Page 63 - WTP Vol. XII #2

She is touched Maris had come so far to spend that day with her. And then she sort of tries to explain her. Becca says everyone she knows has thought about suicide once at least. Lewis gets up to speak then, calling Maris a martyr to an evil system, tenure, or just trying to make a place in academics here and foredoomed, not getting a third year on the Dean’s Appointment after she, like himself, was promised. His wife is still crying, even more now. The bearded red-haired man beside her still looking down, self- absorbed, saying nothing to anyone.
Ina, who’s a well-known scholar, a Victorian, tells how she knew Maris when she was at Amherst. I didn’t even know Maris had been there. Ina describes being a kind of mentor to her. She and Maris even went to the same alternative high school in NYC— Maris was the only other person Ina ever knew who had gone there, years later though. The school taught you to ask questions but not how to answer them, Ina says. If you were a girl, to expect to be taken care of, provided for after you got married. But I wonder for a minute if Maris just made this up, that Ina might have mentioned the name of the school and Maris told her she went there too. Ruta raises her hand then. She says she probably knew Maris for the brief- est time, the most superficially. She has only typed her book and articles on the word processor. She brings up the Alicia Seaman letters Maris was work- ing on, wondering what has happened to them, kept so long. Becca and Ina, who are overseeing Maris’s book manuscript for the publisher, explain that she had finally returned them to the library, the letters have been found, and now they have gone back to the Seaman heir.
Later
Why always, like Oliver, am I learning more than I want to?
I get a phone message this morning at the U. to call Arthur in Boston, “a friend of Maris’s from Amherst.” I have this strange apprehension about returning his call. But of course, I do. He has just heard about her death, had been abroad for a year and a half. His voice breaks. I see him as younger than she was. Yet he tells me he thought of her as a kid sister, someone to protect. Fragile, alone, but brilliant about litera- ture. How they’d talk all night. She knew everything about James’s characters, how they lived and felt about life, as if she were one of them.
~
No, she didn’t seem, now I have blocked the word— maybe “disturbed.”
It had not escaped me that she never asked me for a letter of recommendation.
~
I could picture it, the end of that summer, the empty squared off streets, the heat, the humidity; most Philadelphians would say about summer, if it wasn’t the heat that got you, it would be the humidity. I remember the pocket park her window looked down on, children laughing, climbing up onto stone ani- mals, other painted animals in the fairy tale mural
on the walls surrounding them, the heat pervasive. The empty streets where Maris knew no one. Where were they now the people she worked with, the open doors, the familiar presences on chairs behind desks, recognizable faces in the corridor? Only cold late summer lunches by herself at the deli around the corner. Didn’t I wonder, didn’t my wonder reach? The job she got, small campus in a distant neighborhood, I must have known about it, the book that had miracu- lously found a publisher. Someone I bumped into told me, so I didn’t worry, so I was maybe even at this time envying her.
~
When did she know? It had not been a split second, like Sylvia Plath. It took 20 years for me to write this down the first time, why didn’t I, why couldn’t I call? There’d be no reason I’d expect to run into her in
the halls later, imagine her at a seminar, at a dinner
I wasn’t invited to. Or did she plan to be interrupted like Plath, was that her expectation, the shop down- stairs opening, someone somehow who smelled gas nearby, not a split second, an hour, a day, a week too late? There’d been that long summer without people, more, a whole lifetime to think about it. The side- walks, heat rising up from the pebbled pavements, the lonely boats to watch as they passed one another on the river only a few blocks from her house.
Terranova has published eight poetry collections, most recently, Rinse, and two chapbooks, as well as The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter: a Poet’s Memoir. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other magazines and anthologies. She has translated Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis for the Penn Greek Drama Series and is working on a translation from the French of Ariane Dreyfus’ Le Dernier Livre des Enfants. The Academy of American Poets First Book Award, Pew and National Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, and a Pushcart Prize, are among her awards.
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