The Gathering – Chapter 15 Una “‘Listen,’ I said….” Una liked the directness of Edith’s voice. She liked the no-nonsense way this character addressed the reader, chattily confiding her dilemma about Bradley and Cheryl and the rest. It was as if Edith was taking the reader by the shirt collar or slapping that unsuspecting soul on the back. Of course, this manner of directly addressing the reader could be seen as a throwback to a convention of Victorian novels, typified in Jane Eyre’s line, “Reader, I married him.” As Edith well knew, this famous line was one of many narrative asides scattered throughout the canon of Victorian fiction. And while Edith didn’t say “Reader this….” or “Reader that…,” her speaking style was arguably a nod in the direction of her vocation. As a modern academic, she was well beyond the mores governing most Victorian heroines. Yet her words were shaped, however obliquely, by those Victorian figures. She didn’t say, “Reader, I married him,” but she did demand, like Brontë’s headstrong governess, to be heard. “‘Listen,’ I said….” Una looked out her study window. She was still listening to the mezzo soprano and chorus singing the Liber Scriptus. And she was thinking now of the meaning of vocation, of what it meant to have a vocation. It didn’t simply mean to have a job, she reflected. As its etymological connection to the vocal suggested, it meant to be called to some line of work, to take up pen or score or shovel with the conviction that one was answering a high summons. In the old days the summons had been considered divine, whether it was to enter the religious life or not. Now it was seen as the immanent call of inherited tendencies. Or maybe a response to one’s spouse or parents. In Edith’s case, her vocation had begun as a calling away from her grandmother’s wishes. Her career as an interpreter of Victorian novels had come about as an answer, a contrary answer, to that matriarch’s prayer that she marry a wealthy dentist. Instead of settling into cohabitation with a man who could identify every tooth in her head, Edith had gone off to graduate school in a country where nearly everyone had had bad teeth. She’d gone off to Oxford in search of her nineteenth-century precursors, feisty heroines who had resisted the belief that overworked seamstresses, charwomen, and schoolmarms were doing their God-given work. Una glanced at her bare feet which were propped up on her desk. She thought of Garnet who, before her divorce, had been about to give up on her plan of becoming a “teaching artist” when, in an almost deus ex machina fulfillment of her long-held dream, she had ended up in a stable teaching job in California. Whether Garnet saw herself as called to her place at the University of Southern California, Una didn’t know. Una hadn’t worked through the back story of The Gathering to that extent. What Una did know was that she liked the directness of Edith’s voice and to some extent mimicked it in her own chapters. But, as she observed while looking alternately at the manuscript and her toenails, which, she now saw, needed clipping, Una was a lot different from Edith. Una’s chapters, for instance, were written in the third person, despite their direct tone. And while Una believed in the importance of self-determination, she was more skeptical than Edith about the ability of the first-person voice to tell a complete and accurate story. Perhaps this skepticism had something to do with the conversational nature of first-person discourse and Una’s inevitable bias for the written word. She was, after all, immersed in Constitutional law and trained in the interpretation of legal documents. Witness, for instance, the fact that Una was writing her story, rather than telling it. She was not reclining on her sofa, chatting about Bradley and his dinner plans between bites into an apple fritter. Instead, she was sitting at her desk with a modest stack of pages, her newly sharpened pencil tucked behind her ear. Who was to say that Una’s legal training didn’t lead her to associate the chatty, spoken story with hearsay, and the written story with an authoritative, if somewhat inferential, account not unlike a court opinion? If this was so, then when push came to shove, even an incoherent, incomplete manuscript such as The Gathering would have to seem more convincing to Una than Edith’s confiding narrative. If a solidly written story was arguably analogous to a court opinion, then this novel manuscript, with its inconsistencies and contrasting voices, was at least loosely suggestive of a divided judicial opinion. Or perhaps (if an order could be established here) it was Una’s existence, first, as an author and, second, as a character (videlicet, a lawyer) that made her so privilege the written word. It may be