The Jane Austen Book Club

by Karen Joy Fowler

She turned to look at the dance floor. It was night behind the five-story arch of glass; inside, the balconies were strung with chains of lights, now lit like constellations. The band was small and distant. She saw Dean—tall, handsome, and kind of jerky when he danced, but in a good way.

  Bernadette was rotund, but elastic. She had a serious shimmy in her shoulders, loose knees, rocking hips. She was sugar-footing one minute, buck-and-winging the next. A restrained, ladylike cha-cha. It was too bad Dean was out there with her. He was obviously holding her back.

  Sylvia locked the car in the parking garage and waited with Allegra for the elevator to the street. She was relaxed, relieved. Jocelyn had phoned to tell her that Daniel hadn’t shown. Sylvia had forgiven Allegra for almost backing out on the evening (and now felt guilty for making her come). She’d even forgiven Allegra the serious crime of making Allegra unhappy.

  Somewhere around the second floor she said, “You know, I don’t think there’s anything truly unforgivable. Not where there’s love,” but Allegra was reading an ad for Depo-Provera on the elevator wall, and she didn’t answer.

  Jocelyn spoke to Prudie, but pitched her voice so that Grigg and Mo would also hear. “Don’t you find that people who dance well don’t usually go around telling people they dance well?”

  “Any savage can dance,” Grigg said. He got up, walked over, held out his hand. Jocelyn’s feet hurt all the way up to her knees, but she wouldn’t give Grigg the satisfaction of saying so. If he wasn’t too tired to dance, then neither was she. She would dance until it killed her.

  She ignored the hand, rose without his help.

  She didn’t look at him. He didn’t look at her. Prudie looked at them both, walking off together, angry backs, angry arms, perfectly synchronized angry steps.

  Prudie’s mood had been volatile since her mother’s death. She’d had a pretty nice evening here, listening to Bernadette’s stories, making a mockery of Mo. Now suddenly she felt abandoned by Dean and by Bernadette, Jocelyn, and Grigg. It was silly, they were only dancing, but there it was; they’d left her all alone. She was always being left behind.

  “I feel untethered,” she told Mo. “As if the rope tying me to this earth had snapped.” This wasn’t something she could say to Dean. He’d be so hurt to think he wasn’t her tether. She could say it to Mo only because she had had too much to drink and would never see him again. Or read his stupid books.

  “Then it’s time to soar,” Mo said. He leaned across the table to say it, so the zinnia centerpiece brushed the bottom of his chin. He came close enough to see that she was crying, then straightened up in a helpless, startled way. “Don’t do that!” he told her. “Come dance instead. If you think Dean won’t mind.” The band was playing the Beatles’ “Come Together,” which, out of all the hundreds of Beatles songs, was her mother’s absolute favorite.

  “Let’s not and say we did,” Prudie almost answered, because that’s what her mother would have done.

  But it was such a nice thing for Mo to have said. It seemed, in its small way, like sound advice. A plan, even. Dance instead. She could stay here, alone if you didn’t count Mo, who didn’t count, or she could make herself join the party. She wiped her eyes with her napkin, folded it, and set it on the table. “Okay,” Prudie said.

  So what if she’d refused an earlier offer from the man she loved? He would ask again. In the meantime there were lights and flowers, glass rings and bronze fox faces. Rich men and nice men and absent men and men who just liked a good plot. If the music was good, why not dance with them all?

  * * *

  Bernadette told us:

  By the end of Pride and Prejudice, Jane, Elizabeth, and Lydia Bennet are all married. This still leaves two Bennet girls, Mary and Kitty, unattached.

  According to Austen’s nephew, she married them off later. She told her family that Kitty Bennet eventually wed a clergyman who lived near the Darcy estate. Mary Bennet wed a clerk from her uncle Philips’s office, which kept her close to her parents’ home and part of the only sort of society in which she could distinguish herself. Both marriages, according to Austen, were good ones.

  “I always like to know how a story ends,” says Bernadette.

  * * *

  PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS

  for a new

  TERRENCE HOPKINS MYSTERY

  by Mo Bellington

  MORE MO!

