The Jane Austen Book Club (8 page)

Allegra was trying very hard not to express any of Corinne's opinions, but every time she spoke, Corinne's words came out. Corinne was in no mood to praise a writer like Austen, who wrote so much about love when the world was full of other things. “Everything in Austen is on the surface,” Allegra said. “She's not a writer who uses images. Image is the way to bring the unsaid into the text. With Austen, everything is said.”

Prudie shook her head vigorously; her hair flew about her cheeks. “Half of what Jane says is said ironically. Irony is a way of saying two things at once.” Prudie was trying to express something she hadn't completely worked out yet. She opened her hands, like two halves of a book, clapped them closed. Allegra was mystified by the gesture, but she could see that whatever Prudie was trying to say, it was something she deeply believed. “The thing you've said and that opposite thing you've said at the same time,” she cried out. She had the carefully constructed dignity of someone drunk. Prudie's dignity always felt slightly manufactured, so the difference was a subtle one. A tiny slur, a bit of spit.

“Yes, of course.” Of course, Bernadette had no more idea what Prudie was going on about than Allegra did. She was just choosing agreement because it seemed more polite than opposition, even when one had no idea what point was being made. “And I
think it's her humor that keeps us reading her two centuries later. At least, that's what I respond most to. I don't think I'm alone in this. Tell me if I'm alone in this.”

“People like a romance,” Grigg said. “Women do, anyway. I mean, I do, too. I didn't mean that I didn't.”

Sylvia came back into the room. She stirred the fire so that it threw off sparks, spinning like pinwheels up the flue. She added another log, crushing the life out of what little flame had remained. “Brandon and Marianne,” she said. “At the end, doesn't it feel just as if Marianne's been sold? Her mother and Elinor, both pushing so hard. It reads as if she fell in love with Brandon, but only
after
she married him. He's been such a good man that her mother and Elinor are determined he'll get his reward.”

“But that's my point,” Prudie said. “Jane
intends
you to feel that uncomfortableness. The book ends with that marriage and the thing Austen isn't saying about it.”

Sylvia sat down next to Allegra, which forced Grigg to move aside. “It just makes me sad. Marianne can be self-centered and all, but who really wants her sobered up, settled down? Nobody. Nobody could ever want to see her be anything but exactly what she is.”

“Do you want her with Willoughby, then?” Allegra asked.

“Don't you?” said Sylvia. She leaned forward to address Prudie. “I think you should let Jocelyn drive you home tonight. Don't worry about your car. Daniel will bring it round in the morning.” There was a silence. Sylvia put her hand over her mouth.

“I'll do that,” said Allegra. “I'll bring you your car.”

W
hen Allegra finally rose from her bed, only three days after she'd fled her apartment in nothing but her T-shirt, she drove to
the Vacaville skydiving school. At first she was told that no one would take her. She had no appointment; she knew the rules. And if she was back because of the broken arm, they weren't responsible for that; there were certain forms she might remember having signed. She needed to go home and think it through, they said. She needed to make an appointment and come back after she'd thought more about it.

Allegra argued. She laughed a lot, so that no one would get the wrong idea about her mood and intentions. She flirted. She let the men flirt back. She told them that this was a skydiving emergency, and finally, Marco, who'd been one of her instructors and was apparently still unclear on her sexuality—not that she hadn't told him often enough, but her behavior today had obviously raised the question again—agreed to be her tandem master. Tandem was not what she wanted; she was definitely in the mood for solo, but solo wasn't happening.

Allegra put on the ridiculous orange suit and they went up. Marco clipped himself to the back of her shoulders and hips. “Are you ready?” he asked, and before she could answer, he'd pushed her out. There was a smiley-face sticker inside the plane, just where you put your hand before you jumped. The words “Go Big” were written in marker beneath.

They slid through the air. The wind was rough, Marco close. But she got what she wanted. Blue sky above, brown hills below. Behind her, the university stretching out its vast agricultural fields of unnatural tomatoes, burrowing owls, dairy cows. Somewhere to the east, her parents were having lunch. Her parents, who loved her. Marco pulled the cord, and she heard the parachute spinning out, felt it catching. Her parents who loved her and her brothers and her nieces and each other, and they always would.

