PRAISE FOR ANNE TYLER
“One of the most beguiling and mesmerizing writers in America.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A novelist who knows what a proper story is … a very funny writer … not only a good and artful writer, but a wise one as well.”
—Newsweek
“Tyler’s characters have character: quirks, odd angles of vision, colorful mean streaks, and harmonic longings.”
—Time
“Her people are triumphantly alive.”
—The New York Times
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1965 by Anne Modarressi
Copyright renewed 1993 by Anne Tyler Modarressi
Reader’s Guide copyright © 2005 by Anne Tyler and The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
Excerpt from The Beginner’s Goodbye copyright © 2012 by Anne Tyler.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Ballantine Reader’s Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com/BRC
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96672
This book contains an excerpt from The Beginner’s Goodbye by Anne Tyler. This excerpt has been set for this edition and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming book.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78835-1
This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Excerpt from The Beginner’s Goodbye
1
After the funeral James came straight home, to look after his brother. He left Mr. and Mrs. Pike standing on that windy hillside while their little boy wandered in circles nearby, and the only one who saw James go was Joan. She looked over at him, but she didn’t say anything. When he was a few steps away he heard her say, “We have to go home now, Aunt Lou. We have to go down.” But Mrs. Pike was silent, and all James heard for an answer was the roaring of the wind.
Going down the hill he took big steps—he was a tall man, and the steepness of the hill made him walk faster than he wanted to. It was too hot to walk fast. The sun was white and glaring and soaked deep in through the mat of his black hair, and his face felt slick when he wiped it with the back of his hand. Partway down the hill he stopped and took off his suit jacket. While he was rolling up his shirt sleeves he looked back at the grave to see if the others were coming, but their backs were still turned toward him. From here it seemed as if that wind hardly touched them; they stood like stones, wearing black, with their heads down and their figures making straight black marks against the sky. The only thing moving was little Simon Pike, as he picked his way down through the dry brambles toward James. Simon looked strange, dressed up. He had always worn Levi’s and crumpled leather boots, but today someone had made him put his suit on. That would be Joan. Mrs. Pike had looked at nothing but the ground for two days now, and couldn’t notice what Simon wore. Joan would have polished those white dress-shoes that Simon was getting all grass-stained, and taken out the last inch of cuff on his sleeves so that they could cover his wrists. There was a thin faint line above each of his cuffs where the old hem had been; James could see it clearly when Simon came up even with him. He stood staring at the cuffs for a long time, and then he shifted his eyes to Simon’s face and saw Simon frowning up at him, his eyebrows squinched into one straight line across his forehead and his mouth held tight against the wind.
“I’m coming too,” he told James. His voice had a low, froggy sound; he was barely ten, but in a year or two his voice would begin to change.
James nodded and finished rolling up his shirt sleeves. There was a band of dampness beneath his collar. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, and then he began walking again with Simon beside him. Now he went more slowly, bracing himself against the steepness of the hill. Each time he took one step Simon took two, but when he looked over at Simon to see if he was growing tired, Simon ignored him and walked faster. He wasn’t sweating at all. He looked cold. James wiped his face on his shirt sleeve and followed him down between the rocks.
“Getting near lunchtime,” he said finally.
Simon didn’t answer.
“Want to eat with Ansel and me?”
“Well.”
“Don’t worry about your mother. I’ll tell her where you are.”
Simon said something to his shoes, but James couldn’t hear.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t bother.”
“We’ll tell your cousin Joan then,” said James. “Soon as she gets back.”
The wind was so hot it burned his face; it made lulling sounds around his ears so that he couldn’t hear his own footsteps. He pushed his hair off his forehead but it fell into his eyes again, hanging in a tangled web just at the top of his range of vision. Beside him, Simon was letting his hair do what it wanted. He had greased it down with something (it needed cutting, but Joan had been too busy with her aunt to see about that) and now it ruffled up in thick strings and stood out wildly in every direction. When James turned to look at him he nearly smiled. With his face sideways to the wind the roaring sound was quieter, so he kept looking in Simon’s direction until Simon grew uneasy.
“What you staring at?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said James. “Some wind we got.” He looked straight ahead again, and the roaring sound came back to hammer at his ears.
