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The Mother Who Stayed: Stories - Softcover

Furman, Laura

 
9781439194652: The Mother Who Stayed: Stories
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1439194653 ISBN 13: 9781439194652
Verlag: Free Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

In nine strikingly perceptive stories set miles and decades apart, Laura Furman mines the intricate, elusive lives of mothers and daughters—and of women who long for someone to nurture. Meet Rachel, a young girl desperate for her mother’s unbridled attention, knowing that soon she’ll have to face the world alone; Marian, a celebrated novelist who betrays the one person willing to take care of her as she is dying—her unclaimed “daughter”; and Dinah, a childless widow uplifted by the abandoned, century-old diaries of Mary Ann, a mother of eleven.

The Mother Who Stayed is an homage to the timeless, primal bond between mother and child and a testament that the relationships we can’t define can be just as poignant, memorable, and inspiring as those determined by blood. Tender and insightful, Furman’s stories also bravely confront darker realities of separation and regret, death and infidelity—even murder. Her vividly imagined characters and chiseled prose close the gap between generations of women as they share their wisdom almost in chorus: Although our lives will end, we must cherish the sanctity of each day and say, as did Mary Ann ages ago, “I done what I could.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laura Furman was born in New York, and educated in New York City public schools and at Bennington College. Her first story appeared in The New Yorker in 1976, and since then her work has been published in many magazines, including Yale Review, Southwest Review, Ploughshares, American Scholar, Preservation, House & Garden, and other magazines. Her books include three collections of short stories, two novels, and a memoir. She is the recipient of fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Dobie Paisano Project, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has received grants in residency at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and in 2009 she was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. She taught for many years in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Series editor of The PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories since 2002, Furman selects the twenty winning stories each year. She lives in Central Texas.

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The Eye

The grape arbor was a square open to the sky with tangled vines for walls. There was no breeze, no sound but the sun crackling in midday fullness and the hum of bees at work. An hour had to pass before the girls were allowed to swim, so they lay in the grape arbor, waiting. When it was very hot, Rachel Cantor’s mother had told her, the best thing was to lie still and let the heat leave your body, but Rachel had the beginning of a summer cold and to her ears the bees in the viney walls sounded dangerous. She asked, “Where’s Mom?”

“Don’t bother her,” Betsey Ziegelman said. “She’s with my mom.”

“They’re talking,” Katie Ziegelman said.

“They’re always talking,” said Leah, Rachel’s older sister.

Much later, when they were in their twenties, the Ziegelman sisters became famous for their politics. Betsey went underground and never emerged, and Katie wrote a book about her missing sister. Leah Cantor became a criminal defense attorney, though she had nothing to do with her childhood friend.

The vines moved the tiniest bit from side to side.

Rachel stood up; the sky shifted in a sickening way, and she touched her head.

“What’s wrong now?” To Leah, any complaint of her sister’s was a trick to get attention.

Rachel told her feet to move; through the prickly blades of grass, she felt the earth. With each step she listened for Leah or the Ziegelman girls to call her back.

In between the arbor and the white house with dark shutters Rachel passed the garage with bays for six cars. Harris Ziegelman, Betsey and Katie’s father, kept his 1936 cream-colored Buick convertible polished and in perfect shape. Once in a while he’d invite all the children for a ride, allowing them to fill the rumble seat. When they started down the long driveway, the children were free to stick their heads and arms outside the car.

Eva Cantor was on the patio with Helen Ziegelman, saying, “Everything turns out okay in the end. It’s awful now, but to tell the truth—”

She spotted Rachel standing with one foot on the slate patio and one on the lawn.

“Sweetie,” she said. “I thought you girls were resting after lunch.”

“My head hurts.”

Eva opened her arms and said, “Poor you. Poor Rachel’s getting a summer cold.”

“They’re the worst,” Mrs. Ziegelman said.

Rachel lay down next to her mother on the chaise longue, closed her eyes, and moved her leg so that her foot dangled over her baby sister Emma, who slept in a basket nearby.

“Don’t squirm.” Eva pulled Rachel’s leg in and held Rachel against her, cupping her forehead.

