“They the only ideas you have?”
“If you know a better one—?”
“I don’t, but not yet, please. Let’s have a polite conversation until my eggs start to digest and ideas come to my head.”
“Okay, lead the discussion.”
But for that, we went in the living room. She stretched out on the sofa, yawned, and said: “I feel like a cat that just lapped up the cream.”
“Conversation, please.”
“Lloyd, why don’t we get acquainted?”
“Well? Aren’t we?”
“In a way, yes — in one way, definitely. In other ways, we don’t know each other at all. So all right, I’ll start it off. As I told you, I was born in Chester, of a shipbuilding family, comfortably well off. Public school, then finishing school for three days, high school, Delaware U., then Richard and marriage at nineteen. Then, hostess, hostess, hostess to Richard’s many friends, most of them important, meaning most of them rich. Received and accepted, partly because of my skill as a hostess and partly because of Richard’s money. In school, the boys made passes at me. In college they did, too, and I’m not sure I wasn’t willing. But the passes were pretty clumsy and nothing came from them... The passes weren’t clumsy; they were fainthearted. That’s why I didn’t give in. Your pass wasn’t fainthearted. It was what I called it — rape.”
“It was what you wanted, though.”
“You’re damned right, it was what I wanted.”
“Shipbuilding family, you say. How many?”
“Ships? Oh, dozens and dozens.”
“What size family was it?”
“Oh, well, father, mother — my father died. My mother became a registered nurse, and still looks like one.”
“Brothers? Sisters?”
“One brother who died. Now, how about you?”
“About me, not much to tell. Just a guy who was born in Prince Georges County.”
“Your father — when did he die?”
“When I was ten.”
“And who was she? Your mother, I mean.”
“Just a St. Marys County girl. Father a bank cashier in St. Marys City. It was on her mother’s side — my grandmother’s side, that is — that she traced her line back to the Ark. I told you about that, I think.”
“Which made her aristocracy?”
“I suppose so.”
“And you’re aristocracy, too?”
“But I don’t do much about it.”
“Did she?”
“No, but it still meant something to her.”
Hortense stared at the picture, then went on. “O.K., so you grew up here where we are, in College Park, is that it?”
“Marlboro, the county seat.”
“Oh. Then you moved—?”
“To College Park, here to this apartment, when I entered college — the university, actually. Then football, post-graduate study, and a Ph.D. for me, and all kinds of investments for her. She wasn’t grasping or avaricious, at least as far as I know; but money just gravitated to her, all the time. She made more than my father ever saw, and he didn’t do too badly. She left me comfortable, even without a job. When she died, it was the worst blow of my life.”
“When was this?”
“Little over a year ago.”
“Were you in love with her?”
“What do you mean, in love with her?”
“I mean, did you like to kiss her?”
“Well, she was my mother, wasn’t she?”
“Was it her idea to rip the neck of your jersey?”
“What are you getting at?”
She didn’t answer at once, but stared for several moments. Then she asked: “How many girls have you had?”
“Why — one or two, of course.”
“You were successful with them?”
“Listen, if they want to, they want to, and that being the case, they do. Use your own judgment.”
“How many?”
“No normal guy ever had one before this one now. She’s always the first and only.”
“That’s a very sweet thing to hear you say. How many?”
“Three.”
“And they were? Who was the first one?”
“Little waitress in Ocean City my summer as a lifeguard.”
“Where did you do it with her?”
“On the sand dune up the beach.”
“And the second?”
“A student during my sophomore year at the university.”
“Where did you do it with her?”
“Her family had a beach house on the bay below Annapolis. We would drive down there at night.”
“What did your mother say about her?”
“I don’t think my mother knew about her — not from me, anyway. I never told her.”
“You must have got in quite late.”
“I lived at the fraternity house.”
“Who was number three?”
“A woman quite a lot older than I was, while I was studying for my doctorate. She was a graduate student, too. The subject of marriage came up, but she began getting on my nerves. After she wound up her year, she went back to Chicago and married a guy out there, head of some research bureau.”
“Got on your nerves? How?”
“Does it matter?”
“If I knew how she did, I might manage not to.”
“It was over my dissertation. She didn’t accept the idea I had for it.”
“What was it about?”
“Shakespeare’s sonnets.”
“What was it about them that she wouldn’t accept? We studied them at Delaware. I thought they were wonderful.”
“When I’d worked on them awhile, I got a creepy feeling, as though the words weren’t just words, but a kind of scrim, with someone back of it, talking, someone I could hear but couldn’t see. Suddenly I knew who it was: a boy, a brilliant, gifted boy who was writing these things — not all of them, of course, but the 154 in the Thorpe collection. When I got that far, some mysteries began to clear up. She wouldn’t believe it, though, kept insisting that no boy could have written them. She kept saying, ‘You’ll make a fool of yourself.’ Then things went sour.”
“You make me feel creepy, too.”
I ticked off a few things that tied in with what I thought, and suddenly she asked: “What mysteries?”
“Well, for one, the identity of the ‘Mr. W.H.’ whom Thorpe, the publisher, dedicated the collection to, as ‘the true begetter of these sonnets.’ It has been assumed by all scholars that this was some patron, one of the noble lords Shakespeare knew, and that possibly there was a homosexual relationship there. But if he was talking to himself, if was a youth in love with his own beauty, as revealed to him in his mirror, if this was a not unusual case of teenage narcissism, ‘Mr. W.H.’ might well be Will Himself.”
“Well, I can believe it. What other mysteries?”
“One, mainly. The identity of the ‘Dark Woman’.”
“Oh that’s right. Her.”
“If these things were the work of a boy who started perhaps at fifteen, and three years had gone by since ‘first your eye I eyed,’ as it says in Sonnet 104, then he’s now nearly eighteen, and a big event is due in his life.”
“What big event?”
“You know. Of course you do.”
“His marriage, you mean?”
“His shotgun marriage.”
“Oh, that’s right. She was knocked up, but good.”
“By a funny coincidence, the Dark Woman enters the picture in Sonnet 127: ‘In the old age black was not counted fair—’ ”
“ ‘Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name’ — Well, I’ll be damned! It all comes out even!”