How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

by Mameve Medwed

She barely shook her head. The old Mary Agnes would have marveled over the coincidence. The Mary Agnes I-knew-when would have managed a chuckle at the least. “This won’t take long,” she said.

  She must have noticed my disappointed body language because her face softened. “We’re in the middle of a really big case,” she explained.

  I nodded. I waited for her to add—à la Clyde—Not that yours isn’t.

  She didn’t.

  She got right down to business. She recited from memory, rolling through the words the way you’d deliver the Pledge of Allegiance or the Preamble to the Constitution. We hold these truths to be self-evident: “This should be a civilized procedure. No need for anyone to get angry. No need for you to be anxious. The purpose of a deposition is to discover information so that lawyers can evaluate your case. Discourse should be cordial. No one will attack anybody else. You’ll be interviewed by the opposing attorney. I have the power to object. You’ll be under oath. Be honest. Just answer the questions. If you don’t know the answer, just say you don’t. Don’t volunteer any information. Don’t speculate. Don’t fill in. Don’t guess. Give short answers. You can pause before the answers to think. Make sure you listen to the questions. If you don’t understand, you can ask for clarification. If I object, don’t speak unless I give you the go-ahead. If you feel confused or uncomfortable, you can always request a break. Watch out for tricky questions asked in a friendly style or buried in a series of seemingly innocuous inquiries.”

  I straighten up. “Like what?”

  “A classic example is ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ If you answer yes, you still admit to the beating.”

  “Oh, my God!” I exclaimed. My hands tightened into fists.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll spot those balls coming from left field. You’ll avoid the land mines. I have every faith in your intelligence.”

  “At least somebody has.”

  “We were in college together,” she stated.

  “Well, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “When this is over, I hope you’ll work on your self-esteem issues, Abby.” She shuffled some papers. She scribbled a note on a Post-it and stuck it on the blinking telephone. I tried to read the note upside down, to see if it had something to do with my case. Habeas corpus, I made out. Did that apply to a chamber pot?

  There was more pounding on the door. A man wearing a janitor’s uniform rolled in a trolley filled with document boxes and what I recognized as the litigation cases Sam Waterston used to lug around. “Great, Tony. Stick them over in the corner,” Mary Agnes directed. She cleared her throat. “As for your deposition,” she began, even before Tony had left the room.

  What about client-attorney privacy? What about client-attorney privilege? I wanted to ask. But she was talking too fast for me to point out Tony unloading boxes in the corner, a breach of confidentiality even if he did have a Walkman on.

  She continued. “As we already discussed, to save money on the stenographer and for everyone’s convenience, Jim and I have agreed to depose all of you at the same time, here in my conference room. I understand there might be tensions, but you and the opposing parties are all intelligent adults, well-behaved adults…” She looked at her watch.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

  She stood up.

  “Shouldn’t we role-play a few questions? Don’t I need a rehearsal?”

  “Law & Order again?” She pushed her hair off her forehead. “This isn’t a criminal situation.”

  “From your point of view…”

  She sighed. She opened a drawer. She took out a pamphlet. She handed it to me. “Here’s something we made up for our clients about to be deposed. Take it home. Study it.” She came around from behind her desk. She put a hand on my elbow. She led me toward the class-dismissed door. “Any other questions?”

  “Yes.”

  She cocked her chin.

  “What do I wear?”

  What I’m wearing for the deposition is what Lavinia would wear. Or as close to her taste as my limited bud get and closet full of left-over-from-college vintage bargains and Army/Navy store camouflage would permit. I pull on a pair of black pants. I find the black blazer I bought for my mother’s memorial service, still wrapped in its dry cleaner’s plastic shroud. Under the bathroom light, the blacks don’t match. I put on the white blouse I ironed last night with the iron I borrowed from my neighbor across the hall. I unbutton one button more than usual. For fashion’s sake, not for Ned’s, let me point out. I take so much care with my makeup I could be Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel—if only the results were so good. I blot my lips. I gulp some coffee. My stomach turns at the prospect of cereal, even of dry toast. My stomach turns at the prospect of the day ahead.

  “Looking good, girl!” exclaims a kid I pass on my way to the T stop. The bounce this puts in my step lasts until, inside the train, another kid offers me a seat. “Here, ma’am,” he says, jumping up like a jack-in-the-box. Ma’am! Do I seem that rickety? I offer the seat, in turn, to a gray-haired woman in sneakers, a backpack slung on her osteoporosis-curved shoulder. She declines. I sink down in despair. Squeezed hip to hip with two supersized women hugging Burger King bags.

  For the umpteenth time I open the pamphlet on depositions Mary Agnes handed me. I’ve got the classic student’s panic of being unprepared, a state of terror no amount of cramming seems to dispel. I’ve practically memorized each page. Not hard since, truth be told, the book is written to the level of a ninth grader. Actually even lower, I decide, more Dick and Jane than Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I look through the fingerprinted window into the black subway tunnel. Are you there, God? I want to cry. It’s me, Abigail. Instead, I lower my eyes to my homework. See Dick answer a question. See Jane keep her mouth shut. There’s nothing new here that Mary Agnes didn’t include in her recitation. I study the big print accompanied by line drawings of men and women in suits carrying briefcases. I clutch my floppy hobo-style shoulder bag. Someone I know must own a briefcase I could have borrowed.

  Don’t volunteer, I read.

  Ned, I think.

  Watch out for tricky questions, I read.

  Ned, I groan.

  What’s bothering me more? The prospect of being interrogated or of seeing Ned?

  “Can’t I do this privately?” I asked Mary Agnes yesterday when she called to set up the time. “In another room?”

  Mary Agnes sighed. Could I read into her very breath the regret that old school ties blinded her into taking me on? “Abby, as you are no doubt aware from the booklet I gave you, the parties to a lawsuit have the right to be present at all depositions. The Potters requested this. And as I’ve already said, to save time, the expense of the stenographer…”

  “Okay. Okay.”

  “I gather Ned’s got a deadline and has to take the shuttle back to New York.” I heard a knock. We’re waiting, Mary Agnes, someone in the background called.

  “Okay. Okay,” I repeated, ever articulate.

  “You’ll be fine.”

  I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine, I chant as the receptionist with bad taste in literature leads me to the conference room. I freeze at the threshold. She gives me a distinct push. She has dragon-lady scarlet fingernails, which snag my blazer sleeve. “Sorry,” she says. She doesn’t sound sorry to me.

  Once I’m through the door, the scene in front of me hardly lives up to my Perry Mason fantasies. It doesn’t even match the usual Law & Order interrogations, which, I realize, are overdramatized to compete for ratings and to please advertisers. What I confront now is a convivial atmosphere. A coffee urn bubbles in the corner; mugs and papers and a basket filled with bagels scatter across a not-imposing island of a table. An oleander in a Chinese pot—reproduction—is abloom with pink flowers. Mary Agnes is chatting with a rumpled, rather pudgy, pleasant-looking man, not a bony three-piece-suited WASP with an arrogant arch to his brow and a tan from a winter of skippering a Concordia yawl in the Ca rib be an seas. Not
an Alan Dershowitz type either, bristling with so much energy you suspect attention deficit disorder. They are discussing the bouillabaisse at a just-opened restaurant. A little floury, Mary Agnes laments. A grandmotherly woman is setting up the stenography equipment in a corner of the table. Next to her, Lavinia, wearing a pin-striped gray suit and horn-rimmed glasses (an affectation, I’m sure), is not studying the pamphlet I have in my shoulder bag but is reading the New York Times. The World Business section.

  “Hi, Abby,” she nods at me. “Nice jacket,” she remarks, as if our table unites the shared booth of a Harvard Square coffee shop rather than separates adversaries in a law firm’s conference room.

  Nobody rises. There’s no Oyez, oyez, here cometh the deponent. Instead, Mary Agnes glances in my direction. She moves some papers from the chair next to her. She pats it. “Coffee, Abby?” she asks.

