Mark would resign from Lortex, giving up stock options and promises of riches in exchange for his old job back at CUNY, where he would keep working on mathematical models of mortality, but on his own terms. Within his own parameters. And with a bevy of smart grad students to help him structure the equations, allowing him to come home from work in time for dinner most nights full of stories and hours to spare. Eventually, he and his team would create an actuarial chart that could be fine-tuned beyond anything that had ever been used before, and they would sell these findings to Aon. Not for millions, but for enough to give each one of his engineers a little breathing room that year, a vacation they wouldn’t normally have taken. We’d take our portion of the profits and book a month-long trip to Italy. The first week we’d spend in Rome, showing the girls where we’d met and fallen in love, but they would be far less interested in the specific narrative of their parents’ courtship—And here’s the restaurant where we had our first meal! Oh, and sweetheart, here’s the piazza where you once kissed me in the rain, remember?—than they were in seeking out, along those ancient, cobbled streets, the perfect cup of gelato. After awhile, we would agree with them. There was only so much memory a place could hold. Only so much power the past could wield over the present. Time moves on. Piazzas fill with new lovers. Children get born. Chapters come to a close.
I would also take the opportunity, during that same sojourn, to make a pilgrimage to the Paloma DiMarco Gallery, where Renzo’s photographs from Iraq were being shown. It didn’t make sense for me to stand in line, Mark said, in the hot Roman sun, waiting for three hours to get into the Vatican. “Go take some time for yourself,” he’d tell me. “Put your feet up, like the doctor said. I can handle the kids on my own.” I would drop the three of them off in a taxi near the entrance to the museum and continue on to the gallery, where I would make my way, one by one, from photograph to photograph, starting with the endless line of American tanks, trailing like a miniature serpent through the empty, brown landscape on the first day of the war, and ending with the photo that had caused yet another stir when it was published a few years later in several magazines, above a caption reading, “The last image of war he ever saw.”
This last one would be, ironically, a fairly pedestrian panorama when compared with the others: a market, on the outskirts of Baghdad, the object of interest small and poorly framed in the dead center of the image, with nothing notable on the periphery to counterbalance the composition. Even the focus was slightly off. I would sense that Renzo had probably just been setting up the camera on his tripod at the time it was taken, trying to decide whether and what to shoot, when the woman suddenly appeared. When he must have realized he was out of time. In fact, aside from the small halo of light and debris extruding out from her waist, the black nylon of her hijab caught in the first microseconds of ignition, the image was almost embarrassingly mundane: just a woman in a market, pressing a button on her cell phone. I couldn’t help but wonder if Renzo had survived that particular 1/125 of a second, if he’d gone on, like his colleagues, to spend many more years of his life in and out of that hellhole, whether he would have even included its consequent remnant in the show.
Despite its lack of artistry, I found myself immobilized in front of it, unable to look or walk away. I must have stood in front of that photograph for nearly ten minutes, feeling my lungs expand and contract, wondering what Renzo’s final thoughts were as the shrapnel pierced his sternum. Was he thinking about Paloma, how he’d never get to meet the child growing inside her? Was he thinking about his mother, how he’d found her dangling from the rafters of her father’s barn? Was he thinking, for even the tiniest fraction of that fragment of a second, about me?
“It is an interesting image,” a voice behind me would say, in a thick Italian accent, “even if it lacks the compositional rigor of the others.” I would turn around to see a beautiful woman, with smooth, dark hair and a high, regal forehead. She would be wearing a suede skirt with a cream silk blouse, holding a clipboard with the prices for the photographs attached, clearly wondering whether I was a buyer or just passing through. “You are American, yes? British?”
“American,” I would say, suddenly embarrassed by my ugly sandals, the only ones that would fit around my swollen ankles, knowing that they must have been the dead giveaway. “And yes. I agree. It is interesting. How did the film survive the blast?”
“This is the crazy part of it,” she would say. “The camera, she came out fine. Not a single scratch on the lens. Can you believe it?”
Yes, I would think, I can. “That’s wild,” I would say. “Do you know the photographer?”
“Did,” she would answer. “I did know him.” She would glance up at the black, stenciled letters painted on the wall, spelling out Renzo D’Aubigny, 1962–2007. But before she could elaborate, the woman’s daughter would come bounding out from the back office, a blur of pigtails and white smocking, her heart-shaped face the spitting image of Renzo’s. “Mamma, ho fame,” she would whine. I am hungry. And the woman would excuse herself—the babysitter had called in sick that day, she was so sorry, but if I had any questions about purchasing any of the photographs I should speak to her assistant, Fabrizio—to take her daughter out for lunch. “So when are you due?” she’d ask, before turning to leave.
“End of August.”
“How wonderful,” she’d say, sweeping up her daughter into her arms and planting a kiss on her cheek. “Si, Mona Lisa? Isn’t it wonderful? Andiamo, mi amore. Mangiare.”
The space inside my chest would seize up. “What did you just call her?”
The woman, already halfway out the door, would look slightly embarrassed. “Mona Lisa. I know, pretentious, no? At least her stepfather think so. But it was her father’s choice, so we honor it. We call her Mona, for short.”
