eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Award-winning novelist Katherine Mosby examines the complex landscape of adultery while depicting a woman's unlikely blossoming in the face of war. Lavinia Gibbs defies social convention and family expectations in New York in the 1930s when she breaks off a passionless engagement to a prominent banker. Instead of surrendering to an invisible spinsterhood, Lavinia moves to Paris, where, on the verge of World War II, her sexual and political awakening collide in an unforgettable tale.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061856877 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 01/17/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 497 KB |
About the Author
Katherine Mosby's previous works include a collection of poetry, The Book of Uncommon Prayer, and two novels, Private Altars and The Season of Lillian Dawes, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She lives in New York City and teaches at New York University's Stern Business School.
Read an Excerpt
Twilight
A NovelBy Katherine Mosby
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2006 Katherine MosbyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0060936967
Chapter One
It would be misleading to say that the course of Lavinia's life was diverted by a kiss, or that a chance remark would change the continent on which she lived, although both things were true. Lavinia Gibbs was not known for being either sentimental or a helpless romantic. There was nothing helpless about Lavinia at all. She was, in fact, among the most practical members of her graduating class at Miss Dillwater's Academy, a trait much commented upon in her 1917 yearbook. Born at the turn of the century, Lavinia seemed always older than her years, but this was due to her reserve rather than her wisdom.
At boarding school, she had been told about a kiss the janitor's son had stolen from Maybel Skeffler, a senior who had excelled at archery until her feminine charms became so ample they impaired her ability to pull back a clean shot with the bow. All the girls had talked about the kiss in hushed tones, in the safety of the darkness, from their narrow cots, recounting Maybel's description long after she had been taken home. It had been a revelation that was disturbing and delightful in equal measure: the heat of his lips had made her swoon "down there." Afterward, even though the janitor's son was forbidden to set foot onthe school grounds, just the sight of his father pushing a rake against a gravel path was enough to make Maybel Skeffler dizzy and liable to cry for no reason she could explain to her teachers.
Once, on a trip to Europe the summer Lavinia was thirteen, she had watched a couple embracing in a damp alleyway below the window of her hotel bathroom. It was the woman's moan that had caused Lavinia to hoist herself out of her bath and stand, dripping and soapy, on the closed lid of the toilet from which she could see, when she stood on her toes, the figures blending their bodies in the dank shadows that seemed to lick at them, swallowing now a chin or brow or shoulder.
By the time Miss Kaye, Lavinia's governess, knocked on the bathroom door, issuing directives about the attire Lavinia was expected to wear to dinner that evening, Lavinia had already been marked by the moment as surely as if she had been branded. Remembering the way the woman's voice had fluttered upward in the night, carrying a breathless urgency, Lavinia was flooded with enough jealousy and shame to make her ears burn.
That evening, before she joined her family in the hotel's rococo dining room, Lavinia spent an unusually long time examining herself in the standing mirror that filled a corner of the suite she was sharing with Miss Kaye. Lavinia had been told from time to time that she had beautiful eyes and lustrous hair, but the very fact that those two features had been singled out for comment signified to her that nothing else was worthy of praise.
Her mother had been a great beauty in her youth and even now, aged by unspecified "female" illnesses having to do with the birthing of her four children, Eliza Gibbs possessed an austere eminence that could still cause an appreciative murmur to sweep through a room when she entered, usually a little late and always impeccably attired.
Lavinia recognized in her own face the sharp, almost fierce, features of her father, a man whose distinguished career on Wall Street was only furthered by his passing resemblance to a peregrine falcon. It had given him an air of confidence that men respected and women found attractive in a vaguely primitive way; his was the face of a warrior and suggested a vitality and intelligence that were rarely questioned.
"Of my two girls," her mother was fond of saying, "you were given brains and Grace was given beauty and you should both be grateful for having been given any gifts at all, as there are plenty of girls who have neither. Besides, you are a Gibbs. Your name alone guarantees you a standing in society that most will never attain."
While those words were not comforting, Lavinia had enough horse sense to accept the truth they contained, even if it was bitter. Miss Kaye was more diplomatic: "A woman can do a great deal to commend herself to the opposite sex." Unfortunately, most of the young men Lavinia encountered at cotillions and debutante balls were less moved by the virtues of good posture, good manners, and good breeding than Miss Kaye supposed.
It was true that Lavinia was never a wallflower, the way Juliette Langhorn was, or Ruth Marshall, girls about whom unkind jokes were made by boys and girls alike, but if Lavinia was not at a loss for dance partners, it had as much to do with her sense of humor and her capacity to follow even the weakest lead as with her ability to be "alluring." Occasionally Miss Kaye allowed Lavinia to wear scent on her neck and would coil Lavinia's black hair in elaborate coiffures that showed it to advantage. Miss Kaye also had eyedrops from Germany that dilated the pupils, thereby highlighting Lavinia's best feature.
But the fellows who flirted with Lavinia never steered her across the dance floor to the balcony where, unchaperoned, they could importune her for a kiss. Her sister, Grace, older by two years, complained incessantly about forward boys and how she'd had to slap two different suitors. By Grace's eighteenth birthday she had rejected one proposal of marriage and was on the verge of accepting another.
Grace, moreover, was petite in stature, and before Lavinia had begun to menstruate she was already taller and more broad-shouldered than her older sister, a fact both her brothers teased her about with cruel delight ...
Continues...
Excerpted from Twilight by Katherine Mosby Copyright © 2006 by Katherine Mosby. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.