Spite the Devil - Softcover

McDaniel, Maude Aurand

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1450203957 ISBN 13: 9781450203951

Verlag: iUniverse, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Simple life in small-town America collides with the cultural realities of the 1980s in Spite the Devil, a novel of conflict and hope. Elinor and her husband, Dan, a Lutheran minister, confront racism and religious uncertainty as they deal with the changes that life brings to their faith. Does tragedy destroy faith? Is bitterness inevitable? Their comfortable existence explodes when the turmoil of modern American life invades Evittsburg and forces them to face new and painful truths. Racial tensions strain relationships to the breaking point, and religious differences threaten to tear families apart. Elinor's whimsical perspective cushions misfortune until she faces the one blow that even humor cannot soften. Daughters Grace and Joy pursue their own paths, coloring their parents' lives with laughter and discord. Grace's interracial marriage to Doug creates disturbing tensions, which involve Doug's enigmatic father, Robey, and their teenage son, Gil, Golden Gil, who dances across the pages with wit and a worrisome innocence. With insight, humor, and compassion, McDaniel builds genuine suspense to a shattering climax, and then finds a certain peace in the conviction that death is not the end.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Maude McDaniel, born in Wheeling, West Virginia, holds degrees in Sociology from Gettysburg College and Seminary. Widow of a Lutheran minister, McDaniel has written for The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Milwaukee Journal, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Bookpage. She lives on a mountain in Western Maryland.

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Spite the Devil

By Maude Aurand McDaniel

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 Maude Aurand McDaniel
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-0395-1

Chapter One

"Well, bullshit to you, too," I said to the young man sitting next to me.

Which was probably not a good idea, because we were in church at the time.

Worse yet, I was the minister's wife.

But consider the provocation.

The wedding had been just lovely, until then. Of course, it should have been, because no amount of premarital counseling from Dan had succeeded in persuading Marty Graham that the wedding ceremony was not the high point of her life with Steve. She had spent months planning the affair, and today every daydream of her lifetime was, at last, fleshed out in excruciating detail.

After this wedding, the marriage was bound to be an anticlimax.

It featured fresh flowers, quite a relief from the black leather wedding last month. The perfume of thousands of dollars' worth of imported tropical blossoms doomed every allergy sufferer in the sanctuary.

People were sneezing all over the place.

Still, it was beautiful. And so lush that Dan could hardly make his way through the jungle when the time came.

"I felt as if I should have been wearing a pith helmet," he said later.

"Then you could have said, `Mr. Livingston, I presume,' when Steve came in," I said, not so far-fetched as it sounds, because Steve's last name really is Livingston.

Anyway, the organ swelled slightly (Doug is very good with musical nuance), and the trumpet, played smartly by a small young man in a black mustache, tootled respectfully as the bride's mother, Beth, came in on the arm of an usher. Her gardenia corsage, trimmed in blue to match her lace suit, cut a swath through the other fragrances as she walked past me. It was a big corsage.

She entered the first pew on the left, with the large, fresh-flower-studded white satin bow on the end, opposite the one Mrs. Livingston had just settled into, a trifle frumpy in a light pink crepe dress that looked expensive but too tight. I had to admire Beth's poise as she glanced around, smiling serenely, before she sat down.

I wondered how she stood it. This was one family in the congregation I had never gotten to know very well, but I'd heard that Beth's husband had been steadfastly unfaithful to her for years. Now she was about to watch her only daughter come in on his arm and then take the same vows of love and fidelity Barney had flouted every day of his marriage.

Beth looked happy as a lark.

Well, you could say there's a lot of precedent for romanticizing love. Songs like "Can't Help Lovin' That Man of Mine," and a whole canon of country and rock about how he's bad but I love him, I can't help myself, I'll always take him back.

That's how lots of people think it's done, true love.

But I don't think true love is romantic at all. I think it's when you find a man you decide you can work with to create it.

At least, that's how it was for me with Dan, who was coming out from the sacristy, tall and dark and uneasy-looking right now, in his brand-new linen-texture alba, and his old green stole with the simple Maltese crosses on it from the days before stoles were considered objets d'art. His right temple throbbed visibly, as it always did when he was tense. After all these years, he still got stage fright at weddings and funerals.

A small voice shouted out from the pews three rows from the front, "He's wearing green suspenders over his nightgown!" The titter died down as the groom and his best man shuffled in from the side door, heads down, hunched with embarrassment in their slate blue morning coats and raspberry cummerbunds.

The congregation looked them over with interest.

Suddenly, the trumpet and organ sounded the traditional warning for "Here Comes the Bride," and all the guests got up immediately to check out the rest of the wedding party.

Beth still sat in her pew, and so did Steve's family, but it was a losing battle. Dan always instructs the relatives to rise only when the bride herself appears, a nice touch if only it ever worked. Congregations create their own momentum, and now, as always, the family chucked the agenda and got up too, so as not to miss the show.

Three bridesmaids, two ringbearers, one flower girl, and a maid of honor later, Marty floated down the aisle on her father's arm, looking as gorgeous as she ever would, drowned like Ophelia in fresh flowers, white lace, satin ribbon. Barney Graham, flushed and sweating in a new hairpiece, looked for all the world as if he really believed in the institution of marriage.

Good grief, he was crying.

From what I knew of Barney, though, he wouldn't remember this moment past his next drink. Still, should we give him credit for the thought, fleeting as it is? John Updike always does in his books, implicitly awarding salvation for impulse, regardless of intention, or commitment, or performance.

Well, today, maybe, I decided, because I saw him look at Beth and smile as he passed her, and one can always hope. (So much for hope. The next week I saw him at the movies with a new woman, old-young and battered-by-life-looking with bottle-red curls, so that took care of that.)

Doug one-upped the trumpeter with a flourish of organ chimes after the couple arrived at the altar. Although he was now the regular organist downtown at Our Saviour, Steve had gotten friendly with him while he was still playing here at Trinity, and had asked him to play for the wedding. Doug is always good at weddings, good at funerals, good at everything really, and I say it even if he is our son-in-law. And where was Grace, I wondered, as we sat down after the invocation.

Just then she slipped past the tall young couple next to me, and I smiled at her. How could you help it? She is so nice! Nice is a dirty word nowadays, but let me tell you, it beats nasty for living with, day in and day out. She's getting a little plump, like me, poor thing - our other daughter Joy is thin as a whistle - but she wore a navy-blue chiffon with a little capelet that hid the traces. She'd just had her blonde hair permed lately, and it gave her animation.

She was frowning. "Some more of Doug's fans," she whispered. "I had to talk to them."

It had to be hard, being the white wife of a black man who was increasingly catching the public eye, at least in Evittsburg, but she never said much about it. I had mostly given up pondering it by this time. We'd warned her fifteen years ago about the problems of an interracial marriage, and she had accused us of racism.

Maybe she was right. Dan and I considered ourselves enlightened, and I had brooded over her accusation at the time. Still did, maybe, a little. But things had gone better than we'd dared hope, especially since Gil had arrived, fourteen now, and beautiful.

Up front, a bridesmaid reached out and caught a ring-bearer as he ran past from a standing start.

"Where's Gil?" I whispered.

"Home practicing the piano. He didn't want to come, so he had to think up a good excuse, and I took him up on that one."

Everyone sat down. The family with the outspoken child was now busily taking snapshots, despite the bulletin, which pleaded for no flashes during the service. Their camera was a Polaroid, and they would shoot a picture, and then pass it up and down the pew, pointing at it and whispering, quite missing the wedding itself, rather like a modern version of the Platonic cave.

Marty's cousin read the scripture, obviously doing her...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: iUniverse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1450203957
• ISBN 13: 9781450203951
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 220
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland