He knew that attachments were for the living, and so he did the honorable thing. He let her go. He leaned close so she would hear him say it was all right for her to leave him. They knew it was now; they could feel something shift the way it always did. Even Argus, who’d been whimpering, grew quiet. It was not a dream, but something more. She breathed out, and inside that one breath was every word that had been spoken, every step she had taken, everyone she had ever loved.
Above the stone wall, there stood one of the wild peach trees, possibly descended from one that had been set adrift long ago in the shipwreck, so close to shore. Or perhaps this tree had grown from a love token, tossed aside when it was no longer needed. The air itself smelled of peaches, here and all over Unity; when the breeze came up, petals fell like snow. If a person didn’t move, if she was completely still, the petals streamed over her, catching in the hem of her clothes, in the strands of her hair, white as snow, quiet as snow, silent and fleeting and drifting down from above to cover her and carry her home.
III.
THE SERVICE FOR ELINOR SPARROW took place at the old meetinghouse on Chestnut Street in the last week of May, the season when gardeners are told to plant their tomatoes and corn, when children beg to stay up late now that the evening was bright, when the lion appeared on the western horizon in the nighttime sky and the lamb was nowhere to be seen. The family meant to leave Argus home when they went to the service, but he followed as far as Lockhart Avenue, at a surprisingly rapid pace for a dog as old as he. There was little choice but to stop the Jeep at the corner; Matt and Will got out and hoisted the wolfhound inside. The faithful deserve something, on this everyone agreed: kindness, at least, consideration, naturally; most of all, the right to their grief.
It was a large crowd who awaited them at the meetinghouse, nearly two hundred people, many of whom came back to Cake House for lunch afterward, traversing the rutted driveway for the first time in their lives. Many of the folks who had always been spooked by the notion of snapping turtles and drownings came to hang their jackets into the hall closet and meander around the parlor where Liza Hull had set the long trestle table with the good silver and several huge platters of sandwiches and cakes.
People spoke in whispers at first, then grew braver. Sissy Elliot, helped in by her daughters, roosted on one of the couches in the parlor, calling for fruit salad and tea. A few local children balanced their glasses of punch on the arrowhead case, then chased each other around the occasional table until their mothers told them to mind their manners. Hap Elliot, who was progressing nicely with his physical therapy, still used a wheelchair when he was in a crowd; today, he was nearly overwhelmed by good wishes. Juliet Aronson had taken the train in and was staying with Liza; at the luncheon she barely left Hap’s side. She’d been right about his best feature, after all. Hap told her that he wouldn’t blame her if she’d rather be with someone else, someone taller, for instance, someone who walked without a limp. Integrity, exactly as Juliet had foretold. As it turned out, height meant nothing. Precisely as she had suspected: everything that mattered was within.
Cynthia Elliot had volunteered to pour tea and collect stray plates, and due to the unexpected crowd, she was needed in the kitchen as well, to fix extra cucumber and salmon sandwiches. A guest book was left out on the dining room table, and signed by one and all: Eddie Baldwin, the plumber, had brought his entire family. The Fosters had come, and the Quimbys, including Marian, who looked at Will with moon eyes, just as she always had, even though she was a grown woman and a practicing attorney with three children of her own. She tried her best to flirt with him, but he just talked about Liza, endlessly, it seemed. There were so many neighbors that people who hadn’t seen each other in five or six years now sat down over tea and discussed the intricacies of their lives. When someone left, someone else took his or her place. Cynthia Elliot had the good sense to commandeer her brother, Jimmy, who’d never made a sandwich in his life, and before he could complain, she set him to work spreading cream cheese on toasted rounds of bread.
Jimmy Elliot had become a hero of sorts, heralded for ignoring his community service and failing to chop down the last branch of the oak on Lockhart Avenue. He’d been invited to come talk to the third-grade class, whose students had protested the felling of the oak, and had, for one entire afternoon, held hands and pranced around the trunk singing.
Sometimes, you’re smarter not to take orders, Jimmy told the rapt students when he visited their classroom, much to the dismay of Mrs. Cole, who’d been Jimmy’s third-grade teacher as well and remembered him climbing to the top shelf of the coat closet and refusing to come down.
Doesn’t anyone in this town see what’s right in front of them? They’re all terrible judges of character, Jimmy had said to Stella afterward. I guess they’ll figure out who I am soon enough. I might as well enjoy it while I can.
They know who you are, Stella had told him. So do I.
Will Avery had also been put to use on the afternoon of Elinor’s memorial service. He had helped Liza transport the large coffee urns, and was later sent off with a platter of tiny brioche to offer to the most elderly of the visitors, the ones who, once they were situated in a love seat or couch, only got up again for one thing: to leave. Jenny was the one who didn’t seem to know what to do with herself; she stood in the front hall, as though ready to leave. But where would she go? She couldn’t bring herself to abandon the hall closet, where Elinor’s ashes were stored in a metal canister. She tried to walk toward the kitchen to help Liza, and found she couldn’t take a single step.
“How are you holding up?” Matt Avery had brought over a strong cup of black tea.
