But why wasn’t my grandmother there to meet him? Why hadn’t she come to visit him in the san?
“Well,” my father says. He is standing in my doorway, halfway in and halfway out. He jams his hands deep in his pockets and rattles all his loose change. His body, backlit by the hallway light, is a dark, featureless shape, and the answers he gives to my questions are very much the same. Long before I begin to write fiction, I will learn to fill in these shapes as best I can. I’ll burn the facts, the dry, seasoned kindling, and explore whatever truths I can find by their light. I’ll add missing colors, textures, and emotions, trying my best to stay within the lines.
Three years into a future I cannot imagine, my father will ask me not to write about his time in the san. It is not that any of this is a secret. It is simply the sort of thing that people, nice people, don’t discuss. My father is a respected businessman, and here in our small community, illness and shame go hand in hand. Shame because, if you’d only tried harder, you might have fought off whatever it was that ailed you. Shame because, if you’d lived your life right, God would have protected you, would have answered your prayers, would have kept you safe to begin with. There must have been a moment—one you could have controlled or prevented—when you let down your guard, looked the wrong way, indulged in some slight weakness that opened the door to what was to come.
Even now, far from home, I am able to understand. Haven’t I heard these same overtones in the advice of holistic practitioners, in the comments of New Age acquaintances, who suggest that I’m blocking my own healing energy, that maybe I simply don’t want to get well? Aren’t I regularly approached by Christians who want to know if I’ve prayed to Jesus, if I’ve asked him to forgive my sins? Once, at a party, I noticed a woman staring at me hard, her arms crossed over her chest. “Man, you must have done something awful in your last life,” she told me, “to deserve what you’re going through.”
Oh, yes, I understand.
“A writer’s only responsibility is to his art,” Faulkner wrote. “He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: home, pride, decency, security, happiness, all to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his own mother, he won’t hesitate; the ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”
If your soul is flat as the paper you write on, it will cost nothing to agree. But put an honored face on Faulkner’s “old lady” and suddenly things aren’t so clear. Every writer struggles to find a balance between the paralysis that results from trying to please everyone and the impact of art upon the very lives that inspire it. And while some writers, like Faulkner, do write from a place of loneliness, drunkenness, pain—the stereotype of the angst-stricken artist—there are plenty of us who write best, as I do, from a place of relative well-being. The truth is that I don’t write well when I’m unhappy or anxious. I don’t write well when my conscience is bothering me. Before my illness, my father was, in many ways, a stranger, and the stories he told me about his illness formed the first bridge between us. And so I chose to endure Faulkner’s anguish, rather than get rid of it. For eleven years, I kept the promise I made to my father.
At first, this promise was an easy one to keep. For one thing, nobody wanted to publish the stories I was writing, and I had no reason to believe that this situation would ever change. I told myself that even if I did write about my father’s experiences, no one would be the wiser for it. For another thing, I had already begun to notice that the more my writing improved, the less satisfied I was with anything I wrote. Soon, fearing acceptance more than rejection, I stopped submitting work for publication, and it was then that I began to write the way I’d once played the piano, the way I once had prayed—with an unabashed, single-minded passion that I found hard to explain. I wrote for myself, out of wonder and fascination, in the absolute freedom of anonymity. And in doing do, I rediscovered the spirituality I thought had been lost along with my Catholicism. Only now, that spirituality was articulated in a new way. Where, once, I would have altered my perceptions of the world to fit the contours of my faith, I now shaped narrative worlds that reflected my honest perceptions—worlds filled with contradictions and blurred edges. Worlds defined by questions rather than answers. Worlds that often served as windows into a larger sense of mystery.
Absolute attention is prayer. Simone Weil’s definition is still the most generous I’ve heard. And when I write, I pay attention. When I write, I focus, I give everything I have. When I write, I move beyond my body, the crippled here and now, to enter a place of greater perspective, where fragmented things become whole—the same transcendence I’d sought through conventional faith. I do not mean to suggest that since such faith didn’t happen to lead me there, it is not a road worth taking. But there are as many ways to experience transcendence as there are people in the world, and what brings out the best in one person may leave another person smug, or mean-spirited, or afraid. Perhaps, when we speak of the meaning of life, we are talking about our search to find whatever it might be that unlocks our particular heart. And it might be outright worship, but it might just as easily be the act of raising a child. It might be making a quilt, or restoring an antique car, or planting a garden. It might be as simple as the preparation of a meal. I myself am most capable of transcendence when I claim responsibility not only for my failures and limitations but for my triumphs, for my best intentions, for the things that I’ve done right. And writing allows me to do just that. My characters are the worst and the best of me; there is not one, no matter how mean or glorious, in whom there is nothing I can claim.
Writing has also become the means by which I make sense of a day-to-day world that doesn’t. In life, I’m the sort of person who always comes up with the perfect thing I should have said several hours after a conversation has taken place, usually during the middle of the night as I play the scene back, revising it until everything makes sense in a way it never could in life. In life, I forget important names and anniversaries, the location of restaurants, the titles of books I’ve just read. In life, I am the sort of person who needs to have jokes explained, who hears that a duck has walked into a bar and embraces that image, satisfied. Writing is a way of creating the punch line I have missed, inventing the name I can’t remember. Writing is both the necessary map and the X on that map that tells me where I am. When I write, I am able to give myself the last, resonant word. If a duck walks into a bar, that bar belongs to me.
Perhaps this is why the stories I write are inevitably more believable than their factual roots. “Is this about your family?” people ask. Or: “Is that supposed to be me?” It has taken me years to realize that it isn’t my scant use of facts that people are reacting to. It’s the way I’ve claimed the last, definitive word on those facts. It’s the way those facts have been coaxed into the sort of satisfying shape we long for in our lives, complete with clear motivations, logical developments, resonant closures. It’s the way those facts have been illuminated with meaning.
Facts in themselves are as limiting as fences. Why carve up the imagination with all those long, straight lines? I can follow a fence for a while if I must, but inevitably, I hop it, drawn along paths suggested by the contours of the landscape itself. For a while, things resemble my own life, the so-called real world—but then a double moon rises in the sky. By its otherworldly light, I see someone who resembles a dear friend, an imagined lover, a neighbor’s child. Five drafts later, fifty drafts later, I understand that I am mistaken. This character is a stranger. This character is astonishing. I have never known, never thought to imagine, anyone like this character before. It is this that keeps me writing, leaves me amazed and humbled again and again. There is always that point—what Flannery O’Connor calls “a moment of grace”—when the sum of the parts becomes larger than the whole.
In 1989, I got a fellowship to attend Cornell University’s graduate writing program. Ja
ke and I moved to Ithaca, New York, where, the following year, we were married. By then, I was able to walk unaided around our narrow kitchen; I could comfortably crutch the length of our house. I still needed the power chair to get from the back porch out to the garden, but I weeded the bean rows on my knees and—more important—got back up into the chair afterward. Better still, I was able to hold a regular pen, though my writing was still barely legible, and slow. I had far less pain. I began to gain weight. A teacher introduced me to horseback riding, and I’ll alway remember my first time leaving the power chair’s rattle to enter the silent, wooded paths beyond the barnyard.
By the end of my second year of graduate school, I’d managed to finish my thesis—a story collection that would eventually become my second published book. In addition, I’d nearly completed what would be my first, something I could no longer pretend was not a novel. Vinegar Hill had started out as just another short story, an attempt to reconcile contradictions suggested by details—what Chekhov called “little particulars”—dislodged from the lives of my paternal grandparents. My grandma Ansay had suffered a final, fatal stroke early in 1985. My grandfather now lived in Florida, where he’d gone through a kind of renaissance: dating, taking ballroom dancing classes, blossoming in the sunshine. But I couldn’t stop reflecting on the way they had lived: my grandmother’s misery, my grandfather’s exhaustion, his endless desire for what he called “peace.” It occurred to me that like so many farmers of his generation, my grandfather had spent his youth not as a person, but as a tool, a task, the number of hours he could work in a day. His rage, which had simmered far more than it had shown, now seemed to mirror my grandmother’s grief—two languages that seemed to express the flip side of a single, shared lament. Perhaps it was this that had kept them together. Perhaps this had something to do with the secret my grandfather knew about my grandmother.
“I’ll tell them about you,” he’d say, whenever she raised her voice against him.
I never learned what the secret was, but there were several clues. When I was fourteen, my grandmother had pulled me into the bathroom by my wrist. There, speaking through tears, she told me that sex was for the sole purpose of bearing children, and that once I passed out of childbearing age, I was free to deny a husband anything more. My grandfather had persisted, but she’d known her rights. She’d gone to the priest—on her mother’s advice—and the priest had made my grandfather leave her alone.
And then there was this: she’d been past twenty-five, an old maid by the standards of the day, when she’d married. Her father had approached my grandfather, and the two had negotiated until my grandmother’s dowry was sweetened with the promise of good land. My grandfather himself had told me the story, in Florida, well after my grandmother’s death.
“No one else would have her,” he said.
“Why?”
But my grandfather just shook his head. How he loved the Florida sunshine! He went out and bought himself a pale pink suit. He died a happy man.
Vinegar Hill quickly departed from the fragmented facts of my grandparents’ lives, entering into the Gothic terrain I’d admired in books by O’Connor and the Brontës. Soon I was enmeshed in a fictional world every bit as real to me as any I had known. I finished the book when I was twenty-five, but I was twenty-eight by the time I’d found a publisher for it, and I’d just turned thirty, and was completing my third book, by the time I finally held the first copy in my hand. It had become the story of woman struggling to reconcile the demands of her faith with the reality of a failing marriage, and, frankly, I lost a lot of sleep, wondering what my Catholic relatives would think of it. In fact, my relatives were overwhelmingly supportive. (I once overheard my Auntie Lu explaining to a stranger at a reading, “When we talk about Ann, we just say, ‘the Lord moves in mysterious ways.’”) What I had not anticipated—had never even considered—were the reactions I might get from people I didn’t know well, people who happened to live in my hometown.
