The Confessions of Frances Godwin (2 page)

The only thing worth mentioning was the forthcoming translation of Catullus that I’d done for a small press in Brooklyn. But what had been a source of joy had become a source of anxiety. The jacket designer had put the wrong Catullus on the cover, not Gaius Valerius Catullus, the poet, but Quintus Lutatius Catulus (with one “l”), and I hadn’t managed to garner a single blurb. I used to think that blurbs sprouted like mushrooms, but now I know that you have to impose yourself—beg, grovel, plead, call in favors, cold call. I’d written to all the Latinists I knew and to some I didn’t know, though blurbs from high school Latin teachers were not what was needed, so I’d written to all the poets who had given readings at Knox. But so far, no responses, and the deadline for jacket copy was rapidly approaching. To tell you the truth, I didn’t want to face the issue. I’d already begged, groveled, and pleaded enough. And I didn’t really have any favors I could call in.

Do not resuscitate.
Well, that certainly got their attention. The nurses. The surgeon (Dr. Parker, my neighbor in Loft #5), the anesthesiologist. They were all right there, crowded around. “You can’t do that,” they said, sequentially, and then in one voice. “We always resuscitate.”

“Then why do you have the little box?” I asked.

When it became clear that they weren’t going to repair the hernia unless I unchecked the box, I unchecked it, drew a heavy line through the box, and wrote “Okay to resuscitate.” It wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t really care one way or another.

“Don’t worry about your clothes,” the nurse told me after the doctors had disappeared behind the curtain that had been drawn around my gurney. “They’re right here in this plastic bag. There’s a little lock on it, see?” I saw. I wasn’t at all worried about my clothes. “And I’m going to pin the key to your gurney.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So they’ll be right here when you come out of surgery.”

“Okay,” I said again.

“Don’t worry,” she said.

“I won’t,” I said.

The surgery was what they call microscopic, performed with a laparoscope, which comes from the Greek for “flank” (
laparo
) and “to see” (as in “to scope out something”). The laparoscope has a camera on the end of it. It was all beyond me, and I couldn’t tell you, even if my life depended on it, how they inserted some mesh to replace the damaged tissue. But it was minimally invasive. Band-Aid surgery. In and out the same day, though someone had to be there to drive me home. That was Lois.

I was a little woozy when I came to in the recovery room, but not bad. I could have driven myself home, but Lois was there, and I didn’t make an issue out of it. Besides, they couldn’t find my clothes. Lois had to go back to Seminary Street to get some clothes for me; she had a key to my apartment (Loft #1) and I had a key to hers (Loft #2). My wallet was in the locked plastic bag with my clothes. My driver’s license, Illinois state ID, insurance cards, and so on. My keys, too. But I wasn’t worried. Lois drove me home, let me into my apartment. She wanted to fix some supper for me, later on, maybe have a glass of wine, or two, but I told her I just wanted to rest. Actually, I wasn’t tired, but I wanted to be alone. Besides, the
Complete Seinfeld
DVDs had arrived from Amazon. Lois had to make a second trip down to the mailbox, in the little elevator room on the first floor, to bring it up. She was curious, but I didn’t open it till later.

As a grief counselor at the Banks-Connolly Funeral Home on Carl Sandburg Drive, Lois had been full of advice at the time of my husband’s death, and she was full of advice now about preparing for the end of life. She couldn’t emphasize enough, she said, the importance of getting my papers in order, and she gave me another copy of the little pamphlet she’d put together on the subject.

But, as I pointed out, not for the first time, I already had my papers in order: long-term care insurance; a living will; hospice information, from when my husband, Paul, had been in hospice (though hospice, I knew now, wasn’t a place you went to in order to die in peace; it was an organization that sent someone to your house—a Mrs. Adama in Paul’s case—to help you through the process).

“What about your funeral?” Lois asked.

“Stella can take care of it,” I said.

