How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (10 page)

Yet what makes it all worth the tribulations of acting as a scab to cross my own private picket line into the Harvard Bookstore, of persisting in the book through three changes of chairs, are the following lines:

Flush was equally at a loss to account for Miss Barrett’s emotions. There she would lie hour after hour
passing her hand over a white page with a black stick…She had drawn “a very neat and characteristic portrait of Flush, humorously made rather like myself,” and she had written underneath it that it “only fails of being an excellent substitute for mine through being more worthy than I can be counted.”

That the chamber pot shows up in a photograph of the Brownings’ bedroom at Casa Guidi is more than great. Add to that a description, in Virginia Woolf ’s words, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s attempts to sketch Flush—and, wow, even a semi-well-educated person such as myself can’t begin to parse the thrill of it. All I can come up with is
priceless!
—an adjective pretty much devalued when you consider the MasterCard ad.

I picture the sweet drawing of the cocker spaniel with the word
Flush
written underneath it now sitting in Mary Agnes’s vault. I miss my chamber pot. It’s like a child sent to summer camp for the first time, a kid setting out for freshman year at a college on the West Coast, a quarantined pet. Not that an inanimate object requires Solomonic solutions. Still, Mary Agnes should understand that such feelings, such deep maternal yearnings, can only prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this chamber pot belongs to me.

I shut the book. My bottom is sore from the nail heads, springs, and horse hair upholstery. Besides, it’s almost lunchtime. Why not go home, make myself a sandwich, throw my laundry in the machine. I might pay some bills. I might call my lawyer and check on my case. It’s a glorious day, not that you can actually see the sun in this windowless bunker of small and large treasures, of various degrees of junk, of twisting aisles of hulking dark mahogany.

I turn off my lights. I hang a closed sign on a plaster bust of Marie Antoinette. Maybe I’ll walk along the Charles. Business is so lousy it’s not worth coming back this afternoon. Even Gus, who complains of the heat and what the muddy fields do to his bad knees, is at Brimfield; I miss having someone to talk to just in case I wanted to talk to someone. I decide to bring
Kovels’ Know Your Collectibles
to a bench at the Kennedy School park. So that, professionally speaking, I’m not wasting my time.

“Bye, Abby,” says Frieda, who is filing her nails at the long desk opposite the entrance no one is entering. Over her head hangs an oxen yoke, which a certificate underneath guarantees as a true colonial artifact. “You’ve got the right idea. What with Brimfield and all, just sitting around here is a waste of a good salesperson’s time.”

Mail crams my box in the front hall. I unlock the metal grille with
A. Randolph
slotted into it. Who am I fooling? In contrast to the Daniel and the William and the Omar, the
A
. practically screams to any potential rapist there’s a female living alone in 3B.

I dump the letters and magazines onto the communal table.
Antiques
magazine,
Maine Antiques Digest, Art & Antiques.
Bills. Ads. A letter from my lawyer…What now? I wonder. I set it aside.

At the bottom of the pile I spot a small yellow oblong box. A window is cut into the cardboard. Under its clear plastic lies a vial with a blue top. It looks like a smaller version of a bottle your doctor uses to collect a urine sample. But this is special. lourdes water bottle enclosed! I read. precious item inside! Don’t you dare laugh, you who would dismiss this as junk mail without a second thought. Unlike me. Even as a nonbeliever, I still attach meaning to signs and miracles. After all, as Carol on
Antiques Roadshow
once pointed out, there are no atheists in foxholes. Who couldn’t use a few healing sprinkles? Carefully I extract the Lourdes water bottle. Its precious liquid must be so pure I can hardly see it. I tear the box apart.

No wonder I can’t make out the water; it’s not there. If, however, I mail in twelve dollars and return the vial, my
free, genuine
Lourdes water will be poured into it and sent right back to me. What’s more, if I up the ante to sixteen dollars, I can add prayers for—check one—financial difficulties, personal health, alcohol problems, world peace. What about love? I want to ask the scamming nuns. What about fairness? I want to ask the fraudulent priests. Where’s the prayer for that? I throw the vial in the trash. Is nothing sacred? Isn’t there anybody you can trust?

