'Will you give yourself a break?' my mother would say. 'You haven't even begun to live, let alone find out what you're good at.'
And then she'd hurry off for a meeting of Vermont Artists Against the War, of which she was, naturally, the spokesperson.
That was the thing about my mom – she was always busy. And she certainly wasn't the type to share casserole recipes and bake Girl Scout cookies and sew costumes for Christmas pageants. In fact, Mom was the worst cook of all time. She really couldn't care less if the spaghetti came out of the pot half-stiff, or if the breakfast oatmeal was a mess of hardened lumps. And when it came to house-work . . . well, put it this way, from the age of thirteen onwards, I decided it was easier to do it myself. I changed the sheets on all the beds, did everyone's laundry, and ordered the weekly groceries. I didn't mind coordinating everything. It gave me a sense of responsibility. And anyway, I enjoyed being organized.
'You really like to play house, don't you?' Mom once said when I popped over from college to clean the kitchen.
'Hey, be grateful someone around here does.'
Still, my parents never set curfews, never told me what I couldn't wear, never made me tidy my room. But perhaps they didn't have to. I never stayed out all that late, I never did the flower child clothes thing (I preferred short skirts), and I was one hell of a lot tidier than they were.
Even when I started smoking cigarettes at seventeen, they didn't raise hell.
'I read an article in The Atlantic saying they might cause cancer,' my mother said when she found me sneaking a butt on the back porch of our house. 'But they're your lungs, kiddo.'
My friends envied me such non-controlling parents. They dug their radical politics and the fact that our New England red clapboard house was filled with my mom's weird abstract paintings. But the price I paid for such freedom was my mom's non-stop sarcasm.
'Prince Not So Bright,' she said the day after my parents met Charlie.
'I'm sure it's just a passing thing,' my dad said.
'I hope so.'
'Everyone needs at least one goof-ball romance,' he said, giving Mom an amused smile.
'De Kooning was no goof-ball.'
'He was perpetually vague.'
'It wasn't a romance. It was just a two-week thing . . .'
'Hey, you know I am in the room,' I said, not amazed how they had somehow managed to blank me out, but just a little astonished to learn that Mom had once been Willem de Kooning's lover.
'We are aware of that, Hannah,' my mom said calmly. 'It's just that, for around a minute, the conversation turned away from you.'
Ouch. That was classic Mom. My dad winked at me, as if to say, 'You know she doesn't mean it.' But the thing was, she really did. And being a Good Girl, I didn't storm out in adolescent rage. I just took it on the chin – per usual.
When it came to encouraging my independence Mom urged me to attend college away from Burlington – and gave me a hard time for being a real little homebody when I decided to go to the University of Vermont. She insisted that I live in a dorm on campus. 'It's about time you were ejected from the nest,' she said.
One of the things Margy and I shared was a confused background – WASPy dads and difficult Jewish moms who seemed to always find us wanting.
'At least your mom gets off her tukkus and does the art thing,' said Margy. 'For my mom, getting a manicure is a major personal achievement.'
'You ever worry you're not really good at anything?' I suddenly said.
'Like only all the time. I mean, my mom keeps reminding me how I was groomed for Vassar and ended up in Vermont. And I know that the thing I do best is bum cigarettes and dress like Janis Joplin . . . so I'm not exactly Little Miss Bursting With Confidence. But what has you soul searching?'
'Sometimes I think my parents look on me as some separate self-governing state . . . and a massive disappointment.'
'They tell you this?'
'Not directly. But I know I'm not their idea of a success story.'
'Hey, you're eighteen. You're supposed to be a fuck-up . . . not that I'm calling you that.'
'I've got to get focused.'
Margy coughed out a lung full of smoke.
'Oh, please,' she said.
But I was determined to get my act together – to win my parents' interest and show them that I was a serious person. So, for starters, I began to get serious as a student. I stayed in the library most nights until ten, and did a lot of extra reading – especially for a course called Landmarks of Nineteenth Century Fiction. We were reading Dickens and Thackeray and Hawthorne and Melville and even George Eliot. But of all the assigned books in that first semester course, the one that really grabbed me was Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
'But it's so goddamn depressing,' Margy said.
'Isn't that the point?' I said. 'Anyway, the reason it's depressing is because it's so real.'
'You call all that romantic stupidity she gets into real? I mean, she's kind of a schnook, isn't she? Marrying that dull-ass guy, moving to a dull-ass town, then throwing herself at that smarmy soldier, who just sees her as a mattress, nothing more.'
'Sounds pretty real to me. Anyway, the whole point of the novel is how someone uses romance as a way of escaping from the boredom of her life.'
'So what else is new?' she said.
My dad, on the other hand, seemed interested in my take on the book. We were having one of our very occasional lunches off-campus (as much as I adored him, I didn't want to be seen eating with my father at the Union), slurping clam chowder at a little diner near the university. I told him how much I loved the book, and how I thought Emma Bovary was 'a real victim of society'.
'In what way?' he asked.
'Well, the way she lets herself get trapped in a life she doesn't want, and how she thinks falling in love with someone else will solve her problems.'
He smiled at me and said, 'That's very good. Spot on.'
'What I don't get is why she had to choose suicide as a way out; why she just didn't run away to Paris or something.'
'But you're seeing Emma from the perspective of an American woman in the late 1960s, not as someone trapped by the conventions of her time. You've read The Scarlet Letter, right?'
I nodded.
'Well, nowadays we might wonder why Hester Prynne put up with walking around Boston with a big letter A on her chest, and lived with constant threats from the Puritan elders about taking her child away. We could ask: why she didn't just grab her daughter and flee elsewhere? But in her mind, the question would have been: where can I go? To her, there was no escape from her punishment – which she almost considered to be her destiny. It's the same thing with Emma. She knows if she flees to Paris, she'll end up, at best, working as a seamstress or in some other depressing petit bourgeois job – because nineteenth-century society was very unforgiving about a married woman who'd run away from her responsibilities.'
'Does this lecture last long?' I asked, laughing. 'Because I've got a class at two.'
'I'm just getting to the point,' Dad said with a smile. 'And the point is, personal happiness didn't count for anything. Flaubert was the first great novelist to understand that we all have to grapple with the prison which we create for ourselves.'
'Even you, Dad?' I asked, surprised to hear him make this admission. He smiled another of his rueful smiles and stared down into his bowl of chowder.
'Everyone gets bored from time to time,' he said. Then he changed the subject.
It wasn't the first time my father had implied that things weren't exactly perfect with my mom. I knew they fought. My mom was Brooklyn Loud, and tended to fly off the handle when something pissed her off. My dad – true to his Boston roots – hated public confrontation (unless it involved adoring crowds and the threat of arrest). So as soon as Mom was in one of her flipped-out moods, he tended to run for cover.
When I was younger, these fights disturbed me. But, as I got older, I began to understand that my parents fundamentally got along – th
at theirs was a weirdly volatile relationship which just somehow worked, perhaps because they were such fantastic polar opposites. And though I probably would have liked them around more as I was growing up, one thing I did learn from their sometimes stormy, independent-minded marriage was that two people didn't have to crowd each other to make a relationship work. But when Dad hinted at a certain level of domestic boredom I realized something else: you never know what's going on with two people . . . you can only speculate.
Just as you can only speculate about why a woman like Emma Bovary so believed that love would be the answer to all her problems.
'Because the vast majority of women are idiots, that's why,' my mother said when I made the mistake of asking her opinion about Flaubert's novel. 'And do you know why they're idiots? Because they put their entire faith in a man. Wrong move. Got that? Always.'
'I'm not stupid, Mom,' I said.
'We'll see about that.'
ALSO AVAILABLE IN ARROW
A Special Relationship
Douglas Kennedy
Sally Goodchild, a thirty-seven-year-old American journalist, suddenly finds herself pregnant and married to an English foreign correspondent, Tony Hobbs, whom she met while they were both on assignment in Cairo.
From the outset Sally's relationship with both Tony and London is an uneasy one – as she finds her husband and his city to be far more foreign than imagined. But her problems soon turn to nightmares when she discovers that everything can be taken down and used against you.
'I cannot remember a more compulsive book'
Sarah Sands, Daily Telegraph
'Kennedy knows how to keep the pages turning . . . A pacy, absorbing and intelligent story'
Elizabeth Buchan, Sunday Times
'Excellent . . . The pace is thriller-like, so cancel all engagements for the duration'
Good Housekeeping
ALSO AVAILABLE IN ARROW
State of the Union
Douglas Kennedy
America in the Sixties was an era of radical upheaval – of civil rights protests and anti-war marches; of sexual liberation and hallucinogenic drugs. More tellingly, it was a time when you weren't supposed to trust anyone over the age of thirty; when, if you were young, you rebelled against your parents and their conservative values. But not Hannah Buchan.
Hannah is a great disappointment to her famous radical father and painter mother. Instead of mounting the barricades and embracing this age of profound social change, she wants nothing more than to marry her doctor boyfriend and raise a family in a small town.
Hannah gets her wish. But once installed as the doctor's wife in a nowhere corner of Maine, boredom sets in . . . until an unforeseen moment of personal rebellion changes everything.
For decades, this one transgression in an otherwise faultless life remains buried. But then, in the charged atmosphere of America after 9/11, her secret comes out and her life goes into freefall.
The story is sit-up-until-3am readable, the wide-ranging cast of highly individual characters is beautifully handled'
Sunday Times
'Kennedy is a complete genius when it comes to understanding the minds of stylish but troubled women. What's more, he does so enthrallingly and movingly'
Daily Mirror
AVAILABLE IN HUTCHINSON
The Woman in the Fifth
Douglas Kennedy
Harry Ricks is a man who has lost everything. A romantic mistake at the small American college where he used to teach has cost him his job, his marriage and his relationship with his only child. And when the ensuing scandal threatens to completely destroy him, he votes with his feet and flees . . . to Paris.
He arrives in the French capital in the bleak midwinter, where a series of accidental encounters lands him in a grubby room in a grubby quarter, and a job as a nightwatchman for a sinister operation.
Just when Harry begins to think that he has hit rock bottom, romance enters his life. Her name is Margit – an elegant, cultivated Hungarian emigre, long resident in Paris – widowed and, like Harry, alone.
But though Harry is soon smitten with her, Margit keeps her distance. She will only see him at her apartment in the fifth arrondissement for a few hours twice a week, and remains guarded about her work, her past, her life.
However, Harry's frustrations with her reticence are soon overshadowed by an ever-growing preoccupation that a dark force is at work in his life – as punishment begins to be meted out to anyone who has recently done him wrong. Before he knows it, he finds himself of increasing interest to the police and waking up in a nightmare from which there is no easy escape.
Set in a shadowy, sinister Paris, where nothing is exactly as it seems, The Woman in the Fifth is a novel that is guaranteed to keep you turning the pages well into the night. This eerie and unsettling tale of exile and revenge – and the murky frontier between the imagined and the terrifyingly real – is genuinely haunting. And it confirms Douglas Kennedy's reputation as a true master of narrative fiction.
The Pursuit Of Happiness Page 75
