How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

by Mameve Medwed

  I pictured my mother and Henrietta in their Birkenstocks and denim wrap skirts, travel guides, maps, foreign currency sorted into their identical theftproof travel bags. I remembered their fine bone structure, their good manners, their gentleness, their gentlewomanliness. I rubbed my hand across the waxed mahogany dining table. A bowl of marble fruit sat in the center. The sideboard held candlesticks and a tea service. Cups in their saucers looked as if any minute they would be filled for arriving guests. In the kitchen hung their neat aprons; there were plants on the windowsills, and lavender sachets tucked into bedroom drawers. Everything spoke of quiet, order, comfort. Unconventional? “But they loved each other,” I said.

  “Love.” Lavinia made the dismissive sound the French do when they push air through pursed lips.

  “And they were so happy.”

  I expected her to tsk away happiness, too. Instead, she ignored me. “The situation was embarrassing. Not to mention my brother’s stupid book…”

  “Really? You were so supportive. You gave the book party for him.”

  “Which you refused to attend.”

  “For good reason, need I point out.”

  “One has to keep up appearances. Besides, he’s my brother. You’ve got to be there for those you love. How would it look? And it is a novel. Not fact, but a work of fiction, after all.”

  I kept my mouth shut. I studied the photograph of the mirror that hung on the wall across from me. Nineteenth century. Gold leaf. $1,200 was typed underneath its pasted Polaroid. Which one of us was going to end up with that? I could pretty much guess.

  “Love. Happiness. Such fleeting abstractions broke up our family,” she said.

  “Hardly. They waited until we were grown. Until we were in de pen dent.” I didn’t mention that she had a husband at the time, the stiff and constipated Elliot, who had the bearing of a four-star general and the personality of a flea, and whose wedding ring I had handed over at the altar under the rose-and-lily-of-the-valley-festooned canopy. “They always put us first.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My father suffered terribly. Yours, well, he’d barely cut into those casseroles Emily had left behind in the freezer for him before he was hula-dancing with Kiki in some Maui resort. But my father. I blame Henrietta and Emily for his heart attack.”

  I pictured Bickford Potter, his Tweedledum shape, his glasses of port, his plates of pâté, his lust for sweetbreads and brains and tripe, Awful offal, Ned had called it. His hatred of exercise. He’d summon Henrietta from the kitchen to reach for a book off the shelf two feet away from him. I thought of his attacks of gout, his big toe grotesquely swollen on the piled pillows in the living room. I remembered the minor infarctions, the angioplasty, the midnight rushes to Mount Auburn Hospital well before Henrietta and Emily took their giant step.

  “All water under the bridge,” Lavinia announced. “Let’s get down to business.” She daubed dramatically at her eyes though I didn’t see the gleam of a single tear brimming onto her shellacked cheek. She shuffled her papers. She put a stack in front of herself; a mere three pages in front of me. “I made a list of everything that belonged to my mother. Another list of everything that belonged to yours. The items we can’t determine whose were whose, we’ll discuss and divide.” She waved a sheet of red stickers; it looked like those Candy Buttons we used to buy at Irving’s when we were kids. “I thought I’d put these stickers on everything that’s mine. Then everything that’s yours will be stickerless.”

  “Shirts and skins,” I pointed out. Though I sensed that our particular teams wouldn’t be fairly matched in numbers or in strength.

  “That’s an interesting way to phrase it.”

  We’d received letters from our mothers’ lawyers. They’d left us each separate small legacies—small because, guilt-ridden, they’d typically turned most of their own savings over to the husbands they’d abandoned. Knowing, the lawyer had explained, the husbands would in turn provide for their heirs. (Which Uncle Bick did, of course, for Ned and Lavinia when he died.) But all the house hold goods and personal belongings the lawyers were sure we would divide amicably in the spirit that our prematurely deceased mothers would have wished.

  “So here’s what I have figured is mine,” Lavinia said amicably.

  “Isn’t the list a little lopsided?” I replied amicably.

  “You may think so, but this list itemizes my mother’s things.”

  “Our mothers’ things. They bought everything jointly, shared everything.”

  “Not quite,” Lavinia said. “I had many conversations with my mother before she died. She was very clear on what she wanted me to have.”

  “All news to me. How come I wasn’t let in on any of this? Did she leave written instructions?”

  “That’s beside the point. I knew what she wanted. I was setting up a house hold. I had the big colonial in Concord to furnish.”

  “And what about me?” I asked, less amicably now.

  “Your circumstances are different. You’re renting that tiny apartment. No room for a dining table or sideboard. Any silver you’d leave there would be sure to be stolen. Let’s face it, your neighborhood keeps turning up in the police blotter/crime watch column of the Cambridge Chronicle. Plus…” She paused.

  “Plus?” Little Sir Echo, c’est moi.

  “After my divorce, my rooms are emptier than ever. Elliot took loads.”

  “Excuse me, but you’re not taking loads?”

  She shook her head. “You have your little business. You’re a collector. The kind of stuff our mothers amassed is not to your taste. You’re more a flea-market, tag-sale, kitsch kind of gal.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Abby. You know I’m not materialistic. I never cared for ‘things’ the way you did. You were always a hoarder as a kid. Remember your collections of shells, and buttons, and colored pipe cleaners? I was better at sharing. Ask any of our parents’ friends—you know how everyone always called me so generous. If it were up to me alone, I’d give you what ever you want.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, really. But I have an obligation. It’s my mother’s dying wishes I need to honor.” She sniffed. She squeezed out a crocodile tear. “I could never ever live with myself if I didn’t take what she so patently wanted me to have.”

  And that, dear reader, is how I ended up with a few plates, the everyday silver, a small rug, some platters, a dieffenbachia plant, a photo of Henrietta and Emily on a camel, and the chamber pot.

  Six

  I’m back in my booth. The place is deserted. Everyone’s at Brimfield, dealers and buyers alike. I should have gone myself. Since my Antiques Roadshow appearance, stuff has been flying off my shelves. Now so many bald patches dot my four square feet that a transplant of objets is well overdue. How long can I trade on my fifteen minutes of fame? How long will the customers keep flocking in, hoping that a wobbly three-legged stool or a faded tapestry will be the next ticket to the Antiques Roadshow’s astonished O and a kid’s college tuition or a grandparent’s retirement RV? The way I figure it, I’ve got about one minute more to bask in the glow of Carol’s makeup and my mother’s ability to find the diamond in a haystack of cubic zirconias. In fact, I’m steeling myself for an eventual decline in traffic that I can’t blame on Brimfield’s week of mecca for the fanatic pilgrims of collectibles.

  I suppose you assume it’s residual feelings for Clyde that’s keeping me from traipsing those farmers’ fields in search of Stickley and Duncan Phyfe, Limoges and Imari, colonial samplers and oxidized fur coats. Just because I met Clyde at Brimfield doesn’t mean that the sight of bed warmers and the smell of fried dough will provoke such a madeleine moment I’ll have to take to my bed in my own Inman Square cork-lined room. I don’t miss him. I don’t mind hearing his name whispered among the dealers here in the constant breeze of gossip that circulates the stalls better than its stop-and-go ventilation system. I don’t mind stories abo
ut the wedding to which everyone was invited except—understandably—me. (The saumon en croûte was a little dry, Gus loyally reported. The flowers, over the top. The bride far too gussied up for good taste, plus looking a little fat.) I am not affected when the fat turns out to be a pregnancy with twins. I don’t even bother to do the arithmetic to prove that the seeds for those twins were sowed when their father was still planting a few seeds inside me under our mutually owned Amish quilt. I don’t care that Clyde and his bride have opened a shop on the North Shore. I could not care less when I hear the shop is flourishing.

