by Gail Godwin
And you know, Feron, sometimes I swear I hear his gruff reply. “You? Will miracles never cease?” or “You haven’t mentioned the closets, Blanche.” And sometimes I respond: “Oh, Rowan, for my simplified needs these days your closets are way big enough.”
Blanche wrote regularly to Feron, and Feron—not previously a reliable correspondent (except in the case of Will’s mother)—wrote regularly back. If Feron so much as thought about postponing a reply, Blanche’s reproach was as audible as on that awful December day when Feron had been weaseling out of going to Aunt Mabel’s: “Rowan expects this of you.”
Someone didn’t have to be dead for you to hear their voice.
This must be somewhat similar to what happens, Feron thought, when people are raised from the cradle with principles. The voices live on in you, if you choose to hear. Like in the Daughters and Granddaughters refrain:
Now we walk unseen beside you,
Faithful spirits always guiding.
Blanche had promptly read Feron’s third novel.
I don’t think I have come across a novel like this before. The thing I loved was, this is the skewed manner in which people actually live their lives. There are many unpremeditated turnings which in retrospect may seem like “fate” to us. A bookish professor sees a downcast former student in a coffee shop and on an impulse invites her to go along with him to visit his mother because it’s a nice day. The mother is taken aback when her bachelor son shows up with a young woman. But the mother and the young woman are attracted to each other. As the professor drives the young woman back to campus, she is imagining what it would be like to grow up in a household of such warmth and civility. And then she looks over at the driver’s abstracted profile and feels a little leap of something when she imagines him as her husband. That’s all it takes. Then the young woman writes a thank-you note, working to make it charming, and the mother replies to the thank-you note, and away we go.
After I finished your novel, I stayed in the living room until it grew dark. (Wonderful sunset!) And then I set myself to trace my engagement to Rowan. Where did we meet? It was long ago, but where and why? And then who said what and what happened after that? I am still working on this.
Feron had regretted many times throwing away Aurelia Avery’s packet of letters. They certainly would have been a great help while she was writing A Singular Courtship. Though making them up may have made them better. Feron remembered very well the night she had cut them up in small pieces and buried them in her wastebasket at Blanche’s house. Why on earth would she have done that? She had been packing to go to New York and must have felt more guilt about abandoning the dying Aurelia than she wanted to carry with her. She might as well have kept them because thirty years later she still felt the guilt. How could she have hidden behind “incapacitating grief” to convince Uncle Rowan to make the phone calls? Who was that twenty-three-year-old person cutting up the letters? As she grew older, Feron’s remembrance of callous youthful acts increasingly baffled her or filled her with disgust. (“Oh, no, how could I have?” “What a monster I was.” “Was I born that way?”)
“The rot may have set in earlier,” the drunk woman in Feron’s story for Miss Petrie tells the young girl on the bus. How much earlier? Would there already be a fine pencil line of rot around the fetus? “Either way,” the drunk woman in Feron’s story had concluded, “you don’t have a chance, your fate is decided already.” Even the drunk woman had been better versed than Feron in the concepts of original sin and predestination.
When Dr. Phillips was leading them through Genesis at Lovegood College, he told them you could also read the fall of Eve and Adam as an allegory. “What was the snake offering them? And what did they gain by it and what did they lose? And if they were destined to beget children marked with their sin through the ages, was human life always going to spin on a blighted axis? What, if anything, could you do to reverse the punishment? Or, taking it a step further, what was beyond your human powers to do? And a step beyond that: If you accepted the limits of your human powers, could you still hope for redemption? (“Don’t worry, it’s not going to be on the test. I’m just posing a theological question. I have a graduate degree in theology, and I’m still pondering it.”)
_______________
Dear Nora,
The rain kept me from putting the garden to bed, and I was deciding how else I could spend a useful morning when I saw the postman’s van stop at my box. I grabbed an umbrella and charged into the downpour. There were two letters. I read Tom’s first, saving the thickest one for later, for which I made myself a fresh pot of coffee and settled into the window seat you have become so fond of.
Yes, I, too, was delighted you could stay the weekend this time. The unrushed hours gave us a chance to become more intimately acquainted. Although Tom made himself scarce up there in his attic aerie, I was so grateful that at last somebody besides myself understood that in some very deep place he craves to be left alone to do his work. Even as a child, his powers of concentration were so ferocious and antisocial that his late father, a worrier, insisted we consult a child psychiatrist. Back then, they were few and far between in these environs, but fortunately we had Duke in driving distance, so off we went—only to be told Tom’s IQ was prodigious, and if we wanted to change anything in his routine, we might encourage him to stay outdoors more.
Since he was little, he has been an adamant walker. First round and round the boundaries of our backyard. Then, later, announcing he was “in a mood,” he would leave the house and walk for hours. His father tried to follow him several times and returned exhausted. Tom hadn’t walked far, his father reported, in fact he seemed not to be aware of where he walked, but he set a fiendish pace. The doctor said some people walked to solve problems or get over moods, that brains worked better when one walked. Regarding the antisocial element, the doctor said Tom was an introvert, and trying to change that would be similar to forcing a left-handed person to become a right-handed person. The doctor did advise us to encourage him to play with others his age. I’ll leave you to guess how that went!
