Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather

by Jincy Willett

  She was the oddest reader I’ve ever known, and in my line of work I’ve known quite a few. She had absolutely no taste. She would read everything, everything fictional, anyway. One week it would be The Cloister and the Hearth and the next week Claudia. She thrilled, really thrilled, to Moby Dick, and read passages aloud to us in a sonorous voice, a deep register unfamiliar to us, and as I remember it—we were eleven or so at the time—she didn’t skip over anything, and the chapters she found the most moving were the very chapters traditionally given the most attention by academics. And then, overnight, she was thrilling to King’s Row or Kiss Me Deadly or Leave Her to Heaven.

  Mother and I talked about books. It was our way of loving each other, and the reading of the same book was our principal shared experience. The worlds we inhabited were very different; here we had a common text. Even after I grew up and became aware that Mother did not discriminate between art and trash, and that I needed to, I remained, forever, willing to read any piece of garbage she wanted me to, just for the pleasure, the cocoa-in-bed, Christmas-Eve pleasure, of sharing it with her.

  And she didn’t like any old thing. She found depressing books depressing, horror stories unnerving; she was particularly critical of novels with uninteresting or inconsistent characters. “People don’t act like that,” she would say, and she was frequently right. But no matter how egregious the writing, she would always finish the book.

  Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking.

  When we were twenty-four I lived away from home, mostly. Abigail was a widow then, at home with baby Anna, and I was away at Amherst getting my degree in library science. That summer, though, the summer of ’62, I came home. It was the last time we four were together as a family. It was the summer Marilyn Monroe died.

  I got up before Abigail one morning. (I got up before Abigail every morning.) I took my coffee outside, to the tiny gazebo Father had designed and built in the backyard.

  Barely ten feet in diameter, it dwarfed his little lawn when he first set it up. Soon he dispensed with the lawn altogether and extended the garden borders up to the base of the gazebo, so that the structure appeared to rise like an island in a lily-choked pond. He set down flagstones so that we could get to the gazebo without trampling the dahlias, but his gardens were so lush that the flagstones were the devil to locate. Getting out to the gazebo was like a child’s game, and reduced you to a child no matter what your age.

  The gazebo itself was beautifully constructed, ingeniously designed—to ludicrous effect, because of its scale. Father was an excellent craftsman, with no sense of proportion or perspective. The gazebo still stands, in what is now my backyard. It has weathered twenty-five years absurdly well. Professional office buildings have crystallized and disintegrated in Frome during that time; a major section of the interstate highway has been constructed and duly condemned and now partially rebuilt; in Providence an entire hotel has evolved from Platonic ideal in the minds of the city council to whorehouse and eyesore. And still my father’s gazebo stands, like the pyramids of Cheops, weathered to the bone and white with age, but too solid even to creak and sway.

  Anyway, that morning I picked my way through the snapdragons and sat up on the railing, watching the bees, listening to the others stir within the house. I heard toilets flushing, and the sound of the Today show on TV, and a woman’s cry, “Noooo!”, I couldn’t tell whose, and the crash of breaking glass. Someone had dropped a china cup on the kitchen floor. After a long time Father came out the back door with his mug of coffee, and stood sipping it in the shade from the eaves. Usually he came right out to the gazebo on nice days, and took his breakfast with me. When he did emerge from the shade he walked deliberately toward me. There was a portentous hunch to his shoulders, and intuitively I braced myself for terrible news, although I couldn’t imagine what it could be. The telephone hadn’t rung. (It’s an indication of my youth and the youth of my country that it did not occur to me, that morning, that bad news could have come through the TV. Kennedy was still alive.)

  He sat down in one of the painted wooden chairs, and I sat beside him in the other, and for a time we didn’t say anything. I was very frightened by whatever it was but in no rush to hear about it. The air smelled particularly good to me as I waited for him to speak, and the coffee tasted fine. A door was closing, and everything behind it was beautiful. Good-bye, snapdragons! Good-bye to simple animal mornings, to the life I’ve led. I’m needed at home, at childhood’s end.

