How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

by Mameve Medwed

  Do I tell Mary Agnes how I lied? Not under oath, but by omission. Do I tell her I neglected to inform Lavinia that the Globe is no longer carrying a story about the chamber pot? Do I confess to my lawyer that I blackmailed Todd Tucker by threatening to tell his wife about us? Do I admit to her that this is a criminal case after all? That her old college classmate is a criminal?

  I do none of those things. “Excuse me,” I say. I run to the ladies’ room. I see the stalls are empty; the coast is clear. I resoundingly throw up.

  I gulp water. I do the best I can with my blotched cheeks, my red eyes, tangled hair, sour breath.

  Ned is just leaving the men’s room when I sneak out of the ladies’ into the corridor. He looks almost as bad as I do. “Abby,” he says. I flatten myself against the wall. If I were Superman, I could go right through it. If only. He comes closer. He takes my hand. I gaze down at it—my hand in his. An art historian would call it a familiar motif, an iconic image, like the Mona Lisa, something you’ve pictured, felt, seen, over and over again but still remains fresh. “Abby,” he repeats. I pull my hand away. I turn my head from his pitying eyes.

  “Bye, Ned,” I say.

  As soon as the elevator swallows him up, I lean back against the wall. I take big relaxation-response breaths. I try to empty my mind. I try the visualization techniques that yoga teachers and fit friends and twelve-step advocates and women-who-love-the-wrong-men Globe receptionists are always crediting for getting them through everything from traffic jams to terminal illnesses. I picture a clear crystal lake, a shadowy grove of ancient elms, a cloudless blue sky. I focus on this. I shut out everything but water, trees, sky. I shut out banging doors, scurrying lawyers, the buzz and hum of big business, the lopsided clink of the scales of justice. Water, trees, sky. Water, trees, sky. I am just about to congratulate myself on my anesthesiology powers when, suddenly, an airplane cuts through my sky over my water between my trees. It’s a Delta shuttle from Boston to New York. carrying Ned to his new apartment, his new girl, his new book, his new life.

  And on the ground, diminishing to a speck, diminishing to an atom from the past, is me, clutching an empty vessel, clutching her chamber pot, this hollow symbol of a hollow victory.

  My heart races. Anxiety tightens my muscles, pounds through my veins. I am a relaxation-response failure just as I’m a failure in love.

  Back in the conference room, the crime scene has been all cleaned up. Everyone, except Mary Agnes, has gone on to the next client, the next legal entanglement. Mary Agnes herself looks poised for flight. Nevertheless, I can still picture the metaphorical yellow tape that marked the spot where my blood spilled, the place where I suffered the murder of my soul, the biggest humiliation of my life. I half expect to see the silhouette of my body lying there outlined in chalk.

  “I’ve asked Tony to bring you your chamber pot from the vault,” Mary Agnes says.

  “Now?” I ask. “Can’t I leave it there for a while?”

  “We don’t have the space,” she says, “And since the dispute over the property has been resolved, it’s my pleasure to turn it over to you.” She picks up the thick blue-jacketed folder of her bigger, more important case. “Take a cab,” my lawyer advises. “You can afford it now.”

  Fourteen

  The first thing I do when I get home is slide the chamber pot under my bed. The irony of this gesture is not lost on me. No longer positioned for its intended purpose, it now occupies the territory of dust bunnies, spilled pennies, odd socks—all for security’s sake, for antitheft reasons. Even more comforting is the added benefit: the chamber pot’s out of my sight and thus not the constant reminder of my collusion in perverting the law, my blackmail of an adversary, to become its lawful-by-default owner. Rest assured that my hard-earned prize is not only safely stashed but also well protected, cushioned in its coat of many layers of the finest Bubble Wrap.

  I take off my deponent’s shoes, my deponent’s black blazer, my deponent’s black pants. I unbutton my now wrung-through-the-deponent’s-mill formerly ironed white blouse. I study the discarded ensemble heaped at my feet. I shudder. I hadn’t thought of this before—thank goodness I hadn’t thought of this before—but it’s the outfit a waitress might sport at a Harvard Square restaurant. All at once, I glimpse my future. Which is not a pretty sight: a former antiques dealer uniformed in two different shades of black taking orders for veggie burgers, hash browns, a side of slaw, and the house red.

