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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781963101027 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Green City Books |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2024 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d) |
About the Author
David Plante's 1978 novel The Family was nominated for a National Book Award. The Family is the beginning of an acclaimed trilogy known as the Francoeur trilogy and includes the books The Woods and The Country.
Read an Excerpt
One
He knew it from the past, from when he had once walked along the same street in the town of clapboard houses with lawns and decorative shrubs, there where he grew up with his American longing to go away, an especially American longing when you were alone at dusk walking along an American street, and no lights lit in the dusk.
Someone was playing a piano, and this surprised him, that anyone at all in Revere, Massachusetts, was playing the piano. He stopped to listen, and he thought that here he was, and it was as though he had never left, that as a teenager he had stood here and had heard someone play the piano, and he recalled there had come to him then the longing for all that he could not have. And back then as now the sound of a piano playing in a dark house was unbearable to him. The piano playing ceased, and a light came on through a window in the bungalow.
He longed for London, he longed for Hilary, in London.
Two
Theodore Beauchemin lay on his parents’ bed, where they had died.
He lay for a long while, but he was there to look through the drawers that he had not been allowed to look into when he was a boy, so he made himself get up, and from a drawer in a wardrobe he took out a metal box, and sitting now on the edge of the bed, he put it on his lap. It was rectangular, green, somewhat dented, and had a hasp and a staple but no padlock.
Ted lifted the lid of the metal box and he saw a large birthday card, laminated, with a picture of a lilac bush in full bloom. He opened the card and under a printed poem wishing her a happy birthday, he read a message in his father’s handwriting, a message to his mother, addressing her with a name he had never heard his father use for her.
You’re my funny face.
He hadn’t known his parents had had a relationship that was so light-spirited.
Beneath the card were more cards, birthday cards and anniversary cards and thank-you cards, all saved, Ted thought, by his mother, who would have saved them as small expressions of her friends’ attention to her.
Ted threw the unread cards into a wastepaper basket. He was looking quickly through the strong box for legal documents, one of which was as an insurance policy against his own young death, and too outdated to be of any worth. Whenever he did come across documents which might have been of interest, he collected them together to give to the lawyer.
Toward the bottom of the strong box were letters. From the handwriting of the names and addresses on the envelopes, he knew they were letters written by his parents to each other. The dates showed that they had been married when they wrote the letters, and the dates showed that they had been separated before Ted was born and came together when he was born. He spread these letters out on his parents’ bed to study them, picking up one envelope after another to look closely at the dates, franked in little blue-black circles on the old stamps. The return addresses on the back flaps were different, so his parents had lived apart for a time, and the letters were written, yes, before his birth.
He gathered the letters together to decide what to do with them. How could he bring himself to read them? How could he read into his parents a past about something that they had never mentioned to him, a separation he knew nothing about? They had kept the letters, thinking, he supposed, that the letters were in a place he was not allowed to look into. And over the years of being together, years of Ted’s growing, they had forgotten about them.
He took up the first envelope from the small stack, one on which he saw his father’s handwriting addressing his mother, and he slid the letter out and unfolded it.
Oh, my darling, I miss you so much, so much, so much.
Ted could not bear this. No, he could not bear to continue to read. He could not bear to read any other letters. He folded the letter and placed it back into the envelope, and he gathered all the envelopes and lifted them and lowered them, again and again, as if to weigh their contents against what he didn’t know about his parents and, perhaps, what he shouldn’t know.
But he read a letter from his mother to his father.
Oh, my love—
No, he couldn’t bear this. He folded this letter.
Ted threw them all into the wastepaper basket. He wouldn’t read them. No, he couldn’t read them, he couldn’t bear reading letters his parents sent to each other from either side of a separation. They longed for each other, a longing which finally brought them together in the birth of their son, Ted, their only child.
He closed the metal box, held it on his lap, and thought he wouldn’t continue looking through the contents, for what else could he find that so struck him, that so upset him?
Under a long, brown envelope with the name of the insurance company printed on its upper left- hand corner, Ted found this photograph:
It was of him, of him aged seven, thirty years before, when he had received his Holy Communion.
But this boy, dressed in white and holding his Holy Communion prayer book, couldn’t have been him, couldn’t be him, Ted, now, but some other Ted, for whom the meaning of receiving the host was the boy’s and had no meaning for the present Ted.
Ted no longer knew that past Ted, but he could look at the boy with the wonder of not knowing him. The Ted who was studying the photograph said to the Ted holding the photograph, that was a long, long time ago, and the presence you had a long time ago was with your parents at church, and you are with them there now, a boy with your parents in church. They could not let you know how they were when they died, as if dying was their final and exclusive love for one another that you had not known about until their letters; their deaths so soon one after the other, it was as though they had wanted to die together in this bed.
