Perfect Reader (15 page)

But how to describe a poem? Flora had stayed up all night reading and rereading the poems in her father’s bed. Such intimacy in reading—how closely one attended to the words on the page, more closely than to the words of troubled intimates. How one felt one knew a writer when reading—and yet, when one did know the writer, how distancing the reading could be. How troubling and infuriating. It had been jealousy, finally, and not loyalty, not love, not even duty, that inspired Flora to read. If Cynthia had read them and knew them, Flora wanted to know them better. There was power in knowing, a loss of power in not knowing. “Who owns this kid?” she’d once yelled to her mother while at the playground in the city, before Darwin, the small offender having gotten in her way. Who owns these poems? That was the question now. “For my darling Cynthia,” her father had written, while telling Flora she was the reader he trusted.

We want to know our parents’ secrets, their lives before and beyond our own. But then to know can be terrible. To know is to want to not know. After so much worry about how the poems would sound, what they said came as a shock. The content surprised her most of all, and the content was Cynthia. Cynthia was the Eve of Darwin’s Garden, though she was not Eve-like at all. She was open and honest, boldly aware of her own nakedness. Her nakedness was described with care—Flora read with interest and shame. One knew one’s parents had bodies, used them even, and yet there it was on the page in her father’s handwriting, his thoughts about his body and others’, thoughts Flora felt she shouldn’t know. Certain things children should not know.

It had been his way of telling her—of telling her rather too much—about Cynthia. She might have known about the happy lovers for many months if only she had read the manuscript. No wonder Cynthia had been so unprepared for her surprise, her confusion. For whatever reason, her father had been unable to say, “I’m very much in love,” but instead had handed her the fertile product of his romance and asked her to read it. He must have found it rude, or odd, that she never said, “So, who’s this woman, Dad?” That she said nothing at all. But then he hadn’t asked, or even mentioned the handoff that had occurred that morning at the diner before she went to work. It had been as if it had never happened. And perhaps that had been the point:
If I don’t read these poems, or mention them, then maybe they will cease to exist
. But they existed. More than existed. They throbbed unappetizingly with life. This was why Cynthia loved the poems. Who would not love to see herself so portrayed? Cynthia the revelation; Cynthia the rescuer.

In one poem, “The Gardener,” he watches her planting bulbs: “Impossible in her palm in their crinkly tunics.” Flora remembered the word
tunic
from her days on the gardening beat. Of course he would have found the noun, upon learning it from Cynthia, irresistible—the very word for the thing and yet possessing an innate poetry, an innate metaphor.
Crinkly
, too, was winning—one heard it, like grabbing an onion. When he stuck to the word for the thing, he was good. But later, with Cynthia, he got into trouble. Reassuring, almost, to see the self-centered silliness of romance was not ageist. New love, no matter when, made one see the profound in the ordinary—
the miraculous in the commonplace—
and not in a good way.

He imagines the two of them meeting years earlier, when they were young, when she was still a girl, her body “serpentine, unbitten; the bulb below my ribs not yet ripened.” Had he not realized what was undone under such revisions? For example, Flora? Better to have Cynthia from the beginning than to have had Flora at all? And her mother, beyond being erased, became the emblem of all that had gone wrong, fifteen years of marriage reduced to a regrettable error corrected only with the second coming of love, the Edenic Cynthia, the post-apocalyptic redemption of sins past, the clean slate, o brave new world, the wonder and rightness of it all, at long bloody last. If her father had lived, these paroxysms might have come to seem overdone even to him, but he had not lived, and so their passion was poised and immortalized in the state of perfection, in the state of poetry. Surely he would have gone over that stuff again, cleaned it up—surely he would have.
He would have:
the tragic conditional. Who knew the man was such a thoroughgoing narcissist? Poetry as memoir. She’d heard him say so-and-so was not a novelist because his novels adhered so closely to his life; did all the self-serving autobiography, then, make her father not a poet? Or were poets exempt from such distinctions, as they were from most cares of the world? Flora had been wise not to read the poems. What good could ever come of having read them? What good to her, that is. Her mother could never read them.

