Recent Reads – February 2024

Showcasing Catholic writers with ties to Milwaukee, Part Three:

Letting in Air and Light by Teresa Tumminello Brader

Belle Point Press, 2023

Teresa Tumminello Brader lives and writes in New Orleans. But she attended Marquette University, so I hereby claim her for the city of Milwaukee as well. Letting in Air and Light, Brader’s lovely hybrid of fiction and memoir, turns on her discovery of a family secret. After an exhausting period of caring for her dying mother, Brader spreads out the February 26, 2010 edition of the newspaper to learn that her uncle, William J. Toye, has been arrested in an FBI raid for art forgery. And while the crime is sensational, Letting in Air and Light is mainly a story of family, mental illness, and home.

The voice of the book is divided, reflecting its dual purpose. As a memoirist, Brader must come to terms with her uncle’s exploitation of the name and reputation of Clementine Hunter, a self-taught Black Louisiana artist, and with her mother’s decision to keep the truth from her all this time. But as a novelist, Brader peers into the mirror of life, teasing out the good, the true, and the beautiful; and in this vein, she skillfully ventriloquizes the thoughts and feelings of her family members, who become characters or even narrators themselves.

There is something meta-fictional about the memoir-style entries, which roughly alternate with the fictionalized accounts. Toye is extraordinarily talented, and early in his career, he supports himself with set design and architectural work–even posing, Zelig-like, as a symphony conductor because a famous musician shares the family name. The book’s title refers to an early childhood memory in which Teresa sits on her uncle’s lap, punching out the windows and doors in an architectural model he has made out of balsa wood. “I could use this punching out of windows and doors as a symbol of destruction,” Brader tells us. “Or I could offer it as a metaphor for letting in air and light to an enclosed structure, one that my mother tried to keep that way.” Specifically, we learn that Toye was first accused in the nineteen-seventies, but Teresa was never told. In the fictionalized account, she searches the house for the funnies one day after school, and no one will explain why that day’s newspaper (which contained an account of her uncle’s crimes) has already been discarded. This dual structure avoids the trap of authorial intrusion while enacting the process of reflection and judgment that adults eventually bring to bear on their childhoods.

Brader beautifully evokes her grandparents’ double-shotgun house, where much of the story takes place: “the red-and-white checkerboard tablecloth. … looked as though someone were constantly passing a damp washcloth over it.” In the dining room, young Teresa plays with her aunt Helen’s typewriter and studies her record collection; in the front room, she helps herself to the books. The fictional sections are organized according to the changing rhythms of home: “A Starter House,” “A Shotgun House,” “An Opera House,” “Asylums,” et cetera. Meanwhile, Brader’s treatment of William Toye moves between empathy, wonder, unease, and shame. Here, young William is experiencing an early psychotic break:

The school’s pigeon-gray walls moved inward, closer and closer. Billy tried to quicken the pace, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate. He tried to shrink into himself, but he was already as thin as a blade. He scuttled sideways like a crab…. Bumped on both sides, he collapsed, his knees folding like the Hotch Potch character that taught colonial children their ABCs. Scrunched into a ball, resembling no letter from any alphabet, he went blank.

The story proceeds in a series of beautifully rendered anecdotes, milestones, and tragedies of family life; but as Brader matures, she is caught between her duty to her mother and her desire to learn the truth. After her mother’s death, Brader travels to Lafayette to hear a talk given by Randy Deaton, the FBI agent who investigated her uncle’s case. She has decided in advance not to reveal her family connection to anyone, reflecting that that if her mother were still alive, she might never have attended at all.

Once I’d returned from the talk, she would have wanted to know all about it.  Ironically, she didn’t like things being kept from her. I would have told her what I learned. I would have answered her questions. I would’ve been hoping to help break the chain of secrecy, the one that breeds more secrecy and grows unwarranted shame.

The FBI agent passes around one of her uncle’s forgeries, and

[t]ime feels wobbly again, the surreality of my situation intensifying. I came to the talk with no preconceptions as to an outcome, but I almost feel as if a dream-pencil appeared in my hand and I drew these happenings. My mind churns with all the things I could say.  …. I think of myself as a toddler sitting on Uncle Bill’s lap, as his forgery is now sitting on mine.

In the end, Brader chooses to treat her family with mercy. Letting in Air and Light recalls Sarah M. Broom’s National Book Award-winning memoir of New Orleans, The Yellow House, in which a matriarch’s efforts to patch up the flaws in her house enact the struggle to keep a disparate family whole.