The Sonnet Lover

by Carol Goodman

  “Shall we go to my office?” I suggest because Saul Weiss looks suddenly woozy. He’s carrying a large shopping bag, and I offer to carry it up the stairs for him but he declines.

  “Yes, you two go on up. I just have to check something back at the counseling center. I’m afraid my staff is being overwhelmed by the sudden demand. I’ll check in with you later—or feel free to drop by my office on the way out.”

  Amazing, I think, as Dr. Spiers flees the building: he didn’t even last the five minutes Chihiro predicted. I look down at Saul Weiss to see whether he looks insulted—or outraged, as he’d have every right to be—but the poor man looks apologetic.

  “I suppose this is very upsetting for the other students.” He takes a grayish handkerchief out of his coat pocket to blow his nose. “Dr. Spiers says they’ve had to hire extra counselors. That must cost a lot of money—”

  “They’ve got it to spend,” I assure Mr. Weiss.

  “An accountant’s habit,” he says apologetically, “always adding things up. Robin used to hate it…” He falters and then gestures to the grand staircase.

  “Whew!” he says, whistling. “Did someone really live here?”

  “Cyril Graham,” I say, starting up the steps. “He donated the townhouse to the college along with the funds to enlarge the film department—the windows are Tiffany.” I pause on the second landing to point out the stained glass and to give Saul a chance to catch his breath.

  “Cyril Graham’s the fellow with the place in Italy, right? The school Robin went to last year. Is that place as fancy?”

  “Fancier,” I say. We’ve finally reached my office. Saul Weiss takes out his handkerchief to wipe his pink face. I unlock the door and gesture toward the Morris chair, leaning over it to open the window a crack. The sound of rain and traffic sluicing over the wet streets seeps into the room. “Let me know if that’s too cold,” I say, turning to sit behind my desk. When I see Saul sink into the green cushions, hugging his shopping bag to his chest, he looks so frail there that I don’t have the heart to retreat behind the big imposing desk, and so I perch instead on its edge.

  “No, it’s fine,” he says. “It must get stuffy up here.” He looks up toward the ceiling. “And cost a bundle to heat in the winter. Now I know where all my tuition dollars have been going.” He attempts a chuckle that curdles into a small strangled sob. “I’m so sorry,” he says, rooting in his pocket for the much-used hankie.

  “Please, Mr. Weiss—Saul,” I say, handing him a box of Kleenex, “don’t apologize. I can’t even begin to imagine what you’re going through. I only wish there were something I could do or say—” I break off, afraid that I’m going to start crying myself.

  “You’re a very nice lady,” Saul says, his voice tight with the effort of controlling his tears. “Robin always said so. I’m sure you did all you could for my boy. It’s a comfort to know he had someone like you to turn to. I always thought he missed having a mother—not that you’d have been like a mother—I mean, you’re much too young—”

  “Not really,” I say, remembering that I could have had a son Orlando Brunelli’s age if I’d stayed with Bruno twenty years ago. “I didn’t realize that Robin’s mother died when he was so young. She must have been quite young—was she ill?”

  “Robin’s mother took her own life,” Saul says. “She turned on the gas oven while I was at work and Robin was at Hebrew school. Robin found her.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, at a loss for anything else to say. “Poor Robin.”

  “I’ve always been afraid…You know, they say it runs in families.” Saul sighs. “Pearlie was a sensitive girl who never really had a chance to do the things she wanted. Go to college, live in a big city, travel to Europe. I tried to make sure that Robin had all the opportunities to do the things she missed. I never wanted him to feel trapped the way she had—or like me, for that matter. I never thought about what I wanted to be. My father was an accountant, so I was an accountant. I never pushed Robin to follow in my path—even though he was very good with numbers. Now I don’t know…maybe he needed a little direction. Maybe I should have kept better tabs on him these last couple of years, but he seemed happy—living here in the city and then getting to go to Italy—I figured he didn’t need his old dad dragging him down.”

