Nora Jane
Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
ELLEN GILCHRIST
“Gilchrist is one of the finest writers of a rare species: the happy story.”
—Susan Salter Reynolds,
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“To say that Ellen Gilchrist can write is to say that Placido Domingo can sing. All you need to do is listen.”
—Jonathan Yardley,
Washington Post
“Ellen Gilchrist delights in reexploring the same world again and again…. She is an Attila of a romantic who, as a southerner,
a woman, and a poet, chooses her weapons from a well-stocked arsenal.”
—Julia Glass,
Chicago Tribune
“There is such wisdom and strength and optimism in Gilchrist’s writing. At her best, the prose is so clear it all but forces
the reader toward clarity…. She has an uncanny ability to impart both the joy and the considerable brutality of romantic love
and family relationships…. In the end, almost all of Gilchrist’s stories are about hope, our ability to triumph in ways large
and, mostly, small.”
—Julia Reed,
Vogue
“Few writers are as adept at spinning funny, slyly insightful tales that radiate outward like tiny satellites, orbiting a
fictional universe that mirrors the more unpredictable and tellingly human moments in our own.”
— Katherine Dieckmann,
New York Times Book Review
In the land of Dreamy Dreams
The Annunciation
Victory Over Japan
Drunk with Love
Falling Through Space
The Anna Papers
Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle
I Cannot Get You Close Enough
Net of jewels
Starcarbon
Anabasis
The Age of Miracles
Rhoda
The Courts of Love
Sarah Conley
Flights of Angels
The Cabal and Other Stories
Collected Stories
I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with My Daddy
The Writing Life
Copyright © 2005 by Ellen Gilchrist
Reading group guide copyright © 2005 by Ellen Gilchrist
and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may
quote brief passages in a review.
Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group,
237 Park Avenue,
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: September 2009
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and
not intended by the author.
“The Panther,” copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell, from
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell, Used by permission of Random House, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-316-08521-2
For Molly Giles, friend, colleague, teacher
Contents
Jade Buddhas, Red Bridges, Fruits of Love
Lunch at the Best Restaurant in the World
The Incursions of the Goddamn Wretched Past
Götterdämmerung,
In Which Nora Jane and Freddy Harwood
Confront Evil in a World They Never Made
A conversation with Ellen Gilchrist
Questions and topics for discussion
Ellen Gilchrist’s suggestions for further reading
N
ORA JANE’S GRANDMOTHER
lived in a blue frame house on the corner of Laurel and Webster streets. It was there that Nora Jane was happy. There was
a swing on the porch and a morning glory vine growing on a trellis. In April azaleas bloomed all around the edges of the porch,
white and pink and red azaleas, blue morning glories, the fragrant white Confederate jasmine, red salvia and geraniums and
the mysterious elephant ears, their green veins so like the ones on Nora Jane’s grandmother’s hands. Nora Jane hated the veins
because they meant her grandmother was old and would die. Would die like her father had died, vanish, not be there anymore,
and then she would be alone with only her mother to live with seven days a week.
“Let me set the table for you,” she said to her grandmother, waking beside her in the bed. “Let me cook you breakfast. I want
you to eat an egg.”
“Oh, honey lamb,” her grandmother replied, and reached over and found her glasses and put them on, the better to see the beautiful
little girl, the better to be happy with the child beside her. “We will cook it together. Then we’ll see about the mirlitons.
You can take them to Langenstein’s today. They said they would buy all that you had.”
“Then I’d better hurry.” Nora Jane got out of bed. If she was going to take the mirlitons to Langenstein’s she wanted to do
it early so she wouldn’t run into any of her friends from Sacred Heart. She was the only girl at Sacred Heart so poor she
had to sell vegetables to Langenstein’s. Still, they had not always been poor. Her grandfather had been a judge. Her father
had gone to West Point. Her grandmother had sung grand opera all up and down the coast and auditioned for the Met. She kissed
her grandmother on the cheek and swung her long legs out of the bed and began to search for her clothes. “You cook breakfast
then,” she said. “I’ll go pick the mirlitons before it gets too hot.”
She put on her shorts and shirt and found her sandals and wandered out into the backyard to pick the mirlitons from the mirliton
vines.
A neighbor was in the yard next door. Mr. Edison Angelo. He leaned over the fence. “How’s everything going, Nora Jane?” he
asked. “How’s your grandmother?”
“She’s feeling fine,” Nora Jane said. “She’s fine now. She’s out of bed. She can do anything she likes.”
