Read The Distinguished Guest Online
Authors: Sue Miller
The Distinguished Guest
for Doug
Chapter 1
In 1982, when she was seventy-two years old, Lily Roberts Maynard published her first book. It was put out by Tabor Press, a small feminist publishing house in Chicago. Tabor
Press was named for and funded by the estate of Judith Tabor, whose husband had made a fortune in refrigerated transport vehicles. Though their names, Judith and Gabriel Tabor, appeared linked on
plaques here and there in Chicago—in public libraries and museums and hospital wings—Tabor Press had been Judith Tabor’s own project, endowed by her after her husband’s
death, and run exclusively by women.
The first printing of Lily Maynard’s book was only five hundred copies, but they were beautiful books, carefully designed and produced, with marbled endpapers, and a woodcut reproduced at
the start of each chapter, a church with a narrow spire. Lily loved to hold her book, loved to turn the thick, cream-colored pages slowly, to read her own words, so transformed by the
authority—the heaviness, as she felt it—of print, that she was often startled by them, by their power. The book was called
The Integrationist: A Spiritual Memoir.
Tabor Press was at that time run by a committee of four women who rotated being chair. As it happened, the woman in charge of the watch on which Lily Maynard’s book was published, a thin,
energetic person named Betsy Leaming, was also the person in the house most interested in commercial success, and the only one who understood anything about publicity. She sent Lily’s book,
with a cover letter, to the editors of women’s pages for a number of major newspapers in the Midwest. The letter summarized Lily’s life, quickly: the cloistered, wealthy Minneapolis
background, her forced removal from college by her father after she voted for Roosevelt in the 1932 election, her marriage and transformed life in Chicago with Paul Maynard, a radical young
Protestant minister called to an inner-city church. It told of their bitter struggle and eventual divorce over religious and ideological issues, centering on integration and the black power
movement; and then, in Lily’s own words, “the slow learning about what was left.” The letter laid out some of the various angles an interviewer might take with this material.
Perhaps best of all, it enclosed a photograph of Lily with her pure-white hair sculpted back into a bun, and the piercing dark eyes. She had been a remarkably handsome younger woman in her
unsmiling, sober way, but age had softened her face to a melancholy and gentler beauty.
Lily was a good interview, it turned out, by turns elegant and cantankerous. Quotable. She discovered she liked to talk. She liked the sense of public weight her opinions began to acquire, and
this made her yet more quotable. Often as she sat back and made a pronouncement, a nearly mischievous smile would lighten her somber face. Speaking about the appeal Saul Alinsky’s radical
brand of community organizing held for the Protestant leaders in her Chicago neighborhood, she shook her head and sighed: “Those old church boys were just tired of being thought of as
do-gooders. The idea of hanging around with tough guys appealed to them. Alinsky restored their sense of masculinity.” On the radicalism of the sixties: “It was mostly a call for street
theater, a cheap yearning for more drama in political and public life. Everyone let himself forget that the processes of true change are always long and slow and effortful, and probably for the
most part pretty boring.”
Orders picked up and Tabor went to press again. Betsy Leaming followed her early letter with a copy of an interview with Lily in the
Tribune
. There were glowing and positive reviews.
There began to be other interviews and more orders. Tabor found itself unable to keep up with the demand. Eventually they sold the contract to a much larger house in New York, which, in essence,
published the book anew. This time there were reviews in the daily and Sunday
New York Times.
Suddenly Lily was invited to read at colleges, to lecture at feminist conventions, to speak to
women’s church groups. The galleys of other writers’ books thunked through her mail slot regularly, with requests for any comments she might have. There were more interviews, and she
was featured prominently in an uplifting article in
Newsweek
on aging in America. She’d become a public personage.
Her children were bemused by the transformation, by encountering their mother, who’d always been formidable and remote, more intimately in her work and in interviews than they’d
known her themselves in what they laughingly began to call “real life.”
Clary wrote to her brother, Alan: “I have to confess to you some bitterness at Mother’s success, at her parlaying (oh, oh! here comes the accusation) our whole family’s misery
into her own triumph. Her spiritual triumph, at that. And oddly, I resent too, the skill with which it’s been done, the points she gets for that.”
Though Alan had his own differences with his mother, he thought of himself as more forgiving of her public achievement, and of her transformation. This in spite of the fact that it was he of the
three children who had perhaps suffered most on account of his mother’s spiritual crisis. He was the youngest in the family, five years younger than the middle child, Clary, and he was the
one who lived alone with Lily after his parents’ marriage ended, since the two girls had already left for college. He could still remember the silent dinners with Lily before he escaped to
his room to do his homework—the steady, and to him revolting, sound of his mother’s chewing and swallowing sharpening his awareness of her physical being. Whenever he heard her
footsteps pass in the hallway, he stopped still in the fear that she might knock on his door, might want to talk to him.
But Alan was happily married now. He had put his own uncomfortable teenage years behind him. When he opened the
Times Book Review
and, for the first time without anticipating it,
encountered his mother’s startled and imperious gaze across space and time, he felt safe.
What Rebecca might feel, no one knew. She’d disappeared in 1971 when a bomb she was helping to build was accidentally detonated. Two of her friends had died in the explosion, and the FBI
had declared her complicit in their deaths. The last time Clary and Alan had heard from her was in 1989. Clary had stood in her sunny gravel driveway in California under the branching live oak and
opened an envelope with no return address, postmarked Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Inside there was an old-fashioned, thick postcard with scalloped edges, stamped in Guatemala. On its front was a
faded travel photo of a town square dominated by an ornate white church. On the other side, in cramped handwriting, Rebecca expressed the hope that Clary and her children were well, that Alan was
happy. She said she had work to do that she felt was important, and that her life was full of shared sacrifice and deep rewards. Clary had wept reading the card on the telephone to Alan. She
remembered her so clearly, she said: all the times Rebecca had let Clary come into bed with her and they’d whispered and laughed about boys, about teachers, about their mother. The window in
the basement that Rebecca left unlocked to climb in and out of after her curfew. Their excursions together downtown on the IC, when they’d pretend to be Italian, or German, making an
inflected vocabulary out of the names of artists and foods: “Caravaggio prego, tintoretto manicotti pesto olio olivo. Si, si.” In German they used philosophers, guttural gibberish.
In her book, Lily had said that one of the hardest things for her about Rebecca’s disappearance was the way it brought back to her her conflict with her husband—Paul—about the
role of confrontation and violence in changing the world. Under Rebecca’s photograph in the book, the caption read, “Rebecca at age eighteen, before I lost her.” It was one of the
things Clary hated most about the book, this implicit claim by her mother ever to have “had” her sister.
Alan and Gaby live on the bank of a river. In the field alongside their house they have planted young apple trees—Duchess, Gravenstein, Yellow Newton, Jonathan. It is
Gaby’s idea that one day these trees will resemble the gnarled fruit trees she remembers from the countryside near her grandmother’s house in France. The little leafy sticks will
thicken and bend, and she will make cider and pies with their fruit. She and Alan will grow old watching their grandchildren play among them. She is comfortable thinking of her life in these
terms.
Tonight they have friends over for dinner, a meal Gaby has prepared with care and skill. On the round table, among the guttering candles and the odd, brightly colored crumpled napkins, sit their
thick white dishes with the remaining crumbs of a lemon tart they’ve eaten for dessert. They have all had a lot to drink by now, and they are talking animatedly about the craziness in their
families. When Alan jumped into this conversation—and he jumped in eagerly—he was sure no one could compete with him: the divorced parents, the chilly, famous mother, the new-age sister
in California, the vanished one in Central America. But he was wrong; Tim Gamer has a sister in jail for manslaughter, Melanie Mercer a father who went out for a half-gallon of milk and never came
back. There’s a brother who believes the CIA can read his thoughts, another who’s a Hare Krishna, another who’s been married six times. They laugh harder with each additional
detail in the candlelight, it all seems so unbelievable. Tears sparkle in their eyes.
“These are all such
American
stories,” Gaby says with a wonderment only Alan hears as carrying judgment.
Before he can feel defensive, Tim says, “You’re absolutely right. There’s nothing to be ashamed of here. It’s the American way.” They laugh.
If they chose to look up now from the cluttered table, from the circle of familiar faces in the yellow, warm light, they might see around them through the reflection of the dinner table in the
glass walls of the house, the toss of dark trees, the moon’s slow slide over the opposite bank of the river. Alan does this. He relaxes and feels himself lapse momentarily into a state
he’s familiar with: he seems to be floating away from this group of his closest friends—from his dearest friend, his wife. He seems to be watching them all from slightly above, watching
them in the setting he has imagined and created for them, thinking of minor adjustments he might like to make.
Alan designed this house. He is an architect, and he teaches design at a small arts college in Massachusetts. The house stands on the banks of one of the many rivers that feed into
Buzzard’s Bay in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. It won a small award two years before and was featured in a design magazine. He and Gaby have lived in it for six years, though for a decade
before that, while they lived in awkward rented places and then a cramped house they bought in the village nearby, they spoke of the house as though it were already a reality, as though it existed
somewhere else and it was only a matter of getting there. “My God, I can’t wait to get into my own kitchen and have a little counter space,” Gaby would say. Or a place for the
children to put their sports equipment. Or a guest suite for when her mother or sister came from France and stayed.
And yet, now that they are here, Alan finds himself still thinking of this as temporary. He still imagines the improvements that could be made, he still drifts away, as he is doing now, and
corrects this or that aspect of the design for things he didn’t foresee or take into account. He still imagines that something is missing. “Where we live now,” he sometimes begins
in talking about the house. Recently Gaby has noticed this, has taken to correcting him: “Where we
live
, Alan, if it pleases you.”
Perhaps it’s a mistake, he thinks abruptly, for an architect ever to build his own house.
Gaby has begun to talk now, in her deep, unevenly accented voice, about Clara, about his sister Clary, adding the details of her life—her many divorces and remarriages and children by
different fathers, her belief in past lives—to the list of family eccentricities. How she and Alan joke that she has, in fact, so many versions of her own earthly life, it’s no wonder
she believes there might be even more.
Alan is thinking of his life, his one life here, where he lives now. The house he has made, the woman he has married. He watches Gaby’s mobile, animated face, the square, strong hands
speaking too, accompanying her story. Gaby is a cook, she has her own gourmet shop and catering business in the expensive little village nearby. At home they eat well, they drink good wines. Their
children, although they are in college now and graduate school, like to come back to visit. Often they are present at an evening like this, helping with the meal, talking comfortably with people
twice their age and more.