ABC: A Novel - Hardcover

Plante, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037542461X ISBN 13: 9780375424618

Verlag: Pantheon Books, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

In the wake of an accident in the New Hampshire woods that claims the life of his young son, a grieving Gerard becomes obsessed with a study of the Sanskrit language and joins other "abecedarians" in a quest to uncover the hidden meaning of the alphabet.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

David Plante teaches writing at Columbia University.

David Plante is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the Francoeur trilogy--The Family (a finalist for the National Book Award), The Woods, and The Country--and the nonfiction Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three and American Ghosts. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Plante teaches writing at Columbia University and lives in New York and London.

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Chapter One

From the canoe, stilled on the still cove of the lake, the land was reflected in detail in the water: branches and leaves and pinecones, berry bushes, and the stone-and-timber house on the steep bank among trees. The house was abandoned. For all the ten years Gerard had been spending his summers on the other side of the lake in the house his wife, Peggy, had inherited from a rich uncle, the cove with the abandoned house overlooking it had been the end of every canoe ride. The cove, as calm and warm and peaceful as it was, instilled in them the calm and warmth and peace that they went out on the water for: Peggy at the front of the canoe, Gerard at the back, their dripping paddles resting lengthwise across the sides, and sitting on a cushion on the bottom halfway between them was their six-year-old son, Harry, who seemed to be in the same drifting state as the canoe, or so Gerard imagined.

For the first time, Gerard was struck by how Harry’s bones, which he had up until now seen as delicate, were beginning to enlarge, his vertebrae pronounced, his shoulder blades almost disproportionately large in the way they stuck out, and yet his shoulders were small and smooth. Harry was motionless, which meant he must have been thinking, drifting, Gerard again imagined, on his thinking. Gerard liked to drift on his thoughts, and his son, he was sure, took enough after him to like to too—that is, until Peggy, as Gerard always counted on her doing, stopped the drifting. She did so now by dipping her paddle into the water, a sign for Gerard to get to it and paddle. He did, and they continued in slow ripples deeper into the cove, towards the abandoned house, some of whose wide, many-paned windows on the second story were broken.

Raising his thin arm with a large elbow, Harry pointed to the house and asked, “Who lives there?”

Not turning, Peggy answered, “No one does.”

“Why doesn’t anyone live there?”

His high voice sounded in the silence like one of the natural sounds of the lake, a heat bug trilling or a bird flying overhead.

Gerard said, “Harry, here we go with your question why again. I’d like to answer, but I have to tell you I don’t know why.”

“Did the people who lived there die?”

Turning her head a little, so the thick bunch of her frizzy, tied-back hair swung against her bare shoulders, Peggy said, “No, they didn’t die.”

“How do you know?”

Amused, Gerard also wanted to ask how she knew.

“I just know.”

As a matter of simple fact, Harry said, “You just know a lot of things.”

“I do.”

“I wish I knew a lot of things.”

“You will, darling. You’ll know a whole lot of things.”

“I want to know everything.”

“That’s not possible,” his mother said. “You can know this and that, you can know a whole lot, but you can’t know everything. Everything is too much to know.”

“But that’s what I want.”

“Well, I hope you get what you want, darling. I do.”

Peggy again rested the paddle across the canoe, and Gerard did, and again the canoe drifted, now among water-lily pads that made a slurring sound along its thin bottom; and Harry, silent, seemed to Gerard to be once more drifting in his mind.

Below the abandoned house was a rotted dock, the remaining weathered boards tilting into the water.

Harry suddenly asked, “Can’t we go see the house?”

“No,” Peggy said abruptly.

“Why not?”

“I’m not going to answer one more question of yours that begins with ‘why’!”

Harry was bemused, seriously so. “Why won’t you?”

Now Peggy did turn enough to look at Gerard and say to him, “You’ve got to help me answer Harry’s why this, why that, why everything.”

Smiling, Gerard said, “But that’s his way of learning.”

“If I had answers, he’d learn something, but I don’t. Maybe you do.”

A little petulantly now, Harry asked, “Why can’t we go see the house?”

“You tell him why not,” Peggy said to Gerard.

“I’m not sure why not,” he said. “To be straightforward, why not?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“Why?”

“For God’s sake, don’t be like Harry.”

The boy was deeply attentive to this bantering between his parents.

“Maybe I’m more like Harry than you think, and have a whole lot to learn—more than a whole lot, a whole everything,” Gerard bantered. “I want to know why not.”

The canoe was arrested among the thickness of the lily pads, with white lilies, swarming with small black flies, rising among them.

Peggy clearly didn’t want to banter. “In all the years we’ve been coming here, you never once said you’d like to see into that old, broken-down house. Let me ask you, why now?”

“I want to now because Harry wants to.”

Harry had his father on his side. He bounced on his butt. “I want to, I want to.”

His father said, “The boy’s at the age when he’s drawn to a little adventure.”

“I’m sure there’s nothing in that house, or if there is, it’ll be nothing but broken-down furniture and rubbish.”

“Then he’ll see that.”

Peggy turned away to look, Gerard saw, up at the house, in the shadows of trees, with small flashes of sunlight. He heard her say, “I really don’t want to.”

Harry chanted, “I want to, I want to, I want to.”

Without saying any more, Peggy stuck her paddle into the lily pads, and Gerard followed suit. At this, Harry knelt on the cushion and turned to his father and gave him a wide, bright smile, one that made Gerard place his paddle across his knees and lean forward and reach out and with both hands take his son’s head into his hands and hold it. With a sudden rush of love for his son—love for him because, for some reason he only glancingly wondered about, he realized his son was right now more his son than he had ever been before—he would have kissed Harry if the canoe hadn’t swerved because of Peggy’s continuing paddling. Gerard sat back and righted the canoe, so it slithered over the lily pads to the shore, where, with a soft bump, it was stopped by weeds and mud. Kneeling before him, Harry was still smiling at his father, with a look in his eyes as of his too seeing something in his father he hadn’t seen before, something that pleased him a lot.

In nothing but shorts, Gerard stepped out of the canoe into the muck that oozed in gray-green clouds about his feet and held the side steady for Peggy, in a bathing suit, to step out. Now Gerard could hold his son, his naked, narrow, flat chest against his own naked, rounded, and hairy chest, to heft him out of the canoe and place him on the shore, where the roots of pine trees were exposed among stones. That contact between his and his son’s body was, to Gerard, a contact he had never before noticed with his son, and once again he wondered, however glancingly, Why now? While Harry watched, Peggy helped Gerard beach the canoe up the slope beyond the shoreline.

There was a path up the slope, so covered with dry pine needles it was hardly distinguishable. Harry ran up it.

“Harry,” Peggy called. “I don’t want you out of our sight....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pantheon Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 037542461X
• ISBN 13: 9780375424618
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 247
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar