But that spring, I overheard Professor Nagy had been awarded a full professorship at Harvard, starting in the fall. Barely thirty, he was referred to as a “wunderkind.” He was leaving and I was devastated. School looked like a wasteland without his classes. My fatherly counselor, in his office overlooking glossy magnolias in bloom, asked, “Why not try to transfer to Harvard?”
ODYSSEUS’S DAUGHTER
1975-76
The verb odussomai means “hate,” so Odysseus’s name could be One who is wrathful and hates or is hated.
—DR. EMILY VERMEULE, HARVARD LECTURE NOTES, 1975
IN THE NARROW SHADOWY ROOM ON THE THIRD floor, overlooking the snow-covered Radcliffe Commons, the dull sameness of the brick dorms weighed on me like the failing of my mind. I studied Greek all Sunday, writing pages of vocab lists and verb endings, repeating, saying aloud the words again and again, writing columns of the same word, trying to lock them into my mind. It was my Sunday ritual as I began second semester. I’d moved into South House, thinking this would help with finding friends. I was lonelier than ever. I watched out my window, the snow-drifted quad, the plowed paths, watching girls in princess coats and flats bringing home their dry cleaning, while the rest of us slumped over armloads of books wearing blue jeans and parkas in a decade of crumpled clothes.
On Mondays, in my Homeric Greek class, words I’d stitched through my mind all weekend vanished without a trace, vanished as if I’d never heard them. This was what stunned me. I’d always been able to do whatever I’d set out to do. I knew I’d had trouble with foreign languages, but I was determined. I’d spent four years in labs learning French in high school, and three years of Spanish. When I got to France, I couldn’t speak a word, but I persevered and lived months without English, speaking with humor and enthusiasm, even though it was never grammatically perfect. I’d studied a year of German because professors of classics had to read German. I was enthralled with classicists who delved into the linguistic layers of Homer. I planned after Greek to learn Latin, Hittite and probably Old Norse at some point, since I had a soft spot for medieval Icelandic sagas. But my mind was failing me, killing off the dream of my life, to be a professor. Greek was evaporating out of my mind.
I began to yearn to die. The pressure had built up so long and hard that now all I wanted was to disappear, to be done. I couldn’t keep going any more. All I had to do was find how to die. I went searching for an easy dying. I hoped falling in the snow and slush in front of bus could do it. I hoped it wouldn’t be too painful.
As I walked to class across the Harvard Commons, I imagined a mushroom cloud erupting across the Charles. How was I living my last moments on earth? Was my life meaningful? Had I found happiness before this brief life vanished? Had I done anything to make a difference? No, I had failed. I was so weary. I couldn’t keep fighting any more. I was my father’s daughter, sliding under a crushing sea of failure. My mind had betrayed me. Sheer will and determination had driven me here, to prove myself to my father and my professor uncles, but now all I wanted was to disappear, to be done.
I was sinking, but my mother’s voice long distance from Ohio wouldn’t let me go. She was unswerving. I’d say, “Mommy, I don’t think I can make it. I can’t do this.”
She was fierce, loving. “I know you can get through today. I’ll talk to you tonight.”
I cried, shaking. “I can’t. I can’t do it.”
From her apartment in Cincinnati, as she dressed for another day as a probation officer, she said with determination, “I will speak to you tonight.” Day after day, she offered me the lifeline of her knowing. When I had no idea how I could live through that day, she knew without a doubt that I could and would.
I kept my appointment for a weekly talk with my counselor, a kind man whose handshake was large and soft like his caring face. Even though I didn’t tell him much, I felt him studying my drooped posture as I slumped into the Harvard chair. Veritas, painted in gold, pressed into my back like the pattern of needles in Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony.” My fingers ran up and down the smooth maple spindles, circling where they met the dark wooden carved seat. I couldn’t meet his eyes when he questioned me. My gaze was caught by a water stain under the heavy radiator, hissing on a raw February afternoon. I was sinking and he must have seen it.
“Wait a minute.” He returned with the university psychiatrist, an intense little man in a three-piece suit, who spoke each word precisely.
“Do you ever think about death?”
