Chez Cordelia Read online

  These hopes weren’t unreasonable when I was little, but they persisted into my adulthood. The truth is, my father is a snob; he couldn’t let a book-resistant offspring into the clan. But I was his daughter, he was the poet of family life, he couldn’t very well expel me. So he refused to admit my failings were final. He applied faith, hope, and charity to my case. And he waited for the baby of the family to grow up, to settle down, to become the person he expected.

  The waiting hasn’t aged him; he doesn’t seem to have changed much from his early pictures—the series of snapshots, for instance, he and my mother took of each other on their honeymoon (a walking tour through England) in 1941. My father today hasn’t one white hair, his cheeks are rosy, his vision is 20-20, his belly curves out over his belt to exactly the same degree it did when he was twenty-five. If all his hair turned white, he’d look like Santa Claus, but for the moment he is a large, hearty man who looks more like a lumberjack than a poet. You’d never peg him as someone who sits around writing and reading all day. His poems, by contrast, are apparently polished and classical—and “accessible,” I’m told, in spite of his turning me into a red maple in one of them. They achieve, according to Time magazine, “the difficult combination of readability and profundity.” His fourth book, Where the Children Go, is in paperback at the drugstore in town: “America’s best-loved poet,” the cover blurb says. (I saw it in the rack the other day when I was in there and blushed scarlet, remembering that it’s the volume that contains the poem about my getting my period: “Meditation on a Daughter’s Menses.”) The two-part TV special about him and his family (I refused to appear) set a record for audience response on the public broadcasting station. My mother smiles and murmurs about Browning, Frost … There are times when Tennyson isn’t enough for her.

  It may be partly my father’s large, picturesque hairiness, and our big old house in the Connecticut woods, that have endeared him to the public at a time when bushy beards and wood stoves (we have four of them) and ten acres of birch forest and meadow and close family ties are dear to the hearts of Americans. Or it may be, as they said on the TV special, that “Americans are ready for poetry again,” and specifically for Jeremiah Miller’s brand of poetry.

  But it’s my theory that he simply knows how to market himself. He has always made sure that he and his beard and his stoves and acres and kids are visible. Even before the TV special, he let us all be used in a Time photo essay: “The Poet and His Family.” I was too young to protest: there I am, “Cordelia, youngest of the Miller brood,” sitting up in the apple tree. I’m even quoted: “Says Daughter Cordelia, 12, with the devastating honesty of her namesake, ‘What’s all the fuss about? He’s just my dad,’” words I never uttered. (They could make me sit for the damned photographers, but they couldn’t make me talk; and even at the age of twelve I knew that, whatever my father was, he was surely not just my dad.)

  Then, besides Time, there were women’s magazine articles on my mother: “Elizabeth Miller, devoted mother, first-class cook, nature buff, linguist, biographer, and—last but by no means least—wife to America’s unofficial Poet Laureate.” One magazine even featured some of my mother’s bizarre, extravagant, impetuous recipes, and another was keen to make her over with a haircut and eyeshadow and a string of pearls until my father put his foot down. Daddy has appeared on the Dick Cavett show twice, and he writes articles for the Times Op-Ed page, usually about the old-fashioned virtues of this and that and the other thing. He got his publishers to put into print Horatio’s autobiographical novel (written before he left for Harvard). He even got in on Juliet’s modeling career: Vogue did a series called “The Renaissance of the Family” that included a four-page spread on Juliet (in Ralph Lauren) and her pop (in flannel shirt and dungarees he’d had since the 1940s), and along with it a poem he composed for the occasion called “Daughter,” which compared Juliet to (I think) a loaf of rising bread.

  It tires me to think of it, the lengths he’s gone to for the purpose of cramming literature down the throats of his countrymen. On them, it works. People write him letters saying he’s changed their lives. They send him gifts, usually handmade. He’s always giving readings—college students love him, so do senior citizens. Dick Cavett calls him up. Yale wants him back. He’s been to the White House four times. Only with his youngest daughter has he failed.

  I once made a list—I suppose I was about thirteen—of my differences from the rest of the family. It’s in my List Notebook, the same one I’ve been using all these years, so tidy are my habits, so tiny my handwriting. What it actually is, is a dark blue Old Honesty Composition Book, the kind with the boy and the dog on the front cover and Useful Tables on the back. I bought it when I was in the fifth grade, at the suggestion of Sister Joseph Edward, to keep a list of difficult spelling words, but I never went beyond the first five: lavender, sheriff, radiator, fiendish, humble. That was one list that could have gone on indefinitely, but I quit there, perhaps from the hopelessness of it, more probably from sheer boredom. I devoted the rest of the book to more interesting lists. “Friends,” for example (six names: Danny Frontenac and Billy Arp plus Sandy Schutz and three other girls in my class) and “Coins” (I can date this list precisely: the night of the day—my eleventh birthday—when my aunt gave me Grandpa Cole’s collection).

  This particular list is on the fourth or fifth page of my List Notebook, and it’s headed “Differences”:

  1. Don’t like reading or writting

  2. left-handed

  3. short

  4. scallop-ear

  5.

  Number five is left blank not because I could think of only four but because there were so many—such vastness that was not covered in those four superficial items. The profound difference between the others and me was undefinable, unlistable. To this day I haven’t been able to fill in number five, but I still see the rightness of that extra number and the blank space after it.

  The differences I did list, though, are not really all that trivial—even my left-handedness. How I came to be the only left-handed person in a family of righties I don’t know. Grandpa Cole, the coin collector, was left-handed. He’s the only one anybody knows of. He died when I was a baby, and I’ve always wondered if he was as left-handed as I am: my right hand is practically useless for any movement more delicate than simply picking something up. I couldn’t hold a fork properly with my right hand if my life depended on it, and when kids used to fool around by scrawling their names with their opposite hand, I was a sensation, hardly able to hold a pencil, much less write, even a scribble. My whole right side, in fact, I’ve always thought of as my vulnerable side; it’s my right ear, too, that has the queer, deeply scalloped lobe. When I was married, I insisted on wearing my ring on my right hand, mostly so it wouldn’t get in the way, though eventually I decided it added strength and stability to my bad hand. And when I was obliged to remove it my hand was always uneasy, less defended than ever …

  I’m beginning to be bothered by my lack of organization here. Written-down words have a way of wandering off, and you can’t organize them with a gesture or an inflection or a touch on the hand the way you can speech. You set them down neatly (in your tiny, slanting backhand), and before you know it they march off, forming odd links, hauling in other words, clogging together in ideas you never intended. I keep wanting to supply headings to hold them in: “My Left Hand” and “Lists” and, before that, “Learning to Read” and “My Father’s Poems.” I would still prefer, probably, merely to list instead of write. But listing does have its limitations, even I can see that. It could never deal adequately with the tale I have to tell; I know I have to write it out. If I’m going to deal with it at all, I have to do it with words.

  Whenever I read my father’s poems, I always think: why doesn’t he just come out and say it? I know this is the philistine’s approach, I know I’m condemning myself as an inferior form of humanity even to admit to it—my father, after all, is Jeremiah Miller—but I still can
’t understand why a poem about me (at least it’s called “Of Cordelia, Small Daughter”) should go on for thirty lines about a red maple tree. I always come out and say it. I believe experience can be explained and understood, and I’m here to do it, taking my pencil in my strong left hand and setting down word after laborious word. But I resent all the way the necessity of doing so, of succumbing at last to the family fetish—me writing a book! It’s another victory for the forces of Mrs. Meek. And this time, if I’m rewarded with a ribbon-tied Hershey bar, I won’t be able to eat it, not even secretly in the bathroom, because candy bars are on my list of “Forbidden Foods.” But I don’t need anything tied up in ribbon. The setting-down of this story, the labor of this writing, is its own reward—like virtue.

  There won’t be much virtue in this tale, though. It’s a story of crime, punishment, prison, adultery, deceit …

  There. I’ve whipped up interest right at the beginning, just as Horatio did in Pride, Prejudice, and Poison.

