a swastika wound round his arm like a bandage. His sister’s mouth opened wide to scream something no one will ever hear because she is gassed and then burnt to ashes. All these people trailing poems behind them like too-large overcoats. And Elizabeth is the seamstress: make the coat fit better, close the seams, move the snaps, stitch up the ragged hem.
* * *
Elizabeth, Margaret says toward the end of October. I’m not sure these are poems. They’re more like strange little stories. But I am sure that cheese stinks.
I know, Elizabeth says, but it has a noble purpose.
Which is what, for heaven’s sake? If you want to have peculiar dreams, try this. Margaret holds out the silver flask.
Just . . . without a glass?
Just.
Elizabeth takes a long swallow, coughs.
Oh, she says when she can speak. It’s like drinking perfume.
How would you know that? Margaret says.
I quaff the stuff for breakfast, of course!
Margaret lies down on her bed, and Elizabeth sits below her, on the floor, her back against the bed frame.
So, Margaret begins. About men.
Were we talking about men?
If we weren’t, we should be.
I wish I knew some men the way you do, Elizabeth says.
And what way is that?
To feel comfortable around them. Natural.
Maybe I can help. Give you a lesson or two.
Start now.
Margaret sits up, shifts the pillow behind her back. Elizabeth turns to watch, thinking this will be part of the lesson, how to move one’s body,
the choreography. Margaret looks like a queen riding on a barge. What poem is that? A pearl garland winds her head: / She leaneth on a velvet bed. Margaret as the Lady of Shalott. When Elizabeth turns back, she sees herself and Margaret in the mirror across the room, leg and leg and arm and arm and so on, halves of heads. Halves of thoughts, too. It seems to do strange things, this drink. It’s exhilarating.
First, Margaret says, boys—men—they want two things that are contradictory. They want bad and good. They want prostitute and wife.
Prostitute and nun, Elizabeth says.
Margaret smiles, which makes her entire face seem to glow. Such dark beauty, Elizabeth thinks, like my mother. In some photographs, she looks like someone’s powdered her face with ashes.
That’s the spirit! Margaret says. And not only do you have to know how to be both, you have to know when.
Must take some mind reading.
Which is really just imagination. Which you have loads of, obviously.
Margaret leans forward to rest the flask on Elizabeth’s shoulder. This helps, she says.
Helps us or them?
Both, Margaret says. She watches Elizabeth unscrew the cap on the flask. Not so much this time.
Elizabeth takes a tiny sip, a drop. Suddenly, she feels terribly thirsty. A memory crackles out of nowhere, a fire.
Much better, she says. Almost tastes good.
So it’s a math problem, Margaret says. Which do they want, and when. Probability. Gambling.
What if you guess wrong?
Then you move on.
Moving on. That must be the real secret to it.
Down the hall, a door opens and music pours out. How have they not heard it before now, the phonograph in Hallie’s room? She is trying to learn the Mozart sonata that way, by listening. Miss Pierce tells them it will help, to listen, but it’s still no substitute for fingers on the keys, hours alone in the practice room, making the notes crash and break on your own.
Margaret is talking about a boy named Jerome, someone she knows from Greenwich, her childhood. Elizabeth gazes up at her, drinks in the calm assurance of Margaret’s voice, the confiding tone, the privacy. College can be so awfully public, even places that are supposed to be private: library carrels, bathroom stalls.
Jerome was in her cousin’s class. Now at college in The City. Columbia. He is bound to have friends. Elizabeth listens to the sounds of the words, the hard-soft-hard c’s like a mediocre report card: college, city, Columbia, country. The music of it soothes.
She turns to look out the window, rubs her cheek against the nubby pattern of the quilt on Margaret’s bed, takes some vague and unexpected comfort in the fabric. A light from the dorm room above theirs illuminates the branches of an oak tree outside, two raised arms, a child asking her mother to be picked up, pressed to a shoulder. She hears a child’s voice say the words. Hold me. I’m thirsty. Margaret is talking about men. The tree is asking to be gathered up, held aloft. An impossible request: the roots run too deep, too wide, scrabbling under this dormitory, beyond, halfway across campus.
Elizabeth reaches for the flask, takes a longer swallow, then another.
Margaret says she thinks of painting seascapes as if light and water were holding an interview. And they are both nervous.
Margaret and Elizabeth have gone to Wellfleet, in a car borrowed from Fannie Borden, the college librarian, to stay in Miss Borden’s summer cottage. They find the place just as Miss Borden had described it, small and windtight, despite its many windows, set closer to the water than its neighbors. Margaret wants to paint outside, at the edge of the surf. She tries for half an hour, but it’s too cold, so she sets up her easel just inside the door. Salt air has smeared the glass to a grainy blear that’s like melted sugar. The winter sun tries to make the waves courageous, Margaret declares, but by midafternoon, the sea has lost its nerve completely. It lies flat and gray, the same shade as the sky.
