Baker Towers (39 page)

“I’ll be studying for the rest of my life,” Daniel had told her. Was such a thing even possible? Like everything she heard and saw in the city, it now seems fantastic, as though she made it all up.

His hand in her hair.

In the days after the snowstorm, Mrs. Nudelman had ignored her completely. it was her husband who told Annie the news. “i’m sorry, Miss Lubicki, but we will no longer need your help in the kitchen.” His Polish was awkward; she stared at him, mystified, not sure she’d understood.

Instantly she thought of the dishes. “Oh, no. Have i made a mistake?”

“Not at all. Your work has been very good.” He hesitated a moment, then spoke carefully. “But my nephew is coming from Poland. god willing. So we will no longer have an extra room.”

Years later she will understand the reason. Her brother Peter will die in the war. Her brother John will see the camps, and Annie—married then, with sons of her own—will remember the Nudelmans and the grossmans, the nephew from Poland who was given her bedroom. She will think of Daniel. is he married, too? A husband and father and still studying? Daniel in his separate world.

Now she sets out coffee, a heavy clay pitcher in the middle of the table, milk and sugar already mixed in. Each morning for breakfast she bakes a dozen apples. Then the young ones leave for school, Helen and John and Peter and the rest, and Annie piles the dishes in the sink.

Continue reading for an excerpt from Jennifer Haigh’s new short story collection

News from Heaven

Available in hardcover, downloadable audiobook, large print, and e-book in January 2013

The bestselling author of
Faith
and
The Condition
returns to the territory of her acclaimed
Baker Towers
with a collection of new short stories, centered around the fictionalized coal mining town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania.

NEWS FROM HEAVEN traces the lives of ordinary people over the course of the twentieth century as they come and go from small-town life. Haigh masterfully captures the human condition and the way in which where we come from—our families and our communities—shapes the people we will become, whether through our determination to change or our resignation to circumstance.

In “Beast and Bird,” a teenage Polish girl returns to Bakerton from New York City where she has been keeping house for a Jewish family. The family needs the spare room for cousins coming over from Europe, and the Polish girl will learn of the horrors of war. Later, in “Broken Star,” a family secret comes to light too late for a life to be saved, and an adult woman comes to terms with the sister she never knew she had. A middle-aged woman, once nurse to her now-deceased parents, finally finds love with a younger man returned to town in “Thrift.” But in a place as small as Bakerton, news and rumors outpace their subjects.

The Washington Post
praised Haigh’s ability to bring “a refreshing degree of humanity to a story you think you know well” in her novel
Faith
, and here, in NEWS FROM HEAVEN, she imbues these stories of generations of hometown dreamers and their hopes, both realized and not, with that same refreshing humanity that makes readers want to keep turning the page.

Throughout this beautiful, expertly wrought collection, Jennifer Haigh displays her incredible skill for telling stories and for getting to the heart of her characters. As the
New York Times
recently described her, Jennifer Haigh is a “subtle, serious novelist,” and in NEWS FROM HEAVEN, she brings her unerring talent to the art of the short story.

“The characters in Jennifer Haigh’s NEWS FROM HEAVEN are so vividly drawn, the inner lives revealed so deftly, with such intelligence and sympathy, that fictional Bakerton, Pennsylvania, takes on the additional weight of, say, Winesburg, Ohio.”

— Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
Empire Falls

“In her depiction of Bakerton, Pennsylvania’s inhabitants and exiles, Jennifer Haigh has accomplished what James Joyce did in
Dubliners
and Sherwood Anderson in
Winesburg, Ohio
: render a place with such exactitude the landscape, character, and fate are inextricably linked. Haigh is already recognized as one of America’s finest novelists; this collection confirms she is one of our finest short story writers as well.”

— Ron Rash,
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Cove

My sincere thanks to the MacDowell Colony and Vermont Studio Center, where portions of this book were written.

I am deeply grateful to Dorian Karchmar, Claire Wachtel, Michael Morrison, Lisa Gallagher, and Juliette Shapland, who make all things possible.

Love and thanks to my mother, Elizabeth Wasilko, and to Dan.

Jennifer Haigh
is the author of the critically acclaimed
Mrs. Kimble,
which won the PEN/Hemingway Award for outstanding first fiction. Born and raised in Barnesboro, Pennsylvania, she is a graduate of Dickinson College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short stories have appeared in
Good Housekeeping,
the
Hartford Courant, Alaska Quarterly Review, Virginia Quarterly Review,
and elsewhere. She lives on Boston’s South Shore.

To receive notice of author events and new books by Jennifer Haigh, sign up at
www.authortracker.com.

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www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Both of your grandfathers were coal miners. Was
Baker Towers
inspired by your own family history?

Yes and no. Where I grew up, everybody had miners in the family, and I never gave it any thought. I was an adult before I considered how miners actually spent their shifts: walking into the mine drift, or later, riding the mantrip; the hard labor in tight quarters, the physical danger, the absolute darkness. It seems incredible, now, that I ever considered this a normal and unremarkable way to make a living. Everything about it is extraordinary.

