The Distinguished Guest

Chapter 1

In 1982, when she was seventy-two years old, Lily Roberts Maynard published her first book. It was put out by Tabor Press, a small feminist publishing house in Chicago. Tabor Press was named for and funded by the estate of Judith Tabor, whose husband had made a fortune in refrigerated transport vehicles. Though their names, Judith and Gabriel Tabor, appeared linked on plaques here and there in Chicago—in public libraries and museums and hospital wings—Tabor Press had been Judith Tabor’s own project, endowed by her after her husband’s death, and run exclusively by women.

The first printing of Lily Maynard’s book was only five hundred copies, but they were beautiful books, carefully designed and produced, with marbled endpapers, and a woodcut reproduced at the start of each chapter, a church with a narrow spire. Lily loved to hold her book, loved to turn the thick, cream-colored pages slowly, to read her own words, so transformed by the authority—the heaviness, as she felt it—of print, that she was often startled by them, by their power. The book was called The Integrationist: A Spiritual Memoir.

Tabor Press was at that time run by a committee of four women who rotated being chair. As it happened, the woman in charge of the watch on which Lily Maynard’s book was published, a thin, energetic person named Betsy Leaming, was also the person in the house most interested in commercial success, and the only one who understood anything about publicity. She sent Lily’s book, with a cover letter, to the editors of women’s pages for a number of major newspapers in the Midwest. The letter summarized Lily’s life, quickly: the cloistered, wealthy Minneapolis background, her forced removal from college by her father after she voted for Roosevelt in the 1932 election, her marriage and transformed life in Chicago with Paul Maynard, a radical young Protestant minister called to an inner-city church. It told of their bitter struggle and eventual divorce over religious and ideological issues, centering on integration and the black power movement; and then, in Lily’s own words, the slow learning about what was left. The letter laid out some of the various angles an interviewer might take with this material. Perhaps best of all, it enclosed a photograph of Lily with her pure-white hair sculpted back into a bun, and the piercing dark eyes. She had been a remarkably handsome younger woman in her unsmiling, sober way, but age had softened her face to a melancholy and gentler beauty.

Lily was a good interview, it turned out, by turns elegant and cantankerous. Quotable. She discovered she liked to talk. She liked the sense of public weight her opinions began to acquire, and this made her yet more quotable. Often as she sat back and made a pronouncement, a nearly mischievous smile would lighten her somber face. Speaking about the appeal Saul Alinsky’s radical brand of community organizing held for the Protestant leaders in her Chicago neighborhood, she shook her head and sighed: Those old church boys were just tired of being thought of as do-gooders. The idea of hanging around with tough guys appealed to them. Alinsky restored their sense of masculinity. On the radicalism of the sixties: It was mostly a call for street theater, a cheap yearning for more drama in political and public life. Everyone let himself forget that the processes of true change are always long and slow and effortful, and probably for the most part pretty boring.

Orders picked up and Tabor went to press again. Betsy Leaming followed her early letter with a copy of an interview with Lily in the Tribune. There were glowing and positive reviews. There began to be other interviews and more orders. Tabor found itself unable to keep up with the demand. Eventually they sold the contract to a much larger house in New York, which, in essence, published the book anew. This time there were reviews in the daily and Sunday New York Times. Suddenly Lily was invited to read at colleges, to lecture at feminist conventions, to speak to women’s church groups. The galleys of other writers’ books thunked through her mail slot regularly, with requests for any comments she might have. There were more interviews, and she was featured prominently in an uplifting article in Newsweek on aging in America. She’d become a public personage.

Her children were bemused by the transformation, by encountering their mother, who’d always been formidable and remote, more intimately in her work and in interviews than they’d known her themselves in what they laughingly began to call real life.

Clary wrote to her brother, Alan: I have to confess to you some bitterness at Mother’s success, at her parlaying (oh, oh! here comes the accusation) our whole family’s misery into her own triumph. Her spiritual triumph, at that. And oddly, I resent too, the skill with which it’s been done, the points she gets for that.

Though Alan had his own differences with his mother, he thought of himself as more forgiving of her public achievement, and of her transformation. This in spite of the fact that it was he of the three children who had perhaps suffered most on account of his mother’s spiritual crisis. He was the youngest in the family, five years younger than the middle child, Clary, and he was the one who lived alone with Lily after his parents’ marriage ended, since the two girls had already left for college. He could still remember the silent dinners with Lily before he escaped to his room to do his homework—the steady, and to him revolting, sound of his mother’s chewing and swallowing sharpening his awareness of her physical being. Whenever he heard her footsteps pass in the hallway, he stopped still in the fear that she might knock on his door, might want to talk to him.

