2020 Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing First Runner-Up
A Retiring Woman
by Kathleen Kirk
Lily Chavelle had an eagle eye for an author’s best work—sometimes a vulture’s eye, when taking for The Beholder an elderly, ill, or suicidal poet’s last published poem, by some mysterious combination of chance and intuition. As to her own poems, she hoped they were good, but many poets who sent work to her hoped their poems were good when perhaps they weren’t, and she had come to wonder if her own career had advanced primarily out of politeness. Since it was impossible to judge one’s own work, even if one was one’s own best critic, Lily lived in a state of uncertainty about her reputation.
Once she had asked her husband about a particular poem that was frequently anthologized. “Do you like it?”
“Which one?” he asked.
“This one,” she said, pointing to it in the current literature textbook anthology.
“Oh, that one,” he said, slightly frustrated. “I’ve already read that one.”
“Yes, I’m asking if you like it,” she insisted. “They’re always reprinting it, so I’m wondering why.”
“Well, they must like it,” he said, lifting his shoulders in the exaggerated manner of their son Huck, from his teen years, as if the question were hardly worth asking.
So she decided not to worry about it. If people had published her out of politeness, at best, or hoped-for reciprocity, at worst, what of it? Weren’t their reputations more at stake than hers? If her work didn’t live, wasn’t remembered, couldn’t stand on its own, they were the ones who had chosen it, not she. She had simply written it.
Since she was retiring, she was looking over her life and papers, deciding what to donate to the university library. The university had asked to take over the publication, preserving its essential independence but providing it with office and storage space, so it wouldn’t be lost forever, and because there was an endless supply of career-minded, energetic, competent undergrad and graduate students ready to staff it. The journal might at first suffer an identity crisis, but, titled as it was, could weather it better than some. The current title, The Beholder, was what was left of the original title, Eye of the Beholder, as in “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” from before Lily’s tenure as editor. Lily liked the lingering idea of the original, that beauty would be beheld differently by various editors and readers, giving the journal flexibility over time and acknowledging the subjectivity of the enterprise. At one point, an editor had introduced a logo that converted the title to (I) of the Beholder, the “I” serving as the alien-looking iris of a graphic eye as well as a comment on the mixed dubiousness and tenacity of the “I” in contemporary poetry, but Lily had removed the logo and reduced the title to its remnant when she took over. The journal had thrived under her care, and would have new vigor and better archives at the university. In addition, Peter Edmond, the at-hand poet-professor was good, young, and already assured of tenure. He would see what needed to be done, and all would be well, and, anyway, soon enough she’d herself be safely dead.
“I’ve made Rose my literary executor,” she told her husband, referring to their granddaughter.
“Your what?”
He knew all about estates and executors, so Lily knew he was stalling. “The executor of my literary estate.”
“Oh, fine,” he said. “Yes, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“You’ll probably die first anyway.”
“Then why bother to tell me about it?” he said in his typical mock hurt that might be a pinkish mask for real hurt when they were mock sparring like this.
“In case you don’t,” she said. “In case I die first. I’ll have told you. It won’t be a surprise. I’m getting my house in order.”
Though it would be hard, she’d have to read over her diaries and letters and decide whether to burn them. Burning seemed a bit dramatic but perhaps necessary. It might even improve her reputation, suggesting scandal or literary gossip. But she seldom gossiped in her diaries, which were mostly devoted to the emotional life, the inner life, and the mundane. Her diaries were a way to keep track of what she did, make sure she did it, and cheer herself on, since no one else did. She vented in her diaries, of course; all the negatives that couldn’t be expressed in professional life and social life were set down in mostly indelible ink.
In childhood, she had been a reader, which was understood among writers of her own generation, if not always by the current generation of her creative writing students. Her childhood diaries were accounts of playmates and games, types of weather, minor injustices within family or school life. There were confessions of love, a few spiteful conversations with girls in competition with her, odes to her dog, then elegies when Elsie, the first and favorite dog, died much too young, too young for a girl, if not for a dog. Lists, even then, of tasks to be accomplished, homework assignments, school grades and awards, presents received at Christmas and birthdays. Lists of all the books she’d read and movies she’d seen, with summaries and evaluations. These childhood diaries she merely skimmed, noting that her relentless work habits were present early on. Tears, of course, when she came upon her parents, now dead. Loving passages or complaints, grief or joy, it all made her cry. Her husband found her one morning and asked what she was doing.
“Reading my diaries.”
“What for? It’s making you cry.” Then he sat down beside her and put his arms around her and let her cry.
In a little while, he reached for one of the diaries, a red velvet one from her college years, and opened it. He’d never looked in any of her diaries before, or asked about them. “’I’m in love,’” he read aloud. “Is this about me? ‘His name is Colin, and his hair is black as pitch.’ It’s not about me. What is pitch, anyway?”
“It’s a cliché,” she answered. “I hardly remember Colin.” But she did remember him, now that Frank had said his name aloud. She remembered him primarily for his pitch-black hair, and her ability to say that about him in her diary. Had she ever kissed him?
“Did you kiss him?” Frank asked. And then he kissed her, full on the lips, letting the red velvet book fall closed in his lap.