  In his debut novel, THE DEAD FILES, a case gone horribly wrong sent urban cop, Terrence Hopkins, to the country to devote himself to THINGS THAT GROW.

  In Bellington’s much-loved LAST HARVEST, Terrence Hopkins hoped he’d seen his last dead body.

  But take one small-town politician with big-league ambitions, add one mysterious reclusive cult, and it’s that season again.

  A MURDER OF CROWS

  by Mo Bellington

  “May be Bellington’s best ever.”

  —STANDARD BEARER WEEKLY

  Author available for interviews, readings, and book clubs.

  * * *

  August

  SUBJECT:Re: Mom

  DATE: 8/5/02 8:09:45 am PDT

  FROM: Airheart@well.com

  TO: biancasillman@earthlink.net; Catwoman53@aol.com

  Hey, team Harris—

  Mrs. Grossman called this morning. She thought we ought to know that our seventy-eight-year-old mother with the new hip was on the second-story roof cleaning the gutters. I told her we’d hired Tony for the daredevil housework, but Mrs. Grossman says Tony has already left for college, because he has soccer camp. So one of us should probably go down and find someone else.

  (And what’s up with little Grigg? He called me last night with that scraped-paint voice he gets, so obvious he wants me to know something’s wrong, but then he won’t say what.)

  Amelia

  SUBJECT:Re: re: Mom

  DATE: 8/5/02 11:15:52 am PDT

  FROM: Catwoman53@aol.com

  TO: Airheart@well.com; biancasillman@earthlink.net

  I just want us all to be clear that this is exactly what Mom wants. She knows Mrs. Grossman will call and then we’ll all look like shocking, neglectful daughters and someone will be dispatched posthaste. I mean, of course someone has to go, but she’s a cunning old woman, and why can’t she just ask us? I say she should be locked up in a nursing home until she promises to stay off the roof.

  As to Grigg, am I the only one who thinks he’s in love again? And about time? How long ago was Sandra?

  love all, Cat

  SUBJECT:Re: re: re: Mom

  DA TE: 8/5/02 12:27:59 pm PDT

  FROM: Airheart@well.com

  TO: Catwoman53@aol.com; biancasillman@earthlink.net

  I blame us for Grigg’s love life. We set a standard no woman can possibly live up to.

  A

  SUBJECT:Mom and Grigg

  DATE: 8/5/02 1:02:07 pm PDT

  FROM: biancasillman@earthlink.net

  TO: Airheart@well.com; Catwoman53@aol.com

  Things are slow here so I don’t mind going and dealing with Mom. (We are shocking, neglectful daughters.)

  I’m pretty sure Grigg likes some woman in his book club. I’m not so sure she likes him back. He called me, too, last night, so very late, so very down. I worry that Sandra left him even more fragile than before. (What’s that girl scout motto—Leave the campsite better than you found it? Sandra was no girl scout.) I always thought she was just using him for his computer skills.

  Love to the husbands and kiddies, Bianca

  SUBJEC T:Re: Mom and Grigg

  DATE: 8/5/02 1:27:22 pm PDT

  FROM: Catwoman53@aol.com

  TO: Airheart@well.com; biancasillman@earthlink.net

  Sandra was a piece of work. You remember your Christmas party, Amelia? Just step away from the mistletoe, lady. Keep your hands where we can see them. We did try to warn him. One pretty face and he just doesn’t listen to his sisters anymore.

  XXXXXX, Cat

  SUBJECT:Re: re: Mom and Grigg

  DA
TE: 8/5/02 5:30:22 pm PDT

  FROM: Airheart@well.com

  TO: Catwoman53@aol.com; biancasillman@earthlink.net

  If Grigg’s in love again, one of us better go take care of that, too.

  A

  CHAPTER SIX

  in which we read Persuasion and find ourselves back at Sylvia’s house

  At any given time, most of the people in the California History Room were looking up their own families. Sylvia had worked in the state library since 1989; she’d helped hundreds and hundreds of people load rolls of microfiche into the feeder, adjust the image, master the fast-forward. She’d opened the bride, groom, and death indexes and gone spelunking for great-great-great grandparents. Today had started with a failure—a common name (Tom Burke), a big city (San Francisco), a certain vagueness as to dates, all resulting in a pissed-off descendant who felt Sylvia simply wasn’t trying hard enough. Her resources, her sheer will to succeed, were compared unfavorably with those of the Mormons.

