How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

by Mameve Medwed

  In the usual way that what you most want to happen takes forever, I tried to fill the days waiting for Ned to wind up his life in New York. I pulled those clean and ironed sheets so tight, tucked those corners into such perfect little hospital envelopes, even the most exacting marine sergeant would find nothing to grouse about. I arranged the heap of glossy bike magazines on Ned’s side of the bed—Asphalt, Ride, Bicycling. I bought them yesterday at the kiosk in Harvard Square. “What a bundle,” the man commiserated, dividing them into two bags so I wouldn’t lose my balance on the way home. I held a bag in each hand like the scales of justice. Contrary to Gladstone’s quote, however, in my case, justice was delayed but not denied. I tested the weight. I hefted my load. I pictured the colonial oxen yoke hanging on the wall just as you entered Objects of Desire. I thought of burdens: the burdens of the past, the balancing acts of the present, the different ways people managed to lighten such loads throughout history. “Are you a bike lover?” the man asked.

  “No, my boyfriend,” I said. I must admit it gave me a thrill to roll that word off my tongue. “My boyfriend,” I said again, savoring the syllables.

  “Too bad.” The man winked. “All the good ones are taken, I guess.”

  At last, after the eternity in which I could have read War and Peace, watched all six seasons of Sex and the City, knitted a scarf and matching mittens, and mastered the French subjunctive, my bell rings.

  I would have fallen into his arms right then and there except for the large package he holds out in front of him. The way he’s carrying it, it could be the nine-month stomach of a pregnant woman about to deliver twins. I remember, what now seems like centuries ago, my own toting of the chamber pot. Ned puts his box down. We manage a few soulful kisses, tongues and lips and bodies pressed so hard together you’d expect black and blue bruises to rise on all the squished flesh-to-flesh parts. We can’t get around to doing anything else because the Volvo, three bikes lashed to its rack, Ned’s worldly goods stacked inside, is double-parked on Cambridge Street. “I’ll just be a minute,” Ned says.

  “I’m going with you.” I grab his elbow. “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

  We untie the bikes and chain them to the water-heater pipes in the communal basement. We lug a laundry bag of clothes, a couple of cartons of books and CDs, toolboxes, Ned’s computer. It only takes four arms and two trips up my three flights of stairs. “Is that all?” I ask, incredulous. I think of the first day of my freshman year at college. How many times had my mother and I driven the five blocks from my house to my tiny two-person dormitory room, the car so crammed with my stuff that its back end nearly dragged along the street? Not even taking into consideration that half my clothes remained stored at home on a seasonal need-to-use basis.

  Ned smiles. He looks around my neat but still cabinet-of-curiosities, house-of-a-collector, object-stuffed space. “Jack Sprat and his wife,” he pronounces.

  Though abstractly I know what he means, in reality the only word I can focus on is wife. But because I’ve adjusted my personal twelve-step program into a made-to-order one step at a time, I turn my attention to something else. To the box now sitting in the middle of my living room floor. I point. “What’s that?” I ask.

  “It’s for you. Actually for us,” he amends. “We’ll have joint custody.”

  A phrase that for a second turns me to ice, its negative repercussions all too fresh in mind and heart, not to mention pocketbook.

  Ned shakes his head. His voice is gentle. “Don’t worry. I don’t anticipate any disputes.” He hands me his Swiss army knife, its box cutter already flipped out. “Open it,” Ned orders. “It’s the reason I was late.”

  I slice the knife through the tape. I scoop away the packing: crumpled paper from scribbled-on yellow legal pads, shredded pages from journals awash in op. cit.s, and ibid.s, recycled sections of the New York Times Book Review.

  “Ned!” I cry out.

  What I see tucked in the box, a treasure buried in its treasure chest, is Professor and Mrs. Chauncey Coolidge Thayer’s pale blue china soup tureen. “Ned!” I shout again. “I don’t believe it!” Gently I lift it from the box. Gently I place it on the table. I touch the dancing cupids. I trace the outline of birds and butterflies. I stroke the picturesque ruins next to the gushing waterfalls. I gape at Ned.

  “They wanted us to have it,” Ned explains, his voice the sort of hush-in-the-cathedral whisper you’d use to contemplate a sacred artifact.

