How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

by Mameve Medwed

  On Monday, even though the Szechuan chicken wasn’t due to be delivered for another hour, I made the mistake of answering my buzzer. It wasn’t the most Herculean effort since I had already crawled out of bed for a two-minute bathroom break. What did I expect? A care package? A search party of concerned citizens? Social services? I guess I did because when a voice called up from three floors down, “Abigail Elizabeth Randolph?” I answered “Yes” with such a pathetic eagerness for human contact I must have sounded encouraging.

  “Something for you,” the voice replied.

  “Bring it right up,” I yelled.

  He was huffing by the time he reached my door. A fat man in a cheap suit whose necktie bore the dregs of a breakfast of scrambled eggs and strawberry jam. But there was no basket with a bow tied to its handle, no tower of pears peeking out from its crackling cellophane, no artful mood-elevating bouquets, no meals-on-wheels for suffering shut-ins. “Abigail Elizabeth Randolph?” he repeated.

  “Who wants to know?”

  He held up a blank envelope. “I’m a constable.”

  “And I’m the queen of Romania.”

  He ignored this. He reached into his pocket. He fished out a badge. He stuck it in front of my face. A police shield as shiny as the ones in the cops-and-robber shows I used to watch as a kid.

  I moved my eyes from the badge. I’m not the least impressed, I made my body language show.

  He was not deterred. He kept holding out his envelope, motionless as the mime busking for quarters in Harvard Square on summer nights.

  I stuck both my hands in the pockets of my bathrobe. I felt crumbs and a wadded Kleenex in one. The other had a hole so gaping my fist went right through it and down to my knee.

  He stepped toward me. In the split second before I could slip away, he shoved the envelope up into my armpit, where it caught on a fold in my sleeve. He sighed. “According to regulations, the injunction has to have physical contact with the injunctee to count as delivered,” he stated in the robotic way officers of the law read a suspect his Miranda rights. “You are served.” Then he turned on his heel. “Have a nice day,” he added.

  Do you suppose the soldiers who dropped the atomic bomb waited for that mushroom-shaped cloud to sprout, then said, “Have a nice day”?

  As soon as I heard him shut the front door, I opened my own particular bomb. Temporary Restraining Order—Commonwealth of Massachusetts—You are enjoined neither to sell, remove…blah blah blah…premises. In ten days hence, Miss Abigail Elizabeth Randolph and said chamber pot are to show up in court. On penalty of…blah blah blah. I pictured all the business cards from appraisers and dealers now tucked away in my desk. Money in the bank, I comforted myself. My retirement fund. “When you’re ready to sell,” “If you decide to put this on the market,” one or the other advised with Uriah Heepish rubbing of palms and assurances of my best interest at heart. Temporary Restraining Order! I thought that was something confined to cases of domestic violence. Not that I couldn’t declare myself a battered woman, at least metaphorically.

  I did the only thing possible. I wept some more. I went back to bed.

  By Wednesday, when I climbed out of my grubby hibernator’s nest, I was mad. I stomped around my living room so hard that even the heavy-metal musicians by night/ computer programmers by day downstairs complained. In my kitchen I threw a plate on the floor—not one I ever really liked, not an antique. In the bathroom, I kicked the wastepaper basket. It hit the tub and chipped the already-chipped porcelain. I punched a hole in the wallboard. I slammed a closet door with such force the hinges broke. By now I suppose you’ve decided I’m heading through the four stages of grief. You could be right, but only partially. Acceptance will never come. I swear. I’ll take the oath on it.

  As soon as I realized I was hurting only myself, and damaging my apartment in the process, I pulled off my pajamas, which were getting more than disgusting with the bad hygiene of angst, not to mention soy sauce and pizza grease. I took a bath in my chipped tub. I brushed my teeth. I combed my hair. I got dressed. I changed the sheets. I put gold hoops in my ears and called my lawyer.

