Fortunate Lives

by Robb Forman Dew

  When they reached a natural summit, Dinah’s face was flushed and she was out of breath. She sank down to sit on the ground, bracing herself against the trunk of an enormous spruce, and looked out on the valley. She hadn’t climbed this hill, she realized, in five or six years. “This seems pretty invigorating to me,” she said to Martin, who hadn’t sat down, and she looked up at him. “Can we stop for a little while?” she asked. “Or you can go ahead. This is a wonderful view, and I’m out of shape. I need to catch my breath.” She was apologetic, because Martin seemed to be impatient to go on. He probably had work to do.

  He lowered himself to the ground beside her, his back against the tree, and the powerful scent of evergreens enveloped them. Dinah was always amazed, whenever she paid attention to this landscape, at the notion of the violent ages of geological activity that had resulted in the sanguine rolling hills and modest-sized but ancient mountains. It astounded her to remember that these gentle hills had been thrust violently from five miles beneath the earth’s surface twenty thousand years ago, their spires and peaks sculpted and softened by glaciers and fifteen thousand years of erosion and weather. Now they undulated in benign waves of hills and valleys under a furze of brilliant green grass where black-and-white-spotted Holsteins grazed over the landscape like little wooden child’s toys spread out on green felt.

  “You were thinking about Toby, weren’t you?” Martin asked her. “In the parking lot?”

  She looked at him in surprise. “No, not really.” She didn’t want to talk about Toby’s death. She thought that with David’s recent departure they were both susceptible to opportunistic sorrow, as if a flu had been going around and their white counts were low.

  “Well, you were.” Martin was insistent.

  “Not only Toby… Those two children… the dates on the gravestones. I’d never read them before. They were both about two and a half years old. I was wondering if it was any easier—if it was a different kind of grief, somehow—to lose such a young child.”

  Martin was silent. They both kept their eyes on the landscape, and Duchess came loping down the slope and sank down next to Martin, panting even in the cool weather.

  Dinah said, “I don’t think it would make any difference. It would be just as terrible.”

  Martin nodded. He thought so, too. “You know,” he said, “I still keep wondering if there wasn’t some way I could have avoided that wreck. I’ve gone over it and over it. I was so distracted….”

  “If you could have avoided it?” Dinah’s voice rose a little in consternation. “Don’t even think about that, Martin. Of course you couldn’t have avoided it. That’s not fair to yourself—it’s not even fair to me—for you to try to… oh… take on the responsibility.” Dinah knew that the wreck that killed Toby was nobody’s fault, but in spite of herself she held herself accountable. She constantly fought off this absurd idea, but nevertheless she had been his mother.

  “I know. I know. But I can’t help it. If I had checked my rearview mirror…”

  “What could you have done?” Dinah stood up and brushed the spruce needles off her slacks. “There was a car in front of you. You were caught. It was just bad luck. That’s all.”

  Martin stood up, too, but Duchess lay there looking at them imploringly. “God, luck,” and he bent to pick up a stick, waving it at Duchess to tempt her along. When he tossed it far ahead of them, Duchess rose and went lumbering after it. “But I was distracted, Dinah. Toby was so excited. He kept leaning forward, grabbing the back of my seat. It made me… cross. You remember how he sometimes would get so carried away? How he just didn’t pick up on when to stop.” They were walking side by side on the level ground, and Martin put his hand to his forehead and brought it down across his face, as though it were unbearable to have vision, as though he were pulling a shade. “He was so excited about scoring that goal in the scrimmage.”

  “What?” Dinah said, suddenly alert.

  “In the soccer game. He was so excited. You know how Toby always talked with his hands? He was distracting me. I’d told him to calm down, but he wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Martin. You never told me that Toby scored a goal in that soccer game.”

  “I must have. I’m sure I did… he was really good at soccer.”

