A ribbon wound about the ball. Ask Austen was painted in red on the ribbon. Allegra had matched Austen’s writing from a facsimile in the university library.
“Go ahead,” Allegra said. “Ask a question.”
Sylvia got up to give Allegra a kiss. It was the most fantastic present! Allegra was so very clever. But Sylvia couldn’t think of a question benign enough for its maiden forecast. Later, when she was alone, she thought she had some things to ask.
“I’ll go,” Bernadette offered. Bernadette was nicely dressed tonight, not a hair out of place. Her socks didn’t match, but why should they? Her shoes did. It was rakish.
“Should I take a trip?” Bernadette asked Austen. She’d been contemplating a birding expedition to Costa Rica. Pricey, but not if you calculated it bird by bird. She shook the ball, upended it, and waited. It is not everyone who has your passion for dead leaves, she read.
“Go in autumn,” Jocelyn translated.
Prudie took the ball next. Something about Prudie just looked right with an object of divination. Her snow-white skin, sharp features, dark, bottomless eyes. We thought how she should always be holding one, like a fashion accessory. “Should I buy a new computer?” Prudie asked.
Austen answered, My good opinion once lost is lost for ever.
“I guess that’s no,” Allegra said. “You have to squint a bit. It’s sort of a Zen experience.”
Next was Grigg. All summer, his hair and lashes had been bleaching at the ends. He obviously tanned easily; even that short trip to the beach made him browner. He looked five years younger, which was unfortunate if you were an older woman and contemplating dating him. “Should I write my book?” Grigg asked. “My roman à clef?”
Austen ignored this, answered a different question, but Grigg was the only one of us who knew it. He advances inch by inch, and will hazard nothing till he believes himself secure.
“I bet you could sell a bunch of these,” Grigg said. “You could put out a whole line, different writers. The Dickens ball. Mark Twain. Mickey Spillane. I’d pay a lot for access to daily advice from Mickey Spillane.”
There was a time when we might have bristled at the devolution from Austen to Spillane. But we were very fond of Grigg now. Probably he was making a joke.
He passed to Jocelyn. Jocelyn was also looking exceptionally good. She was wearing a blouse even Sylvia had never seen, so it must have been brand-new. A long, light khaki skirt. Makeup. “Should I take a chance?” Jocelyn asked.
It is not everyone who has your passion for dead leaves, Austen told her.
“Well, that answer works equally well for any question,” Allegra noted. “Anyway, you should always take a chance. Ask Allegra.”
Jocelyn turned directly to Grigg. “I read those two Le Guins you gave me. In fact, I bought a third. I’m halfway through Searoad. She’s just amazing. It’s been forever since I found a new writer I love like that.”
Grigg blinked several times. “Le Guin’s in a league of her own, of course,” he said cautiously. He gained enthusiasm. “But she’s written a bunch. And there are other writers you might like, too. There’s Joanna Russ and Carol Emshwiller.”
Their voices dropped; the conversation became intimate, but the bits we could hear were still about books. So Jocelyn was a science fiction reader now. We had no objection. We could see how it might be unsafe for people prone to dystopian fantasies, but as long as science fiction wasn’t all you read, as long as there was a large allowance of realism, what was the harm? It was nice to see Grigg looking so happy. Perhaps we would all start reading Le Guin.
The globe came back to Sylvia. “Should we talk about Persuasion now?” she asked it. Her answer: It is not everyone who has your passion for dead leaves.
“You didn’t shake it,” Allegra complained. The phone rang and she got up, went inside. “Go ahead and start,” she said as she left. “I’ll be right back.”
Sylvia put down the ball, picked up her book, paged through for the passage she wanted. “I was troubled,” she began, “by the difference in the way Austen talks about the death of Dick Musgrove and the way she talks about the death of Fanny Harville. It’s very convenient to the plot that Fanny’s fiancé falls in love with Louisa, since this leaves Captain Wentworth free to marry Anne. Still, you can see Austen doesn’t entirely approve.” Sylvia read aloud. “ ‘ “Poor Fanny!” ’ her brother says. ‘ “She would not have forgotten him so soon!” ’
“But there are no tears at all for Dick Musgrove. The loss of a son is less important than the loss of a fiancée. Austen was never a mother.”
“Austen was never a fiancée,” said Bernadette. “Or just overnight. Not long enough to count. So it’s not son versus fiancée.”
There was a fly on the porch, humming about Bernadette’s head. It was large and loud and slow and distracting. Distracting to us, anyway. It didn’t seem to be bothering Bernadette. “What matters is the worthiness of the person deceased,” she said. “Dick was a useless, incorrigible boy. Fanny was an exceptional woman. People earn the way they’re missed. Persuasion is all about earning your place. The self-made men of the navy are so much more admirable than the high-born Elliots. Anne is so much more valuable than either of her sisters.”
“But Anne earned more than she got,” Grigg said. “Up until the very end. As does poor dead Fanny.”
“I guess I think we all deserve more than we earn,” said Sylvia, “if that makes any sense. I’d like the world to be forgiving. I feel sorry for Dick Musgrove, because no one loved him more than he deserved.”
We were quiet for a minute, listening to the fly buzz, thinking our private thoughts. Who loved us? Who loved us more than we deserved? Prudie had an impulse to go right home to Dean. She didn’t, but she would tell him she’d thought to.
“There aren’t so many deaths in the other Austen novels,” Jocelyn said. She was already helping herself to a bite of Grigg’s sugar cookie without even asking. That was fast! “One wonders how much her own death was on her mind.”
“Did she think she was dying?” Prudie asked, but no one knew the answer.
This is too grim a beginning,” Bernadette said. “I want to talk about Mary. I absolutely love Mary. Except for Collins in Pride and Prejudice, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, too, and Mr. Palmer in Sense and Sensibility, and I love Mr. Woodhouse, of course, in Emma, but except for those, she’s my favorite of all the comic Austen characters. Her constant complaints. Her insistence on being neglected and put-upon.”
Bernadette supported her case with quotes. “ ‘You, who have not a mother’s feelings.’ ‘Everybody is always supposing that I am not a good walker!’ ” and so on and so on. She read several paragraphs aloud. No one was arguing; we were in complete agreement, listening drowsily in the sweet, cool evening. Allegra might have said something sour—she so often did—but she hadn’t come back from her phone call, so not a person there did not love Mary. Mary was an exceptional creation. Mary deserved a toast. Sylvia and Jocelyn were sent to the kitchen for a second round of margaritas.
They passed Allegra, who was gesturing while she talked, as if she could be seen. “ . . . tore out the toilets and threw them out the windows,” she was saying. What a waste of her pretty expressions, her silent-film-star gestures. She had a face made for the videophone. She covered the receiver. “Dr. Yep says hello,” she told Sylvia.
Dr. Yep? Jocelyn waited until Sylvia had finished with the blender to lean in and whisper. “So! What mother doesn’t want her daughter dating a nice doctor?”
Such a thing to say! Obviously Jocelyn had never seen a single episode of Young Dr. Malone. Sylvia knew how these things worked. Any minute now someone would fall into a coma. There’d be an accident in the kitchen with the blender. A suspicious death followed by a trial for murder. Hysterical pregnancies followed by unnecessary abortions. The many, many braided chains of disaster.
“I’m very happy for her,” Sylvia said. She poured the largest margarita for hersel
f. She deserved it. “Dr. Yep seemed like a really lovely woman,” she added insincerely, although, in fact, Dr. Yep had.
Bernadette was still talking when they returned. She’d shifted from Mary to the older sister, Elizabeth. Equally well drawn, but far less funny. Not intended to be, of course. And then the conniving Mrs. Clay. But how was she worse than Charlotte in Pride and Prejudice, and hadn’t they all agreed they loved Charlotte?
Sylvia started to argue on behalf of her adored Charlotte. She was interrupted by the doorbell. She went to answer it and there was Daniel. He had a gray, nervous look, which Sylvia liked better than the lobbyist’s smile he tried immediately to paste over it. “I can’t talk to you now,” Sylvia said. “I got your letter, but I can’t talk. My book club is here.”
“I know. Allegra told me.” Daniel held out his hand, and in it was a book with a woman on the cover, standing in front of a leafy tree. Allegra’s copy of Persuasion. “I looked it over in the hospital. Anyway, I read the afterword. Apparently it’s all about second chances. That’s the book for me, I thought.”