Childhood took all spring, and college and early adulthood ate up the summer. In her twenties and thirties men kept falling in love with her, and she kept missing it. She would find out about it after the fact, sometimes years later when she ran into those men well into their literary or academic careers. Or maybe they said they’d been in love with her way back when out of politeness, that old worry. But here, in her diary, she found the record of her friendships with these men and, with hindsight, evidence of their love.
She’d made a terrible mistake once, falling in love with a fellow writer. At the time, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to love a writer, someone who’d understand her the way she understood him. But, never good at math, she’d miscalculated.
“A poem demands that you listen to it,” she had confidently told him, in front of a fireplace somewhere. Where? “It quietly insists on holding your attention. You must listen,” she had whispered to him then, licking his earlobe.
“Make me,” he’d said, and she had read him one of her love poems. But he’d nodded off. “See?” he said, when she nudged him awake. “Give me a car chase, a nude scene. I’m giving up poetry!” he had declared.
“A good poem is undeniable,” Lily had mused aloud. “This one must need more work.” She knew she would work on it, but not now, not when there was love to be made. She knew it was almost undeniable.
“Nobody knows what’s good,” he had told her. “What do you mean by ‘undeniable’? There’s no such thing. People who have major careers make them. They don’t depend on the quiet ‘undeniability’ of their work to make their reputations for them. They glad hand, they trade favors, they tell people their work is good, they sell it, in all senses of the word.”
Lily had seen that he was going on and on primarily just to rouse himself, not to insult her, so she forgave him.
“Besides,” he had said, grabbing her, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Beautiful!”
He was the calculating one, it turned out, an opportunist, benefiting from his time with her, as she was generous with advice, helped him revise many of the poems in his second collection, and suggested a more appropriate publisher than the one he’d had before, which led ultimately to a better situation for his novels, a movie deal, and so on. But oddly, inexplicably to her then, he’d betrayed her, suggesting to the judge of a book contest she’d entered that another woman’s manuscript was better, who won, and became her lover’s next affair. He’d been Mr. Betrayal in her mind’s eye ever since.
Then Frank came along. He was nicely unmistakable in his attentions and just barely polite, an insurance man with a gruff, straightforward style. “Well, should we get married or what?” was how he’d proposed.
“Or what?” she’d repeated, wondering what that would be.
“Let’s get married then,” he’d said, as if it were decided. And it was.
They enjoyed each other’s company. He liked to watch her write in the yard, her big or little notebooks open, pages blowing in the breeze. Indulgently, he would read a poem now and then, usually in its handwritten form. “Very nice,” he’d say, or nothing, which was fine. Then. They were in love, and she thought he’d come to understand her poetry, or she could teach him how to read it, but he wasn’t really interested. The published versions would come in the mail, in nice journals or books and anthologies, and he’d nod as if proud of her, and later as if it were just a matter of fact that she was as successful in her career as he was in his, with similar frustrations about deadlines and staffing when it came to her own journal, for instance, and his head office, and that was that. She didn’t criticize the insurance industry, which sometimes did dubious and objectionable things, though his company itself was beyond legal reproach, and he didn’t criticize the world of literature, nor enter it.
It was a mistake, she was convinced when she hit forty-five. She should never have married him. She opened that diary in the middle of June and quickly closed it again. She was so petty, such a complainer. She opened it later along, in September, and things were a little better, but not much. She’d have to read all the midlife years, in chronological order of course, to track the crisis and recall the eventual peacemaking with herself, as Frank had never participated in any of it. He wouldn’t go to a counselor, so she did. He wouldn’t read her books, so she just kept writing them, exposing her heart and sometimes his. It didn’t matter. No one in his family read poetry either. Everyone politely indulged her little hobby, without inquiring into it at all.
Frank was not really a soul mate, Lily came to understand, but instead a heart mate. Her soul would have to go it alone.
Looking for what to burn, she found a long musing in a mid-life diary, wondering about the possibility of loving any and all individuals who demanded love of her, and deciding that it was humanly impossible, her physical person being too fragile and limited to sustain all that love, but amply possible through art, which is what she’d done with her life, given relentlessly her poems to the world, whether or not they were wanted, even if what was wanted, so often, was for her to give her lips and arms, for which poems were no substitute, and what she wanted was for the poems to be thus embraced, and so, ultimately, no one was fully satisfied, the soul, meanwhile, strung along like a battered paper kite.
Once, a student had fallen in love with her after she’d praised the girl’s poems. Lily had felt the girl’s intense affection, thinking it was a need for mother love now that the girl was away at college and homesick. She realized too late—again, too late—that the girl intended romance. When Lily failed to respond, the girl complained about her grade, which had gone down when she stopped coming to class, confided in a mental health counselor, and then to the young dean of students, accidentally creating a hostile workplace for Lily. Lily ignored it, mostly, staying calm and gracious at work, though hurting at home. The dean of students took up the girl’s cause, privately, eventually engaging in a love affair with her. Then the girl committed suicide. The girl’s family, devastated, came later to pick up her belongings and found it all written down in her diaries and poems. They pieced together the truth and came to Lily for comfort.
“She really loved you,” the mother told Lily. And with her trembling hand, she showed Lily the diary page. “And look here where she says you are the only one who understands her poems.”
