The Sweetheart Season Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE SWEETHEART SEASON

  ‘When the person doing the imagining is as singular, wise, and as talented as Ms Fowler, it’s easy to see how ordinary lives can acquire such incandescence’ The New York Times Book Review

  ‘The Sweetheart Season is the sort of novel that makes the reader want to meet the author… A joy to read’ USA Today

  ‘A combination of inquiry, scepticism, and sympathy voiced with a zany appeal’ Los Angeles Times

  ‘Stunningly original’ Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  ‘[Fowler] is a true original, and one of the funniest people currently writing in English’ Minneapolis Star Tribune

  Praise for The Jane Austen Book Club:

  ‘If I could eat this novel, I would’ Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones

  ‘This wonderful novel shows how some books enter our bloodstream’ Independent

  ‘We defy you not to fall head over heels for this lovely novel’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘Stylish, homely and deeply comforting’ The Times

  ‘Exquisite. It’s that rare book that reminds us what reading is all about’ The New York Times Book Review

  ‘I was enchanted. A charming and intelligent read, with the best appendix I’ve come across since Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ Kate Long, author of The Bad Mother’s Handbook

  ‘Very funny’ Daily Telegraph

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Karen Joy Fowler is the author of the international bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club, Sister Noon, a PEN/Faulkner Prize finalist, Sarah Canary and the story collection Black Glass. She lives in Davis, California.

  the

  sweetheart

  season

  a novel

  KAREN JOY FOWLER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,

  Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published in the United States of America by The Ballantine Publishing Group 1998

  First published in Great Britain by Penguin Books 2006

  2

  Copyright © Karen Joy Fowler, 1996

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195708-1

  Contents

  Foreword

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  For the good child

  Foreword

  A limestone rainbow hung over the gate to Margaret Mill. The topmost section of the arch was ornamented with a crown of wheat. Beneath this crown, carved in an arc, was a motto in Latin. “Spinning straw into gold” was the official translation. And a date: 1898. The date, the crown, and the motto were only visible while passing under the rainbow on the way into the mill. On the way out, the limestone was blank.

  My mother showed me this one day when I was a very small girl. We took our bikes and a fried chicken lunch from my great-grandfather’s house to the falls. It was a day in a dream, cloudless and full of light. My mother wore denim shorts and hiking boots. We stopped to rest at the mill gate. White and purple morning glories coiled about the wrought iron, and a flock of invisible birds sat among the flowers. I remember this because my mother pointed out to me how each bird was calling only its one or two repeated notes, but how, taken as a whole, they made a melody.

  A car passed us on its way out of the mill. A woman leaned from the window. “You’re Irini Doyle, aren’t you?” she said to my mother.

  “I used to be.”

  “I recognized you right off. You had a great arm.” She turned to me. “She had a great arm, kid,” she said. She drove on through.

  Inside the mill I was given a tiny metal airplane. My mother identified it as a P-38. Under ordinary circumstances I would have had to eat an entire box of cereal to get it.

  The Date

  Eighteen ninety-eight was the year Henry Collins fled his Bostonian creditors and the shock of his mother’s death to hide in the tiny community of Magrit. In 1898 he walked the stony path behind the Magrit Falls and put a curtain of water between himself and his past. He was not a local; he couldn’t know that in 1882 Miss Opal May had thrown herself over the falls on the day of her own wedding, all dressed in white, and that her veil had been found more than five miles downstream with two fish netted inside it, and that Jeb Tarken had eaten one of the fish and from that day forward suffered from nightmares of suffocation that startled him awake, making him clutch the blankets and gasp for air. But Henry did sense that the spot was touched by some longstanding sorrow.

  It suited his mood. The sound of the falls was a steady scream, obliterating all other sound. The space behind the water was cold and dark. Henry had forgotten how hot and bright the day was. When he emerged on the other side of the falls, he was momentarily blinded by the glare. It was in that moment, deafened by noise and blinded by light, that he was visited by a phantom. The hallucination was entirely aromatic. Henry Collins, in a wilderness of savage water, a man as thoroughly alone as any man has ever been, strongly and unmistakably smelled bread baking.

  Magrit was too far north to be wheat country and the closest area to the south that might have served was already seriously over-wheated. But an omen is an omen. Less than a year later Margaret Mill stood just downstream from the spot where Henry had first smelled it. He had named the mill for the falls and for his mother.

