Rehoboth Beach

When I think back on my years as a graduate student at Homewood University in Baltimore, I’m struck by how the delights of love and learning mingled there in a woman. And how she can still bring to life the desire and illusion marbled into my experiences, like the colors in a slab of travertine marble.  I’ve thought about her off and on for fifty years, from the time in 1960 when all this happened, to the present. Now, at 70, a retired professor of French, I often mull over this story, still trying to understand it. Not that I have got all so far with that.

I was twenty-six, just graduated from a small college in the Pacific Northwest, with a decent but not remarkable foreign language background. I’d spent only this last summer in Paris. In my first days of orientation at Homewood, and in conversations both official and informal with faculty I was quickly learning that my expertise in spoken and written French was considered inferior to that of my classmates. It was a cut-throat sort of place and I was trying hard not to show any weakness.

My advisor in the program, Professor André de Jouvenel, was a touchy guy with a five o’clock shadow and pouched eyes. He glared darkly at the proposed class schedule I had just handed him. As we talked, I could see he was a bit iffy about my French accent, not exactly wincing at it, but close. As we spoke about my college background he kept saying comment? As if he was not quite following what I was saying. As if I was speaking a foreign language.

I had a slate of required courses for the MA in French. His class in the comedies of Molière was one. I was now asking him to let me take medieval art history instead, as it was only going to be offered this Fall semester. His eyebrows and the cant of his head said ‘we don’t do this here.’

“Tiens. You’ll have plenty of work with the movements and genres of French literature. Stay focused.”

I sat with my knees straight in front of me humbly and paid him close attention. What had really begun to interest me in my last year of college, as I had just tried to explain to him, was the intersection of late medieval French literature with visual art. That’s why I wanted to take the art history course right away. Beyond that, I had to admit, I’d sounded pretty vague. I signed up for the classes de Jouvenel suggested, including his Molière.

You can see then, that at this meeting, and indeed, at most others with the faculty in my first weeks at Homewood, I was made constantly aware of my limitations as a graduate student. Still, I had come to Baltimore largely in the hope of finding a more cosmopolitan avenue into life. And I won’t deny, maybe even a romantic one, but now, I was feeling discouraged.

I was, however, pleased with my new attic apartment, which had the true discomfort of a Parisian garret. It was only a short walk to campus, the first place I had ever had on my own. And I had wanted somewhere to dally romantically with the interesting women I hoped to meet in the coming weeks.

Mr. and Mrs. Dillman, my elderly landlords, were both extremely deaf. She was the more outgoing of the pair and wore a large hearing aid with a wire that went to a box she had around her neck on a string. She was constantly rotating the dial on the box. Their daughter, who had tight blonde braids and a bossy attitude had come over from somewhere like Glen Burnie for the lease signing. Standing in the kitchen with her elbows high, she read aloud the rules of the house from a sheet, which prohibited, among many other things, exotic pets and female guests. So much for love on hot Baltimore Sunday afternoons.

After this exchange with them I arranged to have a phone installed. The Dillmans would never hear anyone ring the door bell and probably went to bed by 7 PM. From a nail in my window frame I rigged up a loop of cow bells on a braided line hanging down to the street and told people who might come by to yank hard.

+++

My schedule of course work was not too demanding, so I decided to audit Professor Adrian Kandler’s Introduction to Medieval Art and not mention it in the French Department. A genial Austrian with a goatee, Kandler seemed genuinely interested in me. Each meeting of his class was a joy, with nearly an hour of color slides and lecture. New knowledge and connections made among works of Romanesque and Gothic art rolled over me like the surf of my native Oregon beaches.

Some of the students in Kandler’s class were curious about me coming from the French Department. They seemed welcoming though. A second-year, Gary Prevener, planning to write a thesis on Hieronymus Bosch, soon invited me for a beer. We went to a local bar called Blenheim’s close to campus.

“You want to make this place your second home. Everybody goes here. They have a great crab boil a couple of nights a week if you don’t want to cook dinner,” he said appreciatively, as we walked along at a fast pace.

All of Blenheim’s—even the front of the long wooden bar, and the doors to the toilets—was upholstered in a tufted maroon vinyl with brass studs, as if to control mad men in an asylum. I had never been anywhere like it. But the booths were comfortable and, as Gary said, the drinks and food were cheap.

