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.

Comments

[daysgoby]

Putting it on my list right away....

[Sara O'Leary]

Now you need to find a copy of OPEN ARMS - her first novel which has just been re-issued by Freehand Press. Has a fabulous birthing scene which may fit your theme.

Marina Endicott will be off to represent Canada (and the Caribbean!) at the Commonwealth Literary Awards in New Zealand next month. Hmm, don't you think that our world-class writers are as deserving of sponsorship deals as our world-class athletes? I'd like to see her face on the side of my Cheerios box.

[Steph]

Yes, must find Open Arms too.

Personally, I think I writers are *more* deserving of sponsorship than our athletes. But I'm biased...