FROM Nancy Culpepper: Stories (2006)
Nancy was waiting in Windermere for Jack’s train. With its grassy splendor, the Lake District was an ideal place for a marital reconciliation, she thought. She hadn’t seen him in almost a year. He was flying from Boston to Manchester, then catching the train.
In the ladies’ room at Booth’s, next to the station, she fussed over her hair and her eye makeup in a way she never had when she and Jack started out together, in the sixties, when her hair was long and straight. Now she used hair mousse and eyeliner. She no longer knew how to interpret the face she saw in the mirror.
If it were 1967 again and she knew what she knew now, how would she behave? She liked to imagine herself as a young woman, going north to begin graduate school, but this time she would be carrying confidence and poise as effortlessly as wheeling ultralight luggage. If she had had a sense of proportion back then, would she have married Jack?
She bought a fat double-pack of Hobnobs. She remembered how much Jack had liked those oat biscuits when they were in the Lake District together, long ago—rambling amongst sheep and bracken through the Furness Fells. Now she was on a Romantic kick, she had told him on e-mail. She was tracing the footsteps of Coleridge and Wordsworth, trying to capture in her imagination the years 1800–1804, when the two poets were involved in a romantic upheaval in their personal lives. It was not true that Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother William had an incestuous love, Nancy thought; Dorothy was surely in love with Coleridge. Samuel Taylor Coleridge—a married man, peripatetic, unhealthy, an excitable genius. But Coleridge was obsessed with another woman. Dorothy, doomed never to know the love of a husband or a child, gathered mosses and made giblet pies and took notes for her brother’s poems. That was the story that kept coming to life in Nancy’s imagination, and once it had sparked in her mind, she couldn’t stop it. When Nancy and Jack were young, pairings and commitments were casual and uncertain, and Nancy even wondered later if she had really been in love with Jack. But the passionate love triangles—and trapezoids—in the Lake District two centuries before seemed desperate.
Early in their marriage, when Nancy and Jack traveled to England, their passion was unadulterated. After arriving in London, jet-lagged, they collapsed in the afternoon, then awoke at 3 A.M. Not knowing what else to do, they made love, after dropping a shilling into a wall heater, as if it were some kind of condom dispenser. They always thought that their son, Robert, was conceived in England, perhaps on that occasion.
Or maybe it had been a few days later, here in northern England. Jack had an assignment to photograph cottages. Nancy, who had written a paper on the Romantic imagination for a history course, had brought along an anthology of Romantic poetry. But the poems seemed old-fashioned, with their hyperbole and exclamation points, and she read few of them. Jack was shooting landscapes, and throughout the trip he goofed around trying to sound as if he were from Liverpool, like the Beatles. Nancy had a cold, and she was hungry, but when they arrived in the town of Kendal late on a Sunday, there was no place to eat. They bought Hobnobs and overripe pears from a chemist, who directed her to a preparation on a dusty lower shelf—a fig syrup that was good for colds, an analgesic.
“It’s a very old remedy,” the chemist said. “We’ve used it for generations.”
At a bed-and-breakfast on a hillside of houses with long front gardens, Mrs. Lindsay served an elaborate tea, with little sandwiches and biscuits, enough to call dinner. She sat by the fire chatting about her flowers, her youth, her son the stevedore in Cardiff. Nancy sat entranced, her slightly feverish warmth dissolving into a comfortable ease. Mrs. Lindsay was seventy-five—very old, Nancy thought, thinking of her frail, taciturn grandmother in Kentucky.
Upstairs with Jack, Nancy swigged fig syrup and blew her nose. The syrup made her sleepy, and she slept well in the deep feather bed with piles of fluffy coverlets. At breakfast downstairs, Nancy studied the lace curtains, the flowered wallpaper, the ornate china cupboard, while Jack wrote in his notebook.
“Did you see Dove Cottage, where Wordsworth lived?” Mrs. Lindsay asked as she poured hot milk into Jack’s coffee.
“We’re going today,” said Nancy.
“When I was a wee one in Grasmere I heard the old ones talk about Mr. Wordsworth.”
“You knew someone who knew Wordsworth!” Nancy was astonished. The Romantic period was ancient history.
Mrs. Lindsay set the coffeepot on the sideboard. “They remembered him walking over the hills, always walking, with that stick of his,” she said.