  Now is the time for a who, what, when, where, why J-school interrogation, but I am speechless. I run my hand over the fine china, over the classic contours of the tureen the just-married Thayers bought together in Italy. On their honeymoon.

  Ned reads my mind. “Do you remember, they got this in Italy on their honeymoon?”

  I nod my head. Tears prick my eyes.

  “They called me up. They’ve sold their apartment; they’re moving into an assisted-living home. They wanted us to have the tureen. They emphasized particularly that it was for both of us. For you and your lovely Abigail, were Mrs. Thayer’s exact words.” He pauses. “Mrs. Thayer said her husband was so grateful. Of course I told her that her thanks was more than enough, that I got more pleasure from those trips than Professor Thayer ever could. I told her I couldn’t possibly…”

  Go on, I nod.

  “But she said her husband spoke often of that trip to St. Barnaby’s, of how the both of us had come for sherry afterward. How we were so much in love.” He stops. “I went there for tea, to pick it up.”

  “And how are they? Are they okay?”

  “Remarkable. Chauncey just turned ninety. Mrs. Thayer is still on her bicycle. I promised to come to make some modifications. I promised I’d bring you. They’re excited about their new apartment; they’re going to turn it into something quite modern this time, they told me. Mrs. Thayer’s already found a source for old Marimekko upholstery.”

  I touch the tureen. “Ned…” I begin.

  “I know,” he says.

  We’re both quiet for a while. It’s a comfortable silence. What hovers unsaid between us is eloquent enough. Perhaps we were always on the same wavelength, even when our synapses sparked off onto anomalous detours. I lift the lid of the tureen. I move my face closer. I can almost smell the traces of thousands of lovingly prepared thin consommés, thick chowders, hearty soups. I set the lid back. Maybe I went into the antiques business because of the power of objects, their ability to connote so many things, the inanimate made animate by memory, feeling, history. Or maybe I chose my profession simply because of the way a piece of porcelain, a plaster cast, a well-used, well-cherished tool can act as a touchstone for love.

  I rub my finger over a chubby cupid. I look up at Ned. “I remember bringing the cocktail things into the kitchen and seeing this there,” I say now. “Mrs. Thayer was talking about her honeymoon in Italy. She said that more than sixty years later, every time she served a lobster bisque in this tureen, she remembered how happy she’d been. She said it was her madeleine.”

  “It could be ours, too,” Ned suggests. He walks over to me. He takes my hand.

  I squeeze his fingers. “What a day.” I sigh.

  He pulls me toward my impeccably made bed. “It’s not over yet.” He grins.

  Here’s where I draw a curtain. Please forgive a digression right at the good part, but I’ll explain. I once went to a reading at the Harvard Bookstore—not that reading, which, as you already know, I boycotted, but the reading of someone I was slightly friendly with at college. She had just published her first novel. She talked about how hard it was to write a sex scene. “There are only so many places body parts can go, only so many positions two bodies can contort themselves into,” she said. “The English language is far too limited. How many words do we have for pounding hearts, heated flesh, exchange of fluids?” She gazed out at us. “How do you find a way to describe passion, a way that’s really fresh?”

  I can’t. I’m no writer. And Ned, who onc
e was, is not a writer anymore. Thank God.

  So, in that spirit, while I’m not about to give you details, neither am I going to obfuscate with coy train-enters-the-tunnel imagery or the corny waves-crashing-to-shore symbolism and especially not that overused Hemingway earthmoving cliché.

  Just know that every second, every word, every touch, every breath—all of it is absolutely wonderful.

  Now Ned and I lie postcoitally in bed, fingers laced, legs as latticed as a cherry pie. Ned is making lists, counting sugarplums. “So we’ll get married at St. Barnaby’s; we’ll honeymoon at Casa Guidi…” he begins.

  I put my finger to his lips. Shhh, I want to warn. It’s too soon. Let’s stay in the present. Let’s take it one day at a time.

  But I don’t. Maybe you can make a case for throwing caution to the wind, for daring a risk, for tossing away your crutches and hazarding a leap, for rising from your bed and running off to Italy with the one you love. Knowing your father wouldn’t approve, knowing you’d stir his wrath.

  Our fathers, however—Ned’s and mine—would grant us a solemn nod of endorsement. Well done, they might allow. Our mothers, on the other hand, would be turning cartwheels on the bridges over the Arno, along the columned arcades of the Taj Mahal. Their screams of delight would sail past red-tiled roofs, Gothic towers, ridged pagodas, across oceans and deserts and into our bedroom windows in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with no diminution in decibels. Right now I sense them looking down on us, beaming, nodding, saying we told you so. Saying we knew it all along.

  “Our mothers would be so happy,” Ned affirms. “I feel they’re here with us.” He laughs. “Well, not precisely right here,” he qualifies.

  Once more he rolls over onto me. “Darling,” he whispers. “Abby.” He sighs. We begin again—tunnel, waves, Hemingway—you know the routine by now.

  Our bed sways and creaks. Like an old Viking boat at sea in a terrible storm. Maybe louder, maybe in a different way from before. But it’s a sound that registers only in the deepest recesses, a sound we, otherwise engaged, pay no attention to.

  Until there’s a startling crack: the bed frame splinters apart. Our mattress and its platform of plywood slats crash to the floor. Bringing on the pounded broomstick of the man downstairs.

  Dumbfounded, we just lie there, our voices stopped, our limbs frozen; victims of traumatic shock, stunned in the wake of a bomb. This explosion, this bedwreck, is so surprising, so sudden, that it takes me, the princess on the pea, a few seconds to realize our landing is not flat, that we have crashed on top of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s chamber pot.

  We get up. We start to move, sifting through the rubble that once was our bed. We pull away the tangled, wood-stabbed sheets, we kick away spears of splintered oak; we slide the mattress to the side, pry up the broken boards.

  And stare at the lopsided aftermath.

  “Maybe the Bubble Wrap…?” I start, trying to grab onto a raft of hope.

  Ned shakes his head. His voice is gentle, the kind of tone calibrated for the delivery of bad news. “Not even a chamber pot tucked inside Mary Agnes Finch’s vault would have survived this”—he bends over—“this debacle.” He starts to peel off the Bubble Wrap the way a surgeon might unwind his patient’s bandages, all the while fearing a the-operation-was-a-success-but-the-patient-died result.

  Ned pulls me to him. We survey the ruins of the chamber pot now lying in shards against its failure-to-thrive, failed-to-protect Bubble Wrap.

  “Poor Abby,” Ned laments. “After what you went through for this. The fight. The money. The stress. The…All the plans you had for it.”

  I bend down. I pick up a sliced-off handle. I study the broken pieces. What were my plans? Hoard it under my bed as some kind of talisman? Sell it? Donate it to Casa Guidi? Give it to the Schlesinger Library? Agonize about its safety? Feel residual guilt over how I lied to Lavinia? Wonder forever if Henrietta really did mean for Lavinia to have it? If it really belonged to her?

  “You must be devastated,” Ned says now.

  I start to nod. An automatic response to a natural or unnatural disaster. Then I stop. A bulb sparks. It’s not devastation I feel. Only an extraordinary lightening. Relief. The chamber pot is no longer worth anything to anybody. Only to me. I can keep it. Nobody else will want it.

  “Where’s the glue?” Ned asks. “Let me try to mend it. I’m good at such things.”

  I touch the scar on my knee. “I know you are.”

  He holds up his hands. “My bike mechanic’s hands. I’m pretty sure I can put this Humpty-Dumpty back together again.” He pauses. “Not the same as new.” He smiles. “But good enough.”

  “Sometimes good enough is more than enough.” I reach for his bike mechanic’s hands. “More than good enough.”

  I find the glue. Ned untangles a blanket from a knot of sheets. He spreads it across the living room floor. He sits down on it. One by one he lays out the pieces. He scrutinizes each separate porcelain bit. He shifts the fragments around like jigsaw puzzle parts. He tries one combination. Then another. Until he has set out a blueprint in mosaic of the chamber pot.

  I think of antiques, of objects of desire, how the hair-line crack in an old vase, the foxing in an old print, the clouded glass of an old decanter mark the passage of time, commemorate the history of people’s lives. This has age, one of my colleagues might boast to a customer, extolling its greater value over the shiny and pristine. How much easier it is to live with flaws than perfection. How much more comfortable. Scars and nicks—Ned’s novel, my bad choices, our silence and time apart—can have value in human terms, too, not just in china, glass, silver, old manuscripts. Flaws can reveal growth, authenticity. Can show that two people have lived and learned.

