by Sara Dillon
And it was lovely and safe and poetic, being a child in her world, at least while I was small and the world was oh so luminous; the May altars, the Italiante urns on the front steps. A chaise lounge on the back lawn, a library book, my arm around the neck of the collie from next door.
Calvin:
Just checking in, not that you want me to. You know I never lobby for anything, but when one of the deans from Stannard State came into the bookstore, I asked him about whether I could teach something and the upshot is I can do a comparative lit seminar in the spring. Remember when you and I went to Stannard for that poetry symposium, what was it called? I remember reading in the auditorium, and someone asked me why I wrote about houses so much. Probably thought I was nuts and was trying to be polite. What should I put in the course? What would you teach in a comp lit course? I can do some of my Japanese stuff.
C
Some of us from John Merrill’s writing workshop at Saint Theo’s had gone to Stannard that long ago winter day, to read our poems. I had had coffee with Calvin and looked out at a long, gloomy, snow covered slope reaching into some spindly trees; God forsaken. And I must have chosen to read some work of mine about houses. About houses, what did that mean?
I really wanted to get that course; I wanted to teach it, no matter how inconvenient. Comparative literature; it could be more or less anything I wanted, they said. Novel, desire and the novel, Japan and the novel, Ernest Hemingway and Europe, Ernest and his two bottles of wine for lunch, wrapped in cool white towels by the landlady. Or my dissertation topic, the Japanese writer Dazai Osamu, leaving his family in a cheap apartment at night, heading out to the bars, finally leaping into a river and drowning himself, a few fabulous photos of himself on bar stools left behind. The Japanese artist, self-denying, self-loathing, that was getting too close to my later things, and I wanted to go back to the original, so no to that. I wanted to be back in the workshop, with Calvin and Merrill and people telling me I was the super poet.
As the kids slept, I plotted and planned. I might have only five students, no one would take it, or if they did they would drop it. This worried me constantly over the years; what would I do if everyone dropped a class; could they be forced to stay and listen to me? Was there some clause that said a teacher could not be utterly abandoned by students? Things were cruel now, the teaching evaluations like slam books. I remembered the evaluation in New York that time. I was just a visitor, and one student had written, It makes me sick to see the way she runs out the door to go pick up her child.
Moustaki; late 1970s
Maybe in its own funny way Saint Theo’s, even acknowledging its oddness, was the next reason I thought I could have everything. It was Daddy’s college, his father had forced him to go there against his will at the start of the Great Depression, and Daddy had lived with Saint Theo’s on his mind ever since. It was Daddy to perfection. Catholic, and lost in time, and intelligent without pretension and a little lefty in terms of sympathies.
Daddy had known all the old French Canadian priests who founded the college; remembered them all and visited them as one by one they proceeded into extreme old age and then passed on. Père Poulin, Père Gamache, Père Dulac. Daddy was an unassuming devotionalist. He liked to say grace in French. He knew about the elite world but it held no interest for him; it was too cold, treacherous, without the milk of human kindness without which nothing made sense to him. When I was in high school, he had quit his company job and started lecturing at St. Theo’s; not only would I be going to his college, I would also be going for free. It will make him so happy, Gramma kept saying to me. It will mean the world to him. And so I didn’t consider anything else, didn’t so much as visit any other school. It was straight from Gramma’s East Galway to Daddy’s northern Vermont, with no stops or detours.
Yet I took to it right away. In a sense, anyway.
As for the students, the shrieking and the beer parties, well that was too preposterous. I walked around with my hands over my ears. I kept escaping from roommates. I would move in, and then decide I couldn’t stand them, and get myself moved and be all gone—lock, stock, and barrel—before they came back from a weekend away. I wanted to get A’s in everything; that made life easier. A’s are the wallpaper; A’s look nice, they keep you from having to explain anything. People leave you alone when you have lots of A’s lined up in a row.
In the student plays, I didn’t get the part of ingénue lead; sometimes I played a child with pony tails, sometimes a middle-aged wife; most often the type of Mary Warren in The Crucible. As I saw it, my escape from being objectified under the proscenium was into the writing seminar; or the art studio, where I learned that one paints in oil from dark to light; or in yet one more foray into ponderous discussions of La Symphonie Pastorale.
And out into the snow at night; across the field from one campus to another, the stars whirling and blinking. It was suspended animation. I didn’t come to Saint Theo’s objectively, because I’d wanted to, but rather because in one way I had to, then in a different way wanted to, like an arranged marriage perhaps, always aware that it had nothing to do with me that I had shown up here.
I went home to Gramma and Daddy on weekends, even to Aunt Olive’s on Sundays, and thus nothing had changed. There was a strange absence where East Galway had been, as if, which became so common for me, I had expended great effort learning something important in great detail, only to set it aside almost at once. I wasn’t making plans to go back there, not even to find Clement, nor Nuala. As so often happened, I decided I would just consider it later.
