Page 22 of Telling Tales


  And might it actually have come to pass that she never had become Sister Lucia, had remained Deirdre, renouncing whatever vows she’d made before her probationary period had expired, gone back into the world she’d left, and become wife and mother? On the other side, the chance, fanciful as it might be, of her giving up the regulated life and embracing the world invites so many possibilities that I can understand her choosing to choose to not do so. Though I go back and forth on my conjecture of the path she took, my suppose is that the choice she made was to submit, rendering all other choosing moot. Give up your life to whatever, then choices are made for you. It’s the easier road to take.

  As for me, with certainty impossible, ‘suppose’ haunts me. Suppose I had been an unwitting pander between her and an existent lover, inadvertingly determining that she renounce her preliminary vows, that she return to the world, marry for love, have children and grandchildren, all of whom turned out well, and that she be happily still alive in good health. In other words that inadvertently and unwittingly I was the instrument of a miracle. Given the abomination of the world we live in, that would have been the one good I’d have done in my life. On the other side, suppose the presumptive marriage would have turned out to be a disaster. We do live in a place of darkness, in which presumptions are mere will-o’-the-wisps.

  Then again, suppose there were no lover and she had become Sister Lucia. Then at least the Deirdre she was, to whom I’d delivered mail, whom I’d touched and sent a gold cross during that long ago Christmas season, has been a preserved lighthouse, providing some gleams of sbeauty in the darkness, a lighthouse that I, like Virginia Woolf’s Mr. Ramsay, glimpsed and never was able to reach.

  Or suppose I’d never encountered what I still believe is ‘pure,’ in more than one sense of the word, had never found beauty in a convent on a city street when I was in a state of despair, just emerging from the lower depths to deliver mail as a substitute during the Christmas season? Would my life, devoid of the fleeting fact and long memory of her, have been even more wanting than it has? Suppose I, after closing the book on Protestantism, from the wailing of snake handlers and the jabbering of those who speak in tongues to the chanting of divines in the High Church of England, had eventually returned to Mother Church, even as a nonbeliever, and had taken the Sacraments as merely symbolic wafer and wine—are they any closer to flesh and blood than the Methodist’s bread and grape juice?—and had said prayers with my fingers crossed, and had renounced and retreated from the world of my fellowmen and women. What if I’d dedicated my life to serving the poor, needy and disabled as penance for the bloodshed, suffering and killing I’d been complicit in during my youth—would I then have found atonement? peace of mind? Would my life have been worth something? Would I have justified my existence? Would I have given some purpose to the purposelessness of being?

  Or, the most tormenting question that dogs me from the chance touching of my life and the life of the beautiful novice—suppose during our final encounter, with Eloise and Abelard in mind, I had shrugged off the mailbag I’d been carrying, had gathered up Deirdre in my pea jacket-covered-arms, and, crowning her with my watch cap and tossing the hideous yellow gloves onto the floor of the vestibule, had carried her, with her consent, given or tacit, from the convent out into the raging storm—what then would have been our lives?

  Suppose leads to wonder. Reluctantly because fearfully I wonder whether Deirdre is still in the land of the living. If not, I fervently hope the end of her story did not in any way correspond to Celtic Deirdre’s, her mythic namesake, who died of a broken heart on her lover’s grave. When I think she might still be breathing the air you and I breathe, I refuse to let myself try to picture what she must be now, wherever and whatever her lot. The deceitful eye of my imagination, not my brain, insists that she is a constant, immune to the ravages of time and change, unaffected by the rottenness of the world, that she is still Deirdre, the beautiful novice.

  I sometimes wonder too whether, if she be on this our earth, she ever remembers there was a John the postman, to whom she sang and smiled, whose flesh she touched once, more than glancingly. Might she ever wonder what I am and look like as I record this suppose, while memory, probably glossed-up, the gnaw of that rat time, and the fumble to find words are exerting conflicting claims? Most probably if she does retain a fleeting remembrance of John the postman, it’s just a shape in the dust supposedly we’re made of, or the waning crescent that can be seen in the sky after the full moon has drowned in the sea of darkness.

  Yes, even the seemingly inconsequential suppose always comes down to never-to-be-satisfied wonder. What did she make of the cross of gold? Did she know or suspect from whom it came. Did she ever wear it? Not even once? Did she sell it to a pawnshop for money to give to the Little Sisters of the Poor? Might she, while fingering it during the silence of regulated hours, on her knees with her head bowed, ever have sung so only her inner ear could hear,

  He’s coming, he’s coming,

  Named for the beloved disciple,

  John the postman is coming,

  As sure as our Savior’s love?

  Because after the war never was I able to bend my knees and I’ve refused to bow my head, hours of silence have not been appointed for me, though they have been plentiful and these days are even more so. From time to time during silences my inner ear has heard the parlor-song melody and the substitute words sung not by the croaking contralto of a fat old nun, perhaps now a mother superior, but by the lilting virginal soprano of a truly beautiful young novice.

  To fill in and give up on my story. As I’ve suggested, I was graduated from college as a B-minus student. I did succeed in earning a Master’s Degree in Education. And I did manage to become a high school teacher of… you guessed it…English. As a teacher, I’d grade myself C-plus.

