A Short History of Women

A Novel

Kate Walbert

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781439100547
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literatur Allgemein

NOMINATED FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE A profoundly moving portrait of the complicated legacies of mothers and daughters, A Short History of Women chronicles five generations of women from the close of the nineteenth century through the early years of the twenty-first. Beginning in 1914 at the deathbed of Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a suffragette who starves herself for the cause, the novel traces the echoes of her choice in the stories of her descendants—a brilliant daughter who tries to escape the burden of her mother's infamy; a granddaughter who chooses a conventional path, only to find herself disillusioned; a great-granddaughter who wryly articulates the free-floating anxiety of post-9/11 Manhattan.In a kaleidoscope of characters and with a richness of imagery, emotion, and wit, A Short History of Women is a thought-provoking and vividly original narrative that crisscrosses a century—a book for "any woman who has ever struggled to find her own voice; to make sense of being a mother, wife, daughter, and lover" (Associated Press).

DOROTHY TOWNSEND BARRETT

Patagonia, Argentina, 2004

And wasn’t it Browning who said, “All’s right with the world; God’s in his heaven—” etcetera, etcetera?

Charles found himself asking this—rhetorically, ironically—of their little crew in Patagonia, his soon-to-be ex-wife, Dorothy, elsewhere, at one of the extracurricular lectures delivered by those among them who felt they had something to add. He has been to several and proposed his own, on Browning, waiting to see if the requisite number sign the sheet outside the ship’s dining hall before preparing anything in earnest. So far there are three names: his, Dorothy’s and Chester Briggs, a biology teacher from Seattle who made their acquaintance early in the trip. It’s to Chester that he addresses his question now; the two have joined a few others in the dimly lighted bar of the German hotel, in off the rough seas for a few days respite, the bar’s Alpine theme strange after the endless flat landscape they have earlier crossed in their little bus, the dry, brown steppes interrupted only by windblown trash and the occasional group of guanacos, ears perked, in the distance. They had been on their way to Punto Tombo, to a vast colony—near a million!—of penguins, the only bird, they were told, to lack a natural aversion to humans, the penguins’ minds on other things: the building and rebuilding of nests, the incubation of their dirty eggs. The fathers, even. Think of it! The women in the group had laughed. The fathers!

They had spent most of the day tromping around the penguins, stooping low to see the eggs, hurrying to get out of the birds’ paths as the birds made their beelines to the water. Dorothy had found one covered “head to flipper” in oil, its mate nosing it along though the poor thing drowned once in the ocean, its feathers too clotted, its wings useless, this more and more common, given the way the wind was blowing.

Charles has told the story of the drowning penguin as if he too were witness to it, then added the various details he has read about the shrinking of the Antarctic ice, the predictions, the timetable, before finishing with Browning.

“Browning was a Darwinian, right?” Chester says. And Charles nods, wondering why he has introduced the great poet into this company of high school teachers and retirees, Dorothy right, as usual: he is an old snob. And if she were to return at this moment to apprehend the band of them slackly hunched together as if poised to plunge forks into a great bowl of melted Swiss cheese she would guess—from their various postures and the enervating silence—that her soon-to-be ex-husband has been boring his companions, quoting Browning or worse.

She would rather listen to Sachiyo de Pauling lecture on the art of Japanese floral arranging, or ikebana. Sachiyo was the proprietor, Dorothy earlier told Charles, of a shop in the suburbs of Rochester, where she found herself a war bride in the late forties. Desperate, Dorothy whispered, her look accusatory, as if he were somehow responsible for Sachiyo’s misery. They were half-dressed for dinner in their little Alpine room.

“Frankly, I feel sorry for Sachiyo, though it seems as if there’s a great interest in her talk,” Dorothy said, her back to Charles, his thumbs on her necklace clasp, an emerald on a chain he had given her years before. It seemed especially cruel, given the proximity of the necklace and his helping her, that she would take this particular jab.

“And her qualifications?” Charles said, though she had already told him. Dorothy wheeled around, the clasp just catching.

“She’s owned the store for nearly twenty years. She grew up in Kyoto, for God’s sake,” she said. “I think that accounts for something.”

“I’m sure it will be fascinating,” Charles said.

“I’ve always wanted to know how they do it,” she said.

“What?”

“Put something here, something there. Take three stems, make a masterpiece.”

“Ask her about the bamboo month. They have a month where everything they eat is made from bamboo. Even the hot dogs.”

Dorothy narrowed her eyes.

“She’s a lovely woman,” she said.

“I know she is,” Charles said.

“She’s just lost her husband,” she said.

“I understand,” he said.

“How do I look?” she said.

