Goldengrove

by Francine Prose

  We sold our house to a retired couple, who bought the bookstore along with it. We moved to Boston. Somewhere along the way, Margaret’s possessions were absorbed or disappeared or went into storage.

  Things turned out all right for us. As well as could be expected.

  My father’s book was published. It was called The End of Days and had the Fra Angelico cover. People bought it and liked it. My mother got a job giving piano lessons in an after-school program for kids. Her arthritis, or whatever it was, went into remission. Every so often my father wondered aloud if her illness had come from the dampness at the lake, and we would all fall silent and wait for the breathlessness to pass.

  I finished high school, I went away to college. I looked more like Margaret, and then less like her as I passed the age at which anyone could have said what she would have looked like. There were terrible days, even weeks, when I felt her spirit haunting me, and not in a friendly way. I came to understand that Margaret’s death was an entity, separate from Margaret. My sister would always love me. But her death was a monster that would rip me apart, if it could. Time passed; the monster aged and lost some, but not all, of its power to ambush and wound me.

  Occasionally, a stranger would ask if I had siblings. For years, I felt compelled to say I’d had a sister. I used to explain that she had drowned when I was a teenager. I hated the responses. Discomfort and pity, mainly. I started simply answering no, which was, strictly speaking, true. The question was in the present tense: Did I have any siblings?

  I moved, changed cities, moved again. Until, after a while, people had no idea I’d ever had a sister.

  Of course, my husband knows, as do my close friends. I told my children when they asked about that photo my father took of their grandmother, their mom, and that other girl doing yoga by the lake. My children never asked again, and we don’t discuss it.

  I dream about Margaret from time to time, dreams in which she and I are the age we were when she died. Sometimes I wake up in tears. More often than I would expect, I catch sight of her on the street of a city where she never was. There ought to be a word for that: seeing the dead in a stranger. Some special phrase, like déjà vu, or the spirit of the staircase.

  When I was pregnant, and everyone in the supermarket felt free to predict the baby’s sex or offer child-raising advice, I’d think of the bookstore customers who told me not to make any decisions for a year. It makes sense that birth and death are what people have in common. They want to think it can teach them something they can pass on to someone else.

  The memory of my romance with Aaron faded into a detail of that summer. I never saw him after the day I ran away from his cabin. For a brief period, while my parents were selling the house, I hoped and worried that I might run into him, in town. I have no idea where he went or how his life turned out. I’ve searched for him on the Internet. Maybe he left the country.

  MY HUSBAND AND I ARE GEOLOGISTS. It’s crossed our minds that, after all the trouble I had early on with water, my attraction to earth and stones might not be accidental. But I think it has more to do with my lifelong worry about the planet and my lifelong desire to help stave off the end of the world.

  Our work takes us to foreign countries. For years, we brought our children along. And so it happened that, one afternoon, my husband and I, our daughter and son, found ourselves in a small museum in a provincial French city.

  It was one of those sleepy museums in which the smell of dusty velvet, old varnish, and floor polish induces a swampy exhaustion that makes walking from room to room feel like trudging through water. The paintings were grouped, as they often are, by subject matter, so that the many slight variations keep you from focusing on any one floral explosion in a roomful of bouquets, any one windmill or velvety cow grazing by a stream.

  Most of the galleries were dim, as if to mimic gaslight. But finally we entered a room in which a flat sheet of sun raked through a skylight at such an aggressive angle that, as we stood in the doorway, each frame took turns flashing back a rectangle of glare. Then a cloud must have crossed the sun, and, as the dazzle faded, the paintings revealed themselves, one by one, as ordinary landscapes.

  Perhaps it was a trick of the light. My husband suffers from optical migraines, spiky hallucinations brought on by the strobe of driving past a forest. Maybe I experienced some stationary version of that, a neurological phenomenon that sent me into free fall. Or a verbal association, some complex chemical brain pun. At any rate, the glass over the paintings seemed like a series of mirrors.

  One of them drew me over. A painting of a lake.

  I no longer knew where my husband and children were. I lost track of my surroundings. I approached the canvas with that long-forgotten childhood desire to separate into molecules and reassemble inside it. From across the room, I knew that it was somewhere I had been. It was Mirror Lake. The view I’d seen from my window until the day I’d stopped looking.

  For the first time in decades, I thought of Aaron’s paintings, the ones he’d destroyed. The closer I got, the more the parquet floor seemed to pitch and slosh beneath me.

  A lake. It could have been any lake. Behind it was a mountain, bare red rock stubbled with whiskery pines. On the shore of the lake were four figures, four shadowy brushstroke columns.

  It wasn’t our lake. It was nowhere I’d been. The brass plaque read, “Un Lac en Provence. Ca. 1890.” A nameless lake that a nameless artist had painted a century before I was born.

  Yet something—the image of the lake, or the four figures beside it—had awoken in me that old longing to be inside the painting. I told myself, Children think like that. Adults know you are stuck in your body. Any attempt to leave would mean knocking on a door that opens only once, only one way. Even so, even knowing that, I kept staring at the landscape.

  It was nowhere I’d lived as a child. It was only a painting.

  That was what I told myself, and how I let down my reserve, and then how I forgot myself, and let the painting take over. How could it have done that, such a modest little landscape? How could it have so overcome me that I was unaware of anything but the painted lake and the four figures and the mountains behind them and then my own shockingly grown-up face, reflected in the glass?

