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My late mother had been in her way a less star-crossed version of Mrs. Carter. It was not so much due to her, though, but because of Sarah, who was so courageous in her choices, and who now survived on small payments from the films she had made in her late adolescence rather than act to the tyrant's script, that I had a taste for heroic women. I had spent a lot of time researching the families who lived on the far slope of Beaumont, above the oil pipes running down to the great crude oil terminal of Ibis Bay, a sentimentally named but utterly dingy and polluted stretch where no birds flew or dared land, ibis or otherwise.
My novel began with a Mother Courage figure, Rose Clancy, wife of a former naval officer and activist.
Carrying her pitcher, Rose advanced in sandaled feet to the pump at the end of the street. She stepped across the clods of rubble which proved that the adobe houses were falling inwards upon themselves, and met Mrs. McPherson, a young mother of two, already standing by the pump with an empty pitcher. No water, said Mrs. McPherson.
No water, really? asked Rose.
Mrs. McPherson, who was of strong Intercessionist stock from the southern farmlands, grasped the handle of the pump in a no-nonsense way and began to work it. Again, from the pipe's mouth, nothing emerged.
In the meantime, her husband, now on a pension and the head of his street committee, is reduced to selling black-market cigarettes in the Eastside markets to raise money for pharmaceuticals, a gesture against the grotesque sanctions which the West somehow thought would make the people aggrieved enough to overthrow Great Uncle. The truth being, of course, that they cemented Great Uncle in place, gave him an outside force to blame for the country's condition, and compelled the brave endeavors of Mr. Clancy.
I knew my manuscript was not
Ulysses,
that it belonged to the school of social realism which would be more tolerated in me than in a Western writer. But when I daydreamed, I daydreamed that my book would remind the
New York Times
of Hemingway's
To Have and Have Not,
or of Steinbeck.
Sarah and I had our meal at the fish restaurant. She seemed to eat better than normally, and to be free of discomfort. The CT scan, she said, would probably prove unnecessary. We left the restaurant by eight-thirty, since at nine our friend Andrew Kennedy was programming on national television the final of the European Cup between Italy and France, which meant too that he would have an indulgence from Great Uncle for cutting the
Hour of Devotion,
the reading of tributes to Great Uncle, to half an hour.
As we ascended the stairs to our apartment, we heard howling from within Mrs. Douglas's place, and knew that our neighbor was nursing her demented sister. In that wail, Great Uncle's potency was recalled to our memory. Surely the remains had been removed by now from the stone walls of Wolfmount. Surely the birds had taken the nephew's eyes, and he had gone blinded into the netherworld.
Come on, I told Sarah, taking her by the arm.
Home, she was in the kitchen making tea as I tuned the set to the football match. I heard a cup fall, and a squeal from her, as if she had been cut.
Thus began the worst enduring moment of my life. I found Sarah on the kitchen floor in a swoon, and carried her in to the bed, believing absolutely in her surviving this faint. Even Mrs. Douglas, who was fast becoming a professional comforter, came upstairs, leaving her demented sister, and made me tea, stoking it with sugar for what she already knew to be my loss. Our general practitioner, Dr. Colless, turned up with the police medical examiner. They asked would I leave the room a moment. I stood up as they emerged from visiting her. What is it? I asked them. Did she have access to any poison? asked the medical examiner. Are there any pills in the house? Could I please see the bathroom?
I denied poisons, and any particular pills except her painkillers.
My late mother had been in her way a less star-crossed version of Mrs. Carter. It was not so much due to her, though, but because of Sarah, who was so courageous in her choices, and who now survived on small payments from the films she had made in her late adolescence rather than act to the tyrant's script, that I had a taste for heroic women. I had spent a lot of time researching the families who lived on the far slope of Beaumont, above the oil pipes running down to the great crude oil terminal of Ibis Bay, a sentimentally named but utterly dingy and polluted stretch where no birds flew or dared land, ibis or otherwise.
My novel began with a Mother Courage figure, Rose Clancy, wife of a former naval officer and activist.
Carrying her pitcher, Rose advanced in sandaled feet to the pump at the end of the street. She stepped across the clods of rubble which proved that the adobe houses were falling inwards upon themselves, and met Mrs. McPherson, a young mother of two, already standing by the pump with an empty pitcher. No water, said Mrs. McPherson.
No water, really? asked Rose.
Mrs. McPherson, who was of strong Intercessionist stock from the southern farmlands, grasped the handle of the pump in a no-nonsense way and began to work it. Again, from the pipe's mouth, nothing emerged.
In the meantime, her husband, now on a pension and the head of his street committee, is reduced to selling black-market cigarettes in the Eastside markets to raise money for pharmaceuticals, a gesture against the grotesque sanctions which the West somehow thought would make the people aggrieved enough to overthrow Great Uncle. The truth being, of course, that they cemented Great Uncle in place, gave him an outside force to blame for the country's condition, and compelled the brave endeavors of Mr. Clancy.
I knew my manuscript was not
Ulysses,
that it belonged to the school of social realism which would be more tolerated in me than in a Western writer. But when I daydreamed, I daydreamed that my book would remind the
New York Times
of Hemingway's
To Have and Have Not,
or of Steinbeck.
Sarah and I had our meal at the fish restaurant. She seemed to eat better than normally, and to be free of discomfort. The CT scan, she said, would probably prove unnecessary. We left the restaurant by eight-thirty, since at nine our friend Andrew Kennedy was programming on national television the final of the European Cup between Italy and France, which meant too that he would have an indulgence from Great Uncle for cutting the
Hour of Devotion,
the reading of tributes to Great Uncle, to half an hour.
As we ascended the stairs to our apartment, we heard howling from within Mrs. Douglas's place, and knew that our neighbor was nursing her demented sister. In that wail, Great Uncle's potency was recalled to our memory. Surely the remains had been removed by now from the stone walls of Wolfmount. Surely the birds had taken the nephew's eyes, and he had gone blinded into the netherworld.
Come on, I told Sarah, taking her by the arm.
Home, she was in the kitchen making tea as I tuned the set to the football match. I heard a cup fall, and a squeal from her, as if she had been cut.
Thus began the worst enduring moment of my life. I found Sarah on the kitchen floor in a swoon, and carried her in to the bed, believing absolutely in her surviving this faint. Even Mrs. Douglas, who was fast becoming a professional comforter, came upstairs, leaving her demented sister, and made me tea, stoking it with sugar for what she already knew to be my loss. Our general practitioner, Dr. Colless, turned up with the police medical examiner. They asked would I leave the room a moment. I stood up as they emerged from visiting her. What is it? I asked them. Did she have access to any poison? asked the medical examiner. Are there any pills in the house? Could I please see the bathroom?
I denied poisons, and any particular pills except her painkillers.
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