Letter from Point Clear: A Novel - Hardcover

McFarland, Dennis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805077669 ISBN 13: 9780805077667

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2007

Synopsis

A brother and sister return to their Southern hometown to rescue their younger sister from her marriage to an evangelical preacher--only to find their expectations turned completely upside down The Owen children long ago left their gracious family home in Point Clear, Alabama, in favor of points north. But when their father takes ill, the youngest, Bonnie, who has spent a decade in Manhattan as an unsuccessful actress, returns to care for him. Soon after his death--unbeknownst to her siblings--she falls in love with and marries a handsome evangelical preacher, and together the couple takes up residence in the stately Owen mansion.
When they receive Bonnie's letter announcing her marriage, Ellen and Morris head for Alabama, believing they must extricate their troublesome sister from her latest mistake. To their surprise, they find that Bonnie's charismatic young husband, Pastor, has already saved her from her self-destructive ways, and Bonnie is now nearly three months pregnant. But Bonnie has only recently informed Pastor that Morris is gay, and Pastor quickly undertakes a campaign to "save" him as well . . .
With grace, warmth, and humor, Dennis McFarland reveals the common ground shared by these flawed yet captivating characters--setting them all, and the reader with them, on an unlikely course toward redemption.

About this title

About the Author:

Dennis McFarland is the bestselling author of Prince Edward, Singing Boy, School for the Blind, A Face at the Window, and The Music Room. His fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and The New Yorker. He lives with his family in Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One First, Ellen's letter to Willie: My sweet guy, I hope everything's continuing to go well for you and that you had a great Fourth. You can tell me all about it when we talk Tuesday night. I'll be by the phone at 9:45, so if your plans change, get your counselor to call me and let me know the new time. July 4 was the day when your grandfather always celebrated his birthday, you know, so I've been thinking about him this week. I talked on the phone to Bonnie, who's still in Alabama, and we admitted to each other that we were missing him and feeling a little sad. It's odd, because Daddy wasn't the best company in the world. Of course, he mellowed quite a bit before he died. Anyway, I was very aware of his being gone this past week. I went to the pond yesterday, and the crazy lady who lives in the house on the other side was playing some New Age music--what your Uncle Morris calls "ear candy." Soon she glided down through the trees in a long white robe, promptly let it fall to the ground, and entered the water naked, like a big white bird in a dream. I believe she was having some kind of special New Age moment. Just when I was thinking I would have to leave, she went inside and stopped the music. Then it was really beautiful. You could hear the ocean over the dunes, and I swam all the way around the perimeter. It's lovely being down here, but I think you would be bored. I work in the mornings. Then I go swimming, read, eat dinner, listen to the ball game if there's one, and go to bed. Dull. But I'm getting a lot done. I think by the time you come home, I'll nearly have enough poems for a new book. I love you and miss you and can't wait to hear your voice Tuesday night. If you need help with anything, be sure to ask for it. That's as much a sign of maturity as not needing help--if not a greater sign. Most adults still don't know how to ask for help, and they get themselves into a lot of trouble because of it. I know this, because I'm one of them from time to time. Have a blast, my sweet guy. Drink some milk, eat an apple (or other fruit), brush your teeth, blah blah blah. I love you very much,M And Morris's most recent e-mail message to Ellen: Dear E-- Is it a conversation if only one person is talking? You've probably noticed that Ted Williams's remains are back in the news again. An artist has created a shrine of some kind to Williams's severed head (on display in a NYC gallery), rekindling the endlessly fascinating cryogenics debate. Is this what people mean when they say, Dead but not forgotten? What do you hear from Willie? I still don't understand how you and Dan could send him away like that. I HATED camp as a boy. As far as I can tell, camp takes everything that's already hard about life and makes it harder. If Willie's miserable, just pull him and send him to Richard and me. I know I said no before and now I'm saying yes, which is probably annoying, but some things have unexpectedly changed and Richard's not going to Chicago after all. We're here in Ipswich through the middle of August. Willie could come up and go canoeing with Richard, which would take some of the pressure off me. Come to think of it, what's husband Dan doing for the next few weeks? I'm sure by now he's manicured most of the hillside, straight to the edge of the marsh. There are only just so many weeds that can be whacked in the world, and besides, don't they have environmental laws about such things on the Cape? Send Dan to us. I'll stick a canoe paddle in his hands and make Richard very happy. I had an idea: When we come down for our long weekend on the 19th, why don't we swing by Willie's camp and bring him with us? Do you think they would release him for three days, or do they have ideas about how contact with the outside world might affect his