Until That Good Day is a stunning debut novel loosely based on the Marjorie Kemper's family history. Set in Louisiana in the 1930's, the story revolves around John Washington, a successful traveling salesman who "passes" in the white community. John's young daughter Vivien is a lulu of an unreliable narrator with charm to spare. Profoundly moving as well as comical and sweet, this is a haunting story with dynamite characters from a literary-prize-winning author.
Until That Good Day is a stunning debut novel loosely based on the Marjorie Kemper's family history. Set in Louisiana in the 1930's, the story revolves around John Washington, a successful traveling salesman who "passes" in the white community. John's young daughter Vivien is a lulu of an unreliable narrator with charm to spare. Profoundly moving as well as comical and sweet, this is a haunting story with dynamite characters from a literary-prize-winning author.
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Overview
Until That Good Day is a stunning debut novel loosely based on the Marjorie Kemper's family history. Set in Louisiana in the 1930's, the story revolves around John Washington, a successful traveling salesman who "passes" in the white community. John's young daughter Vivien is a lulu of an unreliable narrator with charm to spare. Profoundly moving as well as comical and sweet, this is a haunting story with dynamite characters from a literary-prize-winning author.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466881976 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/23/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 333 KB |
About the Author
Marjorie Kemper is the winner of the Deep South Writer's Conference Burden Award, an O. Henry Prize Stories 2003, and has been a finalist in the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Contest. Her short fiction has been published by The Atlantic Monthly and other literary magazines. She lives in Glendale, California.
Read an Excerpt
Until that Good Day
By Marjorie Kemper
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2003 Marjorie KemperAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8197-6
CHAPTER 1
December 1928
Myrtle, Louisiana
The coffin was in the living room. It rested across two sawhorses that had been draped in black velvet, and it was blanketed with narcissi and tuberoses. There were standing white wicker baskets of gladioli and carnations — red and white — at each corner.
The piano had been moved back into the bay of the front window, and the sofa and wing chairs had been removed to the attic to make room for the folding chairs for the wake.
It is our living room, Vivian thought, like always; only now it isn't. Because everything had changed, and it had done so very suddenly. Vivian knew that Mother was in the coffin. Daddy had made the man shut the lid.
"I won't have people gawking at her," John Washington had shouted in an argument with his wife's older sister while the man from Thomas Brothers & Sons stood silently by, looking at his shoes.
So the man screwed down the lid. Vivian watched him do it. Now she would never see Mother again in this world. She knew because her older sister, Clara, told her so. Daddy had been sitting in one of the straight chairs that had been brought from the funeral home, with his head on the coffin, crying for three hours straight now, sobbing out Mother's name over and over: "Della, Della, Della." It sounded to Vivian like a very sad song with only one lyric.
But, Clara had whispered to Vivian, there was no sense at all in Daddy doing this because Mother couldn't hear him. She wouldn't hear anything at all, ever again. When Clara said that, Vivian stopped whispering to Mother — as she had been doing for two days. She had been saying, "Don't worry, precious little mother; our Blessed Lord and His Blessed Mother will take very good care of you." And other such phrases meant to soothe Mother because she had had such a worried look on her dead face when Daddy held Vivian up so that she might look at her. Daddy said she must memorize Mother's face, and never, never, never forget it. Vivian had already forgotten it.
Vivian sat on one of the chairs the men had brought in and rocked it back and forth experimentally. She went on talking to Mother silently, careful now not to move her lips so Clara would not know, and she watched her father, who was finally sitting up and blowing his nose into a big white handkerchief — for the moment, even his prodigious tears were exhausted.
When Della died, John Washington had been on the road. He sold wares to the little stores up and down the lower Mississippi Valley for a wholesale grocer in New Orleans. He made his living on the road. Still, Della's sisters were angry that he hadn't been present at the exact moment their precious Della had departed the earth. Bessie wasn't speaking to him; she had Leticia relay all her remarks, including the one that Bessie and her husband, Lamar, intended to take Della's children and raise them as their own. They would fight John in court, if need be. Yes, they would! She wouldn't give away Della's precious babies to a common drunk. Why, they'd take him to the Supreme Court if necessary.
John Washington said they would do it over his dead body. Vivian had heard him use this expression many times before, but now, with Mother's dead body right there where the sofa should be, it didn't seem nice to say. Vivian did not want another dead body in the house. Where would they even put it? Dead bodies took up whole rooms to themselves. Her father continued to sit and blow his nose. Vivian got out of her chair and walked softly up to him. "Daddy?"
"What, sweetheart?"
"I'll take care of you."
Vivian was five.
"I thank you for that. But I need a lot of taking care of. I don't think a little thing like you could do it."
John Washington stared at his youngest child. He'd been on the road since she was born five years ago, and when he had been home, Della's illness (and the whiskey he drank to be able to stand it) had blocked out everything; he scarcely knew this small child. When he'd driven up to the house, when he had been summoned home, John Washington had at first taken her for a neighbor's child. She had been sitting on the front porch, twisting a strand of hair around one finger, waiting for him.
