figures represented the letters of Ida’s name, which often appeared uncoded, too—row after row of
I
’s and
D
’s and
A
’s—in the last notebooks. After that, a statistical matchup of the most common letter frequencies—he remembered good old
etaoin shrdlu
on the Linotype—started to produce results. Words began to form out of the blind symbology of A.O.’s lines, like figures emerging from the mist. The frequency tables needed some adjustment, though, because many of the words—again, unsurprisingly—were Italian, in which the most commonly used letters are
eaoin lrtsc
.
A.O.’s method turned out to be fairly straightforward, and Paul realized to his dismay that if he’d bothered to consult an expert he could have deciphered the notebooks long ago. Arnold’s encoding wasn’t quite as primitive as a Caesar’s cipher, where one letter substitutes for another a set number of places down the alphabet. Instead, he had replaced the letters and numbers with an arbitrary list of symbols: # for
a,
© for
b,
¥ for
c,
x
for a letter space,
d
for a colon. Certain letters and numbers stood in for others:
a
for
i,
and 3 for
d,
k
for
o,
g
for 6, for instance, which it took Paul several long sessions to figure out. Paul’s hypothesis had been correct: when Arnold meant IDA, he’d written A3#.
Once he’d deciphered them, though, the notebooks hadn’t, unfortunately, proven to be all that edifying. The “poems” turned out to be accountings of everything A.O. had done, day in and day out, hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute, in Venice:
23
APRIL
1986
8:30
coffee
9:15
lavanderia
10:36
Dr. Giannotti
11:28
Sra. Lorenzetti
12:45
fuori
15:30
home—long lunch
16:29
Sterling call
18:40
bath
19:30
Moro cocktails
21:00
dinner
22:59
bed—red room
24
APRIL
1986
8:29
caffè, cornetto
9:09
shoemaker
11:19
plumber
14:30
Giannotti …
The entries went on inexorably this way, covering roughly the last five years of A.O.’s life—before dementia seemed to leave him entirely incoherent, that is, though his daily jottings had continued even then. In the last notebook the scribbling became wilder, less concise and organized. The diary entries ceased and all that was left were chains of words, which could go on for pages:
upheaval heavy medieval bevy retrieval seawall scorch
levee steady level conundrum grief set piece
alstroemeria astronomy aphid Arthurian unstable unspeakable
table unable
roadway goldenrod icebox forehead footsteps possess embrace
No poems, no revelations or confessions. Just lists of appointments interspersed with strings of seemingly random words. And Ida’s name, in various permutations, in and out of code, repeated over and over.
Arnold’s notebooks remained opaque. Whatever meaning they held was locked inside them, maybe forever. Paul had succeeded in unscrambling their code, perhaps—or were these supposed diary entries a cipher of their own, with yet another layer of secrets beneath them? Their writer’s deeper imperative, the one that had determined the words on the pages, remained unfathomed.
Paul had been working his way through the old accordion file he’d found with the notebooks, too. It wasn’t just clippings, it turned out, but carbons of correspondence to and from Impetus and others concerning both A.O. and Ida—bills, letters from Sterling to both of them, along with some answers from Arnold—though, of course, nothing from her. Reading them was like watching Ida’s fame balloon.
It was the publication of
Bringing Up the Rear
in 1954 that had signaled her emergence from the chrysalis of cultdominto public fame. Even the aging Wallace Stevens had written Sterling to say, “She gives me hope for our future.” Her kinsman Robert Lowell, only eight years Ida’s senior, who’d also had a stellar career early on, winning the Pulitzer Prize when he was barely thirty, had watched her speed by him like a literary Road Runner. Still, he couldn’t help but praise
I
’s and
D
’s and
A
’s—in the last notebooks. After that, a statistical matchup of the most common letter frequencies—he remembered good old
etaoin shrdlu
on the Linotype—started to produce results. Words began to form out of the blind symbology of A.O.’s lines, like figures emerging from the mist. The frequency tables needed some adjustment, though, because many of the words—again, unsurprisingly—were Italian, in which the most commonly used letters are
eaoin lrtsc
.
A.O.’s method turned out to be fairly straightforward, and Paul realized to his dismay that if he’d bothered to consult an expert he could have deciphered the notebooks long ago. Arnold’s encoding wasn’t quite as primitive as a Caesar’s cipher, where one letter substitutes for another a set number of places down the alphabet. Instead, he had replaced the letters and numbers with an arbitrary list of symbols: # for
a,
© for
b,
¥ for
c,
x
for a letter space,
d
for a colon. Certain letters and numbers stood in for others:
a
for
i,
and 3 for
d,
k
for
o,
g
for 6, for instance, which it took Paul several long sessions to figure out. Paul’s hypothesis had been correct: when Arnold meant IDA, he’d written A3#.
Once he’d deciphered them, though, the notebooks hadn’t, unfortunately, proven to be all that edifying. The “poems” turned out to be accountings of everything A.O. had done, day in and day out, hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute, in Venice:
23
APRIL
1986
8:30
coffee
9:15
lavanderia
10:36
Dr. Giannotti
11:28
Sra. Lorenzetti
12:45
fuori
15:30
home—long lunch
16:29
Sterling call
18:40
bath
19:30
Moro cocktails
21:00
dinner
22:59
bed—red room
24
APRIL
1986
8:29
caffè, cornetto
9:09
shoemaker
11:19
plumber
14:30
Giannotti …
The entries went on inexorably this way, covering roughly the last five years of A.O.’s life—before dementia seemed to leave him entirely incoherent, that is, though his daily jottings had continued even then. In the last notebook the scribbling became wilder, less concise and organized. The diary entries ceased and all that was left were chains of words, which could go on for pages:
upheaval heavy medieval bevy retrieval seawall scorch
levee steady level conundrum grief set piece
alstroemeria astronomy aphid Arthurian unstable unspeakable
table unable
roadway goldenrod icebox forehead footsteps possess embrace
No poems, no revelations or confessions. Just lists of appointments interspersed with strings of seemingly random words. And Ida’s name, in various permutations, in and out of code, repeated over and over.
Arnold’s notebooks remained opaque. Whatever meaning they held was locked inside them, maybe forever. Paul had succeeded in unscrambling their code, perhaps—or were these supposed diary entries a cipher of their own, with yet another layer of secrets beneath them? Their writer’s deeper imperative, the one that had determined the words on the pages, remained unfathomed.
Paul had been working his way through the old accordion file he’d found with the notebooks, too. It wasn’t just clippings, it turned out, but carbons of correspondence to and from Impetus and others concerning both A.O. and Ida—bills, letters from Sterling to both of them, along with some answers from Arnold—though, of course, nothing from her. Reading them was like watching Ida’s fame balloon.
It was the publication of
Bringing Up the Rear
in 1954 that had signaled her emergence from the chrysalis of cultdominto public fame. Even the aging Wallace Stevens had written Sterling to say, “She gives me hope for our future.” Her kinsman Robert Lowell, only eight years Ida’s senior, who’d also had a stellar career early on, winning the Pulitzer Prize when he was barely thirty, had watched her speed by him like a literary Road Runner. Still, he couldn’t help but praise
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