  The reason I’m not going to Brimfield is much simpler. I have no extra money to spend. I’ve already used up too much replenishing my fast-depleting inventory. Wary of overconfidence, and because I come from save-for-a-rainy-day Yankee stock, I can’t count on reruns to match the initial big bang of Roadshow luck. Plus, there’s my Rindge and Latin part-time help. There’s overhead. There are slices of pizza and movies at the Kendall Square Cinema. I’ve put the legacy from my mother into bonds, mad money saved only for an emergency. Meanwhile, I’m waiting to retake possession of my chamber pot. And trying not to focus on the implication for me that justice delayed is justice denied. If, like love, the course of true justice never runs smooth, this particular path of justice is stalled. Nevertheless, the legal fees accumulate at a whopping speed, outpacing both the tortoise and the hare. It’s May. What’s happened so far? you might ask.

  Nothing, I’m forced to inform you. The chamber pot still sits in escrow in Mary Agnes’s vault. I picture it, its plain utilitarian shape, its unmentionable-in-polite-company functionality. Confined to such hard cold steel quarters, flanked by grandma’s tiaras and grandpa’s blue-chip stock certificates, it’s the wallflower. I feel a bond. I know what it’s like to have your value so hidden few can appreciate it.

  Meanwhile, lawyers write letters to each other. Their clients refuse to budge.

  Are you surprised? Me? The wuss, the wimp, the pushover, the patsy, the mark. Aren’t you astonished that I didn’t say to Lavinia, Take it, it’s yours.

  Well, I didn’t. Why?

  Because it isn’t hers. Because I’m developing a spine. Because Ned still absents himself and lets Lavinia speak for him. Because that makes me mad enough to refuse to allow former friends to take advantage of me. And because, deep down, it belonged to a poet who—with Robert—took enormous risks for love. A poet who scratched onto a humble vessel the title of her greatest testament to that love. And because my mother—with Henrietta—bought it in Florence, the city where she was happiest, then lugged it home. Because she would have wanted me to have it after she was gone.

  “Right now it’s Lavinia’s word against yours,” Mary Agnes had said to me. “Jim Snodgrass and I think the only solution is to sell it and divide the proceeds down the middle. Mind you, the offers are pouring in. Amazing the power of TV.”

  No less amazing than the stubborn streak I’ve just discovered, inherited no doubt from R. Griffin Randolph, Professor of Tenacity. Maybe I would have been more flexible, under other circumstances. Maybe if I had been dealing with a real person, a person of understanding, sympathy, warmth. Maybe if Ned, for the sake of old times, old wounds, and overall fairness, had taken my side.

  “Another solution,” Mary Agnes went on, “might be for the two families to donate it to a university library. And get a huge tax credit. Not to mention the little plaque in the museum case saying Gift of…”

  I thought of Lavinia’s ostentatious philanthropy, her coercive childhood work on behalf of the Save the Children Fund, the two pages of volunteer activities touted in her CV, the duly reported charity benefits that she and Elliot held in their eighteenth-century Concord colonial. “Did you run this idea by Lavinia?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And…?”

  “Over her dead body, is what she said.”

  Now I shift my own body in my seat. For the last two hours I’ve been playing musical chairs; I’m starting to regret I sold the throne with the arms that ended in dragon’s heads. All that reading I got done curled up in it. The Sheraton chair is too narrow, the Windsor too high, the bentwood too low. I feel like Goldilocks. I remember an architectural study that discovered no chair, even the most ergonomically designed, was ever comfortable for more than an hour. Today I could supply the proof to that theory since I haven’t lasted more than thirty minutes in any one of them. Maybe I’m restless because I’m reading Flush. Let me confess that if I didn’t have more than a literary interest, I might not make it through. Flush, no To the Light house, is rather precious for my taste. I can’t work up sufficient sympathy for his adventures with other mean dogs, nasty maids, and the bad guys who kidnap and torture him despite how easily some of his disasters could be metaphors for my own woes.

  Yet what makes it all worth the tribulations of acting as a scab to cross my own private picket line into the Harvard Bookstore, of persisting in the book through three changes of chairs, are the following lines:

  Flush was equally at a loss to account for Miss Barrett’s emotions. There she would lie hour after hour passing her hand over a white page with a black stick…She had drawn “a very neat and characteristic portrait of Flush, humorously made rather like myself,” and she had written underneath it that it “only fails of being an excellent substitute for mine through being more worthy than I can be counted.”

