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Overview
The second group, “Time in Exile,” focuses on Americans living in Europe as political and social exiles. These stories offer a vivid glimpse into that world of American expatriates who have been forced to bend both time and place for reasons of conscience or necessity.
The stories in the concluding section, “Time in the American City,” all deal with urban survival. Occasionally comic, but always serious in theme, these stories pay tribute to the variety and adaptability of American city dwellers. Mike-O returns to Boston for a visit with his trendy ex-wife and her new lover; Blair, a U.S. Senator in Washington, copes with a long-absent and highly independent son, Dennis, and struggles to make sense of his artistic success in Venice, California.
All 12 stories have appeared in major periodicals, one being included in both the O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories collections.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504010993 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Permanent Press |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 189 |
| File size: | 854 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Bending Time
By Stephen Minot
The Permanent Press
Copyright © 1997 William McCauleyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1099-3
CHAPTER 1
A PASSION FOR HISTORY
Picture: On the shore where the river joins the sea, a lobsterman's boathouse-home, gray-shingled and trim, morning dew drifting in vapor from the roof, a column of smoke rising from the chimney, flower boxes with petunias. It's enough to turn the stomach.
He is not naive. He will not be trapped by sentimentality. He will not be seduced by those Currier-and-Ives virtues—thrift, honesty, piety, and hard work. These are slogans devised by those who control the means of production—the rich, the landholders, and the factory owners. There is no beauty in poverty.
Picture: On the ledge next to the lobsterman's home stands a couple. She wears a dress only a country girl would buy. Tall, long-boned, graceful, she would be beautiful if she had any notion of style. Beauty is there, hidden.
He has rumpled white pants and a blue polo shirt, the costume of a man consciously trying to be informal but not quite succeeding. He is older than she. But they are not father and daughter or brother and sister. As they look out on the glisten of the river that blends into the sea beyond, his right hand rests ever so gently on her right buttock.
They are mismatched, these two. It is more than her mail-order dress and his rumpled elegance, though that is part of it. There is some deeper aberration here. Like a parent, he can sense something wrong without being able to describe it. But he is not the man's parent. He is the man himself.
It is Kraft himself who is standing there. The woman beside him is Thea. The cottage where she lives is to their left. He is conscious now where his right hand is and can, in fact, feel the warmth of her body.
This kind of thing has been happening to Kraft lately. He can't be sure whether some microcircuit in his brain is loose, blacking out certain periods of time, allowing him to stand on a bank planning to take a walk with someone and then skipping ahead to the actual event, or whether it works the other way around—being in the middle of an experience and suddenly viewing it from a distance, with historical perspective, as it were.
"Brooding?" she asks.
"Me? No. I don't brood. That's an indulgence. Thinking, maybe. Sorry. I was just thinking."
"Perhaps you miss teaching. Miss students and all that."
"No, not in the least. I'm not that kind of teacher, you know. A course here, a lecture series there. Not regular teaching. Not in my field."
He always downplays his university connections, he being a social historian, not a theoretician. He deals with reality, not speculation. A true radical, he disdains the trendy factions of his colleagues with all their jargon. He prefers to think of himself as a scholar in the true sense, a writer and lover of the past rather than a professor who holds a prestigious chair. Back home he would rather be known for his many articles on the lives of common people and for his recent volume on the radical movement in America.
But Thea, his lovely Thea, has read nothing, knows nothing about the outside world. She has never heard of him. He is for her just what he tells her about himself. She has lived her entire life here in rural Nova Scotia, his vacation retreat. Nova Scotia, a perfect time capsule, insulated against the realities of the twentieth century.
"I'd love to learn history," she says.
"Never mind that," he says. "You've got history in you. That's enough."
"But you teach, don't you? Teach history?"
"I don't teach history. I teach about people. Common folk. How they live. If you know how one person lives, you know a whole period. Not armies and national policy—just people. Do you understand?"
"Of course," she says, taking half a step back and turning just slightly to the right as if to search the treetops, checking to see if an osprey nest has been built during the night, and incidentally, innocently, pressing ever so gently against the palm of his hand with the curve of her bottom.
Picture: On the smooth, gray ledge that forms the bank of the Worwich River at the point where it flows into the sea, a man in white pants embraces a long, limber girl, kissing her, and is now beginning to undo the first of one hundred and two tiny, cloth-covered buttons that run down the back of her dress, she laughing, the sound drifting up like a loon's call. From this height one can see not only the little boathouse-home but the marshy estuaries formed by the meeting of river and sea, and farther, on the sea side, a great, gray-shingled rectangle of a house surrounded by tall grass, ledge outcroppings, and a scattering of overturned tombstones.
