At first, I make contact with a few lost friends from college and the American girl I roomed with in Paris the year I spent abroad living in faded luxury in the apartment of an anti-Semitic old vicomte and his wife. In a flurry of exchanges, these women and I share touchstones of our lives—although inevitably, the moment comes when we run out of material suitable to be sent into the virtual void uncensored. Forty years is a long time, almost twice as long as we had lived when we all first met. Partners, careers, children. For me, a first grandchild. And two of our inner circle, it turns out, are already dead.
So what is it that propels me to up the ante and send a message to the boy I unceremoniously left behind? Brice was a year younger than I, with a year of school still to go when I graduated from college in the ‘70s and went off to seek my fortune. It was a rather tame first foray into my future, teaching French at a private boys’ school a six-hour drive through the mountains and down the thruway. We were not over, we swore; we would see the year through and reconstruct ourselves properly the next summer. Those were the days before cell phones and texts and e-mails and Skype, of course, so whatever we had to say, we committed to paper or, more often, stammered out in wine-fueled phone calls after 10 pm, when the rates went down.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, the relationship faltered. Heady with freedom and impending adulthood, I threw myself headlong into the messiness of life. I cheated, albeit with the man I eventually married, then went back to Massachusetts and confessed to Brice during a lost weekend I had not conjured up for years. Finally, in civilized fashion—and for children of the ‘60s we were excruciatingly civilized—Brice and I surgically and decisively disarticulated our lives.
Or so it had seemed to me.
It comes as somewhat of a shock, then, when a few weeks after my impulsive Facebook birthday greeting, I receive an e-mail in that familiar voice—purposeful, keen, literate, still underpinned by the Quaker ethos that had been a bond between us on those Sunday mornings we woke early and hitchhiked in the autumn frost to the Friends Meeting in Leverett. Not the voice of a man nearing sixty but that of the flushed, blond boy with whom I had once intended to cast my lot. As E. B. White imagines initially, in his return to the lake of his youth, “There had been no years.”
Tentative at first, Brice and I engage in a few discursive exchanges, quickly followed by a series of fraught outpourings that keep us both (we acknowledge) awake at night. I had forgotten, if I’d ever known, that he was such a careful and eloquent writer. I am the writer, after all; perhaps that made me blind to his gift. Stunned by the facility with words we have both acquired, words that might have saved us if we’d known then how to summon them, I ask him if, in those earlier days, we ever truly talked to one another.
We exchange increasingly intimate information about our lives and families. He has lost his father, I my mother—a woman he remembers unproblematically, though to me she was the difficult parent at whose funeral I could not, would not weep. He remembers giving my father a Hohner Chromonica on the one Christmas we spent together, oblivious, he says, to the dark memories of that time that I recount. He sends his regards, although my father, veering inexorably now into dementia, does not remember him.
I tell Brice I still have his green plaid Woolrich jacket hanging on the back of my study door, invisible until I am sequestered at my desk. I reveal my three children. Despite having married, he has none. I’m amazed by this, given how my children—even grown—consume so much of my psychic energy and attention. If Brice and I had stayed together, I wonder, would children or fertility have been issues?
Between lengthy e-mails, I excavate old pictures of my college graduation—overexposed prints from a cheap camera showing my parents, my sister, and Brice, all of us so wrenchingly young. My mother had re-emerged from an agoraphobic panic; I suddenly remember her huddled with a flask of Old Grand-Dad in the turquoise Buick for most of the ceremony. In the pictures, she stares tensely into the camera. I am in my cap and gown, Brice costumed uncharacteristically in a new seersucker suit and tie, my arms around him. I gaze mutely at these images, glass of Chardonnay in hand, searching for what had been there once, and then wasn’t.
Seamlessly, we slide back to the ‘70s. We talk about the summer I graduated: the trip we took to Europe; the fetid pensione in Rome where we both fell ill; the subsequent relief of Switzerland; a grueling, raging meltdown we had in the Berne train station, the cause of which neither of us remembers but which, in retrospect, seemed to presage what became of us.
He notes the disparity the year between us created as I catapulted into the world, decorated with honors, while he remained behind, struggling with comprehensive exams. And, he reminds me that his number in the draft lottery was 24, student deferments winding down faster than the war. Having launched my own son into all-volunteer armed forces, I am startled to remember the boys I knew in college gathered around the television sets in fraternity basements, waiting to hear their fate.
Our exchanges remind Brice of Rashomon, he says. Did we witness the same event? What does seeing how differently we view the same memories tell us?
