Mrs. God

Mrs. God

one

Take a line. What is it about? What is it referring to? What picture can I think of to replace it?

It is as if it doesn’t care about me but just stares. (He, She,—.) (Trees, Rocks, Planets, Stars.) Still, I am inside it as much as under or across. I stare back at myself. —CHARLES BERNSTEIN, Content’s Dream

Standish had not realized how tense he was until the jet finally left the ground and his body, as if by itself, began to relax. Nothing could call him back now, neither Jean’s anxiety nor his own reservations. It was settled; he was on his way. The startlingly graphic map of lights that was New York City appeared in the window to his left, then slipped out of view. They were at some alarming, dreamlike attitude to the earth that would have meant certain death during Isobel Standish’s day—but what might she, in whose name her almost-grandson had ditched both home and seven-months-pregnant wife, not have done with the experience of being revolved above the earth in a metal tube?

The anxiety of the past months continued to ebb from him. Like sweat or semen, anxiety was a physical substance that poured from a self-replenishing well. Of course he was right to go, even Jean had eventually agreed that Esswood was a wonderful opportunity for them both. Three or four weeks at Esswood could lay the groundwork for his tenure, for a book about Isobel—his almost-grandmother—for the whole next stage of his life. When he returned he ought to be carrying in his briefcase the germ of a secured future as surely as Jean once again carried another kind of future life within her womb. And to put it crudely, his would pay for hers.

On the strength of that comfort, he ordered a martini from the stewardess. Of course some of his anxiety had been caused by Esswood itself. Esswood had been known to withdraw its Fellowships, occasionally at times very awkward for the prospective Fellow. The Seneschals, Esswood’s owners, appeared to be almost fabulously remote from the details of American academe, but Standish had known two men who, after a period of discreet crowing about being accepted for a term at Esswood, had abruptly ceased to speak about it at all. They had been thrown out before ever getting there.

Ten years ago the first of these, Chester Ridgeley, had been one of the tenured faculty at little Popham College in Popham, Ohio, where Standish had begun his academic career—a stiffly eccentric, prematurely aged fixture of the English Department, Ridgeley had been invited to spend a sabbatical semester in Esswood’s famous library going over notes and drafts of poems by the obscure Georgian poet Theodore Corn, who thirty years before that had been the subject of his dissertation. Theodore Corn had apparently been a frequent guest at Esswood, and once had actually said that no one who had not seen Esswood House and its grounds—“the far field and lazy mill beyond the plangency of pond”—could fully understand his poetry.

With permission of Pegasus Books.