by Liza Wieland
It’s a calling, she says.
It’s a terrible idea. You don’t even study the sciences. You like literature and music and French.
The French had some very famous medical people.
That’s not a good reason, Margaret says. She stares out the window, then bends to look for something in the bookcase.
The Curies were French, Elizabeth says.
It’s about your mother, isn’t it?
How could that be?
You want to cure her.
How could I cure her now?
Elizabeth turns away, to her dresser, and begins to rearrange the lipsticks, the bottles of perfume Mrs. Miller gives her every December and February, Christmas and birthday. Arpège, Vol de Nuit, Tabu, Joy.
You want to have cured her, Margaret says gently.
I don’t think anyone could have done that.
Someone might have been able to.
If they had, they would have done it. She picks up a lipstick that looks like a shell casing. But, she says, I think you hit the nail on the head.
Which nail?
My mother.
Elizabeth knows Margaret is right. She can’t do anything about her mother.
But I want to be useful. Miss Peebles says I should apply to Cornell medical school to study pediatrics.
You could be a teacher.
I couldn’t. I don’t have that kind of patience.
And you don’t think caring for children will require patience? And most of them will be sick. It will be so sad all the time. Hour after hour, in your office, a little person who feels bad and mostly can’t tell you why. And the frantic mothers. Begging you to just do something.
I know. But poems aren’t terribly useful either. But I’m beginning to think stories might be, a little more anyway. Or novels. The energy to write a big, fat thing like The Golden Bowl. I’d be pleased with myself.
That’s more your calling.
And what’s yours? Oh, I don’t even know why I’m bothering to ask. Maybe just to hear you say what everybody else assumes.
Obviously, Margaret says, my calling is a house in Greenwich and children, dinners and diapers and an unhealthy interest in tidiness and order. I mean—just look at this room!
The strew of clothing seems almost designed to create an effect—the rainbow of blouses hung from every imaginable hook, desk chairs and bedposts, picture frames, scarves veiling the lamps. Piles of color broken by the white expanse of blankets and pillows. Like a village in winter, a blur of life and color clustered beside and between snowy fields. Farther away, a border of water, the dark wood floor. Their boots are boats. The desks are wild floating islands, mountainous with books, with flotillas of pencils and pens cruising about the shallows.
We’ll clean later, Margaret. Just say it out loud.
An art critic.
That’s not it. Too practical. You’d go mad.
All right. A painter. I’m sure you’re shocked.
Certainly far worse than a writer. We can be foolish together then.
I don’t think foolish is a requirement. Just rich husbands.
Please, Margaret. What would your mother say?
I’m kidding, Elizabeth. You know that, don’t you?
The college librarian, Miss Fannie Borden, dips into her water glass like a heron, as if she can swallow only a few drops at a time. Their waiter stands at a respectful distance, eyeing her.
The bicycle is a riddle, she says. She speaks quickly, in a whisper with a creak to it.
Elizabeth and Margaret wait. Elizabeth fiddles with the matchbook on the table. A big red A for Alex’s. A scarlet A. She wonders if the management realizes.
If you take off the chain, Miss Borden says, the number of moving parts and overall complexity are significantly reduced. A direct-drive free-wheeled hub joins the crank arm axis with the rear wheel axis, shortening the wheel base and minimizing the design. The ride is nimble. And that, girls, is why my bicycle has no chain.
It’s a physics problem, not a riddle, Elizabeth says.
Elizabeth! Margaret says. Don’t be rude.
As you wish, Miss Bishop. I stand corrected. In any case, it’s lovely of you to have invited me to lunch. I should confess I was somewhat concerned.
Elizabeth looks at Margaret: relief starting to cloud over. They admire Miss Borden—she’s an original—but perhaps asking her to lunch was a bit impulsive.
Miss Borden glances around the restaurant to see if anyone is paying attention. Almost everyone is. Miss Borden is, in Margaret’s words, politely notorious. It’s a compliment.
