Old Lovegood Girls

by Gail Godwin

  “When your husband died, did you cry?”

  “Not at first. I was more angry with him, his carelessness. I felt abandoned. I felt scared. I didn’t cry until I was living with Blanche Buttner. And it was a strange sort of crying. More like suppressed sobs. I remember crying a lot when we lived with my grandparents, but they were temper tantrums to get my way. After my stepfather took us over, I don’t remember crying. Though I must have. I was only four at the time. People of four cry, right?”

  “I was not a crier as a boy. The less I was noticed, the less my monstrousness would be suspected.”

  “I will have to think about it. I really don’t know why I’m this way.”

  “Perhaps you will discover why in some yet-to-be-written tale.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start. ‘The woman who couldn’t cry’? Like the Grimms’ story about the boy who wanted to learn fear?”

  “It will come in its time. If it has a time.”

  “In Nito’s Garden, it’s only the rich, powerful father. The mother is never mentioned.”

  “De acuerdo.”

  “What about your mother in real life?”

  “She was useless to me in real life, so I omitted a mother figure in my book.”

  Walking around Cuervo’s beach house, Feron continued murmuring to him. He had been gone a year. The last time she had seen him in the hospital—or rather the last time he would allow her to see him—they went over his burial arrangements. Paid in full, including gravestone. Plot bought ten years previously. Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Take the R train to the Twenty-fifth Street stop and wear walking shoes. “I’ll be in good company: nineteenth-century lesbian artists, piano virtuosos, Civil War soldiers, Henry Ward Beecher, and now even Lenny Bernstein!” Feron took the R train a single time. When she returned to the beach house, he was waiting just inside the door. He was not under the soil at Green-Wood.

  The afterlife Cuervo had many comments to make, so many in fact that she had stopped trying to distinguish between which ones she’d actually heard him say and which were new ones. She asked him questions and was rewarded with oblique answers, some of them useful.

  “When you arrived in New York feeling you were the Prince of the World, were you planning to write a second novel then?”

  “I hadn’t decided not to yet.”

  It was not unlike consulting a Ouija board or having a fruitful session with your active imagination.

  Blanche had returned to her home after Orrin had been carried out of Buttner House on the undertaker’s gurney. The dreadful Daphne stayed on awhile, then vanished one day. Taking a number of valuable items with her.

  “I had way too many things,” Blanche wrote. “Some of the things she nicked I never liked anyway. If you want anything, now is the time to say, because I am embarking on a long-overdue dismantling of Buttner House. There is no way I can ever adequately thank you for those years in your Pullen house. I know this is only a fantasy but I do feel I was given a taste of being Rowan’s wife, even though he was only there in spirit.”

  The novel Feron had begun in Cuervo’s beach house on his little Olivetti was stalled because of—what? Dislike? Disgust? Discomfort? The Woman Who Lied, it was called, or was going to be called. With Beast and Beauty and Mr. Blue, she had begun with models of fairy tales. A Singular Courtship had evolved out of her needing to record the underlying—Cuervo might use the word strange—realities of her short marriage. “It was more like an impressionistic elegy” she had described it to Merry at their Algonquin meeting. What more had she told Merry at the time? Oh, God, the lie about the kind old editor who praised the draft but said it needed more “bed scenes”? Beginning The Woman Who Lied, Feron had once again felt the urgent need of a model, some other piece of literature to lean on, and she had chosen, perhaps stupidly, a combination of Notes from Underground and The Fall. Both were confessions, Dostoevsky’s narrator enraged and disgusted, and Camus’s lawyer ironic and suave.

  She had got her lying woman onto the bus, as in her failed story for Miss Petrie, and had kept the momentum going through the woman’s narration of falsehoods through her childhood and teen years. (“My lies were safety barriers I put between myself and what others wanted to make of me.”) An excellent reason for lying, Feron had thought, typing away: to save yourself from what others wanted to make of you!

