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Overview
In her rambling Victorian house, surrounded by heirloom gardens and the gentle sounds of a river, fifty-two-year-old Kate Harding faces her second winter since the untimely death of her husband. In her living room are several hatboxes filled with letters recently brought by her sister from the attic of their grandparents' eighteenth-century Connecticut house. Kate remembers the sense of permanence and refuge that she felt in her grandparents' apple-scented world, as well as, more recently, with her husband. As she begins to read the hatbox letters, she discovers that what to a child seemed a serene and blissful marriage was in fact founded on a tragic event. As Kate's eyes clear to the truth of the past, a new tragedy unfolds, and her own house, filled with the shared detritus of marriage and motherhood, becomes the refuge where Kate can connect the strands of her unraveled life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312352004 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/21/2006 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.83(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1. Kate
Kate leans in the doorway of the living room, arms crossed, the sleeves of a cotton sweater shoved to her elbows. Her forearms are sinewy–brown, dry-skinned, thorn-scratched. She wears two silver bracelets and a thick gold wedding band. Some women, she realizes, remove their rings.
In the corner is a stack of nine antique hatboxes. She has not touched them since they were set down a week ago, delivered by her sister, who drove them up from Hartford. They are oval or round, some tied with string, some decorated with maroon-and-silver stripes, others printed with gothic landscapes – willows, mountains, ruined castles. Their smell has begun to permeate the room even though the windows are open. It is the smell of her grandparents' attic, a smell she has not forgotten but thought had vanished, like the past itself. That it has not and is still here, this aroma of horsehair and leather, of apples and musty quilts, of old dresses and satin ribbons – that this smell still exists here in this Canadian river valley, six hundred miles north of her grandparents' house, is disquieting. It awakens a feeling in Kate that she remembers from childhood, composed of odd emotional strands: love, sorrow, pain, contentment.
The arrival of the hatboxes is untimely, since dispossession, like grief, is an act of which Kate has had her fill since Tom's death a year and three months ago, from a heart attack at age fifty-two. She's hauled garbage bags of clothes, like lumpy corpses, down to the washing machine, unable to give away anything that might bear his painty, sawdusty smell. Sorting through the clothes, she was relieved whenever she came across T-shirtslike Swiss cheese or underpants held by threads to waistbands no longer elastic. Choices made easy: Okay, throw this away. No one in her family has wanted to face making such decisions about the papers in these hatboxes. They have been lugged from place to place, from barn to basement to closet, ever since the big house in whose attic they'd accumulated for five generations was sold.
She goes into the living room and squats by the boxes. Their papered cardboard is dry as old plaster. How strange, she thinks, that they are here, now. And she finds herself wishing they could have remained forever under the attic's cobwebbed window, their contents spilled, letters stuffed by children's hands back into envelopes embroidered by the teeth of mice. Like leaves in a mulch pile. Forgotten, skeletal, slowly reverting to dirt. So it might have been if the house had not been sold, if time had not stalked on relentless legs, like a heron, and bent its long neck.
She slides her fingers over a lid, remembering the excitement she and her cousins had felt about these boxes and the disappointment of finding only papers whose half-read sentences were like windborne music or distant surf, faint hints of a larger sound. The box is so desiccated that its lid is loose and lifts easily, releasing the concentrated mustiness within, so familiar that tears spring to Kate's eyes. It takes her to the closets, bedrooms, pantries and cupboards of her grandparents' enormous, white-clapboarded house on the tree-lined street of the village where Kate grew up. She and her sister could leave their own home, walk past the tiny general store, with its wooden porch and post office, past the library and the church, and be on Shepton's lawn in ten minutes. Shepton House had been named by her great-grandmother for the English town where some branch of the family originated. Shepton, they called the place after awhile, dropping the pretentious "House." The word, spoken and accompanied by memory, is what a spell might be to a shaman: an evocation, a tumult of associations. She stirs the papers. Like the snow-flattened leaves of early spring, they are brown and soft, overlapping, their corners fanned. Some are in bundles, tied with faded cotton string. Most lie in a dismaying confusion. Kate pauses, looks out the window. River light quivers in trees at the bottom of her lawn. She is still squatting, irresolute. Why did I agree to take on this responsibility? Now – of all times.
