How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (15 page)

Here goes. I’ll try to make it fast in the way that, as with a Band-Aid, the quicker you pull the less it hurts. When I left off telling you Ned’s story, it was at the highest point of my life: St. Barnaby’s Chapel, Professor Thayer, glorious light, declarations of love. If I’ve learned anything in my thirty-three years, it’s that highs are often followed by lows. And the lows last longer.

But the highs made it through the three more years it took Ned to finish his novel, the waiting period between the proposal and the day the actual event would occur.
We’ll get married. Here. In this chapel. When I’ve finished my novel,
was what he said. If all happy families are alike, so are all happy lovers. Our world blazed in Technicolor. Food never tasted so good; music never had so much charm to soothe a savage breast; our words were sonnets that spilled out. In bed we read to each other the poetry that as students we had scorned.

I opened my heart to Ned. My most private thoughts, any secret I ever buried, I revealed to him. My deepest feelings about my friends, my insecurities about my place in the world, my guilt about my privileged Cambridge life and my failure to live up to it, my bewilderment over my mother’s lifestyle choices and my teenage confusions, my grievances against my father and my hopeless sense of having disappointed him. I came to understand that my lovemaking with Ned was a physical manifestation of this opening up, a dramatization, a choreography, a profound, creative expression, the stuff of an epic or a symphony. Sex with Tom, Dick, and Harry (and three was pretty much the extent of it) was thrilling and fun, but it was never like this, never like sex with the person you trotted after as a child and beheld, when you grew up, in a dazzling shaft of light. He wrote. I worked. We made plans for our future together.

“Can I read the work in progress?” I’d asked Ned.

“I’m superstitious. Wait till I’m done.”

Months passed. More months passed.

“How is it going?” I’d inquire. “Almost near the end?”

“In a while,” he’d say.

Then, “I’m getting there.”

Then, “Soon. I’m starting to reach the home stretch.”

It was a beautiful day when he finished. Afterward I remembered that. I wondered if things always went bad on glorious days. I thought of September 11. Not a cloud in the sky, just a hint of the crispness of fall, a day in which you’re sure all’s right with the world.

Back then, when Ned finished, my mood was as sunny as the day. It was the middle of the afternoon, a summer afternoon, the two words Henry James called the most beautiful in the English language. A Sunday. I was on the Potters’ porch swing. The house was up for sale. Our mothers were in India. My father was in Hawaii fertilizing Kiki’s eggs. Uncle Bick had died the year before, and I’d moved in with Ned. Next door, in my old house, I could hear the cries of the young children of the new owners protesting being put down for their naps. Ned came out onto the porch carrying a typewriter paper box, a bottle of champagne, and two of Henrietta’s best Baccarat flutes. “I finished,” he said.

It was a solemn moment. A hush in the cathedral. We were silent. I wondered what it must be like to complete something so big. We opened the champagne with no talk of whether the sun had passed over the yardarm. Ned poured. We each had a single glass that we raised in a toast. “To finishing,” he said.

“To your novel,” I said.

He passed the box to me.
The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls
was typed in bold across the top. “Cummings,” he said. “Though I’m sure you know.”

I nodded. I lifted the title page.
This book is dedicated to Abigail Elizabeth Randolph, soul mate and light of my life,
I read.

“Ned.” I started to sob.

“Don’t cry yet,” he ordered. He held up a traffic-cop hand. “If you’re going to start it now,” he said, “I’ll have to leave the house.” He kissed me. He unlocked his bicycle from the porch rail. He put on his helmet and set off for Concord. To Lavinia’s.

I settled back into the porch swing. I turned to Chapter One. I was high on joy. On hope for the future. On the realization that all the waiting was over. On dreams of St. Barnaby’s Chapel. On my life with Ned. On love for my fellow man. On love for one fellow man in particular.
This is the most perfect moment of my life,
I thought. My heart swelled.

By page thirty my heart had shrunk into a tiny, hard, cold nub. Joy had turned to misery. Love to shock.

Every little secret I had ever told Ned, every fear and embarrassment and doubt bellowed out there from the page. My troubles with my father; my worries about my mother; my own childhood crush on him, all wrapped up into a scathing critique of our Cambridge lives, our Cambridge friends, generic Cambridge ladies, and our own Cambridge mothers in particular. If you flipped through at random, here’s what you’d see: There I was dropping out of school. There was my first failed love affair. There was the scene where I stole two Snickers from Irving’s, illuminated by my abject confession and my father-edited note of apology. All building up to the crescendo of the moment when, in my pink-striped bedroom described down to my periodic table quilt, my mother told me about Henrietta, mother-daughter dialogue recreated almost verbatim from the conversation I’d revealed to Ned.

Was the book any good? How could I tell? Why would I care? Who could see the forest for my barbed-wire, knife-edged, stiletto-branched trees? I was pierced, beaten, pounded, flattened, kicked so low I could have dropped to China through one of those holes we used to dig as children in the Potters’ backyard. This is the lowest day of my life, I knew.

What should I do? My first instinct was to flee to Lavinia, who was still my best friend. For obvious reasons, I couldn’t go there. I packed a bag. I poured out the rest of the champagne into the hydrangea bush. I left a note, weighted by a stone, on top of the manuscript box.
Please don’t try to contact me,
I wrote. Then crossed out the
Please
. I made a few phone calls and accepted the first offer of a living room couch. In two days I’d sublet the Inman Square apartment from a techie who’d decided to make a trek to Nepal. On day three I moved in. And, yes, just as you’d assume, I took to my bed. I threw out Ned’s letters without opening them. I monitored all calls. I refused to talk to Lavinia, who left unctuous and then increasingly angry messages on my answering machine. I didn’t go to my door except for the pizza delivery man and the plumber the superintendent sent to test the pipes.

Finally, they stopped. The letters. The calls. Finally, I got out of bed.

It took a year and a half for Ned’s book to be published. During that time our mothers had died in the earthquake in India. And I’d met Clyde. Typical rebound scenario, you’d diagnose. I’d have to agree. But for a while Clyde helped me, if not to forget, then to avoid the obsessional hand-wringing and chest-smacking that took over every second of my life since I opened Ned’s manuscript.

The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls
bombed.

There were three local readings. Not well attended, reported my spies, except for a handful of brave
It’s fiction
family members, including Lavinia putting on a public face, and a couple of loyal friends scattered among the usual suspects showing up for the free coffee and shoppers stopping by to take a load off their feet.

The reviews were lousy. The few there were.

“Amateur writing,” wrote the critic in the
Boston Globe.
“Warmed-over Cambridge quiche. Nothing you haven’t heard, and heard better told, before.” He called the protagonists’ lives “boring and dreary,” their problems “tiny tempests in Wedgwood teapots.” “What reader could ever care about such people who lack vision and will?” he asked. “If this is all they can do with their Harvard educations, then they deserve each other.”

I should have been glad Ned’s exploitative book got panned. I should have cherished the starless ratings on Amazon. The mean words. The speed at which his novel got moved from bookstores’ center tables and into the spine-out Siberia of back shelves. It was what the book deserved. Just deserts. The sweet smell of revenge. Bad deeds that
did
get punished.

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.

N
ine

M
ary 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.