How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (13 page)

“Ah,” I said, not realizing at the time that I should be tapping the resource in the seat in front of me.

Three days a week, Ned drove Professor Thayer to visit the chapels of New England prep schools. The old man was fascinated by spires and altars, pulpits and lecterns, church bells, stained-glass windows, spandrels and buttresses. He loved to examine prayer books and pipe organs and choir lofts, memorial plaques and the initials schoolboys had carved into the backs of pews. He studied the plantings around the chapels and the views from their towers. He and Ned had covered most of Massachusetts and were setting out for the greener prep school pastures of New Hampshire and Vermont.

“Come with us,” Ned suggested one morning. We were sharing a sleeping bag in the third-floor attic, having rejected torture-rack horse hair mattresses and the prison-narrow twin-bedded ones. The Professors Potter and Randolph and the Mizzes Potter and Randolph were in Washington for intellectual festivities at the Library of Congress and the Mary Cassatt exhibit at the National Museum for Women in the Arts. “Professor Thayer wants to meet you.”

“You’ve told him about me?”

“Of course.” He took my hand in his hand. He wrapped his fingers around my fingers. “Look,” he said. He lifted our joined hands. “How perfectly your hand fits. Like a bird in its nest. Like a nut in its shell.”

“A nut?” I exclaimed. I studied our clasped hands. Was there anything more beautiful?

I snuggled close. His breath was warm. Velvety. “What did you say about me to Professor Thayer?” I asked.

He squeezed my fingers. “That you’re this pesky girl who grew up next door and follows me around. That I can’t get rid of you.”

“Ned,” I said. I laughed. I gave him a playful punch. I shook my head. And wondered if that’s how he really thought of me.

It was the kind of October day that a writer I once read somewhere described as crisp as a Macintosh. Professor Thayer and his wife were waiting in front of their Memorial Drive apartment building as we drove up. He was a gnomelike man leaning on two canes, dressed in academic tweeds, vest, and striped silk tie. His eyes, two bright black coals in a wizened, ancient face, twinkled with a surprising (for Harvard) lack of self-importance. His wife, taller, thinner, and wiry, had a white pageboy set off by a headband, and a face of finely etched skin over beautiful bones. She was wearing an embroidered Guatemalan skirt topped by a Mexican serape. Pinned to it was a brooch I recognized as a copy of an Egyptian artifact from the Fogg Museum store. White Reeboks gleamed on her feet. A bag printed athenaeum library was strung across her chest. One hand clutched Professor Thayer; the other, an ancient three-speed Raleigh with a bright blue snazzy new helmet hanging over the handlebars. “There you are, Chauncey,” she said, passing her husband to Ned like a grocery bag handed over to a customer. “And you must be Abby.” She held out her hand, dry and papery as parchment with a grasp a politician would envy. “Ned, you must bring her for tea after your little trip.” She strapped on her helmet. “I’m just off to the store to get us some nibbles. Tea is a euphemism, my dear, for sherry, of course. Now you have a good outing, Chauncey, and don’t bore the young ’uns with your naves and apses.”

“You know very well, Virginia, that naves and apses apply only to cathedrals,” Professor Thayer sputtered.

“Indeed I do, dear, after sixty years of wedded bliss.” She steered the bike out onto Mem Drive, clambered onto the seat, and pedaled off, an octogenarian Lance Armstrong in support hose.

Following much
After you, Alphonse, No, Gaston, after you
discussion and my insistence that I didn’t get carsick, wouldn’t feel like a second-class citizen, didn’t have to sit next to my “beau,” I scrambled into the backseat while Ned managed to settle Professor Thayer, his trick knees, his two canes, and his iffy hip in the front.

On the way to New Hampshire, up 93, onto the turnpike, they talked. I listened. It was the kind of conversation I was used to at my own table, in the Potters’ dining room, at the dinners and breakfasts and lunches of my parents’ friends. Wide-ranging, intellectual, grammatically precise discussions of books, politics, the Napoleonic Code, the Supreme Court, the latest theatrical desecration of the classics at the American Repertory Theatre, the declining quality of best-seller lists. The kind of conversation I could let wash over me like a lullaby, its familiar lilts and rhythms so soothing you hardly noticed them.
Jeez!
a public high school friend from the town soccer league once exclaimed after a family dinner my mother forced me to invite her to. (My mother insisted I mix with other zip codes to get a sense of the world outside my privileged one.)
Jeez,
she repeated.
In my house, you talk about Wal-Mart, Madonna, gas prices, baseball scores, Oprah. That is, if you talk at all, considering the TV’s always on
.

