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

by Jincy Willett

  “Since when do you take orders from the Stooge?” Our doctor was Fred Dick, Frome’s only ob-gyn, younger than us by fifteen years. He was a born-again Christian, outspokenly opposed to nonmarital sex and abortion, which effectively relegated him to backwater town practice. Abigail loved to scandalize him with her various exotic infections and fungi. He was a small man with delicate, fine-boned hands. He had a cowlick. Abigail called him Dockery Dick, the Stooge for Christ. Once he suggested that she’d do better to spend her nights with a good husband. “I’d settle,” she said, “for just one night without this terrible itching.”

  “You know damn well who wants me to lose weight.” Her defiance was pointless. This was me she was talking to. “Anyway, it is healthier to be thin.”

  “I’ve never in our life been any healthier than you.” I hated the way she looked at me, pleading, tired, begging me to drop the whole thing and accept what was happening to her. Where was her pride? Where was my twin, the Warrior Bawd? She was dying away, and against all reason I feared she would take me with her.

  For the first time, and not the last, I thought of her old conquests with nostalgia. What she had done to Big Bob Flynn was wrong, but not evil. Conrad Lowe was killing her. She was helping him.

  Abigail tried for an airy smile. “You’ve got to admit I’m looking pretty good these days.”

  “You look like an old balloon,” I said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’m sorry.” I was.

  “You certainly are!” she said, her voice breaking, and she was out the door before I could stand. “You’re a sorry excuse for a woman. You’ll never understand me, and it’s your loss, you, you dried-up old sonofabitch,” she said, and slammed the heavy door so it bounced.

  In a blind rage I ran out onto the lawn after her with the afghan in my hand. I was going to stuff it down her pants or strangle her with it or wrap it around and around her body and jump up and down on it but she drove off and left me standing there waving the stupid thing like a flag, which it somewhat resembled.

  John Bucci, soaping his station wagon, waved and yelled something about giving me a hand and running it up a pole. I think I had a tiny psychotic break right then, a mad moment in which good neighbor John Bucci cheerily shouted lewd gibberish at me while the sun shone and Mrs. Ouimette passed between us walking her old Doberman. I fairly ran inside, still clutching the afghan flag, and shut myself away for the rest of the day.

  It was that name she called me, sonofabitch, and of course it was the sexual insult, the awful power of it, coming from her, but I didn’t admit that for weeks. All I could see at the time was a great slur upon our mother. How Baroque is the subconscious. Mine, anyway.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Great Swamp Fight

  Chapter 15

  Intervention

  The patient reader must bear in mind that none of us realized what Conrad had done to Abby on Block Island. She may have been slightly thinner when they came back, but none of us remarked on it at the time. Guy and I thought she looked her splendid, zaftig self. So when Conrad approached us, alone, soon after their return, to enlist our aid, we were credulous, indeed eager to do as he asked, convinced as we were of the sincerity of his concern.

  Had we but known! Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these…

  “YOU’RE DANGEROUSLY OVERWEIGHT.”

  What Conrad enlisted the DeVilbisses’ aid in doing was an early form of what was just then coming to be legitimized, in psychopop circles, as an “intervention”: luring an unsuspecting citizen into the company of those very humans he has every right to trust in order to confront him with his most obvious frailties. Those who consider this kind of thing acceptable are able, somehow, to distinguish it in their own minds from “sandbagging,” “ambushing,” and “being unforgivably rude,” and it’s gotten so popular even in the exurbs that the prudent alcoholic avoids friendly gatherings of more than two, and even then leaves his motor running.

  I wasn’t prepared for Abigail’s Intervention, and this was no accident. Guy and Hilda knew better than to attempt to enlist my services for their little surprise party. In fact they knew better than to do such a stupid thing in the first place. But they did. They allowed Conrad to convince them that he was

  WORRIED ABOUT HER HEALTH.

  So it was that on a clambake-steamy August morning the Friends of Abigail and Conrad massed like blackbirds at the entrance to the Great Swamp Nature Trail in West Kingston.

