Perfect Reader Part 11

"A blowhard," her father had said of Sid Carpenter. "A voice like a tuba."

And he wasn't wrong. And yet there was something winning about the man, in the extremity of his professorialness, in the operatic tilt of his head, in his tweed jacket and pink gla.s.ses. Carpenter was telling stories, free-a.s.sociating as her favorite teachers and talkers always did. "The best free-a.s.sociator," Paul had called her father. Carpenter was handing out copies of Auden's poem on the death of Yeats.

He said: "In a censorious mode, Philip Larkin wrote a piece called 'What's Become of Wystan?' in essence arguing that post-1940 Auden wasn't worth reading. That he'd gone from a cheeky insouciance toward the past-mocking the holy trinity of Dante, Goethe, and Shakespeare with Joyce's 'Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper'-to being a drippy eulogizer. He claimed Auden had 'become a reader rather than a writer,' as though the two were mutually exclusive-an absurd suggestion. It won't come as a shock to any of you that we're all trying to sort out our relations with our forebears-to say nothing of our contemporaries. And more often than not, our views ripen and soften. And they should soften. Youth looks soft but is hard really."

What had been the source of her father's animosity, her father's hardness? Some well-preserved jamlike grievance-a vestige of the presidency perhaps, the fallout of one committee or another, a feud played out in the rancorous world of scholars.h.i.+p. Maybe he would have softened had he lived a few years longer. But her father had not lived long enough to learn to like Sidney Carpenter. They were old men by most standards, certainly by their students', but too young for death, or forgiveness. "The hairy knot of anxiety doesn't dissolve till thirty"-that was one of her father's lines, or Ira's; she couldn't now remember. But what of the hairy knot of compet.i.tion, or professional jealousy? Those more fetid, mangier, and harder to untangle.

Carpenter read: "'The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.'" Well, f.u.c.k. That was apropos of everything. Her father still everywhere, the narcissism of loss like the narcissism of love. He did own poetry, after all.

"He's an inferior mind," she'd heard him say of Carpenter more than once.

Though Carpenter's mind seemed quite fine to Flora. He was warm; he had charm. He was self-deprecating; he was self-taught.

"An autodidact," her father had said, his voice heavy with sn.o.bbery; in anyone else he would have found the trait admirable. "With all the bizarreness and unevenness of thought that entails."

Carpenter had not been to Oxford, or even to Yale. He'd been to some small college in the West, and a state university for his Ph.D. Like Carpenter, Flora had not gone to a school like Darwin. Growing up in Darwin as she had, she could almost imagine she'd been a student there, but she hadn't the grades. Her parents had insisted if she wanted to, if she really tried, she could be a great student. She had the brain but not the will. But that was a wish on their part, or at least a guess. It was an untested hypothesis. Once, as a child, Flora said to her mother that she wished she lived in Victorian times, when there was no expectation that women would work. Her mother had looked at first indignant, then amused. "You wicked girl," she said, pulling a braid. "What a revolting thing to say." She had laughed, and Flora heard her repeat the anecdote to friends as though it were charming. Was it charming, Flora's naked lack of ambition? Or was there ambition-only to be unambitious? Was she willfully unexceptional?

People often talked about parents envying a child. But it was possible, too, to envy a parent. Her father's had been the kind of accomplishment Flora resented in people her own age. Had her father been her contemporary, she might have written him off as a summa c.u.m laude a.s.shole. A golden boy, whose hair had at one time actually been rather golden. Perhaps Carpenter had resented him on similar grounds. Flora had friends from college who were now architects. She saw them only if they hosted parties attended largely by other architects. She had friends who were artists and hung out with other "creative" people who "made art." No one she knew in her generation was doing anything to make the world better-she leading the charge of helping n.o.body. The one doctor she knew was a dermatologist, saving humanity from the indignity of acne, one adolescent at a time. But maybe she just knew the wrong people.

Carpenter told the cla.s.s a story against himself of "discovering Auden" at a used-book store in his college town, a battered, early volume, thinking he'd happened upon some unknown, unappreciated genius, as he'd never heard the name.