Lily took the mother’s hands in hers and said, “Yes, but she loved you,” then turned and pulled from her file drawer poems in praise of the mother, goddess poems, woman-centered poems. They were all poems of female identity, and probably some were directed at Lily, and some at the dean of students, but in this context they were what they most needed to be, poems to comfort the mother who’d lost her little girl. “What do you think about publishing some of these in the student literary magazine?” she had asked, and the parents said yes. Lily pursued it with the college, and it was a healing experience all around.
Later, the college president and one of its lawyers called her in to thank her for averting a lawsuit, hinting that they hoped nothing more would come of all this, meaning they hoped she’d forget the hostility aimed her way by the dean, who’d been fired, anyway. Lily felt no lingering ill will toward the dean, as it happened. She’d spoken with the woman and was convinced by her grief that she’d loved the girl, even if she’d exercised terribly poor judgment. But this meeting with administrators offended her, so that summer Lily declined her contract, left, and took The Beholder with her. None of this scandal and tragedy had Lily set down in her diary, so Rose wouldn’t have to deal with it. And that year’s diary wouldn’t have to be burned. Unless Lily decided to burn them all.
Of course, it was very possible the girl’s family had not destroyed her diaries, needing mementos of that brief life. But that was their business, not Lily’s, and not something to worry about now. The fired dean had not been able to maintain a life in academia but had become quite famous as a feminist literary and social critic and a commentator on popular culture. And not a very polite one, as Eleanor Roosevelt might have pointed out. So there was that literary biography yet to be written. Though that woman didn’t seem like someone who’d keep a diary, herself, or bother to burn one. She had a blog. Anyone who wanted to know anything about her could. Not that Lily ever read the blog, but she’d heard about it, from her own children.
Maybe it was impossible to be known at all, Lily mused. Maybe you could read a daily blog or all a person’s diaries and poems and learn what others had said or felt about a person, and still not know. She’d always liked how poetry captured both mystery and the concrete world, how poetry invited the reader to pay attention, but she lived in a world that didn’t pay much attention—to poetry or anything else, or not for very long. Still, she’d chosen to give poems to the world—as an editor of others’ work and as a creator of her own. Who reads those poems? she asked herself, relentlessly. Other poets. And regular people. Lily wrote for regular people. Regular people like herself.
“What are you laughing at?” Frank asked, entering the room where Lily sat with a diary open in her lap, but gazing out the window, mouth open, laughing out loud.
“Myself,” said Lily. “Always myself.”
“That’s funny,” said Frank. “How about lunch?”
In September and October, Lily met with the student editors-to-be, showing them the manuscript selection process she’d used for The Beholder, which they quickly converted to an electronic system. The university had helped her time her early retirement with a final sabbatical year, in which to train the new journal staff. It was an unconventional move but efficient and economical for the department. Dr. Edmond was all for it. Lily sometimes worried that they were humoring her while pushing her out, but then she’d let that go, focusing on the tasks at hand.
In her diary she was reading about the birth of her grandchild, which brought back memories of the births of her own children, not recorded in her diaries, since she was too tired and busy then and had converted all her thoughts and memories into baby book entries, and given the baby books to her children when they grew up, which had happened, in retrospect, much too fast—Iris, who’d married young, still and always deeply happy; Huckleberry, who’d only recently forgiven her for his name, off living his inexplicable life in technology, both now entering middle age themselves. There was so much she still wanted to say to her children, with no language for it, though they, too, were regular people.
In mid-October, Lily was asked to read some of her own poems to the Advanced Poetry Writing seminar, mostly juniors or seniors in the undergraduate creative writing program. She selected a sampling of youthful poems, love poems, family life poems, nature poems, and thought-based poems, so the students would give themselves permission to try any content and so almost everyone could find something she or he liked.
A young woman raised her hand. “What makes all your poems sound alike?”
Lily couldn’t help but be shocked. The question seemed impolite. She didn’t know how to answer.
“I meant it as a compliment,” the young woman continued.
Lily saw that she had. The girl went red and then white in quick succession. She was sensitive and realized what she had done. But Lily still didn’t know what to say.
“I need to know,” the girl pleaded. “I want to be able to do that. It’s tone or mood or something, but I don’t really know what those things mean or how to do them.”
It was Dr. Edmond’s class, the popular young poet-professor who was taking over the journal. “Sondra may also be talking about voice,” he said.
“Yes, yes!” said Sondra, literally jumping up to speak. “Voice. All the poems sound like her. She’s just her, and I want to be just me. How do we do that?” Sondra looked back and forth between Lily and her professor, and Lily found herself smiling hugely.
“You’re doing a great job of it already,” said Lily. “I can tell.”
Sondra winced.
“I meant it as a compliment,” said Lily, gently. She looked around at the class for confirmation. “Does Sondra always sound like herself in her poems?”
There were nods, sounds of assent. Then the room burst to life with conversation, phrases evidently quoted from student poems. Lily sensed more camaraderie than competition here. She liked Dr. Edmond more and more. These students felt free, they liked poetry, and they liked each other’s poetry. They could help it come into being. And she might help them do that.
