Remember? Every word she’d uttered was engraved in his consciousness — though he had no idea what in particular she was referring to.
She led him to the elevator, then took both his hands and kissed him lightly on the forehead — was she flirting, performing, or offering him a kind of benediction? Then she smiled again, unreadably, turning away as the narrow door closed.
X. Mnemosyne
The package was delivered to Paul’s hotel at eleven the next morning. It contained a sheaf of eighty-eight numbered pages of rough, ridged European-style onionskin held together by a blue metal clamp, on which a group of poems had been typed. The keys of the old typewriter were so dirty that the e’s, a’s, and o’s were entirely black, but there were no corrections or erasures. In their own way, they were pristine.
Clipped to the cover was a memorandum neatly typed on heavy stationery engraved with the Moro di Schiuma crest:
Dorsoduro 434
Venezia
Teclass="underline" (041)5253975
12 ottobre 2010
To Whom It May Concern:
I am entrusting the manuscript of my final book, Mnemosyne, to Mr. Paul Dukach of New York City, to whom I hereby convey its copyright. This letter will direct him to arrange for its publication as he sees fit upon my death.
I further direct that all earnings from the sale of Mnemosyne be divided equally, like the rest of my literary and personal property, between the Children’s Aid Society and the library of Bryn Mawr College.
It was signed in a shaky but readily identifiable hand:
Ida Perkins
The letter bore the seal of a Venetian notary.
Paul sat at the small, uncomfortable desk in his room, with the only letter of Ida Perkins’s he had ever seen. The clicking of the radiator and the intermittent groan of the Giudecca foghorn were the only sounds.
He began to read.
MNEMOSYNE
Ida Perkins
Venice, 2010
M in memoriam
Ille mi par esse deo videtur.
Paul recognized the Latin epigraph as the first verse of Catullus’s imitation of Sappho’s most celebrated lyric, in which he (she, in the Greek original) likens the man sitting beside his (her) beloved to a god.
The manuscript was divided into two sections. He turned the page and read the first poem of the first part.
MNEMOSYNE REMEMBERS
Mnemosyne remembers. It’s her job.
The stationary heat,
the glare, the trance,
the listless
lob; then evening coming on:
coolth, cardigan
on ramrod shoulders,
sharp myopic stare
across the meadow
where the great man’s sheep
browse as in an underwater dream.
No stars: the tipsy
stumble down the hill
in utter darkness
then the age-old dance
hand held and no stitch dropped
but one word said.
Mnemosyne was there;
the only thing she does
is this: recall.
It’s what she does.
It’s who she is.
That’s all.
Paul read on. The poems, recognizably Ida’s in style, were piercing in their simplicity. This was Ida at her most purely lyrical, he thought, yet sharper and clearer than ever before — and sadder, more elegiac. The poems were stripped down to essential statements in a way that harked back to her early classically inspired work, though these — knowing, rueful, ironic, resigned — were patently not a young person’s poems. And Paul quickly saw that they comprised a narrative.
The Titaness Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother of the Muses, was speaking the poems, remembering. And it soon became clear that what she was remembering was a love affair. But this time, instead of being the longed-for object, the pursued, the responder or rejecter, as was inevitably the case with Ida, her persona here, Mnemosyne, was the initiator, the pursuer, the supplicant — struggling, often without hope, it seemed, for recognition and acceptance, desperate to be taken in by an elusive, reluctant, fugitive, disappointing other.
I WAITED
in the sunlight
by the water
waited in the breeze
to hear the rustle
in the parted
grass to see the towel
fall on the chair
the body sink
beside me and unfold
the silver voice
remind me I was there
I might have dozed
but I don’t think I did
I was so dazed
with waiting
I got lost
in time without you
time I have no way
of clawing back
stale time
that swivels counterclockwise
down the drain
time that crystallizes pain
time that isn’t
life or air
foul time that doesn’t
move but disappears
I waited
in the sun all afternoon
I waited
on the dock
till it was cold
And when I raised my head up
I was old
There were none of Ida’s familiar erotic counterparts here, no “burly assassins,” no importunate, gorgeous swains-in-waiting begging to be sidelined or shown who held the cards. In these new poems, it is Mnemosyne who pines, who struggles to be seen and answered, and often fails. At times, she seems to be fighting for her life:
I never understood
that insufferable
balderdash about
hopelessness
till now but oh now
I do now I know now
how cruel your cool
and simple
kindness is
Then, to his shock, Paul saw something else.
THE RAGE
your local raccoon
didn’t know what to
make of us vamping
disturbing the peace
disturbing his habitat
new in the dawn
flashing his tail
by the dam he was
hoping to scare us
but nothing
could scare us
nothing giardia
thunder or hapless
invaders could
trample our idyll
we were alive
that June morning
only we two
the raccoon
coyote and catamount
mockingbirds dragonflies
bees didn’t
know what to do
weren’t we the naiads
then darling
weren’t we the rage
Mnemosyne’s loved one, the secret sharer of these moments of joy, and also the cause of her uncertainty and pain, was a woman.
Next it dawned on him that he recognized the setting of this exalting and tormented relationship:
wade the old
roadway
through
loosestrife
and goldenrod
where the
primordial
icebox
keeps humming
all night
in the primordial
woods with the
owl as our witness
while the
inexorable
hand keeps on
winding
its stopwatch
killing our time
invading our dark
with its flashlight
The sheep in the meadow, the woods road, the unused cabin by the wind-raked pond: Paul could see every detail in his mind’s eye. He had walked there, basked in the breeze by the water, lain on the dock and watched the clouds pass overhead. Time and again he had strolled past the abandoned cabin by the turn where the woods road rose as it reached the pond. Reading the poems, he was back in Hiram’s Corners on Sterling’s farm.