The Wet Hen Society – Novel Excerpt

My mother’s name was Emily Berrigan and she was a writer of fiction who aspired to be a best-selling author. She spent most of her days up at her desk in my parents’ bedroom, drinking black coffee, smoking Kents and typing with a physical ferocity that rocked her Smith-Corona, something she kept impatiently correcting by squaring the machine in front of her. She was from California—San Diego—and brought with her to our quiet Detroit neighborhood her considered opinion that the world was a much larger and more sophisticated place than that imagined by those who lived around us. She was in her middle 30s, at the time I’m writing about, black-haired and small-boned, beautiful in a dark, honest, intense way, one of those people whose personalities seem apparent in the carving of their face.

Her fervent desire, not just to write, but to win at writing, had come to inhabit me in the form of the fundamental anxiety I felt for her. When I was little we’d walk down to the post office together to get stamps for the big manila envelopes that contained her magazine stories and the self-addressed return envelopes that went along with them. Before dropping the envelope in the mailbox, my mother handed it to me. It was my job to kiss it, for luck, and put it in the box. At the age of six, I bowed my head, making my obeisance to the gods of publishing—here is my kiss, for you, I who kiss no one but my mother and possibly an aunt or two.

And the publishing gods would reply, taking their godlike time—generally about four months—that my kiss was worthless. The return envelope would come back, addressed in my mother’s own handwriting, as if she were rejecting herself. She would pull a chair away from the kitchen table, sit down with her back straight and her knees together, place the envelope on her lap, and open it, hoping for a “good” rejection letter, some words of encouragement. Next best was a form letter, but actually signed by someone real—to ascertain this, she would lick her finger and see if the ink smeared.

I took her hand once, holding her index finger and seeing blue imprinted in the whorls. “That’s not bad,” I told her. I was probably eight years old. It was the first time I’d ever tried to comfort her, rather than the other way around, and I can still remember how different her hand felt because of that, not my mother’s hand, but a person’s, surprisingly thin, angular and cool. Secretly, though, I was alarmed for her. The life of a writer, as far as I could see, involved a constant battle to tamp down hope, yet even then I understood that hope was the trick, the way you got through things, the way you fooled yourself.

***

It was hard being an only child at that time, in that place. Our brick colonial was only two short blocks from Blessed Savior Church and its adjoining elementary school, which I attended and graduated from in the spring of 1963. We were Catholics and most of the people we knew were Catholics, which meant we lived among big families. Three kids at the very least, usually four or five, quite often more. Everywhere we went, to church or school events or restaurants, there were huge groups of related people milling around.

My mother, herself an only child, liked to imitate the reaction of the mothers she met when they asked her how many children she had.

“Just the one?” she would say in the nasally tones she reserved for mocking Midwestern women. “Life must be so very easy for you!”

I laughed along with her, but in truth I envied these big families their daily cacophony, their protective herding. Mothers of the large flocks sometimes took pity on me, even inviting me to dinner. But when I accepted such invitations the kids in the family looked upon me as an interloper and my mother acted like I’d betrayed her.

What pushed me further into solitariness was that I started to get beat up. The idea of getting punched in the mouth because you kept to yourself and were bad at sports was shocking to me. It’s a familiar story so maybe it shouldn’t have been. But these were children I’d played tag with in kindergarten—what had happened to their chubby, innocent souls?  As sixth grade started, they morphed into brutal creatures who shoved me on playgrounds and elbowed me at the water fountain, then jumped back with the fists cocked, expecting me to fight back. Which I never did. At that point, I became quite literally a walking punching bag. One day I was strolling home with a generally friendly kid who lived on my block, talking about this and that, when out of nowhere he hauled back his first and hit me a glancing blow across my cheek.

“Why did you do that?” I asked him.

He stood back, nervously grinning, fists raised. He seemed absurd to me and I walked away. But later I imagined strangling him until his eyes popped out of his head, then stuffing his sightless body down the storm drain in front of his house.

In science class that sixth grade year, they screened a short film entitled “Nature’s Industry,” which featured birds fluttering in frenzied nest-building, sinuous columns of ants carrying twigs, bees arising in clouds from hives, heading out to hunt for pollen, schools of fish darting in astounding synchrony through the ocean. This was meant to illustrate what people and other species had in common, I suppose; it seemed clear to me that what humanity really shared with the natural world was a blank fierce purpose common to swarms, a brutal energy antithetical to meaningful life.