"None of you would make that mistake," he said. "But oh, the things I did not know." He shook his head, his expression between embarra.s.sment and awe. "What is the saying-'It could fill a book'? And then some. A bookstore, I suppose, in my case. Though I was not entirely wrong-he was undiscovered, at least by me. Every reader has to discover the writers who move him or her most, and in those discoveries we make the writer new again. Every silent revelation, every moment of recognition that takes place on the page between reader and writer is a renewal and a rebirth. You have all that still ahead of you." He paused and looked theatrically around the room. "I do not mean to say there was no Auden before I 'discovered' him. And yet. If you are hoping to engage in postcolonialist examinations of the word discovery discovery, or any other word, for that matter, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place. If theory is what you're after-poststructuralist, deconstructionist (why so many building metaphors, have critics suddenly become engineers?)-if you are in the market for Marxist or Lacanian interpretations or any kind of 'critical lens,' please, go down the hall to Professor Das's seminar. She will be delighted to have you. What we will be doing in here is simply reading. Some call it close reading close reading, a term I must say has always struck me as redundant and boorish-as if there could be any other kind. How does one read without attending closely to the words on the page? Not very fas.h.i.+onable these days, I'm afraid. New Criticism is, of course, anything but."

He filled the time allotted, the full seventy-five minutes-something her father would never have dreamt of doing on the first day-reading aloud for long stretches, rocking back on his heels as though the force of the words might tip him right over, his pa.s.sion so much at odds with the apathy of his audience-s.p.a.cey mouth breathers, twitchy watch checkers, bemused text messagers a.s.serting their opposable-thumbness. But the performer seemed unaware of the ingrat.i.tude displayed before him-there it was, the revelation between reader and writer, the pure appreciation of craft, of word, of gift. The poems of old men undid him. At one point, his eyes watered and he had to remove his gla.s.ses to wipe the tears away on his sleeve. Was there anyone in Carpenter's life, anyone living and present, about whom he felt this way, or anything near to it? Was that the burden readers faced-beyond the world of print, no one quite measured up?

We readily accepted that there were no perfect fathers or daughters or lovers. But we persisted in thinking history might give a writer in the fullness of time a perfect reader; or, on the other side, the scholar's fantasy that he could understand, see, know a book, a poem, as all others had failed to see before. We saw so little, so wrongly, with the people in front of us, and yet with words on a page, we fooled ourselves that we could get it right. If Flora knew anyone, it was her parents. She had studied them in that academic way children learn their parents. She was the world's living expert on her father. Ready with the footnotes, a thoroughly cross-referenced index: the boarding school years, the Yale years, the Rhodes years, the city interlude, and the Darwin recapitulation and coda. And yet, did such scrutiny and research make her his perfect reader? Looking closely did not mean seeing truly. In fact, it might mean reading wrongly-magnifying gla.s.ses distort-everything writ large. And then there was all she did not know, all he'd kept from her. How little she had factored in. She, his own daughter. Barely a footnote in his journal.

At the end of cla.s.s, Flora waited till the last backpacks had floated out the door, then approached the professor, a nervousness in her stomach, as if she were a real student. "I wanted to introduce myself, or reintroduce myself," she said. "I'm Flora Dempsey."

"Of course you are!" Carpenter rocked back on his heels, pointing his chin upward, a wolf baying at the moon. "How lovely to see you. Pat mentioned you'd be sitting in on the cla.s.s. You look very well."

"Thank you."

"I remember seeing you walking across the campus with your father when you were as tall as this desk," he said, laying his hand upon the desk and leaning against it. He smiled at the memory, as if it were special. "Are you thinking of following in your father's footsteps? Does academe lie lurking in your future?"

"No," she said quickly. "Not for me. No, I don't think so. The cla.s.s just sounded interesting."

"'Interesting'? I don't recall what you've been doing to keep yourself busy-you graduated more than a few years ago, if I'm not mistaken."

"I've been working. In the city. At a magazine."

"Ah, a journalist!" Everything he said implied an exclamation point.

"That's rather a grandiose term for what I was. It was a magazine for the home and garden."

"I've always admired the domestic arts," Carpenter said. Was he trying to make her feel bad or better? "I'm a disastrous housekeeper myself. Can never find a thing."