A few weeks into the semester, Kandler mentioned in class an article on Gothic ceiling vaulting that apparently everyone ought to know. I went down into the Eisenhower Library basement to investigate the periodicals section and to find that piece in the 1958 Art Bulletin. I brought the volume to a little oak desk by the basement windows. All the other desks were either occupied or piled high with books ready for reshelving.

As I started to take notes, I saw that a woman across from me also had a volume of the Art Bulletin. We looked at each other’s books, surprised. Suddenly, I worried whether I should be here, if there was something I did not know about, an unwritten library etiquette.

I stood to stretch my legs and looking up at me, she finally asked after a bit “Are you a first year?” The vowels in her rich Southern accent were thick as Georgia pine tar. From just these few words, I knew then I’d been waiting to hear this voice since I’d come to Baltimore; I was sure its melodies would reach out to sooth my anxieties about my program.

“Yes, but I’m in French. I’m just auditing Kandler’s class.”

Putting her heavy volume down, she studied me with new interest. “Quelle chance!” She said, and smiled. We chatted for a minute. Her French was pretty fluent. She had lived in Toulouse on a French Government fellowship. Last summer, while I was in Paris, she had taken a bicycle trip to see castles in the Loire Valley. She was now writing a dissertation with Kandler and praised him.

“He’s a very cool guy.” She twirled her fountain pen from finger to finger at me as though offering it to me for the snatching.

As she talked on a bit in that deep Georgia accent, I watched her closely, but was cautious. “Yeah, I like him a lot, and he can be very funny too. It’s a great class, better than any I ever took in college.”

“Oh, where did you go?” I told her, asking her if she had heard of it.

“Nah,” she said, I’ve been mostly South and East.” I wasn’t sure just how to keep things going and was afraid of interrupting her work, but I sensed right off I wanted to know her, even if she was quite a bit older than I was. As she talked, her mouth was wide and mobile when she shaped her French R’s. It was, all in all, a very witty and intelligent face. It spoke to me of a kind of person I knew little of and by the time I got here, I realized, a kind whose company I desperately wanted.

We shook hands. She was Pope, Clara. Her hand was warm, dry, but tense. I was aware of all the bones in her fingers. I learned later that she was, in fact, Clara Daventer Pope through her mother, the middle name telling all if you were from around Athens, Georgia. It was an old Clarke County name. Even now, it still had a lot of weight among the local garden club ladies. People on gallery porches there could talk to you about the Daventers for a long time.

Clara had gone to the University of Georgia, where her father was an agronomist and department chair, and then to Columbia for an MA. When she was home in Athens, she said, with a touch of irony, that in her social circle, it was still customary to wear white gloves and a hat with a veil when going calling with her mother in their LaSalle sedan. They would go out in towns like Madison and Washington, spared by Sherman, apparently, and walk up to the Doric porticos of large white houses, leaving cards in a dish if the women were not home.

As I got to know her better later on, I saw there were still a lot of this Daventer in her. I helped her with some old parish registers dealing with the repainting of church sculptures. In return, I found a note left off at my apartment mailbox, written in a beautiful script in blue ink, on creamy stationery. Strong, black Times Roman print on the envelope flap revealed the sender: Clara Daventer Pope. Her note thanked me, at length, for my most gracious help. I had never seen anything like it before, paper or contents. I wondered if it too was ironic then thought not.

As we both returned to outlining our journal articles, I took stock of her as well as I could by the dim basement light filtered through the ivy growing over the little window panes. She was in her mid-thirties, gaunt, even haggard. She wore a sweater with a brown floral silk scarf at the collar whose knot was so tight as to look permanent. She was no dresser. Even I could see that.

And she was a real rouquin, but not of the rabbity, blue eyed, slightly boiled looking kind. Her hair went from auburn to dark mahogany and it whorled from a center part out in untamed waves, like the grain of a rare piece of walnut. I saw some grey at the crown as she bent over her work.

After a bit, she returned her volume to its spot on the shelf. Her quick, delicate motions, her stance as if in near flight, reminded me of the long-legged Eastern Shore birds I had seen on my trip to Baltimore. “À la prochaine,” she said ironically as she waved goodbye, looking down at me from over her shoulder and walked up the steel steps.

“Hey,” I said to Gary, the next time we drank beer. “I met this girl—woman, I guess— in the stacks the other day, writing with Kandler. Pope. Do you know her, sort of a red head?”

“Yeah, she’s real smart, keeps to herself. I hear she’s a hot prospect for a job somewhere. She’s very Flannery O’Connor.”

I thought this description perfect, O’Connor having been thus far my window into the South.

+++

I made a point of working by the Art History periodicals (in the Dewey Decimal System) of numbering 705. in the library stacks. I came as often as I could at the same hour, and sat at the same table in the hope of seeing Clara Pope again. Though I had not had a lot of experience with women, I knew what I liked and felt I had seen it the day I met Clara. Granted, not love at first sight, but certainly a powerful fascination. When she appeared one afternoon, I waved her boldly to my spot by the window. I noticed as she moved toward me she seemed to be wearing exactly the same sweater and floral print silk scarf combination. I wondered if she owned any other clothes.

“Quelle chance encore,” I said, smiling at her. “I hoped I’d see you down here sooner.”

She made a wry face at my naked show of interest, looking around to notice if we were disturbing anyone. “Well, you have seen. Oh, I’ve been away for a bit. I went to the Phillips, in DC, for the Nicolas de Staël Traveling Show.” As if I’d know exactly what this was.

By asking a lot of cautious questions I learned that this guy was a French Figurative Expressionist who painted soccer players. I made a point of checking out a catalogue of his work right after this. I loved the rich play of thick impasto planes and the barrage of colors. From our first meeting I had figured that there was a lot I was going to learn from Clara Pope about art, and maybe about life. This artist, new to me was just the first instance.

These regular encounters in the library stacks were clumsy enough to make her smile mockingly in that same way of both encouraging me each time we met somehow to respond and yet stopping me at a distance. I was puzzled and thought about her a lot in class or walking home to my garret. Finally, I asked her to go to Blenheim’s. She would, she said, but she wanted to meet there.

We found a quiet booth. I drank beer, but she ordered bourbon. In the practiced way of serious drinkers, she put a pack of cigarettes on the table and some bills in a little stack.She seemed pleased to see me, but somewhat preoccupied. So, I tried to find out as much as I could about her.

Over on Charles, a much fancier address than mine, she shared an apartment. Her room-mate Emily, was also a graduate student at Homewood, but in Economics. Clara had been a Fine Arts major in college and had painted on and off all her life. She still painted when she could. Her dissertation, half completed now, was on French Romanesque art, but I did not then recognize the Auvergnat basilica she mentioned or visualize the kinds of sculptures she studied.  I made a point to look these up, too. She had a decently paying Motley Fellowship through the University, but she said she might go on the job market soon nonetheless. She had been too long at Homewood and she was clearly much older than Gary and all his friends.

I could not tell if being so much further along in graduate school than I was made any difference in how she saw me. She enjoyed being sunk in this encircling padded booth, but when I tried to hold her eyes on occasion, or after my wry allusions to Southern Gothic when she talked about her family, her glance slipped away nervously.

We gossiped about the differences between new and advanced graduate students. I told her about life in a French Department, the small insults and coups d’avances that seemed to be de rigueur with many of my class mates. As we got up to go, we exchanged phone numbers. However, I felt that Clara ducked my open interest, that it made her a bit uncomfortable.

+++

It surprised me when Clara called me on my new phone around 11 PM the next evening, her voice a little slurred. Could she pick me up so we could eat somewhere? She parked a little black Renault on Homewood Street and pulled the bell rope, the first of many times. I could see how this Quasimodo-like gesture amused her.

We went to the dingy White Castle down off Calvert and sat in their parking lot in the evening rain, smoking and talking. She smelled of bourbon, but she seemed sober in the car. We shared a large coffee in a waxy cup. It went cold and stale quickly and we both made faces. The smells of the hot September Baltimore night, of heat lightning and drying rain, of some sort of industrial grit from further south in the city, and the sounds of racial hatred, for this was the fall of 1960, pouring loud from the radios of the cars around us were overpowering. I knew if I went out to get some more coffee in that weather, the roaches on the asphalt would pop under my feet.

Earlier on the phone, she explained, she’d had a run in with her father, who was pretty ill, something with his pancreas. He wanted her to come home, from a desire to control her, she thought. She was bitter about him, painting him as a petty tyrant who had crushed her younger brother Charlie to the point that he had given up on life, never finishing college, working at the Athens main post office, first as a carrier, and now as a clerk. As an example of this behavior, she said “When I was a kid, I watched him, wearing his three-piece suit and carrying his briefcase, get in the car, and run down my cat in the driveway. Carefully. I saw him look into the rearview mirror and then back up.”

My earlier quip about Southern Gothic had not been so wide of the mark.

There was more. I was being slowly led into Clara’s secrets. Her family seemed to be in the business of producing them, of concealing them as well, with only the perfect outlines of the Daventer name shown to the world. I wondered about her own secrets. I saw right off that the Daventers were a contrast to my family, who were annoying, sometimes inconvenient, but never sinister, never not what they seemed.

I felt in some way I was not an adult around Clara, that she knew a whole range of things that I was not ready to understand. Maybe these feelings were about getting through graduate school, getting a job teaching French at a college or university, and rapidly falling in love with a Southern woman, whose cues were so mysterious to me.

I learned that her father, Charles Pope Senior, had mocked her interest in painting and drawing from an early age. “Get in the real world,” he had said to her repeatedly. I could see in her words the man sliding his chair back from the dinner table across the Kazak rug and spreading his knees, heavy, his hands always holding a glass or a piece of food.

It was better with her mother, Edith, but Clara felt she had never taken her children’s part in any effective way. Yes, Clara was distressed by his illness, but guilty because she did not feel worse, that she had so little daughterly piety. She didn’t want to go home and see him. Their conversation ended in shouting. Her voice trailed off as she finished this story. I listened carefully, but said little. I was slowly getting the contours of Clara.

After a while, I went for a fresh cup of coffee and when got in the Renault again, I took her hand. She leaned her head on my shoulder. This was a pretty small car, and we were brought face to face, so I kissed her. As she responded hungrily, I could smell an acrid layer of fear swirling with desire beneath the old sweat in her clothes.

I stroked her thick and wavy hair, letting it fill my hands and slide across the skin of my palms. I suggested we go to her place—explaining that my lease prohibited me from having women over—but she said her roommate Emily was home. She wanted to keep me private.

“So, Clara, as a couple I guess we are going to be pretty hole-in-the-wall. Our future is necking in cars? Am I still in high school?”

“Bah to you,” she said. “Live with it.” I smiled at her.

Though I saw her often in the stacks after those kisses at the White Castle, I never got her to commit to our connection. Indeed, in the library stacks when we met, she was often distant, as if she hardly knew me. Then she would call, usually late at night and we would go out. In her little car, her breasts and her whole lower body, were somehow always inaccessible. And she touched only my hands, my face. I was beginning to worry about all this. That I was way out of my depth with her.

She was conscious of her family name’s weight, and indeed, had tried to conceal it when she was an undergraduate. On these evenings in her car, talk often turned to the Daventers. I had never known a Southerner before, and to me her life, with this stuff about her father, was straight out of O’Connor, McCullers, even Faulkner. As she told wonderful stories of her years before she went off to France, I was a rapt audience. Though I could see she often exaggerated the strangeness of her clan for my benefit.

She had, as a girl, often escaped her father by visiting a favorite uncle, Cullen Daventer, in Madison, a town of ante-bellum Neo-Classic pediments and white pillars. Cullen ran cattle and sold hay on a large farm outside of town, and she told how she would stay there on weekends to sketch and paint amid its live oaks and mistletoe. Deer and turkeys strode in the corners of the fields. The cattle’s gleaming horns crossed like bicycle handlebars as they milled around the pastures.

And there were lots of country Daventers who often dropped by to dip snuff, or talk dogs. Cullen kept English pointers for quail in a kennel along the side of the house. He also had a couple of trotting horses that were considered very stylish.

What she remembered most from these visits to his farm, besides the relief of not having to see her father or recall the death of her cat, was Cullen’s parrot, a large bird in feathers of a sort of Gauguin orange, who sat on a T bar in the “office” of his house, dribbling cracked sunflower seeds on the floor, and singing scraps of old army songs. She had made many sketches of this bird. Fed him treats. She talked of this parrot such that I could see him, hear him, count his droppings on the planks below his perch.

In October, when I told her it was my birthday, Clara invited me to her apartment for pecan pie. What she called a “moon pie.” Her place was on the ground floor of a red brick Georgian block facing Charles.

