“Is that what you looked for when you married Dad?”
“I thought I was marrying a different man. I was stupid and sold myself far too cheaply. I don’t want Savannah to make the same mistake I did.”
“You don’t think a girl will mind how my clothes look?”
“Of course not, unless she’s mindless and shallow and no account.”
“Then why should a man care about a woman’s clothes?”
“Because men are much different from women, much more shallow by nature.”
“Do you really believe that’s true, Mom?”
“I know that’s true. I’ve lived a lot longer than you.”
“Will you give me some money to put down?”
“I won’t give you a dime. I want you to learn to work for everything you get. Everything you really want. You’ll cherish that coat when you’ve sweated blood to get it. Earn that coat, Tom. You’ll respect yourself more if everything’s not handed out to you on a silver platter.”
“I’ve never been handed anything on a silver platter.”
“That’s right, Tom. And you never will. Not by me, anyhow. I know you think I’m being cheap.”
“I do, Mama. I can’t help it.”
“It doesn’t bother me at all. Because I know something that you don’t. I know that all the boys on the team will look back on this year and they won’t even be able to remember what color their sport coats were.”
“So what?”
“They won’t know the value of things. But you, Tom, when you look back to this year, you’ll always remember the sport coat you didn’t own. You’ll be able to see it, feel it, even smell it.”
“I don’t get the point, Mama.”
“You’ll appreciate a sport coat when you finally own one. And you’ll always remember your mama when you wear one. You’ll always remember that I refused to buy you one and you’ll have to ask yourself why.”
“I’m asking you that now.”
“I’m teaching you to treasure what you can’t possess, what is just beyond your reach.”
“How stupid.”
“It might be stupid, Tom. But you’re sure gonna love your first sport coat. And that’s a promise.”
“Mom, this is the best shrimping season since 1956. We’ve got the money.”
“Not for sport coats, Tom. I’m saving the money for your father’s next stupid investment. If it wasn’t for him, you could have everything you want. We all could.”
19
In Savannah’s apartment, I began to look for clues that might give me some insight into the secret life she had been leading before she slit her wrists. Her absence allowed me the guilty leisure to earn a voyeur’s intimacy with her daily existence. Signs of neglect were vivid reminders of her slippage toward the inner frontiers of her madness. I found unopened mail, including a stack of letters from my mother, my father, and me. Her can opener didn’t work. She had two bottles of cayenne on her shelf, but no marjoram or rosemary. In her bedroom, I found a pair of Nike running shoes that she had never worn. Her bathroom lacked aspirin and toothpaste. When I had arrived, there was a single can of tuna fish in the pantry and the freezer had not been defrosted for years. Obsessive about cleanliness her whole life, Savannah had let layers of dust accumulate on the shelves. It was the apartment of someone who wanted to die.
But the apartment had mysteries to reveal if I was only patient enough to receive them. I trained myself to be patient and vigilant for any hint that might shed light on the syntax of her madness.
On the Sunday afternoon of my sixth week in New York, I read all of Savannah’s poems over and over again, both the published ones and those I discovered. I searched for clues, for secrets superimposed in her lush iambics. Though I knew the central events and traumas of my sister’s life, I felt that I was missing something essential in her story, that she had created some desperate and provisional life in the three years away from me to which I was denied access.
When Savannah was a child she developed a habit of concealing her gifts. They were never under the tree on Christmas morning, but she would provide us with elaborate maps to help in the search for our presents. She had once hidden an opal ring for my mother, a ring she had bought with the help of my grandmother, but had hidden it too well in the black-water swamp near the center of the island. She had placed the ring in the nest of a painted bunting, framing it among stems and moss in the hollow of a tree. But her written directives were fuzzy and unsure and she could never lead my mother to that nest. Opals would always remind Savannah of stolen Christmases. After she lost the ring, Savannah went back to being a gift-giver of a more traditional sort.
Later, Savannah would write about that lost ring and describe it as the perfect, the most immaculate, gift. A perfect gift, she wrote, is always hidden too well, but never hidden from the poet. In what became a key to the understanding of her small canon of work, she called the poet “the mistress of owls.” When the poet closed her eyes the wingspan of the great horned owl cast a tawny shadow over the green immense forests. The owl returned to the forsaken nests of migrating buntings, entered the perfect circle in the heart of cypress, and found the misplaced opal, the color of buttermilk tinted with the inks of crushed violets. The she-owl, taloned queen of ungovernable instinct, took the ring in a cruel beak berimmed with the blood of stunned rabbits and flew through a lacery of fabulous dreams, through air voluted and perfumed with language, and delivered the lost ring to the poet, again and again, poem after poem. Nothing was ever lost to Savannah; she transformed everything into mysterious sensuous gardens of language. She retained her love of games in her poetry, hiding her gifts behind a trellis of words, making bouquets out of her losses and nightmares. There were no dark poems in Savannah’s work, only beautiful fruit surrounded by flowers that could put the taster forever to sleep on thorns dusted with cyanide—even her roses came with their assassins. All her poems had their puzzles, their misdirections, their feints and pivots. She never stated a thing directly. She could not break a lifelong habit of hiding her gifts. Even when she wrote about her madness, she made it attractive, an inferno spoiled by paradise, a desert strewn with breadfruit and mangoes. She could write about a killing sunlight and come triumphantly out of it, proud of her tan. Her weakness as a poet was singular and profound: She could walk along the rim of Alps, her motherland, but she could not trim the wings that would set her sailing toward the high currents. The ring was always returned to her when she should have reported it lost. Even her screams were muted, softened to pale harmony, like the imprisoned hum of the sea in conch shells. She feigned to hear music in those shells but I know she didn’t. She heard the wolves, all the black notes, all the satanic madrigals. But they were so pretty when she wrote them down with the help of her ghostly owl and her dreams of opal. She sang of water lilies floating like the souls of swans on the pools in the enclosed yards of lunatic asylums. My sister had fallen in love with the grandeur of madness. Her last poems, which I found scattered about her apartment in secret places, were obituaries of exquisite loveliness. A nostalgia for her own death had made her work grotesque.
While staying in her apartment I paid her rent and her bills and collected her mail. With the help of her neighbor, Eddie Detreville, I painted the apartment in a warm tan, the color of flax. I arranged her vast library according to subject. Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her. There was a fruitful exchange between her reading and writing. She had developed the appealing habit of collecting books on subjects she knew nothing about. I found one book, heavily underlined, on the life cycle of ferns, and one called The Sign Language of the Plains Indians. T
here were six books on various aspects of meteorology, three books on sexual deviation in the nineteenth century, a book on the care and feeding of piranhas, a Mariner’s Dictionary, and a long treatise on the butterflies of Georgia. She had once written a poem about the butterflies that came to my mother’s garden on Melrose Island and through the notes in the book’s margins I discovered how my sister picked up a working knowledge of swallowtails, hairstreaks, and coppers. She used her books well and no fact was too obscure to escape her passionate scrutiny. If she needed a ladybug in her poetry, she would buy ten books on entomology to find the absolutely correct ladybug. She created mysterious worlds with the priceless information she gleaned from long-neglected books. Because she ruined those books in her passage, I could follow the history of her reading by noting which books were marked and which were perfectly clean. It was an authentic way, I thought, to learn about my sister, browsing through her library and taking notes on the subjects she had annotated or underlined. It was also a breach of trust, but I was trying to bridge a distance of three years in which not a single word had passed between us.
I began my summer by reading all the works of the poets who were Savannah’s friends and who had inscribed copies of their books to her. From the tone of these bright yet formal inscriptions, I could tell that most of them had admired Savannah’s work but did not know her well at all. Most of these poets were living out their American lives in proud obscurity, and after reading their work, I understood why. They were all troubadours of the microscopic epiphany. They wrote about calyxes and pomegranates but their theme was meaninglessness. Nothing had ever made Savannah happier than when I admitted that I didn’t understand one of her poems. She took this as a sure sign that she had been faithful to her gift. After reading her friends, I thought that all modern poets should be immunized against abstruseness. But the lines she underlined had a dark, incongruous beauty and I wrote them all down in a notebook of my own as I tried to construct my sister’s life from her journeys into her own books.
From her poems I found out that Savannah was bidding farewell to the South as a subject. I could still find glimmerings of her past, but my sister was succeeding in turning herself into what she had always most wanted to be—a New York poet. I came across a series of subway poems that gave a snowy, decorous symmetry to the nightmare of the post-midnight city. There were Hudson River poems and Brooklyn poems. She no longer signed every poem as soon as she had finished working on it. She left her poems in anonymous piles throughout her apartment. Only the buffed, untouchable sorcery of her talent remained to mark the work as indisputably hers. In the last years, her poetry had grown stronger, more melancholy, and more beautiful still. But something was puzzling and unclear to me, and I would have remained troubled if I had not found the blue and white memory book beneath the Bible on her night table. In a green diamond centered in a white stripe, I read the words “Seth Low J.H.S.” I unzipped a rusty zipper and turned to the first page. There was a photograph of an eighth-grade girl named Renata Halpern. The name was vaguely familiar, but I could not place it exactly. Her face was pretty, self-conscious, but a pair of unfortunate glasses disfigured her appearance. The smile was unnatural, institutional, and I could almost see the dimwitted photographer grimacing the word “cheese,” revealing his unpleasant mouthful of teeth. Her teachers, she recorded on the following page, were Mrs. Satin, Mrs. Carlson, and Mrs. Travers. Renata Halpern had graduated from Seth Low on June 24, 1960. She was not a class officer but Sidney Rosen was the greatly honored president of her class. Sidney had signed her memory book, “To Renata, dated till butter flies, Take the local, take the express, don’t get off, till you reach success.” Renata’s best friend, Shelly, who was blessed with a handwriting like folded silk, wrote, “To Renata, dated 4 ever, Twinkle twinkle little star, Powder-puff and cold cream jar, Eyebrow pencil—lipstick too, will make a beauty out of you. Congratulations to Seth Low’s ‘Queen of Hearts.’ ”
How wonderful, I thought, that my new friend, Renata Halpern, was once Queen of Hearts at Seth Low Junior High School, but I wondered how her life had intersected with Savannah’s. My sister had a whole shelf full of discarded yearbooks that she had collected from used bookshops around the city. She loved to steal intimate glimpses into the lives of perfect strangers. But the name reverberated and I was certain I had seen it before.
