REMEMBERING TIME: STORIES AND NOVELLAS

If the least of my songs
Avail, no future day will ever take you
Out of the record of remembering Time…

THE AENEID, IX, 633-35,
Translated by Robert Fitzgerald

STORIES

1. The Golden River

“ A masterpiece” - - May Sarton

A seven-year-old boy’s perception of an old Indian’s tragic life leads to an epiphany of wonder and filial affection in spite of the impending break-up of his parents’ marriage and the potential harmful effects of an absurd public school system. The story is set by a river and on a farm close to a university in an industrial city of the “new South” in the North Carolina piedmont in the early 1960s. It was originally published in The American Vanguard 1956 (New York: Cambridge Press), then incorporated in The Cold War of Kitty Pentecost (1979). The version here is revised and expanded.

2. A Little Pain and You Get a Result

“Tough, sweet, and classy”- - Fred Chappell

Mary Branch and her son Manny piece together a story of incest, miscegenation, and false imprisonment, one covered up by generations of whites. Mary discovers not only that she is the daughter of an old religious fanatic and missionary, Mrs. Pentecost, and of Mrs. Pentecost’s father, but also that the whole family has “passed” as “White Negroes”. Raised among African- Americans in a coastal South Carolina, Mary speaks in a warm vernacular through which is revealed a strong-hearted acceptance of life. It enables her to triumph over the tragic past and to persuade Manny to devote himself to “the brotherhood of the puny planet.” Excerpted from episodes in The Cold War of Kitty Pentecost.

3. Sentimental Revolution

“A brilliant, compassionate piece” - - Pamela Camille, Contributing Editor of Crosscurrents, which published in 1984; the second half is excerpted from Suddenly a Mortal Splendor. Paul Szabo escaped Budapest during the revolution of 1956, married a crippled, sexually abused American girl with sentimentalized Marxist ideals, served in Vietnam, and returned in the early 1970s to find that Bluejean, his wife, has taken Teapot, his beloved stepdaughter, to a Latin American country where people are “disappeared.”

4. The Ecstasy of Mountain Solitudes

The essence of this story, originally published in different form in Suddenly a Mortal Splendor, may be projected from the excerpt from the novel quoted, under its heading below.

5. In the Country of the Blind

It is 1904. Tree, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy from Colorado Springs, has been banished from home and left to fend for himself in the coal-mining region of southern Colorado then and later in 1914 suffering a violent war of miners striking against the political, economic, and military might of corporations and the State. After being rescued from a near-death experience by “Kill Devil” Dare, a veteran of the Philippines War, Tree becomes Kill Devil’s “buddy” in a coalmine and learns from the older man’s stories of murders, massacres, tortures and imperial lawlessness that humanity may still sometimes prevail in the worst of circumstances. Based upon true events in the Philippines, the story here and there implicitly bears an uncanny resemblance to the war in Iraq a century later, but the primary theme is that of a boy’s love for a spiritual father.

6. Leviathan

During and following a hurricane at a beach in South Carolina in 1939, members of the Caldwell family individually experience aspects of Nature’s mysterious powers, symbolized by the Biblical creature of the deep, Leviathan. To the physicist Aeneas it represents the ultimate subatomic reality, to his wife Trinc it is a pathological shadow personality, and to their 10-yearold son Billy it is a shark, the wonder of which is diminished by man’s subjection of it.

7. Shoes

Colonel DeRoman, Trinc’s father, a Wall Street lawyer, abandoned her when she was a girl. Although he has set her up with a trust fund, he has distanced himself emotionally from her. Then Trinc’s fortune is mostly lost in the Crash of 1929. Moreover, because Aeneas’s secret work in Los Alamos, 1943-45, has alienated him from his family, Trinc’s marriage comes close to
falling apart. Suddenly Colonel DeRoman, a lonely old egotist and misogynist living at the New Haven Lawn Club, offers to make Trinc his heir provided that she change her son’s name to his. With the intention of accepting this bribe at cost to her developing self-esteem, she travels by train to New Haven. Only then, when confronted by a father whose only son has been killed in action in the Pacific in 1943, does she realize that what she wants from him, more than the money she needs, is his acceptance of her as a daughter worthy to fill his “shoes” - - as his equal and possible superior. After rejecting his bribe, she defeats him in a game of tennis that seems to spell out her identity achieved in a patriarchal society. Just before he dies of sudden heart attack, even though he is incapable of expressing love in words, he gives her his boots, those he had worn in France while impersonating General Pershing in 1917. She loses the inheritance but proudly wears the boots as she prepares to return to New Mexico and mend her almost broken marriage.

8. The Physicist

“It’s truly a stunning story… To deal with the angst of the scientists who, for one small space of time, held the fate of the world in their hands, and to extend that anxiety to the questions they couldn’t answer and were nearly terrified of asking is a stroke of genius” - - Clay Reynolds. Published in War, Literature & the Arts in 2004, this story has three New Mexico locales as they might have been in 1945 (Los Alamos, Chimayo, Trinity Site) and ends at Cambridge University in 1947. Aeneas’s mystical, ecological, and ethical sensibilities have come into conflict with his passionate devotion to a free and enlightened scientific research. Too late he protests the use of the atomic bomb for expedient purposes against an enemy already beaten and ready to surrender. He receives a lethal dose of radioactivity at Trinity Site, and a coercive government official enjoys a temporary success in getting him blacklisted at universities in the United States. Living in postwar exile in England, he and Trinc hope that “generations yet unborn” may one day derive benefit from the knowledge that Americans with “conscience” actually created the atomic bomb.

9. The Beams of Love

“A powerful story” - - Bill Hosokawa
This story moves from North Carolina locales (a piedmont industrial city; a pottery in remote Moore County) at the time of Pearl Harbor to the desert Southwest, to Los Angeles (smog-free in 1920s), to an internment camp near Mt. Shasta, and ends in 1945 at an artists’ colony in Taos, New Mexico. Trinc has left Aeneas, not understanding the nature of his secret work on an atomic bomb. Alone and stressed out, he discovers in himself a strange - - and heretical - - devotion to the Great Goddess, its erotic expression as romance. Upon encountering Blevyn Skye, a beautiful young artist of Japanese American descent, he personifies her as this divinity and writes her love letters he has no real intention of showing to her. When, however, she is arrested as “an enemy alien” and forced to depart for the West Coast, he gives her the letters in hopes they will help her to endure humiliations sure to come. Indeed, in L.A., Blevyn is only miraculously saved from a lynching shortly before deportation to the concentration camp. Even though the romance of Aeneas and Blevyn is thwarted by these circumstances and others, his letters do in fact encourage her to survive her ordeal in the concentration camp.

<- back to books page