Emily was there, joining us at the table for a slice. She obviously wanted to get a good look, as Clara must have discussed me. Emily was near my age, feminine in a conventional way, stiff, sprayed bouffant hair, and a made-up, round-eyed expression like a starlet. Her clothes, charcoal cashmere sweater set and row of pearls, were the opposite of Clara’s. Very well kept, they had an expensive yet anonymous look, like the hardwood floors and beige walls of the apartment, the beginnings of modernism chain store furnishings of the dining room.

I quickly sensed that Emily disliked me, or perhaps just the idea of me. That I was not well-off enough looking in my corduroy jacket, my not-fashionable-enough West Coast undergraduate degree. We made small talk. She mentioned a girl who had gone to college with me, but whom I barely knew.

Clara shown as the gracious hostess, moving back and forth into the kitchen, her long, slender legs flashing deer-like below her skirt, slicing the small pie, pouring the coffee in delicate Limoges cups. I felt I was at a stage play and that the two women sitting across the dining room table, side by side, as if arrayed together on a dais, were performing for me. But close up, Clara’s lipstick was flaking, her face wan and strained, the cording of her throat prominent. She looked her age. I wondered,ß did they want me there or not? They seemed an odd pair. Why would they share an apartment?

I spent all the time I could with Clara Pope, given my course work and papers soon due. We returned to the Phillips Gallery, lingered in front of the de Staël paintings in the traveling show. There was one of an allée in planes of blue and grey, “Le Parc de Sceaux,” which I thought was the most gorgeous picture I’d ever seen. We stood still before it in wonder. Clara took my hand and I could feel her lean in towards me in a new way. It was our best outing so far, and certainly one of my most memorable moments since coming to Homewood. I thought of it as learning and loving together.

When we returned to the city, she was quiet, even reflective. I expected her to drop me off at my place as usual, but she took me to her apartment. Through an open door I saw an easel with a bright new canvas, a stand with a palette and brushes in a jar. This was Clara’s bedroom. A double bed sat against the wall across from the window. Next to it was a large night stand, on which sat a gilt Art Nouveau night light with a curving tulip-shaped glass shade. A framed black and white picture of a man, I assumed Clara’s father, in a three-piece suit also sat on the stand.

Besides the easel, there was a desk with an Olivetti portable typewriter, stacks of typescript, and piles of bound journals crowded the space. 35mm slide boxes were scattered all around. A bureau with a fifth of bourbon and a couple of glasses, two chairs, and a filing cabinet were shoved against a wall of mostly large art books of the expensive Skira sort. On another wall was a framed print; its black stripes rolling out across the white picture space stood out. I now recognized Soulages from other works of his we had lingered by in museums. The room was spartan but attractive. Somehow, Clara marked at least this much of the place, gave it some color.

That she had brought me here revealed there was no Emily today. We lay on her bed and kissed for a while. She looked up at me, her lipstick smeared, her eyes unfocussed with something I assumed was pleasure. My face had roughened her skin. “Nicer than high school?” she finally asked in her usual edgy tone.

“Yeah, much. This has been my best afternoon since coming to Baltimore,” I said, a little out of breath from what was going on.

Encouraged by her response, I lifted her sweater and unfastened her bra to put my face and lips to her breasts. Her skin was freckled and pale, her breasts so delicate they did not fall to the sides of their own weight. Yet, as I began to lift her skirt and slip to touch her, I felt her entire body clench, quivering. Then she lay next to me, her arms straight out by her sides as if she were a manequin, her face turned to the ceiling, panicked. I wondered why then did she bring me here to the apartment?

I pulled her sweater down and managed to tuck her head up onto my shoulder, moving us more upright against the headboard. “Hey, what’s wrong?” I asked. She was still, vibrating as if electrically shocked, gently weeping.

Finally, she said, in a ragged voice, her face turned partly away, still contorted, and now also blotched with tears, “You know that bike trip to the Loire last summer I told you about that first day in the library?”

“Yeah, sure I recall.”

“Well, I went with a guy. He, he was very rough with me, and now I have a kind of spasm. I’m, I’m afraid of it. I can’t do it. I can’t be touched there. I’ve been to a doctor.  It’s got a fancy Latin name.”