I adapted, in my way. I lived only a few blocks from school, but I took long circular routes home, arriving via our alley and back fence. Instead of going out at lunch hour, I stayed in my classroom and ate my sandwich and read my book, ignoring the smirks of the nuns—narrow, credulous creatures—who knew why I wasn’t outside playing and seemed to savor my humiliation. I suppose I reminded them of the folktales and parables they’d heard and read that featured the likes of me—the malingerer, the sissy, the coward, the object lesson.

I had different thoughts, though. I decided that my present difficulty was either God’s way of telling me I was too good for the world or that the world was too good for me. To my credit, I suspected the former. Alone in my bedroom, my mother’s typing rattling away in the next room, I started to imagine my life as a solitary, philosophical search for truth and happiness. On Saturdays, I would stock up on books at the local library, where the librarian was an old woman who claimed she had once met Mark Twain. She wouldn’t let me into the so-called Adult Reading section, so I was stuck in Young Adult, which, aside from the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, consisted mainly of the fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So I read Twain, O. Henry, Bret Harte, Stephen Crane, Jack London. The problem was, everything in the books had happened a long time before and everyone who wrote them was dead.

But then one afternoon, misplaced in a book cart abandoned in Young Adult, I came upon The Lord of the Flies, which I stashed under a stack of old Boys’ Life magazines that lay on a radiator cover beneath a tall and dusty casement window at the back of the library. Returning to the book over and over on consecutive Saturdays, I found a fictional world and language I recognized, one of savagery unaltered by good intentions or spiritual purity or hope of succor—“Nature’s Industry” on display. Oddly, it heartened me.

***

My father, a Detroit native, fit into our neighborhood far more easily than my mother and me. It helped, as she often put it, that humanity parted before him like the Red Sea. He was a soft-spoken general surgeon, tall, handsome, hair silvering in his early forties. The man who worked 18 hour days and donated time down at the Catholic Charities Clinic on Beaubien and 4th every other Saturday, who was profiled in the Michigan Catholic, who was on a having drinks basis with Archbishop Dearden.

Once during gym class one of my tormentors threw a basketball to me from such close range that it burst through my hands and hit me hard in the center of my chest. Something tightened up there and became ferociously painful, a knot that felt like an auger was drilling in right above my heart. My mother took me to St. Dismas Hospital, where my father worked, and I was put in a room on a little silver table with my shirt off. My father came in with big syringe filled with yellow liquid. It had a huge needle. I was terrified and then he touched me on the shoulder with his large, warm hands, just touched me gently, and I relaxed. I watched him put this long needle into my chest, several times, each time angling it a certain way and squeezing in some of the liquid, watched this happening as if I were watching it happen to someone else. And my muscle unknotted and the pain went away and I smiled at him.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it, son?”

“No.”

He patted me. “See you at home.”

But he didn’t see me, usually, because I was almost always in bed by the time he arrived. Sometimes I awoke to hear my mother and him having a late sandwich together, down at the kitchen table. I couldn’t tell about their relationship then, and even now I can’t. They seldom fought, despite the fact that my mother could be volatile and argumentative. I know that they were ambitious for themselves, and that they admired each other. Each took it for granted that the other would do well. Together, when they dressed up to go out, they were an absolute knockout, beautiful people, even glittering a little.

In the early sixties, with John F. Kennedy newly installed as president, there was a moment or two when the world seemed to be turning away from herds in favor of us onlies. My mother and father began to throw big parties to which they invited a mixture of doctors and administrators from St. Dismas and Jesuit academics, writers and graduate students from the University of Detroit. It was a crowd, but of individuals. People drank and argued, red-faced, endlessly, or held sly bantering side conversations suffused with  irony, a commodity that generation drank in with their Scotch and exhaled in their smoke. I dodged through it all mainly unnoticed, plucking chips from bowls, guzzling ginger ale.

Without mentioning it to my father and me, my mother had begun to shelter Jesuits who were contemplating leaving the Order. They would often live with us for days, pacing around in the backyard keeping up with their breviaries. They made themselves useful at our parties, making drinks, doing small chores.

One night my father and I walked into the kitchen together to find a pair of them washing and drying a mound of dishes and cocktail glasses.

“Why, hello, fellas!” he exclaimed, using the hearty Army voice he adopted when uncomfortable. The priests smiled at him uneasily. One was marrying a nun; I forget what apostasy had triggered the other’s dash for the exit. They were young enough to look like college athletes on a road trip, with their crewcuts, each wearing a checked short-sleeved shirt and pressed khakis—the runaway Jesuit uniform. The telltale giveaway, always, was the little red line around their necks left over from their Roman collars.

The repressive nature of the Catholic Church was a flashpoint for my mother in those days. Just a few years before, she had knelt in the living room during the dark silent hours of Good Friday afternoon, wearing a black lace mantilla and praying the Rosary. Now she had Teilhard de Chardin taped above her writing desk on a 3×5 card: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

One Saturday night, as a party roared around me, I made myself a ham sandwich and took it upstairs to eat quietly. As I passed my mother and father’s bedroom, I saw a woman sitting at my mother’s writing desk, sipping a drink and poking desultorily through her papers.

She heard me and turned around.

“Is that sandwich for me?”

“You can have some if you want.”

I walked in and proffered the plate. The woman surveyed it critically.

“Hasn’t Emily taught you how to make a decent sandwich?”

I was a little taken aback—I had never had a sandwich criticized before—but I guessed it was true. Fatty pieces of ham flopped out on the sides and the soft white bread was dented by the iceberg lettuce mounding up the middle.

The woman took the plate out of my hands and undid the sandwich, taking out the lettuce and the fattier pieces, then putting it back together into a newer, slimmer, handsomer sandwich. She took half, then handed back the plate and returned to examining the papers on the desk.

I sat down on the foot of the bed and watched her. She was about my mother’s age, although taller, quite thin, and somehow older-looking, with blonde hair down around her shoulders and unusually pale blue eyes. She was not what I considered a beautiful, or even pretty, woman, but there was a gravitational pull about her that had to do with knowingness. When she finished her sandwich, she looked at me appraisingly with her faint eyes, a look that suggested that she understood that she was interesting to me. This appeared to please and amuse her and also make her decide to leave. As she stood up, dusting crumbs off her slacks, she pointed at the de Chardin quote above the desk.

‘Does Emily really believe that?”

“I guess so.”

The woman gave a slight shrug.

“No matter how you slice it,” she told me, “it’s all a goddamn struggle.”

***

This was my first encounter with Tilda Kasper, a new friend my mother had made for whom she had high hopes. Tilda was the wife of Jack Kasper, an anesthesiologist who worked with my father at St. Dismas. She was also a writer—she’d won the Hopwood Award as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and had since published her writing in literary quarterlies.

News of Mrs. Kasper—of the Kaspers in general—had traveled well ahead of my actually meeting her. My mother came home from a St. Dismas fundraiser talking about this woman who was smart, funny and “just a little crazy—in a good way.” And”—my mother told me, acting as if she had a wonderfully pleasant surprise for me—“she has two daughters—one of them is your age.” This type of enthusiastic chatter was unusual for my mother, so I just ignored her, not yet having fully comprehended how deeply she had been yearning for a Tilda Kasper to fill the vacuum created by an uncongenial neighborhood, a brooding and solitary son and a husband who was not there even when he was.

***

At almost the same time as Tilda Kasper came into our lives, my mother’s writing started to reach an audience after years of rejection. Those thick manila envelopes dropped into mailboxes now began to return metamorphosed into slim business size missives containing a crisply folded letter.

The first time she found one of those letters in our mailbox she came in from the porch with the envelope already torn open, its contents crumpled in her hand.

“I sold it,” she shouted, dancing a little jig. “I sold it!”

I asked to see the letter and she handed it to me. I smoothed it out and read:  “Dear Miss Berrigan: We were impressed by your writing and are happy to inform you that we are running your story in the January issue of Ingenue…”

“You’re Mrs. Berrigan,” I said.

My mother knelt down in front of where I sat on the couch, put both hands on my shoulders and shook me a little, trying to get me to lighten up. “Listen: this is the best thing. Having this story accepted makes me so happy, I can’t even begin to describe it to you. It’s like—I can’t sit still. I want to get up and run around the block! It’s just the best.”

“Yes, you said that.”

She took the letter back and stood up. She had expected better from me.

“One of these days,” she told me, “you’ll find something to do with your life that will make you really, really happy and you’ll know what I’m talking about. So don’t get jealous or scared or whatever’s going on with you, okay? I’m going to say it again: it is just the best.”