I pick up the letter from my lawyer. I open it. There’s a small note stapled to a large Xerox.
From the desk of Mary Agnes
…festoons the top. Underneath, scrawled in red magic marker is:
A, FYI. Yrs., MA
.

She has sent me an article copied from the
New York
Times.
The headline announces
T. Rex Bones, Uncovered with a Pick, Will Be Sold with a Hammer.
I sit down. I start to read. Here’s the essence encapsulated and distilled:

A cowboy and his team in eastern Wyoming dug up hundreds of fossilized bones, which turned out to belong to a sixty-eight-million-year-old T. rex. The bones, about 20 percent of the whole animal, have been sent to an auction house where they are expected to fetch almost a million bucks. However, there’s a dispute over their ownership. One of the cowboy’s partners is divorcing and his wife claims the bones in the disposition of their assets. Other investors have come forth with their own claim to a piece of the dinosaur pie. As a result, there’s no clear title. Lawyers warn of years of federal litigation and many boxes of documents filed in many different states. So far the court has ordered the bones to be sold at auction and the proceeds distributed among the various parties.

I read the article twice. What is Mary Agnes trying to tell me? That I should put the chamber pot up for auction before litigators are ringing my bell and boxes of legal documents are blocking my doorways and halls? I am starting to get mad.
My
Flush is no
Tyrannosaurus rex. My
chamber pot would never bring a million bucks.

And even if it did. What about sentimental value? What about honoring another’s wishes? I swear I will never sell.

I look at Mary Agnes’s note again. Maybe there’s no hidden agenda. Maybe it is truly FYI from somebody who lived on your corridor, who lent you her hair dryer, who told an unwelcome suitor you weren’t in.
Thought this might interest you. Thought you’d get a kick out of this. Look how small potatoes your dispute is compared to this.
Or
I promise that compared to this, yours will be resolved so much more easily.
Her attached Xerox bears no more significance than a clipped-out recipe or the engagement notice of someone you went to high school with. After all, Mary Agnes is not just my lawyer but also my friend.

I tuck the page into
Antiques
magazine. I gather up the rest of the mail. I lug it up my three flights. When I go into the living room, I see the light flickering on my answering machine. With a sudden any-news-is-bad-news instinct, I first pour myself a Diet Coke. I knock ice cubes out of the ice cube tray and into my glass. I go to refill the tray. I stop. I leave the tray in the sink. Perhaps because I’m sure that Lavinia, unlike me, would swish water back into those little compartments the second she emptied it.

I press Play.

“Hi, Abby, it’s me,” Clyde announces with typical arrogance. Never mind that I might have ten male callers leaving messages on my phone. Which, alas, I don’t. But of course I’d know Clyde’s voice anywhere; who could mistake those flattened midwestern syllables, that twang so close to a whine. His voice is staticky. I hear the whiz of traffic. He must be calling from the car he didn’t have or the cell phone he couldn’t afford back when we mixed our kitchen spatulas and our old depression glass.

“I need to see you,” he says. “I’m in my car. Heading for the Square. Hope we can meet. Call me back on my cell.” He rattles off some numbers. In the background, the radio spatters. A woman’s voice starts to sing.

My hand hovers over the phone. Should I or shouldn’t I? I dial.

I shouldn’t have because the first thing he says is, “Hey, I heard about the chamber pot.” I think of T. rex’s disputed bones. I know that Clyde has no bone to pick with me, no leg to stand on in relation to the possession of my chamber pot. Unlike the bed warmer, our quilt, a few kitchen tools, there’s no title here he could claim a portion of. Still, I clutch the receiver. My adrenaline is pumping both fright
and
flight. What is wrong with me?

“You looked real good. I liked what they did to your hair. You acted pretty surprised.”

“Because I was.”

“I’m happy for you. I really am. What with your mom’s death and all. On top of that, the dissolution of our business. And, then, me leaving…” He pauses. I listen to a drawn-out cranking of gears, the sudden toot of a horn. “The Pike is your next left,” I hear him yell.

“What do you want, Clyde? I’m busy.
Very,
” I stress.

“As I was saying. I’m glad for you. You deserve a break. I’ve got some things to tell you. Can we meet for coffee in the Square?”

“I figured you’d be at Brimfield. Like everyone else.”

“It was my week to babysit the kids. Why weren’t you there? Spending all that money from your chamber pot?”

