Read Online Muse: A Novel by Jonathan Galassi - Free Book Online Page A

a debonair, eligible, sex-obsessed bachelor-about-town. Yes, he was something of a wastrel, along with his youthful buddy from Cincinnati Johnnie George, heir to the Skoobie Doo peanut butter fortune, who enjoyed nothing more than swanning around with Sterling and a couple of starlets for evenings on the town in New York, ski vacations in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or trouble in Tahiti. One winter Sterling and Georgie had spent two months in the Hole, as they called it, and came away owning the ski resort at the Summit for their pains. The Summit boasted the finest powder Sterling had skied on since his student days in Switzerland, and some mighty attractive women, too. Paul had seen a picture of him making an elegant turn on a slope somewhere, a nimble industrial princeling as handsome as a matinee idol. No wonder dashing, tall, blond, rich Sterling had wowed local cattle heiress and landowner Jeannette Stevens and promptly gotten her pregnant. Jeannette was lovely and forthright in the Western way, but not all that challenging, Sterling admitted, and after giving him a daughter, she had gone back to Wyoming, baby in tow, while Sterling stayed in the East, carousing and reading and picking up writersin minuscule deals that had added up over time to a list of influence and importance, if not overwhelming salability.
    By his fifties, when America was still licking its wounds over its debacle in Southeast Asia and being torn apart by the revolution in values it unleashed, the onetime playboy had evolved, Paul saw, into a literary grandee and guru, a kind of minor saint of the counterculture as the publisher and protector of his most popular author, the iconic Ida Perkins.
    Sterling, as Paul didn’t need reminding, had known Ida his whole life; she was his cousin, after all. Doris Appleton, the much younger half-sister of his grandmother Ida Appleton Wainwright (the Appletons hailed originally from Salem, Massachusetts, and claimed two or three witches in their lineage), had married George Peabody (“Pebo”) Perkins, a stiff, Episcopalian Proper Bostonian if there ever was one, as a mere girl of eighteen in 1919; Ida’s father was a hopelessly ineffectual banker who lost everything in the Crash and turned into a nasty drunk. As if that weren’t enough, Pebo’s brother Thomas Handyside Perkins, known as Handy, married a cousin of Sterling’s mother, Lavinia Furness, so they were doubly if not exactly closely related. So Sterling and Ida were glancingly aware of each other from family gatherings throughout their childhoods, though she barely acknowledged her younger cousin’s existence.
    It had been at the Wainwright family’s elaborate “camp”at Otter Creek on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 1943, the summer Sterling turned sixteen, that he’d first come alive to his older cousin’s beauty. And Ida had been equally smitten with Sterling, a golf club–wielding Adonis who’d already begun turning heads, as he would all his life—Paul had heard the stories.
    Sterling’s infatuation with Ida, then, was not only genteelly quasi-incestuous, but had the sanctified aura of first love about it. But it wasn’t simply carnal, though her flowing red locks, creamy skin, and callipygian figure were as remarkable as her aquiline profile, which today graces our 52-cent stamp. To see the cousins together was to feel you were on a movie set—except that they were so natural and unaffected, there wasn’t the faintest whiff of commerce about them.
    And young Ida had turned out to be a poet as well—and a supremely gifted one. No wonder Sterling, who already had the literary bug himself, fell book, line, and sinker for his beauteous lyre-strumming playmate, who at eighteen had just published her notorious first collection. Even crusty Arnold, himself more than a little dazzled by the poetic
Wundermädchen,
had dubbed her, on reading
Virgin Again
that same fateful summer, “the Sappho of Our Times.”
    The Sappho of Our Times was not