“Humph,” Lois said. Lois had put together a number of pamphlets—in addition to the one on getting your papers in order—on preplanning your funeral, on dealing with grief and loss, on what to say and what not to say to the bereaved. (Don’t say, “He’s in a better place,” or “At least she lived a long life”), and one on the importance of “sharing your stories.”

“Write it all down, Franny,” she said, “you’ve got time now.” She pulled a copy of “Share Your Stories” out of her large handbag. “Your life with Paul, all those years in the classroom, the troubles with Stella, and Jimmy.” As if Lois had any idea about what had happened to Jimmy.

She was still there when someone from the hospital arrived with my clothes. The dog, Camilla, barked up a storm and rucked up the runner in the long hallway, but she did that every time someone came to the door. I made her sit before I opened the door. I thanked the person for bringing my clothes, told Camilla “okay,” and went back to my desk, Paul’s railroad desk that we bought at auction when they tore down the old Burlington depot. I thought that if I sat down on Paul’s stool at the desk, Lois would realize that it was time to go.

“That’s a story right there, isn’t it?” she said. “They tell you not to worry about your clothes, and then they lose your clothes and your wallet and your keys.”

I had to laugh. “You’re right,” I said. “I’m going to get started right now.”

“You’re sure you don’t need me to stay?”

“I’ll be fine, Lois. But thanks.”

Lois’s pamphlet went on and on, like the list I’d been given in the hospital, and I was thinking, once again, that it wouldn’t have been so bad to check out during the surgery. I was almost sorry I’d unchecked the do-not-resuscitate box. Of course, if I hadn’t unchecked it, then Dr. Parker wouldn’t have repaired the hernia and I’d be walking around with a truss.

I wrote down the story about the clothes in one of Paul’s beautiful dark red Clairefontaine notebooks, put a number “1” at the top of the right-hand corner of the page, and then capped my fountain pen. Enough for one day. I was too tired to share any more stories. I opened up the
Seinfeld
box. A large box that looked like a little refrigerator. It was a complete set of DVDs. It was used and hadn’t come directly from Amazon, so I hadn’t gotten free super-saver shipping. The seller had wrapped it up in an old Kansas City
Star.
I glanced through the paper. A military convoy had been attacked by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan, Michael Jackson had been cleared of all counts of child molestation, the Detroit Pistons had defeated the San Antonio Spurs in game three of the NBA playoffs and were looking forward to game four. I folded up the paper and put it in the blue plastic recycling sack in the laundry room.

Kramer’s coffee table book was part of the package. I was a little disappointed. It wasn’t about coffee tables, and it didn’t have little legs on it.

I couldn’t decide between my two favorites episodes, “Wedding in India” and George’s conversion to Latvian orthodoxy, so I watched them both. I took Camilla out for a short walk and when we came back I shrugged off my clothes and climbed into bed and she lay down on a pile of old quilts that had accumulated on the floor on my side of the bed.

In the morning I poured myself a cup of coffee and leafed through Lois’s pamphlet again till I came to “Share Your Stories.”

Why not? I thought, mentally emending “stories” to “confessions.”

I could think of a lot of reasons, in fact, and if you keep on reading you’ll probably come up with a few more.

Nonetheless I sat down at the long, narrow harvest table in the living room, uncapped my Pelikan Souverän 600, and started to write, and I kept on writing for two weeks, filling more than seventy pages and going through a full bottle of Aurora black ink. I’m computer literate, of course—I have all my lesson plans, and all my translations, on my MacBook Pro—but I wanted to share my story in ink, wanted the ink to flow from my pen onto the creamy Clairefontaine paper as if it were my own dark blood.

I’ll begin at the beginning—the Shakespeare party in Paul’s attic—more than forty years ago.

PART II: 1963–1964

2

Santa Maria in Trastevere (1963)

Paul and I joined our bodies—if not our souls—together for the first time after the annual Shakespeare’s birthday party in the attic of Paul’s big Victorian house on Chambers Street. Saturday, April 27, 1963. I’d been around the block a few times, but never with a man who knew what he was doing, and it made quite an impression on me, opened my eyes. Did Paul seduce me, or did I seduce him? Let’s just say that I made myself available. Lois was upset and threatened to report us to the dean, but that was only because she was jealous.