I handed her my handkerchief while I thought about this, pulling her close.

“Men are so cruel; they scare me,” she added reflectively, returning the handkerchief.

I wondered where this was all coming from. We were moments ago making out and now. .  .

“Even when I was a little girl I could never understand them, the violence. It was in my father. And in my uncle too.”

“What do you mean? Cruel how?”

As Clara sat up a bit and leaned back on the head board, her hair falling around her ears, she added to the bicycle story as if I was following her thoughts.

“You remember what I told you about my uncle Cullen over in Madison?” she said, putting on what I now thought of as the typical taunting Southern Gothic expression she adopted with me whenever I reacted to her exoticism and stories of smalltown Georgia.

“Yeah, sure, I do. The parrot. I loved hearing about him.”

“Well, when I was about eleven I was over there once, sitting in a corner of the gallery porch and watching the tree line from the front of the house. I was listening to the singing of the parrot who was out for a sunny day. I heard Cullen telling a story, quiet, to a couple of his buddies. I could just barely hear him over the bird squawks.

“It was a story about a friend and mentor of his youth, an old boy named Adjer, some kind of an Indian. As much as I got was that he was a little older than Cullen and had taught him to hunt and trap. Taught him all he knew. They had had first bird dogs together. Pointers. So some old boys stole these dogs of theirs. The pointers were gone for about eight days and then they reappeared. Cullen was telling the story about how he asked Adjer what happened to the thieves who took them. Adjer said only they would not do it again. But Cullen persisted, saying “But hey, what happened,” and Adjer finally explained he had shot them and tied them to some cinder blocks and rowed them out in the lake and dumped the bodies. Cullen and Adjer cared more for the dogs than those guys.”

She sat up for a while and combed her hair with her fingers. I noticed how bitten her nails were as I took this all in. “I never forgot this. I was just a kid, but I kept seeing Adjer wiring their arms tight to the cement blocks. This was a different Cullen, dangerous, speaking low, serious with his buddies.”

The whole talk on the bed was hard for me to understand, but it somewhat explained her on again and off again behavior with me, her unease about connecting with me emotionally. Her fear. We lay there propped against the headboard, talking about other things until she relaxed, though her back was bony and tense under my hand. I told her softly I was not wiring anyone to cinder blocks. At last, lying tight against me, she slept for an hour or so, and then I left. For the first time, it occurred to me perhaps Clara Pope and I were just not going to work out.

+++

By November and the change in the weather my romance with Clara had not gotten beyond our chaste on-top-of-the-covers moment at her apartment. Her story of the Loire Valley bike ride and her fear of men were not mentioned again. And I did not feel it was right for me to bring it up or to ask more about the bicycle guy, who he was, what he meant to her, how she had finished up the trip to Burgundian castles.

We fell into a rhythm. Clara called me, often quite late at night, and picked me up, ringing the cow bells. She had usually been drinking. She’d talk for a bit and then suggest we go out. If I wanted to come over, she’d always say Emily was there

Having believed since college, that I could fix things with my troubled girlfriends, on these visits, without naming her fear of sex, I suggested how things could be different with other, less aggressive, people. With me. That I was not a violent person and would never hurt her. That she was not a failure as a woman, a freak of nature. That I found her beautiful, full of life and constantly showing me things about buildings, pictures, museums. I loved learning from her. I teased her about playing Flannery O’Connor with me so much and I said she could call me “Greenleaf” if she wanted, think of me as that low-rent bull from the story who would breed among her dairy herd. She liked this allusion.

But more darkly after these meetings, I thought of the photo of her father on her night stand, staring out at life, his rimless glasses glinting like Kerensky’s in Ten Days that Shook the World. And I thought of Adjer holding a spool of galvanized fencing wire, Clara, tiny and curled in a corner rocker.

We usually went to the White Castle, as their parking lot was secluded. Now by this point in the year we needed the car heater. I was very far gone on Clara and told her this often.

“You, toi, oui, toi” she said, shaping the vowels forcefully with her lips, one at a time, spitting them out as if they were sour cherry pits, “Ought to find someone your age, in the French Department. Someone less damaged than I am, uninhibited, a naïve aux nattes out of a Godard movie, you chasing her through fields. I can see it.” She was bitter now.

“Come on, Clara. No! You don’t have to do this, act this way. OK, I can see you’re lonely, unhappy, and blocked on your next-to-last chapter. And calling me lets you escape from writing. But knowing all this sure doesn’t make me feel any better. I just want to be with you on any terms.”

As we talked, I recognized what an important part of my whole graduate school experience Clara was becoming. To succeed with her was to succeed with the worst of the connards among my classmates, my teachers like de Jouvenel, the intractable courses of Linguistics and Philology.

+++

My courses in the French Department were going along well enough so that I had asked Kandler if he would read a paper I wrote for his class, even though I was auditing. I was now interested in the late medieval French poet François Villon’s use of wall painting in his “Ballade to our Lady,” told in the voice of the poet’s mother. He agreed, so I also asked Clara to look at it. In my first moments as a scholar outside my own department I did not want to appear a dilettante to either of them.

One night in the car, my chin resting on Clara’s springy hair, I decided to make a move. “Look, um if you really care for me, and I think you do, why don’t we go somewhere to be alone, no Emily, and give it a try?” I pressed on. “Even if it doesn’t work out, I’ll have the joy of holding you to me all night long. Sleeping with my nose in this chevelure I, I now realize I can’t be without. What do you think?”

She hesitated a beat or two. “There’s a place—” Then she went on reflectively, leaning in against me, “Not so far. It’s Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. I’ve been there before and you can get a cottage for a weekend. It was a great nineteenth-century Methodist revival center. Full of lodging houses for a religious awakening on the cheap. It has miles of boardwalks and brick houses of the du Ponts, follies popping up from the sand. Towers. Turrets. And we could eat great clams. Fresh dug. We could do it. Rent something for a couple of days. About the rest of what you’re asking, I don’t know, honestly, but maybe. Do you want me to look into getting us a place?”

“More than anything,” I said, kissing her hair, straightening her knotted scarf.

This was the farthest she had gone in acknowledging me as someone important in her life. I watched the low hanging moon through the car’s windshield and imagined strolling with Clara on this boardwalk through a sort of mini-Newport of grand houses. Our sandy hands clasped, looking out at wading shore birds and gulls under grey winter skies. I could see it. All the obstacles in Clara faded away. Her body relaxed and eager for mine. The scent of her, ready, marine, not fearful, rising up.

To go away together seemed a commitment at a time in my life when I was looking to commit. Commit to some specialty in French, to a woman, ideally Clara. I could see us on this boardwalk, taste in my teeth the sand of the clams she had described. It was like taking me to one of her galleries for the revelations of an artist entirely new to me. It had a decadent Robber Baron or Gatsby sort of charm, too.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, Delaware. Rehoboth Beach.”

+++

After that evening with its vast promise, its projected getaway together, I did not hear again from Clara. To keep from thinking about it, I worked hard on the Villon and wall-painting project. I was eager to share this with her. I missed her badly. I also spent as much time as I could reading and working in the library basement stacks but she never showed.

Though she had not told me so, I sensed that she wouldn’t like me to call her at home. She always called me. So, I did nothing to contact her, but I stayed home at night during the time she would usually call. Besides, it was the end of the first semester, and I had a lot of course work due, including a paper on Le Malade imaginaire.

I was out with Gary at Blenheim’s on a Wednesday night. We both drank a lot of beer. “How are you doing with Carson McCullers?” He asked in his mocking, heavily ironic voice. But he was genuinely interested, I could see.

I didn’t want to tell him too much, but I indicated that I was attached to Clara and felt that she was less so to me, or at least not willing to show it. Of course, I never mentioned her experience with the bicycling guy. So, we looked at her ambivalent behavior for a while, of which her apparent disappearance after the Rehoboth Beach fantasy was the obvious example. It was near 1 a.m. when I said goodbye to Gary.

Once on the street, I thought I should go to Clara’s place and ring her door bell. Put it up to her. Ask her to make up her mind or let me alone. I walked there. It was a grey, fall night with gathering rain. The smart thing was to head home before it stormed. The streets were deserted with only occasional traffic. I could have been on the moon.

Finally, I could see a light on in the street-side window of Clara’s building. There was a tall hedge in front of the window and I slipped behind it to look in, hoping to see her at her desk. Maybe I’d ring the doorbell. It did occur to me that if a cop saw me I could get arrested, but I just wanted a sight of her. I was filled with self-righteousness and despair at being abandoned without a word after all our talk of a trip to Delaware together.