Nancy’s interest in the Romantic poets went dormant after that and didn’t reawaken until the past year, after she and Jack sold their house in Boston and agreed to live apart for a time—until desire reunited them, they said. Alone in the Lake District, Nancy revived the image of Wordsworth and his stick. She carried it with her, supporting her thoughts of the friendship of Coleridge and Wordsworth, as she imagined the pair hiking in the surrounding landscapes. Her mind dwelled on those characters, seizing each clue to their reality. If Wordsworth was a steady walker, Coleridge was an intrepid pioneer trekker, the type of person who today would have written a Lonely Planet guide. In his fight against an opium addiction, he would trot out boldly into the wild, with his broomstick and his green solar spectacles, daring to walk the drug out of his system. On at least one occasion Coleridge hid out in an inn at Kendal, maybe on Mrs. Lindsay’s street. He went to the chemist for his opium, a mixture called Kendal Black Drop. Nancy smiled to herself, remembering now the fig syrup, pushed to the back of the dusty shelf.
Nimble Jack bounded down from the train. When he saw her, he dropped his blue duffel. Still clutching his camera bag, he jumped up and clicked his heels in the air.
“I can still do it!” he cried.
Nancy burst into laughter. She loved the attention he attracted. Her husband—a grown man, a middle-aged man, a kid. His face was a little harder and thinner. Their embrace was long and tight, with embarrassed squeals and awkward endearments.
“I don’t know how I got along without you,” he said, holding her against the wall of the track shelter.
“We’re both crazy,” she murmured.
“What have you been doing up here?”
“Getting Hobnobs for you,” she said, producing the package. He laughed. He probably hadn’t thought of Hobnobs in thirty years, and maybe he didn’t even recognize them, she thought.
In the taxi, Nancy gestured toward the glistening lake and the gentle green mountains, but Jack was chattering about his flight and his sister Jennifer’s family in Boston. He had a nervous catch in his voice. Then he apologized for that.
“It’s all right,” Nancy said in a soothing tone. The tone was a bit new for her, she thought. She rather liked it. “We’re going to be fine,” she said.
“Thank God for e-mail,” Jack said. “How did couples ever work out their differences in the past?”
“They went walking,” Nancy said.
“Up here for the walking, are you?” the taxi driver, a woman in Bono sunglasses, asked. She said she was a native and had walked all over. “This is the best place in the world,” she said. “I’ve just been to Spain and walked the Sierra Nevada. Really enjoyed that. But I wouldn’t trade the Lakes.”
As they neared the Ambleside, Jack began to consider the scenery. But the view now was throngs of tourists. Nancy had insisted they did not need a car. Cars were discouraged because of the traffic, she told him. She had been there for a week, walking miles every day, just as Dorothy Wordsworth did before she lost her mind.
The lobby of the hotel in Grasmere, where Nancy had been staying, was barely large enough for Nancy and Jack to stand together at the counter. Nancy could have afforded a posh hotel, but she had resisted, uneasy about spending her inheritance on luxuries her parents never had.
“Oh, is this your hubby?” the desk marm burbled, pronouncing it “hooby.” She smiled pleasantly at Jack. “Enjoy your stay, luv.”
As they climbed the soft-carpeted stairs, Jack said, “I brought my boots. You said we were going to climb a mountain a day. Do I need a walking stick?” He joked, “Maybe I need a cane.”
“We’re not old.”
“If you say so,” he said. “That reminds me. I’ve got some news.”
“Oh, what?” She couldn’t tell if he meant good news or bad. Jack had perfected an enigmatic expression.
“Robert and Robin took me to the airport. Robin sent you something. It’s in my bag. But that’s not the news.”
“So is Robert going to marry that girl?”
Jack shook his head. “Who knows?” he said, with a slight flicker of a grin.
“She’s nice. I like her.”
Robert had been living with Robin for two years. Nancy thought Robin was an improvement over his ex-wife, the post-colonial feminist academic from Brattleboro.
In the modest room, Jack glanced around at the evidence of Nancy’s life there—books, hiking boots, a periwinkle fleece neck gaiter—as if he was seeing a side of her he didn’t know. Although he was still slim and athletic, she could see his face was older, but she was already getting used to it. His familiar face jumped back into place. Probably he saw the same aging in her, but he regarded her tenderly, as though he hadn’t noticed the white down that in certain lights was beginning to show on her chin.