It was not yet nine the next morning when she called Cynthia, but she got the machine, the intrepid gardener already in the loam somewhere.

“Cynthia, hello, this is Flora Dempsey. I’m afraid I’m going to have to say no, as my father’s literary executor, to your friend the editor. Please do pass on my regrets. The poems are simply not ready for publication. But thank you so much for the gracious offer to help.”

Winter

11

A Man Who Noticed Things

S
HE WANTED TO LOOK NICE FOR HIM.
Her mother’s advice was to wear something she didn’t mind never wearing again. That made sense, but then, did it mean wear something ugly? And she still didn’t like to defer to her mother’s ideas of dress. Flora wanted to wear something beautiful, and serious. She continued to care about clothing. She continued to care about the way she looked. Death had no impact whatsoever upon her vanity.

Days before his memorial, she walked into town, to the shop she’d bought her prom dress in a decade ago, a store filled with floor-length gauzy dresses in a spectrum of colors meant to be ethereal, all in the sorbet family. The dresses were unchanged by the years. It was amazing to reflect on the rainbow of proms—all that virginity lost and alcohol vomited, friends betrayed and parents deceived, all that ordinary high school triumph and disaster—that had kept the store so long in business. Three high school girls were trying on strapless or strappy gowns for the winter formal. As Flora browsed the racks, she met eyes with one of them in the mirror. She was tall and busty, with a swimmer’s broad shoulders, and had on a champagne-colored slip dress that suited her long blond ponytail, cut on the bias, and slinky.

“You look great,” Flora told her. “Fits like a dream.”

The girl flashed a look of shy longing, an almost cringe. “I love it so much. But my mother will never buy it for me.”

“Too sexy?”

“Too much money, too little fabric.”

Flora laughed. “So often the way.”

The idea of wearing any of those dresses to a funeral was absurd and offensive. Feeling a voyeur, she made herself leave, though she had wanted to stay, to talk to the girls, or listen to them talking to one another in their semiprivate language of nicknames and personal jokes. She wanted to sneak them money for that perfect dress, to honor the way one feels at that age that the perfect dress might change your life. Who knew—maybe it could. Other small things had been known to change lives.

The black silk cocktail dress she’d bought years before for a life she thought she was heading toward but somehow missed along the way, that she’d folded into the body bag for her return to Darwin—she would wear that; this was, no doubt, the occasion for which she had packed it. It was Audrey Hepburn–ish, with a high neck and little cupped sleeves, cut just above the knee, with a slight sheen to the dark fabric. Serious, and beautiful. The morning of the memorial, in the dress, Flora tied her hair back and brushed blush on her cheeks, though she rarely wore makeup. She was reminded of the nights at the opera with her father, their dates, as though the memorial were their final date. What was that about, dressing for one’s father? Another Freudianism best left unexplored.

At the chapel, a long line of downy winter coats stood quietly in the hush of new snow, waiting to gain entrance. The students were on break, exams ended, but many had stayed behind in Darwin to attend. They sat in cliques in the mezzanine, the young men touching and nervous in their ties, the young girls tearful, as though he had been their father. It seemed the whole faculty, from assistant to emeritus, even Madeleine, with Ray beside her, had come. Her father’s editor from
The New Republic
had flown in from Washington. Gus Simonds was there, and Paul Davies, sitting with a group of young men with beards and glasses and ironic, ill-fitting suits—his fellow Apostles. Were Paul’s hiking boots lurking down below? A carful of Flora’s friends had driven up from the city, as had her old boss. Her friends looked like elegant aliens, slinging their oversize city bags. What were they thinking? What had they missed by signing on to be here in Darwin? Flora remembered attending the funeral of the sister of a boy she knew in high school and feeling all the appropriate sadnesses—weepy, vulnerable, sympathetic. But also envious. She’d envied the boy the drama of the occasion. He was so clearly one of the stars of this big event; his life had seemed bigger than hers. Did her friends now begrudge her this moment? Flora hated them for feeling what she imagined they felt. She waved but did not approach.

The pews were crowded to the point of claustrophobia. There was no way out. Though of course there was a way out: Her father had taken it. They were all there for him, and yet there was no him there. She was grateful to have no polished and padded coffin, which at her grandfather’s funeral had struck her as boatlike and vulgar. Grateful to have no graying face poking sculpturally out of a painstakingly chosen suit and tie. And yet. Where was he? Her father could now be stored—in an urn, or a shoe box, or a tightly sealed mason jar. In an ornamental paisley tin. It was too ridiculous. And horrifying, that one’s father, that first and ultimate model of maleness, could be reduced to something so small, so portable; could be transformed into something one could run through a sieve, become another element: from animal to mineral. Grotesque. She felt faint every time she considered what had become of him.

The question of whom to sit with was a difficult one. One that shouldn’t be difficult—one sat with family, one was
the
family—but in her case was. She hovered awkwardly like an uninvited guest; she waited to be told what to do. Also, there was the question of what to do with her mother.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m here for you,” her mother told her, adding, “If you want me up in the front with you, I’m happy to do that, but if you’d prefer, I can sit in the back with Steve and Heidi.”

Perhaps funerals should have assigned seating, like weddings. Calligraphied place cards; each row given quirky and idiosyncratic names. In the end, Flora sat beside Ira Rubenstein and other old friends of her father, Mrs. J. and Betsy and Pat Jenkins just behind. Her mother a few rows farther back. Beyond her, Flora thought she saw Dr. Berry. Her hair had gone a steely gray and grown a few inches longer, from earlobes to chin. Would they have to embrace? It had been years. Embracing might be expected. The thought of hugging her former shrink was appalling. Near her sat the new president of the college, a handsome Brit with a young family. At first, Flora couldn’t see Cynthia, but then she spotted her on the other side and inadvertently caught her eye. Had she been staring, waiting to be summoned? She came up and kissed Flora almost on the mouth.

“Come sit with us, Cyn,” Ira said as she grasped his hand with both of her hands. “You should be up here with us.”

Sin?
Flora hadn’t realized they were such intimates. Cynthia looked to Flora for approval. It was the first they’d seen of each other since Flora told her no.

“Of course,” Flora said.

Out of her brilliant array of colors, Cynthia appeared older, and smaller. She was wearing a blue-gray blazer that looked several sizes too big, like a man’s jacket. Was it possible that it was Flora’s father’s jacket? That was too weird, even for Cynthia, wasn’t it? Though it was likely that he’d left things behind at her house, that pieces of his wardrobe still lived in her closet.

The student players took their seats “up at the holy end,” as Larkin had written in a poem about a church—she knew this from her father’s quoting, not her own reading; this was how she knew most references, her references really his. The mourners stirred and hushed. The seats were uncomfortable, as they were intended to be. Around the sides of the chapel were portraits of all of Darwin’s past presidents—gray-haired men in dark robes, impossible to guess the year by the portrait, 1872 and 1972 indistinguishable. Her father’s was up in the mezzanine, where she couldn’t see it, thankfully. He had hated it, felt the artist had gone a bit Rembrandt on him. “Chiaroscuro up the wazoo,” he’d said. “And I can’t help feeling he didn’t do justice to my nose.”

Smothered in black velvet, two women—a violinist and cellist—began to tune their instruments, releasing the mournful wail of disparate voices blindly trying to find each other. The slow movement of Beethoven’s
Archduke
Trio, the notes of the piano quietly insistent, the thread of the music trading back and forth from piano to strings. Repetitive, though Flora liked the rolling patches of piano. She preferred music with words. Opera had been their compromise. But as she listened, she saw her father, his hand held up, palm toward her to catch her attention, his eyebrows rising with the music, his eyes glassing and spilling, and then the slow shake of his head, his pure appreciation of the skill of the thing. “The fucker could write,” he’d say, slightly embarrassed by his own emotion. “The fucker could really write.”

He had a recording he loved of Pablo Casals playing the piece, where you could just hear Casals grunting irrepressibly at the good bits. “Did you hear that?” he’d say, his wet eyes breaking into smile. “Did you hear it?”