  That the chamber pot shows up in a photograph of the Brownings’ bedroom at Casa Guidi is more than great. Add to that a description, in Virginia Woolf ’s words, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s attempts to sketch Flush—and, wow, even a semi-well-educated person such as myself can’t begin to parse the thrill of it. All I can come up with is priceless!—an adjective pretty much devalued when you consider the MasterCard ad.

  I picture the sweet drawing of the cocker spaniel with the word Flush written underneath it now sitting in Mary Agnes’s vault. I miss my chamber pot. It’s like a child sent to summer camp for the first time, a kid setting out for freshman year at a college on the West Coast, a quarantined pet. Not that an inanimate object requires Solomonic solutions. Still, Mary Agnes should understand that such feelings, such deep maternal yearnings, can only prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this chamber pot belongs to me.

  I shut the book. My bottom is sore from the nail heads, springs, and horse hair upholstery. Besides, it’s almost lunchtime. Why not go home, make myself a sandwich, throw my laundry in the machine. I might pay some bills. I might call my lawyer and check on my case. It’s a glorious day, not that you can actually see the sun in this windowless bunker of small and large treasures, of various degrees of junk, of twisting aisles of hulking dark mahogany.

  I turn off my lights. I hang a closed sign on a plaster bust of Marie Antoinette. Maybe I’ll walk along the Charles. Business is so lousy it’s not worth coming back this afternoon. Even Gus, who complains of the heat and what the muddy fields do to his bad knees, is at Brimfield; I miss having someone to talk to just in case I wanted to talk to someone. I decide to bring Kovels’ Know Your Collectibles to a bench at the Kennedy School park. So that, professionally speaking, I’m not wasting my time.

  “Bye, Abby,” says Frieda, who is filing her nails at the long desk opposite the entrance no one is entering. Over her head hangs an oxen yoke, which a certificate underneath guarantees as a true colonial artifact. “You’ve got the right idea. What with Brimfield and all, just sitting around here is a waste of a good salesperson’s time.”

  Mail crams my box in the front hall. I unlock the metal grille with A. Randolph slotted into it. Who am I fooling? In contrast to the Daniel and the William and the Omar, the A. practically screams to any potential rapist there’s a female living alone in 3B.

  I dump the letters and magazines onto the communal table. Antiques magazine, Maine Antiques Digest, Art & Antiques. Bills. Ads. A letter from my lawyer…What now? I wonder. I set it aside.

  At the bottom of the pile I spot a small y
ellow oblong box. A window is cut into the cardboard. Under its clear plastic lies a vial with a blue top. It looks like a smaller version of a bottle your doctor uses to collect a urine sample. But this is special. lourdes water bottle enclosed! I read. precious item inside! Don’t you dare laugh, you who would dismiss this as junk mail without a second thought. Unlike me. Even as a nonbeliever, I still attach meaning to signs and miracles. After all, as Carol on Antiques Roadshow once pointed out, there are no atheists in foxholes. Who couldn’t use a few healing sprinkles? Carefully I extract the Lourdes water bottle. Its precious liquid must be so pure I can hardly see it. I tear the box apart.

  No wonder I can’t make out the water; it’s not there. If, however, I mail in twelve dollars and return the vial, my free, genuine Lourdes water will be poured into it and sent right back to me. What’s more, if I up the ante to sixteen dollars, I can add prayers for—check one—financial difficulties, personal health, alcohol problems, world peace. What about love? I want to ask the scamming nuns. What about fairness? I want to ask the fraudulent priests. Where’s the prayer for that? I throw the vial in the trash. Is nothing sacred? Isn’t there anybody you can trust?

  I pick up the letter from my lawyer. I open it. There’s a small note stapled to a large Xerox. From the desk of Mary Agnes…festoons the top. Underneath, scrawled in red magic marker is: A, FYI. Yrs., MA.

  She has sent me an article copied from the New York Times. The headline announces T. Rex Bones, Uncovered with a Pick, Will Be Sold with a Hammer. I sit down. I start to read. Here’s the essence encapsulated and distilled: