Mrs. God (2 page)

By this time he had come to realize that his dissertation on Henry James had quietly expired. He was still married, and though he and Jean were again now able, after all their trials, to think about trying to become parents, his career at Zenith was growing more imperiled year by year. Two books about Isobel Standish, an edition of her complete work edited by himself and a consideration of her place in contemporary poetry, would satisfy the tenure committee and enable him to keep his job. He could make an end run around the ghastly corpse of his dissertation and then fly free of Zenith altogether—to come to rest in some far more suitable, even ivied, world.

Nine months before the committee had informed him that publication of some kind would be an absolute requirement of his staying on at Zenith, he had written to Esswood inquiring if in fact Isobel had enjoyed the hospitality of the Seneschals, if she had worked at Esswood—above all, if she had left papers in the celebrated library. If so, might this letter be considered an application for a Fellowship of whatever duration Esswood might deem most appropriate for a thorough study of her work? He had not neglected to describe his enthusiasm for Isobel's work and his sense of its importance, nor to allude to his odd relationship to the poet.

Esswood had returned a prompt acknowledgment signed with the initials R. W. His application would be decided upon “in due course.” Standish informed the members of the committee that he expected to have news for them soon and allowed them to conclude from that what they might.

Three months went by without word from England. In January, the fifth month, Jean Standish learned that she was pregnant again and that the child was due in late September. In the third month of her pregnancy Jean developed alarming symptoms—high blood pressure, one unaccountable instance of vaginal bleeding—and was ordered into bed for four weeks. She dutifully took to her bed. At the end of this time, eight weeks after his application, Standish finally received another letter from Beaswick, Lincolnshire. He had been accepted. For a period of three weeks, he was to be given free access to the Isobel Standish papers and whatever else he might find helpful. (“We do not believe in unnecessary circumscriptions on scholarly work,” wrote R. W., now revealed as one Robert Wall.) Robert Wall had added a bland sentence of apology for the delay, which went unexplained. Standish thought that they had offered the Fellowship during August to someone else, and the other person had eventually turned them down. Or they had withdrawn their appointment, as with Jeremy Starger and Chester Ridgeley. This seemed more likely. Someone else's failure had been his salvation.

For salvation it was. Standish's chairman agreed to postpone for a year any decision about his future at Zenith College. Within that time Standish was to prepare his edition of Isobel's work, write a lengthy introduction, and arrange for publication of the volume.

Jean had been the last obstacle. How do you know they won't withdraw it at the last minute? Maybe they do this all the time. (Unfortunately, Jean knew all about Chester Ridgeley and Jeremy Starger.) Have you ever known anyone who actually went there? Maybe the whole place is a fantastic practical joke, maybe it's just another one of your crazy fantasies, maybe they'll find out about
you
. Don't you think about that, Bill? Why do you need them, anyhow? Flushed, fearful, Jean woke him at night and drilled questions at him until she, not he, broke down into tears of doubt. The next day she adopted an uncharacteristic meekness, barely speaking when he returned to the apartment after school—she was a walking apology.

When he said that he was taking the appointment for the sake of their shared future, she said, “Don't pretend that you want to go for my sake.” During the final months of the semester, Jean wavered between a meek deceptive acceptance of his plans and an increasingly violent opposition to them. By June, she wept whenever either of them mentioned the trip. It was impossible for him to leave—especially now. There were other colleges besides Zenith. And even if no other colleges would hire him, weren't there always high schools? Would that be such a disgrace?

And what if I lose this baby? Don't you realize it could happen?

But she never said, And what if I lose this baby too? And she never blamed him, except perhaps once, for the loss of the THING wrapped in the bloody sheets and flushed away into null-world, oblivion.

Sometimes during these weeks Standish looked at his obese wife, her hair hanging in loose damp disarray around her red face and wondered who she was, who it was that he had married. He reminded her that she was healthy, that he would be back three weeks before the birth.

You won't
, she said.
I know it. I'll be all alone in the hospital, and I'll die
.

If it's that bad, he finally told her, I'll write to Esswood and tell them I can't go because of problems at home.

You think I'm bullying you, you're so weak, you don't understand, you don't even remember
.

What don't I understand?

This baby is real. Real! I am going to have this baby! Do you know for certain there is an Esswood? How can you be so sure you'll write a book there?

Especially, she meant, since you've never been able to write one here at home.

Do you remember, do you, do you, do you, do you even remember what you made me do?

It doesn't matter, Standish thought, in a week or two I'll get the flat gray envelope with its single handwritten paragraph.

He sat with Jean in the evenings. He talked about his classes, they watched television. Jean spoke of very little but food, soap operas, and the movements of the baby in her womb. She seemed two-dimensional, like someone who had died and been imperfectly resurrected. One night he took his
Crack, Whack, and Wheel
from the shelf and began making notes. Jean did not protest. Oddly, the poems seemed lifeless to him, untalented and childish. They too seemed dead.

The gray envelope would come any day, he thought, and put an end to this charade. Mail came to the department office between three and three-thirty, and each day after his Freshman class Standish approached the office with a familiar heartsickness. He looked at the slot bearing his name as soon as he came through the door.

After six working days he found a gray envelope in the slot. It bore the return address of the Esswood Foundation. Standish glanced reflexively toward the littered desk that had been Jeremy Starger's, and the bearded young eighteenth-century specialist who used it now looked up at him and frowned. “Keep away from me, Standish,” he said. Not bothering to reply, Standish took the envelope from his slot, along with the bundle of publishers' announcements that was his usual mail. He was surprised to find how disappointed, almost frightened, he was. Standish dropped the textbook announcements into the overflowing departmental wastebasket and carried the gray envelope to his desk. He felt hot. He knew he was blushing. Robert Wall had found him out. Sighing, he ripped open the envelope and pulled out a sheet of hieroglyphic nonsense which after a few seconds resolved itself into a mimeographed map illustrating how to drive from Heathrow Airport to Beaswick, where Esswood was located. His heartbeat and his flush faded. A lightly penciled
X
marked Esswood's location. Standish felt the profound relief of one who after being sentenced to death receives a full pardon.

That night he gave the map to Jean as she sat before the television set. “Nice,” she said, and held it out toward him. In the glare from the set her cheeks were as puffy as bolsters. As Jean's belly had expanded, so had the rest of her body, encasing her in an unhappy overcoat made of ice cream and doughnuts. He took the map from her bloated fingers. He imagined that Isobel Standish had remained slim all her life.

“… good it's going to do,” she muttered to the screen.

“What?”

“I wonder how much good that map is going to do you.” She did not bother to look at him.

“Why would you wonder about that?” he asked, unable to keep a sudden quickening from his voice.

“Because it shows you how to get to that place from Heathrow.” Then she did turn her head to face him.

“Heathrow is the name of the London airport.”

“But you're not going to London. You're going to someplace called Gatwick.”

The name Gatwick did sound familiar. Standish went upstairs to the bedroom, pulled his airline ticket out of his dresser drawer, and read what was printed on its face.

“You're right,” he said when he came back downstairs. Jean grunted. Standish wondered if she had prowled through his dresser drawers. The television seemed very loud. He turned to the bookshelf and pulled out an atlas and found the index for England. Gatwick was unlisted.

Standish sat down in the chair beside Jean's and unfolded Robert Wall's little map, with its complications of roadways and interchanges. None of the towns in black boldface was Gatwick. He could see Gatwick nowhere between London and Lincolnshire. Gatwick was literally off the map. Well, he would find the place once he got there. Gas stations all had maps. England had to have gas stations, didn't it?

Though Standish checked his mail every day, Robert Wall never wrote that Esswood had found it necessary to withdraw his appointment; and now here he was, thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean. Standish had two more drinks on the long flight, and nearly ordered a fourth until he remembered Jeremy Starger.

You couldn't turn a ridiculous red-bearded little drunk loose in the Esswood library, could you? You couldn't let that happen.

Standish took
Crack, Whack, and Wheel
from his carry-on bag. Feeling pleasantly honorable and muzzy from gin, he opened Isobel's book. His underlinings, notes, and annotations jumped reassuringly out at him, testimony to the merits of Isobel's poetry and the depth of his own thought. Here were the physical traces of an alert scholarly mind at work on a worthy object.
Cf. Psalm 69
, read one of his notes,
world does not answer the cry for pity, ironic intent, ref. husband?
In ink of another color, he had added
eloquent offer of charity, attribute of the poetic self
. And in pencil above this was added
antinarrative strategy
. Isobel Standish's work was full of antinarrative strategy. At some point Standish had scrawled
Odysseus, Dante
in the crowded margins. The title of the poem he had annotated so industriously was “Rebuke.”

Neither found he any, the vagrant said
Under the moldering eaves of the house
Full of heaviness and no one to comfort,
No one wavering up to say

“
Put on your indiscretions, little fool,
but first take your glasses off. Why, Miss Standish …”
This glowing moon. The crowd
Has already gathered on the terraces
.

The history of one who came too late
To the rooms of broken babies and their toys
Is all they talk about around here
And rebuke, did you think you'd be left out?

Blurry with a hangover, he ate the terrible airline meal, drank one glass of red wine that tasted of solvent, and nursed another through the movie. He was not accustomed to drinking so much. Jean did not approve of wine with meals, and Standish did not usually appreciate the sluggishness and confusion with which more than a single drink afflicted him. Yet this was not at all the life to which he was accustomed—the safety of home was thousands of miles behind him, and he was suspended in midair with a copy of
Crack, Whack, and Wheel
, on his way somewhere utterly unknown. Every aspect of this circumstance felt ripe with anxiety. Three weeks seemed a very long time to be immured in a remote country house looking at manuscripts of poems he still was not sure he understood.

Standish fell asleep during the movie, and woke up in dim morning greasy with sweat, as if covered with a fine film of oil. The stewardess had put a blanket over him, and he thrashed and kicked, imagining that some loathsome thing, some fragment of a nightmare, lay atop him—fully awake, he wiped his greasy face with his hands and looked around. Only a few goggling idiots had observed his moment of panic. Standish pulled the blanket off the floor and only then noticed that he had an erection. Like some huge beast diving into concealment, his dream shifted massively just beneath the surface of his memory.

The airplane began to descend shortly after he had eaten. Standish pushed up his window cover, and cold gray light streamed into the cabin. They seemed to descend through layer after layer of this silvery undersea light. At last the plane came through a final layer of clouds filled with a pure, unliving whiteness, and an utterly foreign landscape opened beneath them. Tiny fields as distinct as cobblestones surrounded an equally tiny airport. In the distance, two great motorways met and mingled on the outskirts of a little city surrounded by rows of terraced houses. A long way past the toy city lay a forest, a great flash of vibrant green that seemed the only true color in the landscape.
England
, Standish thought. A thrill of strangeness passed through him.

The plane landed at some distance from the terminal, and the passengers had to carry their hand baggage across the tarmac. Standish's arms ached from the weight of the various small bags he had filled at the last minute with books and cassettes. His Walkman bumped his chest as it swung on its strap. He felt a queer, fatalistic exhilaration. The silvery light, a light never seen in America, lay over the tarmac. Two dwarfish men in filthy boilersuits stood in the shadows beneath the airplane watching the passengers trudge toward the terminal. Standish knew that if he could overhear the words the men passed as they squinted through their cigarette smoke, he would not understand a one.

But he had no trouble understanding or being understood as he passed through the airport. The customs official treated him courteously, and the Immigration Officer seemed genuinely interested in Standish's response to the question about the purpose of his visit. And when Standish asked him for directions to a village in Lincolnshire, he said, “Don't worry, sir. This is a small country, compared to yours. You can't get too lost.” Every word, in fact every syllable of this charming little speech was not only clear but musical: the Immigration Officer's voice rose and fell as did no American's, and so did that of the girl behind the rental desk, who had never heard of Esswood or Beaswick but pressed several maps on him before she walked him to the terminal's glass doors and pointed to the decade-old turquoise Ford Escort, humble and patient as a mule, he had rented. “The boot should hold all your bags,” she said, “but there's lashings of room in the backseat, if not. You'll want to begin on the motorway directly ahead and go straight through the interchange, that'll see you on your way.”