  Now I watch Ned naked, hair falling over his forehead, forehead wrinkled in concentration, arrange the pieces to reconstruct the chamber pot. I think of the day Ned taught me how to ride my bike; “Ride to me!” he’d yelled. “You can do it,” he’d cheered. I remember how I’d looked at the back of his head as he cleaned and patched up my knee. We’ve come full circle, I realize. I touch the old scar. I rub its faint ridge. In spite of the nicks and scratches, our diverging paths along the way, Ned’s return to my life, his place in my apartment, his place in my heart, makes everything once broken now whole. I’ll still have the chamber pot that belonged to Elizabeth Barrett Browning; mended, it will seem more fully mine. Mended like me and Ned. We are glued back together—in a different way perhaps, changed perhaps—but here we are.

  Now Ned holds a fragment of porcelain up to the window. He turns it this way and that. He examines it. From the faint brown lines, I see that it’s half of Flush’s ear. Ned squeezes a coil of glue along its crooked edge. He wipes off the excess. Tenderly, carefully, he joins the broken piece to its other half, back to where it belongs.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks, yet again, to my wonderful, steadfast agent, Lisa Bankoff, whose firm hand and big heart, not to mention incomparable wit, continue to guide me through the geography of publishing. My editor, Lucia Macro, is a pure delight. Her boundless enthusiasm for this book has meant everything to me. Thanks also to Tina Wexler and Esi Sogah, who field questions and run interference with remarkable good humor and awesome aplomb. And to the fabulous Dee Dee DeBartlo and her assistant, Lucinda Blumenfeld, for getting the word out there.

  Andrea Kramer gave me a crash course on depositions and kept this legal novice on the right side of verisimilitude. My in-house lawyers, Daniel and Howard, provided backup at every turn. As always, Jono saved me from embarrassing myself musicwise. Nikki Rosengren got me up to snuff on baton twirling. Novelists Joan Wickersham and Sara Lewis read the manuscript and offered just the right finely tuned combination of advice and encouragement. I am grateful to John Aherne for his continuing and valued friendship beyond the call of duty. To Frederick Olsen for coming up with the perfect cover. And to my sister, Robie Rogge, for cheerleading and fabulous parties. Much appreciation, as well, to
the staff of Antiques on Cambridge Street.

  My first reader, Elinor Lipman, is the sine qua non. She’s the dearest and most exceptional of friends and the dearest and most exceptional of critics. Not a page of this novel has escaped her loving, flinty, and brilliant eye.

  My friends and family and my circle of fellow writers are an endless source of comfort and joy, especially Daniel and Sharissa and Jono and Marnie. This book is dedicated to my husband, Howard, whom—as I’ve mentioned before but it bears repeating—I met in nursery school. In all our years together, he never once said to me, “Go get a job.”

  Reading Group Guide

  How Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Saved My Life

  Mameve Medwed

  Introduction

  Abby Randolph, a thirty-three-year-old Harvard dropout, is a reluctant dealer indeed, renting a booth at a Boston antiques mart, although it was always her ex-lover who was interested in selling their wares. But when Abby is encouraged to go on the Antiques Roadshow to discover the value of a chamber pot her late mother has left to her, she is shocked to discover that not only is it worth a whole lot of money, but it also belonged to none other than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet it’s more than money that Abby receives from this discovery. And it’s more than a lawsuit for the pot itself, slapped on her by her ex-best friend and daughter of her mother’s (female) lover. Rather, Abby embarks on a journey of rediscovery of self, of disputes both legal and romantic, of friendships dissolved and gained, of love and sex spurned and welcomed…and all because of a sickly nineteenth-century poet known for a famous lover and a dog named Flush. Who could have imagined that a chamber pot could offer the kind of education you can’t get at Harvard?

  Questions for Discussion

  1. Not only has Abby Randolph never forgotten her first love, but she has also barely survived its loss. Are first loves the most indelible? And can you ever recapture those early feelings when you reconnect with your first love many years later?