“I was afraid something would happen to you here, out walking alone,” he said, hugging her once more.
“It’s not dangerous here. Tourists, tourists everywhere.”
“I still didn’t like it.”
“Tell your news?” she asked.
“We need to wait a little for a better moment.”
“A Romantic moment?”
He grinned. “I get it.”
“The poets have been keeping me company.” She laughed.
“Aren’t they a little old for you—dead, maybe?”
“Historians always get crushes on dead guys.”
Nancy vowed not to bore him with her latest obsession. She was putting away her jacket, making a place for his luggage. She felt a bit flustered, as if she was going to entertain a near-stranger. They hadn’t really kissed yet.
When Jack came out of the bathroom, she went in. Beside the sink she had made a wall display of Lake District scenes—Grasmere, Loughrigg, Derwentwater. Tourist postcards, not art. He probably disapproved, she thought. She hadn’t always understood his photography. “What is it a picture of?” she always wanted to know, but he wouldn’t tell. “History majors!” he would say. Yet she thought a photograph of knives laid in bomber formation lacked subtlety. Was it supposed to be a statement—about war, say—or was it the simple shock of surreal juxtaposition, as facile as a video on MTV? Even MTV was a generation ago, she thought now. She could hear the telly. Jack had turned on BBC 4.
She had once told him his pictures were cold, and that hurt him. He was actually warm and loving, much more so, than she was. Still, the pictures were cold somehow, she felt. But was that a good reason for the breakup of a marriage?
He was standing by the window, watching the swift, narrow rush of the River Rothay below. His hair was thinner, sandier, but not really gray. Her own brown hair had an auburn sheen, and in bright light she could still find individual rust-red hairs, as if they had been borrowed from Jack.
Turning from the window, he embraced her and they tripped around in a clumsy little circle on the thin floral carpet. She thought his news would be about his photographs, and she wanted to show affection, offer praise. She had been rehearsing. Never good at small talk, she had always found it difficult to issue congratulations or happy, encouraging words. She was often preoccupied; she was laconic; she didn’t elaborate or waste words. It did not occur to her to say, “Good job, honey.” She had never called him “honey.” But of course, she had always loved him. He knew that.
Now Nancy, the grad student miraculously possessed of style and a sense of proportion, and ready with appropriate words, smiled. Jack had opened the curtain and was gazing across the fast-flowing water at the church tower. The Wordsworths lay in its shadow, in the graveyard.
“Robert and Robin—it’s their news,” Jack said, turning to her. “They’re having a baby.”
Nancy gasped. “Well, knock me down and call me Popeye!” It was something her mother might have said. The phrase shot foolishly through her newfound poise. She sank onto the bed. “Wow. I’m speechless.”
“I was surprised. Bowled over. Thrown for a loop. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I’m agog. I’m stupefied. I’m—”
“You had time to rehearse that!” Nancy cried. Jack’s trick of reeling out synonyms had always amused her. Now she started to cry.
“It’s O.K.,” he said, curling his arm around her shoulders. “Robin is a sweet girl. Robert’s old enough to make us grandparents. Not that we’re old! You just said that.”
“Stop,” Nancy said through her tears. “I’m not crying over that. I’m crying because of the synonyms.”
“Want me to go on? I was dumbfounded. I was nonplussed. I was—”
“That’s one thing I missed. I missed that so much.”
“I begged Robert and Robin not to tell you yet, to let me bring the news, because it’s our news too. I wanted to share it with you, to see the look on your face.”
She smiled, but only slightly. She had a sense that she was somewhere off to the side, observing her happiness. She held back, for fear of ruining it.
The bed slanted downward, and the shiny duvet on the comforter made crinkly sounds. The bed was unfamiliar to their marriage. And the time of day was unusual, too. Robert, their child, was becoming a father. This was how it was done, she thought, as she and Jack reenacted the moment of creation. She couldn’t get away from the surprise: a bit of her and a bit of Jack, combined once, now recombined with something else to initiate a new generation. The phrase “recombinant DNA” floated through her mind, although she wasn’t sure what it meant.