“Poor you,” she said, not to Rachel.

“You mean poor Scotty,” Helen said. “At least I can afford . . . But—what a mess.”

“I feel terrible for your girls,” Eva said. “But they’re strong.”

“There’s not a thing I can do about it except—nothing.”

“This too shall pass,” Eva said. “You don’t know what the future will bring.”

When her mother spoke that way, which she did often, Rachel was reassured in her belief that the future was a place—like the general store where they went for the Sunday paper and five pennies’ worth of candy—only no one knew how to get there.

“You’d think he’d think,” Eva said. “With so much at stake. Your life together. The children . . .”

Mrs. Ziegelman laughed.

“Eva, you’re a naïf.”

Rachel fell asleep to the sound of their voices, and Helen picked up her camera. Eva’s lipsticked mouth was a dark shape against her tanned skin. Her hair fell in waves, one point of her white shirt collar hidden by the sweater resting over her shoulders. Her sunglasses reflected Helen as she held the camera. When Eva was long dead and she herself very old, Helen told Rachel she’d never known a woman so happy in her life as Eva Cantor.

Every year, when summer came, the Cantors moved to the country; so did the Scotts and the Ziegelmans. During the week, Sam Cantor and Ellison Scott worked in the city, and they arrived on Friday nights at twilight, their seersucker suits rumpled, their breath perfumed by the gin-and-tonics they’d consumed on the train.

Harris Ziegelman didn’t work in the city in the summer; he had business in the country, the business of being rich, Sam Cantor said. When Rachel asked her father about the Ziegelman money, Sam said that they wouldn’t talk about it anymore.

Summers, the Cantors lived in a brown-shingle farmhouse with a blueberry field on one side and a brook on the other. Their land extended into the woods to a crooked old fencepost; it was a patch compared to their neighbor’s dairy farm or the Ziegelman land that went on for miles.

The Scotts had a cabin by a lake, with a bedroom for the parents and a loft where the children slept. The one time they came to the country for Thanksgiving, the Scotts stayed with the Cantors because their place had no insulation. “It’s like camping,” Mr. Scott said, “like pioneering,” and it did remind Rachel of a diorama she’d made in a shoebox, of a house in Colonial America.

The Ziegelman house with its many rooms was the center of social life; the dining room was big enough for all of them at Thanksgiving, and there was a living room no one went into all summer. Once night came, the grown-ups gravitated to the den with its stuffed bookshelves and knotty pine paneling, and the chintz-covered furniture with its familiar sags and lumps. On warm nights the grown-ups spilled onto the patio, filling the world with their drinks and cigarettes, their eternal talking and laughing.

The Ziegelmans’ cook came with them to the country, a stout, white-haired woman named Jocelyn who always seemed to be on duty, preparing the next meal, providing cookies and glasses of juice when the children trudged up the hill from the pond, wrapped in towels, their lips blue. She warned them not to drip on the kitchen floor. “Back outside! Strip off your suits,” she’d tell them, pointing to the clothesline by the door.

This particular summer, each family had a new baby. The Cantor baby was Emma; Lily was the new Ziegelman. The Scott baby was redheaded like his mother’s mother, like his two brothers. Baby Lily had a young nurse, and often when the children came into the Ziegelman kitchen after swimming, the baby was on her nurse’s lap, and the nurse would say, “We’re having our delicious cup of tea.”

A few times each summer, all the children had a sleepover. In someone else’s house everything was different, even the night sounds. That’s how possessive the children felt in the country. Their birds. Their frogs.

On the winding road to the train station, Leah held the baby in her arms in the front seat while Eva drove. Rachel stretched out on the backseat of the Studebaker; the clouds passed in a blur between the lacy crowns of the trees. Eva was worried about being late, so they arrived before other cars with mothers and children took the best places in the parking lot. It was their custom at the station for Leah and Rachel to parade up and down the platform waiting for the train to make its monstrous entrance. This time Leah went alone, and Eva held the baby in her arms and watched Leah while Rachel stayed in the car. Eventually, the parking...

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Verlag
Free Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1439194653
ISBN 13 
9781439194652
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande