The Excellent Lombards (30 page)

Just inside the door at home my father was good enough not to turn on the hall light but nonetheless I at once remembered my part. I tossed the keys on the floor in the hall,
Fine, there they are, what you wanted
. And then I ran up to my room and I locked myself inside.

It wasn’t until I was in my bed that I began not merely to tremble but to shiver in an uncontrollable way. I wasn’t even all that cold. As usual I wondered if I was losing my mind. The shivering was not, I thought, prompted by William’s unnerving, unique histrionics or my inability to speak to my father on the path. No, my teeth were rattling because of the resemblance that was occurring to me: Gloria. Long ago Gloria had stood in the door frame of the stone cottage, forced by my father to produce Stephen’s passport. Had I become Gloria? Had I become a person going insane? There were moments, I could now see, when it was understandable to completely go off your rocker. The easiest and most reasonable and maybe proper thing to do in the world, to lose hold of yourself. What were my parents doing downstairs but probably trying to figure out how to commit me. They were discussing the fact that I was certifiable. So the question before me: Was I indeed crazy?

Yes or no.

MF Lombard driven mad by a departure?

I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know. Before I could make a determination the Stephen photographs leapt to mind. I hoped they were going to be all right out in the hole for the night. I loved those pictures. I loved them so much I could hardly stand it, but not, it seemed, in an insane way. Loving the pictures simply did not feel like lunacy. Loving the pictures, there was nothing to be done but lie quietly at the mercy of the suffering.

After some time I got out of bed and went into William’s room. My heart sped up, the thin hum in my ears as I approached the threshold. Had the woods been a dream for him, too? Would the correct approach be to laugh, to cry, to do nothing but sit down and lean against his shelf? He was at his desk playing
Posse
. His fine wispy hair was long enough in the back so that a wind might make it tickle his neck. I loved his neck, which he may or may not wish to know.

“Um,” I said.

“What,” he said.

“Are you going?”

“Early tomorrow morning.” He kept playing his game.

I managed a great summoning of my courage and I said right out, “What are you thinking you will do when you get out of college?”

He turned in his office chair to face me. His eyes were bloodshot, I guess from the crying. He looked older than usual, circles etched under his eyes, the brown of them faded. His face was somewhat drawn. “I don’t know, Frankie.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

I stared at the floor. How could he have no idea?

“I want,” he began.

“What?”

He moistened his lips. He shut his eyes tightly, he opened them and looked hard at me. “I want to make hay.”

“Hay,” I repeated stupidly.

“I want to make hay,” he said again. “And the rain is coming.”

“The cloud is hanging over our heads?”

“But,” he said, nodding, “the rain doesn’t fall. It doesn’t fall yet.”

“Because we don’t have all the bales in.”

“Because—” He suddenly did a lightning spin in his chair. “It’s going to wait until we’re done.”

“Because Papa is there.”

“Yes,” William said. “Because Papa is there.”

We both looked at the floor. “Oh,” I said.

“Now would you please get out of here?” He abruptly turned back to his game.

“Okay,” I said. I went out into the hall. I was satisfied with his answer.

Maybe it was the best possible answer for the time being. I stood at the top of the stairs, very still, holding as still as I could. William, I knew, was capable of playing
Posse
until morning. It was well past the dinner hour but I could hear my parents at the table in the kitchen. I could see the light downstairs. By the smell of it they were having my mother’s famous pork-and-turnip stew and probably she’d whipped up mashed potatoes with buttermilk. Librarian by day, chef by night. I heard her laugh. “Jim, Jimmy, my God.” My father had been working all day out in the cold and afterward he’d had to go into the woods to find me. Probably he was holding a cup of tea in his enormous knuckly hands, telling her the story of the search. It occurred to me that I, too, could stay right where I was, holding on to the newel post, until morning. “How did it get so late?” I heard my father say. My mother replied as if it was a real question. “In the usual way,” she said. I thought I might stay on the top step, in the darkness, holding to the post, stay awhile longer, but I also knew that in just a minute I’d go downstairs.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Libby Ester, Mrs. V, Elizabeth Weinstein, and the Wonder Women. My gratitude, also, to the Hedgebrook Foundation. Not least, thank you to Deb Futter and Amanda Urban.

Reading Group Guide
for
The Excellent Lombards
by
Jane Hamilton

Discussion Questions

1. The Lombards comprise a sprawling, complicated family, and the relationships among them are even more complex. How is the concept of family portrayed throughout the book?
   
2. What effect does making Frankie the narrator have on your perception of the plot?
   
3. One might describe Frankie as being both surprisingly mature and immature for her age. Why do you think this is? How else would you describe Frankie’s character? Use examples from the text to support your claims.
   
4. How does a rural setting lend itself to this sort of familial, community-based story? What role does the landscape, which Jane Hamilton describes vividly, play in the Lombards’ tale?
   
5. In many ways, this novel can be viewed as a coming-of-age story. What are some key moments in which Frankie “comes of age”?
   
6. The question of who will inherit the farm is one of the main conflicts in this book. Do you think that the matter of inheritance is emblematic of some other issue?
   
