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

by Jincy Willett

  Excuse me?

  …don’t panic…just checking…you’ve used a new shampoo. Your hair smells of almonds.

  It’s Hilda’s. I ran out of Prell.

  Did you.

  Look, big deal, I’m a perceptible object.

  You’re wonderful.

  I most certainly am not.

  And I love your mind, I hold your inner self in the highest regard, but Dorcas baby, here you are. Look. See? There’s your shadow.

  …

  Dorcas?

  Six more weeks of winter.

  Aren’t you cute. I could never have gotten to your mind without my senses. So I ask again, how do you pull it off? Mental sensualism? [He burlesques this ridiculous word: sssen-ssyooallism. It is a gauntlet, a white-glove slap in the face.]

  …

  Now you’re pissed at me.

  I went to college too. You’re just playing with words. You’re wasting my time.

  I’m sorry. Sit down. I’m truly sorry.

  I was referring to the sensual experience of reading. The book is real, the chair I’m sitting in, the lightbulb is real, everything is three-D real. Whoopee. I read in time, okay? You win. The time is real. The time is gone. The time—

  Take it easy.

  I read Ray Bradbury when I was twelve years old, on a Congregational church retreat in Framingham, babysitting for the minister’s children in a freezing cold log cabin, late at night, while the others were singing around the campfire. I read by the light of a kerosene lantern, and the lantern grew dimmer and dimmer, until I could barely see, and the darker it got the scarier the story became, and then, upon the last line, the light went out. Something Wicked This Way Comes was the greatest book I ever read in my whole life. It is more real than the minister’s children, or Framingham, Massachusetts.

  Ethan Frome. I was eighteen, a freshman at Bates, alone on my dormitory floor over Thanksgiving break. Snow fell in big wet clumps, four days in a row, you never heard such silence.

  American Tragedy, I’m in the back seat of the car, we’re driving to Franconia Notch to look at the flume, whatever that is, Abigail is hungry and bored, demands to stop every hour for one thing or another, Father lectures us all on passing landmarks, and I’ve caught the edge of our car blanket in my rolled-up window and made myself a little cave. They fry Clyde Griffiths for having entertained a criminal thought. I am rapt and appalled. “The Old Man in the Mountain, Dorcas,” mourns my mother, “You’re missing it all.” The blanket is a tattered old strawberry quilt of our grandmother’s, I can see it still, with my eyes.

  Ditto Hunchback, same quilt, different destination, Quebec City, or Ausable Chasm, and when they pry Quasimodo from Esmerelda and his bones crumble into dust, I cry like a baby, a marble baby, Niobe. I don’t make one audible sound.

  All right.

  See how it works?

  I see. I do.

  These are my memories. This was my youth. This is my life.

  I believe you.

  Go to hell.

  In the end I suppose he did.

  Chapter Twenty

  Purgatory

  Hilda’s antepenultimate chapter is called “Hunger.” (A good plain title, for Hilda.) She covers over a year in fifteen pages, taking the story from their departure from Agincourt in late 1977 to the brink of February 13, 1979. The details are vague, because the DeVilbisses were absent most of that time, and Abigail apparently wasn’t very forthcoming. I can actually sympathize; she didn’t confide in me much, either.

  What basically happened was that after Guy and Hilda left for France, things fell apart. I wasn’t expecting that; I thought we would continue as before, only without the annoying hosts. There was no reason I could see to alter our daily routine. Yet immediately the atmosphere turned sour. Abigail and Conrad, returning from dropping them off at Logan, were at each other’s throats as they slammed the Plymouth doors. Undoubtedly he had started it, whatever it was, but my sister was giving it back to him, and this was new. She wasn’t going to bend any more. That night she sent us out to the Blue Moon, just to get a bit of peace. He was in a foul, uncommunicative mood. Not rude specifically, but cold, distracted. This had a shameful effect on me: I found myself trying to amuse him, and when I realized this, and even in my ethically compromised state, I was disgusted. Perhaps, I said, it’s time for me to move back to my own home. This roused him to a semblance of his former charm, and the evening ended amicably. But it was the beginning of a new era, the last era. The Bad Time.