  Then Feron had started second-guessing her original plan. How could you have a whole novel take place on a bus ride? Well, but Camus had kept his nameless narrator and listener inside a bar for the whole 147 pages. Should she keep her narrator nameless? If she gave her a name, what would be the most fitting one? Vera was a little too ironic. Maybe something ugly: Bertha? No, that was the name of Mr. Rochester’s crazy wife.

  Feron’s mother’s name had been Leona. Like the hotel woman who went to jail.

  But The Woman Who Lied stopped dead when the woman, still unnamed, confessed to taking Ergotrate to get rid of a fetus. After two prescriptions of Ergotrate had failed to do the job, she had rushed into a (short-lived) marriage.

  More than once in a mood of drunken spite, Feron’s mother had told her daughter her own Ergotrate story. (“But you hung in there!”)

  The woman on the bus told her listener, “Alas for my life, she hung in there like a tick.”

  At which point, Feron put the cover on Cuervo’s Olivetti, which fit better than her old Royal on his desk, and went out for a walk. When she returned to the beach house, she spoke aloud to Cuervo’s spirit.

  “What should I do with this thing? Please help me.”

  “It has a propulsion, it may be leading you toward something you don’t yet know. But perhaps you could use a short sabbatical.”

  Out of fear that he would stop speaking, Feron kept herself from reminding him he had suggested this in their first conference.

  “It will come in its time. If it has a time.”

  That’s what you said about “The Woman Who Couldn’t Cry” before you died.

  Cuervo’s tiny apartment looked much as he had left it. The only art on the wall facing the windows was his great-uncle Eugenio’s framed pastel of Cervantes dreaming the character of Don Quixote.

  “Would you like me to set you a task?” Cuervo’s voice inquired.

  38

  Your task is to outwalk the sponsor.

  “Refrain from all writing and thinking about writing. You are a walker, so walk. When something interests you, pause, take it in, and walk on. Pause and absorb but do not form words about it or try to shape it into something else. No trying to ‘capture’ it, like tourists with their cameras, who frantically click and click and return home with nothing but little squares. No planning, no plotting. One cannot stop the recuerdos—recollections are inevitable, but refrain from all planning and plotting and fabulating. Resist anything calculated to impress the eyes of others. Walk and look and walk on. Anda … mira … anda.

  “Outwalk the sponsor!”

  It sounded like genuine posthumous Cuervo returning to elaborate on one of his memorable figures of speech. Ah, yes, the good old sponsor. (“All the influences outside yourself—or between you and your work.”)

  She intended to accept his task, but first some letters on the little Olivetti. Having kept faith with her Blanche correspondence, she could certainly honor the longest letter she ever received from her oldest friend. Even as she was reading Merry’s letter, responses were tumbling out of her. But when it came to rolling in the sheet of paper and typing the opening words, she regressed into a childlike stupor. How do you start a letter when your oldest friend has just written to tell you that she had cancer but didn’t tell you?

  She would tackle the other letter first, which had been forwarded from her publisher after languishing for four months in someone’s nonurgent pile.

  This from “Josefa Maglia,” twin sister of the artist who had illustrated Mr. Blue. Joachim Maglia, whom Feron had never met, had died, the sister said. Feron assumed AIDS, since Josefa Magli
a’s film, which had won best Independent Short Documentary at the Atlanta Film Festival, was titled Brother Death: An AIDS Elegy.

  Joachim and I shared a loft, so I watched the art for your book come into being. First he would apply a monochrome layer of wash, usually in sepia, though with Mr. Blue he started experimenting with an almost transparent overlay of indigo. We would go over a passage he was thinking of illustrating and talk about the possibilities. He would try different approaches. You might be interested to know that the first frontispiece for Mr. Blue was a man in work clothes carrying a suitcase and a hat standing as seen from below by the little girl who has just opened the door. His face is in shadow because the sunny fields are behind him. The giant jaw, seen from so far below, dominates, with grim line of mouth, nostrils, and eyes slanted downward. “Too threatening,” said my brother, and he started over so the man with the suitcase and hat has his back to us and is looking down on the little girl blocking his way. She was a success because he caught the juxtaposition between the little-girl body and the closed imperious face.