But Alan was happily married now. He had put his own uncomfortable teenage years behind him. When he opened the Times Book Review and, for the first time without anticipating it, encountered his mother’s startled and imperious gaze across space and time, he felt safe.

What Rebecca might feel, no one knew. She’d disappeared in 1971 when a bomb she was helping to build was accidentally detonated. Two of her friends had died in the explosion, and the FBI had declared her complicit in their deaths. The last time Clary and Alan had heard from her was in 1989. Clary had stood in her sunny gravel driveway in California under the branching live oak and opened an envelope with no return address, postmarked Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Inside there was an old-fashioned, thick postcard with scalloped edges, stamped in Guatemala. On its front was a faded travel photo of a town square dominated by an ornate white church. On the other side, in cramped handwriting, Rebecca expressed the hope that Clary and her children were well, that Alan was happy. She said she had work to do that she felt was important, and that her life was full of shared sacrifice and deep rewards. Clary had wept reading the card on the telephone to Alan. She remembered her so clearly, she said: all the times Rebecca had let Clary come into bed with her and they’d whispered and laughed about boys, about teachers, about their mother. The window in the basement that Rebecca left unlocked to climb in and out of after her curfew. Their excursions together downtown on the IC, when they’d pretend to be Italian, or German, making an inflected vocabulary out of the names of artists and foods: Caravaggio prego, tintoretto manicotti pesto olio olivo. Si, si. In German they used philosophers, guttural gibberish.

In her book, Lily had said that one of the hardest things for her about Rebecca’s disappearance was the way it brought back to her her conflict with her husband—Paul—about the role of confrontation and violence in changing the world. Under Rebecca’s photograph in the book, the caption read, Rebecca at age eighteen, before I lost her. It was one of the things Clary hated most about the book, this implicit claim by her mother ever to have had her sister.

Alan and Gaby live on the bank of a river. In the field alongside their house they have planted young apple trees—Duchess, Gravenstein, Yellow Newton, Jonathan. It is Gaby’s idea that one day these trees will resemble the gnarled fruit trees she remembers from the countryside near her grandmother’s house in France. The little leafy sticks will thicken and bend, and she will make cider and pies with their fruit. She and Alan will grow old watching their grandchildren play among them. She is comfortable thinking of her life in these terms.

Tonight they have friends over for dinner, a meal Gaby has prepared with care and skill. On the round table, among the guttering candles and the odd, brightly colored crumpled napkins, sit their thick white dishes with the remaining crumbs of a lemon tart they’ve eaten for dessert. They have all had a lot to drink by now, and they are talking animatedly about the craziness in their families. When Alan jumped into this conversation—and he jumped in eagerly—he was sure no one could compete with him: the divorced parents, the chilly, famous mother, the new-age sister in California, the vanished one in Central America. But he was wrong; Tim Gamer has a sister in jail for manslaughter, Melanie Mercer a father who went out for a half-gallon of milk and never came back. There’s a brother who believes the CIA can read his thoughts, another who’s a Hare Krishna, another who’s been married six times. They laugh harder with each additional detail in the candlelight, it all seems so unbelievable. Tears sparkle in their eyes.

"These are all such American stories," Gaby says with a wonderment only Alan hears as carrying judgment.

Before he can feel defensive, Tim says, You’re absolutely right. There’s nothing to be ashamed of here. It’s the American way. They laugh.

If they chose to look up now from the cluttered table, from the circle of familiar faces in the yellow, warm light, they might see around them through the reflection of the dinner table in the glass walls of the house, the toss of dark trees, the moon’s slow slide over the opposite bank of the river. Alan does this. He relaxes and feels himself lapse momentarily into a state he’s familiar with: he seems to be floating away from this group of his closest friends—from his dearest friend, his wife. He seems to be watching them all from slightly above, watching them in the setting he has imagined and created for them, thinking of minor adjustments he might like to make.