Port Washington, Wisconsin, is a scenic little town of about nine thousand set on a hill overlooking Lake Michigan. People still say “hello” when they pass on the street. At the top of the hill is Saint Mary’s Church, an old Catholic church made of stone. Lodged in its steeple is a four-faced clock, one of the largest in the United States. Growing up, it seemed to me that no matter where I was, or who I was with, or what we happened to be doing, the eye of that clock was fixed upon me, unblinking as the eye of God. Who could have resisted such a landscape, so ripe for metaphor? I borrowed the hill, the church, the clock for the fictional town where Vinegar Hill is set. I also borrowed my grandparents’ house, which resembled many houses in Port Washington, furnished with the same hanging Jell-O molds, the same framed biblical portraits, the same avocado carpeting. I borrowed Lake Michigan—it is, after all, a big lake—and I borrowed a few other general details. A downtown swimming pool, for instance. A tourist-trap restaurant.
Not exactly the town’s crown jewels.
I was fully expecting questions about the church and its clock. But what I wasn’t expecting was all the people who would accuse me of setting Vinegar Hill in their home. Who claimed to recognize my protagonist, Ellen, as their own mother, their own best friend, even their own self. Who showed up at the readings I gave in the Milwaukee area to chant the refrain of my childhood: if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. In a bookstore, during a question-and-answer exchange, the mother of a childhood friend stood up.
“Nothing like this really happened to you!” she said.
“You’re absolutely right,” I agreed.
We stared at each other helplessly.
Rumors abounded. A cousin of mine was shown the “real” house where Vinegar Hill had taken place—a house I’d never even seen. My parents, who have been married thirty-eight years to date, were whispered to have been secretly divorced. My favorite bit of gossip asserted that Vinegar Hill was actually “Sweet Cake Hill,” a small street in Port Washington I hadn’t known existed.
The truth was that I’d struggled to find a title. I’d known early on that it would be the name of the street my characters lived on; I’d known, too, that its connotations should reflect the book’s bitter sensibility. And yet, two months after the manuscript was finished, the title page was blank. I was still living in upstate New York, teaching at Cornell as a visiting lecturer. One day, driving out of town to see a friend, I glanced up and saw a street sign I’d never noticed before.
Vinegar Hill.
I leaned on my horn. I zigged and zagged through the autumn leaves. Never since has a title hit me with such absolute clarity.
I once heard another writer say that we are living in a time of such cynicism that all nonfiction is assumed to be fiction and all fiction is assumed to be nonfiction. The fact is that certain people will see themselves in your work, regardless of whether or not you put them there. There will always be the postpublication smirks, the howls of betrayal, the accusations of thievery. In a sense, it’s liberating. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
And yet, in this case, I’m glad that I didn’t.
Halfway through the first draft of Vinegar Hill, as I was struggling with a character named James, an entire backstory appeared to me—not exactly based on my father’s experience in the san, but springing from it. For nearly a year, I wrote this backstory in, then wrote it back out. Ultimately, I let it go, and to this day, I am grateful. No matter how different James was from my father, no matter how distinct his circumstances might become, the word tuberculosis would have had to remain, like a tombstone, like a monument, visible for miles. The effect on my relationship with my father, with my family, would have been devastating. And the effect on my writing? One could argue that I’d be a better writer for the experience. One could also argue that I would not have gone on to write as prolifically, as freely, and with the sense of joy that sustains me, had there been that weight on my conscience, that distracting sting.
As it
was, my parents took all the attention, good as well as bad, in stride. My father, a consummate salesman, actually liked the controversy over our personal lives, believing that it could only boost sales. At local book signings, I’d see him grinning mischievously when people asked him if the book was about our family.
“Have you read it?” he’d ask.
If the answer was no: “Well, then, you’ll have to read it and let me know.”
And if they had read it?
“Oh, she’s got another book coming soon. Once you read that one, it’ll clear things up.”
My mother was more cryptic. There’s a scene in the book where Ellen is playing tumbling games with the children; at one point, she stands on her head. Signing books at a local library fund-raiser, I heard a woman asking my mother, in a stage whisper, if Ellen was supposed to be her.
“Well,” my mother said, evenly, “I really can stand on my head.”
Between 1994 and 1999, I published four novels and a collection of short stories, statistics that mean I’ve spent roughly a year of my life on a book tour. Since handicap access to public transportation can be, as my father would say, “a challenge,” he arranges to meet me whenever I give readings in the Midwest. He picks me up at O’Hare and chauffeurs me to talks and interviews in the Chicago area before driving me north to Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis. We take the backroads, the rural highways he still remembers from when he was just starting out, fresh from the san, working as a traveling salesman selling fertilizer across the Midwest. We listen to polka tapes and AM radio. My father points out how the little towns have changed, admiring the Wal-Marts, the shopping malls, the super-size grocery stores.
“When I used to come through here, there was nothing but cows!” he declares, biting happily into a deli sandwich.
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