Read Online The Lone Pilgrim by Laurie Colwin - Free Book Online

dolls I liked—ones with real porcelain heads, hands, and feet. He knew about my collection of arrowheads and animal bones, and that I had tried to carve myself a bow from a willow branch. He dedicated a children’s book to me. He used my name in a poem, “A Day in Pastures with Bernadette Spaeth.” When he came to play chess with my father, he watched my every gesture. He singled me out. I felt that there was nothing worse he could do.
    At fifteen, I was a relatively accomplished skater. I went to the rink every afternoon and during the winter to the pond every weekend, always at odd hours to avoid crowded ice. For playing around, I liked the pond. I liked to see trees when I spun. For serious skating, the rink was best.
    One afternoon at the rink, I saw an older girl doing a complicated turn. I shut my eyes and tried to duplicate it in my mind. Then I looked up. Almost hidden in the darkness at the top of the bleachers was Honnimer, staring at me. You are the inspiration for a poet, he seemed to say. If you think you are being spied on, tell your parents. They will think you are silly and hysterical. They will tell you how great art is made.
    Of course he wrote a poem called “A Girl Skating.” That was the title of his next collection, which my parents kept on the table in the study, with all his other books. My parents admired his work and did not mind his writing about their daughter. They knew that his Bernadette was not me but a transformed Bernadette.
    There was no way I could duck him. If I withdrew, I felt him appreciating my withdrawal. If I stayed away from anywhere he might be, my absence interested him. If I ever spoke to him, he listened intently, as if my voice revealed some new side of my nature. Everywhere I turned, Honnimer was there. He was visiting my parents the night of my senior prom. As I came down the stairs, I saw the familiar plume of his cigar smoke above the wing chair. I was only a girl going to a prom, but that prom, I knew, would live forever. If I forget the color of my dress, I have Honnimer’s poem to look it up in.
    I felt I had another life besides the one I was living—a life in Honnimer’s mind—but no idea what that life consisted of. Certain bonds are primitive, and so was Honnimer’s with me. He counted on the kind of pull you feel toward someone who has seen you asleep or has dreamed about you and told you so. He made me wonder what he knew. He deprived me of the right to know when I was alone.
    His last book was called The Black Bud. I had just started my final year of college when it came out. Honnimer had his publishers send it to me. I kept it on my desk for weeks, unread. It reminded me that for three years I had been praying—praying that Honnimer would never come to read his poems at my college. It reminded me of the intense, literary girls who had tried to grill me about him; of the freshman-English instructors who had sought me out; of the general assumption that I had been, and was still, Honnimer’s lover.
    I finally read the poems late one night. I did not understand modern poetry and I especially did not understand Honnimer’s. The black bud seemed to be a young girl. In the title poem, as I understood it, the poet took the bud home with him and kept it close to see what sort of flower it would form. In another, the bud emerged—half flower, half girl wearing a dress that I realized was the one I had worn to my parents’ Christmas party the year before. In the last poem, the poet took the flower to what appeared to be a motel, and removed its petals, one by one. By that time in my life, I had not yet been in love. I had never had a lover or a love affair. Honnimer’s poems made me feel how my legs might move, what words I might say, how my mouth might look after hours of kissing. I could not accomplish the end of my own innocence. Honnimer had done it for me.
    He shot himself ten days after my