Mrs. God Read Free Page A

illustrating how to drive from Heathrow Airport to Beaswick, where Esswood was located. His heartbeat and his flush faded. A lightly penciled X marked Esswood’s location. Standish felt the profound relief of one who after being sentenced to death receives a full pardon.
    That night he gave the map to Jean as she sat before the television set. “Nice,” she said, and held it out toward him. In the glare from the set her cheeks were as puffy as bolsters. As Jean’s belly had expanded, so had the rest of her body, encasing her in an unhappy overcoat made of ice cream and doughnuts. He took the map from her bloated fingers. He imagined that Isobel Standish had remained slim all her life.
    â€œâ€¦ good it’s going to do,” she muttered to the screen.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI wonder how much good that map is going to do you.” She did not bother to look at him.
    â€œWhy would you wonder about that?” he asked, unable to keep a sudden quickening from his voice.
    â€œBecause it shows you how to get to that place from Heathrow.” Then she did turn her head to face him.
    â€œHeathrow is the name of the London airport.”
    â€œBut you’re not going to London. You’re going to someplace called Gatwick.”
    The name Gatwick did sound familiar. Standish went upstairs to the bedroom, pulled his airline ticket out of his dresser drawer, and read what was printed on its face.
    â€œYou’re right,” he said when he came back downstairs. Jean grunted. Standish wondered if she had prowled through his dresser drawers. The television seemed very loud. He turned to the bookshelf and pulled out an atlas and found the index for England. Gatwick was unlisted.
    Standish sat down in the chair beside Jean’s and unfolded Robert Wall’s little map, with its complications of roadways and interchanges. None of the towns in black boldface was Gatwick. He could see Gatwick nowhere between London and Lincolnshire. Gatwick was literally off the map. Well, he would find the place once he got there. Gas stations all had maps. England had to have gas stations, didn’t it?
    Though Standish checked his mail every day, Robert Wall never wrote that Esswood had found it necessary to withdraw his appointment; and now here he was, thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean. Standish had two more drinks on the long flight, and nearly ordered a fourth until he remembered Jeremy Starger.
    You couldn’t turn a ridiculous red-bearded little drunk loose in the Esswood library, could you? You couldn’t let that happen.
    Standish took Crack, Whack, and Wheel from his carry-on bag. Feeling pleasantly honorable and muzzy from gin, he opened Isobel’s book. His underlinings, notes, and annotations jumped reassuringly out at him, testimony to the merits of Isobel’s poetry and the depth of his own thought. Here were the physical traces of an alert scholarly mind at work on a worthy object. Cf. Psalm 69 , read one of his notes, world does not answer the cry for pity, ironic intent, ref. husband? In ink of another color, he had added eloquent offer of charity, attribute of the poetic self . And in pencil above this was added antinarrative strategy . Isobel Standish’s work was full of antinarrative strategy. At some point Standish had scrawled Odysseus, Dante in the crowded margins. The title of the poem he had annotated so industriously was “Rebuke.”
    Neither found he any, the vagrant said
Under the moldering eaves of the house
Full of heaviness and no one to comfort,
No one wavering up to say
    â€œ Put on your indiscretions, little fool,
but first take your glasses off. Why, Miss Standish …”
This glowing moon. The crowd
Has already gathered on the terraces .
    The history of one who came too late
To the rooms of broken babies and their toys
Is all they talk about around here
And rebuke, did you think you’d be left out?
    Blurry with a hangover, he