The Sisters From Hardscrabble Bay by Beverly Jensen

Good morning, I want to talk to you this morning about a wonderful little collection of stories by a woman who died years before they were published. Thanks to the perseverance of her husband and the endorsement of a number of well-known writers, the stories were finally published in 2010 under the title, The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay.

Beverly Jensen was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2002 and died in 2003. She told her husband, Jay Silverman, that she felt she had been given writing talents but had not used them. In fact, over a period of sixteen years, between her part time office job and the raising of her two daughters, she had written a number of stories about her mother, Idella, and her aunt Avis. She had written them for herself, but after her diagnosis, she made copies for her two teenaged children and her three sisters.

With the help of Elizabeth Strout, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Russo and finally Stephen King, Jay Silverman managed to get the stories published. This little book is as much a tribute to his love and dedication as it is a celebration of Jensen’s story-telling talents.

The stories begin in 1916, when Idella is eight and Avis almost six. The setting is New Brunswick, Canada on a tiny farm on impossibly rocky soil near the sea. Their father had built it with help from his brother. “He put it on the high cliff overlooking the bay that pounded and raged beneath them. Mother had wanted it there…All the houses were slanted and gray and sparse-looking, sticking up out of the flat land like rotten teeth.”

The two girls share the little house and farm with their parents and one older brother, Dalton, their father insisting that he literally has to push the potatoes up out of the ground, and that the rocks multiply over night no matter how much time he spends clearing them. Already a hardscrabble life, when their mother dies after giving birth to yet another child, the two little girls are left to cook and clean for their father and older brother, the new baby sent off to live with relatives.

The two older girls get some respite from the almost impossibly hard life on the farm when they are eventually sent to live on another relative’s New England farm, a time during which they are able to attend school. But when they are still only eleven and thirteen, a hunting accident leaves their father bedridden for many months, and the girls have to return to New Brunswick.

Home. Back to the house and barn on top of the cliff overlooking the Bay Chaleur. What few trees there were about the house were all leaned over and bent from the cold, constant pressures of the winds that blew off the water. That’s how the people got, Idella thought, from living up there their whole lives—bent over and gnarled and hard, rooted in one place. The wind worked on people the same as it did on trees. It howled and bit, especially in winter, and scraped away at you. There was nothing to do but buckle over and try to get where you were going, which was never very far—to the barn or the field or the buggy to New Bandon, two miles down the road.

In spite of the hard lives, the light and laughter that shine through these stories as the two sisters travel back and forth between Canada and New England is enchanting. Tough girls who have learned from their own father and the men they grow up around just how mean and dangerous men can be, they nevertheless manage to carve out lives for themselves and to tame the men whom they allow to join them on their journeys.

I can only imagine how many times Beverly Jensen listened to her mother, Idella, telling stories about her beautiful sister Avis and the wild times they had. Each retelling planting some new seed in her daughter’s mind, providing some delicious new detail about the lives of these sisters welded together by struggle, but also by daring and a thirst for more life, for a different life.

While the men are hard working, hard drinking, and difficult to live with, the portraits   painted by Jensen and derived from her mother’s stories are also forgiving and compassionate. The girls’ father sends them off to New England not because he wants to be free of them, but because he realizes that life without their mother is impossibly hard; the love he shows for his lost wife is luminescent. And he calls them back home only because he is bedridden and cannot keep the house and farm going without them. He sees the fear he inspires in his own daughters, but simply cannot be other than he is.

These days he knew that the sound of his boots was a different thing. There was some poor French girl on hand to hear them. Or Idella and Avis, poor mutts, in there trying to scrape something together for his supper. He scared them all. He couldn’t help himself. It was seeing them scurry around the table trying to put food out, afraid to look at him for fear he’d light into them, that brought it on—the temper, the hurt, the anger at the goddamned world that had taken Emma away and left him alone. It wasn’t them he’d be mad at. But it was them that got the brunt.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking of the hardscrabble lives these girls led, but what I came away with as a reader was the joy they shared, the strength they manifested and expected of themselves and of each other. These stories of ordinary people carving out lives in what can only be called dire circumstances are uplifting and somehow serve as social-political commentary as certainly as if they had been written as manifestos. I recommend them to you wholeheartedly. If you like Elizabeth Strout and Alice Munro, you will like Beverly Jensen.

Love Child by Sheila Kohler

Try to imagine yourself at seventeen, madly in love with a boy not much older than you, but knowing that because he is Jewish, and you the daughter of a not wealthy but nevertheless haughty, authoritarian father, you will never be able to openly date or marry your boy. The time is 1925, the place South Africa, and the young woman with the rather odd name of Bill is poised to grasp her freedom and elope. This is the setting for Sheila Kohler’s lovely but sad novel Love Child.

