But when Lily emerged on Leo’s arm from the shadows of the fervidly blooming catalpa trees, Warren startled visibly, lifting his hand and splaying his fingers across his chest. His gesture expressed not only surprise but dismay, and it appeared to a few of the onlookers that Warren hadn’t believed until that moment that it was a marriage that was about to take place. It caught the attention of the assembled guests particularly, of course, because Warren was playing out a role that generally fell to the groom. It was Robert, though, who grasped Warren’s arm to steady him. Nevertheless, just for a moment Warren’s attitude was stripped bare of any pretense, as if he were a man who had lost any possibility of comfort in the world.
Lily saw nothing of that momentary drama. But Warren had been taken unawares by this clear bit of evidence that his youth was over. That he and Robert and Lily had become adults. It was the moment when he understood for the first time—grasped the clean, severe truth of the fact—that the three of them had become who they had become, and from now on the association of their youth would be relegated to nostalgic musings and remembrances. It was the first moment that Warren looked back at the years of his childhood and thought that they seemed to have flown by so fast.
Lily stepped from the filtered light into the blinding sunshine, her hand resting lightly on Leo Scofield’s arm, so that she paused for a moment when he did while he waited to get his bearings in the bright day. For just an instant while she hesitated alongside her father she had a cursory glimpse of the waiting bridal party. She caught the gleam of her cousin Warren’s fair hair in juxtaposition to Robert’s darker head, and a hazy, amorphous happiness clarified itself in one swift thought before she stepped forward once again: Here we are together. The three of us. Here we are again at last. And then she remembered to move forward with care in order to accommodate her heavy satin train. She considered the next step and then the next, her mind fully concentrated on her progress. But in those few seconds, that fragmentary passage of time, she had satisfied herself that Robert Butler and Warren Scofield were both hers once again and ever after. And everyone looking on had seen—just during that tiny hesitation as she had stepped from the shadows into the sudden, shimmering, metallic illumination, in her pale dress and with her yellow hair—that Lily was as shocking and slender and brilliant with potential as the blade of a knife.
It was one of those singular moments that is seared into a collective sensibility. In that instant when simultaneously Lily stepped into the garden on her father’s arm and Warren Scofield clutched his heart, there was a redefinition of Lily. That day in 1913, at just a little past two o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, June 28, Lily accumulated real consequence in the town of Washburn. Within the blink of an eye she acquired a reputation for possessing unparalleled charm and remarkable, if unconventional, beauty. It was the very same moment, of course, that Warren Scofield was privately acknowledged by many of the wedding guests to have suffered a broken heart.
“Arrestingly elegant.”—ANNE TYLER, New Republic
Selected as the year’s best first novel—and everywhere hailed for its narrative richness and emotional power—Robb Forman Dew’s astonishing debut illuminates the varieties of romantic love and the unexpected rewards of family life as it tells the story of a woman whose husband stays behind in New England while she and their three young children return to her midwestern hometown to spend a summer.
“A precocious debut.…Mrs. Dew can convey, with a skill matched by few writers today, the quick, peculiar shifts in feelings that we experience, moment to moment, day by day.”
—MICHIKO KAKUTANI, New York Times
“Like Virginia Woolf, Robb Forman Dew reaches into the flow of daily life to break open a single moment. She captures beautifully the shift and flux of feelings, friendships, perspectives, the child in the adult and adult in the child.”
—JEAN STROUSE, Newsweek
“The rewards of Dale Loves Sophie to Death are quiet but rich, and prove once again that in fiction there are no automatically compelling subjects. There are only compelling writers.”
—KATHA POLLITT, New York Times Book Review
“Robb Forman Dew has shown a keen eye for the untidy domestic minutia that is the very sinew of American middle-class life, and a generous understanding of the heart that beats within it: that odd, elastic, irreplaceable organ we call family.”
—ROBERT COHEN, Los Angeles Times
ROBB FORMAN DEW is also the author of the novels The Time of Her Life, Fortunate Lives, and, most recently. The Evidence Against Her, as well as a memoir. The Family Heart.
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