  The best I can do to conclude this narrative I don’t know how to end, in fact I can’t even find the words with which to take a proper leave, is to fall back on some appropriate lines of poetry by the seventeenth-century Welsh poet Henry Vaughan in the hope they will convey something of how a few moments of confluence in the lives of Deirdre the novice and a temporary mailman have affected, or should I say have infected me.

  If a star were confined into a tomb,

  Her captive flames must needs burn there;

  But when the hand that locked her up gives room,

  She’ll shine through all the sphere.

  Substitute ‘can’t prevent a touch’ for ‘gives room’ and, though it’s at the cost of losing the poet’s meter and rhyme, you’ll understand.

  RIVER LOVE: PROLOGUE

  I came across the following poems quite by accident. They’d been stored in a barn beside the house my wife and I live in. The property has belonged to her family for generations. In the cornerstone of the limestone foundation, 1832 has been chiseled.

  My wife and I had gone into the loft of the barn to show some guests a historical curiosity—an Old Towne canoe that had belonged to Woodrow Wilson. It happened to be there because “Woody,” a notorious penny pincher, had taken a fancy to an oil landscape, a piece of early American Impressionism. Unwilling to shell out the modest amount the painter, who happened to be my wife’s first husband’s father, had put on it, Woody had induced the artist to swap the painting for his canoe. The painting went into the White House, the canoe into the barn.

  After lifting the sheet from the pedigreed object, my wife was reciting for our guests the oft-repeated scrap of history that accounted for the boat’s having landing there. While they were gawking at the relic, my roving eye happened to light on a Saratoga trunk, standing in a nearby bay. I’d never noticed it before.

  Pointing to it, I asked my wife, “What’s in that trunk?” She had just finished her brief tale of a tub. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” she answered. “Most likely nothing. Why it’s here I haven’t a clue.”

  “Mind if I take a peek?”
r />   “Of course not,” she replied.

  After lifting the rounded lid, I began fussing with garments that almost surely had been in the wardrobe of some nineteenth-century female member of my wife’s family.

  “What’s this?” I suddenly exclaimed, as I lifted a brown paper packet, unmarked, from the cincture of a hoopskirt. “May I open it to see what’s inside?”

  Although my wife is a thoroughly liberated woman, she does have some residual family pride and can be a bit touchy about any denigration of her genteel ancestry.

  “Help yourself,” she replied offhandedly.

  When we returned to the house, I carried in the packet and laid it on my desk. Later that evening, after dinner and the departure of our guests, I retired to my study and opened the parcel. Imagine my surprise when I extracted a slim sheaf of gray paper, with blue-green lines that time had made almost invisibile. The rough edge at the top of the sheets suggested they’d been torn from a tablet or pad. On them, written in pencil, were what looked to be verses of varying lengths. After leafing through, I decided to read them, not because I was expecting to make an earthshaking literary discovery, but just because…well, because I’m a curious person. I counted the pages. On ten of the eleven sheets what certainly had to be poems had been printed in block letters. So faint were the words that it was difficult, though possible to make them out under the light from the halogen lamp on my desk. The letters had been so neatly drawn that, if they hadn’t been badly faded, they could almost be taken for typefaces. At the bottom of these sheets, across the blue-green lines at varying angles, cursively written phrases, also in pencil, had been scrawled.

  One sheet, the eighth, however, was vellum-like ivory. It had scarcely deteriorated. What was on it had been written in black ink, which, though slightly faded, had not given in to—how many years? The slanting strokes and stylized flourishes would seem to indicate that the inscribing hand had had some training in penmanship.

  What had been written toward the bottom of the ten sheets, I came to conclude, indicated the occasions that had called forth the poems. These phrases appeared to have been hastily scribbled at varying times in varying states of emotion, presumably after the poems had been composed and painstakingly printed. So meticulous was the care with which the poetry had been set down and so careless had been the recording of the occasion that it would seem the composition and transcribing of the poems were acts of love, while the scrawl was an afterthought. On the vellum-like page there was no such scribbling.

  As I read the contents of the packet a second time, more closely, I came to understand that the ten printed poems purported to have been written by a river man sometime in the distant past. If so, I considered it remarkable that, limited as his knowledge of poetry must have been, he’d felt compelled and had been able to commit his comings and goings, along with a powerful passion, to paper. Presumably uneducated and isolated from literary culture as he must have been, it seemed unlikely he’d ever read a poem by Wordsworth or Longfellow, let alone Keats or Emerson.

  Nor do the poems resemble the poetry of the sentimental poets of the nineteenth century. In fact, they struck me as being quite original. Clearly they were not a substitute for love notes or letters. The beloved, never named, is mostly a feminine pronoun. Only twice is she directly addressed. All we see of her is “a flounce behind a tree.” Yet these poems are both intimate and passionate. And unliterary as they might be, they have a convincing integrity. In the boatman’s poetic endeavors I also find surprising sensitivity, an ear for language, some diction you wouldn’t expect from such a man, an eye for the river and sky, light and dark. And yet you can be certain that these poems never will become part of the canon of literary poetry.

