New Wave Fabulists Page 5

  I wonder if it’s like the onset of schizophrenia: the sense of living in a world of automata. It’s often been associated for me with the onset of some illness; I wonder if I didn’t first experience it before an asthma attack. Or was that time in the Avon library the first? And is that why I fear it so much?

  Donnelly’s huge screed, so full of wishing, so human a thing. I looked down at the pages and felt him, the froggy man in the picture at the front, lose his him- or he-ness, sadly wink out into unaliveness, only these endless numbers and words multiplying. I wanted to look away, and couldn’t.

  Voiceless. And all other books, and Shakespeare too, and all those who thought about him: they lost their voices, couldn’t make sound, lost consciousness. The air itself lost mobility. I couldn’t move.

  The librarian, the only other person there, was looking at me, making the gestures of seeing me, of taking off her glasses, rising from her desk, coming to where I sat. She seemed to say what’s wrong, is something wrong.

  I think I have a fever, I said without sound.

  She touched my head, her cool hand suddenly real and scorching.

  Oh my goodness you do.

  It’s a summer cold.

  Where do you belong, she mouthed.

  I answered.

  She spoke.

  I tried to get up from the desk and fell down.

  What happened then was that she sent someone—a passing someone in the street—to go out to the offices of the festival and get Robin, out of bed actually, and he drove into town in his Ford convertible; and by the time he got there the librarian had got me outside, and I was sitting on the steps of the library; and then they got me to the office of a doctor, which was just around the corner, and we waited on his step for him. And even before he got there Robin saw that he would have to drive me to the hospital, an hour away, and when the doctor did come that’s what they decided.

  I didn’t know or understand anything of this, and don’t remember it now. I was told it all in the days to come, and in a letter from Robin to my parents.

  He drove me to the hospital, and I do remember that fact: his car and the smell of its upholstery. I was in back with Sandy, who held me wrapped in a scratchy Army blanket that I also remember. Robin said that all the way there he recited Shakespeare, to keep anxiety down; he said I asked him to, but I don’t believe it. He recited most of The Tempest, which he was to begin rehearsing the next day:

  The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great Globe itself

  And all that it inherit, shall dissolve

  And like this insubstantial pageant faded

  Leave not a rack behind.

  We are such stuff as dreams are made on

  And our little life is rounded with a sleep.

  What I remember is waking in that hospital when the fever broke. I remember the white sheets and a smell of soured milk and disinfectant. And I wondered why I had been strapped down to the bed so that I couldn’t move my legs at all. Why had they done that? The nurse came in and pulled the sheet aside and I could see my legs were not strapped down: they just wouldn’t move.

  Harriet says it was the same for her, strangely. Why have I been strapped to the bed? What good does that do? Why has that been done to me?

  They say that in the old days almost everybody got it, but if you were very young when you got infected then it had no lasting effect, it was just like a cold, or like nothing, you didn’t even know, and then of course you were immune ever after. The older you were the more likely you were to have damage.

  But then they had the vaccine, and somehow it vanished overnight, except that it didn’t if you had been missed, if you were at home with asthma when the nurses came to your school, if you didn’t go to a school, if your mother was a free spirit and didn’t altogether believe in medications and wanted to wait and see a while in spite of what everybody told her. I don’t know. I really still don’t.

  It was the last major national outbreak. There were seven cases in Brown County alone: most of them were kids under twelve, and then me, and Harriet. Over a thousand of us nationwide.

  They didn’t tell me that Harriet was there, in that hospital, in another ward nearby. She’d been brought by the stage manager and his wife, a couple of hours after me. Why didn’t they tell me? Because they didn’t tell things then. What they knew might kill you, they thought, if you knew it too.

  We lost each other for a long time then, or better say I lost her; I’m not sure how much Harriet thought about me. At first we were in specialized hospitals far apart, and then home. I didn’t have her address—we never got to the point of swapping them, or phone numbers; making long-distance calls, even across the state, seemed momentous still in those days. Well that might not have been why it took me so long to call. In any case, when I did at last find her number and talked to her father for a moment, I learned she’d gone to still another hospital, somewhere in the East, for more treatment. It was obvious he didn’t want to talk about it, he sounded remote and frightened, as though I’d roused him from a cave.

  And that’s really what kept us apart: that we had both, each alone, gone off into this disaster, and now were separated, along with our blighted families, from everyone else. It was a secret, what had become of us, but a secret that had to be exposed in every new circumstance you entered, explained, confessed to. Well he’s not as strong as other boys in some ways. To coaches, teachers, bosses. My family nearly died of shame and bravery.

  And I was one of the ones who came back, too. I came back nearly all the way. You can see me now and know right away that something’s wrong, but I’ve walked without aids for most of my life. I was a loner anyway, without much sense that the world was waiting for me to make an entrance on its stage. There were times I was actually relieved—and ashamed, of course, to be relieved—to have a reason, such a profound and unchallengeable one, for nonparticipation.

  I can’t think Harriet ever felt that way. But I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about what had become of her, whether she came back, or not. We were sundered. I got a Christmas card from her that first year. Then nothing.

  Harriet calls me at my office in the Liberal Arts Building, the afternoon after we met on the road.

  “You were right about the pope,” she says. “He’s not dead.”

  “No. Hurt.”

  “Tough bastard.”

  When this pope’s accession was announced, and it was made known that he’d be taking the name John Paul II after John Paul I, his predecessor, Harriet said No, no, not John Paul again! George Ringo!

  “I heard them say it was a vulgarian who did it …”

  “Not a vulgarian, Harriet.”

  “… And I thought that was an odd snap judgment to make.”

  “A Bulgarian. A spy.”

  “Yes. I figured it out.” I heard her sip tea. “You want to come over tonight?”

  “Okay.”

  “Air-conditioning’s still busted.”

  “Okay.”

  “Bring a bottle of that wine you think is so good. Brookwood. Woodbridge. Bridgewater.”

  “Waterbrook. My last class is over at five.”

  “Good. Okay.”

  I still have that Christmas card. It isn’t different from anyone’s—snow, dark pines, star. Inside it says May your every Christmas wish come true. And it’s signed with her full name, as though I might not remember her. I knew even then, though maybe I couldn’t have said, that it wasn’t a greeting.

  Oh you don’t know, you can’t: our parents knew it instantly, probably, though my mom with her sense of privilege and being welcome everywhere maybe took longer to understand. The way it was then. You were obliged, for everyone’s sake (it seemed) to check out of the world; you found out that after all you had only been a temporary guest there, on sufferance. It was no longer for you, and you were under an obligation not to make others uncomfortable by your presence. Maybe that’s why we all shun
ned one another; two of us at once, outside of a hospital, would have been a shocking solecism. Just think about it: there were a lot of us, and when do you ever remember, if you’re old enough to remember, seeing two of us hanging out together? On the street, at the malt shop, the movies? Never.

  When I said that once to Harriet she said it was silly: the reason people never saw us was because in those days you couldn’t get out of the house, off the front porch, up on the curb, up the stairs. That’s all.

  “They never saw us together?” Harriet said, and laughed. “They never saw us at all. We weren’t there to see.”

  “‘Others abide our question; thou art free.’ That’s what Matthew Arnold says about, or to, Shakespeare.” I’m speaking to my summer school class, which is about to read and understand twelve Shakespeare plays in four weeks. “And that question would, I guess, be What is this guy trying to say? And Arnold decided that what Shakespeare was trying to say was finally not able to be determined. What did Shakespeare think about things? Was he a propagandist for the Tudor-Stuart monarchy? That’s a common opinion. Was he a secret Catholic, secret atheist, secret antiwar activist? I think that whatever opinions the man Shakespeare might have held, there are no opinions at all expressed in the plays: that like all works that occur in time, they are driven by the impetus to complete a certain kind of movement. The things said in a play of Shakespeare’s are said because the story told is a story of a certain kind; the characters speak as they do so that the stories can be completed. They are no more the opinions of Shakespeare than the inversions and variations of a fugue are the opinions of Bach. And they touch us in the same way, the same astonishing way, when against all the odds they reach their endings.

  “So. Check your syllabus, and for our next meeting we’ll look at a play of apparently utter simplicity, and see how a history, supposedly reflecting actual events, is in fact as shaped and typed as a ballad or a fairy tale. How a story that nearly everyone in its original audience knew was to end in disaster and early death could have the shape of a romantic comedy.”

  By the time I leave school the day has turned dramatically lowering, hot and heavy. I walk across campus with a younger colleague, a woman in American Studies. She’s careful to walk slowly to accommodate me, but not quite tactful enough to conceal that she’s doing so.

  “Tell me something,” I ask. “If you heard someone—a woman, say about your age, maybe older—described as a ‘free spirit,’ what would you think was being said about her?”

  “Oh,” she says. “That she sleeps around a lot. I knew a lot of them.”

  “Knew?”

  “Well it was kind of a thing to be, wasn’t it? A free spirit. Barefoot, living on the earth, sleeping around wherever. You know.”

  “Don’t you mean daisy pickers? Or is there not a difference?”

  She shrugs. “Someone without much sense of reality, I guess. About men or life. Some of them got away with it”—and here she makes an airy gesture of escape or detachment—“but not always.”

  She slows so I can catch up. “Why do you ask?” she says.

  “Cultural anthropology,” I say.

  “I’d worry for her,” she says.

  I see her logic. But I think that there are—speaking anthropologically—several varieties. There are the ones that anyone could recognize, untrammeled, living in worlds of their own; but then there are the secret ones whom you wouldn’t know about unless you know. The librarian and the mailman (curls put up beneath her gray cap) and the dental hygienist. Not soft, not unwise; knowing the costs, and the benefits. Free spirits free even of the label, choosing more carefully than Delia Bacon did.

  And Harriet: who’s going to guess it about her? Sex is something not expected of us. That’s the secret part: and I know it’s astonished more than one person. But Harriet’s had lovers, dozens of them (tens, she says, not dozens; lovers by the tens). Maybe she hasn’t in her life had all those she wanted; maybe she’s been turned down a lot. But being a true free spirit—as I conceive it—means she chose lovers when she wanted them, and didn’t when she didn’t: could have sex with whoever whenever, but knew when to eschew it too.

  “Eschew?” Harriet said to me, in mock wonderment, when I made this case. “Eschew?”

  That was the night of the first day we met again. The early morning of the following day, actually. In her little apartment here in this New England town on a wide river not named Avon, nowhere either of us would have guessed we’d come to, much less both of us, but have, for altogether different reasons. Mine the mundane one of a job offer; hers something to do with those tens of lovers, though the story’s obscure to me still. She loves it here: the shop she’s built, the Federal house she owns where both it and she reside, where she has the solitudes she needs as much as she needs company. I’ve actually wondered if they’re entirely different, for her, solitude and company; and if that’s sad, or not sad.

  “You know something?” she said to me that night or morning. “You have a nice penis.” And I remembered, hadn’t of course ever forgotten, when she’d said it to me first; wondered too if it was something she said often, just a nice thing to say.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a Pendaflex.”

  “Really. Wow. The rotomatic?”

  “No. I’m saving up for one of those.”

  It was June, June again. She rested her hot face in the crook of my shoulder.

  “It’ll stand you in good stead,” she said. “A nice penis like that.”

  I thought it ought to be strange to me, even eerie, to have gone so far from where I started and to find her here, and somehow to take up where we were when we parted so completely, but all different: she so altered, in ways I’d long wondered about. Like dreams you might have, dreams I’ve had. But it didn’t seem that way at all. It doesn’t now.

  Harriet’s shop is called As You Like It. Under these words on the painted sign over the door is a sort of scroll or banner that reads Wonderful wonderful and most wonderful wonderful. There’s a tinkle bell that sounds when the door is opened, though it’s hardly needed.

  “Hi.”

  She was waiting on a customer, wrapping something small and precious with wasteless motions, tissue, box, ribbon, label. One of her hands is different from the other, and the work seems to pass from one to the other as needed, as between two friends, one the stronger.

  You’d think that the worst thing was how all that physical grace and power was blasted and reft from her, and it’s true that that was the loss; but what’s just as true is that all Harriet’s grace, all her strength and physical precision, lay in a more central part of her than that, a place from which she draws all the time now making her way in the world, and everybody who sees her knows it. I watch her in the absurdly crowded shop turn and move, put out a hand to touch, just touch a wall to keep her balance, reach to take something from a high shelf, turn again and put it before you, without a wasted gesture or effort: she’s still that steed.

  “I brought you something,” I say.

  “The wine.”

  “That too.”

  I took it from the grocery bag that held the bottle.

  “Oh my God.”

  “It was in the college library.”

  A small octavo volume, as they used to say, silk-bound, the gold lettering dim but plain. The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines.

  “You know something?” I say. “All the others are there too.”

  “Yes?”

  “All of them are. Still. Ignatius Donnelly and Delia Bacon and Shake-speare: The Mystery. In the same places they always were.” As though library time universally stopped that afternoon, at least in that range of Dewey decimals, all those books growing more useless and foolish every year, never changing their minds or hearts.

  “Delia Bacon,” Harriet says. “The free spirit.”

  “Well so you thought.”

  “Did you look in them?”

  “I did.” I don’t say that it took me a lo
ng time to open one. Of course I’ve always known they were there. Volumes that I use in classes and research are nearby them. But I’d never opened one; that’s true.

  I help Harriet close the shop. Harriet studies The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. White ink numbers on its spine.

  “You know,” she said. “I never took it back. That one from the library in Avon. I never took it back. It’s probably still there, in that cabin, today.”

  Delia Bacon went to England in 1853, perhaps largely to escape the McWhorter mess, but also because people she knew in Boston and New Haven told her she ought to go and find the facts that would prove her conception. Once there, though, she only went on thinking and studying the plays, growing ever more certain she was right. Bostonian bluestocking that she was, she had letters of introduction from Emerson to Carlyle, who was shocked by her heresies (he shrieked, she says, turned black in the face). She would do no research, though; she wrote essays about her idea, as though all by itself it ought to convince; she ran out of money and was practically destitute when she was taken up by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was then the American cultural attaché. Hawthorne took her part, generously, and stood by her, and helped her prepare her huge book (The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded) for publication, and paid for it too: but he didn’t believe either.

  I don’t know how she got the idea that the proof she needed—or rather that the world needed—could be found in a grave. First she supposed that it was buried with Bacon at St. Albans, and when she was refused permission to open that tomb, she went to Stratford-on-Avon. Hawthorne says that Delia told him she had “definite and minute instructions” about how to find, beneath Shakespeare’s gravestone in Stratford church, the documents that the cabal had caused to be put there.

  She got to Stratford sick and shabby, and could find no room at the inn. She wandered the town, and finding a rose-covered cottage whose door stood open (all this is true) she went in, and sat down. And when the ancient woman who lived there alone came in, and saw her there, she couldn’t bear to send her away; and there she stayed, looking out at the river Avon and the spire of the church where Shakespeare lay.