More Advance Praise for The Ice Garden
One of our best American writers, Moira Crone gives us her finest book yet, a story as dazzling and dangerous as ice. The Ice Garden is a heart-stopper. This just may be the most haunting and memorable novel you will ever read.
—LEE SMITH, author of Guests on Earth and The Last Girls
Ten-year-old Claire McKenzie is the narrator of this wonderful novel, and her far-too-soon passage into adulthood is at the core of this great-hearted but never sentimental book. Moira Crone is an immensely talented writer, and all of her gifts are in full display in The Ice Garden.
—RON RASH, author of Nothing Gold Can Stay and Serena
The pages fly by in The Ice Garden, Moira Crone’s powerful new novel that, despite its title, burns with a glowing white heat. A young girl, Claire McKenzie, narrates her life with a mother trapped in the suffocating culture of the South in the sixties, a father too dazzled by his wife to notice his daughter, and the brand-new sister she adores. Moira Crone’s ability to capture feeling in words and to make those words sing is remarkable and memorable. I read the book straight through, shocked, riveted, and in awe.
—KELLY CHERRY, author of A Kind of Dream: Stories
Praise for Moira Crone
[Her] ability to find language that approximates extreme emotional states lifts her work far above most mere … realism. Moira Crone is a fable maker with a musical ear, a plentitude of nerve, and an epic heart.
—ALLAN GURGANUS WITH DORIS BETTS, Robert Penn Warren Award Citation, Fellowship of Southern Writers
Also by Moira Crone
The Not Yet
A Period of Confinement
What Gets Into Us
Dream State
The Winnebago Mysteries
IN MEMORIAM,
James Clarence Crone,
1921–2013,
my father,
and
Lillie Mae Hall,
1924–1981
© 2014 Moira Crone
Editor: Robin Miura
Design: Lesley Landis Designs
Author Photograph, © Owen Murphy Jr., 2014
The mission of Carolina Wren Press is to seek out, nurture, and promote literary work by new and underrepresented writers, including women and writers of color.
This publication was made possible by Michael Bakwin’s generous establishment of the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman and the continued support of Carolina Wren Press by the extended Bakwin family. We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support of general operations by the Durham Arts Council’s United Arts Fund and a special grant from the North Carolina Arts Council.
Earlier versions of some of the material in this novel were published as the short story “The Ice Garden” in the collection What Gets Into Us (University Press of Mississippi, 2006); TriQuarterly, Spring-Summer 2006, and in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2007 (Algonquin, 2007).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crone, Moira, 1952–
The ice garden / Moira Crone.
pages cm
Ebook ISBN 978-0-932112-68-2
1. Families—Southern States—Fiction.
2. Nineteen sixties—Fiction.
3. Mental illness—Fiction.
4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.R5393I26 2014
813’.54—dc23
2014029262
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner. This collection consists of works of fiction. As in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience; however, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.
I
1961
“Your sister is hanging out that window, look,” Sidney said.
I was standing in the stiff short grass outside Fayton County Memorial Hospital, looking up at the next-to-last window on the second floor. Sidney was next to me, her large, deep eyes behind those cat’s-eye glasses of hers. We had to stand on the lawn because neither one of us was allowed inside. Sidney was excluded because she was colored—me, because I was ten.
My father had appeared in a second-story window holding something oblong, white—a blur, really. “Hey, down there!”
The next moment I saw the silhouette of a capped nurse through the window’s sheer curtain. She pulled my father, and our newborn, away.
“Why wouldn’t Mamma come to the window?” I asked.
“She’s tired,” Sidney said and then changed the subject. “You cherish your sister, you hear me?” I said, “I hear.” Nobody had to tell me that part. I had been an only child too long to be jealous.
She pronounced the name they had chosen. To me it seemed uglier than mine, which was not fair. I said so.
“Okay, you name her,” Sidney said. “It’s allowed.”
I hadn’t thought of that. “I have to see her up close first,” I said.
She said, “You know you smart?”
Sidney always called me smart. I liked it. She had no baby of her own, not then. In a way, I was hers. She took that pride. I resolved I would wait until I could hold my sister to name her. Sidney said that would be tomorrow.
I hardly slept that night and woke up early the next day. The sky was bruise-blue with thunderstorms. I rushed downstairs and gobbled breakfast, which was bacon, but then I found out they weren’t coming yet. My mother needed more rest. They’d be home Friday.
Two more whole days.
At lunchtime, Sidney got permission to go in the hospital nursery. She gave me a report on the baby when she came back: her nose turned up, not down. She had big hands, long fingers. Maybe she would be a piano player like her mother.
Then, five days after she was born, we sat waiting on the side porch for a good hour in the heat. When I looked down the street, the horizon wobbled.
Finally, finally, my father’s dark Mercury pulled in under the porte cochere. He took the basket in the front seat in his hand, opened the door on his side, and came up and put the baby on the porch step right next to me. Sidney was the only one who said anything, and she said it softly, “Well, will you look at that?”
I was afraid to touch her at first. Her folded features were more perfect than I had ever seen on a doll. I couldn’t believe someone could be so tiny and be alive.
I went through all the names I had been considering, but none of them fit.
My father was silent all this time, not a word. His mouth was a line, straight across, tight. He went back to open the car door to fetch my mother. He stood there, holding it open, shoulders back like a soldier.
For the longest time, nothing happened. Finally, her leg swung around and touched the driveway pavement. She had on the same black heels she had left in. I could see where the toes separated, the coating