Ida Maclaird is turning to glass. Afraid of people, water, and his dead father, Midas Crook may as well be made of glass. In true fairy tale fashion, the two meet in a wood tinged with darkness, awkwardly blundering past social niceties and into love. Told in alternating points of view, The Girl with Glass Feet flits between Ida and Midas, weaving their stories in and around others: Midas’ father, a detached academic who commits suicide; Carl Maulsen, a Maclaird family friend still in love with Ida’s dead mother; Henry Fuwa, a solitary biologist caring for moth-winged bulls, hunting for other fairy tale creatures, once in love with Midas’ mother; and Emiliana Stallows, a natural therapist once in love with Carl.

While not based on any specific fairy tale, Shaw’s story explores elements common to many transformation tales, particularly Jorinda and Joringel. Like Jorinda, Ida is lured into a trap, (though hers is, in some part, of her own making), lingering, pitying, and readying herself for what lies ahead. Like Joringel, Midas struggles through woods until he comes upon a strange village, battles a witch, and ultimately comes to free his love. Stronger, more aggressive than Jorinda, Ida meets Midas halfway, drawing him into the castle, coaching him through his rescue.

Ida could almost as easily have been dying of cancer. But cancer is not as clean, as beautiful, and yet Ida’s glass is not beautiful. Shaw’s exploration of the dichotomy between the exquisiteness of her feet and the brutality of their effect is haunting, Ida’s grief for her lost self, believable. Her later acceptance of her fate and search for grace border on maudlin, though this is may be an entirely plausible response.

Where Ida is engrossing, Midas is not. His retreat into photography (observing rather than living) is a tired metaphor, and his interactions with other characters are slow and stilted, almost autistic in nature. His relationship with his employer and best friend, Gustav, is saccharine at best; Gustav’s treatment of Midas’ fear of touch is more deus ex machina than convincing character growth.

Shaw is a gifted writer. Atmosphere and character are painted with broad strokes then filled in with minute, pin-prick detail. But the story suffers from early chapter syndrome: the first few chapters are focused (insofar as a thoughtful, dreamlike, meandering story can be) and insightful, the descriptions of St. Hauda’s Land and moth-winged bulls enchanting. Yet somewhere after the fifth chapter, Shaw loses his way, plunging the reader into magic realism at its worst, giving us enough detail to pique curiosity, but not enough to enthrall. Moth-winged bulls and creeping glass soon fall into footnote territory, no more than a reminder that Midas and Ida’s love is transient, ethereal, and doomed. The pacing slows, the time between the reader’s discovery of Ida’s affliction and Midas’ discovery of it too great.“Thats” run rampant as an angry moth-winged bull; light “dazzles” off a surface; characters “oblige” rather than speak. In a less thoughtful, faster-paced work such flaws would be less noticeable, less irritating. Shaw’s story, however, hinges on the unhurried, contemplative bent of Midas, the forced slowing of Ida. As the story buillds–or rather crashes into–momentum, the point of view switches become quicker, the chapters shorter, a failed attempt at creating tension where there is none as Ida’s fate is clear within the first few chapters of the book. Midas and Ida each give in to violent actions as the Shaw attempts to speed the romantic process; toward the end, clunky sentences become the norm, the author’s early precision giving way to a rushed feeling that doesn’t agree with the story.

Written in third person limited, Shaw’s story is–somewhat fittingly–removed from its players. Shaw’s characters are well-described, their voices clear and distinct. Were this a two person narrative, Shaw’s prose would be spot on. As a multi-person story, though, the clear, distinct voices war for attention, their subplots shouting for deeper treatment. Carl Maulsen’s obsession with Ida’s mother and Henry Fuwa’s weak struggles to Do The Right Thing are so scarcely dealt with that they fail to give context. Emiliana Stallows’ short chapter serves no purpose save putting Midas’ friend Gustav in the right place at the right time in another deus ex machina moment. And yet there are hints of something deeper, some thought-provoking turning point in Carl’s, Henry’s, even Emiliana’s chapters that beg to be explored.

Though I’m normally hesitant to pigeonhole books, The Girl with Glass Feet is definitely a niche story. Shaw’s characters, are alternately satisfying (Gustav’s daughter, Denver, who deserves a story of her own) and frustrating (Henry Fuwa, and Midas’ mother, Evaline). Fairy tale lovers, philosophers, and thoughtful readers may enjoy its wandering nature; readers in search of another Great and Terrible Beauty will be disappointed.

Oscar Banks is cookie-cutter perfect. He’s a straight A student, is dating the prettiest, smartest girl in Candor High, and has more friends than a parrot at a pirate convention. He also has a secret – he’s the only one who knows about the “messages”–subliminal commands coded into the elevator music that floods every house, street, and store in town–and his father’s attempt to turn Candor into the ideal small American town. Armed with carefully created messages of his own, Oscar runs his own underground railroad, shuttling the richest kids out of Candor before the messages can take hold. Enter Nia Silva, a black-clad skateboarding artist–and the girl Oscar can’t stop thinking about. How can he save her, when saving means letting go?

Candor’s great strength is its use of the here and now. Bachorz’ take on a subliminally-controlled-small-town-Florida is, perhaps, a little too realistic. The town’s perfection is a clever honey-trap: messages such as “the great are never late” and “respectful space in every place” pepper the book, keeping Oscar and other teens in check. But the book’s structure is such that the plot-driving secrets are apparent from the get-go. Moreover, as soon as Nia, the story’s love interest and damsel in distress skateboards on to the scene, the band-aid’s off. The rest of the story becomes almost immediately apparent: boy tries to save girl, girl refuses, boy tries again, girl gets sucked in, boy saves her. While the ending is not quite so neat as my summary, it’s not too far off.

Of course, Candor can be forgiven for its plot’s not too subtle twists–many books are actually stronger for following an obvious course. Think of Austen’s classic, Pride and Prejudice–from the moment Miss Bennet meets Mr. Darcy, the reader knows they’ll end up professing undying love in a matter of pages. Even the title makes it obvious. And that, of course, leads to the ultimate conversation between author and reader:

Reader: Oh, they are so going to get it on.
Austen: Yes, madam, I know I have made it abundantly clear Miss Bennet and Mr. Darcy shall wed.
Reader: But how? And why? Why would she even look at him? He called her ugly!
Austen: If you truly wish to find out, I suppose you shall just have to read the book.

While Bachorz’ attempt at drawing us into the hows, whys, and whens of the outcome isn’t as smooth as Austen’s, it’s still compelling. Her style is strong, and heavy on the imagery. And while I’m not usually drawn to novels written in first person present tense, it lends immediacy to the story, helping us to focus still more on the story’s questions, while drawing attention away from the ending. Oscar’s concern for Nia never wavers, and Bachorz does an excellent job of reinforcing his motivation without banging on about it. In terms of straight writing skill and style, the book is the debut every writer wants: cool but not slick, well-written but not flowery.

Yet Candor isn’t all sweetness and light (or whatever the dystopian equivalent would be). Some sections feel forced; after the climax, the pacing becomes wobbly, and the tension trickles away, making the last scene between Oscar and Nia weaker than it could be. Some of Oscar’s lines are off: “her smile looks tasty and right” was corny enough to make me want to slap him and snap, “She’s a girl, not a bowl of cornflakes!”

Bachorz’ story is also very single-minded: we focus only on Oscar and his relationships. Her treatment, or better, dissection of Oscar’s relationship with his father, Campbell, is wonderfully apt, and Bachorz uses the absence of Oscar’s mother and brother to great effect. Yet, this single-character treatment means there are no real subplots in the book–every aspect of the story feeds back into Oscar’s, leaving the world incomplete. True, a carefully controlled small town peopled by carefully controlled families doesn’t exactly need Orion slave girls or Daleks to push the story along (although subliminally-messaging Daleks could end in awesome). But the book’s supporting cast–Mandy, the bossy beauty queen and Sherman, Oscar’s fat, mommy’s boy client–react to Candor’s influence too. In fact, Mandy’s not-quite realization of the town’s purpose, and her attempt to play it, is one of the most interesting parts of the book. The lack of subplots is somewhat ameliorated by Bachorz’ supplementary material–as part of her promotion, she’s produced a dedicated in-story Candor website,  complete with podcasts and other related content.

Most irritating, though, is Bachorz’ treatment of women. Nia, for all her spunk, is a damsel in distress. And Oscar’s reluctance to tell her the truth “because he doesn’t want to lose her” only reinforces the idea: by not giving her a choice, he pigeonholes her, and, worse, tricks her into being his girlfriend. At no point does Nia take real action for herself–her emancipation hinges on Oscar. Her personality doesn’t change, and she lacks character growth–in short, Nia is an object, a means to an end–someone for Oscar to attach to, to drive his story forward. Likewise, Mandy is a foil for Nia, though her story is even worse–Oscar’s actions end in her being forced to date whiny rich kid Sherman, with little remorse on either Sherman or Oscar’s part. And while it’s possible Bachorz’ intent was to demonstrate, again, the deeper power of the messages, the story reads otherwise.

Despite its obvious riffing on other dystopias, Candor’s grounding in reality–subliminal messaging is a real and powerful thing–lends the story a certain creepiness other YA dystopias are lacking (Yes, Uglies, Pretties, Specials I’m looking at you). Its shortcomings, while frustrating, were not enough to keep me from finishing the book and appreciating the ending. And Bachorz’ strong, clear writing is definitely worth the time. I’ll be keeping an eye out for her next novel.

“What sound do goats make?” Ginnie asked.

Roger, reclining in his lounge, didn’t look up from the book resting on his expanse of belly.

“We’ll get one of those little hut contraptions,” Ginnie went on. “You know, like a playpen with a top? Set it in the shade.” She pointed to a clutch of palm trees. “And she’ll need one of those inner tube things, the kind with a seat, and some of that special baby sun block.”

“Waste of money,” Roger said, turning a page. “Regular sun block will do. And she might be walking by next year. Won’t like being cooped up in a cage.”

“Not a cage,” Ginnie said, angling her chair away from him, to face the sun. “You know what I mean, like a pup tent. Kids always like tents. Remember how Maxine used to beg me to drape a blanket over the dining room table? She’d spend the whole day under there if I’d let her.”

This was the first time in years Ginnie and Roger were alone on the island, Maxine back home with her husband Stu and the new baby. It had been touch and go if they’d make the trip this year. First Maxine was laid up with high blood pressure, so Ginnie’d had to take off from work to go up there and help out. Stu tried, but he only knew how to cook chicken stir-fry, with red sauce over spaghetti or teriyaki sauce over rice. Then the doctors decided to take the baby early, and there was the jaundice that lasted long past it was supposed to.

But everything was fine now, thank God, the baby fattening up, nursing like a champ, Maxine whipping out a boob at a moment’s notice, so Roger couldn’t bring himself to look at her below the neck. I was better off not knowing what everything looked like under there, he said.

Judy, Ginnie’s boss at the bookstore, told Ginnie to take her scheduled vacation, never mind all the time she’d just taken off for the baby. Judy knew Ginnie was no good to anyone without her week in Paradise.

They booked the same week every year, used to pull Maxine out of school if her vacation didn’t fall the second week of February. In the fifth grade, they actually got a phone call from her teacher, suggesting they leave Maxine home with a friend, as if her life would be ruined by missing a week of multiplication and fifth grade spelling. But Madame Jeanette expected them, reserved their cottage a year in advance, took next year’s deposit at the end of last year’s week when they turned in their keys – cash, Roger would peel from his wallet the bills he’d stashed before leaving home. No need for cancelled checks or credit card receipts. In Paradise? he’d say, a handshake and trust all that was needed between him and Madame Jeanette after all these years.

She always saved them the same cottage, plenty of room for noisy children, although there’d only ever been Maxine, directly across from the beach, pink and soft underfoot, no need for shoes. Madame Jeanette advertised a B&B, although they’d learned early on there’d only be the occasional homemade breakfast, if Madame Jeanette happened to be in the mood.

We have ze same name, Madame Jeanette had said that very first year, Ginnie and Roger also alone then, treating themselves to a week in the tropics as they tried and tried for a baby, as if sun and heat would start their innards properly cooking, a bun in the oven, as someone’s grandma might say, not Ginnie’s, who would’ve had some spicy Yiddish exhortation. Ginnie didn’t bother mentioning to Madame Jeanette that her name was actually Virginia, for the state where her grandparents ended up fresh off the boat, the American name Ginnie’s grandmother had picked to celebrate her escape from Eastern Europe with its poverty and pogroms. Zhinnie, Madame Jeannette pronounced the soft French J, ma soeur. Although sisters, of course, would not have the same name. Soul sisters, Maxine sneered one sullen teenage year, rolling her eyes at the story she’d heard umpteen times.

Once, after an argument with Roger, surely something about Maxine – were they too hard on her, or too easy? – Ginnie had encountered Madame Jeanette on the midnight patio, had inquired after Monsieur Jeanette. The Madame had turned away with a flap of her hand, as if to say, You I will know, the fights, the secrets, the kids gone wrong. But me, no. I belong to myself. So much for sisterhood. But the next morning she left a basket of fresh banana muffins on Ginnie and Roger’s porch, under a dishtowel against the lizards and the brilliant tropical birds.

If you’d asked Ginnie, last year, whether she could’ve missed any baby so much after one day away as she missed Maxine’s, she’d have said you were crazy. It’s not as if she saw the baby every day back home, with the kids way up in Boston. Stu had set them up with a computer, with a camera and speakers, so they could goggle and burble at the monitor down in Connecticut, while at the other end sat Maxine with Ruby in her lap, sucking on her burp cloth or nodding off to sleep, hardly noticing the show going on for her benefit.

Roger even toted the new laptop with him on the airplane, practically getting strip-searched after forgetting to take it out of his carry-on going through security. But of course there was no Internet at the cottage, no wireless in their corner of Paradise. They’d have to wait ’til they were home next week to get a look, Maxine flapping one of Ruby’s arms up and down in a frantic way for the camera. Say hi to Grandma. Say hi to Grandpa.

Ginnie always resisted the urge to tell Maxine to be careful, she might dislocate Ruby’s delicate shoulder. Hard to believe this was the same Maxine from those first days in the hospital, afraid to pick up the baby, practically afraid to touch her, she might break. Maxine was turning into a good mother, talked to the baby nonstop, carried her around all day in one of those papoose baby carriers. She certainly had all the paraphernalia, the swing and the bouncy seat and the baby genius CDs, Ruby should learn Mozart in her sleep.