that she considered the written word the highest form of disclosure simply because she was holding her manuscript in her lap and not merely spinning this story off the top of her head. Her training as a Constitutional lawyer, accordingly, would have to be secondary to her biases as an aspiring author. Either way, she had less faith than Edith in the revelatory power of the spoken word. Confirming Una’s preference for the written word, the Latin of the Liber Scriptus translated as The written book shall be brought / in which all is contained / whereby the world shall be judged. But then Verdi’s Requiem was playing not by actual coincidence but by the deliberate orchestration of Una’s text. If it was the written account, and not the told account, by which all that is hidden shall appear, one must bear in mind that that message emerged through Una’s particular craft. All of this being said (or written), Una was nonetheless attached to Edith. She questioned Edith, yet that woman’s words came to her with the least effort. If Una hadn’t been so trained to consider texts as the product of deliberation, she would have said that Edith’s words came to her by way of inspiration. She already knew how the next “Edith” chapter would begin, for example. She hadn’t finished reading her first “Edith” chapter, and, truthfully, she wasn’t totally sure what direction this novel would take. Yet Edith’s voice came to her with overwhelming clarity. “Where was I?” Una wrote, unable to resist the urge to jot down the opening of the Victorian scholar’s next chapter. “Oh, yes. The multiplicity of perspectives. Most people would agree there are two sides to every story. But I would say there have to be at least eight or nine.” Una wrote this down on the last page of her manuscript, which was now exceeding eight chapters. “We may not always hear them all. Nor might we always believe what we do hear. Or, for that matter, read, as in the case of my Jane Eyre anthology. Yet it’s important to recognize those other versions or interpretations are out there.” The funny thing was that if Una had met Edith at a cocktail party without knowing their peculiar twofold bond as character and character, as well as author and character, she wouldn’t have listened to Edith for five minutes. She’d think the woman, with her washed-up looking British husband, overbearing and self-important. And she’d know, instinctively, that the woman was unreliable. With their indisputable bond, however, Una was under Edith’s spell, not as fully (to use a comparison drawn from Victorian spiritualism) as if she were some clairvoyant amanuensis swept up in a fever of automatic writing, but fully enough to entertain, in imaginative detail, a narrative not her own. Una’s own narrative would focus more on Trena and the hit-and-run accident. It would delve into the question of who’d been driving that sports car and it would examine the curious fact that no one had seen Edith drive her new convertible since the week she had bought it. Una’s story would also look at the permutations of panic and concealment, not just as Owen experienced it with the British government but as he was abetting it, unwittingly, on this very day. Una’s narrative, too, would explore the exact connections between Trena, Garnet, and Grae. For instance, it would make something of the fact that Garnet’s name contained all the letters for “Trena” and “Grae,” something having to do with the possibility that “Trena” and “Grae” derived from “Garnet.” It would look, in ways that were consistent with Una’s deep piety, at the relationship between the three and the one. And it would examine, in ways that were consistent with her professional and personal ethics, the link between brain damage and dissociative identity disorder. By contrast, Edith’s narrative, the one that began in the first person (though, as Una knew, the first-person voice branched into the third with the subsequent chapters of other characters) neglected the accident’s centrality. Edith’s version of this novel swept that episode under the rug, shifting the reader’s attention instead to the question of Steve’s manuscript. Yes, it was possible – in fact, likely – that Trena stole Steve’s novel outline and research notes. It was likely, moreover, that Garnet did the same, given those women’s pre-fall identity. Edith’s account, though, avoided what had been the prelapsarian integrity of Trena’s life before that young woman had even bought that Schwinn Criss Cross. Similarly, Edith’s account neglected the origin of Grae, who, if Trena’s condo had had anything more than a crawlspace, would have been the woman in the attic. Often, Una had thought it ironic – if, under the circumstances, comprehensible – that a literary historian such as Edith would, in telling