When things calmed down a bit, Lily said, “I think voice, or whatever we want to call it, this sameness—.” Lily stopped, not liking to use that word, branding herself as dull, but mainly not wanting to say it because she knew it wasn’t what Sondra meant. “Perhaps we should call it authenticity. No, that’s not it. Integrity. Integrity of voice, a kind of wholeness. I think it comes from deep inner confidence. There is a voice inside you, sleeping, hushed when you speak in daily life, and then it does speak, breaking the restful silence, when you write. You learn to trust that voice. You can’t analyze it, but you can listen to it.” There was a brief hush, and then they burst into excited talk again. Lily laughed out loud.
She visited the Advanced Poetry class several more times that fall, helping Dr. Edmond with workshop sessions, when the students brought new poems to the group for critique. She was positive and polite, of course, but rigorous, as always, and the students appreciated it, especially Sondra.
“I want to do an Independent Study with you next semester,” she told Lily.
Lily felt the past rolling over her and a sense of trepidation. No, it was more like excitement, simple intense excitement, as when a novice skydiver takes her first leap from the belly of the plane, or, if at all hesitant, is pushed, something Lily had never done but could imagine. “I don’t see how,” said Lily, since she was officially on sabbatical, but Dr. Edmond worked it out.
“We have a Writer-in-Residence coming,” he said in his office that afternoon— “Oh, who?” Lily wanted to ask, but it would have been an interruption, so she simply heard her question in her own head— “but this is something special, and Sondra could use the extra credits—she had a rough first semester as a freshman—if she gets a good grade, of course, but I have no doubt she’ll work hard for you… And I have a budget for readings. Let me work this out.”
So he did. He laid it out for her on a Friday afternoon, offering some Wild Turkey from a drawer of his desk. It was like a scene in a movie. He acknowledged this. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” he said. The never-opened bottle had been a casual gift from the retiring professor who had vacated this office. Dr. Edmond didn’t have any glasses. Lily went down to the seminar room where she’d seen Styrofoam cups left over from an Advanced Poetry workshop day, when they made coffee in a little pot stored on a bookshelf. She came back over the threshold tipping the white cups toward him.
“If Sondra doesn’t mind, I’d like to add some graduate students to the class. We’ll find a convenient time for all. They’ll get audit credit and the benefit of your expertise. Tara, Jeremy, John, some of the associate editors you’ve been training.”
Lily nodded. She pulled a bead of Styrofoam from her upper lip.
“You’ll be responsible for two public readings, one by you and one by the students. That’s why I’d like to add a few to the class.”
“That’s fine,” said Lily. The bourbon was warm and pleasant indeed. Outside it was cold, winter coming on, the holidays. Wild Turkey helped get her in the mood. The holiday mood, she was telling herself, examining the fine engraved turkey on the bottle’s label, but she was thinking of Frank, and the red velvet diary.
“I need to warn you,” said Dr. Edmond. Peter, as she was learning to think of him now. “The university will probably want to honor you somehow in your retirement. That’s not why they said yes, but the dean and the chair are fully aware of your reputation.”
“Oh?” said Lily, wondering again what her reputation might be, but she was warm now, and settling into the armchair Peter kept in his large office. “As long as it’s not a surprise party,” she said. “No surprises. Some modest, formal event for old fogies like me.”
“I’ll do my best,” Peter told her, leaning forward to plop a little more Wild Turkey into her cup. “But you’re not that old.”
Lily paused for a moment, recalling that Peter’s wife was pregnant again, and that men sometimes needed extra affection at that time. She’d missed important romantic overtures before, and, though the current possibility seemed ludicrous, she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Ultimately, as she had done so often with men who did not declare themselves, she took him at face value.
“I’m young at heart,” she said, not even ashamed of the cliché.
It was true. She was sixty-four. It had always seemed like a nice solid age at which to retire from her public obligations, and it kept a Beatles song playing in her head. There were things she wanted to do. She would keep writing, of course. Always the poetry. Maybe more essays. She had other things to say now, she hoped. And she wanted more time to do things with Frank, who was seventy-three. Officially retired now from the insurance company, he was kept on as a consultant, as he had precise knowledge in several areas, and new employees needed his help. “They can’t read,” he’d mutter. “They can’t write. What are you teaching them in college?”
But after Thanksgiving, there were some surprises. The student newspaper announced the writer-in-residence for spring semester, who turned out to be her ex-lover. She bit her tongue on her raisin bagel and then burned the same vulnerable area with a sip of coffee, and it all seemed ominous. Worse, the fired dean of her past was coming via the spring speaker series. Lily actually spilled her coffee on that paragraph, and had to sop it up with the thin little napkins from the silver dispenser on the coffeeshop table. Retiring would not be as easy and painless as she’d thought. Instead, it would be a farce with a contrived plot and an illogical number of doors. Lily sighed, got a to-go lid for her cup, and headed to Peter’s office for Wild Turkey and answers.
“You know him?” Peter asked. “Well, of course your paths would have crossed. I had actually lined up Mark Halsted for the spring residency,” Peter continued. “You’ve published him, yes?”
“Yes,” said Lily. “I like Mark very much. He does quiet astonishing work.”
“But evidently his husband is ill, and he wants to stay put.”
