Free The Translator by John Crowley Page A

the box of matches he had toyed with, left behind. She touched it, pressed her thumb against the little paper drawer. Then closed her hand over it and pocketed it.
    When she got back to her room, Fran was practicing, but stopped and put down her viola as soon as Kit entered.
    “I like it,” Kit said. “Go ahead.”
    “Eh,” Fran said, a dismissive New York sound that by the semester’s end Kit would have acquired from her.
    “No really.” Kit had avoided all her mother’s efforts to give her music lessons, and the sight and sound of someone actually playing an instrument, in the flesh, an otherwise ordinary person like herself, thrilled and fascinated her, a magical act, or at least a magic act.
    “Somebody called for you,” Fran said, falling back on her bed with her Kierkegaard. “A sort of redneck-sounding guy? Named Jackie Nor-den?”
    “Really?”
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    “Really,” Fran said wearily.
    “Well,” said Kit. That sense of doors opening if you dared press on them, if you could find their knobs and jambs in the apparently seam-less world around you. This one being the one she had long avoided or chosen not to see, the one she had skirted so artfully through school.
    Except that she hadn’t skirted it, not in the end. She had not skirted it at all.
    “Well,” she said again, alarmed and elated. “Well I’ll be.”
    7.
    The Christmas when Kit was a senior in high school, Ben came home on the last leave of his enlistment. He had been lucky to be posted in the States, he told her, he could have been one of the GIs they watched on TV, getting turkey dinners on desert islands or arctic airstrips, unwrapping presents from home.
    That winter Kit had begun baby-sitting, and learned to write blank verse. She had little interest in babies and no natural ability with them, except in the telling of stories; yet she preferred infants and toddlers, who could be put to sleep early with any luck, releasing her to explore the still house in a close approximation of solitude, close enough to make her giddily gleeful. A sip or two out of the dusty liqueur bottles.
    Once she came upon the family supply of condoms in a blond dresser, though at first she didn’t know what they were.
    Blank verse was just a matter of nerve. At the library she’d come upon the old Mermaid series of Elizabethan poets, beautiful books that just fit into her new Mark Cross bag; and she started reading 62

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    Marlowe and Massinger and Webster and counting the beats on her fingers, da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum. As soon as she found the courage to do it too, it began immediately knitting lines up as though by itself, long swatches growing longer, like the scarves Marion knitted while watching TV, holding them up at the night’s end startled by their sudden length.
    This Park is green. I will not see him here.
    So fall, you leaves, and change your seasons, trees; Turn, moons, from full to dark to full again Until earth bows her head before the sun And winter comes, and snow; and so does he.
    “Who’s this ‘he’?” Ben asked.
    “Nobody,” she said.
    “Oh come on.”
    She meant it though. She thought her “he” was like that “she” who appeared in the poems of male poets so continually, who also appeared in their biographies sometimes, sometimes not. The Eternal Feminine, George had said, as though he knew this, as though everybody did. Female poets didn’t seem to have an Eternal Masculine; the “you” or the “he” in their poems seemed to be more often actual people, being chided or pleaded with or charmed. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Kit loved nobody, but she thought she had a right to this faceless he anyway, and set herself problems in verse to solve, all about him. One or two she had put, anonymously typed, in Burke Eggert’s locker or bookbag at school, knowing he’d never guess.
    Burke was a football player and senior-class officer a year ahead of her, lean and