Ruby. Maxine and Stu had picked a good name. For Ginnie’s mother, Rose, but better. A gem, a sparkling jewel. Perfect. Ginnie finally understood the phrase light of my life in a way she hadn’t when she’d been a harried young mother herself, Roger rolling in late every night from the office, and Maxine with the colic that lasted a full year, never mind only three months like the books promised. Guess she never read the books, Roger would say, lifting a squalling Maxine from Ginnie’s aching arms just when Ginnie was sure she’d drop that baby, if she didn’t toss her into the trash.

Ruby, on the other hand, was a placid, happy baby, gurgled and cooed in front of the computer, seldom cried, or if she did Maxine wasn’t admitting to it. Maxine seemed to have developed a sudden need for Ginnie’s approval, phoned home every day, which was not her usual habit, reporting how much Ruby had nursed, slept, pooped. She’d made Ginnie promise to check for cell phone service in Paradise, but, as always, there was none. Everyone knew there was only one landline at Madame Jeanette’s, in the Madame’s bedroom, off limits except for the direst emergency, which Maxine had discovered the hard way the time she thought she could sneak a call home to some gangly high school heart throb. It’d be good for Maxine, this week on her own, without her mother to lean on for advice. Still, Ginnie flipped open her cell phone every morning to check for bars, always a spark of hope, and then a pang of regret.

At the market, buying milk and juice and Ginnie’s yogurt and Roger’s fiber cereal that Maxine called straw, Ginnie spotted just exactly the inner tube she wanted, with a cloth sling seat so the baby could sit safely, not slip out the bottom. Roger said she was nuts to buy it now, a year in advance, but the way the corners of his mouth crept up when he pulled out his wallet to pay told a different story. He was just as nuts about that baby as she was.

By the end of the week, Ginnie had read six novels and a story collection she was previewing for the bookstore, Roger had finished the latest John Grisham and his backlog of Popular Science, and they’d bought blow-up swimmies for Ruby’s tiny arms, a folding umbrella to protect her from the sun, and the cutest baby swim suit, a one-piece tank with foam inserts all around the waist like a built-in life preserver. Ruby was going to be the safest baby alive in Paradise next year.

“We should stop,” Ginnie said. But she couldn’t stop, planning the easiest route to push the stroller to the water, wondering if their favorite island burger joint had high chairs. When Roger discovered, in one of the free island dailies he picked up at the market, a service that would store stuff for winter folks, Ginnie even dragged him to the new discount mart for a folding crib – wouldn’t Ruby need a place to sleep next year? He laughed at her foolishness, but she didn’t have to ask twice.

Who’d have imagined a discount mart in Paradise? And high-rises going up, condominiums and time-shares. Now this storage service, so you didn’t have to schlep stuff back and forth every year, what with new airline weight restrictions and that damn airport security.

Ginnie and Roger were changing, too. Won’t be much of a vacation, Roger’s cheeky brother Paul had teased before they left, now that you’re sleeping with a grandma, and Ginnie had surprised herself, feeling not old, but newborn with joy. All week she noticed Roger patting her rump, ogling her breasts, as if she were the new mother sporting a youthful, milk-filled rack. Rack! A word she didn’t remember Roger ever using before, at least not in reference to his wife. When they made love, he took special care to please her, brought glasses and a split of chilled champagne to bed, on the last night even joked about trying again, twice in one night, like when they were kids.

In the morning, Roger paid the storage fellow who picked everything up, arranged for him to deliver the load to Madame Jeanette’s next year. Then he unfolded the bills for next year’s deposit, planting a kiss on each of the Madame’s cheeks to seal the deal. Some things never changed, second week of February, their week in Paradise.

That was last year. Last year’s next year has turned into this year. Confusing. Which is how Ginnie feels. Confused. Swimming through fog. Gasping for air. She and Roger are once again alone in Paradise.

Even after four months, people back home were still asking what happened. Did it have something to do with the jaundice? The difficult birth? Was the crib mattress too soft? Too hard? As if it was somehow Maxine’s fault, and then, by extension, Ginnie’s.

Are you sure Maxine understood the new rule against blankets in the crib? Roger’s obnoxious brother Paul had the nerve to ask. How could any new mother be expected to keep track of all the rules, especially when those rules shifted as quickly and dangerously as quicksand?

No wonder everyone asks, Ginnie thinks. If they can figure it out, it won’t happen to them.

Madame Jeanette doesn’t ask. She packs up the crib and the swimmies and the life-preserver bathing suit that were delivered from storage as scheduled – the delivery Ginnie and Roger forgot to cancel, their minds full to bursting with other thoughts – and whisks them away, Ginnie has no idea where, and Madame Jeanette knows Ginnie won’t care. The Madame seems suddenly old this year, her lovely copper hair now a brassy bronze, dangly earrings turned from island exotic to dead weights threatening to stretch old-lady earlobes down to bony brown shoulders.

The island is different this year, as well, not older, but suddenly younger, flooded with children, a tsunami of babies in arms, in strollers, in backpacks, and toddlers weaving and lurching, unstoppable forward motion. Every which way Ginnie turns her head, she sees only sand toys and saggy diapers, tiny sunhats and sandy thumbs in rosy mouths, little boys with their Yankees caps and their swim shorts down to their knees. But it’s the little girls Ginnie can’t peel her eyes from – dimples and soft curls and ruffled bottoms, sweet rolls of flesh behind their necks, Ginnie’s secret place for bestowing kisses and blessings on Ruby.

Against all the strength and wisdom she possesses, Ginnie finds herself secretly planning for next year, Maxine and Stu already trying again, although Ginnie knows from experience sometimes you only ever get the one chance. There’s a family filling a blow-up baby pool with buckets of water, their own safe baby-sized ocean. Look at that little one’s miniature safari hat, perfect to protect her gentle white neck from the sun.

“It’s our fault,” Ginnie whispers, “with our plans and our purchases. We shouldn’t have done that. We gave ourselves a kine-ahora, quoting her grandmother, Yiddish for jinx, or evil eye, or worse, no English equivalent for the troubles she’d once seen.

“Nobody’s fault,” Roger says, not bothering with the pretense of a book this year, just staring at the unchanging ocean, so close to the equator there isn’t even a tide to break the seamless monotony. He’s the one who brought home the news that the kids were trying again, after a trip to Home Depot with Stu, unexpected confidence shared over nails or roach killer or drill bits. Ginnie certainly didn’t hear it from Maxine, who’s too busy back at work for those daily phone calls, back to her old self, if Ginnie didn’t know better. Ginnie is secretly relieved Maxine doesn’t call, Ginnie who once told knock-knock jokes while Maxine’s broken arm was casted, who sang Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats through stitches in Maxine’s knee. “Nobody’s fault,” Roger repeats, “don’t shop for troubles,” quoting his shrink. That’s something else new this year, the shrink.

So they pass the week on fruity vodka cocktails and platitudes, set upon by the intrusion of familiar floral fragrances, blinding red sunsets, insistent singing birds. Too much. It overwhelms the senses. If only it could knock you senseless.

“We should phone the kids,” Roger says. “Maybe they need us.” Which Ginnie translates to mean he needs them, needs to hear Maxine’s voice. Maxine, his own baby girl.

“Don’t you know there’s no cell service on this goddamn island?” Ginnie snaps.

At night she lies in bed, pretending to sleep, remembering that dreadful first week home from the hospital, when Ruby wouldn’t sleep at all. Maxine and Stu were bleary with exhaustion, Ginnie on the foldout couch, up every hour trying to help, discovering there’s a reason God makes mothers young. Take her into your bed, Ginnie finally advised Maxine. That’s what I did with you.

But the rules, Maxine said.

Fuck the rules, Ginnie said. It was three in the morning. Maxine was crying. Everyone does it. It’s every new mother’s secret.

Ginnie startles upright in bed under the ceiling fan stirring the cottage’s dense humid air, reaching blindly in the dark for the comfort of Roger’s cool back. But Roger is in the living room, weeping, no help at all. Not that he hasn’t been trying. He washes the breakfast dishes, except he forgets to use soap. He straightens the bed linens, although when Ginnie crawls back in at noon, she finds he hasn’t really made the bed, just pulled up the duvet to hide sheets still crumpled and twisted, evidence of the night spent less than sleeping.

The bedroom sliders allow Ginnie to avoid Roger on her way to the darkened patio, where she finds not solitude but Madame Jeanette, who seems to subsist on tall glasses clinking ice cubes and lack of sleep. Madame Jeanette doesn’t ask, so she’s the one Ginnie chooses to tell.

“It wasn’t the crib mattress,” Ginnie says, “or some forbidden crib blanket. No crib at all, at least not so you’d notice, turned to extra storage space for packs of diapers, piles of laundry Maxine couldn’t find time to put away.”

Jeanette holds out her glass, and Ginnie takes a sip of something that burns going down, an unexpectedly intimate gesture.

“If she’d been asleep in the crib,” Ginnie continues, “maybe Stu would’ve been the one to find her. Aren’t fathers supposed to get up for the 6 am feeding? Why did it have to be Maxine, half asleep, pulling Ruby to her breast? Do you think she was cold already, the baby?” Ginnie is whispering now, and shivering despite the heavy tropical heat. “It might help,” she says so softly she might only be thinking it, “if only I could know she wasn’t cold.” She takes another drink, this time a long swallow, before handing back the glass. “The Internet says it’s safe to sleep with your baby, or else it’s not. Who knows?”

“This knowing,” Jeanette says, “this will change something?”

The next morning, the last day before the long flight home, Roger sneaks away when Ginnie has slumped into the drugged sleep that eluded her at night, returns with a rental car, a bottle of French wine, plans for a trip to the far beach, the one with the goats. Then he gets lost along the way, meandering across the island, no one to ask directions, so by the time they arrive, it’s nearly dusk. And they find the goats are gone, banished, replaced by a tiki bar and raft rentals, the steel girders of a new high-rise towering overhead, blocking the last waning view of the sun.

They drink the wine and ride back in silence, not at all mellow. Then they make love – the first time this week, the first time in a long time – slowly and drunkenly, like the two old people they have become. She needs a lot of wine, and he needs a lot of time. It was better last year, when you were sleeping with a grandma, Ginnie thinks, moving and grinding under his weight, tears sliding backwards into her ears. Roger pauses briefly, mid-thrust, then resumes. Had she spoken out loud?

In the morning, Madame Jeanette has the taxi waiting, as always, a bag of warm croissants and Styrofoam cups of milky coffee they’ll have to drink before going through security. Roger rolls out the bags, Ginnie lagging behind, checking under the bed, in the bathroom drawers. She double-checks her purse – passports, wallet, house keys, phone. Roger doesn’t have to know that she noticed bars one day midweek, when she thought to check, cell phone service having apparently arrived along with the high-rises on Paradise. Tonight, back home, she will call Maxine, be strong for her once again.

By the time she steps outside, Roger is holding open the taxi door, glancing at his watch, Madame Jeanette grabbing Ginnie for a hot, bony hug before heading into the cottage to strip the bed for the next visitors. If Roger handed her the cash for next year’s deposit, Ginnie missed it.

It’s strange to grow old. I feel I’m the same person inside. All my life I was around people more or less my own age, and suddenly there are hardly any left. I think about death all the time. I guess you could say I’m apprehensive. I don’t want to suffer. I live my life as if my actions could make a difference, but I suppose at heart I’m a fatalist. Whatever happens, happens. I have to accept the fact that my efforts might not have the results I want them to have.

Images and impressions from different times in my life come to my mind, and I exist simultaneously in all of them. I am the short girl with the pale, round face posing in the family photo between Patricia and Eddie, who are between our parents, Martin and Mary Helen Wrightsman. I am right in the middle of the photo, and yet I am the least of them. I am the adopted child.

Most of the time it went unspoken, yet I was always aware of it. I felt it most acutely from Patricia. As the daughter of the family, her status was threatened by my addition more than anyone else’s. I was afraid of her, and I gave in to her. She could be fierce, and I couldn’t cope with that. Better let her keep her advantage.

All those years, I got used to staying out of the spotlight. Instinctively, I avoid attention. Let it come to people who believe that good will follow from their being noticed. I don’t. And who knows? Maybe that’s why I’ve survived so long, when others haven’t.

Eddie didn’t feel the same way about me as Patricia did, but neither were we particularly close. In our childhood, I was a dreamer, and he was a doer. He was off with other boys, playing games. It made a difference that Daddy taught at the school he went to, and it was an all boys’ school, whereas Patricia and I went to a girls’ school. We lived in a faculty house on the campus of Harrison, the boys’ school, so Eddie had a lot more opportunities to get together with friends than we did. But that didn’t stop Patricia from having a life chock-filled with activities, too. She was also sports-minded. She played lacrosse, tennis, basketball; she was a big, strong girl, and she’d try almost anything.

I, on the other hand, dodged sports like I’ve dodged so much else. I’ve learned that although I’m left-handed, my right eye is dominant, which makes it hard for me to aim or catch. My hand-eye coordination is a nightmare, and I’m right-footed, too. I’ve thought sometimes that my brain must be more strangely configured than other people’s. Maybe no one side is dominant; I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I was a bookish child, and introspective, and I tried to be obedient and agreeable and not cause anyone any trouble. There was a deep, lingering fear that I couldn’t give voice to, that Mother and Daddy might one day decide they didn’t want me after all, and send me back to the orphanage, or wherever it was I had come from.

Of my earliest days, I have no memory.

* * *

There’s a passage I once read in a book, The Lights of Earth, by Gina Berriault, that struck a deep chord in me:

“A dense fog covered the city, concealing the hills below this one. Only a few patches of neighborhoods could be seen, floating islets, appearing and vanishing, in a gray sea. She went down the hill trying not to shiver…She had inquired at every bookstore for a job, the secondhand ones, the antiquarian ones, the ones that sold only the latest, because to work in the midst of thousands of books, no matter how cluttered, how musty, how concrete-cold the store might be, was to feel cloistered and concealed from the world and yet in the world.”

Daddy would have been unhappy with my expressing this preference. He was forever encouraging me to be more involved and connected, the way he was, and the ways, after their own inclinations, Mother, Patricia, and Eddie were as well. They all had a tendency to throw themselves into things, whereas I have always held back.

Mother loved me, but hers was a tough love; I had to earn it. I tried hard, she tried hard, too; and this created a strain between us. I wouldn’t naturally go to her if I had a problem; in fact, I’d try to keep it from her, worried about lowering her assessment of me.

I sought out Daddy when I was in need of help or comfort. He was the one who loved me wholeheartedly, and I him in return. His father had died when he was six years old, and that fact brought us together as much as it indicated our differences. He knew firmly who he was. He had taken on the responsibilities for his mother and sister at a tender age. I, on the other hand, had been given away, and taken in, and reared up, like a grafted plant.