A day or two after Christmas, she came home from the drugstore, walked up into my bedroom, and handed me a copy of the January Ingenue. She left without a word.

On the page where her story began, there was a swirly illustration of a young woman walking through a college quad, books hugged to her chest, trees budding into spring around her. The story was entitled “How the Trouble Began.” I had snooped through various drafts of it on my mother’s desk and so now I only had to skim it. It was about a sophomore at a women’s college in California who has, on impulse, stolen five  dollars from the wallet of her very rich, very pretty, utterly vacuous roommate. The roommate notices the five bucks missing and confronts the girl, who is a loner but a brilliant student. The girl denies all culpability and goes to the housemother to complain, carefully framing her argument in such a way as to present the roommate as spoiled and elitist. Without actual proof, the roommate is forced into a humiliating public apology. Then the girl goes out to find Eddie, the kindly local drunk who is a beloved on-campus figure, and hands him the fiver.

This ending had changed from a previous version, where the protagonist spends the stolen money eating hamburgers and drinking milk shakes, all by herself, at the local diner, until she makes herself sick and runs outside. She is bent over, vomiting into the gutter, when the rich girl walks by with her friends, laughing.

Now that was an ending, as far as I was concerned, but I guessed my mother wouldn’t have been able to sell the story unless she ended it the way she did.

I walked into her bedroom where she was just settling down at her desk.

“Well?”  my mother asked me.

What I wanted to say was, is this really worth all your struggle? The long afternoons writing, the crumpled up pages, the dozens of rejections? Months of work for a story in a magazine for teenage girls purchasable from a drugstore rack between Popular Mechanics and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine?

Instead I said, “I like it.”

My mother nodded and held her hand up for the magazine. I handed it to her and left, feeling terrible. My false response was a betrayal of our deep and unspoken pact that went all the way back to me, her six-year-old angel, kissing those big manila envelopes and sending them winging on their way. We were partners in this thing, as far as I was concerned: she did the writing, yes, but I was her helper and her admirer. But I now realized that I had misunderstood her. It wasn’t the story that was the best thing ever. It was selling it that mattered.

***

My mother never mentioned “How The Trouble Began” to me again. She went back to work, hammering away at her typewriter. Far from making her brightly joyous, her next few acceptance letters seemed to inspire in her a kind of grim satisfaction, as if she had taken successful revenge. Within the space of five or six months, Mademoiselle and McCall’s bought stories and Ladies Home Journal asked for a rewrite. Then a New York agent wrote to query her—might she have a novel she was working on?

Shortly afterward the agent’s note, she asked me to lay out our Book of the Month Club selections from the past year or so on our dining room table. It amused me to position each book on a place setting, as if we were having a dinner party. Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter; The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor; The Prize by Irving Wallace; The Group by Mary McCarthy; Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger; and Mila-18 by Leon Uris.

My mother walked slowly around the table tapping her finger on her nose, something she did when she was thinking.

“What’s the common denominator?” she asked me.

“They’re all bestsellers, obviously.”

My mother continued to pace. It was a bright Saturday morning in early October. Buttery sunlight fell through the open windows. On the table, the bestsellers were mute but powerful presences, with their bold colors and insinuating typefaces, handsome, well-fed beasts at rest.

My mother pushed away Ship of Fools.

“Too old school.”

Franny and Zooey.

“Too literary.”

The Edge of Sadness.

“Beautiful writing. But I’m tired of religion.”

The Prize.

“Yuk. He treats women like dogs.”

That left The Group and Mila-18 facing each other from either end of the table, like an estranged couple having a silent dinner.

“People like to read about groups of women friends,” my mother said. “And they like to read about war.”

I could see my mother writing about women friends, but the war? She had been a teenager during in the 1940s and never spoke of it. But when I brought this up, she shook her head.

“Not that war, no. But what have we been commemorating lately?”

“The Civil War?”

“Bingo.”

