Daughters of the Revolution (20 page)

Someone said, “Who was Goddard Byrd?”

“Oh, the last of the single-sex heads.”

“It’s ironic, isn’t it, the last holdout against women at Goode is memorialized by his former secretary, who, I heard, literally
died at her desk writing the thing, and eulogized by the first female student at the invitation of a female head?”

“That tribute book? Can you believe it was hand-set in letterpress?”

The man turned and his hand appeared before Carole. She shook it. “Dick Whitehead,” said the owner of the hand. He had soft brown eyes and a chiseled manner.

“I enjoyed your tribute,” Dick Whitehead said. “Although if anybody asked me, taking God Byrd’s oral English class made me what I am. It changed my life. We used to memorize twenty, thirty, forty lines a night—the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, sections from the King James Bible, Shakespeare—just the widest range of thought. I want to tell you, I never liked it. I’m no effete intellectual. I was in industry. But in that class, I learned discipline. I learned to be prepared, to pay attention. Served me well in business.”

“What business were you in?”

“Dog bones,” he said irritably.

“What was the name of your business?” Carole asked. “Maybe I’ve heard of it.”

Dick Whitehead acknowledged the insolence of the question.

“First company—Penzance Pet Products—was taken over by a conglomerate, which was good, so I started a company of my own. Whitehead Bones.”

“Why was that good, having your company taken over by a conglomerate?”

His eyes narrowed. “More efficient distribution, lower overhead, better prices for you, the consumer.”

“Is that good? When things are cheaper, don’t people just buy more?”

“Are you some kind of Communist?” Dick Whitehead said.

Carole smiled. “Worse than that,” she said.

After the reception, seventy-three of the one hundred copies of
The Venerable Head
remained under the folding chairs, where they lay sheltered and ruined in the grass. I know because I counted them as I gathered them up. Then I took them back to Mei-Mei’s, where I laid them out to dry into swollen husks, which she kept for ten years. Carole Faust came back with us to spend the night. She’d offered to give me a ride back to New York in the morning.

It was God who brought and bound Carole and me together (her rage toward him against my fawning love), and we became friends, or rather, I followed her like a puppy, scratching at her with letters and e-mails and requests for advice, to which she usually responded.

I ran downstairs, then across the gray-painted porch and into the blowsy, leafy street. The air was hot and muggy, and so dense that the rain, though sluggish and irregular, seemed to be having trouble penetrating it. A small river of muddy water had begun to flow in the direction of the library. I jumped over it and stood on the corner, exposed, hoping she would see me.

The cars that passed revealed nothing but blurred faces behind windshields, sheets of water and wipers that swung back and forth across the glass. Thunder rumbled under my feet, rain ran down the back of my neck and a long bolt of lightning shot through the sky and landed somewhere beyond the library. My sense of drama swelled, and I thought, My life, my life, as if my cards had been dealt but not yet turned over.

I stood on the corner, becoming wetter and wetter, listening to the sound of rain hitting hollow-sounding things. Carole pronounced my name “Eve,” and I could not bring myself to correct her, because by now it was much too late to correct her.

“Can I talk openly around your mother?”

“Of course.”

Mei-Mei had a Rob Roy; Carole and I drank Shiraz. We three sat in Mei-Mei’s three Windsor rockers, rocking.

“How have you
been
, Carole?” Mei-Mei asked in a concerned way, opening up small talk as she became expansive with her drink.

“Very well, though a little wrecked. I’m just getting over a sort of icky relationship.”

Mei-Mei grimaced and knocked on the wooden arm of the rocker.

“My husband had cancer last winter, which was awful. He thought he was going to die, although he didn’t—he just became impotent and depressed. So there was that, and finally I stupidly started this relationship—I have to say that because it was mostly
not
sex, thank God—with a woman who worked at my gallery. But you know, although I love women, and I do, I always have, there’s something, I don’t know, you find yourself just, I don’t know, lying there with their fingers inside you, thinking, What am I doing here?”

