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

by Jincy Willett

  “Dorcas,” she said. “I have to eat something.”

  Just like that, so did I. I had hardly eaten all day. I was starving.

  She rose and took my hand and we went into the kitchen, where she turned on the light. “You’ll really eat now?” I asked, and she said yes, she was ready. Hunger gave me momentary purpose, rescued me, for a time I understood would be finite, from the numb horror of this night. While she rummaged purposefully through drawers and cabinets, I got out six eggs and scrambled them with cream, and made us each an omelet with cheese and ham, and served them up on Hilda’s best stoneware, and set us each a place across from each other at the kitchen table, and between us, as a centerpiece, I arranged twelve doughnuts on a white platter. I poured us orange juice and milk both, and started the coffee. Through the kitchen window I fancied I could see first light. “We’ll leave as soon as we’re finished here,” I said. “I’ll figure out something.” When she didn’t answer I turned around and she wasn’t there.

  She wasn’t in the living room either, and the front door was still closed and locked. I stood for a long time at the base of the stairs, and then went back to the kitchen table. Wherever she had gone, she was lost to me. I was of no use here. I was a profoundly useless human being. The eggs were cold and I scraped them into the garbage with the doughnuts, and I dumped out the juice and milk, and I cried and cried into the kitchen sink.

  “Dorcas,” I heard her call from far away. “Come here.”

  She was upstairs. “No,” I said.

  “You have to come up here. I need you.”

  “I can’t. Please don’t ask me.”

  “I’m not asking,” she said then, in a new voice, a cold, dry voice. My voice.

  I don’t remember climbing the stairs. Sometimes I am able to not remember the entire night. I can go for days at a time. The only light on the second floor was a night-light in their bedroom, where, of course, she was. She stood by the bed, her back to me. “Come here,” she said. She was holding something in her hand.

  She had uncovered him. He was lying on his back, legs drawn up toward our side of the bed, the palm of his right hand resting on his narrow upturned hip. He faced slightly away from us, with no dreams rolling behind his closed lids, you knew he was asleep and not dead only by the barest rise and fall of his hairless chest. She leaned over him, so that I couldn’t see his body anymore or what she was doing, and then sharply there were fumes, and when she straightened up, his nakedness gleamed in the soft night-light as though oiled, like a painting, an Old Master, they were never wrong, and she put a bottle in my hand, Calvados, empty. Then she lit a match. Blue flame raced across his body, sluiced over his flat belly, his soft nestled sex, down his long legs, and he was all bone, no fat on him at all, his body was young, younger than us, younger than him, and on he slept, like some enchanted knight, beautiful licked in the blue, no heat but such a basking light that I could see, in profile, the Giaconda smile on my sister’s face.

  “Let’s eat him,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Eye

  Hilda’s final chapter, “Tragedy,” focuses on the “tragedy,” which took place a full year after the Great Blizzard of 1978, about which she actually knows nothing, except what she and Guy read in the International Herald Tribune. She plods along through the months leading up to Abigail’s “savage act of assertive self-realization” on Route 6, where the H. C. had gotten themselves stuck in a snowbank during a much more modest storm, and Conrad, too plastered to think through the ramifications of what he was about to do, got out and knelt down behind the rear bumper, to give it a push. She makes a big deal out of the fact that he was kneeling (“Perhaps he said a short prayer.” Sure he did, Hilda.) She makes an even bigger deal out of Abigail’s two black eyes and broken nose. Well, I can’t blame her for that.

  Hilda knows nothing of the Great Blizzard, or of its immediate aftermath, when Conrad woke up on a bright, digging-out morning with what looked to him like a full-body sunburn. “What the hell happened to me?” he asked, and Abigail, successfully snorting back a horselaugh, spun an elaborate tale about how he had staggered out naked into the howling wind, and she hadn’t found him for the longest time, and it was lucky for him he didn’t have frostbite on his thing.

  “Isn’t he, Dorcas?” she asked me, carving off another wedge of cheesecake. We were all in the kitchen, he in an open robe and boxer shorts, his chest and stomach as red as a tomato. He looked so confused, so credulous, standing there. Whatever magic he had exerted over me was gone. He had done me terrible and lasting damage, and it had taken all his power to do it.

  “Indeed,” I said. “He’s very lucky.”