Jack sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was slow. You used to call me ‘Speedy.’”
Nancy patted him. “It’s all right. We’re out of practice.” She smoothed the goose-down comforter in place. The thing was surprisingly warm. “Ejaculation,” she said suddenly. “Jack off! I never thought of that before. People used to say ejaculation when they meant exclamation.”
“They said erection too. Builders would call a house an erection.” Jack pulled on his T-shirt. He said, “‘My mighty erection,’ he ejaculated slowly.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Nancy said. She couldn’t think of what else to say.
Soon after she left Jack, a year ago, she visited Northampton, Massachusetts, where they had first met. She drove her old history professor around the countryside. Professor Doyle—she still wanted to address him that way—was still passionate about the Transcendentalists. “I hate time!” he wailed. Nancy was unnerved. She remembered how in class he pumped his fist in the air for emphasis, making history come alive, as if it were a timeless possession in his mind.
Nancy pulled over in front of a post office across the road from the house where she and Jack used to live. The green saltbox, now painted brown, was for sale. The field where she and Jack once ran with their dog had sprouted a monochrome faux–New England housing development. Nancy entertained a quick fantasy of purchasing the house and moving in with Jack, starting over.
“History is imagination,” Professor Doyle said, with a tinge of bitterness.
Jack napped while Nancy read snatches of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, his long paean to Coleridge, in the light from the window. Wordsworth was reviewing his life, gearing up to write his magnum opus, not knowing that most of his great works were already behind him. She absorbed the fleeting scenes of youth, when the two poets had connived to whiplash the imagination. Wordsworth wrote about the eloquence of rustic people, who didn’t use proper English and who toiled with bent bodies, people like those from Nancy’s past. The poets, in their quest for what they called the sublime, thought nothing of walking the length of England. With Dorothy, they went for midnight rambles in the dead of winter. Nancy could not stop wondering about Dorothy’s boots.
Robin’s gift was a box of chocolate mice from Boston, and Nancy nibbled several down to their inedible tails. Jack seemed unusually tired, and she let him sleep.
The light was fading when he stirred. Nancy knelt by the bed and nudged him awake. “Come on, Jet-Lag Jack,” she said. “You’ll get your days and nights mixed up. It’s time to go downstairs for dinner.”
Jack groaned and sat up. “What time is it?”
“Eight-ten. You don’t want to miss sticky-toffee pudding.” She grinned as he grimaced.
Jack roused himself from bed, fumbled through his duffel bag, and found a wadded shirt. He began to change into it. Then he reached for Nancy, who was slipping into her black running pants and clogs—her dinner outfit.
“Actually there’s more news,” he said, holding her arm. “I have prostate cancer.”
“What?”
“The prostate,” he said.
“They have to do some more tests, but they want to do surgery.” Nancy realized she was now sitting on the floor, clutching the side of the bed. He sat on the side of the bed, and she raised herself to sit beside him. “Maybe it’s not really cancer?”
“The doctor did a biopsy. I should have waited to tell you after I get all the results.”
She recognized her numbness, the clicking into detachment mode. The news would not sink in for some time. She started to tell him that he was crazy to travel overseas instead of going for surgery right away. But she refrained.
She saw her emotions lying around her, in heaps, like children flung from a Maypole.
Holding her tightly, he told her the details. He had been worried for some time. Perhaps he had come back to her out of a need, she thought, but it was also possible that he knew there was no time for recriminations and separation. Now she was called upon to exert that confidence she had imagined in herself, to say the right things. But she didn’t know exactly what. She was sitting in his lap, her head on his shoulder. Somehow they were now in the easy chair.
“I won’t ever leave you again.” The words didn’t sound like hers. “I’m not just saying that,” she said.
“I know. I’m not asking you to come back because of this.”
“I wanted to come back anyway. You know I did.”
“I was afraid to ask you, afraid it wouldn’t be authentic.”
“Let’s not worry about the authentic. We’ve always pressured ourselves to be authentic. Let’s just be ourselves.”
He smiled. “Whatever that means.” She rubbed his neck. “I missed you,” he said.
“I’m glad.”
He said, “I don’t want you to come home if you don’t really feel—”
“Home? We have no home.” She ran her fingers through his hair. “You know, it doesn’t necessarily mean doom. Some people just live with it.”
“Unless I have the Frank Zappa kind.”
Nancy reached for her fleece shirt, but she wasn’t sure she was cold.
“Bopsy,” Nancy said.
“What?”
“Mom pronounced it that way—when she had breast cancer. Biopsy. Bopsy.”
“Bopsy, Mopsy and—Cottontail?”
She slid from his lap and stood. “You know I love you,” she said. “It’s time that I hate.”
Jack’s news hit her again. It was illogical, unreal.
She wondered if Mick Jagger ever worried about his prostate.
While Jack was in the bathroom, she roamed through a small paperback he had brought about the prostate. The walnut-sized gland—always described as a walnut, like something a squirrel would hide. The inconvenience of it, such a silly thing to harbor in one’s body. A tumor in itself.
Her whole life with Jack was reconfigured in a couple of moments, its arc becoming a circle, like the circle implied in a rainbow or a sunrise.
The downstairs dining room, looking out on the river, was almost deserted. Their table for two was in a corner across from the sideboard of fruit and pudding. The table setting included three china patterns, Nancy noticed.
“The cuisine is strangely inventive here,” she told Jack. “Nouvelle Borderlands.”
She chose an Italian eggplant dish with cubes of smoked tofu and a pasta called orecchiette—fat blobs like collapsed hats. Jack ordered the plaice. The pasta came with roasted potatoes and carrots on the side, while the plaice had mashed potatoes, carrots and courgettes.
As they ate, Nancy talked rapidly, spilling out everything she had saved to tell Jack. They were ignoring his prostate, but her thoughts had adjusted like blocks of text rejustifying on a computer screen.
“Do you like the plaice?” she asked.
“It’s fine—I guess what you always called a charming, cozy hotel.”
“I meant the fish.”
He grinned. “If I’d said the fish was good, you would have said you meant the hotel.”
They laughed. “Maybe you know me better than I thought you did,” she said.
In the gray morning they walked, in rain gear, under the soft, dim sky. Jack had slept through the night and declared his jet lag deleted. Dumped. Vanquished. Atomized. But his eyes still looked tired.
“The beans want sticking,” Nancy said to Jack in the garden behind Dove Cottage.
“What?”
“Dorothy wrote in her journal, ‘The Scarlet Beans want sticking.’ It’s the same way my grandmother talked. And my mother too. They grew scarlet runner beans, and they had to find sticks for the vines to hold on to. Dorothy wrote about William gathering sticks to stick the peas.”
“You’re still thinking about your past,” he said, not unkindly.
Nancy was thinking of the time Coleridge stopped in at Dove Cottage, while Dorothy and William were away. Coleridge went into the garden, picked some peas, and cooked them. He dressed them, he wrote in his notebook. Nancy’s mother used that word. She dressed eggs, dressed a hen. Nancy was pleased to find this cultural connection to her parents and grandparents, but she wouldn’t mention that to Jack now. Nancy followed him down the cobbled lane past Dove Cottage, where he occupied himself with taking photos of some small-animal skulls displayed on the side of a stone house.
She said, “Did it ever occur to you that Wordsworth would have an accent, that he would have sounded like the Beatles?”
“Give me a line.”
“‘My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky’?”
Jack tried it but didn’t quite get it right. They laughed. She wondered if he was remembering their other trip to the Lake District, but she didn’t ask.
A World War II–era Spitfire appeared suddenly, low in the sky over Grasmere. Jack fumbled with his zoom lens and took several shots. “Damn,” he said. “I wanted to get it against that hill over there. I just got sky.”
“There were fighter jets every day last week,” Nancy said.
Early in their marriage, in their rural phase, Nancy grew vegetables. It seemed a moral obligation to grow something if there was good ground. But one night she found herself up at midnight preparing English peas for the freezer. And it occurred to her that she had left home in Kentucky to get away from the hard labor that had enslaved her parents. She was meant to use her mind. But her mind wandered, and she never had a successful career, because she shied away from groups, with their voluble passions. A career was more important to Jack, and she knew he sometimes felt a failure because he hadn’t exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art.