The reader is first introduced to Bill thirty years later when she is a very rich widow, living alone with her trusted servant and looking back over her life. The novel then jumps back and forth between Bill’s life in 1925, 1935, and the present, 1956. The elopement with her young man Isaac ends sadly and abruptly. She has made the mistake of seeking temporary shelter and a witness to their marriage by driving with Isaac to Johannesburg where her three much loved aunts live. Certain that the aunts will understand her deep love for Isaac and help the young couple in whatever ways they can, she discovers instead that their first allegiance is to Bill’s father, their brother; without Bill’s knowledge, her parents are summoned, and when they arrive, they quickly scare off the young man with threats of calling in the law. The marriage is annulled, and Bill is quite literally left prisoner with the three aunts. The one night consummation of their marriage leaves Bill not only an unwilling prisoner but also pregnant. The three aunts have been left the house in which they live and a very modest inheritance on the condition that they never marry, and now the aunts find themselves the unwilling captors of their renegade niece.

She gathered she was a source of embarrassment, a perpetual reminder of what they had forgone. She only added a burden to their already strained circumstances, not only the risk of scandal and shame but also, quite simply, another mouth to feed. The aunts came to regard her, she understood, as a daily affront to all they considered sacred: honor, dignity, and pride, to their upright and cloistered way of life. She was nothing but trouble, trouble brought on them by her thoughtlessness, her lack of control, a weakness of will, her moral deficiency.

Bill is held prisoner until she has her girl-child, and then without her realizing quite what is happening, the infant is whisked away the very night she is born and sold to a woman who runs an illegal adoption service. But Bill learns the details of this transaction thirty years later, and only then begins a search for her baby, her love-child.

Kohler is such a skillful storyteller that most readers will, I think, be captivated by the story and only slowly come to see that this is really a book about the subordination of women. Over time, Bill comes to see that her now hated aunts are as much victims of male ownership as Bill and her sisters are, and ten years later, when Bill takes the job of companion to a rich woman who is rather mysteriously ill and incapacitated, she comes to understand that it is not only poor women who are owned and controlled by men. Helen, the woman whom she is hired to look after, is the beautiful wife of a jealous and controlling husband. It takes Bill months to come to realize that Helen sees Bill not as a needed companion, but as a jailer and spy. The husband calls Bill to his study and entrusts her with the keys to house, the larder, the liquor cabinet, not because his wife is too frail to oversee her house and servants, but because he needs to control her in every way. Helen, despondent to the point of being suicidal, must not be allowed to drink alcohol, must not venture out on her own. What Bill first sees as protective love for his fragile wife, she learns soon enough to see as suffocating control.

“What’s the point of it all?” Helen asked at last. She said her whole body ached as if she had the flu. “If you knew what it was like to wake each morning and find yourself there with the same dull ache,” she said despairingly. She went on talking of the absurdity of her life, the pointlessness of her existence, with all these servants, who did everything for her. She said nothing appealed to her. What purpose would it serve: It all seemed senseless.

Bill comes to hate her role as jailer, and decides as far as possible to give Helen her freedom. But she understands all too well that she must be discreet in her granting of freedom, that she will simply be replaced by a new keeper if the husband is made aware of the conspiracy of the women in his house. Not only Bill, but her sisters, her brother, her entire family have become dependent on the money that Bill brings in from her job as companion.

As she comes to trust Bill more and more, Helen reveals how she was wooed and won by her rich husband, Mark. Helen has a son from a previous marriage; her husband died suddenly leaving her with a small boy “and a mountain of debt.” Although she had been a musical prodigy as a child, she was not talented enough to be a concert pianist. She had written some, even published, but is not even skilled enough as a typist to get a secretarial job. Mark rescues her, takes care of her son (though insisting that the son be sent off to boarding school), but the price is high.

He insisted on her being present whenever he needed her. She was never free to live her own life. She had to attend all his business dinners, his endless trips, to go to bed and to rise when he did…He insisted on sex at odd moments and in odd places…He would rip at her clothes, and thrust himself into her from behind like a wild beast…Afterward, she would get into the bath and scrub at her skin until it was pink, to get rid of his smell, his lingering presence, her shame.

Over time, Mark draws Bill into a kind of ménage a trois; she stays both because she and her family have become dependent on her income, and because she understands that she can help Helen only if she remains in her position. Eventually, as Mark comes to desire Bill more and more, demanding more and more liberties with her, they work out an odd and distorted agreement. Bill’s brother has counseled her to use Mark’s need and lust as leverage, to give him what he wants only in return for a stiff price. Although Helen remains in the house, she and her son still provided for, she grants Mark a divorce so that he can marry Bill and legitimize their relationship.

Bill also gives Mark what Helen could not—two sons who will carry on his name. When he, too, dies rather young and unexpectedly, Bill is left a very rich woman. Loveless but wealthy, her two sons away at school and distant from her both in interests and temperament, Bill is consumed by memories of that early and hopeless love for Isaac and of the love-child who was snatched from her.

Bill thinks again with sorrow of the important role of all the women in her life: the three maiden aunts, Gladys, her sisters, her mother, and Helen, of the secrets they have hidden, the silences they have kept, the lies they have told.

