Ladder of Years (50 page)

“Yes,” he said.

“You know that letter you wrote me in Bay Borough.”

“Yes.”

“Well, what was the line you crossed out?”

He stirred beneath the bedclothes. “Oh,” he said, “I crossed out so many lines. That letter was a mess.”

“I mean the very last line. The one you put so many x’s through I couldn’t possibly read it.”

He didn’t answer at first. Then he said, “I forget.”

Her impulse was to stand up and leave, but she forced herself to stay. She sat motionless, waiting and waiting.

“I think,” he said finally, “that maybe it was … well, something like what Driscoll was wondering earlier. Was there anything that would, you know. Would persuade you to come back.”

She said, “Oh, Sam. All you had to do was ask.”

Then he turned toward her, and Delia slipped under the blankets and he drew her close against him. Although, in fact, he still had not asked. Not in so many words.

———

Long after they went to sleep, the telephone rang, and Delia resurfaced gradually. This late, it had to be a patient calling. But Sam didn’t even change the rhythm of his breathing; so she inched out from under his arm to reach for the phone.

“Hello?” she said.

“Mrs. Grinstead?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Joe Bright.”

A voice as bright as his name, wide awake and chipper at the ungodly hour of—she peered at the alarm clock. One twenty-three.

“Um …,” she said.

“The realtor?” he prompted.

“Oh!”

“You called me? You and your daughter? Left a whole bunch of messages?”

“Oh! Yes!” she said, but she was still floundering. “Um …”

“I would never phone so late except you did say it was life and death, Mrs. Grinstead, and I only now got in from out of town. Wife’s mother died, spur of the moment.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. She sat up straighter. “Um, Mr. Bright, why I called was …” She shifted the phone to her other ear. “My daughter has been wanting to know,” she said. “Yes … will she be allowed to pound nails in the walls?”

There was a silence.

“Just in case they need to hang some pictures, say, or a mirror …,” Delia said, trailing off.

“Nails,” Mr. Bright said.

“Right.”

“She wanted to know if she could pound in nails.”

“Right.”

“Well,” Mr. Bright said. “Sure. I reckon. Long as they spackle the holes upon vacating.”

“Oh, they will!” Delia said. “I can promise. Thank you, Mr. Bright. Good night.”

There was another silence, and then, “Good night,” he said.

Delia replaced the receiver and lay down again. She had assumed Sam was still asleep, but then she heard him give a little whisking sound of amusement. She started smiling. Outside, far downtown, a train blew
past. In the house, a floorboard creaked, and a moment later a foggy cough broke from the room where Nat slept.

“It’s a time trip,” Nat had said.

She thought of her attempt, that afternoon, to picture Adrian. She had begun with his resemblance to her high-school boyfriend, and only now did she realize that the image she had come up with happened to be Sam’s, not the boyfriend’s. A younger Sam, earnest and hopeful, the day he’d first walked through the door.

It had
all
been a time trip—all this past year and a half. Unlike Nat’s, though, hers had been a time trip that worked. What else would you call it when she’d ended up back where she’d started, home with Sam for good? When the people she had left behind had actually traveled further, in some ways?

Now she saw that June beach scene differently. Her three children, she saw, had been staring at the horizon with the alert, tensed stillness of explorers at the ocean’s edge, poised to begin their journeys. And Delia, shading her eyes in the distance, had been trying to understand why they were leaving.

Where they were going without her.

How to say goodbye.

Ladder of Years

Anne Tyler

A Reader’s Guide

A Conversation with Anne Tyler

Q: How would you describe this novel to a potential reader?

Anne Tyler:
I think Nat says it best: It’s a time trip. If you look at Delia’s journey from one angle, it is nothing but an attempt to travel back through the life she’s already lived, doing it right this time (as in the unnamed movie,
Groundhog Day
, referred to toward the end of the book). Symbolically speaking, in her new life she acquires new sisters, a new son, a new husband, and a new father, and she tries to make a better job of it the second time around.

Q: Is Delia a reliable narrator?

AT:
Not always. The more difficult aspects of her father’s character, for instance, and Adrian’s continued attachment to his wife are just two of the unwelcome truths she manages to hide from herself.

Q: Your protagonist, Cordelia, is the youngest and favorite of three daughters of a powerful father. How did King Lear influence the writing of this novel?

AT:
It really didn’t. I had chosen the name Delia before it occurred to me that it must be “Cordelia,” and while Adrian does refer to the
King Lear
connection, I wouldn’t make too much of it.

Q: Delia’s deceased father is a central figure in this novel, but he is obscured by Delia’s worshipful memories. How would her sisters and husband describe him?

AT:
Her sisters would say he was sexist and domineering; Sam would no doubt bring up Dr. Felson’s post-retirement habit of listening in on patients’ phone calls. I particularly enjoyed writing the scenes where these facts emerged so clearly but remained unremarked upon by Delia.

Q: Why did you choose the profession of medical doctor for Delia’s father and husband?

AT:
I was looking for a profession with some power, since Delia’s
sheltered life—from father’s hands to husband’s, with no break—seemed to require that.

Q: You capture perfectly teenagers’ cruelty to their parents in this novel. Do you think such behavior is a necessary rite of passage to adulthood?

AT:
I wouldn’t call it cruelty, exactly, but I do think that it’s necessary at some point for teenagers to draw back and view their parents with a cooler eye. (Notice what happens when they never go through this stage—as Delia obviously never did with her father.)

Q: What is a reader to make of the parallels between Delia’s handling of and socializing of teenagers and cats?

AT:
I was very fond of Delia, and I wanted readers to be fond of her, too. One of the qualities I hoped they would find endearing was her graceful and intuitive touch with both cats and children.

Q: Is her friendship with Nat the most important new relationship Delia has formed and the most important for her to sustain?

AT:
Not really. Nat is only one member of the “surrogate family” she constructs for herself on her journey.

Q: Would Delia really have come home sooner if Sam had asked her to?

AT:
She was very hurt when he
didn’t
ask her, but I suspect that if he had, she’d have invented some quibble with his tone, his wording—some flaw that would allow her to say no and go on with her sojourn until the moment she was ready to return.

Q: So much is left unsaid by your characters. Would you agree that, among many other things, you are a novelist of the inarticulate?

AT:
I would be happy to be called that. I’ve always been fascinated by what’s unspoken in a conversation, what’s revealed by mere gesture or by silence or by talking too much about something completely irrelevant.

Q: Your descriptions of characters, even the most minor, are so specific and evocative. How much work goes into creating a minor character such as Rosemary Bly-Brice?

AT:
Minor characters tend to arrive in my head fully formed, often the result of some long-ago, superficial encounter. The physical model for Rosemary, for instance, was a young woman I saw in a grocery store many years before. She was very conscious of her hairdo, an asymmetrical, angular, high-fashion cut, and held her head constantly to one side as if to accentuate it. I don’t know why I remember things like that, but they certainly come in handy.

Q: Which do you find easier to write: a character like Belle, who is verbose and forthright, or a character like Joel, who is taciturn and emotionally unavailable?

AT:
Oh, definitely Belle is easier; she practically wrote her own dialogue for me. Although the challenge of someone like Joel is enjoyable in a very different way.

Q: Your novels are filled with fascinating characters. Have you ever been tempted to change your protagonist in the midst of the writing process?

AT:
No. I spend so much time thinking about my protagonist beforehand—just daydreaming, inventing a whole unwritten childhood, etc., for him or her—that I’m very sure where my heart lies when I begin writing.

Q: What do you think of one reviewer’s comment that you “involve readers so deeply that they want to fight with the characters” in this novel?

AT:
I’m honored. I’d like nothing better than for readers to believe they’re actually living in my characters’ world, just as I feel I’m living in it while I’m writing about it.

Q: How is Delia going to handle telling Joel and especially Noah about her decision?

AT:
I hate to think about that. I know it will be painful. I felt
downright cruel, letting the situation develop as it did, but I was certain that was the decision she would make.

Q: Did you know from the outset how this novel would end?

AT:
With this particular novel, I did. (I don’t always.) I started my plot with an index card on which I’d written, years before, something like, “Woman leaves her family only to find in the end that she’s just been trying to figure out how to say good-bye when they leave
her.
” It turned out to be slightly more complicated than that, but I always did have the book’s last line in my mind.

Q: When you finish a novel, do you let your characters head into an unknown future or do you find yourself finishing their story in your mind’s eye?

AT:
I feel a novel has come to its end when I can say, more or less, what the characters’ lives will be from here on out. So once I finish writing that last page, I no longer wonder about them or even (after a little good-bye pang) give them another thought.

Q: Joel is endlessly frustrated by the misuse and vulgarization of the English language while Delia embraces the fluid and ever-evolving nature of language. Where do you stand in this debate?

AT:
Every example Joel objects to, I object to, but I agree when Delia points out that some of our most vivid language is the language that evolves from everyday usage. And I profoundly disapprove of Joel’s correcting poor Noah in midsentence—a habit that I hoped would suggest a certain authoritarian quality in Joel that parallels Sam’s.

Q: Could you describe your average workday?

AT:
So routinized that it’s practically a ritual. I work in the morning, after some preliminary puttering that seems essential to the process. I write even if I’m not in the mood. (Sometimes my best work comes when I’m not in the mood.) And I make a point of quitting before midafternoon, when I go brain dead.

Q: How long did it take you to write this novel? How many drafts did you write?

AT:
Two years, roughly. I wrote several pages in longhand, rewrote those in longhand once more, then typed them into the computer. When I’d finished the entire book this way, I wrote the whole thing over, again in longhand—the only way I seem able to catch tiny slips or false notes. I love the rewriting process; that’s when I can relax and play around, knowing that at least the bones of the story are in place.