“No,” Holly says, and means it. There was no way Imani could have known. Especially when Holly herself isn’t entirely sure that something unlucky happened to the already unlucky Ellen Craslow. “When did this woman come?”
“Well, gee. It’s been awhile, but I think it was after Thanksgiving but before Christmas. We’d just had the first real snowfall, I know that, but that probably isn’t any help to you.”
“What did she look like?”
“Old,” Imani says. “Older than me by maybe ten years, and I just passed seventy. And white.”
“Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”
“I might,” Imani says. She sounds dubious.
Holly gives her one of her Finders Keepers cards and asks her to have her husband call if he can remember what kind of car it was.
“I actually helped her carry out the laptop computer and some of the clothes,” Imani says. “Poor old lady looked like she was in pain. She said she wasn’t, but I know sciatica when I see it.”
March 27, 2021
When Barbara arrives at the old poet’s Victorian home on Ridge Road, red-cheeked and glowing from her two-mile bike ride, Marie Duchamp is sitting on the couch with Olivia. Marie looks worried. Olivia looks distressed. Barbara probably looks mystified because that’s how she feels. She can’t imagine what Olivia feels she needs to apologize for.
Marie is first to speak. “I encouraged her, and I took the envelope to Federal Express. So if you want to blame someone, blame me.”
“That’s nonsense,” Olivia says. “What I did was wrong. I just had no idea… and for all I know you will be pleased… but either way I had no right to do what I did without your permission. It was unconscionable.”
“I don’t get it,” Barbara says, unbuttoning her coat. “What did you do?”
The two women—one in the healthy prime of life, the other a shrunken doll-woman soon to be a centenarian—look at each other, then back at Barbara.
“The Penley Prize.” Olivia’s mouth is doing that trembly, inward-drawing thing that always makes Barbara think of an old-fashioned string purse.
“I don’t know what that is,” Barbara says, more mystified than ever.
“The full name is the Penley Prize for Younger Poets. It’s jointly sponsored by New York publishers known as the Big Five. I’m not surprised you don’t know of it because you are essentially self-taught and don’t read the writers’ magazines. Why would you, when there’s no paying market for poetry? But most English majors in the writing courses know about it, just as they know about the New Voices Award or the Young Lions Fiction Award. The Penley Prize is open for submissions each year on March first. They get thousands, and the response is rapid. Because most of the submissions are awful moon-and-June stuff, I suppose.”
Now Barbara understands. “You… what? Sent them some of my poems?”
Marie and Olivia share a glance. Barbara is young, but she knows guilt when she sees it.
“How many?”
“Seven,” Olivia says. “Short ones. The rules specify no more than two thousand words. I was just so impressed by your work… its anger… its terror… that…” She doesn’t seem to know how to continue.
Marie takes Olivia’s hand. “I encouraged her,” she says again.
They expect her to be angry, Barbara realizes. She’s not. A little shocked is all. She has kept her poetry secret not because she’s ashamed of it, or worried people will laugh (well… maybe a little), but because she’s afraid showing it to anyone other than Olivia would lessen the pressure she feels to write more. And there’s something else, or rather someone: Jerome. Although she’s actually been writing poems—mostly in her journal—since she was twelve, long before he started.
Then, in the last two or three years, something changed. There has been a mysterious jump not just in ability but in ambition. It makes her think of a documentary she saw about Bob Dylan. A folk singer from Greenwich Village in the sixties said, “He was just another guitar player trying to sound like Woody Guthrie. Then all at once he was Bob Dylan.”
It was like that. Maybe her brush with Brady Hartsfield had something to do with it, but she doesn’t believe that’s all. She thinks something—a previously dormant circuit in her brain—just fired up.
Meanwhile they’re looking at her, absurdly like a pair of middle school girls who have been caught smoking in the school bathroom, and she can’t have it.
“Olivia. Marie. Two girls in my class took naked selfies—for their boyfriends, I guess—and the pictures turned up on the Internet. That’s embarrassing. This? Not so much. Did you get a rejection letter? Is that what this is about? Can I see it?”
They exchange another of those looks. Olivia says, “The Penley judges compile a longlist of finalists. The number varies, but it’s always a very long list. Sometimes sixty, sometimes eighty, this year it’s ninety-five. Ridiculous to have so many, but… you are on it. Marie has the letter.”
There’s a single sheet of paper on the endtable next to where Marie sits. She hands it to Barbara. It’s fancy paper, heavy in her hand. At the top is an embossed seal featuring a quill pen and an inkpot. The addressee is Barbara Robinson, C/O Marie Duchamp, 70 Ridge Road.
“I’m surprised you’re not angry,” Olivia says. “And grateful that you’re not, of course. It was such a high-handed thing to do. Sometimes I think my brains have fallen out of my ass.”
Marie jumps in. “But I—”
“Encouraged her, I know,” Barbara murmurs. “It was high-handed, I guess, but I was the one who just turned up one day with my poems. That was high-handed, too.” Not exactly how it went down, and she barely hears herself, anyway. She’s scanning the letter.
It says the Penley Prize Committee is pleased to inform Ms. Barbara Robinson of 70 Ridge Road that she has been placed on the Penley Prize longlist, and if she wishes to be considered going forward, would she please submit a larger body of poems, no more than five thousand words in toto, by April 15th. No poems of “epic length,” please. There’s also a puff paragraph about previous winners of the Penley Prize. Barbara knows three of the names from her reading. No, four. It ends with congratulations “on your superior work.”
She puts the letter aside. “What’s the prize?”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” Olivia says. “More than many fine poets make from their poetry in their entire lifetime. But that isn’t the important part. A collection of the winner’s work is published, not by a small press but by one of the houses that participate. This year it’s Random House. The book always attracts notice. Last year’s winner appeared on TV with Oprah Winfrey.”
“Is there any chance I could…” Barbara stops. Even to say it feels like crazy-talk.
“Very unlikely,” Olivia says. “But should you be shortlisted, attention would be paid. The chances that your collection would be published by a small press would be fairly high. The only question is whether or not you want to proceed. You certainly have enough poems for the longlist submission, and if you continue to write I’m sure you’d have enough for a book.”