Northeastern University is the setting for Jim Gardener’s final poetry reading, a public appearance that turns, in the middle of a worsening headache, into an uncanny connection with Roberta “Bobbi” Anderson in Haven. As Gardener struggles to remain upright at the podium, he sees Bobbi in her farmhouse and realizes that she is in serious trouble; the vision restores him to the room and changes the course of the reading. The university lecture hall is thus both a place of performance and the site of an alarm that reaches across distance.

The reading and Gardener’s condition

On the night of June 27, Gardener is due to read with a group of poets at Northeastern University. Stage fright is familiar to him, even before small audiences, but this time it is intensified by a headache that has grown worse during a nap in his hotel-room chair. When his turn comes, he feels detached from his own voice, as if hearing a shortwave recording from Spain or Portugal. Light-headedness makes the papers in his hands seem difficult to manage, and he fears he may faint at the lectern.

The delay between poems stretches long enough to unsettle the audience. Gardener sways at the podium while the room’s murmur grows; behind him, Ron Cummings clears his throat. The experience is not merely private discomfort: the audience’s unease makes the lecture hall a visible stage on which Gardener’s loss of control is unfolding. For a moment, faces seem to him like blank holes rather than people, and even the familiar inner encouragement he associates with Bobbi begins to fade.

The vision of Bobbi in Haven

The turning point comes when Gardener stops merely hearing Bobbi’s voice and sees her with the force of a vision. The scene he perceives is precise: Bobbi sits in a rocking chair in Haven, wearing shorts and a halter top, with her dog Peter asleep at her feet. A copy of Watchers by Dean Koontz lies open-facedown in her lap as she looks into the dark. The detail gives the vision the texture of an ordinary domestic moment, even as Gardener finds that he can follow Bobbi’s thoughts from afar.

At first, he imagines her thinking calmly about something she found in the woods and wondering why she feels tired. The apparent normality of this remote scene makes the correction more alarming: Bobbi is not thinking as he has supposed. A thought comes through with the force of a firebell, telling him that she is in real trouble. The vision briefly shifts to the cellar of the farmhouse she inherited from her uncle, where Bobbi is crouched beside machinery, working among tangled wires as ghostly blue fire flickers between her fingers. Gardener cannot identify the dark cylindrical object, but recognizes it as something familiar. The image does not explain the danger; it makes the warning concrete while leaving its cause unresolved.

From private alarm to public performance

The certainty of Bobbi’s danger snaps Gardener back into the lecture hall. His light-headedness disappears, though a bolt of pain tears through his head; he welcomes the pain as proof that he has returned to himself and is no longer drifting elsewhere. The audience’s faces become human again. Most look alarmed or worried, while Patricia McCardle watches with quiet satisfaction, a contrast that brings Gardener fully back to the room.

Gardener recovers his composure enough to address the audience. He first offers a light explanation for the pause, then admits that he had been deciding whether to read some of his new poems. By making the choice a mock contest between Pride of Authorship and Prudence, he turns the interruption into a joke. The crowd laughs sympathetically, while Patricia’s anger rises. The exchange shows his quick return to performance: the vision has not erased his predicament, but he can again control the room’s attention and use humor to conceal the severity of what has happened.

The last reading and the university’s significance

At Northeastern University, Gardener ultimately reads “Leighton Street.” Because he has not read the poem for so long, he discovers it anew rather than simply performing it. The reading lasts nearly twenty minutes and ends in deep silence. People who attended that night later regarded it as the best reading of the evening, and some considered it the best they had ever heard. Its artistic success is inseparable from its finality: it is the last reading Gardener will give in his life.

The lecture hall therefore holds two kinds of attention at once. Its audience witnesses a poet’s struggle to continue through pain and near-faintness, while the reader of the scene witnesses a vision that the audience cannot see: Gardener’s perception of Bobbi’s remote danger. That difference makes the university setting a threshold between public performance and private knowledge. The reading concludes not with an explanation of the machinery or the danger in the farmhouse, but with the silence after the poem—a formal pause that follows the vision and the performance, while leaving their consequences open.