How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

by Mameve Medwed

  But I was sad for him. A residual feeling like the scar that marks the long-ago childhood bout of chicken pox.

  I avoided bookstores. I avoided his books. I avoided Ned, who must have avoided me, too. But I couldn’t avoid Lavinia. She came into my booth.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. It was yet another quiet day; no one rummaging through my brass doorknobs, the ersatz Currier & Ives, the china gravy boats and coin silver demitasse spoons, no one to impress Lavinia with my industry, my business acumen.

  “It’s a public place,” she said. She was all dressed up in her ladylike color-coordinated clothes. I—well, you can imagine what I was wearing—carpenter’s pants, a Greek sailor’s shirt, my usual scruffy glad rags (accessorized by a vintage scarf, I might add). She picked up a saucer painted with silhouettes of George and Martha Washington. She put it down.

  “This is ridiculous,” she said.

  “These saucers are very popular.”

  “You know what I mean.” She banged her fist on a cherry wood table. A piece of veneer fell off. “Though I can’t understand why, you seem to have broken my brother’s heart. He’s moved to New York.”

  “The center of publishing. All the better for his literary career.”

  “Look, Abby, I got over it. Why can’t you?”

  I stopped. My body went limp. I felt knocked sideways by despair. My whole sad life came washing over me, my whole sad life documented in Ned’s tell-all book. “I can’t, Lavinia. It was my life Ned stole. I just can’t.”

  “That changes everything,” she said. With not even a good-bye, with not even a wave, she turned on her two-inch stacked heel and walked away.

  Nine

  Mary Agnes Finch calls me. “The deposition’s been set for six weeks from today,” she reports. “I’ll mail you the official notice. I must say that the logistics have been a nightmare, for such a little case—”

  “A little case!” I exclaim.

  “Well, not to you, of course, but in the larger scheme of things, in the legal world…” Her voice trails off. Between the lines I read I’m a pain in the ass, I’m being unreasonable. But what about Lavinia? I want to shout. What about Ned? It’s not my fault, I’m tempted to cry, a child unjustly accused of hogging the shovel and pail while others are trying to grab them away from her. I need to be grateful to Mary Agnes. I know she wouldn’t have taken this on if we hadn’t gone to school together. “I can’t thank you enough. I really am so—”

  She cuts me off. “If we hadn’t gone to school together, Abby, I might not have agreed to pursue this. I usually accept cases with much higher stakes.”

  “I understand that a chamber pot isn’t a multimillion-dollar estate,” I admit. “Still…”

  “Of course, to you, it’s high stakes.”

  “Yes. Plus there’s always the principle of the thing.”

  “Naturally.”

  But I can recognize a lukewarm response when I hear it. I change the subject. “You mentioned the logistical nightmares?”

  “Yes, agreeing on a date, agreeing on a time, agreeing on a place. Getting everyone together—the other lawyers, parties to the dispute, the stenographer. Jim Snodgrass and I are in accord about forgoing the expense of videotape. For convenience, we’ve decided to depose you all at once. I’ve set aside a conference room in my office. Ned will take the shuttle back and forth. We’re hoping to get through everything in two days.”

  “Two days?” What was I thinking? A morning of discomfort followed by the lollypop of a Filene’s Basement trip?

  “Often depositions take weeks.”

  I collapse onto the nearest chair. Something sticks into my butt. When I slide it out, I see it’s Flush: A Biography. I hold it against my heart. Could there be a more profound signal to walk on through the storm? Which at least won’t show up on videotape. Small consolation.

  No consolation at all when I hear what Mary Agnes says next. “You realize that you’ll all be deposed not only at the same time but also in the same room, that you’ll all sit in on each other’s testimony.”

  “What?” My throat closes up. I start to sputter. I can barely get the words out. “I assumed we’d be deliberately segregated, that our schedule would be set up for avoidance.” I must be thinking of Feydeau farces, the slamming doors timed so precisely that actors keep missing each other by the tip of a toe or the knob of an elbow. “In Law & Order,” I instruct, “witnesses are always brought to separate interrogation rooms. The Sam Waterston character takes great pains to hide one witness from the opposing one.”

  Do I hear Mary Agnes snort at the source of my legal expertise? “That’s for a criminal case. Depositions are preliminary.” She pauses. “Abby, are you sure you want to go through with this?”

  I stroke the cover of Flush. If I weren’t so sane, I’d swear the cocker spaniel is winking at me. My chamber pot has been in Mary Agnes’s vault for so long I’ve forgotten what it looks like. My mother has been dead for so long I can hardly re-create the contours of her face, the sweet comfort of her smile. What I do know, however, is that she’d want me, who barely finishes anything, to finish this. “Never surer of anything in my life,” I swear.

  “Well, then,” she says, “I’ll send you a copy of the notice of deposition. I’ll also give you a little booklet I had made up for clients who are about to be deposed.”

  “It will be like college again. The studying,” I add.

  “In a way. We’ll meet beforehand for a little coaching.” She laughs. “A Kaplan cram course. A Princeton Review prep.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Come on, Abby. You, a Harvard student.”

  I’m about to answer, Faculty brat, but let it go. After all, Mary Agnes Finch, from blue-collar South Boston, doesn’t need to be reminded that Harvard is not always a meritocracy.

  Mary Agnes continues. “You do understand now that though the three of you will be in the same room, will be hearing each other’s testimony, it won’t be like a trial. You won’t have the chance to reply.”

  “I understand.”

  “And let me just warn you that the questions can get quite personal.”

  I sit up. “What do you mean?”

  “No holds barred. Your background, your family relationships, your sexual history, secrets, feelings, problems you may not necessarily want to talk about. All grist for the deposition mill.”

  “You’re kidding,” I say. This time my voice contains horror, not the delight that followed the valuation of my chamber pot. Will I have to talk about my feelings for Ned in front of Ned? The highs of our life together. The lows of our life apart. How he betrayed me, the embarrassing things there were to betray.

  “It won’t be easy.”

  She’s thrown down the gauntlet. Does she think I’m not up to it? “I’m up to it,” I state with a bravado I don’t feel.

  “I heard from Jim Snodgrass that Lavinia went to see you. That she offered to sell the pot, to split the proceeds fifty-fifty.”

  “So?”

  “You might want to reconsider. She might be persuaded to extend the offer again.”

  I shake my head. “Never.”

  “Even without taking into account legal fees and expenditures of time, this kind of compromise will save a lot of emotional distress.”

  I picture The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls. All my distress is catalogued there—347 pages’ worth in ten-point Galliard, on ivory stock, filed in the Library of Congress, sporting an ISBN, for sale to any comer for $24.95, Ned’s photograph on the back flap. And inside, my heart exposed, my guts eviscerated and spilling out. “Over my dead body,” I say, “to quote an ex-friend of mine.”

  Since I’ve got a whole six weeks until the deposition, I decide to get to work on my brilliant career. I boot up my computer. I look up flea markets and country auctions in the Greater New England area. It’s time to add more to my stock. I’ve been so focused on Lavinia in the present, Ned in the past, my legal woes, I ha
ven’t kept you up to date on my professional activities.

  Well, at least something’s turning out better than I would have thought. As a realist, I expected the increase in business from my Antiques Roadshow appearance to be short-term. The flavor-of-the-month effect. The on-to-the-next-brilliant-discoverer fickleness. And true enough, after every spike, there’d be the kind of significant drop to make me start worrying about my rent. But thanks to endless reruns, my fifteen minutes of fame has turned out to be the gift that keeps on giving. People are still walking into my booth saying I saw you on TV months after the event, months after the chamber pot found its (temporary, I hope) resting spot in Mary Agnes Finch’s repository.

  I stop typing. My fingers freeze. My hands hover, trembling, over the keys like the hands of a séance-conducting medium. Tag Sale: Country furniture, china, washstands, farm implements, chamber pots, Route 193, Kerry, New Hampshire, I read. I read it again. Kerry, New Hampshire, the site of St. Barnaby’s, the site of my only marriage proposal (if you discount Johnny Aherne’s in third grade), the sad reminder of things past. I move my eyes to chamber pots, the object both of my improved circumstance and of my current misery. Lightning can’t strike twice, I comfort myself—neither with the good a chamber pot can bring nor with the bad. If Elizabeth Barrett Browning had only known in the nineteenth century what complications her plain, humble, utilitarian chamber pot would work in the twenty-first, she’d have written an ode on the subject. I highlight the tag sale, click on bold, and bracket the date with two stars.

