Muse: A Novel Page 14

  In the end, though, it was Maxine, the tolerant solid citizen, the brave, good-natured, generous, “normal” one, who wouldn’t have dreamed of putting pen to paper, who had been the muse of his muse’s last and, he was convinced, greatest book—Ida’s secret sharer, someone in and of the real world, without any of the pretension or self-concern that made this crew of narcissists so unbearable to Paul at this moment.

  And what had Maxine felt about Ida? What emotions had possessed her as she consented to love and be loved by this dazzling, mercurial woman and betray her husband, no doubt for the first time—she who had so often been betrayed by him? Had Maxine been exacting some kind of revenge of her own against Sterling? It didn’t feel that way to Paul. He imagined—since this was all fantasy, he might as well go all the way—that Maxine, who had always been so tolerant and contained, so restrained and self-abnegating, had been broken open by unexpected feeling, by unfamiliar passion, by a mutuality she had never shared with Sterling. Paul wanted to believe that Maxine hadn’t always been the self-sacrificing victim. For once, she’d found happiness herself, and in the most unlikely of places, right under her husband’s distractible nose.

  As he collected his belongings and boarded his flight, Paul felt a rush of empathy for Maxine, and for her bond with Ida. Their moment in time, in Ida’s telling, had a purity and a completeness he could only endorse, and envy.

  And besides, who was he to judge? What he’d wanted, as Ida had instantly grasped, he now saw, was to know his heroes as human beings—to feel his way into how they had lived, not in the pages of books, even their own books, but as men and women. He had something priceless in his briefcase—not just the last and most explosive book by Ida Perkins, but a contemporary testament to love. His ultimate loyalty had to be to what Mnemosyne represented. Whatever it took, he had to publish this perfect book perfectly. This at least was something he understood.

  XI

  Publishing Scoundrel

  Homer was beside himself. He and Sally were open-mouthed as Paul recounted his discovery after staggering into the office late the next morning.

  “Are you telling me Ida was balling Sterling’s wife?! I didn’t know the old girl had it in her.”

  Paul did his usual best to ignore Homer’s provocations. “The thing is, the poems are electrifying. It’s a profoundly moving book.”

  “ ‘Moving,’ my ass! This is going to turn the literary world on its tail. Get me Chowderhead!”

  “Hold on, Homer. Ida is still with us,” Sally cautioned. “We have to think about her.”

  “And we have to think about Sterling,” Paul added. “It’s clear he can’t publish the book, but Ida didn’t say anything about that. I need to talk to her, to clarify her intentions, and—”

  “This is no time to phumpher around, Dukach. Purcell and Stern is going to be publishing Animosity, or whatever it’s called. End of joke. Who needs a fourth Ace? This is a … a royal flush.”

  Homer could be a steamroller when aroused. And if he could mangle a name, he would. Paul didn’t remind him that it was his decision what happened with Ida’s book. He hoped he didn’t need to. It was already too late in Venice; he would phone Ida tomorrow.

  He called Roz, thanking her lavishly for her introduction to Ida and providing a redacted version of their conversation. He called Sterling, too. Paul passed on Ida’s greetings and filled him in as to what the notebooks actually described. Sterling didn’t seem all that surprised—or interested, Paul felt. He suggested they meet for drinks, but he didn’t sense—maybe because he didn’t want to—any urgency on the other end of the line, and they said good-bye without setting a date.

  On both calls, Mnemosyne went unmentioned.

  A day passed, and then another, in which he got lost in catching up—writing overdue flap copy, declining manuscripts, returning calls and answering e-mails. Earl Burns had delivered the big novel they’d been waiting on for the past few years, and Paul spent the weekend reading it—somewhat disappointing, but he could see there were things that could be done to make it more reader-friendly. Earl was far from the most responsive author Paul had ever worked with, but he was congenitally practical, and Paul hoped he would come to see the logic in Paul’s major suggestion, which was that the wife should not die at the end of the book. Every thing should go on just as before—except radically new. The novel is superb, he’d tell him; now go rewrite it.

