The Book That Matters Most (25 page)

Everyone laughed. Except John, who frowned and wrote in his notebook in small square letters:
write what you know?????

“Betty Smith wrote it, and it was published in 1943,” Cate said. “But perhaps you didn't know how autobiographical the novel is. Like Francie Nolan, Betty Smith grew up poor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the early twentieth century.

“Although Smith was born five years before Francie, Betty Smith and Francie Nolan share the same birthday,” Cate continued. “And like Francie, she went to college without having a high school diploma.”

John shook his head. “Why didn't she name it
The Story of Francie Nolan
then? The title confused me. I mean, Francie is the main character, and she's what grew in Brooklyn.”

“May I?” Monique asked, standing.

Cate took a seat and let Monique stand in front of the room.

“The title represents the importance of place to the author. This is part of my attraction to the novel. Betty Smith seems most concerned with time and place, and then creating a character out of that setting,” Monique said.

“I see,” John said, still bewildered.

“That's kind of the opposite of Flannery O'Connor's edict to develop character and then story will follow,” Honor said. “Smith seems to be saying develop place, and character—and therefore story—will follow.”

“I just don't see why the New York Public Library would pick this book as one of the best books of the twentieth century,” John said, shaking his head.

“Hm,” Ruth said, “someone did a little research.”

John blushed.

“It's because the novel shows us that strong values help us triumph over adversity,” Honor said.

Ava glanced at her phone for the hundredth time that day, as if a message from Maggie might magically appear.

Everyone started talking at once, about the themes of class and poverty, gender and sex, perseverance and hardship that ran through the novel. John kept flipping the pages of his book, frowning, as if he were trying to find what everyone else saw in it. Ava forced herself to concentrate.

Luke was saying, almost to himself, “The tin can bank.”

“What about it, Luke?” Cate asked him.

“It struck me that Francie and Neeley are told to put money in the tin can bank so the family can buy land. For fourteen years they put money in there, like when they sell the scrap metal to the junk collector they put the money in the tin can bank,” Luke said.

“But they take money out too,” Jennifer pointed out. “To pay the ice cream man and to help pay for one of their moves.”

“Right, right,” Luke said. “And we're always told the amounts too. A dollar for the ice cream, two dollars for the move. We always know how much is in there too. That's what just struck me. When Johnny dies there's $18.62 in the bank, but it's not enough to bury him. Katie has to borrow money to bury him.”

“And then she throws the bank away,” Monique added.

“That's exactly it!” Luke said, his eyes shining. “Now they own land, so they don't need the bank. But the land is a cemetery plot, not a better home.”

“That's sad when you put it like that,” John said.

The room grew quiet.

“Actually,” Ava said, “I'd like to talk about symbolism.”

Monique nodded.

“The tree, in particular,” Ava added. “I think, Luke, the tree is what makes the book hopeful in the end. It's been chopped down and set on fire, but Francie realizes it's not dead.”

“There's a new branch,” John said.

“The tree survived, just like the Nolan family,” Ava said, her voice catching.

Luke smiled at her. In fact, everyone was smiling at her.

“What a lovely note to end on,” Cate said. “Thank you, Ava.”

Ava moved with the group toward the refreshment table, where Emma stood filling the little wineglasses and fanning cocktail napkins. Her hair was leprechaun green and she had a new tattoo of a small pink Piglet, still slightly swollen and red, right above her left breast.

“That was nice,” John said to Ava. “What you said about the tree. It made me appreciate the book a little more.”

“I'm glad,” Ava said.

“I liked what the grandmother said,” John said. He pulled out a folded piece of paper from his pocket and read, “To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”

When he looked up, his cheeks were wet with tears.

“Oh, John,” Ava said, putting a hand on his arm. “What happened to your wife?”

“A brain aneurysm.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

Just like that
, Ava thought.

In that moment, she saw a tree. A different tree. The large oak that grew in the backyard of her childhood home. The tree she and Lily used to climb, where they built a fort. The tree from which Lily fell that day.

“I think the suddenness is making it harder,” John was saying.

“Yes,” Ava said.

“In the book,” John said, “it says something about how you grieve because you didn't hold it tighter when you had it. That got me.”

He folded the paper and handed it to Ava. “I was going to read this tonight, in the discussion.”

“You should have,” Ava managed to say, even though all she could think of was that other tree, the bright sun coming through its leaves.

Then Cate was standing in front of her with a vaguely familiar woman and John left to fill a plate with deviled eggs.

“You never came,” the woman said to Ava.

“This is Penny's daughter Helen,” Cate said. “Remember?”

“I'm so sorry,” Ava said. “I meant to come by. My daughter . . .” She stopped herself.

“She specifically said to give this to you,” Penny's daughter said, and she held out a package wrapped in soft green tissue paper.

“Honestly, I have no idea why Penny would leave me something,” Ava said. “But thank you for bringing it.”

Ava put the package in her bag.

It wasn't until much later, back home in bed, redialling Maggie's number and staring at her email in the hope that a message from Maggie would appear, that she remembered the package. She went downstairs to retrieve it, and brought it back to bed with her. She hadn't noticed the small envelope taped to the outside, the kind usually tucked into a floral arrangement. On the card, it said:
I knew your mother. P
. Surprised, Ava tore open the paper. There, in her hands, was a book. Immediately she recognized the cover, but still she read the title out loud.

“
From Clare to Here
,” Ava said into her empty bedroom.

As if those words acted as a magic incantation, an email from Will dropped into her inbox.

Good news! She emailed me that she was in the hospital with pneumonia but she's better now. She told me not to tell you, of course. Mom, she's fine.

Relief so great swept over Ava that she found herself hugging the book to her chest, the way she had as a young girl. But this time, everyone was alive. Everyone was all right.

PART EIGHT

JULY/AUGUST

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading
it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and
you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.
That doesn't happen much, though.

—
The Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger

Maggie

All Maggie wanted to eat was the chocolate she bought at the newsstand. She bought large cheap bars and devoured them. Two or three a day. She had little money left from the funds her father had deposited for her year in Florence. She'd spent too much of it on drugs and bad decisions.

Nights made Maggie homesick. She wanted to be a girl who had a place to go to, a girl with college waiting for her in September, with her own bed somewhere. But she couldn't find her way back to that girl. Instead, she wrote down sentences and descriptions in her little notebook. She went to the bookstore and filed
books, and when there were no books to file she sat in a beanbag chair and read. She ate her cheap chocolate bars, and went to the cafés where Hemingway used to go, and slept in her little room in the hostel.

“You like chocolate,” a girl said to Maggie one morning in the bookstore.

The girl, about Maggie's age, had come upon her devouring one of the chocolate bars she bought at the newsstand. Maggie had seen her here before, lots of times. She was the only one Madame let use the cash register, which Maggie understood to mean she was the only one Madame actually trusted.

Maggie was wearing a pale yellow dress. The chocolate had melted in the summer heat, and she'd accidentally smeared some on the front of the dress. Her hair hung down her back in a hot ponytail.

“Today I will take you to Patrick Roger,” the girl said. “We will leave here in the afternoon and walk to Saint-Germain-des-Près and there we will gorge ourselves.”

The girl was tall and slender with a big toothy smile. Her blond hair was held away from her face with a wide black headband and her dress—knee-skimming, tucked at the waist, flared at the hips—had a pattern of teapots.

“Bon,”
the girl said, more to herself than to Maggie.

She started to walk away, but came right back.

“Je m'appelle Geneviève,”
she said, sticking her hand in Maggie's face.

For an instant, Maggie couldn't think what she was supposed to do. Then she took Geneviève's hand and shook it, aware that hers was limp and hot in Geneviève's cool firm grasp.

As soon as Geneviève clomped away in her clogs, Maggie closed
her eyes and considered her options. She had taped new postcards on the wall of her room back at the hostel: a rakish Hemingway, a beautiful Scott Fitzgerald, both of them looking young and hopeful. Another one of the Eiffel Tower under construction. Maybe, she thought, she should leave Paris. She opened her little notebook and wrote other futures for herself.
Amsterdam: Canals. Tulips. Windmills. Berlin: Remnants of the Wall. Remnants of WWII. Too depressing??? Prague: What exactly is in Prague??? Wasn't Kafka from Prague???

“What is this category?” the bookstore owner was asking her.

Maggie looked up to find Madame scowling and pointing to an index card.

“‘My Mother's Books,'” she told her. “My mother joined a book club.”

Madame kept scowling.

“I miss her,” Maggie said, surprising herself.

M
aggie picked up a dog-eared paperback of
Anna Karenina
and placed it on the shelf with the other books she'd labeled “
My Mother's Books
.” Several copies of
The Great Gatsby
and
Pride and Prejudice
leaned against one another, and she slid
Anna Karenina
in between them. She tried to remember what other books her mother's book club was reading, but even though she'd received the list by email, she couldn't recall the other titles.

“You!” Madame said sharply from her perch behind the cash register. “Don't just stand there!”

Maggie ran her fingers across the few books on this shelf, as if she were reaching for her mother's hand.

“There's soup,” the woman said. “In the back room.”

When Maggie turned toward her, she was adding up receipts in her big blue ledger, a pair of half-glasses sitting on the tip of her nose.

“Nothing fancy,” she said without looking up. “Just soup.”

“Merci,”
Maggie said, suddenly ravenous.

In the back room, the pot of soup warmed on an old hot plate. Lentil, thick with chunks of carrots and celery and leeks. Beside the hot plate, several chipped bowls sat one inside the other in a crooked pile that made Maggie think of the game Jenga that she and Will used to like to play at the kitchen table as their mother stood at the stove making dinner.
Bowls stacked like Jenga blocks
, she thought. But she was too hungry to pause and get her notebook to write it down. Instead, she took the bright orange bowl on top of the stack and filled it to the brim with soup. There was bread too, a basic bakery baguette already cut into rounds, with a slab of French butter on a plate beside it. Maggie grabbed three pieces, and without even sitting dipped bread in soup and shoved it hot into her mouth, burning her tongue and palate. She finished the first bowl quickly, and took a second one, just as full, and more bread, over to the sofa.

The sofa was old, its springs jutting out, the cushions covered with a quilt, also old and smelling of mothballs and books. Maggie adjusted herself around the sofa's lumps and springs and ate, more slowly now. The quilt, she realized, was made of worn silk, with frayed embroidered birds and flowers on it and small flat mirrored pieces. From here, she could see out a window that needed a good cleaning—“white vinegar and newspaper!” she could hear her mother saying—and beyond to a small yard with dead plants in it, all brown and withered. Still, birds kept dipping in and out of a birdfeeder hung from the bare branch of a
tree. A flash of red, and then gold. The flutter of wings. And even in here the distant sounds of their coos. Maggie eyed the old computer glowing on the desk. She would email her mother, she decided. She would tell her she'd come to Paris.