  She wasn’t my lawyer until I called her, of course. Our family lawyer—my parents’—is a semiretired octogenarian—though age hasn’t withered him enough to keep him from estate plans nor custom staled him sufficiently to avoid the dress-down Friday set. Now that my father’s in La Jolla, his lawyer’s firing those eighty-year-old synapses setting up trust funds for my half brothers. Did I mention that indecently soon after my mother left, my father married his graduate student Kiki, the very grad student who had once fled our dinner table in tears, ridiculed by the great professor for her part-time job making astrological charts? Within weeks, my father had moved West, not-so-young man, and sired three sons, each a year apart. You should read their Christmas letter. Proud Dad goes to all their plays and games, he takes his turn at cooperative nursery school, he toilet-trained Atticus in one day, he signed up for father-and-son drum lessons with Julius, who has a spot of ADD, Kiki reports. He dotes on his family. He’s a changed man.

  One certainly unrecognizable to me, the terrifying pater familias who ignored me as long as I showed good manners and whose wrath knew no fury the minute I acted teenage-appropriate. But this is not my father’s story. What’s more, he’s pretty much out of the picture, emotionally and geographically.

  Who’s in the picture right now is my lawyer, Mary Agnes Finch. She lived on my hall freshman year. She went to Yale Law on full scholarship. She made law review, she clerked, did legal aid, serves on the board of the ACLU, is active in the Big Sister/Little Sister Association of the Greater Boston area.

  And she’s a shark.

  I took a taxi to her office. Profligate, I confess. But then I had to lug the chamber pot. All seventy five thousand dollars’ worth. “Bring it with you,” she ordered. “I’ll hold it in escrow. We’ll keep it in my law firm’s vault.”

  Frankly, I was relieved. My apartment’s not secure, what with its broken intercom and flimsy front-door chain. A DVD player disappeared from the first floor; a computer from the three-decker across the street. You wouldn’t expect the petty thieves and small drug dealers in my neighborhood to watch Antiques Roadshow, to recognize in a nondescript and downtrodden Cinderella of a pot a glass-slippered princess of an heirloom worth a princely sum. But you never know. Let’s face it, even yours truly, in the business, never had the slightest clue there was anything more to this pot than its intended use or as a receptacle for phony flowers.

  A secretary who introduced herself as “Ms. Finch’s associate” led me to a corner office on a high floor.

  Mary Agnes Finch was as put together now as the night back in Cabot Hall when she was the first person to file out onto the quad at the blast of the fire drill alarm. I can still see the camel’s-hair coat neatly wrapped around her Snoopy pajamas, tops and bottoms matching, her bunny slippers unmatted and on the correct feet, highlighter clenched in her right fist, all the next day’s homework tucked responsibly under her arm.

  “Abigail!” Mary Agnes exclaimed. She leaned forward over a huge island of a desk swept clean of everything but a carefully centered blotter, pens and pencils lined up at right angles to it, and a small silver scales of justice that looked to my discerning eye like an antique, though it could have been a good reproduction, second period. And a single exquisite rose in a Waterford vase.

  I felt bad about marring this perfect expanse with my oversize, messily rewrapped chamber pot. But I had to put it down to shake her hand.

  Her hand was cool; her grasp firm. No wedding ring, I noted. Nails filed straight across, one coat of clear polish. She was as impeccably tailored as her office, in a gray suit with that simple cut that screams Made in Italy, pearl button earrings, the kind of glossily shined shoes that nuns at parochial schools warn young girls about.

  I tucked my hands with their ragged bitten nails and inflamed cuticles under my skirt and sat in the client’s chair. Her cli
ents as a group must have been big-boned and long-limbed because my feet barely touched the floor. Behind her desk, high up in her even higher chair, Mary Agnes Finch cut an intimidating figure, although she was my age and I once snuck her toast and tea from the cafeteria when Andrew Peabody dumped her for Nancy Murphy.

  Even so, I felt like the unruly child called into my father’s study for keeping a great mind from important work. On his throne of a chair, behind his skyscraper desk, my father loomed like a giant while I shrank smaller and smaller down into my rabbit hole of shame. A blind date—unsuccessful—from the Harvard Business School once told me about his course on corporate psychology. Lesson number one, he instructed, was that any success-driven alpha male must fight for the corner office, the fortress of the biggest desk, the tallest chair, all the more quickly to get to yes.