  He was chronically nasty with Abigail, to little effect, which worsened his mood. He had always been able to hurt her. But now she was too busy exercising and starving to pay much attention to him.

  Every morning before sunrise, she would jog to Fort Mansfield and back, and at lunchtime she would drag out the rowing machine she had ordered from Hammacher-Schlemmer and sweat through two soap operas. The rowing noise, a steady, rhythmic thunder, drove Conrad crazy, and he was always shouting at her to knock it off, Dorcas and I can’t concentrate, as though we were engaged in some great creative National-Book-Award–winning endeavor, instead of playing In the Manner of the Adverb and debating whether rye or bourbon made the perfect boilermaker.

  By Christmas she was truly thin. The exercise had tightened her skin, and for the first time since Anna she had a waist. She looked ten years older than me. Nobody was happy with the new Abigail. She took no pleasure that I could see in her hard-won slenderness. Instead of reveling in a new wardrobe she schlumped around the house in voluminous old clothes. Her hair was lank and often unwashed, and she didn’t bother with makeup. She was totally focused on shedding weight, but as an end in itself, rather than a bridge to some idyllic future.

  I was so worried about her that I surreptitiously made an appointment with Dockery Dick and tricked her into his office. When we pulled up she didn’t want to go in (“What is this? Another intervention? Shame on you.”), but went through with it anyway. I don’t think she had the energy to kick up more of a fuss. The visit was a disaster. The Stooge was delighted with her weight loss, not to mention her monogamous state, both of which he took as the gifts of a benevolent, intervening Christ, and the beaming lunkhead actually followed her back out into the waiting room to ask me if I wasn’t just so proud of my sister.

  Unhappiest of all was Conrad. The man thought he had issued an impossible challenge, and now he didn’t know what to do. That he could no longer insult her body drove him wild.

  I remained with the H. C. at Watch Hill for almost three more months, commuting to Squanto on weekdays, spending the occasional night in my own home with Anna, but always returning for the weekend. I stuck it out through Thanksgiving and Christmas and into the New Year. Anna came down for the school Christmas break, during which time everyone was civil, and she and I saw a snowy owl late one afternoon, perched atop the Flying Horse Carousel. After she left, the atmosphere became so noxious that I threatened more than once to decamp, and each time they stopped me. Not together: It wasn’t a concerted effort. They did nothing in concert. He always managed to behave agreeably for just as long as it took to change my mind. And Abigail needed me.

  One especially acrimonious night she followed me out to the car, which I had loaded up with my original suitcase and six paper bags full of accumulated odds and ends. “Look,” she said, “I know it’s rough. But it’ll just get worse if you leave.” She looked so negligible. There were hollows under her eyes, and I could not remember the last time I had heard her make so much as a wisecrack.

  “Come home with me,” I said.

  “You know I won’t.”

  “But I don’t know why.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Whatever’s going on here, it isn’t love. It isn’t even love-hate. I’m not just talking about him now. You too. The two of you loathe each other. I don’t know how you can stand this.”

  “You don’t know everything,” she said, patiently.

  “Did he send you out here?”
>
  “Of course not,” she said. “Yes,” she said, “but I’d have stopped you anyway. I need you,” she said.

  And of course I helped her unpack the car. But from then on I slept poorly, and spent more time with my sister than with him. I refused to jog, but I did walk behind her in the early mornings, before leaving for the library, and trained my binoculars as often on her diminishing form as on the winter birds. I began to feel as though I were shepherding my sister through some long, serious, possibly final illness. I stopped drinking.

  Probably of the three of us, Conrad suffered the most. He couldn’t taunt his wife anymore, and he couldn’t get lit up with me. And Guy and Hilda were gone. Despite his professed disregard for them, I think that in some odd way they functioned as his surrogate family. After his death we learned that he had mistresses stashed in all the major cities, three in southern California alone, but they were all more or less professionals, and not one seemed distraught at his passing. He simply had financial arrangements with them. In fact one of them wrote supportive letters to Abigail at the ACI, the gist of which was, the bastard had it coming to him. The point is, he had no friends. Only his literary agent came to the funeral, and he was just sniffing around after a fast postmortem buck. Guy and Hilda, as silly as they were, actually valued Conrad Lowe, and I think this meant more to him than he let himself believe.