  I felt myself slip out of my skin and become that girl watching her sister dive into the water. I lost myself in the time before, and in that innocent landscape, until the spell was broken by a museum guard, shouting.

  He was speaking a foreign language, but I understood. He was saying I’d gotten too close. I’d let the current pull me. I’d allowed myself to drift into that hushed and watery border zone where we live alongside the dead. I was grateful to him for calling me back and reminding me where I belonged, in the clamorous, radiant, painfully beautiful kingdom of the living.

  About the Author

  FRANCINE PROSE is the author of fifteen books of fiction, including A Changed Man and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, as well as the nonfiction New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. She is the president of PEN American Center. She lives in New York City.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  PRAISE FOR

  Goldengrove

  “A captivating novel. . . . Prose’s consistently complex and incisive narratives exhibit uncommon grace and authority, making each new publication an occasion for welcome. Goldengrove is no exception, offering readers the privilege of witnessing one girl’s journey to womanhood through the prism of profound loss, a young soul on its way to becoming older, and wise.”

  —Boston Globe

  “With perfect pitch and no trace of sentimentality, Prose . . . lands on the precise emotional key for this novel. She navigates a fine line, allowing humor and compassion to seep through the cracks of an otherwise dark tale.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Prose . . . examines lovingly the steps by which life reasserts itself in a s
low dance of grief, loneliness, despair, and, finally, a willingness to try again. Arguably, Goldengrove is her best book yet.”

  —Seattle Times

  “Prose locates the life force that gives her narrator the quirky, irreverent, but undeniable sound of a survivor. . . . Prose is tremendously skilled.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Insightful, lyrical. . . . Goldengrove is beautifully and simply written, notable for a clear and emotionally compelling rendering of the heat, confusion, and sometimes panic of young adolescent sexuality. It is a moving portrait of the search for identity through a landscape of pain and loss.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Francine Prose’s new novel is a quiet, clear-eyed, sun-dappled eulogy to lost youth, and a youth lost. . . . [Prose is] a keen chronicler of human emotion.”

  —Elle

  “At a time when too many writers, readers, and publishers seem afraid of lyricism—as if people who read don’t crave lovely writing—Prose forges the other way. Time and again in Goldengrove, a poetic image . . . illuminates a moment. . . . It’s a rare thing: a book to read for its metaphors and similes. Read it, too, for its turn from danger to light, from despair to a hard-won contentment.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A touching and poetic vision of love and loss . . . deeply moving. . . . Prose’s skillful rendering of the human ability to accept hard truths and move on is a poignant lesson for us all.”

  —Miami Herald

  “A powerful novel. . . . Ms. Prose raises her work above . . . bringing so much psychological acuity to her treatment of the novel’s characters. She also laces her writing with powerful imagery and with vivid cultural references, deftly weaving in discussions that range from the end-of-times depictions in medieval and Renaissance paintings to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “Prose holds up a mirror to grief and family life we can’t look away from, revealing their truths on page after page, in beautifully crafted writing.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “This nuanced novel captures the feeling of being unmoored without veering into bathos. . . . Prose paints a remarkably accurate picture of grief. . . . Goldengrove is a subtle work, and one that captures the heart. . . . Prose has done a writer’s job here, and done it well.”

  —Denver Post

  “A lyrical study. . . . Prose gets at the small, precise details of grief. . . . [Goldengrove] holds in balance grief and a love for this world, and lets those two forces fight it out in the lives of the characters.”

  —Columbus Dispatch

  “Beautifully crafted . . . perhaps her most emotionally satisfying novel.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  “A page-turner, thanks to its wholly identifiable, and perfectly flawed, young heroine.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  ALSO BY FRANCINE PROSE

  FICTION

  A Changed Man

  Blue Angel

  Guided Tours of Hell

  Hunters and Gatherers

  The Peaceable Kingdom

  Primitive People

  Women and Children First

  Bigfoot Dreams

  Hungry Hearts

  Household Saints

  Animal Magnetism

  Marie Laveau

  The Glorious Ones

  Judah the Pious

  NONFICTION

  Reading Like a Writer

  Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles

  Gluttony

  Sicilian Odyssey

  The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired

  FOR YOUNG ADULTS

  Bullyville

  After

  FOR CHILDREN

  Leopold, the Liar of Leipzig

  The Demon’s Mistake: A Story from Chelm

  You Never Know: A Legend of the Lamed-vavniks

  The Angel’s Mistake: Stories of Chelm

  Dybbuk: A Story Made in Heaven

  Back Ads

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  “My Funny Valentine” (from Babes in Arms), music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart. Copyright © 1937 (Renewed) Chappell & Co., Inc. Copyright assigned to Williamson Music and WB Music Corp. for the extended renewal period of copyright in the USA. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc. and Williamson Music.

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2008 by HarperCollins Publishers.

  GOLDENGROVE. Copyright © 2008 by Francine Prose. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2009.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

  Prose, Francine

  Goldengrove : a novel / Francine Prose. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-06-621411-5

  EPUB Edition SEPTEMBER 2013 ISBN 9780062329035

  1. Teenage-girls–Fiction. 2. Sisters–Fiction. 3. Adolescence–Fiction 4. Triangles (interpersonal relations) –Fiction. 5. Middle class families–Fiction. 6. New England–Fiction. 7. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.R68G66 2008

  813'.54–dc22 2008002112

  ISBN 978-0-06-056002-7 (pbk.)

  09 10 11 12 13 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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