by Liza Wieland
You never wear them? Elizabeth says.
Only in winter.
Sigrid is still completely clothed. I want to do it this way, she says. She pins Elizabeth’s body beneath her own, holding her arms above her head. The feel of Sigrid’s flesh and bones through the layers of cotton and silk is a delicious tease, Sigrid’s lips on hers, on her cheeks and chin and throat, opening the buttons of Elizabeth’s blouse with her teeth. Elizabeth hears her own voice but far away and small.
Sounds like doves, Sigrid says. Where the name comes from. Or like little girls calling.
Yes, Elizabeth says. Yes.
They receive a handwritten invitation: Miss Barney will be at home two Fridays hence. Perhaps Miss Bishop would do us the honor . . .
She likes the poem about Paris and the clocks, Louise says. She told me that.
Too many clocks, Elizabeth says. Why do so many of my poems begin with some assertion about what time it is?
Time is of the essence?
I wonder if Clara will be there.
It’s odd that we haven’t seen her. She seems to have disappeared.
Elizabeth wants to change the subject.
I don’t think I’m brave enough to read a poem, she says. They’re so terribly slight.
Suit yourself, Louise says. I won’t beg. Though Miss Barney may.
* * *
Rue Jacob is an impressive address, the last private expanse in the heart of Paris, but quite unassuming from the front. The man at the door is Chinese with black lacquered hair, painted on. Beside him, doves startle in their cages. The walls inside are papered red, textured to feel like velvet. Flocked is the word. The rest of the downstairs appears dingy, drafts rushing in at the windows. The garden is the miracle, though, a long lawn and woods beyond, tucked away behind the most crowded street in Saint-Germain.
In the dining room, one could not see to eat. No matter: the Chinaman passes chocolates on a tarnished tray and teacups filled with wine or sherry. Difficult to know which one is choosing.
Miss Barney is a small woman but somehow much larger in her own house. Her blue eyes see through a person’s skull, read her thoughts.
She’s old enough to be your mother, Louise says.
Sigrid must not meet her, Elizabeth decides. Or is it the other way around?
Imitations of Rockefeller’s unicorn tapestries hang on the walls. The six sofas are covered in velvet, shades of burgundy and brown. No chair matches any other.
We’ve fallen into the storage closet at the Metropolitan Museum, Louise says.
On top of the tapestries are portraits. Upon closer examination, Elizabeth sees they are all of the same person, a child, a girl, a woman who looks very like Miss Barney. Close up, one understands that the sofas are really beds, piled with pillows and furs. Mirrors to gaze into and out of, hung so that a person might watch what is happening across the room. A grand piano in need of a polishing and perhaps in need of tuning. Though the room is dark, all these furnishings cast light as if they’re lit from inside, though when one looks away, turns one’s attention to some other object, they seem to fade, to forget themselves.
Dust has gathered on every surface. Elizabeth is finding it a little hard to breathe. She wonders how she will ever be able to read a poem.
Someone turns on a light in the dining room to reveal a new table setting: fresh fruit, sandwiches, and cakes made by Miss Barney’s famous cook, Berthe. Gin and whiskey on the sideboard.
Look at the bottles, Louise says. I’ll bet you’ll be able to read a poem.
Outside the garden runs all the way to the Seine, the lawn and then a forest cut through with paths mostly leading nowhere but occasionally to a single iron chair, rusted, askew, but oddly welcoming. The marble fountain is just a basin full of leaves, the temple a kind of theater, the stage already set to look like a sitting room—or is it really just another place to sit? And be watched. And to that end, Elizabeth discovers, the back side of the house is one gigantic mirror.
The sun can never get past the tops of trees, so gloom drenches the garden, but it makes one thoughtful.
If Clara were here, Elizabeth thinks, this is where she’d be waiting for us.
You feel old here, Elizabeth says. You take on the ages.
I think the opposite, Louise says. Unborn. It’s sort of dark and womby.
I like it. But we should go back inside. People are saying Miss Barney is about to give a speech.
