Patricia Hampl is the author of numerous books, including The Florist's Daughter, A Romantic Education, I Could Tell You Stories, and The Art of the Wasted Day.
She stands where she was instructed to wait, a bouquet of iris wrapped in butcher paper in one arm, tape recorder bulking up her backpack, as he comes (surely this is the man who had answered her letters) down the overgrown cow path.
Three cows mooching along, heads lowered, as he weaves around them to get past. On his neat, smallish head, a stiff straw boater. Is there a ribbon? Faded black grosgrain, yes.
But her nerves! Butterflies beating within—the two letters between them having been their only link until this moment, and she in no way a professional, never mind the tape recorder. He threads his way past the lethargic cows, she waiting by the sagging wooden bench that serves as the bus stop. He might have stepped out of an Edwardian country weekend novel, in his boater and cream linen suit. Trim dark mustache. Everything about him trim, as his two letters had been precise, briskly instructive.
Did I say this is England? Somewhere in the New Forest. A train from Waterloo, transferring at Salisbury into a lumbering bus to—that place is lost. She had waited, wherever that was, for another conveyance, a kind of jitney (his instructions had been exact—only the one stop Sundays, do not move from the spot, trust it will arrive). She was finally deposited at this place, as his letter had said. But it seems—what with the cows, the overgrown path, the end-of-the-line look of the place—like no place at all.
Yet he has appeared as promised, calling her name in a voice she will come to treasure for its amused fussiness, its covert kindness, a question mark lifting at the end—Patricia? Patricia?
Me, yes.
But there is no remembering so much of this. The fiction writing of the recording mind has stripped away many details (what I wore—dress? slacks?), while time has giantized others (iris, tape recorder).
In any case, the tidy man was only meant to be a bridge figure, his purpose to lead me to the mysterious LM, as I'd learned to call her from the memoir she had written. But even she was not the point of all my effort.
She too was a link, though a precious one, the only living connection to the ghost I stalked. Katherine Mansfield. The romantic renegade writer, older by five years at her death at 34 in January 1923 than I was/am on this June day in 1975.
My first “trip abroad” (a phrase then still common, oddly antique now). The journey from home in St. Paul had been made for this encounter, to interview Mansfield's best friend, possibly a one-time lover, it was said—would the girl burdened with flowers and tape recorder nerve up to inquire about that?
LM was the ancient leftover not only of their relationship, but of their world. She, Leslie Moore, had been coaxed into writing a memoir—Katherine Mansfield: field: emories of LM—by the man wearing the stiff boater. And now she had agreed to let “a young American” who had read her book meet its author for an interview.
I had a commission from Ms. magazine (all the feminist rage back then) to do a piece on this friendship. I held pridefully to that commission: this might be my first trip to Europe (to anywhere), but I was no tourist. I was all business.
The interview had been arranged by the man in the linen suit—Peter Day, he said smartly as he approached, the name as tidy as himself. He pivoted immediately and began retracing his steps up the flinty cow path. Come along, he called back to me, come along. That bracing Brit carry-on voice. And I, eager to heel, trooped close behind with my gear.
What a measured, ceremonial dance it was, then, to make connections with strangers before the frantic blur of the Internet, the mosh pit of email and social media. Hi (or even ) Patricia! people I have never met chummily greet me online today. Gone, the crisp of yore, that salutation reading now like an
