How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (31 page)

Ned clears his throat. “If, as they say, everybody has one book in him, I’m proof. I wrote
The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls
as therapy. It was a young man’s book, by a callow twenty-something who tried to make sense of his life, to work out his problems with his family, to record all the joy of his first love…” He stops. He looks away.

I hold my breath.

He turns toward me. “Abby, I’m no novelist. And when it was clear to Juliet there’d be no more books, no money, and no fame, and that I was going to leave New York for Cambridge…”

I clutch my fork. I dig the tines into my palm. “You’re coming back?”

He nods. “With my advance for
The Cambridge Ladies,
I bought a bicycle shop in Kendall Square. You know how I love bikes, how I was always tinkering…”

I nod my head. I remember those bikes locked to the rails of the front porch. The derelicts ready to be rehabilitated. The shiny new ones, multicolored streamers flaring from their gleaming chrome. I see Ned with wrenches and screwdrivers making adjustments, spinning wheels. As a kid, he was always fastening bells on handlebars, attaching cards to spokes. Later, he’d hold out for himself the carrot stick of rides along the Charles after a day’s writing. Then burst out the front door like a trapped animal just sprung from captivity. I can still freeze-frame the joy mapping his face when he climbed on his bike, when he set out on the path to Concord. I picture his thighs in their tight black Lycra shorts. His cute little butt. My throat closes. I make myself stop.

“I can’t believe you didn’t think of this sooner. In retrospect, it seems so obvious, so perfect.”

“It took me a while to admit that. What son of Cambridge professors ends up in overalls, down and dirty, fixing flywheels, calibrating brake alignments…?” He shakes his head. “You of all people understand.”

“We both had to fight against that Harvard thing. We both had to separate from our parents, figure out what we wanted to do for ourselves.”

He nods. He waits. “And who we wanted to do it with.”

I turn away. I make a joke. “What would our fathers have thought? A junk dealer? A bike repairman?”

“To hell with them.”

The first course is served. My stomach is in knots. How can I digest a lettuce leaf when I can barely digest this? Ned’s coming back. Juliet has flown the coop. Will there be peace once more between the Montagues and the Capulets? At least between two members of the opposing tribes? I reach for the wine. Maybe I won’t be getting out of here as fast as I thought. And what does he mean by
who we wanted to do it with
?

Just then, Professor Lowenthal puts his hand on my arm. “Abigail, how is your dear father these days?”

It’s a welcome diversion. Breathing room. I focus my gaze on two rheumy blue eyes. I smile. “Fine,” I say. “He likes La Jolla.”

“How am I?” Professor Lowenthal nearly yells. “How kind of you to ask. Except for my knees, I’m the picture of health for a man my age.”

“That’s great,” I applaud.

“What’s late?” he asks. He cups his hand on his ear. “You’ll have to speak up.”

Fortunately the
saumon en croûte
arrives under its silver dome; the waiter distributes the sauce. He refills the wineglasses; Professor Lowenthal’s attention drifts. “Nice hat,” he says to the woman across the table whose feathery concoction has clearly been passed down through generations of Brahmin wives.

I turn to Ned. “I can’t take this all in.”

“I’m not surprised.” He dips his head. “After my book came out, after all the awful repercussions, I called you. I wrote you…”

“But I never…You couldn’t have.”

“I did. Not that I deserved any response. But I sent so many letters, left so many plaintive apologies on your answering machine that I must have stuffed your mailbox, jammed your tape.” He stops. “Abby, I understand why you’d erase the messages, throw away the letters without opening them.”

Clyde,
I think.
Clyde,
I curse. “I didn’t get the messages. Or the letters.”

“No excuses necessary. I don’t blame you for not answering. I was horrible. I know you felt betrayed.” He holds up his hands in an I-surrender, guilty-as-charged pose. “I was horrible,” he repeats.

Was he horrible? Back then I was sure of it. And now? Has my anger faded? Have I gotten over my sense of having been used, exploited. Betrayed. Or is it this wine—I take another sip—that is responsible for my temporary inclination to forgive if not to forget.

“I have so much to say to you, Abby,” he says.

I’m saved by the champagne. It’s time for the toasts. Though I can barely register their words.
Wonderful wife, charming husband, marriage made in heaven, the path of true love will this time run smooth
…

The path of true love…

“Ned?” Lavinia is searching the room. She shades her eyes with her newly beringed hand. Her head bobs from table to table. “Ned, where are you?”

Ned stands up. He raises his glass.

“What ever are you doing way over there? I distinctly planned—” She catches herself. “Ned, don’t you have something to say?” She turns to her guests. “My brother, my brother the
writer,
has written a toast.”

Ned reaches into his pocket. He brings out a clump of paper. He looks at it. He looks at me. He sticks the clump back into his pocket. He searches the opposite one. “Here it is,” he says. He opens an envelope. “I’m going to turn to another writer—since I am no longer one—who says it better. For my sister, Lavinia, and her groom, John, on this glorious day.” He clears his throat. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning—sonnet fourteen.
From the Portuguese,
” he introduces.

“If thou must love me, let it be for nought

Except for love’s sake only. Do not say

‘I love her for her smile—her look—her way

Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought

That falls in well with mine, and certes brought

A sense of pleasant ease on such a day’—

For these things in themselves, Beloved, may

Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,

May be unwrought so. Neither love me for

Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,—

A creature might forget to weep, who bore

Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!

But love me for love’s sake, that evermore

Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.”

Ned hoists his glass higher.

“Hear! Hear!” the guests cry out.

He holds my eye. “Through love’s eternity,” he repeats.