  Chapter Three

  Hector’s Market

  As you might expect, I left my father’s house as soon as I could. I did it by getting married to Danny Frontenac when I was nineteen.

  Danny was one of the friends I fled to after school and on weekends, as often as I could escape, while my parents and siblings swam in books. Our real friendship—not the Meek-inspired, morally supportive, hand-holding third-grade bond—began when Danny discovered sex. At least, that was when he began to notice me. I already liked him a lot, and I began hanging around him when we were in the sixth grade. He barely tolerated me and hardly ever spoke to me, but he never made me go away, and he and his friend Billy Arp and I became a sort of trio. We hung around the East Shore Stamp and Coin Shop looking at double eagles, and we went fishing together down at Billy’s. I considered them my dearest friends, not counting Sandy Schutz, though I knew full well that Danny and Billy didn’t reciprocate my feeling.

  Billy Arp lived in a house that stood on stilts above the water. His father was an amateur architect and was building the house himself. During the whole time I knew Billy his father was still building it, but it never seemed to change much. It had a glassed-in living room that looked out over the water, a compact kitchen—all gadgets—like the galley on a boat, and an elaborate redwood deck; the rest of the house was half done and chaotic. Billy’s bedroom was never insulated, and in the winter the winds whipping across Long Island Sound would find every crack, so that Billy and Danny and I sat up there playing Monopoly in jackets and mittens. Sometimes we spent long afternoons leaning on the redwood railings of the deck looking out over the water, not doing anything else, just looking at sea, sky, gulls, boats. “If damn Long Island wasn’t in the way,” Billy said once, “we could see all the way to England.”

  “Cut it out,” Danny said, always the skeptic.

  “We could, it’s right across from us,” Billy insisted, as if the ocean were Main Street.

  “Bull,” Danny said. “It’s too far, you couldn’t see a thing, you can’t even see Long Island from here.” He snickered. “He thinks you can look across the ocean from his back yard and see the queen in her girdle.” (We were perhaps twelve, and this was the kind of remark Danny was beginning to direct toward me: slightly risqué acknowledgments of the existence of sex. I noted each one carefully, but never answered, some code requiring that I turn away with a prissy smirk tempered with barely visible amused admiration for his ribald wit.)

  Danny and Billy used to argue a lot—ignorant, theoretical disagreements that did nothing to disturb their friendship. I seldom joined in; in fact, I can’t recall ever doing so in those preadolescent days except once, when Danny announced he had life and death figured out.

  “I read in the paper that the universe came from one big explosion—right?” This was obviously a new concept for Billy, but he nodded readily enough, wanting to be up-to-date. “And that the whole process may be reversing itself—right?” Danny pursued. “And that Mars’ll come slamming into Connecticut again one of these days—right? Right?” He punched Billy in the biceps because Billy was guffawing over Mars slamming into Connecticut. “Come on, I’m serious, Arp. Come on, you guys.” (That included me, though I wasn’t laughing.) “Well, I figure it keeps happening over and over,” Danny went on. “Same explosion, same history of the world, over and over again, same things happening to us over the same billions of years, over and over—”

  “Wow,” Billy said softly, no longer laughing.

  “Get it? It’s like immortality,” Danny said with reverence. “I mean, it explains a lot of things.”

  My head swam, and for some reason I was angry. I heard myself—the silent consort—shouting at them. “That’s stupid, that’s just stupid!” They looked at me, startled. “First of all, the same explosion over and over is crazy, it would take some higher intelligence, but an insane higher intelligence, which is ridiculous—” I stopped, all choked up. The boys looked embarrassed, and gazed out over the Sound as if I didn’t exist. Billy fiddled with his portable radio. I went on. “Besides, what kind of thrill is it, a theory like that? I mean, it could never be proved—right?” Consciously, I aped Danny’s locutions. “We don’t remember sitting out here billions and billions of years ago at four o’clock in the afternoon eating Cheez-Its and listening to the Beatles—do we?” I began to cry. “What’s the use of something like that? Who needs it?” I sobbed a little, as quietly as I could, ashamed of my outburst and at the same time angry that they ignored it. The worst of it was the affection I had for the two of them, affection that had no outlet. I wanted to put my arms around them and hug them to me for comfort. I would have held off Mars with my bare hands if it came anywhere near us. I was overcome with despair at the uselessness of my love.