Eventually they sold their place in the country. Jack craved the stimulation of artistic friends, and Nancy had grown restless. They moved to Boston, which Nancy loved for its history, and fell in with a set of articulate, intellectual dabblers. But she found something myopic in their ways, how they stirred and sifted the doings of the day as if they were separating wheat from chaff, passing judgments on everyone who came to their notice. Their gatherings, although bohemian, were little contests, a show of strained witticisms. They never made crude remarks or talked about sex or money, and they assumed that everyone in the nation knew who Susan Sontag was.
“I should have made a big pot of chicken-and-dumplings, complete with the yellow feet sticking up,” Nancy told Jack once after a miserable dinner party when she had cooked fried chicken. “They would jump right in if it was Chinese. But if it’s Southern, it’s unacceptable.”
Jack just sighed. “There you go again, Nancy. They ate.”
“Don’t laugh at me,” she said.
Kentucky wouldn’t release her. She wouldn’t let it. She fought Jack on this, and he always accused her of being held back by her culture. She and Jack had often been apart for considerable stretches of time—her many trips to Kentucky; a former job that kept her on the road; and then a serious separation a decade ago. She went to England then, too, but that trip held no good memories. It was only a midlife crisis, she and Jack assured each other, when they reunited. Then a few years back, her parents died, in a ghastly six-month period—cerebral hemorrhage and massive stroke. Nancy broke from Boston then and began living part-time in Kentucky while she reconsidered herself and waited for her grief to subside. She supposed that 9/11 freed her from her own personal grief, but she never said so, for fear of sounding melodramatic. After her parents’ farm was sold, that hard rural way of life that had endured for centuries passed away. Nothing held her there, except what Jack called the guilty-daughter syndrome, her conviction that she had betrayed her parents in a hundred ways and that she had never really explained herself to them.
Now Nancy stood in Dorothy’s garden and gazed at the yew tree beside the house, a tree that had been there two centuries ago.
Her parents were gone. Their farm was gone. She was herself. It was the twenty-first century.
Heavy rain hit at lunchtime, but by afternoon it eased and the sky brightened slightly. They walked to Easedale, past Goody Bridge. The rain-swollen stream was rushing and high under the bridge. They walked along a boardwalk with the water lapping at the edges, then crossed a sheep pasture to the rocky trail that ascended the mountain. Tall granite fences, the ancient work of farmers and shepherds, made hard lines up the mountain. The rock steps of the path were carefully laid, now worn smooth by generations of walkers. The ascent up to Sour Milk Gill was not difficult.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Nancy asked Jack.
“I’m O.K. Fine. Couldn’t be better.”
“Maybe we should have trekking poles,” Nancy said, indicating a young couple with backpacks who were descending at a fast clamber, their metal-tipped poles clicking rapidly against the stones.
“I knew I should have brought a cane,” Jack joked.
“We’re not old,” Nancy said.
They walked steadily for about a mile, Nancy following Jack’s lead. They paused just before a steep ascent and drank some water. Nancy stood on a large, smooth rectangular stone that served as a small bridge over a streamlet. As she gazed across at the waterfall, she thought she glimpsed her own image, outsized, with a halo, in the mist above the water. She felt she was in one of Coleridge’s “luminous clouds.” The sudden sensation faded as she said all this aloud to Jack. “The poets called it a ‘glory,’” she explained. “It’s accidental, not something that can be forced. It just swoops in, like a bright-feathered bird landing inside your head.”
“I’ve read about that,” Jack said. “It’s caused by a tiny seizure in the brain.”
“Well, then, I’m having a tiny seizure.”
The path veered close to the tumble of the waterfall, which was known long ago as Churn Milk Force. Nancy, watching the crash and spray of water, suddenly felt a rare burst of anger as she pictured the days lined up ahead, days that could descend into a dark tedium. Churning through her mind was an intolerable parade of flash-card images—a hospital corridor, a shrunken body, falling hair, a coffin. She would not be able to endure it.
“Stand still. I want to take your picture.” Jack lifted his camera and pointed it at her. “I like the way your hair seems to be in motion.”
He fiddled with his lenses, paused to let a hiker past, and began snapping.
“What are you thinking?” he said, shielding his camera in its case.