After the cake and the groom’s patently pained look when Lavinia shoves a forkful of white icing into his mouth and before the coffee, Ned grabs my hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

We find a love seat in the corner of the downstairs lounge, empty except for a man dozing under a crumpled copy of the
Guardian
. Our thighs touch.
Move over,
my brain relays. My leg doesn’t get the message; my thigh stays locked in place.
You’ve been warned,
I Mirandize my stubborn, quivering flesh.

From his pocket Ned takes out the clump of paper he’d brought out earlier, then exchanged for the fourteenth sonnet of
From the Portuguese
. I gaze at it. Thin, air-weight pages as creased and folded as a fine linen handkerchief sold at the antique fabric booth at Objects of Desire. “What is this?”

He pries open my fingers. He sets the pages in my hand. Gently he closes my fist over them. “I’ve wanted to give this to you forever. But it was too late. It seemed unfair…” His voice trails off; his hand clasps mine.

“What is it?” I ask again. A lock of his hair falls across his forehead. I reach over. I brush it away. How silky it is; how silky it was; the memory seared into my fingertips. “Ned?”

“I received this after our mothers died. A long time after. My mother must have written it just before the earthquake. Maybe someone—a Good Samaritan—found it on the street. Or in the ruins of their hotel. And put it in the mail.”

My hand tightens on the pages. “My God!” I turn to him. “And you never told me? Never thought to tell me?”

“I wanted to a million times. But it came too late. Seemed unfair to you after you had so clearly, and justly, decided…” He shakes his head. “It must have been sent on a slow boat from India. It turned up—like those letters in the movies—much too late to change the course of devastating events.”

“Who can control the force of nature? Who can prevent an earthquake?”

“Not that. The devastating effect of my book. The sign of an amateur and self-involved novelist, one who can’t transform fact into fiction. Who hurts the last person he’d ever want to.”

“I
was
hurt. Utterly shocked. I never could have imagined when I let you in on my secrets, when I laid bare my soul…”

“And why should you have?”

“I told you everything. All my adolescent insecurities, how I felt about my mother and Henrietta, how I failed to live up to my father’s expectations, my hopes, my dreams. You used me, Ned.”

His voice is a whisper. “I know.”

I shake my head. Being used by men seems to have become a recurring theme in my life. Not anymore. I’m no longer that person. I resume my litany of injustices. I can’t help myself. “These were my secrets, my deepest, most private feelings, meant for you, for you alone. Not for every reader with a library card or twenty-five bucks to buy a book.”

“I was an asshole, Abby. A stupid, selfish prick. You probably won’t believe how rotten I’ve felt about this, how much I regret everything. I’ve changed. I’m no longer that person. Can you ever forgive me? Can I ever make it up to you?”

I stare at him. I tap the letter. “Shall I read it?”

“Please.” He gets up. “Let me reenlist for a stint of brother-to-the-bride hardship duty. You’ll probably want to read this by yourself.” He smiles. A sad clown’s smile. “But I’ll be back.”

“You’d better” comes out before I can even think of how to answer him.

I glance across the room. The
Guardian
rises and falls with the dozing man’s every breath like a tent in full wind. Next to the window the grandfather clock ticks. A muffled sound of chatter comes from the front hall. I open the letter.

Henrietta writes:

My dearest Ned,

I’ve been thinking of you a lot these days. Funny how when one is in the midst of exotic places, excited, overstimulated, drunk on art and color and love, one’s thoughts can surprisingly turn to home. Maybe it’s my own happiness that makes me want the same for everyone I love.

I worry about you. Much more than about your sister, who seems and always seemed utterly capable of taking care of herself, completely aware of what she wanted and determined to get it. Of course I’m afraid that her relationships don’t mea sure up to the other demands she puts on herself. But I don’t think this bothers her. Introspection isn’t one of her talents. She’s lucky that way.

Unlike you. And me. Unlike Emily, and dare I say Abigail, too. We navel watchers. We empathetic creatures. Bleeding hearts, your father used to call us, without implying the usual political connotation—though as iconic members of our species, Cambridge academic agnostic Unitarians—we are that, also.

I worry about you. I worry that you had a misleading, unfairly eccentric, confining childhood, that you felt you had to live up to expectations and ideals that weren’t your own. Perhaps you had to write that novel because, by process of elimination—law, medicine, academia, business—that was what was left and maybe the struggle to put your odd childhood down on paper was a kind of therapy.

No, Emily and I were not hurt by any revelations in your book. We are beyond that. But I understand from Emily and from your current situation that Abby was hurt. I’m sure you were surprised and at the same time I am sure you are starting to understand why. Let’s blame the book on the callousness of youth, something I have no doubt you’ve learned from. Not to diminish the achievement of publishing a novel, I sense nevertheless that you’re not really a writer in your heart and soul.

You need to decide who you are and what you want to do. If it’s making doughnuts, then I’m sure you will be the best doughnut maker in the whole world. Don’t let your childhood, the Harvard thing dictate your own choices. While some of your classmates have thrived, many other children of these families are unhappy, adrift, bitter, estranged from their parents. You can probably name half a dozen or more of your friends who fit this category.

Though never ever would I count you among them. You have so many gifts. And a big, generous heart. I trust it will take you a shorter time than it took me, who finally made the leap at fifty-five, to find yourself. But you’re smarter, and yours is a different generation.

Here’s what’s important: work you love; people you love. You need to figure out the work. Emily and I think you already have the love, if you can come around to see it for yourself. We’re experts now. What we want for our children is the happiness we’ve found. As your mothers, as the not so neutral observers of your growing pains, we can point out that the greatest leitmotif in your and Abby’s life has been each other. You may not know it, but we know it. You are meant for each other. Maybe the love is a little broken now. Fragmented by bad choices. But it can be mended. Once you find yourselves, the work you love, you’ll find each other.