Fortunate Lives (36 page)

What are your favorite books, books that have influenced you, or books you enjoy recommending to readers?

Well, the usual suspects, I suppose. Austen, James, Virginia Woolf. And I’ve discovered that when I read many books when I
was young I knew they were wonderful but I missed so much of what was brilliant about them. I’m rereading Eudora Welty right
now.
Delta Wedding
. She’s so good that I didn’t realize just how brilliant she was until this reading. How it could have escaped me is mysterious
to me. She has such tact and is so careful, but this book is like a pointillist painting. There are so many ways to understand
her characters.

I was enormously affected by Fitzgerald, who’s so visual a writer, and by Peter Taylor, who has exquisite phrasing. I worked
very hard for a long time trying to achieve his sense of ease—the sense that the story already exists and is just being unraveled
for you. But the book that made me want to write—and which I came upon, oddly enough, in the Baton Rouge bus station when
I was taking a bus to visit my cousins in Natchez—was
The Man Who Loved Children
by Christina Stead. When I got back to Baton Rouge it turned out that my mother had just read it as well. It’s an astonishing
book. It’s a masterpiece, and it always seems to me the opposite, in a way, of
War and Peace
, which I also love for all sorts of reasons but
especially for the wonderful story. Each of those books gives you an entirely believable world, but Stead’s starts wide and
becomes so amazingly intense that finally it’s like a laser of compressed emotion. Tolstoy explodes into a universe and gets
wider and wider.

Has it gotten easier, or more difficult, for you to write as you get older?

Oh, no. And that’s what’s so wonderful about being fifty-four. At last I thought to myself that whether or not anyone would
acknowledge my right to assume authority I was ready to take it anyway. And I was able to think… wider, bigger, with more
reach. I was weary of concentrating on a relatively narrow range.

What are you working on now? You mentioned a trilogy…

The Evidence Against Her
is the first in a series of three novels, each of which will stand on its own. The second book is tentatively titled
Greenside Lane
, and the third book, also tentatively titled, is
Two Girls Wearing Perfume in the Summer
. The series is a tale of a particular American family from its inception, beginning with the gradual confluence through marriage
of four midwestern families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and that family’s evolution through the 1900s
and into the early years of the twenty-first century.

I’m interested in the careless, random, ironic, or merely accidental circumstances from which communal and familial myths
and expectations are first derived, and, of course, I intend to unravel the intricate—sometimes tragic—consequences of those
myths.

I have always been interested primarily in an investigation of character, and that still absorbs me, but I also want to give
readers a whole world, so that when they have finished any one of these books they will be able to revisit its landscape in
their
imaginations. I want any reader to believe that he or she grasps more about the essential lives of the characters than those
characters understand about themselves. I want to make it clear that the accuracy of those legends and myths by which we all
define ourselves is irrelevant in the long run. We inherit or grow into expectations based on who we are assumed to be because
of family, class, gender, race, etc. And much of the struggle of discovering a way to be happy is choosing which myths and
legends we embrace and fulfill, and at what point it’s necessary to discard the expectations of anyone else altogether.

Reading Group Questions
and Topics for Discussion

1. The novel opens as Dinah Howells is sitting down to respond to the Harvard Freshman Dean’s request for a letter describing
   her son David. How do Dinah’s attempts at drafting letters evolve in the course of the novel, and what insight do these attempts
   afford us about Dinah’s state of mind and her feelings toward her son? What do you think she is feeling as she confronts the
   impending departure of her oldest child?
   
2. David himself undergoes a transforming summer. What prompts the changes in his attitude, his shifts in perception and perspective
   on his life and his family and friends? How do you think his first year at Harvard will unfold?
   
3. Dinah and Martin responded to the death of their son Toby by grieving in very different ways. Can you explain how their respective
   methods of coping affected their lives and personalities? Do you think one way of coping is “healthier” than another?
   
4. Owen Croft is a sad but dramatic figure in Martin Howells’s life. How does he act as a catalyst for Martin’s grief, pain,
   and rage? Do you think Martin’s experience would have been different had someone other than Owen been responsible for Toby’s
   death?
   
