When a Person or Event Comes Along to Jolt or Appraise Me
All cues from the universe accepted here
I guess I’m a slow fulfiller of promises. I’m like the main character in Grace Paley’s story, “Wants,” who decides to return two library books she’s had checked out for eighteen years because she just noticed that morning that “the little sycamores the city had dreamily planted a couple of years before the kids were born had come that day to the prime of their lives.” The main character, after returning the books, checks them out again and congratulates herself for finally doing so: “[W]hen a person or an event comes along to jolt or appraise me, I can take some appropriate action, although I am better known for my hospitable remarks.” Yep, that’s me and probably all of us to some extent.
My original reason for writing this Substack was to chronicle the collecting and editing of the short stories of my mother, Elaine Gottlieb. An important writer in her day, my mother wrote fiction almost indistinguishable from memoir, which might be called autofiction today. My approach has not been simply to transcribe her stories, but to annotate them, footnoting the stories in an unacademic and hopefully personal and engaging way. Sometimes I directly engage/converse with her and sometimes with the reader. This collection, The Dance at the End of the War, has been slow going – as with all such projects, I’m too often bogged down by daily life and responsibilities, my own books, teaching, travel, and sometimes just goofing off. But the other night, I was introduced at dinner to an artist, Deborah Kruger, who, until recently owned and operated an artist residency on the shores of Lake Chapala in Ajijic, Mexico.
Ajijic was where, in 1946, my mother traveled alone to work on her novel, Darkling, and where she met and fell in love with Elliott Chess, a dashing writer and former fighter pilot in both World Wars, sixteen years her senior. When she left Mexico some months later, she had more than a novel on her hands, but also a pregnancy. Chess promised to follow but never did, and in 1947 my older sister Nola was born.
Mention of Ajijic was my version of Paley’s two sycamores. I took it as more than mere coincidence (regardless of whether it was coincidence) but as a sign from my mother to get off my duff and get back to her stories. After all, I had promised her before her death twenty years ago to collect them.
The next day after meeting Deborah, I devoted myself to transcribing my mother’s story, “Passage Through Stars,” which told of her time in Mexico with Elliott (renamed Claude in the story) and her subsequent pregnancy and abandonment by him. This story, in fact, had long been next in the queue for me.
Of course, you might expect me to say that this is a beautiful story, and if so, you would be correct. I think I would feel this way even if she were a stranger to me, but who knows? My father must have felt similarly as he published the story in his literary magazine, an arm of his publishing company, Noonday, back in 1962.
I’m reprinting it here for my paid subscribers in advance of the book’s eventual (I hope) publication. I hasten to add that I don’t mean to put off or offend non-paying subscribers at all! But paid subscribers should get something a little extra (don’t you think?), and I hope they will find this worth their attention. When the time comes, I hope the rest of you will be interested in reading the book in its entirety.
PASSAGE THROUGH STARS[1]
Now, in the hospital room, as the warmth of summer entered through the open window, she recalled that other summer, that fall a year ago. It seemed she could still place herself on the bus on that last day, the day they left the Mexican village and the Casa Unger, could still wonder as she had then: Can one say it never happened, merely close one’s eyes? . . . His eyes, beside her, were closed a few moments as the bus departed. How smoothly the village vanished. Behind her now the long afternoon-bright time by the lake, the blue, pink, silvery-woven waves, young coppery men in blue ploughing against a bluer sky. Yet she had felt a little relieved, like one who had been waiting too long. Nothing was as silent, as unconfiding as his face, which made no salute to her thoughts, did not seek out her anxiety. She was glad to see then and now separate, if only through the window of a bus. They were going away; something was happening.
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