If you want to discover how she finally takes her revenge on her husband, her father, all the power-hungry men in her life, you’ll have to read the book.

The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell

It always feels a bit like magic to be swept away by a new author, caught up in the lives of fictional characters so thoroughly that they seem in many ways more real than the folks one is dealing with everyday. Maggie O’Farrell is a writer of extraordinary gifts, and although her 2010 novel, The Hand That First Held Mine, is the first book of hers that I’ve read, I intend to read everything she has written or will write. Indeed, I am now almost finished with an earlier novel of hers, and as impressed as I was with the book I’m discussing today.

This is really two very separate stories of women who live about a half century apart. We meet Alexandra Sinclair in the mid 1950s when she is twenty-one and just as her life is about to change forever along with her name. She is discovered by Innes Kent, thirty-four, an art collector and editor of a small art magazine, as she lies reading in her backyard in a small town in England. The oldest of several children, she feels constricted, claustrophobic, and somehow in limbo as she waits for her real life to begin. Turning her gaze from the overcrowded house she has grown up in, “She keeps only the sea in her sights. She has had a creeping fear of late that what she wants most—for her life to begin, to take on some meaning, to turn from blurred monochrome into glorious technicolour—may pass her by. That she might not recognize it if it comes her way, may fail to grasp for it.”

Within moments of this thought, Innes stumbles onto her; his car has broken down on a country lane, and while seeking help—a garage or at least a telephone—he spies the beautiful Alexandra. And although their conversation is soon interrupted by her suspicious mother, before he leaves the small town, Innes manages to slip her a note with his London phone number on it and a suggestion for a new name. Not Sandra, the shortened form of her given name adopted by her family although hated by her, but Lexie, a name more in keeping with the bright and energetic journalist and lover of Innes that she is about to become.

Next on stage, fifty years or so later, we meet Elina Vilkuna, a talented young artist who has nearly died just four days earlier while giving birth to a son via Cesarean section. After these two introductions, the novel jumps back and forth between the two women and the men in their lives. While the reader has some inkling that the two lives will in some way intersect eventually, part of the intrigue of the novel is trying to unravel the mystery that connects the two women. Both women are bright, both think primarily of their careers, their quests for meaning, and both find men (on the whole) to be a distraction from those quests rather than a fulfillment.

One thing that unites the women is that both find themselves pregnant without having chosen that course, and both find themselves not only unprepared for motherhood, but overwhelmed by it. Ted, the father of Elina’s son, is also thunderstruck by the birth of his son, but not so much by the burdens of fatherhood as by strange, unbidden memories that begin to surface—memories that seem to have nothing to do with the story of his life as presented by his parents, and indeed, some of which seem even to contradict that story. Elina finds herself dealing not only with her own weakened condition and a new baby, but with a psychologically fragile and oddly distant mate.

This novel is enchanting in so many ways; the language is rich and painterly. The descriptions of London life in the 50s and early 60s, and especially of the painters who congregated there, are fascinating. But while there are many threads in the novel, for me it is primarily the intensity of the two female lead characters and their reactions to motherhood that leave a lasting impression.

No doubt parenting profoundly alters the lives of both female and male parents, but I find that I can scarcely even imagine what it must be like for women, especially for women who never see motherhood as even a goal, let alone the goal, of their lives. O’Farrells descriptions of the early days of mothering are frightening, sometimes horrific, but also spellbinding. She talks about the special form of blinding love that some mothers have for their offspring so clearly that even I, an old and quite ignorant man, can grasp something of its ineffable significance. When Ted’s father asks Elina about how she is finding the whole baby thing, she wonders how to reply.

‘Well’ She considers what to say. Should she mention the nights spent awake, the number of times she must wash her hands in a day, the endless drying and folding of tiny clothes, nappies, wipes, the scar tissue across her abdomen, crooked and leering, the utter loneliness of it all, the hours she spends kneeling on the floor, a rattle or a bell or a fabric block in her hands, that she sometimes gets the urge to stop older women in the street and say, how did you do it, how did you live through it? Or she could mention that she had been unprepared for this fierce spring in her, this feeling that isn’t covered by the word ‘love’, which is far too small for it, that sometimes she thinks she might faint with the urgency of her feeling for him, that sometimes she misses him desperately even when he is right there, that it’s like a form of madness, of possession, that often she has to creep into the room when he has fallen asleep just to look at him, to check, to whisper to him. But instead, she says, ‘Fine. Good, thanks’

Lexie and Elina, both passionate about what they do, both quite content being childless, and yet both metamorphosed by motherhood. I love both characters, wish that I could know them. I have not mentioned, of course, the mystery that unties them, nor do I intend to. Suffice it to say that it is not an artificial hook to keep the reader interested. The mystery and its solution are integral to the story and to its worth. I hope you will read the book and solve the mystery for yourself.