When I was in fifth grade at a private school for boys in Newton, Massachusetts, my geography teacher, Mr. Neale, was blind, had been blind for some years, probably on account of some gradual degenerative disease. This was in 1952. Mr. Neale was a large man, with a round face and thick fleshy ears;…
What ever happened to George Van den Heuvel, carbuncled waiter extraordinaire who hazed me relentlessly the year I turned sixteen and took my first job as a waitress at Le Bistro, Lubbock’s only bona fide French café? Why George Van den Heuvel proposed marriage on my first day was never clear, nor why he celebrated…
The high school kids are so beautiful in their lavender blouses and crisp white shirts. They open their mouths to sing with that far-off stare they had looking out from the crib. Their voices lift up from the marble bed of the high altar to the blue endless ceiling of heaven as depicted in the…
Andrea Barrett, after spending years immersed in science and history, recognized her literary calling in a house in western Massachusetts. She was working on a paper about the Franciscans and noticed the narrative threads circulating throughout her research. "I was enrolled in a master’s program in Reformation and Medieval History, thinking I might go on…
Opening chapter of The Condition, by Jennifer Haigh To be published by HarperCollins in May 2008 Summer comes late to Massachusetts. The gray spring is frosty, unhurried: wet snow on the early plantings, a cold lesson for optimistic gardeners, for those who have not learned. Chimneys smoke until Memorial Day. Then, all at once,…
For awhile the house sagged on itself, then new people moved in with teacups that chink in a different key from the teacups that lived here before. There is an innocent pouring of coffee, a holding themselves apart, a surreptitious glance into my garden as though I grew rare greens. How hard will they struggle…
Each day she woke before dawn and walked the grounds of the American hospital. She didn’t go far. She kept to the footpaths that encircled the main hall, past the evergreens and the timber cottages now used as additional wards for the wounded. It had once been a Japanese vocational school for the arts, and…
I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk… —Robinson Jeffers The squirrels are up to their nuts in pecans, And the largesse of the trees Has made them careless in their comings and goings, Their carryings and buryings. Every few blocks there’s one Who zigged just when he should have zagged;…
Perhaps the purpose of leaves is to conceal the verticality of trees which we notice in December as if for the first time: row after row of dark forms yearning upwards. And since we will be horizontal ourselves for so long, let us now honor the gods of the vertical: stalks of wheat which to…
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