A light brunette, she must have been about five-foot-seven,
and her bearing and walk were as graceful as bearing and walk can be. But it
was all somehow understated without being wishy-washy, with the softness of a
pillow, not an ice cream cone.
She was married to Richard Hugo, chunky and rather
unprepossessing. A tolerable poet, he was at the University of Washington along
with several other disciples or acolytes of the residing genius, the poet
Theodore Roethke. I considered him a good minor poet, and was never forgiven
for uttering it by the entire English department. I taught at the University
for a year, and of course had some use for the library. The library whose
librarian was Barbara Hugo. According to the poet J. V. Cunningham reflecting
back, I managed to alienate everybody at U of W. But not Barbara Hugo.
It was enchantment at first sight for me, and something like
it for her at second. We started seeing each other. I was subletting a one-room
ground-floor apartment where Barbara started coming to me on afternoons. The
window was always open, and I can still summon up the excitement of hearing the
clickety-clack of her high heels approaching on the pavement. It was as lovely
as any music I ever heard, perhaps even more so.
Once in the room, she and I got on top of the bed, but never
inside it. We indulged in all kinds of loving sexual play, but there was never
any real intercourse. She disallowed any penetration, out of some weird kind of
minimal fidelity to her husband.
This went on for most of my year at the university,
an instructor in the English and Comparative Literature Department. It is
curious how I have forgotten the details of
our relationship (if that’s the word for it). I do remember, however, how she
told me one day that she had dreamt of still being the unmarried Barbara Williams
in her parents’ house, and me driving a car through all the walls to her
bedroom. One did not have to be a Freudian to interpret that dream.
As I was headed back East to Cambridge and Harvard, I had to
transport some of my stuff from somewhere to somewhere else, I cannot recall
from where to where, but there was a lot of schlepping to do and Barbara very touchingly
helped. We were both broken-hearted, only slightly comforted by the promise of
writing to each other. Nothing more. She had her husband, and I had a sexy
student mistress who called herself Cheryle, in incorrect imitation of Lana
Turner’s daughter Cheryl.
She joined me in Cambridge and, huge mistake, I ended up
marrying her.
Still, Barbara and I continued our affectionate
correspondence until Cheryle dis-
covered Barbara’s hidden letters and, I presume, burned
them. In any case, they have vanished. Barbara remained a memory that could not
compete with reality, however prosaic. But marriage to Cheryle ended in a not
very distant divorce.
A few years later, I attended a reading at the 92nd
Street Y by Carolyn Kaiser , a poet I had befriended in Seattle. After the
reading, she remarked to me that Barbara Hugo, now divorced, was very lonely,
and I should write to her. Carolyn must have known about my “affair” with
Barbara.
So I wrote to her, and before long we were again immersed in
a glowing correspondence. What made Barbara’s letters even more endearing were
the misspellings, droll from a librarian and poet. We decided to meet again as
her vacation from the library was imminent. We chose a midway point, Toronto.
I was waiting for her at the airport, and then there she was,
as winsome as ever. On the bus to the city, she confided that she had been worried
that I might have turned
worse with time; I had similar worries. But we were happily
unchanged.
Downtown, she had to go for a haircut, and I could hardly
spare her that long. We picked a place called (if I remember correctly)
Beaulieu for our French Canadian
holiday, but first she had to buy a bathing suit. The store had only two that
fit: a very revealing bikini and I demure black one-piece suit. Barbara asked
me to choose, and I chose the latter, which made her extremely happy.
About Beaulieu I can recall only that we felt fulfilled, and
one detail. On a bosky hillside, we went picking wild strawberries, and
competed for who could gather more. They tasted sweet, we were side by side,
and I was pleasantly reminded of Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries.” If there
was a fly in the ointment, it was Barbara’s smoking, which she did keep
infrequent.
At the hotel, we met a middle-aged couple who were driving
back to Toronto and gave us a lift in the back seat. And then something
happened reminiscent of Bergman. You may recall that in the movie the principal
couple pick up a pair of young hitchhikers, who fight so vehemently in the back
seat that they have to be ejected. Something similar happened to us. Barbara
needed a cigarette for which we had to make a stop.
Acrimony ensued. Parting in Toronto (or was it Montreal?),
was rather cool, but we professed continued correspondence. That, however, did
not endure, and soon ended. There was no further contact.
I have now looked in Google, where in Richard Hugo’s bio
there is mention of his marriage and of his divorce. No details about Barbara,
of course. She could still be alive, but only namesakes can be found. Such
delicate persons tend not to be long-lived.
Survival in memory is a melancholy business. So good-bye,
Barbara, I loved you.
