A Look Back at Summer
Child of my Heart by Alice McDermott (2002, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr (1980, reissued by New York Review of Books in 2000)
Word on Fire’s Women of the Catholic Imagination: Twelve Inspired Novelists You Should Know is the gift that keeps on giving. When I reviewed it here in July, I was only familiar with half of the novelists featured, leaving me with an excellent list of good things to read. Since June, my husband and I have visited six used bookstores in four different states, where I’ve been cruising for titles by Muriel Spark and Alice McDermott.
Set in what might be the nineteen-seventies, McDermott’s Child of my Heart is the story of fifteen-year-old Theresa, an only child growing up in Long Island among the summer homes of the rich. Theresa is beautiful and on the cusp of adulthood— “I believe my parents had grown a little wary of me by then” –and she works tirelessly all summer, caring for children and pets while her mother and father commute to the city. In addition to her paying clients, Theresa keeps an eye on Petey Moran, one of a large and neglected brood of children living next door. Petey spends enough nights sleeping in the yard outside Theresa’s bedroom window that her parents have considered calling Child Protective Services. But in the morning, they just give him breakfast, pretending he’s only dropped over. Daisy, an eight-year-old cousin, arrives from Queens Village to stay with Theresa for a few weeks, bringing a suitcase full of brand-new and ill-fitting outfits and one very special pair of impractical shoes. Theresa takes Daisy up to the attic, where her own parents have preserved all of her childhood clothes. As they pick out a few things for Daisy to wear, Theresa lays claim to the memory of a prior existence. “’You don’t remember God?’” Theresa asks. “’Or heaven? Or the angels? Or the other children waiting to be born?’” When Daisy demurs, Theresa goes on to insist that she has always remembered the name of a brother of hers who had died before she was born. “Clearly, I said, my brother and I had met, and exchanged names, sometime between his birth and mine.”
Theresa takes Daisy on her rounds, walking dogs and picking up Flora, the toddler daughter of an elderly artist and his beautiful, vulgar wife. Early in the novel, Flora’s mother takes off for the city, leaving Flora in the hands of a jealous French maid who sets her out on the porch every morning strapped in a stroller, a bottle of Hawaiian Punch hanging out of her mouth. Theresa cares tenderly for Flora, but she also attracts the attention of Flora’s father, who spends most of his days in his art studio drinking. Other men leer at Theresa as she minds their children on the beach or by the pool.
There were things in this book that had never occurred to me, and things in which I immediately saw myself. In the mornings, Theresa eats peaches on the front porch while she finishes her book, rinsing her hands and mouth with dew. A lover of Shakespeare, she nicknames a pair of twins Cobweb and Peaseblossom, and she invites Daisy to do fanciful things that are not done at home. Eat the center out of your English muffin with jelly, she tells her, and then wear it like a ring so you can nibble it later. When a dog takes it from her in one bite, the day is sealed in her memory, along with its heat and freedom and promise. Theresa knows in her heart that something is desperately wrong with Daisy. But if she tells anyone, Daisy will have to go home.
The elderly artist, meanwhile, wonders whether he has made anything that will last. Most of his work is ugly and abstract, but three beautiful mother-and-child drawings hang above Flora’s crib—drawings that belie the neglect of the mother, the cupidity of the father.
I glanced at the three sketches in their gold frames and considered what their worth might be, when they had been claimed by the future and all that was pretty and charming about them was transformed by all that had intervened—the infant grown into a troubled woman, the mother never returned, the father and all his efforts turned to dust. But then, I supposed, with more time, all that would be forgotten as well, and they would once again be charming and pretty portraits of a mother and child—not a biography, as Macduff might have said, but a novel.
I found I preferred modern art, pictures of nothing, after all.
This may sound a bit jaded, but perhaps it is only the speech of a prescient young woman who has seen through a weak older man. Near the end of Daisy’s visit, Theresa sees Daisy “carrying [a] gaudy kite on her back to keep the wind from bending it. A modern-art version, it seemed to me, of angel wings.” She is not the only one who comes to love Daisy on her short visit; long after the cataclysm at the end of the book, Petey Moran brings a box full of baby rabbits over to Theresa’s house.
