Life Sentences. Laura Lippman
she pulled on the fluffy robe provided by the bed-and-breakfast—one of two fluffy robes, she noticed, feeling the clutch and lurch of fresh heartbreak—and made her way, trancelike yet lucid, to the picturesque and therefore infuriating little desk not really intended for work.
She found a few sheets of stationery in the center drawer and began scratching out, with the crummy B and B pen, the first few pages of what would become My Father’s Daughter. She had kept those pages, and while the book changed considerably over the next six months, as she wrote to blot out her pain and fear, those first few pages remained the same: I didn’t speak until I was almost three years old. Later, when she began to query agents, a famous one had said he would represent her, but only if she consented to a rewrite in which she excised that opening.
He took her to lunch, where he explained his pet theory of literature, which boiled down to The first five pages are always bullshit.
‘It’s throat clearing,’ he said over a disappointingly modest lunch of spinach salad and bottled water. Cassandra had hoped the lunch would be grander, more decadent, at one of the famous restaurants frequented by publishing types. But the agent was in one of his drying-out phases and had to avoid his usual haunts.
He continued: ‘Tapping into a microphone. Is this thing on? Hullo? Hullo?’ (He was British, although long removed from his native land.) ‘It’s overworked, too precious. As for prologues—don’t get me started on prologues.’
But Cassandra believed she had written a book about a woman finding her own voice, her own story, despite a title that suggested otherwise. Her father was simply the charismatic Maypole at the center; she danced and wove around him, ribbons twisting. She found another agent, a Southern charmer almost as famous but sweet and effusive, unstinting in her praise, like the mother Cassandra never had. Years later, at the National Book Awards—she had been a judge—she ran into the first agent, and he seemed to think they had never met before. She couldn’t help wondering if he cultivated that confusion to save face.
She had started the sequel at a spa in the Berkshires, another shattered marriage behind her, but at least she was the one who had walked out this time. Paul, her second husband, had showed up in the final pages of her first book; she had believed, along with millions of readers, that he was her fairy-tale ending. Telling the truth of that disastrous relationship—along with all the others, before, after, and during the marriage—had felt risky, and some of her original readers didn’t want to come along for the ride. But enough did, and the reviews for The Eternal Wife were even better. Of course, that was because My Father’s Daughter had barely been reviewed upon release.
Then, just eighteen months ago—not enough time, she decided now, she hadn’t allowed the novel to steep as the memoirs had—she had checked into the Greenbrier, again in West Virginia, but much removed, in miles and amenities, from that sadly would-be romantic place where the first memoir had begun. Perhaps that was the problem—she had been too self-conscious in trying to recapture and yet improve the circumstances of that first feverish episode. The woman who had started scratching out those pages in the West Virginia bed-and-breakfast had an innocence and a wonder that had been lost over the subsequent fifteen years.
Or perhaps the problem was more basic: She wasn’t a novelist. She was equipped not to make things up but to bring back things that were. She was a sorceress of the past, an oracle who looked backward to what had been. She was, as her father had decreed, Cassandra, incapable of speaking anything but the truth.
Only this time, the answers were not inside her, not most of them. Last night, in her sterile rental, she had started jotting down, stream of consciousness, what she could remember. Her list wasn’t confined to Calliope but covered every detail of life at Dickey Hill Elementary, no matter how trivial, because she knew from experience that small details could unearth large ones. The memories of the latter had come readily: foursquare, the Christmas pageant, Mrs Klein teaching us about Picasso and Chagall, the girl group. The girl group—she hadn’t thought about that in ages, although it had been key to a scene in the first book. Now and Later candies—did they even make those anymore?—the Dickeyville Fourth of July parade, her own brief television appearance, lumpy in a leotard, demonstrating how adolescent girls cannot do a full, touch-your-toes sit-up at a certain point during their development. She couldn’t decide what was funnier—her desperation to be on television or the fact that people believed those sit-ups accomplished anything.
But where was Calliope in all of this? The girl-woman who was supposed to be at the center of Cassandra’s story remained a cipher, quiet and self-contained. No matter how hard Cassandra tried to trigger memories of Callie, she was merely there. She didn’t get in trouble, she didn’t not get in trouble. Was there a clue in that? Was she the kind of child who tortured animals? Did she steal? There had been a rash of lunchbox thefts one year, with all the girls’ desserts taken. Was there something in Callie’s home life that had taught her early on that it was better not to attract attention? Cassandra had a vague impression—it couldn’t even be called a memory—of an angry, defensive woman, quick to suspect that she was being mocked or treated unfairly, the kind of woman given to yanking children by the meat of the upper arm, to hissing, You are on my last nerve. She had done that at the birthday party, upon coming to gather Callie. No, wait—Fatima’s mother had picked the two up, and she would not have grabbed another woman’s child that way. Still, Cassandra believed she had witnessed this scene with Callie, not Fatima.
Abuse—inevitable in such a story, but also a little, well, tiresome. She hoped it didn’t turn out to be that simple, abused child grows up to be abusive mother. Hitting the wall of her own memory, but feeling too tentative to press forward in her search for the living, breathing Calliope, she decided to spend an afternoon at the library, researching what others had learned about the adult woman presumed to have murdered her own child.
The Enoch Pratt Central Library had been one of the places where her father brought her on Saturday afternoons, after the separation. That was the paradox of divorce in the sixties—fathers who had never much bothered with their children were suddenly expected to do things with them every other weekend. It was especially awkward in the Fallows family because Ric wanted to involve Annie in their outings and Lennie had expressly prohibited Annie’s participation. Ric defied his estranged wife, setting up fake chance encounters with his girlfriend. At the library, at the zoo, at Westview Cinemas, at the bowling alley on Route 40. Why, look who it is! You couldn’t even say he feigned surprise; it was more as if he feigned feigning. Annie, at least, had the grace to look embarrassed by their transparency. And nervous, with good reason. People were not comfortable with interracial couples in 1968 and not at all shy about expressing their objections.
Cassandra liked Annie. Everyone liked Annie—except, of course, Cassandra’s mother, and it was hard to blame her for that. In fact, the outings were more fun when Annie was along because Annie didn’t give the impression that she felt debased by the things that a ten-year-old found pleasurable. Annie was only twenty-six, and a young twenty-six at that, but her interest in Cassandra was always maternal. She expected to be Cassandra’s stepmother long before anyone else thought this might be possible, including Ric. In his mind, he was having a great romance, and romance was not possible within a marriage.
But Annie assumed she would be his wife. ‘She set her cap for him,’ Cassandra’s mother said with great bitterness, and Cassandra had tried to imagine what such a cap looked like. A nurse’s hat? Something coquettish, with a bow? (She was the kind of ten-year-old who knew words like coquettish.) She imagined the hat that the cinematic Scarlett O’Hara lifted from Rhett Butler’s box, the girl in Hello, Dolly! who wanted to wear ribbons down her back, the mother in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, setting her jade green velvet hat at a jaunty angle. But Cassandra could not imagine round-faced Annie, who wore her hair in a close-cropped ‘natural’, in any kind of hat, much less see her as calculating.
Annie had been literally thrown into her father’s arms, her dress torn, people ebbing and flowing around them. Then, even as Ric tried to help her out of the melee, he had been sucked in, with far more serious repercussions. ‘A riot is…an odd thing,’ Annie had told Cassandra years later, when