  Paul let himself get reabsorbed by his work, and before he knew it three weeks had gone by. On a Thursday afternoon—it was Ida’s birthday, he suddenly realized—at about four o’clock, just as his energy was flagging, he answered a call that had been transferred from the receptionist.

  “Signore Dukach?”

  “Yes.” The connection was poor and it was hard to hear.

  The caller was weeping. “Sono Adriana Pertuzzi, la cameriera della Contessa Moro. Mi dispiace informarla che Donna Ida è scomparsa oggi pomeriggio alle ore quindici-trenta. Mi dispiace, mi dispiace tanto.”

  Scomparsa. Disappeared. Ida, his heroine, was gone. Paul expressed his sorrow as succinctly as he could, thanked Signora Pertuzzi for calling, and hung up.

  Everything was going to change now. Beyond his grief, he felt an upsurge of remorse like an attack of heartburn: he’d dragged his heels and failed to find out what precisely Ida had wanted him to do about Sterling and the sheaf of poems that were now his responsibility. Yes, he’d known she was ill, but he hadn’t realized how seriously. How could he have? Had her awareness of her impending death precipitated her impulsively giving him the manuscript? Had some intimation held him back from following up with her? Would she have spoken to him in any case?

  Whatever the truth, he was sitting now on the horns of an impossible dilemma.

  * * *

  Ida’s obituary, which began above the fold on the front page of The Daily Blade the next morning, ran over onto two full inside pages, with photos of her with each of her four husbands, and three presidents. There was a picture of Ida with Sterling and Maxine in Hiram’s Corners, and a group shot with A.O., Pound and Olga Rudge, Celine Mannheim, and her cousin Homer Stern in the garden of Palazzo del Pisellino on the Grand Canal in 1969.

  Unsurprisingly, Ida’s and Stephen’s son, Thomas, went unmentioned in the long article. Paul noticed numerous other errors and omissions, though the general tone of the piece was appreciative, even affectionate, and, he felt, took the true measure of the loss to American culture that Ida’s passing represented.

  Memorial services were held in Venice and London and, soon after New Year’s, at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the colonnaded Beaux Arts palace on 155th Street in upper Manhattan that felt to Paul as if it belonged in Washington, D.C., or maybe Saint Petersburg. He watched them all file into the neoclassical auditorium with its coffered ceiling, red velvet curtains, and Renaissance-style organ, reputedly one of the best in the city: the disciples and children of the writers of the Movement whom he’d read and reread all his life. Mary de Rachewiltz, Pound’s daughter, was there, ghostly and remote, with her son, Walter, whom Paul had known at NYU, as well as the sons of William Carlos Williams, bent with age, and Giovanni Di Lorenzo’s curly-headed granddaughter Holly, now a budding rock singer—the whole club of the inheritors of the royalties, such as they were, if not the genius of Ida’s predecessors. Her younger contemporaries were in attendance, too: Snyder, Merwin, Strand, Tate, Glück, Wright, Williams, Bidart, and Stotowski. Ida’s husband, Count Leonello Moro, an elegant, short, fit man in his mid-fifties with pomaded hair, sat unnoticed in the back with Svetlana Chandos, who had come with two of her sons, as well as the Wainwright and Perkins clans by the score, in stiff dark suits and frosted hair, so different in style and demeanor from their famous renegade relation and her brothers and sisters in the art. Most of the raffish crowd in corduroy jackets and hiking boots, though, what passed for the remains of America’s literary aristocracy, struck Paul as hopelessly dowdy compared with the person they were there to
celebrate.