Dear Miss Austen:

We must regretfully inform you that your work does not suit our current needs.

In 1797, Jane Austen's father sent
First Impressions
to a publisher in London named Thomas Cadell. “As I am well aware of what consequence it is that a work of this sort should make its first Appearance under a respectable name I apply to you,” he wrote. He asked what it would cost to publish “at the Author's risk,” and what advance might be offered if the manuscript were liked. He was prepared to pay himself, if necessary.

The package came back immediately, with “Declined by Return of Post” written across the top.

The book was published sixteen years later. Its title had been changed to
Pride and Prejudice.

In 1803, a London publisher named Richard Crosby bought a novel (later titled
Northanger Abbey
) from Jane Austen for ten pounds. He advertised it in a brochure, but never published it. Six years passed. Austen then wrote to Crosby, offering to replace the manuscript, if it had been lost and if Crosby intended to publish it quickly. Otherwise, she said, she would go to another publisher.

Crosby wrote back, denying that he was under any obligation to publish the book. He would return it to her, he said, only if she returned his ten pounds.
Northanger Abbey
was not published until five months after Austen's death.

Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

MARK TWAIN

 

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. . . . All that interests in any character [is]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? . . . Suicide is more respectable.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

in which we read
Mansfield Park
with Prudie

Her perfect security in such a
tête-à-tête
 . . . was unspeakably welcome to a mind which had seldom known a pause in its alarms or embarrassments.
(
MANSFIELD PARK
)

Prudie and Jocelyn had met two years before, at a Sunday matinee of
Mansfield Park.
Jocelyn was sitting in the row behind Prudie when the woman to Prudie's left began a whispered monologue to a friend about high jinks at some local riding stable. Someone was sleeping with one of the farriers—a real cowboy type, boots and blue jeans and a charm that seemed unstudied, but anyone who could gentle horses knew perfectly well how to get a woman into bed. The horses, of course, were the ones to suffer. Rajah was not eating at all. “Like he thinks he's
hers
,” the woman said, “just because I let her ride him from time to time.”

Prudie was pretty sure this was about the horse. She hadn't spoken up. She sat and seethed over her Red Vines and thought about moving, but only if it could be done without an implied accusation; she was, ask anyone, courteous to a fault. She was just beginning to take an unwelcome and distracting interest in Rajah's appetite when Jocelyn leaned forward. “Go gossip in the lobby,” Jocelyn said. You could tell that she was not a woman to be trifled with. Send her to deal with your cowboy types. Send her to feed your oh-so-sensitive horses.

“Excuse me,” the woman responded resentfully. “Like your movie is so much more important than my real life.” But she fell silent, and Prudie didn't really care that she was offended, an offended silence being just as silent as a flattered one. This silence lasted the whole movie, which was all that mattered. The gossipers left at the credits, but the true Janeite was truly gracious, and stayed for the final chord, the white screen. Prudie knew without looking that Jocelyn would still be there when she turned to thank her.

They talked more as they threaded through the seats. Jocelyn turned out to like fiddling about with the original story no better than Prudie did. The great thing about books was the solidity of the written word. You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been. A good book was surprising the first time through, less so the second.

The movies, as everyone knew, had no respect for this. All the characters had been altered—Fanny's horrid aunt Mrs. Norris was diminished simply by lack of screen time; her uncle Mr. Bertram, a hero in the book, was now accused of slave-dealing and sexual predations; and all the rest were portrayed in broad
strokes or reinvented. Most provocative was the amalgamation of Fanny with Austen herself, which scraped oddly at times, as the two were nothing alike—Fanny so shrinking and Austen so playful. What resulted was a character who thought and spoke like Jane, but acted and reacted like Fanny. It made no sense.

Not that you couldn't understand the screenwriter's motivation. No one loved Austen more than Prudie, ask anyone. But even Prudie found the character of Fanny Price hard going. Fanny was the prig in your first-grade class who never, ever misbehaved and who told the teacher when anyone else did. How to keep the movie audience from loathing her? While Austen, by some accounts, had been quite a flirt, full of life and charm. More like
Mansfield
's villainous Mary Crawford.

So Austen had given Mary all her own wit and sparkle, and none of it to Fanny. Prudie had always wondered why, then, not only Fanny but also Austen seemed to dislike Mary so much.

