Today, as it happened, it was just Bree on the dock with Sterling. She was knitting, chuckling as Sterling commented on the news and made derisive noises about the Higher Social Orders over at Serenity Lake, the other body of water in Hiram’s Corners, whom the Handspring Pond denizens enjoyed condescending to. There wasn’t much of a breeze this afternoon, and the one Sunfish out on the pond, manned by Rick Binns with a new blond passenger, wasn’t making much headway.
Paul, his head full of his work in the barn, asked Sterling about Outerbridge’s visit to Hiram’s Corners with Ida. “When were they here?”
“Must have been in seventy-nine, when A.O. got his honorary degree from Harvard — an honorary A.B., in fact; as you know, he never graduated.
“It was quite an afternoon,” Sterling continued. “A.O. wasn’t talking. It was in his period of Silent Protest against the way he’d been treated in the McCarthy years. But Ida was wonderful. She made the whole thing as natural as an ice-cream social with her nonstop chatter, while attending to Arnold’s every need.”
Paul noticed that Bree had stopped knitting and was looking out over the pond, at what he couldn’t tell.
“How old was she then?”
“Let’s see. A.O. was seventy-four, so she would have been in her early fifties. But she looked much younger. She always has. Her flawless skin, her carriage, her piercing green eyes — she’s always been twenty years younger than her actuarial age. And acted it, too! No, there’s no one like Ida. Never was, never will be.”
Paul hadn’t heard Sterling talk this way before. He was being sentimental! Paul had read enough of the man’s poetry to know the many varieties of amorousness he could affect, most of them patent hot air, and probably meant to be taken as such. But there was a kind of straight-up idealization in his reminiscing today that was unlike him, in Paul’s admittedly limited experience.
“What did she talk about?”
“Everything and nothing, like any normal person. She made wonderful conversation, kept things going as if there were nothing unusual or untoward about Arnold’s behavior. She covered for him. You would never have known that, of the two of them, she was arguably the greater writer. By a country mile.”
Bree was rising now, stuffing her knitting into her bag. “It’s time to be going, Sterling,” she said, though it was only five, unusually early for them to be leaving the dock.
“Read her, my boy,” Sterling advised Paul, as he struggled to his feet. “Read her.”
“Oh, I’ve read her, Sterling,” he answered. “I think I know her almost by heart.”
“Just checking,” Sterling snorted. “She’s the one, you know, boy. She’s the one.” Then he followed Bree up the steps, and in a minute Paul heard the station wagon turning over and slowly trundling up the woods road.
He spent the evening immersed in Ida yet again — there were multiple copies of all her books in the barn. As always, he tried to feel his way into her life through her poems, but there was something elusive, indistinct, about the objects or catalysts of her own precisely evoked feelings, though Paul knew her amorous itinerary inside out. But he was beginning to hear Ida differently in her poems than he had before. True, her love objects were all gorgeous antagonists, virtually interchangeable conquered conquerors shorn of their manhood along with their locks, as in the infamous “Verga” of 1943, written when she was just eighteen:
sleep while you can while
the sun is still roaming
white body tarred
by its cyclamen stain
night-haired Endymion
splayed in the gloaming
stay in my arms
till its coming again
Yet as Ida aged, as life flowed through her veins, Paul began to detect a subtle change in her explorations of eros. It was as if gradually she became able to entertain feelings of vulnerability and insufficiency. And her portrayals of self then could be heartrending:
Look for me under my pinafore
under your skin
reckless and shivering
ravenous wild-
eyed and thin
Ida’s work developed, and changed, too, as she aged. And at times her heroic self-sufficiency began to feel like simple sadness.
* * *
The next morning, it was back to work in the barn. After a long slog, he felt he was beginning to make headway. Slowly, by a grim, steadfast process of elimination, he’d begun to break into Arnold’s code.
He’d started with some long lines, predominately in the later notebooks, which were repetitions in every possible permutation and in numberless styles of penmanship, upper- and lowercase, of just three symbols: A, 3, and #.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
################################################
or sometimes
################################################
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
or
333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
################################################
AAAaaaAAaaAaAaAaAaAaAaaaaaAAAAAAaAaaAAaaAAaA
Paul decided to adopt the hypothesis that these frequently repeated figures represented the letters of Ida’s name, which often appeared uncoded, too — row after row of I’s and D’s and A’s — in the last notebooks. After that, a statistical matchup of the most common letter frequencies — he remembered good old etaoin shrdlu on the Linotype — started to produce results. Words began to form out of the blind symbology of A.O.’s lines, like figures emerging from the mist. The frequency tables needed some adjustment, though, because many of the words — again, unsurprisingly — were Italian, in which the most commonly used letters are eaoin lrtsc.
A.O.’s method turned out to be fairly straightforward, and Paul realized to his dismay that if he’d bothered to consult an expert he could have deciphered the notebooks long ago. Arnold’s encoding wasn’t quite as primitive as a Caesar’s cipher, where one letter substitutes for another a set number of places down the alphabet. Instead, he had replaced the letters and numbers with an arbitrary list of symbols: # for a, © for b, ¥ for c, x for a letter space, d for a colon. Certain letters and numbers stood in for others: a for i, and 3 for d, k for o, g for 6, for instance, which it took Paul several long sessions to figure out. Paul’s hypothesis had been correct: when Arnold meant IDA, he’d written A3#.
Once he’d deciphered them, though, the notebooks hadn’t, unfortunately, proven to be all that edifying. The “poems” turned out to be accountings of everything A.O. had done, day in and day out, hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute, in Venice:
23 APRIL 1986
8:30 coffee
9:15 lavanderia
10:36 Dr. Giannotti