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Authors: Katharine Weber
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
Praise for OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
A
New York Times Book Review
Notable Book
“Katharine Weber delivers the goods: an unpredictable, unsentimental story driven by characters who seem more alive than on the page.… The best novels pack both an emotional and an intellectual wallop. Weber’s is one.”
—W
ALLY
L
AMB
“Engaging … Ms. Weber’s nuanced renderings of childhood traumas, of families in crisis, and of Harriet’s grandmother are impressive.”
—
New York Times Book Review
“A fine first novel … filled with hope and playfulness.”
—
Cosmopolitan
“Weber has a gift for anchoring situation in time and place; for rapid shifts of tone; for showing how the ordinary and the extraordinary commingle in our experience.… She knows how treacherous the heart can be and also that it is our only resource.”
—
Boston Globe
“Katharine Weber, in her stunning first novel, might be a murder-mystery author, so tight is her style.… A fascinating read.”
—M
AY
S
ARTON
“Wonderfully complex characters, witty prose, ironic situations, and tragic consequences.… Weber’s control of language holds this cleverly touching book together.”
—
Charlotte Observer
“First novels are rarely this good. Katharine Weber has produced a work that reveals an uncommon control of her craft and a mature understanding of human character and motives.… A work that makes us want to turn the pages as fast as we can to learn what will happen next to these original and interesting female characters.”
—
Kansas City Star
“Witty, bittersweet … A meticulously drawn cast of characters, keen irony, and a flawless sense of place.”
—
Plain Dealer
“Weber writes with captivating charm and an easy intelligence.”
—
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“A rock-solid novel, with impressive style and amazing detail.… More than just a beguiling narrative; Weber steps into the looking glass and pulls the reader in with her.”
—
Providence Sunday Journal
“Tender and funny and sometimes jolting, this is a first novel of remarkable accomplishment.… Weber’s sly and prickly wit, her delight in the farcical aspects of the most tragic situations, and her sure sense of the rewards—and limits—of feminine friendship cast a life-enhancing glow over the proceedings.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Compelling from the outset, due in large part to an enchantingly vulnerable, articulate, clever, yet candid protagonist.”
—
Booklist
Also by KATHARINE WEBER
The Memory of All That
True Confections
Triangle
The Little Women
The Music Lesson
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1995 by Katharine Weber
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Paperbacks, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Broadway Paperbacks and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995, and subsequently published in paperback by Picador USA, a division of St. Martin’s Press, New York, in 1996.
An excerpt from this book originally appeared in
The New Yorker
in January 1992.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for previously published material:
WHO CARES? (SO LONG AS YOU CARE FOR ME) (from “Of Thee I Sing”) Music and Lyrics by GEORGE GERSHWIN and IRA GERSHWIN © 1931(Renewed) WB MUSIC CORP. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC PUBLISHING CO., INC.
CAN’T WE BE FRIENDS? Words by PAUL JAMES, Music by KAY SWIFT © 1929 (Renewed) WB MUSIC CORP. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC PUBLISHING CO., INC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weber, Katharine.
Objects in mirror are closer than they appear / by Katharine Weber.
p. cm.
1. Americans—Travel—Switzerland—Geneva—Fiction. 2. Young women—Switzerland—Geneva—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Switzerland—Geneva—Fiction. 4. Geneva (Switzerland)—Fiction. I. Title.
[PS3573.E2194025 1996]
813′.54—DC20 96-59
eISBN: 978-0-307-88750-4
Cover design by Elizabeth Ackerman
Cover photography: Ralph Gibson, “Bastienne,” from
Infanta, ©
1987
v3.1
For Nick
O.l.i.h.t.s.
Always there lurked the fear that one’s own view of truth was merely a small window in a small house.
—T
HORNTON
W
ILDER
,
The Eighth Day
Oh, Benedict,
It’s been five days since your touch. Your touch, hell, your rib-crushing hug at the security checkpoint. I think I have a bruise, Dr. Heimlich, would you mind taking a look at my clavicle? Have I told you how easily I bruise? How easily I bruise: Once, when I was maybe seven and I was walking with my grandmother, my marvelous grandmother, Gay, across 59th Street to the Park, I darted out into the street at an intersection. She grabbed my wrist, for fear of what she called Come-Arounders—cars turning the corner at a high rate of speed and disregard—and by the next day I had developed a perfect set of her fingerprints. I thought it looked as though a freshly printed felon had taken my wrist in the middle of a booking. (Did you know that when I was little, I wanted very much to be an FBI agent?)
That same afternoon, when we were waiting for the light to change at Second Avenue, a little boy darted into the street in front of us, with traffic streaming close by, and Gay let go my hand to trot right after him so she could whisk him back up onto the sidewalk with a quick underarm hoist. And then the little boy turned around and hissed, “Fuck you, lady!”
It was no little boy at all, but a dwarf, a middle-aged dwarf with acne scars and a Don Ameche mustache. He and I were
about the same height. My grandmother grabbed my arm and we backed away together as she murmured, “So sorry, so sorry,” in a tone that suggested a limited command of English. She hustled me into the nearest doorway as the dwarf advanced, shouting horrible obscenities at us still. This was fortunately a luncheonette, and we backed into the doorway as if that had been our intention all along, and we sat at the counter, Gay and I, and had coffee frosted milk shakes and the dwarf went away and we kept looking at each other and laughing.
I still can’t believe she is gone. I wish you had known her. I dream about her. God, I miss her. Even when she was dwindling away with encroaching senility, she was still there at the core in some tiny way. One of the last times I saw her, about a week before she curled up to die—I just realized she died exactly six months ago today, which is perhaps why I find myself thinking about her now—she seemed to have no idea who I was. But she tugged at my sleeve and kept saying, “What’s this?” until I figured out what she was asking and said, “I’m Harriet.”
“Are you really?” she asked. “Are you really Harriet? In that case, I love you!”
Funny: that moment with the dwarf. Horrifying, but reassuring. Something about Gay always made me feel protected, almost magically so. Though God knows she was impossible, judgmental, full of rules for others to live by. She’s in my thoughts all the time. And I carry her with me in other ways, too. She was, of course, English, as you know. But she was
really
English. I wish you could have heard her voice. Even though Gay emigrated as a young child and lived in New York for the rest of her life, she had all sorts of her mother’s habitual gestures of speech, which I absorbed osmotically, without even knowing that certain phrases or words weren’t ordinary American talk.
Was it Alexander Portnoy who thought
spatula
was Yiddish? When I was small, Gay read to me a lot (possibly because she wasn’t particularly adept at making conversation with a toddler), and what she read included some books from her own childhood, as well as books she had read to my mother when she was little. Consequently, when I was about six (the story goes), I asked my mother for a sixpence for the gumball machine in the shoe store. (My mother thought this was a bit much and instituted an embargo on Enid Blyton books.)
So. My own use of language, spoken and written, ends up somewhere halfway over the sea, unless I’m mindful. There I go. (I notice when you raise those eyebrows over some of my more uncommon utterances, don’t think I don’t.) Maybe it’s one of my connections with Anne. Though I insist that I come by my affectations more honestly.