How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (7 page)

A secretary who introduced herself as “Ms. Finch’s associate” led me to a corner office on a high floor.

Mary Agnes Finch was as put together now as the night back in Cabot Hall when she was the first person to file out onto the quad at the blast of the fire drill alarm. I can still see the camel’s-hair coat neatly wrapped around her Snoopy pajamas, tops and bottoms matching, her bunny slippers unmatted and on the correct feet, highlighter clenched in her right fist, all the next day’s homework tucked responsibly under her arm.

“Abigail!” Mary Agnes exclaimed. She leaned forward over a huge island of a desk swept clean of everything but a carefully centered blotter, pens and pencils lined up at right angles to it, and a small silver scales of justice that looked to my discerning eye like an antique, though it could have been a good reproduction, second period. And a single exquisite rose in a Waterford vase.

I felt bad about marring this perfect expanse with my oversize, messily rewrapped chamber pot. But I had to put it down to shake her hand.

Her hand was cool; her grasp firm. No wedding ring, I noted. Nails filed straight across, one coat of clear polish. She was as impeccably tailored as her office, in a gray suit with that simple cut that screams
Made in Italy,
pearl button earrings, the kind of glossily shined shoes that nuns at parochial schools warn young girls about.

I tucked my hands with their ragged bitten nails and inflamed cuticles under my skirt and sat in the client’s chair. Her clients as a group must have been big-boned and long-limbed because my feet barely touched the floor. Behind her desk, high up in her even higher chair, Mary Agnes Finch cut an intimidating figure, although she was my age and I once snuck her toast and tea from the cafeteria when Andrew Peabody dumped her for Nancy Murphy.

Even so, I felt like the unruly child called into my father’s study for keeping a great mind from important work. On his throne of a chair, behind his skyscraper desk, my father loomed like a giant while I shrank smaller and smaller down into my rabbit hole of shame. A blind date—unsuccessful—from the Harvard Business School once told me about his course on corporate psychology. Lesson number one, he instructed, was that any success-driven alpha male must fight for the corner office, the fortress of the biggest desk, the tallest chair, all the more quickly to get to yes.

Obviously Mary Agnes Finch had already got to yes. Now she got down to business. One thing you could say for her, she was not judgmental. Nothing registered across her face except neutral interest and bull’s-eye attention.

I told her about my mother and Henrietta. Their life; their deaths; how they had shared everything. I recounted how Lavinia and I had divided up the spoils. How Ned had left it to his sister to act for him. I didn’t go into why. I described word for word the way Lavinia had offered me the chamber pot. She hadn’t wanted it. I explained that except for clothes and jewelry, and items that each of us could identify as having occupied certain rooms of our respective houses before my mother and Henrietta had set up their domestic partnership, all the other belongings were things they had bought together, things they had owned jointly. But the chamber pot was mine, I repeated. Lavinia had scorned it. It was only when it had turned out to have more than sentimental value that she, that she and Ned…My voice went hoarse. I stopped. My throat felt raw. Was I going to weep? I pointed at the object of our disputation, now flaunting its remonstrative bulk on my lawyer’s desk. “The idea of being forced to take this pot into court…” I cried.

“Not so fast,” Mary Agnes warned.

But my mind was spinning out dire scenarios. “Will it be passed through security? Will it be tagged exhibit A? Will it become a ward of the court?” I was on a roll now, gathering the moss of desperation at accelerating speed. “Will I have to go to trial? In…” I stared at Mary Agnes’s Bauhaus calendar. “Oh God, it’s already Tuesday—in eight more days?”

“You’ve been seeing too many
Law & Orders
,” she diagnosed.

“Special Victims Unit.”
I managed a smile. “I’m a victim myself. I can identify.”

“No need for panic yet.”

I patted the chamber pot. A couple of the plastic bubbles popped in solidarity. “But it’s mine. It’s meant for me.”

Her voice was soothing. “Let me call Jim Snodgrass,” she said. “The chamber pot will be safe in my vault. It’s not going anywhere. I’m sure he’ll agree to letting the temporary restraining order lapse. No need for a preliminary injunction. We’ll enter a stipulation without prejudice. These are two responsible, intelligent families we’re dealing with here. I’m sure we can settle out of court. I’m certain we can come to an acceptable resolution.”

“You don’t know Lavinia,” I started to wail.

