Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather

by Jincy Willett

  There’s Guy, of course. And there are Hilda and Abigail now, collaborateurs. And Gloria Gomes, one of Guy and Hilda’s foundlings, a legal secretary who writes vegetarian feminist fables and gets them published locally in hand-bound stacks of two hundred fifty by a press endowed by the United States government. There’s even a best-selling paperback novelist living in Frome, Dante Minuto, whom none of us has ever seen, who writes Ludlumesque thrillers with Ludlumesque titles, like The Marchpane Cicatrix and The Wiesenheimer Punctilio. One of my steadiest patrons, a Southern transplant named Shirley Joe Birdwell, writes ghastly poetry and publishes it through a vanity press. And this is in Frome alone. Twenty-seven miles to the east, in the great metropolis of Prov, writers, most of them Not From Around Here, are caroming off one another like billiard balls.

  It wasn’t always like this. There was a long quiet time, before the sixties, when our only writer of note was a sports columnist for the PJB. I don’t know what happened. I used to assume it was happening everywhere, this geometrical progression of writers, multiplying asexually, without antecedents; that it was just part of the overall American demise. But New York magazine did a long piece on Rhode Island, and it turns out that we are atypically prolific here and no one knows why, not even New York magazine. The solitude, they speculate. And “the striking lack of competitiveness. Rhode Island,” they claim, “is an evolutionary cul-de-sac, a Darwinian twilight zone, where anything is possible because nothing matters. To put it crudely, the would-be writer has nothing to lose.” Also, regionally, this is virgin forest. Although “eventually, of course,” they predict with unseemly enthusiasm, “this little plot of land will be overworked and lose its nutrients. Its migrant workers will pack up, then, and move on to fresh territory.” Leaving the rest of us to the dust bowl.

  Whatever the reason, Conrad Lowe, slithering into our midst in the summer of 1975, when Abigail and I were thirty-seven years old, was himself a writer. Although Guy rarely mentioned it. Lowe’s books were so dishonorable, so vulgar, so deeply trashy that Hilda protected her husband from them. Even Conrad Lowe could not bully Guy when it came to the importance, the necessity, of art; the evil contingency of trash.

  Conrad Lowe had written, by the time we encountered him, three best-sellers: a tell-all biography of his parents, a Hollywood roman à clef, and a horror novel. After he came to Frome he finished two more immensely successful horror novels, and when he died he was working on a screenplay.

  But really he wrote only one book, his first: The Violet Angel, a “no holds barred” story of his beautiful movie star mother and his physician father. Everything else he wrote was a thinly disguised reworking of this primal story. His appetite for revenge upon his mother was gargantuan, bulimic, and the public appetite no less so.

  If any of these books can be said to be well written, it would be the first, the straight-out telling. Conrad Lowe’s mother was Celeste Garrett, a star of the 1930s, immensely popular at the time, then falling for thirty years into obscurity, finally resurrected and resuscitated by her son, who breathed life into her reputation like a pervert blowing up a sex doll.

  She was a beautiful blonde, silver from head to toe in the old black and white movies. They billed her as “The Girl with the Angel Eyes.” She was the ingenue in dozens of mediocre historical pictures and contemporary soap operas and drawing room mysteries. She had the body of Jean Harlow and the luminous, breathtaking, witless face of Loretta Young.

  She was terrible at comedy and sex farce. The only comedy she ever made, The Grass Widow, always makes those “fifty worst” lists. She came across on screen as so helpless, innocent, and unworldly (she was dubbed “The Elegant Waif”) that the film’s many slapstick scenes are excruciating to watch. She looks like a novice nun being manhandled by slavering thugs. The public forgave her this misstep, and she was immensely popular during her heyday, which ended in the early forties, when her beauty began quickly to fade.

  So strong was the Hollywood star system during the thirties that her fans believed her to be as sweet and delicate offscreen as on, and not until after death in 1957 did anything else get hinted. And of course when her son spilled the beans in the sixties there was a terrific resurgence of interest in her old films, which people scrutinized for evidence of her depravity and sexual incontinence.

