Palming Off the Mongoose
(after Anton Chekhov)
What nerve-just what you
would have expected of him
-to ask them to take care
of his mongoose while he
traversed the steppes
to the Orient and then raced
back to Italy and France.
In letters to his family he
records his worries about
the pet-is he eating, is he
moping, will he die, will he
survive only to run away?
On May 27, 1891, at four
a.m., he starts his letter,
“The mongoose has run
away into the woods and
has not come back. It is
cold. I have no money.”
The mongoose is found.
Money comes hard.
The cold breaks.
George Monteiro is a lifelong student and teacher of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, contributing to the scholarship on numerous writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot and Bob Dylan. His latest book is Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed (McFarland, 2012).