“Absolutely fine.” But, in fact, Jenny felt as though she was glued to the floor. She, who had found it so very easy to run away, now found she couldn’t move an inch. “Terribly,” she amended.
“Him, too.”
There was the doctor, looking through one of the windows beside the front door. He could see into the garden, but it was a vision that was cloudy and green. What was he seeing? Elinor’s last breath, broken into a thousand molecules? Was that what he was breathing? Her essence, her self, the person he would miss every day, his worst patient, his nastiest neighbor, his most treasured friend.
“Stella’s out there,” he said when Jenny came to stand alongside him. When she looked, Jenny thought she saw her mother in the garden. She thought she saw Elinor crouched down, the way she’d been when she was grieving for everything she’d lost all those years ago. But it was Stella who was out there now, in the sweet, humid air. Stella who had seen snow, when instead there were only petals drifting down from the peach trees, who had seen time, when in fact there was none.
It was then Jenny found she could walk out the door. One minute she was standing there paralyzed, unable to go forward, the next she was on the porch. The wisteria was blooming, a twisted vine that scented the air. Bees droned, lazy, hypnotized by the wine-purple sugar. Argus was on the step, looking out toward the road, as though he expected his mistress to arrive any time. Jenny patted the old dog’s head, then went across the lawn. On her way, she could hear the dog padding after her. She could hear the chatter of their neighbors’ voices rising from within the house and the call of a cardinal in the woods. The bees had moved on from the wisteria to the laurel.
People used to believe that a spot of sugar placed in a baby’s mouth would bring about a sweet life, but some children couldn’t be force-fed; they had to make their own luck. These were the children who were forced to eat acorns and lily roots rather than sweets, they were fed by wild birds and had to be satisfied with liberty tea, made from loosestrife, or hyperion tea made from raspberry leaves. They had to make due with what they had.
Stella came over directly when she saw the metal canister that her mother carried. The garden gate shut behind her and she could hear the lock click shut. She had combed her hair back and a line of her natural color showed through. Star light, star bright. She had cried all
night, so much so that her eyes hurt. Jimmy Elliot had sat beside her out by the monument. This is what loving someone does, Stella had told him. Run away, she’d advised. But the milk moon was above them, the one that made everything grow, like it or not, and Jimmy Elliot had remained where he was.
Later, when he walked Stella home, she had found a peach stone, left behind by a blackbird, right there on the road. She snatched it up, and once the stone was in her pocket, she felt some comfort. It was not every day you found something worth keeping, a token that could remind a person of what she had and what she’d lost and what was yet to come. Stella slept with the peach stone under her pillow. She dreamed it had fallen from a tree that was washed ashore when the old ship the Good Duck went down in the harbor, the day when the whole town smelled of peaches. She dreamed a girl in love had thrown it on the road after all her wishes had come true and a hundred trees had grown from that single stone. She dreamed her grandmother looked up and saw falling peach snow, so quiet it was nothing like a storm, so fragrant it could make a grown man cry.
Elinor had left Stella everything she had, enough for college, and for medical school if that was her choice. But the house, she had left to her daughter. Jenny. Henry Elliot had handed Jenny the deed to Cake House on the evening of her mother’s death, made out and witnessed the year that Jenny had run away. The house had been hers all along. It was a house she didn’t want, one she despised, the model of which was now being used as a dollhouse by a little girl in Medford, Massachusetts, who thought it to be the most beautiful house she had ever seen. House of windows and of wedding cakes, of pain that was never felt and of sleepless nights, of bird’s-nest puddings, of invisible ink, of arrowheads, of laurel that was taller than any other in the Commonwealth, of bees that would never sting.
Jenny had thought they would scatter Elinor’s ashes in the rose garden, but at the last moment, that had seemed wrong. Instead, they went into the woods. Argus followed them through the hedges as they went toward the Table and Chairs, past the lilacs, past the washing shed where Rebecca’s portrait was still hidden behind the bricks. It was the time of year when the yellow warblers returned, when Baltimore orioles appeared once more, when one creature after another returned to Massachusetts, no matter how dark the woods might be. The spring azure butterflies, the dragonflies and damselflies, the wood thrush, the hummingbirds, tiny, but so territorial they would fight to the death to keep their home safe from trespass. Matt had arranged to have Rebecca’s memorial bell on the common sounded, for the first time, and on this afternoon the pealing rose above the village, the way wind rises and then fans out, over houses and steeples, farms and shopping centers. The ringing reached farther than anyone would have imagined, all the way to North Arthur and Monroe, to Essex and Peabody. There were people walking down Beacon Street in Boston who swore they heard the sound of a bell on that day. In the Public Garden, children on the swan boats reached out as if to catch fireflies, although there was nothing but an echo which flew about in the air.