5. How did Toby Howells’s death alter the relationships between Dinah and Martin Howells and their two surviving children, David
   and Sarah? Do you think Toby’s death altered the way Dinah and Martin thought about their role and their responsibilities
   as parents?
   
6. Netta Breckenridge evokes diverse reactions from the various members of the Howells family. Why do you think the Howellses
   accept this stranger and her daughter into their home so easily, and what is it about Netta that prompts such strong emotion
   from each of them? How does Netta alter the dynamic of the family?
   
7. The title of the novel is
   Fortunate Lives
   . Do you think the Howellses’ lives are more or less fortunate than most other people’s? Do the physical circumstances of
   their lives influence the effects of the losses that the Howellses must cope with?
   

About the Author

Robb Forman Dew received the National Book Award in 1982 for her first novel,
Dale Loves Sophie to Death
. She is also the author of a memoir,
The Family Heart
, and of the novels
The Time of Her Life, Fortunate Lives
, and, most recently,
The Evidence Against Her
.

Following is a preview of
The Evidence Against Her
.

T
HERE ARE any number of villages, small towns, and even cities of some size to which no one ever goes except on purpose. There
are only travelers on business of one sort or another, personal or professional, who arrive without any inclination to dally,
or to dawdle, or to daydream. And yet, almost always in these obscure precincts there is a fine grassy park, a statue, perhaps,
and benches placed under tall old spreading trees and planted around with unexceptional seasonal flowers, petunias or geraniums
or chrysanthemums in all likelihood, or possibly no more than a tidy patch of English ivy. A good many visitors have sat on
such benches for a moment or two, under no burden to take account of their surroundings, under no obligation to enjoy themselves.
A stranger to such a place may settle for longer than intended, losing track of the time altogether—slouching a bit against
the wooden slats, stretching an arm along the back of the bench, and enjoying the sun on a nice day, comfortably oblivious
to passersby and unself-consciously relaxed—without assuming the covertly alert, defensive, nearly apologetic posture of a
tourist.

By and large these towns are middling to small, and are never on either coast or even any famous body of water, such as
a good-sized lake or major river. These are communities that lie geographically and culturally in unremarkable locales: no
towering mountains, no breathtaking sweep of deep valleys, no overwhelming or catastrophic history particular only to that
place. In fact, with only a few exceptions, these unrenowned districts are all villages, towns, or small cities exactly like
Washburn, Ohio, about which people are incurious, requiring only the information that it is approximately forty-five miles
east of Columbus.

As it happens, Monument Square in the town of Washburn is not four sided but hexagonal and was a gift to the city from the
Washburn Ladies Monument Society, ceded to the town simultaneously at the unveiling and dedication of the Civil War monument
on July 4, 1877. The monument itself is a life-size statue of a Union soldier at parade rest, gazing southward from his perch
atop a thirty foot fluted granite column, the pediment of which is over twelve feet high. Altogether the monument stands nearly
fifty feet, and on its west face is the inscription:

O
UR
C
OUNTRY
!

B
Y THAT DREAD NAME

WE WAVE THE SWORD ON HIGH
,

AND SWEAR FOR HER TO LIVE

FOR HER TO DIE
.

—
Campbell

Within a year of the dedication ceremony the common idea among the citizens of Washburn was that the stonecutter—imported
all the way from Philadelphia, hurrying the work, eager to catch the train, and possibly with a few too many glasses of beer
under his belt—had chiseled into that smooth granite the mistake “dread name” as opposed to “dear name.”