  I think of how desperate I had been to leave my mother’s house on Long Island and escape to Manhattan. How I’d doubled up on classes in high school and studied through the nights to graduate a year early. Looking at this mousy little man—no trace of Robin’s beauty in his face—I’m afraid he’s probably right. Robin had reinvented himself and left his father behind. And now he’d left forever. What can I possibly say to this man to ease his grief?

  “There is one favor I wanted to ask,” Saul says as if reading my mind.

  “Of course,” I say, “anything.”

  “Robin wrote a lot. Poems, letters, journals…the kid never stopped writing. I don’t know what to do with it all. I’d feel like I was invading his privacy if I read it, and I wouldn’t be able to tell if there was anything…well, anything worth saving. You’re an English teacher, right?”

  I nod, sure that the distinction between comp lit and English would be meaningless to Saul.

  “And a writer, too? Robin said you wrote poetry?”

  I nod again, this time speechless that Robin had even known this. I never talk about my writing to my students.

  “Would you look at this stuff?” he asks, patting the well-stuffed shopping bag. “I’d trust you to keep private anything that you should, and if you thought there was anything worth saving—” He holds the bag out to me.

  Behind me on my desk I’ve got more than a hundred unread term papers. The last thing I need is extra reading. “Of course,” I say, taking the bag from him, “I’d love to read what Robin was writing. Perhaps there’s something we could publish in the literary magazine. I could talk to the editor about doing a memorial issue—” I falter, realizing that I’ll have to go over anything Robin wrote to make sure he actually wrote it, but luckily Saul doesn’t notice my hesitation. He smiles and for the first time I do see something of Robin in the shape of his mouth. “Yes, exactly, that would be nice. I knew you’d be the right one to talk to. Now, I probably shouldn’t take up any more of your time…” He braces his hands on the arms of the chair to push himself up. He looks so weary that I hate to send him out into the rain. I’m thinking of what else I can say to him when there’s a knock on the door.

  “Maybe that’s Dr. Spiers,” I say, but when I open the door there’s a delivery boy from Veselka, the aroma of beets and dill steaming up from the insulated bag he cradles in his arms.

  “Stay here and have some soup,” I say as I pay the delivery boy and read the message Chihiro has scrawled on the take-out menu (“You owe me, Asher!”). “I bet you haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

  Saul Weiss leaves after finishing a quart of borscht and half a loaf of challah. The hot soup, the sound of the rain, and the emotions of the morning have left me craving a nap. After entering a few grades on my laptop and checking my e-mail (scrolling through a dozen messages with the subject line “Robin Weiss” that I can’t face reading right now), I turn off the machine and start packing up to leave. I’m interrupted by a knock on my door. Hoping that Chihiro has thought to send coffee and dessert, I open it—but no such luck. It’s the young blond lawyer, wrinkling her nose at the smell of beets that still permeates my office.

  “Can I help you?” I ask, hoping my tone sounds cool enough to discourage her. She’s holding a stack of folders and I suspect she’s going to ask me, in the absence of Saturday office staff, to help her with the copying machine.

  “President Abrams suggested I speak with you about a project I’m working on,” she says, her eyes moving rapidly over the cluttered surfaces of my office. “Do you have a minute?”

  I can hardly tell her I was planning on taking a nap, so I open the door and gesture toward the Morris chair.
Since I don’t have the same desire to make her feel comfortable as I had in Saul Weiss’s case, I take the chair behind my desk, lean back, and treat her to the silent expectant gaze I reserve for students requesting a grade change. She shifts uneasily in the dent left by Saul Weiss in the upholstery and clears her throat. It occurs to me that she no more wants to be here than I want her to be.

  “President Abrams thought this project might interest you because of your background in Italian Renaissance women,” she begins. “You are interested in Italian Renaissance women, right?”

  “Well, I’m interested in the poetry of certain Italian Renaissance women. Gaspara Stampa, Veronica Franco, Vittoria Colonna, to name a few…” I wait to see whether these names provoke any response from her, but I might as well be reciting a Greek declension. “Does this project concern poets?” I ask.