I don’t answer. What does he need to know of my internecine wars?

Obviously nothing, since he doesn’t pursue it. “So where can we meet?” he presses on.

“What’s the point?”

“I’ll explain when I see you.”
Who’s sorry now
rises to a screech on the radio. I can just about make out
You had your way. Now you must pay.
“Look, don’t worry. This has nothing to do with antiques. Or with money. I have no agenda here.”

I get to the Pamplona early. It’s warm enough that tables are set up in the little courtyard. I order gazpacho and a coffee ice cream parfait from one of the young, slim, white-shirted, black-trousered waiters who seem to have stayed the same since I was a kid coming here with my parents for flan and almond syrup poured over ice. That’s the trouble with living in a college town. Every four years there’s a fountain-of-new-youth turnover while you do nothing but unfashionably age.

A man at the next table is reading the
Harvard Law Review.
Two women under the tree toward the back talk animatedly in a Slavic-sounding language, Czech maybe, or Hungarian. Typical Cambridge scene.

Which is destroyed when Clyde pulls up in his sleek, atypical Cambridge BMW, no residential parking permit marring its atypically bumper-stickerless, atypically sparkling rearwindow glass. He parks right in front, wheels teetering on the curb, in the
NO PARKING
loading zone. He’s not dressed in his usual Cambridge-cum-Midwest jeans and tattered denim shirt either. Country-club-like, he sports North Shore pressed khakis and a blue blazer, anchors shining on its brass buttons. At least he’s not wearing pink pants printed with spouting whales.

“Abby!” he exclaims. His prematurely tanned face is suffused with glee. His hair sparkles with mousse. He leans in toward my cheek.

I smell too much cologne. I turn my head away.

He backs off. He holds up his hands in an I-surrender pose. “You’re right. You’re right. No way should I have approached your personal space without your explicit permission.” He points to the chair opposite. “May I?” he asks.

Do I have a choice? I nod.

“Great to see you,” he says. “It’s been a while.” The waiter slinks by. A small Spanish flag sticks out of his lapel. “Let’s see. I’ll have a cappuccino,
s’il vous plaît.
” He points to my bowl. “And a cup of that tomato soup.”

What did I ever see in him? I wonder. How could an antique bed warmer and the prospect of a warm body in bed—his body—have so blinded me? “Why did you want to meet me?” I ask.

He reaches into his breast pocket. He pulls out a folded paper. His wedding ring, a thick gold band embossed with entwined hearts and a Celtic cross, catches the light. Some sort of rope bracelet clasped with an ankh circles one wrist. “I’m on a journey,” he says.

“To where?”

“Not that kind,” he says. He makes the embarrassing eye contact of a crazy man ordered by invisible voices to stare at you. “Mine’s a journey of self-evaluation. Of self-discovery. Of self-knowledge. Of meditation. Of contemplation. Of spirituality. Of redemption.” He lowers his voice. “Of making amends.”

“Oh, yeah?” I say. His eyes look so tired from gluing themselves onto mine that I add, more gently, “That’s quite a list.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” He unfolds his sheet of paper. He sets it on the table. He smooths it out. Some of the gazpacho drips onto it. “I’ve written down all the ways I’ve wronged you.”

“Believe me, I know them. I don’t need to hear them.”

“But
I
need to recite them. It’s part of the plan.”

“What plan?”

He lifts his spoon across to my coffee ice cream parfait. “Do you mind?” He excavates the whole scoop. A melting mustache smears across his upper lip. “According to my spiritual director, I must get back in touch with those I have wronged and make amends before I reach the next level.”

“Of beatification? Are you planning to become a saint?”

“It’s not funny, Abby. I knew you wouldn’t appreciate it.” He stops himself. “Not that you haven’t a God-given right to your personal opinion.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Lately. Ever since the twins, I’ve been doing a lot of meditation. Been going on a lot of meditation retreats.”

“Having twins must make you want to get away.”

“Not how you mean it. You don’t have to be so sarcastic. Not that—”

“Not that I don’t have a right to be sarcastic,” I fill in.

“In fact, the miracle of Edda and Rune’s birth did just the opposite, propelled me into my personal journey of making amends. Remember, we are all our own people. We arrive at enlightenment as a matter of our own individual choice, at our own time.”