crooked house

Babies in Literature: More from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

 

Image courtesy of The Graphics Fairy.

Anna Karenina's husband, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, is a contradictory character I can't quite figure out. I can't decide if he isn't particularly well-drawn or if he's actually so well-drawn that he's as difficult to put in a box as a real human being would be -- but I suspect it's the latter. Poor Karenin is a dull fellow, deeply concerned with appearances, who can sometimes be very unpleasant. And yet he's got some endearing qualities, too, like the way he responds to Anna's plea for forgiveness when she thinks she is dying from puerperal fever after giving birth to little Annie, her lover Vronsky's child, and especially the way he responds to the newborn:

He forgave his wife and pitied her for her sufferings and repentance. He forgave Vronsky and pitied him, especially after rumours reached him of his desperate act. He also pitied his son more than before, and now reproached himself for having been too little concerned with him. But for the newborn little girl he had some special feeling, not only of pity but also of tenderness. At first it was only out of compassion that he concerned himself with the newborn, weak little girl, who was not his daughter and who was neglected during her mother's illness and would probably have died if he had not looked after her -- and he did not notice how he came to love her. He went to the nursery several times a day and sat there for a long while, so that the wet nurse and the nanny, who were intimidated at first, became used to him. He would sometimes spend half an hour silently gazing at the saffron-red, downy and wrinkled little face of the sleeping baby, watching the movements of her scowling forehead and plump little hands with curled fingers that rubbed her little eyes and nose with their backs. At such moments especially Alexei Alexandrovich felt utterly at peace and in harmony with himself, and saw nothing extraordinary in his situation, nothing that needed to be changed.

But the more time that passed, the more clearly he saw that, natural as this situation was for him now, he would not be allowed to remain in it. He felt that, besides the good spiritual force that guided his soul, there was another force, crude and equally powerful, if not more so, that guided his life, and that this force would not give him the humble peace he desired. He felt that everybody looked at him with questioning surprise, not understanding him and expecting something from him. In particular, he felt the precariousness and unnaturalness of his relations with his wife.

Babies in Literature: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

'...The evening before last I met a woman with an infant at her breast and asked her where she had been. She said: "To the wise woman, because a shriek-hag has got into the child, so I took him to be treated." So I asked how the wise woman treats the shriek-hag. "She puts the baby on a roost with the chickens and mumbles something."'

Although this anecdote, from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, is offered by Levin as an example of the hopeless ignorance of his peasant workers, I'm guessing the remedy for colic it describes is about as effective as any known to date, including those suggested by medical personnel.

Babies in Literature Series: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall

The Darmstadt Madonna by Hans Holbein, whose paintings are mentioned in Wolf Hall.

Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall traces the career of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's closest advisor for a time. The book is written in the close third person, and we are led to assume that Cromwell  is about as pleased with the birth of a girl child to Queen Anne as was Henry himself. Which is to say, not very. There are two descriptions of the infant Elizabeth that are amusing. Here is Cromwell's first view of her:

The princess, unswaddled, had been placed on cushions at Anne's feet: an ugly, purple, grizzling knot of womankind, with an upstanding ruff of pale hair and a habit of kicking up her gown as if to display her most unfortunate feature. It seems stories have been put about that Anne's child was born with teeth, has six fingers on each hand, and is furred all over like a monkey, so her father has shown her off naked to the ambassadors, and her mother is keeping her on display in the hope of countering the rumours. The king has chosen Hatfield for her seat, and Anne says, 'It seems to me waste might be saved, and the proper order of things asserted, if Spanish Mary's household were broken up and she were to become a member of the household of the princess Elizabeth my daughter.'

   'In the capacity of ...?' The child is quiet; only, he notes, because she has crammed a fist into her maw and is cannibalising herself.

   'In the capacity of my daughter's servant. What else should she be? There can be no pretence at equality. Mary is a bastard.'

   The brief respite is over; the princess sets up a screech that would bring out the dead. Anne's glance slides away sideways, and a sideways grin of infatuation takes over her whole face, and she leans down towards her daughter, but at once women swoop, flapping and bustling; the screaming creature is picked up, wrapped up, swept away, and the queen's eyes follow pitifully as the fruit of her womb exits, in procession. He says gently, 'I think she was hungry.'