Earlier, at the penguins, Dorothy wore boots up to her knees and a sun hat that shaded her face. Charles had taken her picture with the digital camera Caroline had sent to them announcing this trip; Caroline had booked the whole thing, of course, paid in full, meals and lectures included. She firmly believed, she said to her father—this in secret, out of Dorothy’s earshot—that recent events suggested her mother needed a rest, Events which shall now go unnamed, relegated to that jar of History appropriately labeled Unmentionable, Not-to-Be-Discussed, At a Later Date, Plug It (and within the jar Charles pictures a young James in shorts, dirtied knees, sulking in the corner, his cheeks flushed and tear-stained, his fingers wrapped in twine: he’s tying a cat’s cradle or maybe the other one he could never get right; and now Charles sees his marriage there as well—what had Virgil said? There are tears in things. Fine, then, his marriage at the bottom of a glass jar: a lost penny, or a golf tee). These not-to-be-discussed Events have become more frequent now, Dorothy a fire sign, she will tell you, as if this explains it. It does not. In short, he no longer understands her. None of them understands her. She used to be happy with a steak and scalloped potatoes, a round of bridge. Now she seems like a different Dorothy, as if, during one of her secret excursions, she shed a skin.

“Beautiful,” he says, realizing Dorothy is still waiting.

Charles found his bar friends out of desperation. Come for a drink and there they were, a few of the other men from the tour now bosom buddies. Chester Briggs had waved him over.

“Dorothy?” he said.

“Sachiyo’s lecture,” Charles said, taking the stool beside him. If Charles had bothered to ask, he would have found that Chester, too, felt a fondness for Sachiyo, this newly widowed tiny woman, a gray streak in her black hair, a habit of offering Kleenex. But he did not ask. He ordered a drink, disheartened by the image of the women over their individual containers, listening as Sachiyo explained the various symbols that the arrangement of the stems in their hands have historically represented: love, filial duty, friendship. Friendship? Hah! More like a coven, an exclusive club. They were all there together, Bibs Pierce, Ginny Donaghue, Gayle Schwartz, Madeline What’s-Her-Name.

“I understand,” Chester said, his voice coming out of the dark, “that Dorothy has settled on Florence Nightingale.”

Charles had no idea what Chester referred to, though shook his head as if he, too, were baffled.

“She told me the great nurse is much maligned,” said Chester, whose eyebrows curled in dramatic ways; at this moment they resembled the sea at its worst pitch.

“By whom?” Teddy Flamm wanted to know. Charles hadn’t noticed Teddy before; he sat on one of the darker barstools, inexplicably distant.

Chester shrugged. “Schoolchildren,” he said. “History books.”

Charles ordered another drink. To find himself served in a true bar, albeit Alpine inspired, felt delightful. Theirs was not a grand ship nor even a passenger liner, but one of the smaller boats that could cut through the ice that might, if they lacked the equipment, maroon them. The bar on board consisted of the bottles they had purchased in Duty Free and carried to dinner.

“The one I always loved,” Teddy said, joining their small circle, “was Mary Todd Lincoln. Didn’t she walk the halls wringing her hands?”

“Ghosts, I think,” Chester said. “She saw ghosts. Of course, her husband was a homosexual.”

“Was he?” Teddy said, finishing his drink. “Well, I’m seeing ghosts. Last night my father sat on the side of my bed.”

They paused, waiting, but Teddy didn’t go on.

“So, when did Dorothy take on Florence?” Chester said, bringing it around again. Upstairs, in one of the junior suites, Sachiyo de Pauling demonstrated how with a simple piece of copper wire and patience, one could train bamboo to spiral upward, she said, like a dancer spinning to the heavens. The metaphor felt a bit hackneyed, or maybe, first generation, Dorothy will say to Charles later, but compelling nonetheless; this when he confronts her over Nightingale.

But for now Charles chooses to go along. “When did I take on Browning?” he said.

Charles must maneuver the narrow hallway to the door of their rickety, temporary room; within are the twin beds, a chest of drawers, and a mirror that reminds him that his teeth need cleaning. He removes them to drop into the fizzy water, watching as they bubble to an artificial white. James used to love to participate in this, flicking the wafer into the water, fishing out the whitened teeth though the boy could never understand why his own teeth wouldn’t snap out like his father’s. When he lost his first tooth Charles let him drop it in, the little pearl, where it sank to the bottom of the glass impossibly beautiful.

Charles startles and looks up. Dorothy looms behind him.

“So,” he says, ineffectually frowning, tipsy. “Florence Nightingale?”

“Oh, you heard,” she says. “I thought I’d give it a shot.”