  It made Sylvia reflective. Had there always been this level of interest in genealogy, she wondered, even in the sixties, when everything was to be made from scratch? What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now?

  She supposed she was no better than the rest. She felt a particular pleasure whenever anyone asked for Box 310, a collection of archived Spanish and Mexican documents. She herself had recently translated the “Solemn Espousal of Manuel Rodríguez from Guadalajara, parents deceased, to María Valvanora E La Luz, daughter of a soldier and a resident of Cynaloa.” The date on the document was October 20, 1781. The information, dry. Did they love each other desperately? Were they friends, or did they eat each night in icy silence, have resentful sex? Did they, in fact, go on to marry? Were there children? Did one of the two then leave with little warning, and if so, who left and who was left behind?

  Other items in the box included an invitation to a grand ball at the governor’s house in honor of Antonio López de Santa Anna; a photocopy of Andrés Pico’s Articles of Capitulation to John C. Frémont at Cahuenga; a letter to Fra José María de Zalvidea discussing marriage laws among the Indians. This last was tentatively dated 1811. A world away, Jane Austen was finally publishing Sense and Sensibility, on a similar subject.

  We were here first, Sylvia’s father used to say to her, although her mother was only second-generation, and even so, of course, they weren’t even close to first, just earlier than some.

  For California is a Poem!

  The land of romance, of mystery,

  of worship, of beauty and of song.

  Ina Coolbrith had written it, and the words were now chiseled into the wall near the staircase to the second floor. But the sign Sylvia preferred was upstairs and done in Magic Marker. Quiet, it read. Research in progress.

  Sylvia had never come to this library as a child, but she’d grown up not far away, in a gray wood house on Q Street. They’d had a large yard with lemon trees in the front, tomatoes and chili peppers in the back. Her mother was always in the garden; she had the touch. Her mother’s favorite saint was Thérèse, who had promised, after her death, to shower the world with roses.

  Sylvia’s mother was doing her bit. She had rosebushes and rose trees and roses that climbed on trellises. She washed them for aphids and fed them with compost and wrapped them in the winter. “How do you know what to do?” Sylvia asked her once, and her mother said that if you only paid attention, the roses told you what they needed.

  Sylvia’s father wrote for the Spanish language paper La Raza. At night men would come and sit on the porch, play guitars, talk politics, farming, and immigration. It was Sylvia’s job the next morning to clean up the bottles, the cigarette butts, the dirty dishes.

  Her second job was to hurry straight to her grandmother’s house after school and provide a running translation of the daytime soap Young Dr. Malone. Such goings-on in the small town of Denison! Murder, incarceration, drink, and despair. Adultery and hysterical blindness. Thrombosis. Throat cancer. Crippling accidents. Forged wills. And then came episode two.

  Afterward Sylvia’s grandmother would analyze the show for character shadings, themes and symbols, useful moral lessons. The analysis took most of the rest of the afternoon. Women had affairs and went blind. Nurses loved doctors with quiet and unrequited devotion, opened pediatric clinics, did good works. Life was made up of medical emergencies, court cases, painful love affairs, and backstabbing relatives.

  Sometimes Sylvia’s father read her European fairy tales at bedtime, changing the heroines’ hair from blond to black (as if Sylvia could be fooled by this, as if Diego Sanchez’s daughter would identify with a brunette named Snow White anyway), pointing out class issues whenever they arose. Woodsmen grew up to marry princesses. Queens danced themselves to death in bloody shoes.

  Sundays her mother read to her from The Lives of the Saints, about Saint Dorcas, and all the others who’d given away their fortunes, devoted themselves to charity. Her mother flipped hurriedly past the martyrs—Saint Agatha (her breasts were cut from her body), Saint Lucy (her eyes were put out), Saint Perpetua (she guided her executioner’s blade to her throat with her own hand). For years Sylvia didn’t even know those other stories were there. She merely suspected them.