  “What’s the use? What’s the use?” I blubbered. The boys looked intently out to sea, toward England. The Beatles sang “A Hard Day’s Night.” Some time passed. Billy threw a Cheez-It to the beach below, and a gull caught it in midair, and he and Danny laughed and began to talk about gulls, leaving me to recover myself. I did, and I watched the gulls as nonchalantly as either of them after that, but even today Danny’s Perpetual Big Bang theory fills me with rage and frustration. I suppose it’s the grim impersonality of it that bothers me—and the inevitability.

  I like to think I’m in charge of my life. In the beginning, I was the controlling force in my affair with Danny. I was the leader and the instigator, so what happened to me as a result of that affair is my own fault—and that’s as it should be. Sitting across the aisle from him in the sixth grade, I used to admire Danny out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t dare look at him directly, but secretly I checked out his shiny red hair, and his wrists (he has marvelous wrists and forearms, pale brown and nearly hairless, slender and strong and curiously flat, like sword blades).

  I used to watch, furtively, the bones of his arm and hand moving as he doodled in the margins of his English book. His doodles were complex and artistic, the doodles of a potentially profound personality; they tended toward spiral shapes, whirlpool constructions of astonishing symmetry which seemed to tremble on the page, but he also did a lot of interconnected cubes, partly shaded in, that looked like housing developments on some unimaginably wacky planet. He always worked in pencil, and he kept a good supply of sharp yellow number twos in his desk. Every couple of days he spent several minutes at the pencil sharpener, honing his tools for the doodles ahead.

  I wouldn’t say I actually fell in love with Danny that awkward sixth-grade year when I sat across the aisle and mooned over his wrists and exchanged appalling English papers with him. I was busy being in love with John Lennon and trying to keep my passion a secret from my parents, who sanctioned preadolescent imaginary love affairs only if they were with dead writers. I had a black-and-white glossy picture of my idol, procured for me by Sandy Schutz, hidden in Volume Ten of the Book of Knowledge, which I was attempting, with the aid of a pad of tracing paper, to copy; what impulse prompted this I
don’t know, unless I was drawing John Lennon the way conscientious art students sit in museums copying Rembrandts—to feel my way, to learn from my ideal, to assimilate my notion of perfection, drawing it into my bones and blood. I studied John Lennon to prepare myself for Danny Frontenac.

  It wasn’t Danny I fell in love with that year I was eleven, though: it was his house. It wasn’t far from ours. For all our acres, we lived less than half a mile from the center of town, where the Frontenacs lived. They lived as smack in the center as you could get without pitching a tent on the Green. They lived over Hector’s Market.

  Hector’s was the heart of the town, and Danny’s father ran it. The Green there is flanked with important and distinguished buildings, all wearing plaques put up by the Historical Society: the Town Hall (1737), the Congregational Church (1803), the Library (1889), the Christian Science Reading Room set up in the Jared Pitch House (1684), the Village Gallery of Fine Arts in a 1668 saltbox, the Village Apothecary (1855), the Oyster Inne (1825), and the huge Squire Blodgett mansion, which houses, discreetly, a card shop called The Purple Parrot, a liquor store, Francine’s House of Beauty, and the East Shore Stamp and Coin Shop.

  In the midst of all this New England stateliness, between the Apothecary and the Library, once bloomed Hector’s Market. It was not without historical interest. Danny’s grandfather built it on the site of the old general store when that burned down in 1900, and it was a grand old building in the lovely, fanciful late-Victorian style, covered with peeling ivory paint, with trim around the crenelated windows that was exactly the rich color of mud. There were people in the village who sneered at it, especially at its cute Gothic dipped gables and diamond-paned upstairs windows, but I loved it.