The rubbing and the stretching seemed to do my back no good at all—I would just have to get used to the pain. I stopped and closed the door. Mr. Delatte was sitting by the telephone. He did not seem to notice anything strange. “I’ve got the number,” he said. “Would you like to make a private call?”
“No,” I told him, “don’t bother to leave.”
His face had the empty look of people in church as he handed me the slip of paper. There were two Seattle numbers.
Mr. Delatte said: “One is his office, the other’s his home.”
Saturday—he would be home. It was so simple. So very, very simple. He himself answered the phone, I recognized his voice. “I said I would find you, Robert,” I told him. “Do you remember me? Are you waiting for me?”
He didn’t say a single word. Just a quick rasp of breath as he hung up. “Oh, Robert,” I said to the empty line, “that won’t do any good. I’ll be calling again. Over and over and over again.” I sat back and laughed. Laughed until my insides hurt. Laughed until I put my head down on the smooth top of the telephone and cried. I was conscious that people came and bent over and looked at me, shook their heads and went away again. On tiptoe as a funeral. I no longer cared. I had my own sob-wracked echoing world, and I was locked into it.
Look at the colors, I thought, why are there so many colors? There never were before. Tears make prisms in the light.
I went on crying until I slipped off the chair. And cried on the floor, huddled fetus-like against the cold unyielding boards.
A Biography of Shirley Ann Grau
Shirley Ann Grau is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author whose novels are celebrated for their beautifully drawn portraits of the American South and its turbulent recent past.
Grau was born on July 8, 1929, in New Orleans. A few years later, her family moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where her father was stationed with the army. Grau returned to New Orleans for her senior year of high school, then attended nearby Tulane University, earning a BA in English in 1950. She initially planned to continue into graduate school, but soon found she was far more interested in writing than in scholarship.
Her first published story appeared in 1953, in the university quarterly The New Mexico Review. Soon another was printed in The New Yorker. Encouraged by these acceptances, Grau began a series of short stories set in her familiar world of the Deep South. That collection, The Black Prince, was published in 1955 and earned great critical attention.
That same year, Grau married James Fiebleman, a philosophy professor at Tulane. For many years, they split time between New Orleans in winter and Martha’s Vineyard in summer. While starting a family (Grau and Fiebleman had four children), the author completed her first novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), a story of feuding families on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. The House on Coliseum Street (1961) followed, with an unflinching depiction of a young woman’s life in New Orleans. Her next novel, Keepers of the House (1964), directly confronted one of the most urgent social issues of the time. Considered Grau’s masterpiece, it chronicles a family of Alabama landowners over the course of more than a century. Its sophisticated, unsparing look at race relations in the Deep South garnered Grau a Pulitzer Prize.
Though she taught occasionally—including creative writing courses at the University of New Orleans—Grau focused on her writing career. Her novels and stories often track a rapidly changing South against the complex backdrop of regional history. The Condor Passes (1971) celebrates New Orleans even as it reveals some of the city’s worst sides, as experienced by one of its wealthiest families. Roadwalkers (1994), Grau’s last published novel, follows a group of orphaned African-American children as they scrape by during the Great Depression.
In addition to writing, Grau enthusiastically pursues her loves of travel, sailing, dogs, books, and music. She continues to split her time between New Orleans and Massachusetts, and maintains an active presence in the New Orleans literary community.
Grau’s lilac-covered cottage in Martha’s Vineyard, where she has worked on all of her books “while the field mice played in the walls and scuttled across the floors, while occasional deer scratched themselves on the outside corners,” as she describes it.
A 1955 announcement for The Black Prince featuring glowing reviews of Grau’s short story collection. “No book is ever as exciting as the first. I found this in my flood-wrecked house in New Orleans, dried it out with a hair dryer,” says Grau.
Grau and her daughter in Alaska, while on a cruise in 1992.
Grau at work in a fishing camp on the northern coast of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, in 1997. She finds the marshes and swamps on the Gulf Coast “endlessly interesting, with their own terrible beauty.”
Grau’s German Shepherd, Yoshi, the last of a line that have been in Grau’s family since her childhood. He acts as her writing companion, sitting beside her while she works—“a kind of silent supervisor,” notes Grau.
Grau’s view of the beach on Martha’s Vineyard. She describes the experience of sitting on the sand while watching the sunrise as “a comforting feeling of belonging, of cosmic happiness if you will.”
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A condensation of this novel appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal.
The quotation on page 32 is from “The Land of Heart’s Desire” in The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats. Reprinted with permission of The Macmillan Company, Mrs. W.B. Yeats, and MacMillan and Co. Ltd. Copyright 1934, 1952 by The MacMillian Group.
Lines from “Johnny Cuckoo” by Bessie Jones appear on page 114. Copyright © 1960 by Progressive Music Publishing Co., Inc., 1619 Broadway, New York, 19, N.Y. Used by permission.
copyright © by 1964, 1992 by Shirley Ann Grau
cover design by Julianna Lee
978-1-4532-4720-4
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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EBOOKS BY SHIRLEY ANN GRAU
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The Keepers of the House Page 30