Lois and I had sat next to each other in the front row of Paul’s Shakespeare classes during our sophomore year. And as seniors we’d both taken his seminar on Shakespeare’s Roman plays. We were attracted by his energy, which was calm and flowing rather than nervous and jumpy—a river, not a waterfall. You could see it in his eyes as he leaned back against the chalk board at the beginning of every class, making eye contact with first one student and then another. “Friends,” he’d say in a deep rich voice.

So this was our third Shakespeare party. At the first party Lois, an English major, played Hamlet’s mother in the closet scene and I got stuck as one of the fairies in the play within a play in
A
Midsummer Night’s Dream.
At the second party—our junior year—I did a knockout Portia—“the quality of mercy is not strained”—with Lois as Nerissa, and Rita Johnson, who taught French, padded out as a fat Shylock, though she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. At the third I got to do the balcony scene in
Romeo and Juliet,
but according to an ancient Shakespeare party tradition—one that predated Paul—the gender roles were always reversed in this scene, so I played Romeo to Paul’s bearded Juliet.

After the party, Lois’s boyfriend dragged her off. I stayed behind in the attic and was pretending to be asleep on one of the old couches when Paul came up to put the makeshift costumes and hats away. Paul’s wife—a lovely woman, elegant—was in New York, visiting her parents, who lived in a large rent-controlled apartment on Central Park West. She was a native New Yorker and loved to talk about New York, the greatest city in the world. She felt trapped in Galesburg: no Zabar’s, no MoMA, no Metropolitan Museum, no Central Park, no Lincoln Center .
.
. Lois and I knew nothing of these magical places, but we resolved to live in New York after we’d been graduated, preferably on Central Park West.

Paul and I began a torrid affair—at least that’s how I thought of it at the time, though “torrid,” from Latin
torridus,
meaning parched or scorched, is perhaps not the right word. “Scorched” maybe, but not “parched.” Paul’s wife was going to stay in New York till the middle of June, so we had no logistical problems. I would walk down Kellogg Street, where no one was likely to see me, then over to Chambers. I’d circle around and come up the alley and cut through a gap between the end of the privet hedge and the neighbor’s garage. I’d wait on the back porch for a minute, sometimes two, holding my breath and (standing on tiptoe) looking through the little window into the kitchen and admiring the picture of a big artichoke on the far wall before knocking on the door. If Paul was reading at the kitchen table he’d look up and smile. If he wasn’t in the kitchen, I’d have to pound on the door and wait.

I felt very grown up. Safe, too, because we had a clear
terminus ad quem
:
as soon as the term was over Paul would be leaving for New York, to join his wife for a few days, and I would be leaving for Rome, to take an eight-week course in spoken Latin.
“Quo fata trahunt,”
I said to myself,
“retrahuntque sequamur.”
Wherever fate leads us, let us follow.

I was graduated from Knox College in June and left for Rome a week later. Leaving Paul. Leaving my family. My mother had hoped I’d get to see the Pope—John XXIII—before he died, though she wasn’t a big fan of the changes that were coming out of Vatican II. “The Pope can go to hell if he wants to,” she liked to say. “That’s his business, but I’m not serving meat on Fridays.”

One of the announcers at the Radio Vaticana had come from Galesburg. His father still lived here. You could see him—the father—mowing the lawn in front of a small brick house on Cherry Street. My mother called him, but he said he couldn’t arrange an introduction to the pope and didn’t think his son could either. In any case, Pope John was already dead by the time I got to Rome.

My mother, who’d gotten wind of my affair with a faculty member and who was very upset about it, wanted me to go to confession before I left for Rome. It had been a long time.

“You know,” she said, “Father Gordon at Saint Clement’s is very understanding.”

“He’s not supposed to know who I am.”

My mother waved her hand. “When was the last time you made a full confession?”