  I force myself back to the next flea market on the list. I am struggling not to obsess about the deposition, about seeing Ned. When I was a teenager, up to my erupted skin in adolescent angst, my mother suggested I bring all my worries to her between four and four-thirty every afternoon. We would worry together, then and only then. The rest of our hours would be productive and glorious. For a while this ploy worked, if you agree that productive and glorious are adjectives subject to interpretation and full of flexibility. But now that I’m grown, the tsunami of worries washes over me twenty-four hours out of a twenty-four-hour day. If my mother were here, I’d call her up the way you call up your sponsor in AA. I feel a worry coming on, I’d confess, I can’t stop myself. And she’d rush right over and hold my hand until the craving passed.

  How I wish my mother were here. How I miss her. When I picture her and Henrietta in front of the Taj Mahal, one lover’s monument to his beloved, I am cheered. The fact of her happiness at that moment cushions my loss. Underneath the hum of the computer, the tap of the keys, the click of the cursor, the stop and go of my heart, the up and down of my despair-o-meter, I can almost hear her voice. Keep busy, dear, she says to me. Time and work are the great healers. Work makes the time pass.

  I reach for my date book, which is sadly underutilized. I can just imagine Lavinia’s dance card, her daily planner cluttered with lunches, dinners, appointments, benefits, second wedding, lawyers’ meetings, torment-your-friend meetings, all jotted down in her cramped, clear, anal hand. I mark my own calendar: flea markets, tag sales, teeth cleaning a month from now, lunch date with a friend who is bringing her two children down from Maine to follow in the footsteps of Paul Revere. La-di-da! You won’t be surprised to see that my Friday and Saturday nights are blank. At thirty-three, I find those empty spaces are harder to fill than at twenty. Especially if you no longer have a Clyde on your arm for a movie at the Brattle Theatre, a hamburger at Bartley’s, a drink at the Casablanca bar. Searching for Mr. Right—or even Mr. Just Okay—while getting over one man and legally entwined with the other is worse than cooking fudge when you’ve got twenty pounds to lose. I pencil in Tag Sale, Kerry, New Hampshire, under Saturday. Viewing, as it says in the ad, from ten till all the merchandise is gone.

  Just then the phone rings. I pick it up. “Abigail Randolph?” a man’s voice asks.

  “Who wants her?”

  “The Boston Globe.”

  “I already subscribe.”

  I’m about to hang up when the voice cuts in. A laugh followed by, “Wait. I’m a reporter.”

  It’s a word that should come with a warning: Reporter: Danger Ahead. A word that should trigger my flight response, but, well, what can I say? He is a man, his voice sounds deeply masculine, I am staring at a crossword puzzle’s worth of fill-in-the-blank squares for all weekend nights. “Yes?” I answer, careful to keep any eagerness or encouragement out of my tone.

  “Todd Tucker. I’m doing a piece on the follow-up to Antiques Roadshow. What happens to people and their objects once they’ve been featured on the program.”

  Well, if that isn’t a signal to slam down the phone and flee in the opposite direction, then my name isn’t Abigail Elizabeth Randolph. Maybe it isn’t, maybe I’m adopted, because I don’t do any of those things. I plead loneliness. I plead stupidity.

  And also a susceptibility to flattery, as you can gather by what comes next. “I saw you on TV with your chamber pot,” he admits. “You were terrific. Believe me, I’ve been watching the program for an age trying to find just the right person to interview. Can I take you to lunch?”

  But then the sensible single-woman-in-the-city kicks in, the new me whose distrust has been honed by Clyde’s leaving, Ned’s betrayal, Lavinia’s threats. Boy, can a chamber pot in a lawyer’s vault and a looming deposition change a person’s people-are-really-good-at-heart philosophy. I wouldn’t put it past Lavinia to have hired a private detective posing as a reporter. How many times have I seen that ploy on the television programs I used to feel ashamed to watch but can now claim as essential research? “Actually,” I say, “can I call you back? I need to dig up my date book and check my schedule.”

  He gives me the number of his direct line. “I’ll be here for another hour or so.”

  “It won’t take that long.” I search the yellow pages for the Boston Globe. “Do you have a Todd Tucker on your staff?” I ask the “This is Phyllis” woman who answers the phone.

  “City and Region section,” she supplies. “Shall I put you through?”

  He picks up on the first ring.

  Yes, reader, I say yes. You can’t admonish me any more than I admonish myself. What is my excuse? Mankind is weak and a woman in need of a man, a woman with legal problems and a single carton of yogurt and a frozen chicken à la king for one in her refrigerator, is weaker still.

  We arrange to meet at the East Coast Grill at noon. Brownie points on the thoughtfulness front, he’s chosen a place in my neighborhood. “No need for the red carnation in the lapel,” he jokes. “I’ve already seen you on my Sony portable.”

  If I’d already seen him, I wouldn’t have been so tempted to leave a note with the hostess explaining that Abigail Randolph had been taken away for an emergency appendectomy. The minute he walks through the door, all second thoughts fly right out that door. He’s tall and big with a Kennedy thatch of hair and a Cary Grant cleft in his chin sexy enough to make a girl regret any resolution to swear off men. What would you expect with a name like Todd Tucker? A movie star name if ever there was one. Tab Hunter. Troy Donahue. Nick Nolte. Jude Law. Brad Pitt. “Abby,” he says. He heads straight for my table even though there are a few nymphish waifs picking at salads and reading Kierkegaard.

  We split a rack of ribs. “Let’s splurge for boutique beer,” he suggests. “I’m on an expense account.”

  He tells me he got his B.A. from Wisconsin, majored in English, specialized in nineteenth-century British poets. “I went through a real Elizabeth and Robert phase,” he confides.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “’Fraid not. Am I the only living nonacademic male under seventy to dig the Brownings?”

  “Probably.”

  “The reason why I’m convinced your story is meant for me.” He laughs. “Even though I decided to quit my own poetry. I figured I had to make a living.”

  My fork stops in midair. “You’re a poet?” I exclaim.

  “Barely.” He shrugs his (very broad)
shoulders with disarming modesty. He waves a dismissive (well-modeled) hand. “Well, I placed a couple of my verses in a few literary journals. The kind that pay you in two copies.”

  “I’ll have to look them up.”

  “The quarterlies are so obscure they’re impossible to find. In fact they’re probably defunct. I’ll show them to you”—he pauses—“when I know you better.”

  He’s a poet. He’s going to know me better. He’s going to show me his poems. He’s handsome. Stop it, Abigail, I tell myself, you’re not thirteen.

  “So I decided to forgo poetic suffering and went to the J-school at Columbia,” he continues.

  “Any misgivings?”

  “Sometimes. When I pick up Elizabeth or Robert. Or Wallace or E.E. You know, that alone-in-bed-in-the-middle-of-the-night thing.” He pauses. “Not that you…”

  I stare at him. I am starting to rue the ribs. I’m afraid the grease has smeared my lipstick way beyond acceptable boundaries; strings of pork are no doubt sticking between my teeth. I’ve lost my appetite.

  “I like a girl who eats,” Todd says. He means it as a compliment though I’m sure the women nearby with their salads, dressing on the side, their bottled water, slice of lemon on a saucer next to it, wouldn’t take it that way. I don’t tell him about my empty refrigerator, how I hardly leave my apartment, how I’m living on pizza slices and dregs from my fast-diminishing supply of Chardonnay. Let him think I’m a healthy girl with a healthy appetite, a healthy social life, and a healthy lack of stress. A girl with a special regard for iambic pentameter. I study the cleft in his chin. What would it be like to slide a finger right into that cranny? How would it feel? Maybe like a little cocktail frank snug in its little cocktail bun. Maybe like a perfectly contained haiku? Is that a healthy thought? I wonder. I grab a paper napkin. I wipe my mouth. For a reporter about to conduct an interview, he’s barely posed a question yet.