  The Crown

  The mill was the first of Henry’s projects to prosper. It would remain the basis of his fortune for the rest of his life. In an age when the w
orld seemed to be made for the sole purpose of providing room to vigorous and propertied men, men with that extra little bit of go and the capital to feed it, Henry Collins found himself, at last, in the breakfast cereal business.

  This was a fortuitous fit. It combined his love of science with his love of conquest with his love of invention with his love of philosophy with his love of money. Breakfast cereal was the wilderness, first tamed, and then eaten. It was family, it was America, it was a wholesome and American alternative to grain’s other uses, a point that Henry made clear in his 1906 pamphlet, Barley, the Janus-Faced Seed.

  During his long career Henry made several contributions to milling in general and to the breakfast cereal field in particular. He introduced the concept of the Scientific Kitchen; he created Maggie Collins; a lady in a red-checkered apron who represented the Kitchen. Maggie authored a line of cookbooks, then branched out into etiquette manuals, and by the 1940’s was a magazine columnist, combining household tips with family counseling. Three letters taken from an issue of the magazine in the early forties illustrate the range of concerns on which Maggie was considered expert:

  Dear Maggie,

  No one in my family will eat the end pieces of a loaf of bread. I have always eaten them myself, because I believe waste is wicked, particularly when so many in Europe are going without, but I don’t really like them either and eating them makes me feel put upon. Any suggestions?

  and

  Dear Maggie,

  Every time I pick up a magazine I am told how much easier the American housewife’s life is in these modern times. If this is true, then why are we still mixing the coloring into our oleo by hand? Can’t somebody market yellow oleo? How hard can this be? Does it take a rocket scientist?

  and

  Dear Maggie,

  I was recently at a dinner party where Jews were discussed. I had no wish to be rude, neither did I wish to listen to the conversation. What should I have done? Do you think we will ever see an end to intolerance?

  Maggie herself was a fiction—over the years a variety of men and women at the mill wrote under her name, which explained the unevenness of her marital advice—but in a poll taken in 1945, she was named the most admired woman in America. She was not eclipsed until the late forties, when her star set quite suddenly as Eleanor Roosevelt’s continued to rise.

  In the 1940’s, well past the age of retirement, Henry invented Sweetwheats, America’s first puffed and sugar-coated cereal. According to the ad campaign, the puffing resulted when the germ of the wheat was forced through the barrel of a special cereal gun on which Henry held the patent. In fact, the gun had been abandoned when an early prototype exploded, leaving Henry, who was operating the gun at the time, with the permanent sensation of hearing bells ring, a condition he gamely described as festive. The introductory campaign continued with a ten-gun salute in ten targeted cities in the Midwest, although the equipment involved in the process now bore a closer relationship to today’s popcorn popper.

  The crown in the limestone was made out of wheat, but was shaped like the laurel wreath.

  The Motto

  As a young woman my mother worked at Margaret Mill in the Scientific Kitchen. Her father had worked there as well, as the staff chemist. My mother left the mill and the town of Magrit sometime before I was born. We rarely went back and my mother was vaguely unhappy whenever we did—things were wrong somehow, things were not as she remembered them, this was not Magrit. Magrit turned out to be a hard place to find again.

  But the motto continued to have a particular importance in our family. It was quoted often as I was growing up and always in reference to me.

  By way of shorthand my mother would call me a spinner. This was a polite way of saying I told whopping lies. My mother always did this, always put the best face on everything, filtering the world through her own generous and charitable spirit. This was not lying, not the way that I did, although the results were often far from truthful. “I’m just fine. You go and have a nice dinner” were the last words she ever said to me.

  She was a good parent for the kind of kid I was. Another mother might have believed, and might even have convinced me, that I was untrustworthy, tricky, or evasive. In fact, I was all these things. But I was driven primarily by a love of drama. My mother always made it seem like a gift.

  She hardly believed in evil at all. When confronted with undeniable evidence of malice or cruelty, her fall-back position was that it would be punished. She was not a religious person; she was not talking about the afterlife. “I wouldn’t have his nights for anything,” my mother would say sadly. Or “I wouldn’t want to dream her dreams.”

  The story I want to tell now is a story my mother told to me. It takes place in a time before I was born, a time I must work to imagine. When my mother told it to me, it was a very short story. I have been forced to compensate not only for her gentle outlook, but also for her spare narration.

