How were they, that was the question, but it was not a question to be entertained at this moment. Her erratic course through the pine woods had now brought her to the spring.
“I can still walk barefooted through cold water, over rough stones,” she assured herself. Then she flung off her felt bedroom slippers and stepped into the rapid, murmurous current of the brook.
Tonight it was practically babbling those voices out of the past.
She heard excitedly amplified whispers such as she used to hear in her favorite little French restaurant in the Village before she’d imported Giovanni (and Sabbatha’s Eyrie to keep him in), yes, quite a while before then, at least twenty years.
In those days she had always been escorted by a bevy of very young men, and she had marched into the restaurant, oh, yes, it was called L’Escargot Fou, ahead of her feverishly animated escorts, and at once, in those early days, a few moments of hush would descend upon “the mad snail,” as she called it.
Then, as she was seated at her corner table, voices would become audible, exclaiming about her.
“That striking woman, who is she?”
“Christ, don’t you know her? Sabbatha Veyne Duff-Collick?”
“I thought so, but wasn’t quite sure! Are these young men all her lovers?”
“Yes, of course, she’s the most profligate artist since Isadora Duncan.”
“She does move like a dancer, she has a dancer’s gestures, and what a distinguished profile with that long mane of chestnut hair.”
And then they would talk about other matters which concerned themselves, but seated among her bevy of youths in a corner, she knew that they were all really talking so loudly in order that she could hear them, and she would smile indulgently to herself at their innocent folly.
But, oh, my God, there was that final visit to “the mad snail” when she had entered to find her usual table usurped by some very scrubby and bearded young men, not at all the sort that she went about with.
“MaÎtre,” she had said, “my table is occupied by strangers tonight. Would you please remove them for me?”
“Oh, madam,” the maìtre replied, “that is the young poet Ginsberg with two others, they can’t be moved. I’m afraid they’d make a scene if I asked them to give up the table. You see, they’re very, very fashionable just now. They’ve been on the covers of several big magazines lately.”
“Why, one of those obscene barbarians is seated in the very chair that has the bronze plate with my name engraved on it! Always reserved for meeeee!”
“Plate? Bronze? Engraved?” the maître repeated in a mock tone of incredulity. Then his face assumed a look of recollection and he said, “Oh, you must mean the chair that collapsed and couldn’t be repaired, it did have an old piece of metal on the back, but it’s gone to the junkyard now.”
“You must be new here to speak to me in this insolent way.”
“I’ve not been around as long as some of our patrons, but as they say about brooms, a new one sweeps clean, madam.”
At this she had drawn herself up and thrown her head back so far that she seemed to be inspecting the ceiling.
“I wouldn’t speak of cleanliness, I would avoid that subject in view of your new clientele! Come along, mes amis! When an eating place turns into a trough for swine, I…”
She didn’t complete this statement for the group of poets who had confiscated her table burst into howls of derision: her young men shepherded her quickly onto the street.
“Cochons!” she screamed.
The streets of the Village spun brilliantly about her for a moment before everything went black. When she came to, she had only one young man with her: they were in a taxi, headed uptown. He was a very slight young man with great sorrowful eyes, and he carried a small beaded bag.
“Oh, Sabbatha,” he whispered, “didn’t God tell you that things turn out this way?”
“I have received no information from God except that I am alive and capable of decision. Tomorrow I am going to Paris and then to Venice and then to The Eternal City of Rome.”
“Will you take me with you?”
She sighed and permitted her hand to fall into his lap. And there she made a discovery of less than minimal requirements for a long-term companion.
“My dear,” she murmured, “how dreadful it must be for you.”
He understood her meaning and after a moment or two he said to her: “I have some male friends of your age or thereabouts who have admired the size and color of my eyes.”
“God help you, dear, in this world. God help your large eyes, these friends will gouge them out.”
And they both began to cry quietly together with clasped hands.
At the dockside in Cherbourg, many cameras were focused on Sabbatha as she disembarked and the effect was exhilarating to her.
Apparently Europe was not yet aware of her declining prestige or it had more respect for work not favored by trivial fashion.
A journalist in Rome…
“How does it feel to be the most celebrated female poet since Sappho?”
“Of Sappho’s work,” she replied, looking into space, “there remain only fragments, such as…”
At the moment she couldn’t think of any.
“Miss Duff-Collick, your work is sometimes compared to…”
“Oh, yes, I know whom you mean and, actually, I did rather like the one about some birds and beasts. How did it go? Something about entertaining no charitable hope. And it rhymed with antelope!… I’ve always liked wild animals in their natural habitats, not domestic ones or the pathetic creatures in zoos. I detest confinement, you know…”
“Your work in the sonnet form has naturally suggested to some critics the influence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.”
“My dear young man,” she laughed. “My influence on Mrs. Browning must have been rather slight since she succumbed to consumption long before I was born.”