  Father’s voice when he finally spoke was pleasant, but there was a husky, nasal quality to it, as though he had a cold, which he didn’t. He said, “Marilyn Monroe is dead.”

  I held myself perfectly still.

  “Suicide,” he said. “She was all alone, poor thing.”

  I gripped the broad, flat arm of the chair with one hand, and covered my mouth with the palm of my other hand. Covering my mouth was an instinctive act. I didn’t know whether I was doing it to hide my mouth, or hold it shut, or both.

  “Abigail’s with your mother,” he said.

  I was trying to abstract the things Father was saying: to get beyond the apparent non sequitur, to whatever awful thing had made somebody scream and drop a teacup. I made a geometrical problem out of them:

  Marilyn Monroe is dead

  Abigail is with Mother

  Therefore:

  What????

  I tried algebra.

  (M. M. is dead) + x = Childhood’s end

  x = (Childhood’s end) - (M. M. is dead)

  x = What????

  All my life I had yearned for responsibility, for someone to need me, to require me to do some hard service, so that I could begin the business of my life. I yearned for duty the way Abigail yearned to show her ass. And here it was, my first assignment. Horribly, and for the last time, I burst into tears in the presence of one of my parents.

  He covered my hand, the one gripping the chair, with one of his. “You surprise me, Dorcas,” he said. “I’ve never known you to be sentimental.” He squeezed my hand. “She was special, though, wasn’t she?” He was smiling sweetly at me, a father comforting his daughter, in control of the situation.

  I blew my nose and took a few breaths. “Of course I’m not sentimental,” I said, “and I never knew you to be either, especially about movie stars. What’s happened here? What’s really wrong?”

  “Nothing’s ‘really wrong.’” Father laughed, in a maddeningly fond way. “You don’t have to be ashamed, honey. Lots of people loved Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Well, not me! You’re the one who’s making a big deal out of it!” As the tension drained away, humiliation rushed in to take its place.

  “You know,” he said, “that there are only three women in the world I care about, and they’re all right here. I was just upset on your mother’s account. It seemed to hit her pretty hard, and Abigail, too.”

  I couldn’t imagine why. Mother was a reader, not a fan. “Did she know her in high school or something?” Mother had gone to high school with Red Skelton.

  “Mattie looks just like her,” Father said. “I’ve always thought so.”

  “She does not,” I said. Although I knew what he meant. Mother had the baby-blond hair and a real sweetness, an innocence that made us all want to protect her. But she had a long, horsy face and an angular body. She gave the impression of softness because of her personality. Actually, she looked like a cross between Marilyn Monroe and, well, Arthur Miller. I said so, and it gave me no small satisfaction to see Father wince at my infliction of this sharp little truth.

  “She’s Marilyn Monroe to me,” he said. “Prettier.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, without looking at h
im, and went into the house. Mother was changing her bed and humming. “Mother,” I said, “are you all right?”

  She nodded brightly, unable to more than grunt, with one corner of a pillow in her mouth as she coaxed it into its case.

  “About Marilyn Monroe?” I said.

  “Isn’t that sad,” she said. “Poor thing.”

  “Does it especially bother you?”

  “No.” Mother sighed. “But your sister is taking it very hard.”

  Abigail was feeding baby Anna in the sunroom. She held the bottle carelessly, tilted slightly up, so that the baby had to work hard for her meal, and Abigail’s face was pale, her eyes red-rimmed. I took Anna and the bottle away from her and sat down to do the job properly.

  “I know it’s crazy,” Abigail said, with her lower lip quivering, her big myopic blue eyes swimming in fresh, easy tears. “She died with a telephone in her hand. She was trying to call someone.” She sobbed freely, like a baby on its back. “Don’t you say it, Dorcas. I know I’m being dumb. But she was so…”

  “…much prettier than you,” I said, “and now she’s gone.”

  Abigail blew her nose. “Bitch,” she said. “She had a special quality, which I don’t expect you to appreciate.”

  “And what quality is that?”

  “Oh, you know.” She gestured impatiently toward Anna. Even in youth Abigail was profoundly lazy. She loved to make me finish her sentences for her.

  “Infantilism? Baldness?”

  “Innocence, you boob. But it wasn’t just that. She was…a pure tramp.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  “Come on, you know what I mean. She was pure and a tramp. She had this way of making the whole world…I don’t know…what?”

  “Salivate. Ogle her breasts. I give up.”

  “Gosh, you’re hateful today.” Abigail threatened to cloud up again. “You wouldn’t appreciate this, but she had this special ability to make the whole world feel responsible for her. That’s it. She wasn’t supposed to watch out for herself. Everybody else was supposed to do it for her.”

  I just let her run on. The bare idea of my sister feeling responsible for anything or anybody, including Marilyn Monroe, was beyond comment. She was quiet, finally, for a long time, and then she looked up at me and asked, shrewdly, without artifice, “Do you think I look like her at all? Do I remind you of her in any way?”

  This was the sister I knew best, and loved, over my severest disapproval. Hard as nails, absolutely shameless. She had never hesitated to expose her worst self to me, or pretended to feel guilt, or even the justification for guilt, about anything.

  She was, on this very day, the day of the dreadful news about Marilyn Monroe, a two-week widow, her shotgun husband, Everett Esser, having died of a heat stroke during basic training at Fort Gordon.

  I had been with her when she got the news. She put down the telephone and told me, briefly, what had happened. She sat still for a while, without expression, absently hugging her fatherless baby. She sucked me in for a few minutes. I averted my eyes from the spectacle of my sister thinking, for perhaps the first time ever, about something besides herself. It was, for me, a holy moment. She cleared her throat. “Dorcas? Do you think we could hold off the funeral until Monday? Is there some law that says you have to do it right away?”

  I was a little slow, but I got it. Country club dance on Saturday night. She had bought a dress for it, a Monroeish scarlet taffeta thing cut low to just about her nipples, stretched tight across her high waist, her appalling rump and thighs, flaring out with brilliant irony at the knees, allowing free movement now that none was possible. A 1962 version of the dress Amber St. Clair wore to the King’s Ball. The dress my sister had dreamed of wearing since she was twelve.

  I told her she could wear it to the funeral, which, of course, would have to be held on Saturday, and that in any event if Everett’s parents caught wind of her cavorting at the Agawam Hunt Club dance they would cut her and the baby off without a cent.

  “Shit,” she said. “You’re right.” And grieved, visibly, for her missed opportunity.

  Abigail showed me everything. Only me. She cried at the funeral, and got her money, but she never pretended to me.

  The only grief she has ever felt was for our parents, whose deaths were a year off, and for Conrad Lowe, whom she murdered and, in her own horrid way, loved. She cried with pleasure at the death of Marilyn Monroe.

  “You are like her,” I said, “in that you are an amoral exhibitionist.”

  “If I killed myself,” she asked dreamily, “would people feel responsible?”

  “If you killed yourself, pigs would fly.”

  Abigail laughed. “I’d be missed, though.”

  “Sure. Every flag at Quonset Point Naval Air Station would be lowered to half staff.”

  She smiled still, and closed her eyes, and slept like a cat, leaving me with the baby and the bottle. You are like her, I had refused to tell her, though she already knew it well, in that you make a man out of everybody.

  Chapter Six

  Diminished Responsibility

  Chapter 6

  After the Game

  Nineteen fifty-three, just after Abigail turned fourteen, was the year Frome High won the state football championship. On the night of January 10, at 9:00 P.M., the winning touchdown scored, setting in motion a number of traditional rites. The ritual tearing down of the goal-posts. The ritual beer bacchanal in the woods behind the stadium, beside the frozen Assonocket Reservoir. The ritual human sacrifice.