Alan designed this house. He is an architect, and he teaches design at a small arts college in Massachusetts. The house stands on the bank of one of the many rivers that feed into Buzzard’s Bay in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. It won a small award two years before and was featured in a design magazine. He and Gaby have lived in it for six years, though for a decade before that, while they lived in awkward rented places and then a cramped house they bought in the village nearby, they spoke of the house as though it were already a reality, as though it existed somewhere else and it was only a matter of getting there. My God, I can’t wait to get into my own kitchen and have a little counter space, Gaby would say. Or a place for the children to put their sports equipment. Or a guest suite for when her mother or sister came from France and stayed.

And yet, now that they are here, Alan finds himself still thinking of this as temporary. He still imagines the improvements that could be made, he still drifts away, as he is doing now, and corrects this or that aspect of the design for things he didn’t foresee or take into account. He still imagines that something is missing. Where we live now, he sometimes begins in talking about the house. Recently Gaby has noticed this, has taken to correcting him: "Where we live, Alan, if it pleases you."

Perhaps it’s a mistake, he thinks abruptly, for an architect ever to build his own house.

Gaby has begun to talk now, in her deep, unevenly accented voice, about Clara, about his sister Clary, adding the details of her life—her many divorces and remarriages and children by different fathers, her belief in past lives—to the list of family eccentricities. How she and Alan joke that she has, in fact, so many versions of her own earthly life, it’s no wonder she believes there might be even more.

Alan is thinking of his life, his one life here, where he lives now. The house he has made, the woman he has married. He watches Gaby’s mobile, animated face, the square, strong hands speaking too, accompanying her story. Gaby is a cook, she has her own gourmet shop and catering business in the expensive little village nearby. At home they eat well, they drink good wines. Their children, although they are in college now and graduate school, like to come back to visit. Often they are present at an evening like this, helping with the meal, talking comfortably with people twice their age and more.

His friends are laughing again now as Gaby finishes. Laughing at Clary, at poor beautiful Clary who has used such gaudy, foolish tricks to hold herself together, to keep herself going: crystals, past lives, psychics. The stepwise movement through drugs, then vegetarianism, then analysis, then drink, and now the recovery movement. He feels a pang of loyalty to her.

Of course, he says, Clary’d have her own riff on us, I suppose.

Oh come on, Wade London says. You lead exemplary lives. Irreproachable.

No, no. Much could be made of certain elements here.

Gaby’s gaze is steady on him, wary. She knows she shouldn’t have talked about Clary that way. He’s too protective of her.

A certain, perhaps . . . yuppie? obsessiveness about detail. Do you know how long it took me, for example, to choose these knobs? He gestures behind himself at a low storage wall of cherry, its doors and drawers studded with square brass knobs. Or Gaby to plan this meal? To cook it?

"It was a great meal, Melanie offers. That couscous, yikes. And the shrimp!" Gaby is pleased, even if it is a dutiful comment. She curtsies her head at Melanie, who is slender and nervous, and always the conciliator.

Fine. I agree, says Alan. But that’s what we’re about, to my sister. Appetites and greed. Comfort. Materialism.

Gaby’s face lights in delighted recognition. "Oh Alan, that’s not Clara talking. That’s your mother." She has learned to say this exactly as midwestern Americans do, giving it the doubled or tripled consonant at the end, and everyone laughs with her, even, after a beat, Alan. Pronounced this way, the word itself becomes a kind of joke.

And then Wade says, "I saw that story of hers a couple of months ago in The Atlantic. I liked it, actually."

Alan nods. Stories are what Lily turned to after the memoir. "After all, you can’t do two of them," she’d said. She’s published perhaps ten or twelve stories. Several in Ms, three or four in little magazines, and within the last few years, two in The Atlantic, one in The New Yorker. They’re fiction, but everything in them, even the most alien details, seems as familiar as toothache to Lily’s children. (Of course I use my life, Lily had said in the one interview Alan had read. What else do I have? Waspish, the interviewer had called her. Actually, she’d written, Alternately waspish and flirtatious. That was a side Alan knew less well.)

What had made Lily turn to fiction? I was fed up with being so damned discreet, she told the interviewer. And it was true that in the stories, more disturbing, more psychologically violent things happened, as though Lily were acknowledging the dangerous emotions that had been held in check in her life and only hinted at in her memoir. In one, a middle-aged woman flees her husband and allows herself to be used by a younger man she meets at a cheap resort to reinvigorate his own failing marriage. In another, an older woman discovers, years after the event, that a beloved, difficult son—a radical—killed, she believed, while building a bomb, was instead present by coincidence when it went off, an accidental victim only, drunk and drugged and asleep in a corner of the room. In yet another, a young, idealistic minister of an inner-city church is duped and exploited in an outreach to the gangs around him, the church transformed to a warehouse for guns and drugs—but he’s so thrilled by the romantic turn his life has taken, so moved by the rhetoric of action and violence, that he consents even to this.