I walked back into the living room and searched the jackets of all her friends who were poets. Then I saw the stack of mail my sister had received in the last week and I remembered that I had seen the name in that stack.
The Kenyon Review had sent a copy of its latest issue to a Renata Halpern and had sent it to Savannah’s address. I had thought when I first checked the mail that I should just steal the magazine, but I was afraid I might offend some pal of Savannah’s who was using her apartment to receive mail. I opened the brown envelope and found a letter from the editor of the Kenyon Review addressed to Renata stuck between the pages of the magazine.
Dear Ms. Halpern,
I want to tell you again how proud I am that the Kenyon Review has the honor of publishing your first poem. Also, I want to emphasize that we would like to see any work that you should like to show us in the future. We want to publish as much as we can before one of the “biggies” steals you away from us. I trust your work is going well.
Sincerely,
Roger Murrell
P.S. Mazel tov on the publication of your children’s book.
I scanned the contents page of the Kenyon Review and turned to page thirty-two, where I began to read a poem by Renata Halpern. I had read eight lines when I realized the poem was written by my sister.
Coats are the plenary music I make with my dreaming hands,
but only the hunter knows the true hazard of fur.
He takes the tiger’s many-pillared coat and buries his face
in the starshine and strength of a thousand Bengali nights.
This pelt is a perfect text of creation, the attar of a sacred wildness.
The soft rind of its beauty turns gold on the bodies of vain women.
The ermine proves the playfulness of God when he conjures up his milky dreams of plumage and snow,
but the tiger’s coat is a wedding song to the eminence of blades.
Daughter, take all the words of blood and lavender and time.
Bring them shining and clear into the light.
Search them carefully for flaws.
Know that the tiger puzzles over the cunning of well-placed traps
as his nostrils fill with the incense of death.
He watches unafraid as strangers approach him with knives.
How lordly and solemn is the woman who will wear his coat.
With my own hands I fashion the prodigal coats and send them out as love letters from Sigmund Halpern
to those slim, amatory women who honor my craft each time they move in the peerless lust of furs. For you, I have chosen my best work, daughter, the furrier’s only poem.
This gift is the scripture I have lifted from the mink’s spine
as I sought to praise the longitudes of your cautious shape.
My skins are the new trustees of your comeliness.
Before the poet dreams of coats, she must master the blazonry of fur
and learn to make art from the blood of brothers and tigers.
When I finished reading the poem, I told myself that it could all be explained, that a simple solution existed and, in time, would present itself to me. As far as I knew, my sister knew little about Jews and nothing of furriers. Yet I was certain that Savannah had written the poem. The tiger was the dead giveaway, not to mention the inimitable, un fakable rhythms of her poetry. I reopened Renata’s memory book and looked at the first pages again. It did not take long to find it. Mother’s occupation: housewife; father’s occupation: furrier.
I knew I was touching something essential in the life of my sister, but I did not know exactly what it meant. It had to do with my sis
ter’s fierce rejection of her history in South Carolina. The furrier had redirected the poet’s voice back to the island and her childhood, and its images were clear and thrilling to me. She was approaching the story none of us could tell, but indirection weakened her art; hers was not deceitful art but it was both circumambient and oblique. It suggested a subject but did not meet it head on. If you’re going to write about the tiger, Savannah, then write about the fucking tiger, I thought. And do not hide behind a furrier’s craft, Savannah. Refuse to cover your poems in lush pelts and the choice skins of wintering animals broken in the jaws of cruel traps. A furrier warms; a poet simmers in her own exquisite elixirs. A furrier sews a coat from matched brook mink and leopard skins; a poet resurrects the mink and sets a fish wriggling in its mouth; she returns the leopard to the veldt, filling his nostrils with the smell of rutting baboons. You are hiding behind fur and finely sewn coats, Savannah. You are making the terror warm, making it beautiful by enfolding it softly in ermine, merino, and chinchilla when it should stand naked and raw in the cold.
But you approach it, dear sister, you are coming to it and I am coming to it with you.
I turned back to the Kenyan Review editor’s postscript and read it again carefully: “Mazel tov on the publication of your children’s book.” Was he talking about the real Renata Halpern’s children’s book or had my sister taken up the writing of children’s books under the same pseudonym she used to publish her poems? For an hour I carefully checked every bookcase in the apartment, searching for a children’s book written by Renata Halpern. I failed to turn up a single children’s book in her entire library and I wondered how Savannah had planned to write in that form. Frustrated, I was about to abandon the search when I remembered that the Kenyon Review always ran small autobiographical sketches of its authors in the back of the magazine. I turned quickly to the back pages and under “H” I read the brief description of Renata Halpern.