Lilli seemed too far away even to miss. The driving lessons and Portuguese classes and “my own work” were set aside. It was all Elizabeth could manage to teach two courses, she was so terrified. She drank, though not as often as Lota predicted. She had a terrible case of the Asian flu, requiring hospitalization. She sambaed alone in her apartment on Carnival night. She was passed over for the National Book Award. And one evening, at a dinner party hosted by the poet Carolyn Kizer, she fell in love with a pixyish blond, blue-eyed twenty-three-year-old, the newly pregnant fifth wife of a forty-eight-year-old Seattle artist.
It was Roxanne Cumming’s love letters, not Lilli’s, that Elizabeth tossed into the swirling waters of the Rio São Francisco from the deck of a paddle-wheel steamer a year later when she took her last river trip in Brazil, alone. Roxanne was so young, not practiced in deception, and Lota had found them out.
Spring 1977
PUSEY LIBRARY, HARVARD YARD
My grade was a B, the first I’d received since high school chemistry, and then I’d been proud—my B-minus was the highest grade in a tough class. I didn’t mind this B so much as the knowledge that Miss Bishop thought I’d cheated. A feeling of shame, edged with anger, burned in me every time I recalled her accusation, burned so that I couldn’t think. I knew there was no arguing with her. Another student had defended her use of “dime” in a poem set in British Jamaica; the student had heard English schoolchildren use the word as slang, referring to a tenpenny piece, and she was making a point about American cultural hegemony. Before the next class meeting, Miss Bishop had phoned a friend in London to check the usage and reported back, almost gleefully, that the student was wrong. My sin had been far greater in her eyes, I was sure. Had she told Professor Fitzgerald?
There had been no more poetry workshops or Advanced Verse Writing courses left to take by the spring semester of my senior year, and I’d persuaded Professor Fitzgerald—“Fitzy,” we called him fondly, never to his face—to supervise an independent study. I wanted to keep on writing poetry, or thought I did. Each time we met in his spartan office in Harvard’s new, underground Pusey Library, I wondered what Elizabeth Bishop might have said to him. Had she attempted to verify her hunch that I’d double-dipped with an assignment from his class? Or had she merely assumed (correctly) that no student would have written Catullan hendecasyllabics of her own free will? I still wished I knew what she thought of the poem, and I didn’t seem to be able to write much more now.
Professor Fitzgerald, too, seemed diminished, no longer the twinkle-eyed tale-spinner who’d held us captive with recitations of Chaucer and Virgil in his smoker’s sotto voce. When I saw him pacing ahead of me through Harvard Yard—its patches of winter-brown lawn cordoned off and strewn with grass seed to make them green again in time for commencement—and turning off toward Pusey, his waterproof canvas book bag slung over a stooped shoulder, I slowed my steps and let him reach the building first.
Pusey Library wasn’t really a building. It was a bunker, constructed below ground to house overflow books from the immense, many-columned Widener Library next door, and opened just a year earlier. One of Alexander Calder’s black steel stabiles, Onion, marked the otherwise easy-to-miss glassed-in entryway, seeming to advertise the subterranean world beyond, down a short flight of steps—a bibliophobe’s Hades. Sometimes I reached Professor Fitzgerald’s office from the bowels of Widener, taking a rickety elevator down seven stories from the fourth-floor entrance to the stacks and following a path marked in crimson footprints through steam tunnels, then emerging into a surprisingly bright shelving area on Pusey 2, one floor below ground level.
Professor Fitzgerald may have liked his new office, one of twenty neat compartments bordering a sunken interior courtyard, open to the sky, where plantings had yet to grow but sunlight streamed in. I didn’t know where his office had been previously, but he seemed to me out of place, tucked away amid volumes on sociology and economic theory, and his own shelves were bare. I’d owned a paperback copy of his translation of the Odyssey since taking a course on epic narrative at Bennington, and early in this semester I’d acquired the blush-red clothbound In the Rose of Time, a collection of his poems, some of them first published in the 1930s when Fitzgerald was a Harvard undergraduate. “What should you know at last when / Spirit’s spun from you, bobbin of bone, ghostbody in the sun?” he’d asked in “Elegy.” No answer would come from the books in this new neighborhood.