  Paul remembered a luncheon Homer had given years ago at the Thespian Brotherhood, a temple to bygone theatrical greatness on Madison Square. The occasion had been the publication of a group biography of the Wintons, arguably the most distinguished artistic/intellectual family in American history, who could lay claim to having produced America’s first great sculptor, her leading naturalist, and her first internationally acclaimed lyric soprano, all in one generation. The Winton descendants, though, turned out to be a raggle-taggle bunch of dipsomaniac WASPs from the back of beyond whom Paul couldn’t imagine being familiar with, let alone understanding, their famous forebears’ achievements. So much for genetics. Genius, it seemed, struck like lightning and moved on, leaving befuddlement and disarray in its wake. It didn’t tend to deposit a residue in the following generations the way egregious beauty or physical prowess, not to mention wealth, sometimes could, but scattered its glory willy-nilly. Which was why Paul set no stock in ancestry, Homer’s or Sterling’s or his own. Who cared who your grandfather was, in the end? It was not where or who you came from but what you did with your own grab bag of advantages and disadvantages that made you remarkable. He’d learned early on in his work that the real writers hadn’t gone to Yale or Oxford; they came from everywhere—or nowhere—and their determination to dig down, to matter, whatever the odds against them, was the only key to their succeeding. For every Ida who had been to the manner born, there were ten—no, twenty—Arnolds and Ezras and Pepitas, youngsters from the provinces determined to make their mark by dint of their own talent and hunger and grit. And Ida and Sterling had been no different. They’d been just as eager to escape their own stifling, if well-padded, backgrounds, to break away that ecstatic summer in Otter Creek, to leave behind where they’d come from and become who they aspired to be.

  Nothing was more democratic than talent. And nothing was more threatening to families, be they rich or poor, or consequently more despised and feared.

  Here, too, in the academy’s ice-cold auditorium, while the speakers droned on, accurately enough, about Ida’s Enduring Significance, Paul felt something was missing. It was all heartfelt, all true as far as it went, but the encomia failed to catch the essence of the living, breathing person he’d been privileged to share an afternoon with—and whom others here had known intimately. Ida wasn’t here, in body or spirit—except when she was quoted. And then she came miraculously to life.

  That was the thing. Ida was her work now. Her life in the world had ceased to matter, except to those who’d been touched, or wounded, by her. Her significance had transmuted into something lodged in her words. They’d grown out of the substrate of her life, just as she herself had derived from Delanos and Perkinses and Severances and Wainwrights, but they’d detached from their source and become autonomous. “Tel qu’en lui-même enfin l’éternité le change,” Mallarmé had put it: the future was going to refine, to redefine, Ida’s nature in a way mere life never could; it would anneal her to her essence, such as it greatly, or even maybe not greatly, was—though Paul was as sure of her work’s enduring value as he was of anything. Time would tell. The process was already under way, and it was beyond anyone’s power—hers or Sterling’s or Homer’s or Elliott Blossom’s, or his, for that matter—to determine or even influence her fate. Along with all the other words Ida had written, the poems of Mnemosyne would have a life of their own. It was Paul’s job to get out of the way, whatever the consequences. He had spent the weeks since Ida’s death wrestling with what he should do about her book. Now, at last, he thought he saw the way forward.

  When Sterling’s turn came, he spoke without notes. He leaned over the podium and gazed into the packed, drafty hall, his glasses sliding disarmingly down his long nose.

  “Cousin Ida was one of the lights of our house and the glories of our literature. She was named for my grandmother, like my daughter, but we shared much more, thanks in part to her loyalty to the noble and unjustly maligned Arnold Outerbridge. The freshness of her poems, the depth and strength of feeling they embody, their miraculous, sometimes shocking honesty worked wonders on the readers, and the other writers, of her time. Lionel Trilling once referred to Robert Frost as ‘a terrifying poet’—a tremendous compliment. Ida by contrast was a poet who inspired reverence and love, for the brilliance but even more for the humanity of her knowledge—not only of the fundamental properties of our language and our complex and contradictory history but, most important, of our unpredictable human natures—qualities of the woman herself now fixed forever in her immortal poetry.

  “All the forces that play on human beings were at work in and on Ida. This, I think, is the secret of her astounding popularity with everyone, from Brother Elliott Blossom, who is here with us in the front row, to the Common Reader out there in the wide world. Ida was the Common Writer in a way that was and is and ever shall be entirely her own. She is Walt and Emily and Herman and Tom and Wallace and Hilda and Gertrude all rolled into one. We shall never see her like again.”