You'll have to read the book for the other description. And you'll want to -- it is excellent. My only quibble is that, at 650 pages, it isn't quite long enough. I was willing to follow Cromwell to his death. If you need more convincing, check out Levi Stahl's terrific review.

Babies in Literature Series: Laurie Colwin's A Big Storm Knocked It Over

Laurie Colwin is as hilarious as Lorrie Moore (or as nerdy about word-play, depending on your point of view) but she's fundamentally more cheerful. Colwin's stuff reads mainly as the work of a mostly optimistic person with a few dark patches, say, like freckles. Moore's stuff is like the darkest dark chocolate, if dark chocolate were depressed and angry in addition to being bitter. Laurie Colwin is dead, however, and Lorrie Moore is not. For what that's worth.

I am tired. Am I making any sense at all?

Anyway. Here's a good bit about motherhood and the accompanying exhaustion from Laurie Colwin's lovely book A Big Storm Knocked It Over:

   That afternoon the babies were napping in Miranda's crib, an accomplishment their mothers felt was a kind of miracle. It was the first time they had managed to get both asleep at the same time. They sat on Jane Louise's couch, on opposite ends, drinking decaffeinated coffee. Edie yawned.

   "I'd love a cup of real coffee," she said. "But why should I feed him caffeine? He never sleeps as it is."

   "He sleeps a little," Jane Louise said.

   "I ought to hate you," Edie said. "Because Miranda sleeps through the night."

   "Yes, darling," said Jane Louise, "if you consider eleven o'clock at night till four in the morning sleeping through the night. Oh, sleep! Don't you remember how wonderful it used to feel?"

   "No," said Edie. "I'm too tired."

   "Someday," Jane Louise said, "they'll be fifteen years old. Just think of it."

   "You think of it," Edie said. "We'll be up all night wondering where they are. Then they'll be sixteen, and we'll lie in bed all night wondering if they cracked up the car. Then they'll be twenty, and we'll lie in bed terrified that they're taking drugs."

   "Well, most of the people we knew did, and look at them now," said Jane Louise. [...]

   "You look at them," Edie said glumly. "Oh, Christ. I'll never have a decent night's sleep for the rest of my life."

   "Oh well," Jane Louise said. "Anyone can sleep."

   "Perhaps we're so old that our cells are way past the regeneration point, so maybe it doesn't matter if we never sleep again, since we probably don't have any cells left to repair."

   "Hey," said Jane Louise, "why don't we just pass out quietly on the sofa while our little babies sleep?"

   "Because they'll only wake up," Edie said. "Besides, I'm too tired."

Babies in Literature Series: Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs (with A Very Brief Appearance by Ernest Hemingway)

Completely gratuitous picture of Sylvie wearing a pink foam crown. She looks a bit apprenhensive about her responsiblities as a monarch, don't you think?

Yesterday Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs, which I'd preordered a few weeks ago, arrived. As soon as the kids were asleep I dove into it. It's written from the point of view of a college-aged babysitter (or perhaps more accurately, a middle-aged woman looking back on her experience as a college-aged babysitter) and so there are plenty of funny, insightful passages about pregnancy and babies. Like this one, about the protagonist Tassie's potential employers:

One forty-ish pregnant woman after another hung up my coat, sat me in her living room, then waddled out to the kitchen, got my tea, and waddled back in, clutching her back, slopping tea onto the saucer, and asking me questions. "What would you do if our little baby started crying and wouldn't stop?" "Are you available evenings?" "What do you think of as a useful educational activity for a small child?" I had no idea. I had never seen so many pregnant women in such a short time -- five in all. They alarmed me. They did not look radiant. They looked reddened with high blood pressure and frightened. "I would put him in his stroller and take him for a walk," I said.

It's true. Most forty-ish pregnant women look far from radiant. It's only the twenty-something pregnant women who look radiant. Mind you, most twenty-somethings tend to look radiant anyway.

Lorrie Moore is one of my favourites -- I absolutely adore her self-conscious jokiness and word-play. She's so zingy and yet heartrending at the same time. Take this little remark, apparently tossed off, from a description of Tassie's depressive mom:

...one year the holiday card my mother sent out was an October photo of my brother and me, with a caption that read The children. In some dead leaves.

Remove the "one year" (for the purposes of word count) and you've got an entire award-winning twitter-sized short short story right there. Ernest Hemingway and his "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" can eat his heart out.

Appropriate Names for Half-Human/ Half-Vampire Babies

Half-human/ half-vampire baby Renesmee's photo taken from this fan site.

So I finished the last of the wretchedly addictive Twilight saga last night -- it was kind of like eating four giant chocolate cakes one after the other or maybe four pot roasts and now I am feeling more than a little sick. Also: I have been suffering through lots of vivid but not particularly frightening vampire dreams. My head cold has turned into a painful sinus infection and I had to finally give in and start taking tylenol and a decongestant, which apparently acts as a stimulant, so perhaps that helps explain all the dreaming. I'm thinking it's why the baby has been kicking so hard. My teeth are killing me, especially one of my eye teeth, which seems fitting. I'll start antibiotics on Monday if this isn't getting any better by then as I cannot imagine undergoing either a c-section or a normal delivery in this state.

Obviously, now that I've read the final book and (spoiler) discovered that Bella gives birth to a half-human/half-vampire child, I can no longer write the vampire/baby allegory I was hoping would make my fortune. Great minds think alike or dull ones seldom differ, whichever. I will say that it's probably not a good idea to read the baby's birth scene/Bella's death as a human scene when you are only weeks away from giving birth yourself. I'll post an excerpt for the Babies in Literature series when I can stomach reading that section again. But half-human/half-vampire babies apparently tear their way out of the womb with their teeth.

I was amused by how Bella came up with her baby's name, as it also echoes some of my own ideas about trying to honour grandparents. She combined her own mother's name, Renee, and Edward's adoptive vampire mother's name, Esme, and came up with Renesmee. (Maybe we should go with something like Ruthinda. Or Luntha.) Astonishingly, Bella managed to go even further than that, by combining her father's name, Charlie, with Edward's vampire dad's Carlisle, to make Carlie, which she used as a middle name. Impressive feat, wouldn't you say? (We'd have to go with Jurray or Mohn or some variation thereof.) I'm wondering if we're going to see some actual Renesmees when the final movie comes out -- I've heard tell of the odd Trinity since The Matrix came out ten years ago. As of yet, Nameberry has no entry for Renesmee. Must remember to give Pam the heads-up.

Babies in Literature Series: Mary Wesley's A Part of the Furniture

 Sara O'Leary recently suggested the biography Wild Mary: The Life of Mary Wesley. Mary Wesley was a British novelist who, according to Wikipedia, didn't publish her first novel for adults -- she'd written two for children -- until she was 71. She went on to produce ten best-sellers. I'm still waiting on the library for Wild Mary but I've become increasingly curious about her real life after reading two of her novels, both set in and around the second world war, this weekend: A Sensible Life and Part of the Furniture. In email Sara said of Wesley's books "In some ways, it's the same novel over and over again but  I can't say I really mind that." That's very true of these two particular novels -- and I didn't mind it, either. Both feature almost identical young girls whose parents dislike and neglect them, girls who run away around the age of 17; and both plots feature romantic entanglements between the girl and two or more men. However, the two plots end very differently. I can't remark on her other novels yet but these two read as if Wesley was a bit obsessed with working out different but equally plausible consequences for the aforementioned scenario. They are surprisingly sexy books, considering the age of their author, and funny, too, but dark. If you google Mary Wesley you'll find her work constantly described as "arsenic without the old lace."

In Part of the Furniture, Juno, the seventeen-year-old girl in question, becomes pregnant after her first sexual encounter with not one but the two boys she has idolized since her childhood, on the eve of their departure for the war. Through a series of rather improbable circumstances, she finds herself working as a land girl on a farm in the West Country for Robert, a man forty years her senior. This passage features Juno, a few months after she has given birth to twins, Robert, and Bert, the extremely crabby old man who is in charge of the farm. Juno is calling in the sow, Eleanor, and her piglets:

   Suddenly, as if by magic the sow was brushing against Juno's legs; surrounded by piglets she was patting the sow. He heard her voice, 'All hams and sides of bacon present? Everybody there? One, two, three, four,' she counted, 'eleven, twelve? Right then, race you to your sty," and she turned to run down the hill with the sow and litter streaming behind her. 

