Gossip of the Starlings
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4. At one point in the story, Catherine says, “None of us were addictive personalities” (page 156). Do you think this is true? On the whole, would you consider Catherine a reliable narrator? What makes you believe her? What makes you question her?
5. Catherine narrates from a remove of years. How does her distance from the events affect the way she tells the story? How has the passage of time altered your perception of your own adolescence?
6. The novel’s title comes from a Shel Silverstein poem, “Forgotten Language,” which mourns the loss of childhood magic. In what ways is this story—despite its dark overtones—nostalgic for youth? In what ways is it not?
7. The characters in this novel live extremely privileged lives. Are the issues they face unique to upper-class teens, or are they universal? In what ways do you sympathize with these characters, despite their advantages? Does their wealth explain their delinquency, or does it simply make it harder to excuse?
8. In some ways, Catherine and Skye have opposite personalities. What parts of the other does each girl contain? Are they drawn together because of the characteristics they share, or because of the ways they differ?
9. At first glance, Skye seems to have the power in her and Catherine’s friendship, but when the two girls become estranged, Skye is the one who falls apart. How does each girl wield power within this story? Do they bear equal culpability for how the story plays out, or is one ultimately more responsible than the other? Why?
10. The friendships of our adolescent years are often fraught with high drama and intensity. Why do you think this is? Do you remember similar relationships in your own life? How did they affect you then, and in retrospect, how do they affect you now?
11. From Catherine’s perspective, adults play a peripheral role in these events, but several of them—including Mr. November, Mr. Twining, and Senator Butterfield, in particular—are clearly complicit. Could the seemingly more innocuous adults also be blamed for what transpires? In what ways do Mrs. Morrow, Mrs. Butterfield, and Ms. Latham—among others—contribute to what goes wrong?
12. Catherine is a talented and committed equestrian, and most often her moments of clarity are in conjunction with her riding. What are the connections between the appeal of a championship and the appeal of her outlaw life? How do her relationships with the two horses—Pippin and Bloom—mirror the conflict between Skye and Susannah?
13. John Paul is as guilty as his more privileged friends in terms of drug use and rule breaking, but even the adult Catherine stands firm in her assessment of what she calls his “gallantry.” Do you agree with Catherine’s perspective of John Paul, or does he ultimately deserve his fate?
14. The young people in this novel indulge in behavior that can easily be seen as immoral. Yet each one is also, in his or her own way, idealistic. Is this idealism at odds with their behavior, or is there a connection between their flouting of rules and their personal belief systems? How does this vary from character to character?
15. None of the characters in this novel has qualities that are commonly associated with delinquents. They are good students, headed to top colleges, with not only impressive achievement but active consciences. What causes them to break the law to such a serious degree? Is there any one event that might have changed the conclusion that Catherine seems to consider inevitable?
16. In the letter Skye writes to Catherine, she describes a house that she fell in love with when she saw it at night; in daylight, the house turned out to be ill repaired and unappealing, a disappointment. Skye asks Catherine, “Did that make the house I’d seen the night before, the one I’d loved, any less real?” (page 196). What does this question say about Skye as a person? How might she see this reaction as a metaphor in her own life?
We hope you enjoy this special preview of Nina de Gramont’s latest novel, The Last September, available in print and e-book formats in September 2015 wherever books are sold.
1
BECAUSE I AM a student of literature, I will start my story on the day Charlie died. In other words, I’m beginning in the middle. In medias res, that’s the Latin term, and though my specialty is American Renaissance poetry, I did have to study the classics. Homer, Dante, Milton. They knew about the middle, how all of life revolves around a single moment in time. Everything that comes before leads up to that moment. Everything that comes afterward springs from that moment.
In my case, that moment—that middle—is my husband’s murder.
WHEN I LOOK back now, it hurtles toward us like a meteor. But at the time we were too wrapped up in our day-to-day life to see it. Charlie and I lived in a borrowed house by the ocean. Our daughter, Sarah, was fifteen months old. September had just arrived, emptying the beaches at the very moment they became most spectacular: matte autumn sunlight and burnished eel grass. Cape Cod Bay was dark enough to welcome back seals but warm enough for swimming, at least if you were Charlie. He made a point of swimming in the ocean at least one day every month, including December, January, and February. I used to joke that he was part dolphin.
But this was late summer, and unseasonably warm. You didn’t need to be a dolphin to go swimming, and on Charlie’s last day he had already been in the water by the time Sarah woke up from her morning nap. At eleven thirty, he carried her into the extra bedroom I used as a study. If I’d run my hand through his hair, I would have felt the leftover grit of salt water. But I didn’t run my hand through his hair because I was too angry. I was generally angry at Charlie that fall, and it didn’t help, his tendency to wander into the room where he knew I was trying to work. Sarah still wore nothing but a diaper, and obviously not a clean one. Between jobs since his restaurant failed, Charlie had spent the morning working on reshingling the house, which belonged to his father. Like Sarah, he was half naked; he wore khaki shorts and no shirt. Ignoring my pointed glance, he lay down on the worn, woven rug, crossing his long legs at the ankles. His curly blond head rested on his hands with his elbows pointing toward the ceiling. Sarah squatted about six inches away, her gaze focused on her father, concentrating in that intense toddler way—almost as if she knew these hours constituted her last chance to see him alive. Remembering that look, I like to think of Charlie’s face imprinting itself on her subconscious, the memory as intrinsic as the strands of his DNA. Sarah was a thoughtful child who already had an impressive vocabulary—twenty words that she said regularly, more popping up here and there. But she was slower to walk. She hadn’t begun crawling until past her first birthday; she often stood up on her own, her face scrunched in a grimace as if she were planning to walk, but she had yet to risk a step.
I sat at my desk, reading a collection of Emily Dickinson’s letters to her sister-in-law. My dissertation was on these letters, their hidden code. Charlie had promised to watch Sarah but instead was letting his parenting time spill into mine—lounging with only one halfhearted eye on his daughter. I tried not to move my eyes from the text. If I indulged in my usual gaze out at Cape Cod Bay, it might imply availability. I’d spent the early morning with Sarah and would have her again in the afternoon. Now was the time for Charlie to remove himself and our child from my work space. Staring down with unnatural concentration, I marked a line that I had already underlined many times, grooves surrounding it so deeply that you could almost read a sentence on the next page through the wear. Sue, you can stay or go. I dragged my pen beneath it, drew another large star in the margin, then put down my pen and sighed.
Just as Charlie raised his eyes to mine, Sarah teetered to her feet. She pushed up with one hand on the teepee of her father’s crooked elbow. Then she let go, picked up one bare foot, and stepped closer to him. I pushed my book aside. This was the moment I’d been waiting for, checking milestone charts, harassing the pediatrician.
“Did she just take a step?” I asked, as if I hadn’t seen it myself.
Sarah broke into a smile. Her fat little legs began to shake with the effort. Charlie and I froze as she lifted her foot to step again, then coll
apsed in a triumphant, diapered heap on his chest.
“Step,” Sarah said, her voice filled with the finality of the achievement, and the prospect of a new world of movement.
Charlie got to his feet and swooped Sarah over his head in one fluid motion, so her white curls grazed the exposed beams of the sloped, second-story ceiling. Two identical pairs of blue eyes smiled at each other. Everywhere Sarah and I went people asked, “Is she yours?” assuming I must be the small, dark-eyed nanny.
With a smile that mirrored his rosy mirror self, Charlie pretended to take a congratulatory bite out of Sarah’s cheek. Not a giggler, she didn’t laugh, but just looked quietly and enormously pleased. Clearly she understood her accomplishment and all that it presaged. She had spent months thinking it through, and finally the road lay passable before her. We cheered, Charlie bringing her down to his chest so I could step in for a family hug. His bare skin felt warm against my forearms. Sarah’s spicy baby scent bonded the three of us into a single entity. We could hear the flutter and chirp of swallows outside our open window as they staged for their journey south. The Saturday Cove church bells chimed the half hour, mingling with the salty breeze off the ocean. Our home’s musty disrepair transformed, as it sometimes did, into something almost magical.
“My God,” Charlie said. “I love you so much.”
He squeezed his hand at my waist, a degree of fervency, as if he had something to prove to me. So I said the only possible thing, reflecting the dominant, if not sole, emotion: “I love you, too.”
Charlie kissed my forehead. And Sarah—who deeply approved of any kind of affection—put one hand on her father’s bare shoulder and one hand on my T-shirted breast. Then she laughed.
I hope I’m not just being charitable toward myself but am remembering correctly, because it seems to me now that in that moment, I thought: if Charlie left for work every morning in a coat and tie, we might have enough money to pay our bills or move out of his father’s summer house. But we wouldn’t have been in the same room, all together, to witness Sarah’s long-awaited first step.
And that moment is what should have remained of the day— happy and indelible, an entry in a pale pink baby book. If the phone hadn’t rung two hours later, I never would have known to regret using up our luck so early. When I think about the rest of that day, and how it unfolded, there are too many stretches of time that would require rewriting, if ever the chance presented itself: to do everything over again.
From The Last September by Nina de Gramont. Copyright (c) Nina de Gramont. All rights reserved.
PAUL BLACKMORE
Nina de Gramont is the author of the collection Of Cats and Men, which was a Book Sense selection and won a Discovery Award from the New England Booksellers Association. She is also coeditor of the anthology Choice. Her work has appeared in Red-book, Seventeen, Nerve, the Harvard Review, Post Road Magazine, and Exquisiste Corpse. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and daughter.
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2008 by Nina de Gramont. All rights reserved.
First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, June 2009. Originally published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2008.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
eBook ISBN 978-1-56512-641-1
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“De Gramont’s debut novel is the kind of smart and riveting read that fans of a certain kind of campus drama—think Donna Tartt’s The Secret History—will devour . . . There’s romance, betrayal, a gorgeous scholarship boy and a spot-on rendering of the queasy regret you sometimes feel when friends from separate orbits meet. Grab this one and share it with your teenage daughter.”
—People
“It’s a rare book that draws you into the tiny, idiosyncratic world of its characters so completely, and de Gramont’s descriptions are often so vivid you’ll want to give them a closer read . . . Grade: A-.”