The Jane Austen Book Club

by Karen Joy Fowler

  In general, librarians enjoyed special requests. A reference librarian is someone who likes the chase. When librarians read for pleasure, they often pick a good mystery. They tend to be cat people as well, for reasons more obscure.

  A black man in a gray turtleneck requested an oral-history interview regarding public policy in the Lieutenant Governor’s Office from 1969 to 1972.

  An elderly man in a velvet beret called Sylvia over to his table to show her his work. He was lettering his family tree in meticulous and beautiful calligraphy.

  Maggie returned, having failed to find the missing date. She offered to put in a call to the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, but the woman who had asked for the Chronicle said she had to go; there was no more time on her parking meter. Maybe next week when she’d be back.

  A man with bad skin asked for help printing a copy from the microfiche reader. It was Sylvia’s turn to do this.

  The main room was a lovely space, with curving walls, large windows, and red-tile-rooftop views. If you sat at one of the tables you could see the top of the Capitol dome.

  The Rare Materials Reading Room was lined with glass bookcases filled with rare books and was, in its way, equally pleasant. You worked there with the door locked and outside noises hushed. Only the librarians could key you in and out.

  But the Microforms Room was windowless, lit by overheads and by the screens of the readers. There was a constant hum, with images inevitably warped on one side or the other, no way to bring the whole into focus at once. All very headache-inducing. You had to love research to love the Microforms Room. Sylvia was threading the feeder when Maggie came to get her. “You have a phone call from your husband,” Maggie said. “He says it’s urgent.”

  Allegra had been having an excellent day. She’d spent the morning working and put several orders in the mail. She’d thought of a birthday present for Sylvia and was figuring out how to make it. To aid in this she went to the Rocknasium, a local climbing gym. You couldn’t really think about anything but climbing when you climbed, but Allegra always found it a fruitful not-thinking.

  She strapped herself into a harness. She was supposed to be meeting her friend Paul; they’d been belaying each other for the last couple of months. Allegra’s level was somewhere in the 5.6 to 5.7 range, Paul’s a bit better. The regulars were almost all men, but the few women who came were Allegra’s sort of women—strong and athletic. The place smelled of chalk and sweat, and those were Allegra’s sort of smells.

  The Rocknasium had only nine full-sized walls. These were knobbed and creviced in many places, the holds marked with bright-colored drips like a Jackson Pollock painting. Each wall contained a variety of routes—a red route, a yellow, a blue. You were always passing up a closer hold to find the correct color for the course you were on. The correct hold was inevitably small and far away. Paul had called Allegra the night before to say the routes had just been changed. And about time.

  When Allegra first started climbing, she would hang in one spot for too long, contemplating the best way to make her next grab. Her arms and fingers would begin to burn with exhaustion. She noticed that the experienced climbers moved very, very quickly. Staying still was more work than moving; thinking too much was fatal. Allegra supposed there was a lesson there. She learned things quickly, but she didn’t much like lessons.

  She’d never been to the Rocknasium during the day. Gone was the intimidating soberness of the regular climbers, the focused quiet. Instead someone was screaming. Someone was singing. Someone was throwing chalk. There was laughing, shouting, all the chaos of a ten-year-old’s birthday party echoing off the fake paint-splotched rocks. Children, sugar coursing through their tiny veins, were everywhere, fastened to the walls on their ropes like spiders. There was so much chalk in the air it made Allegra sneeze. This was intimidation of a different sort.

  Allegra liked being an aunt. Her brother Diego had two girls; that was all the kid time Allegra needed. Probably. All she wanted. Mostly. There would certainly be something challenging in a genetic code that made you gay but left your reproductive urge fully functional. Some days Allegra hardly noticed how the years were floating by. “Come on,” some kid shouted impatiently to someone who wasn’t coming on.

  Allegra went to warm up on the solo wall while she waited for Paul. This wall was low enough to climb without ropes, no more than seven feet. At the bottom was a very thick mat. Allegra put her foot on a blue hold. She reached for a blue hold above her head. She pulled herself up. Blue hold to blue hold to blue hold. Toward the top she saw some enticing orange paint, farther than the next blue—she’d have to leap—but glittering at the edge of what might be possible. Things worked best if you didn’t think about them. Just jump.

