Read Online Enchanted August by Brenda Bowen - Free Book Online Page A

money to speak of—Granite Hill Press was a tiny place—but it was a bona fide offer to publish her poems between two covers. Fred and she had shared an agent then too: the miraculous, manipulative Holly. She’d been as poor as they were back then. But she had a nose for success. Just after she’d made Rose’s deal, she said she couldn’t keep representing the two of them. “I’m afraid it’s a conflict of interest,” she’d told them and then diabolically left it to them to decide who would go. Rose knew immediately that what she meant was Fred was going to make money—Holly knew it even back then!—and Rose was not. So Rose went through the motions of talking it through, figuring it out, and of course they decided in Fred’s favor. She never could resist Fred. The literary life meant so much to him. And—blame it on what, her background? her era? her inability to internalize her own politics?—she thought it would be better for their marriage if she backed away. And besides, she’d find a new agent: she had her own book deal—until that fell apart when her editor left to get married in New Zealand and the publisher in turn canceled her contract. After that, she didn’t have the heart to find anyone else to publish her. So she turned back to her dissertation. But slowly.
    And then the MacArthur. The fucking MacArthur.
    Ben’s fairy house was next. She didn’t have to be as exacting with his. She collected bark and sticks, a lot of them. No moss, and certainly no flowers.
    At the time, neither of them had an inkling that Fred was even on the watch list for the MacArthur Award. The committee kept it so quiet, until the onslaught of press and praise. The parties! The interest from Hollywood in those bleak, dense short stories. It died down soon enough, but Jesus, it was a fun ride.
    Ben’s fairy house was essentially a great big pile of sticks, just the way he’d like it. Rose felt a gigantic pang of something close to panic. She had left her kids for a month? But Fred would take care of them. He was better with Ben than she was. She let Ben push her buttons. Fred did not.
    Fred had been great when he got the big prize, of course, because Fred
was
great. The only thing Rose couldn’t take was the questions that came her way: “Oh, you’re working on your dissertation?” The implication being, always, that there was one genius in the family and she was not it.
    So Fred overcompensated. Every quarter, when a payment came in, he wanted to give every penny of it away to the hospice in Chicago where he had learned to help people die. He still felt guilty for burning out, and leaving the place. “Then all this money can’t touch us,” he said. But Rose said they should find themselves somewhere to live, somewhere modest, but a place that would allow them to be independent and have a family. She could teach at Sarah Lawrence, maybe, once she got her doctorate, and Fred could write. For the rest of their lives.
    When they bought the parlor floor and basement of a brownstone on the right end of Garfield Place, it had been modest. Rose loved their house. They could do anything they wanted with it! They could put nails in the wall and buy planters for the half-rotted terrace and marvel at their amazing good fortune. There was a second bedroom for a baby. Mrs. Diorio, who lived upstairs, was a lonely, cranky pain in the neck but she was harmless for the first year. Then when Rose got pregnant before they were ready and she was so sick with the twins, Mrs. Diorio got sick too, but the kind of sick no one recovers from. Fred was there with her to the end. It was a hard, tenuous, sad time in their lives, redeemed by the birth of Bea and Ben. And by the fact that Mrs. Diorio left her half of the house to the four of them.
    She ripped up some moss and made it a roof for Ben’s house. It looked more like a troll’s house