Free Muse: A Novel by Jonathan Galassi

belonged elsewhere, outside the suffocating family circle. And no doubt Maxine understood this, though she never made reference to it; that would have meant disturbing the almost courtly decorum that regulated their lives. So Maxine held firm but gentle sway in Hiram’s Corners with young Sterling III,while Sterling toggled back and forth between the farm and the Impetus office he’d opened in New York in the sixties, where it was easier for him to sweet-talk wayward authors, and indulge his penchant for beautiful young things.
    That was decades ago now, and a lot of water had flowed under all their bridges. Maxine had died far too young, in her late fifties, and Sterling had up and married Bree soon after. Ida was walled up in Venice with the ghost of A.O. and her showboat Italian husband. In the old days, she’d made a cross-country tour every year or two, organized by the Impetus staff, who were understandably desperate to maintain her franchise. She’d appear like royalty, magnificent in frayed velvet, silvering hair flying wild in her face, before ecstatic audiences of all ages, and then, as long as Maxine was alive at least, would drop down for a week or two of R&R at the Wainwrights’ farm in Hiram’s Corners, north of the city. She and Sterling had been kissing cousins, after all, and she was his best-selling author. Though their lives had long since diverged, their literary and personal ties endured. They were like family—no, they
were
family. It had been ages, though, since Ida, claiming the excuse of age, had been to America.
    “The Goddess,” Sterling called her more than once in the course of his evenings with Paul, with more than a hint of envy. “She barely deigns to notice us mere mortalsanymore,” he complained, drawing contemplatively on his amber-colored meerschaum, its bowl sculpted into a grinning satyr’s head.
    To which Paul had gently retorted, “Isn’t she just the same as always—only older?”
    “Maybe so,” Sterling muttered, chewing on the stem of his pipe, then withdrawing inward, his mind already on something else, or lingering on how his and his cousin’s lives had developed and diverged, tendrils from the same plant that had wound around different branches, different banisters—undeniably separate, yet still connected, still somehow one.
    Paul had come upon a framed picture of them all together in Hiram’s Corners on a bookshelf in Sterling’s apartment, a color snapshot from the late eighties, its greens and blues leached out now. Ida, uncharacteristically wearing jeans and a straw hat, is seated between Sterling and Maxine, looking up at the photographer—most likely Sterling’s daughter, Ida, her namesake. Ida P is wearing a determinedly happy smile, possibly a little careworn around the eyes. Putting a brave face on things? It was hard to tell from one photograph, one small yet precious bit of evidence, one mere tessera in the great mosaic that might fit in so many places. Who could say what those looks, those hands, those clothes, that weather truly signified? But there it was, a piece of thegone world that existed where we tread today. One sunny moment, moving inexorably toward sepia. Incredible, really, so far and yet so near: the divine Ida Perkins in Hiram’s Corners, New York, holding hands with Sterling and Maxine Wainwright, smiling into the sun.

V

The Outerbridge Notebooks
    One night, in Sterling’s Barrow Street apartment, a floor-through in a West Village brick row house softened by elegant old Turkmen carpets, with drawings by Kandinsky and Max Ernst on the walls and a waist-high soaring Brancusi marble nude that stood voluptuously next to Sterling’s chair, Paul asked about Outerbridge’s last years.
    “What happened to A.O. in Venice, Sterling? He seems to have gone radio silent. And what about the notebooks I understand he left behind? When are you going to publish them? When I studied his work in college, nobody even knew they