incarceration? It would be so nice to have a thirteen-year-old around for the weekend, an ally when Dan's onslaught of shellfish dinners begins. Somebody to eat cheeseburgers with while the rest of you all are cracking open crustaceans and sucking out the innards. Are you getting any work done? (Sorry. Idle curiosity.) Did you think of Daddy this past week? It would be gratifying, someday, to learn whether or not he was really born on the Fourth of July. I don't know why it matters. Somehow it does, though. Would also be nice if Bonnie would someday make known her intentions (I refer here mostly, but not solely, to Daddy's ashes). Will you please send me something to read, or at least recommend something? I find everything I lay my hands on disappointing this summer (I refer here mostly, but not solely, to books). xxoo,Morris p.s. Cafe Martelle finally reopened on Saturday, and there's a big sign in the window that reads under "new management," further evidence that most people think quotation marks are for decoration and don't have any particular meaning. Ellen Owen, middle-aged poet of Marsh Light and Mirror in the Woods, sat at a battered drop-leaf table by a triptych of double-hung windows and stared at her brother's message on the screen of her laptop until Morris's words began to go blurry and jumbled. She closed the lid of the computer, shut her eyes, and saw in the darkness a clear image of herself at the table in the small room: wearing a baggy white T-shirt, pink jogging shorts, and sky-blue trainers, a possibly too-thin woman with a bad haircut. A reckless pre-vacation visit to the beauty salon and an untried stylist had resulted in straight chin-length hair, unflattering, matronly, the color of dark mahogany, much too red, and entirely artificial-looking. The last few days, she'd noticed herself avoiding mirrors--both here in the little cabin, where she came in the mornings to work, and in the main house a hundred yards up the hill--and she hadn't quite managed not to interpret this symbolically, a cowardly evasion of truth. Now she opened her eyes, turned toward the window by her right elbow, and asked herself why oh why had she begun her letter to Willie--already mailed yesterday--with My sweet guy? She should have avoided a salutation that would embarrass him, should any of his buddies be looking over his shoulder. At least, she thought, she'd had the presence of mind to sign the letter M rather than Mommy. She gazed down a tunnel in the locust trees to the lime-green grasses of the marsh. This view, meticulously tended by "husband Dan" in summers past, boasted a ragged periphery, a change Ellen thought she liked, even with its gentle threat of occlusion. She'd withheld from her brother the fact that Dan was not with her at the Cape house--that she and Dan had decided to spend the six weeks apart--for she wanted to spare herself Morris's voluminous opinions. Willie did know his father had remained in town, but not why. With Willie you could say, Daddy's staying behind to take care of some things, and that was enough of an explanation. With Morris the result would be twenty rapid-fire questions and an hour of debate. Across the cabin's small central room, three other windows looked onto an expansive slope of lawn that led up to the main house, an antique Greek Revival so essentially Cape Cod with its white clapboard walls and roof of cedar shakes, its rambling side porch, wide parson's door, many dormers, and clothesline stretched between whitewashed posts, it had been featured over the years in no fewer than four coffee-table books of photography. Some two hundred years before, a half-dozen acres had been cleared of trees in this spot, providing most of the lumber for construction of the house, but only a small portion of the acreage--a circle hugging the house and the long slope to the cabin--was still dedicated to lawn. A perennial garden had been planted near the porch, which faced south, and beach grass about two feet tall had taken over the rest of the original clearing, so that the overall impression was one of fields, which changed in color with the seasons and gradually rolled to the edge of the abutting salt marsh. A single towering horse chestnut stood in the side yard twenty feet from the parson's door and--happily, to Ellen's thinking--humbled the house on its hilltop. A small grove of locust trees provided shade around the three-room cabin, which had been used by previous owners as a place for guests but which was now Ellen's private retreat. She loved everything about the cabin, its weathered shingles and unpainted wooden interior walls and black potbelly stove, but she valued most its artistic usefulness: Something about its removed position, in this larger dramatic scene, she found encouraging to poetry. This was especially true when the main house was filled with people, and music and voices drifted down the hill, or near the end of a day, when an upstairs window ignited with the sudden yellow fire of a light switched on inside. Beneath the chestnut tree was a turnaround of crushed clamshells, where now, to Ellen's surprise, sat a black pickup truck beside her own car. She moved to the cabin windows and could see, indecipherable from this distance, gold lettering on the driver's door. Few unsolicited visitors found their way to the house, at the end of a long driveway through the woods, marked by homemade private signs; the drive itself was at the end of a narrow dirt road, whose sharp ruts and heaves discouraged explorers. Ellen felt in her stomach what she gauged to be a normal flutter of butterflies--a woman alone in a remote place, encountering a surprise