  Now he had no family, no punching bag, and no drinking buddy, and he was not doing well. Many nights he disappeared until two or three in the morning. Twice we got late-night calls from the local constabulary, and we had to drive down to the Westerly police station and collect him. Two weeks into the new year he wrapped the Plymouth around a copper beech, and after that he was stuck inside with us, as I refused to let him take my car.

  One Sunday morning in early February I attempted to sneak out by myself for a solitary day at Squanto. I was halfway to the car when Abigail called to me from their bedroom window. I assured her that I’d be back by nightfall, but she insisted that I wait for her. I assumed Conrad was still asleep, but five minutes later they emerged together, too lightly dressed for the day. “Look,” I said, practically begging, “I need some time to myself. I just have to be alone.”

  Abigail threw two satchels into the back seat and followed them in. Conrad rode shotgun. “Lead on,” he said to me, and slammed the door.

  I drove for an hour in silence. After I crossed the Massachusetts line, Conrad asked where we were going. Montreal, I wanted to tell him. Halifax. Nunavut. “Purgatory Chasm,” I said, between my teeth.

  “Hey!” Abigail said. “That’s a great idea!” I could tell she was genuinely pleased. This might have placated me, had we been alone.

  “The Bishop Berkeley place, right?” asked Conrad, yawning. “Where he got struck by lightning and realized that the universe was chock full of nothing?”

  “That was the other Purgatory Chasm.”

  “There are two? What a magnificent state.”

  “You’re thinking of the one in Middletown. This one isn’t even in Rhode Island. And he did not hold that the universe was chock full of nothing.”

  “Essie S. Perkippy. I knew her well.”

  “We used to go to Purgatory Chasm all the time when we were kids,” Abigail said. “I love it there.”

  “So what’s the deal?” Conrad asked. “Is it an amusement park, or what?”

  “It’s just the Chasm,” Abigail said.

  “It’s chock full of nothing,” I said.

  “Whatever you say, ladies.”

  The day was overcast, the temperature hovering just above freezing, and ours was one of only five cars in the lot. We could hear, from across the road, children playing on the swings and slides, and the push carousel, where my sister always threw up and I did not. Abigail led us through a pine needle-carpeted grove to an old picnic table beside a brick cookout oven, and immediately began to examine the table’s underside. Sure enough, there was

  A.M.

  D.M.

  6/16/1949

  deeply etched with Father’s boy scout knife. I remember being astonished that he would enable us to deface public property, and how he took me by the hand and showed me around the picnic grounds, pointing out all the old initials and avowals of constant love. When I was still skeptical, he said, “Think of it as a kind of library.” Actually, it was more of an archaeological site, where you could piece together the mating habits and linguistic vagaries of vanished tribes. On the evidence of these tables and trees, it apparently hadn’t occurred to the ancient scribes to etch obscenities until the early 1960s, at which point the quality of the printing itself suffered a downturn. Unless somewhere in Southern New England there’s a “Robet Ahearn,” it appears that some of them didn’t know how to spell their own names. Or maybe they just grew fatigued.

  Abigail and I were enjoying identical flashbacks. There was something timeless about this place. We used to come here on hot humid summer days, while everyone else fled to Scarborough Beach and Point Judith, and here it was always cool and dry, and the air smelled of pine. They never modernized the playground, or widened the parking lot, and the rest of it was just a big rocky hole in the ground that had resisted change for at least fourteen thousand years, when the last Ice Age ended and unleashed a glacial torrent on a tectonic fault plane. The resulting deep jumble of boulders, spilling in a quarter-mile-long scar, is a pleasing anomaly in the surrounding Puritan landscape, the mysterious flamboyant red jigsaw piece in a sepia puzzle.

  I hadn’t packed anything to eat, since I hadn’t planned to come here in the first place. I had driven here because, in addition to being a childhood refuge, it was the longest day trip I could think of. As I watched them unpack their satchels I had a startlingly vivid mental picture of myself backing quietly away and driving off, abandoning them to their own devices in the primeval forest. It could be hours before they even realized I was gone. The way everything turned out, I probably should have gone ahead and done it.

  Abigail unpacked her usual depressing assortment of rabbit food, which she proceeded to ignore. Conrad had of course brought with him only liquid sustenance. I told him this was a state park, no drinking allowed, and he pointed to one of the green-painted wooden signs nailed high on a number of trees. “Loophole,” he said. The old signs read, as they always had,

  NO BEERS, WINES OR LIQUEURS ALLOWED

  For some reason, probably because “liqueur” is harder to spell than “liquor,” this misspelling had never annoyed me. I loved that over the decades these signs had been periodically repainted, and no one had corrected them.

  “Lucky for me,” he said, tearing the seal off a pint of Jim Beam, “I decided, at the last minute, not to go with the crème de banana.” He unpacked his leather binder, flattened it open on the picnic table, and regarded me expectantly.

  “I’m going for a hike,” I said.

  “Wait for me,” Abigail said.

  Conrad began to extricate himself from the table.

  “What are you people? Twelve? Five? Stupid?” Suddenly I was yelling. “Leave me alone! For pity’s sake!” I stalked off toward the chasm, then whirled around, fully expecting them both to be three feet behind me. They remained seated, each looking off in a different direction, neither at me. I hate to raise my voice. Hate it.

  At the north entrance the chasm descends abruptly, like a giant’s stone staircase. There are alcoves along the way, which looked like caves to us when we were small, and if you look up you can read more romantic protestations scratched high on the sheer rock walls, chiseled deep, their authors hanging by a thread. You have to admire that. When we were kids we used to scamper fearlessly from rock to rock, even Abigail, who wasn’t nearly as agile as I. On this day I found that I could still scamper here, fueled as I was by outrage and desperation. I went down and down, past Lovers’ Leap, Devil’s Pulpit, that unnamed crevice where Abigail had gotten her leg stuck and been rescued by a handsome park ranger.

  The chasm was mine alo
ne, all other visitors apparently opting for the playground, and as I descended I lambasted my tormentors in full voice, and they listened attentively to me. “It’s time, people,” I said, “to put up or shut up. Divorce or kill each other. Either way, leave me out of it.” I said, “I quit,” over and over and over again, and when I caught my breath I was at the base of the chasm, in the boulder field, where there was as much earth as stone. The ground was spongy, and stretched over much of it was a thin shroud of ice, fragile as a pressed leaf. I sat down on a mossy rock and immediately the damp cold entered my bones and I was shivering, and my throat was closing up again, as though I were about to sob, but I wasn’t, not any more, no more of that nonsense. I quit. I quit. I quit.

  Now they call them panic attacks. Maybe they were calling them that in 1978, but if so I had filed that term away with the Universal Choking Sign. To me a panic was a more or less rational response to a specific perceived threat. That day, at the bottom of Purgatory Chasm, I thought I was experiencing some sort of cardiac event. My heart, which should have slowed when I came to rest, banged in my ears, I was gulping for air for no good reason, and while attempting calmly to assess these symptoms I became terrified, again for no good reason. I had never been a fearful person, not even as a little child, but now I shuddered and gasped and whipped my head around, searching for the cause of my distress. There are no tigers in my native habitat, no bears either, but I felt stalked, staked out, hunted down, exposed to some piercing merciless eye. I had to get out of there, and yet I couldn’t move.

  They call it “fight or flight” too, and I probably would never have flown, would have remained transfixed until I blended with the rock, had the word vastation not popped into my head like a cartoon mouse come to save the day, and I began to know what this was, I could name it!, the James boys had it, William and Henry, sought spiritual remedies for it, it was a real, comprehensible event, and I was not dying, probably.