No, what I paid attention to was Ned. His kindness, his gentleness to Professor Thayer. His deference, his courtesy, his hearty appreciation for stories of the good old days and even heartier reappreciation when the old man repeated himself. Unlike me, he didn’t just let the sound of Professor Thayer’s voice perfume the air; instead, like the most attentive student taking notes from the front row of the lecture hall, he asked questions. He mulled answers. That he was interested in Professor Thayer, that he cared, intensified my own interest in Ned, made me care for him. To the exclusion of Professor Thayer, I’m forced to admit. For me, that day, there was only one person in the car. From my backseat perch, it was easy to study him. I noticed the way he leaned over to tug at Professor Thayer’s seat belt to make sure it wasn’t too tight; the way he asked him if he wanted to stop, to stretch his legs, to use the gas station facilities. The way he drove steadily, surely, avoiding potholes and sudden swerves. Every so often, through the rearview mirror he’d smile at me, then turn his attention back to how the law school students had changed since Professor Thayer first started teaching there.

We were in our twenties then, and though the hippie adage
Don’t trust anyone over thirty
had both originated and died in our parents’ generation, not many of our peers, me included, would have taken such delight three times a week in the company of an octogenarian. I craned my neck toward the rearview mirror. Traffic had knotted up, pinning Ned’s lovely hazel eyes to the road. A thatch of brown hair fell boyishly over his brow.

Two weeks before, I’d been to the wedding of my friend Marnie, who’d married the boy she’d played in the sandbox with at the Cambridge Nursery School. They’d been a couple throughout kindergarten, grammar school, high school, and college. “Imagine,” one or another of us had exclaimed admiring the photographs of the two of them set out in the foyer of the church, photographs that could have stood in for those growth charts of boys and girls at every stage of their development. “Guess there’ll be no surprises with Jono. Marnie must know him as well as any person can know anyone,” said Marnie’s maid of honor in her toast to the newlyweds.

Can you find your soul mate as a kid? Can you keep him in your sights until you’re out in the world with your own credit card and sauté pan? I scrutinized the sweet back of Ned’s neck and listened to Professor Thayer expound on the disclaimer provision of the gift tax law.

Soon enough we pulled up to St. Barnaby’s Chapel. People talk of Chartres, how when you drive from Paris to the Loire Valley, the cathedral starts to emerge in pieces, a spire, an arch, a rose window, a tower, a block of medieval stone, until the whole glorious creation rises up from the Plain of Beauce and takes your breath away. A spiritual experience, such people report.

The term
spiritual,
let me warn you, is not in my vocabulary (despite my anomalous fling with astrology). I come from a family of atheists. We are proudly secular. Our church affiliations are these: weddings, funerals, memorial services in Appleton Chapel, and poetry readings in the Unitarian Church. Old clothes get bundled into boxes and left off at the Quaker Meeting house in Longfellow Park, destined for the most oppressed population depending on what conflict was currently oppressing what part of the third world.

And yet when I first saw St. Barnaby’s Chapel, I had this startling and intense ecstatic response that, for lack of a better word, I can only call spiritual. This chapel couldn’t have been less like Chartres. A small New England building of white clapboard, plain leaded-glass windows, some framed with black shutters, cresting the rise of a gently sloping hill, its spire peeking up through a grove of trees fluttering with red, yellow, and orange autumn leaves.

We all rushed to the open double doors.
Rushed
used euphemistically since Professor Thayer’s hips, two canes, our firm hands on his elbows cranked our pilgrims’ progress into slow gear.

The chapel was empty. I sat on a pew, the wood underneath scooped by centuries of bottoms. I took in the elegant, eloquent simplicity of line, of space, of air. Outside the leaves rustled; faraway young voices rose from playing fields. Inside there was a hush broken only by Ned and Professor Thayer’s quiet murmuring and the
tap-tap-tap
of the old man’s cane. I felt the kind of contentment I had as a child when a warm bath, a story, an ice cream cone, a bunch of us kids playing tag at dusk, the smells of supper wafting through the screen doors was enough evidence to prove all’s right with the world.

