And I ask myself about the stories we’ve been hearing lately: Have they grown thinner? The Australian mother and daughter, for example—what had they offered? Relations in Exeter. A wedding in Melbourne. Is that enough? Dobey says to be patient, that everything is fragmentary, that it’s up to us to supply the missing links. Behind each of the people we pick up, Dobey believes, there’s a deep cave, and in the cave is a trap door and a set of stone steps that we may descend if we wish. I say to Dobey that there may be nothing at the bottom of the stairs, but Dobey says, how will we know if we don’t look.
IN 1974 FRANCES WAS ASKED to give a lecture in Edmonton, and on the way there her plane was forced to make an emergency landing in a barley field. The man sitting next to her—they had not spoken—turned and asked if he might put his arms around her. She assented. They clung together, her size 12 dress and his wool suit. Later, he gave her his business card.
She kept the card for several weeks, poked in the edge of her bedroom mirror. It is a beautiful mirror, a graceful rectangle in a pine frame, and very, very old. Once it was attached to the back of a bureau belonging to Frances’s grandmother. Leaves, vines, flowers and fruit are shallowly carved in the soft wood of the frame. The carving might be described as primitive—and this is exactly why Frances loves it, being drawn to those things that are incomplete or in some way flawed. Furthermore, the mirror is the first thing she remembers seeing, really seeing, as a child. Visiting her grandmother, she noticed the stiff waves of light and shadow on the frame, the way square pansies interlocked with rigid grapes, and she remembers creeping out of her grandmother’s bed, where she had been put for an afternoon nap, and climbing on a chair so she could touch the worked surface with the flat of her hand.
Her grandmother died. It was discovered by the aunts and uncles that on the back of the mirror was stuck a piece of adhesive tape and on the tape was written: “For my vain little granddaughter Frances.” Frances’ mother was affronted, but put it down to hardening of the arteries. Frances, who was only seven, felt uniquely, mysteriously honored.
She did not attend the funeral; it was thought she was too young, and so instead she was taken one evening to the funeral home to bid goodbye to her grandmother’s body. The room where the old lady lay was large, quiet and hung all around with swags of velvet. Frances’s father lifted her up so she could see her grandmother, who was wearing a black dress with a white crepe jabot, her powdered face pulled tight, as though with a drawstring, into a sort of grimace. A lovely blanket with satin edging covered her trunky legs and torso. Laid out, calm and silent as a boat, she looked almost generous.
For some reason Frances was left alone with the casket for a few minutes, and she took this chance—she had to pull herself up on tiptoe—to reach out and touch her grandmother’s lips with the middle finger of her right hand. It was like pressing in the side of a rubber ball. The lips did not turn to dust—which did not surprise Frances at all, but rather confirmed what she had known all along. Later, she would look at her finger and say to herself, “This finger has touched dead lips.” Then she would feel herself grow rich with disgust. The touch, she knew, had not been an act of love at all, but only a kind of test.
With the same middle finger she later touched the gelatinous top of a goldfish swimming in a little glass bowl at school. She touched the raised mole on the back of her father’s white neck. Shuddering, she touched horse turds in the back lane, and she touched her own urine springing onto the grass as she squatted behind the snowball bush by the fence. When she looked into her grandmother’s mirror, now mounted on her own bedroom wall, she could hardly believe that she, Frances, had contravened so many natural laws.
The glass itself was beveled all the way around, and she can remember that she took pleasure in lining up her round face so that the beveled edge split it precisely in two. When she was fourteen she wrote in her diary, “Life is like looking into a beveled mirror.” The next day she crossed it out and, peering into the mirror, stuck out her tongue and made a face. All her life she’d had this weakness for preciosity, but mainly she’d managed to keep it in check.
She is a lithe and toothy woman with strong, thick, dark brown hair, now starting to gray. She can be charming. “Frances can charm the bees out of the hive,” said a friend of hers, a man she briefly thought she loved. Next year she’ll be forty-five—terrible!—but at least she’s kept her figure. A western sway to her voice is what people chiefly remember about her, just as they remember other people for their chins or noses. This voice sometimes makes her appear inquisitive, but, in fact, she generally hangs back and leaves it to others to begin a conversation.
Once a woman got into an elevator with her and said, “Will you forgive me if I speak my mind? This morning I came within an inch of taking my life. There was no real reason, only everything had got suddenly so dull. But I’m all right now. In fact, I’m going straight to a restaurant to treat myself to a plate of french fries. Just fries, not even a sandwich to go with them. I was never allowed to have french fries when I was a little girl, but the time comes when a person should do what she wants to do.”
The subject of childhood interests Frances, especially its prohibitions, so illogical and various, and its random doors and windows that appear solidly shut, but can, in fact, be opened easily with a touch or a password or a minute of devout resolution. It helps to be sly, also to be quick. There was a time when she worried that fate had penciled her in as “debilitated by guilt,” but mostly she takes guilt for what it is, a kind of lover who can be shrugged off or greeted at the gate. She looks at her two daughters and wonders if they’ll look back resentfully, recalling only easy freedoms and an absence of terror—in other words, meagerness—and envy her for her own stern beginnings. It turned out to have been money in the bank, all the various shames and sweats of growing up. It was instructive; it kept things interesting; she still shivers, remembering how exquisitely sad she was as a child.
“It’s only natural for children to be sad,” says her husband, Theo, who, if he has a fault, is given to reductive statements. “Children are unhappy because they are inarticulate and hence lonely.”
Frances can’t remember being lonely, but telling this to Theo is like blowing into a hurricane. She was spoiled—a lovely word, she thinks—and adored by her parents, her plump, white-faced father and her skinny, sweet-tempered mother. Their love was immense and enveloping like a fall of snow. In the evenings, winter evenings, she sat between the two of them on a blue nubby sofa, listening to the varnished radio and taking sips from their cups of tea from time to time or sucking on a spoonful of sugar. The three of them sat enthralled through “Henry Aldrich” and “Fibber Magee and Molly,” and when Frances laughed they looked at her and laughed too. Frances has no doubt that those spoonfuls of sugar and the roar of Fibber Magee’s closet and her parents’ soft looks were taken in and preserved so that she, years later, boiling an egg or making love or digging in the garden, is sometimes struck by a blow of sweetness that seems to come out of nowhere.
The little brown house where she grew up sat in the middle of a block crowded with other such houses. In front of each lay a tiny lawn and a flower bed edged with stones. Rows of civic trees failed to flourish, but did not die either. True, there was terror in the back lane, where the big boys played with sticks and jackknives, but the street was occupied mainly by quiet, hard-working families, and in the summertime hopscotch could be played in the street, there was so little traffic.
Frances’s father spent his days “at the office.” Her mother stayed at home, wore bib aprons, made jam and pickles and baked custard, and every morning before school brushed and braided Frances’s hair. Frances can remember, or thinks she can remember, that one morning her mother walked as far as the corner with her and said, “I don’t know why, but I’m so full of happiness today I can hardly bear it.” The sun came fretting through the branches of a scrubby elm at that minute and splashed across her mother’s face, making her look like someone in a painting or like one of the mothers