He let the photograph fall onto the bed. He was tired. He had flown from London to Boston with only two days to sort out all the business of the inheritance, the clearing out and the selling of the apartment, which, for what it was worth, he would put in the hands of a lawyer and a real estate agent. He had a meeting back in London he must be at.
In a neighborhood restaurant, he took out his mobile from the inside pocket of his jacket to check if there were any messages for him on the little illuminated panel. He did this often, as if instinctively, but there was nothing urgent, and he paid for his meal and left. The trees alternated with electricity poles, the wires of which passed through the illuminated leaves into darkness.
The house was cold, and there was no hot water, and it seemed to him that the lights were dim.
He would sleep in his parents’ bed because it was the only one made up by the doctor’s wife.
In the dark, he held close to his eyes the photograph of himself on the Sunday of his Holy Communion. Yes, he remembered the prayer book, but that was all he remembered: it had a shiny black cover, and inside the front cover, as if in a shallow niche, was a small white crucifix with a golden Corpus. He put the photograph on the bedside table, and, undressing quickly to his underwear, he got into bed. The sheets were damp with cold, and he shivered a little, perhaps with more than the cold dampness.
He had been so unhappy in this house, where he had never, ever felt his parents were happy—never, as if the dark house did not allow happiness.
He sat up and switched on the bedside lamp. Shivering from the cold, he reached for the photograph again to study it in the light of the lamp.
There he was, in his white knee socks and white suit and white tie and his hair neatly combed and parted. He was, that boy, so far removed from Ted, he might have been any boy, not him, not Theodore Beauchemin. And he would put the photograph with the other mementos to be burnt in the backyard incinerator, for Ted heard Hilary telling him he was too sentimental, which he was.
He threw the photograph among the cards in the wastepaper basket and again switched off the light.
He was worried that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. That was always a worry, because if he couldn’t sleep, he knew that he wouldn’t even be able to close his eyes against his thinking, but would lie awake and stare out into the dark of this dark house.
He would think of Hilary, of being at home with her, of being in London with her. She was there, and soon he’d be there with her, so when he did close his eyes, he could let go of the bedroom where his parents had slept, sleeping in the bed where his parents had died.
Let go, he said to himself. Let go.
Let go and think of Hilary, of being in bed with her and her holding him.
Three
And how strange, he thought, that he was in an airplane hurtling through dark space.
Yes, he longed to be in London, though how could that be, how could London exist? How could the house he lived in there exist? How could Hilary exist, and their bed? Their bed, with soft sheets that often twisted about them when they made love, and, too, the pillows fallen to the floor when they made love.
Yes, yes, she would be in bed when he arrived, and he’d undress without waking her, waking her only when he raised the sheet to get into bed and take her in his arms. There would be the proof that Hilary existed, that their bed and house existed, and that London existed.
A very fine light began to show in the space outside.
She had given London to him, and, oh yes, he was happy there.
The space outside became more and more suffused with dawn, and there appeared a flame-colored tint to it, and then the sun rose.
And then Ted fell asleep.
In a dream there appeared a boy, ill and in bed, and Ted was standing by the bed, where he gave the boy a small man in a gladiator’s Roman gear, which the boy took but then threw on the floor where a gladiators’ fight had occurred, and in the midst of the fight the killed were, one by one, dragged out of the arena by a horse, leaving long ruts in the sand, to go into the unknown passages within the coliseum. They were there, Ted and the boy, in a vast field where the dead bodies of gladiators were skeletons in their armor. And there were deep pits and fires and many more dead bodies, some naked and some with uniforms burnt away and revealing bleeding muscles and wounds open to bones and skulls. The boy asked, “Where are we? Why are there so many dead? Tell me, I want to know.”
Lights flicked on in the cabin, and he woke when he was told to set his seat upright and fasten his seat belt.
He was light-spirited. He could be light-spirited. It was in him to be, somewhere in him, and in some way that spirit was finally released in him because of Hilary.
And he thought, on the train into Paddington Station, and in the taxi through London, here I am, and it’s fine, it’s all good. And the sun was now up and shining on pedestrians, on automobiles, on red double-decker busses, on London.
London, where he would live all the life he had left to live, which, given he was—what? thirty-seven—and Hilary just a little bit older, gave him years more to be able to say, This is London, this is my London . . .
And to let himself into the house, and to climb the stairs quietly, and to find the door to their bedroom open, and to find Hilary asleep on his side of the bed, and to undress so as not to wake her, and naked, to get into bed beside her, she naked, and, as if he had not been away but had been there all night in their bed, to feel her, awake or not, turn to fit her back against his chest, and for him to put an arm over her.
And to think, how safe I am here, how much in love.