“It’s a beautiful name,” I would say. A flash of Renzo’s face hovering above mine, contorted, ecstatic, reappeared. As it would, now and then, for the rest of my life. I’d tell the woman maybe I’d come back later, though I knew I never would. Then I’d find a deserted bench on the banks of the Tiber, where I would sit, and I would cry, feeling the new life stirring inside me, watching the waters of the river flow.
A WEEK LATER, arriving home from Italy, I’d sort through the month’s worth of mail and find a package addressed to me from Shep Cassidy, containing the copy of the manuscript I’d sent him plus the following letter:
Dear Ms. Burns:
I can’t say I enjoyed reading this, and I didn’t understand the point of The Inferno or why you included all that extra stuff from your own life. But never mind. If someone wants to turn it into a book, that’s their business. It’s not what happened, and it’s not how I would have written it, but I’m not the writer. I’m just grateful you respected my privacy and made it up.
And no, I don’t mind if you keep April’s initials in the “in memory of” part. I guess if she’d lived she might have liked that.
Cordially yours,
Shepherd Cassidy
Before folding it back up, I would read the last line again: I guess if she’d lived . . . And then again: . . . if she’d lived . . . Realizing I’d never conjugated her fate in the conditional. If she had lived? But she hadn’t. She’d disappeared, suddenly and soundlessly, and it was the absence that took up permanent residence inside me, not her presence. In fact, had April Cassidy actually made it past her seventh birthday, had she grown up and grown breasts and gone trudging off toward her own horizon, red shorts ablaze, she would have probably slipped out of my basket of friends the same way most childhood friends do: not with a loud crash, yolk and shell lying in a puddle on the ground, but so quietly and imperceptibly I wouldn’t have even realized she was missing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR HARBORING BOTH this author and her manuscript when no one else would: David McCormick and Kathy Pories.
For sparking the flame: Infanticide: Psychosocial and Legal Perspectives on Mothers Who Kill, by Marga
ret Spinelli; Mothers Who Kill Their Children: Understanding the Acts of Moms from Susan Smith to the “Prom Mom,” by Cheryl Meyer and Michelle Oberman; Women’s Moods: What Every Woman Must Know About Hormones, the Brain, and Emotional Health, by Deborah Sichel and Jeanne Watson Driscoll; Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, by Kay Redfield Jamison.
For tending the fire: Dr. Gloria Stern.
For explaining data mining to a word person: Chris Wiggins, Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University.
For rescuing an old file from the shredder: Mike Fry, Montgomery County Police Department.
For its amalgamation of commentary on The Inferno: The Princeton Dante Project (http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/pdp); and for his translation: John Ciardi.
For providing the time, space, and audience for the first reading: Tim Ransom and The Naked Angels Theater Company.
For eggs with a chance of Coke: Meg Wolitzer.
For the cabin in the woods: Anne and Kipp Sylvester.
For further acts of midwifery: Abigail Asher, Elizabeth Beier, Nora Ephron, Leslie Falk, Tad Friend, Sarah Jane Grossbard, Courtney Hodell, Brunson Hoole, Gillian Linden, Patty Marx, Samantha Miller, Janet Patterson, Martha Parker, Francesca Schwartz, John Burnham Schwartz, Jennifer Steinhauer.
For childcare: Bonnel Mercado and the staff at Park West Montessori Day Care.
For grandchildcare: Margie and Dick Copaken, Marcy and Maurice Swergold.
For love, every day: Paul, Jacob, Sasha, and Leo Kogan.
Between Here and April
Reading and Discussion Guide
Reading and Discussion Guide
1. Lizzie tells her shrink she feels “lost” (page 9). Is it personal? Societal? A combination of both? In what ways are both Lizzie and Adele representative of the gender politics of their times? In what ways are they simply human?
2. Lizzie and Mark have some unresolved issues in the bedroom. How do themes of human bondage inform the rest of this story? At the end of the book, we’re left in the dark as to whether these issues get resolved, either in the master bedroom or in the marriage. Is bondage, whether explicit or implicit, an inescapable element of love? When you imagine Lizzie and Mark’s marriage five years, ten years, twenty years down the road, what do you see?
3. The year 1972, the historical setting of this book, was the golden age of journalism, but in 2007, the modern-day setting of this book, journalism has entered a period of crisis. Celebrity culture has all but drowned out the news. Newspapers and magazines are foundering. How do these issues affect Lizzie’s life and career? Should Lizzie have gone to Iraq? Why or why not? If she were a man and a father, would your response be the same?
4. Consider Renzo: should he have gone off to war and left a pregnant girlfriend behind? How has Renzo, in his own work, dealt with the issues facing the modern-day journalist? “No more close-ups of the crying widows,” he tells Lizzie, “and the bleeding soldiers and the little child with the shrapnel stuck into the skin on his face in the hospital bed. We have seen these pictures too many times, in too many places. They have become meaningless” (page 155). Is he right? Have we, as a society, become inured to the pain of others?
5. Eyewitness accounts—of an event, of a life—are inherently inaccurate. When Lizzie sets out to discover the why of Adele’s crime, she talks to several eyewitnesses, each of whom give her versions of the story based on their own particular lives and biases, none of whom provide the kind of answers Lizzie’s hoping to find. “You think you need facts to write truth?” Renzo exhorts on page 174, and by the end, she accepts that he’s right. She must settle for the musings of her own imagination to get to the truth of the story. What are the limitations of such novelistic inquiry? What are the limitations of journalistic inquiry? Is one “better” than the other, “truer”? If so, how?
6. How does the repression of painful memories and events influence both Lizzie’s life and the plot of this novel? Are some things better left repressed, or should they be brought to the surface in order for the psyche to right itself?
7. All the main characters in this novel—Adele, Lizzie, Mark, Renzo—are dealing, in one way or another, with the fall-out from maternal wrath and/or abandonment. How are their situations similar? How are they different?
8. Dr. Rivers asks Lizzie what Renzo represents. Lizzie responds, “Oh, I don’t know. All the normal cliché things, I suppose. Freedom. Love. The path not taken” (page 191). Is this a cop-out or the best possible answer Lizzie is able to offer? What do you think Renzo represents to her? What does he represent to the story?
9. If Lizzie had married Renzo instead of Mark, what would her life have looked like today? Do you fault her for her adulterous behavior, or did you see her actions as inevitable, understandable within the confines of her situation?
10. Is Lizzie a good mother? If so, how? If not, what advice would you give her? What about Adele? Were you able to empathize with her actions in any way, or were they completely anathema to your way of thinking about motherhood and, therefore, indefensible? If Adele could talk from the grave today, what would she say, how would she defend her actions? Would she consider herself a good mother?
11. Trudy Levine teaches a class called Misogyny in Literature. When Lizzie asks her which novels she studies, Trudy replies, “All of them” (page 89). Is this a fair assessment of literature? If you were designing such a class, which authors and novels would you include? Is this novel misogynistic in any way? If so, how? Does the author treat her male characters fairly? Empathetically? Cruelly?
12. When Lizzie tries to find the woods where Adele killed herself and her children, she finds instead a new development of McMansions. “Refugee camps I’d visited in Somalia had more joy in them that that house,” she narrates, “yet there it was (I zoomed out until the whole house was in the frame): The American Dream” (page 96). How does Lizzie feel about this American Dream? In which ways might the house represent those feelings?
13. “Revenge! It’s built into our RAM just as surely as hunger,” Lizzie muses on page 169, when she frets over the future legacy of Iraq. Is a desire for revenge part of our genetic makeup? Is Lizzie driven by it? What about Adele? What makes you believe this?
14. When Lizzie takes her own children into the frigid woods, she hits rock bottom, the icy center of hell. Why is she able to snap out of it, to find her way back out into the starry night, while Adele was not?
15. At the novel’s end, Lizzie goes to Italy, where she stands, pregnant and immobilized, in front of the last photograph of war Renzo ever snapped: a female suicide bomber, at the moment of detonation. How is this photograph a proper coda, not only for Renzo’s life, but for the novel as a whole? What about Lizzie: why is she so moved by that image, unable to look away?
MATTHEW CIPPAGHILA
Deborah Copaken Kogan is the author of Shutterbabe, the bestselling memoir of her years as a war photographer, and the just published Hell Is Other Parents, comic essays she has performed live onstage with both the Moth and Afterbirth. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, O: The Oprah Magazine, Paris Match, Newsweek, Time, Elle, Géo, L’Express, and PHOTO, and on ABC News (for which she won an Emmy), Dateline NBC, and CNN. She lives in Harlem with her husband and three children.
also by DEBORAH COPAKEN KOGAN
Shutterbabe
Praise for Between Here and April
“A page-turning good read . . . A tautly written story with sympathetic characters and evocative storytelling.” —USA Today
“[A] haunting page-turner . . . [A] compelling look at what it means to be a mother and a wife.” —Working Mother
“An amalgamation of autobiography, true crime and melodrama . . . The story is so engaging . . . a credit to this narrator’s wonderfully appealing voice: funny, frustrated, likable, totally candid about her desires and failings . . . The perfect book club book.” —The Washington Post Book World
“
Deborah Kogan’s fearless novel interrogates one of society’s last great taboos — maternal love gone wrong. Between Here and April is a provocative page-turner with brains and soul; it boldly exhumes the human story so often buried by scandalous headlines and family silence. Reading this book, I felt like I was being told a dangerous secret.” —Heidi Julavits, author of The Uses of Enchantment
“[A] provocative page-turner . . . Outstanding book club potential.” —BookReporter.com
“Engrossing.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Extraordinary . . . Fascinating and detailed . . . This is a story that needs to be told.” —Elle, #1 Reader’s Pick
“[A] hair-raising journey of self-discovery . . . Reading the book sometimes feels like four-wheeling through a war zone in a fog. At the end, you turn to your driver, Deborah Copaken Kogan, and thank her for the ride.” —The Raleigh News and Observer
“Deborah Kogan’s first novel is the work of a natural writer dealing with an unnatural event, a mother who murders her children and herself. From this most tragic of premises, she makes fiction that is heartfelt, painful, and almost hypnotically readable.” —Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon
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