The Nichols heirs have hired me, on the belief that I am a lady scholar of the old school, to put the late Ms. Rita Nichols’ papers in order. But I am not a scholar. No, no. Quite the opposite.

       My credentials are real; I was once a scholar. And I still write the odd little paper for the obscure little journal applying barely-outmoded theoretics to the analyses of Ms. Nichols unfinished works. For example: "A Horuptian Reading of the Erotics of Caesura in the Fourth and Fifth Stanzas of ‘Paper Dignity.’" It is an unusual and perhaps false conceit to write only papers whose analyses I find utterly untenable. False, because this does not keep them from being published, nor cited in dissertations, nor does it keep me from receiving the occasional admiring letter from another in my former field, as a specialist in the work of Ms. Rita Nichols. Also, I teach a seminar, once every two years, at a once-elite, now-debauched private women’s university where I am Professor Emeritus, and the mini-skirted girls pay obeisance to my spiny fingers, the benign growth on my neck, my conservative scholarship.

       Under an assumed name, I write even less-noticed, but utterly earnest invective for a magazine which is read by brilliant drop-outs, filling-station philosophers, and a few sympathetically-minded old biddies like me.

       I first read Rita when I was a high school senior, in love with the field-hockey captain in what proved to be a painful, unconsummated affair. I would steal the girl’s little red skirts, the tape she peeled off her hands after rough games to protect herself from blisters. Fetishes in hand, I would sit in an oak tree by the Fenway River. There, I would read ‘To my Sister’ aloud in a voice covered by the breeze through the drying, turning leaves. Ah, yes, very romantic. Perhaps if I had kissed my Captain—but my life has been, for some ten years now, dedicated to undermining the insidious little power of speculation.

       What is over what might be.

       Rita, you know, wrote one gorgeous and slim volume of poetry, the work, it was believed when it first came out, of a true original. An auto-didacte, that rare and singular voice, like Henri Rousseau, which appears, and is beloved, outside of the academy. There are those pictures, from the early years, of slight Ms. Rita, blinking into the camera, her hat half-cocked as if to hide her face. Her small, pointed features shadowed by its brim, a single bright eye twinkling with the flash. Accounts of her first few appearances tell of her hesitating voice, her simple language which mirrored her poetry, a shyness which made her enter and leave by the back way, though small girls like myself clamored with dog-eared paper backs for the coveted impression her pen upon their pages.

       And then, the much-studied appearance of seven or eight more poems in the major magazines of the day. They represented her move into the mainstream. They articulated the thematics apparent in the first volume with a new confidence, which, had it been maintained, would have assured her a place in the academy. They demonstrated her self-consciousness of this or that brilliant reading of her deceptively raw first verse. Or—they were the washed-up, forced attempts of a corrupted genius, suddenly in the limelight, to maintain the honesty lost in a flush of champagne and notoriety.

       And the end: the missing two weeks, the suicide attempt, and the descent into thorazined-idiocy, where she lived, a drooling invalid in pricey institutions until her recent, literal, death. Meanwhile, her husband, then heirs grew rich on reprint after biography after collected works of Ms. Rita Nichols.

       I met her on a boat. It was a month or so before her disappearance and I had attached myself to a cousin of the Nichols family. Henrietta Nichols Bezan was my first lover, and worked in the same secretarial pool where my fingers first grew spiny. I was supporting myself and my own awkward poetry while I saved the money to attend graduate school. I convinced Henrietta, by withholding powder-room caresses for a month’s time, to bring me along on the family riverboat trip. The voyage, my lover confided in me, was intended to rescue poor Rita from the grip of fame.

       I imagined that the last thing I would want, were I ever to have the fortune to become decadent, would be a riverboat ride with my extended and fawning family. Still, I bought a good black dress with a rhinestone collar, though it would delay my entry into school by a semester, and steeled myself for the possibility that Rita would not show.

       Standing, a week later, on lighted deck I watched the gangplank, and tried to ignore anxious Henrietta behind me. She kept repeating that I was a school friend, though I was quite apparently her senior. When I glanced back, thin Nichols’ eyebrows raised at my square nails, and my cropped hair.

       "They know," Henrietta said, squeezing her thick hands together. I squinted past her to the small, frenzied group just alighting from a limousine. I did not care. Rita had come, after all.

       I can see Rita now, disappeared in a luxuriant fur coat, sheltered or smothered in the arms of her enormous husband, followed by the infamous Lucy Tremaine, the secretary and later administerer of Rita’s increasingly potent drug cocktails. Lucy would, of course, marry Mr. Nichols when Rita was declared incurable, relinquishing Rita’s guardianship to her children.