Mei-Mei clucked sympathetically. “Oh, gee,” she said. But this small confidence was enough for her; it opened up the possibility of going deeper. In the end, Mei-Mei told Carole the whole story—the German-made kayak, the delusional weather that March, the eight miles of rough water between Penzance Point and Capawak, the hero (described in the papers as “a hardy Danish nursemaid”) who saw the boat capsize and swam a hundred yards in thirty-eight-degree water to save the other man—Carole’s father, Rebozos. I know the story by heart—like all ghost stories, the story of my father’s death must always be told exactly the same way. The fishermen of Capawak dragged the water for hours until they brought my father up—a boat hook caught him by his sneaker. He had a dollar in his pocket, a detail that caused my father’s wealthy uncle Frank particular
grief. The police identified Heck Hellman and called Mei-Mei. The call taught her that we could never rest, could never assume that anyone would come back. If you tell Mei-Mei, “I’m going outside to meet Carole Faust at her car,” she’ll say, “Be careful of the
street
,” and touch something wooden with her knuckles.

“May I have another drink?” asked Mei-Mei, interrupting herself.

“Me, too!” said Carole. “But keep talking.”

I went out to the kitchen and found Mei-Mei’s little urinal—a glass vase, actually—which held the generous dregs of her evening Rob Roy. I added ice and poured out a glass, then poured more wine for Carole and me. Carole didn’t usually drink—she veered in and out of a form of spirituality that tolerated and forgave sexual indiscretion but took a hard line against alcohol. At first, this felt awkward, like a cultural difference between us, like Carole being black, or bisexual. But Carole rejected identity politics. She simply was herself—“just strongly male-identified. I like men
and
women.”

When I came back with the drinks, Carole was leaning forward in her chair, her eyes fixed wide on Mei-Mei, who is a first-rate storyteller, especially of
this
story.

“It was raining—like today,” Mei-Mei said. “Only winter, colder. I didn’t beg him not to go—I didn’t want to be that kind of wife, the kind of anxious woman his mother was. He told me they were just going to try out the kayak along the shoreline. And your father, Rebozos, I mean,
Archer
—well, it was, as you know, a very af
fluent
family. He was dressed for the weather. He had a life jacket. Heck didn’t. No raincoat and no life jacket. The woman who saved him—I wish I could remember her name—said he was swimming. Heck didn’t swim. Maybe he had hypothermia. He just held on to the overturned boat, touching it with his fingers. She saw Heck’s fingers slip away from the boat. She saw him sink underwater.”

But the usual story had veered off course. I saw Mei-Mei’s hands, her fingers vertical, just touching the sides of an imaginary boat, not holding on at all. Her eyes were bright. “He didn’t have a life jacket on?” I said.

“No,” she said.

“You never mentioned that—the fingers on the side of the boat, the life jacket, the woman seeing him go under. You never told me that.”

“Didn’t I?” said Mei-Mei.

“Why didn’t he have a life jacket?” Carole asked.

“Because we were poor,” Mei-Mei said angrily. “Because we didn’t have any money.”

“I hear you,” said Carole.

But I couldn’t let go of this detail about the life jacket that was not a detail, that changed our whole story into a story about power and economics, about our lesser equipment and poorer tools. I’d misunderstood everything. “You never mentioned the life jacket,” I said. “How come I never knew?”

“I never thought of it that way before,” Mei-Mei said. “When Carole said that about the women’s fingers—that gesture—I don’t know, I was shocked. I thought of your father’s fingers touching the side of the boat—not even letting go, just falling away. It freed me. It upped the ante.”

Carole laughed, reached out and took Mei-Mei’s hand in hers and held it, laughing.

The rain stopped; the sky lit up. I went to the kitchen to freshen our drinks. When I came back, Mei-Mei stood with Carole at the open window, pointing into the air.

“Look,” she said. The sky had turned into lines of pink and bright orange, and thin clouds stood in an even queue, like dominoes. “Don’t the clouds look like the souls of the drowned lined up waiting to be counted?” she said. “I think of all those people lost in that tsunami in December, all of them at once, so many.
See, there’s the dog guarding the gate of heaven and the souls have to wait in lines on the horizon. They’re even dressed in the sunny colors of those countries, waiting in the last sunlight over the water to be counted.” She said, “Carole, dear, can you see how they’re the souls of the drowned? Can you see their watery faces?”

Thanks to Randall Babtkis, Dorothy Cooke, Laurie Fox, Charlotte Gordon, Jordan Pavlin, Chessie Stevenson, Sarah Stone and Kate Walbert for their insightful reading, protracted encouragement and practical help. Parts of this book first appeared in
Five Fingers Revew
and
The Idaho Review
, to whose editors I’m grateful. For generous gifts of money, time and extraordinary spaces in which to work, I’d also like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship Award, the California Arts Council, the Ucross Foundation and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program.

ABOUT THIS READING GROUP GUIDE

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of
Daughters of the Revolution
, the debut novel from acclaimed writer Carolyn Cooke.

ABOUT THE BOOK

“So smart, so visceral, so sexy … Absolutely brilliant.”—Kate Walbert, author of
A Short History of Women

From the O. Henry Award–winning author of the story collection
The Bostons
—a
New York Times
Notable Book,
Los Angeles Times
Book of the Year, and winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers—an exquisite first novel set at a disintegrating New England prep school.

It’s 1968. The prestigious but cash-strapped Goode School in the town of Cape Wilde is run by its aging, philandering headmaster, Goddard Byrd, known to both his friends and his enemies as God. With the nation engulfed by the social and political storms of integration, coeducation, and the sexual revolution, God has confidently promised coeducation will come to Goode “over my dead body.” And then, through a clerical error, the Goode School admits its first female student: Carole Faust, a brilliant, intractable fifteen-year-old black girl.

A ferociously intelligent, richly sensual novel about the awkward collision of privilege, tradition, and the possibility of radical social change, Carolyn Cooke’s debut is remarkable for the precision of its language, the incandescence of its images, and the grace and gravity of its themes. A distinctive new voice in American fiction.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Who is the main character in this novel? Why are the EV sections told in first person?
   
2. There are several unusual character names here: God, Heck, Mei-Mei, EV, Pilgrim. What is the metaphorical significance of the names?
   
3. For God, “loss was one theme: the headship of the school, the battle over girls, memory, prostate, lung, teeth, foreskin.” What are some other themes in the novel?
   
4. What does the title mean? Who are the daughters of the revolution?
   
5. Discuss the class issues raised throughout the book. What effect does money have in determining one’s place in society as opposed to gender or ethnicity?
   
6. Why isn’t the story told chronologically? Discuss how the author plays with time.
   
7. What do you imagine happens to Archer Rebozos in the years following the accident?
   
8. Goddard Byrd swears that the Goode School will admit girls “over my dead body.” Is God a misogynist?
   
9. God sees a phrase written in graffiti: “Are we not drawn onward we few drawn onward to new era?” What does it mean? Mrs. Rebozos points out that it’s a palindrome. Why is this significant?
   
10. Herman Melville’s novel
    Moby-Dick
    comes up again and again over the course of the novel. Carole Faust compares herself to the whale, calling herself a “fearful
    symbol.” What point is the author making with this connection? What is the role of literature in the novel?
    
11. In what ways does Carole represent the radical changes of the 1960s?
    
12. EV says, “Mei-Mei thought my father’s death was a story about accidents, threats, loss, abandonment, risk. ‘Be careful,’ she used to tell me … ‘Don’t die.’ ” It sounds like she thinks her father’s death was about none of those things. What did it mean to her?
    
13. Several times, we are told that Mrs. O’Greefe had her own nipple grafted onto her forehead. What is the significance of this act?
    
14. Discuss EV’s trip to the Caribbean island, which ends with the news of her roommate’s murder. What does the reader learn during this section of the book? Why is the reckless EV safe while the cautious Jess dies?
    
15. Mei-Mei points out the similarities between Pilgrim and God. Why does EV choose a man like Pilgrim?
    
16. After she has sex with Pilgrim, Mei-Mei wonders if she had ever been a good mother to EV. Do you think she was? Why does she sleep with Pilgrim?
    
17. Why does God get circumcised? How does it bring about his downward spiral?
    
18. Discuss the character of Mrs. Graves. Why is she so devoted to God? What does she get out of their relationship?
    
19. In her speech at the end of the novel, Carole says that God is “the secret of my success.” How so? Do you think he knew this?
    
20. When Mei-Mei tells Carole about Heck’s accident and the life jacket, EV is shocked, because it “changed our whole story into a story about power and economics, about our lesser equipment and poorer tools. I’d misunderstood everything.” How does this one detail make such a difference? Why hadn’t Mei-Mei told EV about it before?