   Still Robert watched. 

'You'll run all the fat off 'em.' Bert came to meet her. 'I've mixed their meal for you.'

   'Oh, thank you, Bert, thank you. You should not have bothered.' Their voices carried in the frozen air.

   'No bother.' (Robert raised his eyebrows. Well, well.) 'You need to get back to your own.'

   'They are safe with Ann. In you go, Eleanor.' She held the sty door open; the sow pushed in, followed by the piglets.

   'Maybe, but Ann can't feed 'em,' Bert nagged.

   'They will still be asleep, they are always sleeping when I get in. We have this exchange every night, Bert,' she teased.

   'Maybe so.' Bert watched her pour the pigswill into Eleanor's trough and shut the sty door.

   Juno said, 'Anything else?' She looked round the yard.

   'No, you get along upp.'

   'Goodnight then, Bert, thank you, goodnight.'

   ...

   'Bert.' Robert came up beside the man.

   'Sir? You're back? Didn't hear no car. No-one said you was coming. Made me jump.'

   'The taxi was busy. I walked, glad to stretch my legs. Did I give you a shock?'

   'Was just packing it in for the night, glad to see you. That Juno just called the pigs in from the wood; they are after the acorns.'

   'I was watching.'

   'Got a touch with the animals, that one. Didn't allow so at first, but she has.'

   'Good. Everything all right here?'

   'Yes, sir, seems so, ticking over.'

   'Good.'

   'Very glad to see you back, sir.'

   'Thank you, Bert. Eleanor's litter look fine.'

   'See a difference in them babies, too, sir. Quite plumping out, two fine little babbies.'

   'Oh yes, the babies, good.' Since when had Bert been interested in babies? 'You sound quite proprietorial,' Robert said.

   'I sound what?'

   'Interested, Bert, you were never a babies man.'

   'Well, I am now, we all take a turn,' Bert snapped. 'Tis nice for a change to care for something you ain't going to eat.'

   Robert said, 'I had not thought of it in that way. You have turned philosopher while I've been in London.'

   Bert snorted.

(Please excuse all the unnecessary line-breaks -- Typepad, irritatingly buggy today, insists on inserting them.)

(Cuckoo) Babies in Literature: A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book

Picture, of a baby cuckoo being fed by a reed warbler, taken from the Wikipedia entry on brood parasites.

Can you search e-readers for specific keywords? Because that would be a vast improvement over the conventional book. I'm forever wanting to find an interesting bit of text in a long, long book and not being able to. Right now I am devouring A. S. Byatt's latest, The Children's Book, which is a very full, almost too full, novel -- it contains oodles of characters and themes and lots and lots of information about the Edwardians. Parts of it are loosely based on the life of E. Nesbit and it makes me want to go back and read her biography, A Woman of Passion, again. (I see I read it only last year and that my ideas about her are most likely hopelessly mixed up with ideas about Simone de Beauvoir and Mavis Gallant. Some people have minds like steel traps. I have one like a steel sieve.) There are a number of fascinating tidbits in The Children's Book and the one I have finally managed to locate in order to share today is about the breeding habits of cuckoos. In this scene, the children of Olive Wellwood (the character based on E. Nesbit) are having a nature studies lesson from Olive's sister Violet (a character based on E. Nesbit's friend -- and her husband's lover -- Alice Hoatson).

   Violet told about cuckoos.
   'They make no nests. They borrow. They lay their eggs secretly in other birds' nests, among the other eggs. The mother cuckoo picks the foster mother carefully. She lays her eggs when the foster mother is fetching food. And the foster mother  -- a willow-warbler, maybe, a bunting perhaps, feeds the stranger fledgling as though it was her own, even when it grows much larger than she is, even when it is almost too large for the nest, it cries for food, and she answers...'
   'What happens to her real children?' asked Hedda.
   'Maybe they leave early,' said Violet vaguely.
   'It pushes them out,' said Dorothy. 'You know it does. Barnet the gamekeeper showed me. It pushes the eggs out, and they go splat on the ground, and it pushes the fledglings out. It goes round and round and shoves with its shoulders, and tips them out. I've seen them on the ground. And the parents go on feeding it. Why don't they know it isn't theirs?'
   'It's surprising what parents don't know,' said Violet. 'It's surprising how many creatures don't know their real parents. Just like Hans Andersen's ugly duckling, which was really a swan. Mother Nature means the baby cuckoo to survive and fly away with the other cuckoos to Africa. She takes care of it.'
   'She doesn't take care of the willow-warblers,' said Dorothy. 'If I were the willow-warbler, I'd let it starve.'
   'No you wouldn't,' said Violet. 'You'd do what comes naturally, which is feed what's crying out for food. It's not so easy to decide who are your own real children.'
   'What do you mean?' said Dorothy, sitting up.
   'Nothing,' said Violet, retreating. Then, almost sotto voce, she said... 'Who is a child's real mother? The one who feeds it, and cleans it, and knows its little ways, or the one who leaves it to the nest to do the best it can..."
   Dorothy could hear Violet's thoughts, as she had heard Philip's. This was not the first time Violet had spoken this way. She said, turning to science for help
   'It's just natural instinct. For the cuckoos, in their way, and the willow -warblers in theirs.'
   'It's the kindness at the heart of things,' said Violet. She stabbed at the sock with a needle. Charles said, in an audible undertone
   'Lots of people aren't really their parents' children, don't really know who their real parents are, you hear about it all the time --'
   'You shouldn't be listening to such things,' said Violet, with a return of force. 'And folks shouldn't be telling you.'
   'I can't help having ears,' said Charles.
   'Then you'd better wash them,' said Violet.
   Hedda took up her shoe-dolls. 'All these have no father or mother, only a shoe. They are mine to look after.'
   Something had become very uncomfortable. Tom put his nose in his Latin. Griselda proposed to Dorothy that they go for a walk in the woods. Charles said he would come, and Tom.
   'Cuck,' said the cuckoo in the wood. 'Cuck, cuck, cuck.'
   'It's funny,' said Dorothy, 'how it knows it's a cuckoo when it comes to flying to Africa, it goes with the cuckoos. I wonder what it thinks it is, when it goes. It can't see itself.'

This conversation is, of course, a clever bit of foreshadowing. Alice Hoatson was the real mother of two of the five children who were supposed to belong to E. Nesbit and her husband, Hubert Bland. Alice lived with the family and oversaw the housework and childrearing.

But I was most taken with the strange and clever behaviour of the cuckoos. Imagine that first cuckoo mother to try it. "Oh my god," she thinks with her little birdbrain. "What have I done? I have no idea what to do with this egg and once it hatches, yikes! Here, let me see if I can fool this lady into thinking it's her egg." The amazing thing is that it works. I guess it takes a village to raise a child -- or just one really stupid reed warbler.

Babies in Literature Series: Rick Bass's The Wild Marsh

I first read this excerpt from Rick Bass's forthcoming book The Wild Marsh in last month's issue of O magazine and I was thrilled to discover it just now on her site. (It's all Oprah all the time around here, isn't it?) In the following passages, Bass writes about how his daughter Mary Katherine stopped breathing twice the night she was born. After the first time, Bass stayed awake all night to watch her and caught the second time. This really resonated with me -- I did the same thing, only I tried to do it for about six months instead of one night.

I think that when you save someone, you become saved. I think something passes between you and the rescued person, something almost entirely unnoticed, as if some thin and perhaps artificial barrier—a gauzy curtain that gives each of us a bit of necessary distance from all others—has been pulled away: as if such distance, believed to exist at the heart of all things, might really exist only in our imaginations.

Mary Katherine stopped breathing the night she was born. Elizabeth had delivered her, and we were in our hospital room; Mary Katherine was still in her first 24 hours of life. Her vital signs had been perfect at birth, and remained fine. But only a few hours after we moved to our room, she just stopped breathing. Her face scrunched up and turned red as she gasped and sucked and waved her fists, and then she wasn't getting any air at all.

