One of my favorite authors as a kid was Elizabeth Enright. I read her books about the Melendy family, The Saturdays, The Four-Story Mistake, Then There Five and Spiderweb for Two: A Melendy Maze, over and over. I identified with Randy and felt Rush was just like my brother Bob. Thimble Summer and Newberry winner Gone-Away Lake were favorites too, although I read each of them only a half dozen times or so.
I recently ordered the Melendy books for our granddaughter to read when she visits and came across a book of collected short stories she wrote for adults, Borrowed Summer. Had I not seen the author’s name I would not have guessed these were by the same author as the serious but oh-so-much-fun children’s books. All the stories are set in the late 1930s to mid 1940s.
The title story sets the tone. Raymond Lantry is a clerk, living at a mean boardinghouse in the city who has no money, no family and no prospect of ever having anything more than a dreary life all alone. He has one radiant memory, of a week in the country so long ago, visiting his aunt.
One day Raymond decides to abscond with one of the firm’s payments instead of depositing it as he should. He goes west, leaves the train on a whim somewhere in rural Wisconsin. Raymond tells everyone he is Raymond Beemond, looking for a quiet place to write a book, and takes a room with Mrs. Meinhardt at her farm. Raymond spends the golden summer building memories. Helping with the harvest, spending time fishing with little Marvel, eating with the family. There is growing interest with widowed Mrs. Meinhardt.
It ends when Mrs. Meinhardt’s son, Earl, is wounded in the Pacific war and is coming home. Raymond says good-bye, leaves all the rest of his embezzled money in an oriole’s nest in Earl’s room and goes back east to face the music. The story makes you question what you would do if you had no memories, no summers of joy to recall and no hope. It’s excellent.
Another very good one is Home to Grandma’s, where we see Fenella traveling south on the train with her mother to visit her grandmother. Fenella is precocious, smart, polite, and six years old. She is also African-American and bewildered by the strange way people treat her mother and her, especially when they reach their destination. As her mother says “I forgot where I was.” All Fenella wants to do is go home where things are normal again.
Most of the characters in the other stories are not good people. Olivia in The Maple Tree is desperate to live in a ghostly fantasy. In The Bureau of Lost and Found Mrs. Persin tries to confess her terrible cruelty and trouble-making to her dying brother-in-law. She tells him how she made it look like her sister had an affair (which in the end caused her sister to commit suicide), but her brother-in-law is too busy dying to even listen. Another character tells fortunes for a living and decides to frighten everyone, for no better reason than she fears her lover is casting her aside.
One of the recurring themes is the daughter (or daughter-in-law) caring for an invalid mother. The one of these I liked best was A Ton of Pitchblende where the daughter-in-law takes comfort in a night flower which is ready to bloom its once-a-year blossom.
If you read this book you will remember the stories. Not all of them of course, some did not resonate with me. But the tales of women deciding to take revenge for some slight or hurt by grossly hurting everyone they can, or caring for an elderly mother or getting the news of a son’s death in war all have strong emotions. The characters all try to solve the problem of alone-ness, alienation, whether by taking revenge or finding joy and storing memories.
I got this on inter library loan from Wayne State University. Amazon has a different book of Elizabeth Enright’s short stories, The Riddle of the Fly & Other Stories, which I did not read.
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