  “You never even told me that he was good at soccer. He used to get so nervous about going to practice. You never told me he scored a goal that day. He hadn’t scored a goal before that, had he?” They had reached the narrow path that they would have to descend single file, and Dinah reached out and detained Martin by holding on to the crook of his elbow.

  “No. Well, not in Group Three soccer. He’d just been moved up that year.” Martin was distracted from his brooding by this curiosity on Dinah’s part. “He was pretty young for that group, but he was one of their best players. He was the youngest kid on the team. He was a good athlete.”

  Dinah was still for a moment. Then she pulled Martin closer to her and reached her head up to kiss him lightly on the cheek. “We’d better go ahead. I don’t hear Duchess anywhere.”

  “She won’t leave the path,” Martin said, turning and preceding Dinah down the hill.

  She followed him slowly, tantalized by this new way to understand Toby’s death. She had always thought that the tragedy of the death of children is that they haven’t had a chance to complete any of the natural cycles of their lives, and therefore it strikes a universal chord of injustice. Their lives seem incomplete to the survivors. But now she thought about the whole of Toby’s life. Maybe it had been happily complete in that very instant before his death. There he had been: a hero in his own mind. He had been gesticulating and excited and pleased, and then his life had ended. Of course, she couldn’t let go that easily; she would forever grieve for all that Toby hadn’t had a chance to accomplish, or attempt to accomplish. But at least she could feel a certain relief at knowing that the greatest sorrow of Toby’s death was for her and Martin to bear, that it had never, for an instant, weighed heavily on Toby himself. And she and Martin would be all right, the two of them. When they reached the bottom of the hill, she linked her arm through Martin’s. This new bit of knowledge about the mystery of Toby’s life—and his death—was something she would bring forth and examine again and again, for the rest of her life.

  She turned her mind to the problem of what she should fix for dinner. Ever since she had discovered the wonderful bakery on Carriage Street when they first arrived in West Bradford, she had stopped doing any baking herself. “I never bake,” she would say, “because the house slants.” She intended to be slightly amusing, but she also meant it as an explanation. They had moved to West Bradford at the height of a wave of domestic zeal.

  “I’d like to get some bread at The Whole Grain Elevator,” Dinah said as they made their way down the path and circled back through the museum parking lot. “Why don’t we walk down to Carriage Street? You can hold Duchess while I run in and see if they have any of their oatmeal bread left. We can have tomato sandwiches for dinner.” They continued on, with Duchess bobbing between them, and occasionally they had to pause and unwrap her from around their legs. They made their way haltingly along the shortcut down Marchand’s Drive.

  Dinah bought two loaves of oatmeal bread, a half dozen blueberry muffins, and eight apricot squares. When she came out of the shop, laden with two bakery boxes and a large bag to hold the bread, she found Martin chatting with Nat Kaplan. “I always like to see the students back in town,” Nat was saying. “After three months of tourists they never fail to cheer me up, especially now that I’m retired and don’t have to teach them.” They all laughed, and Nat stepped around her, courteously taking her elbow so as not to jostle her as he passed by to enter the bakery himself.

  Dinah smiled in acknowledgment when she saw Martin glance at all her parcels. “I shouldn’t ever be allowed in there alone. Everything they have is wonderful. I think it’s the real reason Bradford and Welbern is so popular.” She handed the bread to Mar
tin. “I’ll have to freeze some of this stuff. I’ve gotten used to having so much food on hand for David’s friends. Sarah likes these apricot squares, but she won’t even be home for dinner tonight. She and her boyfriend are cooking spaghetti at his house.”

  She and Martin were in no hurry, and they strolled the length of Carriage Street and turned onto the sidewalk along Route 2. “Do they have boyfriends, still?” Martin asked. “Is it anything like it was when we were in the eighth grade? I always think of Christie as David’s girlfriend, but I don’t know how he thinks of her.”