I grabbed her and went running down the hall. It felt like football days, the narrow unoccupied hallway a path to travel as quickly as possible with a dire force in close pursuit, and time the most vanishing, valuable thing.

In the meantime, Elizabeth had called down to the front desk, and an elderly nurse, a tiny old woman, came hurrying around the corner.

Before I had time to explain, the nurse flipped Mary Katherine over so that she was holding her facedown, cradling her belly in the palm of one hand, and tapped her on the back, then lifted her upright. And just like that, she was breathing the clean, sweet air of life again.

Back in our room, Elizabeth had gotten disentangled from her bedsheets and was running down the hall in her robe, barefooted, trailing tubes and towels and blood, and by the time she reached us, she was faint, terrified, and it was hard to believe that, this quickly, everything was all right again.

I was already amazed at the astonishing miracle of life, and to receive now, scant hours later, a second miracle—salvation—was indescribable. I remember feeling joyous and terrified both, and wondering how other parents did it, if every hour was to be filled with this intensity of emotion.

They put Mary Katherine in an incubator for the rest of the night, with some kind of sensor taped to her, so that if she stopped breathing again—for longer than 10 seconds, I think—a buzzer would go off. The nurse said it wasn't uncommon for newborns to stop breathing, but that usually they started right back up again. She said Mary Katherine must have gotten some kind of obstruction, milk or phlegm, and briefly choked.

I hated that she couldn't be with us, her first night in the world, but the nurse assured us she'd be asleep anyway, and would never know we weren't there.

Still, I stood on the other side of the glass and watched her for most of the night. If she opened her eyes, I wanted her to see that someone was there; if the monitor failed, I wanted to be there to back it up.

I watched her sleep, and breathe; I counted the seconds between inhalations and exhalations. Once, later in the night, she stopped a second time—I was counting, with increasing concern, eight, nine, 10, as Mary Katherine stirred, increasingly uncomfortable—and by 11 I was rushing back to the nurses, though by the time we returned, she was breathing easily again.

The nurse unstrapped the monitor, examined it, recalibrated it, and tested it against the side of the bed; when it had been motionless for 10 seconds, it began to beep.

I can't remember what the nurse said, or how she explained it, though she did allow that sometimes the monitors weren't always perfect.

Bleary-eyed, I watched for the rest of the night. Mary Katherine kept breathing, and the monitor never beeped. The nurses were just across the hallway, but what was one night of lost sleep to me, in the grand scheme of things, and her very first night, at that?

What I think I felt, that next day, was a newness of responsibility: an utter and concrete reminder that I was no longer the most important person in the world—that, in fact, I was nothing, and she was everything.

How such knowledge saves a person, I can't quite be sure, but I felt rescued, felt as if I had passed completely through that thin curtain and into some finer land where the self dissolved, and another was born. I still feel that way, anytime I look at either of my daughters, Mary Katherine or her younger sister, Lowry, and I know that other parents feel that same way—I have heard them speak of it, had in fact heard such things even before I became a parent myself, though in those earlier days, such discussions had held no meaning for me, possessing the quality of sound of a radio playing faintly in another room, with the language of the radio's music identifiable, but with the individual words, and their message, indistinguishable.

There is nothing like it, that feeling of love and responsibility you have for a child, especially a child in danger, and it's true, it's as if the self completely dissolves when you experience it. It's not a feeling that lasts forever, obviously -- but it's certainly an experience akin to a moment of spiritual transcendence. And it's not necessarily a comfortable experience at all. It can feel huge and terrifying and powerful and true. I think of this when I think of childless friends -- what would I tell them if they asked me whether they should have children? The experience is more difficult than anything else in the world, the work is so easy to screw up, and all of it is so rewarding in ways that don't necessarily feel rewarding in any way you're familiar with. And yet I feel like, at least for me, not having children would be much worse than never having fallen in love.

