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6
Holly finishes her prayer, but now it’s really just a rote recitation. Her mind is on the case. If anything keeps her awake tonight it will be that, not thinking about Charlotte’s Millions. In her mind she sees Deerfield Park, with Ridge Road on one side and Red Bank Avenue on the other. She thinks of the Belfry, the deserted repair shop, and the Dairy Whip. She thinks, location, location, location. And she thinks that none of them had a car.
Well, Bonnie did, but she didn’t use it for going back and forth to work. She rode her bike. Ellen also rode a bike when she didn’t take the bus. And Pete Steinman had his skateboard.
Lying in the dark, hands clasped on her stomach, Holly asks herself the question these two similarities raise. It’s crossed her mind before, but only as a hypothetical. Now it’s starting to feel a lot more practical. Is it just the ones she knows about, or are there more?
February 12, 2021
1
Barbara stands outside 70 Ridge Road, one of the smaller Victorians on the smoothly sloping street. The temperature has dropped thirty degrees since the day she saw Professor Harris washing what he had (rather grandiloquently) called his chariot, and today her red winter gear—coat, scarf, hat—are a necessity instead of a fashion statement. She is once more holding her folder of poems, and she’s scared to death.
The woman inside that house is her idol, in Barbara’s opinion the greatest American poet of the last sixty years. She actually knew T.S. Eliot. She corresponded with Ezra Pound when he was in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the criminally insane. Barbara Robinson is just a kid who’s never published anything except for a few boring (and no doubt banal) editorials in the high school newspaper.
What is she doing here? How dare she?
Emily Harris thought the poem she’d looked at was good—quite the load of fear and loathing packed into nineteen lines, she’d said. She’d even suggested a couple of corrections that seemed like good ones, but Emily Harris hadn’t written End for End or Cardiac Street. What Emily Harris had written were two books of literary criticism published by the college press. Barbara checked online.
This morning, after she’d started to believe she would hear nothing, she had gotten an email from Olivia Kingsbury.
I have read your poem. If your schedule permits, please come and visit with me at 2 PM this afternoon. If your schedule does not permit, please reply to my email address. I am sorry about the short notice. It had been signed Olivia.
Barbara reminds herself that she has been invited, and that has to mean something, but what if she makes an ass of herself? What if she can’t even open her mouth, only stare like a complete dummocks? Thank God she didn’t tell her parents or Jerome where she was going this afternoon. Thank God she hadn’t told anyb—
The door of 70 Ridge Road opens, and a fabulously old woman emerges, swaddled in a fur coat that comes down to her ankles and walking on two canes. “Are you just going to stand there, young woman? Come in, come in. I have no tolerance for the cold.”
Feeling outside herself—observing herself—Barbara walks to the porch and mounts the steps. Olivia Kingsbury holds out a frail hand. “Gently, young woman, gently. No squeezing.”
Barbara barely touches the old poet’s fingers, thinking something that’s both absurdly grandiose and very clear: I am touching greatness.
They go inside and down a short wood-paneled hall. As they do, Olivia pats her enormous fur coat. “Faux, faux.”
“Fo?” Barbara says, feeling stupid.
“Faux fur,” Olivia says. “A gift from my grandson. Help me off with it, will you?”
Barbara slips the coat off the old poet’s shoulders and folds it over her arm. She holds it tightly, not wanting it to slip away and fall on the floor.
The living room is small, furnished with straight-backed chairs and a sofa that sits in front of a television with the largest screen Barbara has ever seen. She somehow didn’t expect a TV in a poet’s house.
“Put it on the chair, please,” Olivia says. “Your things as well. Marie will put them away. She’s my girl Friday. Which is fitting, since this is Friday. Sit on the couch, please. The chairs are easier for me to get out of. You are Barbara. The one Emily emailed me about. I am pleased to meet you. Have you been vaccinated?”
“Um, yes. Johnson and Johnson.”
“Good. Moderna for me. Sit, sit.”
Still feeling outside herself, Barbara takes off her outerwear and puts it on the chair, which has already been mostly swallowed by the improbable fur coat. She can’t believe such a tiny woman could wear it without collapsing under its weight.
“Thank you so much for giving me some of your time, Ms. Kingsbury. I love your work, it—”
Olivia holds up one of her hands. “No fangirl remarks necessary, Barbara. In this room we are equals.”
As if, Barbara thinks, and smiles at the absurdity of the idea.
“Yes,” Olivia says. “Yes. We may or may not have fruitful discussions in this room, but if we do, they must be as equals. You’ll call me Olivia. That might be hard for you at first, but you’ll get used to it. And you may take off your mask. If I were to catch the dread disease in spite of our vaccinated state, and die, I would make very old bones.”
Barbara does as she has been told. There’s a button on the table beside Olivia’s chair. She pushes it, and a buzzer sounds deeper in the house. “We’ll have tea and get to know each other.”