  She appears to have been an evil, soulless woman who took real pleasure in the infliction of pain both physical and emotional. She took Conrad’s father, an eminent Boston physician, away from his wife and children and lured him to Hollywood, where he married her, gave her a son whom she tried twice to abort, and endured her private and public abuse for ten years until it finally killed him. He died, according to his son, of a heart attack while being forced to witness his wife cavorting naked with three men in cassocks and a pinheaded whore.

  Conrad hints in The Violet Angel that on many occasions, even before his father’s death, he was forced to take part in his mother’s orgies. In two of his novels he does more than hint at this. The facts of his mother’s character and life are so outlandish that one would dismiss them as the ravings of a madman, except that after the book came out dozens of old Hollywood hands stepped forward to support it and elaborate further.

  Conrad became a doctor, like his father. Unlike his father, he specialized in gynecology. And then, as soon as his residency was complete, he gave it up, and moved on to the mom-exposé business.

  This was a story he loved to tell, how he “gave up” gynecology. “I went into it for the steady money. It’s not just babies, you know. Women fall apart like they’re made in Taiwan. The whole female works is a model for planned obsolescence. They get lumps, rashes, discharges, gross smells. They bleed. Or they don’t bleed. Whichever, they worry about it. Their insides fall out, like the udder on a cow.

  “So I had steady work. No problem there. And it was interesting too, at first. Learning all the things that could go wrong.”

  At this point in the telling, the person being told—always female—would ask, What went wrong? Would ask something foolish like this, with a strong sense of dread, as if something indefinably important rode on his answer. For when he told the story he was always at his most charming—boyish, ingratiating, comradely. He would light the woman’s cigarette as he spoke, or freshen her drink, or wink at her, and in every way indicate that he liked her, wouldn’t at that moment wish to be anywhere but where he was. A man who liked women, a man comfortable with women. A man who paid attention to women.

  The woman who had his full attention at the moment would ask, What went wrong? Why did you give up your practice? Just as she had been led to do.

  He would look down at his lap, blink rapidly like an anxious girl (like his mother), sigh, appear to make up his mind about something, look up at his companion with kind, honest eyes. “I could make up a long involved answer to that, but it would just be so much bullshit. The truth is…I came into the office late one morning, late from hospital rounds, but it was an ordinary workday, and I went in to see my first patient, an ordinary patient, in for an ordinary checkup, an ordinary smear. And she was a normal looking woman in good health, and pleasant and quite intelligent even. Good sense of humor. Nice lady. And she had on the little paper tent, and I got her to scoot down and spread her knees, and I got on the gloves and got out the speculum, just like always, and we were chatting all the while, interesting stuff about her work—she was a lawyer—and she smelled nice, I remember, the way career gals tend to do, they use an expensive talcum, a nice considerate scent. And everything was, you know, ordinary. And then I inserted the speculum.” Here he would pause. “And I really looked at it. It was like it was the first time, you know? All I can tell you is, I had this flash. Zap! And I suddenly knew.”

  Knew what? asks the patsy.

  He would smile then, sadly, and shrug, and hold out his hands to her in supplication, for moral support, often getting her nodding agreement before he opened his mouth. “I just knew. That it really is never too late.
That I could change my life. That money isn’t everything. The whole megillah, you know?”

  I don’t understand…

  He would stutter a little, as though frustrated, and his voice would rise with evangelistic zeal. “That I could just get out! That I could walk away from it! Start fresh! That I didn’t have to live like that! That no one has to live like that!”

  And the woman would shut up, try to smile, continue nodding, mechanically, as though indeed agreeing that no one has to live like that, and often she would hug her stomach reflexively, as though holding in her repulsive “female works” with her hands alone.

  The most chilling thing about the whole performance being, of course, that the performance, the assault, was obviously the reason he became a gynecologist in the first place. Abigail never did believe this. “You’re crazy,” she said. “I’m the one who knows men, remember? I’m never wrong, and I’m always right, and you just don’t like him and you won’t admit it.” Well, she had always been right until now, but this was a man I knew and understood, from the beginning, to my sorrow, and she was wrong now, and I knew without a doubt, as well as I know my own name, that this creature so despised and feared his mother, and all women, that he applied to medical school, studied for six years, interned for two, worked for three more, built up a small beginning practice, attended medical conventions, bought malpractice insurance, all of it, just so he could entice women at parties to sit still and listen to him tell how he gave it all up because no one has to live like that.

  “That’s insane,” Abigail said. “He’d have to be some kind of monster.”

  “He is,” I said.

  She studied me. “You want him too,” she said. “My God, it’s finally happened. It’s you. Well, Dorcas…” She looked away from me for a long time and held herself still. “You can’t have him,” she said. “I know it isn’t fair. But this one is different for me too. And you can’t have him.”

  “He’s already made you crazy,” I said. I left the room, then, the house. I was shaking. I wasn’t sure of anything, except that he was some kind of a monster.

  The only motel in Frome is the Howard Johns. It used to be a Howard Johnson’s, and when they lost the franchise they sold it, in pretty decrepit condition, to Sippy Siniscalchi (who saved my sister’s behind in 1953). Sippy just painted the tile roof turquoise and whacked three letters off the neon sign, and voilà!

  No one ever understood why Howard Johnson’s chose Frome in the first place, or why it survived as long as it did. Frome lies smack in the middle of the Providence-Willimantic route, which is to say, nowhere. We have an interstate highway in Rhode Island, and we are a microscopically small state, and yet a great deal of Rhode Island is practically inaccessible. Like Frome.

  At any rate, the survival of the Howard Johns is no mystery at all. All you have to do is drive by on any Saturday or Sunday morning, and you’ll notice the parking lot choked with cars bearing R.I. license plates. This can mean only One Thing, as it is literally impossible to be so far from home in Rhode Island that you have to put up somewhere for the night. You can’t drive for an hour in any direction without crossing into Connecticut or Massachusetts, or driving into the Bay.

  The night of our apocalyptic meeting, Conrad Lowe was staying with the DeVilbisses. The next day he took a room at the Howard Johns motel.

  In short order a young female Journal-Bulletin reporter came around to interview the famous author of The Violet Angel, Corinna Gabriel, and The Mantis. I clipped the interview and kept it on file here, in my secret desk drawer. I thought I was gathering evidence about the man. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but it seemed at the time a worthy task. In the end, when Abigail became notorious, it was joined by masses of clippings from newspapers all over the country. Slobby Hilda, uninterested in mere facts, makes no reference to the interview; doubtless she was too busy sharing my sister’s feelings to look it up.

  The reporter, a doughty young woman named Sheila O’Bannion, starts out by asking how long Conrad is planning to stay in Frome. “At least,” he says, “until I finish my current novel.” Sheila dutifully elicits the information that his new book has the working title Night of the Gorgon, and is going to be “a chiller in the Mantis tradition.”

  “Is that, more or less, the Stephen King tradition?” she asks pertly.

  “No,” he responds, impatiently brushing back a forelock, which seems to have a life of its own, “it is exactly in the Stephen King tradition.”

  At this point Sheila begins to lose control over the interview:

  And how do you think your work compares with King’s?

  It’s even worse.

  How did you happen to choose our state?

  I was kicked out of New York City.

  [Sheila might have gotten testy at this point, because she has “his hazel eyes twinkling” as he says this, and, a line later those same eyes “dancing merrily,” punishing him with clichés. Either that or she was on drugs. His eyes were moist enough, I’m sure, and alert and lively, in the sense that fire is lively, and he certainly had a penetrating stare. But he was no more capable of twinkling than a Komodo dragon.]

  I am persona non grata in New York City. My publishers love me, but I am unwelcome at parties.

  Why?