  The presumptive date for the building of the barn, 1832, more than a decade before the first railroad tracks were laid in this region, a period when boats, barges and log rafts, carrying lumber, freight, grain, and passengers, were still plying the Susquehanna and its adjunct canals, seems likely to be the approximate time in which the poems were written and during which the events they present happened—if they weren’t just by-products of someone’s imagining.

  Arguing against the poems’ being fiction is poem number eight, written from a woman’s perspective, in a woman’s voice. This poem does suggest that the writer had some familiarity with the Lancelot-Elaine of Astolat love story in Arthurian narrative, perhaps by way of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Like the quality of the paper it’s written on and its calligraphy, it almost surely indicates a class difference between the protagonist and the woman he loves. Such a surmise is supported by the ladies’ garments, with their frippery of hoops, hooks and eyes, ruffles, flounces and furbelows, within which the packet had been hidden in the trunk. Quite a contrast to the rugged dress of a river man.

  Although the events recorded, if they did happen, are cryptically fragmented, with huge gaps, the sequence of poems does seem to tell the story of the river man’s falling in love with a woman living in a house situated close to the shore, which he passes as he makes his runs down and back up the river. At first the woman rejects his advances, then comes to accept and return his love. It appears there was a consummation, without marriage, culminating in the woman’s premonition that she was soon to die, followed by her death in fact, or in her lover’s imagination. If my supposition about what happened is correct, it’s quite possible that a difference in class was an impregnable barrier between the lovers. From what I know of my wife’s genealogy, a number of beautiful and stylish women might serve as plausible prototypes for the beloved. For the river man there is no candidate.

  Concluding that these pieces might be of some local historical interest, I decided to edit and transcribe them. In so doing I’ve not altered the diction, with the exception of a single word I couldn’t resist (see whether it jumps out at you)—or tampered with the figurative language—obviously the river is the dominant metaphor—nor have I modified the original rhythms in any way. But I have supplied punctuation where it seems helpful and regularized spelling where it’s eccentric. Also, I’ve taken the liberty of changing the format of some poems by indenting lines that are metrically short. Neither the poems nor the pages of the original are numbered, but I have preserved the order in which they lay in the packet. This arrangement seems to be compatible with the sketchy narrative I’ve constructed.

  The poems are without titles. So I’ve used the scribbled occasion as a title for each of the ten printed poems. Since there is no such notation on the vellum-like sheet, I invented a title for that poem, enclosing the words in a parenthesis to signify that the title had not been provided by the writer. I’ve also given the entire set of poems its straightforward title.

  It would seem that these poems, secured in a trunk as they have been, were not meant for the eyes of any of the living save the two who were involved. Might their preservation suggest that the one who wrote ten love poems did not, perhaps could not bear to destroy them? After all, our ancestors did have matches, lucifers they were then called, and the river was running by, waiting to spirit off shreds of paper that were tossed into it.

  Somehow the ten poems must fallen into the hands of the one who seemingly had called them forth. Placing it where it significantly belongs, she then had added a poem of her own to the cache. Could it be that, with every intention of doing away with all the poems at some future time, she had hidden them in the trunk with her clothing? Were that the case, it seems unlikely she would forget they were there. Perhaps death, her sudden death saved the life of the poems. Or might it be she hadn’t the heart to destroy her lover’s poems? Could this be the reason her trunk had been stored in the loft of the barn like an exile or a castaway, rather than in the capacious attic with its hoard of Victoriana? There are mysteries that will never be solved.

       Still another possibility is that the lady, if there really was one, when she was no longer a maiden, howev
er short or long her life, didn’t want the poems to be destroyed, after all. Rather, perhaps, she wished them to be preserved for her familial posterity, some one of whom, after she was no more, she wanted to find and read them as evidence of her having lived, having been loved, and having given her love in return.  Whatever the circumstance or intention that preserved them and however slight their literary quality, as I’ve worked over them I’ve come to believe that these pieces of poetry, which serve as a cultural or poetic curiosity, maybe also be a bequest, a last will and testament.

  I should add that my speculations and conjectures about this trove of love poems raises a genealogical/biological question. Whether such a possibility has also occurred to my wife since I exposed the poems to her, or her to the poems, I have no idea. In fact, I’ve made a pact with myself never to put the question to her. When you’ve read the poems, you’ll know, I’m sure, what the hazardous, unmentioned and unanswerable question is.

 

  RIVER LOVE

   

  i. The Night After the First Morning I Dared Speak to Her

 

  Three times I put the name I love

  In one great question to the night,

  While near the shore I stood against

  The running of a powerful tide.

   

  The current would not let me stand,

  Three times it heeled my stern around.

  Three times I spoke out through the dark,

  Three times the hills returned the sound.

   

  And after that a silence came,

  Giving her ungiven answer.

  Three times I called the name I loved,

  Then gave myself up to the river

  ii. Another Rejection

   

  There were no lights along the river,

  None in the sky,

   There was no sound upon the water

           As I ran by.

   

  Tonight her answer has been given,

 
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