her story, neglect an entire chapter of a character’s history. But then Una had always reminded herself that Edith wasn’t really a literary historian. She was a literary scholar who had always analyzed nineteenth-century narratives in a historical vacuum. Occasionally, Edith began her lectures with contextualizing anecdotes about authors and their pyromaniacal housekeepers or unscrupulous publishers. Within minutes, however, she grappled with the assigned book, dissecting every word with a narrow rigor very different from her casual tone as this novel’s first-person and competing third-person narrator. In her place on the sofa, where she spoke of Bradley between her bites of apple fritter, this sense of rigor appeared intermittently as disapproval of that man’s conciliatory designs or as impatience with her husband, Owen. Behind the lectern, though, she became a strict disciple of objectivity, rolling up her cerebral shirtsleeves in a suspension of context, picking apart words as though they were self-contained artifacts. Well, if Edith was an ethically and verbally unreliable narrator, she at least shared with Una a rock-bottom love of words. Even this whole business of the distinction between the spoken and written word got lost amid such a fundamental love of language. It almost didn’t matter whether one woman’s sentences rang truer than the other’s. Una wanted to be with Edith in the constitutive way that verbs conjugate. Even on the days when she felt like shredding her manuscript, Una felt an attachment to Edith that was sheer syntax. Luckily, today was not one of the days when Una felt like shredding her manuscript. At least not yet. In fact, Una was feeling pretty good about her novel, especially considering how busy she’d been. If nothing else, she was proud of the fact that she had produced her seven (eight) chapters amid the demands of her career at the university. Plus she had squeezed in her hours at the computer while juggling her pro bono work and her volunteer duties at the soup kitchen. If she wasn’t the picture of efficiency, who was? She asked herself this question, not for the first time, as she wandered to the kitchen and reacheed for the Lady Grey tea at the back of the cupboard. The differences between Earl Grey and Lady Grey were more subtle, certainly, than the differences between spoken and written words, but they were substantial enough, with the infusion of citrus, to make Una stand on her tiptoes and grope past the Earl Grey. Unable to reach the Lady Grey, she was about to climb up on the counter when she remembered her sore knee. The pain was so infrequent that she forgot about it until she attempted some maneuver like climbing up on the counter or until she went running without her knee brace. With a sigh Una fetched a kitchen chair and stood on it. Verdi’s Liber scriptus, meanwhile, swellled to a crescendo through her stereo speakers. On a day like today, when Una didn’t feel like shredding her manuscript, she was almost happy to accept Edith’s voice with her own, omissions and all. She realized she was like the mezzo soprano whose melody (the chapters entitled “Una”) was the essential expression of her work, and that Edith, with her first-person preening and her third-person entourage of prospective diners, was like the chorus without whom Una’s voice would have been a too insistent petition for a fair hearing. In this way, Una was closer than Edith to being the pluralist that the Victorianist scholar imagined herself to be. Pointing to the various perspectives represented in her Jane Eyre anthology, Edith touted herself as a proponent of diversity. But would she have gone so far as to concede that the truth was often a complicated chorus of incompatible half-truths? Standing at the kitchen window, waiting for the water to boil, Una thought of her father. Usually, when working on some project, whether it was her novel or a lecture or a conference paper, she didn’t allow her mind to wander like this. How else could one be the picture of efficiency? A person must have the mental discipline to shut out all distractions, sitting astride one’s cogitative faculties as though they were a lumbering mule. The idea was to keep the mule on its path, its head pointed in the direction of immediate truths, its steady jaws free from the tufts of unanswerable questions. Yet even Una, the productive, conscientious Una, failed to keep her mule on the trail sometimes. In recent months her beast of contemplation had wandered off its path half a dozen times before she had even noticed it going astray. Was this the normal consequence of attempting a novel, a project that by its nature was more intellectually liberating than legal argumentation? Possibly. Certainly, on this particular morning, Verdi’s