The Time of Her Life Read online

  Acclaim for Robb Forman Dew’sTHE TIME OF HER LIFE

  “The Time of Her Life examines the fragility of family ties, the ease with which they can be broken, the carelessness of what passes for ‘love,’ and the terrible, lasting damage that can result…. Everything about this novel is right: the characters, the interplay of plot and theme, the wonderful prose, and the depiction of the world of children—a world Dew seems to know better, and to convey with greater understanding, than any American writer since Carson McCullers. The Time of Her Life is the work of that rarest of people, a real writer, and it will knock your socks off.”

  —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

  “A sensitively drawn but far from sentimental portrait of a little girl without a childhood…. With The Time of Her Life, Dew establishes herself as a master of exploring family love, with all its pain, joy, and intimate distances.”

  —Anita Creamer, Dallas Times-Herald

  “A writer of great sensitivity to the intricacies and ambiguities of family love…. Dew’s skill as a writer has permitted her to convey all the ambiguity and pain of a family dynamic without the least resort to reductiveness.”

  —Julie Rolston, Los Angeles Herald Examiner

  “Dew has powers of observation akin to an Updike or Cheever.”

  —Bob Moyer, Grand Rapids Press

  “Dew puts her sensitive ear to a family’s heart…. She comes up with a beautiful, personal language with which to describe its pulse.”

  —Lisa Schwarzbaum, Detroit News

  “Intensely focused, elegantly written fiction…. With extraordinary depth and emotional detail, Dew dramatizes a family in crisis.”

  —Janet Wiehe, Library Journal

  “Dew tangles with potent themes…. She is also capable of turning a simple phrase in a way a poet might envy.”

  —Alida Becker, St. Petersburg Times

  “An accomplished, chilling, and memorable book, one that establishes Dew as a novelist of the first rank.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The quality of Dew’s writing is exceptional. She is able to take an introspective subject and create the kind of excitement that makes it almost impossible to put the book down, a rare achievement for a novel that depends on character development rather than action for its impetus…. Robb Forman Dew writes from within the innermost souls of the people in her story. She makes her readers think as they think and feel as they feel, and the experience is as gripping as any daring adventure novel.”

  —Anne Price, Sun Magazine

  “Engrossing…. Dew already has made a good start in delineating a territory all her own, a part of American life that is as ineffable as the emotions she is able to make substantive and meaningful.”

  —Vincent Leo, Columbus Dispatch

  “Content, structure, and the moral and emotional clarity of its author make The Time of Her Life a powerful and complex book…. Dew’s own development [as a writer] is as subtle and important as the plots of her books.”

  —Myra Goldberg, Village Voice

  “Astonishment is the rule in Robb Forman Dew’s fiction. And it is our response to her remarkable literary talent.”

  —Dan Cryer, Newsday

  Also by Robb Forman Dew

  Fiction

  The Evidence Against Her

  Fortunate Lives

  Dale Loves Sophie to Death

  Nonfiction

  The Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out

  A Southern Thanksgiving: Recipes and Musings

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1984 by Robb Forman Dew

  Reading Group Guide copyright © 2003 by Robb Forman Dew and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  Originally published in hardcover by William Morrow and Company, 1984

  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  The first chapter of this novel originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The New Yorker. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to use material in this book: On page 223, lines from the song “Tell Laura I Love Her” by Jeff Barry and Ben Raleigh, copyright © 1960 by Edward B. Marks Music Company. Used by permission. All rights reserved. On page 218, lines from the song “Twilight Time,” lyric by Buck Ram; music by Morty Nevins & Al Nevins. TRO, copyright 1944 and renewed © 1972, Devon Music, Inc., New York, N.Y. Used by permission. The correct words of the song are: “Heavenly shades of night are falling, / It’s twilight time. Out in the mist your voice is calling, / It’s twilight time…”

  ISBN: 978-0-316-09036-0

  Contents

  Also by Robb Forman Dew

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  A Reading Group Guide

  About the Author

  A Preview of The Evidence Against Her

  For Charles,

  “… my cause, my proper heat and center.”

  —JOHN CROWE RANSOM

  “Winter Remembered”

  1

  Once every summer a mass of humid air settled over Lunsbury, Missouri. For perhaps ten days in July or August a muggy silence predominated, and everyone became short-tempered and uneasy in the still heat. Otherwise during the year there was a pervasive susurration of wind that rustled through the streets and down the alleys, across the golf course and between the houses, moving the light objects—Frisbees, aluminum lawn chairs, a scarf—from one place to another in any backyard where they had been left behind. An open door would soon slam shut. Papers on a desk near an open window would drift away and lie in trembling, shifting disarray across the floor. There was always something afoot, afloat, in motion. Sometimes the weather was severe, but from day to day it was more often tame. Since Lunsbury was a settlement of sixty thousand people, with many good-sized buildings and sycamore trees planted strategically in long rows of windbreaks, the force of the air that shifted from the Pacific coast across the plains was divided and channeled through the maze of the community.

