Jason will become a daddy, too, later this year. Aliza is due in May. That news she wanted to tell me? That was it. Next week, Kat and I will be meeting our daughter and her husband-to-be at Manhattan’s City Hall. Jason’s asked me to be his best man and Aliza’s maid of honor will be one of the three Js. Jordana, maybe? Jilly? I still can’t keep them straight.
A lot has been happening career-wise for Aliza, too. An editor has approached her about publishing one of her blog posts for a collection of essays by new feminist writers. This past winter Aliza was promoted to the position of deputy editor at New York magazine. For the most recent installment of their “Yesteryear” edition, she’s been given the cover story, a survey of Manhattan’s “it” girls, past and present, from Edie Sedgwick and Madonna through Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and Chloë Sevigny to the current downtown sensation, transgender DJ, artist, and runway model Juliana Huxtable. “It” today, gone tomorrow, alas. Time, as they say, does not stand still.
Lois Weber’s ghost said that she and her fellow shades, Verna Hibbard included, appeared to me because I had been deemed “educable.” To prove worthy of that designation, I’ve been reading widely and eclectically: Saint Paul, Søren Kierkegaard, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In preparation for the book on Lois Weber I’m planning, I’ve also undertaken a study of silent films made by the women who were largely written out of the accounts of the early days of motion pictures—not only Weber but also Alice Guy-Blaché, Hanna Henning, Dorothy Arzner, Dorothy Davenport Reid. I’m hoping to bring these creative filmmakers—the predecessors of contemporary directors like Jane Campion, Lisa Cholodenko, Ava DuVernay, and Rebecca Miller—out of the darkness and back into the light. We’ll see. And I’ve decided against writing that book about Hollywood’s secrets and scandals. Who needs another one of those?
My reading and viewing have led me to think more deeply about life and death. About women and men. About faith. Kierkegaard noted one of the central ironies of human existence when he wrote: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” I guess that’s why historians and Monday morning quarterbacks seem so damned insightful. . . .
Like our parents before her, my sister Simone practices the Roman Catholic faith. Each Sunday and two or three times during the workweek, she attends the 7 a.m. Mass at St. Aloysius Gonzaga where she entreats the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to care for the souls of the departed, especially her parents, her husband, Jeff, and their son, Luke.
Frances and Molly are churchgoers, too, although their attendance, they say, is erratic. They belong to a Congregational church which is “open and affirming.” They believe in a God who loves but does not judge.
My ex-wife, Kat, is a Reform Jew who goes to Temple once a year during Yom Kippur. She believes that personal autonomy takes precedence over patriarchal Jewish tradition, but she nevertheless adheres to some Judaic customs as a way to honor those family members who came before her. She is troubled, however, by the chauvinistic assumptions embedded in Orthodox Judaism.
Our daughter Aliza is a nonbeliever who, on Sunday mornings, goes to brunch with her friends or, if she’s been out late the night before, sleeps in. She believes that organized religion does more harm than good and that we need to be charitable to one another because it’s the right thing to do, “not because it allows us to rack up mileage points for our trip to some imaginary heaven.”
Me? I’m not exactly a Catholic anymore, but I’m not exactly a non-Catholic either. I guess you could say I’m stuck in the middle, although Francis, the Jesuit pope from Argentina, offers a glimmer of hope that the church can change. As my sister Frances put it, better to bend than break.
So what do I believe in? Equality. Forgiveness. Compassion. Social justice. I believe in the value of family, whether you define it as your blood relatives or the people you draw to you—which is to say that I believe in love.
I believe, too, that art—literature, painting, music, film—has the power to illuminate the human condition.
And I believe in miracles. How else to explain that my sister Frances—born into a toilet, baptized in a kitchen sink, ensnared in the tangled relationship between cruelty and fear brought on by withheld information, and rescued from an eating disorder that nearly killed her—not only survived but later thrived, having inherited the verve of a birth mother she never knew and given the support of the loving family that cradled her and kept her safe?
William Faulkner wrote that “the past is never dead.” F. Scott Fitzgerald concluded The Great Gatsby with these words: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” But Louisa May Alcott wrote, instead, about the future. “Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.” I sent that last quote to my daughter a while ago, figuring she’d appreciate it, which she did.
How could I not believe in ghosts, and what they have to teach us about how to learn from the past, fully inhabit the present, and embrace the propulsive thrust of the future, as when Jason holds my daughter’s hand and squeezes it, the baby’s head crowns, and the obstetrician says, “Okay, Mom. Are you ready? Push!”? I’m told by those in the know that I’m going to love being a grandfather. And I could be wrong, of course, but something tells me Aliza is having a girl.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
UNITED TALENT AGENCY’S Kassie Evashevski is much more than my literary agent. She’s also my writing coach, my business adviser, and, when I hit the occasional bad writing stretch, my unpaid psychologist. Most of all, she is my good and trusted friend, for which I am enormously grateful.