  “I’m not sure,” Dinah said. “I don’t think they ‘date’ exactly. It’s more like they socialize in herds. God, don’t ever let Sarah know that I called Scott her boyfriend…. I can’t tell what kind of relationship they have. Sarah told me last week that she was going out with Scott. I felt like a fool. I said, ‘Where are you going?’ and she gave me that sort of look. You know that new kind of ironic expression she gets? Sort of cynical? It means that they’re going together, I guess. Going steady? I didn’t press it. It’s exhausting to have to explain your ignorance all the time to your own children.”

  They had reached the intersection of Routes 2 and 7 at the very worst time of day. With Martin holding the bread and Duchess’s leash, and Dinah balancing the two boxes, they made several false starts across the road, leaping back each time a car came racing around the curve. Dinah had a memory, just then, of being in the third grade and playing jump rope at recess with the girls while the boys played softball out in the far schoolyard.

  Two girls turned the long rope, and a line of jump-ropers formed, one at a time, gauging the rhythm of the rope hitting the dust and then arching up into the sunlight. You had to judge it exactly right in order to “run in,” and Dinah felt that way all of a sudden, trying to cross the road. It was as if she were standing before the sweeping rope, rocking her body back and forth to match it to the rhythm of the slap, swish, of the circling rope, her hands held out slightly for balance and in anticipation before taking those few running steps and being caught up in the rhymes and turns and acrobatics of jump-roping.

  Each time she had “run in” she had experienced that little pulse of adrenaline, not at all unlike the slight exhilaration she felt as she and Martin made a run for it when a large black car paused to give them the right-of-way, its huge engine thrumming. They dashed across the street and reached the sidewalk with Duchess at their side, their bags and boxes intact. She was pleased and pleasantly energized as she and Martin and Duchess strolled slowly along their own street, past the sweeping estate across the way and the various homes fashioned from a carriage house and outbuildings, past the Davidsons’ renovated barn, and on to their own house at the end of Slade Road.

  Fortunate Lives

  A NOVEL BY

  Robb Forman Dew

  A Reading Group

  Guide

  A Conversation with

  Robb Forman Dew

  How did you begin to write novels? Did you always want to be a writer?

  I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately—why I became a writer, that is. I used to think it was because I had something urgent to say. But I actually started writing before I could even write. I don’t know how old I was—four or five—and I would fill pages with wavy lines as though I were writing words. So maybe it’s a genetic imperative of some sort. I don’t think I’ve ever asked anyone why he or she became a painter, because I assumed it was simply a deep pleasure because that person was talented. But, of course, I’m sure painting is filled with the same euphoria and misery as writing.

  I grew up in a family where everyone seemed to write, or seemed to want to write. I remember being truly startled when a friend of mine avoided a class in college because she would have to write essays, and instead she took a science course. It was the first time I really understood that loving to read—my friend was a great reader—really didn’t have that much to do with wanting to write. And I’ve come to a few conclusions about why people do write. I think that writers really have to write or they become unhappy—even depressed and disoriented. And I think that they’re lucky if they also have talent, but whether talented or not anyone who writes is—for the time the actual writing is going on—imagining that he or she is imposing on some imagined reader a worldview. It’s an unconscious attempt at seduction, I think.

  When did you start writing your first novel, Dale Loves Sophie to Death? How long did that novel take you to write?

  Oh, I think that I was growing increasingly frustrated with my inability to write good short stories. I was getting some of them published, but I knew they weren’t right. I was so furious at myself at one point—for finishing a story and knowing that while some of the writing was good the story didn’t work—that I picked up my typewriter and put it in the middle of the driveway so that when my husband came home that evening in the dark he would run over it! Of course, about a half hour later I rushed out and saved it—I couldn’t have afforded another and it had occurred to me, too, that it might ruin our car. Also, of course, how on earth could I have explained it to my husband? But I think my idea was that if my typewriter got run over by a car then it would hardly be my fault if I didn’t write.

  During my twenties and early thirties I struggled with short stories, and they were published in some wonderful journals, and those editors were extremely encouraging. I began the first chapter of Dale Loves Sophie to Death as a story. And I was pretty pleased with the ending for once, but I didn’t send it out right away, and I began another story which in the back of my head I knew was not a story; it was a second chapter. But I was too terrified to admit it. By the time I had four chapters I admitted to myself that I was writing a novel.

  How did the response to Dale Loves Sophie to Death—and, in particular, winning the National Book Award—affect your writing, your career, your life?

  I was thirty-five when Dale was published and thirty-six when I won the Book Award, and for about five days I was simply elated. It was like being the homecoming princess at Westdale Junior High School. I felt just as Sally Field must have felt when she received her second Academy Award and said, “You like me! You really like me!” And then—since I had won it—it began to seem to me not all that special. And the following year when I was asked to be one of many judges for the award I realized that my book was probably a choice that was a compromise for most of the judges. It really didn’t change my career as far as I know, although it probably made it easier to get publishers to read my manuscripts. But it didn’t alter the way I write or cause me to worry about succeeding with my next book.

  In Fortunate Lives, your third novel, you chose to write again about the family at the center of Dale Loves Sophie to Death. Did you always know that you’d return to the Howells family?

  You know, I really can’t remember. I know they stayed in my mind, but my second book, The Time of Her Life, was the obverse of Dale. It was about a less healthy family, and I certainly wasn’t thinking of the Howellses then. The Howellses were moving right along with me through my life, though. They were learning the most terrible things you can learn—which were passions and terrors that I only knew through them—and yet in the grand scheme of things they were incredibly lucky. I believe it was the irony of their being safe and comfortable—enviable to so many people on the earth—while suffering a loss that is as bad as anything that can happen to anyone that intrigued me about the Howellses. Well, I guess I was bound to return to them. And I think that in the trilogy I’m at work on now all the families from my books will end up knowing each other or possibly being related. I know there’s some sort of connection.

  In Dale Loves Sophie to Death and in Fortunate Lives, the novels’ respective settings—Enfield, Ohio, and West Bradford, Massachusetts—are almost like characters in the books. Can you talk about the importance of place in your novels?

  It’s something I don’t think about much except for the actual town or neighborhood—the immediate surr
oundings, the weather. When I first started writing, the South was the setting for all my stories—I grew up in Louisiana. But it was like struggling to grow while being suffocated by kudzu. I grew up during the civil rights movement—my high school didn’t integrate until I was a junior, in 1963. I cared passionately about social justice and race relations, and when I realized that I could not write about the South without tackling those issues on some level I switched locales. I wanted my stories to happen in a place that didn’t need to be explained, because although I’m politically active, politics is unbearably distracting to me when I write fiction.

  What are your favorite books, books that have influenced you, or books you enjoy recommending to readers?

  Well, the usual suspects, I suppose. Austen, James, Virginia Woolf. And I’ve discovered that when I read many books when I was young I knew they were wonderful but I missed so much of what was brilliant about them. I’m rereading Eudora Welty right now. Delta Wedding. She’s so good that I didn’t realize just how brilliant she was until this reading. How it could have escaped me is mysterious to me. She has such tact and is so careful, but this book is like a pointillist painting. There are so many ways to understand her characters.

  I was enormously affected by Fitzgerald, who’s so visual a writer, and by Peter Taylor, who has exquisite phrasing. I worked very hard for a long time trying to achieve his sense of ease—the sense that the story already exists and is just being unraveled for you. But the book that made me want to write—and which I came upon, oddly enough, in the Baton Rouge bus station when I was taking a bus to visit my cousins in Natchez—was The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead. When I got back to Baton Rouge it turned out that my mother had just read it as well. It’s an astonishing book. It’s a masterpiece, and it always seems to me the opposite, in a way, of War and Peace, which I also love for all sorts of reasons but especially for the wonderful story. Each of those books gives you an entirely believable world, but Stead’s starts wide and becomes so amazingly intense that finally it’s like a laser of compressed emotion. Tolstoy explodes into a universe and gets wider and wider.