A Circular Journey

A Circular Journey

A Circular Journey The place names in my personal lexicon—where I was born, where my family came from, and where I have lived and studied —are classical: Syracuse, Croton, Utica, Magna Graecia, Rome, Aurora. They are in America, or they are in Italy; some are in both places. My hometown was Syracuse but at the time I was growing up the name gave off no Old World, classical ring to me; it was a hard-nosed upstate New York locale committed to commercial interests . It was a place not much given to ‘‘culture,’’ where opera or ballet, when they came by, had to be seen in the auditorium at Central High School. It’s the place where, despite Syracuse University ’s hosting the state College of Forestry, the lofty elms that canopied James Street with deep shade are gone, dead of Dutch elm disease. Even the weather is ungenerous in Syracuse; I remember heavy, humid summers that lay on one like a thick shawl of rags, and long miserable winters with just enough nice days in between to show us what we were missing elsewhere. No one ever comes to Syracuse to vacation. Syracuse sounded ominously like ‘‘circuitous’’ to me, setting up images of a ferret on a Ferris wheel circling always in the same direction, getting nowhere. And it was its heaviest the summer I graduated from the Convent School and was waiting to enter my freshman year at Wells College. It was a strange, fitful summer filled with longings to be free from the old while apprehensive 188 and unsure of the new; I was in limbo, neither saved nor lost, just waiting. We spent summers on Oneida Lake, a steely grey body of water fourteen miles or so out of town, where my parents played golf at the old Syracuse Yacht and Country Club at South Bay. I swam in the lake and for years imagined myself swimming to Frenchman ’s Island which had a lighthouse and lay about a mile and half away. The Yacht Club was boring to me and only the island and my idea of getting there held any interest for I felt different from the golfers, the going-steady couples of my high school friends, even my family. It was that summer while I waited to be out of Syracuse and other encirclements that I went downtown and purchased my first book of poetry, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. It was the sign of something , but I hardly knew what. I bought the book at Emily Mundy ’s bookshop on Warren Street across from the original Schrafft’s restaurant. Certainly the nuns hadn’t ever spoken of T. S. Eliot. No poets more recent or less Catholic than Alice Meynell or Francis Thompson ever reached our ears. So how was I drawn to Eliot? (Elective affinities, my future husband would later remark wryly.) Perhaps I had read in Life magazine that Eliot was the eminence of our times, and there learned of ‘‘The Wasteland,’’ whose title alone would have drawn me to him. In any case, though my best friends, Kathleen and Camille, thought it weird of me, I continued to carry Eliot around with me all summer at the Yacht Club even to the dock where we sunbathed and looked across the lake to the thick green clump of trees that was Frenchman ’s Island and where we made our plans for the big swim. They were lazy, nonurgent plans: we would need someone to follow with a boat; we would have to train, swimming farther and farther from the dock each time; we should set a target date when there was less chance that one of those sudden storms the sullen 189 lake was so famous for would come up. But the plans were desultory —neither Kathleen nor Camille took the swim as seriously as I did, for they both had boyfriends that summer and I was the extra on the fringe of their foursome, feeling odd and out of place. I wasn’t popular with boys, my mother said, because I always had my nose in a book. Popular? Who cared about popular, I scoffed. I would meet and marry a poet . . . I would be a poet. And that, unknown, was the real goal of that summer, more than Frenchman’s Island. In the fall I would be gone, and not to a to...