Angel in the Parlor
Five Stories and Eight Essays
Nancy Willard
For my mother and in memory of my father
Contents
Stories
1. Her Father’s House
2. Animals Running on a Windy Crown
3. The Doctrine of the Leather-Stocking Jesus
4. The Tailor Who Told the Truth
5. Amyas Axel, His Care and Keep
Essays
6. The One Who Goes Out at the Cry of Dawn: The Secret Process of Stories
7. Becoming a Writer
8. Angel in the Parlor: The Reading and Writing of Fantasy
9. The Well-tempered Falsehood: The Art of Storytelling
10. The Spinning Room: Symbols and Storytellers
11. The Game and the Garden: The Lively Art of Nonsense
12. The Rutabaga Lamp: The Reading and Writing of Fairy Tales
13. “Who Invented Water?”: Magic, Craft, and the Making of Children’s Books
Introduction
Astronomers, evolutionary biologists, physicists, no less than storytellers, are compelled to ask themselves how the universe and life began and what are the causes of change. And therein lies a story. In fact, many stories. One might say that man is the storytelling animal. In the deepest human sense, we are, and we become, the stories that we tell about ourselves to explain ourselves. We never tire of retelling each other into each other’s lives.
True storytelling begins with the sense of wonder. Why does the universe exist rather than nothing? Why did he meet her by the willow tree that windy day? What happened next? Did they get married? Did he die? In this remarkable collection of stories and essays, Nancy Willard wonders her stories into form and wonders about the art of wondering. In effect, her essays are stories about stories, how they have their roots both in experience and in invention. If her childhood seems to have been magical, it is because she has not lost her sense of enchantment in its recounting. In her retelling of the Cinderella story from the point of view of the rat-turned-coachman, she is able to project herself into other characters who also value their histories and speculate about what is to become of them. Unlike the children in e.e. cummings’s poem who “down they forgot as up they grew,” Willard cherishes the origins of astonishment in the child’s curiosity about herself and her world. Willard says:
The teller tells the story he has made out of bits he has seen and pieces he has heard. His telling brings these fragments together, and in that healing synthesis, he gives the wasted hours of our lives an order that they don’t have and a radiance that only God and the artist can perceive.
The universe that Willard’s imagination inhabits is enchanted because everything in it has its story, everything is touched with the animation of her own delight in the thoughtful act of looking. In this book the reader can witness the products of Willard’s imagination in their completed form and at the same time glimpse the resources of her particular experiences that she has shaped into stories. And therein lies her dominant theme—how people either fail or succeed in inventing the lives that finally they must call their own. Their fictions of themselves must bear the weight of what they feel, just as the lovers, Nicholas and Janet, must define their chosen love against the fantasy of their benefactor, Amyas, who wishes he could fly. The story that Willard creates is a fabric of the fictions each character creates for himself or herself, and this composite fiction is the “lie” that enables the reader to see into the representative truth of her characters. That is what Willard means when she concludes her essay, “The Well-tempered Falsehood”: “Yes, to tell the lie. But in the telling, to make it true.”
Willard is right in assuming that the fictions we invent, the life of the imagination, are an essential part of the reality of human life. And so the supernatural in her work, the aura of enchantment that often surrounds her objects and people, must be seen as what the mind adds to the perceived world of events and images. A dreamlike or impressionistic sense of things gives expression to the feelings that inevitably are associated with what we call the actual. Even the most recalcitrant realist must acknowledge the existence of human fantasy, of wishing and making believe. It is as if we live in two worlds at once, and these worlds of the literal and the imagined are always merging or clashing, each contending for our allegiance.
In the world of the actual the universal law is that everything is causally connected, and therefore description is essentially linear. Explanation or interpretation must show how things connect in sequence, motivation causing action, one action leading to the next. But in the world of imagination such necessity may be suspended briefly to allow an imaginative premise to take the place of a cause. In Willard’s hands, the real and the imagined are joined and enhance one another. That is perhaps one of the many reasons why her lectures on the craft of writing given at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference over the years have been so important to other writers.
Willard’s writing demonstrates that the spirit of fiction is never far from the spirit of childhood recollection, of the fairy tale, and of myth. Such narration possesses the freedom to reject explanation for presentation, to apprehend an image or an action in the intensity of the moment in which it is witnessed. For example, in a poem inspired by a literal reading of a newspaper headline on a sports page, “Buffalo Climbs Out of Cellar,” Willard restores the life of the buffalo by making him a four-legged buffalo again. She gives us his predicament and his story. We know how he must feel, and so we care. But as artist she does not tell us, nor does she have to, how he got there in the first place, for that would be another story.
Robert Pack
Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
5 Stories
1
Her Father’s House
Over the loudspeaker the stewardess’s voice disintegrated, crackling like cellophane. Erica stood up and herded Anatole into the aisle.
“Goodbye,” said the stewardess. “My, you’re real big for three years old. I’ll bet your grandma’s going to give you a big hug.”
“I’m going to hug my grandma,” said Anatole. “My old grandpa died.”
The stewardess smiled. Erica’s husband, Theo, made a space for them, carrying the suitcase, and they all three hurried through the carpeted tunnel into the terminal. Erica saw John, looking more bald than she had remembered him and paler, wiping his glasses on his T-shirt the way he always did just before he lifted Papa into his chair at the table or took Papa the paper. She wondered if he was looking for a new job or if her mother would let him stay on to take care of the house. Perhaps he’d already put his advertisement in the newspaper—the same advertisement that had brought him into their family three years ago.
Then she caught sight of her mother at the gate and ran forward and hugged her, astonished at how small she had become.
“Mother, you’ve gotten thinner since I saw you at Christmas.”
“I am thinner,” said her mother. “I didn’t sleep a wink all night. I know I won’t sleep tomorrow night, either.”
“Your sister and her kids got in yesterday,” John said.
“Kirsten’s here?”
“But not Harold,” added her mother. “He couldn’t get away. I’ve got to make a reservation for Kirsten and the children at Grubb’s for Saturday. Joan wants to go there for her last free birthday. After your tenth you have to pay for the cake and ice cream. Danny went there for all his birthdays.”
“I thought you said the funeral’s on Saturday,” said Erica.
“Funeral’s tomorrow. This dragging it all out, I’m a wreck.”
“I’ll get the car,” said John as Anatole and Theo joined them. “I’ll meet you outside the bagg
age gate.”
The four of them watched him hobble down the escalator.
“How’s his foot?” asked Theo.
“It turns all dark in the morning,” Erica’s mother said. “It’s his circulation. And he keeps on smoking. And he won’t have an operation. Yesterday he cut the toes out of his shoes. Too bad his room is on the third floor. It takes him forever to get there. And he can’t lift as well as he used to. But he was so good with Hal.”
John turned onto the expressway and opened the window. The warm winds of May blessed them. Traffic at this early hour was not heavy; the air smelled fresh. In the front seat, her mother turned around and talked to the space between Erica and Theo, just over Anatole’s head.
“Hal had such a good day Monday. He ate a big lunch——”
“Not quite as big as the day before,” said John.
“Why, he ate some nut loaf and a bowl of yogurt and a dish of prunes. And he shaved all by himself. The bridge club was coming over, so I got him dressed in his best suit. He looked real nice. I asked him did he want to go downstairs and watch TV, and he said no, he’d rather read in the study. All the ladies came to see him when they went upstairs for their coats, and he talked to them.”
“Did he talk?” asked Erica. “He hardly spoke a word to me at Christmas.”
“He did. He showed Mrs. Nordlund his book on the Grand Canyon. He used to read it every night. I’d sit up with him when he couldn’t sleep. I can still see him reading that book, the tears running down his face.”
“Was he in pain?” asked Theo.
Erica’s mother shook her head vigorously.
“No,” she said. “He told me his grandfather used to cry too, for no reason. They called it sunstroke in those days. Look at the new shopping center that’s gone up since you were here last.”
Over a drive-in restaurant a giant chef balanced a hamburger on his upraised palm and turned slowly on a pedestal. Erica tried to recall what had stood there before. An open field? Stands of oak and hickory, holding the twilight like a cup?
“I used to tote a tray like that,” Theo said quietly.
“You worked as a waiter?” asked her mother, surprised.
“Six months.”
“And now Erica tells me you’re working with birds for some research project.”
Theo nodded. “Only till my teaching fellowship comes through.”
“I didn’t know you knew anything about birds,” said John.
“I don’t,” said Theo. “I was only hired to feed them and clean their cages.”
“What kind of birds do you work with?” asked John.
“All kinds,” answered Theo, suddenly vague, as if he had very nearly divulged a great secret.
Her mother blew her nose.
“And after dinner I took him into the sunroom to watch TV, and then I took him upstairs to bed and got his nightshirt on, and he said, ‘I have a bad pain,’ and I said, ‘Where?’ And he pointed to his heart. And I said, ‘I’m right here, Hal’—he always liked to know I was there—but his eyes were going all funny and I ran downstairs to call for the ambulance.”
“I’d already called the police,” said John. “They came right away.”
“I had the downstairs looking good for bridge club but I’d thrown everything into the bedroom. And that’s where everybody came. The police, the ambulance, the rescue squad. All the kids on the block were lined up across the street. The doctor gave Hal oxygen all the way to the hospital.”
John turned off the highway, down Norfolk Drive.
“I shouldn’t have had bridge club,” said her mother, rolling up the window. “I shouldn’t have gone to that college reunion with Minnie. It was my fiftieth. After that you don’t get any more.”
Far ahead of them, Erica could see the pear trees blossoming on both sides of the front walk like a wedding procession, spangling the grass with petals.
“He was ninety-two,” said John. “He had a good and fruitful life.”
“I never knew his age when I married him,” her mother said. “I was twenty-six. He didn’t look forty-five.”
“The trees,” said Theo. “They’re beautiful.”
