30
PARTISAN REVIEW
the balcony railing, blowing her precious breath away. I watched, and
then slipped away.
August is the racing season in Saratoga Springs - or was, forty years
ago - and occasionally, when the right words remained stubbornly out
of reach and the afternoon seemed longer than eternity, Elizabeth and I
stifled our guilt about playing hookey, and sneaked off to the racetrack.
With our perfect ignorance about horses and racing, Elizabeth and I
would wander around the stables before post time, trying to decide how
to place our bets. Elizabeth was fascinated by the names of the horses,
and those names dictated our choices. We would risk our money on a
nag that had been christened - with such poetic futility! - Flying Dol–
phin or Speed of Light, the very ones that invariably dragged far behind
the others, fated again and again neither to win nor place nor show. But
despite our pathetic failures, those afternoons with Elizabeth at the race
track were exhilarating. Her tireless eye absorbed the scene with zest, and
responded to every detail with witty, contagious pleasure: the crowds
swarming in the heat of the day; the tense expectation, palpable as
heartbeats, as the horses pounded around the track; the satiny gleam of
the jockeys' uniforms; the dark glisten of galloping horseflesh; and finally
the triumphant shrieks of the winners and the sour moans of the losers.
Elizabeth's attention was absolute, and even when she was silent I was
intensely aware of the way she was capturing the roiling motion of the
afternoon, always seeing, looking, storing, remembering.
That month in Saratoga was a magical time for me, a month's lib–
eration from workaday routine, a time filled with hours for uninter–
rupted writing. I glowed with happiness and could not understand why,
in this island of perfection, Elizabeth's face was often ashen with misery,
why she seemed assaulted by nameless demons that couldn't be disarmed.
She drank, but drinking only worsened her wretchedness. At the time I
knew nothing of the reasons for her suffering, the abandonments and
traumas of death and madness she had endured in childhood and that
haunted her still. And I was filled with admiration for her ability to
slough off the pain that sometimes trapped her, and become her more
familiar self, cheerfully blowing bubbles, patiently reworking a poem,
wasting a few dollars on slow-stepping nags like Flying Dolphin and
Speed of Light.
When the month at Yaddo came to an end, I went back to my
job in New York and Elizabeth moved on to Washington, where she
was succeeding Robert Lowell for a year, as Poetry Consultant at the
Library of Congress. Occasionally I'd receive a handwritten letter that
often required a magnifying glass to decipher, and was well worth the
eye strain. (Elizabeth's handwriting was daunting, but as I later discov-