  I make myself obnoxious.

  On purpose?

  [At this point he was quiet “for a long moment, as though making up his mind about something.” This is the same pause he always used just before dropping his stink-bomb on the “female works.”]

  It’s the women, really, I can’t stomach New York women.

  Oh, come on. You’re talking about five million people.

  I’m talking fifty, five hundred people, tops. I don’t know five million people. Do you? New York women are idiots. They’re pushy, trend-happy, promiscuous, and pathetic. They live in depressing apartments and spend all their money on terrible clothes. They wear too much makeup. They have cigarette breath. They are shrill. They’re all Jewish.

  [Eeeeek!] You can’t say that!

  I just did. What you mean is, you can’t print that.

  [At this point we get a dialogue-free interlude, in which his nicotine-stained fingers play with various items and his amazing autonomous hair does some more tricks.]

  Do you plan to be obnoxious here, Mr. Lowe?

  [His eyes twinkle to beat the band.] I don’t like to make too many plans. Spontaneity is my middle name.

  You seem to be implying that Rhode Island is no more than a dumping ground, where you end up when you get kicked out of the majors. [Atta girl!]

  Is that a question?

  Well, no, but surely the question is implicit.

  Really? What is it?

  Well, do you really want to say that coming here is a step down for you?

  What do you mean, “do I want to say it”? What are you asking for? Truth or consequences?

  Well, I guess I’m asking for the truth.

  You guess?

  Mr. Lowe, are you a misogynist?

  I beg your pardon?

  You have that reputation.

  I do?

  Of being a misogynist.

  In New York City.

  Well, yes.

  Well, no wonder! In New York City I am a misogynist! There’s your answer.

  What about Rhode Island women?

  Now you’re talking!

  Well, do you plan to, do you think, what do you think of Rhode Island women?

  I’ve only met a handful so far. You’re nice.

  [At this point the reporter “succumbed to his boyish charm and burst into gales of laughter.” This is so hard to comprehend that one wonders if, while thus deranged, she succumbed in some other way.]

  Seriously, Sheila, [he finally says, laying his finger aside of his nose] I came here to your lovely state, and to this gentle, pastoral place, for the peace and quiet I require for my work. I very much look forward to making this place my home, and meeting as many
people as I can, women and men. I intend that our relationship be amicable, fruitful, and long-lived.

  [Whereupon he ushered Sheila to the motel door with “easy gallantry” and paused with her at her car, looking up at the sky, squinting and shading his eyes.]

  Storm’s coming. How are the storms here?

  Pretty good, actually.

  Great. I love bad weather.

  And Sheila drove off with his tagline ringing in her ears and the strong conviction that “whatever happens, Frome will never be quite the same again.”

  Chapter Ten

  Abigail Gets What's Coming to Her

  Hilda titles this chapter “Abby in Love,” and is for once right about something. Conrad Lowe was Abigail’s first true love.

  The mature Abigail, that is. When she was sixteen, Abigail thought she was in love with Everett Esser. They kept steady company for a month or so, long enough for her to get pregnant, anyway. He was a sandy-haired boy with glasses and a dimpled chin, a bright kid with a weak character. A romantic. He used to call her his “woman,” and Abigail told me he had forgiven her her past indiscretions.

  I watched them together once, in a crowd of kids at Scarborough Beach, and she was unpacking the sandwiches and he was pouring the punch; and they were encapsulated in that aura of intimacy and exclusivity that young couples cast about themselves like a toreador’s flashy cape. She was playing wife, he was playing husband, and they were both full of shit. Had Everett lived he would have clung to his illusions for, perhaps, a couple of years. I’ll give him credit for that. He was very young. But Abigail, she was just trying the whole thing on for size. When she got the news of his ridiculous death there was a moment of genuine pity, but that was it. What followed at the funeral was of course theatrics. Her farewell performance. Love, for Abigail at sixteen, was a big hog wallow, and when he died—and not a moment too soon—she went to the showers.