He will soon discover her sign-up sheet, boldly tacked next to his own in what passed on board as the lounge: bad coffee, donuts replenished in a box, some worn paperbacks. She has even stolen two tacks so that the corners of his flop while hers, which reads, pretentiously, he’d add, “Dorothy Barrett, A Discussion of the Works and Principles of Florence Nightingale,” is neatly pressed to the cork. Though it has been posted after his, there are many names scrawled on the lines for interested persons—the women, of course, and Chester.

“I’ve been doing some reading,” Dorothy says. “I didn’t tell you?”

“No,” he says, though without his teeth it is difficult to look doubtful.

“I’m sure I told you,” Dorothy says.

Charles shrugs and sits on one of the twin beds to untie his shoelaces. He wears boots entirely out of keeping, sent FedEx by Caroline, who no doubt pictured her parents scrambling up rocky outcrops and crossing blue glaciers—not sitting on bolted chairs listening to lectures on penguins.

“Vivian gave me the idea,” Dorothy says. Vivian Vivian, thinks Charles, because the names of all the women on board have run together into a swirl of muddy brown; Vivian now rises out of this swirl—a librarian or administrator of some kind from the Midwest—one of those smart women with an underappreciated profession who wears strange, square glasses and asks a lot of questions.

“Vivian?” he says. Dorothy has crawled into the opposite twin, covered herself head to foot in one of the wooly red blankets. She reaches over to flick off the light. The designers of these geriatric adventures have clearly ruled out making love as an activity—given this much exercise and twin beds and their age, of course. (He will be seventy-nine next month, and she, remarkably, is soon to be seventy-five.) Then again Dorothy is no longer his wife or intends not to be when they return to the Northern Hemisphere. They are roommates, perhaps. Bunk buddies. And it’s been so many years, besides. The last time near his retirement, when Dorothy hula-hooped her toast a bit blotto, perhaps impressed by the number of speeches celebrating his success. Silly, crude things, but he believed they might have prompted her, just for that moment, to remember what had convinced her to say yes in the first place.

Yes, she had said, or rather, wrote. Yes, she wrote.

Simply that for a lifetime. It has been, for both of them, a lifetime.

My God, he thinks. “My God,” he says.

Dorothy stops talking and shifts—she had been talking! Damn ears. Now he hears the cold rustle of starched sheets as clear as a bell.

“Good night,” she says.

“I was listening,” he says.

“You’re more than welcome to skip it.”

“What?”

“My talk.”

“I was listening,” he says. Though it is pitch black, he sees her face, too angry to sleep, eyes wide open. She is lying there livid, regretting everything, regretting her life, regretting him; or maybe she’s remembering James. He has no idea and besides he would rather not think about his son. He does not think about him, in fact, will not think about him. In his mind, James has gone with his Boy Scouts on a trip. They’ve ascended the mountain already and are looking down. James points out the general area where he lives—the development with its many neat houses in a row on the streets that wind and dip through what was once farmland, the trees grown large and towering (he can remember when they were planted!) since his family moved in when he was a boy, the ridiculous sign at the entrance, Thornbrook, and the garden of foxglove and black-eyed Susans, tulips and daffodils that his mother took the time to plant around its base. To lend the neighborhood some character, she had said, to spruce things up. James can see it all from there, or imagine it well enough to describe to his friends. He is surrounded by friends. He is on a mountaintop. He is standing beneath a brilliant blue sky. He is reaching for his canteen—

“She never married,” Dorothy says in the dark. It is the steady Dorothy voice, the cool Dorothy voice: considered and one might even say dramatic. “She was tempted once. Apparently she fell in love. But she weighed the options. She wrote, ‘I have an active nature that requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in his life.’”

It is the demon intellect that seizes him. “Vivian?” he says.

She sighs.

“Not your Browning,” she says. “But a good line nonetheless.”

Charles found it strange to see chaplains in the war: men who daily spoke to the pilots and gunners and flight engineers stationed on Tinian of the spirit of the bayonet, the bomb. The clergy had constructed makeshift churches: pews of horizontal cots. There the men prayed or slept, depending, and the chaplains preached. One they called Father Simple. “It’s simple, boys,” he would say whenever they’d approach him with what they believed were complicated moral questions. “Jesus wants you to kill Nips.”

A boy named Frank Peterson, tail gunner when they dropped incendiaries on Okinawa, confessed that from his seat in the back he could see the way the fire ran like so many rivers of popping light. He said how it jumped in a school and the children flew out the windows, a flock of startled wrens.

Of course Peterson hadn’t seen a thing. How could he from his place in the skies?

Father Simple started. “It’s simp...