  The movement of the trees was whispery in this season. It was autumn, and the dried leaves stirred in the full-blown heads of the old trees or rolled and spun across the grass in turmoil. In the summer, when the leaves were full of sap, there was a tender, fleshy chafing. When winter came, there would be the creaking of the bare, abrasive branches, and then again, with spring, the softer sigh of young leaves and the tall, spurred grasses that grew in the meadows, in the ditches, and untended patches of real estate.

  All of the residents enclosed within their own quiet rooms had more than an ordinary sense of security. When they shut their windows and went to bed they had an unusual knowledge of being protected from the elements. And those prevailing westerly winds were some part of the reason that—against all odds on this Saturday morning—Claudia Parks came out of sleep in her closed and silent house in a state of optimism. She awoke as though she had been out running; her
body was loose and warm, and she was carried along into the day on an early surge of animation that led her mildly to consider good will, good luck, new chances. Her turn of mind so early-on had the same frail and opalescent quality as the crescent moon that hung late in the first light.

  Before she went down to fix breakfast, she brushed her short hair until it was full of static electricity and stood out around her head like a cloud. It had no sheen, and her hair didn’t curl so much as curve in soft brown puffs against her cheeks. It bobbed as she moved around the kitchen but then settled around her head once more when she came to rest. Electrified wisps and tendrils frizzled outward against the backlighting of morning windows, softening the outline of her image in the white kitchen.

  Claudia had drawn her eyes all the way around with dark pencil that was artfully smudged, and she had exaggerated the pale wedge of her face by blending a little pink color beneath her cheekbones so that they bore the strength of her looks in a wide, gleaming winglike span above her fox-pointed chin. But she had left off there and wandered into the kitchen, and in the fluorescent light the triangle of her face was shadowed into a pinched and haggard look by her uncolored mouth and darkened eyes that seemed huge and hollow-socketed beneath her indistinct and unpenciled brows.

  Claudia had on her scarlet robe that billowed and undulated around her ankles with each step. It was a finely made robe that descended in long tucks to the waist, where its fullness was released, and the sleeves were also pleated from the shoulder and then let loose in exorbitant width to be caught up again in more banded pleats and a pearl button at the wrist. Her movements as she broke eggs into a blue bowl and took dishes from the shelves were as red and startling as the flight of a male cardinal in the snow. However, that robe was three years old, and it was by the force of her own complicated vision that she didn’t notice that the elbows were worn thin as gauze. She almost never remembered to run the robe through the lingerie cycle of the wash, and the cuffs were darkly edged and fraying slightly. All down the front were strewn tiny scattered holes where ashes from her cigarettes had flown and caught as she swung her arm in an expansive gesture. “Oh, well. Don’t worry,” she would say as she brushed at the tiny flickers where the cinders smoldered, “ashes keep the moths out.”

  Her daughter, Jane, sat at the table and paid sullen attention while her mother fixed breakfast and talked to her. Claudia transferred the milk to a pitcher and the jam to a crystal dish, and she put the silver down on woven mats with matching cloth napkins. But she put the mats down on a table gritty with scattered sugar that had spilled during some other meal. She stood at the counter staring out the window as she waited for the toast to pop up, and she put her cigarette on the windowsill as she poured out orange juice. She forgot it there, and later in the day she would be surprised to find the dark burn it had left on the white paint. The sunlight fell across her face and bright red robe with a shaft of light that caught her in its narrow beam and enhanced the peculiar tension that was Claudia’s alone; she had a waveringly suppressed and dramatic energy that was with her rain or shine.

  “I don’t know if I should do it or not,” she said to Jane, about a class she might take. “Maggie wants me to, but I don’t know…. You know how she wears you down. They don’t teach it here. I’d have to commute to Kansas City, and I don’t have any sense of direction. And in the winter…” She told Jane all about her plans, new things that had occurred to her. She talked and chatted while she moved dreamlike around the room, stepping over their dog, Nellie, without seeing her, reaching automatically for the things she needed, without alacrity, just a lazy uncurling of her sleepy muscles when she reached or stirred. It was the urgency of her new ideas that made Claudia appear languorous as she moved around the counters. It was dazzling to her, the things that were possible, and in the morning her musings were entirely visionary and hopeful. She gave Jane some toast and juice and settled at the table across from her daughter with her own breakfast, but then she elbowed her plate slightly to one side and lit another cigarette, idly breaking her toast into pieces with her other hand.

  “And this is the last pack, Jane. I swear it! It really is,” she turned to her daughter to say, gesturing with the cigarette she was smoking. Claudia’s gestures were fluid and poignant with earnestness, and she was impressed, herself, with her own sincerity.