  My purpose in writing you is to make a bid for a two-year film option on Mr. Blue. Ever since Joachim died, I keep seeing scenes from your story. I have read multiple versions of the Bluebeard story, and watched the best film treatments (Gaslight, Spellbound, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt), and then tried to turn it around, as my brother turned around your frontispiece, to see if I could come up with why a woman, a wife, a woman of property, would make a certain room off-limits for the man. More perplexing is why he honors her injunction? Even more mystifying, what does the sparsely furnished old loft room tell him, and us, after her death?

  Why, really, does someone of either sex keep a private place no one else may enter? Or does that place already exist because each and every one of us spends the majority of our time at the mercy of our interior life?

  Joachim threw away many attempts before he got that room the way he liked. We walked up and down lower Broadway looking for The Chair. Joachim said, “Nobody’s going to try to sell a chair with stuffing coming out of it, but I can do stuffing.” And the table and the folded blanket and the window and those lines still showing where the loft had been plastered over.

  I believe that filming and editing a story can convey dimensions of time and the way the mind works that are not so accessible to the writer or the painter. Brother Death was black and white and silent in the dying sections, and was in color with minimal dialogue when he was making his paintings. Whether I would take that route with Mr. Blue, I can’t say until I begin. But if you are willing to take a chance on me, we could meet and talk. That is, if the book isn’t optioned to someone else.

  Hoping,

  Josefa Maglia

  Walking without planning and plotting was no easy task. What had she thought about during all those months and years, when she was swinging along the pavements to and from work? She remembered her shoes, every damn pair of them, it seemed, but nothing of the mental travels that accompanied them on their daily rounds. Had young women really traipsed back and forth to work in three-inch heels? Blanche had schooled Feron in footwear before she left for Lovegood College. Better to go half a size bigger than what you thought you were, if it feels roomier. Besides, longer is more elegant. Through all of college and for the (few) Institute of Medieval Studies gatherings at Durham University in England, when she was known as Mrs. Avery or “Will Avery’s wife,” the 8AA black pumps with three-inch heels were her set of social feet. On excursions with Will to ruined monasteries and holy places, she had a pair of lace-up walking shoes that lasted until fifteen years later, when one morning they began to pinch because her feet had grown. She remembered the exact morning: before the lunch with Merry at the Neuse River Café. Feron had worn pants and a sweater and a jacket and the suddenly-too-tight walking shoes, and Merry had dressed in beautiful clothes and announced that she had married Mr. Jack. Why, you could write a whole essay revealing a person’s life through their choice of shoes.

  STOP!

  Pause and absorb but do not form words about it or try to shape it into something else.

  Stop “capturing” the shoes: the three inch, then the two inch, then the eighties when young women sprinted to work in gym shoes and carried their social feet in a bag.

  “Scores,” Cuervo had said.

  “Scores! You mean as in ‘threescore and ten’? That kind of scores?”

  “Let’s see, when did you enroll in my class?”

  “Seventy-two?”

  “Yes, in seventy-two I had scores of friends. Counting colleagues, students, social acquaintances, and publishing people, not all of them close, but some of them were. A decade later they started dying mysteriously. One day a friend asked me to go with him to see his friend in the hospital. He said, ‘He’s got something strange and they’ve isolated him and we will have to wear masks and gowns.’ From then on, the mystery disease started picking them off. I was lucky to be among the living when they discovered a pill that inhibits the damage. Inhibits. Not cures. My ugly sores have disappeared but my lungs are too compromised. I have made it to my threescore mark but won’t complete the extra ten.”

