Remembered Styles

Abstract

Remembered Styles Lowell Edmunds (bio) 239 Marlborough Street Is it Elizabeth Hardwick I see serving her bad-boy husband and me? Is that liver and mushrooms on the plate? We have come down to the dining room by a flight of stairs from the midday light of his study, where mirror and fellow poets behind glass play a refractive game. A maid in a blue dress opened the door. Through a museum of furniture I climbed to the fourth story: teak, cherry, mahogany, some from Mordecai the Jew four generations back, whom he had hewn into a branch of the family tree. And there he sat, the nakedest of his life studies, though clad in their achievement and in patrician clothes that day. What brought me here? I’d hoped the mind-drenched poems for his course in Harvard summer school. It could have been the half-chiasmus of our names, or some odd wish to confirm the good and bad news of the wasp climacteric. He said I should keep up my Latin and read the Symbolists, who had found a way to combine remembered styles with self. She serves us and disappears. We drink coffee from china cups his father brought from China. [End Page 23] The maid in the blue dress holds the door. The old stillness of the house comes with me for a moment. Now feet begin to scurry on the sidewalk. I hear cars and the city’s other noises. Forty years are soon to pass. Rosalind Wilson (1923–2000) A lady grampus on human legs in an old-time bathing suit with skirt descends the beach at Wellfleet, pauses to plié, sets down a sack (knife, lemon, bottle of wine), knows where to scrape a hole. Grazing on oysters, it is Rosalind of the summer colony. Twilight of the day and of that life. The beach becomes a national park. A lumpy lady in her Sunday best comes to dinner in Cambridge at her father’s house on Hilliard Street. Debates the Auden of caved-in face and vanity forever young. Castro, avocados—she maintains a perfect interval of irony above every position that he takes. That afternoon passes, as does that life with its afternoon-long conversations. The sixties part the times and end. She leaves the apartment on Beacon Hill and moves to the house in Talcottville, where he, antagonist of time, works through the night, takes drink [End Page 24] to porch to watch the sun come up. Three years later he is dead, and she stays on to match his sum of years with hers; they pass; and in her life it’s suddenly the evening-time. [End Page 25] Lowell Edmunds Lowell Edmunds, who professed classics at Harvard, Boston College, and Rutgers, is the author of a durable book on the martini. Copyright © 2010 University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee