September 10, 1890. The invitation was unexpected, the neat sloping hand addressed to Miss Eleanor Marx.
It has been a year since Amy’s death, Isabelle Levy wrote. Please come.
In the house in Endsleigh Gardens, porcelain cups and saucers rest on a silver tray.
The resemblance is unmistakable. The fine dark eyes; the aquiline nose; the perfectly shaped lips that are also perfectly out-of-style, full and expressive in an age of parsimony. The figure slight but shapely – like Amy. Amy is the link between Mrs. Isabelle Levy and me. Otherwise, I would not be sitting here across from Mrs. Levy, at a small, square table, drinking fine China tea.
Mrs. Levy says: “The Yiddish word is Yahrzeit. Do you know it?”
“I’ve heard it – commemorating a death one year later?”
“Every year. This is the first, but we will observe Amy’s Yahrzeit every year, so long as her father and I remain alive.”
Amy was two months short of her 28th birthday, with three novels and two books of poetry published (having proofed the galleys for a third poetry collection) when she took her life, sealing the doors of her attic room and inhaling charcoal fumes. She waited until her parents and brothers were out of the house.
“All year I tried to understand it. Sometimes I think I know. I feel calmer. The next day, or the next hour, the sense of peace vanishes. Surely there was something we could have done. If only we had not gone out that day, Amy would still be here.”
“It would not have made a difference.”
I mean this to be comforting, but it sounds harsh.
Mrs. Levy does not respond. She retrieves a blue leather-bound book from the sideboard. “I intended to create a scrapbook for each child. After Amy, my second, I stopped.” She turns pages. “At fifteen she wrote from school: My dear Mama, Thank you very much for the buttons. I have quite recovered from the blues, which it was horrid of me to mention. . . My conscience pricks me that I bother you a great deal. I wrote back that of course, she did not bother me.”
“Amy knew how much you and her father loved and supported her – her education, her writing. You always stood by her.”
“When did you last speak with her?”
The question I was dreading. Twice during the weeks prior to her death, Amy stopped by our flat. I was out, attending to union business. In early September, when there were bits of herring in the cats’ bowl, I thanked Edward for giving them a treat. “Not me,” he said. “Your friend Amy. She always brings something for them.”
“Always?”
“She stopped by twice. I forgot to mention it.” He went to a drawer in the kitchen cupboard. “Here is a note she left – two notes. She was looking for you.”
I cannot say this to Mrs. Levy. “We last met in early summer. I told her how much I loved translating Reuben Sachs. By the second page, I was laughing out loud.”
“I only hope Reuben Sachs’ mother was not modeled after me. The way Amy introduces her in Chapter One!”
As if on cue, we recite: “She did not appear in good health but you saw at a glance that this was an old lady whom it would be difficult to kill.”
We giggle then like schoolgirls.
We trade reminiscences. Amy’s parents visited her at Newnham College, where she was the first Jewish student. “We got lost walking from Cambridge station and stopped a young man for directions. Lewis said, ‘We’re visiting our daughter, Amy Levy.’ The young man’s hand fluttered, like shooing a cat. ‘Go straight. You can’t miss it. A red-brick monstrosity.’ Lewis thanked him and plowed on, oblivious to the insult.”
Mrs. Levy refills my cup. “That day, Amy served us coffee in these cups. Wait!” Mrs. Levy pages through the scrapbook. “Amy wrote us after purchasing them: I have invested in gorgeous coffee cups, real Chinese, greenish grey outside, with blue sprays inside. That afternoon, we took a boat on the Cam. It was beautiful: weeping willows, storks craning their necks over the water.”
“Coffee was part of our friendship,” I say. In the British Museum Reading Room, I did research, either for my father for the second volume of Capital or as a poorly-paid research assistant for other writers too lazy to do their own work. Devilling, they called it. Amy translated Heine’s poetry and composed her own. During breaks, we drank coffee and shared stories, serious or silly. Amy revealed her pseudonym as a teen: The Dog with the Bad Name.
Sometime later Mrs. Levy offers sherry. I present chocolates: Cadbury’s London Collection, each piece molded into a London landmark: the Tower, Waterloo Bridge, Big Ben. Miniature works of art.
Mrs. Levy reads aloud from Oscar Wilde’s posthumous tribute to Amy, praising Reuben Sachs for having not one superfluous word. “If only he had written this before she died.”
“Wilde published her short stories in his magazine. Amy knew Reuben was good. Her eyes shone when she asked me to translate it into German. What troubled her were the readers who misunderstood her intent.”
“A superstitious person,” Mrs. Levy says, “would consider this street cursed. Do you know they changed the name from Euston Square to Endsleigh Gardens after a woman was murdered two doors down?”
“I remember reading about it.”
“The suspect was acquitted for lack of evidence. Lack of evidence. Where is the evidence of what killed Amy? She had depressive episodes for years but they passed. What was different now?”
With trembling fingers, she selects a chocolate: St. Paul’s Dome. “And why here? Above this very room?”
I know little about Judaism. But honor thy mother and father comes to mind. Or is it love thy father and mother? “She wanted to be close to you and Mr. Levy; to make it . . . not so hard.” Dying in her room at home. As if saying: here I am; hold me close; remember me with affection.