Then came his long slog through medieval studies; he learned all the languages and ruined his eyes in libraries for twelve years.
When people asked me, ‘What is your son going to be when he gets out of school,” I started replying, “Old.”
—opening of A Singular Courtship, a novel by Feron Hood. Knole, 1994.
31
1992
“Even the darkness is not dark to you, the night is as bright as the day …”
On the west porch of Merry’s house, the Ezekiel Bible group was doing Psalms: four women, including the host, and today’s leader, Simone, whose deep and certain voice rolled over your aches and worries like healing balm.
The group numbered six members, but Dedra, a surgical nurse, had been called in to work overtime, and Corinne was attending her great-grandson’s graduation from kindergarten.
The west porch of the Jellicoe house still looked out on a pastoral scene: green meadow, grazing horses, new horse barn, all bathed in the golden light of a late-summer afternoon. On the east and southeast sides of the house, the big earth-moving machines had finished their terrible work, scooping away a hundred and ninety years of successful tobacco growing. Next to arrive would be the graders and trenchers, followed by the landscapers, sculpting the broken soil into a “pastoral-seeming” gated community of houses with double garages, a man-made lake, and a nine-hole golf course.
“In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.”
Simone’s voice, you wished you could put it in a bottle. Like in that last psalm they had studied: “Put my tears into your bottle.”
(“Hey, you know what?” Ritchie would have said. “We could package that voice and sell it to a Christian radio station. No, better! Make a CD of Sister Simone reading some fabulous psalms for people to listen to when they are feeling bad.”)
Each Sunday, Simo
ne’s powerful contralto lifted the Ezekiel choir a few miles closer to Heaven. (“No, wait: at the end of our CD, we could have her break into ‘Amazing Grace.’ It would top the charts, Merry Grape!”)
Alda, the trainer who had leased their horse barn, came out of the stables leading the already saddled Nola, a blue roan mare known for her patience with children. And sure enough, here came the rattling Mercedes bringing little Jennifer for her twice-a-week lesson.
This was not what they had planned.
In your book all my days were written before any of them existed.
At children’s Bible camp, she and Ritchie had recited the twenty-third psalm with its green pastures, still waters, and the good shepherd who hurried you past the valley of the shadow of death and on to a table laid out with good things all for you. At Lovegood, Dr. Phillips had shared with them a few scholarly facts about the collection of psalms: composed three centuries before Christ—or “Before the Common Era,” as it was now called; many were attributed to King David, many more to poets or priests unknown. The book consisted of songs of praise, laments, penitential prayers, supplications, and “some outright vindictive screeds.” At Dr. Phillips’s last category the class perked up, and he assigned them a choice of maledictory psalms to ponder before the next class.
What were those psalms? She didn’t remember. All she remembered was Feron saying something like, “Wishing you could go back and step in your enemy’s blood, and have your dog drink it, is, well, picturesque, but what would be some more up-to-date maledictions?” They had come up with some wonderful little horrors, but again, Merry could not recall a single one. She did recall Feron saying, “Dr. Phillips certainly is in love with the word ponder, don’t you think?”
Since Jack had moved of his own volition into assisted living at Laurel Grove in the spring of 1990, Merry had spent many hours “pondering” this thing called memory. And overresearching it. She knew more than made her comfortable about “the old brain” and could close her eyes at night and see the X-ray colors of parts of the brain as it shut down. His father had begun losing it a full ten years before Jack’s present age of sixty-nine.
One day Jack phoned her from the hardware store and asked her to give him directions how to get home. From there his descent relentlessly progressed until, having seen yet another specialist, Jack told her as they were walking back to the parking lot that it was time they went shopping for a place where he could deteriorate without losing his pride.
“But I can take care of you, Jack. I want to.”
“I know you do. But I want it this way. I’ve ruined your life once.”
“How can you say that?”
“I took advantage of you the night your parents died.”
“We were both in shock. What happened sort of unfolded out of our trying to comfort each other.”
“I robbed you of your rightful future.”
“Please don’t ever say that again. Don’t even think it. And if you feel yourself starting to think it, remember you are Paul’s father, and I wouldn’t exchange those three months with him for any other future I might have had.”
“Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
Sister Simone, who was from that older generation who still addressed one another as “Sister” and “Brother,” closed the Bible on her lap, took off her reading glasses, and, along with the others, closed her eyes.
The silence of a summer afternoon. Which of course was never silent. With closed eyes, your ears picked up the sounds of birds, insects, hum of traffic on the distant interstate, Alda’s voice from across the field putting the compliant Nola through her paces. (Little Jennifer, proudly mounted, probably believed she was doing it all herself by her control of the reins.)
This was their time for turning away extraneous thoughts and meditating on the psalm Sister Simone had read. By now, Merry knew the members of the Ezekiel Bible group so well that she could guess at some of the extraneous thoughts each woman was trying to turn away.