Concerned, Miss Borden continues, because the term is not quite ended. It may be inappropriate, as they say here. But I think not. Certain other students might hope to improve their grades, but you two are such excellent bibliographers, I needn’t worry.
It never crossed my mind, Margaret says.
And others, Miss Borden says, might be interested in stories about my family.
Families are a puzzle, Elizabeth says.
There is a rhyme about Miss Borden, Elizabeth knows. Fannie Borden in the stacks, hiding from her auntie’s axe. First-year girls assumed Elizabeth had invented it. Every year’s graduating class tries to compose the next two lines, which are always lurid or obscene.
Miss Borden dabs at her lips with a napkin, then folds it on the table beside her coffee cup. Indeed, she says. But here we are. And so, quite inappropriately, I have a gift for each of you.
She bends to her enormous bag, on the floor beside her chair. Her spine curves beneath the fabric of her dress, as if the vertebrae were softer than bone, held together by elastic bands. She produces two books, one large, the size of a Spanish-language dictionary, the other much smaller.
Actually not gifts, she says. Loans.
You’re a librarian, after all, Elizabeth says.
Miss Borden smiles. You are too clever by half, Miss Bishop. I admire that. Here, Margaret. Modern Painting is for you.
The Mather, Margaret says. I’ve been looking for it.
Miss Borden nods once slowly, like a benevolent queen.
Margaret opens the book. Pages of glossy plates attract all the light in the room and reflect it back. Each page is a beacon.
And Elizabeth? What have you been looking for?
The Marianne Moore?
This is my personal copy, Miss Borden says, handing over the small volume. Treat it kindly.
Elizabeth can barely speak, but manages to say of course she will.
I have known Marianne since she was a child, Miss Borden says. She had fierce red hair and addressed us all by the names of the animals she thought we resembled. I can introduce you to her if you’d like.
* * *
The New York Public Library. Third floor. Outside the reading room. The bench on the right. These were the coordinates, as if Miss Marianne Moore were a kind of geometry. As Elizabeth approaches, the stern-looking woman in the turban, blue the color of dragonflies, stares for a moment. A slash of yellow sunlight falls on her coat and pocketbook. Then she stands and walks away. Golden dust motes, like tiny bees, swirl over the empty bench. Elizabeth has worried for weeks that this is exactly how their meeting would begin and end: Miss Moore would take her measure and not like what she saw. Miss Borden said sometimes Miss Moore meets her devotees in Grand Central Station because of its infinite escape routes. The dust clumps as if it might coalesce into a person. Inside the reading room, someone, a man, coughs violently. Down the hall, a door closes, the echoes a shudder of glass shifting inside a frame. Footsteps on the stairs behind her. Don’t! Elizabeth tells herself. Don’t be discovered weeping in the New York Public Library. She hears a rapid-fire whispering, like Miss Borden’s.
Miss Bishop? Is that you? I’m very sorry to be late.
Elizabeth turns, sighs, swallows back her tears. For the smallest increment of time, she thinks she might embrace Marianne Moore. Instead, she watches Miss Moore see her, take in her sealskin jacket, white gl
oves, pearl earrings. She has the distinct impression Miss Moore’s X-ray vision can locate the tiny notebook in her purse, read the questions closed in there, waiting shyly to be asked. She notes Miss Moore’s braided hair, red streaked with white, coiled around her head in a style her own mother might have worn (the thought pierces), her pinkish eyebrows, eyes pale as cloudy sky.
Shall we sit? Miss Moore says.
Later, Elizabeth will remember a delicious blur of subjects, names, and words. Hopkins, Crane, Stevens, the circus, Hound & Horn, Herbert, Crashaw, strangest animals I have ever known. Good for you is an insulting expression. Do you research for a poem, or do you research and then the poem arrives? Tattooing: Is it for good luck or to show possession?
Margaret Mead. In some cultures, the females look after one another in many different ways. Elizabeth wonders what this can possibly mean. And then she knows. She blushes, though she is quite sure Miss Moore is simply being factual.
Impersonal. Miss Moore is neutral, measured, despite the fascinating, speedy talk. She looks a bit like Mickey Rooney.
Elizabeth believes that nothing more unlikely than this meeting has ever happened in her entire life. She has the sensation that everyone in the New York Public Library is leaning closer to listen. The books, too, all of them, inching forward, imperceptibly, to the edges of their shelves.
I must be going now, Miss Moore says. You’ll send me some poems, Miss Bishop?
Yes, Elizabeth says. Yes, of course. That would be kind of you. To read them, I mean.
Miss Moore reaches into the pocket of her overcoat, draws out a scrap of paper and a pencil stub, writes out the address in Brooklyn.
I live with my mother, she says. I expect you know that. She’s an excellent reader of poetry. A strict grammarian. A veritable cudgel.
She hands the paper to Elizabeth. One or two at a time, please, she says. Poems, that is. No more.
Of course, Elizabeth says. Thank you very much.
Don’t thank me yet, Miss Moore says. Maybe in twenty or thirty years. We shall see.
At first, at Barbara Chesney’s house in Pittsfield, Elizabeth doesn’t notice the crutches. The room is mostly in shadow—or rather it is filled with firelight that transforms and disembodies and amplifies. The crutches are behind Robert Seaver’s chair, in a corner, next to the door. But she believes they are a pair of fishing rods. So Elizabeth is drawn to this young man immediately because he must love to fish and maybe sail, as she does. She is already composing an invitation to Wellfleet when she moves between him and the fire and discovers the truth.
There is an empty chair, so Elizabeth swallows the sailing invitation and sits down.
Barbara has been telling me we should meet, Robert says.
That was the very first sentence, she will recall later. The death knell. She glances across the room, locates Robert’s sister—another Elizabeth—staring at them, her face vacant and sad, as if she already knows what will happen.
Why? Elizabeth says, and immediately the question sounds cruel, as if she were asking, Why on earth? How absurd! She wishes she’d said something neutral, like Miss Moore would. I’m not really a neutral person, she says out loud, as if Robert can follow her thoughts.
I know, Robert says calmly, smiling. I suspect that’s why Barbara thought we might be friends. Because I’m not a neutral person either, and we’re both rather literary.
Oh? Are you a writer?
No, but I’m what every writer needs. A reader.
Robert lifts both hands, palms up, the gesture for Look: empty.
What do you read? Elizabeth says.
I read everything. But I have to confess I think it’s all downhill from Shakespeare.
I came to the same conclusion last year. Then I thought I should talk myself out of it, or I’d end up not being able to write anything of my own. Then I read Hopkins, and I felt better.
You’re a poet.
Doomed to be a poet, as one of my professors put it.
I would say that’s a better doom than most.
I’m leaning toward fiction now. Stories. Maybe a novel.
A few couples have risen from the circle to dance. The singer is Ruth Etting: “I’m Good for Nothing but Love.” Their bodies make grotesque shapes in the firelight, and Elizabeth feels attracted and repulsed at the same time. She half wishes she had the nerve to do it, just stand up without much deliberation and match her body to the music, let the sound of it move through her. And yet, she tells herself, glancing up at the ceiling, around the walls of the room, I’d be making that, those terrible shapes and gestures. She knows Robert is watching her. She hears him sigh, a quick ohhhh of breath, and feels the same sound gathering in her lungs, her chest.
I don’t dance, Robert whispers, inclining his head toward the crutches. Polio. When I was thirteen. Elizabeth murmurs that she’s sorry, and Robert gives a little shrug. It’s caused me to concentrate on other things. Other aspects of life.
Intensity, Elizabeth says, and Robert nods.
He’s looking at her with something like amazement. She likes being on the receiving end of such a gaze. Girls at school stare at her like that, but the expression is usually clouded by something else—envy maybe, or an indeterminate sort of mistrust. Like looking at a puzzle one can never solve.
Elizabeth rides the train to Pittsfield about once a month, usually when Robert’s parents are away. Robert’s sister plays chaperone, and Elizabeth senses the same sort of amazement from her. This wonder might be a genetic trait, like their dimples or their blue eyes. Or maybe his sister’s look of wonder is more like suspension, waiting to see what Elizabeth might do or say next. She knows his sister keeps a journal, and she longs to read about herself, about these visits. She sees the journal lying on the desk in the bedroom, in plain view, a light blue notebook with gold edging. Robert’s sister has gone for a walk, and Robert is downstairs resting. She hears his gentle snoring (like everything else about him, soft, tender, alluring that way). It would be so easy. But how could you invade someone’s privacy like that? It was the worst sort of betrayal. If anyone were to read what she’d written, without her consent, it would feel like a mortal wound, the kind you could never get over.
She closes the door to the bedroom, makes her way down to the small sitting room, watches Robert sleep. He is a very expressive sleeper. It’s almost as if his dreams are printed on his forehead, his cheekbones, engraved into the corners of his mouth. She leans back in the armchair, closes her eyes. He can tell her about his dreams later, if he wants to. She won’t peer into them on her own.
In a little while, Robert’s sister comes in. The creaking of the front door wakes Robert. He blinks once, smiles at Elizabeth, and then he says it: Let’s go out for a walk so I can tell you what I was dreaming.
A small lake stretches behind the house. After the polio episode, Robert’s father installed a walkway paved with moonstones, and a bench.
So you won’t have to go far to see something beautiful, was how he’d explained it to his son. Robert gestures for Elizabeth to sit first. He lowers himself off the crutches and stows them under the bench. He takes Elizabeth’s hands, grips them as if the details of his dreams will be revealed through his fingers.
I don’t know if I was awake or asleep, he begins. But I dreamed I gave you this. He lets go of her hands and reaches into his vest pocket. You’re supposed to unpin it from yourself first, he says, but that seems like too much extra business.
Elizabeth feels a whirling storm in her head. She wants to think about what this means, but there doesn’t seem to be time. She likes Robert enormously, his literary talk, his rapt attention, his courage. That could be enough for a pin. She instructs herself not to look beyond this minute right here in front of her, the lake, the touch of Robert’s hand and its inverse, the cold edge of the fraternity pin, now pressing into the center of her palm.
The class is called Contemporary Press. The course description: Students will read the newspaper and talk ab
out current events. Elizabeth hates it, but she cannot seem to stop herself from going, believing she will eventually ease into Miss Lockwood’s method. Elizabeth hopes the twice-weekly idiocy of it will pare away some roughness in her own character, maybe crack the shell of her loneliness. But week after week this paring and cracking does not happen, and then it is too late. She must stay in the class or withdraw and waste that much of her tuition.
It’s awful, she tells Margaret. She encourages us to lump everything together, to think about the big picture. I hate the big picture. You only look at the big picture if you can’t see very well.
And Miss Lockwood’s eternal, infernal search for consensus. Elizabeth realizes she hates the word itself, the way it half rhymes with nonsense. Miss Lockwood is happy only when everyone in the room is nodding and smiling and congratulating herself for thinking the same as the girl sitting at the next desk over.
So she says nothing. Sometimes she shakes her head and disagrees, but mostly she watches the sun slide out of the window behind Miss Lockwood’s nodding head. The class begins at four o’clock, and it’s winter term, and so for three months, the afternoon darkens with disapproval every Tuesday and Thursday. Elizabeth wants to point this out. See? The sun goes down on your big picture.
One day, in late March, Miss Lockwood asks the class to list the qualities of the typical businessman, and Elizabeth can no longer contain herself. She starts to laugh, at first a little, broken sighing, but then she just gives in to it, listening to herself at the same time, marveling at the happy sound. As if she’s just been given a gift. She puts her face in her hands, hears the laughter amplified. The pencil scratching beside her stops. Desks creak, and then the room goes eerily silent. Elizabeth is aware of Miss Lockwood’s footsteps, really a sort of heaving glide. She feels the breathing presence of Miss Lockwood right in front of her.
Miss Bishop? Are you not quite yourself today?