  If you really got into the walking task, you noticed more things than you ever supposed could exist in the same period of time within eight to ten blocks of Cuervo’s beach house. One could write a guidebook, How to Absorb New York without Trying to Shape It into Something Else.

  Get lost, sponsor!

  How deeply ingrained was this habit of plotting and planning how to attract the sponsor? How far back did it go? Not to the walks in Pullen and Benton Grange. In those walks she had been trying to think of ways to improve herself in order to remain welcome to the people in her new life. At Lovegood there was little walking, except to seedy Cobb’s Corner with Merry. At the university, her walking steps around the quad drummed to the beat of how to pass the courses, how to impress, how to graduate. Or had they begun after her bathroom reading of Merry’s “Lingering on the Lawn,” when envy and competition had reared their heads? From then on, perhaps she had carried plottings of how to turn her despoiled childhood into something artistic that would snag the attention of others—as Joyce had struggled for ten years to find the right form to hold his young years.

  She walked up and down Bleecker Street and thought about Will. The rainy trip back to school when he broke a long silence:

  “You and my mother have become friends. I was wondering how you thought of me.”

  It was deep winter, cold with icy rain, so he kept his eyes on the road ahead of them. Driving back to campus from his mother’s house. For the eighth, or was it the tenth, time?

  “You mean, as a friend, or what?”

  “I think I’m asking more about the ‘or what?’ ”

  Was this it? Was this on the way to being it? Whichever it was, her answer had to be clear and true but not frightening or tell-all true.

  “Well, I think you are the first man I have ever admired.”

  “Admired.” He tested the word, still staring hard at the road ahead of them.

  “Wait, I haven’t finished. I like spending time with you. I am a little envious of your work. I hope that someday I become as engrossed by something as you are, something I’d rather do than anything else. And as I already said, I really admire you.”

  “You do like spending time with me?”

  “I have no other person who has come as close. The nearest was my old roommate, Merry, at Lovegood College. But you’re the first man I feel at home with, though I don’t know you as well as I do your mother.”

  The windshield wipers swiped back and forth against the icy rain.

  “I am thirty-seven years old. Did you know that?”

  “I’d more or less figured it out from talking to your mother.”

  “You are how old?”

  “I was twenty-two last June.”

  “So you’re twenty-two now and I’m still thirty-seven until February. For four months every year I will be fift
een years older, and for the other eight I’ll be sixteen years older. Will that be too much difference?”

  “I think it will be just about right.”

  “Why, really, does someone of either sex keep a private place no one else may enter?” Josefa Maglia had written. “Or does that place already exist because each and every one of us spends the majority of our time at the mercy of our interior life?”

  Sometimes during a walk around the Village, Feron began experiencing moments of transitioning out of herself and evaporating into an excursive mind with no personal needs to hold it back. Sort of similar to Joyce’s wish to refine himself out of existence in his writing. Or did this count as a sponsor thought?

  No, it didn’t. It didn’t want anything. It was merely a recuerdo of having been struck by that Joyce passage in her university dorm room.

  Taking off from Josefa Maglia’s speculation about being at the mercy of our inner lives, Feron walked one day into a comprehension of what Will had probably been doing on the windy, misty day he stumbled and fell off the eroded edge of the cliff at Saltburn-by-the-Sea.

  She remembered Aurelia Avery’s description of young Will’s ferocious walking. (“… in fact he seemed not to be aware of where he walked, but he set a fiendish pace …”) The doctor had told Will’s parents that brains worked better when one walked.

  January 2, 1997

  Dear Josefa Maglia,

  Sorry about the long delay. Your letter had been sitting at my publishing house for four months.

  Your project sounds promising. Let’s meet and talk about the two-year option. I feel I should tell you I have never been satisfied with Mr. Blue. Your questions about private places and interior lives were intriguing. The film medium may indeed convey dimensions of time and the way the mind works that I failed to capture.