  But neither the fairy tales nor the saints had the lasting impact of Young Dr. Malone. Sylvia dated her grandmother’s decline from the day the show was cancelled.

  Most of what we knew about Sylvia came from Jocelyn. They’d met at Girl Scout camp when they were eleven years old. Little Jocelyn Morgan and little Sylvia Sanchez. “We were both in the Chippewa cabin,” Jocelyn said. “Sylvia seemed very grown up compared with me. She knew stuff you would never have imagined a little girl would know. History and medicine. She could tell you more things about comas.

  “But she always thought the counselors were scheming behind our backs. She was always seeing the most elaborate plots in everything they did. One day four of us Chippewas were taken on a hike away from camp and left to find our own way home. It was part of some merit badge we were getting, or so the counselors said. Sylvia was suspicious of the whole thing. ‘Is there any reason anyone would want you out of the way?’ Sylvia asked each of us. What little girl thinks like that?”

  No one in Sylvia’s family knew that her father had stopped drawing a paycheck and started putting their money into the paper until the money was gone. They moved then to the Bay Area, where Sylvia’s uncle gave her father a job working at his restaurant. Sylvia and her brothers traded their two-story Victorian for a small apartment, private school for the large public ones. Her older sister was already married and stayed behind in Sacramento to have babies her parents complained they now never saw.

  Sometimes they drove all the way to Sacramento for Sunday with Sylvia’s grandparents. More often Sylvia’s father had to work, and they didn’t. Her father wasn’t used to waiting on people and struck the customers as unfriendly. He had to be reminded not to participate in their conversations, not to talk about unions with the busboys and cooks. The whole tipping process is designed to humiliate. On her mother’s birthday when he serenaded her at five-thirty in the morning just as the sun came up, as he’d done every year since their wedding, Sylvia had seen curious, irritated Anglo lights coming on in the house behind theirs.

  One of the cooks at the restaurant had a daughter at the public high school. Sylvia’s father arranged for them to meet so Sylvia would already have a friend when classes started. The daughter was named Constance; she was a year younger than Sylvia. She wore white lipstick and ratted her hair so it cushioned her head like packing material. She’d sewn the name of her boyfriend into the palm of her left hand. Sylvia could hardly look at this, though Constance said it hadn’t hurt; the secret was in shallow stitches. It fell to Sylvia to explain the dangers of infection, the risk of amputation. Plus, it was really gross. Obviously they were not going to be the best of frien
ds.

  But there was Jocelyn. And then there was Daniel.

  “Is he Catholic?” her mother asked the first time Daniel drove her home from school.

  “I’m not going to marry him!” Sylvia had snapped back, because he wasn’t and she didn’t wish to say so.

  After their wedding, on the night when Sylvia and Daniel had had their first big fight and she’d driven to her parents’ house and stood on the doorstep with tears on her face and an overnight bag in her hand, her father wouldn’t even let her in. “You go home to your husband,” he said. “You live there now. Work things out.”

  Non-Catholics, on the other hand, they believed in divorce. They would become miserable for one reason or another, and then they would leave, and their parents wouldn’t even try to stop them, which was why you didn’t marry non-Catholics in the first place.

  And sure enough, thirty-plus years later, wasn’t that exactly what Daniel had done? It was a shame Sylvia’s mother hadn’t lived to see it. She so enjoyed being right.

  In all fairness, probably no more than anyone else did.

  A stout woman emerged from the Microforms Room and came to the desk. She was dressed in jeans and a green Squaw Valley sweatshirt. She had a pencil balanced between her ear and her head. Since she also wore glasses, the space behind that ear was crowded. “There’s a date missing from the 1890 San Francisco Chronicle,” she told Sylvia. “It skips from May ninth to May eleventh. I looked at the Alta, too. And the Wasp. They just don’t seem to have had a May tenth in 1890.”

  Sylvia agreed that this was strange. Since the microfiche came from a central service, she guessed that nothing would be solved by going to another library. Sylvia sent Maggie to the basement to see if she could find the missing date among any of the actual papers.