Nora Jane bent over the mirliton vines. They were beautiful, sticky and fragrant, climbing their trellis of chicken wire.
The rich burgundy red fruit hung on its fragile stems, fell off into Nora Jane’s hands at the slightest touch. She gathered
a basketful, placing them carefully on top of each other so as not to bruise them. Mirlitons are a delicacy in New Orleans.
The dark red rind is half an inch thick, to protect the pulp and seeds from the swarming insects of the tropics, for mirlitons
are a tropical fruit, brought to New Orleans two hundred years ago by sailors from the Caribbean. Some winters in New Orleans
are too cold for mirlitons and the fruit is small and scanty. This had been a warm winter, however, and the mirliton vines
were thick with fruit. Nora Jane bent over her work. Her head of curly dark black hair caught the morning sun, the sun caressed
her. She was a beautiful child who looked so much like her dead father that it broke her mother’s heart and made her drink.
It made her grandmother glad. Nora Jane’s father had been her oldest son. She thought God had given Nora Jane to her to make
up for losing him. Nora Jane’s grandmother was a deeply religious woman who had been given to ecstatic states when she was
young. It never occurred to her to rail at God or blame him for things. She thought of God as a fallback position in times
of trouble. She thought of God as solace, patience, wisdom, forgiveness, compensation.
Nora Jane’s mother had a darker meaner view. She thought God and other people were to blame for everything that went wrong.
She thought they had gotten together to kill her beautiful black-haired husband and she was paying them back by staying inside
and drinking herself to death. Still, it wasn’t her fault she was weak. Her mother had been weak before her and her mother
before that. It was their habit to be weak.
Nora Jane’s grandmother came from a line of women who had a habit of being strong. One of them had come to New Orleans from
France as a casket girl, had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean when she was only sixteen years old, carrying all her possessions
in a little casket and when she arrived had refused to marry the man to whom she was assigned. She had married a Welshman
instead, a man who had been on the boat as a steward. Each generation of women was told this story in Nora Jane’s grandmother’s
family and so they believed they were strong women with strong genes and acted accordingly. When she was about four years
old Nora Jane had looked at the strong story and the weak story and decided to be strong. It was the year her father died
and her grandmother sat in the swing on her porch and watched the morning glory vines open and close and the sun rise and
fall and believed that God did not hate her even if he had allowed her son to die in a stupid war. Many of the men who fought
with him had written her letters and she read them out loud to Nora Jane. One young man, whose name was Fraser, came and stayed
for five weeks and painted the outside of the house a fresher, brighter blue and put a new floor in the kitchen of the house.
Every day he sat on the porch with Nora Jane’s grandmother as the sun went down and talked about the place where he lived.
A place called Nebraska. When all the painting was done and the furniture put back in the kitchen, he kissed Nora Jane and
her grandmother good-bye and went off to see his own family. After he was gone Nora Jane and her grandmother would talk about
him. “Where’s Fraser gone?” Nora Jane would ask.
“He has gone to Nebraska,” her grandmother would answer. “He went to try to find his wife.”
“Where’s his wife?”
“He doesn’t know. She got tired of waiting for him.”
“She’s sad, like Momma, isn’t she?”
“I think so, some people get sad.”
“But not us, do we?”
“Let’s walk over to the park,” her grandmother said, and got up from the swing. “Those Emperor geese are dying to see you.
They’re waiting for you to bring them some bread.”
“Then do I have to go home?”
“Sometime you do. Your mother doesn’t like it if you stay here all the time.”
“I’ll go tomorrow. In two days I’ll go back over there.”
“We’ll see. Put on your shoes. Those geese are waiting for you by the bridge.”
Of course sooner or later she would have to go back to her mother’s house and watch her mother cry. Although the older she
got the less she had to put up with it. Her mother’s house was seven blocks from her grandmother’s house. Her mother’s house
was in the three hundred block of Webster Street and her grandmother’s house was in the five hundred block of Henry Clay.
By the time she was six years old Nora Jane was allowed to walk from her grandmother’s house to her mother’s house anytime
she wanted to as long as the sun was up. She knew every house and yard and porch and tree between the three hundred block
of Webster Street and the five hundred block of Henry Clay. She knew which fences made the best sound when she ran a stick
along the railings. She knew which dogs were mean. She knew which people got up early and which ones were sleepyheads. She
knew who took the Times-Picayune and who did not. When the golden rain trees bloomed and when the magnolia blossoms opened.
Hello, Nora Jane, everyone would say. How you keeping? How’s everything with you?