I had never seen the large stucco house on Bryant Street where he’d lived with his family of six children until recently either, only the drab faculty apartment he’d moved to on Fernald Drive, near the Radcliffe Quad, after leaving his wife of twenty-five years for a young professor of English literature at Yale. I’d taken him a loaf of banana bread I baked one week, in lieu of a poem, and handed it to the slim, dark-haired woman who answered the door and welcomed my gift.
I’d changed living quarters too. I had a new boyfriend, a senior English major descended, like me, from Harvard men, but unlike mine, his father and grandfather had left college with degrees and made something of themselves. Finished with his courses at midyear, he moved to an apartment near campus where he’d write his thesis on Wallace Stevens and begin a career as a freelance magazine journalist. I was in love, and my boyfriend’s offer to share his modest trust-fund income with me until I graduated in June, enabling me to forfeit the scholarship that covered my dorm fees, shocked me into accepting his invitation to move in with him. His spontaneous generosity felt like—was—love.
We shared an ancestor, I would later learn, Thomas Dudley, a colonial governor of Massachusetts who’d built the first house in Cambridge. My boyfriend’s branch of the family stayed on the East Coast and prospered; mine headed west to risk and ruin. Still, that trace of common DNA may have contributed to the feeling I sometimes had that he was an adorable little brother, though he was a month older. I liked his playful, impulsive nature. He hadn’t lived out in the world as I had, and for a time he relied on my superior wisdom—the Morgan Memorial for secondhand furniture and kitchenware, recipes from The Vegetarian Epicure. We would not qualify for food stamps, as I had before returning to college two years earlier. The ten dollars an hour I charged several Harvard students for elementary piano lessons and two English literature PhDs, beleaguered mothers of young children, for help in revising their dissertations for publication, made me feel rich.
My plans for the future were vague. I’d applied for a Michael Rockefeller grant from a lavish travel fund honoring the “brief but intense” life of the twenty-three-year-old son of Nelson Rockefeller who’d disappeared on an anthropological expedition in New Guinea in 1961. It was Harvard’s only substantial post-baccalaureate fellowship that didn’t require academic work, and I’d proposed a year in Paris where I’d write poetry. Freedom beckoned. Maybe my boyfriend would come along if I won the competition.
I signed up for the LSAT and GRE, but took neither one. For a psychology course that semester I’d interviewed a young female associate at a prestigious Boston law firm, one of the first women hired to her position. She had time for the interview because she was home on a two-month maternity leave. The fatigue in her eyes and my own sleepiness kept me in bed on the Saturday morning of the LSAT. As for grad school in English, my work for the middle-aged PhDs had been alarming. Both had been off the job market for so long that their professors, eminent men of letters, had retired or forgotten them. The grad students in my seminar classes seemed to feel nearly as hopeless; there would be no jobs for most of them either.
I was happy living the life I had, studying psychology and early American literature, taking piano lessons for another self-directed course and practicing seriously for the first time in years. I was in love and I felt loved. Perhaps this was why I suddenly had nothing to say in verse. My only problem was disappointing Professor Fitzgerald. Each week when I had little to show beyond revisions of old poems, he nodded sympathetically. Why not try writing poésie trouvée?—found p
oetry, he explained, the poetry of the street, derived from newspaper headlines, billboard texts, graffiti. He urged me to find beauty, form, grace in what was given to me.
I thought of my piano teacher Patricia Zander’s advice when I was deciding on a program for the recital I planned at semester’s end: “You can only sing the songs you know.” For the concert, along with the Beethoven sonata I was learning that spring, I’d pulled out of my scant repertoire Schumann’s Papillons(Butterflies), opus 2, his first suite of fantasy pieces. But in writing poetry, what did I already know? What did I want to remember?