And then we are in the thick of it—back in that fall, that New England town, that week-end, that bed, saying all the things we never said. What hadn’t he known? he asks. And after decades, I tell him what I concealed before, what I seldom tell. His kindness overwhelms me.
What blows my mind (suddenly I find myself slipping into old slang) is the ease with which I detached. As I read the feelings he kept from me then, I can’t locate matching ones of my own. It isn’t lack of memory—my memory is a keen crow, hoarding shiny objects—but rather the way I apparently dissociated, a strategy I later identified but was not aware of then.
He somewhat chivalrously proposes that my detachment came from a flame of resolve necessary to achieve what he calls “escape velocity,” then confesses to feeling judged and found lacking. My opinion of him was the only one that mattered, he says, and I cringe. Such unwarranted, unwanted power.
All these years later, I am moved by his pain in a way unavailable to me then. I resort to long since decommissioned private names for him, the only vehicle with which to convey the authenticity of my feeling. I apologize. He forgives me. I can feel him retreating.
The more we move toward resolution, the more anxious I become. I conceal his e-mails in mislabeled folders on my laptop, then re-read them late at night, feeling like I am cheating on the man I chose instead. It is not longing or regret that overwhelms me. There is no sense of having made the wrong choice. But some powerful, unfamiliar emotion has seized me while carefully constructing my missives to Brice and attempting to deconstruct his.
I can tell when our correspondence is coming to an end. Irony of ironies, given the way our relationship came apart, I do not want to let him go. I cry inconsolably, incoherently, until one white night the grief breaks through in the words of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that captured me years before, when I was young and still immortal: Margaret are you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving? It is a poem I didn’t fully understand at twenty, seduced only by diction and meter, the way the words felt in my mouth: Ah! as the heart grows older/ It will come to such sights colder/ By and by, nor spare a sigh/ Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;/ And yet you will weep and know why.
Staring out the pantry window into the moonlit yard where I have buried beloved cats under the apple trees, hosted nesting cardinals, and watched my now-grown children toss balls and build castles for fairies, I know that the pain doesn’t come from letting Brice go. Brice was not the person, not the life I chose. The clenching in my throat comes from releasing the green-eyed girl from the ‘70s who has briefly reappeared, dressed in black tights and a red Indian-print dress, long hair braided, a woven Greek bag over her shoulder, smelling of Patchouli. It is the blight man was born for, Hopkins whispers across the years. It is Margaret you mourn for.
“Fare well. Farewell,” Brice says at the end of the last e-mail he writes.
“Mind the light,” I answer. Mind the light — the Quaker exhortation to attend to what endures in the heart, my parting words to an old love but mostly to the girl I lost somewhere along the road as I drove through the mountains, headed into time.
How can we find meaning in the face of aging, illness, and the inevitability of death? How can we respond to the double plague of a fierce pandemic and a divided society?
The keenly observant and urgent poems of The Holy & Broken Bliss are grounded in daily existence, human tenderness, the rituals of a long marriage, and the poet's ongoing spiritual quest. In the middle of a world that seems to be breaking down into suffering and anger, the spare and direct lines of these poems, surrounded by silence, offer a kind of healing. The poems ask us to consider what living looks like inside of ongoing misery (misery we often are responsible for making and accept-ing). They call us to ask ourselves how we locate joy and even laughter when despair is ever-present.
The Holy & Broken Bliss contemplates free will, autonomy, self-control, the commodification of ourselves, and our desires for vengeance, satia- tion, rage, and acknowledgment of our collective sicknesses, along with the sacred possibilities of love, communication with nature, the power of art, and the "need to praise."
"Ostriker confronts the intricate dance between spiritual despair and revelatory beauty in her ethereal 17th collection. ... [The Holy & Broken Bliss] resonates long after the final page, reminding readers that even in a fractured, plague-stricken world, there is still a living, breathing force within all things."
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Available from Alice James Books, Amazon or Bookshop
Deborah Kelly Kloepfer recently retired after several decades as an English professor at Buffalo State College (now Buffalo State University). She is a published poet, fiction writer, and the author of multiple scholarly essays and the book, The Unspeakable Mother (Cornell University Press).
Janice Lynch Schuster is 61 years old and lives in the Annapolis MD area, where she works full-time as a writer for a large consulting firm. Her essays and articles have appeared in publications such as The Sun Magazine, The Washington Post, Poet Lore, and The New York Times.
How well I remember, now at age ninety, my one-time student and superior writer, Deborah Kloepfer, as she was then, now a retiree. How creative her prose was then, and still is, how envious I, as the English professor, was of her skill and imagination. Now to see her name in an issue of Persimmon Tree, how it brings back the years that no longer exist. Well done, Deborah.