  “Well, not poets per se,” she says, “but it concerns documents pertaining to the lives of women in Italy during the Renaissance—letters, household accounts, nuns’ chronicles—”

  I hold up my hand. “I’m not a women’s studies or history professor,” I say. “Maybe you should be talking to Frieda Mainbocher.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she agrees, “but President Abrams especially wanted you to handle this job.”

  I sigh, secretly flattered that Mark’s still plotting to get me to Italy—and that this attractive lawyer is annoyed by Mark’s preference for me. “Exactly what papers are we talking about?”

  “Rare manuscripts collected by Lucy Wallace Graham,” she says. “I’m sure there’s some very valuable scholarly material—”

  “I’ve seen Lucy Graham’s collection,” I tell her, “when I was at La Civetta during college. For the most part it’s comprised of laundry lists from the Convent of Santa Catalina. I’m sure they’re valuable from a historical point of view, but they’re really not my kind of thing. No doubt there are plenty of scholars who have worked with them over the years at La Civetta who could help you inventory them—”

  “The thing is,” she says, squirming so hard in the leather chair that it creaks, “President Abrams wants someone completely trustworthy to ascertain the value—monetary and scholarly—of the collection. You see, it might be important for our case to establish Lucy as a scholar and discriminating collector.”

  “My understanding is that the only collecting Lucy Graham ever did was of the gin bottles she stashed in her armoire. The only reason she ended up with those papers from Santa Catalina was that when the convent’s library was flooded in 1966 she offered to house the damaged manuscripts in the limonaia until they could be restored. She thought that since the original convent was once on the grounds of La Civetta, there was a special relationship between them. But then she never gave them back! If you ask me, the best thing to do is return all of it to Santa Catalina.”

  “If Lucy drank, it was because of how Sir Lionel treated her. He took all her money and then seduced her own secretary.”

  “You don’t sound like a fan of the Graham family, Miss—?”

  “Wallace,” she says. “Daisy Wallace. Lucy Wallace Graham was my great-aunt on my father’s side.”

  “Only one ‘great’?”

  “My father had me when he was already sixty,” she explains. “He died last year.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Daisy Wallace bows her head and to my shock and dismay begins to cry. I move around the desk and hand her the box of Kleenex that I’d given Saul Weiss and sit on the edge of the desk while she struggles to regain her control. “He wanted me to work on the Graham bequest,” she finally is able to say. “He felt the key would be in establishing Lucy’s role in Sir Lionel’s collecting and that it would be an opportunity to rehabilitate Lucy’s reputation. My father cared a great deal about family honor.”

  “Perhaps he felt that the Wallaces were owed a share in La Civetta as well.”

  “Oh, no,” Daisy says, coloring deeply, “believe me, no one in my family wants anything to do with that villa. My father wasn’t a superstitious man, but he said that the one time he was there as a young man he was sure it was haunted. He said that at night he could hear a woman weeping and that he saw blood spots appear on the tile floor of the rotunda—”

  “Yes, I’ve heard those stories,” I say, standing up. “The blood in the rotunda is an old legend about La Civetta, but if you look at the tiles you see it’s just a mosaic pattern of rose petals in the marble that’s faded over the years. When it gets wet it can look like blood—”

  Daisy is staring at me as I recite this elaborate attempt at an explanation for the phenomenon. I stop myself before telling her of the time I saw the spots of blood glistening in the moonlight that poured through the oculus of the rotunda, but she must sense something of my horror at the memory.

  “I completely understand you not wanting to go back there,” she says, gathering her folders and getting up from the chair. “I told President Abrams that it really wasn’t necessary. I’m sure I’ll be able to catalog the books with a student intern to help with the Italian. I’ll let President Abrams know what you said.” She pauses in the doorway and smiles for the first time since she came into my office today. “I’m sure you have better things to do with your summer than spend it in Italy.”

  Sure, I think to myself as I listen to the sound of her footsteps echoing in the empty townhouse, I can spend it in a mosquito-infested cabin in the Catskill woods deconstructing four-hundred-year-old lyrics.

  I gather my things and close the window, pausing to gaze out at the rain-drenched park. A fine mist hangs in the branches of the sycamores, muting the colors of pavement and brick to pale monotones. Gone are the bright dresses and T-shirts of yesterday; instead the few pedestrians crossing through the park are huddled under dull gray and tan raincoats. The brick townhouses that briefly glowed ochre in yesterday’s sun are now a faded rust color.

  Yesterday’s weather might have been a mirage, a tease of spring, but it’s left everything a shade grayer. I believe that I was looking forward to spending the summer at my aunt’s cabin in Woodstock; I believe I was hoping that once I made tenure in the fall Mark and I would get married; I believe I thought I’d done the right thing when I didn’t report Robin’s plagiarism to the dean.

  I put on my raincoat, shoulder my book bag, and pick up the shopping bag that Saul Weiss left. I can hear its weight in the dull thud of my footsteps descending the stairs. I don’t feel much like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel today, but rather like one of the unnamed extras that people the margins of those sprawling epics: a scullery maid carrying down the slop buckets or a spinster aunt collecting castoffs for charity.

  When I left La Civetta, I did see myself, however grief stricken, as the heroine of the story. I was Jane Eyre fleeing across the moors to keep from becoming Rochester’s mistress. Soon after I came back to New York I heard that Bruno Brunelli had left La Civetta and gone to live in Rome. I suspected he couldn’t bear to stay at the villa once I had left. Perhaps I maintained some small hope that someday I would hear his voice calling me, just as Jane does when Rochester calls out for her after he’s been destroyed—and suitably chastened and de-wifed—by fire. But hearing that he’s back at La Civetta, teaching that same class on the sonnet in which he so easily seduced me with a little Petrarch and Tasso, and that Claudia is there, too, feels like being forgotten.

  And if he has forgotten me, I think, walking bareheaded in the rain because I can’t handle an umbrella and Saul Weiss’s enormous shopping bag at the same time, if it means nothing to him to be at La Civetta after all these years, why should I be banned from the one place on earth where I was ever truly happy? Why not go along with Mark’s re-quest to make nice to Cyril Graham? Why not take up Leo Balthasar’s business offer and pick up a tidy sum for advising some Hollywood director on iambic pentameter? Mightn’t there be in Lucy Graham’s collection some worthwhile tidbit to flesh out my dry-as-dust book on Renaissance sonnets? After all, I’ve been a
sked three times—

  I stop on the stoop to my building and drop the shopping bag to the pavement. No; no, I haven’t, I realize. Daisy Wallace never really asked me to go. She got out of there before she had to because, I see now, she really doesn’t want me to go. Mara was right: There is something going on between the lawyer and Mark, and she wants the field to herself.

  I’m tempted to leave the shopping bag in the vestibule and come back for it later, but, then, what if someone takes it? So I drag it up five flights of stairs, wondering how on earth I’d ever been grateful for the lack of an elevator. That little bit of karmic spitefulness—begrudging my mother my home—would no doubt come back to haunt me someday, when, old and alone, I can no longer manage the stairs myself.

  I am in so foul a mood when I finally drag myself into my apartment that the only respite I can imagine is Mara’s white circles and ovals still wrapped in tissues in my evening purse. I take the bag and a bottle of Poland Spring into the bedroom and crawl into my unmade bed. For a while I just listen to the rain on the rooftop—an advantage of living on the top floor that today only seems to deepen my wintry gloom. I open my purse and sort out all the pills into two neat piles of ovals and circles on the bed. They lie on the floral-patterned sheet like late snow on spring buds. I close my eyes and remember the morning it snowed at La Civetta—a rare enough occasion to send Florentines out into the streets with cameras to document the effect of snow on centuries-old stone and stucco. At the villa the olive trees were glazed with silver, each tree casting a circular shadow of deep green where the snow didn’t stick. The statues were dusted with a mantle of fine white powder, transforming Roman gods and goddesses into eighteenth-century bewigged courtiers. The students flocked into the gardens to take pictures, but Bruno took me into the limonaia. He made me close my eyes while he opened the huge green shutters. All around me I could smell the deep spicy scent of the lemon flowers and the sharper tang of the fruit. I could hear the rustle of the leaves as Bruno walked back through the potted trees to stand beside me.