F
ive

I
’ve procrastinated long enough. I owe Lavinia a chapter. I’ll try to flip fast through the early years; what counts in this story is our more recent history. (Please note that I’m not lumping her brother here. He’ll have pages all his own.) There’s no need to pile on the facts for you to get the gist. Sharp and intense as wasabi, just a daub of her will flavor the whole meal. Unlike those of us who hope to change, to grow, those for whom the therapeutic hour counts as water to a plant, Lavinia’s been the same since she was five. It’s I who didn’t see it until too late. But then that’s one of my problems. I’m Miss Give-Her/Him-the-Benefit-of-the-Doubt. Miss People-Are-Really-Good-at-Heart. An attitude that didn’t help Anne Frank, by the way, no matter how well it defined her character.

Still, to understand Lavinia and me, it’s important to know the sociological context. I’m sure right now you’re saying, Stick to the point, Abby. Deliver what you promised. I swear I will. But in order for you to have the 360-degree view of her, let me fill in some background.

My father always pronounced me thick as a board. When Princess Diana used the term to describe herself, I figured she’d swiped it from my father, who’d spent a sabbatical at the London School of Economics. As soon as I learned it was a common Anglicism, I saw how, in a monarchy, Princess Diana’s heart, beauty, grace, and social conscience could more than compensate. In my own non-blue-but academically blooded family, no amount of charm could refute a phrase which we Americans would define as dumb. How could the only child of the Epworth chair holder turn out to be so limited? Of course R. Griffin Randolph was speaking grades and SATs, summa cums and valedictorian addresses. All the school reports that stressed my niceness, my plays-well-with-others qualities, my helpfulness, my sensitivity meant zilch measured against my lack of intellectual rigor and my alternative-style lust for sand castle making and Play-Doh modeling. My Miss Congeniality awards paled compared with the gavels wielded by class presidents, the torches waved by debating team captains.

For a long time I was pretty sure I’d been adopted. I’d even hoped that I’d been found swaddled on a church step or in a basket made of rushes floating down the Charles River. In any other family, any
normal
family, my accomplishments would have earned pasted-on stars and double scoops of Heath Bar Crunch. Here’s a typical example of the upside-down nature of
Randolphus Familius Academicus
reproduced from my real life. Abigail Elizabeth Randolph: The (Later) Teenage Years.

ME
: I made the honor roll at Shady Hill.

HE
: Second tier.

ME
: I got into Harvard.

HE
: Faculty brat.

Maybe that’s why he ran off to sire Atticus and Julius and Lucius. Second chances. New testing grounds. Does committed fatherhood transform
thick as a board
into
sharp as a tack
? Can perfect toilet training hike IQs up into the stratosphere?

My loyal mother, on the other hand, always admired my artistic soul, touted my fine character. Emotional intelligence, she called it. Though it was impossible to stand up to my father, she tried. I’m not blaming my mother for any of this, let me reassure you. Ours was a male-o-centric house hold. One male. One house hold. One center of everything. My mother and I deserved the shaved heads of collaborators. We were detainees on Brattle Street, prisoners of academe, whose wills were broken down with rules the Geneva Convention would never tolerate.
Darling, Abigail is so talented. She made the loveliest drawing, wrote the loveliest poem…
she’d begin. But to my father, my messy scribbles, my awkward rhymes, showed only that his ivied ivory tower harbored no Mary Cassatt, no Emily Dickinson.

No Elizabeth Barrett Browning either. At least in the poetry sense. Still, I once wrote several stanzas to my dog Jinx that, thanks to a rhyming dictionary, compared him to both a minx and a sphinx. This effort won an honorary-mention volume (paperback) of the collected E. E. Cummings. (The judge was a former student, my father felt obliged to enlighten me.) In fact, now that I think of it, Elizabeth and I turn out to have a lot in common. We’ve got not only our canine poetry but also our domineering-father issues; such a bond would unite us even without the passed-down chamber pot. Neither Barretts nor Randolphs dared to dispute the great man in their midst. My mother had to flee to Henrietta, to the other side of Harvard Square and then the oceans beyond, to escape my father. Elizabeth fled to Robert and to Italy to escape hers. Even in his final illness, Mr. Barrett returned all her letters unopened and refused to let his daughter cross the threshold of his door.