Maybe even more than Patricia and Eddie, I loved listening to Daddy’s stories of his past, with its deep roots in New England. In his boyhood, he knew the Civil War veterans who used to sit on the front porch of the general store in Ashland, New Hampshire, smoking and swapping stores and passing time. One man had only one leg; another was missing an eye. They’d all been wounded in one way or another, and they weren’t shy about showing Daddy their old wounds. Their wounds were evidence that they’d given their utmost to their country.

These men made a tremendous impression on Daddy when he was a boy and later influenced his attitudes when it came time for him to serve his country in World War II. He transferred from the Coast Guard into the Navy as Lieutenant Junior Grade and finished the war with his own command. He served on board the Clay at the battles of Saipan and Guam and on the Morrison at Truk and Okinawa without injury. He left the Morrison two weeks before it was sunk by a kami-kaze. Then he was given the job of writing to the families of all the men who had died, men whom he remembered and wrote about personally.

He was assigned to navigate the empty tanker Androscoggin. On a return trip from Okinawa to Ulihi Atoll, they picked up the signal of a Japanese submarine on their sonar and outran it. Back on Guam, he learned that the cruiser Indianapolis had been sunk at that very spot with the loss of 1,300 lives.

He was on the St. Paul, part of Bull Halsey’s fleet. Ten miles from Honshu, planes took off, dropped bombs, and circled back to the fleet, steaming east away from Japan. Many ran out of fuel and didn’t make it; he saw them drop in the sea to be left behind.

He had no illusions about his survival. “It was a matter of pure chance,” he said, as we sat spellbound around him. As I recall, Mother didn’t take part, either as narrator or listener, in Daddy’s story hours, but neither did she discourage him, even though his stories were frightening to children—and to grown-ups, too. I think she recognized how important they were for him to tell and us to hear, and she tolerated them, even though they weren’t part of her world. She didn’t like to dwell on war and adventure and courageous deeds and grisly ends.

She had a Yankee background, too; her people were ministers and college professors. I admired both Mother and Daddy, and if I could have chosen my own family, I would have selected people like them. They knew where they came from, and they stood up for what they believed in.

* * *

Mother and Daddy were frugal to a fault. They practiced economies that most of their friends never considered. Mother mended and patched our clothes and darned our socks until they were falling apart. She bought dented cans at the grocery store to save a nickel. Anything that she and Daddy could make or repair themselves, they did. Never once did they buy a new car or appliance. The general opinion held that their attitude was a result of their having grown up during the Depression. I think that those experiences contributed, but it went deeper than that.

When Daddy was three years old, his father, a New Hampshire country doctor, contracted tuberculosis from a patient. For three years Dr. Wrightsman lingered in a worsening illness. Without success, he tried special diets, treatments, a sojourn at a sanitarium. His illness was a financial disaster for his family—Daddy, Daddy’s mother Alma, and sister Gertrude. He couldn’t practice medicine. His earnings dried up. For years, he had treated any patient who came to him, regardless of his or her ability to pay, with the result that many of his patients had accumulated quite substantial debts, and when he fell ill, none came forward to pay him. At the time of his death, when Daddy was six years old, he was owed about fifty thousand dollars, an enormous sum at that time. My grandmother never saw this money.

One of Daddy’s indelible memories was of being summoned to a family conference shortly after his father’s death. There he was, six years old, surrounded by his aunts and uncles. Uncle Henry, his mother’s sister’s husband, bent down so they were at eye level and, wagging a finger in Daddy’s face, he told Daddy that he was the man of the family now, and it was up to him to provide for his mother and sister.

Uncle Henry was the one who owned The Eaton, a rambling resort hotel in the White Mountains that catered to a rich city clientele escaping the summer heat. After his father died, Daddy and his mother and sister spent their summers there. But it was quickly understood that Daddy had to work—all day long he was required to be available to run errands and do odd jobs.

Grandma was a fragile woman, overwhelmed by grief. She was unequipped to take charge of the family’s affairs and unprepared to earn a living. I knew her, but not well; she died when I was ten. It certainly seems that she was content to be dependent and had few qualms about her young son going to work to support her. Daddy shoveled snow and split wood for the neighbors, and soon he was taking care of the horses that were used back then for road work or to pull the narrow-gauge railroad trains that plied the mountain valleys out of the snow drifts that stranded them in the bitter winters.

Daddy handed over all his earnings to his mother. He developed a life-long reluctance to spend money on himself. In old photographs I see a handsome youth with a painful smile. Yet sociability came easily to him, more easily than to me. He knew how to fit into a group and make himself indispensable. He was a natural leader. These qualities were evident in his Navy career and in his profession as a prep school master.

As a growing boy, Daddy had a mentor—a boyhood friend of his father, who was kinder to him than most of his relatives. This man had a house on Oyster Bay and kept a sailboat. It was he who taught Daddy how to sail in Long Island Sound and developed in him his life-long love of ships and the sea.

Daddy was a natural athlete (Patricia and Eddie take after him), and in his studies he discovered a talent for Latin. All college-bound boys needed Latin back then. As a high school student, Daddy tutored other students and coached sport teams for younger boys (which prevented him from playing on his school’s varsity teams). After The Eaton was sold out of the family, Daddy worked at various summer camps as a tennis, horseback riding, and canoe and sailing instructor. He loved these jobs and cherished happy memories of those relatively carefree summers.

He was a hardworking student, well-liked by his teachers, and it was a happy day for him when he was accepted into Harvard. He borrowed the tuition fees, $1,200 for the four years, from a great-aunt, with a promise to pay back every penny, which he eventually did. In addition to attending class, he had to work to earn his room and board, and the first semester he nearly flunked out. In his rural high school, he had not been taught how to write a formal essay. He was unprepared for the college curriculum. He nearly broke down from the stress, but he was lucky; a friend he had made, from a Boston Brahmin family, invited him to live rent-free in the apartment over the family garage, enabling him to quit some of his jobs and devote more time to his studies. For the rest of the year, Daddy had to commute from Boston, and he missed out on extracurricular campus life, but he learned to perform academically at the level expected of him. He graduated with honors in history.

As a teacher, Daddy was all for giving his students another chance—to a point. In the sixties, when Harrison began to accept more students from underprivileged backgrounds, Daddy held firm to the belief that Harrison could be the making of them. For students who refused to conform or put forth the effort, he had no patience. He let them know in no uncertain terms what opportunities they would be throwing away. Usually they would come to their senses, but if they didn’t, Harrison wasn’t the place for them, and they didn’t last there.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m not sure how Daddy became a history master and athletic coach. I know when he began teaching at Harrison before the war, he had earned his master’s degree in history and taught at two other schools. Knowing him as I do, I think that the first teaching job must have been offered to him, and that he probably accepted it because it promised work that appealed to him, benefits, and job security. After a few years, the war intervened and took him off to the adventure of his life, and by that time, I think, he already had earned tenure at Harrison.

In other words, I doubt prep school teaching was what he set out to do. I’m not sure what his aspirations were, but I think he would have liked a university career. But the life that chose him was suited for him. There’s no denying he had a gift for molding hearts and minds—particularly boys’. For several years, he’d handpick a group of six students and invite them on a summer sailing trip, charging their families only expenses. He’d drive the group from outside of Philadelphia, where we lived, to New London, Connecticut, where his boat, a navy surplus tender that he had bought after the war at auction and had refitted—would be ready. For a month they would sail up and down the New England coast, from Connecticut to Maine and back, stopping at ports of interest along the way. Some of those boys later cited Daddy as their single most important influence and kept in touch with him for the rest of his life.

While Daddy was on his sailing trips with his students, we stayed at the cottage on the Vermont lake that belonged to Mother’s family. All summer, friends and relatives dropped in—it was that kind of place. We loved it. It was paradise to us.

There was a day camp on the other side of the lake, with a swimming school, canoeing, hiking, and other activities that we all participated in, but most of the time we were free to wander.

By the time that Patricia was twelve and I was nine and Eddie seven, Daddy put an end to his summer sailing trips with his students. Instead, we all sailed together for a couple of summers, and then Daddy sold his boat and bought a smaller sailboat, named the Mary Helen for mother, for the lake. We also kept canoes and kayaks there. Back then motor boats weren’t allowed on the lake, and we eschewed them on principle.

There was a state forest bordering part of the lake, with steep trails up rocky slopes and streams that fell in small waterfalls on their courses into the lake. There were also deep underground springs that fed the lake, whose waters at that time were crystal clear. I remember summer nights, sleeping in the hammock on the screened-in porch. If I craned my neck, I could see the stars over the lake. On moonless nights they seemed to hang so close in the black sky that I found it hard to believe how many millions of miles away they really were.

* * *

Mother and Daddy had met while chaperoning a co-ed dance that brought together students from Chapin-Oakes, the all-girls’ school where Mother was teaching, and Harrison. Mother had reached her thirties without getting married and seemed destined for spinsterhood. In fact, that evening she had hoped to get out of going to the dance, but there weren’t enough chaperones.

No less than Harrison’s headmaster claimed the first dance from Mother. Daddy later said that he had noticed Mother right away and wanted to ask her first, but the headmaster’s rank was higher, and Daddy dared not presume on it. By this time he had already commanded a ship of three thousand men on Guam, and he was a scrupulous observer of courtesy and hierarchy.

It seemed to Mother that she had been waiting for Daddy all her life without knowing it. For the rest of the evening, they danced all the dances together, except when they stopped to talk to each other.

Mother instinctively felt that Daddy was a man who could be depended on, a man who had already proved his worth as an adult many times over, and who would be a good husband and father. She saw that he respected her intelligence, and she believed he would let himself be influenced by her opinions. When she learned of the hardships he had suffered in his youth and the burdens he had borne for others, her heart went out to him. She fell in love with him because she could tell he was a loving man who had been deprived of love. She believed that her love could rescue him from his unhappy past.

Consciously, they entered into marriage as an equal partnership. Mother came from a line of strong-minded men and women, who weren’t afraid to agitate for what they believed in. They were Abolitionists and women suffragists. One hundred fifty years ago, they had been Quakers; now they were Congregationalists. No matter the denomination, their religious ideals stressed works more than faith. They focused their efforts on building a better world in the here and now.

They were sober people, plain and respectable. They revered music, painting, poetry, drama—in a serious-minded way that was in keeping with their characters. Everything they did had a purpose of improvement. Their great values were humanism and education, yet they also indulged their children, allowing them long stretches of unstructured time in which to develop their interests as they wished.

Mother was devoted to her parents and to her younger sister, who suffered from cerebral palsy, but because of the family’s care and support, lived a normal life. I was well into my teenaged years before I realized that Aunt Kat had a disability. It had not occurred to me before.

Mother’s father, Julius Phelps, was Professor of English and Philosophy at Swarthmore College, and his living room was often a gathering place for his students, where they were welcomed with cookies and conversation. Mother later created that atmosphere in our home, but with an inescapable difference, because Daddy’s students were all boys.

When Mother and Daddy met, she was French instructor at Chapin-Oakes. She had graduated from Bryn Mawr College with honors in French and continued her studies at the Sorbonne. That was in the thirties, before the war. Sensing that Europe was about to explode, she returned to the U.S. and found a teaching job. Chapin-Oakes had an excellent reputation and the added advantage of being near her family. She had been employed there for eight years when she met Daddy.

To hear Mother tell it, through her college and graduate years, she was too busy studying to think of young men, and once she found herself ensconced in a girls’ school, there were no young men around to meet. Then came the war, and all the young men were off fighting, and many didn’t come back. Eventually she had to face it; there weren’t a lot of men around, period. As I said, she’d just about given up when she met Daddy.

The dance was in November; by Christmas, they were engaged, but they had to conceal it, because if Mother’s principal knew, Mother would lose her job. School policy did not allow married teachers or even engaged teachers at Chapin-Oakes. But Mother and Daddy needed the salary from her job to start their married life with, and she was intending to finish out the year before resigning.

There followed a winter and spring of secrecy and subterfuge. Mother’s parents knew, but no one else did. Daddy was insistent that he wanted to be married in a small ceremony with only Mother’s immediate family attending. Mother felt guilty about excluding Daddy’s mother. She hadn’t yet met her future mother-in-law, yet felt she would never be forgiven. Daddy explained to her that his mother would insist on their having a fancy, expensive wedding, just the kind of wedding that they didn’t want and couldn’t afford, and she would involve herself in the planning of it, and the result would be an additional headache for them that they could well do without.

“Believe me,” he emphasized, “I know my mother. I’m certain what she’ll do.”

As Mother got to know Daddy better, she realized that he had an additional reason for not including his mother: she lived with a man that she wasn’t married to. She called herself Mrs. Bruce Aylmer; she had the name engraved on her calling cards and her stationery, but, in fact, there was already a Mrs. Bruce Aylmer, and that first Mrs. Bruce Aylmer clung to the name and refused to divorce, even though she and Bruce Aylmer hadn’t lived as man and wife for nearly twenty years.

Mother also learned that Daddy’s mother was still his chief financial burden. Since Bruce Aylmer was disabled by an injury and unable to resume employment as a train conductor, Daddy was obliged to contribute to maintain them. Gertrude, now married, also helped out when she could, but she had a young child and depended upon her husband’s salary.

Poor Martin! thought Mother. His family has caused him little but trouble! Almost all his life, Martin has been supporting his mother, and he still is, and he is ashamed of her.

Once Mother understood the sources of Daddy’s feelings, she willingly acceded to his wishes. They were married in early June, just after their school terms ended, in the Phelpses’ garden. A garland of roses was wound around a wire arch under which Mother walked, escorted by her father, on her way to Daddy. Mother wore a white, calf-length dress suitable for the afternoon, and perched on her head was a tiara sewn with pearls, anchoring a veil, that had been passed down in her family for four generations.

The service deliberately omitted the word “obey” from the vows.

Mother and Daddy spent their honeymoon at a summer camp in the Berkshires, where Daddy had worked, that hadn’t yet opened for the season. The owner had offered it to Daddy free of charge. They were the only people there, except for two workmen making repairs to the cabins. There was a large kitchen in the main building, but they had brought an ice chest with them and preferred to cook their dinner over an open fire and at breakfast and lunch sustain themselves on sandwiches and fruit.

There was a lake where Daddy took Mother rowing and canoeing. No sailboats were available, but Daddy promised Mother a future of many sails.

Following their honeymoon, they went to Amherst to pay a visit to Daddy’s mother and Bruce Aylmer, who were living there.

In my experience, Mother was always careful of what she said about her mother-in-law. “She’s had a hard life,” Mother was apt to remark, “we mustn’t blame her.” But a note of impatience invariably got into Mother’s voice when she mentioned Grandma; she couldn’t seem to help it.

When Mother married, she was in her thirties, past what was then considered childbearing age, and she and Daddy tried to start a family immediately. She suffered two miscarriages before she gave birth to Patricia, and then there was a long space before they had Eddie, during which time they adopted me.

After Mother and Daddy were married, Harrison rented them a house on the campus. This was the house we grew up in, a lovely center-hall colonial, painted white, with a dining room downstairs on one side, a living room on the other, and a kitchen at the back. Upstairs were three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Patricia and I shared a bedroom until Mother and Daddy created a room for Eddie in the attic, and I took his bedroom.

In the beginning of their marriage, in order to spare Mother the work of shopping and cooking, Mother and Daddy paid Harrison a boarding fee and took their meals in the dining hall with students and other faculty. They had calculated the costs, and they were more or less equivalent. But after Mother became pregnant, she wasn’t allowed to eat with the students. Apparently, these boys were of a tender age and not to be subjected to the sight of a pregnant woman.

For all Mother’s championship of women’s rights and equality, she was unable to continue to work after she was married, and, pregnant, she was banned from the dining hall at her husband’s school. The school refunded her portion of the board, and for the remainder of the term, Daddy ate his meals in the dining hall and Mother at home.

But this was an unsatisfactory situation, made infinitely worse when Mother lost the baby. From then on, Mother and Daddy ate their meals at home. Daddy washed the dishes and frequently assisted with food preparation. He preferred to cook what was simple and easy, and so did Mother, with an emphasis on what was good for you.

I admit, as teenagers, that Patricia and I were hard on Mother when we asked her how she could call herself a feminist and yet have put up with such discriminatory behavior from both schools. We once reproached her in this way as she sat at the sewing machine, mending a torn seam in a sheet so it could still be used. I recall, bent like that over the sprigged fabric, that she reminded me of nothing as much as a pioneer woman (although pioneer women didn’t have electric sewing machines). After we both upbraided her, she was silent for a moment. Raising her eyes to meet ours, she said, “One cannot bring about such a revolution in a year or even ten years. Or in my lifetime. Perhaps your generation will experience perfect equality between the sexes, but I doubt it.”

The glare of the sewing machine light was reflected upward on her face. It hurt my eyes to look back at her, but Patricia wasn’t fazed. “Women can’t continue to wait forever,” Patricia replied. “You’ll see.”

Patricia came of age at the exact break in our culture between cotillion balls and rock concerts, between padded bras and girdles and nylons (what was once called a “foundation”) and a loose, liberated, bra-less way of being and dressing—tie-dye, fringe on jeans, flowing blouses, and wavy hair. Mother was tolerant of Patricia’s appearance. Not Daddy. He said he’d had too much experience of men to trust them around his daughter with her looking the way she did when she went out.

Daddy and Patricia clashed. They each claimed the moral high ground, and they both had to be right. When they argued, I pictured two determined bulls locking horns. With Patricia, Daddy seemed to forget his tact, and once, when she had infuriated him, he lashed out at her in such a tone of voice I have never forgotten it. Until he got control of himself, it sounded as if he were strangling.

I think Daddy’s conflicts with Patricia must have triggered a reaction that awakened his complicated feelings about his mother. Daddy’s mother had been an intelligent and cultured woman; she’d read widely and had good taste. He admired her in many ways, and her discriminating nature had helped form his character. Yet she’d been a weight on him that dragged him down and a sorrow he had to bear.

His mother’s experiences indicated to Daddy that Patricia did not appreciate how hard life could be for a woman, and how, more than a man, she needed protection and support. An unblemished reputation, a good name—these were important assets, difficult to acquire, and essential to maintain. Daddy believed that Patricia valued these too lightly. He knew she was impulsive, and he didn’t trust her judgment.

There was something about Patricia that drove her to tangle with Daddy. She would oppose him even when she had no intention of disobeying him. Struggle with him seemed to energize her. Her excitement built, and Daddy would get angrier.

Eddie and I both took cautionary lessons from Patricia. Instead of welcoming confrontation, we try to avoid it. To give her credit, she blazed a trail for us as the eldest child. After Patricia opposed Mother and Daddy, there was no need for us to.

In many ways, I admired Patricia for her bravery. She was then—and remained—a crusader. She was too transparent to be a politician, but she had a politician’s ability to change people’s opinions. In the union office where she ran the literacy program, she attracted many followers, and they became the union’s next generation of leaders. For all that she conceived of herself in opposition to Daddy, she ended up transmitting Daddy’s essential values and his lessons in civic duties and responsibilities.

Yet I’ve always felt uncomfortable around her. I felt she judged me and found me lacking because I wasn’t like her. It’s not that I’m a cynic, or don’t believe in helping my fellow human being, but I’ve always avoided large public demonstrations. I guess I’m afraid of losing my individuality in the multitude. I invariably had an excuse for Patricia when she wanted me to join one of her marches, because I knew she wouldn’t understand or accept my real reasons for not participating.

When we were growing up, she definitely let me know that my accomplishments were a threat to her, except in areas she did not care about, and I did my best to avoid arousing her feelings of competition. There’s no denying that I was a plump, mousy, stay-at-home girl. While part of me longed to be pretty and popular, another part of me was relieved not to be. I was only twelve when Patricia started going out with boys, and I had plenty of opportunities to witness examples of her jealousy and possessiveness. I wasn’t eager to stimulate them, nor, after the anxieties that she’d caused Mother and Daddy, did I want to be the source of any more trouble for them.

I never have been willing to reveal my private feelings and motives in the same way Patricia did. Patricia, who was touchy about so many things—her prerogatives as the eldest, her principles when she felt they were being compromised—did not seem to feel sensitive at all about what other people knew about her.

Mother was more like me, circumspect. Patricia sometimes shocked her. She considered Patricia headstrong and occasionally thoughtless. She knew I was not, but I don’t think she was at all aware of the fear I lived with, of having been an unwanted child. I was good at concealing my feelings. I succeeded in concealing them from myself.

* * *

I was a little afraid and in awe of Harrison students when I was young. Sometimes I’d be crossing the campus with Mother and Daddy, and I’d see some of them chasing after each other or throwing a football or butting into each other in the way that boys do, and I’d worry that I’d somehow get in their way and get hurt. I tended to avoid them and knew little at all about them, except for occasional details that Daddy shared with us at the dinner table. It wasn’t until I began to attend Daddy’s “Cookies and Conversations” that I became acquainted with any of them.

As I mentioned, the idea for Daddy’s “Cookies and Conversations” was really Mother’s, because it was inspired by Professor Phelps’s evenings with his students in his home. But while Professor Phelps’s gatherings had a literary purpose—one particularly notable evening was his reading from The Turn of the Screw, in which he frightened some of his students so much they couldn’t go to sleep—Daddy’s meetings had a wholly different raison d’être. Daddy was deeply interested in his students as individuals, and he welcomed opportunities for frank and stimulating exchange. I believe he had in mind Socrates’ Academy when he spoke of education as a kind of conversation. This was the lofty ideal behind his “Cookies and Conversations.”

They were memorable evenings, not so much, I think, for what was said, but for their relaxed and pleasant atmosphere. Daddy laid some ground rules: no one could monopolize the conversation or interrupt anyone else; each had to speak in turn and give all a chance to have their say. It sounds simple, but I think it was the rare quality of Daddy’s encouragement—and Mother’s, too, for she always participated at these gatherings—that left us feeling uplifted.

Daddy never asked, “Do you mean?” He made a statement, “You mean,” and when he finished, he had not only expressed the thought clearly and simply but had made it sound as though it had been entirely the other person’s, with no contribution from him. He was a generous teacher, and that was why his students revered him.

There’s a story Daddy used to tell from his days in Guam that illustrates some of his qualities. A Japanese sampan, a fifty-foot fishing boat, had been stranded a hundred feet up on the beach of the base where Daddy was stationed. One of Daddy’s young ensigns rounded up a motor machinist and several others and went to work on the engine. Daddy regarded this as good recreation. They got the engine going, and they began digging up the beach to get the boat into the water. Daddy saw what they were doing, and he also saw that they had to cope with a hard coral beach below the sand.

One afternoon Daddy heard a loud explosion, and he knew there would be trouble. When he got back from the beach, he had to return a call to Naval Supply Command and report that the explosion was unauthorized and wouldn’t happen again. He thought the boys would give up in the hundred-degree heat, but two days later he noticed that the boat was not on the beach. In fact, it was out in the water inside the reef at anchor.

At the Officers’ Club, the Captain informed Daddy that he had no authorization to increase the size of the United States Navy, and further, Daddy was to get rid of the boat even if he had to sink it.

Daddy bargained with him to let him give it to Captain Olaf, the Swedish husband of a native lady with whom Daddy had been working to set up a school for the native children. The Captain approved and said Daddy could let those boys cruise on the sampan with Captain Olaf if they had an officer present in charge and did not go more than a half mile beyond the reef and only in perfect weather. Captain Olaf was glad of the boat and took the boys for their well-earned outing. It was a great boost to their morale, said Daddy.

Daddy enjoyed telling this story to his students because he believed it was important not to discourage young people. He didn’t let his deep, unfulfilled need for a father prevent him from becoming the kind of fatherly man that two generations of young men looked up to. It was only with Patricia that Daddy’s ideals came into painful conflict with his behavior, and I think it was because Patricia was able to hurt him in ways that no one else had except his mother.

But at the “Cookies and Conversations,” Daddy took a calmer, more measured attitude to Patricia. He seemed to listen to her more carefully and weigh her opinions, which were sometimes extreme, more judiciously than he might at other times. Thus, these evenings had a salutary effect on him as well, and he was able to be more accepting of Patricia as an individual.

It is an indication of the difference between Patricia and me that at these gatherings she liked to sit in the center of the room, where everyone could see her, and I preferred to remain at the periphery. Eddie, when he was old enough to be included, was rarely still, but liked to be petted and made much of by the young men. It excited him to be around them. It excited all of us. Patricia’s face glowed in the lamplight, and even Mother relaxed and grew more animated than usual.

I was excited, too. Listening to the high-minded talk gave me a sense of security and contentment, and I rarely felt the need to add any idea of my own. I was shy and unconfident of my ability to express myself. I preferred to watch the others; I hardly thought they noticed me.

I noticed them, of course. And so it is that now I find myself approaching the other subject, as yet unmentioned, underlying these pages.

Paden. Paden Powell. Just saying his name aloud affects me strongly.

At Harrison, one of my first memories of Paden was of him kneeling on the rug in front of the coffee table in our living room, pouring out tea and passing around the cups. Paden had beautiful hands, with long, slender, tapering fingers, and he loved tea and the ceremonial aspects of tea drinking. The reason for his presence in our living room was that he was one of a group of Daddy’s students invited over for “Cookies and Conversations.” Yet from the beginning Paden was more than a student. He was almost like a member of the family.

One reason was because the Powells had become our neighbors at the lake. They had bought a three-acre lot on the water a quarter-mile down from us. The first year after Daddy had stopped taking his students sailing up the New England coast and had taken us instead, we visited the lake at Labor Day to find the Powells already well-established.

Augustus Powell had first seen the lake many years before that, when he had been one of Mother’s father’s favorite students and had come to stay for a week one summer and assist Professor Phelps in his research. When I knew Augustus, he was Professor of Philosophy at Columbia. He had piercing blue eyes under bushy eyebrows and an abrupt way of coming up behind me when I wasn’t looking and surprising me with direct questions. I felt uncomfortable around him, because he seemed to enjoy embarrassing me, and I never knew what he would say.

His wife Sally was blonde and curvy, as different from him as could be. When I think of her, I think of a de Kooning painting, all chaos and bright colors. She liked to make outrageous statements for effect. Much of the time Augustus barely seemed to pay attention to her. Paden knew just how to calm her down when she was upset. “Now, Sally,” he’d begin, with that silky note in his voice, slightly teasing and flirtatious, and it worked every time.

Paden had always called his parents by their first names. They didn’t seem to mind—quite the opposite. Sarah, Paden’s junior by nine years, followed his example, and so did everyone else in Paden’s circle.

* * *

Another memory I have of Paden is of when he was building his treehouse at the lake that summer after his freshman year at Columbia, before he went to France. He said he’d always wanted a treehouse. It would be his place, where no one else could come unless invited. He was making it purposely hard to get to. He’d found the tree—a tall red maple out of sight of the lake and the Powells’ house. The first thing he did was nail a ladder up the trunk. Fifteen feet up, he constructed the treehouse’s platform. He brought the boards up on a pulley, and he used a hammer, nails, wood screws, and a cordless drill.

Once Paden had built the platform, he’d sleep up there sometimes, even before there were any walls. He wasn’t afraid of falling out of the tree in his sleep. He said that he just told himself not to move, and he never did. He buried his head in his sleeping bag to keep off the insects, and he said he’d never slept so soundly.

There was a path through the woods that went near Paden’s treehouse, and during the day sometimes I would pass by there to observe his progress. By mid-August, he’d gotten the roof and three walls up.

The day I’m remembering was hot and sunny. The sun filtered down through the trees, creating a dappled pattern on the forest floor. It was so pronounced it was almost like an optical illusion. I had lost track of where I was when I came on the small clearing where Paden’s tree had grown so tall. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I peered up at the treehouse. In my angle of vision, it was in front of the sun, and I was dazzled. I made out a dark shape—it was Paden—waving his arms, in greeting or in warning, I couldn’t tell. Then I saw part of a shape moving behind him, the glimpse of a bare shoulder and a woman’s hair.

I knew who it was. I hadn’t spoken, and neither had Paden, but he had seen me, and I had seen him. Very quietly, I turned my back and retraced my steps the way I had come. I didn’t think the woman he was with had seen me.

That’s how I found out that Patricia was sleeping with Paden.

* * *

It was a long time after Paden was dead, and I was living on my own, when I discovered a new connection to him. Oliver had been Paden’s friend at Columbia. When Paden went to France, they had kept up the friendship for a while and then lost track of each other—so Oliver told me when we met. They were out of touch when Oliver had learned of Paden’s death. He hadn’t even known that Paden had gone to Chile.

Apparently, even years later, Oliver remained affected by Paden, because he’d spoken about him to his girlfriend, Renée, who was the high school friend of my friend, Maria, which is how I learned of it.

At that time I was not in close contact with the Powells, and the wish to talk about Paden with someone who had been his friend overwhelmed me. Through my grapevine connection between Maria and Renée, I sent out feelers to learn if Oliver would be willing to meet with me to share our reminiscences. It took about a month for the answer to come back in the affirmative and another week for us to set a time and place.