The ground they were treading was wild and weedy, with rocks sticking up here and there so white they might have been painted. There was no path to follow. Below them was the whole town of Larksville—the main street hidden by trees, but the outlying houses and the tobacco fields laid bare to the sun. At the foot of the hill was the white gravel road where Simon and James both lived. They lived in a three-family house that looked like only a long tin roof from here. No houses stood near it. James’s brother Ansel said whoever built their house must have been counting on Larksville’s becoming a city someday, but Larksville was getting smaller every year. When anyone went away to college it was taken for granted they’d never be back again, not for any longer than it took to eat a Christmas dinner in the house they’d started out in. Yet the long crowded house sat there, half a mile from town as a bird flies and a mile by car, and its three chimneys were jumbled tightly together with the smoke intermingling in wintertime.
The sight of that green part of town was cool and inviting; it made James think of cold beers in the tavern opposite the post office. He looked down at Simon, but Simon was hunched into the jacket of his suit and he still seemed cold.
>
“Do you like sardines?” James asked him.
“Not much.”
“Or cold cuts?”
“No.”
They stepped through a tangle of briars, with the thorns making little ripping sounds against their clothes. “I could eat a pizza,” Simon said.
“You better talk to Ansel, then. He makes pizzas.”
Simon tripped and caught himself. He looked down at the small rock that had tripped him and then began kicking it ahead of him down the hill, swerving out of his course to recover it every time the rock rolled sideways. Gray streaks began to show on his shoes, but James didn’t try to stop him.
When they reached the gravel road they turned right and began heading in the direction of the house. Simon’s rock rolled into a ditch; he left it lying there. It looked as if they might get all the way home this way—not talking much, and not saying anything when they did talk, just as if this were an ordinary walk on an ordinary day. That suited James. He had been thinking too much, these last two days—turning things over and over, figuring out how if just some single incident had happened, or hadn’t happened, things might have been different. Now he ached all over, and thinking made him sick. He was just beginning to feel easier, ambling along in silence beside Simon, when Simon turned and began walking backwards ahead of James, fixing his frowning brown eyes on a point far down the road. He opened his mouth and closed it, and then he opened it again and said, “James.”
“What.”
“How far down in the ground before it starts getting cold?”
“Pretty soon,” said James.
“How soon.”
“Pretty soon.”
“I’m just thinking,” Simon said.
To keep him from thinking any more, James said, “But then it gets hot again, down towards the center of the earth. That’s beyond digging distance.”
“Six feet under is stone, stone cold,” said Simon.
“Well, yes.”
“Good old Janie Rose, boy.”
“Now, wait,” James said. “Now, Janie Rose don’t feel if it’s cold or it’s not, Simon. Get that all straight in your mind.”
“I know that.”
“Get it straight now, before you go bothering your mother about it.”
“I know all about that,” said Simon. He spun around and began walking forward again, still ahead of James. Strands of his hair rose up and floated behind him, like the tail plumes of some strange bird. “You don’t get what I mean,” he called back.
“Maybe not.”
“Now, you know Janie Rose.”
“Yes,” said James, and without his wanting it the picture of Janie Rose came to him, sharp and clear—Janie Rose looking exactly the way he thought her name sounded, six years old and blond and fat, with round pink cheeks and round thick glasses. He hadn’t been planning to think about it. He said, “Yes, I know,” and then waited for whatever would follow, keeping part of his mind far away.
“She just hated cold,” said Simon. “Playing ‘Rather’ in the evenings after supper—which would you rather be, blind or deaf; which would you rather die of, heat or cold—she chose heat any day. She had a twenty-pound comforter on her bed, middle of summer.”
“I already said to you—” James began.
“Well, I know,” said Simon, and he started walking faster then and whistling. He whistled off-key, and the tune was carried away by the wind.
When they reached their house, which stood slightly swaybacked by the road with its one painted side facing forward, James stopped to look in his mailbox. There was only a fertilizer ad, which he stuck in his hip pocket to throw away later. “See what your mail is, why don’t you,” he told Simon.
Simon was walking in small neat circles around the three mailboxes. He stuck out a hand toward the box with “R. J. Pike” painted on it and flipped the door open, and then made another circle and came to a stop in front of the box to peer inside. “Fertilizer ad,” he said. He pulled it out and dropped it on the roadside. “Letter for Mama.” He pulled that out too, and dropped it on top of the first. “She’ll never read it.”
James picked the letter up and followed Simon along the dirt path to the house. Halfway through the yard the path split into three smaller ones, each leading to a separate door on the long front porch. Simon took the one on the far left, heading toward James’s door, and James took the far right to deliver the Pikes’ letter. The Pikes’ part of the porch had a washing machine and an outgrown potty-chair and a collection of plants littering it; he had to watch his step. When he bent to slide the letter under the door he heard a scratching sound and a little yelp, and he stood up and called to Simon, “Your dog wants out, all right?”
“All right.”
