The Fortune Teller's Daughter - Hardcover

Those are my earliest memories of my secret life of writing. For reasons I cannot really fathom, I never pursued writing as a vocation. Although I majored in English, I didn't focus on writing and it wasn't really until I was first married that I hauled out my old Olivetti and began to thump away at my first novel. This was, as I recall, an amorphous thinly plotted excercise in putting sentences together and has mercifully disappeared in some move or another. I didn't try anything more adventurous than some short stories and a lot of newsletters for various things I belonged to until we moved to Martha's Vineyard and I bought my first computer. My little "Collegiate 2" IBM computer was about as advanced as the Olivetti was in its heyday but it got me writing again and this time with some inner determination that I was going to succeed at this avocation. I tapped out two novels on this machine with its fussy little printer. Like the first one, these were wonderful absorbing exercises in learning how to write.

What happened then is the stuff of day time soap opera. Writing is a highly personal activity and for all of my life I'd kept it secret from everyone but my husband, who, at the time, called what I did nights after the kids went to bed, my "typing." Until, quite by accident, I discovered that here on the Vineyard nearly everyone has some avocation in the arts. Much to my delight, I discovered a fellow closet-writer in the mom of my kids' best friends. For the very first time in my life I could share the struggle with another person. I know now that writers' groups are a dime a dozen and I highly recommend the experience, but with my friend Carole, a serendipitious introduction to a "real writer", Holly Nadler, resulted in my association with my agent. Holly read a bit of my "novel" and liked what she read, suggested I might use her name and write to her former agent. I did and the rest, as they say, is history.

Not that it was an overnight success. The novel I'd shown Holly never even got sent to Andrea. But a third, shorter, more evolved work was what eventually grew into Beauty with the guidance of Andrea and her associates at the Jane Rotrosen Agency.

The moral of the story: keep at it. Keep writing the bad novels to learn how to write the good ones. And, yes, it does help to know someone. Andrea might have liked my work, but the path was oiled by the introduction Holly Nadler provided.

Hawke's Cove is my second published novel, although there is a "second" second novel in a drawer, keeping good company with the other "first" novels.

One

Thursday, September 24, 2000

South Congregational Church was rapidly filling up. Sabine Heartwood eased herself into a pew beside Moe Condon, the editor of the weekly Pennywise Paper and her boss. It was a tight squeeze and Sabine felt a little awkward as her rump touched the massive thigh of her curmudgeonly employer. South Congo, as everyone called the church, was a living antiquity; excepting the electricity in the ornate hanging chandeliers and central heating, nothing was different about the church than when it was built in the early eighteenth century. White-painted pews with shellacked coamings, a simple preacher's lectern to one side of the plain wooden cross at the front of the nave, massive multi-light windows -- open now to allow in the slight breeze, a faint lick of which tickled the back of Sabine's neck, ruffling the loose curling hairs not caught up in her twist.

Sabine nodded to Moe, and he patted her hand in an uncharacteristic show of solidarity. The town had lost an icon and they all felt the loss. No, Beatrice Danforth had been more than a static icon, she had been Moose River Junction's matriarch. The overflow crowd at this funeral was testimony to a life well lived. Influence, imperiousness, expectation. She was the last of her kind. Everyone at the wake last night had used those words, or ones similar. She was the last of her kind. Born with the century, living long enough to have witnessed wars and depressions, foolish politics and personal loss. Stoic, uncompromising Beatrice had indeed been the last of her kind. She'd witnessed the zenith of her town's heyday as it moved from agrarian to industrial, and then its inevitable decline as one by one the small manufacturies closed, and subsequent exodus of her town's youth to the siren call of city successes. The most personal of these was the departure of her only grandson, Danforth Smith.

The organist, hidden from sight in the loft above and behind the congregation, played a soft, sorrow-evoking prelude. Sabine smoothed the fabric of her dark blue silk dress and let her eyes rest on the pearl gray wall in front of her. The sunlight streaming in through the wavy, ancient window glass created an odd illusion of shapes against the wall, bending and blurred in such a way that she could make out faces, as if the light was exposing the crying out of spirits who once worshiped here. Nonsense, of course. Churches were seldom haunted. Sabine half-closed her eyes and let the images shift, shadow and light playing against the pearl gray, revealing to her alone the sad visages of perpetrators of cruel punishments. Sabine blinked to dispel the vision. There had been cruelty dealt out in the name of God within these marvelously preserved walls. Once a woman had been condemned to death for accusing a prominent citizen of rape. They had turned it against her and the magistrates, using these holy spaces as a court, had banished her from the fledgling town of Windsorville. Banishment, into what in those days was surrounding wilderness, was tantamount to a death sentence. As clearly as a photograph, Sabine saw the woman's face in the wall. "Stop it." Sabine widened her eyes to throw off the trance.

"What did you say?" Moe had been talking with his wife, to his right.

Sabine hadn't meant to speak aloud.

"Oh, just a little prayer." She blushed, annoyed with herself for letting the spirits so easily catch her attention. All of her life, Sabine Heartwood had felt the cold spots, sensed the disturbances, and heard the wind in still places which revealed the presence of the lost. As a busker, a street performer, her mother, Ruby, told fortunes, reading Tarot cards or tea leaves, or palms. When it became evident that Sabine not only had inherited her mother's small gift of second sight, but also had an enhanced psychic capacity to sense the mysteries beyond the knowable world, Ruby had imagined a ghost-busters-style mission, traveling cross country in their lime green Volkswagen bus. "Imagine it, Beenie. Heartwood and Heartwood, "It's Not Your Imagination' Spiritualists and Psychic Communicators."

It had been their largest bone of contention. All Sabine wanted was to be normal. Which is why she'd come to Moose River Junction. To live like a normal person. To have a regular job, a permanent home, and people she could call friends. The ordinary things everyone else took for granted were the things her mother's peripatetic lifestyle had made exotic and charming in Sabine's eyes. She looked around the airy room, taking satisfaction in picking out all the familiar faces. There was Greta Sutler, and her boyfriend, Arnie Sokolowski. Over there, also checking out familiar faces, was Lynn Miller, Sabine's closest friend in Moose River Junction. Sabine wiggled discrete fingers at her friend. Her coworkers from the Pennywise Paper, Teddy and Balto, were standing in the back of the room, looking odd in their Sunday best. Sabine was so much more used to seeing them in their rumpled workaday state. Had they known Mrs. Danforth? Had all these people really known her? More people than ever filled a town meeting crammed into the church, Moose River Junction paying final homage to the last of its aristocracy.

The prelude was over and the congregation ceased their soft, respectful murmuring. The only sound now was the slow footsteps of the pallbearers flanking the solid cherrywood coffin. Behind it followed Beatrice Danforth's prodigal grandson, Danforth Smith. Holding him by the right hand was her surviving offspring, her late-in-life, developmentally challenged son, Nagy. Beside his tall nephew, Nagy looked more gnomelike than usual. Like everyone else, he seemed out of context all dressed up in a dark suit hastily altered to fit his stumpy legs and short arms. His grizzled gray hair had been flattened into submission. As he drifted by Sabine, she felt the palpable confusion emanate from him. He'd had half a year to understand this was going to happen. And yet, as clear as speech, Sabine knew that he didn't really understand that his mother was dead.

The pallbearers brought the casket on its wheeled bier to a dignified stop, and the organist began the introductory measures of the opening hymn. Sabine let the words sink deep into her voice, laying them against the memories she had of Beatrice Danforth. A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing; our helper he amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing....Admittedly, she'd known her only a little, but that little seemed enough for the sorrow Sabine felt at the old woman's passing. Sabine and Moe had worked on the obituary with Mrs. Danforth. Like everything else the dying woman did, she planned the details well in advance. Of all the good works she might have listed, from trustee of the library and founder of the historical society, to second soprano in the Windsorville High School Glee Club, class of 1921, patron of the small art museum, mother and grandmother, it was her ownership and love of the Palace Theatre which Beatrice wished to be her best-known legacy. "Tell them all about Frederick Danforth and how he built the Palace for me."

The Palace Theatre, an Art Deco-style house that might hold 350, not counting the long-disused balcony, now dusty and threadbare. The only movie house in town. At one time, the Palace was Moose River Junction's entertainment capital. Vaudeville, live theatre productions, then, finally, simply movies. Sabine preferred it, with its full sized screen, to any multiplex she'd been in. At least at the Palace, the rococo decorations were original. And Nagy was there to make sure you took your ticket stub. Poor Nagy, a child yet in a middle-aged man's body. He looked somehow even more vulnerable dressed up like he was today. Sabine watched his nephew Dan lay a comforting arm across his shoulders.

Wh