  “Jim Snodgrass,” says the man across from her. He reaches out his hand. The table isn’t so wide that I can’t shake it easily. He has nice eyes, crinkled at the corners. And a warm, slight squeeze of a grasp. An endearing daub of cream cheese dots his lower lip. “Milk? Sugar?” he asks. “I’m pretty sure a little slip of a thing like you wouldn’t want a sugar substitute.”

  “Black,” I say. I smile back. I start to loosen up. This isn’t so bad, I think. Especially since there’s a missing person here.

  Mary Agnes reads my mind. “Ned’s shuttle is delayed. We can start without him. If you’re all agreed, we can get through the preliminaries.”

  I hope Ned’s shuttle sits on the tarmac at LaGuardia for the rest of the day. “Fine,” I tell my attorney in my most agreeable client’s voice.

  The preliminaries are a piece of cake. Name, address, Social Security number, et cetera. I won’t bore you with them. They’re boring anyway. The stenographer types along; red polka-dotted half glasses perch on the edge of her nose. Out the window I can look over skyscrapers to Boston Harbor. I see seagulls swoop and swirl. Lavinia continues to read the newspaper. Mary Agnes doodles in the margin of her yellow legal pad. She’s drawing a child’s version of a house: a pointed roof, two square windows; the chimney puffs out spirals of smoke, which she starts to turn into a snake. I lean back; I see no balls out of left field, no land mines, no snakes in the grass waiting to un-coil and spit their venom out at me.

  “Anytime you want a break,” Jim Snodgrass says now. Kind. Avuncular. He reminds me of Uncle Bick. In fact, this whole scene harks back to halcyon childhood days, the parental Randolphs and Potters lingering around the dining room table sipping port, discussing—not legal matters—but, oh, maybe Ingmar Bergman films, we kids scribbling with Crayolas in the corner, drinking the hot cider our mothers had just mulled. “Whenever you need the bathroom. Water; a walk down the corridor to stretch your legs…” Jim Snodgrass goes on.

  “No thank you,” I say.

  “Well, then let’s turn to the chamber pot,” he suggests.

  It’s about time, I want to complain. Isn’t that the reason for all of this? But I keep my mouth shut. He’s the lawyer after all.

  He is the lawyer after all. He gets down to lawyerly business. His voice sharpens. His eyes pierce. “So, tell me when your mother first acquired this chamber pot.”

  “I’m not sure exactly.”

  “Can you try to place it in time?”

  “Well, after she left my father. After she set up house with Henrietta.”

  “Tell me what you know about the circumstances of the acquisition.”

  “No idea.”

  “Have you any idea where it came from?”

  “Italy.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She and Henrietta traveled to Florence all the time. They bought tons of things together. I assume—”

  Mary Agnes nudges me. Don’t speculate flashes in huge letters from the deposition pamphlet drummed into my brain.

  “The antiques experts say it’s Italian,” I offer.

  “Any documentation?”

  “No.”

  “Any sales slip?”

  “No.”

  “Did your mother tell you when she bought it?”

  “No.”

  “Did your mother ever notify you either in words or in letters that she wanted the chamber pot to be yours?”

  “Not specifically. But of course she wanted me to have everything that was hers.”

  “But do you know for a fact that this was hers, as opposed to belonging to Mrs. Henrietta Potter?”

  “Well, if it wasn’t hers, it was half hers, as they shared everything.”

  Mary Agnes sighs. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt, but I really need to take a break.” She turns to me. “You, Abby?”

  “I don’t have to,” I say. Even if my backbone is sometimes made of mush, I’ve got a bladder of iron. “Let’s get this over with.”

  She grabs my wrist under the table. “This would be a good time to take a break now,” she demands, louder this time. “You might as well stretch your legs, too, Abby,” and shoves me out into the corridor.

  As soon as we are far enough away from the other leg-stretchers and restroom visitors, she ticks her mouth close to my ear. “You don’t want to concede fifty percent of the chamber pot at this stage.”

  “But if our mothers owned everything jointly, then that proves at least half the chamber pot is mine, not the whole that Lavinia claims possession of.”