Still, neither Alan nor Clary had thought the memoir could have been called discreet. Lily had written:

In those summer Sundays of our new marriage, I could sometimes experience the hour or so in church as a kind of drug, a near-aphrodisiac really. All my senses were dilated by it, by the gradual and powerful accumulation of layers of physical awareness combined with my own spiritual hunger, my greed, really. The Midwest heat outside was always intense by eleven o’clock, and the dark little church was cool and damp by contrast. When you entered the doors, there was a long, dizzying moment of welcome blindness, accompanied, for me, by a near-sexual weakening in my legs. The air inside smelled deliciously of mildew, a mushroomy, earthy odor that changed slowly as the space filled up with people. The odor of soap was added first, and talc, then perfume, and finally, as the service wore on, a basic but not unpleasant smell of sweat. And, of course, there was always, floating above them all, the erotic smell of the flowers. Summer flowers, plucked from their gardens by the church ladies on this committee.

I always arrived early because I couldn’t bear the idea of the eyes of the congregation on me as I walked to my place alone. The young minister’s new wife: it was how I thought of myself too. I thought of our sexual delight in each other as being visible in my every gesture, even in my carriage, and I know I myself would have stared with prurient curiosity. Instead I always tried to be there ahead of the congregation. Except of course for the odd old woman or two, up since dawn, no doubt, chores long since accomplished, and in need of a way to fill the time. We all dipped our heads—our hats, I should say—at each other. (Of course we all wore hats, and gloves too, which we hoped matched our shoes, or went with our hats somehow.) When I bowed my head to pray after I sat down, I was aware of the brim of my hat—it was a wide-brimmed hat that first summer of my marriage, a beautiful hat I’d bought to make my young husband love me more—shutting the world out, blocking my view of these ladies. The hat was straw, and it had a faint straw smell, a clean, farm odor.

The music played by the plump, elderly organist during this interval of sitting was like an odor too: never sharply defined, always meandering, soothing. Occasionally you could hear through it the leaky wheeze of air from the old pump-organ. It made me catch my breath too when I heard it, it made my sleepy pulse blossom irregularly.

Behind me, I could hear the room slowly filling up, the footsteps, the whispered greetings. And then there was the sudden thump! thump! thump! of the stops being thrown open, the music would peal out, and Paul would enter, coming down the aisle like a bride. But more determined, more sure of himself by far than I’d been on the day of our wedding, than any bride ever was. He would disappear around the side of the pulpit, and then appear again in it, above the flowers, transformed by his black robe, his gravity, and magnificent to me: my messenger from God, my bridegroom. I felt in danger of weeping as I lifted my eyes to look at him.

We had stood by now. Everywhere in the room was the constant rustling sound of shifting feet, of moving flesh, of clothing redraping—the sound people make simply standing still. The Paul looming above us was and was not my Paul. His face was and was not the face I’d studied from almost the same angle as he rose above me the night before, his lips as they began to speak were and were not the lips that had sought mine. His voice was and was not the voice that had cried out my name then, over and over. Let us pray, he would say, and I would become, at his command, a prayer.

There were two baptisms that summer, and both times, watching the placid baby lie across my husband’s arm, the yards of sheer white cloth, hemstitched or embroidered, spilling down over the yards of dull black of Paul’s robe, looking at his face bent over the child’s, pronouncing the holy words—his wet fingertips moving over the child’s egg-shell skull, blessing it—I experienced the purest envy. I was able to conjure it away partially by reassuring myself that we would have a child too, that it too would lie just this way in Paul’s safe arms as he bent over it. Yet I knew I wasn’t confronting the heart of my feeling, which was that. I wanted somehow, too, to be that child, to lie just that still in his arms, to have him hold me as I lay open before him and consecrate me in the name of the Lord.

Could this be called discretion?

Of course, it wasn’t so much for passages like these that Tabor Press was drawn to the book, or to Lily. It was rather the later passages, where she moved away from her husband and from the notion of a male, commanding God with what seemed in the book a slow but inevitable, triumphal turn.