But perhaps my father was only trying to toughen me up for the world beyond my own threshold. Maybe dealing with the bully inside your door was how he prepared me for doing battle with the bully next door.

These days, my father isn’t that bad. Kiki has mellowed him. Could it be the couples counseling she’s talked him into? Who would have thought? But then who would have pictured him wearing a grass skirt and strumming the ukulele, as documented in the shocking photographic evidence from their Hawaiian honeymoon? On our Sunday telephone conversations between Cambridge and La Jolla, I can sense a bit of regret for old child-rearing ways now that he’s seen the shock of the new.
That’s very perceptive of you, Abigail,
he’ll say to me when I make some prosaic observation like the reason Atticus is so slow tying his shoes is that kids all have Velcro now.

I may be perceptive, but my emotional intelligence as far as Ned and Lavinia were—and are—concerned plunged straight to the bottom of Stanford Binet’s percentile pit.

Which offers a good reason to get through our mutual childhoods fast. I know you can go to the theater and see the abridged Shakespeare, all the comedies and tragedies acted out and boiled down into an hour including a ten-minute bathroom/Raisinets break.

Let’s start with my corner of the world. Cambridge may be a city of 100,000, a city of diverse neighborhoods, a community—or several communities—proud of its multiculturalism. Our ethnic restaurants paste their high Zagat ratings and maps of Afghanistan, the Algarve, Ethiopia, Turkey on their windows and doors; our bookstores (not that I go into them) are Marxist, feminist, Buddhist, gay, architectural, revolutionary, culinary, foreign language; the kiosk in Harvard Square sells the
Sewanee Review
next to
Hustler
and
Pent house, Daedalus, Seventeen, Hello!,
and Italian
Vogue
. Some Cantabrigians boycott the bridges to Boston, insisting that Cambridge alone can satisfy a person’s every need.

You know Linnaeus’s system of classification: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Well, we were children of academics, a Cambridge subspecies but a kingdom unto ourselves. You wouldn’t believe my childhood playmates; their parents and grandparents bore the titles of Nobel laureates, Bancroft, Pritzker, and Pulitzer Prize holders, MacArthur geniuses by the score. They advised governments, served as secretaries of state, headed the National Endowment for the Arts, donned the robes of Supreme Court justices. I guess I shouldn’t name names without permission, and many of my old playmates, who fled Cambridge as soon as they came of age, would be a challenge to hunt down. They’ve joined twelve-step programs, are living in cabins in the woods, and are up to page 1200 of their memoirs, working on oil rigs in Alaska, construction sites in New Jersey. They’re mostly people who realized Cambridge wasn’t a kingdom any king could force you to be a subspecies of. Young adults who are now thrilled not to be known as the child of fill-in-the-blank. Who are no longer in a position to embarrass parents or maintain standards others have set up for them.

Some of course stayed and thrived. These merry few now hold the positions their parents held, reap the esteem their parents reaped. But it’s the others who interest me. The falling/failing star kids of rising/ risen star parents.

Unlike some of us, Lavinia never fit that category of the minister’s daughter who ran wild, the professor’s son who flunked out, the chef ’s offspring who burnt toast. She was everybody’s pet. Let me rephrase this. She was the favorite of the grown-ups. The child our parents wished we could resemble more.
Why can’t you be like Lavinia?
rang out throughout our West Cambridge neighborhood.
If only you had half her manners. Half her accomplishments.

How can I explain this phenomenon? Here’s an example. When we were kids, there was a toy store on Mass. Ave. called Irving’s. The kind of store that no longer exists. It sold everything: penny candy, fancy candy, candy bars, puzzles, games, masks, Slinkies, not to mention educational toys and books—Lincoln Logs and
Make Way for Ducklings
—and the noneducational ones we all coveted—Conan the Barbarian comics and GI Joes and Barbie dolls. It also brought adults to its aisles stuffed with pots and pans, needles and thread, crepe paper and ribbon, paints and staple guns and screwdrivers. Irving and his wife, Doris, ran their store like a small municipality. White-haired and fake jovial, they barricaded themselves behind the front counter on stools, Buddha stomachs cushioning their laps and Santa Claus smiles stretched across their commerce-seeking faces. Our dimes and quarters bought Irving his big white Cadillac and their winters in Florida and the sapphires sparkling in Doris’s ears.