Free Lost Girls by Andrew Pyper Page B

those lion-clawed porcelain units installed when they built the place. And it's deep. So for a time I lie there with eyes closed, absently whispering the opening lines of the only thing that I've ever memorized from beginning to end:
    My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.
    Keats. Had to recite the whole thing for an undergraduate English class taught by one of those old-school profs who still believed that speaking the words aloud was essential to catching the full force of their poetic meaning. Maybe he was right; I wouldn't know. He was certainly pissed off when I asked him what a ''Lethe'' was when I was done. Apparently the question was more properly phrased not as what but where, as it turned out Lethe is the river of forgetfulness that runs through the underworld. ''Perhaps you have drunk too deeply from its waters yourself,'' the old bastard scolded me in front of the class, but gave me an A on my reading as I recall.
    I loved the words. I loved their sound and suggestion and rhythm, but could live without having to think too much about their meaning. It's likely that this passion, or some lesser form of it, was inherited from my father. A professor of comparative literature, although I never knew what he compared to what. The Romantics were his specialty--Keats, Byron, Shelley, and other flowery sorts-- but his text of principal interest was my mother. He read her and reread her, coveted her like a rare first edition, his affections singular and exclusive. In my limited set of childhood memories he strikes two distinct poses. The first has him sitting at his desk preparing a lecture or fussing over an essay, in either case not to be interrupted. It seems I needed only to consider approaching the sliding oak door to his study before there would be my mother's sharp whisper behind me, ''Your father is working !'' The other is a picture of him reaching to embrace my mother, his face loosened into an expression of unseemly satisfaction for a grown, married man.
    Of course I was too young myself to recognize how much he loved her (in the sense of how much more than other husbands loved their wives) but in the following years, whenever I've bumped into someone who knew them both back then, I've been told over and over that while he was a committed teacher, he was a devoted husband. Always the same adjectives used to describe the same occupations. In fact I came to understand the distinction between the two through this common observation others made about my father. One can be committed to any number of things. But when it comes to people, devotion requires attention to only one.
    In the years since, I've come to see the two of them held together in a kind of orbit. Each connected to and moving about the other according to some superior, intricate power. And somewhere on the periphery there was me, passing them at a distance, related but secondary as a moon.
    Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath.
    We were a family of three. But when they died together in a car accident at the end of my fourteenth summer, the family part was gone. I required farming out. It was my wish to be sent to boarding school and the sympathetic but preoccupied circle of uncles and aunts in charge of my care were more than happy to oblige. Somewhere along the line there were friends, books, and a handful of clever, scandalous pranks, all now difficult to recall. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the better part of my remembered adolescence was spent staring out the window of a third-floor dorm room at Upper Canada College. The smell of burnt margarine hanging in the stairwells, the salt of lights-off ejaculations buried in every mold-speckled mattress. And this: On my seventeenth