She hesitated, unzipping her jacket partway. She heard a sheep bleat. “I was remembering when we were in the Lake District before,” she said. “In Kendal. Remember Mrs. Lindsay and how when she was small, the old people would tell about seeing Wordsworth walking around with his walking stick? Just think—we knew somebody who knew somebody who knew Wordsworth! I’ve never forgotten that.”
“Only three degrees of separation.”
“Isn’t that amazing?”
“That’s important to you?”
She heard the judgment in his voice. The “so what.” But she sped along.
“Don’t you remember Mrs. Lindsay? I’ll never forget her.”
“Vaguely.”
“I counted forty-eight dishes and pieces of silverware on her breakfast table.”
“What a thing to remember,” Jack said. “You amaze me.”
“Our minds are different.”
He nodded, then zipped his camera into its pack. He moved away from the path and sat down on a large rock, his hand gesturing for her to sit beside him.
“I’ve done a lot of thinking in the past year,” he said.
“Me too.”
“We weren’t paying attention to each other—for a long time.”
“I know.”
“Because our minds are so different,” he said. “I get it now.”
“We knew that.”
“I know, but we were so busy going in different directions, we just didn’t make time. You were always doing your puzzles—I mean your scholarly studies.”
“Same thing.”
“And I was translating everything into some formal meaning.” He sighed. “What the hell am I trying to say?”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“I just mean that the tracks stopped crossing. And we forgot to say hello.”
“It’s pretty typical,” Nancy said, then laughed. “I hate that. I hate to be typical.”
“Let me tell you something that happened,” Jack said, reaching for her hand. “I was in New Hampshire. Robert and I went to Franconia Notch. And I was overcome with a memory of when we went there years ago. Franconia Notch wasn’t at all the way I remembered it.”
“You and I were together there with Grover.”
“Grover.” Jack seemed about to blink out a tear. Grover had been his most beloved dog. “I remembered how we played hide-and-seek in the Flume. Grover and I hid from you. We had such a great time hiding from you. All those big boulders down there.”
“The Flume was so narrow and dark,” Nancy said. “And I remember a man gave me a hint—where you were hiding. I must have seemed lost. But I found you.”
“God, that was such a great memory.” Jack put his head in his hands. “And then I realized that all this time I’ve been hiding from you.”
Nancy put her arm around him. “But it is a good memory. And Grover was at our wedding!”
“Life was grand then,” he said.
“It was very heaven.” Quickly she added, “Wordsworth.”
At the top of the waterfall, the scene opened to the tarn, the small mountain lake leaking down the side of the mountain. The lake’s surface was shiny and smooth, the reflections of the surrounding mountains sharp. Except for the half dozen hikers in view, there was no sign of the modern world. The mountains—erratic brown-and-gray walls—rimmed the setting.
“This is incredible,” Jack said. His camera case dangled from its strap, as if at a loss for pictures, as Nancy was at a loss for words.
“Dorothy and William walked up here at night,” she said presently. “They walked everywhere at night. Even in the winter. In the snow and rain.”
“I hope they had Gore-Tex,” said Jack.
As Nancy pulled Hobnobs from her pack, explosive sounds burst from above—a pair of jet fighters blasting through the sky above the tarn.
Jack scrambled for his camera. But the jets were gone.
The trickle of the river was loud through the open window.
“Let’s call Robert,” Nancy said.
“Good idea,” Jack said, glancing at his watch. “He should be home now.”
Robert and Robin were at the house in the White Mountains where Jack’s family spent summers. Robert did research at Dartmouth in molecular biology, and he had already published a paper of some significance on cell signaling.
After Jack dialed a long series of numbers from his telephone card, Nancy took the phone. Robert answered on the second ring. Hearing her son’s voice filled her with an anxious pleasure. She sensed that whenever she talked to him she turned into a slightly different Nancy, seeing herself as he saw her. Now she turned into a giddy grandmother, silly, talking to her son.
“Robin wants to keep her job,” Robert was saying. “She can work at home.”
“I hope you’re happy,” Nancy said. “I hope this is what you wanted.” She wondered if they were still in love after two years of cohabitation.
“Dad told me some news too,” he said.
“Oh?” Nancy sensed Robert’s hesitation.
“He said you were getting back together.”
“Did he know that?”
“You’d better ask him.”
