The Green Man

With many thanks to Susan Duff and Bob Knowlton for their insights into the world of the secondhand book dealer and for the generous gift of their time in reading and commenting on the manuscript.

I
n the middle of the night the phone rang, wrenching O from a dead sleep. She lay listening through the thin wall as her father dragged himself from bed in the next room to answer it.

“Hello? … Oh, hello, Emily.”

Emily was her father’s older sister. She was a poet who ran a secondhand bookshop back East called the Green Man. One of the first books O remembered her father reading to her as a child was a collection of children’s poems Aunt Emily had written. She still knew some of them by heart.

Her father said Aunt Emily was one of the finest poets of her generation. He kept copies of her books in a special place on the bookshelves that lined the living-room wall, along with a thin folder of reviews he’d clipped from newspapers and magazines over the years.

The books were few – five slim volumes of about fifty poems each, each book separated from the last by nearly ten years. That worked out to about five poems a year,
O figured, though her father assured her it was not quite as cut-and-dried as that. Instead, there would be sudden bursts of creativity, followed by long stretches of silence.

It was during the most recent stretch of silence that the late-night calls started to come. Father never complained about the time of the call. He just listened to her quietly, as he did now, assured her that things were not as dark as they seemed, and walked her back to the days when they were young and the world was new.

Eventually he calmed her down enough that she could go to sleep. Then he said good-bye, hung up the phone, and went back to bed himself.

Next morning, over breakfast, O asked about the call in the night.

“It was Emily,” Father said, “going through one of her spells again.”

“Why does she go through spells?”

“It’s just part of who she is, O. Part of what makes her the poet she is.”

Later that day, O took down the books and the tattered sheaf of reviews and looked through them again. The reviews were generally good, though more than one reviewer wondered at the thread of darkness that ran through her work. On the back of one of the early books was an old photo of her aunt – a thin, intense young woman, her long hair caught up in a bun, staring straight
into the camera lens as if she could see down the decades to the girl who looked back.

It had been three years since O had last seen her aunt, at a rare family gathering one Christmas. With more than two thousand miles between them, and Father busy with his teaching and Aunt Emily with her bookshop, they saw one another infrequently. But there were always her cryptic letters in their spidery scrawl, and now the phone calls in the night.

Last fall, shortly before O’s fifteenth birthday, a parcel arrived for her in the mail from Aunt Emily. It contained a secondhand copy of a collection of poetry called
A Treasury of Great Poems
. On the flyleaf of the book, her aunt had written
For Ophelia
–
Begin!

Begin what? she wondered. It was yet another mystery in the many that surrounded her aunt. But the strange thing was, shortly after the book arrived, a number of things
did
begin.

First, early in December, they received word that Emily had suffered a mild heart attack. Endicotts had a history of heart disease – and a history of stubbornness to go along with it. Emily was kept in hospital overnight. The next morning, she checked herself out and went back to the flat above the bookshop, where she lived. She wouldn’t hear of her brother dropping everything to come and take care of her.

Then, at the end of the winter term, Father received a grant to finish researching the book on the poet Ezra Pound he’d been writing for as long as O could remember. Ezra, slightly mad himself, was like a member of the family. The research would take her father to Italy for the summer. He invited O to go with him, but after the traumatic trip to Ireland they’d taken two years before, when the plane limped and lurched across the Atlantic on one engine, she refused to go anywhere near another plane.

So her father came up with a plan. He would go to Italy – and she would go to Emily. He called it “killing two birds with one stone.” She, presumably, was one of the birds; Emily was the other; and he was the one with the stone. She felt he might have found another way of putting it.

Father wrote to Emily, explaining his dilemma and asking if O could possibly come and stay with her for the summer. If she said yes, which he hoped she would, it would also be a way of having O help Emily out – without her aunt suspecting it was part of his plan. Two birds, one stone.

After some delay, Emily wrote back. She seemed a little hesitant about the idea but, ultimately, she agreed. Father firmed up the dates with her over the phone, and it was settled.

But one last thing had begun since O received the book with its mysterious inscription. And, by mid-May, with
the time of the trip barely a week away, it was this that led O to question her father a little more closely on the state of his sister’s mental health, the morning after yet another middle-of-the-night phone call.

“Is Aunt Emily crazy?” she asked.

“We’re all a little crazy in our own way,” Father said. “Emily’s a bit eccentric. Her axis is slightly off-center, so the world wobbles a little as it spins around her. She’s a poet. Poets tend to be a little different than other people. Take Ezra, for instance.”

“But is she a poet because she’s eccentric, or is she eccentric because she’s a poet?”

It was a fine distinction, but O had her reasons for asking. She wanted to know whether her aunt was crazy before she began to write poetry, or if writing poetry had made her that way. For the third thing that had happened since she received the book inscribed
Begin
was that she’d begun writing poetry herself.

For the time being, it was top secret – like some raging rash on an embarrassing part of your body. She hadn’t breathed a word of it to anyone. But what she desperately needed to know was whether she had begun writing because she was another crazy Endicott, or if that was just a little something she could look forward to down the line.

“Emily’s been the way she is for as long as I can remember,” said her father, “always a poet, always a little odd.
I’m not sure which came first. I think maybe some people are just born to be poets, and there’s not much they can do about it.”

“Well, they could just
not
do it, couldn’t they?”

“I suppose, but surely that could drive you crazy – not doing what you know in your heart of hearts you were meant to do.”

“I see. So if you write, you go crazy. If you don’t write, you go crazy. Wonderful.”

Up to this point, her father had been only half-committed to the conversation. His eyes kept drifting back to the book he was reading. Now he put the book down on his lap and took off his glasses.

“What’s this all about, O?”

“Nothing,” she said.

He gave her that squinty-eyed look of his as he sucked on the arm of his glasses. She wondered if he suspected her secret. Recently, she’d been finding stray books of poetry scattered around the house like fallen leaves.

“Listen, O, Emily has a gift, a wonderful gift. But for every gift we’re given, we’re also handed an affliction. They’re two sides of the same coin. Poets are not normal people. Normal people feel no need to write poetry. They’re happy enough with the world as they find it and make the best of what life brings their way.

“Poets see through things … see behind things. They
remind us that the world is a much more mysterious place than we imagine. They’re like explorers, bringing back news of unknown lands. Like most explorers, they’re outsiders who don’t quite fit. But if it weren’t for the poets and the artists and all those other slightly eccentric people, there would be no one to remind us of the mystery. So we should be thankful for all those who are ‘counter, original, spare, and strange,’ as another crazy poet once put it.”