Saying all this took time. Prudie and Jocelyn stopped at the Café Roma to have a cup of coffee together and examine their responses more minutely. Dean, Prudie's husband, left them there and went home to reappraise the movie in solitude while catching the second half of the 49er–Viking game.

On her first reading,
Mansfield Park
had been Prudie's least favorite of the six novels. Her opinion had improved over the years. So much so that when Sylvia picked it for May, Prudie volunteered to host the discussion, even though no one is busier than a high school teacher in May.

She expected a lively exchange and had so much to say herself, she'd been filling index cards for several days in order to remember it all. Prudie was a great believer in organization, a natural Girl Scout. She had lists of things to be cleaned, things to be cooked, things to be said. She was serious about her hosting. With power—responsibility.

But the day began, ominously, with something unexpected. She appeared to have picked up a virus in her e-mail. There was a note from her mother: “Missing my darling. Thinking of coming for a visit.” But then there were two more notes that had her mother's return address plus attachments, when her mother hadn't mastered attachments yet. The e-mails themselves read, “Here is a powful tool. I hope you will like,” and “Here is something you maybe enjoy.” The identical “powful tool” message came again in another e-mail. This one seemed to be from Susan in the attendance office.

Prudie had planned to send out a reminder that, because of the heat, the book club would meet at eight instead of seven-thirty that night, but she didn't wish to risk spreading the infection. She shut down without even answering her mother's note.

The predicted temperature for the day was a hundred six. This, too, was bad news. Prudie had planned to serve a compote, but no one was going to touch anything hot. She'd better stop by the store after work and get some fruit for a sherbet. Maybe root beer floats. Easy, but fun!

Dean lurched out of bed just in time to kiss her good-bye. He was wearing nothing but a T-shirt, which was a good look for him, and how many men could you say that about? Dean had been staying up at night to watch soccer. He was in training for the World Cup, for those games that would soon be shown live from whatever time zone Japan and Korea occupied. “I'll be late today,” he told her. He worked in an insurance office.

“I've got book club.”

“Which book?”

“Mansfield Park.”

“I guess I'll skip that one,” Dean said. “Maybe rent the movie.”

“You've already been to the movie,” Prudie answered. She
was a tiny bit distressed. They'd been to it together. How could he not remember? Only then did she see that he was teasing her. It was a measure of how distracted she was, because she was usually quick to catch a joke. Anyone could tell you that.

“How long ago it is, aunt, since we used to repeat the chronological order of the kings of England, with the dates of their accession, and most of the principal events of their reigns!” “ . . . and of the Roman emperors as low as Severus; besides a great deal of the Heathen Mythology, and all the Metals, Semi-Metals, Planets, and distinguished philosophers.”
(
MANSFIELD PARK
)

Prudie gave her third-period students a chapter of
Le Petit Prince
to translate—
“La seconde planète était habitée par un vaniteux”
—and took a seat in the back of the classroom to finalize her notes for book club. (The secret to teaching was to place yourself where you could see them but they couldn't see you. And nothing was more deadly than the reverse. Chalkboards were for chumps.)

It was already way too hot. The air was still, with an odor faintly locker-room. Prudie's neck was streaked with sweat. Her dress was fastened onto her back, but her fingers slid on the pen. The so-called temporary buildings (they would last no longer than Shakespeare's plays) in which she taught had no air-conditioning. It was hard to keep the students' attention in May. It was always hard to keep the students' attention. The temperature made it impossible. Prudie looked about the room and saw several of them wilted over their desks, limp as old lettuce leaves.

She saw little sign of work in progress. Instead the students slept or whispered among themselves or stared out the windows.
In the parking lot, hot air billowed queasily over the hoods of cars. Lisa Streit had her hair in her face and her work in her lap. There was something especially brittle about her today, the aura of the recent dumpee. She'd been dating a senior and, Prudie had no doubt, pressured daily to give it up to him. Prudie hoped she'd been dumped because she hadn't done so rather than dumped because she had. Lisa was a sweet girl who wanted to be liked by everyone. With luck she would survive until college, when being likable became a plausible path to that. Trey Norton said something low and nasty, and everyone who could hear him laughed. If Prudie rose to go see, she believed, she'd find Elijah Wallace and Katy Singh playing hangman. Elijah was probably gay, but neither he nor Katy knew it yet. It was too much to hope the secret word would be French.