  Anna and I had come bird-watching here countless times: it was for me, until this particular Sunday, a place of great peace and beauty. Here is where I taught four-year-old Anna how to talk to chickadees, and get them to talk back to you. Here we saw our first osprey. Here she tasted her first wild strawberry. Abigail never came along with us, as the walk, though not arduous, is over five miles long, and Abigail always hated what she called pointless exercise. In order for anything natural to acquire a “point” for Abigail it has to be flashy and vulgar: Niagara Falls. The Grand Canyon.

  Abigail was as surprised as I, then, when, after I mentioned the trail at a recent DeVilbiss gathering, Conrad, Guy, and Hilda, as one, suddenly voiced an irresistible urge to go there. I should have smelled a rat, especially when Guy, who had spent his whole life insulated from firsthand experience, insisted that he pay his respects to the noble Massasoits, at the spot where they made their last stand against the imperialist English colonists. I should have smelled the Giant Rat of Sumatra, but I was too eager to set him straight—it was the Narragansetts, you dolt, Massasoit was a Wampanoag chieftain—and, I must confess, all too eager to show off the swamp itself. Instead of sniffing the strange air while the rest twittered about picnic baskets and insect repellent and who was going to drive, I was already planning our route, and wondering if there were enough binoculars to go around.

  So I went for a walk, and on that walk I brought an Audubon bird guide, my Bushnells, a small flask of Courvoisier, a duck call…. Not a duck call, actually, but an ingenious device that makes squeaky chittering sounds which fool an odd variety of songbirds into briefly coming out of hiding, searching for baby birds in trouble, before they get a grip on themselves and remember that their own babies are grown and flown. I also brought Anna, and Tim Paine, sans dolorous wife, and Tansy Wasserman, a recent addition to the DeVilbiss group. Abigail and Conrad came with the DeVilbisses.

  We must have looked a bizarre gaggle, as we milled around the gateway to the trail, divvying up provisions. This was before backpacks were popular, and we contended with straw baskets and shopping bags from the Outlet Company. Only three of us looked anything like nature-lovers: Anna and I, of course, and the dreaded Tansy, an old nature-girl, a wrinkled Ophelia who, in addition to penning whale sonnets, grows her own dyes, colors her own homespun wool, and weaves it into what Perelman called, in 1930, “horrid super-dirndls with home-cooked hems.” Apparently the type existed way before the sixties, as did Tansy herself, as well as Perelman’s Mibs (“usually engaged in reading a book written by two unfrocked chemists which tells women how to make their own cold cream by mixing a little potash with a dram of glycerine and a few cloves”).

  Guy looked paler than ever against the glorious backdrop of the dog-days swamp. He was wearing something like lederhosen, only knee-length and made of shiny corduroy, some weird European outdoor garment. He looked like an old Hitler youth who’d fallen asleep under a rock in 1942. Rip von Ribbentrop. Hilda, swathed in something like a burlap caftan, slathered Guy’s exposed whiteness with Off. I don’t remember what Conrad wore, but he looked jaunty and cool, especially compared to Abigail, who emerged from the DeVilbisses’ Karmann Ghia as from a Turkish bath, complaining bitterly about the group’s choice of venue. Conrad, parceling out the burdens, stuck her with shopping bags full of potato salad and condiments.

  “Hey,” she said, “these weigh a ton.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “That’s why I gave them to you. Would you rather carry the wate
rmelon?”

  My sister hung her head like a shamed child, and, as if a bell had tolled, off we started. Anna and I, lightly burdened with bread and deviled eggs, forged ahead, locating, in record time, an American redstart, a scarlet tanager, and a pair of goldfinches. The tanager was particularly exciting; they’re common enough, but so shy that despite their brilliant plumage you hardly ever spot them. We announced each find to the group, but they were already preoccupied with their burgeoning discomfort and, no doubt, the mechanics of the impending “intervention.” At this time of year mosquitoes hovered in the shade and deer flies in the sunlight. The flies were worse: their stings hurt, and they were spectacularly impervious to Off. Neither flies nor mosquitoes have ever bothered me, nor Anna. Abigail suffered mightily, unable to swat them away, shackled, as she was, by potato salad.