She slips into a sitting position, crosses her legs. The house is so quiet. No one will be coming to visit until Thanksgiving. Her daughter, Christy, is in Halifax, her son, Liam, in Ireland. She listens to the sound of an empty house, thinking, Am I still a wife? She sees her future not the way it is now but the way it was supposed to be; this, unlike the bald fact of Tom's death, is a loss she can't share, a grief she can't reveal. She is allowed to mourn the past, Tom as he was, the sound of his voice, the body that once cradled hers; but the future that was theirs – its loss has become like a new death, the death of someone no one else knows. A hidden corpse. It ebbs away, her memory of how it felt to slide her hand into the back pocket of Tom's shorts, to relate a rambling dream and not care whether he listened, to casually wipe mustard from his chin. This loss of intimacy is the hardest, for with it goes her sense of self. She cannot bear to be with long-married couples: she's watched a husband lift a strand of windblown hair from his wife's mouth, has seen a wife peel a hard-boiled egg and hand it to her husband. It is dangerous, as well, to be in places – dinner parties, picnics – where conversational lures may attract memories, or feelings. She feels stripped of some sleek texture, as if she has lost her favourite silk scarf, orange-pink and luminous as sun-filled tulips, that carried in its folds the wife she once was, the wife she would still be.
She leans forward and rummages in the hatbox, knowing that she is being hooked by its sweet smell. She tips reading glasses from her head, settles them on her nose, unfolds a paper and presses it to her face. She breathes deeply. What is it? Lately she finds herself in a peculiar state, slowed, as if floating without impulsion, in which she examines her own feelings. There's a familiar, disturbing stab in her heart that she remembers from when, as a child, she laid her head on Shepton's prickly pillows, or lifted the lids of stoneware crocks or opened the games cupboard under the stairs. It's a small ache, a presage of grief, evoked by the distilled smell of age. It's a reminder, she thinks, of joy's sorrow-edge. Of how every moment tilts on the brink of its own decline. There's something else, though. Responsibility to the past. And flight from its demands. The feelings she's come to recognize, holding in her hand, say, a small pin that Tom was once given at a ceremony in Ottawa "for service to the arts." How, she chastises herself, during her process of dispossession, could she think of parting with this piece of silver? Doesn't she have the responsibility of memorializing Tom?
Table of Contents
Part One1. Kate
2. Sandpipers
3. Rain
Part Two
4. Asters and Woodsmoke
5. Measles
6. Harvest
Part Three
7. Love Letters
8. The Blizzard
9. Muskrat Trail
10. The Isolation Ward
11. Broken Glass
12. Elizabeth Park
13. A Windfall Apple
Part Four
14. Black Ice
15. Sally's Café
16. Tulips
17. Quaco Head
18. Dovetail Joints
Part Five
19. Barberry Pie
20. Summer Wind
Reading Group Guide
1. Why does it take so long for Kate to begin reading the letters/diaries? How is reading the letters similar to the "act of dispossession" that she is going through with Tom's belongings?
2. Do you think Hetty could be considered the "hero" of the book? What does Kate learn from Hetty?
3. Analyze the use of the Isak Dinesen quote: "Here I am, where I ought to be." How does Kate feel about this at the end of the book, as opposed to the beginning?
4. Describe the way Kate reacts to acquaintances and neighbours after Gregory's death — how is it different to the way she reacted to people's concern after Tom's death? What has she learned?
5. The working title for this novel was "Vanished Lives." What were Kate's feelings, as a child, about the people who once lived in Shepton? How does reading the letters change this feeling?
6. Compare the person Kate is at the beginning of the book to the person she is at the end. How is saying "yes" similar to the way the Bakers dealt with Jonnie's death? Compare the way the Baker family and the Thomas family grieve. What does this teach Kate about healing?
7. "A layer of perfect black ice smoothes the river's corrugated surface, where winter's history lies in striations of frozen snow, rutted tire tracks, broken branches, fissures, windblown soil" (p. 256). How does the image of black ice relate to the story? In what ways does Kate seem to be a new person during the outing in the chapter "Black Ice"?
8. Compare the ways in which Hetty and Lilian made a home of Shepton. How does Kate apply this understanding to her own home on the river? How do you see Kate's future?