“They carried him out on the stretcher under the pear blossoms,” her mother continued. “I remember that shock of white hair sticking out of the blanket. You know, he had so much hair. Oh, those doctors, they all lie! There was a nice young intern who told me, ‘His heart is getting stronger. He’s going to make it. He’ll be fine in a few days.’”
John drew up to the curb. Her mother opened the door for herself, still talking. “Kirsten and the kids are in Hal’s and my room. Kirsten can sleep in my bed and Danny can sleep in Hal’s, and I’ve put up a cot for Joan. I’ll sleep on the couch. It’s awful for me, looking from my bed over at Hal’s empty one. The night he died I had to push the dresser between them.”
“You should have moved into the guest room,” said Erica.
Her mother shook her head.
“No. I knew if I didn’t sleep there right away, I’d never sleep there again. Anatole can have the cot in Hal’s study. When Kirsten comes back, she can help us pick out a suit for Hal. She went downtown to get some ice cream with Joan and Danny.”
Standing in the upstairs hall, Erica looked for a place to unpack. The house seemed smaller every time she returned to it. The walls in the hall were done in diplomas; whenever her mother uncovered a new certificate she added it, and now the plaster was almost invisible. There were baptismal certificates and marriage certificates; certificates stating that long ago Erica and Kirsten had finished a summer program here, a Bible program there. There were Papa’s chemistry awards and his Ph.D. diploma.
Her mother puffed upstairs with the laundry.
“Where’s Theo?”
“Outside.”
“He has his B.A., doesn’t he? Why didn’t he pick up his diploma?”
“He says he doesn’t need a diploma.”
“Of course he needs a diploma. Who will believe him if he doesn’t have a diploma?”
… And an enormous certificate on shriveled parchment stating that somebody—the name could not be read—was Bearer of Dispatches to Denmark. There were Kirsten’s certificate of graduation from the Powers modeling program, Aunt Minnie’s Dale Carnegie award, Erica’s mother’s fiftieth-reunion certificate, an Arthur Murray diploma that came with the house; and then the wall turned a corner and there were the photographs, the family and the family and the family.… But her father’s family was notably absent, having died long before the births and marriages celebrated in this house.
Erica could hear Theo counting to ten outside and Anatole and the other children calling him.
“Hide, hide!”
“Here I come—ready or not!”
Her sister’s suitcase lay open on the floor. A dozen navy socks and Danny’s eighth-grade yearbook spilled out of the corner. And whose wristwatch and bikini pants lay folded together on top of the clothes? Joan’s? At ten years old? At ten, Erica was wearing undershirts suitable for either sex and she still couldn’t tell time, having been sick the week it was taught in second grade. And then one day she was too old to admit she did not know how.
But what difference did it make? Her father owned no watch. Yet he was always punctual, home for dinner at five-thirty and back to the lab by eight. For half an hour he listened to Lowell Thomas and Drew Pearson; for half an hour he read the newspaper with such concentration that he didn’t notice the time that Kirsten and Erica combed his hair and wound it in curlers. It took him ten minutes to straighten the curls. He never looked at a clock; it was as if these events measured themselves. Beyond the front door lay his work, of which Erica understood nothing until one April day her mother said:
“Your father has been given an important award. I want you to see the presentation and to hear his acceptance speech. I know you will not understand it, but I want you to hear him.”
In the auditorium, her mother led Kirsten and Erica pr
oudly past papa’s students and colleagues to the front row. For Kirsten, always a lady, her mother had not brought so much as a single crayon. For Erica she had brought ten “Little Lulu” comic books.
The crowd applauded. Her father stood at the podium. The microphones leaned toward him, a field of cattails. And then he began to speak.
Erica put down her comic books. She tried to listen. If I listen hard enough, she thought, I will understand him.
Growing old, he almost never spoke to her. Age had eroded the rich soil of his learning and exposed the bedrock of his childhood. He dozed all day, interrupting his long naps for the enormous meals his wife prepared for him and for George Pereau’s television trips to Africa.
Coming to visit on her father’s ninety-second birthday, Erica was appalled at her mother’s haggard face.
“Mother, you sleep in the guest room tonight. I’ll sleep in your bed and keep an eye on Papa. I can listen for Anatole from there.”
Her mother was tucking fresh pillows under Papa’s head. The old man watched her wistfully, a child who did not want to sleep.
“Don’t let him get out of bed. The bedrail won’t stop him. Remember Marie Hetchen, who climbed over the rail and broke her hip? He sleeps pretty well till around two. Then he wants to get up. I’m the only person who can lift him. And he likes the light on, don’t you, Hal?”
“Yes,” came a voice, tiny as a cricket’s.
“The purple lamp?” asked Erica, anxious to please him. “You like it on?”
In the circle of its twilight shone the bottles of lotions and pills and piles of clean handkerchiefs neatly arranged on the bureau. Her mother bent down to adjust the dials on the electric blanket and then motioned Erica to the door.
“I’ve got the two beds tied together. If he tries to get up, you’ll be right there. My sunglasses are on the dresser if you need them.”
“Sunglasses?” asked Erica.
“I can’t sleep a wink with the light on,” said her mother.
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