She'd had one desperate hope, and that was that when Daddy got home he could make things go back right. He would, she'd thought, never stand for Mother being dead. But though he'd cried and raged and cursed the Living God, just as Vivian had expected him to, nothing changed. Vivian understood now that nothing would.
"Oh, yes," Vivian said. "I can take care of you."
The man clutched the little girl to him, lifting her toes off the floor, so that she lost her balance, and she had to steady herself with one hand on her mother's casket.
"I'm sad, too," Vivian said urgently. But her father made no answer; his own sadness had expanded to take up all the room in the world, and there was none left in it to accommodate his children's grief. Not under the roof, not even under the low winter sky that lay over the town of Myrtle like a lid on a pot.
People began entering the room, and John Washington got up unsteadily from his chair. Vivian turned and looked at the not-living room and saw the neighbors and people from church filing in. The aroma of the tuberoses was so strong that it was visible; it was, Vivian decided, yellow. The aunts had come into the room. The silk drapes with the pink roses were drawn against the afternoon sun, but they did not quite meet, and Vivian could see little specks dancing there in the slanting light. She thought maybe the specks were fairies, like the ones hidden in the garlands that decorated each page of her Fairy Book. She hoped they were. She hoped that the fairies were coming to help them. It seemed that no one else could.
* * *
Shortly after the funeral — which neither Clara nor Vivian attended because the spots the aunts had declared to be a nervous rash turned into measles instead — the girls and their father moved across town to Grandmother's house. Grandmother was Daddy's mother, but she did not like children, and she did not come out of her bedroom except for meals, when she sat at the head of the table and watched the girls like a hawk, criticizing their dress, correcting their manners and their grammar. Sometimes when they were in their rooms napping or in bed for the night, she came downstairs to play the piano, but she always vanished back to her room before they got up. Because Vivian never saw her actually seated at the piano, she thought the piano played itself as her Aunt Leticia's did.
Grandmother's house was dark. She kept the shades down and the drapes drawn, and had ever since Grandfather's death. It always felt, even at high noon, like the middle of the night on La Salle Avenue. Grandmother's cook, Cassie, looked after the girls and made their meals, but she didn't like children any better than Grandmother did.
After the New Year, when John Washington fled back to the road and Clara went back to school, Vivian spent her days wandering the house — her father had forbidden her to play outside for fear Bessie and Lamar would make good their threat. She tried to make friends with Jupiter, Grandmother's big black cat, but he scratched her when she tried to pick him up, and thereafter hid from her. She pored over pictures in the old books that had belonged to her grandfather. She felt a strong attachment to Grandfather because he'd died the day she was born. Much had been made by adults of this coincidence. After a few weeks Vivian began cutting pictures from these priceless old leather-bound volumes, the ones containing large color plates of Indian chiefs. She worked patiently and carefully with shears she'd taken from Cassie's sewing basket to make paper dolls from the chiefs' portraits. She cut out the backgrounds, too, the forests and clearings, and the swamps and rivers that these old chiefs had ruled over. These she propped up, and she moved the dolls around in the landscapes. She'd cut out horses and dogs and canoes and long houses and wigwams and burial mounds. She disappeared into her Indian world for hours at a time. She would have been in a great deal of trouble had anyone known what she was doing.
And then Grandmother stopped coming out of her room to preside at the table or to play the piano, and the doctor came every day, as he had used to come every day at home, and he held hushed consultations with Cassie in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, and Daddy was again sent for, and then, before the year was out, there was another coffin in another living room.
And Daddy cried even more inconsolably over this coffin than he had the last. And there was yet another funeral that the girls did not attend. This time they had the chicken pox and were quarantined. The doctor nailed a yellow sign on the front door.
It seemed to Vivian as she lay in the dark bedroom, picking at the scabs on her arms and chest, that she was going to pass her entire life in the dark, in curtained houses with coffins and itchy diseases and uncelebrated Christmases.
After Grandmother died, Cassie took charge, and their father came home even more rarely than before. Grandmother's yardman, Gilbert, who formerly slept in a room over the carriage house, moved into Cassie's room. Something that Grandmother would not have allowed, Clara said, and that perhaps John Washington would not have allowed either, had he known — which he didn't. But at least Cassie and Gilbert had raised the shades and opened the drapes, and sunshine came into the house and spilled onto the floors and over Mrs. Washington's English rugs.