  “The whole that you claim possession of, too,” Mary Agnes reminds me. “Stiffen your spine. We’re going for the total enchilada, the one that Lavinia, for all intents and purposes, gave up her half to you.”

  Back in the conference room, Jim Snodgrass repeats the question before I’m even settled into my chair. “Do you know for a fact that the chamber pot was your mother’s as opposed to belonging to Mrs. Henrietta Potter?”

  “No,” I say, earning Mary Agnes’s good-girl! kick.

  “Then, can you tell me for a fact that it was your mother herself who bought this chamber pot?”

  “No.” I glare at the opposing attorney. I am starting to hate Jim Snodgrass. His phony avuncular smile. His fake just-plain-folks approach.

  “How would you describe your mother and Mrs. Potter’s relationship?”

  I’m sure you well know, I want to yell. I look over at Lavinia. Her eyes are glued to her Palm Pi lot. She is scratching a stylus across its screen. What am I going to say in this room with Lavinia and Mary Agnes and the grandmotherly stenographer typing away? Their lesbian relationship? Their sex life? Did they even have a sex life? I pause. And a phrase from my nineteenth-century English literature class pops into my head. God, if I knew how useful my education would turn out to be—Literature of the Plains, Henry James—I would have not only finished but reenlisted for an extra tour of duty. “Boston marriage,” I say.

  “Could you clarify? For the record,” he adds. God forbid I’d think he might not know what I mean.

  “An intimate friendship between two women sharing a house hold. It came from Henry James’s novel The Bostonians,” I instruct.

  “You’re very well informed.” Jim Snodgrass smiles. “Yes, then isn’t it possible that one could make the case that what the women shared might be shared equally by their heirs”—he pauses—“except of course for what was specifically designated.”

  “Yes. But in that circumstance, then, Lavinia took—”

  He holds up his hand. “Just answer the question, please.”

  I look at my lawyer. Who nods. A fine lot of help she is.

  “Yes,” I mumble.

  “Now then…” He flashes his blinding teeth at me. Are they real? Did he use those whitening strips? “Can you tell me how you came to be in possession of this chamber pot?”

  “Lavinia gave it to me.”

  His eyebrows rise to the heights of incredulity. “So the plaintiff, Lavinia Potter-Templeton, said, ‘Abigail Randolph, this is yours, I want you to have it,’ and handed it over to you?”

  I shift
in my chair. “Not exactly.”

  “Then how exactly?”

  I scroll through my mother’s rooms. The before: rooms full of plants and food and flowers, objects of desire, the objects she and Henrietta desired, china and furniture and paintings, smells, life. And the after: empty rooms, inanimate objects no longer infused with desire but, instead, emblems of our quarrel. Sadness overwhelms me. I prop my chin on my hands to keep my head from dropping onto the mahogany. “We went to our mothers’ apartment to divide their possessions. Lavinia arrived with a list of the things she said belonged to her mother, all the items she said she was entitled to; she brought red stickers to mark all her stuff.”

  “And you didn’t do the same? You didn’t prepare for this in the businesslike manner that Mrs. Potter-Templeton did?”

  Why does he make Lavinia’s scheming seem like a virtue?

  Mary Agnes comes to life. “Objection as to form. Which question would you like her to answer?”

  He scribbles a note. He clears his throat. “To continue, will you describe how you ended up with the chamber pot?”

  “I asked Lavinia if Henrietta had left written instructions. She said no but she had had many conversations with her mother about what her mother intended her to keep. Not that I ever heard any of this.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I got the chamber pot by default. It was among the things she didn’t want. A few plates, a plant, a photo, and the chamber pot.”

  “So the chamber pot wasn’t specifically left to you by your mother?”

  “I’ve already—”

  “Just answer the question.” He pauses. “Please,” he adds as an afterthought.

  “No, but—”

  “You are in the antiques business, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Given your experience, did you tell Lavinia the value?”

  “No. I didn’t know its value. It was a kind of discolored, rather uninteresting object. No one would have looked twice at it.”

  “But you did, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it true you took it even though it was, as you said, uninteresting?”