by Liza Wieland
But in time, she recovers her good sense:
In connection with traveling, you must leave out everything you can and must not think of answering letters if anyone writes to ask what you are doing.
1949
What Elizabeth believes first is that Louise has stopped drinking. She looks well-preserved but mirthless. Like something that has been entombed here in the Library of Congress, in the closet behind the poetry consultant’s office or under a drop cloth in a storage room, an unloved and forgotten sheaf of thin pages, bound still, but stiffened. There’s a creak and a splitting of the spine when you touch it.
You didn’t tell me you were coming to Washington, Elizabeth says.
That’s not much of a greeting, Louise says. You look tired.
I’m not, though. Not tired. Just citified.
You’ve lost weight. It’s nice.
Thank you. How’s Victoria?
Will you ask me to come in?
Elizabeth steps back into her office, motions to the chair. A battered typewriter sits on her desk, surrounded by piles of paper.
I have a lovely view, she says. The Capitol dome. Do you know you can get a ten percent discount on pens at the House of Representatives? Good thing since I keep losing pens. I’ve lost the black-and-gold one I’ve had since Paris.
Louise falls heavily into the chair, as if she’s walked a long way. Elizabeth crosses the room, sits down behind her desk.
You look rich, Elizabeth, Louise says. Successful. You never did before. You were always such a church mouse.
I’m not rich. But people treat me as if I were. Or might become rich. Or make them rich.
You wear it well, that treatment. It’s alluring.
And I’ve become an expert filler of forms. Before I came here I was wretched at it. I’m going to the zoo this week to see the two new baby elephants and the baby leopard, who chases his tail constantly, everyone says, because he knows he’s in Washington and that’s what they do here.
I hope you will forgive me, Louise says suddenly.
That was ten years ago. I wish I could believe in free love, but I can’t. Anyway, I’ve nearly forgotten it.
Well, I haven’t.
You should try. Really, Louise, we were so young. Traveling like we knew what we were doing. Rushing to the next excitement. Then Margaret’s arm. It made us all strange, I think. How is she? She doesn’t speak to me anymore.
She’s all right. She doesn’t drive, but hardly anyone in New York drives. She talks about you.
She does?
Would you like to go get a cup of coffee? I’m chilled to the bone.
In the Library of Congress snack bar, Elizabeth watches a small, dark-haired woman, about forty, who is eating her lunch alone. There is something about her stillness—and then Elizabeth realizes this woman is the only person in the entire room who isn’t talking. She’s the only person by herself. And she’s not tucked away into a corner or against a wall or facing away from the rest of the tables. She’s not distracting herself by reading or writing in a notebook. She takes small teeth-baring bites of her sandwich, tears at a ruffle of lettuce. She stares into space or watches other diners with a sort of brazen attention.
Louise follows Elizabeth’s gaze. That one? she says. She’s probably your age. Isn’t that too old for you?
Don’t even joke. I could lose my job. They’re already firing one a day.
One what?
Louise. Don’t be dense.
You mean us.
Elizabeth nods. Anyway, that’s not it. I’m jealous of how peaceful she looks. Here they’d say she was comfortable in her skin. In Canada, you would say she was in her skirt.
Too bad about that. She’s lovely.
Louise.
And you do have power.
Elizabeth stirs her coffee. Not really. I’m terribly ill-suited for this job. And for this town. The way people assume you’ll do favors. Writers mostly, but regular people, too.
And can you do favors if you’re asked? Louise says.
I’m glad you didn’t say do you. Most people don’t even ask. It’s rather cold and calculating that way.
And just plain cold.
Winter in Washington is so damp. It’s rather like Paris. Without the compensations.
So you don’t do favors for other people? Louise says. Not ever?
Suddenly, Elizabeth feels a weight in her arms—the ghostly memory of a weight, carrying a small, living bundle. The coffee in her cup is as dark as the streets of Dieppe, as the back of Clara’s coat hurrying ahead toward the port.
Apparently, she says, if someone asks, I’ll do just about anything.
1953
Elizabeth recognizes the woman standing on the platform in Grand Central Station, but for an instant, the name will not come. All she remembers—or envisions really—is a photograph held up to the light. Light flooding in through the windows on her left, and a fresh tinge in the air, the lightened air, the promise of trees nearby but not quite visible. The photograph, who was it? A young woman, somber, some injury about her face, causing a kind of squint, as if she had just been hit and believed she would be again, very soon. Elizabeth doesn’t know where this comes from, the bone-deep memory, not only of having seen the face but having felt it in some way, as if she had been the woman struck. Or, less possible, the man—she thought it must have been a man—behind the camera, the one who had just raised his hand to the woman and caused her to flinch that way, inwardly, a flinching of the soul.
Suzanne. From the photograph, the awful one meant to show Suzanne how she looked. How awful she looked.
Clara, Elizabeth says.
Elizabeth. How strange to see you here.
Isn’t it? But really, where else would we have met?
A train station of course, Clara says.
