Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [26]
Or, to be accurate, I helped Bill study. What I helped him with was English literature. So far, he’d managed to squeak through it, but now he was frightened, although he didn’t call it fright. Instead, he blamed the literature itself: it refused to make sense. He wanted everything to be clear-cut, as in algebra, a subject he was good at. How could there be two or three meanings to one single word at the same time? How could Miss Bessie get all of that stuff out of a single poem? Why couldn’t people say things plainly?
Helping Bill wasn’t turning out to be easy. He’d get mad at the poem for being complicated; he’d argue with it, and demand that it be different; then he’d get mad at the poet for having written it that way; then he’d get mad at me. After a while he’d say he was sorry, he hadn’t meant it – I was really, really smart, in that way at least; I was good with words, not like him, and he admired me for it. He just needed me to explain the thing again, only more slowly. After that we would neck and fumble around, though not for very long because we couldn’t afford the time.
This day, Bill and I were in no great hurry to get home. We strolled, we sauntered; we paused for ice cream cones at the drugstore. You had to take a break from the books once in a while, said Bill. The ice cream came in cylinders and tasted faintly of the cardboard in which it had been rolled; the cones themselves were leathery in texture. We reached the funeral parlour and sat down on the low stone wall in front of it. The sunlight was golden; pale greenish tassels dangled from the trees; Bill’s hair, which was light brown and cut very short, shone like a soft velvety lawn. It was all I could do to keep from stroking the top of his head, as if he was a plush toy dog, but he wouldn’t have liked that. He didn’t like to be patted.
“I’m not going to pass it,” said Bill. “I’m going to flunk out.”
“No, you’re not,” I said.
“I just don’t get it.”
“Don’t get what?”
“What’s going on.”
“What’s going on in what?” I said, though I knew what he meant.
“That goddamn Duchess poem.”
Goddamn was the worst swearing Bill ever did in front of me. To say the other words – the F-word, for instance – would have meant he thought I was the kind of girl you could say such things to. A shoddy girl.
I sighed. “Okay, I’ll run over it again. The poem is by Robert Browning. He was one of the most important poets of the nineteenth century. It’s a dramatic monologue. That means only one person is speaking, like a monologue in a play. The form is iambic pentameter run-on couplets.”
“I get that part,” said Bill. Form wasn’t difficult for him, because it involved counting. A sonnet, a sestina, an abab rhyme-scheme ballad – identifying these caused him no problems.
I finished my ice cream and tucked the end of the cone in between the stone wall and the funeral parlour’s flower bed, in which a neat row of red tulips was arranged. I felt lazy, I wasn’t really in an instructive mood, but Bill was leaning forward, he was actually listening. “So, it’s the Duke of Ferrara speaking,” I said. “The whole poem is told from his point of view – that’s important, because they always ask about point of view. We know it’s Ferrara because it says Ferrara right under the title of the poem. Ferrara was a noted centre for the arts in Italy, so it makes sense for the Duke to have a picture collection. The time is the Renaissance. There was a lot of murdering going on then. Okay so far?”
“Yeah, but …”
“Okay, so the Duke is talking to an envoy from the Count. We know it’s the Count because it says