This large rectangle is the house Kraft has bought for himself and his family as a summer home—house and barn and outhouse and woodsheds and 953 acres of land. This is what he has bought with the royalties from his book on the radical movement in America.
Like a mistress, the place is an embarrassment and a pleasure. He makes a point of keeping it out of the press. His name is still mentioned in the press from time to time as "the one-time guru of radicals," but academic Marxists have written him off as an anachronism. He has no cult following, but he is read. His book is occasionally adopted for class use.
When interviewers press him, he refers to his property as his "rural retreat" or his "wilderness camp." In spite of this, a tediously strident Marxist historian has recently tried to write him off as one who bought up "a thousand-acre Nova Scotia dukedom." Kraft sees this as typical academic sniping that merely reflects the shameful level to which contemporary scholarship has sunk. Besides, the idiot has exaggerated by forty-seven acres.
His house up on the high land is in a permanent state of disrepair. He has not allowed one can of paint to be used inside or out. It is a weathered gray. There is no electricity, and water must be lifted bucketful by bucketful from an open well. The plaster was half gone when he bought it, so they removed the other half, leaving the horizontal laths as semipartitions between the rooms. It is, he reminds his family from time to time, their vista into the past.
But this spring there is no family. He came up alone in mid-April, leaving his wife and three children in New Haven by mutual agreement. He was to have two and a half absolutely clear months to complete the final draft of his most recent book, this one on the liberal tradition.
It is a perfect arrangement. No meetings to attend, no speeches to present, no teaching, no family to sap his energies. So of course he has done no writing.
There are times when he can't stand the clutter and filth of his own house—clutter, filth, and whispering deadlines. Those are the times when he comes here to the neat little boathouse-home on the river, the little Currier-and-Ives home Thea shares with her father.
Right now he is walking beside Thea, walking back to that perfect little place, his arm around her and hers around him. Seven of the one hundred and two tiny cloth-covered buttons down her back are undone. Ninety-five to go.
Kraft is not entirely certain that this is right. His wife, a sure and competent woman with a law degree and a practice of her own, would consider this a serious malady. Worse than the flu. On a par with income-tax evasion. And of course she would be right.
With these thoughts passing through his mind he sees in the far distance, inland, just coming out of the woods and beginning to cross the rocky field, approaching the boathouse-home, old Mr. McKnight.
"Oh," Kraft says, noticing for the first time that the barrow which the old man pushes has a handcrafted wooden wheel. Involuntarily Kraft's mind provides a parenthetical notation. (Hand-fashioned oak wheels disappeared from each county at the point when mail-order houses reached that district.)
"Oh," Thea says, not hearing his unspoken observation. "It's Father."
Kraft likes the old man—his courtly, country way. But he has mixed feelings about delaying what he and Thea had been heading toward.
"Well," she says, "it makes no nevermind. He'll stay for a while and we'll talk. But then it'll be time for his scavenging."
Every day at low tide the old man scours the beaches for usable items—timbers, orange crates, even nails that can be pried out and ground smooth on the whetstone. (Recycling was an economic necessity for the rural poor long before its adoption as a cause célèbre by twentieth-century liberals.) Clearly old Mr. McKnight lives in the previous century.
"I don't mind," Kraft says. Actually he does and he doesn't mind. Both. But that is too complicated to explain. Even to himself. "I don't mind," he says again. They are on the front stoop—a simple porch with no roof. She sits in the big rocker and he is perched on a nail keg old Mr. McKnight has salvaged from the sea. It will be a while before the old man puts the wood in the shed and comes around to suggest a mug of tea. Nothing whatever moves rapidly in rural Nova Scotia. Especially time.
"I don't mind," Kraft says, thinking that the last time he said it to himself in his own head. "It's good talking with the old man. Just this morning I wrote in my journal, 'I hope I see old Mr. McKnight today. He is my link with the region. I like hearing his voice. I learn a lot from him.'"
"Are you perhaps spending too much time with that journal of yours?" It is exactly the question his wife asked by letter the week before. Unsettling.
"I've kept that going ever since I was ten. I'm not going to stop now." He is, though, spending too much time writing in his journal and she knows it just as clearly as he does, so it is essential that he defend himself. "It's an act of survival, writing that journal."
"Survival?"
"Did you know that shipwrecked sailors rowing a lifeboat must keep their eyes on their own wake? Otherwise they would turn in great circles. Did you know that?" She shakes her head. "I wrote about that last week, as a matter of fact. 'It's a paradigm for social continuity and tradition,' I wrote. Journals also give the writer identity. 'Sheepherders,' I wrote, 'talk to themselves and address their members with obscene endearments to maintain their sense of humanity.'" Or, he wonders, did he write "sanity"? "Well, I mean, here I am living in an ark of a house up there without electricity or running water miles from anywhere, adrift for two months with only a rough draft and a clutter of notes to work with and a publisher's deadline for navigation. Did you know that mermaids are an optical illusion caused by solitude and malnutrition?"
