The Ghost Orchid Read Online Free PDF Page B

(on the authority of “sundry guests who were present at the séances that summer”) that Tom Quinn and Corinth Blackwell pretended not to know each other when they met at Bosco in 1893, but that there was reason to believe that they had once been “intimate.” I can’t tell what the pamphlet writer, who could be maddeningly opaque at times, meant by this word or upon what evidence the deduction was based, but I suspect that while Corinth didn’t expect to meet Tom Quinn at Bosco, they had been lovers before that summer. Would the sight of him, then, have aroused her old feelings for him? It is a difficult moment to pull off and I am beginning to despair of ever doing it.
    For not the first time I consider abandoning the book altogether. My old teacher Richard Scully was right. It’s really too hard and too big for a first book. There’s all the period detail—the minutiae of clothing and food and customs—and then there’s the ever-present threat that the use of those details will sound phony and the book will come out like one of those overheated bodice rippers that Bethesda Graham so disparaged last night.
    I thought that being at Bosco would inspire me to re-create the nineteenth-century scenes. After all, that is what Bosco is famous for: inspiration. From my window on the west corner of the house I can see one of the surviving Muse statues on the first terrace. Originally there were three Muses on each of the three terraces—a phalanx guarding the wellspring of inspiration that was supposed to flourish here at Bosco. Certainly Zalman Bronsky doesn’t seem to be lacking in inspiration this morning. There he is now, looking, in his loose linen smock and floppy hat, very Monet-at-Giverny, heading down the old fountain allée, saluting one of the Muses as he passes by, a spring in his step. He announced over breakfast that he planned to take a “sonnet walk” this morning. And he thanked me again for that line about the eloquence of water.
    As his green hat vanishes into the tangled overgrowth below the second terrace, I wonder if I shouldn’t try writing outside as well. It worked yesterday, at least for a while, when I sat in the grove at the western edge of the first terrace. Deep in the ilex grove I was able to imagine, for just a moment, what the hill must have looked like when the gardens were intact, the hedges clipped in neat geometrical shapes, all the statues standing, and the water flowing from terrace to terrace. I imagined Corinth Blackwell climbing that hill against the flow of all that water, approaching the house that would ruin her. I started to write, but then I was seized by the feeling that there was someone watching me, as if I had conjured up the ghost of Corinth Blackwell by the force of my imagination and she would, at any moment, appear before me. I closed my eyes then and banished the image from my mind. It was a foolish idea in the first place—Corinth Blackwell no doubt approached the house for the first time like everybody else, through the porte cochere off the main drive. After a few minutes my heartbeat slowed to normal; my fear was gone, but so was the little trickle of inspiration.
    It was just as Nat Loomis said last night on the terrace about the springs that had dried up: Not a particularly good omen for those who’ve come to drink at the wellspring of the Muses. Or, as I imagine Bethesda might say to me, maybe the problem is that there is no Muse of historical romance present on the grounds. Apparently Nat’s muse is with him this morning. I can hear the clatter of typewriter keys coming from his room next door. I’d read once in an interview he’d given that he used a manual typewriter to “make a physical connection to the words.” All morning the sound of the typewriter has summoned in my mind an image of Nat, the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled up above his forearms, the light from the garden catching the red highlights in his tousled brown hair. It’s an