“Oh, dear,” said Lily. She’d go home and write him a letter. She listened as Peter explained how Mr. Betrayal—as she still beheld him—happened to contact the dean almost simultaneously with the news of Halsted’s withdrawal, eager to come to campus that spring, as he was on sabbatical, and was a natural fill-in. “Ah,” said Lily.
“Is there a problem?”
“No,” said Lily. She licked the bland white rim of her cup.
“He asked about you right away,” said Peter.
“Mmm,” said Lily, offering her to-go cup to the bottle.
Over Christmas, Lily threw up her hands and made a decision. She wouldn’t burn anything. Instead, she would offer the diaries to the Newberry Library in Chicago, its Special Collections. They had cushions and book snakes and climate controls, and you could only use pencils to take notes in that particular reading room. The diaries wouldn’t circulate, so anyone who was really interested would have to go to Chicago to read them. They would not be as unsupervised and easily accessed there as in her university’s library.
She would still make a substantial donation to the university. She’d give them her general library, books Frank wouldn’t want, anyway; her private archive of The Beholder, including all the issues she’d worked on from pre-production stages to final copies; personal correspondence with Beholder authors; and drafts and final copies of essays and articles related to her professional editing career. The rest of her personal literary correspondence and the drafts of her poems, stories, and personal essays would go, with the diaries, to the Newberry. She typed up her directions and put them in a file folder marked Death.
In January, Mr. Betrayal arrived on campus. He was living in the Writer-in-Residence house, a sweet little cottage just off the quad, surrounded by white oak and red maple, branches at the moment bare and stark, except for clutches of dry brown leaves, but lovely all the rest of the year. Lily didn’t avoid him, but she dodged his ebullience. He invited her for cocktails one winter afternoon, and she brought Frank.
“Nice little house,” Frank said on entering the cozy living room. There was a fire going. “Did you have this cleaned and inspected before you laid the first fire?” he asked, ever the insurance man.
“No,” said Mr. B.
Lily was enjoying thinking of him in this emblematic way, and seeing him deal with Frank. “B” could stand for “bullshit” as easily as “betrayal.” She suppressed a giggle.
“Never occurred to me,” said B, glancing at Lily, then peering at Frank, who was peering at the fireplace.
“You should have,” Frank said. “You’re the one who will go up in smoke.”
Lily coughed into her whiskey. B offered them a seat with his arm. They chose the brocaded loveseat instead of the couch and left him the big leather armchair.
“So,” B began, looking at Lily. “We are the writers in residence.”
“But she resides with me,” Frank answered, also looking at Lily. “Nice little house, though,” he repeated, looking again around the room, and the conversation moved on to politics, sports, and business. Lily mainly listened.
Lily’s class with Sondra and the graduate students was going well. They remained lively and interested in their own work and each other’s. They were cooperative and collaborative, rather than competitive. They were sensitive but not egocentric. They wrote things that amazed Lily with their innovation. They were a delight.
Lily heard rumors that Mr. Betrayal’s classes were going a little less well. It was a mixed group, of course, including education majors as well as English majors, creative writing minors as well as majors, and he taught fiction as well as poetry, to larger classes. There were bound to be some problems. One of his female graduate students had signed up at the deadline for an Independent Study, to work on her creative thesis, and she’d been seen going to and from the cottage, but she was twenty-eight and could take care of herself, Lily supposed, wondering.
Peter brought it up over Wild Turkey just after spring break. “Is it none of my business?” he asked.
“It might become your business,” Lily said, “if things don’t turn out as she hopes, but we don’t know what she hopes. Have you spoken with her?”
“What would I say?” They’d made quite a bit of progress on the bottle over the year, and there was only a third of it left. They might have to invest in another.
“You could ask her how it’s going. And what she hopes.”
Peter looked down at the huge piles of student papers and folders on his desk. “Could you?” he asked.
“No,” she said. Lily sighed, a here-we-go-again feeling building up inside. “But you could review the policy and then speak to the Dean of Students if you are concerned. You can ask what you should watch out for, and for strategies to deal with your own reservations. Remember? Or did you avoid the training session?”
Peter looked out the window, and Lily did, too, seeing the bright yellow-green buds and leaves that Frost would call gold, forsythia, and spurts of white and pink blossom here and there already, on dogwood and redbud.
“You must follow your instincts,” she said. “If you feel the need to protect her, then protect her. Ask her directly if she is comfortable with her Independent Study.”
“Ah,” said Peter. “Yes.”
Lily waited a moment, sipped. “So you won’t regret anything later.”
As Peter had warned, the university planned to honor Lily in the spring, at her poetry reading. She wished they wouldn’t, but it was a done thing. B had helped engineer it, it turned out, inviting some of the big names she had published in The Beholder to attend the reading and a reception directly following. This would be in early May, after the two student readings in April and before graduation in late May. There would be flowers in abundance on campus and in her own garden, tulips, iris, peonies coming on.
B had held his own reading in March, and Lily had attended with her small class. His classes had to go, of course, and the English faculty, and it was open to the public. The local press covered it, and high school teachers brought their classes, as B was famous thanks to the major motion picture made from one of his novels. There was a Q&A afterward, dominated by the high-school contingent, plus a few vague, self-centered questions from academics, and many, many Hollywood questions, but he got through it well, charming the crowd. He was on the local news that evening and the front page the next day.
Lily hoped her own event would have less coverage. A student reporter had called for an interview. People were writing and emailing that they were coming, and planning to stay the weekend, and when could they get together? Lily started making the arrangements, and realized this could be a good thing. She’d have a chance to hand out the spring issue of The Beholder, her last issue as editor, to several literary friends at the same time. She wondered if she should invite her children, who would wonder, otherwise, why they hadn’t been informed. Then a New York Times reporter called, an NPR interviewer, and a fellow making a documentary for PBS, and Lily began to think this was getting out of hand.
“Why are all these reporters calling?” Lily asked Frank, lying in bed one night in late April, the May event looming.
“You’re famous,” said Frank. “More famous than he is.”
“Who?” Lily asked, shocked.
“That other writer in residence,” said Frank, pinching her. “I’m not an idiot.”
“Oh, Frank,” said Lily, turning to him. “That’s all done now.”
“He had no idea,” Frank continued.
“Of what?” she asked, but he answered with a light snore.
That night Lily dreamed she had escaped from a nursing home in an aqua housedress and was running through an urban neighborhood. As so often happened in dreams, she was the woman and she was watching the woman. A kind young woman pushing a baby stroller stopped and asked, “Can I help you get back to some place?”
“That’s a hard question to answer,” replied Lily the escapee. She did want to get back to a place she remembered, but where was it? “That’s why I’m in the home,” she said.
“What home?” asked Frank.
Lily opened her eyes. It was morning.
“You were talking in your sleep.”
Lily tried to shake off the strange feeling left over from the dream. She made coffee, emptied the dishwasher, and rinsed out last night’s ice cream bowls. When the coffee was brewed, she opened the morning paper to read that the fired-dean-feminist-popular-culture-critic coming for the university’s speaker series on Tuesday night was going to stay through the week, visit some classes, and attend the Thursday night poetry reading and wine-and-cheese reception for Lily Chavelle, who was officially retiring from The Beholder, and would be listed as editor emerita next fall and thereafter.
Lily went to the kitchen sink and retched, a dry heave. There was nothing on her stomach but a few sips of coffee.
“What’s the matter?” said Frank, entering. “Are you sick?”
Lily shook her head. “It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s the past. It’s still there.”
He put his arms around her and helped her back to her chair.
“I’m all right now,” she said.
“No orange juice,” he said. “It’ll upset your stomach.”
She agreed. She put the newspaper aside.
She went to see Peter in his office after her class, and after his, with her usual campus coffeeshop visit in between. “No surprises,” she said when she walked in, bringing a rumpled copy of the morning paper with her and laying it across his cluttered desk. “Why is she coming to the reception?” she asked Peter.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess she wanted to. I think Women’s Studies asked her to visit the Thursday morning seminar, so maybe she felt she ought to, with all the media coverage. Or that it would be polite—.” He stopped and looked at Lily. “Why? Do you think she wants some media attention herself?”
“Maybe,” said Lily. “Yes, maybe it’s that.” And then Lily surprised herself by breaking into tears.
Peter, a good friend by now, waited patiently, offering tissues from the big discount box beside his shoulder on a bookshelf, and finally opened the bottom drawer and pulled out the bottle. Lily laughed. Then she told him the whole story while they drank the last of the Wild Turkey. “You loved the girl,” he said quietly.
“The way I love any of my students,” she said. “The way I love Sondra.”
“I know,” said Peter. “I love them, too.” He paused. “But there’s a line we won’t cross.”
He waited a bit while Lily, inspired by bourbon now as much as grief, blew her nose.
“I spoke to Suzette,” he said.
It took Lily a moment, but then she remembered that Suzette was B’s graduate student, who may or may not be able to take care of herself. “Yes?” she said.
“What she hopes,” he said, smiling at Lily, “is that he’ll help her find a publisher for her creative thesis. She’s not really into marriage.”
Lily laughed weakly, only partly relieved. “Did you follow protocol?”
“Oh!” continued Peter. “And he hopes that I’ll let him take over as interim editor of the The Beholder, for five years, until he retires, to give me time to establish my own career as poet and literary critic.” Peter chuckled.
Lily found it hard for a moment to breathe. She had gotten everything in order, and now the earth was buckling, opening like a great horrendous mouth, the maw of hell, to swallow her up. He would betray her again. He would take The Beholder, eye it coldly, and then betray beauty itself. She clutched another tissue from the box. Holding tightly to the pale pink, she said, “You told him no, yes?”
“Yes, I told him no,” Peter said, still chuckling, having evidently missed her current upheaval. “My career as poet and literary critic is about as established as it will ever be. I love teaching, and I look forward to editing. You’ve prepared me well. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” said Lily, fiddling with her tissues, wadded on Peter’s desk. “Thank you.” She inhaled finally, deeply, in relief, but the air had a whiff of something in it, a mouse dead in the corner, a carrion flower.
“I think he’s feeling edged out of his own department, or perhaps he’s worn out his welcome among the graduate students there.” Peter sighed and shrugged.
Lily wanted to warn him. She wanted to protect Suzette and all the young women to come. Nausea rose up in her briefly, like morning sickness. She had no words. Rage and judgment swelled in her, then subsided into sympathy. It surprised her. “It can be hard to grow old,” said Lily.