"It's not really about housekeeping-the magazine," Flora couldn't help saying. "More about design, style, a holistic approach to living."

"Of course."

"But I've left my job, and I'm not sure what comes next. But no, no graduate school for me. I don't think so."

"You know, I was reading something about you."

"About me? Or my father?"

"No, no, I did not misspeak. About you. Well, both of you. That he was working on a great new project before the end. And that you have been named his literary executor and hold the reins." Carpenter had the faded eyes of the old, an eerily translucent liquid blue that lit up greedily as he announced this information. He was a beaming, radiant nemesis. "The scholarly world now awaits your next move!"

"Did Cynthia Reynolds say something to you?" She could see his interest stirred.

"No, I've not spoken about the matter with Ms. Reynolds."

"Where did you say you read this?" Had Cynthia's editor friend told someone?

"Some online journal, I think. Don't look so surprised, my dear. I am well aware of the Internet, and perfectly capable of browsing the latest literary gossip. An odd verb choice-browsing. Suggests all research is basically shopping, no?"

"Did they mention what he was working on?"

"Well, Ms. Dempsey, I'm sure you know more about it than I. A far cry from your material at the magazine, hmm?"

The sn.o.bbery stung.

"They just said he was moving in a new direction," Carpenter crowed. "I'd be curious to read Lewis Dempsey's new material, certainly. Always intriguing when the critic is bold enough to face a jury of his peers."

"I'm afraid I have to run. But I'm really so looking forward to this semester." Flora gestured to the syllabus in her hand, speaking with exaggerated warmth, as one does when lying. She shook Carpenter's hand, and escaped the cloister of the cla.s.sroom. She ran across the quad to the Cross Library. At the computer, she typed "Flora Dempsey poems publication," feeling self-conscious, as one does when researching oneself-the feeling not unlike that of being caught in the act of examining one's own reflection. Nothing. She tried "Lewis Dempsey poems" and "Lewis Dempsey literary executor" and "Dempsey Darwin death poetry." A photograph of her father from his inauguration appeared and with it an archived article from Darwin's alumni magazine that described a small child-her-running out and hugging her father as he led the processional into the gymnasium. She hadn't remembered doing that. But she could not find the story of his new material, of literary antic.i.p.ation. Was it possible Carpenter had invented it? But then, how would he know of the new project in the first place?

Another story came to her-one her father had told her about Sidney Carpenter. He'd been so disgruntled with the college a few years back that he'd become a Deep Throat for The Darwin Witness The Darwin Witness, the student newspaper, leaking bits of administrative gossip to the reporters, enumerating the excruciating minutiae of the endless faculty meetings, telling them who exactly had been the dissenting vote at some beloved a.s.sociate professor's tenure decision. How had a man who so loved words, a man so enamored of the subject of his work, come to feel such an equally exquisite loathing for the inst.i.tution that supported his devotion? What was wrong with this place-this corrosive, embittering bastion of enlightenment?

Flora counted and dreaded down the days to fourth grade. The counting made it come quicker, and the dread. School resuming-the ostensible, official return to normal life. But Georgia would not be there. Georgia was home from the hospital but still in bed. Flora pictured her in her purple room plastered into a full-body cast covered in marker-loving notes of encouragement, none from her. Almost everyone from school had visited Georgia-everyone but Flora. The cla.s.s made her a giant "Get Well Soon" card, and while the other girls scrawled how terribly they missed her, Flora simply signed her name, "FLORA," as if they hardly knew each other.

Flora loved her new teacher, Kate, who was slow to smile, but when she did, when you made her, it made you feel important. Flora's life was thickly populated by adults now-Kate, her mother, and occasionally her father, Betsy, who picked her up from school some days and brought her back to her mother's house, and Dr. Berry. Even Robert Frost and Emily d.i.c.kinson-in cla.s.s they were studying poetry-were grown-ups, and the author of that year's play, too, Shakespeare. The play was Macbeth Macbeth, or at least Macbeth Macbeth'' greatest hits: the witches boiling and toiling, Lady Macbeth out, outing, and Flora, as Macbeth himself, performing the soliloquy of "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow." Was Kate being nice to her in a.s.signing her the role, or trying to keep her busy, or was the consensus that she, of all the nine-year-olds, could most relate to the material? Of course you couldn't call it Macbeth Macbeth anywhere near the stage. You called it "the Scottish play." If you called it anywhere near the stage. You called it "the Scottish play." If you called it Macbeth Macbeth, bad things might happen. Everyone was very strict about it, especially Sarah Feldman, the tallest, prissiest girl in their grade.