It was starting to pour and I pulled the collar of my jacket up around my neck. I was thinking how I could tap lightly on the window pane to get her attention. The tulip flowered night lamp shade lit her bed like a light source in a Rembrandt painting. Next to it a couple of half-filled highball glasses. Clara’s heavy roan hair was tousled and wild as if she had not combed it for days. She lay propped with her shoulders on the headboard, and nestled in at her neck was Emily’s perfect bouffant hairdo. Under the quilt, their feet, intertwined, made a single lump at the bottom of the bed. Clara dreamily stroked Emily’s cheek. Then she reached over and angled the photo of Charles Pope Senior on the night stand so that he regarded them through his rimless glasses. I backed out of the hedge as if scalded and walked home in the heavy rain.

I was too embarrassed at seeing Clara like this, at invading her privacy, to feel myself misused in any way. I thought, too, that there was a certain adult world where things were more complicated, mysterious, and that what I had seen was simply one of the Daventer secrets.

The semester ended and the Dillmans were not renewing my lease. They told me they had decided to move to a nursing home, and were putting the house up for sale. I would have to move out. I found a new place, a janitor’s basement apartment a bit south and east, where the roaches were bad only in the dark.

+++

In the Spring semester, when I saw Gary to give him my new address and phone number, he mentioned gossip about Clara in the Art Department. An all-but-dissertation job had opened up at a small college in Virginia and she had taken it. He said that one day before she left he passed her in the stacks, and she had said something very strange, as if to herself. “It just isn’t worth it,” is what he thought he heard, maybe about her dissertation. It probably wasn’t about saying goodbye to me.

In my remaining time as an M.A. candidate in French at Homewood, I never went near her old apartment on Charles. It was too painful. In all these years I never told anyone—not even my wife—what I had seen the night I stood in the rain looking into Clara Pope’s window.

I went on to eventually become a Professor of French at a Midwestern University. Not top tier, but good enough. I heard that Clara got her PH. D in 1964, as did I. I dedicated my first book to her with the dates of her birth and of her death from breast cancer in 1967, along with a few words of homage. I often thought in those years how important she had seemed to me when I had been a graduate student. I had gained a great deal of knowledge about medieval art from her, and if I learned rather less about women and love, I felt the whole experience had been positive, if very puzzling.

Long retired from my University, I was recently in Athens on a visit to my wife’s family. I started to think about Clara and on a whim, I found the Pope burial plot in Oconee Hill Cemetery. I saw that the only stone without a full set of dates was the brother, Charlie, Jr.’s. So, I looked him up. He lived in a rooming house in Athens, and there was a number.

“Is this Charlie Pope?”

“Yep, that’s me,” he said. “Who this?”

“I uh went to Homewood University with your sister.”

“Well, shit,” he said. “That was a while back.”

We talked for a few minutes. He was long gone from the Post Office and spent his time with ham radio transmitters. He was chatty. Gave me his call letters. I told him I was a retired French teacher.

After a bit I asked him the question on my mind all these years. “Mr. Pope, Charlie, by chance, do you recall the guy that Clara went on a bike ride in France with? I know it was a very long time ago.”

“Why, I sure do, but it was a woman Clara rode with. Her name was Pud.” This was one more of Clara’s secrets.

I thanked him and drove on the narrow roads out of this fantasy cemetery with its live oaks festooned with swags of mistletoe, its tall, moon-stone colored obelisks of eminent Victorians. I went slowly past red brick Victoria and Albert mausoleums with folly turrets just like those Clara and I had imagined along the boardwalks of Rehoboth Beach.

Why had Clara told me how men had scared her as we lay on her bed in that Baltimore afternoon so long ago? What was the point of telling me her uncle Cullen’s story of Adjer, which I could see had affected her deeply as a girl? Especially, if it was Pud’s thick, harsh fingers which had caused Clara to shrink from the touch of love, why the fear of men? These were questions I started to think about as I drove away.

The Pope headstones get smaller and smaller in my side mirror, and I felt that I had been almost at the point of knowing much more about the human heart than I did in Baltimore when I had looked through Clara’s window. But now, upon reflection about the way Charlie had ratted out his sister, I realized that I knew nothing, nothing about it at all.