Jenny and Stella stepped carefully over the lady’s slipper orchids that grew up through the pine bark and mulch. They walked past pitcher plants and trout lilies until they came to the place of the woods where it was always dark, where people in this part of the Commonwealth vowed there were wild roses, the sort that disappeared if viewed by the human eye. They followed the dog, who seemed intent on a particular path. It was not an easy route, but it wasn’t impossible. Here, where there were thorn apples and water hemlock, was the very spot where Rebecca Sparrow was said to have appeared, beyond the rock formation of the Table and Chairs. Years from now local people would tell anyone willing to listen that blue flowers bloomed in this area year-round. They would insist that bees could be heard droning even on days when there was snow and ice. Close your eyes and listen, such people advised, then walk twenty paces farther than you thought necessary. Just when you’re certain you’ve lost your way completely, you’ll be there. Open your eyes.
A CONVERSATION WITH ALICE HOFFMAN
Jennifer Morgan Gray is a writer and editor who lives in New York City.
Jennifer Morgan Gray: The title The Probable Future has many possible meanings. What did you hope to convey about the permanence—and changeability—of destiny by choosing this title? Were there any others you considered and then discarded during the writing process?
Alice Hoffman: Finding the right title is much like being given a gift. The title arrived during the writing of the novel. I realized in the process that “seeing the future” is impossible. There are thousands of possible futures all dependent on choice and circumstance.
JMG: Did you begin the novel with a particular image, situation, or idea in mind? Or was there one character in particular that sparked your imagination for this book?
AH: The novel began with the image of a young girl who awakes on her thirteenth birthday with a “gift”—the ability to see the way some people will die. The impact of such a gift interested me. I wrote the novel after a period in which I lost many people I loved, including my mother, and I was trying to make some sense out of how unpredictable life and death are.
JMG: I was struck by the significance of names in the book, including Stella, Sparrow, and Unity, to name just a few. Did you write the book with these names already in place, or did you choose them later as the story unfolded?
AH: Names most often come with the character for me. If I ever have to change a name for any reason (repetition, another character in another book with the same name) I’m completely thrown—it’s almost as if characters are “born” with their names.
JMG: The town of Unity is as vivid a character as any of the people in the story. Did you base Unity on an actual town, or was it in some ways an amalgam of what a small New England town should be? In which ways is it idyllic? What flaws does it possess?
AH: The town of Unity was named in much the same way as the characters—it arrived along with the place—and of course it is ironic, as the town is torn in two. There is an official history and an unofficial history. One excludes the contributions of women, such as the Sparrows. That’s the history I’m interested in.
JMG: Many of your novels are rooted in the tradition of magic. In writing The Probable Future, how did you manage to blur the lines between fantasy and reality but still make the plot events seem plausible? How do you trust your readers to make that leap and still identify with—and relate to—your characters?
AH: I feel that the tradition of literature, of storytelling, is rooted in magic. Realism seems to me a newer, less interesting tradition. I grew up reading fairy tales, science fiction, fantasy. As far as making the leap to belief, as soon as a reader opens a book he or she must suspend belief—marks on paper become a real world. The next leap, to identify and relate with fantastical occurrences, seems easy to me. The sort of magic I write about is that which is rooted in the real world—the probable and the possible.
JMG: Stella veers from being a recalcitrant thirteen-year-old to a young woman who is wise far beyond her years. How did you strike that balance in evoking her personality, and how did writing her character pose a challenge? Why do you think that many people in Unity are drawn to her, despite her troubled past and notorious family history?
AH: I’ve always felt that adolescence is what makes the person. That time is the most intense, the most difficult, the most amazing time in a person’s life. In the beginning of the novel Stella is a child; by the end we can see the woman she will become. I think we are drawn to her because she’s true to herself, she’s fearless in an emotional sense.
JMG: This story is told from many points of view. What made you decide to employ this method? Who do you feel is the most reliable narrator of the story? Is there one person who you feel forms the “heart” of The Probable Future?
AH: I’m not sure the writer chooses the story. I think it’s more that the story chooses the writer. I think the heart of The Probable Future comes in thirteen parts—all of the Sparrow wom
en. Because the novel is the story of a town, there are many points of view, all of which flow together into one history.
JMG: It has “additions added on like frosting,” you write of Cake House. This statement also could be a description of the multilayered aspects of the novel. Did you envision Cake House as a physical embodiment of the novel’s shape while you were writing? How does the house function as a symbol— both good and bad—to the Sparrow women and to the inhabitants of Unity?
AH: I think Cake House is symbolic of history and the way history is told. Story upon story, fact upon fact. The novel is an “anti-history,” if you will, taking history apart and examining the pieces that make up the town of Unity’s past.
JMG: A theme that threads through the book is the strong links of family—and how those bonds can be created by more than blood ties alone. Was there one relationship that you found the most compelling to create? Which was the most frustrating to write?
AH: Because I began the book soon after my mother died, I was thinking about the complicated and amazing relationship between mother and daughter. It seemed to me that mother-daughter relationships are in constant motion—the way you feel about your mother at sixteen can be radically different from the way you feel about her at sixty.
I was always interested in the importance of grandmothers and how they enrich one’s life.
I was extremely close with my grandmother Lillie. She was the intermediary between me and my mother for many years, and I think girls often feel close to their grandmothers in a way they can’t in a mother-daughter relationship. There’s a freedom, an easing up, a friendship. Those of us who have or had such relationships with a grandmother know how lucky we are.
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