  Speaking of the house red. By now you’re probably ready to start sending me pamphlets marked From a Friend of Bill. You’re right to note that all my sorrows seem accompanied by glasses of wine. There have been a lot of sorrows lately, and a lot of wine along with a lot of whine. For which I apologize. But believe me, I’m not about to lurch down Mass. Ave. with a brown bag concealing half a gallon of Thunderbird. I’ve got the drinking under control. It’s my lack of control over other things that worries me.

  I review the events of the day, a humiliation of such immense proportions even the wine can’t soften its harsh reality. I started out okay, faltered at the middle, and by the end, even though I prevailed, nevertheless dissolved into tears. Causing everyone to flee, including myself. The story of my life. Or at least the story of my love life. The worst was seeing Ned regarding me with such pitying eyes. A close second was my position as the object of uncharitable Lavinia’s charity. The let-her-have-it-she’s-got-plenty-of-nothin’ syndrome. We got the result we want, Mary Agnes had crowed. But if we won, I wonder, why do I feel as though I lost?

  I try to distract myself. I look around my living room. Half the clothes from my closet lie draped across sofa and chairs and tables limp as drunken party guests. Some party. Dishes stuff the kitchen sink; the bed’s unmade; there’s a crack in its oak frame I keep meaning to call a carpenter in to fix. I managed to extract the name of a good one from Lavinia, back when we were on friendlier terms. You can only imagine how long ago that was. Somehow the prospect of clean sheets and an orderly house hold doesn’t console. I reach for the basket stuffed with magazines and newspapers. I flip through a couple of catalogues. Husbands and wives cuddle on Pottery Barn sofas. They curl up together in the center of mattresses the size of a small municipality. They share a cup of cappuccino over a polished espresso machine. They embrace in matching his-and-her terry cloth robes. Ecstatic smiles mark their perfect faces.

  I throw the catalogues across the room. Why not a full-color spread of a slovenly, frowning, chapped-skin ex-deponent sipping wine on her ratty couch? I ignore the challenging pile of the New York Review of Books; I took over my parents’ subscription. It must have been for life (a Harvard professor’s perk?) since the biweeklies keep coming even though I never once renewed.

  For some reason, what I pick up is Harvard Magazine, which goes to anyone who ever sent in a first-semester tuition check. For some perverse reason, maybe because I feel so turned around today, I start at the back. I stop. My hand freezes on the page.

  I put down my wine. I stare. In front of me is a photograph of two clasped hands against a black background. One hand is edged with a ruffle of lace at its delicate wrist. The other, slightly larger ends in the fold of a cuff. Immortal Hands, asserts the caption, then underneath, in smaller print, Tiny, but iconic.

  I start to read. Every sentence sends me into deeper and deeper states of disbelief. The plaster cast belongs to Harvard’s Schlesinger Library. Analysts claim to see in the bone structure of the woman signs of tuberculosis. The hands are tiny. “Yet,” states the article, “these are the hands of the larger-than-life lovers Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”

  I read that line over and over again. Can this be possible? I force myself to go on. The cast is the work of Harriet Hosmer, a neoclassical sculptor and expatriate who met the Brownings in 1853 in Italy. Nathaniel Hawthorne himself wrote about Clasped Hands, that it symbolized “the individuality and heroic union of two, high, poetic lives.”

  For a long time I gaze at the photograph. I t
hink of the Brownings’ joined hands, the symbol of their joined lives. I think of Ned and me just hours before, our own pulled-apart hands a signal of our own separated lives. Bye, Ned, I had said. And—poof!—he was gone.

  I rush to the phone. I dial the all-purpose Harvard number, a number I have known by heart since I was five. I am put through to the Schlesinger Library. The woman who answers connects me to the reference librarian.

  “I’m calling about the plaster cast of the hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” I explain. “I saw the photo in Harvard Magazine. I just want to check that the cast is still on display at the library before I make my way over there.”

  “Actually, it isn’t,” she says. “Unfortunately, it’s stored off-site.”