I wanted to laugh. “Yes, I think about death all the time.”
When he asked, “Would you like to stay here a few days in the infirmary?” I met his gaze. “Yes,” I answered, “yes,” certain for the first time in weeks.
AT HARVARD’S WELCOMING reception for transfer students, we had been assured we were the cream, beating higher odds than freshmen to be accepted. They expected great things from us. A white-coated waiter carved a massive half-side of roasted beef. As he piled slabs of bloody meat on my plate, I thought of Odysseus feasting after offerings had been made to the gods. I wandered back through the labyrinth of Cambridge streets that night, warmed and hopeful.
When I’d transferred into Harvard as a junior I was sure I’d find happiness. I found tastes of my imagined life of happiness in a darkened lecture hall, looking at slides of Greek vases, on a late September day in 1975. I was taking careful notes as Dr. Emily Vermeule’s commanding voice led us behind the scenes to understand the myths. A mythic figure herself, as a young woman she had discovered a Mycenaean city.
“Odysseus is the least heroic of the Greek heroes. He is always the deceitful, malicious liar but also the most mature and eloquent of speakers.” She showed an image of the large-chested hero. “He was a series of contrasts. He arranged that the Trojan War should be fought but then he tried to get out of it by feigning madness.” I imagined him, the young father who tried to escape his destiny. If he left for war, it was foretold he wouldn’t return for twenty years, and then as a beggar. “He stole statues from temples, tricked heroes, but he made the Trojan Horse, and so his wit finally won the battle of Troy.”
I was captivated by Odysseus, this larger-than-life hero, a tyrant who was humbled as he barely survived his journey home. I wasn’t attracted to him, like the naïve Princess Nausicaa on the beach waiting for a fine husband—no, he was an older man, old enough to be my father. I didn’t identify with the enduring Penelope, holding off the suitors with her grief and wit as best she could. I wasn’t the young Telemachus who sailed off to other island kingdoms to listen for word of his father. I wasn’t Athena watching out for him, steering him as best she could through the Gordian knot of fate so he could be released from the curses of Poseidon for having blinded his son, the Cyclops. No, I loved him like a proud warrior daughter, who would have stood waiting for his return without a doubt, ready to take the spear to vanquish his enemies.
I knew him because I read him, over and over, in English and, as I struggled to learn, in Greek. I had no idea then that I had found in Odysseus a man of my father’s stature and moral complexity, but in a story with a happy ending. He succeeded in returning to his loving Penelope. Ever since I’d been a girl, I’d merged with characters in books. In high school I became Cassandra in I Capture the Castle. As I read the Odyssey, I loved him like a daughter, not realizing he was the father I yearned for. In reading, I could see his rage and despair, and they didn’t hurt me. He would triumph in the end, he would conquer death, find his way home, destroy the suitors, return to his wife’s loving arms.
As a child, I had been my father’s companion, accompanying him on his jobs, seeing houses, colleges, and towers emerge from his drawings. In the Odyssey, I was a quiet companion, privy to his grieving on the beach, his longing to return home. I sat up late, a reading light shining over the page, and wept when the old nurse found the scar on his leg and recognized him. In disguise, when Odysseus saw his adult son for the first time, he was overcome with love and
pride. That was the father I still hoped for, who would adore his sons, who would weep with love for them, and with grief for having missed their childhoods.
Reading Homer, I returned to Ithaca before him, knew the goatherd who was still loyal to his beloved master. I knew who was the most despicable of the suitors and waited excitedly for Odysseus’s revenge. After the palace had been cleansed and Penelope had tested him for the last time, after they retired to their bed and the gods held back the night long enough so he could tell her his entire journey home, I wasn’t jealous. I loved him like a loyal daughter who stood sentry over the palace in Ithaca all night. Who else knew him, loved him better than I? I was the daughter who still loved her broken father after no one else remained.
After the seminar was over, the lights switched on, notebooks were shuffled into packs, footsteps clattering over the scuffed wooden floors. As if the magic show was over, and daily life reeled dully before me. I wanted to stay, breathing in the excited air of her class, but I didn’t know how to do that on my own. I knew there were years of study ahead of me before I could make brilliant connections like these Classics professors. Researching in the library, I explored Greek concordances for the origins of words, but I didn’t have the background in languages that was needed, yet. But I was determined, taking notes on index cards on every article I read, creating my own library of quotes and ideas to carry with me into an academic life.
LEAVING GREEK MYTHOLOGY class, I watched a flock of pigeons rise up through the ancient trees of the quad, their wings as illuminated as my mind. But crowds of students poured out of the lecture rooms and no one lingered to talk. I began slipping into my old loneliness and yearned for a shared passion. Other students went off to cafés to gossip about skiing, or flying to Egypt for the weekend with their roommate who was a prince, or how many kegs they had for the next party in one of the houses along the river. There were other silent students, the ones who asked if they didn’t have to speak in my Anthropology section for their grade. A few students confessed they were afraid people wouldn’t think they were smart enough to be here. Like me, they went back to their rooms alone to study.
I loved my work-study job Saturdays in the shadowy Poetry Room in the Lamont undergraduate library. Being there meant I didn’t have to figure out what to do on Saturdays when people with friends already seemed to know what to do. Being there meant I could listen to recordings of poets on reel-to-reel tapes under thick-padded headphones. Of course the first I played was Sylvia Path, but that trembling proud fevered voice disturbed me and I quickly filed her away.
I sat at my wooden desk in the Finnish-style modern library room, designed by one of my father’s favorite early modernists, Alvar Aalto. There was a serene uniformity in the wooden desks, arched leg stools, chairs, and cupboards. The windows were screened so no direct light would damage the tapes and books. I studied in muted comfort, mostly alone. The librarian, a slight Greek man, would arrive with a kind smile to work a few hours in the afternoon. He invited me into his office where sunlight poured onto his desk, stacked with papers and books. He asked me questions about my classes and told me about the manuscript he was working on. A poet with books printed in Greek, he was now finishing his first collection in English.
As the fall continued, each time he arrived he said he could feel my emotions filling the little library. I liked writing out his name, Stratis, in Greek characters. He was about forty and I was twenty-two, my parents’ ages when they got married. I thought he was the perfect age; a few grey hairs made him more handsome. I liked watching how his neatly trimmed mustache expanded with his smile. I liked glancing into his office as I put tapes away, his classic Greek profile focused on revising his poems. I didn’t have a crush on him; instead, I was grateful for how he listened to me with quiet attention.
The Saturday I limped in on crutches after breaking my foot, he listened with sympathy to my failure at my first ballet class since fifth grade, which I could now make comical. I could tell him about the huge lecture hall doors I couldn’t pry open and how students poured by and almost no one helped me. It was getting dark by five when I got up to leave. He said, “Let me take you to dinner.”
I swung along on crutches beside him, passing the orderly eighteenth-century brick buildings and stately trees of Harvard Yard. We left through a cast-iron gateway into the whirling neon and lights of bookshops and cafés, rapid chatter of late shoppers and students, traffic pummeling and subway thudding towards Harvard Square. He took my elbow protectively as we hurried across the street and he steered us into a quiet bistro with candles already lit on the tables.
With a sip of wine, I answered his questions about my life. “My father is a famous architect. I sometimes think he’s like Odysseus, because he’s crafty, the smartest of the Achaeans, and can figure out any puzzle.” I paused and felt encouraged by his warm dark eyes to explain.
“As I read The Odyssey, I have this weird idea that I’m Odysseus’s daughter, even though, of course, he didn’t have a daughter.” After reading the book three times, I felt I was part of their lives. “I think his teenaged son, Telemachos, is kind of a wimp, and after a while his long-suffering wife Penelope gets annoying. I wish she didn’t just mope around. But I’m his daughter and I know he’s coming home!” I paused for another sip of wine, I could feel my cheeks flushing with excitement. “I grew up in a modern glass house, sort of like a little palace in a little valley all to itself. It was all lit up and glowed at night. We lived in an old wealthy village and we were kind of like aristocrats.”
