Holly

February 15, 2021–March 27, 2021

Barbara and Olivia Kingsbury begin their meetings. There is always tea brought by Marie Duchamp, who seems to have an endless supply of white shirts and fawn-colored slacks. There are always cookies. Sometimes ginger snaps, sometimes shortbread fingers, sometimes Chips Ahoy, most commonly Oreos. Olivia Kingsbury is partial to Oreos. Every morning at nine Marie appears in the doorway of the living room and tells them that it’s time to stop. Barbara shoulders her backpack and heads for school. She can Zoom her classes from home but has permission to use the library, where there are fewer distractions.

By mid-March, she is giving Olivia a kiss on the cheek before leaving.

Barbara’s parents know that she has a special project of some kind and assume it’s at school. Jerome guesses it’s somewhere else but doesn’t pry for details. Several times Barbara comes close to telling them about her meetings with Olivia. What mostly holds her back is Jerome’s special project, the book he’s writing about their great-grandfather, a book that’s going to be published. She doesn’t want her big brother to think she’s copying him, or trying somehow to draft off his success. Also, it’s poetry. That seems pretty frou-frou to Barbara compared to her brother’s sturdy, well-researched history of Black gangsters in Depression-era Chicago. Further also, it’s her own thing. Secret, like the diary she kept in her early teen years, read over when she was seventeen (as much of it as she could bear, at least) and then burned one day when everyone was gone.

To each meeting—each seminar—she brings a new poem. Olivia insists on it. When Barbara says some of the new ones aren’t good, aren’t finished, the old poet waves her objections away. Says it doesn’t matter. Says the important thing is to keep the channel open and the words flowing. “If you don’t,” she says, “your channel may silt up. And then dry up.”

They read aloud… or rather Barbara does; Olivia picks the poems but says she has to save what remains of her voice. They read Dickey, Roethke, Plath, Moore, Bishop, Karr, Eliot, even Ogden Nash. One day she asks Barbara to read “The Congo,” by Vachel Lindsay. Barbara does, and when she’s finished, Olivia asks Barbara if she finds the poem racist.

“Oh sure,” Barbara says, and laughs. “It’s racist as hell. ‘Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room’? Are you kidding me?”

“So you don’t like it.”

“No. I loved it.” And peals laughter again, partly in amazement.

“Why do you?”

“The rhythm! It’s like tromping feet! Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom. It’s like a song you can’t get out of your head, a total earworm.”

“Does poetry transcend race?”

“Yes!”

“Does it transcend racism?”

Barbara has to think. In this room of tea and cookies, she always has to think. But it excites her, almost exalts her. She never feels more alive than she does in the presence of this wrinkled old woman with the raging eyes.

“No.”

“Ah.”

“But if I could write a poem like this about Maleek Dutton, I totally would. Only the boomlay-boom would be a gunshot. He’s the kid who—”

“I know who he was,” Olivia says, and gestures to the television. “Why don’t you try doing that?”

“Because I’m not ready,” Barbara says.

Olivia reads Barbara’s poems and has Marie make copies of every one, and when Barbara comes again—not every time, only sometimes—she will tell her to make a change or find another word. She always says the same two things, either “You were not present when you wrote this” or “You were the audience instead of the writer.” Once she tells Barbara that she is only allowed to admire what she writes a single time: during the act of composition. “After that, Barbara, you must be ruthless.”

When they’re not talking about poems and poets, Olivia encourages Barbara to talk about her life. Barbara tells her about growing up UMC—it’s what her father calls the upper middle class—and how she’s sometimes embarrassed to be treated well and sometimes both ashamed and angry when people look right through her. She doesn’t just assume it’s the color of her skin; she knows it. Just as she knows that when she’s in a shop, the people who work there are watching to see if she’s going to steal something. She likes rap and hip-hop, but the phrase my nigga makes her uncomfortable. She thinks she shouldn’t feel that way, she even likes the YG joint, but she can’t help it. She says those words should make whites uncomfortable, not her. Yet there it is.

“Tell that. Show it.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Find a way. Find the images. No ideas but in things, but they must be the true things. When your eye and heart and mind are in harmony.”

