The Last Romantics(102)

Will, my darling Will, follows Caroline one week later. The single-engine plane he is piloting alone crashes over Hopi lands in northeastern Arizona, an accident that is never fully explained. He’d lived a rich and healthy eighty-eight years and his funeral is a celebration, a party, of all that he was and all that we experienced together. But these two absences, Caroline and Will in such quick succession, will topple me like nothing else since Joe. For years I will find myself sitting with eyes closed, one hand around a book, a pencil, an old T-shirt, and the other on my heart. I sit like that old medium Mimi Prince, and I wait for the enduring vibrations to reach me.

I meet Henry when I believe I’m finished with new experiences. I want only to retreat, to hide away and write in peace. To never hear another siren. Everything, I think, has already happened to me, but then there he is. Henry, fly-fishing in those big rubber boots and a floppy green hat in the river on my new land. He’s a neighbor who becomes a friend, then lover. My house in the mountains becomes our house and we fill it with books, the barn with horses, the river with trout. Our extended families come when they need respite from their lives in cities—Henry’s children and their children, my nieces and nephews, their children and theirs. My sisters never meet Henry, they’re gone by then, but I know they would have approved.

And Noni? On the day of Jonah’s college graduation, she will fly from New York to Seattle, and in those hours over the vast sweep of the United States something goes wrong. Something fails inside her brain, one blood vessel, a nerve, a synapse that does not connect to its partner. Renee meets her at the gate but senses immediately that Noni is not well. “I’m perfectly fine,” Noni says, and waves Renee away, but later in the hotel she’ll lie on the bed and pull the covers over her body and she’ll talk to Renee, a sometimes nonsensical monologue about her childhood, about the first boy she kissed, the teacher who told her she was too smart for secretarial school, the doctor who felt her breasts with her mother in the room, the summer day she first met our father, and other days, other events we’d never known or thought to ask about. For hours Renee sits and listens. She learns more about our mother on that day than she has ever known before.

And finally Noni will talk about the Pause. “Once,” she says, “I went to church. I looked to that dry, ridiculous Father Johns for some kind of wisdom. But after Ellis died, my idea of religion changed. I became a nonbeliever. Your grandmother was turning over in her grave, I’m sure, but the world struck me as stark and unforgiving. There was no plan. No one—no entity, no power, no God—controlled a thing. Life was a struggle. Not without its joys, of course”—here Noni smiles—“but a struggle nonetheless to feed, clothe, house, love the people for whom I was responsible. My children. You four. I was the only one who would ever love you wholly. I was the only one who would give my life for yours, and this seemed an important and terrible burden.” Noni pauses and closes her eyes, opens them again. “It froze me. It did. The Pause, you kids called it. I couldn’t face it alone, any of it, but somehow you managed. The four of you, together. You got through and you forgave me. Thank you, Renee. I’ve never quite forgiven myself, but thank you.”

It is not that night that Noni dies, or the next, but two weeks later, after she’s admitted to the hospital and rendered mute by tubes and falls unconscious, long after Jonah’s graduation ceremony and our planned returns to the East Coast. We stay. Noni dies with us surrounding her in a strange bed, a strange city.



And I write. The success of The Love Poem grants me a certain degree of independence and I consider leaving ClimateSenseNow!, but I don’t. I stay and do what I can for another twenty-seven years. Through it all, the floods and the forced migrations. The west coast tsunami and Asian food shortages and all the talk talk talk from the politicians. I write and I work. Poetry guides me, guides so many through these times in a way that would have seemed impossible when I was a younger woman. Back then, poets seemed quaint, possibly irrelevant, but there is something about crisis that returns us to the fundamentals to make sense of an uncertain future and remind us of what we need to know. It’s been that way since humans began telling stories. We sang our poems, we chanted them. Only later did we write them down: Gilgamesh and the Iliad and Ramayana. Akhmatova and Tupac Shakur. In poetry’s stripped-down urgency, in its openness, the space between lines, the repetition and essentialism—poets can speak in ways that transcend culture and gender and time. Films and novels remain rooted in their age, give or or take a century. But poetry? Tell me The Canterbury Tales doesn’t still make you laugh and Keats make you cry. And, my dear girl Luna, why did your mother name you what she did?

You asked about the real Luna. You asked about my inspiration. All of my work, from The Love Poem to The Lasts, The Pond, Mothers and Fathers, even The Last Romantic, derived from my brother and my sisters. My first and greatest loves.

For many years love seemed to me not something that enriched or emboldened but a blind hole into which you fell, and in the falling you forgot what it was to live in your own light. This was the lesson I took from Noni and Caroline and all those restless young women who wrote to the Last Romantic. My last conversation with Joe, this was what made me so angry. Find someone to love, he told me. It seemed halfway between a cruel joke and condescension, a declaration of my weakness. I didn’t know then what the word meant, despite all those men, the flirtations, sex and analysis. But I learned. Perhaps it was Will, or Henry, or Noni, or my sisters or their children who taught me. Perhaps it was Joe and Luna.