The characters themselves are inventions; they don’t resemble anybody in my family. But the details about the town itself, what life was like in the postwar years, definitely came from my parents and other relatives.
Baker Towers
ends in the Vietnam era, right around the time I was born, so I couldn’t rely on my own memories of the period I was writing about. By the time I came along, the coal mines were already in decline. The era of the company town was past, and the region was on its way to becoming
something else. But I grew up hearing about how things used to be, and when I set out to write this book I had a wonderful time interviewing family members about what life was like when coal was king.

How did the characters evolve from the time you began imagining them?

The characters really developed a generation at a time. When I began writing, Rose and Stanley were clearest to me. I had a vivid mental picture of what they looked like—Rose very dark, southern Italian; Stanley a Slavic type, big and blond—and I was fascinated by how those two sets of physical traits would combine and manifest in a large family. As far as developing the characters, that happens in the process of writing. Each event in the character’s life changes her destiny in some way, and the writer makes these discoveries over time. One of the pleasures of writing a novel is following the characters over many years, from infancy to adulthood. When the story opens, Lucy is two months old; by the end, she is a grown woman. It’s important to me that the reader recognizes the child in the adult, that the character “turns out” in a way that seems organic and true.

Does Joyce’s experience mirror your own in any way?

None that I can think of. The generational differences are very significant. Joyce was born forty years before I was, into an entirely different social climate. A very different set of opportunities was open to her. I never served in the military, or worked in a factory, and I have never held a family together the way Joyce does. Her resolve and competence and moral strength are a product of those life experiences.

Did you ever consider writing
Baker Towers
in the first person, from Joyce’s perspective?

Writing in the first person is difficult for me. I sometimes approach short stories that way, but I find it too restrictive for a novel. Part of what intrigued me about writing
Baker Towers
was the chance to show the reader a time and place through several different sets of eyes: Joyce’s, Dorothy’s, Georgie’s, Lucy’s. Without those different perspectives—male and female, soldier and civilian—
Baker Towers
would be an entirely different story and, I think, a less interesting one.

How do men and women experience Bakerton differently?

The obvious difference was work. A man mined coal, and a woman almost never did. Her economic security depended completely on finding a husband, and that reality shaped her life in all sorts of ways. A bachelor could make a living, but an unmarried woman had a rough time of it. She might work in the dress factory, or do housework for wealthy families, or care for her elderly parents, but her livelihood was tenuous and probably a source of worry for her family.

A man was also more likely to see some of the world beyond Bakerton, or to leave the town completely. Going to away to college was a luxury almost no one could afford, but if you were a young man in the forties or fifties, you likely served in the military, which took you across the country or even overseas, and much increased the likelihood that you would settle somewhere else. Young women stuck close to home. After the World War II, the GI Bill allowed some people to get an education—mostly men, since they were far more likely to have served.

What are some of the themes and motifs present in the novel that resonate with you?

Well, it’s a book about first-generation Americans, those of a certain place and time; today’s first generation families have different stories to tell. The small town way of life, which no longer exists as it once did. We still have small towns, but with television and the internet they’re not the islands that they once were; they’re much more connected to the culture as a whole. We have lost much of our regionalism, those qualities that gave one part of the country a different texture from all the others. And there’s no getting it back.

Those are the first thoughts that come to mind. I don’t think about any of this stuff when I’m actually writing. It occurs to me later, when I’m looking at a printed page and the words no longer seem like mine. A kind of separation occurs, and it’s as if I’m reading a book written by someone else. And the book appears to have a theme.

How did you choose your setting?

To some extent Bakerton is modeled on Barnesboro, the town I grew up in, but it’s not an exact replica. It’s really a composite of towns I know in that part of Pennsylvania. Each mining town is unique, though its distinguishing features may not be obvious to people who don’t know the place well. Every town has its own landscape, its own ethnic mix, its own relationship to the mine operators. I invented a town so that I could have control of those variables.

What kind of research did you do for this novel?

I do my best research by talking to people. These conversations yield more than simple facts; they give me a feel for how people talk, what they remember, which events in their lives hold the greatest significance for them. Beyond that, I spend a lot of time looking at old newspapers and magazines—not just the headlines, but the advertisements. I care what people were wearing, what kinds of cars they drove, what groceries cost, what was playing on the radio. Some of this information finds its way onto the page, but most of it doesn’t. It’s my way of creating a world in my imagination, of making it real and vivid for myself.

What was your writing process like? How did the experience of writing this novel compare to that of your debut? What is life like now, as a full-time writer?

On a first draft I write every morning, at my kitchen table, by hand. I do later drafts at a computer, but I can’t imagine composing on one. It’s too easy, the words too cheap. There is something about the act of forming letters with a pen that makes me conscious of each word, and I write better sentences.

When I was writing
Baker Towers
, I felt a real sense of obligation to the region and the people who live there. It’s a part of the world that doesn’t get written about very often, and it was tremendously important to me that I do it justice, that I get it right.
Baker Towers
took three years to write, with occasional interruptions; I’d been thinking about this book for many years, before I even wrote
Mrs. Kimble
, but I wasn’t ready to tackle it. I think I sensed that I didn’t yet have the skills to write it.