       Had I not been the only non-relation on board, had I not spirited away the only bottle of whisky, had the boat not run aground and stranded us, I might never have spoken to Ms. Rita Nichols. As it was, I had hidden myself on the third deck, exhausted by Henrietta’s foolishness, and incensed at my own shyness, for, pass as the evening might, I had not so much as made eye contact with my idol, the woman whom I believed had saved my miserable little life. I was swilling whisky and trying to make out the dark water that turned around the stranded boat. I could hear the rest of the party, watching for rescuers and occasionally, Henrietta’s embarrassingly loud guffaw. I would have to leave her, I decided, though the honesty of years tells me I was unkind and I hope she is well somewhere.

       There was the sound of footsteps on the rickety ladder that led to my perch. Too soft for Henrietta’s, I assured myself, and then--the outline of my idol against the pale sky, and her soft, slurred voice, quite audible above the noise of her family reunion.

       "Tell me you are not, no matter how distant, any relation of mine," she said, seating herself on the bench beside me.

       "I’m not," I said, "I am Henrietta’s lover."

       She laughed.

       "Good old Henri!" she said and then, "Do I smell whisky? They’ve gone dry below."

       I passed over the bottle.

       For years, I regretted the drunkenness that ensued, that obscured my memory of what passed in the hours before the arrival of the rescue boat. Now, I am glad that it is all but lost. I retain the hazy recollections of her arm around my shoulder, my—reason now forgotten—tears. I can even taste the whisky and brackishness that filled my mouth.

       And one other thing, a brief exchange, which, through the quirks of the brain, remains as clear to me as any moment of my life.

       The boat had gone suddenly silent and I felt Ms. Rita’s hand tugging at my hair.

       "May I ask you a question?" My voice was thick with drink.

       "Ah," she said, "That."

       "Well?"

       "I am writing, but not poetry. I am writing a little book of criticism."

       I was instantly disappointed, and glad for the dark.

       "On whom?" I asked, regaining my composure.

       I could sense her smile.

       "On myself," she said.

       That is all I remember.

       After the madness overtook her, I waited for the appearance of the work she had confessed to me that night. I was certain she had finished it in the missing two weeks, knew that I, perhaps alone, understood how those much-speculated upon fourteen days had been spent. That work’s appearance into the canon of criticism on Ms. Rita Nichols became, in my opinion, increasingly urgent as the scholarship on her work spiraled into the sublimely ridiculous.

       When it became known, for example, that Rita had been one-thirty-second Indian, the critics flurried around the images of the natural in her patently urban sonnets. Though this movement has been abandoned, one still finds a residue of attention to the incidental mention of swallows and trees in the first and seventh poems in the volume. I confess that I made a name for myself analyzing the homoerotics in her work. I was young, and wanted to make something of that arm around my shoulder, of my life. Perhaps I was right to read it that way, but I was not right to publish it.

       When Mr. Nichols divorced his mad, lost wife, and married Lucy Tremaine, I again waited for the definitive critical account, the only one which mattered, to appear. It did not. Perhaps you know what came then.

       A rich climate which in the universities where academics, following the French, professed not to care what Rita meant, only the imprint of the map of her social world, things she could not know, only manifest. And then only the words, as read by, say, a girl in a tree, fingering a sweat-damp field hockey skirt.

       I undertook to reconstruct the missing—yes definitive—text myself, based upon those private lost hours. I underwent hypnosis, and even less-reputable forms of time-travel. I researched. I can recite you every known moment of Ms. Rita’s life. But my speculation was no less doubtful than that of the most desperately trend-following tenure-minded Ph.D candidate who assures himself a job by applying, like a geometry formula to the knowledge of a shape, the latest accepted theories to Rita’s inexplicable brilliance.

       At last, I went to visit Ms. Nichols, following the popular underground rumors that she had been suppressed as a voice because the world would not hold her power.

       How I wish, in a sense, I could erase the memory of that visit, as simply as I lost the knowledge of our first encounter. Had she once been lucid, and only numbed by the drugs? No matter. Now she was indistinguishable from the paralytics and the feeble-minded. Drooling, insensate, mesmerized by the television, her hair gone thin and white. Gone, in general.

       I abandoned my project. I became a renegade, miming idiotic analyses, teaching an illegitimate alphabet to long-legged girls dreaming about their own caresses, their own heroes, and loving the poetry nonetheless.

       Now, I sit in Rita’s preserved study, and hold in my hand what I have long known existed, the lost work, the lost weeks. The script is faded, once-blue, gone lavender with time, the pages curled. I slip it into my folio and bid the now-grayed children goodbye, promise them a complete catalogue in a few weeks. It will not, quite, be complete.

       Will I publish it? Do you have to ask? Will I read it? Of course, of course, of course. Alas, I know what I will find, have known since that visit to the Sanitorium. As I ride in my car homeward, I wish almost that I had discovered the work when I was young enough to be a fool. It will be quite good, of course. I will have the bitter pleasures of having agreed with her on many points, and being tickled by the ways we differ. But it will be no better or worse than anything else that is out there. And at three or four this morning, I will burn it in the fireplace, for the sake of my students.