distractingly gorgeous music wasn’t helping. But it was also likely that her wandering thoughts were due to her father’s death, a buzzing patch of clover so thick and green that the ungulate of her mental faculties couldn’t but wander amid its confusion. With the water coming to a boil and the chorus singing that all that is hidden shall appear, Una thought, yes, of her father. His cancer, according to the autopsy, had been of the highly curable kind, not pancreatic or stomach cancer, but colon cancer. The disease had been in its early stages, too. Had it been for this that he’d shot himself, scattering his brains against an assortment of canned vegetables? Had he even known about the disease? His wife liked to think so. Una’s mother found solace in the conclusion that her husband hadn’t been able to cope with the cancer. It was easier to think he hadn’t been able to cope with the cancer than to suppose he hadn’t been able to cope with… what? A forty-year marriage without quarrels, two prosperous children (one a law professor and up-and-coming therapist, the other a heart surgeon), a summer home on Martha’s Vineyard and an enviable pension? Una didn’t know what to conclude. Consequently, in a manner true to her legalistic education, she didn’t conclude anything. She merely thought of her father on the golf course, swinging the club with a drive too fierce and scattering the sod in a fanning arc that foreshadowed the spraying of his brains. If, with insufficient premises, she found her beastly logic running amok, forcing her to jump to conclusions, then she allowed herself, if only to pacify the beast, to conclude that she would know more if she could find her father’s diaries. Over the years she had seen the man writing in a series of identical leather-bound books, scratching away with the same fountain pen and the same look of concentration. Neither Una nor her mother knew what had become of those diaries or journals. Nor did Una know that they didn’t simply contain facts and figures pertaining to her father’s practice, instead of soulful revelations. But she did know that if she could find those diaries and read them, she would have a better sense of her father’s state. Even if the entries were humdrum actuarial minutiae, she would walk away with an understanding of how jealously he had harbored his despair, even from himself. The water was at a boil now. Una lifted the kettle from the burner just as it began to whistle and poured the water into her favorite mug, a gift from her brother after she had finished her first year of law school. Emblazoned on the side of the mug was the name of her alma mater. Though modest about her first-rate education, Una liked the mug with its bold lettering, if only because it was capacious. Blowing on her tea, Una sat back down at the desk, which was really not a desk at all but a dining room table covered with books and papers. Suddenly, she set the mug aside and picked up her pencil. Hearing Edith’s voice, she continued jotting down the words with which that character’s next chapter would begin. “That being said, I really only heard two sides of the story….” Story about what? About whom? Part of what made this story hard to tell, with its two or however many sides, were the redeeming traits of the putative villains. Edith was not an especially bad person. She’d panicked behind the wheel of her sports car, and then she’d lapsed into elaborate denial. Arguably, she was spinning her story as much for herself as for her reader. And Steve? He was a philanderer, but he was just a man, after all. He was painfully smart and wonderfully loyal to his children. He was a good mentor, and under the right circumstances he was a sacrificing friend. Plus he had a surprisingly wry sense of humor when he was relaxed. As for Garnet/Trena/Grae… wasn’t she just what had come from the crossfire between Edith, Steve, Cheryl, and poor, confused Jack? Yet, however sabotaged from within by Edith, the story had to be told. Una had to press forward and try to get every word just right. So instead of plunging forward with some haphazard elucidation of the story and its many sides, which was what happened whenever she dictated Edith’s voice in headlong inspiration, Una tucked her pencil back behind her ear and flipped to the first chapter of her manuscript. She continued reading, resolved at this point merely to edit. “‘Listen,’ I said as soon as he suggested it, ‘there are good ideas and bad ideas. This is a bad idea. These guys have nothing to say to each other. Or what they have to say is not fit for our ears. Why force it?’ “But you know Bradley. He thinks he has all the answers….”
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 14:35:25 +0000
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