This interview was taking place in a little taverna where the Via Margutta angles sharply into the Piazza di Spagna. There were three young journalists and there was also the young painter Giovanni. He had been in the taverna when she and the newspaper people entered and she had greeted him as if she knew him well the moment that she first saw him and had invited him to join the group at her table.
She sensed that her behavior was leading her into public embarrassment. She even suspected that she might be going a little crazy but the thought gave her no alarm; in fact, it exhilarated her as the flash bulbs had when she arrived in Europe.
She had arranged the seating at the table and placed Giovanni next to her.
“You’ve found some one you know?”
“Oh, yes. I’m sure we’ve known each other forever.”
She decided to expand upon that typically histrionic remark.
“All of my first encounters with people are like that, as if I’d known and hated them forever or as if I’d known and loved them since before I was born.”
The journalists exchanged inscrutable glances but she paid no heed.
She had a hand on Giovanni’s arm and then on his knee and she made certain that the newspaper people observed this exhibition of poetic license or whatever it might be termed.
They all drank golden Frascati out of big carafes.
Going mad can have a certain elation to it if you don’t fight it, if you just pull out all the stops, heedless of consequence.
Sabbatha knew this was happening to her and offered no resistance, with flash cameras popping in her face while pencils scribbled comments for press release, here in a Roman taverna so close to the house in which John Keats had written of love and death in lines which almost approached the intensity of her own.
For ten years she had been much out of the public eye and, phonetically, there is slight difference between the noun “decade” and the adjective “decayed,” just an accent placed on the first syllable or the second.
Then came a devastatingly brutal question from the young
journalist with the most innocent and deferential air.
“Does it disturb you much. Miss Duff-Collick, that your most celebrated poem was written while you were still at the female college of Bryn Mawr?”
The heavy carafe felt very light in her hand as she lifted it from the table and shattered it over the head of the young man who had stabbed her with that insufferable question.
By midnight she had proposed to Giovanni that he remain with her permanently.
He told her that he was a poor young student of painting whose survival depended upon the interest of an elderly patron. But, as Sabbatha guessed, this plaint was only a token of reluctance…
(In those days all the young and impoverished Romans dreamt of being spirited off to the States.)
At daybreak they engaged a horse-drawn vehicle, a fiacre with a hunchback driver.
She touched the driver’s hump for luck which made him furious. He turned about and shouted in her face, “Che vecchia strega, che stromal”
“What did he say? Something impertinent to me?”
“He called you a witch,” said Giovanni, discreet enough that first night between them, not to translate the scatalogical portion of the old man’s invective.
“I’ll show him when we get to San Pietro!”
At Saint Peter’s Square she had Giovanni direct the hunchback to drive about the twin fountains and when he hesitated to comply Sabbatha scrambled over the partition between passengers and driver and wrenched the reins from the driver’s hands.
He leapt out of the carriage and started shouting, “Polizia!”
Sabbatha stood up like a Roman charioteer, tore her blouse open to expose her rather flat and pendulous breasts and drove the horses round and round the fountains till she was drenched in the winy spray and was almost restored to sobriety.
But this incident proved to be one touch of poetic license too much for public tolerance in The Eternal City.
The next morning it was reported scathingly in Il Messagero that a demented female tourist, with a much younger male companion of questionable morales, had made a “figura bruta” in the sacred square and that she would be well advised to indulge her inebriate fancies in some other province if not in a madhouse.
Once again, then, and for the last time in her European sojourn, she was confronted by cameras and reporters. It was when she came out of the lift at the Academy.
“About the scandal?” they asked her.
“All truth is a scandal,” she informed them in ringing tones, “and all art is an indiscretion!”
With this outcry she had tossed her hair in their faces and lifted her arms in a gesture which she thought the cameras would interpret as an unfettered condition of spirit as strikingly as the camera of Genthe had captured for posterity the classic pose of Isadora Duncan among the columns of the Acropolis: but evidently there was a difference both in the subject and in the photographic craft or intention, for what appeared next day in the papers of Rome suggested nothing more nor less than the abandoned posturing of a middle-aged female, three or four sheets to the wind.
A day later she left Rome with Giovanni who recognized her manic condition quite clearly, now, but was adhered to the lady as a postage stamp to an incoherent postcard.
In the early days of film-making the copulation of lovers could only be suggested by some such device as cutting from a preliminary embrace to a bee hovering over the chalice of a lily: and there is probably a similar bit of artifice involved in bringing up so much of Sabbatha’s past history through the murmurs of the spring that cascaded beneath her Eyrie.
In any case, those evocative murmurs of the spring were now invaded and quite overwhelmed by another sound, the starting of a motor which was that of Giovanni’s sports car, the Triumph she’d given him on his thirty-fifth birthday that summer. It was roaring into motion.
At its first noise she had cried out, “Giovanni!” and had made a staggering rush to intercept the car in the drive winding down from her Eyrie, but of course wasn’t quick enough to throw herself across the drive before the car had passed over the wooden bridge and was beyond interception; indeed, she wondered if, had she been able to throw herself in the car’s way, he might not have driven it straight over her prostrate body, and gone on speeding away.