7. The relationship between Gloria and the Lombards is very complicated. What do you think prevents genuine feelings between the children and Gloria? Between Nellie and Gloria?
   
8. “We weren’t just bored with the world; we were bored with ourselves, or we were hardly in our selves anymore. It was hard to tell what was going on. Maybe, if we could remember one little trick about how we used to be, we could get there, get back, as if we ourselves were a country we’d left.” How does this quote relate to some of the book’s main themes?
   
9. Frankie often has incredibly strong feelings and opinions toward those around her. Analyze Frankie’s relationships with other key characters, such as William, her father, Amanda, and May Hill.
   
10. How does the bond between Frankie and her brother, William, evolve throughout this book?
    
11. How does Frankie view love? Does it change throughout the course of the book? If so, how?
    
12. What do you think makes the Lombards “excellent”?
    

A Conversation with Jane Hamilton

What was your initial conception of
The Excellent Lombards
? Has it changed much?

I wrote many versions of this novel. I have a friend who writes crime fiction. She is often understandably shocked at the inefficiency of my process. “You had
another
failure?” she once lovingly said to me, when I was explaining that yet another version of the novel hadn’t worked out. At the start I knew the situation of the orchard family but I kept superimposing ridiculous plots onto the basic structure. For instance, there were several versions involving a nun and the lesbians in the neighborhood. The nun drowns in the marsh. I read
Catholicism for Dummies
and went to Mass. That version was six hundred pages.

How did your own experience of living and working in a Wisconsin orchard farmhouse inform the content of this book?

I certainly couldn’t have written this novel if I hadn’t lived the life I live. I suppose that could be said for any novel in relation to the novelist, but for this book and my life that statement is especially true. My business associates have for some time been suggesting that I write a memoir about my farm life, but I can’t seem to muster enthusiasm for nonfiction. The pleasure and requirement of writing a novel is living in an invented world. There is the basic material that is the novelist’s life, the marble, clay, the canvas, and as the work progresses the invention becomes entirely separate from whatever real-life events or situation inspired it. So this book lives in an altogether different plane from my own life and times.

What was your greatest challenge in writing
The Excellent Lombards
?

I had the voice of the girl at the beginning. I knew the situation of the family. But situation is not the same as plot. How was I going to organize all the material? How was I going to make a contained narrative with material that is close to me, and ongoing? What should the time frame be? In several of the many different versions Frankie—whose name was once upon a time Nina—is in college. In one version she is well out of college. In one version her father and Sherwood die, a double accident in snow. Chain saws are involved. At a certain point I realized it was better to limit the passage of time. Also, there are specific challenges in an episodic novel. There needs to be connective tissue from chapter to chapter. The whole thing has to flow and cohere through the episodes. I didn’t want to write an eight-hundred-page, intergenerational book with a family tree but rather a book that was relatively short, the girl’s narrative a story that is a distillation of her family history, that history contained, you could say, in her body.

In her essay “On the Art of Fiction,” Willa Cather said,
Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole, so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
I’m not a poet but that goal of condensing and being precise—that trick!—was my impossible goal. All that to say, I wanted to write a short novel about time passing.

Which characters did you enjoy creating the most?

Oh Frankie! I love the clear sight and confusion in the child, and the fury of the teenager. Frankie cannot bear to grow up. She cannot stand the idea that her family’s ties will have to change as she and her brother grow older. She is in love with her family as it is. Her rage as she tries to hold on to time and place was compelling to me. I loved looking at the world from her point of view. Inhabiting her mind and spirit was a privilege.

Frankie clearly loves her family deeply, but this love sometimes manifests itself through seemingly bratty behavior. What do you think love really means to her? Do you believe that people often struggle to express love?

Frankie is trying to figure out how and if she can cement her future, trying to foresee who will get to stay on the farm, who will have to leave, who belongs, and what a person is if they don’t have a place that roots them. For her, all of those problems, those conundrums, are bound up in the word
love
. She is at times nothing but raw feeling. She is powerless even as she exerts her powerful self in her household. Back to Willa Cather: In an essay on Katherine Mansfield she wrote,
As in most families, the mere struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be one’s self at all, creates an element of strain that keeps everybody almost at the breaking point
. Love threads in and out of that “mere struggle.” Certainly in Frankie’s family each member is at different times almost at the breaking point. It’s hard to express love when you are at that point.

Frankie’s family structure is unusually complex, especially the dynamic between Gloria and Jim. Is this tangled web of people—and the heightened emotions that accompany it—reminiscent of your own family? If not, what inspired you to create such a complicated group?

A family business is always a good place to observe tribalism, and the subtribes within the overarching tribe. Mrs. Kraselnik asks her class to think about Who Your Tribe Is? (The word
tribe
seems strange to the fourth and fifth graders.
Tribe? We’re not in a tribe!
) I first started to think of tribal society not long after I stopped going to ballet school, in the 1970s. The pecking order at ballet school was brutal! And I’ve continued to think about how we all operate inside and outside of our particular tribes. All tribes, I’m quite sure, are tangled and complex, and my own family is no exception.

Did the character of Frankie evolve much as you were writing? Is the experience of writing a young woman’s coming-of-age story ever like going back in time to your own childhood?