"I didn't know you believed in mermaids."
"I don't. You don't have to believe in them to know that they exist. I've got an entry about that too."
"Those entries," she says, shaking her head. He notices that she is shelling lima beans. Where did they come from? "You spend too much time with them," she says.
"It's just a trail of where my thoughts have been."
She shrugs. She is no lawyer and never argues. She makes commentary on his thoughts, but she never presses her point. "All that looking back," she says gently. "It'll turn you to salt." She smiles and a loon laughs. Either that or a loon smiles and she laughs. "Time to put the kettle on," she says. "He'll be coming in and wanting his tea right soon. Come sit with me while I fix up."
Picture in sepia: A woman stands by the soapstone sink, her hand on the pump. There is little light in the room because the windows are small. (Large windows were avoided not only because of expense but because of a strong sense of nocturnal dangers. Except in cities, police protection was practically unknown.) There is no view of the river or the sea.
The kitchen walls are made of the narrow tongue-and-groove boarding, a poor man's substitute for plaster. Open shelves rather than cupboards—the price of a hinge saved. Kitchen table bare pine, unvarnished, scrubbed with salt—to be replaced in the 1920s with white enamel. Kraft can glance at a photograph of an American kitchen and date it within a decade and can lecture without notes on its impact on the status of women, the institution of marriage, and the hierarchy within the family. Here in Worwich he has found a lost valley. Time has moved on like a great flock of geese, leaving a strange silence and sepia prints.
"He's been cutting wood," Thea says, taking the cast-iron teakettle from the range and adding water to it from the kitchen pump. Kraft's mind flashes a notation. (The shift from the heavy cast-iron kettle to the aluminum type was as significant for women as the replacement of the wood range by gas.) "I imagine on your land."
"He's welcome to it. I've got enough problems without clearing my own woodlots." He has a quick vision of his study, the upper room in the big house on the bluff, his papers scattered about like leaves after a storm. His manuscript, the one on the American liberal movement, in cluttered piles; and in addition to his own journals there are his father's journals, which he has foolishly brought. One more distraction. One more bit of clutter. So if old Mr. McKnight wants to poach, wants to clear land, he is welcome to it. Perhaps Kraft can persuade the old man to steal unfinished manuscripts as well.
Simplicity. Order. He looks at Thea there at the sink. She is both. Her cottage, her life is harmony. His own place is a shambles. How can a man, he wonders, pick a summer home so far from the complexities of contemporary society, so painstakingly distant, and work so hard to keep the place unimproved, simple, true to Thoreau, and still end up with such an enormous rubbish heap in his own study?
The kettle has come to a boil. Thea measures loose tea into a crockery pot and fills it with boiling water. She carefully arranges three mugs, spoons, and cloth napkins. He feels a great wave of envy for her neat and orderly life, a passionate and agonized longing that he mistakes for healthy sexual desire.
"It is madness to romanticize nineteenth-century rural life," he has written in his journal only that morning. "Even a cursory examination of the McKnight family reveals a history of backbreaking work, sickness, and early death."
He silently recites his observation verbatim, cursed with total recall. No, blessed. Without some kind of historical sense of reality, this recent affair with Thea will turn into a nightmare of complications.
There is nothing to envy in Thea's life, he tells himself, and the affair is only a passing sexual fancy, a mildly comic sample of male menopause.
The evidence of brutish living is all around him, after all. Abandoned houses, cellar holes where families were burned out in midwinter, private cemetery plots grown over with chokecherry, no one left to tend them. One such is right on the rocky scrub grass he calls his front lawn. McKnights. Half of them children. A family shattered by the brutality of what they had hoped would be their New Scotland.
They came to the New World looking for the good life, and they hung on for more than two hundred years. But now as a clan they are broken and scattered, beaten by isolation, by madness, by sudden death, the younger ones fleeing to Montreal, to Toronto, to the States, the survivors selling the last remaining house and most of the land to this American historian and his family, who come north as summer residents, looking for the good life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bending Time by Stephen Minot. Copyright © 1997 William McCauley. Excerpted by permission of The Permanent Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Dedication
- Part I: Bending Time and Memory
- A Passion for History
- The Sea Wall
- A Sometimes Memory
- The Death of Little Gloria
- Apparitions
- Part II: Time in Exile
- See You Around
- A Death in Paris
- Exiles
- Part III: Time in the American City
- The Temptations of Mike-0 Angelo
- The Senator’s Son
- Balm Street
- Things not Everyone can Do
- Copyright Page