Glory


                  All of us will lose our youth, and some of us, alas, have lost it already,
                  but not all of us will pin the loss on Henry James. I, however, do.
                  I blame Henry James.

                                                — Cynthia Ozick, "The Lesson of the Master"



Henry James, I’ve loved your novels best
in winter, on public transportation:
snow-melt puddling around my boots,
the inky musk of a new paperback mingling
with the menthol exhalations of riders
chain-sucking cough drops beside me.
Through one slow, muffled Syracuse winter,
riding the James Street bus to a stenography job
I was learning to hate, I read half your books
in a daze of addiction to Penguin Editions, scoffed at
by oil portraits of aristocrats on their covers.
Reading while riding combined your well-wrought prose
with views of the formerly elegant avenue
named in your grandfather’s honor
by my city’s founders. Your family always
preferred to live elsewhere on the fortune
funded by old William James’ Upstate New York salt works,
his boatloads of dirty blond crystals
traveling the Erie Canal, from Albany to Buffalo.
Now nothing’s left of you Jameses in the city
that supported your father’s Swedenborgian musings,
Alice’s specialists, and your own literary avocation,
except James Street and shelves of books
in every branch of the Onondaga County Library.
The city’s a little lower in tone now, Henry,
since you sailed off for good from our American scene.
Dust dulls the brine vats in the Salt Museum on the shore
of Onondaga Lake, and the wineglass elms were chainsawed down
from East Genesee. Still, I love the sagging white houses
of Syracuse, the neighborhood where streets
are high-mindedly named for 19th century poets —
Whittier, Coleridge, Bryant, Tennyson, Lowell —
who have also never lived here. I have always regarded you,
Henry, as more of a friend than any other
19th century literary man — as one of the local boys,
in fact, though it’s uncertain that you ever saw
your family’s income-producing lands,
even from the comfort of Edith Wharton’s touring car.
Still, I think you’d understand my homesickness
for Syracuse winters. You always had a soft spot
for aspiring American girls from the smaller, inland cities.
I miss my winter with you, though I hated
the Plexiglass shelter, its urinal reek, where the bus docked
weekdays at eight o’ clock, like an American clipper
fragrant from Old World neighborhoods
of Italian restaurants and Irish bars.
Like Strether embarking with a Saratoga trunk,
I lugged my tote bag, a Dunkin Donuts coffee cup,
and one of your novels. I thought you’d teach me
how to write, though the night school teacher
warned me I’d only pick up your tics.
Your cantilevered sentences fascinated me
more than my seat mates’ attempts at talk
about how the neighborhood had faded
now that Shop City was empty.
I don’t think you’d agree with them, Henry.
You might find James Street rather picturesque:
the Channel 5 TV studio, home of Doppler
the weather cat, the Travel Lodge,
three mini-marts selling the Lotto ticket thrill
of the fortune-hunting that drove your stories.
In between, some landmarked mansions still resemble
the stately homes where you weekended in Surrey.
Perhaps their first mortgages helped compensate
your British tailor for repairing the elbows
of the dinner jacket you wore
the winter you dined out 107 times.
Perhaps they paid your stenographer’s salary.
I was a stenographer when I rode
the James Street bus twice daily
past the only addresses in my city
that your heroines would have left cards upon.
I dreamed too much of the wealthy that winter,
my first as a downwardly mobile English major,
secluding myself in novels to avoid seeing
— and so a little bit becoming —
my seat-mates, the cleaning ladies whose ankles
overlapped the tops of their running shoes,
and old men whom I suspected of riding the bus
all day, for something to do. I was a snob, then,
Henry, afraid to tell their stories, afraid
of what would happen if I heeded
the night school teacher’s scribbles
on my manuscripts: Write what you know.
Didn’t I know your novels? Didn’t I know
your characters’ thoughts better
than the thoughts of anyone on that bus?
When I typed at night, the idea that I was making
literature gleamed heavily overhead,
like a Victorian gas fixture, all tarnished floral scrolls
and cherubs, rewired for my low-wattage modern bulb.
In the hush of your light, how could I write
about word-processing for corporate lawyers?
About pantyhose dripping in my shower stall?
Those views weren’t suitable for framing
in James Street windows. It’s been hard
for me to fight your undertow,
to keep from becoming a dreamy docent,
forever coveting and describing someone else’s
high-ceilinged rooms. At the bus window,
averting my face from the new, deigning only
to notice the remaining mansions, I felt
like Isabel’s plainer sister, one
who did not inherit a fortune
or interest the eccentric expatriate aunt.
In Syracuse, it seemed, my life would always
be vicarious. By spring, I’d tired of guessing
which Upstate millionaire had lived where.
The Beaux-Arts architecture began to blur.
I was in need of a heroine I could become,
and what use were your heiresses there, Henry?
Not one stenographer among them. They had the income
and the leisure and the fireplace to gaze into
while musing for hours on friends’
tortuous motives. Whenever I took lunch orders
for lawyers, or typed their torts, I felt
like the maid who must have laid out
the ball gown on her mistress’s bed
and made sure the carriage was waiting
before disappearing into the unheated attic room
your narrative never entered.
You left that room for the likes of us, Henry.
But I am no Marxist. Mahogany oiled by a century
of sliding hands always banishes my ideology.
I’d never razor your waistcoat like that disaffected
suffragette upset by your Sargent portrait’s
patriarchal paunch. In my apartment,
miles from Syracuse now, I’ve taped that portrait
on my refrigerator door between train schedules
and museum listings. Your hairline is like a senior partner’s.
You’re amused when I unload my groceries.
Sometimes you knew how women felt,
caught between the contentment of wanting nothing
and their intimations of what life might be
with just a little more spending money.
You know what a curse imagination can be, Henry,
how some of us rage instead of being content
with walking in the lamplight from mansion windows
on our way home to a one-room efficiency.
I can forgive James Street now
for never permitting my feet to crunch across
its cracked parquet floors, for never warming
my wet mittens before its yellowed Carrera fireplaces.
The James Street houses tell the same story
over and over. I’d like to write something
in my own century. I’d like to stand up
at my corner and say to the driver:
Sir, this is my stop. I get off here.

from The Southern Review, Winter 2002.