Margaret has been painting since dawn, working on three canvases. One is mostly shoreline, sand, and grasses, a path toward the water, and, at the top, a ruffle of cresting waves. Another is copied (loosely) from a photograph of the harbor. The third is their actual view, with a lone sailboat disappearing off to the left.
Doesn’t your arm get tired? Elizabeth asks.
Only if I stop, Margaret tells her.
Elizabeth envies this focus and concentration. She’s done nothing these six hours except read and make boiled egg sandwiches for lunch. Margaret doesn’t even sit down to eat.
I wish I could be as dedicated as you are, Margaret.
To what?
Anything.
You’re dedicated to feeding us.
Elizabeth sets her book (Augustine’s Confessions) facedown, splayed open on the sofa, shifts, stretches, crosses the room to stand beside Margaret. There hasn’t been a boat all day, she says.
I know, Margaret says. This is the ghost ship.
That might appear at any moment.
So I’m ready for it.
Should we try a walk? Or is it still too cold?
Margaret shakes her head. Let me work at this another hour or so. Then we can try. Pull that chair over here beside me so you can have the view, too.
My view is watching you misinterpret the view.
Very funny, but you should have this one.
Still holding the paintbrush, Margaret drags the armchair into position beside her easel. She takes Elizabeth’s shoulders, turns her around.
Now go get that juicy book and sit, she says.
It’s hard not to keep looking. Even this weak wind keeps the water moving. Or is it the tide, really, rolling underneath? These three soft elements conspiring to make something sharp, the points of diamonds, a hard thin line of coast. This morning, Margaret had said the sunlight made the water look like a case of knives. It was true: knives rolling at them like chariot wheels, vicious. There was a fable in that somewhere, a little story, a scrap of history. The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold. This is nice, she thinks. Right here. Beside Margaret.
Why don’t you paint the ship on fire? she says.
Don’t give instructions, Elizabeth.
Sorry.
And then paint sailors swimming around the ship, Elizabeth imagines saying. How ironic! All that water and still the ship goes down. One man left on deck, the captain. No. The boy who swabs the decks, who’s come to love his decks so much he can’t bear to lose them. He’s waiting for someone to come and tell him to abandon ship. His father. No one ever arrives.
Your imagination is so loud, Margaret says. Let’s put it to better use.
She opens her paint box, which is olive green and artfully spattered, rummages to the bottom, finds a child’s watercolor kit, tears a sheet of watercolor paper from her pad, sets them on the table beside her.
Get a glass of water, she says. You paint the burning ship.
I can’t paint, Elizabeth says.
If you can see, you can paint. And sometimes even if you can’t see. Monet, for instance.
The scene comes to Elizabeth from memory: a flat gray sea, and beyond it blue cliffs with caves made into lacework, like pictures she’s seen of the Alhambra. A red sun, a ship already burnt but not sunk, held still, arrived at its destination maybe and then caught fire, charred masts like the bitter remains of a forest. If you make little v v v’s in the sky, that could be birds.
Elizabeth is aware of not having raised her head once in three-quarters of an hour or so (she doesn’t have a watch—the clock is behind them, on the kitchen wall, heard but not seen, like a bad child).
Margaret glances down at Elizabeth’s painting, sighs. Oh, Elizabeth, she says. You have to look at the scene. The colors are too runny. Here. Mix this in.
She presses a blob of white pigment from a tube. With a few, quick strokes, she’s done something wonderful to Elizabeth’s painting. Crystallized it. Let in the light.
All right, Elizabeth says. She stands, walks around to the other side of the tabl
e so that she is facing away from the sea.
I’ll do this view now, she says.
It’s the kitchen: a high, rickety table and the stool beside it, the icebox, the pie safe, the extension cord running from one side of the room to the other, tacked up to the ceiling in the middle. The closed door. In the summer, it would be open, and from here you could see climbing roses, the yellow ones. Make it July then. Make it that July, the last one.
Years ago. Back from her first stay in the sanatorium, Elizabeth’s mother has flung open the door to get the scent of roses. Gertrude Bishop has been awake all night, roaming through the small house, then walking down to the shore and back. Each time she leaves, Elizabeth tries to hold her breath until she hears the screen door open again, the sound of it like inhalation. If she can’t breathe, maybe her mother will come back and stay home for good.
Elizabeth paints the door half off its hinges; the round yellow roses open wide like babies’ faces, crowd outside, peering in.
Much better, Margaret says. Even if everything looks like it’s going to fall apart.
That’s how I see it.
Use the white the way I showed you.
Elizabeth swirls a tiny crescent moon of white into the table, the ceiling, the roses.
That is really something, she says. It’s like what salt does for food.
I never thought of it like that, Margaret says, but you’re right. You could be a painter. But if you expect me to try being a writer . . . Well, don’t.
No. You’re a painter forever.
* * *
After dinner, they put on their coats and walk out to the water’s edge, stand in the beam of moonlight, arms linked, close together for warmth. Elizabeth wears a hat, but Margaret does not, and so her long hair blows back and becomes part of the darkness, as if Margaret’s white face is carved out of the night, like George Washington on Mount Rushmore, those photographs in the newspaper.