He stopped smiling and the nervous look came back. The book in his hand was shaking. It softened Sylvia. “Allegra thought you were feeling forgiving,” Daniel said. “I took a chance she was right.”
Sylvia had no recollection of having said anything that would give Allegra this impression. She couldn’t remember talking about Daniel much at all. But she stood aside and let him in, let him follow her back to the deck. “Daniel wants to join us,” Sylvia said.
“He’s not in the club.” Jocelyn’s voice was stern. Rules were rules, and no exceptions were made for philanderers and abandoners.
“Persuasion’s my favorite Austen,” Daniel told her.
“Have you read it? Have you read any of them?”
“I’m fully prepared to,” said Daniel. “Every single one. Whatever it takes.”
He had a rosebud, short-stemmed, in the top pocket of his jeans. He pulled it out. “I know you won’t believe this, but I found it lying on the sidewalk in front. Honest to God. I hoped you’d think it was a message.” He gave it to Sylvia, along with a couple of petals that had come loose. “Te hecho de menos,” he said. “Chula.”
“ ‘Les fleurs sont si contradictoires,’ ” Prudie answered coldly, to remind him we didn’t all speak Spanish. Grigg had wanted only a single margarita, so she had taken his second and made it her third. You could hear this on the “sont si.” She gave Daniel the courtesy of a translation, which was more than he had done for her. “From Le Petit Prince. ‘You should never listen to flowers.’ ”
No one was more of a romantic than Prudie, you could ask anyone that! But the rose was a cheap move, and Prudie thought less of Daniel for making it. Added to this was the guilt of knowing the rose was hers. Dean had picked it for her, and the last time she’d looked it had been pinned to her blouse.
She wasn’t sure that Persuasion wasn’t a cheap move, too, but who would put Jane to an evil purpose?
“Ask Austen,” Bernadette suggested.
“Shake it up,” Grigg said. “Shake hard.” Clearly he was rooting for Daniel. So predictable. So tediously Y to Y.
Sylvia set the rose down. It was already limp on its stem; the heavy head rolled from side to side. If it was an omen, it was an unclear one. She cupped the globe and shook. The answer began to settle: My good opinion once lost is lost for ever; but Sylvia didn’t want that. She tipped secretly past it and got: When I am in the country, I never wish to leave it; and when I am in town it is pretty much the same.
“So what does that mean?” Jocelyn asked Sylvia. “Your call.”
“It means he can stay,” Sylvia said, and saw, on Jocelyn’s face, for just one moment, a flash of relief.
Allegra came back outside. “Hola, papá,” she said. “You’ve got my book. You’ve got my margarita. You’re in my chair.” Her voice was suspiciously light. She had the face of an angel, the eyes of a collaborator. Daniel moved to make room for her.
Sylvia watched them settle together, Allegra leaning against her father, her cheek on his shoulder. Sylvia found herself suddenly, desperately missing the boys. Not the grown-up boys who had jobs and wives and children or, at least, girlfriends and cell phones, but the little boys who’d played soccer and sat on her lap while she read The Hobbit to them. She remembered how Diego had decided over dinner that he could ride a two-wheeler, and made them take the training wheels off his bike that very night, how he sailed off without a single wobble. She remembered how Andy used to wake up from dreams laughing, and could never tell them why.
She remembered a ski trip they’d all taken the year of the big floods. ’Eighty-six? They’d rented a cabin in Yosemite and barely gotten home after. Interstate 5 had closed while they were on it, but they’d been able to shift to 99. Highway 99 flooded an hour after they’d driven over it.
While they were in the mountains, it snowed and snowed. This would have been lovely if they’d been sitting in some expensive ski lodge with their feet propped next to a fire. Instead they were standing in the Badger Pass parking lot with hundreds of other families, waiting for the bus to take them down.
It was a long, cold wait, and everyone was unhappy to be doing it. An announcement told them one of the buses had stalled and wouldn’t arrive at all. This worsened the collective mood. The boys were hungry. Allegra was starving. The boys were cold. Allegra was freezing. They hated skiing, they all said, and why had they been made to come?
When a bus did arrive, almost thirty minutes later, a man and a woman pushed their way into line in front of Sylvia. There was little point to this. None of them was close enough to the front to have a shot at this first bus. But Sylvia had been shoved aside and, in her efforts not to step on Diego, had fallen onto the icy pavement. “Hey,” Daniel had said. “That’s my wife you just pushed over.”
“Fuck you,” the man answered.
“What did you say?”
“Fuck your wife,” the woman added.
The kids had scarves wound around their necks, covering their mouths. Over these, their eyes were shiny with excitement. There was going to be a fight! Their father was going to start it! The people nearest gave way so that there was empty space around Daniel and the other man.
“Daniel, don’t,” said Sylvia. One thing she’d always loved about Daniel was his lack of machismo. The boys she’d grown up with were such caballeros. Such cowboys. She’d never found it attractive. Daniel was like her father, self-confident enough to take an insult if one was offered. (On the other hand, she had been pushed and cursed, entirely without provocation. That wasn’t right.)
“I’ll deal with this,” Daniel told her. He was wearing ski pants, soft après-ski boots, and an enormous parka. That was the top layer, but there were many strata beneath. He looked as if he were about to be shot from a cannon. The other man was equally padded, the Michelin man in Patagonia blue. They squared off. Daniel was as angry as Sylvia had ever seen him.
He took a swing, but the ice was so bad he almost went down from his own momentum. He missed the other man’s chest by many inches. The other man rushed him and Daniel side-stepped, so the man slid past and crashed into a pile of skis and poles.
Both regained their balance, turned around. “You’ll be sorry for that,” the man said. He walked toward Daniel, setting each foot onto the ice with care. Daniel took another swing and a miss. His boots slid out from under him; he went down hard. The other man stepped in to hold him there, pin him with a knee, but in his haste slid past again. His wife caught him and propped him upright. Daniel got to his feet, lumbered forward. He took a third swing; it spun him halfway around to face Sylvia.
He was smiling. Fat as a Santa in his big dark parka, there he was, fighting for her honor, but never managing to land a single punch. Windmilling, slipping, falling. Laughing.
Is Anne Elliot really the best heroine Austen ever created?” Daniel asked. “That’s what it says here in the afterword.”
&nbs
p; “She’s a little too innately good for my taste,” said Allegra. “I prefer Elizabeth Bennet.”
“I love them all,” Bernadette answered.
“Bernadette,” Prudie said. She’d reached that pensive, sentimental state of drunkenness that everyone watching so enjoys. “You’ve done so many things and read so many books. Do you still believe in happy endings?”
“Oh my Lord, yes.” Bernadette’s hands were pressed against each other like a book, like a prayer. “I guess I would. I’ve had about a hundred of them.”
On the deck behind her was a glass door, and behind the door a dark room. Sylvia was not a happy-ending sort of person herself. In books, yes, they were lovely. But in life everyone has the same ending, and the only question is who will get to it first. She took a drink of peach margarita and looked at Daniel, who was looking back, and didn’t look away.
What if you had a happy ending and didn’t notice? Sylvia made a mental note. Don’t miss the happy ending.
Above Daniel’s head, one leaf, and only one leaf, ticked about on the walnut tree. How exacting, how precise the breeze! It smelled of the river, a green smell in a brown month. She took a deep breath.
“Sometimes a white cat is just a white cat,” Bernadette said.
November
Epilogue
The Jane Austen book club did meet one more time. In November we gathered at the Crêpe Bistro to have lunch and take turns looking at the pictures from Bernadette’s Costa Rican trip on her laptop. It was too bad she’d done no editing. Every time she saw something breathtaking, she took two or three identical shots. There were also two photos of headless people, and one in which you saw nothing but two red spots, which Bernadette said were jaguar eyes, and we couldn’t prove they weren’t. They were very far apart, though.
She told us how one day the tour bus had broken down in front of a plantation named The Scarlet Macaw. The owner of the plantation, the courtly Señor Obando, had insisted the group all stay there until a new bus could arrive. In the fourteen hours that took, they hiked around the plantation. Bernadette saw a bare-necked umbrella bird, a torrent tyrannulet, a rufous motmot, a harpy eagle (a cause for considerable celebration), a stripe-breasted this, and a red-footed that.
The Jane Austen Book Club Page 21