visitor--but in the next moment she recalled having scheduled a noontime appointment with the local chimney sweep. A kindly man in his sixties by the name of Gaston, he would have knocked at the front door, let himself in, and gone about his business of inspecting the flues. It made sense that she'd forgotten about him, for the weather had been unusually and consistently hot; the thought of an evening fire hadn't crossed her mind. Up the hill and five minutes later, she found Gaston kneeling at the cold living room hearth, resting on his heels and holding a clipboard, already making out the bill. "I'm going to have to order a part for that damper upstairs," he said by way of a greeting, when she came in. "But both flues are clean enough, good for another year. No need to waste your money on that. Just give me forty-five dollars for the house call." He tore the invoice from the clipboard and passed it to her, smiling, a dot of soot at the tip of a very red nose. "Thank you," she said. "I'll write you a check. Gaston, are you sunburned?" "Can you imagine that?" he said. "Spent my whole life out here and still can't tolerate more than a minute of sun. Had to be up on a roof yesterday and forgot to bring my hat." He began to push himself up from the hearth. "You should wear block," she said, moving across the hall and into the kitchen, where she kept her checkbook in a drawer and where, now, she noted in herself an impulse she often disparaged in others, the impulse to adopt a maternal air with older persons. She'd taken a chair at the kitchen table and was writing Gaston's check when he appeared in the doorway. "Easy for you to say," he said. "Can't tolerate sunblock either. Makes me break out in a rash. You've done something to your hair." "Yes," she said, not looking up. "And where's Dan?" he asked, as if he were ticking off items on a list of changes--new hairdo, absent husband. "Dan didn't come down this time," she answered, still not looking up. "Too many things to do in town." "You mean you're out here all by yourself?" he said. She stood and handed him the check, which he fastened to his clipboard. "Yes," she said. "All by myself." He turned and took one step into the hall, then returned to the kitchen door and said, "You don't get lonely?" She looked at him as he stood in the doorway holding his clipboard with both hands against his chest, expectantly, like a schoolboy, his shirttails hanging out of baggy blue carpenter's jeans. Sunlight fell onto the broad planks of the hall floor behind him and cast a glow that lit up the short wisps of white hair at the back of his neck. The bank of windows to his immediate left offered its usual spectacular view of the marsh, a shimmering blue-and-green tangle of water and odd-shaped islands. Now Ellen recalled that Gaston's wife had died a year ago last spring. "Well," she said at last, "if I did get lonely, I could just go home. It's only a two-hour drive." She meant to show sympathy by alluding to their very different circumstances, their different sorts of solitude, and something in the way he paused and then nodded pensively made her think he understood. "I guess that's true," he said. "I like that husband of yours. I hope you'll give him my best when you talk to him. I'll be back when the part for that damper comes in, but it's likely to take a few weeks. And now I'm headed to the harbor, to get myself a bite to eat. Hot as it is, I think I'll call it a day." "Gaston," she said, as he turned again to leave, "you've got soot on your nose." His remedy, swatting at his nose as if he were shooing a fly, accomplished nothing, so she shook her head and said, "You want me to get it for you?" Gaston signaled his consent by craning his neck forward. Beneath the kitchen tap, she wet a corner of a paper towel, then wrapped it around two fingers. Approaching him, she thought she detected apprehension in his eyes. "I'll be very careful," she said softly, but he stood in the hall and kept his head so perfectly still, it was as if he really did think that any slip he might cause her to make would result in injury. In the ten seconds it took to wipe away the soot, she saw his eyes fill with tears. She pretended not to notice and simply said, "There you go," allowing him to turn away quickly and leave through the screen door. She followed him as far as the front stoop. "Is that a new truck?" she asked. "I don't think I recognize it." "Bought it around Christmastime," he called matter-of-factly, without turning back. With the distance of the side yard between them, he waved, then climbed into the truck and drove away. As she returned down the slope to the cabin, she thought, Of course it isn't true. She couldn't "just go home," as she'd so glibly put it to Gaston. She'd isolated herself by design--in truth, Dan had acquiesced to the arrangement with some bitterness; you couldn't honestly call it a mutual decision to separate--and she'd been lonely and generally out of sorts almost every day since she got there. Contrary to what she'd written Willie, she hadn't got a lot of work done, and her time alone on the Cape hadn't been especially lovely. Though the shady cabin stayed cool enough during the day, and she'd been able to sleep all right in the house with the help of an electric fan, the weather had been so hot that the water in the bay was unpleasantly warm; if you wanted to swim you had to go to the pond, which was nearly always overrun with people and a pestilence of biting greenheads. Yesterday, after ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0805077669
• ISBN 13: 9780805077667
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304