Over the phone Oliver had a deep voice, and I tried to picture him. I had seen his likeness in a photograph Maria showed me of him and Renée. He was handsome, there was no doubt about it, with dark hair and eyes, and easily as tall as Paden.

Impulsively, I told him about the letters and asked him if he and Paden had ever corresponded.

“Oh yes, I believe we did,” he replied. “Paden was a great one for writing letters.”

“I have some wonderful letters from him,” I said. “I’ll bring them to show you, if you show me yours.”

To my surprise, he and Renée didn’t live far from me. I agreed to meet him at a neighborhood bar later that week after he got off from work.

I was nervous when the time came, and I deliberately arrived late so I wouldn’t have to wait alone for him. He was sitting at a booth with a bowl of peanuts in front of him when I walked in. It was winter, and he was wearing a heavy knit turtleneck sweater, like one Paden might have worn.

In person, Oliver was even handsomer than in his picture, and I felt nervous, the way I often feel with someone that physically attractive, that I won’t be able to measure up to the same standard. The lighting in the room was deliberately dim, and I was glad of it, since it made it harder for us to scrutinize each other. Immediately I brought the conversation to Paden.

I wanted so much to understand Paden, and I thought perhaps Oliver could provide me with some keys to knowing him that would give me new insights.

“I have to hand it to Paden that he was a serious scholar and thorough in his studies. He wasn’t afraid of hard work. For example, he was determined to read the Greek and Roman philosophers in the original, and he would do it,” Oliver recalled. “And yet, I wonder if there wasn’t something lacking in him. That he just didn’t have that spark of creativity, and all his diligence couldn’t make up for it.”

What Oliver said caused me pain. I didn’t want to believe it. To my mind, there had been no one like Paden, no one with his brilliance. Why, it was even legend in our family. I remembered what Daddy had said about him as his prize student.

I also remembered, of course, how later Paden lost much of his luster. But that had been due to his illness.

At this thought, I felt sadness cloud my feelings—sadness, and nostalgia. It was then that I offered to show Oliver my letters. It turned out he had none to show me in return. I accepted the disappointment.

As I handed him the small collection of thin, light-blue aerogrammes and white, blue-lined envelopes, they seemed to me as delicate and fragile as butterfly wings. Paden had had a small, careful handwriting, and Oliver had to put on glasses and strain close to read in the dim light of the bar. For a while I looked at him reading, and then I looked away. I couldn’t see his expression, but I felt embarrassed all the same. I wondered if I had made a mistake in showing him the letters, and if I would regret it.

Oliver read one letter, and then another, and another, perhaps half a dozen in all, before he folded them, arranged them in a neat stack, and carefully laid his hand over them. There was a silence as I sensed him struggling for what to say.

I could feel his eyes on me, and his voice was so gentle I could barely make it out. “Were you Paden’s lover?”

His question astonished me. “Oh no, no…nothing like that,” I stammered. “You don’t understand. He was so much older than I. Four years…”

Oliver’s expression turned to disbelief, and I suddenly remembered that he was six years older than Renée.

“Well, it seemed a big difference back then,” I lamely tried to explain.

It was clear that Oliver didn’t believe me. “But these are intimate letters,” he said. “Letters you would write to a lover. Paden never wrote letters like these to me.”

Our hands touched briefly as he gave me back my letters, but it was his words that had opened up a well of feeling. I had never allowed myself to admit how much I loved Paden. That I had been afraid of Patricia, afraid of her anger, long after she and Paden broke apart—that was one reason. I’d also believed that, because of Patricia, Mother and Daddy wouldn’t have approved. But the main reason was Paden himself. I couldn’t comprehend that he could really have been interested in me as a lover. He always seemed lofty and unapproachable, far above me. For years I had treasured his letters and kept them separate from other letters, but the thought that they might have been as important to him—that was a new thought, and an answer I’ll never know.

Oliver and I never met again, but he helped me see what had passed between me and Paden in a new light. The ancient Greeks whom Paden revered believed that what happens to you after you die can affect how well your life has gone. Most people today would scoff at the notion that what you say about a man after he is dead can make a difference to him, yet the ancient Greeks took it for granted.

One purpose in writing this memoir is to learn about myself and explain myself to me. Another is to make a gesture of love and affection to Paden in perpetuating his memory. I ask his forgiveness from beyond the grave for not being as good to him as I might have been, for not understanding what he was suffering when I should have, and not helping him when I could have.

At last I acknowledge the love for him that I never allowed myself to express to him directly.

“Come on, Arabella.” Laurie touches the girl’s sharp-boned back. “We can’t just hang around out here. Not in the dark.”

But Arabella falls to her knees on the sidewalk, stretching tremulous fingertips toward the dog. Scuttling down the edge of this no-name park, the puppy is oblivious of them, his muzzle thrust inside an old bean can. There’s no sound but the amplified banging of his can on the hard-packed dirt, his once-lush tail rustling behind him like a sullied white train. Cocker spaniel, most likely: one of the cuddly types the dog vendors specialize in. By day, they camp out in this park, middle-aged women who stand on the curb with crates of small wriggling dogs at their feet. Or they dangle a fat furry handful of cocker spaniel or poodle out over the street, as morning traffic grinds past. They make a couple of pups sit together on top of a high stack of boxes, so high the dogs can’t jump down.

Every morning for two years, Laurie has seen this. Normally, after the sun’s up—when it’s safer—she walks out from the Peace Action house in Zona 1, Guatemala City’s decrepit old heart, to buy the paper in Parque Central. She reads it aloud to her teammates, though they’ve all come to Guatemala to stay and are no longer shocked by the news: University students kidnapped as they step off their campus, a leading journalist’s house set on fire, a judge on the Constitutional Court shot through the head in his driveway. Reporting these matters—or teaching them to students like Arabella, who come on brief learning tours—is Laurie’s job. Here’s what happened, and how, and to whom. The follow-up question must be, What can we do about it? It keeps the bad news just bearable.

Explanations are Laurie’s strong suit, part of her work. But the dog hawkers don’t fit into any Peace Action report or lecture to visiting students. They are one of those things she sees but tries not to see. Most days, however, she still thinks of the dogs, how they quiver together on their wobbly box towers, stranded in air.

Now here, before sunrise, is one of their lot—a stray?—snuffling among the day-old tabloids and empty Tortrix bags that litter the park, and nobody else is around. Only Laurie, who wants to keep moving, and this teary twenty-year-old who won’t listen to her.

“I can’t leave you out here alone.” Laurie tries to keep the apprehension out of her voice.

It’s the end of the third decade of war, the tenth year of the Army’s scorched-earth campaign. They have burned whole towns to the ground, with people in them. Draining the ocean to get rid of certain fish, as one General put it. The Army’s death squads patrol these streets every night, their black Chevy vans with dark-tinted windows hunting down writers, union leaders, students: anyone who might still support the guerrilla.

“Poor puppy, can’t we help him?” Arabella wails from the pavement. “He must be lost.”

Ten minutes earlier, Laurie showed up at the guesthouse where the visitors in her charge are staying, to share early breakfast with them. But the first thing the other kids told her was that Arabella had left for a jog. “What?” Laurie said. “Who let her do that?” She banged out the front door before it shut behind her, and didn’t stop running till she saw the pony-tailed figure in a silver-gray Gore-Tex tracksuit, on her knees at the edge of the park.

“Arabella. We can’t do anything for him. We need to get in off the street.”

The dog shakes the can loose and notices them. His forelock is matted, his jowl smeared with beans. He cowers and whines, then shrinks away into the park, and Laurie’s chest tightens with pity. She could pick him up in one sweep, zip him into the front of her sweatshirt.

The dog’s retreat seems to unlock Arabella. “Oh my god,” she breathes and, before Laure can stop her, hastens after him into the darkness. The park’s trees close around her and blot out the shine of her track suit.

Squinting after her, Laurie hesitates on the sidewalk. “Give me a fucking break.”

Normally she wouldn’t enjoy being out in Zona 1 at quarter till six; normally she’d walk fast and hold onto her Mace or her knife. But today she ran after Arabella with nothing at all in her hands, nothing in her head but the notion of bringing her back. And the guilty image she’s pushed down this past hour won’t leave her alone any longer: an image of the man who secretly slept last night in her house. A guerrilla, who arrived after supper, bedded down on the spare cot, and slipped out before dawn, before she did. Laurie had said Yes to him, and endangered them all.

“He’s on his way through,” Ruben told her, when she answered his knock yesterday. “He needs a hiding place in the city just for tonight.”

The skin beneath Ruben’s eyes was pulled tight, pale as the color of scars. He’d come all the way from his human rights office in Zona 9—one of the city’s new neighborhoods, wheeling out from the center like a graph of centrifugal force—to ask for this favor in person.

“Ruben, no sé,” stammered Laurie. “We’re here to do education, to work with civilians. We have to act like we’re neutral.”

“Please, compañera. We would do it ourselves, but—but we can’t keep him this time.” Ruben’s voice sank to a whisper. “We think he’s been seen at our place before.”

“Bring him, then,” Laurie said blindly. “Just for one night.”

The guerrilla had not remained long. He came at nightfall, looking half-starved and strained in civilian clothing, borrowed khakis and a washed-out polo. He slept a few hours and left under cover of darkness, presumably looking the same. During his refuge with them, the man barely opened his mouth, and Laurie and her teammates, tense as he was, hadn’t tried to make conversation.

Now the guerrilla won’t stay quiet inside Laurie’s mind; he keeps moving around just in back of her eyes. Oh, please please be gone by now, please be out of the city again. Please have left without anyone knowing you stayed here with us. She might as well be walking around with her skin peeled back from her bones, she feels so exposed this morning.

“Arabella,” she calls. The girl’s torso is a thin silver wedge, ten or twelve yards into the park. “Let that dog go, and get back here.”

She can see, as if from a distance, how all of this looks: the moon scraping the roofs of the buildings behind them, throwing the last of its light on the backs of a dog and two foreign women, none of whom should be out at this hour. Laurie takes one step, then another into the park. It’s like wading into cold water. Arabella crouches in front of a park bench; the dog’s eyes are two frightened glimmers beneath it. Laurie can feel the street sneering behind them.

“What were you thinking, coming out at this hour?”

“I needed to get out. To do something, you know, on my own.”

“Well, you can’t.” This seems so self-evident, Laurie is blunt. She’s supposed to be teaching—supposed to take care of—short-term visitors like Arabella, but she’s clearly neglected to explain a few things.

Arabella wipes her nose with the back of her wrist and sinks to all fours, so as to get her head under the bench. Another thing Laurie’s forgotten to explain is that Guatemalan men view parks as urinals.

“You can’t just go out on your own,” Laurie insists. “Not here. Not without one of us.”

She hears the morning’s first buses, a few blocks away, grind past the stops on Parque del Centenario. Though she can’t see them from here, she knows how the passengers throng against the bus’s bright windows like a Hydra in silhouette; before daybreak, drivers burn their interior lights, to fend off hijackers and thieves. Traveling in city buses is never a picnic, but Laurie envies those riders for the way they are inside, together. Marimba music drifts from an apartment window across the street.

Then she hears something else, a sound less expected—Psst, psst. A human voice, just behind her.

“Grin-guiiitas.”

Laurie spins on her heels, her skin prickling. The man sounds so close, she ought to detect his outline. But all she can see is the shifting penumbra of the park’s furzy edge and behind it, the street, narrow as a tight-lipped mouth.

“Váyanse a casa, gringas.” Go home, gringas.

Surely this antagonist at the edge of the park is just another Guatemala City cat-caller. Surely nobody’s been watching her house.

“Better go home, gringuitas,” sings the man in the dark. “We know you’re up to no good.”

Laurie’s whole scalp seems to vibrate, like a cap that might leap off her head. But she balls her hands into fists; she points herself toward the man’s voice.

“Fuck off,” Laurie says. “Fuck you, and your mother, and fuck off.”

Arabella withdraws her head from under the bench, her face a smudgy white thumbprint on the thick air. “What are you saying? What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” says Laurie. It’s a mercy this girl speaks no Spanish. Laurie takes a final step forward and hauls her up by both elbows. She does not release her again until they’re well out of the park and making for Casa San Juan, still three blocks away. As far as Laurie can tell, no one follows.

For the first block, Arabella keeps crying. “It’s not fair, it’s not fair. I hate how people treat their animals in this country.”

She’s tired, of course. She’s overwhelmed. Laurie tries to recall how this feels. In another corner of her mind, she calculates how much longer she has to work with this group of students. Six days down, four more to go.

Helping North Americans to see Guatemala, is how Peace Action describes their learning tours—to refugee camps on the Mexican border, through Guatemala City’s orphan-filled slums—but for some people it is too much. There’s always one, toward the end of their time with Peace Action, who ends up like Arabella: fixating on animal life. It’s as if they give up, Laurie secretly thinks. They squeeze a week or ten days’ accumulation of horror and grief onto these objects of suffering—the dogs or the cats—that still make some sense, whose pain is just small enough to imagine.

Even some of her Peace Action teammates, though they’ve lived here so long they all dream in Spanish, have started to weaken. Last month, Dean had to dash from the theater in the middle of watching Platoon, to throw up in the manicured bushes of Zona 10. And now Yvette won’t leave the house after dark, not at all: not since she saw a death squad chase down a student outside Universidad de San Carlos.

“He froze when he saw them,” Yvette kept saying, when she got home. “Like a deer in the fucking headlights. Just froze.”

“You’d have to be crazy, reacting like that,” Laurie said.

But Yvette slapped the table, open-handed, so hard Laurie started. “You don’t know. You don’t know what you’d do. If you try to fight them, those death squad guys just break your legs first. Then they can get you into their van.”

“But you could try to run away, couldn’t you?” Laurie snapped. She felt she’d been struck herself. Yvette was over-reacting.

The next day, however, when Yvette wouldn’t get out of bed—not even to eat—Laurie tried praying again, a practice she thought she’d abandoned once and for all, along with her sorry-ass, backwoods hometown.

“We ought to think about leaving,” Yvette said, when she finally got up. “It’s getting too dangerous here.”

No, Laurie thinks now, hustling Arabella along the last blocks to the guesthouse. Joining Peace Action, she signed on for three years; they all did. She won’t, she can’t, back out now. No matter what Yvette says. No. You have to grow a new skin to live here; have to tell yourself, “My life in this country is going to be different.” That’s all.

All the poems exist within the circumference of Whitehouse’s own knowledge experience, but they do not only detail her own stories.  Several poems, in fact, are told through the voices of other speakers, raising subjects as diverse as Jimi Hendrix, the Holocaust, September 11th, and the challenge of raising a mentally handicapped child.  Whitehouse wisely resists the impulse to comment on these stories but instead stands back, allows the speakers their say, and then lets the reader draw his or her own conclusion.  What becomes marvelously clear—both in these poems and the volume as a whole—is just how thin the line is between the blessing and the curse.  Many of the curse poems come embedded with undeniable blessings and vice versa.  The Jewish speaker of “Curse VII” remembers her devastation upon finding out that her parents were murdered during the war, but at the same time makes apparent the blessing her parents bestowed—unto her and to succeeding generations—in managing to ship her to England in 1938.  The speaker of “Curse XI” describes the unprecedented horror of living through an atomic blast and yet explains that the long term result of the blast, and the war, was to bring her to upstate New York, where she taught Japanese at Vassar College.  “I love it up there,” the speaker notes.  This inherent duality of experience is perfectly reiterated in the last poem of the collection in which Whitehouse details her conversation with a Buddhist Monk working on a Mandala.  With perfect equanimity, the monk informs her that the Mandala will be dropped in the Hudson, so that the materials can be “given back” to nature and the cycle of life continued.  The poet does not accept the loss of the beautiful the Mandala nearly as easily as does the monk.  “It mattered not to him that nothing lasted,” she writes, “and I counted it as a blessing and a curse” (“A Blessing and a Curse”).

Eschewing linguistic showmanship and the too familiar carpet bag of postmodern ironies, Whitehouse crafts quietly elegant poems in which the seemingly simple surfaces contain striking profundities and deeply felt experience.  These poems literally glow from within.  Of the pleasure of stepping in the “cold rushing waters” of a forest brook, the poet relates that “Later, dried and dressed, / my feet in socks and sneakers / hiking back on the trail, / I can still feel the cold / tingling in my soles” (“Blessing IX”).  And nowhere is she more eloquent than when describing the intensely isolating challenge of rendering words, work that is at once unforgiving and divine, that can engender as much nostalgia for what has been lost as pride for what has been accomplished:

Tethered, words enter the mind
Through the eye or the ear
to make of themselves
the weightless structure
apprehended wholly or in part,
like a shape shifting in the mist,
reverberant as a song,
to be taken up or forgotten,
like spent desire, or sunlight
shining on water, a fading reflection.    (“Blessing XVI”)

How fortunate for readers of contemporary poetry that Whitehouse has assembled such an accomplished and engaging meditation on life’s meanings and its accompanying troubles.  “Her abiding wish / wish was to instruct by delight,” the poets writes of a pianist she once knew.  The same can be said for this profound and delight-full collection.

I saw a business opportunity here and decided it was time to act. I’d spent the last ten years working for an insurance company, finding creative ways to deny peoples’ claims. The pay was great and it was fun being on the winning side. But, the hours were long and the job was getting boring. So, I placed an ad in the New York Times seeking a computer programmer. Two weeks later I quit my job and hired Patel, a brilliant MIT Phd who for the last three years had been developing algorithms that priced mysterious derivatives for a Wall Street investment bank. Needless to say, that line of work was drying up. Patel was no great fan of Wall Street and was eager to leave. In our interview he described Wall Street as Las Vegas with better educated people and more expensive drinks.

Patel eagerly hired on to Acronym, Inc. He labored for months, plugging a series of test variables into Acronimity ™, our flagship product. He added one for Seriousness, another for Patriotism, and a third for Wit. At the last minute Patel devised a variable for Populism. We finished up and approached congress with our product. They loved the idea and promised to find money for a demonstration project.

Our trial runs haven’t been as good as expected, but these things always take time. We applied our invention to proposed financial reforms and came up with PAIN (Protecting Absurd Industry Nest eggs) and BROKE (Bankers Receiving Overly Kind Exhortations). We back-burnered that for a while and worked on the healthcare bill. Here our model spit out CANCERS (Competition Avoiding No Change Emergency Room Solutions).

Patel’s still at it, putting in hellish hours and working on a variable for Freedom. He’s getting frustrated and has threatened to quit a number of times. There are rumblings in Congress that our results are poor and our funding should be yanked. But I’m convinced we’re getting closer. I can feel it.

——–

The river was smooth and it wound murkily, rising with the seasonal rains and receding with the dry ones, laggardly moving, like a serpent on the sly, cutting the face of the land with its body, shaping banks and inlets for miles, creating the land that would one day become Magnolia, and later Sugarville, and now a story for us all. For the land is a dwelling place of spirit, and as such, it is a shared place of souls, existing everywhere in the geography of heaven, which is timeless, but also now, becoming ours to shape and imagine, as it was long ago by angles and demons, who, empowered by light and darkness, trod the earth with Will.

In the summer of 1873, Captain McGeary stuffed his wallet with twelve-hundred dollars in cash and traveled down Snake River to Coastal City. He didn’t bother with a bath when he arrived, but went directly to the saloon. Cradling a bottle of bourbon in his arms, he eased into a poker game and proceeded to win seven consecutive hands, three on a bluff. Taking a long, hard drink from his bottle, he gradually stood up and announced, “I’ll be back.”

No one at the table objected. They merely watched as the red-bearded landowner stacked his winnings into a pair of neat
piles, and, folding up the bills with his big hands, he inserted them deep into the pockets of his trousers. Stumbling upstairs to the second floor, he found a familiar door and passed through it. Beatrice Baudelaire, a fair, finely sculptured French woman with an impeccable facility for language, stood behind the half wall of her boudoir. Strapping on a garter, she was naked from the waist up.

“Mousier McGeary,” Beatrice said melodiously. “I did not expect you so soooon.”

McGeary set his bottle down on her dresser with a clunk.

The sound caused Beatrice to take notice, and she peered cautiously at her guest. He stood motionless, except for his head, which weaved ever so slightly, moving up and down and sideways, searching for the proper degrees by which to fix his gaze and steady his world. Beatrice realized the big man might fall away, and crossing to him, she steadied his body by hugging his waist.

“I’ll be a’right,” he said surly.

Beatrice turned her attention to the bed, and gently drew back a cotton blanket to expose a silk sheet and a pair of duck-feather pillows. She fluffed the pillows with her hands, then smoothed the sheet by delicate strokes of her fingers, much like a Goddess would in preparing an immaculate bed for an immortal. She then took McGeary by the hand and drew him to the edge of the bed, where, dropping to the floor, she knelt at his feet and unloosened the laces of his boots. McGeary got the message, and he responded by sitting down on the bed and lifting up a leg. She removed one boot, then the other, setting each carefully aside as though they were fine garments. When McGeary felt himself bootless, he fell back, his arms spread lengthwise across the bed, and his eyelids drawn down heavily over his eyeballs. As he lay, he got the sensation of her hands working to undo his shirt and belt. Then suddenly, he felt a tug as she drew his trousers off his legs. He fell into a dream before Beatrice could remove his shirt, and she allowed him to lie at peace, sleeping in his fallen place, smelling of liquor, and breathing in balmy rhythms.

Beatrice reached in his trousers’ pocket and removed the cash. After a cursory inspection, she estimated its worth at nearly three-thousand dollars. She rolled off a pair of hundred-dollar bills for herself and slipped them into her brazier. The remaining cash she stashed behind a loose board in the wall.

A knock came to the door and Beatrice answered. It was Cassandra, an island woman. Like nearly everyone in Coastal City, she had a hard-luck story. Her husband had practiced sorcery, and the authorities forced him to flee the mainland, leaving Cassandra to her own devices, which included the secret making of potions.

“He back, hu?” Cassandra asked, peering at McGeary on the bed. “I knew. Didn’t think so soon, though. I put a spell on him. He a good man, but he know too much sin. I told him so, about the land, too. The war change things. Some land clean. No man, though.” She pushed back the braids of her hair and leaned over the bed. Putting her face close to McGeary’ lips, she smelled his breath. “Bourbon?” Cassandra guessed. “He gamble yet?”

“Yes,” Beatrice replied.

Cassandra grinned, exposing a broken tooth at the front of her mouth. “He got money?” she asked.

“I imagine you need some,” Beatrice replied.

“Even the devil need money,” the island woman commented.

Beatrice reached into a drawer and withdrew a gold coin.
“Here’s ten dollars,” she said, handing the coin to Cassandra. “Wash his trousers and bring them back nicely pressed.”

“I do that,” Cassandra said richly. “Sure do.”

. . . . .

McGeary slept soundly throughout the night, and he did not awaken until mid-morning. He was a voracious handler of a knife and fork, but on this occasion, when Cassandra brought him a breakfast of eggs, beans and beefsteak, he was unenthused.

“I had me a dream,” he said, poking the beefsteak with his fork somberly. “The same as years ago.”

“What was it?” Cassandra asked. “You wanna talk ’bout it? I knows about such things.”

McGeary thought of his dream and revisited images of red rain flowing ribbon-like from the sky. The rain filled the fields with crimson, and the earth’s furrows ran coldly with the color of blood. “Ain’t nothin’ a man wants to share,” he explained. “Some things best be lived with alone.” He pushed away his plate. “It was a sign, though,” he commented. “That’s fer sure. I best sell.”

Beatrice overheard, and stepping away from her dresser mirror, she asked McGeary, “sell your land?”

“I’ll find a decent buyer,” McGeary replied. “Many’s a wantin’ cane. We’ll move west. California. Land flows of milk and honey. Not like here.”

“Land flows wit’ blood in these parts,” Cassandra commented. “Gots to. Like a woman some land is.”

“Hush!” Beatrice admonished. “It’s not polite to talk like that.”

“Maybe,” Cassandra said. “Is the truth, though.”

McGeary stood and stepped into his trousers. “Think I’ll play some poker,” he announced. “Give the boys a chance to win some of their money back.”

“Not yet,” said Beatrice, taking McGeary by the arm. “Walk with me through town and down by the water.”

“That’s right,” Cassandra concurred. “Too soon after a dream like that. You best walk in the salt air.”

Beatrice guided Captain McGeary outdoors. She strolled with him along the sidewalks of town, showing him off like a prize. The time had come, she thought. Captain McGeary would finally take her away. She held her head loftily in the morning air, her eyes searching the porches of affluent homes, hoping for the town’s respectable ladies to catch sight of her with the rich landowner. The couple summoned a carriage and traveled down to the water. The beach was empty, except for shells and gulls. The moon was away, and waves crawled lazily ashore, washing the sand with clear, calm strokes.
. . . . .

In the land of cane twenty miles away, two dissimilar yet equally affected storms brewed upon the land, one in the minds of men and the other in the soul of the sky. Both hellacious and damning, they came together not by accident, but by the mood of the moon, which was waxing full and incandescent. The storm of the sky had been building on the horizon for hours, but only when the storm of men congealed did it fully manifests itself and demonstrate its powers. The turbulence began with the appearance of low-hanging clouds, and the wind swirling, uplifting the leaves of trees, causing small animals of the fields to seek shelter in hovels. The land was quiet, except for stalks of sugarcane, which rustled in the wind, murmuring a dialog of inextricable nature. Yet, everyone who passed along the field that evening understood the intention of the stormy sky, and, too, the moon, which appeared in gaps between tumultuous clouds, giving evidence to a dreadful transit come to the land.

A mile outside of town, Lucien Eliot, a landowner and neighbor of Captain McGeary, rode with a band of twenty men, all of them armed with weapons, their horses galloping steadily, their hoofs thundering the ground, like drums of an ancient order. Drops of rain fell from the sky, large ones stinging skin, and making rude, slapping sounds on leather. The heavens crackled with lightning, and it riled the horses, but they remained apace and in concert, for the beasts sucked moist air into their nostrils, the fresh, watery scent exhilarating them.

. . . . .

An hour later, Captain McGeary’s son, Andrew, rode into a cane field with four companions and came upon a pair of black men lying low on the grubby ground.

The white men hooted and hollered. “Get up and run! We gives you a chance.”

One of the blacks spoke up. “We’re tired of running.”

“Then we’ll shoot ya here,” Andrew declared. He got down off his stallion and drew his pistol, pointing it the faces of the two black men. “Which one wants it first?”

“You just gonna murder us?” asked one of the blacks.

“Sure, why not?” a white man mocked.

The black man pulled a knife from his trouser pocket and welded it. “Maybe it’s best we fight!” he cried angrily.

Andrew smiled. “I knows somethin’ about knife fightin’, too.” He withdrew a blade from his belt, and held it high, circling it about like a scintillating lasso.

The black man kept his eyes fixed on Andrew’s knife and moved in measured steps, watching and stalking, awaiting the moment to strike. It was Andrew who struck first, however, for he adroitly looped his blade and lashed the black man’s hand.

“You won’t do that no mo’,” the black man promised.

He leapt toward McGeary and the two began to tussle, their blades slicing the air with violence. The fighters appeared to be evenly matched, for neither man’s knife could find a deadly mark and fell the other. But the black man stood the better ground, and soon he swiped at Andrew and nicked his neck. Andrew saw the act as an opportunity and quickly went in with his blade, catching the black man in the chest and cracking a rib. The black man dropped his knife and stood dizzily, his eyes rolling in his head. Once he fell backward, Andrew proclaimed the man dead.

“You see that?!” cried Andrew. “I got him in the chest! Cut his heart, I bet”. He took a hand-rolled tobacco from his shirt pocket and lit it, adrenalin pumping through his veins. “He went down like a rock,” Andrew continued. “I kilt him with a single stroke.” He puffed heartily on the tobacco and blew smoke. The white men watched and were aghast, for the black man had opened a gash on Andrew’s neck and smoke flowed out of it, like through a pair of grotesque lips.

——-

Mark Shannon is a writer of short novels, screenplays, and theatrical work.  A former teacher and dramatic performer of literature (fiction and poetry), he has been writing for more than a decade without publication or production of his work.

———
Had his life been a movie, Josh Jordan would not have gotten the role – he was all wrong for the part. Too tall, too handsome, with eyes that had too much light in them, he didn’t look like a man with no luck at all. But he was. Josh Jordan was unlucky in life and unlucky in love.

His father had been a doctor so he had gone into medicine, or at least had tried to, but had had no luck with the chemistry – the organic or the inorganic. Gray’s Anatomy had left him cold with its technicalities, but he found the illustrations beautiful when viewed without any intent of medicine, so kept the volume on the coffee table. There had been a brief stint trying to sell cars after college in the spring of 1952, the year following his first marriage, but he hadn’t actually sold one, so was let go. He almost achieved semi-success as a banker, but in the sixties, made too many loans to too many unscrupulous developers. It had taken him years to crawl out from beneath the shadow of bankruptcy, a shadow that no longer had him in a half-Nelson, but that trailed after him and would be discovered years later still clinging to his lungs. He had had other professions, but for the past nine years, he had endured a very unaccomplished career as a marine insurance assessor. His camera jammed frequently as he photographed hurricane-tossed yachts along the Gulf from Bayou La Batre west and going on out to Dauphin and Gasque Islands, and east along the shore to Perdido and all the way to Lillian, or wind-sheared Chris Crafts and their once-harboring boathouses on the lakes and waterways of Alabama – Lake Purdy, Inland Lake, the Coosa River, Logan Martin, Smith Lake, Lake Lanier. He was good at assessing damage, and luckily for Alabama Allright Insurance Companies, did not overvalue it.

As to love, his high school sweetheart, a dark beauty (my mother, Olivia, for whom I am named), had dumped him for his best friend (my father) whom she married after college; his first wife became alcoholic in the midst of giving him four children and sharing his luckless life but discovered herself as a lover of women after their divorce and was the happier for it; the second, more stylish wife – “Anyone would be, after the first one,” Mother had a habit of saying, not realizing that it was clever only once – relieved him of any and all assets he had either inherited or accumulated; and more recently, a third wife died of cancer, shriveling up like a fresh-cut poppy brought indoors (they won’t last a day once they’re cut – put them in sugar water, singe their stems – it doesn’t matter, they always wither). Josh Jordan had found no empirical truth in the old adage “Third time’s the charm.”

The hapless of the world are often the romantics, as is Josh. In a poetic and dreamy voice he will tell you, “If you look at a map of Alabama, its bodies of water, its rivers and lakes, alongside an illustration of the heart with its veins and arteries, you will be amazed that their major and minor arteries almost correlate, right down to their lesser meandering tributaries. Just look!” And he’ll pull out his Rand McNally Alabama State Map and hold up his old medical text, opened to a surface-view plate of the heart. It is amazing in itself that he can still be amazed at anything at all.

My mother is beautiful the way an icy dark planet is beautiful: both are dishearteningly desirable, but ultimately, unobtainable. I thought the fact that Josh and Mother were involved in an affair was truly unlucky and that perhaps this would turn out to be what he would later perceive as his worst bout of luck yet if he ever got far enough away to look at it from a distance. The trouble is, he has always been in her orbit: it was only a matter of time and gravity before he was pulled in to a tighter circle around her as he was. He’ll never even make it to the cooled-off inner core of her heart. Eventually, he is bound to plummet past her lovely atmosphere right into her five-mile crust.

Mother is not a sympathetic woman, and even though she is obviously sleeping with him and loves him in her own way, she refers unkindly to him, his three marriages, his children and his life in general as “Lightning-struck once and snake-bit twice.” She has no idea that she is not even a variation on a theme, but a continuation of his run of luck. He has nothing material for her to latch on to and abscond with anyway (besides, she has her own assets), but his heart is in danger of being stolen and mishandled, misappropriated. There are worst things to lose than money.

A year and a half after his third wife, the sweet and young one – too young, Mother says – - died, her cancer filling and emptying her at the same time, Josh himself was diagnosed with the stuff. But by then he and Mother were in love, seemingly very tight, and had been taking boats and planes and cars to places everybody else had already been – to Ochos Rios, or little excursions to Isle of Palms, or running off to Cozumel.

Visiting him at Mother’s was like watching Camille hit Mobile Bay. Downstairs I said to Mother, “I wonder if he even knows how bad his luck is. If he does, he doesn’t let on.”

“Believe me, he’s oblivious – totally clueless,” she said.

“It must be awful to lose your wife to cancer and then get it yourself.” This reference to the young wife he’d loved so dearly didn’t suit mother. She turned her back on me, but I had already seen her face. She started up the steps and I followed.

Mother had gotten Josh’s old text book for him from his home and had set it on the bedside table. Nothing is consistent with the woman, though, and she had blotted out her own kindness by leaving the book open to an illustration of a pair of healthy lungs.

She sits at the edge of his bed and announces, “You should have seen that lung – it was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” No one but Mother would have wanted to see it.

“Show me where you and Mother went on your trip,” I say, trying to steer the conversation to things other than cancer. I hand his maps to him, and his eyes catch light.

“This is where we went last spring, and here is where we’re going in June.” Josh puts his finger on the places they’ve been, places that he’s highlighted in a hopeful neon green.

Mother, who has no patience with his maps, rolls her eyes and says, right in front of him, “Spare us the maps this time, Josh. We’ve seen them. You and I won’t be going anywhere anytime soon, and you know it.” And she goes downstairs.

There’s a low in the air, the barometric pressure has plummeted. She’s in and out of there like Camille, swiping one way, then coming around and hitting from the other direction. I look at Josh. The damage is done.

His hand pats at the empty place Mother made. I go over and sit, happy to be close to a good, albeit unlucky, man.

“You look like your mother, Olivia.”

“A little bit, I guess. Josh, I still want to see the maps. Show me the rivers.”

With his finger he traces the Tennessee River flowing into the Northwest corner of Alabama where it bulges out to become Wilson Lake and later Wheeler. “It goes all the way across the top of the state like a borrowed blue garter on a brides’ leg,” he says, and I know he is thinking of Mother’s leg. He goes on in a voice that widens, pools up and overflows. “The Coosa comes in from the East, winding south past Gadsden and Pell City, flanked by the Talladega National Forest a good way. Then it runs on to Wetumpka before it marries the Alabama River, which flows all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. Lake Tuscaloosa’s waters empty into rivers named Black Warrior, and Tombigbee, ending up at the mouth of Mobile Bay. Towns with names like Chickasaw, Mon Louis and Daphne rest on those rich shores, waiting for the waters from the rivers of Alabama to flow and rush and comingle with the warm Gulf.”

His words rise and fall like soft waters lapping against us, and for the moment, we are carried.

I lean over and flip the pages of his book until I come to the one I know he likes, the one of the heart. I’m not good at lying, but I try anyway. “She’s just worried about you.”

“She’s not a cartographer,” he sighs, and sets the map aside.

“No, never was.” I take the map from him and prop it beside the illustration of the heart.

Mother does her best by him, nursing him for two weeks before tiring of it. “If you don’t control it,” she tells him, “it will control you!” To hear her talk, you’d think she believed cancer was a choice.

“Mother, cut him some slack – he just had surgery. There’s no such thing as snapping back from cancer. It’s not like a bout of the flu.”

“He has to try,” she says.

A few months after his surgery and the radiation treatments, just when his luck was turning, Josh slipped on dew-slicked grass in Mother’s yard while walking back up to the house for iced tea. He had been planting a flowering vine at the foot of her mailbox to show his love, a clematis (that mother later dreamed had wrapped around the mailbox post and squeezed until the box popped off before overtaking the yard like ravenous kudzu and devouring the house, covering every entry and every exit, its tendrils lacing delicate but insidious lattice work across the windows so there was no looking in and no looking out, no light from sun or breeze from sky, but it was only a dream), which of course he shouldn’t have been doing she told him later, when he fell, fracturing his leg not neatly, as a luckier man would have, but so that the bones protruded from the skin.

Mother saw him from her dining room window, but was sure he was embarrassed about falling (“The radiation has sapped every bit of manhood out of him! He’s like a child,” she had complained. “It’s like caring for an infant.”), so she did not rush to help him. It was not that she knew about men and their pride, but that she felt he should have some, and get back on his feet. “I can’t keep playing nursemaid – he’s taking forever to get well. He’s got to pull himself up by his bootstraps!” she had told my sister who had called from Texas to ask how he was doing since the radiation. Later, when my sister phoned me, I gave her my own diagnosis of the situation. “Boo, he’s a slow healer everywhere but the heart.”

Fifteen minutes after Josh’s fall when Mother was bringing out the freshly iced tea with lemon and sugar and two cookies from the store for him, he was still on the ground, but had pulled himself closer to the house.

Luckily, Mother saw at once that something was clearly out of place and that he was in some sort of trouble again, that he needed her help one more time.

“Josh?” She could see the blood and the torn flesh and the very bones of his leg, a leg that had been entwined with hers.

“Call 911,” he said and fainted dead away.

I have to admit that Mother was kind enough to insist he return to her house when he left the hospital, just as she had when they had taken out his rib to get to his cancerous lung. “I have to bring him here – people will talk if I don’t. But I’m sick to death of it all. If I had wanted to be a nurse, I’d have gone to Nursing School.”

It was true that there was no one else to take care of him. His three remaining children (the fourth one, the one who was tall and handsome and looked the most like him, but who was alcoholic like the mother, had died the previous year in a single instant when his horse spooked and reared and he fell and his neck snapped) were in places far-flung from Birmingham, Alabama; places such as Washington, Montana, New Mexico. Mother would point this out to him as well as comment on it to anyone who would listen, and most people would. “His children don’t seem to care. They live far away on purpose. There’s bad blood between them . . . and drink, you know.” And everyone did know. She had kept none of his secrets to herself.

Before Mother brought Josh home to recuperate this second time, she explained to him that she felt they needed to re-examine their relationship, that they could still be friends (he would always have a place in her heart), but that she was worn out, and that Perry Livingston, someone they had both gone to grammar school with, had asked her out and that she was tired of taking care of and would like to be taken care of instead, and that she had been to the Seafood Buffet at The Club atop Red Mountain, next to Vulcan’s statue with him and had said yes when Perry invited her to join him for a week at the end of the month on Bogue Island. “So you can’t take too long getting better. Besides, you can’t get your strength back lying around in bed all day.”

On the phone I ask her, “How can you dump Josh? He loves you, Mother.”

“Well, Perry loves me, too. Besides, his children don’t cause problems, his wife is remarried, and he doesn’t have cancer. If it weren’t for bad luck, Josh wouldn’t have any luck at all.”

“People’s luck can change,” I tell her, meaning Perry’s, meaning Josh’s, maybe meaning hers.

When I visited him in the hospital to sign his cast, Josh said something strange to me that I still remember. He said, “My heart has been folded like a written-on piece of paper.” He was on Demerol and I didn’t know if he was talking nonsense, or if he was trying to tell me something important. I have considered what he said, and this is what I think he meant. He meant that the heart is like a piece of paper and that its secrets – its desires and loves, its injuries and vagaries – are written indelibly across it. Mother had held his heart in her hands, practiced her signature, then wadded the whole thing up.

“The mind might forget, but the heart keeps and ponders. Some things just can’t be erased,” Josh had said to me, and I had understood that well enough.

When I think about Josh and what he has been through, I imagine his heart literally covered with his joys and sorrows – and the name “Olivia” scribbled all over it. If Josh ever has a by-pass, the cardiologist will have a lot to read.

It took time, but what I said to Mother about luck changing came true. Lady Luck has at long last smiled her winsome smile on Josh: his broken leg has mended, his cancer is in remission, and he has escaped Mother’s orbit (now she only has eyes for Perry). Josh has introduced me to the travel editor for Southern Sojourns, his new ladylove. His heart has opened to a new page. I think this may be where Josh’s luck lies. She is gentle and kind, and frequently travels with him along Alabama’s waterways. She likes maps. “Did you know that the lakes and rivers flowing across our state and down to the Gulf are like the vessels of the heart, carrying blood back to its source?” he asks. Her eyes light and she smiles. Then he reaches for his maps and Gray’s.

———

Mary Larkin’s award-winning short stories have appeared in Shenandoah, The Chattahoochee Review, The Nebraska Review, Red Mountain Review, and other journals. She is a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a Pushcart Nominee.

Snow fell again like feathers tumbling from the sky and when they hit the concrete, they dissolved into a clear liquid.

The old joke that Phoenix used to tell Jalen when it snowed back in Cross River was that he’d spotted two snowflakes that were exactly alike. It was never that funny, or even original, but year after year he’d tell it and cackle as loudly as he did the first time Pop Pop or his father (he couldn’t remember who told him the joke) first said it way back when he was five or six. Now, Jalen wasn’t around to hear the joke. Cliff was, but he was a poor substitute. It seemed he had forgotten how to laugh.

Phoenix sat out in the cold on his porch in a t-shirt and running shorts. He sat with his legs straight out in front of him and grabbed his toes, then he followed that with a round of jumping jacks while Cliff sat in the living room cleaning his drum set and checking the recording equipment. Phoenix stopped exercising to look into the window at Cliff. The drummer’s face was nothing but an open scowl. He hadn’t smiled since he arrived the day before.

Exiled to this cold, gray rock of a town away from his wife and children, delivering newspapers for a living and aching physically and mentally from the bullets that had lodged themselves in his body, Phoenix still found things to laugh about. He thought of a few as he did a series of pushups right there on the icy wood of his porch. There was the way people here said crick instead of creek; there was the frozen stares his snake-like dreadlocks inspired as if he was Medusa; and of course, there was Cliff’s grumpy old man demeanor, which was the funniest thing of all. What was Cliff’s problem? Sure he was working at a factory in Port Yooga instead of drumming. Sure he had to hop in his car and drive several hours to upstate New York—Endicott, part of the Southern Tier of New York, or as he called it the Cold Asscrack of America—to work on music with the guy that fronted his band. Was any of that Phoenix’s fault? Did he ask to be set up and shot? Sure his exile affected others: Jalen and Cliff; Shirley and the kids he now rarely saw. The only one who didn’t complain in some way was Jalen. What love his friend had for him. Would everyone else rather he wave a banner announcing himself to those that wanted him dead?

Cliff opened the window a crack. Rog, he said. Rog.

The truncation of his birth name annoyed Phoenix. He ignored and continued his pushups.

Cliff opened the door.

Roger man, come on it’s time to make some music. We’re already behind. Stop playing around.

Phoenix paused mid-pushup and rose to his feet. Then he started jogging in place.

***

When Phoenix Starr first arrived in upstate New York, he was little more than a wrecked human being. His mind swirling, swirling. Separating. Coming back together. Sometimes he thought in doubled drumbeats. Sometimes they were tripled and accompanied by backwards notes. Other times he thought in fevered lyrics.

Marijuana had the power to steady his mind, except when it didn’t. He copped thick bags from Syracuse and often smoked into the night. Dave, had he been there, would have said, Why you want to waste your mind with that stuff? And when he wanted to assert his power he’d say, Not in my studio or my house, fool. It was the reason, Dave said, his group’s apprenticeship had been so long. The smoke dulled their sharp edges. You don’t listen, Dave would say. Bullshit, Phoenix would mutter. Bullshit, Phoenix muttered sitting there in that Red Roof Inn across from the mall in Johnson City. The stuff was good for easing migraines and now good for quieting the mind. It had been about a week since he’d been shot. Phoenix was still bandaged and bleeding. He wrapped his lips around a psychedelic red, yellow, green and blue pipe. He sat sketching things that were on his mind; that was the first time he drew the flaming bird with the scarlet three on its chest that would become the Phoenix Starr Trilogy’s logo.