Natalie Barney holds court in the dining room. I think the truth is this, she is saying, men have skin, but women have flesh, which gives and takes light.
What does she mean? Elizabeth asks Louise.
I have been told, Louise says, that we should see her bedroom.
They leave the crowded parlor and follow a velvet rope to the staircase and up the steps.
The bedroom is dim on purpose, curtains half drawn, a pattern of gray and white stars on all the upholstery and linens. The brightest light is a tiara glittering from inside the open armoire, which is heavy, dark, hulking, from another world. Elizabeth can’t help thinking it’s as if a man is in the room, pointedly occupying the space, belligerent, vaguely threatening. It’s hard to believe Miss Barney would not have seen this for herself. Perhaps she notices individuals more than effect, although her parlor would seem to disprove that notion.
Someone has left a pile of old letters on the low dresser, a walking stick; a life-size china swan sits in front of a mirror. Three photographs of a woman in a top hat, in embellished frames, arranged like a triptych of icons.
Wouldn’t you like to lie down and go to sleep? Louise says.
It’s too gloomy. I’d be afraid I might never wake up.
They hear footsteps on the stairs. The Chinaman appears in the doorway.
Miss Barney is looking for you, Miss Bishop, he whispers.
There you are, Miss Barney says. She takes both of Elizabeth’s hands and leads her toward the piano. It’s a kind of odd two-step, but Miss Barney is very graceful, so that their procession, all the way across the room, is not the least bit awkward. At the last minute, Elizabeth wonders if Miss Barney has made a terrible mistake—she believes Elizabeth is a singer, and that is why a musician introduced as Monsieur Poulenc is settling himself at the piano.
But no, she is calling Elizabeth a poet, a protegée of Miss Marianne Moore, but a new and distinctive voice in her own right. Evidently, Miss Barney has looked into things. The older poet, she says, tells us this younger one has a methodically oblique, intent way of working. She is not like the vegetable shredder that cuts into the life of a thing. Miss Barney says this in both English and French. Elizabeth is interested and somewhat horrified to realize that the French word for shredder is râpe.
She has decided to read “Paris, 7 A.M.” as Louise suggested. As soon as she begins, however, the words sound dull and flat—a series of sheep bleats is how the French will hear it, or anyone who doesn’t know English and maybe some who do. The rhymes occur in the oddest places. Some people will surely go mad waiting for rhyming words when there is no real pattern. Weathers and feathers, high, die, below and snow. What does it all mean anyway? She hopes no one will ask because she will not be able to answer the question.
Extraordinary that she can say the words of the poem and listen to herself at the same time. She scans the sea of faces for Clara’s.
Then it’s over. The word snow followed by silence. The audience politely waits for more. Elizabeth thinks she might drown in the horrible awkward moment of judgment that follows.
Miss Barney begins the applause. It’s astonishing, the racket her two tiny hands can make. Louise joins in, nods her head decisively, mouthing the word triumph. Elizabeth rolls her eyes. One poem does not a triumph make.
Miss Barney is sixty years old, almost exactly her mother’s age, Clara’s age, so the attraction Elizabeth feels is very strange. Clara is a few years older but seems more like a governess or a nursemaid. Miss Barney, though. Elizabeth would like to s
tay in the beam of her attention forever—though she suspects no one does for very long. She would like to sit very close to Miss Barney, on one of the velvet sofas, Miss Barney’s arm around her shoulder, Miss Barney whispering in her ear that Elizabeth is a good girl, smart and pretty and soon to make something extraordinary of herself. She would like to lie in bed with Miss Barney and talk about the day’s events and plan for the next day. Then Miss Barney would put her arms around Elizabeth and hold her for a full minute, kiss her on her cheek or her forehead or both, get up, turn out the light, step out of the room, close the door, whisper something necessary from the other side.
Necessary? Now where did that word come from? Necessary angel.
But Miss Barney bestows her attention, her concentrated gaze, on everyone. That is why the Friday salons are such a success.
It’s interesting, Louise says now, what she chooses not to see.
