Until That Good Day

Until That Good Day

Marjorie Kemper (2003, St. Martin's Press)

     "The coffin was in the living room." What a promising way to start a story! The time is 1928; the place, Myrtle, Louisiana. Five-year-old Vivian is old enough, and perspicacious enough, to spot the paradox of putting the dead in the living room. Her father is a traveling man, peddling groceries to small shops in tiny towns from Mississippi to Arkansas, so Vivian and her eight year old sister Clara move into their grandmother's quiet, gloomy house. In another year, Grandmother Washington, too, is dead, and John Washington goes looking for a wife. When he tells his children he's found one, they respond in character: "Clara wore a sweet little smile on her face the way she might have worn a flower in her hair. Vivian studied the rug and kicked her heels against the base of the sofa. Hard, enjoying the thudding sound it made."

      Antoinette Malone is not someone who could ever replace his first wife, Della, in John's heart. She is young, tiny, beautiful, vain, and stupid. She doesn't much care to be a step-mother, so John sends Clara to a convent school in New Orleans, and Vivian to live with his wife's family. "As time passed, John, without knowing that he did it, began to think of Vivian as a Malone. That this hurt and dismayed his daughter past all reckoning, John was too busy with his own life and with Antoinette and their frenetic new life together to notice."

      Life at the Malones has its compensations for Vivian. Mrs. Malone, the mother of eight, is warm and welcoming. Her widowed father lives under the stairs in some sort of broom closet. " 'He's no trouble,' Mrs. Malone often said of her father, and he wasn't; a heavy drinker and an inveterate gambler, he came home only to sleep off a bender or to hide from his creditors." Vivian finds him soothing, his taciturnity a relief from the chaos of the household. The youngest Malone, Willie, is Vivian's age. He's fragile and pale, and given to sick headaches, but the two form the bond common to outcasts and observers. Clara, meanwhile, develops a crush on Maureen Malone, who is blonde and beautiful, and plays the piano like an angel.

     Antoinette is happy spending John's money, and they build a new house across town from the Malones, so the girls can come live with her and John, awkward as that might be. Mama Malone helps her daughter hire live-in help, in the person of Emmy Clegern. Antoinette has a horror of black people–they threaten her in her dreams–but Emmy, with her twisted lip, should at least be safe from John's wandering eye, in case he has one. She has no idea that in Sylvan, Louisiana, "an island bounded on three sides by cotton, and on the fourth by piney woods," John has a mistress. Odessa is a young black woman who'd like to move far beyond Sylvan; John's gift of his mother's phonograph set lets her take the first steps, immersing herself in Madame Butterfly.

     It's not too hard for John Washington to keep his secrets, because he's always been a traveler. "His territory was his true home, and not even Della, on her best day, had been able to compete with it. Nowadays, the tiny Antoinette disappeared from his mind seconds after he got behind the wheel." Life in Myrtle comes with costs and entanglements, but the road, "particularly in the mornings, stretched out before John Washington like the promise of Life Everlasting."

     While he's gone, Antoinette is "thrown back on her own resources. Of which she had very few. She had no close friends and no outside interests save her house and her clothes–and subordinate to these, John." So, like her grandmother before her, she spends a lot of time sleeping. Emmy keeps Clara and Vivian quiet when they come in from school, because Antoinette is quite erratic–possibly crazy–when she's roused unexpectedly.

     Marjorie Kemper's treatment of this unstable situation is utterly artful, combining compassion and knowingness. I'm reminded of Flannery O'Connor, quoting a neighbor to whom she had shown some of her stories: “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do." Probably the more apt comparison, though, would be Eudora Welty. She'd have recognized Myrtle, and the need to occasionally leave Myrtle for New Orleans; and she'd have appreciated the transition from what actually happens to what the town will say about it in later years, and what it will forget.

     One of my pre-readers asked the very reasonable question of why I'm reviewing a novel, which I don't usually do. That is to say, why this one? I first noticed Marjorie Kemper for a story in The Sun, "At Prayer Level," which has stuck with me. She's no longer with us, but I'm seeking out her other work, and it's all rewarding. A God-like narrator who has compassion for the wise and the foolish, the drunkard and the little child, somehow gives me hope.

https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/415/at-prayer-level

Any Good Books, email 1 June 2022