In the spring of 1882, Leo Scofield, soon after he and his brothers had cleared the woods and begun construction of their
houses on the north side of the square, had written to Mrs. Dowd, who commissioned the statue but who had moved
back to Philadelphia soon after its unveiling, to inquire if he might have the mistaken inscription altered at his own expense.
He had attempted to cast his offer along the lines of being an act of gratitude for her generous gift, but Leo was only thirty-one
years old then, a young man still, without much good sense. He was enormously pleased by the largesse of his idea—which had
occurred to him one day out of the blue—and delighted that he finally had the wherewithal to make such an offer. A slightly
self-congratulatory air tinged the tactlessly exuberant wording of his letter, and he was brought up short by her reply:

… furthermore, I shall arrange to have the statue removed piece by piece if need be, as it is I who pays out the money each
year for its upkeep, should the inscription in any way be altered. I never shall believe in all the days left to me that the
preservation of the Union was worth the price of the good life of my dear husband, Colonel Marcus Dowd, who left his post
as President of Harcourt Lees College to head Company A. He died at Petersburg. The statue was undertaken at my instigation
only as an honor to him. I shall live with nothing more than despair and contempt for this Union and Mr. Lincoln all the rest
of my life. As my children do not share my sentiments in every respect, however, I have made arrangements to fund the maintenance
of the monument and the fenced area of its surround. I have engaged a Mr. Olwin Grant who lives out Coshocton Road as a caretaker,
and any further questions you may address to him. I implore you, Mr. Scofield, not to raise this matter to me again.

Leo spent several long evenings sitting in the square, contemplating that handsome statue, which towered over the young trees
installed by the Marshal County Ladies Garden Club. It was his first inkling of the fickleness of legend, the ease with which
one is misled by myth. He wrote a letter of deep
and sincere apology but did not hear again from Mrs. Marcus Dowd, nor had he expected to.

He was young and perhaps still a little brash, but he was not an insensitive man, and he applied this glimpse of the possible
effect of grief to his own circumstances, admonishing himself to take all the good fortune of his business and his marriage
much less for granted. The spirit of expansiveness that had characterized his outlook up until the receipt of that letter
was checked somewhat over the year that followed, and as his business ventures grew increasingly complicated, as his house
took shape day by day, as his infatuation with his new wife inevitably grew more complex and profound, he became a man of
a fairly solemn nature.

The three houses built just north of Monument Square in the early 1880s for Leo, John, and George Scofield fronted on a semicircular
drive and shallow common ground that in the summer became a crescent of feathery grass that bent in bright green ripples across
the lawn in the slightest breeze. In time the grass at the inner curve of the drive gave way to a golden velvet moss under
the elms as the trees matured and produced heavy shade all summer long.

The houses were comfortable though not grand. They were well built and nicely spaced, one from the other, and for a number
of years those three south-facing houses marked the northernmost edge of the town of Washburn, Ohio. During the several years
the houses were under construction, and long after, the residential property of those three brothers was known all over town
simply as Scofields, whereas the twenty-odd buildings comprising the flourishing engine-manufacturing business of Scofields
& Company, begun as no more than a foundry in 1830 by Leo’s grandfather, had for some time been referred to merely as the
Company.

The second Sunday of September 1888, on either side of a muddy wagon track that led into the east yard of his new house, Leo
Scofield, at age thirty-seven, planted eight pairs of
cultivated catalpa saplings. Six days later, on Saturday the fifteenth, there occurred the unusual incident of the births—all
within a twelve-hour span—of his first and his brother John’s second child—a daughter and son respectively—and of the third
child of Daniel Butler, a good friend and pastor of the Methodist church. John and Lillian Scofield’s first child, Harold,
born in 1883, had died before he was a year old, so the Scofields’ compound had been childless for some time.

Some years earlier Leo had given up the idea that he and his wife, Audra, would have children. His wife was twenty-nine years
old with this fourth pregnancy, and through the early months they both had dreaded and expected another miscarriage. They
had been married for eight years when Lily was born. The planting of those young catalpa trees was only a coincidence, of
course; Leo hadn’t intended any sort of commemoration, but in spite of himself he developed a superstitious interest in the
welfare of those trees. He had started them himself from seed six years earlier, and they were just barely established enough
to transplant. Several days after his daughter’s birth, when it was clear she and his wife and the other mothers and babies
were thriving, his brother John and he walked the lane he had created, staking the saplings when necessary to guide them straight.