"It doesn't work that way. A word can't control the universe," Flora told her.

"Just don't say it, okay?" Sarah said, as though trying to be patient.

There was no Georgia, but there was a new student in Flora's cla.s.s, a boy named Ezekiel. No nicknames, only Ezekiel. He was the only black student in their cla.s.s of eighteen. He was not as smart as Georgia, but then, no one was. But he was very smart and had lived in England and, before that, Nigeria, and he had a wonderful accent that made everything sound surprising. He played Banquo, and Banquo's ghost, to Flora's Macbeth.

In the evenings, her mother helped her memorize her lines, Flora reading them again and again and again, and then reciting them as her mother, patiently at first, then less so, read along. "And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death." Why was death dusty? Flora didn't like that part. "Do I have to say that?" she asked.

"Yes," her mother said. "That's the whole point. He wrote it, you speak it. You don't get to write it, too."

"I don't think I want to be an actress," Flora observed. Though she still liked sneaking through her mother's things, and trying on her life. She still liked spying in other people's windows, and drawers, though now she did it alone. But she drew the line at other people's words.

At the performance, Flora tried not to look at her father, but it was impossible not to look at him. He had come in as the show was beginning and stood off to the side, leaning against the wall in his tan suit, his tie off. She thought she could see his eyes watering; he looked the way he did when he listened to music he loved. When she got through to the end of the soliloquy without making a mistake, he let out a strong "Yes" and clapped, loudly and slowly, and then Flora's eyes watered, too.

"Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth," she whispered as she walked offstage. she whispered as she walked offstage.

No one in school said an unkind word to Flora. The girls in her cla.s.s simply withdrew from her and banded together around Sarah Feldman. They seemed to like one another more than they once had. Mistrust of Flora united them. Over lunch, they talked loudly about Georgia, how brave she was, how she itched under her cast, how they loved to feed her gerbils for her. One day, they all came to school wearing skirts, a perfectly synchronized fas.h.i.+on attack, Flora the only girl in shorts. Flora noticed but hoped no one else would-acknowledgment worse than the thing itself. But Kate did notice, and she pulled Flora aside and apologized. She said she'd talked to the girls about excluding people, and it wouldn't happen again. Flora wondered if they'd been sent to the headmaster, as she and Georgia had, if many girls had faced what had once been their groundbreaking punishment.

"It doesn't matter," Flora told Kate, though she cried to her mother that night and begged her to let them move. Her mother had hated Darwin before, and now she refused to leave. But from then on, she referred to Sarah Feldman as "that little b.i.t.c.h."

The next day, Flora went to school with safety pins in the holes in her ears, where earrings used to be. She looked like her mom with purple hair. Her ears said other people didn't matter. At lunch, Kate pulled her aside again and asked her to take them out.

"They look like you're trying to hurt yourself," she said.

"I'm not," Flora said. "They don't hurt at all."

Ezekiel did not try to befriend Flora, though they were the only two to sit alone at lunch. He seemed not to need friends, and this made Flora want to know him more. How did one do that, not need company? Flora watched him and he didn't notice her. Like Flora in the beginning, he had a hard time calling the teachers by their first names. Instead, he called them "Excuse me." His posture was impeccable, his neck a foot long. Every day he wore a knit vest over a pressed white s.h.i.+rt, as though the school had a uniform, which it didn't, which was one of the best things about the school.

"Why do you dress like that?" she asked him. "You don't have to, you know. T-s.h.i.+rts are fine here."

He didn't answer, denying her even his accent.

Flora asked him, "Which do you like better, Africa or England?"

He was silent, and Flora couldn't tell if he was thinking or ignoring her.

"I've been to England," she told him, because her family had once, a few summers back, gone to London and stayed in a flat where the living room walls were painted black, which her mother found lugubrious, Flora glamorous. Her father had taken her to Laura Ashley immediately upon their arrival from the airport to buy a white petticoated dress with a scarlet pinafore; the perfect outfit, what Laura Ingalls would call her "Sunday best," her "finery," as her father called it. "I like the punks on the King's Road," she said.

Ezekiel said, "Africa is a continent. England is a country. You can't compare them."

"I know that," she snapped. They hadn't studied Africa yet-that was fifth grade-but she wasn't an idiot. "I'm not asking you to compare them. I'm asking for your opinion, which you like more."

But he had no opinions, or none he was willing to share.

Finally, one day weeks into school, she trapped him in the cargo net at recess and asked what she'd wanted to ask, what she'd suspected all along. "Was your family happier before you moved here, before you came to Darwin?"

"No," he said without a glimmer of doubt. "We are happier now. We are very lucky to live in Darwin. Darwin is an ideal place to grow up."

That finished Ezekiel for Flora. There was nothing she could learn from him.

15.

New Routines.

THE WINDOWS OF THE S SPOTTED S SALAMANDER, the bakery in town, had been painted in frosty shades of white by local schoolchildren with snowmen and snowflakes, sleighs and secular stars. Two decades ago, Flora had been one of them. The Spotted Salamander was so named in honor of Darwin's Springtime Salamander Crossing, an event in which roads in town were blocked off to make way for the amphibians' annual migration to their mating grounds. Though not actually grounds-they mated in pools of water, a fact that Flora and Georgia had, with the silly prurience of youth, found endlessly amusing, conjuring as it did steaming hot tubs and salamanders with towels around the waist. A movement had long been afoot in Darwin to dig little tunnels along the salamanders' desired route to provide them even safer pa.s.sage. How the Darwinians cherished the lower members of the animal kingdom. the bakery in town, had been painted in frosty shades of white by local schoolchildren with snowmen and snowflakes, sleighs and secular stars. Two decades ago, Flora had been one of them. The Spotted Salamander was so named in honor of Darwin's Springtime Salamander Crossing, an event in which roads in town were blocked off to make way for the amphibians' annual migration to their mating grounds. Though not actually grounds-they mated in pools of water, a fact that Flora and Georgia had, with the silly prurience of youth, found endlessly amusing, conjuring as it did steaming hot tubs and salamanders with towels around the waist. A movement had long been afoot in Darwin to dig little tunnels along the salamanders' desired route to provide them even safer pa.s.sage. How the Darwinians cherished the lower members of the animal kingdom.

Flora was becoming a Spotted Salamander regular, having decided she needed new routines for the new year, or at least some semblance of routine, period, and her breakfasts there were not unlike the old Tuesday-night dinners at the unmemorable Ponzu in their neat, formulaic construction-though lonelier-and this time currant scones and overpriced coffees in large saucerless mugs instead of scorched shrimp, cold soda, and plum wine, the college kid behind the counter flirting with her, stamping her free-coffee card extravagantly, winkingly, six times for every one so that every other week hers would be on the house-the cheap perks of monotony. Though today she was not alone.

She had called Cynthia and suggested they meet. Cynthia was the star of her father's journals-the "gentle and generous" C., C. the "marvel." Cynthia possessed the poems, had what appeared to be the original ma.n.u.script. She had an inscription, a dedication, a claim. She had an interested editor. Cynthia would not disappear, move across the country, or die anytime soon. But Flora was the executor; her father had left her in charge. If he had lived longer, perhaps all that would have changed, but he hadn't. If mutual adoration was unlikely, perhaps a bland apathy could be achieved, an enduring emotional stalemate arrived at in the place of mutual understanding.

"I was so so happy that you called, Flora," Cynthia said, emphasizing the emphatic word happy that you called, Flora," Cynthia said, emphasizing the emphatic word so so to the point that Flora pictured it as she had written it in letters as a child with a long string of to the point that Flora pictured it as she had written it in letters as a child with a long string of o's o's. "I was so hoping this moment would come, when you would be ready to sit down and talk about your father's work. I'm so glad it's here."

"Yes, me too," Flora said.

