The Jane Austen Book Club Read online

  “I care.”

  “You don’t have to hide it. No one out there will think any worse of you if you throw a glass or scream or go to bed or tell them all to get the fuck out.”

  “You’ll have to let me be who I am, dear,” Sylvia said. “Do you know where we were when Daniel told me he wanted a divorce? He’d taken me out to dinner. To Biba’s. I’d always wanted to go to Biba’s, but we’d never been able to get in. So that’s what just occurred to me. That he had to make a reservation way in advance and then pretend for weeks that everything was okay. Such a thoughtful way to dump your wife.”

  “I’m sure he wasn’t planning the evening like that! I’m sure he didn’t know what he’d say or when he’d say it. Some people do things without planning them all through like you.”

  “You’re probably right. A person’s no more sane falling out of love than falling into it, I guess. Thank God it’s raining. We didn’t get enough rain this year.”

  Sylvia’s face was dimly reflected in the kitchen window. Allegra thought how she was seeing both sides of her face at once. Her mother had been such a pretty woman, but after holding her own for quite some time, she’d aged all of a sudden a few years back. You could see how the aging would go on now; you could see where the hammer would hit next.

  Allegra knelt unsteadily and put her head into her mother’s lap. She felt her mother’s hands combing through her hair. “What do we know about it, you and I?” Allegra asked. “We’re not the sort who fall out of love, are we?”

  Allegra got up when she was sure Corinne was sleeping, and went into the study. She emptied the wastebasket onto the floor. There wasn’t much, and what there was had been torn into tiny, despairing bits, none looking as if they’d come from Corinne’s printer. Allegra found the word “Zyzzyva” embossed on one piece. She persisted, sorting by color, until she had three piles. She was wearing nothing but the knee-length T-shirt she slept in, so she dragged a blanket out of the linen closet and lay on the floor, swaddled, piecing bits of paper together.

  “We must regretfully pass on the story you’ve sent us,” she read at last. “ ‘Billy’s Ball’ has much to recommend it, and although it didn’t seem exactly right for us, we would be willing to see other work from you in the future. Good luck with your endeavors, the Editors.”

  Fifteen minutes later: “We are returning your story ‘Good-bye, Prague’ to you as we are only interested in lesbian material. We highly suggest you familiarize yourself with our magazine. A subscription form is enclosed. Thank you, the Editors.”

  Ten minutes later: A form rejection—“does not suit our purposes at this time”—but someone had penned a single sentence across the bottom in ballpoint ink: “Who among us has not tormented ants?”

  Allegra swept the pieces up, mixed them back together, dumped them into the wastebasket. She felt as if she’d been stripped and then strip-mined. So Corinne’s desire to keep her away from her writing friends had nothing to do with Allegra’s sarcastic tongue. How unkind of Corinne to make her feel that she was the one at fault.

  Of course, this small unkindness was nothing compared with the betrayal of trust. It had begun to rain, but Allegra didn’t know that until she went outside. She hardly felt it even then, though she was wearing only her T-shirt. She walked three blocks to her car, drove two hours to her parents’ house—longer than usual, because she’d forgotten to bring money for the bridge toll (forgotten even her driver’s license) and she had to pull over to the side, get out undressed as she was, to talk about this. Eventually she was waved through, such was the persuasive power of crying uncontrollably when you were practically naked.

  It was after three in the morning when she arrived home, soaking wet. Her father made her a cup of hot milk; her mother put her straight to bed. For three days, she got up only to go to the bathroom. Corinne phoned several times, but Allegra refused to speak to her.

  How dare Corinne write up Allegra’s secret stories and send them off to magazines to be published?

  How dare Corinne write them so poorly that no one wished to take them?

  It wasn’t Jane Austen’s fault that love went bad. You couldn’t even say she didn’t warn you. Her heroines made out well enough, but there were always other characters in the book who didn’t finish happily—Brandon’s Eliza in Sense and Sensibility; in Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas, Lydia Bennet; in Mansfield Park, Maria Bertram. These were the women to whom you should be paying attention, but you weren’t.

  Allegra was trying very hard not to express any of Corinne’s opinions, but every time she spoke, Corinne’s words came out. Corinne was in no mood to praise a writer like Austen, who wrote so much about love when the world was full of other things. “Everything in Austen is on the surface,” Allegra said. “She’s not a writer who uses images. Image is the way to bring the unsaid into the text. With Austen, everything is said.”

  Prudie shook her head vigorously; her hair flew about her cheeks. “Half of what Jane says is said ironically. Irony is a way of saying two things at once.” Prudie was trying to express something she hadn’t completely worked out yet. She opened her hands, like two halves of a book, clapped them closed. Allegra was mystified by the gesture, but she could see that whatever Prudie was trying to say, it was something she deeply believed. “The thing you’ve said and that opposite thing you’ve said at the same time,” she cried out. She had the carefully constructed dignity of someone drunk. Prudie’s dignity always felt slightly manufactured, so the difference was a subtle one. A tiny slur, a bit of spit.

  “Yes, of course.” Of course, Bernadette had no more idea what Prudie was going on about than Allegra did. She was just choosing agreement because it seemed more polite than opposition, even when one had no idea what point was being made. “And I think it’s her humor that keeps us reading her two centuries later. At least, that’s what I respond most to. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Tell me if I’m alone in this.”

  “People like a romance,” Grigg said. “Women do, anyway. I mean, I do, too. I didn’t mean that I didn’t.”

  Sylvia came back into the room. She stirred the fire so that it threw off sparks, spinning like pinwheels up the flue. She added another log, crushing the life out of what little flame had remained. “Brandon and Marianne,” she said. “At the end, doesn’t it feel just as if Marianne’s been sold? Her mother and Elinor, both pushing so hard. It reads as if she fell in love with Brandon, but only after she married him. He’s been such a good man that her mother and Elinor are determined he’ll get his reward.”

  “But that’s my point,” Prudie said. “Jane intends you to feel that uncomfortableness. The book ends with that marriage and the thing Austen isn’t saying about it.”

  Sylvia sat down next to Allegra, which forced Grigg to move aside. “It just makes me sad. Marianne can be self-centered and all, but who really wants her sobered up, settled down? Nobody. Nobody could ever want to see her be anything but exactly what she is.”

  “Do you want her with Willoughby, then?” Allegra asked.

  “Don’t you?” said Sylvia. She leaned forward to address Prudie. “I think you should let Jocelyn drive you home tonight. Don’t worry about your car. Daniel will bring it round in the morning.” There was a silence. Sylvia put her hand over her mouth.

  “I’ll do that,” said Allegra. “I’ll bring you your car.”

  When Allegra finally rose from her bed, only three days after she’d fled her apartment in nothing but her T-shirt, she drove to the Vacaville skydiving school. At first she was told that no one would take her. She had no appointment; she knew the rules. And if she was back because of the broken arm, they weren’t responsible for that; there were certain forms she might remember having signed. She needed to go home and think it through, they said. She needed to make an appointment and come back after she’d thought more about it.

  Allegra argued. She laughed a lot, so that no one would get the wrong idea about her mood and intentions. She
flirted. She let the men flirt back. She told them that this was a skydiving emergency, and finally, Marco, who’d been one of her instructors and was apparently still unclear on her sexuality—not that she hadn’t told him often enough, but her behavior today had obviously raised the question again—agreed to be her tandem master. Tandem was not what she wanted; she was definitely in the mood for solo, but solo wasn’t happening.

  Allegra put on the ridiculous orange suit and they went up. Marco clipped himself to the back of her shoulders and hips. “Are you ready?” he asked, and before she could answer, he’d pushed her out. There was a smiley-face sticker inside the plane, just where you put your hand before you jumped. The words “Go Big” were written in marker beneath.

  They slid through the air. The wind was rough, Marco close. But she got what she wanted. Blue sky above, brown hills below. Behind her, the university stretching out its vast agricultural fields of unnatural tomatoes, burrowing owls, dairy cows. Somewhere to the east, her parents were having lunch. Her parents, who loved her. Marco pulled the cord, and she heard the parachute spinning out, felt it catching. Her parents who loved her and her brothers and her nieces and each other, and they always would.

  * * *

  Dear Miss Austen:

  We must regretfully inform you that your work does not suit our current needs.

  In 1797, Jane Austen’s father sent First Impressions to a publisher in London named Thomas Cadell. “As I am well aware of what consequence it is that a work of this sort should make its first Appearance under a respectable name I apply to you,” he wrote. He asked what it would cost to publish “at the Author’s risk,” and what advance might be offered if the manuscript were liked. He was prepared to pay himself, if necessary.

  The package came back immediately, with “Declined by Return of Post” written across the top.

  The book was published sixteen years later. Its title had been changed to Pride and Prejudice.

  In 1803, a London publisher named Richard Crosby bought a novel (later titled Northanger Abbey) from Jane Austen for ten pounds. He advertised it in a brochure, but never published it. Six years passed. Austen then wrote to Crosby, offering to replace the manuscript, if it had been lost and if Crosby intended to publish it quickly. Otherwise, she said, she would go to another publisher.

  Crosby wrote back, denying that he was under any obligation to publish the book. He would return it to her, he said, only if she returned his ten pounds. Northanger Abbey was not published until five months after Austen’s death.

  Jane Austen’s books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.

  MARK TWAIN

  I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. . . . All that interests in any character [is]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? . . . Suicide is more respectable.

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  May

  CHAPTER THREE

  in which we read Mansfield Park with Prudie

  Her perfect security in such a tête-à-tête . . . was unspeakably welcome to a mind which had seldom known a pause in its alarms or embarrassments. (MANSFIELD PARK)

  Prudie and Jocelyn had met two years before, at a Sunday matinee of Mansfield Park. Jocelyn was sitting in the row behind Prudie when the woman to Prudie’s left began a whispered monologue to a friend about high jinks at some local riding stable. Someone was sleeping with one of the farriers—a real cowboy type, boots and blue jeans and a charm that seemed unstudied, but anyone who could gentle horses knew perfectly well how to get a woman into bed. The horses, of course, were the ones to suffer. Rajah was not eating at all. “Like he thinks he’s hers,” the woman said, “just because I let her ride him from time to time.”

  Prudie was pretty sure this was about the horse. She hadn’t spoken up. She sat and seethed over her Red Vines and thought about moving, but only if it could be done without an implied accusation; she was, ask anyone, courteous to a fault. She was just beginning to take an unwelcome and distracting interest in Rajah’s appetite when Jocelyn leaned forward. “Go gossip in the lobby,” Jocelyn said. You could tell that she was not a woman to be trifled with. Send her to deal with your cowboy types. Send her to feed your oh-so-sensitive horses.

  “Excuse me,” the woman responded resentfully. “Like your movie is so much more important than my real life.” But she fell silent, and Prudie didn’t really care that she was offended, an offended silence being just as silent as a flattered one. This silence lasted the whole movie, which was all that mattered. The gossipers left at the credits, but the true Janeite was truly gracious, and stayed for the final chord, the white screen. Prudie knew without looking that Jocelyn would still be there when she turned to thank her.

  They talked more as they threaded through the seats. Jocelyn turned out to like fiddling about with the original story no better than Prudie did. The great thing about books was the solidity of the written word. You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been. A good book was surprising the first time through, less so the second.

  The movies, as everyone knew, had no respect for this. All the characters had been altered—Fanny’s horrid aunt Mrs. Norris was diminished simply by lack of screen time; her uncle Mr. Bertram, a hero in the book, was now accused of slave-dealing and sexual predations; and all the rest were portrayed in broad strokes or reinvented. Most provocative was the amalgamation of Fanny with Austen herself, which scraped oddly at times, as the two were nothing alike—Fanny so shrinking and Austen so playful. What resulted was a character who thought and spoke like Jane, but acted and reacted like Fanny. It made no sense.

  Not that you couldn’t understand the screenwriter’s motivation. No one loved Austen more than Prudie, ask anyone. But even Prudie found the character of Fanny Price hard going. Fanny was the prig in your first-grade class who never, ever misbehaved and who told the teacher when anyone else did. How to keep the movie audience from loathing her? While Austen, by some accounts, had been quite a flirt, full of life and charm. More like Mansfield’s villainous Mary Crawford.

  So Austen had given Mary all her own wit and sparkle, and none of it to Fanny. Prudie had always wondered why, then, not only Fanny but also Austen seemed to dislike Mary so much.

  Saying all this took time. Prudie and Jocelyn stopped at the Café Roma to have a cup of coffee together and examine their responses more minutely. Dean, Prudie’s husband, left them there and went home to reappraise the movie in solitude while catching the second half of the 49er–Viking game.

  On her first reading, Mansfield Park had been Prudie’s least favorite of the six novels. Her opinion had improved over the years. So much so that when Sylvia picked it for May, Prudie volunteered to host the discussion, even though no one is busier than a high school teacher in May.

  She expected a lively exchange and had so much to say herself, she’d been filling index cards for several days in order to remember it all. Prudie was a great believer in organization, a natural Girl Scout. She had lists of things to be cleaned, things to be cooked, things to be said. She was serious about her hosting. With power—responsibility.

  But the day began, ominously, with something unexpected. She appeared to have picked up a virus in her e-mail. There was a note from her mother: “Missing my darling. Thinking of coming for a visit.” But then there were two more notes that had her mother’s return address plus attachments, when her mother hadn’t mastered attachments yet. The e-mails themselves read, “Here is a powful tool. I hope you will like,” and “Here is something you maybe enjoy.” The identical “powful tool” message came again in another e-mail. This one seemed to be from Susan in the attendance offic
e.

  Prudie had planned to send out a reminder that, because of the heat, the book club would meet at eight instead of seven-thirty that night, but she didn’t wish to risk spreading the infection. She shut down without even answering her mother’s note.

  The predicted temperature for the day was a hundred six. This, too, was bad news. Prudie had planned to serve a compote, but no one was going to touch anything hot. She’d better stop by the store after work and get some fruit for a sherbet. Maybe root beer floats. Easy, but fun!

  Dean lurched out of bed just in time to kiss her good-bye. He was wearing nothing but a T-shirt, which was a good look for him, and how many men could you say that about? Dean had been staying up at night to watch soccer. He was in training for the World Cup, for those games that would soon be shown live from whatever time zone Japan and Korea occupied. “I’ll be late today,” he told her. He worked in an insurance office.

  “I’ve got book club.”

  “Which book?”

  “Mansfield Park.”

  “I guess I’ll skip that one,” Dean said. “Maybe rent the movie.”

  “You’ve already been to the movie,” Prudie answered. She was a tiny bit distressed. They’d been to it together. How could he not remember? Only then did she see that he was teasing her. It was a measure of how distracted she was, because she was usually quick to catch a joke. Anyone could tell you that.

  “How long ago it is, aunt, since we used to repeat the chronological order of the kings of England, with the dates of their accession, and most of the principal events of their reigns!” “ . . . and of the Roman emperors as low as Severus; besides a great deal of the Heathen Mythology, and all the Metals, Semi-Metals, Planets, and distinguished philosophers.” (MANSFIELD PARK)