by Gail Godwin
She never should have come to New Orleans. And the rest of it all boils down to this: Is it better to leave something unfinished?
The way he first looked when he walked in that room in New Orleans. Like a fish out of water, too tall for the door, too loud for such a small room.
The way he added up the check with his finger.
The way she grew sleepy and just wanted to sleep.
The night in Brennan’s when he mispronounced a word.
And when she got back to Miami International. Walking down the ramp to the parking lot, still tasting too many oysters, still smelling a surfeit of his tobacco mixture, still recoiling at those homely phrases. “God,” she said aloud to the whining jet overhead, “I’m glad that’s over.”
He wrote her many letters from New Orleans. And from Galveston and once from Hong Kong, long troubled introspective letters, letters that can only be written by a lonely man, surrounded on all sides by water. At first, she read parts of them and felt guilty and embarrassed. Finally the time came when she could, quite quickly and without any feeling at all, slip the unopened bulk into the garbage can and forget the whole episode.371
“My name’s Halcyone Harper,” she screamed, teetering in her spectators in the stern of the pilot boat, cursing the Tempest for being so high. “From the Star.” She paused to let the name sink in, but Wanderer was simply looking at her patiently, legs poised for retreat up that ladder and into the cabin.
“Yes, Miss.” His voice was unbelievably deep.
“Do you have any comment on . . . on what has happened, Captain?”
“No, Miss.”
“Well, you’ll at least admit you’re stuck, won’t you?” she yelled up angrily.
“Can’t deny that.” He sucked on his pipe. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Miss, I know you’re a real eager beaver and all that . . .” His words stung her, but before she had a retort framed, he was agilely taking the ladder rungs two at a time, and finally disappeared around the bridge.372
Later, as the pilot boat plowed back to shore, transporting her and the representative from Lloyd’s (they regarded each other sullenly, enemies on purpose), she saw the Captain peering through binoculars, his elbows resting on the rail of the bridge.
Deliberately she hoisted her skirt up, so the lens could take in a nice firm calf, caramel colored, and getting farther and farther away every minute.
Note: In January 1962, while housed in Denmark, Gail began writing a story titled “Halcyone and the Lighthouse” that had little to do with the Captain Wanderer story. It featured a young woman trapped in a marriagein the Florida Keys. Her salvation seemed connected to painting a picture of the historic local lighthouse. Renamed “The Gall Crab” and then “Gull Key,” the novel was completed, but not published.
“It’ll keep you busy till you get pregnant”—and she sets out to paint.
Every day she goes down there and paints and has uplifting thoughts. When she finishes it (in the middle of May, when it is getting hot), she hangs it in the living room at Evan’s insistence and he invites Thelma and Bunny over for a drink. Thelma praises her, comparing it to her own attempt, and suggests she enter it in the island art show.
Sometimes, late in the night, she would go into the kitchen to get a glass of water and stand by the dark window listening to the sounds of the crickets, and sometimes she would hear the distant blast of a steamship passing around the key and she would experience a feeling which she could not put into words . . . it was something like the feeling of missing a friend or a train by five minutes . . . or like feeling the silent walls of the brain coral373 closing slowly above her head.
She had married Evan because she thought she should be married by twenty-three. He was the type of man one picks for a husband: gentle, hard-working, healthy; only later did she have intimations that he was unimaginative and . . .
But some nights in August and September of that year, when the still heat made her restless, she would lie awake for some minutes, hearing the dry clacking of the palm fronds, which sounded so much like rain. Then she would climb out of bed and walk barefooted over the cool terrazzo floors to the kitchen to get a drink of water. Standing by the window, a crepuscular square sketched with shadows of her trailing arbutus, she would listen to the chirring of the cicadas and press her palms gently, inquisitively against her swollen belly. Sometimes she would hear the single blast of a steamship rounding the tip of Gull Key and she would experience a feeling she could never put into words. It was something like missing a friend or a train by five minutes . . . or like feeling the silent walls of the brain coral closing slowly above her head.
The trip up the Florida coast she would always remember as the most memorable of her life, plodding through interminable stoplights, heat, and Howard Johnsons until she reached the turnpike.374 Then three solid hours of letting go, feeling the small car whipped by the wind, urging it on, 65, 70, 80, guiding it over rims, around curves, past slower cars.
She stopped at four in the afternoon in Daytona Beach, her father’s old haunt. She could still hear him saying in the resonant lazy voice, “Think I’ll take a couple of weeks off and drive down to Daytona.” It was his answer to the unsolvable problems, his escape hatch. Then when he got to Daytona and became properly browned and soaked in sun and in whiskey, he would announce: “Think I’ll get back to Carolina. That’s what I need, the good clean air. I’ve had enough of all this falseness.” Perhaps he found his answers somewhere between Florida and home, on a flat, narrow road through the unexciting territory of Georgia, where an unmarked patrol car hid behind every bush, or in some drowsy small South Carolina town while he was waiting for a red light. God only knew. God would have to know. No one else did.
She bought a book (a hardcover novel she paid too much for) and ordered tea in a small elegant “tea shoppe” with an antique show-room in the rear. She made a conscious effort to sip the tea, to make a ritual of it as the English did, to read some pages in her book. But her new awareness made her nervous in a good sort of way—not the nervousness of a woman waiting alone in a dark house, but the nervousness of a diver about to spring. She kept thinking, “I’m free, dammit, I’m free.
“I got to do both: I looked behind the curtain and still escaped.”
Hurriedly, she scraped back her chair and walked over to the waitress to pay the check. She wanted to be out on the open highways again, to open all the windows and let her hair fly wild as she drove, to stop at gas stations and slouch around the Coke machine, drinking a Coke and smelling the wonderful raw, chemical smell of gas being pumped into her car, to flex her bare toes in her sandals and make small talk with the garage men.
“Sure is getting hot again for April . . .”
“Sure is . . .”
“Fine little automobile you got here, Miss. Tell me, how many miles does she really do on a gallon?”
“Well, you know the advertisements. If it says 30, you can count on 20 . . . if you’re lucky.”
“Ha! Ain’t nobody gonna fool a clever girl like you, eh?”
“Well, I bought it, though, didn’t I?”
“Well . . . still, it’s a great little car, fine little automobile. Like to have one myself . . . Check the oil and water?”
“No, that’s okay. How much do I owe you?”
“Stop in on your way back down.”
“I won’t be back down.”
“Oh . . .”
“But thanks anyway. Have a good summer.”
“Right you are. Same to you. And . . . good luck.”375
She drove out onto the road again and managed for the first time to get through Jacksonville without missing any turns. The sun was going down when she reached the outskirts of the city. She would stop at the motel in Clayton, right over the line. That is, if she felt like it. That was the whole thing. She was free to stop wherever and whenever it suited her.
“And it’s going to stay that way,” she said aloud to nobody, pressing her toes on the accel
erator to underscore her vow.
Note: On March 10, 1962, Gail was still calling her heroine Halcyone. By July, the name had changed to Bentley. At this point, she places Bentley in danger of having an a fair, and she inserts a Florida traffic scene into Bentley’s unconsummated rendezvous with her seducer. In the next scene, Gail applies a frequently rewritten drive up the Florida coast to her new ending. Bentley takes flight from her husband, Evan, who, after bouts of disillusionment and rage, has recommended that she visit her mother in the mountains. Gail had advised herself to make Evan as sympathetic as possible. She places that softening into Bentley’s mind by having her telephonehim just before crossing the Florida state line.
She drove faster when she came in sight of the Miami River Bridge. But this just wasn’t her day. When she was almost within fifty yards of it, the warning bells started clanging and the barriers went down. “Oh God!” she cried, exasperated. “Oh God, how can it . . . how can everything be so filthy all at once!”
The drawbridge raised slowly, creaking and groaning, and she looked down at the brackish river to see her enemy. A smooth, expensive yacht waving a little American flag with four people wearing shorts sitting under a deck umbrella sipping drinks. “I hope you all four rot in hell,” Bentley said through clenched teeth. It was almost eleven.
After the bridge, she was caught by virtually every red light between the Dupont Plaza Hotel and the Miami Beach street on which he lived. She did not have the right change when she drove into the pay-yourself toll stall on the beach causeway and had to back out (to the accompaniment of more horn blowing by disgruntled drivers behind) and drive into the second stall from the end, marked “Change” and manned by a uniformed nonentity who mechanically gave her back a quarter and a dime, saying, “Y’all come back soon.”
She hung up on him, staring a minute at her own hand on the impersonal black instrument. Then, automatically, she felt in the refund box just in case her coins had been returned by mistake. She hastened out into the evening and got back into her car and drove back onto the highway. She could reach Waycross by dark if she hurried, and stop there for the night in a friendly little motor court near to the road where she could lie in bed and hear the trucks purring by all night long. Waycross wasn’t very far into Georgia from Florida, really, but at least it was a new state and that would be the start.
Note: Gail let Bentley find some solace in her stepfather, who echoes what Gail’s friend B. had written to Gail. “Gull Key” concludes, in fact, with one of B.’s lines that Gail had taken to heart: “So rises the indestructible pyramid.” It refers to the process by which the heroine slowly builds a personal foundation that will not weaken as she fulfills herself in life.
Dear Bentley:
When I received your letter, I had a kind of a split reaction. I was sorry that you and Evan aren’t getting on (naturally), but on the other hand I must confess that my pride was considerably restored when I realized that you had, for the first time since we’ve known each other, actually come to me for advice. It almost scares me. This is what I’ve waited for for years. I used to have it all bottled up and packaged for you, but you just never seemed to be in the market.
If I tell you what I would do, it might not work and you’d blame me, or it might work and then you’d feel shortchanged because you couldn’t claim all the credit and you’d blame me . . .
Are you sure that you didn’t make one mistake? The mistake of saying to yourself, “I do means I quit. You take over and entertain me for the next years.” . . .376
It’s kind of like building a pyramid. The only difficulty about pyramids is (shades of my old Tech days!) that the higher it gets, the steeper the slope becomes. (Is this true?) . . .
So, all this runaround and I can see you sitting there reading this letter, saying, “But he hasn’t told me the answer yet.” I’ve gone on and must confess I’ve enjoyed writing this letter. Why do people write letters anyway? True, this one was ordered, but one does love seeing oneself on paper. But back to the so-called purpose of this letter. You ask: what to do. And I must answer, the one time you’ve come to me for an answer, neither I nor anyone else can help you.
APPENDIX 2
LITERARY INFLUENCES IN THE WORK OF GAIL GODWIN
In addition to responding to the ways that books resonate with their lives, aspiring writers register suggestions about how they might fashion their own work and be part of a literary tradition. Gail’s journals reveal the following influences:
PRE-1961 Classic poems: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King; John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Richard Cory” Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice and Emma George Eliot, Middlemarch Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary AUGUST 1961 Stories in leading literary magazines—Esquire, Atlantic, Mademoiselle, New Yorker SEPTEMBER 1961 J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey OCTOBER 1961 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or NOVEMBER 1961 Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Winter’s Tales
DECEMBER 1961 Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock and Of Time and the River JANUARY 1962 Ray Bradbury, The Golden Apples of the Sun MARCH 1962 Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point MARCH 1962 Philip Roth, short stories; and later, Letting Go NOVEMBER 1962 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love FEBRUARY 1963 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl. APRIL 1963 T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets and The Sacred Wood JULY 1963 C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Writers and works that have provided a counterpoint:
PRE-1961 James Joyce, Ulysses SEPTEMBER 1962 Franz Kafka, Diaries JANUARY 1962 Hortense Calisher, False Entry MARCH 1962 Reynolds Price, A Long and Happy Life SEPTEMBER 1962 Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way NOVEMBER 1962 Samuel Beckett, Happy Days APRIL 1963 Albert Camus, The Outsider (The Stranger) MAY 1963 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook JUNE 1963 James Agee, A Death in the Family
APPENDIX 3
GAIL GODWIN CHRONOLOGY
Important Dates in the Life of Gail Godwin, 1937–1963
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, June 18, 1937, to Mose Winston Godwin and Kathleen Krahenbuhl Godwin. Parents divorce after a short period.
