Last Resort (32 page)

What had surprised Lee was Wilkie’s appearance.

Nothing that Jenny had said, and none of the magazine or book-jacket photographs, had prepared her for his being so heavy, gray, worn, and slow-moving. Why, he’s an old man, she had thought, and an inconvenient flood of compassion had sloshed over her. No wonder he’d believed he was ill, dying even.

Lennie’s right, she thought now. Wilkie won’t be around forever. But whether or not he was around, Jenny would be determined to get his book into publishable shape. There was no point in trying to fight that, because in Jenny’s mind it was her book too. When he and the manuscript went north she would go with them. And though she and Lee might manage to meet somehow, somewhere, this summer, she would be gone for the next half-year.

But that wasn’t going to happen just yet. Lee remembered something she had read once, that as you grow older and the future shrinks, you have only two choices: you can live in the fading past, or, like children do, in the bright full present.

Jenny would be here for nearly two more months—the rest of March and all April. Spring was Lee’s favorite season in Key West: by early April most of the tourists would be gone, as well as the college students who had made the town noisy and dangerous with their rented mopeds and riotous intoxication.

The weather would be perfect: the nights warm and romantic. Almost every day, as soon as the conference was over, Jenny would come to the guest house, and sometimes late at night too, after Wilkie was asleep—as she had already done several times.

They would be together often as the island became steadily quieter, more beautiful, and more overgrown with flowers. Together they would watch the purple and white orchid trees unfold into bloom; they would see the stubby spread hands of the frangipani put out their pink and white and golden velvet whorls of petals, and the poinciana explode slowly overhead in drifts of scarlet confetti.

Alison Lurie (b. 1926) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author of fiction and nonfiction. Born in Chicago and raised in White Plains, New York, she grew up in a family of storytellers. Her father was a sociology professor and later the head of a social work agency; her mother was a former journalist. Lurie graduated from Radcliffe College, and in 1969 joined the English department at Cornell University, where she taught courses on children’s literature, among others.

Lurie’s first novel,
Love and Friendship
(1962), is a story of romance and deception among the faculty of a snowbound New England college. It won favorable reviews and established her as a keen observer of love in academia. Her next novel,
The Nowhere City
(1965), records the confused adventures of a young New England couple in Los Angeles among Hollywood starlets and Venice Beach hippies. She followed this with
Imaginary Friends
(1967), which focuses on a group of small-town spiritualists who believe they are in touch with extraterrestrial beings.

Her next novel,
Real People
(1969), led the
New York Times
to call her “one of our most talented and intelligent novelists.” The tale unfolds in a famous artists’ colony where much more than writing and painting occurs. Lurie then returned to an academic setting with her bestseller
The War Between the Tates
(1974), and drew on her own childhood in
Only Children
(1979). Four years later she published
Foreign Affairs
, her best-known novel, which traces the erotic entanglements of two American professors in England. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

The Truth About Lorin Jones
(1988) follows a biographer around the United States as she searches for the real, and sometimes shocking, story of a famous woman painter—a character who appears as an eight-year-old in
Only Children. The Last Resort
(1999) takes place in Key West, Florida, among a group of ill-assorted characters, some of who appear in earlier Lurie novels.
Truth and Consequences
(2005) returns to an academic setting and plumbs the troubles of a professor with back trouble, his exhausted wife, and two poets—one famous and one not. 

Lurie has also published a collection of semi-supernatural stories,
Women and Ghosts
(1994), and a memoir of the poet James Merrill,
Familiar Spirits
(2001). Her interest in children’s literature inspired three collections of folktales, including
Clever Gretchen
(1980), which features little-known stories with strong female heroines. She has published two nonfiction books on children’s literature, as well:
Don’t Tell the Grown-ups
(1990) and
Boys and Girls Forever
(2003). In the lavishly illustrated
The Language of Clothes
(1981), she offers a lighthearted study of the semiotics of dress.

Lurie officially retired from Cornell in 1998, but continues to teach and write. In 2012 she was named to a two-year term as the official New York State Author. She lives in Ithaca, New York, and is married to the writer Edward Hower. She has three grown sons and three grandchildren.

Lurie at age seven.

Lurie at age fourteen, wearing her first long party dress in preparation for dancing school.

Lurie and her dog, Sliver, in the backyard of her family’s home in White Plains, New York, in the summer of 1947. (Photo courtesy of Kroch Library.)

Lurie on the porch of her parents’ home in White Plains, New York, in the early spring of 1947.

Lurie with her husband, Edward Hower, in Key West, Florida, in 2008. 

Lurie and Hower.

Lurie in 2009.

Lurie’s three sons, from left to right, John, Jeremy, and Joshua, in October 2011.

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