Word: alma
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...naming of a professorship and a building in honor of Henry Lee Shattuck is an expression of the University's enormous gratitude to a devoted graduate for many years of quiet generosity and valued service to his alma mater...
This impressive new novel begins as a Midwestern idyl set on a leafy, residential street in Rainbow Center, Ohio. A widow er of 78. Realtor Boyd Mason comes home to the wide-lawned Victorian house he shares with his sister Alma, a spinsterish ex-schoolteacher. Each day is an agreeable carbon of the one before. Boyd grumbles contentedly about Alma's bluntness, stinginess and love of gossip. Alma gets comfortably cross at Boyd's deafness, his lack of interest in scandal, his irritating habit of forgetting to flush the toilet...
...Cliff is as emotionally tongue-tied as his aunt and uncle: his prosaic letters might as well be coming from nearby Cincinnati instead of distant, mysterious, embattled Korea. Then the comfortable, cozy pattern of the days is shattered by a War Department telegram reporting Cliff missing in action. Alma passionately insists Cliff is alive and will return; she decides to write an account of his life. "It would be a kind of family thing." she tells her brother. "A kind of record just...
...Alma questions the neighbors about Cliff and at first gets the expected tame responses. But Faye Laird bursts unexpectedly into tears and her dotty old mother insults Alma. Wealthy, widowed Mrs. Barrington clearly knows more than she will say. Strangest of all are the talks with epicene Willard Baker and the peculiar young man who lives with him. As rumors build slowly into facts, Boyd impatiently tries to stop Alma from digging into events that "should have been for gotten long ago." But Alma is a woman who must finish what she starts, and she rips frantically at the curtain...
...Alma finally discovers how little she had really known the boy who grew up in her house, another telegram confirms his death in battle. "I only loved him," she mourns. "I never knew him." But to love someone is enough. Mrs. Barrington tells her, "that's all we dare hope for in this life." The "record" of Cliff's life, containing only a few tentative sentences, is wrapped in tissue paper and locked away in a drawer. Boyd and Alma, who have now become "permanently and very old, their correct age." sit in the dark staring...