I think of my parents, long-dead. The chocolate melts on my tongue. A shadow mounts the staircase: Mr. Levy. “Lewis, Eleanor Marx has come to visit.”
He pauses on the stairs. “Miss Marx. You honor us with your presence.”
Mothers’ love we take for granted; a father’s esteem is harder-won. Understanding that his daughter has something to contribute. This Amy and I shared.
Mrs. Levy pours more sherry. “The coroner found Amy died under the influence of a disordered mind. What does that even mean?”
“I think she drove herself too hard. Her body suffered too. Constant headaches. Going deaf in her 20’s. Beethoven, she told me, was her god the way Shakespeare was mine.”
“You’re familiar with her story Cohen of Trinity?”
I nod.
“That poem by Robert Browning she quotes. Her favorite poet since childhood.”
I remember the quotation: a fish abandons the ice-cold stream of her birth for the warmer sea but then flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe/And in her own bonds buried her despair/Hating and loving warmth alike.
“Lewis thinks the new science of ethnology is responsible. Hostility to our race has increased. For me, at home, it is mostly invisible; but for a Jewish woman writer who satirizes Jews? Some Jewish reviewers attacked her for anti-Semitism; anti-Semites used her as fodder.”
When Mrs. Levy says “our race,” is she including me? My father was converted to Christianity as a youngster; I am the only family member who considers myself Jewish, an identity forged in London’s East End, among impoverished Jewish refugees. I learned Yiddish, my grandmother’s first language, so I could urge them to join unions – or form new ones if necessary.
“There is something I must ask,” Mrs. Levy says. “It is a painful thing, unrequited love.”
For a moment she looks more like Amy than ever, her dark eyes speaking what is left unsaid.
Does she know about my Edward, unfaithful and cruel, yet I stay?
Does she know Amy preferred women?
“From her first poem Xantippe to her character Judith Quixano, was not that her subject? Socrates humiliates Xantippe when she ventures an opinion, degrades her before Plato and Alcibiades. In Reuben Sachs, Reuben unpins the flower on Judith’s gown and lets it fall to the ground. My greatest wish is that Amy found love, even if only for a while.” She twists and untwists her napkin. “Do you know who ‘E’ is?”
To E is the title of Amy’s last published poem.
Mrs. Levy is too delicate, too tactful, to ask if “E” is for Eleanor.
I shake my head. “The speaker in the poem travels with a man and a woman.” I struggle to remember the details. “They are discussing philosophy. I used to think the man was Karl Pearson, a professor she admired.”
“Who admired himself even more. He organized the men and women’s discussion group Amy attended. A Darwinian, like Lewis.”
“I was part of that group too, until Pearson reorganized it. Excluded Amy, and eventually me as well. Surrounded himself with women who would not question anything he said.”
“Is that what you heard? Pearson told Amy it was because she was going deaf. Deaf and Jewish? Too much. A horrid man.”
I remember then the last lines of To E: “On you the sun is shining free . . . on me, the cloud descends.”
*
When I leave, three hours have passed. Near Russell Square, an omnibus – Amy’s favorite transport, memorialized in one of her poems – rumbles past. Her poetry extolled gray city over village garden, found in crowded streets an antidote to despair.
Yet London failed her too. Distraught that last summer, she visited the country, then returned. Like the fish in Browning’s poem, neither stream nor sea could save her.
Eventually I board an omnibus that will take me home. Like Amy would do, I climb to the top deck: a modern woman.
Towards Farringdon, blood-brick houses and tobacconers shadow every street, church and boneyard huddle disconsolate, soggy September wind ruffles my hair. I imagine Edward waiting eagerly for my return but know not to count on it. I think then of Amy’s poem, A Wall Flower. It has something to teach me, surely; regarding romantic love, I am, my friends say, unteachable. How unfair that Amy thought herself a wall flower. Whence come the images imprinted on us before we speak a word? Our view of ourselves versus how others see us. Inside and outside the group, Jewish and not Jewish, admired and despised. I wish she could have heard Yeats’ appreciation. He met her at a dinner party days before her death, wrote afterwards he found her “good-looking” but sad. He was right about the sad. And the good-looking.
The poem opens in a doorway, neither inside nor outside the room: “I lounge in the doorway and languish in vain/While Tom, Dick, and Harry are dancing with Jane.” It’s simple and silly, a nursery rhyme of longing; of wanting, languishing, and exclusion.
The omnibus rumbles to a halt. I climb the steps to our flat, Edward’s and mine. Amy’s poem is in my head. I recite the final verses aloud. “To move unto your motion Love, were sweet; . . . But, ah, the leaden demon in my feet!”
There is no one to hear except my cats, behind the door, unfed and lonesome.
I fumble for my key, my limbs stiff and heavy with grief.
The cats mew, and I am home.
***
Nancy Ludmerer has published over 100 stories in such places as Kenyon Review, Litro (print and online), North American Review, Best Spiritual Literature, and Fish Anthology. Her work has appeared twice in Best Small Fictions and other stories have been translated into Spanish and read on public radio. Her debut collection, Collateral Damage: 48 Stories (Snake Nation Press 2022), received SNP’s annual fiction prize, and her novella, Sarra Copia: A Locked-in Life (WTAW Press 2023), set in seventeenth-century Venice, was a finalist for WTAW’s Alcove Prize. She lives in NYC. Learn more at www.nancyludmerer.com