  I imagine huge ware houses filled with art, ranged like the gas tanks that pimple the Southeast Expressway. Not long ago I heard a news report about a ware house fire on the outskirts of London. Which destroyed valuable masterpieces. The loss is immeasurable, declared a painter whose canvases hang in museums all over the world. I look again at the photograph. How small the cast appears. How vulnerable. “Off-site in a big art ware house?” I ask. “In Boston? In New York?”

  “No. It’s here in the library. Stored in a climate-controlled vault. Off-site in this case meaning not available to the public.”

  I’m not the public! I want to protest. I’m a near Harvard graduate, daughter of the holder of the Epworth chair, owner of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s chamber pot, which I could conceivably donate to the Schlesinger’s collection of Browningiana, now that I know it has one, if I could personally witness the Browningiana myself. “Is it possible to make private arrangements to see the hands?” I request.

  She clears her throat. “Under certain circumstances.” Her voice is cautionary. Is she worried about theft? A lawsuit? A Lavinia-type claim? My great-great-aunt was a friend of Harriet Hosmer, who promised her the sculpture, I can hear Lavinia insist. Those hands are my inheritance.

  “What circumstances?” I ask.

  “You’d need to produce a good reason. For scholarly purposes as opposed to touristy ones.”

  Would a layman’s interest in the Brownings qualify? Would a mother’s love of Italy add gravitas? What about a fascination with entwined hands—the entwined hands of lovers, of ex-lovers, of poets? The clasped hands of an antiques dealer and a betraying novelist? I consider telling the reference librarian the story of my own Browning treasure. If I can earn her sympathy, maybe a chamber pot fresh from a law firm’s vault could be my ticket to another—this one off-site and climate-controlled—vault. More likely she’ll just dismiss me as a crackpot with a chamber pot. “What about someone who simply wants to take a look?” I offer. “Someone in the community? With Harvard connections that go way back?”

  “Sorry. I’m afraid those reasons don’t fit within the parameters of our library’s policy.”

  I hang up the phone. I have to laugh. How many times can Harvard diss you, let me count the ways. Touristy! The arrogance of the university even to those of its own, to those who teach there, who study there, who bought their houses at a reduction from University Real Estate, who send in their class dues and wave the Crimson at all the football games. A friend of my mother’s, a Radcliffe alum, who had been a host family for international students coming to Harvard for thirty years, wrote an essay about her experience for a local literary magazine. So delighted was she by its publication that she sent a copy to the international student office. “I expect they’ll be pleased,” she told my mother. They were not amused. “What’s the matter?” she called up when she realized she hadn’t been assigned a student for the new term.

  “Your essay,” came the frosty reply. “You insinuated our office served jug wine at our get-togethers when we pride ourselves on offering very fine vintages.”

  “Do something,” my indignant mother advised. “Write an op-ed for the Globe.”

  My mother’s friend had shrugged. “You can’t go up against Harvard.” She sighed.

  Harvard be damned, I think now. Lacking the scholarly credentials to get into the inner sanctum sanctorum, I’m not as crushed as you might predict. Do I actually have to see the hands? Maybe it’s enough to know they exist. That they inhabit a resting place only one zip code away from me. Perhaps it’s enough to make the connections. To marvel at the coincidence. To acknowledge how plaster can resonate with flesh. To take comfort in the possibility of the “union of two high, poetic lives.” I came close to such a union, I tell myself. Maybe the next.

  I lie down on my creaking, unmade bed. The room spins. I’m at sea on my lumpy mattress, crashing against wave after wave, my only anchor, my only consolation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s chamber pot.

  But the minute I think this, up seeps the old familiar guilt. Ned’s pity. Lavinia’s charity. What have I done? What am I going to do?

  Then something happens that only proves that you need to hold on to your raft, that you should never give up on life. Because when your emotions plummet so low they have nowhere else to go but up, fate can take an unexpected, soaring turn. Not that I can recognize the truth of this maxim right away.

  Here’s what happens: The phone rings. I can’t bear any more of anything, I plead. Besides, I am so pinned to my bed of woe by woe, so weighted down with remorse and guilt, I could never lift an arm to reach for the telephone. I manage a few tubercular-sounding coughs to underscore my invalided state and let the machine pick up.

  “Abby, Abby!” Gus nearly screams. “I’m just back from Antiques Roadshow. Your King’s Arrow is worth forty thousand bucks!”

  Like a miracle at Lourdes, I throw off my shackles. In an instant I’m off the bed. In seconds I’m at the phone before Gus hangs up. “I don’t believe it!” I scream.

  “It’s true!” Gus screams.

  “Oh my God! Oh my God!” I scream.

  The man upstairs pounds a broomstick on his floor. I lower my voice. “What happened? Tell me everything.”

  “Do I have an eye or not?” he fishes.

  Far be it for me to split cherubs. “You do indeed!” I agree.

  “The expert vetted it. And then a museum curator came up and offered the full estimate price on the spot. I told him I’d consult the owner.”

  “Accept the offer. Sell it,” I order. Decisive, businesslike, I revel in the take-charge-of-your-life side of me I’ve never seen before.

  “Done.”

  “I’ll give you a commission. Only what you deserve.”

  “The result is its own reward,” Gus assures. He pauses. “Though I wouldn’t turn down a bottle of bubbly.”

  “A bottle? I’ll send you a case.”

  I waltz a self-congratulatory loop around the living room. I allow myself a few yelping yippees! which bring the pounding of the broomstick back. Without any thought, without any waffling, I know exactly what I’m going to do. Forty thousand dollars! Thirty-seven fifty is exactly half of the seventy-five. I’ll have some money left over to purchase new stock for my business. I salute my professional eye. That I first set that eye on a corn sheller instead of the King’s Arrow is something I hardly bat an eyelash at. Who can fault a dealer clever enough to buy the whole lot? Hooray! The solution is so clear it’s astonishing.

  But first I dial the University Liquor Store. I ask for the authority on champagne. Expert to expert in our different milieus, we discuss possibilities. We decide on a single vineyard. Vintage. Brut. I supply Gus’s address and the number of my Visa card.

  By now it’s seven-thirty, way beyond quitting time. For anyone except Mary Agnes Finch, that is. I reach her on her direct line. I explain about the King’s Arrow, about its forty-thousand-dollar sale.

  “Is it in dispute?” she asks. Oh, no, here we go again, her tone implies.

  “Not at all,” I assure her. “I want to use the money to buy back Lavinia’s half of the chamber pot.”

  “You what?” She stops. “I don’t think I heard you right.”
>
  “I want to use the money to buy back Lavinia’s half of the chamber pot,” I repeat.

  Though I can tell she’s making a superhuman effort to keep her voice measured, I can still detect an edge of fury. “Don’t be an idiot, Abby.”

  “I’m not. I got a windfall. I bought something for fifteen bucks that turns out to be a little more than half of the chamber pot’s worth. It has to be a sign. Manna from heaven.”

  “And you want to give this away?”

  “It seems the right thing to do.”

  “Abby, the chamber pot is lawfully yours.”

  “How could it be lawful if I lied to Lavinia?” I wince at the killed Globe article. At my adultery-in-the-Old-Man-of-the-Mountain-Room threats. “I didn’t tell her the Globe story on the chamber pot had been canceled. Because she assumed it was going to be published, she gave in.”

  “You didn’t lie. Nobody questioned you about that putative article.”

  “But I withheld information, I committed the sin of omission,” I confess.

  “Can’t you just recite a few Hail Marys?”

  “An agnostic? Quaker? Unitarian? We went to college together, not parochial school.”

  “Oh, Abby, legally your sin of omission is irrelevant.”

  “How about spiritually? Emotionally? Personally? Ethically?” Romantically, I’m tempted to include. I change my mind. Romance is what’s really irrelevant.

  I hear noise in the background. Doors slamming. Bells ringing. Miss Finch, a voice hollers out. “Hold my calls,” Mary Agnes tells someone. “All of them.”

  Mary Agnes sighs. “What is it you want me to do?”

  “I want you to call up Lavinia.” I hesitate. “And Ned,” I add. “And tell them I plan to write out a check to guarantee I have full and sole title to the chamber pot.”

  “Excuse me? You already own the chamber pot.”

  “Technically, maybe,” I concede. “But I don’t feel it in my bones.”