It pooled first thing every morning in the music room and moved next to the study. Vivian followed the sun around the house during the day as though it were a friend or a pet from which she could not bear to be parted. She stared out the tall French windows at a world that lay outside the house like a rare and beautiful painting. She longed to enter it; and she did so in her imagination: spending most of her time in the thicket of bamboo by the fishpond or climbing to the top of the oak in the side yard, from which she could see all of the town to the bayou — even their old house, where she and Clara had played outdoors every afternoon and where they'd had a sandbox and a swing set and a bull terrier named Rex. (Daddy had sent Rex to live in the country when Mother died.) Where every night they'd been brought inside and bathed and fed and were then presented to their mother in her bedroom, where she kissed them and smoothed their hair with her long thin fingers and told them what precious, precious little girls they were and how much God loved them. (He loved them better than the very stars he'd set in the sky. That's what Mother had said. Poor stars, Vivian thought now, as God's love for her continued to play itself out.) From her imaginary perch in the real tree, Vivian watched these scenes from her former life. Over and over.
Cassie found the cut-up books, but she said nothing. The children's daddy was out of his head even when he was sober, and crazy as a tick when he was drunk — which was most of the time he was home. It wasn't like he was going to sit himself down in the library and read books. Instead Cassie took logical steps; she took away the scissors and taught the girl her alphabet so she might read the books instead of cutting them up. This was all the reading lesson Cassie herself had had; and it sufficed for Vivian, as well.
Clara, being three years older, got out of the dark house to school, where Aunt Bessie haunted the grounds with gifts of fudge and divinity — which she spent frenzied nights alone in her kitchen cooking especially for her nieces, her hot tears salting the boiling candy. She of course meant these gifts for Vivian, as well, but Clara shared them with school friends and never mentioned them to her sister.
While Clara was at school, Vivian watched the sun creep across the long-board, cypress floors and the rugs, and she sat at the kitchen table and studied her letters, and later, she read. In the daytime Cassie and Gilbert stayed mostly in their room. Vivian had to be very quiet because Gilbert got mad if she made noise.
Vivian had come to regard her life as a long, pointless dream, from which she was patiently waiting to be awakened. She reassured herself from time to time that it was only a dream, and that it could not last always. But another Christmas went by before her father, finally emerging from his own bad dream, arranged for her to join Clara at Saint Clare's Academy.
At first Vivian was shy of all the strange children, but as it turned out she had learned a great deal from Grandfather's books — those she'd not cut up before she'd learned to read. She was ahead of her class in almost everything. She knew the names of the continents and the seas and how many there were of each, and all the kings and queens of England — in order. Humility visited her only once a day, during Arithmetic, this hitherto unknown world formed entirely of numbers came as such a surprise to her that she could not even begin to think about it. She was also surprised to learn how small a part the history of Indian chiefs played at Saint Clare's, but she assumed the nuns were saving this subject for later. Vivian had been afraid that the other children would think she was stupid and wouldn't like her, but instead it turned out they thought she was smart. And they didn't like her. It was being something they called a "pet" that led to Vivian's fights with her classmates that called so much attention to her, and in so doing, provoked and mortified Clara. Vivian was confused. Why, if you were supposed to know the answers to Sister's questions, and you did, and you said them aloud, was everyone mad at you? And why were people so proud of being dumb?
The principal, Sister Mary Imelda, had to take Vivian aside to tell her that nice young ladies did not fight in the school yard. In fact, Sister confided, they did not fight at all, and perhaps, she suggested, it was not altogether charitable to laugh at the wrong answers some children gave in class. Everyone had not had Vivian's advantages. That's what Sister Imelda said. Vivian was left to herself to ponder what her "advantages" had been.
That school year Daddy began spending more time at home between road trips. Cassie had to make real meals, had real laundry to do; she became, briefly, so busy actually getting the house running to speed again that she had little time for Gilbert — who had moved back into the carriage house and fallen into a very evil mood, such an evil mood that Vivian went to any amount of trouble never to be alone with him.
That winter, Daddy brought home a big radio from New Orleans, and as soon as supper was over everybody gathered in the living room to listen to it. At night after the children were in bed, John listened to music programs from famous hotel ballrooms all over America, and sang along to all the sad songs — whose every lyric he had by heart.
Sometimes after Clara fell asleep, Vivian crept back downstairs and sat next to him on the sofa. He would put an arm around her and go on singing. Vivian pretended to sleep, leaning up against her father, smelling his smell of tobacco and bourbon and lavender water — with which he scented his handkerchiefs — and listening to his heart beat. This was her favorite sound. Even more than the sound of rain on the gallery's tin roof, even more than Aunt Leticia's player piano. More than train whistles.
The sisters shared a bedroom, but little else. Clara, Vivian thought, was a lot like Jupiter. She spent her time preening and thinking her secret thoughts that she would never tell. And like the cat, she didn't like to be played with — you daren't touch Clara either.
For her part, Clara felt stuck with Vivian — who would always remain, in Clara's mind, "the baby." She remembered Mother telling her about the baby that God was sending them; the baby who was to keep Clara company and be a friend to her for the rest of her life — like Mother was friends with Bessie and Leticia. The baby was to be Clara's Christmas present.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Until that Good Day by Marjorie Kemper. Copyright © 2003 Marjorie Kemper. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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