Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark
To Henry Dunow
“What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth. For the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish, and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs to him only?”
MASSASOIT
“The best mirror is an old friend.”
GEORGE HERBERT
PART ONE A Leading
CHAPTER 1 Agnes, Philadelphia, March 2000
SUCH A PERFECT DAY FOR writing, gray and quiet. But nothing came to her. Not a sentence, not a phrase, not a word worth keeping. Her wastebasket was full. Her pile of index cards was robust. Graph paper covered with diagrams was neatly pinned to a sheet of felt on the wall. But the spot where her stack of usable pages usually accumulated was an empty nest.
This had never happened to her before. Agnes Lee had written six novels and dozens of books for children without hesitation, composing and rewriting and tossing, fearlessly killing her darlings, trusting many more would come along—not to mention volumes of journals and logs secreted in a captain’s trunk in an attic room at the cottage, and lots of articles and essays under various witty pseudonyms. She might rewrite an entire manuscript, but she’d never before been at a loss at this juncture, after her research had produced new material and the time had come to sit down and draft the book. The words had always arrived. Her writing was on tap. All she had to do was pull down on the handle and out it flowed. That fact was at the center of her self-conception. She wrote. If she couldn’t, if the tap was dry, then what?
This sorry state—that was what. She was racing through barrels of Rapidograph ink, and wearing down a new pencil sharpener. Yet her book, her novel, the work that would round out a series written over decades, had garnered a usable word count of zero. All winter, she’d gotten nothing done.
Agnes had lost hope for today, too, but her allotted writing time wasn’t up yet. So she sat. Her rule was five hours, and dammit she’d put in five hours. Habits filled in the fissures of an aging body and mind, and she couldn’t afford to let them go. She’d seen her mother attempt to do a few sit-ups on her deathbed, and though Agnes felt little but a generic filial regard for that soulless snob, in that moment she hoped she’d be as disciplined at the last. She kept an inviolable schedule, afforded by some inheritance and abetted by having had the vocation of writing for the last nearly sixty years. Rarely did she have to compromise for anyone, a privilege she did not take for granted and refused to squander. She was eighty, but she had not slowed down. Just the opposite. Her remaining work was urgent, and she was well aware of working alongside the specter of the unknown moment of her last breath.
Since Mrs. Blundt had placed the mail by Agnes’s place at lunch, and her perusal of several of the items had brought agitation into her controlled small world, she’d been particularly distracted. She paced her room and looked out the window and paced again. She allowed herself to pace into the living room, too, as long as she kept her mind in her work. Mrs. Blundt had bought fragrant lilies and Agnes dropped her nose into their midst, inhaling heaven. She walked to the window next. She had a good view from her third-floor apartment. The brown flora and collapsed grass in Rittenhouse Square hung on with stoic forbearance. People crossing through had scarves in place of faces and bodies obscured by masses of cloth or fur. Every so often they looked up at the sky, and Agnes followed their gaze in search of early flakes. Snow was general all over Ireland. A line from Joyce’s “The Dead.” Her eyes pricked. She rarely cried at life, but certain turns of phrase prompted hot tears to sting her cheeks. She squeezed the bridge of her nose, pinching off the emotion. Blizzard, she thought, a word that cooled her off. A blizzard was predicted that would leave a few inches over Philadelphia. The prospect of a rinsed landscape replete with glistening branches and snowmen in the Square cheered her. Refreshed, she returned to her writing room.
Agnes was well aware she could afford to be moved by snow. Mrs. Blundt, her housekeeper, kept her shelves stocked and the domestic details of her winter life on course. Snow would fall over all the living and the dead, and Agnes would have a couple of days of privacy and silence. Perhaps in that quiet she’d find what she needed to begin. An image; a character’s voice; a sentence that contained a seed from which the next sentence could grow. Something that would open this cage. Writing had been the one place where she had felt—free. And also on Fellowship Point. Always free there.
She pulled the blank pad in front of her. Fifty-three minutes to go. Frustrated, bewildered, she suffered in silence and could complain to no one. She drew a horse and quickly scribbled over it.
She had a bifurcated writing career, both parts successful, but she was only publicly known for the When Nan books. She’d written more than thirty volumes in the series, starting with When Nan Was a Lobsterman in 1965 and most recently When Nan Ran a Wind Farm. They were published under her own name, as they had been from the beginning, when she’d predicted, accurately, that the books would serve as an alibi for all the time she spent alone at her desk, unavailable. The When Nan books allowed her to pretend she was a very slow worker who needed to be left alone. She actually wrote them quickly, in one sitting, after waiting for an idea to present itself whole.
The illustrations took longer, or she took longer with them, because she didn’t really have an innate talent for it and drew many versions before she got one right enough. She’d stuck to her style of pen-and-ink line drawings, but had learned to paint on paper over the years and had eventually gone back and added color to the early books. Children liked the way she showed an emotion with a simple slant of the line representing Nan’s mouth. She’d practiced that line and agreed she was able to milk quite a bit of nuance out of it. In her social circles, her work was treated as a decent hobby for a woman of her ilk. Being a famous children’s book author in her world wasn’t so different from anonymity.
Her other series, the Franklin Square novels, were popular and, over time, critically praised. She’d written the first one at age twenty-four, mainly as a way to inoculate herself from succumbing to the fates of her friends—reconfigured as the Franklin Square “girls”—as they married or got jobs. It galled her to see them make themselves smaller in order to fit into the roles available to them. Their talents were subsumed into utility and support. She wanted to show things as they were in great detail, to the end of portraying the absurdity of the setup, even for women who had advantages. In her experience, it was harder for girls who’d grown up as she had to notice exactly when they’d been conscripted into the power structure—it was all so seamless and nice. She had been in danger of it herself, her father being kind and on her side, but she’d noticed from the earliest age the hierarchies that existed in every gathering of people, and she’d had a clear visceral objection. It was her subject, in many variations and permutations.
She didn’t moralize, or preach, or conclude. The project of fiction was in essence dramatic and sought to reveal what a particular person was bound to do under explicit circumstances. It was hard to figure that out, but when she was able to do so, when after she’d thrown out dozens of false attempts she suddenly saw exactly how her girls would act and react, when she was able to make her plots ring the clear bell of inevitability, she’d fulfilled her end of the contract as a writer, and left it to the reader to discover the meaning. She was absolutely sure of her opinions and her worldview and trusted that they were conveyed, palatably, in engrossing plots so that she didn’t have to spell out her positions.