How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

by Mameve Medwed

  Gus reaches for the iron. He wrests it from Fred’s vise of a grip. “You don’t have kids, Fred.”

  “With that, I could get me a few.” He laughs. “And a couple of wives to go with them.”

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “And you an antiques dealer. You mean you bought it without knowing what it is?”

  Once again Gus comes to my rescue. “The girl’s got an eye,” he boasts. Proud parental glee shines from his face. What he doesn’t confide—an omission for which I’m grateful enough to buy a few cupid sconces myself—is that my eye was on the wrong prize, a corn sheller made by the Witchell manufacturing company, a corn sheller rattled off an assembly line along with a zillion of its clones.

  “One of a kind,” Fred says now. He pulls out a couple of rickety old chairs. “Take a load off,” he says, “and I’ll explain.”

  He clears his throat. Smooths his hair. Straightens his shoulders. I recognize the all-too-familiar professorial grinding of the gears. And when he starts to speak, his tone is professorial, too. I lean forward, half expecting to hear, Dim the lights, here’s the first slide.

  “Here’s the story,” he starts. He takes his time, though Gus is emitting impatient, get-on-with-it sighs.

  “Get on with it,” Gus groans.

  “Well, back in the old days, your 1700s, our li’l ole colonies were rich in natural resources. As I’m sure you know.” He raises his eyebrows.

  “Yes,” we chime.

  “And some of these resources were considered the exclusive property of the king. The English king.” He stops.

  “Yes,” we prompt.

  “So, at any rate…”

  “So at any rate,” I coach.

  “What is this, some kind of choral reading?” Gus snorts. “Get on with it, Fred.”

  He picks up the pace. “At any rate, there were huge forests of white pine in New England. The best kind of wood for shipbuilding. For masts. So the king, being a king, made a law that any tree a foot from the ground and two feet in diameter belonged to his navy. And to drive this rule home, to make sure there were no mistakes, they decided they needed some kind of X-marks-the-spot doohickey.” He stops. He clears his throat again. It sounds like he’s gargling. He shoots his thumb at the iron Gus is now clutching close to his chest.

  By this point Gus and I are both nodding and exhaling in perfect unison, such mirror images of each other we could be synchronistic swimmers butterfly-stroking and somersaulting for Team USA. “So…?” we push.

  “So this is it. The King’s Arrow. Take a look.”

  We all screech our chairs together in a neat little circle and examine the branding iron’s base. The three crude lines—which I previously dismissed as, well, three crude lines—now flaunt their intrinsic arrow-ness. How could I not have spotted this? I wonder. I blame the distraction of Todd Tucker. I blame my immersion in the literature of the plains. Underneath in raised metal blocks is GR III. Letters and numerals I would have rejected, in another less-enlightened moment, as grade three, third choice, third place, undesirable.

  “Georgeus Rexus the third,” Fred says, gloating. “Or however you say that bugger’s name in Latin. Mad King George, the tea party dude.” Do his eyes mist up? He brushes away something glistening on his cheek. “Never seen another one myself. Scarcer than hen’s teeth.”

  Gus runs his finger over GR III. He cradles the King’s Arrow like a newborn. He’s almost rocking it. “I had a hunch about this,” he says. “Didn’t I, Abby?”

  I nod. “Full credit where credit is due. And I’m awfully glad you did,” I add.

  “You’re one lucky dame, Abby,” Fred crows.

  If my first instinct is to answer luck had nothing to do with it, I can’t bring myself to lie. “I know,” I admit, a gracious concession if I say so myself. “Now what do I do?”

  “Put it in a vault. A safe. Until you have a plan.”

  I think of my chamber pot in Mary Agnes’s vault. Not that I would ever send the King’s Arrow off to join its fellow antique. Who knows what contamination from legal disputes it might suffer just by sharing the same space. Add to that the possibilities of a mix-up with one client’s trust indentures, another client’s emerald lavaliere.

  “I bet I can probably find someplace to keep it in this building here,” Fred volunteers.

  “I’ll take it to the bank,” I decide. “A safety deposit box. It should just about fit.” I pause. “Then what?” I ask. “What do I do next?”

