Echoes by Robin Jones Gunn Page A

“The doctors all thought she was going to die. After a year and a half of writing to each other every day, they eloped, left England, settled in Italy, and at forty-three years old, she had a baby.”
    “Who are you talking about?” Mindy stood blocking the elevator door with both hands on her hips.
    “Elizabeth and Robert.”
    “Who?”
    “Robert and Elizabeth Browning. You know, the poets from the book I’m reading for class. ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways …’ ”
    The elevator door opened, and they stepped into the vacant lunch room. “He wrote that? I thought that was Shakespeare.”
    “No, she wrote it. She didn’t show it to Robert for several years. Then one morning in Italy, after breakfast, he was looking out the window, and she came up behind him and stuck a packet of papers into his coat pocket. She told him to read them and tear them up if he didn’t like them. Can you imagine? Then she left him to read the sonnet alone. She was quite shy. It’s a beautiful sonnet. So romantic.”
    “You’re the one who’s so romantic,” Mindy said, fishing for change for the Coke machine. “I thought you were talking about Marie.”
    “Marie?” Lauren questioned.
    “You know, Marie, our supervisor,” Mindy said. “I thoughtyou were talking about real people.”
    “I am talking about real people,” Lauren protested.
    “I mean people who live in this time zone. Not somebody buried a hundred years ago in England. Do you have an extra quarter?”
    “Italy,” Lauren said, handing Mindy a quarter. “Elizabeth is buried in Florence. Robert is buried in England. At Westminster Abbey, to be exact. But he always said his heart was buried in Florence. He outlived her by twenty-eight years and carried her little gold ring on his watch chain.” Lauren let out a contented sigh.
    Mindy’s can rumbled from the belly of the Coke machine, and she stepped aside to let Lauren drop in her quarters. Lauren was staring at the ceiling.
    “Hello?” Mindy said, waving her hand in front of Lauren’s starry eyes. “You’re starting to spook me. Would you mind staying in the here and now, at least as long as you’re around me? I mean, I don’t mind you telling me about your class and your papers, but when you start talking about these dead people as if they’re your friends, well …”
    Lauren let her quarters slip into the machine and pressed her fingertips on the selection button. “That’s what’s so amazing. They do seem real to me. Their personalities and their passions. Why aren’t people like that today? Do you know what I mean? Whatever happened to nobility and honor and cherishing another person’s feelings? Did I tell you she gave him a lock of her hair and wrote a poem about it being the last strand her dead mother kissed?”
    Mindy looked at her with raised eyebrows. “And your point is …”
    “Oh, never mind.” Lauren headed for the elevator.
    “No, no, go on. I didn’t mean to shut you down,” Mindy said.
    Lauren gathered her thoughts as they waited for the door to open. “I guess I’m discovering that I’m very much a romantic at heart. It didn’t come out much with Jeff. He was so straight and practical all the time.”
    “I happen to remember something about flowers Jeff brought you all the time. Flowers are not exactly straight and practical.”
    “Jeff only brought them because I hinted how much I liked flowers. It wasn’t his idea. Don’t you see? He brought me flowers as a response to my idea. It wasn’t something he did out of a symbolic passion.” They entered the elevator, and Lauren pressed the cold soda can against her cheek. In a low voice she said, “What I want is not an obligatory bouquet, but one red rose on my pillowcase. Or a gardenia tied in a pink ribbon on my doorstep with a note that says, ‘You are the fragrance in my day.’ ”
    Mindy burst out laughing. “Dream on, girlfriend! And while you’re there, dream a good one for me.”