  Abigail Mather, giddy with drink, was the only female remaining at midnight in a stronghold of brutally healthy young men. When the beer was gone they moved out on the thick ice, sliding, at first cautiously, then with increasing confidence. They formed a long hand-linked line, which became a circle, with Abigail at the center.

  She flew across the starry night with her feet tucked up under her bottom and her head thrown back, held up by the steely arms of the young men. There was laughter, and then there wasn’t, and Abigail was alone, in the middle of the frozen lake, at the center of a rough circle of men…. No one was to know what was done to her that night. Ever. Until now.

  Which was my fault, as I had refused to listen to her when she climbed into my bed at three in the morning, her hair filthy, reeking of dried beer, her body rank and strange. She smelled of copper and hops and fear and horses lathered by a killing run.

  “Dorcas,” she said. “It’s wonderful.” My sister was trembling, in the grip, for the first time in her life, of something more powerful than herself. She squeezed one of my hips in her hand. “They’ll love you,” she said, laughing, as I tried to jerk out from under her. “They’d love you just as much. You can make them do anything! I know you’re not ready yet, but Oh, Dorcas, I wish I could show you now….”

  I punched her soft stomach with all my strength. “Get out of my bed, you pig,” I whispered through my teeth. I hit her again. “Get away from me. Wash yourself. Get off me.” It was enraging not to be able to scream, to have to protect her from our parents, our parents from her. For the first time I saw my sister as a burden, and understood that I would have to carry her, in some sense, for the rest of my life. I kept punching her, and she made no move to protect herself, and everywhere my fist sank in, its small force was muffled by her flesh.

  I kept hissing at her to get off me, although, literally, I was on top of her, kneeling on her thighs, wobbling precariously, and her dirty nightgown was bunched and twisted around her waist, but still she was on me, really, with her bullying musk and her appetites, and I stopped hitting her only when I saw, through the stars of my rage, that she loved it, with her eyes shut and her mouth jagged in a sow’s pink grin. I slapped her hard across the face, drawing a tear from one eye, making no difference, and then leaped away from her, hugging myself with fright.

  The only effective weapon against her was indifference. I had always instinctively known that, but had not, until that night, beg
un to know just how horrible that was. She thrived, she prospered, on any sort of attention, like a plant on light. Even horror, disgust. Even fear. Love, disapproval, clinical interest, curiosity, outrage, hate, cold, and warm—no matter how you regarded her you were already lost, for the mere fact of your regard became her nourishment. To look at Abigail was, is, to feed the beast. To look at her with strong emotion is a kind of suicide.

  She drew a bath for herself in the basement tub, so that our parents would not hear. She came back clean and cleanly dressed and got into her own bed. I lay awake until daylight with burning eyes, worrying at my parents’ innocence, my duty to preserve it, my duty to Abigail, my crippled sister, my monster, who slept deep. At one point during the night she rolled up onto her knees and slept the way she had when she was very young, with her face mashed into her pillow and her bare rump in the air. My innocence was gone forever. Hers returned, and always would, settling upon her in the night like dew. My sister manufactures innocence, like adrenalin, or sweat.

  So I never learned What Happened That Night until last year, when Abigail was at the ACI and I couldn’t raise bail because it took all the money I had to retain a decent lawyer. Frank Calef was a great help to me at that time. Frank’s a banker, probably more responsible than any one other individual for the Wampum Factory Mall, and one of the City Council Yankee Impersonators who stand fast against the Italian Menace. But Yankee impersonators, like their Platonic ideal, have some virtues, the greatest of which is devotion to duty. Frank helped me out with money and made his shoulder discreetly available should I want, in an uncharacteristic (but permissible in the extreme circumstances) moment of weakness, to sag against something. I suppose he was motivated by a notion of solidarity, and if my name had been Squillante or O’Malley or Fishbein (especially Fishbein) he might not have been so willing to stand by me. Although I suspect he would have anyway, but would have missed a beat between hearing the news and offering assistance.