Ira read from Hardy, as Flora had suggested he do. Not one of the Emma poems, as had been Cynthia’s hope (poems to a dead estranged wife were wrong for this occasion, weren’t they?), but “Afterwards,” of wanting to be remembered as “a man who used to notice such things.” Flora avoided Cynthia’s gaze, which she could feel pointed at her, as he read.

“Yes, Lew, we do remember you that way,” Ira said, his voice straining at his friend’s name.

James Wood talked about his scholarship, his brilliance as a reader: “Harold Bloom has written at length about ‘strong mis-readings.’ But Dempsey was interested above all in strong readings.” Bloom was himself in attendance, so Wood did not say that Dempsey had referred to the former’s famous book as
The Anxiety of Flatulence
. “Dempsey’s book
Reader as Understander,”
Wood went on, “moved readers away from narcissism. Books were not mirrors, he argued, but windows. One ought not read to understand one’s own place in the world, or the world in abstract, but to understand the individual experience of another. And even more, to understand the individual force and resonance of words. ‘Who owns these words?’ he often asked of books he read, of Hardy’s novels in particular. He better understood the intricacies of point of view than anyone. Many talk of close reading, but what interested him was close writing.”

He called her father “vatic,” his writing “plangent,” and offered other words for which Flora required a dictionary. Even death could not dampen a scholar’s erudition; even death an opportunity to edify and exclude.

“Those of you who knew my father well know that he surely imagined the words to be spoken on this very occasion,” she began her eulogy, releasing a nervous laugh. “And any of you who had the pleasure of hearing him speak know what a daunting task I have before me in trying to live up to his version.”

It had taken so long to write the words on the papers before her, but all she wanted to do, up there like a bride abandoned at the altar, was sing the songs he had written for her when she was small, to share his secret words. Her father, the great nicknamer, was also an inveterate lexicographer, compiling their own private family dictionary. It had taken Flora a long time to learn that these words were not in common parlance, that other families did not say “birfus” for
birthday
, or “I’m having an attack of the fondines” when they felt crazy about someone. Still other words were actual words, though rare—one gave the dog a
sop
, not a treat or bite; one woke not at dawn but at
sparrow fart
, and wore not party clothes but
finery
. Now it was like speaking Yiddish, or some other dying language; soon there would be nobody around to talk to. All families, she suspected—unhappy or otherwise—spoke their own dying languages. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe her family—her father—really was remarkable.

But she followed her script and told the crush of mourners that she had never asked him the meaning of a word he couldn’t define, that it seemed he knew every word ever made, and as a child she assumed that was a prerequisite of parenthood—knowing all the definitions. She told stories about summer vacations on the shore, his enthusiasm for the simple pleasures of good days—a nice sandwich, a long walk, a book, a swim, a fire. Writing the words she would speak, she had found herself again and again going back in time, to her childhood, her earliest memories, to the years before Darwin, as if those years had been real life, and afterwards something else entirely, a wrong turn, an anomaly overrunning a working system.

She talked about his tastes. How he applauded the low as much as the high, how he could narrate a commercial he loved with such relish, nearly equal to his relish for talking Larkin. How he had such confidence in his own views (“So-and-so is only partly right in thinking …”), how she often had to remind herself that what he was offering was an opinion, and that she was entitled to disagree, and, in fact, he loved it when she did. Where did that come from, that academic certainty about ideas, the total lack of intimidation in the land of thought? She had written too much, and almost wanted to skip a page, but she read to the end, and when she sat down, Ira nodded at her with what looked like approbation, and Cynthia’s cheeks were wet and shining and she squeezed Flora’s hand with her damp hand. But Flora felt embarrassed and exhausted and miserable—had she talked for too long, and too much about herself? Had she simply indulged her inexhaustible appetite for sentimental childhood memories, remarkable only for their very commonness? Would her father have been disappointed that she was not herself more scholarly, more vatic? She had put a foot wrong—many, many feet wrong.