A Child of Air
from Chapter 3
One Saturday afternoon when I was in third grade, I was home alone, which was unusual. Our household at that time consisted of two adults, four children, and a large dog, and the house was rarely without activity. My troop leader had just dropped off my brand-new Brownie uniform. Excited, I immediately put it on. I felt very official, for want of a better word. But there was no one around to show off to. My father was just across the street removing screens and putting in storm windows for our elderly neighbors, the Sprouls, so I headed over there, primed for his smiling admiration. I walked up the brick steps and around the side of the house. At the corner of the house, I saw Mr. Sproul standing in the back yard looking up at my father, who was on the slanted roof wrestling a storm window into place.
Suddenly, my father lost his footing and fell. He made no sound as he fell and none when he landed. He lay unmoving on his back on the grass, eyes closed. I was frozen. For a moment, so was Mr. Sproul. Then he ordered me to get my mother. Terrified, I ran to the front and down to the sidewalk. I stopped, not knowing where to turn. Then I saw my mother walking slowly up the hill towards me, my two-year-old sister Holly perched on her hip.
“Dad fell off the roof,” I shouted. She began to run, awkwardly because of the hill and the heavy weight of Holly. As she rushed past me, I saw alarm and fear on her face, which made me even more afraid. I stayed on the sidewalk, irresolute. The whole neighborhood was eerily silent, as if a giant bell jar had descended over it. There wasn’t a single person in sight anywhere. My mother, disappearing into the Sprouls’ back yard, had pulled all the pulsing, ordinary life of our street after her like the suck of a receding wave.
I went to my empty house, got my rosary, and knelt beside my parents’ bed. Prayer was all I could think of to do. I prayed that my father would not die. I also wanted my mother not to stay afraid, so that I myself could stop feeling so afraid, but I didn’t dare express those wishes. When beseeching God, I felt, it was humbler and therefore safer to stick to a single request. My father’s survival was more important than the erasure of my fear. Soon, there was bustle downstairs, and I had to put my rosary away. My siblings had returned, and bossy Aunt Marjie, who still lived with my grandparents across the street, was flitting around, corralling us, telling us not to worry, that an ambulance had taken our father to the hospital, that our mother was with him. I hadn’t heard a siren. I wondered if she were lying. I wished she’d leave.
I don’t remember my mother’s homecoming, but I do remember coming upon her crying at the kitchen table that night. My brother and sisters were in bed. My father, with a concussion and a broken arm, had been kept in the hospital. The kitchen was shadowy, lit only by the small light over the stove. My mother was holding my father’s folded eyeglasses in her hands and quietly weeping. Her tears reawakened my fear from the afternoon. In a bid to comfort her, I remarked that at least his glasses hadn’t been broken. She opened her fingers and showed me one cracked lens.
I worried for a while that I had caused my father’s fall. Had I called out to him as I rounded the house into the back yard? Did he twist around to look down at me, losing his balance? Had my pride in my crisp new uniform, in myself, brought on disaster? I never told my parents these thoughts. I expect they would have reassured me that I was in no way to blame, that it was just coincidence. But even if I’d gotten such reassurances, I don’t think I would have altogether let go of the idea of a connection between my excited arrival in the Sprouls’ back yard and my father’s horrible fall. It was the closest I’d come in my young life to true tragedy, the first intimation that tragedies can happen, unexpectedly, undeservedly, in the midst of happiness and security. I didn’t think all this then, of course, but I believe such learning was there underneath. I had had a role in my father’s accident, if only by witnessing it and by being the dire messenger to my mother, a kind of linchpin to the event. I didn’t want to think I had caused him to fall — and I’ll never know if I did — but I also didn’t want to be left out of the drama.
My husband is fond of saying that I’ve been writing this story for 30 years. I always bristle when he says that because it makes me sound like the world’s slowest writer, but metaphorically, he’s right. The writing of the book was concentrated in the few years before its publication in 2016, but the first stirrings began in 1976, and the story I eventually uncovered stretches back years before then.
In 1976, my marriage was in trouble. When I wrote to my mother about it, she responded with a surprising confession: early in her own marriage, with my father overseas during World War II, she’d had an affair that eventually forced her to choose between her young husband and her man-of-the-world lover.
cases of 13 “respectable” French and English women from the 1840’s to the 1890’s who had been accused of murder. I soon found myself intrigued by one particular woman, Adelaide Bartlett, and her sensational trial in 1886 London.
Fine, I thought, I’ll take some of the facts of Adelaide’s case, move the story into modern times and onto American soil, and I’ll be all set. But as I fiddled with the idea of a present-day setting, I kept coming back to the fact that what really interested me about the story was the light it shed on the lives of ordinary people at the turn of the twentieth century, which was a time of tremendous social change in the United States. There were organized forces for change like the women’s rights movement and the beginnings of labor unions. But change also grew out of seemingly neutral events like the invention of the typewriter, which allowed middle-class women to enter the work force for the first time, and, in turn, led to the simplification of women’s clothing; or the bicycle, which let adventurous young couples literally escape the watchful eyes of their elders. So I decided to stick with 1886, and Adelaide Bartlett became Isabelle Martin, the discontented wife of a prosperous Philadelphia shopkeeper. Or, rather, Adelaide was the seed that sprouted Isabelle, a distinct personality in her own right.
Though I’d set out to write a mystery, I had no interest in inventing a detective. But I needed a narrator. Aha, I thought: a maid! Servants always know a great deal about the personal lives of their employers. True to the era, my maid would be a country girl come into the city to work. With these two characters in hand, I began writing. Lo and behold, within a few pages, the maid, Hanna Willer, insisted on taking center stage, and THE SHOPKEEPER'S WIFE turned out to be as much Hanna’s story as Isabelle’s, if not more. Not only that, despite my original commercial intentions, the story quickly veered away from the neighborhood of the supermarket racks. Themes of friendship, gender, secrets, and silences engaged my attention. At one point, I was dismayed to realize that I was on Chapter 17, and my murder victim was still alive! But one reviewer later called THE SHOPKEEPER'S WIFE a “strong and finely crafted psychological novel” and “a quiet thriller,” so I guess I did all right in the end.