“You’re handling it rather well.”
“I’m not that old,” she reminded him.
“He did have one good idea,” said Peter, blushing a faint prim pink. “He said The Beholder should take a couple of your unpublished poems now to publish later when—” and then he blushed all the way, making him rosy.
“When I’m dead?” Lily finished for him.
Peter shrugged. “I’m a big buffoon.”
“It is a good idea, actually,” said Lily. “Yes, I have some poems for you. I never know where to send my work now, since everyone knows me. Would they just be taking them from politeness?” Then she, too, began to blush. “Oh, I didn’t mean to diminish you or your judgment by suggesting you take them if…,” she fumbled. “I think they’re good! But who knows?” She stopped, uncertain of her own work and uncertain what to say next. “I’m a bigger buffoon.”
Peter laughed.
“Oh, I hope they aren’t mediocre,” she said.
“I’m sure they are rare and subtle and beautiful,” said Peter. It was the gracious thing to say next, she knew. “I’d be honored to hold your poems for posthumous publication.”
Lily swigged from her Styrofoam and grinned. “Over my dead body.”
On Monday, Lily met Sondra at the campus coffeeshop to look over some final drafts of her portfolio poems. Lily was properly reassuring, and Sondra gave her a thank you gift for her help all semester, a tiny blown-glass lily laid on cotton in a small white box. They embraced when they parted, and Lily tucked the box carefully into her big leather purse. She set off across campus already aloft on astonishment, which somehow helped her handle the shock of suddenly running into the feminist popular culture social critic. “You’re already here,” said Lily.
“I am,” said the woman, whose name had flown right out of Lily’s brain. “I got in last night. I’m looking forward to your party!”
“Thank you,” said Lily. “I hate surprises.” She saw that this was an awkward thing to say at this particular moment. “I mean I’m glad it wasn’t sprung on me. I hope it will be your standard wine and cheese thing, no big deal.” Oh, God. She must have picked up “no big deal” from the students. Years ago. She couldn’t believe she had just uttered outdated youthful slang to this famous writer on popular culture, whom she wanted to call Artemis, goddess of the hunt, or Minerva, but that was wrong; Minerva was the name the student poet had called Lily herself in her poems, the student like a deer, and why couldn’t she remember the woman’s name, having just read it in the paper again that morning, or was that yesterday morning?
“Oh, we’ll have more fun than that! Are you coming to my talk?”
Here it was. Lily would have to go, or offer an excellent excuse. She had one! “As it happens, my friend Mark Halsted is coming to town this week, tomorrow. He’s just lost his companion of many years, and he wants to get together….” Lily wasn’t exactly sure of Mark’s itinerary, or why he was coming so early in the week to attend her retirement party on Thursday, but at least he’d be here to save her.
“Oh, yes! Mark’s coming to my talk! We’re old pals. He’s taking it well, you know. He had time to say his goodbyes. He did it right.”
“Ah,” said Lily, sounding stodgy even to herself for saying ‘ah.’ “Yes. It will be good to see him.”
“I wish…. Well. Wish in one hand….” The woman stopped. “I hope I am more eloquent tomorrow when I speak with the students.”
Lily waited patiently in silence. She didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what the woman before her was struggling to say.
“You were kind to me when I was grieving,” said the nameless celebrated woman.
“I was grieving, too,” said Lily. “I knew how it felt.”
The two women stood face to face on the cobblestone path. Lily felt it to be a moment of intense connection but couldn’t interpret what sort. Was it forgiveness they were sharing, or was this the challenge, finally, to a duel to the death?
“So, I’ll see you tomorrow night. I’ll be talking about comic book wonder women. How they can be sexy, vulnerable, and invincible all at once. Should be lots of fun. Let’s do lunch sometime this week.” A blush was beginning, as if the ignominious past were suddenly overtaking the famous present. “I can’t believe I just said ‘let’s do lunch.’ Oh, well, let’s do do it.” There was a pause, both of them stunned, holding eye contact. “I just said ‘do do.’” Lily watched the woman melt into a mist and rematerialize. “You are my personal wonder woman,” she said, this expert on popular culture. “Thank you so much.” She held out her hand, and Lily took it.
That evening she said to Frank, “I forgot to invite the children. They might have wanted to come, or to have been told about it, anyway.”
“They’re coming,” he said.
“What?’
“I invited them.”
“You did? Don’t they have work? And school?”
“Huck said this would be way more fun than work, even if it is poetry. And Rose said it would be way more fun than school.”
“Rose is coming?” Lily was stopped at the foot of the stairs, with a laundry basket of folded clothes. She had to put it down on the hall floor, and sit on the bottom step.
Frank looked over his bifocals at her. “She is your literary executor,” he said.
“I better wash the sheets,” she said, getting up. He followed her up the stairs, telling her to forget about the sheets, and she wandered into the bedroom, confused about why she was there.
He lay down on the bed. “Let’s spoon,” he said, and so they spooned until bedtime, eventually pulling back the covers and climbing under them.
The Wonder Woman talk was quite a delight. Lily’s students were happy to see her there and insisted that she sit with them. She had a good visit with Mark the next day, and when her family started arriving, she thought her heart might fall out onto the floor and bounce back up like a Superball. A red one. Like the one in the toe of Huck’s stocking one Christmas. Iris and Rose insisted on taking her shopping for a new dress for the reading. Not a red one, but they tried on a red one. All three of them crowded into the dressing room, and Rose leaned out from behind Lily while zipping her up and said, “Elephant glue” into the mirror.
“What? Elephant glue?” Lily panicked slightly, thinking she should have kept that appointment about the hearing aid.
“Read my lips,” said Rose. And then she mouthed “elephant glue” into the mirror again.
“Oh,” said Lily. “I love you, too.”
Really, it was all going too fast, she was behind on all the movies and trends that Iris and Rose and later at dinner even Huck were talking and laughing about, and then it was the night of the reading, and they were all in the audience, and Lily was seated with other English faculty at a table on a platform in the university ballroom where they were having the reception for her retirement, and now it was time to read her poems. Peter introduced her. There was Sondra, right in the front row. The media were there, but she blocked them out and spoke to the whole crowd as if they were Sondras and Peters and Franks and Roses and Irises and Hucks. And they were, really, and they listened so attentively. They sent her waves of love, rock star love. She was a Superball, a red one, bouncing! The applause was like a flash mob of Superballs. She was so glad she knew now what a flash mob was. What else could have captured it?
Lily began to make her way back to the table, but heard someone rustle the mike behind her and turned back. Was Peter going to give her a plaque or something? But there was Mr. Betrayal, looking right at her.
“When literary figures retire, the speculation about their reputations begins,” he began, standing at the lectern and holding on. “While some writers are fully aware that they’ll be remembered as major figures or even major majors, others, like you, have had more modest careers, limited in fact by your chosen genre, poetry, which has a limited audience. Poems are not very often made into major motion pictures.” There was polite laughter but a growing hush. “How does it feel, as you retire, to know that you will probably be considered a minor writer rather than a major literary figure even though your reputation may have nothing to do with the quality of your work?”
Lily was face to face with him as he delivered this astonishing bit of nuanced speech, open to so many interpretations that she saw it explicating itself in small fireworks in her head. No, those were the little stars that came when she was dizzy, when she had risen from her knees too quickly after working in the garden, or, these days, after she’d gone up the stairs. Someone shouted from the audience, “Get the patriarchy off the stage!” Lily looked and the whole Women’s Studies department was rising up with the Wonder Woman expert to heckle Mr. B. They were laughing, but they were serious. Now Peter came up on the other side of the lectern to take Mr. B away by the elbow.
Lily grabbed the microphone. She glanced down to see if this was real, if she was naked in a dream, or wearing an aqua housecoat, but, no, she was in the dress they’d chosen on their shopping trip, a modest gown dusted in gold, and hardly a moment had passed, though it felt so long and in such slow motion. “That’s not a question I could possibly answer,” Lily said into the mike. “And certainly not one it’s fair to ask. What were you thinking?” Then she turned to address the loving crowd. She didn’t quite know what to say. So she sang them a bit of the Beatles song playing in her head, two crucial questions. And they sang back! Then everyone laughed and cheered, celebratory mood restored. “Elephant glue,” she mouthed to the crowd, and all the red Superballs bounced down from the ceiling.
At home she made decaf, served some of the reception cookies they’d sent her home with, and then went upstairs to take off the new dress. It was a pale matte gold, classic and elegant, with just that hint of glitter. “Could you unzip me halfway?” she’d asked Rose at the foot of the stairs. There was the blue basket she’d left behind on laundry day, so she took it up with her. She hung up her dress by the closet light and began to unload the laundry wearing just her slip. She put the piles of Frank’s things on top of his dresser for him to put away. He had his system. So that’s where his two-tone socks were, the ones he’d wanted to wear to the reading, the pair that neither of them could find because they were still in the basket at the foot of the stairs. She opened and closed her dresser drawers, putting her own things away. Then she sat down on the bed, shivering a bit, the empty basket in her lap, trying to get a grip on herself.
It was all too much, giving everything away to libraries, people coming to hear her read, reporters, photographers, her children and grandchild home again, the odd confrontation with B at the lectern. And why had he pulled that prank? Why had he asked the question about reputation, her one small obsessive worry? Had she revealed that vulnerability to him when they were in love? Why would he twist the knife so? Or maybe it was his own worry, his own vulnerability. He had all that fame, all that money, and still didn’t feel secure. Or maybe he thought she’d been right, after all, about the undeniability of her poems once he heard them, really heard them. Had she been right? She had put the posthumous poems in Peter’s campus mailbox that very morning, wondering right up to the last minute. What if nobody liked her poems, really? What if nobody really listened? But they had, hadn’t they, after all. They had listened, and they had loved her. Maybe even B had loved her, and now he was angry and ashamed that he’d let her go. He’d used her to advance himself, and he had let go of the real thing. Oh, it would make a good novel if she were a novelist. She laughed. And this would be a good moment for Frank to make an entrance and find her laughing.
“Frank?” she called. Her voice wasn’t loud enough. But it had integrity. She had integrity of voice. “Frank?” She thought she heard him starting up the stairs, and smiled. Then she lost her grip on the plastic edge, and the empty blue basket slipped to the floor.