We were currently undergoing the Centennial celebration of the American Civil War—had been undergoing it for a couple of years, actually, and it promised to stretch on for a few more. Towns all across the nation held Centennial parties. There were television specials and essay contests and newspaper editorials, plus magazine stories that were intended to show us how really recent the Civil War had been, how close we all were to it. The last Civil War soldier, a drummer boy, had just died. The last person to view Abraham Lincoln’s corpse, a man named Fleetwood Linley, was still alive. He had been a boy of fourteen in 1902 when Lincoln’s casket was opened in Springfield, Illinois, before the body was removed to a steel and concrete sarcophagus. The body was perfectly preserved, Fleetwood told a reporter, except the face had turned gold because of bruising from the bullet that had shattered bones and tissue as it burrowed into him. And his beard had grown. It all made Lincoln seem like an Old Testament prophet, even an idol, who might, just possibly, arise any day to save us all again.

We were interrupted by a rapping on our screen door. Walking into the living room, my mother called out, “HI, Vicki! It’s open!”

Vicki was Victoria Miller, who lived just across the street from us. She was a good-natured, heavy-set woman with bright red cheeks whose blouses, continually untucked from her skirts, bespoke the industrial grade chaos of daily life as the mother of seven children under the age of sixteen.

“I’m so sorry to disturb you,” she said, eyeing our dinner party of books, which seemed to momentarily make her lose her train of thought, but then she rallied and crowded closer—Mrs. Miller was notorious as a tight-in talker—causing my mother to take a step backwards.

“I loved your Ingenue story,” she said. “So beautiful.”

It was only then that I noticed Mrs. Miller had a folder tucked underneath her arm.

“Vicki, that’s very kind of you.”

Blushing, Mrs. Miller handed the folder to my mother, who took it, puzzled.

“What’s this?”

And Mrs. Miller said: ‘I do some writing myself, you know.”

While my mother made our lunch that October day, I sat at the kitchen table and read Mrs. Miller’s short story, which was entitled “The Garden.”

“Well?” my mother asked, placing bowls of soup in front of us.

“It’s about this woman who hears her tomatoes talking to her in the backyard.”

I read the last page out loud:

The voices of all the tomatoes rose around her until her head began to spin. ‘One said: “You ignore us! You are no good!’ Another said: ‘Give me more water.’ And yet another: ‘I must have richer soil.’ Only the large fat juicy one in the center of the tallest plant spoke to her in kindly tones: ‘God looks out for you, my child.’ Finally Mary lay down on the cool green grass and closed her eyes. If only they would stop, she thought. If only.

“Bob found her that evening when he came home from work, lying motionless, perfectly beautiful, perfectly dead. The doctors said it was a heart attack, unusual in such a young woman. Bob mourned her, and then, unable to stay any longer in the house where they had been so happy, moved away with the children. For a while the house sat empty, until a new family moved in, this one with two laughing beautiful blonde-haired children, a boy and a girl. When they first appeared on the backyard on a fine summer day, the tomatoes bobbed up and down, glistening brighter, whispering in the wind, and bided their time.”

“Interesting,” my mother said.

“It’s a little bit like ‘The Twilight Zone.’”

“Ignore what’s on the surface. Look at what she’s actually saying—she’s got seven kids over there who are driving her bananas.”

Mrs. Miller summoned her kids in on summer nights with an endless call and response—‘JOHHHNNYYYY!!!” “COMMINNNNGGGG!” “BEEETTHHHH! “COMMINNNNGGGG!” “MAARRYYYY!! “COMMINNNNGGGG!”—that had caused my mother to nickname her “Old Yeller.” She was one of the mothers who seemed to feel that being without siblings meant I was to some extent adrift in the world and so would call me over from time to time and slip me a few of her oatmeal raisin cookies, which I appreciated.

But here she was imagining herself lying dead in her garden?

I knew from my mother’s writing that I wasn’t meant to interpret fiction autobiographically and I understood that Mrs. Miller didn’t (probably) really think her tomatoes were talking to her. But I also knew there was truth in things that people wrote. Both versions of the protagonist in “How The Trouble Began” inhabited my mother—the righter of wrongs, the self-destructive thief—although neither was, entirely, her.

My mother dipped a spoon into her soup.

“If even Vicki Miller is sitting down and scribbling away,” she said, “I wonder how many other women around here are doing the same thing?”

*****

The London Times called Joseph Cummins’ novel The Snow Train “a wonderful, sustained piece of intelligent and emotive writing.” He has published fiction in Sleet Magazine, Apple Valley Review, Atticus Review, Chagrin River Review, Local Knowledge, Hobart, Wilderness House Literary Review, Embark and elsewhere.