The Binnses over time had created a Currier and Ives world of rambling old houses, orchards, and rolling fields amid the pond-studded woodland of Hiram’s Corners. Other relations of Aurelia’s had followed her here — including her niece Lobelia Wainwright Delano, Sterling’s aunt, until the whole east side of Hiram’s Corners facing the Middlesex Mountains, which rose gently a few miles beyond, was one large swath of Binns/Delano/Wainwright lands. Ida and Sterling, though they had fallen for each other in Michigan, had spent winter holidays here, too, at extended-family house parties, engaging, or not engaging, in the activities — snowshoeing and cross-country skiing by day; skating by the light of the bonfires built on the ice of Handspring Pond, playing bridge, and drinking by night — that made up life in the Magic Kingdom.
There was something about the changeless tranquillity of the place — the large, unfarmed farms with their well-tended meadows and woods; the lack of change in their ownership; the deep, deep cold of the long, long winters. When Sterling’s Aunt Lobelia had settled here in the twenties, she’d built herself a Palladian mansion on a rock ledge on River Road. After Sterling had come to his senses and returned from London, she’d constructed a tall, boxy wooden house for him across the street, and let him set up Impetus Editions in the farmer’s house beyond the meadow. In between the Cow Cottage, as it was known, and his aunt were nothing but birch and maple fern woods scattered with towering rhododendrons and flame azaleas that blazed bright orange in June.
On Paul’s first evening, he walked down the grassy old woods road that ran past the cottage like something out of a poem by Robert Frost. It wound over a rickety bridge, up a steep hill, and across a pine forest plateau, then descended beside a swamp that was home to Venus flytrap and other carnivorous plants, passing a small, unoccupied screen-porched cottage on the right. After another slight incline it arrived at Handspring Pond and Aunt Lobelia’s stone “camp,” a Beaux Arts gem in its own right, with Sterling’s shingled one a few hundred feet to the east. Sprinkled around the edge of the little lake were a dozen similar structures, most of them owned by the several branches of the Binns family. The only noise that intruded on the pond, where motorboats were forbidden, was an occasional shout from the beach at the west end, which Beebe leased to the town for a dollar a year. The woods roads and trails in the Bald Mountain Forest passed many wonders — secret lakes, cellars of settlements abandoned centuries ago, even occasional patches of primeval first-growth forest, the ultimate rarity.
The photos of Hiram’s Corners in the mid-nineteenth century that Paul saw at the Historical Society on the town green were shocking: these densely green hills had, like most of the Eastern Seaboard, been virtually shorn of forest by charcoalers avid to feed the kilns of the small iron factories that lined the Huckleberry River, which was little more than a big brook, before the invention of steel. The very innovations that had been the sources of the Wainwrights’ and Binnses’ wealth — oil, coal, and steel — had killed off these little enterprises and tens of thousands like them and allowed those brash nineteenth-century Midwestern arrivistes to become the lords of Hiram’s Corners. And now oil and steel had been shoved aside by what — high tech? Everyone was waiting for the first dot-commers to show up in Middlesex. So far, though, it seemed to have been passed over by the new Masters of the Universe in favor of showier spots. Being up in the hills, Hiram’s Corners didn’t even have high-speed Internet access, a bone of contention, Paul soon learned, for the few transplanted New Yorkers who wanted to live and work here. It was a place out of time, nearly feudal in its hierarchies and peaceableness. Paul lay back in his chaise longue and breathed in its self-satisfied woodsy air like perfume.
The Cow Cottage had originally been built as the farmer’s house on Aunt Lobelia’s property. Like her own aunt Aurelia, she’d arrived from Cincinnati, one of those reverse pioneers who made their way back to the original Colonies to acquire the patina of gentility that was missing in the Western Reserve. Aunt Lobelia was stolid and a little self-righteous, but devoted to her brother’s wayward yet alert only son, and indulgent, up to a point, of his odd interest in the arts. When Sterling had decided to become a publisher, she’d created a sylvan refuge in which he could pursue his literary aspirations away from the intermittently prying eyes of his intermittently disapproving parents and under her conventional but benevolent nose.
A succession of writers had lived in the Cottage, helping Sterling conduct Impetus business and holding down the fort when he took off for the Summit, where he still spent much of every winter, skiing, snowshoeing, and transforming the place into a Spartan but first-world-class ski resort, and visiting Jeannette and their daughter, Ida, named, he said, for his Wainwright grandmother.
In his absence, first Harold Cowden, then Konrad Preuss, and lastly Eli Mandel, all of them among Sterling’s second string of indigent young writers, had tried to make a go of working for subsistence wages in the upper Hudson Valley with no one to see or talk to except the naturally curious — i.e., suspicious — locals, who didn’t know a villanelle from a bottle of bourbon. Cowden had got a book out of it — his Hiram’s Corners Cantata, usually viewed as an aberration in his work — before being briefly institutionalized. Preuss and Mandel, perhaps better balanced, had lasted less long. Then Sterling established the Impetus New York office and bought the Barrow Street apartment (useful for authorial conferences that sometimes turned into trysts and/or vice versa), and the work and play of Impetus Editions had largely moved south. But to the initiated, the Cow Cottage retained its aura of literary sanctity, and the attached barn, with its mullioned Swiss windows, was stocked with Sterling’s overflow library of IE books, a veritable temple to the literary cult he’d established. It was here that Paul had set up shop to work on A.O.’s notebooks.
Paul shared Sterling’s view that A.O. was the only Red poet who had not been bested by ideology. As with his model Shelley, Arnold’s superabundant lyric gift surpassed and, some would say, annihilated the ideas he expressed, till all there was, in effect, was the poetry — its thrust and lilt steamrolling the poet’s purported convictions. Paul could practically taste the romance of A.O.’s life in Venice with Ida, she consoling him about the eternal vagaries of politics and reminding him of the enduring power of his voice, Arnold urging her on to ever-new delvings, new castles in Spain, new amazements to be pulled out of the humid Venetian breeze, composing his mysterious encrypted poems all the while.