Which doesn’t explain why Olivia did not attend last year’s Christmas party, which she could have done from her computer—she does have one. But Livvie (or the woman who works for her) did not refuse the elf-delivered beer and canapes; they were happy enough to take the food and drink. Emily has a resentment about that. As Roddy would say, I have marked her in my book. Black ink rather than blue.
“I don’t want mentoring,” Barbara says. She manages another sip of tea without grimacing, then touches her folder, as if to be sure it’s still there. “What I want, all I want, is for her to read a few of my poems. Maybe just two, even one. I want to know…” Barbara is horrified to realize her eyes have filled up with tears. “I need to know if I’m any good, or if I’m just wasting my time.”
Emily sits perfectly still, just looking at Barbara. Who, now that she’s said what she came to say, cannot meet the old woman’s eyes. She looks into the brackish brew in her cup instead. So much is left!
At last Emily says, “Give me one.”
“One…?” Barbara honestly doesn’t understand.
“One of your poems.” Emily sounds impatient now, as she did in her teaching days when faced with a dullard. Of which there were many, and she had no patience with them. She stretches out a blue-veined hand. “One you like, but one that’s short. A page or less.”
Barbara fumbles open her folder. She has brought an even dozen poems, and they are all short. Thinking that if Ms. Kingsbury did agree to look (a long shot, Barbara knows), she wouldn’t want to look at any like “Ragtime, Rag Time,” which runs to almost eighteen pages.
Barbara starts to say something conventional, like are you sure, but one look at Professor Harris’s face, especially her bright eyes, convinces her not to be so foolish. It wasn’t a request but a demand. Barbara opens her folder, fumbles through the few poems with a hand that’s not quite steady, and selects “Faces Change.” It has to do with a certain terrible experience the year before, one she still has nightmares about.
“You’ll have to excuse me for a bit,” the professor says. “I don’t read in company. It’s rude and it hampers concentration. Five minutes.” She starts to leave the room with Barbara’s poem in her hand, then points to the cannister beside the tea. “Cookies. Help yourself.”
Once Barbara hears a door close on the far side of the living room, she carries her mug to the sink and pours all but a single swallow down the drain. Then she lifts the lid of the cookie jar, sees macaroons, and helps herself to one. She’s far too nervous to be hungry, but it’s the polite thing to do. She hopes so, at least. This whole encounter has a strange off-kilter feel to her. It started even before she came in, with the way the male Professor Harris hurried to close the lefthand garage door, almost as if he didn’t want her looking at the van.
As for the female Professor Harris… Barbara never expected to get past the front door. She’d explain her business, ask Professor Harris if she would speak to Olivia Kingsbury, and be on her way. Now she is sitting alone in the Harris kitchen, eating a macaroon she doesn’t want and saving the last sip of awful tea, for which she’ll offer her thanks, just as her mother taught her.
It’s more like ten minutes before Emily comes back. She doesn’t leave Barbara hanging when she does; even before sitting down she says, “This is very good. Almost extraordinary.”
Barbara doesn’t know what to say.
“You’ve packed quite the load of fear and loathing into nineteen lines. Does it have to do with your experience as a black woman?”
“I… well…” The poem actually has nothing to do with her skin color. It has to do with a creature that called itself Chet Ondowsky. It looked human, but it wasn’t. It would have killed her if not for Holly and Jerome.
“I withdraw the question,” Emily says. “It’s the poem that should speak, not the poet, and yours speaks clearly. I was just surprised. I was expecting something quite a bit more jejune, given your age.”
“Oh my,” Barbara says, channeling her mother. “Thank you.”
Emily comes around to Barbara’s side of the table and lays the poem on top of Barbara’s folder. Close up she has a cinnamony smell that Barbara doesn’t quite like. If it’s perfume, she maybe should try another brand. Only Barbara doesn’t think it’s perfume, she thinks it’s her.
“Don’t thank me yet. This line doesn’t work.” She taps the fourth line of the poem. “It’s not only clumsy, it’s banal. Lazy. You can’t cut it, the poem is already as brief as it needs to be, so you must replace it with something better. These other lines tell me you are capable of that.”
“All right,” Barbara says. “I’ll think of something.”
“You should. You will. As for this last line, what would you think about changing This is the way birds stitch the sky closed at sunset with This is how? Save a word.” She picks up a spoon by the bowl and begins to jab it up and down. “Long poems can provoke deep feelings, but a short one must stab and stab and be done! Pound, Williams, Walcott! You agree?”
“Yes,” Barbara says. She would probably have agreed to anything at this moment—it’s just so weird—but this she actually does agree with. She doesn’t know Walcott but will look for him or her later.
“All right.” Emily puts the spoon down and resumes her seat. “I will speak to Livvie and tell her you have talent. She may say yes, because talent—especially young talent—always engages her. If she says no, it will be because she is now too infirm to take on a mentee. Will you give me your telephone number and email address? I’ll pass them on to her, and I’ll send her a copy of this poem, if you don’t mind. Make that little change—just scratch it in, please, and don’t bother with the bad line for now. I’ll take a picture of it with my phone. Does that sound like a plan?”
“Sure, yes.” Barbara scratches out the way and adds how.
“If you don’t hear back from her in a week or two, I may be in touch. If, that is, you might consider me as… an interested party.”
She doesn’t use the word mentor, but Barbara is sure from the pause that’s what she means, and on the basis of a single poem!
“That’s wonderful! Thank you so much!”
“Would you like a cookie for the ride home?”
“Oh, I walked,” Barbara says. “I walk a lot. It’s good exercise, especially on nice days like this, and it gives me time to think. Sometimes I drive to school, I got my driver’s license last year, but not so much. If I’m late, I ride my bike.”
“If you’re walking, I insist you take two.”
Emily gets Barbara the cookies. Barbara lifts her mug and takes the final sip as Emily turns around. “Thank you, Professor… Emily. The tea was very good.”
“Glad you enjoyed it,” Emily says, with that same thin smile. Barbara thinks there’s something knowing about it. “Thank you for sharing your work.”
Barbara leaves with her red coat unbuttoned, her red scarf hanging loose instead of wrapped, her knitted red beret cocked rakishly on her head, facemask forgotten in her pocket.
Pretty, Emily thinks. Pretty little pickaninny.
Although that word (and others) comes naturally to mind, if spoken aloud it would surely sully her reputation for the rest of her life in these Puritanical times. Yet she understands and forgives herself, as she forgave herself for certain unkind thoughts about the late Ellen Craslow. Emily Dingman Harris’s formative years occurred in an era when the only black people you saw in the movies or on TV were the servants, where certain candies and jump-rope rhymes contained the n-word, where her own mother was the proud owner of an Agatha Christie first edition with a title so racist that the book was later retitled Ten Little Indians and still later as And Then There Were None.