When We Argued All Night

by Alice Mattison

  I think my father was more troubled by the Depression than my mother was. He remained a worrier; she came out of the experience optimistic: I don’t think she’d have thought of teaching the homebound on her own. The WPA changed her life.

  When the war started, my father was not drafted because of a minor physical problem. The war meant Hitler to my parents, and they could barely speak of it, though my mother mentioned hearing Hitler’s speeches on the radio, listening with horror though she didn’t understand what he was saying. My grandparents were in America, but some relatives had stayed behind in Europe, and nobody talked about them. The exception in my childhood was a visit of two cousins who had escaped to Israel. My grandmother’s Yiddish was now almost English— nobody understood the visitors, they didn’t understand us. If I came across a photograph of other European relatives and asked my mother about them, she’d just say “Hitler.” I never heard the term Holocaust until I was an adult.

  My mother spoke of learning about the death camps when they were liberated in 1945, and it wasn’t until I read about the period so as to write this book that I understood that people who read the newspaper carefully, and could bear to believe what they read, knew about them as early as 1943. Alfred Kazin wrote of what he knew in one of his three memoirs, New York Jew. (The others are Starting Out in the Thirties and A Walker in the City, parts of which I read aloud, as a teenager, to my illiterate grandmother because it was about East New York, where we lived.) The New York Times didn’t give the extermination of the Jews the emphasis one would expect, but if you look for the old stories, they are there—and in my book, Harold knows about it.

  Growing up, I thought of the thirties and early forties as a period when my parents had something they’d lost by the time I knew them. In their stories, they seemed more passionate, more adventurous. I’ve often written about the years when they were young, maybe trying to recover what was lost.

  The history of the Communist Party in the US is not widely known. How did you become interested in it, and in the impact of the McCarthy investigations on teachers?

  I wasn’t what was called a “red diaper baby,” but my parents had friends who were or had been Communists, and I knew a girl named Joan, after “Uncle Joe” Stalin. My parents were ardent Roosevelt Democrats, but it was ordinary for people like them to feel positive toward the ideals of the Communist Party, and my mother talked about going to a Communist Party meeting in the thirties—like Artie, she was put off by the coercive discipline. After the last few decades, in which we’ve heard so much about communism as a horror, it’s hard to remember that the party represented a plausible and progressive way of thinking in the thirties.

  During the McCarthy era, I was old enough to be aware that something was troubling and frightening the adults in my family. A family friend, who had never been a Communist, lost his teaching job. I scarcely knew him, and my parents believed that children should be protected from hearing about trouble. When children are kept from knowing facts but sense feelings, they are more affected than if they were told everything. I found the event unforgettable, and I’ve twice written about New York teachers losing their jobs because of McCarthyism—in an earlier novel, Hilda and Pearl, and now here.

  Teaching runs through the book—Artie and Harold are teachers at various levels, Brenda is a teacher before she starts building playground sets. How has teaching (good and bad) informed your life?

  My mother, as I’ve said, was a teacher of the homebound— children whose disabilities, in the days before ramps and elevators in schools, kept them home. She traveled from house to house, teaching children in grades one through six. She and my father seemed to assume I’d become a teacher, as so many girls did, and they expected me to live at home during college and attend one of the (then) free city colleges, as they had. I did. My parents were not ambitious, but they were slightly ambitious for me: they hoped that I might go away to a university after college, earn a master’s degree, and become a high school teacher. I grew up wanting to teach (as well as write) and have taught all my life, but in community colleges and four-year colleges. However, I absorbed my parents’ admiration for high school teachers and still feel it. The high school I went to, Franklin K. Lane in Brooklyn, was full of gifted, serious teachers, men and women of astonishing depth and learning. Best of all was an English teacher, Agnes Jaffe. I love to write about teachers—I’m still trying to thank them.

  The cabin on the lake is an important location for the characters even though they identify strongly as city people. Do you have a “cabin on a lake”? What role does it play in your life?

  There is no cabin on a lake, and there have been many cabins, some on lakes. Many summers, my parents rented cabins in the Adirondacks or New England for a few weeks, often in bungalow colonies. Years later, my husband and I discovered we wanted to take the same kind of vacations—though we like more remote cabins than they did, with as few people around as possible.

  If you could, would you buy such a cabin, or is part of its magic that it’s not yours?

  I’ve never wanted to own a cabin—one would always be worrying about the leaky roof—and in my book, the people staying in the cabin, experiencing something important there or thinking about it, usually don’t own it. The cabin in the book represents—as such vacations represent in my life, I suppose—respite: physical and imaginative freedom. You can’t take that for granted: no one can own that. People have always written stories in which characters from cities or towns come to understand a truth when they go into the woods, into the wilderness. It’s in the Bible, in King Lear, and in books as different as Pride and Prejudice (Elizabeth Bennet understands that she’s in love with Mr. Darcy when she meets him by chance on his wooded estate, which she tours with her aunt and uncle) and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. The cabin—the woods—is where my characters, too, learn who they are. I’m one of those people for whom letters of the alphabet and numbers have colors in the mind and, at times, so do books. This one, long before it was written, was “green book.”

  Read on

  Have You Read?

  More by Alice Mattison

  NOTHING IS QUITE FORGOTTEN IN BROOKLYN

  Constance Tepper is staying in her mother’s Brooklyn apartment while her mother is out of town, and her week turns frightening when she wakes to find someone has entered the apartment and taken her purse. A series of revelations jeopardizes her marriage, her job, and her love for an older woman who has mesmerized Con all her life. Years later, now living in Brooklyn, Con is brought back to that week when reminders and discoveries lead to grief, love, and the unraveling of the past—personal and historical—as she crosses the city, from Coney Island to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from Prospect Heights to the traces of a lost elevated train line: a forgotten, century-old attempt to make sense of Brooklyn’s peculiarities once and for all, through public transportation.

  “A generous, empathetic writer, [Mattison] believes that the human connection, while imperfect and fragile, takes precedence over any abstraction.”

  —New York Times

  IN CASE WE’RE SEPARATED

  Spanning the length and breadth of the twentieth century, Alice Mattison’s masterful In Case We’re Separated looks at a family of Jewish immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s and follows the urban, emotionally turbulent lives of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren against a backdrop of political assassination, the Vietnam War, and the AIDS epidemic. Beginning with the title story, which introduces Bobbie Kaplowitz—a single mother in 1954 Brooklyn whose lover is married and whose understanding of life is changed by a broken kitchen appliance— Mattison displays her unparalleled gift for storytelling and for creating rich, multidimensional characters, a gift that has led the Los Angeles Times to praise her as “a writer’s writer.”

  “Radiant. . . . A book filled with felicitous writing and ferocious insight.” —Susan Halpern,

  New York Times Book Review

  THE WEDDIN
G OF THE TWO-HEADED WOMAN

  For years, following an early first marriage, Daisy Andalusia remained single and enjoyed the company of men on her own terms, making the most of her independent life. Now in her fifties, she has remarried and settled into a quieter life in New Haven, Connecticut. She’s committed to a job she loves: organizing the clutter of other people’s lives. Her business soon leads her to a Yale project studying murders in small cities. While her husband, an inner-city landlord, objects to her new interest, Daisy finds herself being drawn more and more into the project and closer to its director, Gordon Skeetling.

  When Daisy discovers an old tabloid article with the headline “Two-Headed Woman Weds Two Men: Doc Says She’s Twins,” she offers it as the subject for her theater group’s improvisational play. Over eight transformative months, this headline will take on an increasing significance as Daisy questions whether she can truly be a part of anything— a two-headed woman, a friendship, a marriage—while discovering more about herself than she wants to know.

  “Bracingly serious but without pretension, Mattison’s voice is like that of no one else writing today: the demands she makes of her readers are difficult but exhilarating.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  HILDA AND PEARL

  To Frances, an only child living in McCarthy-era Brooklyn, her mother, Hilda, and her aunt Pearl seem as if they have always been friends. Frances does not question the love between the two women until her father’s job as a teacher is threated by anti-Communism, just as Frances begins to learn about her family’s past. Why does Hilda refer to her “first pregnancy,” as if Frances wasn’t her only child? Whose baby shoes are hidden in Hilda’s dresser drawer? Why is there tension when Pearl and her husband come to visit?

  The story of a young girl in the fifties and her elders’ coming-of-age in the unquiet thirties, this book resonates deeply, revealing in beautiful, clear language the complexities of friendship and loss.

  “Accomplished poet, novelist, and short-story writer Mattison adds to her laurels with this quietly suspenseful, psychologically penetrating novel, which is both a perceptive study of adolescence and a dramatic exploration of family relationships.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  THE BOOK BORROWER

  On the first page of The Book Borrower, Toby Ruben and Deborah Laidlaw meet in 1975 in a playground, where the two women are looking after their babies. Deborah lends Toby a book, Trolley Girl—a memoir about a long-ago trolley strike and three Jewish sisters, one a fiery revolutionary—that will disappear and reappear throughout the twenty-two years these women are friends.

  Through two decades, Deborah and Toby raise their children, embark on teaching careers, and argue about politics, education, and their own lives. One day during a hike, they have an argument that cannot be resolved— and the two women take different, permanent paths—but it is ultimately the borrowed book that will bring them back together. With sensitivity and grace, Alice Mattison shows how books can rescue us from our deepest sorrows; how the events of the outside world play into our private lives; and how the bonds between women are enduring, mysterious, and laced with surprise.

  “Extraordinary.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “An ambitious and original novel.”

  —Wall Street Journal

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  Also by Alice Mattison

  NOVELS

  Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn

  The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman

  The Book Borrower

  Hilda and Pearl

  Field of Stars

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  In Case We’re Separated

  Men Giving Money, Women Yelling

  The Flight of Andy Burns

  Great Wits

  POETRY COLLECTION

  Animals

  Credits

  Cover design by Robin Bilardello

  Cover photograph © Bert Hardy/Getty Images

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  WHEN WE ARGUED ALL NIGHT. Copyright © 2012 by Alice Mattison. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Epub Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780062120380

  ISBN 978-0-06-212037-3

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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