  Fred stands up. He performs a Charlie Chaplin dance. His shoelaces are undone, though his shoes, still-bright Reeboks dotted with holes, aren’t anything I could imagine Charlie Chaplin putting in a pot and serving for lunch. “Take it on to Antiques Roadshow. It sure worked for you before with that potty your English poet lowered her delicate butt onto.”

  I think of Antiques Roadshow, the disaster in its wake, the repercussions still ahead of me. “Gus?” I implore.

  “No way!”

  “Please?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Come on, do it for the little lady,” Fred joins in.

  “Stay out of it, Milligan. The little lady, my ass. You were going to take this little lady for a ride.”

  “Just business,” Fred excuses.

  “It would mean so much to me,” I beg.

  His mouth shuts. He fiddles with his watch fob.

  “You’d be so great on TV,” I add. “Plus think of all the cherubs you’ll sell.”

  I’ve got him. He twirls his mustache. He passes me the King’s Arrow as if he’s passing me an Olympic torch. “For you, Abby,” he promises. “The next time the program comes to our area.”

  Twelve

  By the time I make it home from the bank, I’m exhausted. My new treasure’s safe passage to the Cambridge Trust involved even more of a CIA operative mind-set than the paranoid scuttling elicited by my misplaced faith in a corn sheller tied to Willa Cather’s Nebraska roots and lesbian love affair. There’s a lesson in all of this, I tell myself. A lesson I’m sure has been stated eloquently by poets and philosophers and hit lyricists. I’ll have to flip through Bartlett’s to find the exact quote. But here’s the gist: Don’t be so blinded by the wrong thing you can’t see the right just in front of your nose.

  Not that such a lesson holds any meaning for me, in the romance department at least. As soon as I think this, I hear Clyde’s voice: It’s not funny, Abby. I knew you wouldn’t appreciate it. Not that you haven’t a God-given right to your personal opinion. Words my mother would call giving with one hand and taking away with the other. I consider Clyde’s method of righting wrongs. His apologies for previous complaints about my small breasts, lousy house keeping, lack of enough sexual enchantment to keep him awake during intercourse, Are these so sorrys supposed to make me feel better? What did he expect? That I’d see how opposites attract and manage, like Jack Sprat and the missus, to work together to lick that plate clean? Hardly. It’s more the seesaw effect. A lightening of his conscience that drops me into the slough of despond. I click off the postadolescent wrong men who have blinded me: Ned, a couple of insignificant others, and Clyde.

  Soon I’ll be adding Todd. I’m starting to realize I made a big mistake. I should have ditched him right away, especially because I have the sinking feeling he’s already ditched me. How did that best seller phrase it—He’s Just Not That into You. Well, he was into me, Old-Man-of-the-Mountain-Room, king-size bed into me. Once he achieved what he wanted, however, he disappeared. Exactly what our mothers always warned us about. Though my case turned out to be a twist on the same old story—it wasn’t my body he was after; it was selected sordid scenes from a life he seduced out of me. For a while I refused to see this. Doesn’t everyone deserve the benefit of the doubt? I asked myself. And let me reassure you that the fact that he was the only game in town was completely irrelevant.

  Oh, God, what have I done? What is he going to do?

  I’ve left messages on his voice machi
ne at the Globe. I’ve e-mailed him so many times carpal tunnel is setting in. For any hope of damage control, I need to speak to him. Of course, having lived with a writer, I understand the obsessiveness of the species, how the world can fall away, how time and place can dissolve. But would a reporter hide in that cave of creativity, suffer that darkness of the soul? A journalist? A member of the fourth estate who receives a regular paycheck along with a cubicle, a desk, and press privileges?

  Only a louse.

  But maybe—and don’t think I’m being too vain here—since the subject of his article is me, he needs to keep a temporary distance. So his pure vision of the story won’t be contaminated by a personal relationship. He’s writing a feature about business, about what happens businesswise to the businesswoman whose chamber pot hits the jackpot for collectibles. No different from an impartial description of how a stock might take off or a conglomerate might buy up a smaller company. Sex, cocktails, conversation, any kind of contact could skewer a reporter’s badge of neutrality.

  Am I kidding myself?