  Blossom spoke, too, at mind-numbing length, and Pepita Erskine, to Paul’s surprise, recalling her time with Ida at Esalen in the sixties. W. S. Merwin represented Ida’s younger poet-peers and Abe Burack the prose writers, and Evan Halpern, now miraculously converted to unstinting approval of Paul’s goddess, the critics; last of all was Alan Glanville, the rising young Stanford scholar whom Sterling had just commissioned to write Ida’s biography.

  Homer, never one for solemnities, left as soon as he decently could, but Paul stayed to the bitter end (the speechifying went on for an excruciating two and a half hours).

  At the reception afterward in the upstairs gallery lined with anodyne paintings by the academy’s artist members, he finally approached Sterling.

  “Well, hello, Paul. Long time no see. How’s Homer?”

  “Very well. He was here, but he had to leave. Your remarks were beautiful; perfect, I thought.”

  “Ida and I had a very strong connection, you know. A profound bond,” he drawled. Paul could tell he’d said it a thousand times on as many campuses. Paul was having a hard time picking up on what Sterling was feeling, not that it was ever all that easy to tell. He wasn’t a WASP for nothing. “Thanks for your letter,” he added, referring to the condolence note Paul had written him about Ida.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been more in touch. Things have been insanely busy at work. As a matter of fact, though, there’s something I need to talk to you about that came up in Venice. May I call you tomorrow?”

  “Please do.” Sterling raised his left eyebrow quizzically in a characteristic gesture of—what? “I’ll be up at the farm.”

  Sterling was tackled by Angelica Blauner, the painter, who had been the second wife of his chum the translator and poet Oswald Fessenden. Paul chatted nonsensically for another hour with Blossom and Glanville and Sterling’s daughter, Ida Bernstein, “Ida B,” as he’d come to think of her. He introduced himself to Count Moro, but the man, who was out of his element in English, only nodded vaguely, clearly unaware of Paul’s involvement with Ida or her book.

  He also managed to stay on the other side of the room from Roz Horowitz. How was he going to explain things to Roz? She had been Ida’s loyal agent for decades, one of the first to take on a poet as a client. Why had Ida left her out of the picture? Mnemosyne was bound to be a colossal hit. Roz was not going to take kindly to being cut out of the excitement, not to mention her 10—or was it 15?—percent.

  Should he have told her right away about what had happened in Venice? Possibly. But whatever and whenever Paul told her, she was going to go ballistic, and in his bones, he knew their relationship was over. Which was a shame, because he had always enjoyed Roz, and they’d done excellent work together. After all, it was she who had sent him to see Ida in the first place.

  Ida had put him in an incredible pickle. He was going to toss and turn that night, and not only because of all the cheap wine he’d knocked back at the reception. He hated being on the wrong side o
f people he liked or admired. Only the fact that Mnemosyne, sitting quietly on his desk like a smoking kryptonite nugget, now belonged to him consoled him.

  And it did, he had to admit. Big-time.

  XII

  A Call to Hiram’s Corners

  “Sterling, it’s Paul Dukach.” He was at his desk, hunched over the phone, an encouraging mug of coffee within reach.

  “Good morning, Paul,” said Sterling, always the gentleman. And then, as ever, “How’s Homer?”

  “He’s well, I’m sure—though I haven’t seen him yet today. How is it up there?”

  “Sunny and wickedly cold. We got three inches overnight—after I got home, luckily—and the wind is whipping it around in the meadow. But tell me about your visit with dear Ida. We haven’t had a real chat since your trip.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry about that. We must set a date.” He took a sip. “It was one of the extraordinary afternoons of my life, Sterling. We discussed the notebooks, as I told you, and a thousand other things. I learned an enormous amount. But here’s the thing I need to tell you.” Paul put his mug down. “She gave me something. She gave me a manuscript.”

  “She did what?”

  “A book of poems. She said it was her last. And now, unfortunately, I guess it will be.”

  “Well, why haven’t you sent it over?”

  “That’s what’s so difficult. I don’t know quite how to tell you this, but, you see—she asked me not to. She gave it to me and told me she wanted me to see to its publication after her death.”