Early on in my time at Saint Theo’s, the first winter break I suppose, I was asked to go to Paris with a group of sociology students, as their translator no less, on the grounds that I was allegedly fluent in French. As with everything, I was so good that it first seemed to others I was great, but I was not that great. I could pick up a newspaper and read French with ease; I could chat and sound creditable; I could understand to some degree, though not slang. But something was missing, the follow through, the focus. Teach me French and I’ll teach you German, Miles Bradford had said. But I never did more than a smattering of German; Wie war’s im Theatre? Ich muss mir eine neue Jacke kaufen.
It was between semesters, that we went to France. I got a sore throat first thing, and had to go to bed when we arrived. I remember the quiet days in bed in the hostel in Clichy, the ladies who worked there, scrubbing down the stone floors. Their voices, speaking Portuguese and Arabic, echoed through the corridors. There were posters of Algerian revolutionaries in the common room; I remember strolling past the couscous restaurants in the evening. The students were interviewing immigrant workers in Paris, and I was to be the translator, meeting with local officials and workers’ groups, young men who met us in doorways, petty officials in local administrative offices. I did my job, but tried to escape from the American students, left them to fend for themselves.
I wandered by myself in all the places you would expect: the Luxembourg Gardens, the Rodin museum, up and down the labyrinthine pathways of Fontainebleau. Even then, I was remembering and regretting; I recalled that Madame Celeste had wanted me to go to piano summer school at Fontainebleau, and felt her disappointment following me; I felt passive, felt a failure of sorts, though this was in its early stages. It was so much more natural for me to walk, observe and feel, simply feel. And there was the purchase of symbolic goods, in this case two French sweaters, one dark pink and the other bright green, too small and tight as was the fashion at that time. I wore them every day after that, I wore them as we made our communal spaghetti dinners.
I was proposed to by a singer with a voice like Georges Brassens.
Observe, feel, observe, feel, I was well versed in this even back then.
Without question, I got stuck in a time warp that dates to that trip; the lipstick, the bangs, the turtlenecks.
The discussions of what went wrong in ‘68, Danny le Rouge, Moustaki, Leo Ferré, my cold hand rummaging in books, book
s with clear, luminous prose. Imagining a two roomed pied à terre, ribbed tights. I saw Clichy by evening, and it was mine. I smelled the burnt sugar smell of the metro; I waited in line to eat at a famous, old and very cheap restaurant at Saint Denis. Part experience, part premonition, I stood and looked at boots in the shop windows. The boots were new to me, speaking a language I did not know, but believed I could master with ease. If only I tried; but perhaps I would try later. I would learn the language of the French boots later, later, later.
I had a secret admirer, though I was surprised and disappointed when I found out who it was. He left a white rose in my mailbox at Saint Theo’s every day and sent me notes that said such things as, Like Beatrice, conduct me. The secret admirer is probably never the admirer you want.
By the second year, I had finagled my own room and moved in a piano from home. In his endless trust, Daddy thought this a great idea, and still believed I could be such a pianist, that one day he could sit and listen to me play wonderfully, his fondest dream. Even when he was very old, he would ask me with polite regret whether I wouldn’t take it up again. I probably gave him the same sharp answer I gave him when he asked me if I didn’t want to see my ex-husband Yukito ever again.
It was cruel to say, but no, and no again. Though I still felt a shiver of love for my Paderewski music editions, with their rough paper covers; the Nocturnes and the Mazurkas, most of which I never got to.
The students of Saint Theo’s were mainly from the Italian and French Canadian middle classes; cozy and complacent, they drove banged-up Toyotas and with whoops and war cries went home in groups at Thanksgiving to Maine, New Hampshire and New Jersey. I didn’t know most of them, their names or their interests. I didn’t much care; didn’t attend their social gatherings. I was, as Una might have said, essentially spaced out. It was outside my abilities to share a room amicably or to quaff a beer in a dormitory corridor. I hurried away, always busy, always entranced with myself.
With my trace of an Irish accent, I was a chameleon; but not that much of one.
To that extent, I guess I was spared any unseemly involvement with the alien zones of ambition and calculation. I left no footprints, took no responsibility for my presence or even existence, which freed me up for higher matters.
Daddy would see me on the campus and race home to tell Gramma. I saw her, she looked great, carrying her books, hurrying along, he no doubt said.
Roger; 1974
As for who Calvin Pini was, well, he is the person above all who did not rescue me.
Even much later, while I was teaching at the law school, I would write to him, Why are you still so elusive? And he would answer with a poem or a cryptic comment. I thought in the end he would recall those days walking in the snowdrifts at Saint Theo’s and with good humor and good will solve a few things for me. But he never did. He stubbornly nursed his grievance against me until he was bored with it, and then it wasn’t even a grievance any more, but he did not want me to be too clear on this.
At that stage, especially after Japan, I had had enough of mysteries, and poetry is something that shouldn’t rely on mystery per se. At least so I thought.
But as to who Calvin Pini was, it began at Saint Theo’s with a dog.
Or more properly, it began in John Merrill’s writing seminar. It began with John Merrill, and Calvin Pini, and my dog Roger.
It was when Roger died, on a late winter afternoon.