With mother, moves in with widowed grandmother, Edna Rogers Krahenbuhl, in Weaverville, North Carolina, 1939; and then Asheville, North Carolina, 1941.
Kathleen Godwin marries Frank Cole, 1948; they have three children, Franchelle, Tommy, and Rebel.
Attends St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines, in Asheville, 1944–1952.
Attends Peace College, in Raleigh, North Carolina, 1955–1957.
Attains B.A. in journalism from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1959.
Works as reporter for the Miami Herald, 1959–1960.
Marries Herald photographer Douglas Kennedy, December 10, 1960; divorces in May 1961.
Boards SS Oklahoma for trip to Europe, October 6, 1961.
Arrives in Copenhagen, October 22, 1961; takes up lodging with the Høiaas family, November 9.
Receives letter of employment from U.S. Travel Service, London office, January 18, 1962.
Travels to Spain, January 24, 1962; and to Las Palmas, January 31.
Begins work on the novel that will become “Gull Key” (unpublished), March 14, 1962.
Arrives in London March 20, 1962; rents room from the Wests at 31 Tregunter Road in South Kensington.
Begins work at U.S. Travel Service, April 11, 1962.
Moves to 21 Old Church Street in Chelsea with Wests and fellow boarders, August 1, 1962.
Stella Anderson arrives in London to stay at Wests’, September 12, 1962.
The Cuban Missile Crisis begins with President John F. Kennedy’s blockade of Cuba, October 23, 1962.
Begins reading D. H. Lawrence, October 30, 1962.
Moves to own apartment at 5 Green Street in Mayfair, November 14, 1962.
Begins story “Father Flynn” (later incorporated into “Mourning”), February 9, 1963, on the fifth anniversary of father’s death by suicide.
Moves out o
f 5 Green Street apartment to move back in with Wests at 21 Old Church Street, May 19, 1963.
The Wests relate the story of Mr. Bedford, June 22, 1963.
Begins “The Illumined Moment—and Consequences,” the story that will become “An Intermediate Stop,” July 13, 1963.
Books by Gail Godwin
The Perfectionists. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Glass People. New York: Knopf, 1972.
The Odd Woman. New York: Knopf, 1974.
Dream Children: Stories. New York: Knopf, 1976.
Violet Clay. New York: Knopf, 1978.
A Mother and Two Daughters. New York: Viking, 1982.
Mr. Bedford and the Muses. New York: Viking, 1983. A novella and five stories.
The Finishing School. New York: Viking, 1984.
A Southern Family. New York: Morrow, 1987.
Father Melancholy’s Daughter. New York: Morrow, 1991.
The Good Husband. New York: Ballantine, 1994.
Evensong. New York: Ballantine, 1999.
Heart: A Personal Journey Through Its Myths and Meanings. New York: Morrow, 2001.
Evenings at Five. New York: Ballantine, 2003.
Queen of the Underworld. New York: Random House, 2006.
NOTES
1. Reprinted in the 2004 Reader’s Circle edition of Evenings at Five.
2. Godwin shared this Faustian urge with Thomas Wolfe, with whom she also shared a hometown—Asheville, North Carolina. In an introduction she wrote in 1990 for a Book-of-the-Month Club reissue of Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, Godwin described her enchantment with his writing and her desire “to capture the whole history of the human heart,” as Wolfe had phrased it. It is also worth noting that when Godwin’s mother, Kathleen, had worked as a reporter for the Asheville Citizen-Times during World War II, she had been dispatched to the dead novelist’s home “whenever Mrs. Wolfe called up the paper to announce, ‘I have just remembered something else about Tom’” (quoted from “Becoming a Writer,” in The Writer on Her Work, volume 1 [W. W. Norton, 1980], a collection of essays edited by Janet Sternburg).