  To her right the birthday girl came rappelling down at top speed, her belayer playing the rope out to give her a ride. “Wire work,” someone called. “Hello, Jet Li.”

  An adult at another wall was giving instructions. “Look up,” he said. “The purple’s just on your left there. You can reach it. Don’t worry. I’ll catch you.”

  I’ll catch you.

  Nobody was catching Allegra, but Allegra had never needed catching. She reached back with one hand into the pouch on her harness for chalk. Kicked off and grabbed.

  Sylvia called Jocelyn from the car. “Allegra fell at the climbing gym,” she said. She was trying not to picture all the things that might happen to someone who fell. Wheelchairs. Comas. “They’ve taken her to Sutter. I’m on my way, but I don’t know anything. I don’t know how far it was. I don’t know if she’s awake. I don’t know if she’s broken a nail or broken her neck.” She could hardly get the last part out, she was crying so hard.

  “I’ll call you as soon as I get there,” Jocelyn said. “I’m sure it’s fine. They don’t let you climb in those gyms without a harness. I don’t think it’s possible to really hurt yourself.”

  Jocelyn always thought things were fine. If they weren’t fine when she got there, she made damn sure they were fine before she left. Jocelyn didn’t think about those things she couldn’t make fine until she was forced to. There were days when Sylvia thought about nothing else. Jocelyn had no children; Sylvia had three, plus two grandchildren; that was the difference. Why would Allegra be at the hospital if things were fine?

  Bad things did happen, after all. You could be lucky only so long. Sylvia and Daniel had been parked in his car just a couple of blocks from his house on the day his brother died. It was their senior year of high school. They were kissing some and they were talking some. Both the kissing and the talking were fraught. They’d begun to have the same conversation over and over. Would they go to the same college? Should they go to the same college just to be together? If they both wanted to be at the same college, should one of them go elsewhere just to avoid being together? Could their relationship pass the test of a separation? Should it be made to? Who loved whom most? They heard sirens. They kissed.

  Daniel’s brother had been hit by a car driven by a sixteen-year-old. Andy was killed instantly, which was the only small mercy, so Daniel didn’t have to spend the rest of his life thinking that if he’d gone home the minute he heard the fire trucks he could have said good-bye.

  Sylvia had thought Daniel’s mother a peculiarly affectless woman, polite but distant. This became even more obvious after Sylvia and Daniel were married and had children. Where were the constant complaints about never seeing the grandkids? And where was all the sobbing and hand-wringing when Allegra—such a beautiful girl!—turned out to be gay and would likely have no children of her own?

  Sylvia was somewhat affectless herself, but in the general noise of her own dramatic family, no one, including Sylvia, had noticed this yet. She liked Daniel’s mother okay—the woman hardly cast a shadow, what was not to like?—but she would have been insulted to be told they were similar. On the day Andy died she watched Daniel’s mother crumple like paper. Something moved into her face that never moved out.

  In Persuasio
n, Jane Austen mentions the death of a child. She is brief and dismissive. The Musgroves, she says, “had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year.” Dick Musgrove was not loved. When he went to sea, he was not missed. Assigned to a boat under Captain Wentworth’s command, he died in a way never specified, and only death made him valuable to his family.

  These are the parents Austen’s heroine, Anne Elliot, describes later in the book as excellent. “What a blessing,” Anne says, “to young people to be in such hands!”

  There was traffic on the causeway; the lanes were glutted. Sylvia inched along. Bad things did happen. Now there was glass, now a fractured car on the shoulder of the road, the back door on the driver’s side folded nearly in two. The people had been removed, no way to guess what shape they were in. As soon as she passed this, Sylvia was able to resume a proper freeway speed.

  It took Jocelyn fifteen minutes to get to the hospital, another five to find the nurse in the emergency room who’d admitted Allegra. “Are you a relative?” the nurse asked, and then explained very politely that the hospital couldn’t release information on Allegra’s condition to anyone who wasn’t.