Clara and Elizabeth look at each other for a long minute. Each waits for the other to speak, but then the politeness passes, and in its place a kind of stubbornness grows. Elizabeth sees that Clara’s coat is warm and expensive, certainly too hot for New York in June. Clara seems to shrivel inside it, dry out to an essential self. It’s as if Elizabeth is seeing her really for the first time, this innermost Clara, a hot, hard, brittle, wounded thing in a chinchilla coat.
I want to thank you, Clara says.
I have never spoken of it, Elizabeth says. I was glad to help.
And I was glad to buy you a bottle of jenever.
And a fountain pen (Elizabeth does not admit she’s lost the pen).
That, too, Clara says.
What did you do after?
My husband and I had to leave, though the library was allowed to remain open. You know this, I expect.
I didn’t. I heard some things. I think I hoped the Paris I knew just . . . went to sleep.
Like the fairy tale? Well, it didn’t.
Clara stops talking. She looks down at her beautiful leather shoes. She seems to collapse into her coat like a fallen marionette. Then she rights herself and begins again.
You’d be standing in line behind a woman and marveling that she had silk stockings. Where did she get them? Whom did she know? And then you’d see her legs were bare and she’d drawn a line like a seam up the back of her calf.
Oh, Elizabeth says.
Dorothy was a marvel. She ran a kind of underground lending service for people who couldn’t get books. Soldiers and Jews. Even after the library was closed to the public, she came to work every day.
We heard your Vichy connection—
Yes. It was useful. We don’t speak of it now.
Certainly not.
That is Clara, Elizabeth thinks. Enthusiasm and then withdrawal. Warm wind and then a cloud passes over the sun. Still, that gigantic, unseen force, the magnetic pull of the past, keeps us rooted here. Elizabeth thinks she might miss her train. The idea is completely neutral, neither a hope nor a worry.
You must have a train to catch, she says.
Perhaps it will miss me.
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Did you ever see them, Clara?
Léonie and Dominique died in the war.
Clara bows her head. Another train departure is announced with bells.
The babies? Elizabeth says. Did you see them?
No, I never did. Anyway, not that I knew. But so often in Paris, I would see little dark-haired girls, and sometimes I would be quite certain. But that isn’t the same as really seeing, is it?
It’s not.
Clara reaches into her coat pocket, extracts a ticket. She turns and surveys the tracks, but Elizabeth notices she is looking in the wrong direction, southbound.
I don’t much follow the poetry scene, Clara says, but I have followed you.
There’s not much to follow.
Not yet maybe, but I shall keep a lookout.
The 1:42 from Philadelphia arrives without, it seems, any announcement. Disgorged passengers swarm around and between them, and Clara lets herself or causes herself to be swept away into the crowd. Elizabeth thinks she sees the back of the chinchilla coat climbing the stairs slowly, like a tired, misunderstood beast resigned to move among humans.
1964
Elizabeth wants the owls because she believes after she and Lota return to Brazil, they will remind her of Italy, where she could always breathe better than any other place in Europe, where she was farthest from Margaret’s mother, and the daily horror of the accident, where Louise was away from all her lovers, Mademoiselle Indira and maybe Ann and who knows who else. And, too, there was all the mythological, fantastical nonsense about owls. She believes in that, too, though it’s somewhat embarrassing to talk about. Also, the owls look like little girls—Elizabeth doesn’t really understand this part, or doesn’t want to—like tiny girls bundled up against the snow. Girls she might have seen or grown up with. The girl she might have been, at four or five, before her mother went away for good. Girls safe in a cage.
But Lota insists she leave the owls behind in Genoa. The customs official promises to write and let her know what has become of them. He looks to be very young, barely out of school, she guesses, but he wears a wedding band, a rarity for Italian men. He is shy to the point of nervous collapse. She believes he might weep when he has to remove the owls’ cage from her baggage cart.
Sorry, he whispers in English and then in Italian, mi dispiace, quietly, as if to speak his own language pains him more.
Lota, Elizabeth knows, is not at all dismayed.
I don’t know what we would do with them in a rough crossing, she says.
Just like a windy branch, Elizabeth tells her. They’d know how to hang on.
Lota rolls her eyes. I expect your Miss Marianne Moore would say that, too.
No, Marianne would actually be clever.
At the last minute, the young customs official asks if the owls have names. Archimedes, Elizabeth tells him, and Helen. Octavian. And the little one is Dante. This makes the young man smile—a gorgeous light washing across his face as if he’s thinking, An Italian owl! The most profound and prolific of all Italians!
He’ll take good care of that one, Lota says.
Don’t, Elizabeth says, don’t even joke.
She gives the young man their address in Ouro Preto and tries to forget about the owls.
* * *
Who do you know in the Italian civil service? Lota asks, waving the envelope just out of Elizabeth’s reach (a gesture she’s lately adopted).
Elizabeth turns and starts toward her room, knowing Lota will eventually tire of the taunt. She hears the letter fall onto the tray that holds the day’s mail.
The handwriting is shockingly graceful, the kind of script you might see on a wedding invitation. Miss Bishop. Elizabeth swears the seal has been perfumed.
