Fortunate Lives (35 page)

“What?” Dinah said, suddenly alert.

“In the soccer game. He was so excited. You know how Toby always talked with his hands? He was distracting me. I’d told him
to calm down, but he wasn’t paying attention.”

“Martin. You never told me that Toby scored a goal in that soccer game.”

“I must have. I’m sure I did… he was really good at soccer.”

“You never even told me that he was good at soccer. He used to get so nervous about going to practice. You never told me he
scored a goal that day. He hadn’t scored a goal before that, had he?” They had reached the narrow path that they would have
to descend single file, and Dinah
reached out and detained Martin by holding on to the crook of his elbow.

“No. Well, not in Group Three soccer. He’d just been moved up that year.” Martin was distracted from his brooding by this
curiosity on Dinah’s part. “He was pretty young for that group, but he was one of their best players. He was the youngest
kid on the team. He was a good athlete.”

Dinah was still for a moment. Then she pulled Martin closer to her and reached her head up to kiss him lightly on the cheek.
“We’d better go ahead. I don’t hear Duchess anywhere.”

“She won’t leave the path,” Martin said, turning and preceding Dinah down the hill.

She followed him slowly, tantalized by this new way to understand Toby’s death. She had always thought that the tragedy of
the death of children is that they haven’t had a chance to complete any of the natural cycles of their lives, and therefore
it strikes a universal chord of injustice. Their lives seem incomplete to the survivors. But now she thought about the whole
of Toby’s life. Maybe it had been happily complete in that very instant before his death. There he had been: a hero in his
own mind. He had been gesticulating and excited and pleased, and then his life had ended. Of course, she couldn’t let go that
easily; she would forever grieve for all that Toby hadn’t had a chance to accomplish, or attempt to accomplish. But at least
she could feel a certain relief at knowing that the greatest sorrow of Toby’s death was for her and Martin to bear, that it
had never, for an instant, weighed heavily on Toby himself. And she and Martin would be all right, the two of them. When they
reached the bottom of the hill, she linked her arm through Martin’s. This new bit of knowledge about the mystery of Toby’s
life—and his death—was something she would bring forth and examine again and again, for the rest of her life.

She turned her mind to the problem of what she should fix for dinner. Ever since she had discovered the wonderful bakery on
Carriage Street when they first arrived in West Bradford, she had stopped doing any baking herself. “I never bake,” she would
say, “because the house slants.” She intended to be slightly amusing, but she also meant it as an explanation. They had moved
to West Bradford at the height of a wave of domestic zeal.

“I’d like to get some bread at The Whole Grain Elevator,” Dinah said as they made their way down the path and circled back
through the museum parking lot. “Why don’t we walk down to Carriage Street? You can hold Duchess while I run in and see if
they have any of their oatmeal bread left. We can have tomato sandwiches for dinner.” They continued on, with Duchess bobbing
between them, and occasionally they had to pause and unwrap her from around their legs. They made their way haltingly along
the shortcut down Marchand’s Drive.

Dinah bought two loaves of oatmeal bread, a half dozen blueberry muffins, and eight apricot squares. When she came out of
the shop, laden with two bakery boxes and a large bag to hold the bread, she found Martin chatting with Nat Kaplan. “I always
like to see the students back in town,” Nat was saying. “After three months of tourists they never fail to cheer me up, especially
now that I’m retired and don’t have to
teach
them.” They all laughed, and Nat stepped around her, courteously taking her elbow so as not to jostle her as he passed by
to enter the bakery himself.

Dinah smiled in acknowledgment when she saw Martin glance at all her parcels. “I shouldn’t ever be allowed in there alone.
Everything they have is wonderful. I think it’s the real reason Bradford and Welbern is so popular.” She handed the bread
to Martin. “I’ll have to freeze some of this stuff. I’ve gotten used to having so much food on hand for David’s friends. Sarah
likes these apricot squares, but
she won’t even be home for dinner tonight. She and her boyfriend are cooking spaghetti at his house.”

She and Martin were in no hurry, and they strolled the length of Carriage Street and turned onto the sidewalk along Route
2. “Do they have boyfriends, still?” Martin asked. “Is it anything like it was when we were in the eighth grade? I always
think of Christie as David’s girlfriend, but I don’t know how he thinks of her.”

“I’m not sure,” Dinah said. “I don’t think they ‘date’ exactly. It’s more like they socialize in herds. God, don’t ever let
Sarah know that I called Scott her boyfriend…. I can’t tell what kind of relationship they have. Sarah told me last week that
she was going out with Scott. I felt like a fool. I said, ‘Where are you going?’ and she gave me that sort of look. You know
that new kind of ironic expression she gets? Sort of cynical? It means that they’re going together, I guess. Going steady?
I didn’t press it. It’s exhausting to have to explain your ignorance all the time to your own children.”

They had reached the intersection of Routes 2 and 7 at the very worst time of day. With Martin holding the bread and Duchess’s
leash, and Dinah balancing the two boxes, they made several false starts across the road, leaping back each time a car came
racing around the curve. Dinah had a memory, just then, of being in the third grade and playing jump rope at recess with the
girls while the boys played softball out in the far schoolyard.

Two girls turned the long rope, and a line of jump-ropers formed, one at a time, gauging the rhythm of the rope hitting the
dust and then arching up into the sunlight. You had to judge it exactly right in order to “run in,” and Dinah felt that way
all of a sudden, trying to cross the road. It was as if she were standing before the sweeping rope, rocking her body back
and forth to match it to the rhythm of the slap, swish, of the circling rope, her hands held out slightly for balance and
in anticipation before taking those
few running steps and being caught up in the rhymes and turns and acrobatics of jump-roping.