"Do you have a favorite?" Cynthia homed. "My favorite is always changing. I'm always discovering some new miracle in his words."

"Hmmm, yes," Flora answered, vagueness her only weapon against Cynthia's enthusiasms. She admired her scone. "I know what you mean." But Flora did have a favorite, the one she returned to, trying to make sense of it, the one that stood out from the others as a work not of self-reflection or narcissistic adoration, but of imagination and empathy, that on her first night of reading she'd put aside to think about later, the one poem she felt sure Cynthia would never mention, but which Flora could now recite: the one called "The Wizard."

"How would you describe his style?" Cynthia asked.

"What a good question," Flora said, looking deeply into her paper napkin.

"Lyrical, certainly. Scholarly, steeped in the English tradition," Cynthia offered. The bakery was overheated, but she wore a long knit scarf coiled around her, this one an orgy of magentas-too many days in gardens had chilled her blood.

"Umm," Flora said. "Yes."

"But how would you put it?"

"I was surprised by them, I think."

"Really? I think of them as being so entirely, so fully him."

"I wasn't expecting them to be so ... so steamy."

"Oh." Cynthia smiled more to herself than at Flora. "Some of them are steamy."

"I guess you never expect to gain access to your father's erotic mind in that way."

"No, you don't," Cynthia said. "I hadn't thought of that."

Flora watched as Cynthia considered this new perspective, her perspective. The moment didn't last long.

"But they were also richer than I expected them to be," Flora went on, the sudden lift, the pleasure in talking about him. "His writing, it's musical-or, more specifically, it strikes me as choral, with many voices singing different parts. He used to listen to this ancient choral music. I forget the composer and the exact era, but it had forty-seven different parts or something, dozens of singers singing in their own voices, each part small, but the c.u.mulative effect huge, grand. His work reminds me of that. He was so good at voices-literally, at creating different voices. He was a good mimic. There was a famous family story of him reading The Wind in the Willows The Wind in the Willows to my mother early in their courts.h.i.+p and doing all the voices." Flora looked to see how this news was received, but Cynthia, a great nodder, was nodding at almost every word Flora said. What was that, agreement? "When I read the poems, I can see him hearing them, if that makes sense. The writing is more aural than visual. Meant to be engaged with the ear and not the eye." to my mother early in their courts.h.i.+p and doing all the voices." Flora looked to see how this news was received, but Cynthia, a great nodder, was nodding at almost every word Flora said. What was that, agreement? "When I read the poems, I can see him hearing them, if that makes sense. The writing is more aural than visual. Meant to be engaged with the ear and not the eye."

"We must host a reading of them!" Cynthia burst out, as though the nods had propelled the words from deep within her.

Flora had shared too much. Stupidly, she'd told Cynthia what she thought. Her brief openness an error. The call had been a bad idea. The thing to do was toss the phone in the trash, to send it off to the landfill with its brother the answering machine.

Cynthia pushed: "I was just so taken with what you were saying, with the rightness of it. It made me want to hear them aloud. Wouldn't that be lovely?"

The point was not to hear other voices reading them, but to hear his his. Reading the poems to herself, alone in the house, Flora heard his voice. The poems were hers. They made her squirm, they made her mad, but they were hers hers. What would Cynthia do, distribute the ma.n.u.script to everyone in town? Perhaps she already had. She'd admitted to sending some pages to the editor. Likely, there were multiple copies afloat. She was handing them out on street corners. "Here, take them, take them," she'd call out, her head bobbing like a buoy in agreement with herself. "Read these exquisite poems all about me!"

"It might be something to think about, Flora. We could get a group of his friends and colleagues-Ira, and a few others from Darwin's English Department, and maybe Wood would come down-and they could each read one, perhaps they could each even choose the one they wanted to read. Oh, it would be wonderful."

"He was so private about them. Do you think he'd really want that?"

"I think so. Don't you? Something to consider-a precursor to publication. Whet the public appet.i.te! A wonderful idea," Cynthia said, as if Flora had come up with it.

"Maybe at some point. But not now, I don't think." A precursor to publication? How many different ways would she have to say no to this woman? Her indefatigability was irritating. Her hopefulness refused crus.h.i.+ng.