Ned was helping Professor Thayer up onto the pulpit. Professor Thayer started to examine a stack of prayer books on the table behind the lectern. I looked at Ned. He stood still as a statue. A shaft of light angled in from a high clerestory window and turned him golden. There in that plain New Hampshire church, the sun shining through old bubbled glass, he was lit like a Renaissance saint. I love him, I thought. This is the man I love.

Ned walked down from the pulpit. He sat beside me in the pew. He took my hand. His fingers circled mine. “Abby,” he whispered. “The most extraordinary thing. I was just standing there and this light came from the window behind you and illuminated you in such a way…” He stopped.

He kissed me. The kind of kiss not suitable for a chapel, not suitable for a room where a student might any second run in through the open door, not suitable in the presence of an elderly professor now examining the window that had just anointed your one true love. Not suitable for a public place. Not suitable, but he kissed me anyway.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
.

The words came out in a rush. “We’ll get married. Here. In this chapel. When I’ve finished my novel. When you’ve got your business up and running. When we’ve laid a little groundwork to build a life together as husband and wife. Isn’t it amazing? You’ve been here all along, right in my own backyard.”
The lark’s on the wing; / The snail’s on the thorn: / God’s in his heaven—/ All’s right with the world
.

Then we went outside. Where the fourth former in blazer and beanie took our beaming, in-love, ecstatic, revelatory photograph.

We would have preferred not to stay for tea. We would have preferred to go back to the Potters’ third floor and seal our declarations of love in the time-honored way. But an invitation accepted is an invitation that can’t be declined. Like so much of everything, we were beginning to discover, we agreed on that.

Mrs. Thayer had set out sherry on a silver tray in the library. The apartment was a big rambling one, much like our houses, with river views and books piled everywhere. Paintings of stern ancestors in dour suits and wasp-waisted ball gowns covered those spaces between bookshelves. Stacks of legal journals filled a brass coal shuttle. My in-the-process-of-being-educated eye focused on the antiques. Sheraton sideboard, Chippendale chairs, Queen Anne footstools, tapestries with moth holes and ragged edges, lacquered Chinese tables. Scattered throughout, like guests who’d wandered into the wrong party in the wrong century, were some bent plywood tables, bright plastic stools, and pale oak chairs. I remember my mother once telling me how shocked she was when she visited one of England’s stately homes—Chatsworth? Blenheim?—to see a Donald Duck telephone, a vinyl butterfly chair, a 1950s pole lamp of wrought iron and chrome. The Thayers’ anachronistic pieces I recognized from the old Design Research on the corner of Brattle and Story streets. The Thayers must have filled gaps when the antiques they’d inherited started to spread too thin.

Now Mrs. Thayer spilled out the contents of her Athenaeum Library bag. “Here are the nibbles,” she said, sifting them into a series of blue-and-white Chinese export bowls. “Unfortunately the bounty is limited to what I could bring home on my bicycle. There was the loveliest wedge of Limburger, but I decided it just might tip the balance.”

“Not to mention the smell, my dear,” added Professor Thayer with a pinch to his nose.

She passed around the bowls. Smoked almonds, olives, sunflower seeds, wasabi peas, Goldfish crackers—the ones with smiles. She smiled. “So I trust you had a good trip to St. Barnaby’s.”

Professor Thayer popped a Goldfish into his mouth. “Most gratifying. Quite a nice 1789 Book of Common Prayer. An original bell tower, too. The pulpit looked new, though. You can always tell by—”

“Enough, dear. I’m sure the young people had more than their ration of the ecclesiastical for the day.” She fanned out four white linen cocktail napkins monogrammed
VGT
. “I had wanted to arrange some entertainment for them. I called Amelia and Geoffrey to see if they could come upstairs for a game of Latin anagrams.”

“What a splendid idea,” the professor said.

Ned and I looked at each other, panic mapping our faces, the panic fueled by that old nightmare of students everywhere: you’re in a room taking an exam and realize you’ve studied the wrong lesson, read the wrong book.

Mrs. Thayer didn’t seem to notice. “Unfortunately they have a grandchild—or is it a great-grandchild?—visiting them,” she went on.

“Who could certainly join us, dear.”