In fact, why bother? Why bother to send teenagers to school at all? Their minds were so clogged with hormones they couldn't possibly learn a complex system like calculus or chemistry, much less the wild tangle of a foreign language. Why put everyone to the aggravation of making them try? Prudie thought that she could just do the rest of it—watch them for signs of suicide or weapons or pregnancy or drug addiction or sexual abuse—but asking her to teach them French at the same time was really too much.

There were days when just the sight of fresh, bright acne or badly applied mascara or the raw, infected skin around a brand-new piercing touched Prudie deeply. Most of the students were far more beautiful than they would ever realize. (There were also days when adolescents seemed like an infestation in her otherwise comfortable life. Often these were the same days.)

Trey Norton, on the other hand, was beautiful and knew it—wounded eyes, slouched clothes, heavy, swinging walk.
Beauté du diable.
“New dress?” he'd asked Prudie while taking his seat today. He'd looked her over, and his open assessment was both
unsettling and infuriating. Prudie certainly knew how to dress professionally. If she was exposing more skin than usual, that was because it was going to be a hundred-fucking-six degrees. Was she supposed to wear a suit? “Hot,” he'd said.

He was angling for a better grade than he deserved, and Prudie was just barely too old to be taken in. She wished she were old enough to be impervious. In her late twenties, suddenly, unnervingly, she found herself wishing to sleep with nearly every man she saw.

The explanation could be only chemical, because Prudie was not that sort of woman. Here at school every breath she took was a soup of adolescent pheromones. Three years of concentrated daily exposure—how could this not have an effect?

She'd tried to defuse such thoughts by turning them medicinally, as needed, to Austen. Laces and bonnets. Country lanes and country dances. Shaded estates with pleasant prospects. But the strategy had backfired. Now, often as not, when she thought of whist, sex came also to mind. From time to time she imagined bringing all this up in the teachers' lounge. “Do you ever find yourself . . .” she would begin. (As if!)

She'd actually been sexually steadier her first time through high school, a fact that could only dismay her now. There was nothing about those years to remember with satisfaction. She had grown early and by sixth grade was far too tall. “They'll catch up,” her mother had told her (without being asked, that's how obvious the problem was). And she was perfectly right. When Prudie graduated, most of the boys had topped her by a couple of inches at least.

What her mother didn't know, or didn't say, was how little this would matter by the time it happened. In the feudal fiefdom of school, rank was determined early. You could change your hair and clothes. You could, having learned your lesson, not
write a paper on
Julius Caesar
entirely in iambic pentameter, or you could not tell anyone if you did. You could switch to contact lenses, compensate for your braininess by not doing your homework. Every boy in the school could grow twelve inches. The sun could go fucking nova. And you'd still be the same grotesque you'd always been.

Meanwhile, at restaurants, the beach, the movies, men who should have been looking at her mother began to look at Prudie instead. They brushed past her in the grocery store, deliberately grazing her breasts. They sat too close on the bus, let their legs fall against her at the movies. Old men in their thirties whistled when she walked by. Prudie was mortified, and this appeared to be the point; the more mortified she became, the more pleased the men seemed to be. The first time a boy asked to kiss her (in college) she'd thought he was making fun of her.

So Prudie was not pretty and she was not popular. There was no reason she couldn't have been nice. Instead, to bolster her social position at school, she'd sometimes joined in when the true outcasts were given their daily dose of torment. She'd seen this as a diversionary tactic at the time, shameful but necessary. Now it was unbearable to remember. Could she have really been so cruel? Someone else perhaps had tripped Megan Stahl on the asphalt and kicked her books away. Megan Stahl, Prudie could now see, had probably been slightly retarded as well as grindingly poor.

As a teacher Prudie watched out for such children, did her best for them. (But what could a teacher do? No doubt she made things worse as often as she made them better.) This atonement must have been the real reason she'd chosen the career, although at the time it had seemed to be about loving France and having no inclination for actual scholarship. Probably every high school teacher arrived with scores to settle, scales to tip.