  He made eye contact then and I could see him remember, not the flambeau, but what had gone before, the endgame. He smiled foully and asked me if I had slept well, and I said, Just fine, thank you. I was standing at the kitchen sink, in which still reposed a sticky mass of jelly doughnuts wetted down with my own tears, and I informed him that I had slept like a veritable baby. All that day he used his arsenal of grins and winks and nasty glances to goad me into an acknowledgment of defeat, and in the end he had to give up. If the English make the finest actors, then perhaps the New English aren’t too shabby at it either, at least at one little thespian trick, the one where you are convincingly oblivious to the immense outrageous object galloping around and around you. He never knew if I remembered. Perhaps he believed I had convinced myself it was a dream. Perhaps he even wondered if the dream had been his. I’ll never know, and I don’t give a rat’s ass.

  The story should have ended that day, when Abigail and I left him alone at Agincourt and took up three days’ residence at a local inn. Or a month later, when he showed up drunk at our house in Frome, demanding to see his wife, and we called the police on him. He should have died drunk in bed, from smoking, or throwing up, or just from being too awful to live.

  A well-wrought piece of fiction, I used to lecture Guy, helps us make sense out of the chaos of our lives. Why be deliberately obscure when real life is so impossibly fractured and opaque? In a novel, Conrad Lowe would have died, or disappeared, after we declined to eat him. In reality he stayed around, slinking in and out of our lives until late the following fall, when my sister took him back.

  “I’m strong now,” she said, and she certainly looked it. She wasn’t yet up to her fighting weight, but she had regained much of what she had lost, and was beginning to look like herself again, as though she could mop up the floor with any man, even Conrad Lowe. He had lately been affecting heart-felt remorse, calling her every night, and when she got her job back, he took to following her on her postal rounds, and once inveigled her into the back of her mail truck for what she told me, before I could stop her, was the best sex they had ever had. “Look,” she told me, “whatever his problem was, he seems to be over it. I know it probably won’t work, but it’s worth a try.” No, it certainly wasn’t, but nothing I could say would stop her.

  The DeVilbisses had returned from France, but Guy was too preoccupied with his “work” to spend much time with Conrad and Abigail, and they ended up living two miles down the road from Anna and me, in a rundown rental, and by year’s end the honeymoon was over. They fought constantly, often with their fists and whatever heavy objects were handy. Both of them spent about the same amount of time in the local emergency room. She never called on me for help, and when I telephoned her, which I did once a week, she never sounded in the least pathetic. She was not, in those last months anyway, a victim.

  I think now that she hated him from the time we left Agincourt, and that she took as much pleasure in the battle as in the bed, and that she intended all along to kill him. I don’t mean that she provoked the final fight just so she could run him over. My sister is not a sneak. But she’s no fool either, and when the opportunity presented itself, she took it.

  She called me right afterward, from a private house a block from the site of what Miles Minden calls “the reckoni
ng.” It was mid-February, almost exactly a year after our last night at Agincourt, and it was snowing, and midnight, and she was on my mind. I picked up on the first ring. “It’s over,” she said, and instantly I knew, more or less, what this meant. I remember that as she began to explain her voice shook, and that I closed my eyes and steadied myself against the kitchen wall. He was gone. It was an accident, she said. I backed over him.

  We were twins. I could ask her anything. I took a breath, but before I could put the question, she said, “Eight times.”

  Did we laugh then, in perfect unison? Barking like harpies? I don’t remember. Yes, I do.

  On her final page Hilda manages to drag Shakespeare into it, and she ends with my sister as Mistress Quickly, and so Conrad Lowe is not in hell, but “in Arthur’s bosom; if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom.” Which, if no man ever went to Arthur’s bosom, is certainly true; though it’s pushing it to imagine that he spent his final moments babbling of green fields. Yet, I am moved, despite Hilda’s foolishness, or perhaps on account of it. She is true to her silly self. In the end, who deserves mercy? Everyone or no one.

  My sister, who is much smarter than Mistress Quickly and measurably less soft of heart, never talks directly about Conrad Lowe. As far as I have been able to tell, she misses only her old life, which she plans to resume as soon as she’s acquitted—or, more likely, freed without trial, charges dropped: lately Miles has hinted that the D.A. seems ready to throw in the towel. She has wallowed in all the attention, to a degree that has threatened to drive me mad, but in the end I think she will quit the national stage, and content herself with local notoriety. Rhode Islanders tend to stay put. Everything we know is here.