He opened the door and a very old, fat Chihuahua slid through, dancing nervously on stiff legs as if her feet hurt her. “Okay, Nellie,” he said, and bent to pat her once and then stepped over her and continued down the porch. On his way he passed the Potter sisters’ window and waved to Miss Faye, smiling and shaking his head to show her he couldn’t come in. She was sitting behind closed glass, full face to the window and as close to it as she could get, and when James shook his head the corners of her mouth turned down and she slumped back in her chair. Neither she nor Miss Lucy could climb that hill to the funeral, and they were counting on James to tell them about it.
Simon was standing at James’s door, his hands in his pockets. “Why didn’t you go on in?” James asked him, and Simon just shook his head.
“I reckoned I’d wait,” he said.
“Ansel’d let you in.”
“Well, anyway,” said Simon, and stood back to let James open the door for him.
The inside of the house was cool and dim. It had unvarnished wooden floorboards, with no rugs, and when Simon walked in he clicked his heels sharply against the wood the way he did when he was wearing his boots. Walking that way, swinging his thin legs in heavy, too-big strides, made him look younger, like a small child entering a dark room. And he didn’t look to his left, although he knew James’s brother would be on the couch where he always was.
“Ansel?” James said.
“Here I am.”
James closed the screen door behind him and looked toward the couch. Ansel was sitting there, with his back very straight and his feet on the floor. Usually he spent the day on his back (he had anemia, the kind that never got much better or much worse so long as he was careful), but today he had made a special effort to be up. He was wearing his Sunday black suit, and he had slicked his pale hair so tightly down with water that it was the same shape as the narrow bones of his head. Probably he had thought that was the least he could do for Janie Rose. When James came in Ansel didn’t look in his direction; he was watching Simon. He waited until Simon finally turned around and faced him, and then he stood up and stooped toward him in what looked like a bow. “I hope this day wasn’t too hard on you,” he said formally, and then sat down and waited while Simon stood frowning at him.
“We got back before the others,” James said. “I promised Simon lunch.”
“Oh. Well, I doubt that he—Here, you want to sit down?”
He patted the couch where he sat, which meant that he was extending special privileges. Ordinarily he didn’t like people sitting there. After a minute Simon shrugged and clicked his heels over to the couch, and Ansel moved aside to give him room.
“I haven’t really talked to you since the, uh—It’s been quite a few days. But I wanted to say—”
“I been busy,” said Simon.
“Well, sure you have,” Ansel said. “I know that.” He was sitting forward now, placing the tips of his fingers together, gazing absently at the floor with those clear blue eyes of his. It made James nervous (Ansel had been known to get too serious at times like this) but before he could change the atmosphere any, Ansel had begun speaking again. “Uh, I wanted to tell you,” he said, “I been meaning to say to you—sheesh! James, will you close the door?”<
br />
James gave the inner door a push and it clicked shut.
“Too much wind,” Ansel said. “Well. I been meaning to, um, give you my condolences, Simon. And tell you how sorry I am not to go to the funeral. James said I shouldn’t, but you don’t know how I—”
“You didn’t miss much,” said Simon.
“What? Well, I just wish I could’ve come and paid my respects, so to speak. That’s what I told James. But James said—”
Simon sat tight, his hands pressed between his knees and his eyes straight ahead. When James started into the kitchen Simon half stood, with that squinchy little frown on his face again, so James stopped and leaned back against the wall. He wasn’t sure why; always before this it was Ansel that Simon followed, leaving James to Janie Rose. But now Simon sank back in his seat again, looking easier, and began kicking one foot lazily in the direction of the coffee table. Ansel rambled on, his speech growing more certain.
“I had never been so shocked by any news,” he said. “I was saying that to James. I said, ‘Why, she and Simon were over here not but a while ago,’ I said. ‘Why, think how Simon must feel.’ ”
“I feel all right,” Simon said.
“I mean—”
“I feel all right.”
Ansel rubbed the bridge of his nose and looked over at James, and James straightened up from his position against the wall. “Mainly he feels hungry,” he told Ansel. “I promised him lunch.”
“Why, sure,” said Ansel. “If he wants it. But I doubt he does. You hungry, Simon?”
“I’m starved,” Simon said.
“You going to eat?”
“I reckon I am.”
“I see,” said Ansel.
Simon stood up and came over to James. When he got to James’s side he just stood there and waited, with his eyes straight ahead and his back to Ansel. “We going to get that pizza?” he asked.
“Anything you want.”
“Pizza?” Ansel said, and Simon turned then and looked up at James.
“That’s what I promised him,” James said.