Professor Fitzgerald’s shifting domestic arrangements may have prompted him to briefly set aside his latest Olympian translation project, the Aeneid, to write a short memoir of his childhood in Springfield, Illinois. “Notes on a Distant Prospect” was published in the New Yorker the same week Pusey Library opened its doors, and Fitzy’s student admirers felt something like an illicit thrill to be let in on a few scenes from our reticent professor’s boyhood. What we learned was almost incalculably sad. The piece was a fond reminiscence of the “humorous and tender, lame personage” who was his father, bedridden with osteo-tuberculosis the year Robert turned eight and, until his death ten years later, “every evening my companion.” Robert Sr.’s crippling illness was not the tragedy, though. Indeed, in surviving so long the disease that had been expected to take him swiftly, “my father was given to me, and the gift was beyond estimation.” Robert’s mother had died of puerperal fever when the boy was three, and four years later the little brother who’d survived his birth died of influenza—“they had been removed as by a razor.” Our professor had discovered early that “the fate of the breathing person was to be hurt and then annihilated.” In his father’s case there had been a reprieve.
But no father could be only saint, or martyr. In the years immediately following his wife’s death, while he could still walk with the aid of crutches, Robert Fitzgerald Sr. had been “one of those Irishmen who when they drink go blindly under some wave that has been mounting inside them . . . and are different men in the violence of the wave.” There were times when Robert’s father became “a changed and redolent stranger of whom one has to be afraid.” Some evenings, the boy was sent by his grandmother, whose home they shared after his mother’s death, to fetch his father from a shabby downtown office where he could be found playing cards with “old cronies . . . whisky and syphon bottles beside them.” His father’s worsening illness brought a reprieve from this too. Never again well enough to go to an office or play a poker game, his father was confined to bed in a second-story room next to Robert’s, “not large, with bay windows under a maple tree, and he could look out over a quiet street toward a long slanting lawn where the afternoon sunlight lay, and beyond that to a grove of elms.” No longer “crazed and sodden, cut off from himself,” his father had been returned to Robert with “everything to impart, as I had everything to learn, of the discipline, humility, and humor proper to a man.”
I wished my own father would come back to me, a “personage” from whom I could learn more than how not to live my life. Perhaps I’d been drawn to Harvard so I could do it over, differently, for both of us. Sometimes I thought of him arriving in Boston by train at age seventeen for the start of his freshman year in the fall of 1938, after stopping in Kansas to meet relatives, who’d given him his first drink. He waited tables in the freshman dining hall, serving his classmates, a requirement of his scholarship. For spending money he delivered newspapers, running up and down the stairwells of the Harvard dorms in the early mornings. He’d never owned a raincoat in sunny Southern California, and he’d bought a cheap slicker that caused him to sweat unbearably in the humidity on wet days. But I knew little more. He’d won a book prize for straight A’s that year, and the next he’d succumbed to mental illness, to drink, and been asked to leave.
I was never told to fetch my father from a drunken poker game, but I remembered the year 1966, when I was twelve and he’d lost his driver’s license. He’d borrowed a neighbor boy’s ten-speed bike to get to a bar (my mother allowed no liquor in the house) and, weaving home late at night, he’d turned too soon into our driveway, colliding with a concrete lamppost, dislocating his shoulder. If I’d been a year younger, I wouldn’t have been permitted to visit him in the hospital, and I wished I didn’t have to join my mother at his bedside the next evening. He was groggy and didn’t seem to know I was there, the way he often was at home. But in the hospital with nurses looking on, things should have been different. I should have been able to wish him a speedy recovery, to hope he’d get well soon.
I remembered the day I’d come home from school knowing he was in the house—he’d lost the last of his city planning jobs and stayed home sleeping much of the day while my mother was at work. I had the backdoor key tied around my neck on a shoelace, and I’d used it many afternoons to let myself in. But that day I wanted Dad to let me in. I knocked on the door. I banged on the glass with the key in my fist until it broke around my hand. Still no one came, and I swept up the broken glass, mercifully unhurt but afraid to tell my mother what I’d done when she got home. Why hadn’t I used my key? Who would knock on a pane of glass? It would cost precious dollars to make the repair.