I’m indebted to Ken Siman, Metabook’s publisher and editor-in-chief, for his encouragement and invaluable editorial feedback during the evolution of this novel through several drafts. Benjamin Alfonsi, Metabook’s brilliant creative director, built a multifaceted multimedia adventure around my humble story. Thanks as well to Christian Alfonsi, Metabook’s president and CEO, and the entire Metabook team.
HarperCollins has been my loyal and longtime publisher and I’m grateful to the Harper imprint team, led by publisher Jonathan Burnham, executive editor Terry Karten, and Harper’s affable and expert veeps Kathy Schneider, Leah Wasielewski, and Tina Andreadis. It’s always a delight to work with Leslie Cohen, Harper’s publicist extraordinaire, and to swap wisecracks with Virginia Stanley, who is HC’s library marketing director despite all those overdue books fines she’s accrued.
Whenever the members of my writing group provide critical feedback for my work-in-progress, I shut my mouth and take notes as fast as I can; their instincts and observations are always reliable and razor-sharp. These talented writers are Denise Abercrombie, Jonathan Andersen, Bruce Cohen, Leslie Johnson, and Sari Rosenblatt. While writing I’ll Take You There, I also received useful reactions from Susan Cole, Janet Dauphin, John Ekizian, Doug Hood, Careen Jennings, and the students in my writing class at York Prison.
Doctoral students Matt Jones and George Moore keep things running smoothly in my office. Big thanks to both of these full-time scholars and part-time assistants.
If stories are rivers, this one had two tributaries. One was my involvement with Beauty and the Beer, a documentary about the storied Miss Rheingold contest; the other was the premiere showing at the Garde Theatre of Synthetic Cinema’s Wishin’ and Hopin’, an adaptation of my novel of the same name. Thank you to the Garde Arts Center’s directors Jeanne and Steve Sigel, who told me about the theatrical tradition of the ghost lamp and about sightings of the spirits that haunt the venerable old movie palace they manage so lovingly. Director and onetime Miss Rheingold finalist Anne Newman Bacal and her Beauty and the Beer associates, Leslie Clark, Tom Spain, and Esther Cohen, invited me to participate in their film project which, in turn, triggered this novel’s exploration of women’s roles and expectations from the 1950s to the present.
For laughter, m
oral support, and camaraderie, I tip my hat to Joe Leonardi, Mark Croxford, Penny Balocki, Jerry Spears, Ken and Linda Lamothe, Hilda Belcher, and—especially—my best buddy, Ethel Mantzaris.
It still amazes me that, on that first day of July in 1978, Christine agreed to be my partner through life. Of my many blessings, she is the central one.
ABOUT WALLY LAMB
WALLY LAMB is the author of five New York Times bestselling novels: She’s Come Undone, I Know This Much Is True, The Hour I First Believed, Wishin’ and Hopin’, and We Are Water. He was twice selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Lamb also edited I’ll Fly Away and Couldn’t Keep It to Myself, two volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Connecticut, where he has been a volunteer facilitator for the past seventeen years. He lives in New York and Connecticut.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
ALSO BY WALLY LAMB
We Are Water
Wishin’ and Hopin’
The Hour I First Believed
I Know This Much Is True
She’s Come Undone
BY WALLY LAMB AND THE WOMEN OF THE YORK CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION
Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters
I’ll Fly Away: Further Testimonies from the Women of York Prison
CREDITS
COVER DESIGN BY MILAN BOZIC
COVER PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF METABOOK (WOMAN); © GETTY IMAGES (BACKGROUND)
COPYRIGHT
I’LL TAKE YOU THERE. Copyright © 2016 by Wally Lamb. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Published by arrangement with Metabook Inc.
FIRST EDITION
Title page photo: interior of the Garde Arts Center,
New London, Connecticut © Tony Bacewicz / Atlantic Vision Media
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lamb, Wally, author.
Title: I’ll take you there : a novel / Wally Lamb.
Other titles: I will take you there
Description: First edition. | New York : Harper, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016032491| ISBN 9780062656285 (hardback) | ISBN 9780062656292 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Literary.
Classification: LCC PS3562.A433 I45 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032491
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EPub Edition September 2016 ISBN 9780062656292
16 17 18 19 20 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Wally Lamb, I'll Take You There
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