(What Alan remembers of that time are the anguished, intense talks between his parents that trailed off at his appearance, the excruciating family meeting called to explain the separation, and after that, for what seemed like years, the sound of weeping from behind closed doors. He was tormented after his father left by his sense of solitary responsibility for Lily. Hearing her weep, he knew he should knock and offer comfort. She was, after all, his mother. She was, after all, human, and in pain. The one time he finally mustered the courage to do it, there was a long pause before the door was opened, a pause she clearly used to pull herself together. Because when she stood before him, she was composed, her reddened, swollen eyes the only giveaway. Yes Alan? she had said coolly, as though he had asked a question. Is there something you need?)

Now, at the table, they have moved on. They are arguing about an article in the same issue of The Atlantic as Lily’s story, an article that proposed a new basis for immigration laws, connected to maximum feasible populations which would be absolutely set for various areas of the country.

It’s ridiculous, Tim is saying. As long as we measure the health of our economy by housing starts, it just ain’t gonna happen that way.

"Is there such a thing as health without housing starts, without population growth?" his wife, Susan, asks.

It’s been done. Look at western Europe in the eighties.

Yes, Gaby says. She’s behind Alan, and he can’t see her. She’s getting glasses and bottles of brandy and liqueurs from the storage cabinet. France had it for many years.

But France is a mess now. And so is Sweden and all those socialist countries.

Well, and it’s partly immigration that did it, Gaby answers.

Oh horseshit, Gaby, Tim says. "They needed those workers to come from Africa and so forth, because no French people would do those jobs."

Yes, but they came and they came and they came, Gaby says. That is precisely my point.

She is angry, Alan can tell as she sets the glasses down just slightly too hard, and he is startled by this, as he often is by her politics as they apply to France. He doesn’t understand the line she draws—and he’s heard her father and brothers draw it too. They are repulsed by a character like Le Pen, by anything so openly racist, but they speak in a way no educated American would dream of speaking about the blacks and the foreigners among them—their laziness, their slack morals, their drugs, their smells, their peculiar food.

Here’s the thing, Melanie says quickly. No society should import people to do the dirty work. Ever. Not slaves. Not guest workers. It’s morally reprehensible. And it leads to big trouble. Like France, she says to Gaby. She smiles nervously. Like us. Instead there should be some mandatory, like, dirty-work service. Like the army, or the Peace Corps. But everyone should have to do a stint.

And how would you define dirty work? Wade asks. Who would define it?

Well, it’s obviously those jobs that go unfilled when there’s high employment. Service jobs. Micky D’s.

Housework! Susan says.

Alan looks again at Gaby. She is sitting in her place at the table. Her face has relaxed, she is smiling at Susan. The moment has gone by.

They begin to argue about the implementation of Melanie’s plan. Teenagers, they agree, should be the dirty-workers. They exchange a few stories about their teenagers, their children. They talk about the pear brandy Gaby has served. Alan is watching Gaby, feeling a sense of her difference, her Frenchness, which he isn’t conscious of most of the time.

And then he is thinking of the story Lily published in The Atlantic. A story about an elderly woman who had abandoned her husband and children in middle age to run off with an alcoholic painter. Now, old and alone and sensing her approaching death, she imagines the lives her children might have led. She calls information in the cities she thinks they might have landed in, and when there is someone with one of her children’s names, dials the number and listens without speaking. In each case, she is able to argue herself out of the possibility that it is her child whose voice she hears, and so—Alan felt, reading the story—is also able somehow, magically, to forestall her death another day.

Was it, in some sense, an apology for Lily’s own life? Was it her fictional speculation about the life his father might have led after the divorce? Was it only invention?

Alan couldn’t tell, and he’d felt the same sense of disquiet he felt whenever he read Lily’s work. More her fiction, he realizes now, than the memoir. (Although the stories have recently been published in a collection Lily had had sent to him—the enclosed card said, Compliments of the author and was signed, Mother—he hasn’t read it yet.)

The evening winds down, and when the first couple rises apologetically to go, the others get up too. They have busy days the next day, they have children, yards, boats, cars, tennis games, golf games to play—possessions and connections which need tending.

After the guests are gone, Alan comes outside to fetch the glasses they left on the deck. They had been sitting here earlier in the evening, watching the sun’s red deepen in the cirrused clouds in the western sky, and then the mosquitoes descended on them in a faintly whining cloud and they rose almost as one, slapping themselves and laughing, and fled inside.

The air now is cool and smells briny. The river makes