One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Read online

  Also by Deirdre McNamer

  Red Rover

  My Russian

  Rima in the Weeds

  This is a work of fiction. Characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously

  Text copyright © 1994 Deirdre McNamer

  Introduction and Readers’ Guide copyright © 2013 by Nancy Pearl

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477807644

  ISBN-10: 1477807640

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013904880

  Contents

  Introduction

  Dedication

  The sergeant sang…

  I

  MORNING

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  II

  AFTERNOON

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  III

  EVENING

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  IV

  22

  23

  24

  V

  MIDNIGHT

  MORNING

  Acknowledgments

  Readers’ Guide for One Sweet Quarrel

  Discussion Questions

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  About the Author

  About Nancy Pearl

  About Book Lust Rediscoveries

  Introduction

  MANY YEARS ago now, my husband’s cousin Bob called me to talk about a book he’d just finished. Our conversation went something like this:

  “Nancy, I just finished reading a terrific thriller and wondered if you’ve read it yet.” (I could hear the enthusiasm in his voice.)

  “What’s the name of it?”

  “The Da Vinci Code. It’s by someone named Dan Brown. Did you read it?”

  I paused—a long pause. I think of myself as a promoter of reading, someone who recommends good books to read. I’m not a book critic, and if I don’t like a book I’d just as soon not talk about it at all, but Bob had, unfortunately, asked.

  “Well, actually, I began to read it because so many people were talking about it, but the writing was so abysmal, so clunky, that I couldn’t get much farther than the first page. There are so many terrific books available. I just can’t bring myself to read the badly written ones.”

  Silence on Bob’s part. Then, in a tone of great amazement, “Really? I thought it was wonderfully written.”

  A few months after that conversation, a woman I didn’t know approached me at a party and asked if I could suggest a book she might enjoy. (This happens more than you might think.) When I asked her to tell me about a title that she’d liked, she didn’t respond directly, instead saying that she liked only well-written books. Without questioning her any further, I suggested Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. About two weeks later I got an e-mail from her to say that she’d loved the Roy novel and wondered what else I would recommend for her to read.

  “Well-written” is a phrase that comes up often when people talk about books, be they editors, reviewers, blurb writers, or ordinary readers. But what does that phrase mean exactly? For some, it might bring to mind the dazzling paragraph-long sentences and the languid and lush narrative to be found in the transporting novels of Gabriel García Márquez. Or the writing style of William Faulkner, which my cousin Stephen, a retired English professor, describes as “complex, dense, challenging, innovative, and filled with rich, subtle implication.” For others, perhaps, it means the simile-laden prose that characterizes Raymond Chandler’s work. Others might believe it refers to the pun-filled humor of Terry Pratchett’s novels, or the witty writing that’s found in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next stories. And then there’s Stephen King (The Stand, among many others), a master of providing his readers with the delicious tension between feeling compelled to turn the page to find out what happens next (or, in the case of the “complete and uncut version” of The Stand, to turn well over a thousand pages) and terror at the thought of exactly what that might be. His books are certainly effectively written, but are they well-written? (Bob is a big Stephen King fan.)

  Or what about, for example, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (Anne Tyler), Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov), The Storyteller (Jodi Picoult), The Other Side of the Story (Marian Keyes), Bleak House (Charles Dickens), Beloved (Toni Morrison), Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie), The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver), Emily, Alone (Stewart O’Nan), Ulysses (James Joyce), Safe Haven (Nicholas Sparks), and The Maytrees (Annie Dillard)? I know which of these I’d consider to be “well-written,” but what about you? Based on my experience from talking with readers of all kinds, we’re unlikely to find ourselves in strong agreement on many of these titles.

  Too often, I think people rather casually (and carelessly) equate a “well-written book” with “a book I enjoyed.” When Bob said that The Da Vinci Code was wonderfully written, I think he meant that it delivered the reading experience he was looking for: a fast-paced and exciting page-turner of a novel. He’d never describe himself as someone who read “well-written” books; that isn’t what he wants from a novel. But when I use the phrase “well-written,” I associate it with a particular kind of reading experience, one that focuses on the pleasure received from the way in which an author uses language.

  Whenever people want me to help them find a good book, I always begin by trying to ascertain the kind of reading experience they’re looking for. I ask them to tell me about a book that they’ve enjoyed. Often they’ll talk about how they couldn’t put a certain book down because it was so exciting, or they’ll say that they cried when they finished a novel because they didn’t want to leave the characters behind. Sometimes, though, people will describe a favorite book like this: “I kept reading and rereading sentences because they were so beautiful;” “I savored the writing, constantly amazed that someone could have put words together like that;” “I kept copying down (or underlining) paragraphs so I could go back to them;” “I love books where the sentences sing;” or “I didn’t care what happened in the end; I just wanted to find out how the author would describe it.” For these readers, the way the author uses language goes a long way toward determining whether or not they’ll enjoy, or even read, any particular book. Readers like this will frequently preface or conclude their description of a book they’ve loved by saying, “I love well-written books.”