It was that word “aristocrats” that burned my cheeks with shame after Stratis began to speak, his eyes solemn as he spoke of the Nazis coming to his island when he was a little boy. He remembered them rounding up the men, his father, uncles and neighbors, the sight of their boat leaving the harbor, never to see them again. His stories merged with his poems, blood staining the stones in the village square, the swish of women in black dresses, the taste of honey and lemon.
I don’t know if I corrected my story after he spoke. Did I say that my father went mad and drove us all away, living like a blinded Cyclops in his cave with just my youngest brother caring for him? Did I say my impoverished mother kept getting evicted from apartments because neighbors complained about my long-haired brother and his friends playing loud music as they worked on their cars on the street?
I couldn’t have said what I didn’t know, that I was building my life here like a precarious house of cards. When I told him my plans to become a Classics professor, he toasted me with his wineglass. After dinner, I felt blessed when he kissed me on both cheeks before he caught the bus home to his girlfriend. I carefully placed my crutches, step by step, on uneven sidewalks, heaved and shattered by tree roots, heading towards my beautiful room miles away. Even then I was beginning to sink, without knowing it.
The spasms in my belly returned, grabbing me on my way to class, forcing me to sit on a stone bench clutching my side until I could breathe. My first paper for mythology class was decimated in red ink. Dr. Nagy’s brilliant lectures were reserved for grad students. I was left to plod unsuccessfully through Greek. I made short calls to my mother, who was worn out from moving again. The sharp pain in my abdomen began to come every day. Desperate, I took down a poster off a telephone pole that promised release from stress. A class in TM, for the princely fee of $60, enough for food for two weeks. I paid for the mantra. I began to sit for twenty minutes twice a day, repeating my mantra, breathing into the terror in my belly, calming the cramping pain. But the loneliness didn’t abate.
I WAS SINKING. A month later I was escorted to the infirmary. Soon I was lying in bed in a hospital jonnie, my clothes and books stashed in a closet. From my bedroom window, I could see a concrete building facing Harvard Square, where a clock flashed the time and temperature in red. 3:47 pm. 27 degrees Fahrenheit. An hour before I’d crossed Harvard Square calculating how to get hit by a bus. Relief spread through my trembling body. Now it was so obvious
. I whispered to the empty room. “I don’t have to die to leave Harvard! I can just drop out!” When the nurse entered a minute later, she caught my first smile in weeks.
“You don’t look depressed,” the nurse said critically as she took my vitals. I wanted to feel shocked, incredulous that she doubted me—I was an undergrad on suicide watch. But she was right. Something was different, already. I called my mother from my bed in the health center. “You were right. I didn’t have to die. I can just drop out!” I was elated. She answered, “Just come home. We can’t wait to see you.”
In a few days I packed and closed my accounts. I was given extensive tests in the language center. A voice on a tape recorder listed unusual sounds that I had to say back in order and move around like chess pieces to make phrases, but the sounds vanished as quickly as Greek. The evaluator told me I had such a severe short-term memory deficit that I would be excused from any foreign language requirements. When I stopped to say good-bye at the Poetry Library, Stratis gave me a copy of his poetry manuscript as a gift.
I steered a drive-away car across the Charles River early in the spring of 1976, the back seat piled to the ceiling with books, quilts, posters, and clothes. I sang along with Dylan’s new album, Desire, on the radio, happy to be alive, singing, “One more cup of coffee for the road, to the valley below.” On the turnpike driving west, I wondered if the quirks of my mind had saved me for another life.
PARKER STREET
1976
The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living.
—HARRY BERTOIA
“IMAGINE MIDNIGHT IN A RUN-DOWN NEIGHBOR-hood.” My brother, Wood, set the scene. “The police show up in front of a three-story wreck of a house at the dead-end of Parker Street. Someone had called. The drug dealers were acting up again. They pound on the door with their guns drawn.” Wood pretended to open the door. “Here are Jo’s friends from Glendale. Marilyn, in a long evening dress,” he gestures and emphasizes, “with jewels, and furs, with her husband Dick, in tails, who have dropped by Jo’s new apartment after the Opera.” Wood’s voice raised into falsetto. “Is there a problem, officers?”
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