How did it all happen? Perhaps it was chance. Random. Another botched break-in by a jittery thief with a gun. Nothing, his life told him, was ever random.

He looked out the window, eyeing every car, every face with suspicion. Was this how Dave dissolved a relationship—a hastily arranged assassination? Or perhaps it was bigger than Dave. Phoenix was a man who saw things. A dangerous man. John on the island of Patmos.

***

In the first few months, only Jalen knew where he was hiding. Not even his wife and children could say where he rested his head.

It was all such a quick thing. One night Jalen learns his friend is in Cross River General with three gunshot wounds, the next day he’s driving his car north convinced by his bandaged friend who is in the passenger seat laughing, then agitated, then sedate, then puffing on a reefer.

Every 50 miles or so, Phoenix would reach into the backseat and snatch the map. Unfolding it neatly, he’d run his fingers along the white dotted rendering of the highway.

Man, he said, you got about as much driving sense as a stuffed animal. If they was following us they’d be on our ass now.

Who?

Man, we ain’t never gonna get there. I think I seen a bicycle pass us.

Why are we going to New York?

Just drive.

***

Phoenix found what he was looking for about a week after he arrived in upstate New York. Jalen had left, a bit confused by his friend, but convinced by his assurances that he’d be OK.

Ask some questions for me, chief, Phoenix said. I don’t want to think it was Dave that did this.

Phoenix walked downtown Binghamton until he could no longer take the pain and then he took the BC Transit bus back to his hotel room in Johnson City. There he wrote songs and plotted his days. She was somewhere in these cold barren interconnected towns

It didn’t take long to find her, after he got his head together. Once he figured out that Binghamton University wasn’t in Binghamton, but in a neighboring town, he hopped on the bus and wandered the campus, wide-eyed staring at every woman who shared even the remotest physical trait with her. Perhaps he looked insane, though he didn’t much care.

After the gray sky turned a shade of dark blue, he happened upon a sad woman in the student center with a look of displacement in her eyes. It was a look he had seen all over the town. Everyone here was unified by their isolation.

There’d been so many false alarms all day. Could this really be her? When she looked up, she smiled. It was a quizzical smile.

Roger? she called.

Cleo.

What are you doing outside of Cross River?

I got shot.

I know, I heard…

***
After Cleo’s mother exiled her from Cross River, she headed to South Carolina where she lived miserably with her aunt and two cousins all the while dreaming of flying away. The end of high school was her chance.

She longed to return home, sending in applications to Alfred McCoy University and Cross River Community College. Her mother refused to pay for those schools, still unconvinced that her daughter would not fall back into sinful and corrupted ways. They still calling you Cleo the Cocksucker here, her mother said. Why you even want to come back? Cleo argued with her mother over scratchy long distance lines. If not Cross River then how about New York University? Cleo asked. Ha, her mother said. How about I send you to the University of Gomorrah? As a compromise, they settled on Binghamton University, in the same state as New York City, but far enough so that it didn’t infect her daughter and, most importantly, she was safely away from Cross River and Roger Griffin, Jr.

At the same time, Phoenix and his band had begun to rise on the Riverbeat scene. They appalled Cleo’s mother as did most Riverbeat. It was full of such anger and rage, so much misdirection and irreligiousness. It had been a close call, but her daughter was safely delivered from this boy’s influence.

***

They felt they were fifteen and untroubled as if they were living the nostalgic lies they told themselves about the old days. It seemed that his first few months in the area were spent staring into her face. Phoenix moved to an Italian neighborhood in Endicott. He wrote syrupy songs about her dark hair and her brown eyes and he sung them to her while they drove out to where there were no streetlights and gazed at the stars together. But they weren’t teenagers or carefree even if they pretended to be. Cleo had paid so little attention to school since Phoenix’s arrival that she’d begun to fail most of her classes. The little money Phoenix had was dwindling. He took a job waking early in the morning and delivering the local newspaper around his neighborhood.

Around that time, Phoenix received the first of many letters from his mother. They alternated between lucid and delusional, sometimes in the same letter. She called him Phoenix and asked him to get ahold of himself. Sometimes they were poetic and he tossed her words into his lyrics, but most of the time it was too painful to read. He made to write her back, his floor was often littered with crumpled balls of paper with just Dear Mom or some variation scrawled on them. When he began to feel too haunted by her, Phoenix stopped reading the letters. He left a neat pile of them in his kitchen.

Before she passed, she sent him a short letter that read simply: I’m going to die now. Her heart stopped the next night and Phoenix didn’t read about it for months.

And what of the Phoenix Starr Trilogy? Jalen found work with the local government while he attended Cross River Community College and Cliff worked at a factory. At night they both dreamed about that last show. People said the band dazzled their minds’ eye with a colorful mural masquerading as song. It’s what kept them going even when it seemed like Phoenix just wanted to lie around and be paranoid and in love.

Sometimes Cleo disappeared for days, studying for an exam or doing make-up work. Phoenix felt his mind slipping into unease. For her sake, he left the reefer in his closet untouched, but she didn’t even appreciate his sacrifice, becoming a ghost when he needed her. She’d turn up and they’d argue into the late hours.

It became tiring and boring like most things. Every time he saw a movie in which a man quested for a woman, he always wondered what happened after the credits. Now he knew.

***

Back in Cross River, Jalen had indeed kept his eyes and ears open. He had seen things. Heard things. Dave refused to return his calls. Throughout the Riverbeat community, speculation sat on everyone’s lips. Perhaps Dave was involved, or he maybe he knew something that he wasn’t saying.

Cliff and Jalen lounged in Cliff’s basement smoking and drumming. When the music stopped Jalen said, Should we tell Rog about Dave?

Think it was him?

Jalen nodded tentatively.

Why not? Cliff shrugged. Maybe it’ll shake the crazy off him and get him back to work.

***

That cold day in which Cliff came to visit, Phoenix felt a sense of dread flowing through him. He thought if he could only harness it, he would be powerful.

He stepped inside from the porch, his head not fully clear. Wasn’t it always like that, even with the smallest things such as singing a song, you’re never really prepared. It is never quite the time.

Phoenix paced the living room counting his breaths then he mumbled his new lyrics to himself. Even those burbled rumblings gave Cliff chills, but he was a romantic. It was early in the morning and they played till noon.

Phoenix made spaghetti for lunch. He and Cliff ate in silence until they started to bicker about garlic bread. Cliff played back the music and dreamed. He’d later play it for Jalen and Jalen would also dream—guitar here, bass there. Phoenix didn’t give the songs second or third thoughts. He hadn’t heard from Cleo in a while and as much as he hated it, her absence made his stomach feel hollow no matter how much spaghetti and garlic bread he shoveled into it.

***

That night, as his mind raced and Cliff lay sleeping on the floor, Phoenix decided that counting his breaths as Cleo taught him couldn’t properly center his thoughts. He smoked a joint of the Syracuse weed. Not as good as the black leaves that were grown in the Wildlands back home, but it would have to do. Dave, the man who saved him, had tried to destroy him. It was beyond understanding.

There was a rapping on his door—hard and swift—and both he and Cliff jumped. Phoenix wondered whether or not to run for a kitchen knife. Every knock sent a feeling like fireworks shooting through his entire body.

Who is it?

There was a muffled sound coming through the door. Phoenix peeked out the window and all he could see was a dark form shivering in the cold.

The more he stared the more the figure took shape. It was a female form. She had hair like a fright wig, her face buried in a zibeline coat.

The voice shouted again, in frustration. It came together. Cleo. Phoenix opened the door and she looked strange. Her face pale and ghost-like, but still shimmering like the euphotic waters of the Cross River.

Were you going to let me freeze? Damn.

He introduced her to Cliff. His voice was polite, but Phoenix sensed disapproval. Once he mentioned Cleo and Cliff said, Aren’t you married? Phoenix never forgot that. She returned Cliff’s nod and leaned into Phoenix. Let’s go to your room, she said.

Her eyes were wild, Phoenix thought. She wrapped her arms about her torso as if they were not made of flesh, but of steel and there to protect her from any sort of assault.

***

First she leaned into the corner, with her head against the wall. She said nothing.

Baby, what’s wrong.

She didn’t respond. Instead she walked over to the window and pushed it open. I need fresh air, she said.

Phoenix wrapped his hands around the guitar and plucked at the strings.

Could you stop that?

The silence was a great gulf, Phoenix thought. It was the first time he had seen her since she stood him up at Town Square Mall in Vestal. He waited with the movie tickets in his hands until the final credits rolled. He had cancelled a gig at a downtown bar for the date. She had forgotten. Always her excuse. She showered him with professions of love. Her sweet voice softened his heart always and then he was again Charlie Brown with his eye on a football he would never kick. She made part of him tender and raw just like the bullets had done to his flesh and muscle.

Sometimes she was just a voice over the phone, if that. What’s the difference? he told himself, with or without her or anyone else for that matter, life was a lonely place.

Where you been at? he asked, putting down the guitar and walking around the room.

Failing all my classes, she said. Oh, Roger, I messed up. I’m supposed to graduate in May.

I thought you were studying. I imagine you got plenty time since I don’t see you.

Funny, Phoenix Starr. Not the time.

Is that all?

She buried her face into his chest and they stayed like that for a while. Instead of sleeping that night, they joked, laughed, made love, ignored the music Cliff played in the living room below, called each other names, argued and joked some more, but then there wasn’t laughter. Sometime early in the morning, just before the sun rose and after they each had a second orgasm., Cleo said: Roger. I think I’m pregnant.

Yeah, you probably are, he replied. I really was on tonight, wasn’t I?

I’m not playing. I tested myself before I came over. I’m pregnant, Phoenix.

***

As the months passed, the world slipped from an unbearable winter into a damp, tolerable summer. Cleo swelled until she looked like the dugong of the Indian Ocean, her skin appearing just as slick and shiny sometimes. The dream of music became as elusive as a forgotten melody. Cliff accepted a promotion at the shoe factory and Jalen signed up for another semester.

In Riverbeat Magazine, Dave was quoted as saying: Phoenix? That boy ain’t brave enough to make Riverbeat. Where he at? He ain’t set foot in Cross River since he been shot. Shot? Yeah right. Ain’t no one see no wounds on that nigga. Some people think they want this life, but then reality strike they ass like a bullet. Phoenix Starr’s punk ass is like a real bad dream to me. I’m done thinking about him.

Jalen mailed Phoenix the interview. He read it on his way to work. He was now an account executive at the newspaper. Phoenix wasn’t very good at selling classified advertisements, and it pained him to put on a tie go to his windowless office each day, but he was down to his last piece and nearly checkmated. He sent money off to Shirley and the kids and then turned around and peeled off some dollars for Cleo. And there was Cleo again asking for more and more of his time. Where was the time for music?

One night he dreamt of a bird pushing itself out of Cleo’s womb and flying off a bloody mess, whistling against a blue sky.

A pain rose in Cleo’s stomach one night as if the baby was churning, trying to tumble out. Phoenix had a gig in Ithaca. He arrived home with a smile and some cash to put toward the baby. He’d name her Robin. The house was empty though, both Robin and Cleo gone. There was no note, perhaps she was with friends or back at the dorm. Wouldn’t be the first time she vanished. She needed her space. She needed to not feel boxed in. Sure her absences never sat right, especially now that she carried his child inside of her, but he was careful not to shackle her. That would only make her fly into the ether more frequently. Besides, how could he worry now when he felt such a profound exhaustion. Phoenix fell asleep and woke later that night to a ringing phone.

He arrived at the hospital, not with the drawn face and a heavy heart he’d later wear, but with hope that it wasn’t true. That somebody had made a mistake. But in reality, Cleo’s womb had turned into a morgue, littered with cold bodies, that’s how he thought of it. He cursed himself, but he couldn’t help imagining it that way.

***

Their silence was no longer a gulf, but instead it became a great ocean. He’d sit downstairs playing his guitar while she lay in the bed. Sometimes she would chastise him, That guitar is your best and only idea, isn’t it?

His lungs plunged into his stomach every few hours. His job, taken for the sake of the new baby was a reminder that Robin would never cry in his arms or smile at him. He called Shirley for solace. She was good at that. She spoke flatly, robotically. Now you can come home, she said. How insensitive and cruel, he thought. Didn’t I just lose a child? Isn’t my whole world a dying planet? Why did he think she’d be filled with empathy? Why did he fool himself into thinking she’d provide him peace? Instead, Shirley said she would be defying him: ended the conversation by announcing that she’d be returning to Cross River. It doesn’t make any sense to be away from everything I care about, she said. If me and the girls matter at all, you’ll come too.

But it’s not safe, he said. Dave…

He heard a click, then a dial tone.

***

On a Saturday morning, Phoenix moped about, strumming his guitar. As he played, Cleo told him she too would be returning to Cross River.

He shrugged. Perhaps part of him didn’t believe her. She was bluffing. Cleo was a good bullshitter. They didn’t say anything about it for the rest of the day. The next morning she wished him peace, dragging a suitcase behind her. He saw the cab pull off and still it wasn’t real, even though he watched it happen.

***

Phoenix moved sluggishly after Cleo left. He felt his whole life was a dance around a black hole that threatened to swallow him. After work one evening, he lit a joint and a candle and climbed the steps to write a new song. Perhaps all was not wasted. He’d start with that bird he saw escaping from the brown folds of Cleo’s vagina. Its hair matted by blood, twitching its head in confusion. Was it such a bad thing that it flew away?

After some moments, his smoke detector screamed sharp clean bursts of outrage, troubled and angry like an indictment.

He rushed down the stairs. A thick, black acrid smell entered his nose and choked him. His skin felt hot. He covered his eyes with his sleeve.

Phoenix knew he could save the day. Put out the fire and set everything straight to the way it used to be. He moved toward the kitchen where the extinguisher was, coughing and gasping. The fire moved quickly around the room, taking over every corner. Bleary-eyed, he looked around for an exit, but could see little.

He broke out a window and cried for help. When he retold the story, Phoenix said a tall old man with a long singed beard, dragged him from the flaming house. That’s all he remembered. No one ever saw an old man. The firefighters found him lying in front of the house alive, but unconscious.

***

There it was, Phoenix ended his time in upstate New York as he began it, at the Red Roof Inn in Johnson City, smoking a joint, observing his mind twist and separate and return to sanity only to crack up all over again.

The next day, Jalen and Cliff came to pick him up. Exile was done, they said. It would be about making music from here on out. If the music was good enough they reasoned, it would be a shield. Cross River would never let him die, not by Dave’s hand, not by anybody’s. Phoenix didn’t mind singing to save himself, so he agreed. Everything was back in Cross River, the whole world and the rest of his life.