  I’m one of those readers. And Deirdre McNamer’s intricate and beautifully written second novel, One Sweet Quarrel, is one of my all-time favorites. It spans the lives of three siblings, Carlton, Daisy, and Jerry Malone, during the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Carlton becomes a businessman, Daisy stays home to care for her ailing mother, all the while yearning to move to New York and sing professionally, and Jerry heads off to homestead in north-central Montana. Much happens to these three over the course of the novel, including marriages, deaths, lost loves, and a major boxing match, in which heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey takes on Tommy Gibbons in Shelby, Mo
ntana, in 1923. (You can actually watch a video of the bout on YouTube by googling Dempsey Shelby.) While I enjoyed the story that McNamer tells, what drew me in from the first sentence and kept me reading to the very last page of One Sweet Quarrel was her skill at weaving real events and real places into the lives of her imagined characters. (Or are they imagined? They seem so real to me that I can’t help but wonder about the extent to which her novel is taken from her own family’s history.)

  I’ve now read One Sweet Quarrel four or five times (twice in the last three months as I prepared to write this introduction). It’s one of those novels that rewards rereading. Each time through I find more to admire about the way it’s written: how McNamer can take ordinary words and turn them into sentences and paragraphs bursting with meaning and emotion, sentences and paragraphs that perfectly fulfill the task she gives them. The first time that Alan Turkus, editor of the Book Lust Rediscoveries project, and I talked about this novel, he was about halfway through reading it, and the first thing he said to me was, “It’s so well-written.” Indeed it is. The language is miraculous and meticulous. Even minor characters become living and breathing people.

  Indeed, I could have filled this whole introduction with quotations from One Sweet Quarrel, but I’ll limit myself to these three.

  In this one paragraph about the death of Carlton, Daisy, and Jerry’s father, McNamer tells us all that’s important for us to know about the man and his death:

  The Reverend Franklin Malone died in the spring of 1912 after he cut himself with a dirty penknife while repairing a hinge on the cellar door. The poison set in, and he was gone in four days. When he realized he would not continue to live, he had an attack of pure panic and had to be tied for a few hours to the bedstead before he found acceptance.

  Here’s a description of the morphine-addicted doctor who’s caring for Daisy’s mother:

  He had the addict’s grandiosity, which says that a drug in the bloodstream does not represent a weak person’s intolerance for pain; it represents a strong person’s willingness to look honestly at real pain, to acknowledge the terrifying whimsy and heartbreak of this life.

  Writing about the terrible five-year drought (1915 to 1920) in Montana, McNamer makes this striking comparison: “Drought, like a slowly dying marriage, is only a growing absence, and it can take a long time to believe.”

  If “well-written” is an accolade that makes you perk up your ears when you’re in the market for a new book, then I recommend One Sweet Quarrel to you. And if it’s not, well, try it anyway. It might broaden your horizons about the pleasures to be gotten from reading. In either case, I hope you enjoy One Sweet Quarrel as much as I have.

  Nancy Pearl

  TO MY PARENTS:

  HUGH AND PATRICIA MCNAMER

  TO THE MEMORY OF THEIRS:

  BRUCE AND LUCIE MCNAMER

  JOHN AND JEAN OWEN

  AND TO BRYAN

  The sergeant sang a ballad through a megaphone, turning from side to side that his voice might carry out into the skimpy crowd. He stood there bareheaded under the hot sun, in those surroundings, a pair of blue glasses over his sightless eyes and singing away.

  —DAMON RUNYON, NEW YORK AMERICAN, REPORTING ON THE DEMPSEY-GIBBONS WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT BOXING CHAMPIONSHIP IN SHELBY, MONTANA, JULY 4, 1923

  I

  MORNING

  July 10, 1973

  AS SHE aged, Amelia Malone spent an ever larger portion of each day preparing for it. First, she drank three cups of tea in her dim, low-ceilinged kitchen, while her cat, Verdi, caught a sunbeam under the window. Then they both moved into the bedroom and Amelia stood for a long time at her mothball-scented closet, deciding what to put on. She wore a chenille bathrobe and metallic gold mules.

  Amelia was quite old. Her bluish scalp was plainly visible through the last of her colorless hair. Her flesh yearned downward, resting in rolls at her belly and hips, hanging in sleepy flaps from her upper arms. Her legs were short and sticklike, and her toenails, poking through her toeless slippers, were horned and yellow.

  Her eyes were the eyes of two people. One eye was brown, alert, surrounded by crinkles. The other was larger, and milky as the moon.

  Once she had chosen her dress for the day—she had four—she repaired to the bathroom for a lengthy session at the sink and mirror. She inserted her teeth. She combed her curly black wiglet and anchored it to her own wisps with many bobby pins. She put on her face.

  When she emerged—all this could take an hour or more—she had a vermilion mouth, stately pink circles on her cheeks, new eyebrows, the hair, and rhinestones on her wrinkled earlobes. Often, at this point, she wore the concentrated, gathered look of a performer waiting to go on.

  The rest of the job was mostly a matter of redistribution. The armorlike girdle was pulled upward, pushing flesh before it, until it was braced in place around her midsection. Now she had a bosomy pigeon silhouette. Stockings and shoes—she was gasping a little by now—brassiere, slip, and, finally, a print dress with a fluff of lace jumping from its throat. Sparkly bracelets and a good dose of Chanel No. 19. Then she had to sit awhile dabbing beads of sweat from her upper lip with a small linen handkerchief. It would be late morning, perhaps noon.

  Amelia lived in a small house halfway up a long shallow hill in a little town called Shelby in northern Montana. Her house was two homesteaders’ shacks that had been moved to town back in the twenties, then added to. It had a porch now and a room off the kitchen that doubled as a laundry room and music studio. The yard was bare of trees or shrubbery, and the grass was sparse and dry. A big blue Buick, almost thirty years old, waited in the driveway.

  Amelia’s first plan today was to drive the Buick seven blocks down the long hill to the post office, where she occasionally received something with her name on it from the Baha’is or the government, or, every month or so, from her friend in the Montana State Prison.

  That’s when people in Shelby saw Amelia—when she drove her huge blue car to the post office or the grocery store. She wore a hat with a small veil attached to it that shaded her eyes, and she drove in fits and starts. Almost everyone knew her. Some had taken piano or voice lessons from her when they were growing up. More recently, of course, there had been the incident with the convict on the run.

  He smelled like outdoor smoke, like a campfire, and that’s how she knew he was there. Even before the cupboard squeaked and set her heart knocking so furiously it pinned her to the bed. Smoke first, campfire smoke on dirty clothes, and then the sound of drawers sliding open. These are my last moments, she thought, amazed.

  The drawers closed. Bold feet moved across the floor toward her bedroom, then stopped. They moved away—why?—and out the back door, and sweat broke through all her pores at once, drenching her.

  Twenty minutes later, smoke poured from the sagging storage shed behind her house, and by the time the fire truck got there, two flames were licking out of the roof. Amelia clutched her yellow bathrobe and watched the shed until she realized that half a dozen neighbors, including her brother Jerry, were staring at her. She was more shocking in her unconstructed state than the fire was, or the fact of a criminal from the state prison who had left a burning cigarette or something more deliberate in her shed, then crept through her house opening drawers.

  The day after the fire, she sat at her kitchen table—wigletted, toothed, dressed, made up—and picked through a large box of charred and soggy letters, newspaper clippings, narrow leather diaries, a few photographs. The box was Jerry’s, and it had been in the shed, forgotten, for years. Some of the letters were in her own handwriting, her handwriting of half a century earlier. She studied it, trying to remember a time when she had lived somewhere else.

  On her way to the post office, she stopped at Jerry’s to see if he wanted anything mailed. He sat watching the television news with T.T. Wilkins, a man to whom Amelia had been briefly married in the twenties.

  Both men were in their eighties. Wilkins had a drooping white mustach
e and was asleep on his hand. Jerry was listening to Nixon, and he looked cranky. The last time Amelia had stopped by, he told her the cleaning girl had stolen a bunch of his mineral lease documents. This time, he handed her his subscription renewal to the Oil & Gas Journal and told her he’d be ready for the banquet at six. He went back to the TV, leaning forward a little. He had a wild shock of whitish hair, large eyes in a narrow fallen face. His skin was mottled, and his fingers were knobbed. He wore a starched white shirt and slacks and old-fashioned high-top shoes.

  She and the prisoner corresponded about the Baha’i faith. After he was captured and returned to the prison, she had refused to press burglary charges because her religious beliefs demanded forgiveness and tolerance. This had prompted the prisoner to convert to Baha’ism himself and to begin a correspondence with her. A week before, he had written to ask her to tell the parole board about his religious sincerity. He suggested that she send the board his letters to her from the previous year. That’s what she was doing today.

  The prisoner’s letters were the only personal mail she got as a rule, though she had also corresponded recently with a man in California who said he was a former piano student of hers. This man was named Michael Cage, and his parents still lived in Shelby. He lived in Pasadena and did something so important with the television industry that he had been invited to be the guest speaker at the banquet tonight in honor of Shelby’s pioneers. He wrote to her to say that he particularly hoped she would be at the banquet because he was pegging his speech to his memories of her. You are, he said, the hook.

  Amelia wrote back to say she would be most pleased to see him again. She had no idea who this person was.

  For forty-one years, they climbed the long shallow hill to her studio, their music under their arms. The studio had a wooden floor, then a linoleum floor. A wringer washer and some drying racks stood in a corner.

  An old upright piano with small gouges in the paint of the black keys. A music stand. Two folding chairs. Bare wooden walls, then plaster and calcimine, then, in the fifties, blond wood paneling. A wood stove, then gas.