A few years later I would discover in Professor Fitzgerald’s new translation that he had made a bold alteration in the Aeneid ’s famous opening line, “Arms and the man I sing.” His version began, “I sing of warfare and a man at war.” He had rendered the epic personal by telling the story of “a man” rather than “the man.” In 1977, making my weekly visits to his office, where I found him looking out on an all-too-near prospect, the unlovely courtyard, into shafts of sunlight from the living world above us, I could think only of what it must have cost this small, quiet man, a devout Catholic whose forehead I’d seen marked with ashes on a Wednesday in late February, to cause a rift in the family he had made: the battles that must have preceded and ensued, internal as well as familial. Had he cut himself out of his wife and children’s lives “as by a razor” to set up housekeeping with his new, young Penelope? I was grateful I had no part in this drama, and thankful for each afternoon he walked from Fernald Drive to Pusey Library to nod his head over my slight efforts in verse.
I scanned his memoir for clues to his present state of mind. Of long summer days at play with his brother, he’d written, “Imagination like a mercurial fluid ran where it would.” And was this sentence, in a passage following the account of his father’s drunkenness, a bid for his own forgiveness? “No general view of things would ever seem just to me unless it comprehended Heaven and Hell—a range in experience at least as great as that between my exaltations as a child and my glimpses of anguish and evil.” Perhaps the answer lay in his poems: given longer to live than his father, he would not rest content to be a “ghostbody in the sun.”
I wrote a love poem for my boyfriend on his birthday in early May and turned it in as the last week’s assignment. I called it “The Swing.” He was an athlete, adept at racket sports I didn’t play, but we’d spent idle hours that spring tossing a softball, joining pickup games on the quad. I admired his form at bat. The poem played with the elements of grammar in the simple sentence so often used as an example in grade school English classes—“the boy hit the ball.”
. . . subject and predicate
subject-verb-object,
blackboard diagram
of a primal event—
a child’s mind grasps
new relations,
impulse and action,
desire and fulfillment:
the world splits
as he takes his swing. . . .
The rest of the poem wasn’t much good, and Professor Fitzgerald let me know it. But at least I’d written something new, and we had lines to talk about. We parted with a handshake. I might never see him again.
The final acts of the semester played out: my recital, with no hitches since I’d decided to read from the scores rather than
perform by memory; a final in psychology, for which I’d filled two blue books; a paper on Edward Taylor and an oral exam in English 270, Early American Writing. The grass in Harvard Yard grew green for commencement, my commencement, six years after I’d started at Bennington.
In late May I received a letter from Professor Fitzgerald, handwritten in black ink on a half sheet of English department letterhead:
24 May
Dear Megan,
You left me your copy! It’s a better poem than anyone listening to my grumbling would think. I’ve put an A on the record for your 91r and hope this cheerful token will be succeeded by others.
R.F.
Maybe it didn’t matter any longer what Miss Bishop thought of me. And if she’d asked Professor Fitzgerald to confirm her suspicions, I’d been forgiven by him.
5
Miracle
LILLI HAD BEEN the only person in whom Elizabeth could safely confide about Lota’s distressing obsession with Flamengo Park and the feuding that preceded her departure for Seattle. Now Lilli was the only one she could speak to frankly about the turmoil during what Lota would call “that dramatic year,” 1966.
It hadn’t taken Lilli long to sense a cooling in Elizabeth’s passion for her “Danish Viking” following the dinner party at which Elizabeth had met the young Roxanne Cumming. There were fewer letters, and in them Elizabeth had begun to “almost enjoy” teaching, thought of Lilli only “a great deal,” and reasserted her commitment to Lota. “You know exactly how I feel about you,” she wrote to Lilli, “also that I could never leave L—it’s my life, I’m afraid, and I wish it weren’t so complicated.” For the moment, the complications didn’t trouble her; she was feeling “pretty cheerful about the future, really.” And then the letters stopped, until a June 9 missive from the San Juan Islands, north of Seattle, where Elizabeth was staying in a “weird old cottage” set among fir trees and “great twisted old pines” on the edge of a lagoon. She had made the trip with Roxanne, who was due to have her baby “in about a month” and was setting up house in advance of her husband’s arrival to teach at a summer art school. Elizabeth badly needed a rest—“I swear that university makes one work too hard.” She’d been suffering from asthma and eczema, she told Lilli, but promised, “I’ll be beautiful again when I get back,” in early July. She’d be staying away a full month longer than she’d promised both Lota and Lilli.
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