I am dictating this to my sister who studies English. I want to tell you of your owls. They are well and very gentle. My son has taken a friendship with them. He likes to wear them on his body and head to believe he is a tree. Dante sleeps in his hair. My son is also gentle. He does not rush around like some boys. He is blind from his birth. Most animals are a danger but not your owls. He says they take care of him, just as he takes care of them. They give him wise ideas about the things he cannot see. He says they are his invisible babies.
Later, Elizabeth shows the letter to Lilli.
It’s funny, she says, that notion that if you can’t see something, it must be invisible.
1966
I am sorry you are not well, Elizabeth writes to Margaret.
I am sending the name and address of my analyst who has been a great help to me over the years. Please come to see Lota and me in Rio. The best art here is quite primitive, as I’m sure you know, but I think I can convince you to like at least some of it.
I am working on a book about Brazil. The first chapter is to be called “Brazil: A Warm and Reasonable People.” It begins with a story I know.
In Rio de Janeiro, one of those “human interest” dramas took place, the same small drama that takes place every so often . . . a newborn baby kidnapped from a maternity hospital. The hospital staff was questioned. A feebleminded woman feeding an infant in the train station was questioned . . .
Even today, one occasionally sees an elegant lady out walking leaning on the arm of a little, dressed-up dark girl, or taking tea or orangeade with her in a tearoom; the little girl is her “daughter of creation,” whom she is bringing up as if she were her own.
This next part, she crossed out:
I once had this experience for a few days in France, after the car accident, a daughter of creation. And then I had to let her go.
And this part, too:
For many years, I would wake up thinking of you and a great knot would tie itself in my chest. Then one day, the knot was gone, extinguished itself by itself, like a wave, a wake. The sea that was always so desperate for your attention: wave after wave. That was me.
But not this:
I think we will be friends now, for the rest of our lives.
1970
Elizabeth dreams that her mother is walking ahead of her, down the beach at Wellfleet. She recognizes—even though this is not possible—her mother’s back, the fall of her shoulders, the color of her hair, which is the same as the sky, flat gray shot with white: waves in skeins, cirrus clouds. In the dream, she thinks she has just spoken, called out to her mother. She is waiting for a response, but none comes. Her mother keeps walking, toward nothing. Sand and sea and sky into infinity.
This beach at Wellfleet is endless. Elizabeth feels she can move forever toward some unknown, unseen horizon. Suddenly, her mother is gone, and a tall, rangy man is with her and talking a blue streak. This is literal: the sky behind his head flashes azure as he speaks. The face appears and dissolves, like the Cheshire Cat. Then the dark tortoiseshell glasses frames materialize: Robert Lowell. In the dream, Elizabeth wishes he was her mother. The wish is so strong as to be pungent, like the salt air. She wishes her dead, disturbed mother was her living, disturbed friend. She wishes this with all her heart. Maybe if she says it, the name everyone calls him, Cal, her mother will turn and walk back to her, and some staggering imbalance in the universe would be repaired.
She opens her mouth to speak, but of course dreams have their specific and cruel peripheries. She cannot push the words into the air, and her mother keeps going. The distance between them amplifies, as if it were sound. Sand flashes into the air behind her mother’s feet as she moves. Elizabeth thinks, If I were closer, I would be blinded and weeping for days.
When she wakes, Elizabeth knows she must leave Roxanne to her own darkening madness. She tries to think how she can rescue Roxanne’s baby. It’s too awful and familiar a picture (the mother taken away, the endangered child packed off to relatives). She scans the roil and indifference of Puget Sound, but the necessary sailboat and its Belgian captain do not, of course, appear.
1972
I don’t know why I remember the look of Robert’s hand on the tiller.
I don’t know why
I remember that Robert was fascinated by the idea of the Quabbin.
Elizabeth and Cal Lowell (the second Robert, she calls him privately) drive out to the Quabbin Reservoir to sail.
She has been told the story many times, how four towns, called Dana, Prescott, Enfield, and Greenwich, had been flooded to make the Quabbin Reservoir, how the stone foundations sat on the bottom, home now only to fish and other such watery life. She sees it in her mind’s eye, the ruin, the whole empty towns lost, so heavy with water they couldn’t even crumble.
It is a perfectly lovely morning, though it would be hot later. Cal has phoned for permission to walk through the reserve. The officials are well-disposed toward the old families from the four towns. They felt sorriest for the children, of whom Cal’s mother was one of the oldest, who had lost their homes. Cal had said something else to them, romantic and mysterious, something about showing a brilliant poet what his family had lost.
They hoist the canoe and walk in from the parking lot—not very far—to where the old town center of Dana had once stood—very near the water, but not in it. In the long grass, Cal shows Elizabeth a hitching post and a mile marker.
I know these, he says, but I don’t remember them. They’re so lost. There was a hotel here, and the town hall. The church was just over there. He crosses to the place and stands, staring at the ground. Isn’t it odd, he says finally, to lose a whole town?
I have been thinking of that, Elizabeth says.
But at least no one died here, Cal says. And there are no dead. The graves were all moved. Very carefully, though it was unpleasant business. Mother said it felt like going to the same funerals twice.
They find a flattened spot in the grass at the water’s edge—it appears someone else had launched a boat there, too, or lain close to the water.