The sound of the motor receded and receded, now, until it faded under the tristesse of the brook, and Sabbatha and solitude had at last joined forces truly, if forces is the right word for it.
The first night that Sabbatha found herself unable to ascend the stairs to the bedroom in a reasonably vertical state, in other words as a biped, but had to mount them on all fours if she wished to sleep in bed, she assumed with some logic that she was entering upon a downstairs existence at Sabbatha’s Eyrie. She realized that her curvature of the spine which now made it difficult to reach objects on a mantel or kitchen shelf without the precarious expedient of climbing onto a tabletop or a chair, articles of furniture that seemed to resent her efforts to climb on them as female animals not in heat resent the advances of the tumescent males of their species, it occurred to her that death in solitude was not an unlikely or remote prospect, and this reflection was entertained by the lady with mixed emotions.
Death in solitude, she remarked to herself, rolling her sea-green eyes from side to side in their sockets, set rather close together on either side of her almost too prominent nose.
Names of poets and poetesses who had died alone, completely alone or virtually alone, passed through her mind. It was a roll call of honor; it included such names as Thomas Chatterton who had hung himself alone in his garret to escape debtor’s prison, it included the minor but not ungifted poetess Sara Teasdale who had cut her wrists in a bathtub, presumably behind a locked door without bath attendants, it included that eccentric spinster poetess, somewhere between minor and major, who had died alone in agony from a deliberate O.D. of some lysergic acid, and now it seemed to Sabbatha that death in solitude was the preordained fate of almost any self-respecting poet or poetess.
On hands and knees she had reached the telephone stand on the stair landing when this sad but uplifting conviction took hold of her.
She was just barely able to haul the phone off its stand and from a prostrate condition she put through a long-distance call to one of her once-young male escorts in Manhattan. He was still living there and was now employed as a society reporter for the leading newspaper. The call was put through with difficulty and through his answering service. It took her almost an hour and a great deal of shrieking and growling to track him down at the residence of the Fourth Duchess of Argyle, and when she finally had him on the wire, she could scarcely make her voice, strong as it remained, heard through the hysteria of supper guests of the Duchess, all high on grass or booze with rock music. The former young escort kept pretending to think, or did actually think, that he was receiving a crank call; she only succeeded in confirming her identity to him by reciting the sextet of a sonnet which he had once pronounced her most exquisite accomplishment of all.
“Oh, yes, then it is you, Sabbatha. How goes it?”
“My darling, I am preparing myself for death in complete solitude which is why I am calling to beg you to…wait! I’m all choked up! Preston, I know that important newspapers keep a file of obituaries of well-known persons, especially when the person’s health is known to be failing. Now, Preston, this is dreadfully vain of me but I can’t help but want to know what is going to be printed about me when I.…Do you understand, darling? And could you very, very privately obtain a copy of my obituary from these secret files called obits? Please, please I can’t explain how or why it would matter so much to me, but somehow it does, it really and truly does, so for old time’s sake, would you, could you, please, do this for me, dearest?”
“Sabbatha, you are breaking my heart,” he said rather matter-of-factly. “Why just last month I saw a little squib for your new book of verse. The Bride’s Bouquet, cute title. And now you want me to sneak your obit out of t
he files? My God, you’ve broken my rice bowl! I have to blow my mind with another joint, baby. Take care, ciao, bambinaV’
He had hung up with a bang, but a few days later a letter arrived whose envelope bore the masthead of his newspaper.
Thus far this top-secret letter had remained unopened at the Eyrie but she knew precisely where it was, she’d put it under a box of Twining’s Formosa Oolong tea bags in the breakfast nook.
It took considerable time and effort for her to retrieve it since the chair fell over several times before she could successfully mount it.
It also took her quite a while to get the obit into the living (or dying) room where she had intended to read it by firelight which she had somehow imagined might improve her reaction to its content.
But nothing could have assuaged her shock when she saw that the clipping was less than half a column in length and included no photograph of her and that it had even dared to omit one ‘b’ from Sabbatha and the hyphen between Duff and Collick.
Fuck them all! she decided. Fuck them all, past, present and future!
She flung the obit into the appropriately dying embers where it revived a slight and brief conflagration before going up in smoke—as human vanity must either side of—
The nocturnal fiasco of California Chianti served Sabbatha now as a measure of the hours before detested daylight crept between the locked shutters of her Eyrie. When the bottle was half empty it would be about midnight and when there were only two or three inches left in it, she knew that she might at any instant expect the crow of a distant cock to warn her that it was time to chug-a-lug the remaining vino and bury her face in the nest of cushions she’d hauled down from the sofa several months ago to provide her with pillow and mattress.
Beside this disordered bed before the fireplace were the implements of her trade, the notebooks and pencils, now that the arthritic condition of her joints had obliged her to give up the Underwood portable whose ribbon, anyway, had faded to a point where a typed page had become barely legible.