  The Great Swamp is nothing like the better known swamps of the southern U.S. The trail is dry, flanked by bogs and stands of dead maple and occasional flashes of living holly. Alligators and water moccasins could never survive here. You have to walk for an hour before you reach real water. The heart of the swamp is a largish stand, more pond than swamp, perhaps three feet deep, ringed by a dike. A footbridge bisects it, running directly beneath a march of power lines, and at the top of the poles are osprey nests, to which the great birds return every year.

  By the time we neared the water everyone but us was out of sorts. Anna and I had stayed far enough ahead so that their complaints did not interfere with our pleasure, but all along we could hear Abigail swearing, and Conrad needling her, and Hilda soothing her miserable husband, whose close encounter with nature was proving intolerable. I don’t think he had ever been bitten before. Certainly not by Hilda. Tim and Tansy kept up with us for a while and made an effort to enthuse, but then Tansy, spotting a small field of her wild-flower namesakes, stupidly waded in for a harvest—tansies are apparently great dye plants—and emerged covered with ticks. Most ticks fall off by themselves, and the ones that remain are easily tweezed, and they were just deer ticks, for God’s sake, but Tansy got hysterical and reenacted the leech scene from The African Queen, with poor agreeable Tim playing Katharine Hepburn, pinching the little nippers off Tansy’s quivering midsection, a sight so depressing that Anna and I tiptoed off and returned to the birds.

  Anna. By my reckoning she was fourteen years old then, as this must have been 1976, the year after the wedding. The bicentennial year! Yes, and we had gone, just the two of us, to the big bash on the Charles River, Fiedler’s Last Stand, and the most gorgeous fireworks display I have ever seen. I don’t remember why Abigail didn’t go. It would have been her sort of thing.

  Anna is our child, Abigail’s and mine. We have always shared custody, and Anna, who looks like neither of us, has never, to my knowledge, suffered as a result. The three of us lived together until Conrad, upon whose arrival Anna chose to stay with me, with no hard feelings on anyone’s part. I had never discussed Conrad with Anna. I had no idea what she thought of him.

  Between us, Abigail and me, we have been a good mother. Abigail nursed and diapered, I manned the cloth books and refrigerator magnets, and we were both there to hold her, though almost from the beginning she was a cool and independent child, not a cuddler. She walked early and talked late, waiting, I think, until her vocabulary was sufficient to her needs. Even before she walked she would make me carry her around the house and yard, pointing at various objects and inquiring, with respect to each, “Iss ta?” And I would name the object, which was clearly her aim, and I would only have to say it once. Mantel. Dahlia. Ottoman. Snapshot. Dictionary. Afterward I could refer to any of these objects in conversation, and she would know what I meant. She was wonderfully bright and sunny.

  She took us both in, Abigail and me, her eyes sharp and amused. She listened to us quarreling, and sometimes, when one of us got in a particularly good dig, she would clap hands with delight. “The kid gives me the creeps,” Abigail said more than once. Which sounds harsh, but isn’t. Abigail was a serene and careless mother, and she needed me to complete her, to be the prudent worrier, but with her child, as with all her men except one, she was free of sentimentality and generous with her love, and did not require reciprocity. I suppose if Anna had hated her it would have stung; but Anna liked her mother, likes her still, likes us both. We called her “I Spy with my Little Eye,” and then just “The Spy.”

  Abigail took the post office job when Anna was three, and from then on I took Anna with me to the library every weekday. She grew up in the library, and not just in the children’s section. Her favorite spot, when she was little, was behind the check-in desk. She would position herself beside the return slot and goggle at the fall of books. She seemed interested at first in the haphazard mess they made, but soon she was stacking them neatly. By the time she was four she was alphabetizing them, and at six she had a basic understanding of the Dewey decimal system, and kept the F’s separate from the B’s, and all the numbers in perfect order. She even understood the Mc/Mac principle. Of course she was an early, voracious reader.

  I was intoxicated, in Anna’s early years, by the belief that somehow she had taken after me. The belief was silly—how could she “take after” her aunt?—and the intoxication sillier still. So what if she did? She was, and is, her own creature. Then, when she hit high school, her body, which had always been slim like mine, began to take on more opulent curves, and boys started coming around, and I thought that somehow she was both of us, Abigail and I, made sensibly whole. Really, I was quite romantic about Anna.

  Abigail never was. “There was,” she would remind me, cruelly, “another family involved, you know. She looks more like the Essers than like any of us. She’s got the German coloring, the cleft chin. She’s going to be tall, like Ev.” I wouldn’t even consider this possibility until, three years ago, Anna came back home for Thanksgiving break, her freshman year at Middlebury, and there she was at the front door, Everett Esser’s daughter, of course. But still ours, our girl.

  And on this day she was fourteen, and still, in my foolish eyes, my heir and soul mate. Until we reached the Great Swamp’s heart, and allowed the rest to catch up with us, we enjoyed ourselves immensely. I still have the bird list from that day. We spotted fifty-six separate species, our prize the gorgeous pileated woodpecker, a discreet red-crested creature the size of a hawk. We heard him first, of course, rattling on a dead sugar maple like the crack of doom, and then Anna spotted him, and, holding her breath, pointed him out to me. And just as I got him square in my sights, Conrad Lowe burst through the bushes behind us, vanishing the marvelous bird as though at the flick of a wand. What a terrible man.

  “What the hell was that?” he asked. “Some kind of mutant crow?”

  “Dryocopus pileatus,” I said. “The pileated woodpecker, or logcock. I only saw one before in my life, and that was thirty years ago. I’ll never see another. And if you hadn’t come crashing through the underbrush like that—”

  “Hey, everybody,” Conrad yelled over his shoulder, “Dorcas just spotted a postulated wallbanger!”

  Anna giggled. I couldn’t blame her. He was funny; this was one of his worst traits.

  “Or ‘logcock,’” he repeated, waggling his eyebrows at me. “I’ll have to tell the little woman.”

  “How much farther?” whined Guy, at the head of the sweaty, deeply unhappy pack of stragglers.

  They were all petulant, except for Conrad; martyred, as though I had forced them to do something onerous. For God’s sake, this hadn’t been my idea. “Stop where you are,” I said, to all of them. “Just turn around and go back. Leave one car for Anna and me. Throw away your goddamn potato salad. Beat it.” They didn’t deserve to be here.

  Abigail set down her load and flexed both hands. From ten yards away I could see cruel shopping-bag grooves worn across each palm. She waved at Conrad, that tentative, hopeful wave she used with him, like a shy child who has no real hope of being noticed. She wasn’t. “Yoo hoo!” she called, blushin
g. Still he ignored her, ducking by Anna and taking the lead away from us. “Honey!”

  Abigail never used his name. Conrad was, in reference, He, Him, in address, You, in supplication, Honey. Use of his actual given name was to her an affront to their great intimacy. I never used his name either. Using it was like summoning him up, acknowledging his importance, an affront to our great enmity. He was to me, in reference, he, him, it, in address, excuse me, I beg your pardon, hey you, look you. See here. (I use his name now that he’s dead, joyfully, waving it about like a war trophy, a severed ear.) “Hey!” I cried, and then, lunging forward, grabbed the back of his shirt. It was white, I remember it now, a frayed Oxford cloth shirt with buttoned-down collar, the sleeves rolled up. I grabbed it and it pulled loose of his pants. Chinos. “Hey, you!” He looked around at me, raising his eyebrows. “Your wife,” I said.

  “Yes?” He tucked in his shirttail with exaggerated languor.

  “Are you deaf? You’re not deaf. Pay attention to her.”

  Abigail caught up with us. “Race ya,” she said softly, smiling up at him, trying so very hard. My sister never lost her pride, not really. That was one of the awfulest things. He never broke her. She bent and bent and bent.

  “How much farther to the famous dike?” he inquired, of me, of course.

  “Not to the dike,” said Abigail. “Back to the lot. Seriously, honey, I’ve had it. Guy’s covered with welts. Wasserman’s having a nervous breakdown. Even Tim isn’t happy.” She tugged on his wrist. “Come on.”

  “We’re almost there, right?” Still to me.

  “Your wife,” I said, “would like to go home, and so would everybody else, except us.”

  “How about it?” He addressed everybody but me, and Abigail. “Are we giving up?”