  Jane was looking out the window in the direction of the Tunbridges’ house which could be glimpsed through the trees far away down the hill, and her mute nod of acknowledgment was so peremptory, so casual, when Claudia meant never—never—to buy another pack of cigarettes, that Claudia slowly took in the presence of her daughter with a tinge of resentment that colored her early ebullience. It was the first bruise on what she had chosen to see as the perfect apple of her day. Claudia looked down the hill, too, at Maggie’s house, and was agitated all at once by the things in this day that she meant to get done. She was disturbed by the idea of order and efficiency that always eluded her at the last minute. She almost got things right. She just missed by a hair.

  “Jane, you’ve got to get your things ready to go to Diana’s tonight.” This was a command, but in her sudden uneasiness Claudia’s voice was faintly tentative. She was offering a small bit of instruction, a slight complaint. These days she had constantly to remind Jane of the obligations of Jane’s own social life, but all at once this year Jane’s face had elongated and become narrow and stern, so that compelling her to do this thing or that was a risky business.

  “I might not be going,” Jane said.

  “Well, Jane. Please remember to tell me these things. Would that be too much trouble?” Her tone was light with injury. “I thought it was all planned. When I talked to Maggie yesterday, she said Diana was counting on it. I thought you were going over this morning and staying overnight.”

  “I’m not sure I want to go, though,” Jane said.

  Claudia sipped her coffee and let the conversation become vague in her mind. “I don’t want you to hurt Diana’s feelings,” she said, but her wishes dispersed into the warm, scented kitchen air.

  Jane finished her toast but still sat at the table, moving her juice glass in tight circles that blurred the ring of condensation beneath it. “Did Dad come home?” she asked.

  Claudia made a dismissive gesture with her hand and gave her daughter a nod, but in spite of herself a sudden weight of accountability plummeted through her in that instant, making her lethargic, her arms and legs heavy with despair. Thirty-two years and the responsibility for them. Claudia had never thought that life would demand any effort on her part; she had assumed it had its own momentum. She had never even thought she would be thirty-two. The whole business had taken her by surprise.

  “He’s still asleep,” she said to Jane. That’s where she had meant to leave Avery for the moment—stuporously asleep in their bed—and she was irritated at Jane, because here he was now, in the forefront of her mind. She wasn’t pleased to disturb herself this morning, in her favorite, mellow hour.

  Claudia and Avery had gone to a party at the Tunbridges’ the night before, and now Claudia lost all track of her thoughts about the class she might take. The idea of herself in her blue car driving along I-70, sure of her destination, crisp in nice clothes, passing by the idling traffic while she drove straight on to Kansas City to be on time—that soothing image—became a kind of low hum of a thought to fall back on. It was a bit of theater, really; she enjoyed watching the idea work itself out, but she would never have taken the action. She was irritated, though, because she didn’t want to think about the night before, not any part of it at all, and here it was, surfacing in her mind.

  At the party Maggie had been explaining how disappointed she had been after meeting and entertaining the convocation speaker, a writer whose books she had reviewed several times. “It’s ruined his writing for me. He’s a whiner,” she had said, drawing one foot up on the couch and clasping her arms around her knee. It had gotten late, and only eight or nine people wer
e still ranged around the room in various stages of party fatigue. Eight or so acquaintances who lingered on. “He’s insinuating. In a sneaky way,” Maggie went on, “he’s really trying too hard to convince you how humble and amusing he is.”

  “You were not impressed,” said Vince, who had been sitting in a chair across from his wife. He summed this up. It was only a statement, but Avery waved his hand impatiently at this comment.

  “Oh, Maggie. You were impressed. I know you. I know you were impressed. Think of what that man has achieved!” There was a nasty note to Avery’s voice; there was a challenge in his tone, and the whole group turned to him, surprised. He had said very little for some time.

  This was a group of people—the ones who remained in the long living room—of some note. They had a little fame one way or another or, like Claudia, were married to persons of some limited renown. But they were not necessarily fond of each other; they simply tended to congregate because they had that much in common, and they were all there was.

  Vince watched Avery for a moment. “Well, all right, Avery. What about you? Who would impress you? Living or dead?” Avery’s face lost its sardonic expression and became momentarily reflective, so Vince pressed on. “Any single person. Who would you like to meet? And why?” Vince added. “Why would you like to meet whoever you’d like to meet?”

  Avery had become quite solemn, and he took some time thinking about this. “I would be”—Avery spoke slowly and raised one hand to emphasize his words—“I believe I would be impressed by Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln.”

  There was a small collective sigh of disappointment, and Avery raised his hand a little higher to retain their attention, but he kept gazing morosely ahead of himself. His solemnity had become a kind of maudlin petulance. “No,” he said. “No. I mean it. The language. He had the language…. He could write. But his terrible melancholy…” Avery was sinking into a slow-witted and boozy sentimentality.