Laurie Sheck Read online

  sky, precipices (I see my own weakness) nevermind

  the

  and that I will never be able to

  I remember after Mary ran away and you weren’t permitted to see her she sent you a lock of her hair and you kept it in your drawer. It’s late now. Why do I still write to you though I know you’re no longer alive? Is it my way of slowly getting used to your not being here? Or am I delaying the idea that you’re not here? The blunt fact of it. (I don’t pretend we were even close.) Your hard, skinny body, your bones. The away in you, in anyone. The apart.

  Nights I lie awake imagining chromosomes breaking inside me, suddenly estranged from what they were. Insurgencies, counterinsurgencies of thought. Scorchings. Retaliations.

  I remember the notes you left behind. How they went over every step you took to make me, the discarded parts you collected from the graveyard, even the fevers you suffered as you built me.

  I keep those notes in my knapsack, though I wish never to look at them again.

  Months now since I’ve seen a human face.

  “And he who studies himself will find in himself much discordance.”

  Fanny,

  Mary visited today. She brought a few pages she found in your drawer (Godwin finally allowed her back into the house). I wouldn’t have thought this of you, that you kept notes, made sketches. Even just a few. No one knows but Mary and me. Not even Shelley. In this one, here, the pencil line’s so faint I can barely make out your shoulders’ slope, your head with the face turned away. Why did you make the face turned away? The paper’s so small, barely 2” square. As if you were already disappearing … Maybe time’s different from what we think and we get only glimpses, we think it moves forward but it doesn’t, just allows us in at different places. Maybe there’s no continuity of space or time after all. So where are you then, and why? You with your face turned away. These faint traces you left that say however softly: I was here. Which is different from: am known.

  This, too, Fanny, you left behind:

  August 1, 1816

  Mr. Booth says it’s peace that has brought calamity upon us. But what hope is there if Peace is Calamity? The foreign ports are shut, manufacturing drastically cut back. Millions left to starve. That’s what he says. He says 26,000 men are unemployed in Shropshire. Workers drag coals in immense wagons without horses all the way to London and are turned back. So they give the coals for nothing to the poor. Mr. Owen says he has a plan, but how can he expect the rich to give up their possessions and live in a state of equality with others—this is too romantic to be believed. His plan says that “no human being shall work more than two or three hours every day; that they shall all be equal; that no one shall dress but after the plainest and simplest manner, that their slaves shall be Mechanics and Chemistry.” But why does he use the word “slaves”? I wish I were not a dependent being in every sense of the word. Claire and Mary and Shelley all far away. Why am I always so affraid? And Godwin always worried about money. I know Mary used to sit near our mother’s grave—but I could never do that. Too affraid of what I’d feel there. Mary writes and asks about what old friends I’m seeing, but I see no one. When I look at the page my eyes blur though the doctor says it’s not my eyes but my mind. So cold since Mt. Tamboro erupted. What I write I write to no one.

  And this:

  August 7, 1816

  A watch and some books arrived today from Mary. I’m not used to this kindness. I would like to visit Venice and Naples one day. And finally, this (no more papers left in your drawer): 5 a.m., Sept. 9, 1816

  I record here my dream: Mary was visiting, and Clare. Someone was complaining that vials of poison had been scattered on the moor, that this should be looked into. Then we were all in a room with many large machines. Soon we each lay on a bed by a machine. The machines seemed to have an odd authority, as if they knew us. Mary’s leg was taken off and given to me. My arm was removed and a machine clamped it onto Clare. Other body parts were exchanged. But even though our body parts were being exchanged I still felt different from them, and alone. There was no blood. How would Godwin recognize us? And how would Shelley know who Mary was, which one? When I tried to speak I didn’t know whose voice would come out of my mouth and this frightened me. There was a drowned woman too who was brought in and she, too, exchanged body parts with us. A man had cut the white dress off her and hung it in a closet. It was dry and unspoiled as if newly cleaned. I looked over at Clare or was it Mary? I was suddenly very hungry. But if I asked for some toast I would have to hear the voice from my mouth and so said nothing.

  That’s all, Fanny. Nothing more left.

  “A cold fire envelops me,” Lomonosov wrote. This is what I feel when Claire’s hand doesn’t come, sometimes for days, sometimes weeks.

  I know she’s going to have a child, but nothing of where she is or what she’s feeling. Not who the father is or if she loves him. (Her hand’s left no trace of this.) Will she care for the child alone?

  (And you who made me in secret, and abandoned me in secret.)

  Fanny’s voice a shut place now. And Claire, where is she? Will she come back?

  The revving of engines on the airstrip. Fighter planes practicing maneuvers overhead.

  Fanny,

  I’m thinking today of the plainness of things. The plain facts of things. The burnt corner of the note you left behind. Your small gold watch. Why do people have to turn such things into symbols? Make them mean? It’s strange enough to breathe and to have eyes. Just to look and to have eyes, and that we will be gone (as you’re already gone) and others will appear, and this cottage in Bath where I’ve come to have my baby will be here with its faint smell of wood-rot and wisteria. The cracks in this table, this frayed sleeve.

  Pitcher. Chair. These objects I touch daily. The little weed that smells like mineral oil—I don’t know what it’s called.

  Soot.

  Loneliness.

  Skinner Street. St. Pancras.

  For weeks Shelley knew I was going to have a child, but neither he nor I told Mary (she has a baby of her own now, William). Now Mary knows and I think she’s not pleased with me. Shelley’s drawn up a new will, left money for me and the baby. On the way here from Geneva we stopped at Chamonix where Shelley wrote in Greek in the inn’s guest book “I am a lover of mankind, democrat, and atheist.” All that feels far away. Amid the thousand thousand lines of human life branching and intersecting in endless and infinite directions, I think now there’s not one that leads to safety.

  Lately I remember those long hours at boarding school with my French books when I seemed both I and not I as I read in that other language and sometimes thought of home.

  I don’t know how to think about what home is.

  Awkwardness.

  Breath.

  The word “if.” My shoes in the corner. The word “despite.”

  Claire writes to Fanny of objects she touches each day—a pitcher, a chair. What do I touch? Ice. Can opener. Boots. The Chinese stick I found at Archangel. Knapsack. Stray pages picked up here and there. In one of my books: “The mind’s aliment is wonder, search, ambiguity.”

  Sometimes I see mountains and islands over the ice, then the light changes or the temperature drops and they’re not there. Yesterday I watched for an hour a white Moorish city of onion-domed temples and walled streets. Is my voice also a mirage that crumbles and drifts off?

  My affections are few and therefore strong—the extreme solitude in which I live has concentrated them to one point and that point is my child. We sleep together and if you knew the extreme Happiness

  So Claire has had her child and is happy…

  But this cold has many turns in it.

  Olaus Magnus made this list:

  Cold burns the eyes of animals and stiffens their hairs.

  Cold makes wolves fiercer.

  Cold makes hares, foxes, and ermines change color.

  Cold causes copper, glass, and earthenware vessels to break.

  Cold
causes damp clothes to stick to iron if they graze it.

  Cold causes nails to spring from the walls.

  Cold makes lips stick to iron as if held in indissoluble pitch.

  When she wakes I hold her and there is no cold in me, no broken place. Is it possible that—I am still however(nothing)

  any creature must but then

  To feel such consent in myself I wouldn’t have guessed it

  So many places the northern explorers were sure they saw didn’t even exist. They drew them into their maps—mirages, though they didn’t know it: Crocker Land, King Oscar Land, Keenan Land, the Barnard Mountains.

  and now unlocked from these strictures of

  The maps were revised again and again. (So many gashes in me as I think of her arms, how she pulls the child in.) Each time, the mapmaker believed he was writing in the final answer—

  Fanny,

  Why is it I still talk to you—to you more than the living, or so it often seems? As if pressing my lips against an ice-shelf. Yet there’s a comfort in the things that come to mind when I imagine you listening in the extreme ardor of your solitude. I’ve been told I must give up my child. First she lived away from me with Mary and Shelley and the Hunts in Hampstead. Then I came down from Bath and was allowed to live nearby. Finally in March Mary and Shelley and the children (William and Clara and my Allegra) and I moved to Albion house together. People think I’m my child’s Aunt.

  Little holds still in me, so much is clash and tremor, and I don’t want to lose her but I XXXX

  What stays in place, finally, what is secured?—is

  anything?

  January ice. February. March wind batters

  the door, strong as instinct—

  Even my child’s name is a thing that shifts. First: Alba, or the Dawn (why couldn’t I just leave it at that, let her be the dawn?) Then she was Clara Allegra (but did I want my name in hers?) Now she’s Allegra.

  Nothing’s still or held in safety.

  On her christening certificate her father has “no fixed residence.” She is his “reputed” daughter.

  In London last October I saw hundreds of vagrants lying about the streets, half-naked and starving. Sometimes the Night Officers brought them to the Lord Mayor’s Mansion house, as many as 300 at a time, where their cases were “examined,” whatever that means. I dreamt of them last night, I don’t know why. Over and over someone kept saying the price of Bread now is extremely high.

  XXX all these rules we have and strictures. And if you fall out of what’s expected, they punish you, Fanny, XXX and I don’t want to be married, never wanted it, don’t believe in marriage. Anyhow he doesn’t want me. And the vagrants in the streets … that they must be “examined” … so many laws to fall through, and Propertius said ivy grows best when wild and birds wing most sweetly without teaching …

  I study my child’s pleasure all day long. (what rules will consume her, what laws?)

  They say for her sake I have to send her to her father.