What? Elizabeth says. Louise points discreetly to the staircase, two women ascending, arms and hips touching, not accidentally.
That looks like fun, Louise says.
Elizabeth feels the electricity of her reading drain away, and gravity, that mundane force, take its place. She knows what’s happening in her expression, and that Louise is watching the change, the fade.
Don’t worry, Elizabeth. I won’t leave you.
Elizabeth moves closer to Louise.
And there’s always Sigrid.
I don’t know about always.
I don’t think she’s leaving Paris anytime soon.
No, I don’t suppose she is.
Do you want another whiskey?
I do, but let’s go before I can get it. I want to use my typewriter.
And not be the monkey typing Shakespeare?
They search for Miss Barney to say goodbye, but she does not appear to be in the house.
Try the Temple, Berthe tells them.
They wind through the crowd outside, to the Temple de l’Amitié. Miss Barney is indeed inside, with a dozen other guests, listening to a young singer. The singer is nervous to the point of trembling, a full-body vibrato, but her voice lacks color and depth. Next to Miss Barney is a woman whose frozen smile suggests she must be the girl’s mother. Elizabeth and Louise stop in the doorway to listen. Poulenc accompanies her on the piano. A woman beside them whispers that it’s his newest composition, incidental music for a poem by Paul Éluard. Everyone in the room wears the same look of confusion, including Poulenc. Only Miss Barney is rapt. The sight of her rapture causes Elizabeth to wonder about her poem and the depth of Miss Barney’s appreciation. She tries to drive the thought away.
Can you follow the words? she asks Louise.
He’s a surrealist, Louise says. Don’t worry.
When the young singer is finished, she begins to weep. She drops onto the piano bench and buries her face in Poulenc’s sleeve, clutching the folds of his coat in her hands. This almost seems like a part of the performance. Poulenc stares straight ahead, his expression now devoid of any emotion. He is absent.
He is someone, Elizabeth can tell, who has mastered the art of listening, and so must also have a deep understanding of silence, things unsaid and unheard. Elizabeth watches Poulenc and learns something. He has found a way to be anonymous, invisible. Even while he was playing—his music absorbs or intuits Éluard’s poems but doesn’t feel them. It is like living close to a graveyard in which no one you know is buried: the grief is far, far way. Like pain a half hour after the analgesic. All this seems to Elizabeth like the kind of poem she wants to write. Fear and panic finally calmed, lying quietly underneath the words. Poems like Poulenc’s silence, his stare. He will not comment on the singer and her mortification. No. His silence is the comment.
Elizabeth remembers: a boat going to save somebody, to save children. The boat carries out this very great task, but the boat doesn’t feel anything at all.
The Sirène, in fact, bobs once again at Léonie’s dock without comment, a pool of bilge on the floor of the cabin, an oil rainbow spreading below the lee cloth that held the babies. There is a sort of boat called tender. Elizabeth remembers the stars that guided them back from Dieppe. The Dipper, itself a kind of boat, swings overhead. You want to climb up into it, be safe above the fray, be tended. Such pleasure. A real boat could never be that. The heeling, the bilge, the torn sail, the broken mast. It may be stars are the only pleasure boats we have.
ELSEWHERE
1938
At the Murray Hill Hotel in New York, there is a letter for Elizabeth, from Sigrid.
Your ghost is everywhere: Hotel Colombe, the underground rooms at Dehillerin, which I cause myself to pass every day, and where I have no purpose but to think of us there. Ann and Marie do not allow me to cook—have I told you this? They say I will have many years to do the cooking for someone who will not appreciate it, and so I should stay away from stoves and pots and knives for as long as I can. I ask them if I will have to cook when I am married, and they explained everything. So it will be all right. I will tell you when you return. And when will that be? I hope it will be soon because there is something in Paris now that frightens me. I sense danger all over. The führer writes or telephones to say that he will visit, and we prepare again. Flowers mostly. The rest of it stays upstairs without comment, as if it had known what was to be.
Elizabeth likes this turn of phrase, as if all the tables and chairs, the dresser, the bed with its fat pillows might speak of their ambition and dashed hopes.
And then we wait. And then there is a telegram saying he is not coming this week. Then E takes the flowers out of the rooms. You should see it when he gets into the taxi and I hand him the bouquets, pack them in as if he would be preserved in flowers. He says his apartment is like a florist’s shop, the most terrible florist in Paris, who never sells a single stem.
E is worrisome. I wish he might stay at work in the evenings. I am afraid he will cause trouble, for himself and for other people. The Polish boy waits for him in the street most days. Once the police told him to go away. If loitering is a crime in Paris, he will soon be arrested. I am afraid for that, too, because now we have met him and he knows our names.
Most evenings, I travel right back to Saint-Denis after work, but yesterday, I stayed in the city. I do not really know why. I felt quite lost, and I began to walk. Though I managed to put one foot ahead of the other, I did not know where I was going. It was as if I were asleep, Paris hung with soft, gray fog, which turned to rain and then back to mist. I found myself in front of Sylvia’s bookshop—I had walked all the way in the damp to this very spot without any plan to do so.
I stepped inside intending to ask for a drink of water. The shop seemed nearly empty, and silent. I stood, shivering, trying to understand. Then I heard, faintly, from the back room, the sound of a woman’s voice. I could not make out the words or even the language, but I became convinced that the voice was yours. You had returned to Paris but had not told me—or you had never really left. I wanted to go toward your voice, but I did not want to discover or embarrass you. I turned away, went back out into the street to look for a taxi.
I tried not to write to you, but I could not help it. I think I should not bother you—you who have so many important things to do. I am sure New York is keeping you busy and entertained. And yet, somehow writing to you makes me think you are here. For a few minutes, you are standing beside me or sitting across a table. There is a bottle of wine between us. We are holding hands around it.
But in the end, when I try to stop writing the letter and sign my name, I find I can’t do it, and I think of more to tell you.
Such as this: Marie returned from Seville disgusted by the fascists and how they have destroyed the monuments and beautiful places. A chapel she saw was saved from fire but ruined all the same, the ceiling black with smoke, everything drenched. She is furious and frightened. Ann was angry that she went. But Marie said it was her research. And Ann said, your research could kill us. So now I think we will all be staying
home. I must say I do not really know what that means. The English word is not sufficient.
1940
Miss Moore writes:
Though we would very much enjoy traveling with you, Mother and I are entangled beyond ingenuity. Our illness has made us like snakes in alcohol, and that is abhorrent. You must come back and help us by example to have leisurely habits and better health.
From Key West, Miss Moore requests snake fangs, a rattlesnake rattle, and alligator teeth. After Elizabeth wraps the parcel, she worries that it will arouse suspicion—already it sounds broken inside—and be torn open by some diligent postal clerk in Brooklyn, who will now have further cause to wonder about the eccentricities of the Moore household. But the package arrives safely, unbreached.
I have always wanted to see the hypodermic opening in a snake fang, but could not have anticipated what a treatise on specialization the entire implement is—with that swirling taper and high polish. To think of your sending two fangs and two alligator teeth. The rattle in nine or ten ways is a mechanism of inexhaustible interest. . . . I felt a slight shudder of superstition as I first held it up, as if I were touching the bones of Osiris.
Who traveled, Elizabeth knows, out to sea in the boat of his own coffin.
Miss Moore continues:
Thank you for the descriptions of chameleons, ostrich, and the bathing grackles. One of an animal’s more endearing savageries—her habit of carrying things with her and keeping guard over them.
The owl is perhaps my favorite—nothing it seems to me can rival the look of remoteness in its eyes.
I have always wanted to see cork trees like those under which Sancho Panza and Don Quixote rested; the Hispanic Museum catalogue of locks, grilles, and weapons made me imagine that wrought iron is one of my hobbies.
When Miss Moore’s mother dies, her handwriting in these letters suddenly appears as child’s scrawl, oversized, slanting downward across the page. I’m trying to be peaceable about things, Elizabeth; and not aggrieved that life is just nothing like what life should be.