Calvin was such a gifted poet; he wrote boys’ poetry, ships and sails and sand. He never wrote anything jarring or wrong, not audacious either, but just impeccable and true. Calvin was as tall as I was small; up to six foot four, I believe, but not slender, on the contrary, somewhat heavyset and he walked as if bending forward into a stiff wind. Calvin was from a world unknown to me; suburban Connecticut, parents divorced, real estate wealth and elaborate family battles. Calvin loved his Italian grandmother and vowed that he would stay with her forever and never leave her.
John Merrill had come to teach at Saint Theo’s as a young man and was famous for his poems about lakes and rivers and gardens. I had gone to him early in my second year and told him that I actually thought in an odd way; in lines and waves of poetry. I told him that I tapped these out on my fingers and that all my ideas came to me in this way. Merrill, Mr. Merrill as we called him then, always sighed before he spoke, whether he was pleased or displeased, he stopped and sighed, as if he needed the time to think through what he would say. And so he sighed that day in his office, the air thick with pipe smoke, not only from him, rather all the men professors smoked pipes back then, the plumes of smoke trailing from their offices.
I see, he said, or something like it.
And perhaps John Merrill told me which workshop to sign up for; he was not sending me away, far from it, I had the sense of being believed. He seemed to know what I meant.
I went dancing and singing out of his office and across the huge grassy expanses of Saint Theo’s. For you see, I resented everything about the place, and neither hating nor liking it, simply resented it as being a place I had not chosen. To that extent, I wasn’t responsible for it. But I could daydream to my heart’s content, and it was a pleasurable kind of resentment. I wrote and painted. Afternoons in the art studio, evenings in the theatre, late mornings in John Merrill’s writing seminar, working out my attempts to impose the discipline of the sestina and other difficult forms on my tendency to simply talk too much.
How big he was, Merrill, in his red plaid shirt. Despite that touch of red and the old red van he drove, everything else around him was watercolor beige. He had the washed-out Germanic coloring of the Midwest; he didn’t speak at first, but raised an eyebrow and waited.
And he sighed.
As for the poetic sequences I told him about, I tried to explain that they had a self-generating organization to them. I thought in groups of words. This might be called, thinking in poetry.
Merrill wasn’t one to say Wow, great, come on board. He regarded me soberly, and with a very slight but unmistakable degree of interest. As I ran from his office, I held my disorganized sheaf of work to my chest.
The students in his writing seminar talked of Merrill endlessly; his brood of children, his nature poetry, his likes and dislikes, which of the poets were his friends, his villanelle assignments, his propensity to listen to Mahler, reportedly in the middle of the night. We invented nick-names for him; we brought in copies of Merwin, Jarrell, Kinnell, asking him which he liked best and why.
He would sigh and look up at us, world-weary but never refusing to participate. His smile was a half smile, a quarter smile, usually a thrilling indication that Merrill was pleased.
It was in the seminar sophomore year that I met, among others, Calvin Pini, whose later failure to rescue me at a crucial moment would follow me around for many long years to come. I tried to make him repent for this, but he never did. I say that I met him, though in fact I had known who he was, from a required Bible history class.
Calvin proved to be an expert at disappearance and reappearance; for decades, each time he re-emerged and looked back, there I was on his tail, faithful, ever vigilant, waiting for answers.
Calvin and I began sitting side by side in Merrill’s poetry seminar. Calvin, you see, was a damned good poet.
To return to the beginning: I barely knew Calvin Pini, but he read nice poems about navy blue water and birds, lots of birds.
Looking back, there wasn’t that about Calvin’s poems that seemed to invite unlocking the ultimate door. That fact alone might have provided a premonition of things to come, had one only been able to see so far into the future, or even imagine its contours. My poems came much closer to that and in each case attempted it; I was unable to wish to conceal; a defect or weakness, though one of the higher order, something that also haunted me for decades after.
For whatever reason, I began to want a dog in some profound and overwhelming way. I really, truly longed to have a dog, maybe because my parents would so disapprove
of it as a useless addition to things, and despite the fact of it being completely forbidden in the dormitory; I wanted a dog with a relentless determination that is hard now to explain, though I remember its demands on me.
And somehow or other, through someone’s recommendation, I found myself gazing into a box of squirming puppies in an upstairs apartment in town, the hippie owners smiling down with peaceful approval. I chose a young brown nondescript male dog who was to be Roger, carrying him away inside my jacket, showering him with love.
It wasn’t easy, hiding a puppy from the Resident Assistants in the dorm. I brought him in and out inside my clothes, on cold nights even sending him out the window on a kind of rope and pully system to go potty and then slowly raising him again. He was greatly loved, was Roger. He looked like all kinds of dogs in the world, a true mongrel, part Shepherd, but smaller, part this, part that, and without interest in anything except being a dog and running in the leaves, and then in the snow. In that impossible situation, I slept with him by my side every night, left him in my room every day to go to classes, then came back and managed to smuggle him out to run with me in the nearby woods and fields; nothing exotic or remote, just the fields around the campus, where at least spies for the Dean of Students would not see us.
He was good, was Roger. He didn’t bark very much. He allowed himself to be hidden, as if realizing that his survival was at stake.