But after the first weeks of expansive ego, the grandiose stimulations of the new, pernicious self-doubt is back. The uncertainty crushing, dangling her over the edge of another fruitless depression. The fear? She’ll never write anything to justify her rejection of the life she’s been groomed for. So: Brooding over the sewing of buttons on Ted’s shabby clothes. Morbid witness to the premature deaths of ill-fated goldfish in their bowl. Scanning Acorn Street from the window in her workroom, waiting glumly for the mailman to climb the steep cobbles. Listening for Ted’s key in the lock, his daily return from steadfast concentration at the library. After all these years, no role in the outer world, by choice—taking sanctuary now in their insulated universe of two, a closed circuit of quotidian commerce, knowing her total dependence on Ted to be counterproductive, even if it is safe and comforting. The freedom she’s wanted, and paralyzed to use it. I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead. Maybe she should get a job; maybe she should get a Ph.D. in psychology. Panicked voices, those old familiars, needle her. How could she have been so foolish: throwing away a faculty appointment at Smith, disappointing her mother, Mrs. Prouty, her professors, to live—scrape by, really—among the rivalrous ghosts of the writers whom she has the temerity to think herself above? She’ll fail; whatever made her think she could ever prevail? Only one thing do I fear, and that is to follow my own will, says the good Little Flower, Accept then the offering I make of it, for I choose all that Thou willest!

Life in the city of her birth, meant to dilate, instead constricts with history, tightening at the rime-edged windows. Floating heads block the view: holographic before the snow-bedded Charles, the ruddy shadows of Acorn Street. The real and current face of crew-cutted Lowell, wearily mumbling revelations of bleak inner grotesquery, of sordid familial failure—nothing short of electrifying. Frost’s drawled, ramified monologues as unbreachable as his eminent countenance. Henry James, of whom she would be an apprentice to circuitous subtlety, to flawlessly weighted implication—though lost on the prep-school blondes she lectured through a Northampton spring. Her feverish father and his gangrenous toe, raving curses at his fate, in the slovenly beard he died with. (Was it red? Brown? White? She didn’t know, she’d never asked; she had never seen him again after he left for the hospital.) Even childhood’s Louisa May Alcott levitating over the lacework elms in Louisburg Square, scribing her earnest Jo; even Jo who broke down and gave up her literary dreams to marry a kind foreigner and save herself from a wizened garret life. History, poetry, fiction—everything contracts to level an accusing finger at the mediocre watershed of her avowed vocation, this, her arid life.