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The World to Come: Stories - Softcover

Shepard, Jim

 
9780525432319: The World to Come: Stories
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0525432310 ISBN 13: 9780525432319
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Bursting with wicked humor and driven by an incomparable understanding of what it means to be human, The World to Come is the inimitable work of “the most ambitious story writer in America” (The Daily Beast).

Now a major motion picture

Shepard traverses both borders and centuries, seamlessly inhabiting a multitude of disparate men and women, and giving voice to visionaries, pioneers, and secret misfits—from nineteenth-century explorers departing on one of the Arctic’s most nightmarish expeditions to twentieth-century American military wives maintaining hope at home. Shepard’s characters confront everything from the emotional pitfalls of everyday life to colossal catastrophes, battling natural forces, the hazards of new technology, and their own implacable shortcomings.

"[Shepard] has a knack for compressing a novel’s worth of life into 30 or 40 pages.” —The Boston Globe

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jim Shepard is the author of four previous collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which won The Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award, and his short fiction has often been selected for Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. The most recent of his seven novels, The Book of Aron, won the PEN/New England Award, the Sophie Brody Medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Harold U. Ribalow Book Prize for Jewish literature, and the Clark Fiction Prize.  He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts with his wife, the writer Karen Shepard, his three children and three beagles, and he teaches at Williams College.

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Safety Tips for Living Alone

Twenty-­five years before Texas Tower no. 4 became one of the Air Force’s most unlikely achievements and most lethal peacetime disasters, marooning nineteen wives including Ellie Phelan, Betty Bakke, Edna Kovarick, and Jeannette Laino in their own little stewpots of grief and recrimination, the six-­year-­old Ellie thought of herself as forever stuck in Kansas: someone who would probably never see Chicago, never mind the Atlantic Ocean. Her grandfather wore his old brown duster whatever the weather, and when riding in her father’s convertible he always insisted on sitting in the dead center of the backseat with a hand on each side of the top to maintain the car’s balance on the road. This was back when the Army was running the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Navy exploring the Pole with Admiral Byrd, and the Air Corps still flying the mail in open-­cockpit biplanes. Gordon had reminded Ellie of her grandfather, and this had stirred her up and set her teeth on edge. She’d first noticed him when he’d stood on the Ferris wheel before the ride had begun, to make certain another family’s toddlers had been adequately strapped in, and when they were introduced she’d said, “Who made you the Ferris wheel monitor?” And then after he’d answered with a grin, “Isn’t it amazing how much guys like me pretend we know what we’re doing?” she’d been shocked by how exhilarating it was to catch a glimpse of someone who saw the world exactly as she did.

She’d always been moved and appalled by the confidence that men like her grandfather and Gordon projected when it came to getting a handle on their situations. But they each also had a way of responding to her as if she’d come around to the advantages of their caretaking, and she surprised herself by not saying no when after a few months of dating he asked her to marry him. That night she stood in her parents’ room in the dark, annoyed at her turmoil, and then switched on their bedside lamp and told them the news. And when they reacted with some of the same dismay she was feeling, she found herself more instead of less resolved to go ahead with the thing.

Her father had pointed out that as a service wife she might see exotic places and her share of excitement, but she’d also never be able to put down roots or buy a house, and year after year she’d get settled in one place and then have to disrupt her life and move to another. Her children would be dragged from school to school. Her husband would never earn what he could as a civilian. And most of all, the Air Force would always come first, and if that seemed too hard for her, then she’d better back out now.

When her mother came into her bedroom a few nights later and asked if she really understood what she was getting herself into, Ellie said that she did. And when her mother scoffed at the idea that her Ellie would ever know why she did anything, Ellie said, “At least I understand that about myself,” and her mother answered, “Well, what does that mean?” and Ellie said she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“Now that we see you’re not going to change your mind, we give up,” her father announced a few days later, and she chose not to respond to that, either. His final word on the subject was that he hoped this Gordon realized just how selfish she could be. She lived with her parents for two more months before the wedding and they exchanged maybe ten words in total. Her mother’s mother came for a visit and didn’t congratulate Ellie on her news but did mention that the military was no place for a woman because the men drank too much and their wives had to raise their children in the unhealthiest climates. She offered as an example the Philippines, that sinkhole of malaria and vice.

They were married by a justice of the peace in Gordon’s childhood home in Pasadena, and her parents came all the way out for the ceremony and left before the reception, their wedding present a card that read, “Take care and all best wishes, Mom.” The following week Gordon was posted to a base in upstate New York and Ellie spent a baffled month alone with his parents before taking the Air Force Wives’ Special across the country: Los Angeles to Boston for one hundred and forty dollars, with stops everywhere from Fresno to Providence and seats as hard as benches and twenty infants and children in her compartment alone. The women traveling solo helped out the most overwhelmed mothers, and Ellie spent the trip crawling under seats to retrieve crayons and shushing babies whose bottles were never the right temperature.

In upstate New York, the place Gordon found for her while they waited for quarters on the base was a rooming house that instead of fire escapes had ropes coiled beneath the bedroom windows. She had only a room to herself, with kitchen privileges. “At least it’s quiet,” he told her when he first saw it, and then asked a few days later if her nightly headaches were related to what he’d said about her room.

She was relieved that he mostly served his time on the base. Larry was born, and Gordon worked his way up to captain, and when in 1957 he was offered the command of some kind of new offshore platform, he wanted to request another assignment—­what Air Force officer wanted to squat in a box over the ocean?—­but told Ellie that it was her decision, too. “You have a family now,” she answered. “I just want anything that keeps you closer.” “I wouldn’t get home any more often,” he pointed out. “And safer,” she added. So after sleeping on it, he told her he’d take the command, though afterward he was so disappointed that he wasn’t himself for weeks.

By 1950 the Department of Defense had determined that the radar arrays carried on Navy picket ships and Air Force aircraft on station were not powerful enough to detect incoming Russian bombers sufficiently far offshore to enable fighter interception. The radar stations comprising the Distant Early Warning system across the far north of the continent provided some security in that direction, but given that nearly all of America’s highest-­priority targets were situated inside its northeastern metropolitan corridor, protection from an attack across the Atlantic seemed both essential and entirely absent. In response, the Air Defense Command urgently ordered the construction of five platforms along the coast from Bangor to Atlantic City. The platforms were called Texas Towers because of their resemblance to oil rigs, were numbered from north to south, and cost eleven million dollars apiece.

They faced engineering problems as unprecedented as the space program’s. Tower no. 4 in particular had presented a much greater challenge than the others since its footings would stand in 185 feet of water, more than three times as deep as the others. In 1955 the maximum depth at which anyone had built an undersea structure was sixty feet, and that had been in the Gulf of Mexico. Because of that, the Air Force had decided that this tower would require bold new thinking in its conception and hired a firm known for bridge design. The firm had had no experience at all in the area of ocean engineering for marine structures.

Tower no. 4 stood on three hollow legs nearly three hundred feet long. The legs were only twelve feet in diameter and braced by three submarine tiers of thirty-­inch steel struts, and topped with a triangular triple-­leveled platform that stood seventy feet above the waves. From its concrete footings on the seafloor to the top of its radomes it was the equivalent of a thirty-­story...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525432310
ISBN 13 
9780525432319
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
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