Barbara Robinson is young, barely old enough to vote, but terrible things have happened to her. She went through a brief suicidal period. What happened with Chet Ondowsky last Christmas in the elevator was even worse; it amputated her concept of reality. She would tell Olivia about these things even though they are too fantastic to be believed, but each time she approaches the subject—almost throwing herself in front of an oncoming truck in Lowtown, for instance—the old poet raises a hand like a cop stopping traffic and shakes her head. She is allowed to talk about Holly, but when Barbara tries to tell about how Holly saved her from being blown up at a rock show in Mingo Auditorium, the hand goes up again. Stop.

“This is not psychiatry,” Olivia says. “It is not therapy. It is poetry, my dear. The talent was there before awful things happened to you, it came with the original equipment just as your brother’s did, but talent is a dead engine. It runs on every unresolved experience—every unresolved trauma, if you like—in your life. Every conflict. Every mystery. Every deep part of your character you find not just unlikeable but loathsome.”

One hand goes up and makes a fist. Barbara can tell it hurts Olivia to do that, but she does it anyway, closing her fingers tight, nails digging into the thin skin of her palm.

“Keep it,” she says. “Keep it as long as you can. It’s your treasure. You will use it up and then you will have to rely on the memory of the ecstasy you once felt, but while you have it, keep it. Use it.”

She doesn’t say the new poems Barbara brings her are good or bad. Not then.

Mostly it’s Barbara who talks, but on a few occasions Olivia changes it up and reminisces, with a mixture of amusement and sadness, about literary society in the fifties and sixties, which she calls “the gone world.” Poets she’s met, poets she’s known, poets she’s loved, poets (and at least one Pulitzer-winning novelist) she’s gone to bed with. She talks about the pain of losing her grandson, and how that’s one thing she cannot write about. “It’s like a stone in my throat,” she says. She also talks about her long teaching career, most of it “up the hill,” meaning Bell College.

One day in March when Olivia is talking about Sharon Olds’s six-week residency and how wonderful it was, Barbara asks about the poetry workshop. “Didn’t there used to be both fiction and poetry? Like in Iowa?”

“Exactly like Iowa,” Olivia agrees. Her mouth tucks into a bed of wrinkles, as if she’s tasted something disagreeable.

“Weren’t there enough applicants to keep it going?”

“There were plenty of applicants. Not as many as for the fiction workshop, of course, and it always ran at a loss, but since the fiction workshop makes a profit, the two balanced out.” The creases in her mouth deepen. “It was Emily Harris who moved that it be shut down. She pointed out that if it was, we could afford not only to lure more high-profile fiction writers to come but add considerably to the overall English Department budget. There were protests, but Emily’s point of view carried the day, although I believe she was emerita even then.”

“That’s a shame.”

“It is. I argued that the prestige of the Bell Poetry Workshop made a difference, and Jorge—I liked that man—said it was part of our responsibility. ‘We must carry the torch,’ he said. That made Emily smile. She has a special one for such occasions. It’s small, no teeth showing, but in its way it’s as sharp as a razor blade. She said, ‘Our responsibility is wider than a few would-be poets, dear Jorge.’ Not that he was her dear anything. She never liked him and I imagine she was delighted when he decamped. Probably resented him even coming to that meeting.” She pauses. “I invited him, actually.”

“Who was Jorge? Was he on the faculty?”

“Jorge Castro was our fiction writer-in-residence in the 2010–2011 academic year, and part of 2012. Until, as I say, he decamped.”

“Did he write The Forgotten City? That’s on our summer reading list.” Not that Barbara plans to read it; she will be done with high school in June.

“Yes. It’s a fine novel. All three of his novels are good, but that’s probably the best. He was passionate about the virtues of poetry, but couldn’t vote when the time for that came around. Not a faculty member, you see.”

“What do you mean, he decamped?”

“That’s a strange story, sad and more than a little mysterious. It’s off the subject you are here to discuss—if Jorge ever wrote poetry, I never saw it—but I’ll tell you if you want to hear it.”

“Please.”

Marie comes in just then and tells Olivia and Barbara that it’s time. The old poet raises her hand in that stop gesture. “Five more minutes, please,” she says.

And tells Barbara the story of Jorge Castro’s strange disappearance in October of 2012.

On the last Saturday of March, Barbara’s phone rings while she’s curled up in the living room, reading The Forgotten City, by Jorge Castro. It’s Olivia Kingsbury. She says, “I think I owe you an apology, Barbara. I may have made a bad mistake. You will decide. Can you come and see me?”