  You would do well therefore to keep always in mind that this is a story told by two liars. It is possible, our fictional impulses being so opposite, that we may arrive together at something clear-eyed and straightforward, the way two negative numbers multiplied together produce a positive value. If this happens it will be by accident. It is not my intention. I will go so far as to say I would consider it a disappointment.

  1

  In 1942, with much ceremony and sentiment, a new portrait of Maggie Collins was hung in the entryway to Margaret Mill. The Margaret Mill Story, a thin pamphlet given out to mill visitors all through the forties, identified the artist as Ada Collins, Henry’s second and final wife. The portrait was an anniversary present to Henry, done between the wars. It differed from every other depiction of Maggie in two obvious ways: it was the only portrait in which she was not wearing an apron but was instead in evening wear, and it was the only portrait done entirely in the medium of breakfast cereals. It was the highlight of the Margaret Mill tour. The skin tones Ada coaxed out of flakes and farina were nothing short of remarkable. Henry in the flesh had never looked so lifelike.

  Page 2 of the Margaret Mill pamphlet contained a vaguely erotic look at wheat. The individual grain was described as hairy at the apex, with a small embryo and a large development of endosperm. A sample grain was pictured in cross-section, in the very act of germination. There was also a list of wheat pests, illustrated by a pen-and-ink drawing of the adult chinch bug with an ambitious, predatory look on its face. The list ended with the fungal killer, stinking smut. The pamphlet’s forgotten author achieved an astounding degree of drama, given the inherent limitations of the subject matter; the title of this section was “Wheat!”

  Sometime in the early forties, Henry iced the portrait of Maggie over with shellac in an effort to preserve it against a sudden infestation of chinch bugs or stinking smut. Maggie’s colors suffered in the process and the portrait took on the yellowish tones of an old photograph. This had its own charm, but was not the effect intended by the artist. It irritated Ada whenever she saw it and she saw it until the late forties, when Maggie had her troubles, and the portrait was quietly removed from the mill and stored behind Collins House, in the potting shed.

  The work was rediscovered in 1982, intact, thanks to its coat of varnish. At this time it was reinterpreted as a radical statement on the role of women and rehung in a show in Chicago whose theme was the kitchen, next to a recent painting of an oven through whose glass door a well-groomed woman’s head could be seen, cheerfully roasting. But this is the happy end of Maggie’s story.

  The beginning is in 1947, when the portrait still hung in the mill. This is the year that Irini Doyle graduated from high school and took a job in the Scientific Kitchen. Of course, a lot of women all over the country were going back to the kitchen after the war, but for Irini it was a promotion.

  During World War I the troops had been fed primarily on cereal grains; by World War II these had been demoted in nutritional importance in favor of meat and dairy. Margaret Mill spent the early d
ays of the war producing breakfast cereal for the troops, but it was a devalued effort that could be accomplished by the almost entirely female staff. In 1943, with manpower and gasoline both in short supply, the milling and the production of cereal were moved south. By the end of the war, only the Scientific Kitchen part of the operation, only Maggie’s part, remained in Magrit, where the emphasis was on R and B—research and baking. Irini was assigned to the B team.

  Later Irini would become my mother, but in 1947 she was only nineteen and this is not my story in any other way except the largest possible one, that I am the person telling it. You must keep in mind that I’ve not been nineteen myself for many years now. If, from time to time, a more cynical, more fatigued tone creeps into my mother’s teenaged voice, you’ll know I’ve slipped up, and that’s me, not her. She’s the mother and I’m the daughter, but she is young and I am not; this is one of those time-travel paradoxes and we just all have to deal with it.

  Irini Doyle’s great arm was the right one. It was larger than her left. This is true of most right-handed people, but in Irini’s case the difference was pronounced. She attributed this to her stint in the Scientific Kitchen. Nineteen forty-seven was, she always told me, a whale of a good time. The fighting was over, the air-raid drills were over, rationing was over. “You can’t imagine what VE Day felt like,” she said to me, more than once, and it’s quite true that I can’t. And that I resent this, just a bit.

  In 1947 Magrit was a world whose every aspect was touched, however lightly, by victory. They had all been hearing about victory for so long—there was the victory garden, the victory coat, the victory penny, the victory salute, Victory cigarettes, and Elizabeth Arden’s Victory-Red lipsticks. But this was the real deal, the capital V with the thumbs pointing out and the arms like wings, not the later unhappy, close to the body, sixties version. The simplest, most ordinary tasks—mowing the lawn, folding the laundry, dusting the sideboards—took on a temporary luminescence.