  Jocelyn believed in rules. She believed in exceptions to rules. Not only for herself, but for anyone just like her. She described with equal courtesy the scene she was capable of making. “I don’t get embarrassed,” she said. “And I’m not tired. Her mother is waiting for me to call.”

  The nurse noted that Allegra was also the name of an allergy medication. This was spitefully done and inappropriate, too. When Jocelyn looked back on it later, remembering everything but with the anxiety over Allegra removed, she was quite angry about this part. What a flippant thing to say under the circumstances. And it was a beautiful name. It was from Longfellow.

  But then the nurse conceded that X rays had been taken. Allegra was in a brace. There was concern about a head injury, but she was conscious. Dr. Yep was in charge of the case. And no, Jocelyn couldn’t see Allegra. Only her relatives could see her.

  Jocelyn was in the midst of explaining why the nurse was mistaken about this as well, when Daniel arrived. He walked in as if it hadn’t been months since they’d spoken, and put his arms around Jocelyn. He smelled just exactly like Daniel.

  Times came when you needed someone’s arms around you. Mostly Jocelyn liked being single, but sometimes she thought about that. “She’s been X-rayed. Possible head injury. They won’t tell me anything,” she said into his shoulder. “I have to call Sylvia right away.”

  By the time Sylvia saw her, Allegra had been immobile for almost two hours and was furious about it. Sylvia, Daniel, and Jocelyn circled her with white faces, forced smiles. They agreed that it always was Allegra getting hurt, never the boys. Remember how she’d broken her foot falling off the monkey bars? Remember how she’d dislocated her collarbone, tumbling from the elm tree? Remember how she’d crushed her elbow in that bike incident? Accident-prone, they agreed, which made Allegra madder and madder. “I’m not hurt at all,” she said. “I fell maybe four feet and I landed on a mat. I can’t believe they brought me here. I didn’t even black out.”

  In fact she had lost consciousness, and she suspected as much. She’d no memory of the fall, nothing until the ambulance came. And certainly she must have dropped more than four feet. She knew about the mat only because she’d seen it. But since she couldn’t remember the details, she felt free to adjust them. How was that lying?

  And right then, in the hospital with everyone standing around her bed as though it were the last scene of The Wizard of Oz movie, it seemed that they were all colluding to make a big deal out of nothing. In the context of the white-water rafting, the snowboarding, the surfing, for God’s sake the parachuting, Allegra had done, she felt her record was pretty clean. It looked bad to her parents only because they didn’t know about the white-water rafting, the snowboarding, the surfing, the parachuting.

  Finally Dr. Yep entered with the X rays. Allegra couldn’t move an inch to see, but she could never see anything on X rays anyway. She could never see the colors of stars through a telescope, never find birds through binoculars, paramecia through microscopes. This was irritating, but not on a daily basis.

  Dr. Yep was talking with her parents, showing them this and that on Allegra’s ribs, her skull. The doctor had a very pleasant voice, which was nice because she talked for a long time. After cataloguing the many things that might have been on Allegra’s X rays, but happily were not, Dr. Yep came to the point. Just as Allegra had said, there was absolutely nothing wrong with her. Still, they wanted to keep her overnight for observation and maximum annoyance. Dr. Yep claimed Allegra had given some bizarre answers to questions in the ambulance—what day of the week it was, what was the month. Allegra denied this.

  “They just took me so literally,” she said. She didn’t remember her answers, only that the emergency techs, buzzing about like gnats, had provoked her. Perhaps she’d quoted a little Dickinson. In what universe was that a crime? At least she could finally be un-strapped, move from side to side again. It was embarrassing, when she did this, to learn that she had a bandage on her temple, blood on her cheek. Apparently she’d gashed her head.

  It took another forty minutes to finish the paperwork and get her checked in upstairs. She was in quite a bit of pain by then, bruised, stiff, with a dreadful headache beginning to stir. Nothing the couple of Tylenol she’d been offered were going to manage. She needed real drugs; she hoped she wasn’t going to be the only one to think so just because no bones were broken.

  The nurse on duty turned out to be Callie Abramson. Allegra had gone to high school with Callie, though they hadn’t been in the same year or run in the same circles. Callie’d been yearbook and student government. Allegra, field hockey and art. Still it was nice to see a familiar face in a strange place. Sylvia, at least, was delighted.

  While helping Allegra into bed, Callie told her that Travis Browne had become a Muslim. Hard-core, Callie said, whatever that meant. Allegra didn’t suppose she’d ever exchanged two words with Travis. Brittany Auslander had been arrested for stealing computers from the language lab at the university. Everybody but Callie had always thought she was such a good girl. Callie herself was married—no one you’d know, she said—and had two boys. And Melinda Pande turned out gay.

  “Hard-core?” Allegra asked. She remembered how Callie had gotten so thin everyone suspected she was anorexic. How she tried out for cheerleading anyway, like a stick figure in a short skirt, her sharp little face shouting to give her an F, give her an I. How she’d freaked out one spring during finals and been taken to the counselor’s office in hysterics, and they’d found pills in her locker, either to help her diet or to kill herself; no one seemed to know, but it didn’t stop them from saying.

  Now here she was, thin but not too thin, working, smiling like someone’s mom, and telling Allegra how nice it was to see her again. Allegra was very happy for her. She looked at Callie’s photos of her boys and she got a whole vibe off them of a tolerant, loving, noisy home. She thought Callie was probably a very good mother.

  Callie didn’t seem to remember much about Allegra at all, but wasn’t that really what you wanted from the kids at your high school?

  Sylvia and Daniel drove back to the house together to collect some things for Allegra—her toothbrush, her slippers. She’d asked for a milk shake, so they’d pick that up, too. “She was very emotional,” Dr. Yep had told Sylvia privately. Clearly she thought it a matter of some concern.

  Sylvia heard it as a reassurance. Relief turned to happiness. There was her Allegra, then, undamaged, unchanged. She would rather have taken Allegra home, yet there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to complain about. A narrow escape. Another lucky, lucky day in Sylvia’s lucky, lucky life.

  “How’s Pam?” she asked Daniel charitably. Sylvia still hadn’t met Pam. Allegra said she was every bit as tough and opinionated as a family-practi
ce lawyer would have to be.

  “Pam’s good. Did Jocelyn seem a bit subdued to you? Of course, she was worried. We were all worried.”

  “Jocelyn’s fine. Busy running the world.”

  “Thank God,” Daniel said. “I wouldn’t want to live in any world Jocelyn wasn’t running.” As if that weren’t exactly what he’d done, left the world Jocelyn ran, for one she didn’t. Sylvia thought this, but was too relieved, too grateful (though not to Daniel) to say it.

  Seeing him in the house again gave Sylvia a peculiar feeling, as though she were dreaming or waking up and couldn’t tell which. Who was she, really—the Sylvia without Daniel or the Sylvia with? In some ways she felt that she’d aged years in the months he’d been gone.

  In other ways she’d become her parents’ daughter again. After Daniel had left, she’d found herself remembering things from her childhood, things she hadn’t thought of in forever. As though Daniel had been an interruption that went on most of her life. Suddenly she was dreaming in Spanish again. She found herself thinking more and more about her mother’s roses, her father’s politics, her grandmother’s soaps.

  Divorce itself was an inevitable soap opera, of course. The roles were prewritten, no way to do them differently, no way to make them your own. She could see how it was killing Daniel not to be the hero in his own divorce.

  “You have to remind yourself that it isn’t just the good Daniel who left,” Jocelyn had told her. “The bad Daniel is gone, too. Wasn’t he insufferable sometimes? Make a list of everything you didn’t like.”

  But when Sylvia tried, the things she didn’t like often turned out also to be the things she did like. She would focus on some unpleasant memory—how she’d set out a punishment for one of the children, only to have him grant a parole. How he would ask her what she wanted for Christmas and then shake his head and tell her she didn’t want that, after all. “You’ll put it in the cupboard and never use it,” when she wanted a bread machine. “It looks just like the coat you already have,” when she’d shown him a winter jacket she liked. It was so smug. She really couldn’t stand it.