She owed these women to Feron. Who had written to her at the end of 1979 that she should make a novel out of Stephen Slade. “It reads like a story,” Feron wrote. “You got inside his head—his fear, his panic, his envisioning all too well his probable punishments, and then his wild inspiration about the logs. And you stayed with him till he was dying, a free man on his own farm where he is buried.”
It was the longest letter Feron had ever written to her. Anointing herself Merry’s “donor,” she had set Merry the task of sending the uncut version of her magazine article to Mr. Sterling in New York and telling him she felt there was more to uncover and did he think the story could make a novel.
Merry didn’t go so far as to contact the literary agent who still wrote once a year, “Remember, I am always here for you.” But she had been excited by Feron’s suggestion and began planning ways she might fill in Stephen’s life between the night he discovered bright leaf until the day he died and passed over to the other side. Though Feron had praised her for “following him over the threshold,” in the article, saying it went one step farther than Chekhov, Merry had grown to regret including such a blatant feat of speculation about Stephen’s entry into afterlife. She grew to wish the magazine editor had cut that out, too.
And then came Feron’s bewildering little novel with the pictures, Mr. Blue, published in the early eighties. Feron hadn’t sent her a copy; Merry had found it in a bookstore a year or so after it was published. Who were these people? Where had it come from? What did it have to do with Feron’s life? With Beast and Beauty, Merry had been able to sense her friend’s experience between the lines, even before Feron had elaborated on the real man on the bus. (“I tried to erase him happening to me … until I transported him safely into a fairy tale and secured him there.”)
But in certain passages of Mr. Blue, Merry started to recognize familiar things. Mr. Blue’s parents and grandparents had been tenant farmers. He was allowed to build himself a house on the owner’s land. He had arrived when the future Mrs. Blue was a child of eight, as Merry had been when Mr. Jack came to work for them. Mr. Blue was distant and proud, but, when you got inside his head in every other chapter (this book had the same alternating point-of-view structure as Beast and Beauty), you learned how uneasy he was in society. You also picked up a low-burning resentment, something that was not at all in Jack’s nature, but something Merry had strongly sensed in her roommate back at Lovegood. And, like Feron, Mr. Blue often didn’t answer you. He guarded his thoughts.
And the crop, that had to be tobacco, though it was never named. (“Keeping it generic like in the fairy tales.”) But how well Feron had described its dramatically changing appearance as it grew, the long deep green fleshy leaves, then crowned with yellow-white heads, then the pathetically naked stalks after they had been stripped and dried and sold.
Hadn’t she herself use similar descriptions in her magazine article on Stephen Slade? Which Feron had read immediately after their lunch at the Neuse River Café.
And those were definitely tobacco fields in the beautifully strange illustrations. The leaf shapes were accurately drawn. Had Feron simply handed over the magazine to the artist? (“Here, it should look like this field on the cover.”)
But Mrs. Blue dies at the end. In childbirth! Child and mother die. There’s no one left but Mr. Blue, who owns all the land and is a rich man, like the Bluebeard in the fairy tale. The jacket copy said the novel could be read as a feminist version of Bluebeard. Why? Because she had the secret room? Mr. Blue in Feron’s novel is left inconsolable, though he can’t stop himself from climbing to the tower room and unlocking the door and seeing what Mrs. Blue didn’t want him to see for all those years. A room with a chair with the stuffing falling out, a table and a folded blanket and a single window inserted into a space once big enough to be a hayloft. At Lovegood she had told Merry about Mama’s off-limits loft room where litt
le Ritchie had thought Mama went to literally put herself back together. What was Mr. Blue supposed to leave you with? Why did it need Merry’s family history? Was there something Merry the Reader was too obtuse to see, or was it something Feron the Writer hadn’t made clear enough?
The novel had come out two years before Paul was born, which made the childbirth thing kind of weird. Perhaps Feron had assumed if Merry did get pregnant in her forties she would most likely die, or give birth to something horrible, like the monster in Mr. Cuervo’s book.
At first Merry hadn’t resented the likenesses between Mr. Blue and her own family history. Following Feron’s creative trail, she felt a pleasant comraderie with her old friend. That girl first seen in the parking lot of Lovegood College, who looked at odds with someone or something, that girl was still there. You could easily imagine her making up a story like Mr. Blue thirty-six years later and snatching her friend’s family story to make it more interesting. But after a closer second reading Merry realized she felt raided. Feron had appropriated her life without even asking permission. Would she have given the permission? She didn’t know. If Feron were with her right now, would she have the nerve to confront her: “Why did you use my family story in your book? And as it is, the story still leaves you hanging. What is the reader meant to take away from Mr. Blue?”
“Remember how Miss Petrie led us to accepting being left in uncertainty?” Feron might reply with a touch of disdain. “And how was I supposed to guess you would have any problem with my using your hayloft room story?”
“I can go first, unless somebody else wants to.” It was Tabitha, church organist, piano teacher, and mother of five. “Psalm 139 is my favorite psalm, so I was curious about how worshippers down through the ages have translated those last lines, which always reminds me I have a moral life. So I asked Pastor Ford if I could look at some of his books. When he found out what I was up to, he was a terrific help. I could never have tracked down all this stuff by myself.”