Each time she had “run in” she had experienced that little pulse of adrenaline, not at all unlike the slight exhilaration
she felt as she and Martin made a run for it when a large black car paused to give them the right-of-way, its huge engine
thrumming. They dashed across the street and reached the sidewalk with Duchess at their side, their bags and boxes intact.
She was pleased and pleasantly energized as she and Martin and Duchess strolled slowly along their own street, past the sweeping
estate across the way and the various homes fashioned from a carriage house and outbuildings, past the Davidsons’ renovated
barn, and on to their own house at the end of Slade Road.

Fortunate Lives

A NOVEL BY

Robb Forman Dew

A Reading Group
Guide

A Conversation with
Robb Forman Dew

How did you begin to write novels? Did you always want to be a writer?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately—why I became a writer, that is. I used to think it was because I had something
urgent to say. But I actually started writing before I could even write. I don’t know how old I was—four or five—and I would
fill pages with wavy lines as though I were writing words. So maybe it’s a genetic imperative of some sort. I don’t think
I’ve ever asked anyone why he or she became a painter, because I assumed it was simply a deep pleasure because that person
was talented. But, of course, I’m sure painting is filled with the same euphoria and misery as writing.

I grew up in a family where everyone seemed to write, or seemed to want to write. I remember being truly startled when a friend
of mine avoided a class in college because she would have to write essays, and instead she took a science course. It was the
first time I really understood that loving to read—my friend was a great reader—really didn’t have that much to do with wanting
to write. And I’ve come to a few conclusions about why people do write. I think that writers really have to write or they
become unhappy—even depressed and disoriented. And I think that they’re lucky if they also have talent, but whether talented
or not anyone who writes is—for the time the actual writing is going on—imagining that he or she is imposing on some imagined
reader a worldview. It’s an unconscious attempt at seduction, I think.

When did you start writing your first novel
, Dale Loves Sophie to Death?
How long did that novel take you to write?

Oh, I think that I was growing increasingly frustrated with my inability to write good short stories. I was getting some of
them published, but I knew they weren’t right. I was so furious at myself at one point—for finishing a story and knowing that
while some of the writing was good the story didn’t work—that I picked up my typewriter and put it in the middle of the driveway
so that when my husband came home that evening in the dark he would run over it! Of course, about a half hour later I rushed
out and saved it—I couldn’t have afforded another and it had occurred to me, too, that it might ruin our car. Also, of course,
how on earth could I have explained it to my husband? But I think my idea was that if my typewriter got run over by a car
then it would hardly be my fault if I didn’t write.

During my twenties and early thirties I struggled with short stories, and they were published in some wonderful journals,
and those editors were extremely encouraging. I began the first chapter of
Dale Loves Sophie to Death
as a story. And I was pretty pleased with the ending for once, but I didn’t send it out right away, and I began another story
which in the back of my head I knew was not a story; it was a second chapter. But I was too terrified to admit it. By the
time I had four chapters I admitted to myself that I was writing a novel.

How did the response to
Dale Loves Sophie to Death—
and, in particular, winning the National Book Award—affect your writing, your career, your life?

I was thirty-five when
Dale
was published and thirty-six when I won the Book Award, and for about five days I was simply elated. It was like being the
homecoming princess at Westdale Junior High School. I felt just as Sally Field must have felt when she received her second
Academy Award and said, “You like me! You really like me!” And then—since I had won it—it began to seem to me not all that
special. And the
following year when I was asked to be one of many judges for the award I realized that my book was probably a choice that
was a compromise for most of the judges. It really didn’t change my career as far as I know, although it probably made it
easier to get publishers to read my manuscripts. But it didn’t alter the way I write or cause me to worry about succeeding
with my next book.

In
Fortunate Lives,
your third novel, you chose to write again about the family at the center of
Dale Loves Sophie to Death.
Did you always know that you’d return to the Howells family?

You know, I really can’t remember. I know they stayed in my mind, but my second book,
The Time of Her Life
, was the obverse of
Dale
. It was about a less healthy family, and I certainly wasn’t thinking of the Howellses then. The Howellses were moving right
along with me through my life, though. They were learning the most terrible things you can learn—which were passions and terrors
that I only knew through them—and yet in the grand scheme of things they were incredibly lucky. I believe it was the irony
of their being safe and comfortable—enviable to so many people on the earth—while suffering a loss that is as bad as anything
that can happen to anyone that intrigued me about the Howellses. Well, I guess I was bound to return to them. And I think
that in the trilogy I’m at work on now all the families from my books will end up knowing each other or possibly being related.
I know there’s some sort of connection.

In
Dale Loves Sophie to Death
and in
Fortunate Lives,
the novels’ respective settings—Enfield, Ohio, and West Bradford, Massachusetts—are almost like characters in the books. Can
you talk about the importance of place in your novels?

It’s something I don’t think about much except for the actual town or neighborhood—the immediate surroundings, the
weather. When I first started writing, the South was the setting for all my stories—I grew up in Louisiana. But it was like
struggling to grow while being suffocated by kudzu. I grew up during the civil rights movement—my high school didn’t integrate
until I was a junior, in 1963. I cared passionately about social justice and race relations, and when I realized that I could
not write about the South without tackling those issues on some level I switched locales. I wanted my stories to happen in
a place that didn’t need to be explained, because although I’m politically active, politics is unbearably distracting to me
when I write fiction.