The coming together again seemed easy, she thought. Perhaps Jack’s good news and bad news had canceled each other out, leaving them in limbo. While Jack spoke with Robert, Nancy examined her face in the bathroom mirror. More and more, she resembled her mother. This used to frighten her, but she had come to find the recognition pleasant. She would say a quiet hello. Now, as she gazed into her reflection, she could remember the stages of her growth in photographs—the tentative baby-faced firstgrader; the saucy high-schooler; the college adventurer, with her brows darkened and thickened, her lipstick lustrous, her hair briefly beehived; her unadorned sixties personality (the “natural look,” it was called); the thinner, more angular face as her son grew up and she weathered. She could see all her faces morphed together, each peeking out of the other, the guises through which she had acted out the scenes of her history. And, too, she saw her mother’s turned-up nose and scared eyes; and her father’s square jaw; and her grandmother’s sagging jowls. She imagined other unknown faces of ancestors, and she saw her son, his mouth and warm coloring. And somewhere in her face was her grandchild.
She heard Jack winding up his talk with Robert. Again, she remembered that first trip to the Lake District with Jack, at Mrs. Lindsay’s in Kendal. When Coleridge returned to England in 1806 from a long escape to Malta, he didn’t want to see his wife. He had gone to Malta to forget a woman he loved—not his wife, and not Dorothy. He returned to England after two years, intending to ask for an official separation from his wife, but he couldn’t bring himself to go home to the Lake District. He remained in London for months. And then when he did go, he delayed the reunion even further by stopping at an inn in nearby Kendal. After he invited Wordsworth to supper, people heard he was back. His family and friends rushed forth to see him, because he had been gone for two years, and they loved him. But he was afraid, afraid to go home.
Nancy could see him reaching far back on the dusty shelf for his opium mix. Kendal Black Drop. The words beat on her ears.
That evening after dinner, Nancy and Jack walked down Stock Lane to look at the stars. They wandered out into the soccer field. Tiny Grasmere was sleeping, but a faint stream of music and laughter seemed to emanate from the mountains, or maybe the moon. The moon was hornéd, as it was in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The hornéd moon, an image Dorothy had contributed.
Coleridge often walked the fourteen miles from Keswick to Grasmere to visit Dorothy and William. In her journal, Dorothy wrote that she and Coleridge took this very walk, along Stock Lane. They walked from the cottage to the church in the moonlight. She wrote of lingering in the garden later with Coleridge, after the others had gone to bed. To Nancy, the spare notations resonated with desire.
Nancy and Jack stood in the soccer field, gazing up into the night sky. Nancy’s mind was busily adjusting the details from Dorothy’s journal to this spot. She felt the sorrow of separation and unrequited love and romantic obsession—all of life’s romance blowing like a cyclone through those lives two centuries ago, when they were innocent of time.
“I don’t think I could live this far from a city,” Jack said. “But I like this climate. I don’t have any sinus trouble here.”
“What about your guys?”
“What?”
“The poets. Any sinus trouble?”
“Coleridge had to breathe through his mouth.” She laughed. “But his worst trouble was his digestion.” She paused, trying to remember one of his descriptions. She said, “He wrote in a letter that he had been bathing in the sea and it made him sick. He said, ‘My triumphant Tripes cataracted most Niagara-ishly.’” She spoke slowly, to get the syllables right.
He laughed. “Your pals are starting to be real to me.”
She squeezed his hand. “They’re here, like ghosts.” She could feel them, young people struggling with the future.
The air was damp but not biting. They crossed the road to Dove Cottage. The windows were dark. Nancy imagined Coleridge stopping there in the rain, wanting solace and comfort from his friends; arriving late, past midnight, he was wet and anxious after his long tramp over Mount Helvellyn in the rain. Probably he needed to spew out all his ideas and affections—the treasure trove of a young genius, thrust forth like a hostess gift. His was a mind that never stopped whirling and somersaulting. Nancy imagined the stone floor in the front room, wet with the rain Coleridge brought in, and the urgent glee of his voice slamming the walls and the low ceiling. A man whose voice was music.
In the dark, by the garden gate, Nancy and Jack huddled together, his arm tight on her shoulders. He had come across the ocean for her.
“I missed you,” she said. “I want you back.”
“I want you back,” he said. “But where? Where will we live?”
“I don’t know. Where can we live?”