  Hilda mourns him; Abigail does not. I wonder if she misses her love for him, if indeed that was what it was. She surprised me once, in the early days of her strategic sojourn at the ACI, when I offered to argue Miles out of keeping her there. She had just spent fifteen minutes railing against the narrow lumpy mattress and the goddamn chicken à la king and the nerve of her lawyers warning to keep her hands off the prison guards, “As if,” she huffed, rolling her eyes toward the especially unappetizing specimen stationed in the visiting room. Say the word, I told her, and I’ll figure out a way to take you home. For a while she was silent, her face impassive, and then she said, “Let it go. I’ll be home soon enough.” But you hate it here, I said. “Well,” she said, meeting my eyes. “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

  The lights have come back on. I’ve finished Hilda’s book, and catalogued it, and after some internal debate placed it on the New Non-Fiction shelf, in True Crime, under D for DeVilbiss. Really it belongs with the other Bios, under M or L. When you read a biography you know you’re getting a more or less inspired guess; less, in this case. True Crime should be, well, true. But there it is, eye-level, between a cheap compendium of serial killer lore and yet another unnecessary look at Lizzie Borden, the dusty old sphinx of Fall River. I can’t wait for Moriarty’s review.

  Outside, the late afternoon sky is an optimistic, ladylike shade of gray. The low clouds have blown away, as have half the branches on my cherry trees. It’s a mess out there, but a manageable one. Apparently, Pandora has, just as I feared, taken one good look around and flounced off with her nose in the air. More fool she.

  When I was seventeen years old I set out to write an answer to Molly Bloom. Molly Bloom had not, in fact, asked me anything; Molly Bloom was a fictional character, and one not famous for asking questions. But fictional women are real, and this one was famous for saying yes, and that bothered the hell out of earnest me. I began an epic monologue, for my eyes only, and my speaker was, so help me God, Mary Budd, and my idea was to make no every bit as beautiful as yes. I failed. I put down my pen and every year or so I’d pick it up again and fail again, and for a long time I thought I was just too young, that the failure was all mine, that some day it could be done, and that I would do it. No is not a plump round word, it doesn’t sing like a serpent, there’s nothing cheap and alluring about no. Therein, I believed, lay its promise. No is slender, steely, unadorned. No is an arrow, bright and shining. I was Mary Budd, and I would say No. And I did, off and on for ten years, and each attempt was lamer than the one before. In the end I threw it all away, but I can still remember bits of it, I left him under the Moorish wall and, of course, I will not put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls,…but no matter how hard you try, his heart was going like mad and no I said no I won’t NO I said forget it Charlie absolutely NOT no way José N-O Means NO—well, it just isn’t art. It isn’t even true. No is a necessary word; but not, I think, sufficient. You need them both: yes and no.

  I miss my sister.

  I’m going to lock up and go home now. If we have electricity, Anna and I are going to bake her a cake, as we do every Saturday, for our Sunday visitation. This time maybe devil’s food with butter frosting. Or maybe—who knows?—on my journey home I’ll see, on every side, way out behind the rooftops of my town, a white cloud wall a mile high, a great revolving cylinder of white. Well, probably not, of course not; the storm has left us far behind. But even so, it’s there, all right, whether we see it or not. The Eye. Always. And my sister is in it. And I am in it too.

  Also by Jincy Willett

  Jenny and the Jaws of Life (stories)

  Just in case the reader may feel that the title of this book means it actually has been nominated for the National Book Award, let us be clear: This book has not been nominated for or won the National Book Award. It has not been prepared, authorized, or endorsed by the National Book Foundation or anyone else associated with the National Book Awards. Which is not to say it may not one day be nominated for said award, or the National Book Critics Circle award or the Pulitzer. Time will tell.

  —The Publisher

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD. Copyright © 2003 by Jincy Willett. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Willett, Jincy.

  Winner of the National Book Award: a novel of fame, honor, and really bad weather / Jincy Willett.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-312-31181-0

  1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 2. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. 3. Women—New England—Fiction. 4. New England—Fiction. 5. Sisters—Fiction. 6. Murder—Fiction. 7. Poets—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.I4455W56 2003

  813'.54—dc21

  2003054966