  I have no words for who I’ll be without her. I should sign all my letters Unsigned. Or sign them as I once signed those to her father who would never, anyhow, reply: Cl___Cl,___ the blank unsaids as much a part of me as anything—

  I see her signing her name on different pieces and sizes of paper. Where is she? Is she in various places, writing at various times? Her name shifting as this horizon line shifts (I see luminiferous stalks, but what could grow here? They turn into towers, a caravan, armored men wearing helmets of ice.):

  Clara Mary Jane Yours, Clare Claire Cleary Clari

  Clara Mary Constantia Jane Clairmont (they’ll put this on my gravestone)

  I know Mary wrote in her journal: “absentia Clariae,”—she’s glad to be rid of me

  Write me as Madam Clairville, Poste Restante … I have taken the name Clairville as you said you liked the name Clare but not the mont because of that ugly woman

  Then she’s:

  Unsigned

  Then:

  G.C.B.

  (a mystery as to why)

  Then:

  address me as E. Trefusis

  (also a mystery)

  I wish to give you a suspicion without at first disclosing myself. I am an Utter Stranger.

  More and more I go out alone. Mine is a delicate case, my feet are on the edge of a precipice. I am your own affectionate Clare

  Ever quite affectionately, Clara My dearest Albe’s Affectionate Clare Unsigned

  Again:

  Unsigned

  I have unloosed myself from the trammels of custom and opinion. Most often I feel quite alone and hope you will think sometimes of me without anger & that you will love and take good care of the Child.

  Fanny,

  We’re in Milan, Shelley and Mary, their little William and Clara, Allegra and myself. We traveled past the Alps, past mountain torrents in the valleys. Near Mt. Cenis snow at the road’s edges was as high as our carriage. This comforted and excited me—that alien landscape where I could become something other than myself, anonymous, unnamed, no need to hide from anyone or pretend I’m not my child’s mother. Where I could be a machine of flesh pulsing around a chainless core, a creature foraging, exploring. Cascades of ice hung in immense masses from the tops to the bottoms of the Precipices! A stream flowed between two snowy banks. We passed some Alpine bridges.

  The Descent was beautiful—

  Sometimes I’m quiet as a bird roosting in the night. Sometimes the Operations of the Mind are so strange to me I might as well be a piece of metal or wood. Then I know I’m afraid. But mostly I feel alive with my child. Shelley writes of being “entangled in the cold vanity of systems” but sometimes, when I forget I have to give her up, I can almost feel those systems fall away—myself finally outside them—

  Mostly I jot down the mundane details of my days:

  Sunday April 12th: Play chess with Shelley in the evening.

  Monday April 13th: Walk in the Morning. In the Evening go to the Theatre of the Marionetti. Play at Chess. Read the Life of Tasso.

  (Often I try not to think … I know what’s coming … I wait for my child to be taken—)

  Read Locke. Read Davanzati’s Tacitus. Read Berrington’s History of the Middle Ages. Very pleasant Evening.

  I write in my journal, but all the while the creature in me forages through ice and deep snow. Waits for what’s coming. Sleeps where? Tries to hide itself where? And then here and there, suddenly, as out of nowhere, the black acid of bare branches, a bare rock.

  I wanted to come to this cold place where your face would be ash to me, or less. But now when her hand doesn’t come, or comes only briefly, the eyeless glare of ice almost frightens me; I think of crushed ships, all the men who wrote journals no one would read, and sought an elsewhere they could never find.

  The Barents Sea. The Kara Sea. White Island. Mt. Misery. Cape Mary Harmsworth. The small islands called Existence Doubtful.

  Cape Allegra. Cape Clara. Cape Wonder. Cape Ruthless. Cape Abandonment. Cape Custom. Cape Longing. Cape Remain.

  Dear Fanny,

  Sometimes I feel I’m on a frozen Sea. My map’s torn, and anyhow I feel stupid even looking at it since it depicts the sea in gradations of soft blues and greens but the water around me is a rigid, violent white.

  to never return to and there is no reason

  at once captive and eruptive nevermind

  The map’s suggested route toward land is laid out in lines red and broken—

  Fanny,

  Allegra’s in Venice. She was taken from here the day after my birthday. I’m 20 now.

  I write this to you as if a human voice makes sense. As if words are beads strung orderly and sanely. But I think now the mind’s all edge and precipice. It has no grammar but itself. I don’t know how to—

  XXX and the cruelty of XXXXXX and no way to begin to

  Such twists and turns, Fanny, such slashings overall—

  Custom is its own punishment. The within cracks and b
uckles, stutters, rallies, fails. I dream of conflagrations nightly. I think of the cleft of de-creation embedded in every sentence, every breath. I think angrily of Logic’s ramparts. Noun this, noun that. Subject, predicate, verb, verb.

  We line them up so neatly, but they’re not, and the mind …)XXX and my own thinking … and what hides inside each word and in between them (and how could I have let them take her?)