I knew without asking that this was Petey’s gift, indistinguishable as it was from a burden. Petey, who always used to ask, challenging and pleading at the same time, ‘Do you like me? Do you like my family?’ Who had wept with his fists tight. Who would be plagued all his life by anger and affection, by gifts gone awry, by the irreconcilable difference between what he got and what he longed for—by the inevitable, insufferable loss buried like a dark jewel at the heart of every act of love.
Like Child of my Heart, J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country captures the fleeting essence of a long-ago watershed summer. I don’t know if Carr is considered a religious writer; but in this 1980 novel, he takes up questions of faith, sectarianism, and the power of art to bring us closer to the Divine. As Michael Holroyd puts it in his introduction, “A Month in the Country is a novel of resurrection.”
Shortly after the Great War, Tom Birkin, an art restorer and veteran with a severe facial tic, sets up residence in the belfry of a church in the village of Oxgodby, in Yorkshire. He has been hired by the vicar, John Keach, to uncover a medieval mosaic of the Last Judgment. A local widow has left a bequest to the church on two conditions: 1) restore the mosaic, and 2) find the grave of an ancestor of hers who was buried outside of consecrated ground. A man named Moon, who is employed for this second purpose, is secretly mapping out the foundational remains of an ancient basilica with the intention of publishing his findings—though he will get around to locating the ancestor eventually. He lives in a tent on the property and befriends Birkin as a fellow veteran of the war.
Tom’s work attracts frequent observers, including the fourteen-year-old daughter of Mr. Ellerbeck, the stationmaster. Soon, Tom is invited to tea at the Ellerbeck home on Sunday afternoons; he finds himself recruited as an umpire for cricket and as an assistant at Sunday school. Mr. Ellerbeck doubles as a Wesleyan preacher, and once, when he is expected to visit three far-flung churches in a single day, he sends Tom Birkin himself as a substitute. This fraternization with the Wesleyans earns Tom no points with the Reverend Keach, whose beautiful wife Alice also visits Tom at his work.
Carr’s book deliberately recalls Thomas Hardy’s portrayal of life in the English countryside. Near the end of the summer, Tom joins a hay wagon ride—a “Sunday school treat” for the Wesleyans—that might have been lifted from the pages of Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
And so we clattered off, calling farewell to those disqualified by infirmity or alien beliefs from joining us, conscious (as they were) that we were part of the ancient cycle of the farming year and that our passing was token that the harvest was almost in.
Tom, whose own wife has left him, falls in love with Alice Keach, prompting the vicar to pay Tom what he is owed and dismiss him from the work. Tom counters that, if he is forced to leave now, he will tell the lawyers he was prevented from finishing, voiding the widow’s bequest. But while Tom’s love for Alice necessarily entails a denial of Keach as a man, the vicar has the last word.
The English are not a deeply religious people. … They do not need me. I come in useful at baptisms, weddings, funerals. Chiefly funerals—they employ me as a removal contractor to see them safely flitted into their last house. … But I am embarrassing you, Mr. Birkin,’ he said. ‘You too have no need for me. You have come back from a place where you have seen things beyond belief, things which you cannot talk of yet can’t forget, but things which are at the heart of religion.
Tom has numerous meaningful encounters in Oxgodby, but there’s an argument to be made that the key relationship in the book is between Tom and the unknown artist who created the mural. “Who was he? I couldn’t even name him. People don’t seem to understand those far-off folk. They simply weren’t us. Our idea of personal fame was alien to them.” But here is Tom, packing to leave and mourning the end of the summer:
Last of all, I gazed beyond the scaffolding to the great painting half hidden in the shadows. Truthfully, I felt nothing much. …Then (and I can’t explain it) the numbness went and I knew that, whatever else had befallen me during those few weeks in the country, I had lived with a very great artist, my secret sharer of the long hours I’d labored in the half-light above the arch.
Tom might not describe this as a religious experience, but what else could it be? He is attracted, even transformed, by the good, the true, and the beautiful–and by the end of a marvelous watershed summer.
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 