The Sunken Cathedral by Walbert Kate

Author:Walbert, Kate [Walbert, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

XVII

After Elizabeth won the small prize in graduate school, the entire department gathered, students and faculty, in the lounge to hear her read, the refreshments generously donated by the surplus at History, a department better-funded for reasons having to do with the tragedy of Miles Whitbread.

Elizabeth looked out from the little half-podium hastily set up on the conference table, and then she did what they had gathered to see her do, although moments before she had believed she just might faint. Still, she read, shakily, the four poems she had labored over for her three years of graduate school.

Three years, she thought, even while reading. Four poems, she thought. That was all she wrote.

“The end,” she said, looking up, smiling.

The applause surprised her, delighted her. She might have even said sustained. Hernandez approached first, beaming. “Brava,” he said. “Brava!”

She gave a little bow and a curtsy; she wore a skirt of her own making. Long ago she’d gotten used to stitching together fabric into skirts, sundresses, smocks when outings with her mother meant Woolworth’s for a grilled cheese and coffee and the bible of patterns in back, the fabric swatches on sale.I

“I need a drink!” Elizabeth said.

“Here, here,” someone said to her left and then she had a Dixie cup of white wine. “Cheese?” they said, and she saw Richard, the Brit, a speared orange cube on a pick. She should have known; should have heard the voice.

“No, this is perfect. Cheers,” she said, downing her thimble and immediately reaching for more. “I’m parched,” she said.

“You’re amazing,” he said, pouring.

“Go on,” she said, looking around for Hernandez but he had wandered off, again.

“You are,” he said. “The real deal.” The Brit’s eyes were green and freckled like the Irish—was he Irish? He had a smooth voice, a beautiful voice. His poems she never fully understood but others did and pronounced them brilliant; he would have won the small prize, she knew, would have beat her had he been in her own class, but he had only just arrived.

“You, too,” she said, gregarious. She felt a sudden whoosh of affection for everyone who had listened to her three years, four poems, anyone who stood now with wilted napkins and cheese and warm wine in the center of this room, littered with journals and reviews.

Years later, she will recognize the Brit’s name on a panel of distinguished Brits and think maybe she should show up and ask a question from the back. Or maybe she should just sit there and smile.

Who would come to hear him?

Who really has the time?

He sees a stranger among familiar faces and is puzzled—he knows he knows her from somewhere—but it isn’t until afterward, when she approaches him, that he puts two and two together, launching forth on their graduate school, the ones he’s seen the ones he’s read about the ones he’s lost track of given his distance across the pond.

And what of you? he would like to know. Tell! he says.

But this isn’t about that,

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