  Obviously Mary Agnes Finch had already got to yes. Now she got down to business. One thing you could say for her, she was not judgmental. Nothing registered across her face except neutral interest and bull’s-eye attention.

  I told her about my mother and Henrietta. Their life; their deaths; how they had shared everything. I recounted how Lavinia and I had divided up the spoils. How Ned had left it to his sister to act for him. I didn’t go into why. I described word for word the way Lavinia had offered me the chamber pot. She hadn’t wanted it. I explained that except for clothes and jewelry, and items that each of us could identify as having occupied certain rooms of our respective houses before my mother and Henrietta had set up their domestic partnership, all the other belongings were things they had bought together, things they had owned jointly. But the chamber pot was mine, I repeated. Lavinia had scorned it. It was only when it had turned out to have more than sentimental value that she, that she and Ned…My voice went hoarse. I stopped. My throat felt raw. Was I going to weep? I pointed at the object of our disputation, now flaunting its remonstrative bulk on my lawyer’s desk. “The idea of being forced to take this pot into court…” I cried.

  “Not so fast,” Mary Agnes warned.

  But my mind was spinning out dire scenarios. “Will it be passed through security? Will it be tagged exhibit A? Will it become a ward of the court?” I was on a roll now, gathering the moss of desperation at accelerating speed. “Will I have to go to trial? In…” I stared at Mary Agnes’s Bauhaus calendar. “Oh God, it’s already Tuesday—in eight more days?”

  “You’ve been seeing too many Law & Orders,” she diagnosed.

  “Special Victims Unit.” I managed a smile. “I’m a victim myself. I can identify.”

  “No need for panic yet.”

  I patted the chamber pot. A couple of the plastic bubbles popped in solidarity. “But it’s mine. It’s meant for me.”

  Her voice was soothing. “Let me call Jim Snodgrass,” she said. “The chamber pot will be safe in my vault. It’s not going anywhere. I’m sure he’ll agree to letting the temporary restraining order lapse. No need for a preliminary injunction. We’ll enter a stipulation without prejudice. These are two responsible, intelligent families we’re dealing with here. I’m sure we can settle out of court. I’m certain we can come to an acceptable resolution.”

  “You don’t know Lavinia,” I started to wail.

  Five

  I’ve procrastinated long enough. I owe Lavinia a chapter. I’ll try to flip fast through the early years; what counts in this story is our more recent history. (Please note that I’m not lumping her brother here. He’ll have pages all his own.) There’s no need to pile on the facts for you to get the gist. Sharp and intense as wasabi, just a daub of her will flavor the whole meal. Unlike those of us who hope to change, to grow, those for whom the therapeutic hour counts as water to a plant, Lavinia’s been the same since she was five. It’s I who didn’t see it until too late. But then that’s one of my problems. I’m Miss Give-Her/Him-the-Benefit-of-the-Doubt. Miss People-Are-Really-Good-at-Heart. An attitude that didn’t help Anne Frank, by the way, no matter how well it defined her character.

  Still, to understand Lavinia and me, it’s important to know the sociological context. I’m sure right now you’re saying, Stick to the point, Abby. Deliver what you promised. I swear I will. But in order for you to have the 360-degree view of her, let me fill in some background.

  My father always pronounced me thick as a board. When Princess Diana used the term to describe herself, I figured she’d swiped it from my father, who’d spent a sabbatical at the London School of Economics. As soon as I learned it was a common Anglicism, I saw how, in a monarchy, Princess Diana’s heart, beauty, grace, and social conscience could more than compensate. In my own non-blue-but academically blooded family, no amount of charm could refute a phrase which we Americans would define as dumb. How could the only child of the Epworth chair holder turn out to be so limited? Of course R. Griffin Randolph was speaking grades and SATs, summa cums and valedictorian addresses. All the school reports that stressed my niceness, my plays-well-with-others qualities, my helpfulness, my sensitivity meant zilch measured against my lack of intellectual rigor and my alternative-style lust for sand castle making and Play-Doh modeling. My Miss Congeniality awards paled compared with the gavels wielded by class presidents, the torches waved by debating team captains.

  For a long time I was pretty sure I’d been adopted. I’d even hoped that I’d been found swaddled on a church step or in a basket made of rushes floating down the Charles River. In any other family, any normal family, my accomplishments would have earned pasted-on stars and double scoops of Heath Bar Crunch. Here’s a typical example of the upside-down nature of Randolphus Familius Academicus reproduced from my real life. Abigail Elizabeth Randolph: The (Later) Teenage Years.

  ME: I made the honor roll at Shady Hill.

  HE: Second tier.

  ME: I got into Harvard.

  HE: Faculty brat.

  Maybe that’s why he ran off to sire Atticus and Julius and Lucius. Second chances. New testing grounds. Does committed fatherhood transform thick as a board into sharp as a tack? Can perfect toilet training hike IQs up into the stratosphere?

  My loyal mother, on the other hand, always admired my artistic soul, touted my fine character. Emotional intelligence, she called it. Though it was impossible to stand up to my father, she tried. I’m not blaming my mother for any of this, let me reassure you. Ours was a male-o-centric house hold. One male. One house hold. One center of everything. My mother and I deserved the shaved heads of collaborators. We were detainees on Brattle Street, prisoners of academe, whose wills were broken down with rules the Geneva Convention would never tolerate. Darling, Abigail is so talented. She made the loveliest drawing, wrote the loveliest poem… she’d begin. But to my father, my messy scribbles, my awkward rhymes, showed only that his ivied ivory tower harbored no Mary Cassatt, no Emily Dickinson.

  No Elizabeth Barrett Browning either. At least in the poetry sense. Still, I once wrote several stanzas to my dog Jinx that, thanks to a rhyming dictionary, compared him to both a minx and a sphinx. This effort won an honorary-mention volume (paperback) of the collected E. E. Cummings. (The judge was a former student, my father felt obliged to enlighten me.) In fact, now that I think of it, Elizabeth and I turn out to have a lot in common. We’ve got not only our canine poetry but also our domineering-father issues; such a bond would unite us even without the passed-down chamber pot. Neither Barretts nor Randolphs dared to dispute the great man in their midst. My mother had to flee to Henrietta, to the other side of Harvard Square and then the oceans beyond, to escape my father. Elizabeth fled to Robert and to Italy to escape hers. Even in his final illness, Mr. Barrett returned all her letters unopened and refused to let his daughter cross the threshold of his door.

  But perhaps my father was only trying to toughen me up for the world beyond my own threshold. Maybe dealing with the bully inside your door was how he prepared me for doing battle with the bully next door.

  These days, my father isn’t that bad. Kiki has mellowed him. Could it be the couples
counseling she’s talked him into? Who would have thought? But then who would have pictured him wearing a grass skirt and strumming the ukulele, as documented in the shocking photographic evidence from their Hawaiian honeymoon? On our Sunday telephone conversations between Cambridge and La Jolla, I can sense a bit of regret for old child-rearing ways now that he’s seen the shock of the new. That’s very perceptive of you, Abigail, he’ll say to me when I make some prosaic observation like the reason Atticus is so slow tying his shoes is that kids all have Velcro now.

  I may be perceptive, but my emotional intelligence as far as Ned and Lavinia were—and are—concerned plunged straight to the bottom of Stanford Binet’s percentile pit.

  Which offers a good reason to get through our mutual childhoods fast. I know you can go to the theater and see the abridged Shakespeare, all the comedies and tragedies acted out and boiled down into an hour including a ten-minute bathroom/Raisinets break.

  Let’s start with my corner of the world. Cambridge may be a city of 100,000, a city of diverse neighborhoods, a community—or several communities—proud of its multiculturalism. Our ethnic restaurants paste their high Zagat ratings and maps of Afghanistan, the Algarve, Ethiopia, Turkey on their windows and doors; our bookstores (not that I go into them) are Marxist, feminist, Buddhist, gay, architectural, revolutionary, culinary, foreign language; the kiosk in Harvard Square sells the Sewanee Review next to Hustler and Pent house, Daedalus, Seventeen, Hello!, and Italian Vogue. Some Cantabrigians boycott the bridges to Boston, insisting that Cambridge alone can satisfy a person’s every need.