A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [3]
“Were you frightened?” he asked.
“Here? No. Not really. Upset. Very upset. But not frightened. I thought of Carl. I was glad he wasn’t alive. To see it.”
Nora began to nibble at the skin at the top of her index finger. Abruptly she stopped, putting her hands in her lap with a decisive gesture. From behind the shut door of the library, Harrison could hear a vacuum cleaner.
“They say it’s the death of literature,” she added.
“I think that’s a little extreme,” he said, shifting his position on the couch. In the days following the tragedy, he’d been greatly annoyed by such dramatic remarks. “I admired your husband’s work very much,” he added, feeling remiss that he hadn’t mentioned this earlier.
“He . . . he was a wonderful man,” Nora said. “A wonderful poet and a wonderful man.”
“Yes.”
“I was the helpmeet,” Nora said, surprising Harrison with the archaic word. “I’ve . . . I’ve never understood what that means exactly. Helpmeet. Help. Meet.”
“I’ll look it up for you,” he offered.
“I could do it myself. I must have a dictionary. Somewhere . . .” She gazed at the spines of the books that lined the shelves.
For Harrison, the brilliance of Carl Laski’s work lay in its oblique nature, the way the point of a poem was often a glancing blow: a glimpsed headline across the breakfast table while a woman tells her husband she has a lover, or a man berating his wife on a cell phone in an airport lounge as he passes a small child sitting alone with a bright red suitcase. Later it will be the memory of the child with the suitcase that will bring the man to his knees in his hotel room.
Harrison, of course, knew of Laski’s reputation. The poet had won numerous international prizes, had been the recipient of honorary degrees, had been—when he’d died—professor emeritus at St. Martin’s College, at which he had founded the celebrated St. Martin’s Writers School and from which he had sent out into the world a disproportionate share of poets. Laski, Harrison had read, regarded the writing of poetry as man’s highest calling and therefore worth the inevitable squandering of happy marriages and good health, to say nothing of sound finances. Largely due to his efforts, poetry had been enjoying something of a renaissance when he’d died, though one so mild as to barely register on the North American consciousness. Not one man in forty could today name a living poet, Harrison thought. Not one in a hundred could say who Carl Laski had been.
Harrison had also read the Roscoff biography, a book that purported to be literary but showed almost no interest in the work itself. Rather, Roscoff had focused on the more lurid aspects of Laski’s life: his abusive father, his early drinking problem, his nearly obsessive womanizing while a professor at New York University, his disastrous first marriage, the loss of his sons in a bitter custody battle, and his subsequent self-imposed (and somewhat misanthropic) exile to the backwater college of St. Martin’s in western Massachusetts. “Your husband should have won the Nobel Prize,” Harrison said.
Nora laughed. “If he were here, he’d agree with you.”
“Was it difficult for him, being passed up year after year?”
“It . . . it was an event each time it was awarded. I mean that it would register. Like a small seismic shudder. He’d hear the news or read it in the newspaper, or someone would call and tell him, and his face, for just a moment, would cave in. Even as he was ranting about the winner or reading another part of the paper. The only time . . . the only time he didn’t mind personally was when Seamus Heaney won. He loved Seamus.”
Harrison set down his cup. Laski had been thirty years older than Nora. The two had met when Nora was nineteen; Laski, forty-nine. “Was it ever an issue between you—the age difference?” he asked.
“Only that he had to die before me.”
Harrison listened for a note of bitterness or grief.
“We always knew it would happen,” she added.
Harrison nodded.
“We just didn’t know it would be so awful. One night . . . one night when it