  Mistress of rationalization, I turn on the kettle for tea. I want wine. Too early. I deserve champagne. Too premature. I’ll wait till Gus goes on Antiques Roadshow and hears the official report. Then I’ll splurge on a case of Bollinger. I’ll buy myself some cut crystal flutes. I’ll invite everyone at work to share a glass, not just the elite. I’ll pass around French cheeses on an English ironstone platter. I’ll fill Rose Medallion bowls with salted almonds and macadamia nuts. Just the prospect of all this activity sends me to the sofa. I plump the pillows. I lie down flat. I do some stretching exercises. I decide to sign up for yoga. All my bones and joints and muscles ache—from excitement, from fear, from life.

  The kettle whistles. I force myself upright. My knees creak. Before I sign up for yoga, however, I’ll have to get into better shape. I totter toward the kitchen. My peripheral vision registers a flickering light. The answering machine on my desk is blinking. I stare at it. I must be suffering from some kind of traumatic shock to have changed such ingrained habits. This is the first time since I left Ned’s house and moved into this Inman Square flat that I have not checked my messages the instant I came through the door.

  Is this lapse a sign of dementia? Or a sign of improving mental health? Considering my mounting level of anxiety and neurotic twitching, I can hardly claim mental health. The message has to be from Todd. I’m sure of it. He’s overcome his work crisis. He wants me to vet his article. He wants to take another stab at the sexual pas de deux of the Old Man of the Mountain Room.

  Or—I stop—he wants to worm more secrets out of me.

  I press the Play button.

  “Goddammit. Abby, call me.”

  It’s Lavinia.

  I’m in no rush. I dunk the last bag of chamomile into the first mug I grab. You’re not going to believe this, but the mug reads new hampshire is for lovers. It’s not my mug, I swear. The previous tenant must have had a bad experience in the Granite State because besides dust bunnies, a family of roaches, an under-the-sink colony of silverfish, and a wadded Women’s Studies syllabus, it was the only thing he left behind. I wrap my hands around the hot ceramic. My thumb just covers the lov. Of all the mugs on all the shelves, of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…Astonished, I shake my head. It has to mean something that I picked this one.

  I sit down next to the telephone. I stare at it. You’d think with our deposition looming, our disputes both legal and otherwise, our general family rift, our last heated words, Lavinia would not be eager to reach out and touch me so much. At least not through AT&T. Why wouldn’t she use her hired mouthpiece, that Snodgrass lackey of a representative?

  The minute I decide not to return her call, the minute I allow myself a triumphant sigh of liberation, the phone rings. I jump. I spill half the mug of tea. I ignore the burning, widening stain on my lap. And, relying on the power of signs and symbols, relying on a chipped and tacky left-behind souvenir, relying on recent lubricious thoughts, I answer it on the first ring.

  “I warned you,” screams Lavinia.

  “I’m fine, thank you. How are you?” I chirp.

  “Stop chirping,” she orders. “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I predict this would happen?”

  “What are you talking about?” My eyes wander to a pigeon on the windowsill. I swallow the rest of the tea. I grab a pencil. I start to compose a grocery list. Onions, I write. Cornflakes. Oreos…

  “The newspapers. And not the tabloids.” She takes a few wheezing pants. “Some reporter called from the Globe.”

  This last word might well have been the hypnotic suggestion that set off the assassin in The Manchurian Candidate the way it explodes in my brain. I look at my list. I am shocked to see I have written The Globe in the penmanship of a palsied nonagenarian. My hand must have been guided by an otherworldly spirit. I fling down my pencil. My possessed body quivers. My infiltrated head rattles. “What do you mean?”

  “Your friend. Your reporter friend with the stupid name.” I can hear her spit out the consonants: “Ted Turner. Tip Tucker. Tad Todd. Your very close reporter friend, if I can quote that slimy hack.”

  “Go on,” I manage to get out.

  “He’s going to write about us. The chamber pot. Our mothers. Our dispute. Our personal, private lives.” She pauses. “He’s planning to write about you and Ned. He’s in the midst of working on the article right now.”

  I clutch my chest. Lavinia has twisted that knife and stabbed me right through the phone line. “He swore—” I cry.

  “Are you an idiot, Abby?”

  I grab a Filene’s shopping bag. I start to breathe into it.

  “Your father always thought so. To think I used to defend you. There are different kinds of intelligence, I used to tell Uncle Griff.”

  The bag has a hole. I crumple it.

  “Earth to planet Abby. Are you there?”

  “You’re wrong,” I gasp. And the minute I say this, I believe it. My breath comes slower. My voice grows stronger, more confident. Didn’t Lavinia always overdramatize everything? Sarah Bernhardt, Henrietta used to call her. The Divine Lavinia. What ever Lavinia’s position on anything means I now take the opposite stance. “Look, he’s writing a feature on what happens after someone’s been on Antiques Roadshow. Just about the chamber pot itself. The show. The business end.”

  “And if you believe that, then I take back every good word I said about you to your father.” I hear the slap of a hand against wood. “Idiot,” she repeats.

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Wake up, Abby. This turd of a reporter said you told him everything.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “He gave me a few meaty examples. The kind of stuff you can only get straight from the source. From the horse’s mouth. The horse’s big mouth.”

  “I can’t believe—”

  “And he’s even read Ned’s book. Thanks to your practically providing him with the ISBN.”

  “I—”

  “Given his smarmy, insinuating tone, it’s pretty clear he didn’t use thumbscrews to get this out of you.”

  “Lavinia…”

  “Stop sputtering, Abby. Call this asshole up and read him the riot act. Not that he sounds like the type to pay any attention to”—she stops, then hisses—“the wishes of his very close friend.”

  “I’m sure there’s a misunderstanding,” I offer. It’s a weak response.

  She knows it. She’s yelling now. “It’s all your fault, Abby. We could have settled. We could have been spared this humiliation. You’re going to be very sorry.” Her voice goes quiet. She stretches out a dramatic Sarah Bernhardt silence. She clears her throat. “Just wait till I tell Ned.”

  She slams down the phone before I have the chance to do it first. For my own benefit, I slam it down anyway. I lift it up and slam it down a second time. The receiver cracks. Two black chips fly off. My landlady will probably make me pay for a replacement. I stagger to the k
itchen. I search for another paper bag. All I find are plastic. Once again I’ve made the wrong choice. This time I’ve failed the paper-or-plastic? checkout-counter quiz.

  I open the refrigerator door. I take a swig of Chardonnay right from the bottle. I need to get hold of Todd. Is Lavinia right? She’s probably been coached in brainwashing techniques. In how to torture your adversary to surrender her chamber pot. A seminar in psychological intimidation held in the paneled conference room of Messieurs Snodgrass, Drinkwater, and Crabbe, counselors-at-law. This doesn’t make me feel better. Nor does the wine. It’s off. Vinegary. Acidulous. It sloshes in my stomach like landfill sludge.

  I am going to paste myself to the telephone until I manage to reach Todd. What’s the matter with me? One minute the evidence all points to the fact that he’s a cad. The next minute, I plead extenuating circumstances. I make excuses, telling myself he can’t be that bad. After all, the article hasn’t come out yet. We don’t really know what he intends to write. One thing I’m sure of: I’d be a terrible judge; or the kind of juror all eleven of the others would grow to detest.

  I dial Todd’s direct line at the Globe. Surprise, surprise, I get his voice mail. “This is Abigail Randolph,” I say after the tone. “Call me,” I order, imitating a Nazi commandant cowering her prisoners. “It’s an emergency.”

  I formulate a plan of action. I decide to check Information for all the suburbs in the Greater Boston area. One of them should be able to cough up Todd Tucker’s number and tree-lined street address. I grab the phone book. I start to make an alphabetical list. I begin with Abington, move on to Arlington, Belmont, Billerica, through Mattapoisett, Newton. I stop. It occurs to me that the man who drove me alone to New Hampshire, the man I had that tryst with in the Old Man of the Mountain Room, the man I let do such remarkable things to my body, the man I put on and took off my underwear for, the man who was as close to me as a man can ever be to a woman, at least in the physical sense—that man, well, I didn’t have the slightest clue where that man lived.

  It takes me over half an hour to reach the end of the list. There are suburbs of Boston I’ve never even heard of, I who’ve lived here all my life. When I get to Somerville, I hit pay dirt. Of a sort. “The number you request is unpublished,” informs a dulcet-toned operator.