Babies in Literature Series: Marina Endicott's Good to a Fault

Marina Endicott's excellent novel Good to a Fault, shortlisted last year for the Giller Prize, is the story of Clara Purdy, a divorced and childless 43-year-old woman, who crashes into the car of a family who happens to be living in it. It turns out that no one has been hurt in the accident -- except the car -- but at the hospital the mother, Lorraine, is discovered to have cancer. She is immediately admitted so that it can be aggressively treated. There are three children: Dolly, Trevor, and the baby, Pearce.  There is also an angry, inept father, Clay, and his elderly and equally inept mother. Because they have nowhere to go, because she was at fault in the accident, because she feels sorry for the mother, and because, deep down, she wants to, Clara takes them all into her home. Clay absconds with the contents of Clara's wallet and her car and she is left with the children and their grandmother, who behaves as much like a child as any of them. What follows is a deeply moving love story and a truly wise examination of what it means to be good. There are a couple of love stories in this novel, actually, but the most important one is between Clara and the children:

   Clara's spine had grown used to the living-room chesterfield, and back in her bed she had a ragged sleep. About midnight Pearce woke, hot and cranky. She gave him a sponge bath by the kitchen sink, with only the stove light on in the dim night kitchen. Poor lamb. Was this mild fever from illness, or new teeth coming in Or withdrawal from the Benadryl. He was good-natured about it, lying peacefully on the towel as she sluiced him with trickles of water. His legs slid open and relaxed, and he turned his melon head on his small neck to look at the dark gleaming window over the sink, and through the window, to the moon shining out there in the night.
   "There is the world," Clara told him. "There is the moon."
   He reached his finger out to it, and he looked back at her, to make sure she saw too. Beloved. She dabbed him dry with a couple of tea-towels from the drawer, so the water could evaporate and cool him that way. She dried between his fingers and his beautiful toes while he stared and stared at her, at the amazing presence of another human being. Clara had never understood that a baby could be so physically, solidly satisfying. When she picked him up to take him back to the crib, he put his arm around her neck in a tender way, a partner in this. Not only a baby but a person, too, already.
   Pearce was still staring at the bears in his crib when Clara heard a noise from the children's room. It was Trevor, awake and crying.
   "My mom," he said -- she could hardly make it out. She lifted him down off the bunk, took him to her room and tucked him into her bed. His shuddering gradually calmed.
   Dolly appeared at the door. One a.m. "What's wrong?" she asked, tears in her eyes too.
   "They're fine, Dolly. Come and sit with Trevor for a minute, and we'll see if we can sing Pearce to sleep."
   Clara went to their room, opened the window, and left the curtains open, plumped up their pillows and added a fleece blanket over Trevor's duvet. Then she put them back to bed. She sat in the semi-cave of the lower bunk, smoothing Dolly's shin; Pearce lay curled on her lap, happy to be held.
   "Betty Pringle, she had a pig," Clara sang for Trevor, and he chimed in softly almost with the tune. "As on my way to Strawberry Fair," she sang and "Baby's boat is silver moon, sailing in the sky." She felt Dolly going limp as she patted her, and heard her breathing change. She stopped singing.
   "That was wonderful," Trevor said from above her.
   Clara sat in the little cave wondering if she would be able to recall this later, when she was an old woman alone in some nursing home, if she would remember Trevor saying wonderful, and the sleeping weight of Pearce on her lap, and Dolly under her hand, and how she'd done that herself, put them at ease, even though they were not her own.

Of course, things don't stay like that, even though there is nothing Clara wants more. There is a brief, interesting forewarning or parallel, deeply satisfying to lovers of children's literature -- Dolly, nourishing herself with books about orphans, reads Mistress Masham's Repose, and thinks:

   They always had to be careful about Clary, to keep the balance between them and someone who was not their mother, who they couldn't be too nice to; but they couldn't make her mad either, or be mean to her, because she might give up on them, or because it wouldn't be fair. They had to be good, and then they got to expect things from her, but there was a set of invisible rules about how much they could be hers. There was almost math in it: pluses and minuses, even brackets like they were learning (Trevor + Pearce + herself), but it all had to come out with an equal sign in the end, you had to get the equation right. Like in Mistress Masham: Maria found those poor little people and took care of them and brought them candies, but then she started bossing the death out of them, and then one of them almost did die, and they told her to back off! So she did, but her heart was broken. But there was more book, maybe they could somehow be able to be friends with her again. She had learned her lesson.

I can't recommend Good to a Fault highly enough -- it a perfect example of how a work of "women's domestic fiction" can also be a "social novel"  in the truest sense.