Page 21 - 2017 WTP Special Edition

The Elizabeth Sloan Tyler Memorial Award
First Place for the Literary
Is it possible, Peter asks, looking out at the leaves gathering on the patio, that man was me? With Helen gone, Peter rarely eats outside anymore. Weeds have sprung up between the paving stones, and the flower and vegetable beds are hopelessly overgrown. Only the bird bath Peter tends with some care, for Helen had loved watch- ing the grosbeaks and warblers and an occasional Western Tanager bathe there.
“Love is the art that Shakespeare’s talking about,” Agnes said when the others stayed silent. “Love is an art, but it’s also natural, a part of us; the most important part.”
After fixing scrambled eggs and a salad with a heel of sourdough bread, Peter sits at the Formica table, the collected plays of Shakespeare beside him. There are twenty-three students in the class, and of that number Agnes Kurowsky has not
Pierced by the dead-on-rightness of these words, Peter stood before the class, and suddenly, ter- rifyingly found himself catapulted back to those first weeks after Helen’s death, the paralysis that struck him every time he neared the nursery door. How he’d almost wished then that he could shut off—the way a nerve could be severed—that lov- ing part of himself.
especially distinguished herself. Her essays are clear and at times insightful, but she isn’t quite up to the level of analysis he expects from a se- nior seminar. Yet Agnes will make the occasional remark that lingers within Peter long after class.
thinking about what his daughter would be doing now, if she’d been born. Sometimes he dreams about this little girl he so wanted. In the dreams she is a newborn in a cradle, and he sits beside her, singing a lullaby; or she is a toddler on un- steady legs, and he is kneeling on the floor, his arms outstretched calling to her. Always, Peter wakes from these dreams weeping.
There was what she’d said about Hermione, the dead queen who returns to life at the end of
The Winter’s Tale, thanks to the healing magic
of her most trusted friend. There is an art that doth mend nature, change it rather, and yet the art itself is nature. Peter had asked the students to interpret these lines which he’d committed
to heart during his first Shakespeare course at Northwestern more than twenty-five years ago. After Helen died, he’d sit in his dark office re- peating the words over and over again, as if they were a mantra, though he’d known, even then, that Helen, unlike the queen in the play, could never be brought back.
~
More than a year later, Peter catches himself
“It’s not my baby,” Agnes tells Peter when she shows up on Monday to take the exam.
Peter rubs his beard, squints in the bright sun- light. “Sorry?”
“I’m a surrogate.” She shifts her weight, self-con-
scious now, for she hadn’t anticipated his fur- rowed brow, the confusion in his expression. Not
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